Napa in the Spring

What visit to Northern California would be complete without a visit to Napa?

Beautiful countryside, delightful friends, and a splendid day out.

Guy St. Clair - Andrew Berner - Dale and Debi Stanley enjoying a good time
together, with Guy and Andrew very grateful to Dale and Debi for their
splendid California hospitality.

The Catsup Tower

And while San Francisco is famous for some of its towers – Transamerica, Coit, the supports of the two suspension bridges, etc., the city may one day be more famous for its catsup tower.

While visiting a friend’s garage recently, one’s eye alights on a packing box labeled: “Catsup Tower.”

Yes, you read that right, and Keith – obliging fellow that he is – agreed to display the contents.

When he was a lad, Keith Stanley’s artistic apprenticeship was occupied with a number of splendid adventures in design. Not the least of which was his version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, built from catsup packets.

Never again will a visit to a fast-food restaurant be the same! I’ll forever be wondering about how many catsup packets I can take away, and what Keith might make of them.

Well done, sir.

Brussels - Geneva - New York - San Francisco (2)

So the connection here is a little stretched, since it has been three weeks
since I left Geneva (and a little more since I left Brussels) but I'll do
what I can.

Back to New York to work at the U.N., catch up with some friends (not too
many - too busy and the time too short), see a show (my favorite Sondheim -
"A Little Night Music" with Angela Lansbury and Catherina Zita-Jones - just
terrific), give a speech (see the SMR International blog), and head out to
San Francisco to work on the West Coast for a while.

And to attend a family wedding (well, extended family, I suppose), which is
my real reason for being in America at this particular time.

As with Brussels, couldn't resist having a few days to play around in the
city, and since San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, capture a few
images to help me remember why I love this place so much.

Interesting - as always - building decorations and of course a couple of
famous landmarks. Washington Square in North Beach is always fun to visit
and photograph and the Sts. Peter and Paul Church offers a uniquely San
Francisco-esque view. Naturally the two towers are fun, seen from everywhere
in the city.

And I have to find my art nouveau wherever I go. In San Francisco it's in
the lobby of my favorite hotel, the Galleria Park, right in the heart of the
city at Sutter and Kearny. Here it is, a mecca for lovers of art nouveau,
even if it is (probably) a modern adaptation. It's still pleasant to look at
and, on a cool San Francisco afternoon, sit in front of and talk about how
lovely it is to be in one of the world's great cities.

Brussels - Geneva - New York - San Francisco

A blog is, I suppose, something of a diary - and particularly a travel diary
for people who move about a lot - when one does interesting things.

But sometimes we get caught up in the mundane and don't get to post what or
when we want to post, which I seem to recall is an on-going issue for people
who like to keep diaries. Since we don't live in the 18th century anymore,
it's hard to fit it all in, and keeping a diary I expect is 'way down the
list for most 20th-century folks!

So it's been a while since I left Geneva, and truth to tell, there wasn't
much to tell. Work went well, and I got done what I went to Geneva to do.

The hotel (shown here) was pretty ordinary but it worked. I didn't have to
sleep in the streets!

But there wasn't time to visit the sites, and I'm sorry not to have had a
tour of the Palais des Nations and the other U.N. buildings in Geneva.
Perhaps there will be another assignment to Geneva one of these days.

Saw only one work of art, oddly enough directly outside my hotel window. But
very special, and well worth the time I was able to spend looking at it.

Could find out nothing about this piece of sculpture, and I somehow had the
sense that it was in a temporary location, since so much construction is
going on in the area, especially behind a huge shopping mall just across the
road. And the setting seems very strange for such an important work of art.

Still, I found it kind of fascinating, and I'm intrigued that the sculptor
gave the kiters - whom most of us would think of as boys and not as men -
the forms of adult men. An interesting little intellectual excursion into an
artist's way of thinking, I suppose. Very nice.

Saying Good-By to Brussels

There's no question but that Brussels is a very photogenic city, and this
amateur photographer enjoying his new hobby had many delightful moments.
Like most visitors from America, I often wonder - as I stroll about cities
like Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and of course London, what it must be like to
have such "monumental" open spaces within the city.

We have our Central Park of course, and many other American cities have
grand public parks, but somehow in these European parts I always have the
feeling that the combination of space and massive monumental architecture
adds a separate dimension to the experience. And what must it be like to be
an ordinary citizen and just have all this available to you, anytime you
want to wander in and out? How lovely!

That lead-in is to introduce my pictures of the Royal Museums in Brussels,
located in the Parc du Cinquantenaire. These are massive structures, and I'm
sorry I couldn't be in Brussels long enough to explore the whys and
wherefors of that massive pile with its huge window facing the park. Is it a
meeting hall? A open museum? I couldn't find out, but if the interior is
anything like the exterior, it is, no question about it, a "grand" space. If
it were located closer to the City Center, I would think it was a railroad
station but, no, that can't be. Not in a park.

And what trip to Brussels could not include a few pictures of the Grand
Place? All these odd buildings, each so lavishly and uniquely decorated. And
there are advantages in a winter visit, because like the Piazza San Marco in
Venice, once the visitors start coming in with their holiday excursions,
Grand Place will be just one big crowd and I don't think I would like that.

My friend and I enjoyed the Brussels version of New York's Flatiron Building
(and I seem to recall seeing these I lots of other cities, where two streets
come together at an angle). This one - for some reason - was particularly
interesting to me. As was the wall of houses climbing up Mont des Arts,
culminating in one of the most famous art nouveau buildings in the city
(yes, I would conclude with art nouveau, wouldn't I?). The big black
building on the right with the highly decorated wrought iron is the Old
England Department Store, built in 1899 with Paul Saintenoy as its
architect. Now the city's museum of musical instruments, the building has
been preserved as one of the great examples of art nouveau architecture.

Brussels Art Nouveau

A typical floral Art Nouveau doorway 

OK. I'm going to stop being pretentious. My French is all right, and certainly I'm comfortable throwing around a few French phrases when I'm feeling particularly "continental" (and how can you feel otherwise when you're thinking about Art Nouveau?).

But I'm also beginning to realize that in all my striving to refer to my favorite style as l'art nouveau, it was coming out a little, well, "pretentious" seems to be the only word that comes to mind.
So "Art Nouveau" it will be from now on!

An Interior Entrance from a Building Foyer
(with exquisite tracery connecting the
wooden trim and the glass)

Loved all the exposure to Art Nouveau in Brussels. There are so many variations on the theme, and it's hard to characterize the entire spectrum of Art Nouveau that's available in Brussels, but the basics are there, and they're really all over the place. Brussels, like Paris and Prague (I hear) and Riga (ditto), is an essential stop on any Art Nouveau itinerary and I'm happy I had some time to spend so I could look about. 

The photos are my own (not very professional - sorry about that) and I guess it's pretty obvious that I didn't go for the more famous sites and objects. I did, though, have fun with trying to figure out just what it was - back at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th - that inspired people to latch on to Art Nouveau. And through the intervening years, to keep going on and on with it, so that even in some of the more modern buildings, one sees references to Art Nouveau, often attached to (and obviously inspired by) some true item or building or room or shopfront from the actual Art Nouveau period.

An Art Nouveau Building Entrance
(seen from inside the foyer)

So these photographs are something of a mélange (there I go again!), just trying to capture some of the different representations one runs into in a walk about Brussels. You see a lot of these painted borders over doorways, and sometimes they are sculpted into the surface of the wall (plaster, stone, or what-not). 

Art Nouveau Letterboxes in the Same
Building's Foyer

I like the way some of the building entrances pull it all together, with the door frames and window frames, the glass decoration, and the door surrounds all of a piece (the intricate tracery of the interior entrance of one of the buildings makes just entering the foyer exceptionally pleasing). And I even found one building where my friend pointed out to me the Art Nouveau characteristics of the letterboxes. Such fun!

Art Nouveau Signboard
in an Office Building

Another pleasure is looking at the wide range of Art Nouveau fonts and typefaces, the adverts of the period, and even the monumental signs and sculptures carried it out in the lettering (including one specially notable list of companies and tenants in an office building I walked into). It all just seems to come together.

I've tried over the years to come up with some ideas - for myself (I'm not scholarly in these things) - to characterize Art Nouveau. I guess the basics for me are the sinuous lines and the delicacy of the "movement" of the lines. The botanical references please me a lot, too, and then there's the famous "whiplash line" that for some Art Nouveau specialists is almost the most famous characteristic of the style.


Whatever it is, it is a joy to behold, whether in architecture, drawings, painting, light fixture, door handles, china and glassware, even the magnificent silver candlesticks (now often reproduced in polished pewter), sculptures, and such. Great fun.

Wandering About the Passages in Brussels

Like the over-the-streets enclosed walkways in Canada and the Northern
Middle States in America, the planners of Brussels long ago figured out how
to deal with getting the shoppers inside in the winter weather. Somehow I
had missed the beautiful "passages" in Brussels when I visited here in the
past. Similar to the handsome arcades in many other Northern European cities
(and, strangely, in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia), these lovely
enclosed areas with shops along either side are a very pleasant diversion on
a cold, rainy afternoon. We explored quite a few. The photos were taken at
Galeries Saint-Hubert, but there are several others worth a visit: the
Ravenstein-Galerie, the Horta-Passage (under the Gare Centrale), and the
Nord-Passage. Nice shops, good restaurants, and of course the
not-to-be-missed patisseries. Very special.