First, a disclaimer: The events in this despatch do in fact precede the events in the previous one. I know this is strange but I don't really care.
My department went on its bi-annual trip to Northern Europe just before Easter. They alternate between Italy and Northern Europe, and you get dragged around multiple museums, churches, buildings. The purpose is (as far as I can tell) to make links with the history of letterforms and writing and with the development and growth of culture in general, and the cultures of printing in particular.
Oh, alright. We left at 6 am on a coach and we drove to Dover. Nothing exciting or invigorating here, a state which continued with the ferry journey, though the entry and exit from the harbours is quite fun. We got to Calais and headed up the coast towards Belgium. To cut a long story short we did a kind of two-week lightning trip with Belgium [1 full day] (for the cathedral and the van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent and the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp), then Amsterdam [4 days] (principally studying stuff in the Hague), then Cologne [1 day], then Frankfurt [3 days] (principally looking at stuff in and around Offenbach and Mainz).
The Gemeentemuseum, in the Hague, was designed in the late twenties/early thirties specifically to contain works from the contemporary movements that were happening at the time. It was designed by Peter Berlhage. I don't know precisely how his brain worked, but what it produced was something quite phenomenal. It's modernist architecture using brick (rare enough) and local materials and local craftsmen and local stylistic touches. It really ought to be a hulking monstrosity but somehow it isn't - the ponds added at the front of the museum, the attention to the changes on the roof... It works. And inside, it gets better. Most museums take their all-white interiors very seriously. The Gemeentemuseum has these fantastic enamelled primary-coloured tiles: red, yellow and blue. They run in big stripes from floor to ceiling in the main atrium and make the atrium look really vibrant. The contents of the Gemeentemuseum are on a par with the museum itself. There are wonderful collections of modernist work: a highlight for me was the room full of Mondrian works from his early works right through to the geometric compositions he's probably most famous for. On their own they're fabulous, but as a group they really shine. As a group they show the progression and twists and turns Mondrian took in getting to the colour compositions. I really liked being able to see that.
I had lunch in a cafe in Antwerp where the proprietor wore a badly-fitting cap and rollerblades. They were playing the Eagles. It was raining outside and the man on rollerblades didn't leave the cafe, which was very small.
In Germany we saw some funky stuff in Cologne, at the museum of applied arts - a design museum, whose collection of artifacts ranged from late medieval to contemporary and who had some fabulous art nouveau stuff: furniture, glassware, posters. They had some exquisite glassware by Peter Behrens, who would come back to haunt us when we visited Darmstadt. The contemporary things at the museum were very good too, although the main exhibition of contemporary objects was rather let down by two Epson printers, which were obviously normal Epson printers that had had new enclosures made for them, like tablecloths, but were just standard printers underneath. One fantastic exhibit was a space made from a set of mattresses hung in a line, like a loaf of sliced bread, they were lit from underneath and when you looked closely you saw that they had been hollowed out - that the mattresses had chunks missing and you could push into that space in the middle. The space turned out to be almost a church, with what would have been a vaulted ceiling if it had been a real ceiling.
The Klingspor museum in Offenbach is something else again. A museum dedicated to book-art: hand-crafted books. Rudolf Koch's work is here, the dynamism and energy of his formal writing breathtaking, as was the range he was capable of working across. He did work in cut-paper, where intricate designs in black silhouette were made by cutting out the white parts of the image. The works aren't big, which makes them very special, but then you realise that the level of detail he was capable of goes further - small bits of hair, bows on chldren's dresses, the tools in a pot on a desk. The sheer level and artistry of the detail is breathtaking. In fact the whole museum is full of work that grabs at you. When we were there the room where they showed us some more of Koch's work was hung full with line drawings by Braques.
I missed out the Museum of the book in the Hague. It's full of printed works that in many ways run parallel to the Klingspor, but deal with mainly printed works. They had an exhihibition of work by German and other private presses from the art-nouveau and inter-war years, which had some fantastic illustration work and lovely printing. What really blew me away was the work of Willem Sandberg, a dutch designer who was curator? at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam before the second world war. He produced work with an intense object quality that was (and is) far, far, beyond what most designers are capable of achieving with today's printing technology. The extra effects that letterpress printing produces contributes to the overall effect of Sandberg's work rather than diminishing it. No flat four-colour work here.
Instead of coming home at the end of the trip I headed north on an ICE (think TGV but German). I was heading for Hanover, and from there on to Celle where I have relatives. This was the most fun part of the trip I think. I actually got to experience a bit of German culture in the company of Germans. I went places with my family (Uncle Andy and Aunty Karin), went drinking with my cousins (Jan and Daniel), and went to a house party, where I discovered that German teens are as drink-obsessed. I went with Jan back to Hanover for an afternoon and we went to the Sprengel museum which has a really fabulous collection of modern art. They have a massive collection of Kurt Schwitters work, unsurprising since Schwitters was the Hanover city designer. The also have rooms dedicated to Paul Klee, Max Ernst, a reconstruction of a room by El Lissitsky, stuff by Dali, Warhol and four installations by the American artist James Turrel, who did something for the eclipse in Cornwall. We went all over the place, and even went into what had been East Germany, where there is still a stark contrast between the quality of building and infrastructure after 10 years. A sobering place, and a testament to the desire of the Germans to pick up the pieces: a 'Solidarity tax' of 6% extra is levied on all West Germans to pay for the rebuilding and after a decade there still seems to be little complaint about this.
To get home I flew for the first time, from Hanover to Gatwick. Uncle Andy drove me to the airport (with Benny the Alsatian, who hides under the table if he doesn't want to go for a walk) and I flew out on a little 60 seater turbo-prop plane. They let me onto the flight deck (because it was my first time) which was fabulous, and then they let me back on for the landing, which may have been because they liked me, but may have been because I name-dropped another uncle who works at the CAA... I had a good time, anyway.
Matt