The Bridge.
My first real introduction to art history was a high school class I signed up for because I thought it would be interesting. I’d read some pocket biographies of famous artists and I wanted to get a broader view of how they fit together. I didn’t think it would be easy but when a subject is interesting that makes even the hard parts worth it. It helped that I had a really good teacher.
We started with the 19th century which both made sense and was also jumping into the deep end. It was where all those movements and -isms really started—Classicism and Romanticism leading into Impressionism and so on. But then it wasn’t until around the 12th century that putting paintings in frames and carrying them around became widespread and the first public art museum didn’t open until 1661. There’s been art as long as there have been people—art history is human history—but the 19th century is one point where European art at least started to get organized in a way that’s easy to study.
One of the later groups we learned about was called Die Brücke, The Bridge. They were unusual because, first of all, their name wasn’t an -ism (they were kind of a subgroup of Expressionism but that gets complicated) and they were also in Germany. Most of the artists and movements we were learning about were in Paris. Many artists even came to Paris from other parts of Europe and beyond to be part of what some considered the center of the art world. A little side trip to Dresden was a reminder that art, and art history, was happening everywhere. It was also happening in Africa and Asia and North America and South America and Australia and Oceania, anywhere there were people, but we didn’t get into that at the time.
I was really fascinated by Die Brücke paintings which are bold and colorful. I especially liked Emil Nolde who did a whole series of paintings of masks. But why “The Bridge”? I asked my teacher. She thought for a minute and said, “I don’t know. I never thought about it. Why don’t you look it up and you can tell me because I’d like to know too.”
I told you she was a good teacher.
The answer, by the way, is that, like a lot of founders of art movements, they were young and idealistic and wanted to create art that was “a bridge to the future”, breaking with past traditions and opening up a whole new freedom of expression. When I read that it opened up my mind to the realization that all art, really, is a bridge to the future—art is creating something that didn’t exist but which reaches beyond the present.
I still think about that every time I see art on or near a bridge.
Here’s Emil Nolde’s Mask Still Life III.
Source: Artchive
I confess I was briefly tempted to take the box full of snacks left outside of an office down the hall from the one where I work. I saw it as I was leaving for the day and obviously the delivery person couldn’t get anyone in that office to answer the door. It’s possible everyone had already left for the day, although from what I’ve seen there’s rarely anyone in that office, which made me wonder if the snack box had been ordered by someone who worked there or if it was a special promotional gift sent by someone outside whatever department uses that office. I still wasn’t going to take it but I wondered if anyone who worked there knew it had been delivered, and how long it would take them to find it. At least from a quick glance I didn’t think there was anything perishable in the box.
When 
There are hornets under the house, in the crawlspace. I only know this because I’ve seen them going in and out of a hole in the bricks next to the patio. They’ve kept to themselves which is the only reason I haven’t convinced my wife to pack up the dogs and all our belongings and set the house on fire as we drive away. I’ve thought about getting one of those bug bombs that sprays a cloud of insecticide and throwing it into the crawl space, then packing up the dogs and all our belongings and setting the house on fire as we drive away, but, as I said, they’ve kept to themselves.
Mondays are always tough. I know that’s a cliché and hackneyed joke, one that can be counted on to pop up on a regular basis everywhere from the office watercooler to Garfield comics. It’s so pervasive there’s even a counter-response, people who like Mondays. I can respect that even if I don’t share the feeling. Especially this Monday. This weekend I was sick and didn’t get much done. A busy weekend can make Monday feel like a relief, even if it’s not entirely welcome, just because it is a break. Almost as old as jokes about Mondays is the saying that “a bad day of [fill in hobby] is better than a good day at work!” My feeling is that even a good day of housecleaning isn’t that much better than a good day at work, unless somebody brought donuts in, which usually happens on Thursdays. When I’m cleaning the house no one’s going to bring in donuts unless I bring them in myself.