Ringing in 2023
Best wishes for a colorful New Year, tree at the Ritz, and a Westphalian museum tour
A quick message to wish you a joyful 2023 — with a few last holiday pictures since we can still celebrate the 12 days of Christmas?! I hope that you and those around you are having peaceful and revitalizing days before launching fully into this new year.
Looking back to a little bit of Christmas spirit, the tree at Paris’ Ritz Hotel was too impressive not to share a few snaps. It is something I look forward to every year and requires finding a reason to make it past the bellmen at the main entrance to take a look, despite not being a guest. This year, the way to the tree was searching for last-minute Christmas presents in the hotel’s gallery of shops.
Here’s the iconic view of the grand staircase, tapestry, and the star herself, the Christmas tree, designed each year by Parisian floral designer Anne Vitchen: a dreamy world of frosted evergreen, candy canes, and red and golden ornament globes.
If you look closely, you can see that there’s a train hidden near the base of the spruce (or pine, or fir? I never know the difference). Last year, the train even went round and round, you could almost imagine it puffing steam and blowing its horn as it choo-chooed off on its path.
Behind the action of the small entrance lobby and various bars (like the one named after Ernest Hemingway, or the salon named after Marcel Proust) and restaurants lies a gilded, sparkling hallway lined with shops. While such shops within a hotel might appear typical these days, back around 1900, the female head of the hotel was the first to bring shops inside her hotel.
Granted, the vast majority of things on display here were far, far, far out of my budget. But I did pick up an English breakfast tea at the TWG shop, a Singaporean artisanal teahouse chain, for family, which we’ve been enjoying every morning since (especially in an adapted ‘London fog’, with some milk and sometimes sugar/vanilla), as well as some other tea gifts.
Outside, light installations were sparkling in the rainy pavements, turning my slight scowl at having been soaked on my bike ride to a real enchantment at the reflections.
Another last-minute holiday gift stop was the bookshop Galignani, a dual English and French language bookstore, where one is hard-pressed not to linger for hours, but alas, the train station was calling…
From Gare du Nord, I caught one of the last trains before the holiday train strikes started in full force … with only a couple hours delay upon arriving in Münster, Germany to visit family. I love spending this time of year in Germany, with its Christmas markets, music, candles, mulled wine, and gingerbread Lebkuchen galore.
My year as a ‘house elf’ in my former undergrad house after graduation paid off with being able to quickly polish silver and bake cakes for holiday gatherings… I dusted off an old family recipe for the laziest person’s cake: simply eggs (separated; with egg whites fluffed), a bit of sugar, and melted chocolate, topped by a whipped cream and lingonberry mixture (also made vegan for some). Since the recipe comes from circa the 1920s, it has the cringe-worthy name of the ‘blushing girl’, which as someone very much prone to blushing made me blush all the more.
Opening the mass-holiday greeting from the Tate Britain, this Winter Landscape, by Frederick Porter (1929) from their collection made me smile at the soft, lush, colorful winter scene.
In local life, there wasn’t so much purpled-tinged snow, as biting frost and fog, lovely in a different way, especially when sufficiently bundled up in Uniqlo heat tech clothing.
Maybe the environment wasn’t in line with Porter’s painting, but it seemed that clouds in the countryside were trying to emulate Rothko’s paintings… close, and maybe next year, they’ll get there?!
After Christmas, with family, we took a one-night trip to visit museums in the region, starting with an amazing exhibit of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square works between 1950-1976. These paintings depict three or four colorful planes, seemingly advancing or receding, playing with our perception of colors and dimensionality. The museum is located in a small city, Bottrop, the hometown of Albers, that punches well above its weight, hosting a very impressive exhibit in a recently-renovated museum, filled with light from huge windows that framed views of a surrounding park.
The second museum we visited was Küppersmühle, in a historic grain mill redesigned by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in 1999 to house a contemporary art collection. My favorite parts were the Anselm Kiefer room-installations (not pictured) and the staircase (photo below), which felt like you were wandering up, in, and around a sculpture itself. It looks like wood but is not (I think it is concrete).
As a third stop, we went to Düsseldorf to 1) have dinner in the largest ‘Little Tokyo’ area in Germany and 2) visit the blockbuster Mondrian exhibit that appeared to have attracted half of neighboring Netherlands. Perhaps it became such a success due to all the publicity around a Mondrian painting in the Düsseldorf collection that was incorrectly hung upside down since 1945… Maybe it is a bit anti-climatic to say that in the exhibit today, they didn’t flip the painting up-side-up, because that potentially could have damaged the fragile work with its colorful tape and pigments (pictured below). The topsy-turvy news made it around the world, for an English-speaking audience in the NYT, Guardian, and Smithsonian Magazine, for example…
And in lieu of any fireworks, since I spent the coziest (alias: uneventful) New Year’s Eve in memory (c.f. these fireworks in Berlin in years past),
will instead sign off with this view of the Lamberti Church in Münster, in the blue hour, marked by the ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ light installation on the church spire by the Viennese artist Billi Thanner. Spotting it, when you are wandering through the city, lost in other thoughts, somehow feels so centering, pulling you towards something onwards, and higher.
Hoping that everyone has a wonderful, colorful start to the new year 2023,
Anna Lea
How do you see a landscape or sunset and immediately conjure up images of Rothko paintings? Every particle of your being is that of an artist. Thank you for bringing the Parisian and German beauty into my SF home. <3
Happy new year!! Wow that Ritz Xmas tree is quite the show!! And how funny with the Mondrian picture, I hadn’t heard about it, but at least I know
Mondrian, always thinking back to one exhibition I saw by him with my dad many years ago, and now every time I walk through a city and see a similar arrangement of red-yellow-blue , I think of Mondrian :)