On a Saturday in June

On a Saturday in June, we celebrated and natural and man-made beauty with two activities: a musical nature walk and a museum visit. Tomorrow is the summer solstice, so in the morning we gathered with the East End Song Studio at Nine Mile Creek* Trail to sing, to play movement games and circle dances, and use our imaginations. We set off like treasure hunters with a hand-drawn map. *The other side of the road, leading off the larger parking lot, is the Nine Mile Run Trail--easy to confuse!

I catalogued the different colors we saw: orange, white, periwinkle, and purple flowers; orange and blue butterflies or moths; and dragonflies with electric blue or green bodies. And of course, many shades of green. The creek even smelled like moss--a very green smell.

Jett’s programming appeals to children of all ages, including an elderly man named Pete who was walking the trail and joined in for one of them. Then we had brunch under the trees, and the cool green-ness of it all reminded me of nothing so much as the Central European hygienic habit of “forest bathing,” except we were fully clothed.

Next Dear Husband went to church to play a wedding, and I went home to do this and that. We reunited in the late afternoon at the Frick Museum, where we met a friend who has lived in Pittsburgh for a quarter century and had never been before. Our object was the opening of a traveling exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum of Art on French modernist painters.

Sold as "French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degas," we saw works by Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Matisse, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin. Also Gabriele Münter, I think the only female painter, who had lived a couple of years in Koblenz(?), the village our guest is from. The style of the paintings and sculptures included realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, Fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, spanning the century from the 1850s to the 1940s. 

Goustave Courbert's The Wave was one of my favorite paintings, because it reminded me of one of my favorite works of glass art, a solid hunk of clear glass that nevertheless gave the feeling of movement.

I feel as though I have seen a similar vita in Frick Park, with a high path overlooking a tree-filled valley and buildings in the distance.

This one was large and stunning in person. The fact that you can tell the artist painted her left arm multiple times to get the angle right gives the painting a sense of movement.

I thought the curator(s) had done an excellent job choosing and staging the works so that we could appreciate multiple landscapes together, portraits (backlit peasants in fields, humble figures rich and poor, full-length middle-class icons), still lifes (including a painting of a basket of freshly caught fish, still bloody from having the hooks removed), and another set of portraits they entitled “Bodies” that mostly consisted of nude female bathers. 

Left: a Cardinal smelling flowers--the level of detail without visible brushstrokes was captivating.

Right: The Philosopher. reading a newspaper. He was displayed amid bathing women. I think the only other nude male was a half-life-sized bronze by Rodin made after the Franco-Prussian War.

As a historian, I find it valuable to be familiar with the culture of the time that I study, and attending an exhibit such as this helps me recalibrate my mental timeline of. I/We? have a tendency to think of modernity coming with the world wars in the 20th century, but artists were already challenging norms and perceptions in the second half of the 19th century. 

Before the museum closed, we sped through a couple of the free, permanent-collection galleries, although these are updated with some regularity. For instance, I don't remember seeing this peeved St. Catherine of Sienna with her  tortured expression before.

I was tickled by the juxtaposition of the painted wig on the left and the photographed "wig" of shaving cream on the artist's daughter on the right.

Magnificent composition of the painter's studio, in front of a room filled with ceramics:

Then we dodged the raindrops back to our cars and reconvened at a local French restaurant to eat and catch up. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the midpoint of the year.

A Weekend in SW Pennsylvania

When my youngest brother and his wife flew into Pittsburgh for a family vacation at Deep Creek Lake, I created a "tasting" itinerary of the area to whet their appetite for a longer visit:

Saturday:
Personal pick-up at the airport
Dinner on the back patio
A show at the Arcade Comedy Theater

Sunday:
Take the Monongahela Incline up to Mount Washington to enjoy Grandview Avenue
Have brunch at Eggs & Moore, a mom n' pop diner
Drive to Fallingwater for an in-depth tour of the famous house
Arrive at Deep Creek Lake in time for a late dinner

As usual, things didn't go entirely to plan, but they ended up okay in the end. From the airport, we drove over to The Village of Sewickley to pick up an audiobook I had requested from the library and then made a loop to show them the church where Dear Husband plays. Then we drove to Wexford to pick up my old car. Oh yeah, did I mention I bought a new(ish) car?

My Turquoise Torpedo is 20 years old, dented like a tin can, and has no working air conditioning. The new car--I'm taking nominations for a name--is a 2024 Hyundai Elantra Hybrid with a driver's seat that reminds you of a cockpit. Of course we ran into a couple of snafus, namely having to unfreeze my credit to get the bank loan, and then the car salesman completely missing the fact that we had a check-ready loan, leaving us waiting for a completely unnecessary hour while they tried to generate their own loan offer. Thankfully the restaurant where we celebrated our 20th anniversary that night was able to hold our reservation (Monterey Bay Fish Grotto)!

That was Thursday; this was Saturday:

(Playing arcade games before the show!)

Sunday morning we got terribly lost trying to get to the lower station of the Mon Incline, but we made it. Breakfast was delicious. We then got ~8,000 steps and a lot of sun as we ambitiously walked to the Duquesne Incline and back to the upper station--only to discover that due to a power outage, the incline wasn't running. Two Lyfts later (don't ask), we were home, packing our bags and the cars to drive south.

A short ride through very green southwestern Pennsylvania, we reached Fallingwater. Our tour guide told us all about the land that is now Bear Run Preserve, the summer cabins that the Kaufmanns visited before hiring Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s, and the house with its famous cantilevered terraces. Wright's design incorporates nature so much that it is currently being waterproofed to ensure that its sandstone doesn't erode from the inside out.

Above: approaching Fallingwater from the near side of Bear Run;

the waterfalls begin to the left, just outside the frame

Main terrace looking toward the bridge

View over the terrace wall down to the wading pool (left) and the flowing stream (right) with the Jacques Lipschitz "Mother and Child" (1941) sculpture 

The hearth was supposed to be the heart of the home. Also: alcohol.

Looking down the steps to the stream

I love this planter in the middle of a stairway, as well as the bookcase on the stairs

Tiffany lamp in the primary bedroom

To the left: geraniums as privacy screen in the primary bathroom; to the right: the only room in the house with window treatments (horizontal blinds) was the guest bathroom

Full bathroom with rainforest shower head and cork instead of tile off Edward Kaufmann, Sr.'s study

Edward Kaufmann, jr.'s bookshelves in his study; I've long wondered about the wisdom of keeping books in a home with Fallingwater's humidity. When it rains, the rock below has a channel to drain the water that seeps through the wall via pipe in the floor to the driveway.

Final stop: guest house and staff quarters (now offices). My pictures aren't very good, but I was left with an impression of color and angles that would be interesting to look at.

Of course we ended our visit with a stop at the lookout that gives the famous view of the house and waterfalls, an aspect that cannot be appreciated when you're actually in it.

Monday: running the river rapids