We have gradually acquired an appreciation for fine art, mostly paintings with a bit of statuary and bronzes here and there.  Kat booked our hotel after first locating this city’s best museum, noting it is but a half mile’s hike each way.  CIA is famed for its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections (nearly everybody’s favorite genre?); we just had to see it. 

The touring exhibition was Matisse’s Jazz collection, a book of colored paper cutouts he and a few assistants put together late in his life.  He had undergone a serious abdominal surgery which prolonged his life by years, but which somehow cost him his touch with a paintbrush.  Using combinations of colored paper, cutouts and backgrounds, Jazz made him feel that he had at last mastered line and color, together at once.  Personally, I prefer his paintings and see no weakness in his line or dissonance in his color.  And now that we’re back home it’s clear that CIA either had some of its best art on loan, or just on hiatus; there’s a lot of really good art we missed despite seeing the proper galleries. 

We did see two 20^th century American works I’d long admired but never expected to see up close.  Just think of Grant Wood’s American Gothic and its austere models.  The old farmer holding his pitchfork tines up, and his wife so plainly attired, both serious as a tooth ache.  The man was Wood’s dentist (decades of painful healing may have made him feel and look scary) and the woman was Wood’s daughter.  What a terrible disservice to her; if justice is a real thing she inherited a pile of money from her hateful old daddy. 

Nighthawks represents the other side of America circa late 1930s to early 40’s.  It shows an all-night big city diner with a cook/server and three customers, each alone with their problems and worries which had to be plentiful late in The Depression near the beginning of WW II.   The painting is much larger than expected and packs real emotional power.  The artist is Edward Hopper, famous for his starkly realistic images of American life in one of our darker hours.  But it was a thrill to see Nighthawks in the canvas.   

A late lunch at the Berghoff Restaurant featured Chicago style German food.  Kat ordered a Reuben sandwich.  I had their wurst appetizer, knockwurst and bratwurst with German potato salad and red cabbage.  This café started out in the 1890’s as a brewery with an attached saloon.  The brewery is next door, their beer is quite good, and the food did not disappoint. 

Once back in our hotel I did the research on tomorrow’s excursion.  This is stuff you can only do a day or two ahead of the ballgame.  Who will pitch for each team?  Who will bat against those pitchers?  Who tweaked a muscle or got hit by a pitch?  Can I predict the batting orders?  Spoiler alert: I did predict the batting orders, perfectly.  Don’t tell you me fantasy baseball is a childish waste of time!

https://www.edwardhopper.net/nighthawks.jsp That is a decent image of Nighthawks. Still much better in the museum!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_Wood_-_American_Gothic.jpeg Who would make his daughter appear so drab?