Leipzig

We spent four days in Leizpig after our holiday in Dresden. These are Saxony's two major cities, but nonetheless quite different in history and temperament. Dresden was the court city and is still the capital city, while Leipzig was and remains commercial city with an historically strong publishing sector. Leipzig also has Germany's second oldest university.

Leipzig  has an impressive collection of old masters , though not quite enough to attract the hordes of tour buses that choke Dresden's Zwinger. Leipzig's Museum der Bildnenen Künsten does something very innovative, though: it integrates very contemporary art, often photographs, in the rooms of the old masters. Sometimes these are photos of the museum itself. The effect is itself artistic and gives the viewer a sense of the continuity of artistic thought. On principle I take no photos of copyright-protected works, as the photos certainly are, so I can show none here. But I can show an example based on what I saw.

Museum der Bildenen Künste

On the suggestion of a friend (I will use no names here, since this is public), I began taking photos of clocks with the idea of putting them together in a single work much like a painting of doors from Guatemala. This turned out to be much harder than I thought, since the individual photos had clocks of different sizes with different amounts of background and different angles.

Saxon Clocks

There were also choices to make with the background color. I tried white originally. Then dark blue, and finally settled on a gold that matched the gold in the clock faces. The leftmost clock comes from the Leipzig Rathaus tower and needed some editing to remove a flag mast that obscured the lower part of the image. One ordering principle is that time progresses from left to right.

The painting below struck me not so much for its merit as for the topic. This examination  reminds me strongly of a Habilitation defense defense.

Hasenclever-Hieronymous Jobs im Examen

Leipzig is rich, but not every building has been renovated. The following photo comes from an alleyway with a ghostly 16th century wooden head from the museum in the window.

Window - Leipzig