Category Archives: Hungarian art

Note: I am not dead…

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nor have I been quite as productive as I had imagined when I got the idea to take a blog break. My novel isn’t finished–but I’m really excited to have a complete draft. Now I just need to mold it into something coherent and staggeringly genius.

I’m almost finished with my application for a grant to research emerging artists in Hungary. Keep your fingers crossed on that front, and perhaps yours intrepidly will be corresponding from Budapest in a year’s time.
Also, I finally got to harvest my urban garden! The four tomatoes are scrawny and ugly. However, let me brag about my amazing hot peppers. My herbs are growing like weeds, and I can’t make enough mojitos to keep up with my mint plant.

Despite having been away almost a month, this is not the resumption of your regularly scheduled blog. I’ll be back in full force after a long Labor day weekend. And my god!, the art world is exploding with awesomeness at that time. I would need to take a vacation just to see it all (but I won’t : ). Jerry Saltz’s pick for the upcoming season here. Mine to come!

Ravels in Review: 4th of July Weekend!

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Thank god it’s finally here. I mean, aside from some techincal snafoos, it’s been a good week– but I rather be off on a long weekend. Jasper John’s Three Flags, above, is as close to patriotic as I get. I’ve been on a mental vacation everywhere but NYC USA this week.

There was a video post about the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and then there was Hungarian art past (Tamas St. Auby) and present (Peter Forgacs) plus the current cool festivities at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.

There was a crazy sky last weekend, which led to some good sailing weather, and hopefully there’ll be more of it for this upcoming weekend: we’re sailing over to Fire Island. It’ll be nice to have some good ol’ Americana in my life. Enjoy the long weekend!

Where I Want to Be: Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary

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Budapest is looking lovely this time of year, despite the Danube rising over its banks and causing minor flooding in the city. My 4th of July plans don’t really have room for a trip to Budapest, but if they did, I’d go to the Ludwig Museum. The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art will be open until midnight on July 3 and 4. A night at the museum is always fun, and a night at the museum in Budapest during a warm summer sounds especially pleasant.

On these late nights, the Ludwig Museum will be showing films by Anton Corbijn to complement the photography exhibition of his work that focuses on rock and roll idols, documenting them, and in a later series trying to become them, rather like Cindy Sherman’s transformations.
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I have been- ahem– slightly focused on Hungarian art of late, and it just so happens the Ludwig Museum is displaying the largest amount of its permanent collection since its inception in 1991. How the collection came to be is an interesting story in itself: collector Peter Ludwig was a German tycoon with a passion for collecting art. In an obituary, The Independent described him as “either the most selfless and discriminating art collector of the late 20th century or a self- aggrandising amasser of objects which he regarded as bargaining counters in a relentless pursuit of honours and distinction in his native Germany and abroad.”
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Hommage à Dezső Korniss by Nadler, left, and Faces from the Square by Feher, right

Either way, Peter Ludwig created one of the largest collections in private hands, and turned over much of it to found museums in Cologne and Budapest, among other things. Because of his extraordinary donation, 200 excellent works of the 20th C. out of 300 in the Ludwig Museum’s show are from Ludwig’s original collection. The Warhols, Lichtensteins and Oldenbergs are complemented by works by Hungarian artists such as Keserü, Nádler and Feher.

Doesn’t it just look like fun? A night at the museum, a little rock and roll, a solid permanent collection of Hungarian and International art, and the story of an eccentric collector…