Bedford Street Gang
An interesting day spent at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It’s a big museum that’s taken an interesting gamble: many of its galleries are organized thematically rather than chronologically, so you can find contemporary painting next to Picasso and Rembrandt next to Lucian Freud.
This amazing etching is from a temporary exhibit of American Depression Etchings, one otherwise populated by more familiar images. Oh my: Buffy and Lyra, meet the kids from the neighborhood. (Notice, incidentally, how carefully the image walks right up to the line. Make the girl on the left just a little older, or just a little younger, and it’s too terrible. There’s a skinny girl in the gang, too, and she’s right in the foreground, and she isolates the heroine while giving us a chaperone. The corner store will shortly make its appearance in Hopper, who studied with Lewis.)
Also on tap today (besides lots of preparation for the Hypertext 2010 planning meeting): a trip to the Bata Shoe Museum. Yep: a three-story museum of the shoe. I now know a lot about shoe fashions in the Venetian Republic and on the Great Plains. I still don’t understand Manolo Blahnik.