sandr020

Notable German art dealer Hild­ebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) was the ­son of a famous art hist­or­ian, Cornelius Gurlitt I (1850–1938), and grandson of Louis Gurlitt (1812–1897), an important C19th landscape artist. Early in his car­eer in the 1920s, Hilde­brand worked as a museum dir­ector in Zwickau, where he tried to convince people of the merits of modern art. But he faced a right wing backlash and was dropped. In 1933 he moved to Hamburg where young Hildebrand tried to rebuilt his career as a modern art dealer, just as the Nazis rose to power. Hildebrand started to actively link himself with the Nazi goals, writing to the Propa­ganda Ministry to volunteer his skills as a leading expert in modern i.e degenerate art. He was sent with other dealers to act for the Nazis, with the task of acquiring works for the Führermuseum project. Hit­ler’s Special Art Comm­ission of Linz planned to create a super museum in his boyhood town, Linz, that would contain every important art work in the w...

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Medit­er­r­anean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was bapt­is­ed. Touristy Plaza de la Merced was where the art­ist etched his first drawings outside his home. Picasso was messy, both boisterous and silent, amor­ous and domineering. His love of bullfighting stemmed from child­hood visits to Málaga’s Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta, making picadors and bulls a recurring motif in his work.   Guernica, 1937 3.5 × 7.8m Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid Photo credit: publicdelivery Early on Pablo shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By 16, his work got him into the prestigious Royal Acad­emy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid . And studied the Spanish masters he admired at the Prado Museum . Picasso was young when Paul Cézanne, Geo...

The origins of the boy scout movement have been well documented and well read.  Col. Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) had long been very familiar with the organis­ation called The Boys' Brigade , founded by his Scottish friend William Alexander Smith back in 1883. Members of the Boys’ Brigade were encouraged to combine drill and fun activities with Christian values. And during the Boer War in South Africa, Col Robert Baden-Powell was clearly very impressed by the 16 volunteer British adolescents in The Mafeking Cadet Corps . Later, back home in Britain, he used them in his military books as an example of bravery during the Boer War. Baden-Powell wrote a small military manual,  Aids to Scouting  1903, and found it useful for adults as well. With encouragement from William Alexander Smith, Baden-Powell decided to re-write Aids to Scouting to suit a younger market. This new book de­scribed outdoor activities, character development, citizenship and per­sonal fit­ness as th...

The Silk Road was a trade route for precious silk, but not only silk. It became an East-West network of inter-­con­necting routes linking Central Asian Kingdoms (eg Bukhara, Samarkand, Bishkek and Islamabad) in the west with major China cit­ies; especially the Han and Tang dynasty capital, Changan (modern day Xian) in the east. It was rare for individual traders to cover the whole length of the Silk Road. When each trader arrived at his region’s limit, he sold the goods ac­ross his border. Thus as the goods moved westwards from China, Chinese traders would sell to Central Asians, then to Pers­ians, to Syrians, to the Greeks and Jews, and finally to the Italians. Marco Polo mosaic, by Francesco de' Rossi Ducal Palace,   Genoa The volume of goods traded along the Silk Road increased during the Tang dynasty (618-907), in both directions. The Chin­ese imported gold, gems, per­­fumes, dyes, textiles, ivory and glass, and exported furs, ceram­ics, spices, jade, silk, bronze a...

My family’s borscht is milchig (no meat), made up of beetroot, pot­ato, cabbage, somewhat bitter sorrel and sour cream; it was the heart and soul of my grandmother’s Russian cuisine. From my friends at school in the 1950s, I knew that the Ukrainian, Lith­uan­ian and Polish Jewish families also loved borscht. For families with too many children and very little spare income, borscht was an ideal food. Cheap and easy to grow at home, beet­roots and potatoes were collected by the children in autumn and stored in the family cellar for use during the long winter months. There were no fridges of course, but the family cellars were so cold that the vegetables were naturally preserved. I had assumed that borscht was always vegetarian, hot and tasty in winter, chilled in summer. The women in my family in any case traditionally avoided meat when they could help it; meat was too expensive and who wanted to slaughter helpless animals? Other families preferred meat borscht, made with beef marrow ...

The Economist Intelligence Unit is a British business providing forecasting and advisory services through research and analysis, including country, industry and management analyses world-wide. Plus, as examined in 2016, it has published an annual Global Liveability Ranking which began in 2004. The Unit ranks cities for their urb­an quality of life, based on assess­ments across five categories — stability, infrastructure, healthcare and culture, education and environment. With Melbourne winning the world title for the past seven years, it may come as a surprise to Australians that Vienna for the first time topped the EIU’s Global Liveability Index. The 2018 results were as follows: 1. Vienna Austria; 2. Melbourne Australia; 3. Osaka Japan; 4. Calgary Canada; 5. Sydney Australia; 6. Vancouver Canada; 7. Toronto Canada and Tokyo Japan; 9. Copen­hagen Denmark and 10. Adelaide Australia. Vienna The differences between the top 30 cities in this index were small. Vienna and Me...

The Tartan Weaving Mill on The Royal Mile in Edinburgh covers 5 storeys inside, with an exhibition that shows the whole process involved in tartan production: shearing sheep, working looms, making a kilt and being photographed kitted out. So I already knew that tartan   was not described in Scotland until the C16th . In 1538, James V ordered a tartan hunting out­fit for himself and his men: they wore trews/close-fitting trousers and stockings of a warm stuff of divers colours call­ed tartan. A plaid about their shoulders, which is a mantle of divers colours, of much finer and lighter stuff than their hose, with blue flat caps on their heads. Thus the belted plaid appears to have become a loose garment made up of 5 metres of double tartan. Highland looms could only weave a maximum width of 75 cms so lengths had to be sewn together down their long edge to make the plaid. Such outfits were practical for riding and led to the aristocratic fashion for tartan trews. The trews wer...

Let us start with whist. The  history of Whist can be traced at least to the early C16th in England (as mentioned in a pub­lish­ed sermon by Bishop Latimer in 1529) and through succeeding centuries under different names. Whist maintained its pop­ularity as a fashionable amusement, but it was not until 1742 that Edmond Hoyles’ famous Short Treatise on Whist appeared. In 1834 Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1804-70) invented the first sig­nal where partners defending against a contract could play particular cards to give a coded meaning, to guide each other. After ret­irement in 1857, Cavendish devoted himself to playing world class whist at the Port­land Club in London . In fact the first game of Duplicate Whist was pl­ayed in London that year, under Cav­end­ish’s dir­ec­t­ion.      Two beautifully dressed couples playing bridge c1900 The USA progressed in parallel with Britain in extending Duplicate. A dup­licate whist game was played privately in Chicago in 1880 ...

A Scandal in Bohemia by Gideon Haigh (Hamish ­Hamilton, 2018) tells an incredible story.  Mollie Dean (1905-30) was a very attractive Melburnian, a young woman who had great plans for the future. Many men said she was an excep­t­ional person, with great vital­ity and was a good conversation­al­ist. Women (like playwright Betty Roland ) said Mollie was sul­try or sullen-looking. Everyone agreed she was slim with dark bobbed hair and simple makeup. And that she was forceful and Bohemian, wanting to energet­ically discuss art, culture and pol­it­ics with the males. Clearly Mollie was a rising star, writ­ing a novel that would be call­ed Monst­ers Not Men . Mollie’s family was already problem-filled. Her father George, a tough school prin­cipal, died during her childhood. Her mother Ethel Dean was manipul­at­ive, controlling and physically violent. Ethel had just one plan for Mollie: to quickly marry her off, to a specific groom - mechanic Adam Graham (the Deans’ lodger in Elwood ...