German Joys

Eija-Liisa Ahtila in K21

I note that K21, the contemporary-art museum in Duesseldorf, is currently hosting an retrospective from Eija-Liisa Ahtila (g) a Finnish video artist.  I saw her 2002 work "The House" a few years ago, which documents a schizophrenic woman's perception of space and time in a series of surrealistic, dream-like vignettes.  Oddly moving, and like nothing I'd ever seen before.  Plus, you get to hear Finnish being spoken.  Finnish is a spine-tingling language.  I plan to drop by soon, and will post a review. 

Stealing Art in Europe

Cyrus Farivar asks:

Why is it so easy to steal art in Europe?

Smaller galleries and no guns. Europe has an especially high concentration of world-class art collections, many of which are housed in modest institutions. The art in Zurich was housed in a 19th-century villa, as opposed to a large-scale museum with a complicated entrance. Further, most security personnel in European museums aren't armed, mostly due to a culture of openness and trust, but also for reasons of expense and liability—you wouldn't want bullets flying around an enclosed space with lots of frightened tourists and precious objets d'art. While many galleries have alarms, guards, and other staff to prevent off-hour thefts, they don't always take precautions to avoid the most obvious scenario: armed criminals walking right through the front door.

American art museums aren't likely to have armed guards, either, but they do tend to have better security overall than their European counterparts. In the United States, your chances of finding a Van Gogh on display in a small gallery are slim; more likely, it would be in a museum on the scale of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. American museums also tend to be located in modern buildings, where it's easier to set up high-tech sensors and alarms. The proprietors of centuries-old European houses are more reluctant to start drilling through walls and running cables in odd corners.

St. Benedict and the Diamond Ring Effect

From the invaluable Astronomy Picture of the Day, an unlikely combination:

Let a professional astronomer explain it:

The above painting was completed in 1735 by Cosmas Damian Asam, a painter and architect famous in early eighteenth century Germany. Clearly drawn is not only a total solar eclipse, but the solar corona and the diamond ring effect visible when sunlight flows only between mountains on the Moon. The person depicted viewing these eclipse phenomena is St. Benedict. Roberta J. M. Olson and Jay Pasachoff have hypothesized that Asam himself may have seen first hand one or all of the total solar eclipses of May 1706, 1724, and 1733. Many facts about our astronomical universe that are taken for granted today have been known -- or accurately recorded -- only during the last millennium. Asam's painting currently hangs in Weltenburg Abbey in Bavaria, Germany.

Art Theft in France

This I didn't know: last year in France, over 3000 works of art (G) were stolen -- about 8 per day -- from private collections, museums, and churches. 

French culture minister Christine Albanel said security in many of these places is so lax that it's as easy to steal a work of art as it is to steal a bicycle, and that many thefts appeared to have been arranged in advance by private parties.  (Albanel said that the religious works were "shipped in container-loads to the USA" to decorate private chapels.)  Art thieves in France routinely receive extremely light sentences; Albanel proposes to stiffen them considerably, and Justice Minister Rachida Dati has promised cooperation.

Don Giovanni on Paper

Next Wednesday, Germany's sinister underground of "paper-theater" hustlers visits the Theater Museum in Duesseldorf, housed in Schloss Jaegerhof, to perform Mozart's Don Giovanni (G) -- with live musical accompaniment -- using carboard-cutout figurines.  Be there and be square!

Bonjour Russland at the Kunst Palast

I just got back from the exhibition Bonjour, Russland (Bonjour, Russia) at the Kunst Palast museum in Duesseldorf. More than 120 works have left Russian museums for the first time for this show, and its only stop in Germany is the Museum Kunst Palast.

The exhibition features dozens of French and Russian paintings from around 1870 to 1925 held in major museums in Russia.  Russian collectors Sergei Schukin (1854-1936) and Ivan Morozov (1871–1921) were discriminating collectors of avant-garde French and Russian art around the turn of the 20th century.  Their collections, in turn, helped inspire many Russian modernists.  After the Revolution of 1917, these holdings were nationalized and sent to Russian state museums. 

Now, Schukin and Morozov'z French paintings -- including fine canvases by Gauguin, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Derain, Manet (among them his 1878 Tavern, pictured above) and Matisse -- are on display.  Alongside these rather familiar works are paintings and sculptures from Russian masters of early modernism such as Ilya Repin, Wassily Kandinsky, Natalya Goncharova, Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Mikhail Vroubel, and many more.  Vroubel, an extravagant symbolist who descended into insanity in the early 1900s, is a fascinating figure.  Here is his 1904 Six-Winged Seraph, on view in Duesseldorf now:

The curating is unobtrusive, which suits me just fine.  The paintings speak for themselves; if you want to read about them, pick up a catalog (the Kunst Palast museum has a mezzanine fitted out with dozens of catalogs and benches for just this purpose).

I've seen several Russian exhibitions in the past few years, including a show dedicated to Ilya Repin (G) in Wuppertal and a massive exhibition of Russian art from the second half of the 19th century (F) in the Musee D'Orsay.  Russian painting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a comparatively neglected field, but as these exhibitions, along with Bonjour Russland, show, it's a trove of idiosyncratic, spiritually intense creation.  The impressionists and post-impressionists are a bit over-exposed, but it's the lesser-known Russian paintings that make Bonjour Russland  well worth going out of your way for.

Gregor Schneider's Weisse Folter

Weisse Folter means "white torture" in German. It's a term used for techniques of incarceration and control that drive humans mad without leaving visible injuries. Put people in a featureless interior landscape and isolate them from human contact, warmth, sunlight, leaves, the smell of dirt, and normal noises of everyday life, and most will eventually lose their minds. Most German are familiar with the term because the left used it to describe the conditions imposed on prisoners of the Red Army Fraction in German prisons in the mid-1970s. (This was agit-prop; the RAF prisoners were housed in a high-security environment, but could socialize among themselves, watch television, and read dozens of books and periodicals. But that's another debate.) A better example of White Torture would be the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in California.

Gregor Schneider is a young German  artist who is fascinated by spaces, walls, prisons, isolation, and jarring changes in context. One of his project is to erect a black cube about the size of the Kaaba in Mecca in various European locations -- a project that has been banned in many cities for fear of unrest. "White Torture," his latest installation can be experienced until July 15 in the fabulous K21 museum in Duesseldorf. Schneider used the entire basement of this large museum for this installation. Visitors are allowed in only singly or in pairs, and are warned not to go in if they are claustrophobic or prone to panic attacks.

You enter through a blank white door, and find yourself in a featureless hallway resembling a maximum-security prison. Some of the doors open, some do not. Around you is complete silence; the walls are covered with sound-insulation foam. If you find your way out of this area, you come to another which is totally dark, only to find yourself in another part of the exhibition which looks exactly like the first hallway you found yourself in. Most of the rooms look like tiny prison cells, but some of them feature strange, cheerless decorations: metal plates attached by hinges to blank walls; a permanently-locked chain-mesh door; a room shaped like a pointed triangle. If you manage to get farther, you'll come to the service area of this eerie abandoned prison -- a thick-walled dark chamber chilled to near-freezing, or a shiny, corrugated-metal warehouse space -- completely empty, completely new.

There is an exit, but there's no guarantee visitors will reach it. Many creep out shortly after entering and run back out the entrance. Others wander around for a good part of an hour before finding the way out. Like a medieval hilltop fortress, the installation is filled with strange twists, dead-ends, and doors that lead nowhere. The featureless uniformity of the spaces offers no clues; you sometimes believe you have backtracked to a part of the installation you thought you had escaped, until you notice a subtle change that means you've actually entered new surroundings. If you let the door close behind you, you might just find yourself locked into a small space with no obvious means of escape. You do encounter other visitors, but because of the heavy soundproofing, you might not notice them even if they're very close to you.

I managed to find the exit, but it required strange leaps of logic and some blind faith. Powerlessness and inhumanity are the message of Weisse Folter -- just as prisoners are completely at the mercy of the guards and bureaucrats who control what they experience, museum visitors are, for a short while at least, completely at the mercy of Gregor Schneider, an absent but all-powerful god. You can only hope that his indifference is tempered by enough mercy to let you escape his silent, sterile underground dungeon.

If you can make it to Duesseldorf by July 15th -- when the installation ends -- do so.

Sublime.

Julius Popp's Idea Machines

A few days ago I heard an interview with Julius Popp (G) a German artist who studied "Buchkunst" (literally, the art of bookmaking) and graphic design.  He seemed like quite a friendly chap.  His work combines dizzying technical proficiency with oblique, poetic social commentary.

Here is a description of Bitfall (2005) from the Saatchi gallery website:

"Using technological wizardry, Julius Popp’s Bitfall reproduces the ‘flood’ of media information in the form of a real waterfall. Comprised of 128 nozzles, Popp’s curtain collects a continuous stream of water droplets. Directing their flow with a complex system of magnetic valves controlled by computer, text and graphics randomly selected from the internet appear in the drizzling liquid, creating a DIYplasma screen. As each message drips into a collection tank, its feeds back into the cycle, creating a metaphor for the impermanence and flux of the perception of ‘reality’"

Another project, micro.spheres,  involves robots. Little, ball-shaped ones.  They're described in German here (my translation):

The spherical knee-high robots have only one ability: they roll automatically to the middle of any room in which they are placed. When they are left alone, they produce static, geometric patterns.  However, as soon as a "foreign" element enters the room, a wave-formed chain reaction is produced in which the space re-orders itself -- a highly poetic image of our environment, which is constantly in the process of change and organization, and of the laws of cause and effect which form its basis.

Perhaps it's my German genes, but I've always had a soft spot for art that somehow 'works.' (Although perhaps the Belgian Wim Delvoye's shit-making machine carries things a bit too far.) Everyone who shares my taste should book a trip to Vienna, where Popp's currently showing at project space (G).

Carol Vogel profiles the "Alchemist" Sigmar Polke

Carol Vogel profiles the fascinating Sigmar Polke in the New York Times:

Sorcerer, jester, sage, visionary — Mr. Polke is a hero to many artists working today and a magnet for curators and collectors. Part of the attraction is his relentless quest to ask more of the conventional canvas, applying clumps or droplets of ancient substances or cheap mass-produced fabrics in unusual juxtapositions with sketched figures.

At a moment when no clear artistic movement or style dominates popular tastes, he is known as a master of the unexpected. And while often rooted in ancient mythology, philosophy and chemistry, artists and curators say, his work always seems new. The artist John Baldessari, 75, describes Mr. Polke as an artist’s artist. “Any one move can provide a career for a lesser artist,” he explained.

He has reclusive tendencies:

Unlike Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami, who work hard at maintaining their movie-star allure, Mr. Polke shuns the limelight and guards his privacy. He has been known to go for months without answering his phone, opening his mail or allowing visitors into his studio.

[h/t: JR]

Catalog of Missing Objects

Go visit The Missing Objects Project. It's a website dedicated to important objects that are known to exist, but which are now missing. They include everything from "Gen. John Cadwalader's Parlor Sofas" to the Ark of the Covenant. Anyone can suggest a new missing object to be added to the collection. Here's an email I sent to the Project:

Hello there. I have a proposed Missing Object for your catalog. During the summer of 2006, I visited the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, Poland. The basis of the museum's collection is a group of artworks and antiquities collected over centuries by this Polish noble family. The highlight is Leonardo's The Lady with an Ermine. However, on the opposite wall of this room is a frame containing a picture of a now-missing painting by Raphael. The English-language museum guide describes the painting thus:

The empty frame on the opposite wall stands as a reminder of the missing Portrait of a Youth (ca. 1509-11), by Raphael Santi (1483-1520. This was originally thought to be a self-portrait of Raphael, and later variously described as the portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino, and of Federico Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. The painting was bought about 1800 in Venice from the Giustiniani family by Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and Konstanty Czartoryksi. It was looted by the Germans in 1939 and has not been seen since 1945.

Best of luck with your interesting project!

New Objectivity in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is hosting a major show of Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") portraits, and the New York Times calls it "amazing":

Organized by Sabine Rewald, curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, this exhibition creates an indelible, psychologically charged picture of Weimar Germany as it teetered between World Wars I and II. In a larger sense it is a humane hall of mirrors whose representation of individuals and types, of the quick and the deluded, the knowing and the devouring, has a sharpness that still cuts.

Presented in seven galleries devoid of fanfare or froufrou, “Glitter and Doom” contains just more than 100 paintings and drawings by 10 artists, prominent among them George Grosz, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter and Karl Hubbuch, and most conspicuously the unrelentingly savage Otto Dix and his magnificent other, Max Beckmann. With Dix represented by 53 works and Beckmann holding his own at 17, the two preside over this exhibition like Picasso and Braque, except that they are equals.

A slideshow is found here which highlights the glistening, icily perverted work of Christian Schad (G), who's not as well-known as his more traditionally "Expressionist-looking" colleagues:

The meticulous Schad, represented by works done in Berlin during the late 1920s, seems to have been more evenhanded. He imbued all his subjects, including himself, with an enervated yet dignified remoteness. The exception may be the portrait of a pair of sideshow performers, “Agosta the ‘Winged One’ and Rasha the ‘Black Dove.’ ” Here a slim man with an inverted rib cage and a watchful black woman summon a challenging energy and direct it right at us.

For those of you who, like me, can't pop off to New York to see the show, I recommend the glorious Taschen book on this period, The New Objectivity (German version here). Dozens of large, full-color illustrations and sympathetic essays bring these odd, intense, cynical, vulnerable creators to life.

Here Come the Testicle-Biting Optimists!

Urban density -- lots of people living stacked on top of and right next to each other in lively little neighborhoods. You don't get much of it in most U.S. cities, but you do in Germany.

Urban density means there are hundreds of people from all income levels and walks of life living within, say, 300 metres of your home. When you live in a nice, dense neighborhood, excitement comes to you; every time you leave your front door, something fun has happened.  In my neighborhood, the "German-Iranian Cultural Center" just inserted a marble plaque into the sidewalk commemorating Goethe's praise of the Persian poet Hafiz.

Another recent addition to the neighborhood is a "store" called diesistkeineuebung.de (=thisisnotadrill.com). The cardboard man in the window is smiling and holding a sign saying "I've got a good feeling!"

What can you buy here? Hard to say. The website offers no products (or if it does, they're well concealed), and describes its "motivation" thus:

German Joys in Welt Kompakt

A while ago, the lovely and talented Katrin S., who writes for the Welt Kompakt newspaper, interviewed me. A short piece resulting from that interview was published today on Page 28 of that paper. I think this is the NRW-teil, which means you can only read it if you buy the Welt Kompakt in the German state of Northern Rhine/Westphalia.

NRW, as the state is fondly called, is the most populous state in Germany, jam-packed with 18, 058,150 fresh, juicy human beings. As this link shows you, every one of us NRWler, as we're called, has an amount of space availabe to us that is the equivalent of one-quarter the size of a football field.

In the article, Katrin says lots of nice things about me, and, what's more important, quotes me saying lots of nice things about me. I won't translate it, because translating stuff about me creeps me out, just like hearing my own voice. But if you happen to be visiting German Joys because of the article, welcome aboard.

On the same page is another piece (which can't be linked, unfortunately), that nicely ties up a few themes of German life. We meet Remy-Pascal Bernet, a 19-year old German who designed an audioguide for the (splendid) Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum (G) in Duisburg, a museum dedicated to modern scultpture and focussing on the Expressionist sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

The audioguide is special because it's designed for the blind. Blind visitors are allowed to touch the sculptures while listening to the descriptions. They have to be accompanied throughout the museum by a guide, because some of the sculptures consist of stuff scattered on the floor, and blind visitors might accidentally "destroy" the sculpture with their canes.

Remy-Pascal Bernet get this prized internship by not training to fight for his country. Germany still has a draft, which means, at least theoretically, that all young German men must report for military service. For the many young Germans who would find this boring or inconvenient (and some who are convinced pacifists) there's a way out: you need only convince the military draft board that you have a conscientious objection to training for military service. During the Cold War, when Germany theoretically needed soldiers, you had to prove you were sincere. Now, I hear, the process is not much more complicated than checking off a box on a postcard.

That's what Mr. Bernet did. Instead of military service he signed up for program called the Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr ('Volunteer Social Year') in which the conscientious objector work in some non-profit institution, such as a retirement home or museum. Thus, the state subsidized a pacifist to help blind people appreciate art. Could there be anything more European?

He Came. They Stripped. He Conquered.

Spiegel Online reports on Spencer Tunick's photo shoot with 840 naked Germans yesterday in Duesseldorf's Musem Kunst Palast. And of course, provides uncensored photos, including lots of naughty bits, for those of you who like naughty bits. The local newspaper Rheinische Post provides 52, count 'em 52, photos here.

Overall, they're a pretty handsome crowd, these Duesseldorfers.

The article reports Tunick's difficulty in being taken seriously, but gives his work an approving nod: Tunick is a kind of sculptor who specializes in "makine the structures of public space insecure," and, at his best, interestingly tweaks the conventions of nudity in Western art. One dpa (German Press Agency) reporter was a bit unsettled by the "associations" brought up by displaying stacked, naked human bodies in Germany -- especially in a courtyard that also contained a monumental female marble nude by Hitler's favorite artist, Arno Breker.

Tunick himself is shy -- he's only undressed once for his art.

Conservative Mayor: By all Means, Go Get Naked in Public Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, Sunday the 6th of August, the American artist Spencer Tunick will stage a happening in the sleepy little village I live in, Duesseldorf, Germany. His shtick is to arrange thousands of naked humans in public and then take photos of them. If you'd like to participate, just click on the website (G).

Surely you recognize Tunick's work from the end of countless local-news broadcasts:

[Male Anchor]: Well, to wrap up on a lighter note, the artist Spencer Tunick was in town today, and arranged 3,000 naked people in Jackson Square.

[Show picture of event. If on American television, make sure any visible dangly bits are blurred out]

[Male Anchor]: Debbie, was that you there in the 5th row? [oleaginous chuckle]

[Female Anchor]: Oh, you kidder! Anyway, authorities report everything went off just fine.

[Male Anchor]: Except somebody came by and stole all their clothes! Now they're walking around the city nude! [oleaginous chuckle #2]

[Female Anchor]: That's artists for you. Always doin' somethin' a lit-tle crazy.

When Tunick does his thing in the U.S., there's usually a strict 15-minute time limit on the actual nudity, to prevent injury to public morals.

Here in Germany, of course, people enjoy swanning about in the altogether; Tunick has all the time he needs to arrange the bodies. There's nothing unusual about seeing naked people in public in the summer; most beaches have a "FKK" (nude bathing) section right next to the main beach, hidden at most by a discreet hedge.

The local newspaper asked Duesseldorf Mayor Joachim Erwin for his reaction to Tunick's stunt.

Caspar David Friedrich in Essen

Last Wednesday I and a friend dropped by the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. I have always had a soft spot for Friedrich, who is considered the greatest German Romantic painter and is best-known for his brooding, metaphysically-charged landscapes. Typical subjects are two monks wandering next to the see, or a neglected cemetery in winter, in which snow drifts against the gravestones of long-forgotten peasants, or a lone wanderer atop a rocky precipice, contemplating a fog-shrouded rocky landscape. Friedrich's reputation has had its ups and downs. He was practically ignored for years after his death, and his religious paintings have been accused of kitsch. Those pesky Nazis clasped him to their stinking bosom, praising the "German spirit" of his art. But after all that, he still speaks to me.

I have never been disappointed by the Museum Folkwang before, and I wasn't now. Yes, I know what you're asking: "What's a Folkwang?"  There are probably a million reasons they can't do this, but the Folkwang should change its name. People assume it is a peculiar little collection devoted to, err, Folkwangs, or the 16th-century Bohemian glass sculptor Hans-Joachim Folkwang. But no, the Museum Folkwang is a big, fascinating museum of modern art right in the heart of Essen, Germany, which will be Europe's cultural capital in 2010.

Former Synagogue as Gas-Chamber

The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra parked 6 cars in front of a former synagogue in the city of Pulheim, near Cologne. Rubber tubes extend from the autos' exhaust pipes into a top window of the building, pumping carbon monoxide into the building.

Visitors can take a tour, one at a time. They must wear a gas-mask, and are escorted by a fireman. During the tour, they are shown a read-out documenting that the level of carbon monoxide would kill them without the gas-mask.

The installation is part of an 11-year series of Holocaust-related installations and shows in the former synagogue. Sierra says the point of the work is to undo the banalization and the trivialization of the Holocaust.

The FAZ describes (G) the reaction:

The journalist Ralph Giordano criticized the action as an "unparallelled piece of infamy."  "If Sierra had even the smallest inner contact to the world of the victims, he would have ababdoned these doings in Pulheim," said the Holocaust survivor.  The Central Council of Jews in Germany renewed its strong criticism: "This fictional and tasteless artistic spectacle not only violates the dignity of the victims of the Holocaust, but of the entire Jewish community," said General Secretary Stephan J. Kramer.

On the radio this morning, an elderly woman phoned the call-in show supporting the work. She was a Jewish holocaust survivor who had lost over 90 relatives to the Nazis. She said she found Sierra's installation to be a refreshingly blunt way to convey the reality of the Holocaust to a generation which knows it only from TV screens. She admired the way in which the State was brought into the work. Previously, it had herded people into rooms full of invisible, deadly gas. Now, it provides them with protection and escort, precisely to ensure their lives are spared.

"It's Herpeling"

Last weekend, Deutschland Radio Kultur broadcast a documentary about a man named Rainer Herpel called The Explorer of Bad Ems.  The webpage is here (German).  I'll translate the first few lines for English-speaking readers:

At the beginning of the 1970s, Rainer Herpel stopped talking.  He was 21.  He dropped out and turned inwards.  He withdrew from the world, and moved silently about his parent's home and the small town he lived in.  It was a time in which radical groups were the talk of the nation, alternative dreams bloomed, and drugs became respectable. 

He remained mute for 30 years.  That fact and his extraordinary lifestyle -- he wore earmuffs, military clothes, and a chinese parasol -- hit the small town of Bad Ems like an explosion.  What makes this outsider tick?  What drove the "General of Ems" into silence?  Two years ago, Herpel resumed talking, displayed his hand-painted oil paintings, and says "Silence is peace for the soul."

Saints in Sunglasses

Well, as we wait for Frontpagemag.com to actually show that there's a "European Professor" that said the things they said he said, let's take a detour into the origin of sunglasses.  No, really.

What led me down this path was a recent trip to Luebeck, Germany, which I'll tell everyone about a little later (including my shock-and-awe assault on the German language, carried out in full view of hundreds of German professors). 

While there, I visited the Church of St. Mary's, which boasts this astounding altarpiece, crafted in Antwerp in the late 15th century (see inset).  A lovely piece of work depicting various stations in the life of Mary, including the display of the infant Jesus in the temple (lower left) and the young Jesus disputing with the scholars in temple (lower right).  But look closer.

Look carefully at the center panel, which displays the death of the Virgin.  There are two apostles in front of her bed.  The one on the left is wearing sunglasses.  They weren't stuck on there by a passing school group, they're original.  I immediately thought of that other famous early Renaissance wearer of sunglasses.  Come on, you know who I'm talking about.  It's on the tip of your tongue.  I refer, of course, to the Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem, composer of weird, sinuous Masses.  He was court composer to three French kings, and died in 1497.  Here you see him on the right, wearing flowing black robes and ink-black, wrap-around shades.  Apparently nobody knows why he wore them.

Why on earth would a craftsman in Antwerp in the late 15th century portray an apostle wearing sungasses?  When were sunglasses invented?  How were they made back then?  Were they worn for the same reasons we wear them now?  Did they send the same message they do now? 

In short, what is their social significance?  If we can have our most talented minds studying oh, I don't know, Barbie, why can't we find an answer to this question?

Lucio Fontana's Mary

I visited Rome in early March.  I'll spare you the details here, but I did want to share one picture. 

It was taken in the Vatican museums, where you can see oodles of treasures, including the Caravaggio Entombment and the Sistine Chapel.  For me, a high point was a short trip through the Vatican Museum Collection of Contemporary Religious Art, a less-visited section of the museum.  Put together by a few forward-looking Popes, it contains many works by little-known Italian artists, including one painting featuring a crucified Christ in a business suit, which I found a bit jarring. 

I was surprised to see how many bona-fide contemporary artists have done a Holy Family or St. Christopher or two, including such unusual suspects as Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.  The most unusual was perhaps Lucio Fontana, the Argentine/Italian sculptor, best known for thoroughly abstract works involving punctured canvases and globes with erupting holes.  He was given to names like "Spatial Concept."  Here, he shows an unexpectedly lyrical side with this enchanting Madonna.  No idea how this work came to be, but I'm quite glad it did.