C and I bike along the bike path that runs along the Charles River to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It’s a gorgeous fall day and the leaves are just beginning to turn here. We’re going to see the famous collection of glass flowers made by father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who were based near Dresden and worked from 1886 to 1936. For the time being, some of their glass sea creatures are on loan here as well. I’ve heard about these for ages but have never seen them, and they don’t disappoint. They’re entirely made of glass, though there are, sometimes, invisible wire supporting structures. Even the coloring is made of glass and they aren’t transparent or translucent as one might expect. The brothers used a kind of painted enamel of colored glass powders which was then fused with the models.
One might also expect exclusively flowers, as that is what the collection is called, and one might imagine vaguely pretty copies of lilies, roses and orchids. Well, those are there, but most of the specimens — they were commissioned by a Harvard professor for teaching biology — are much more mundane, and all the more spectacular for it. Some look like common weeds, ripped out of the garden with a tangled bundle of roots dangling from the bottom. And here they are, made entirely out of glass.
Here’s a tangle of leaves, tendrils and the traps of a pitcher plant:
It’s all glass. Just amazing. Sort of crazy too. But when one imagines that there was no color photography to speak of then, and this would have been an imaginative way for the professor to have “specimens” available for his classes all year round…add to that that it would have been a lifelong commission for the Blaschkas, and the obsessiveness makes a little more sense. The father and son team took their secrets to the grave.
Here’s a sea slug made of glass:
This wonderful little museum is located right in the middle of Harvard University. We rode through the yard to reach it. The nicely mowed lawns, hidden from the surrounding streets, the august halls and weight of history and reputation — well, one can easily see why students here might come to feel separate from the world, and slightly superior to it as well. Cambridge, in England, has a similar vibe, a feeling that here is where the masters are handed their instruction manuals.
After that we biked to the relatively new Institute of Contemporary Art building to catch Tara Donovan’s show there. The ICA is located in a sea of parking lots just south of downtown Boston. It’s an odd area, but they do at least have a spectacular view of the bay. Donovan’s show was just amazing. Her work usually consists of installations of ordinary materials, lots and lots of them, arranged on a wall or on a floor in a way that, hey, reminds me of coral reefs or weird sea creatures.
Photography was not allowed, but I snuck a snap of a ceiling piece made of Styrofoam cups. Sometimes these pieces are not even glued together. There was a spectacular wall of drinking straws that, we were told, collapsed during installation, and so tiny bits of glue were needed to prevent another disaster.
As you can imagine, these pieces can’t be picked up and plopped down just anywhere. Transportation is impossible for many of them. They have to be, most of them, re-made every time. The local biologists, evolutionary scientists and similar folks at Harvard and MIT are, we were told, enthralled. You can see why.
