Seen in Florida

Compared to places I've lived such as Korea and Upstate New York, Seattle has a pretty mild winter. My wife, who lived for many years in California, begs to differ. Seattle's winters feature short days, plenty of overcast and even rain. Although it isn't frigid, it can be pretty gloomy. So we head off to sunnier places for much of November through March. For the last two years this has included Florida, at the opposite corner of the contiguous United States.

It turns out that the airline distance from Seattle to Orlando or Miami is about the same as to Honolulu. Plus, the route is over land, unlike the Hawaii run that is seriously lacking in emergency landing fields. Better yet, with a rental car, one can range over a lot of Florida to visit a variety of sites, unlike the islands where you are pretty much stuck once you arrive.

Even though many readers, especially those living in the Midwest and Northeast, have visited Florida, I thought I'd post some photos I took so that others might become aware of what can be found there.

Vizcaya

A few miles down the shoreline road from downtown Miami is the Vizcaya estate, built by the bachelor scion of a farm equipment manufacturer who, like other rich Americans, brought many objects of art and architecture from Europe to the New World. The Wikipedia entry on Vizcaya is here. Photography of the interior is forbidden, so I can offer only some exterior views.

South Beach

The South Beach portion of Miami Beach is perhaps best known these days for its collection of Art Deco style hotels that were built in the 1930s and very early 1940s. Aside from the buildings, I have to say I'm not fond of South Beach, lively though it can be. Many of those buildings along Ocean Drive have restaurants by or even on the sidewalks, and there are so many and competition is so fierce that a number of them hire pretty girls to entice you to a meal.

New River, Fort Lauderdale

The southeast coast of Florida is home to thousands of fancy boats and yachts that somehow weather the occasional hurricane. The photo below was taken from the Riverwalk in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Tarpon Springs

A short ways north of St. Petersburg on Florida's west coast is Tarpon Springs, a small city with a large Greek population. One can eat lots of Greek food, enjoy watching the boats and even take a tour out to an island on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

Universal Studios, Harry Potter Area
The Big Deal for tourists in the Orlando area is Walt Disney World. But once that becomes old hat, there are other attractions, one of which is the east coast version of the Universal Studios theme park. So far as I'm concerned, it's okay, but doesn't measure up to Disney. The area I liked best was devoted to Harry Potter. Below are a few street scenes. Yes, it was actually raining that day.

Hard Rock Cafe

You have to eat someplace. So my wife chose the Hard Rock Cafe, a venue we normally avoid. The most striking thing for me was the pink Cadillac rotating above the bar.

Anglada-Camarasa, Colorful Catalonian

Since the time of Goya, Spanish painters who spent much of their careers in Spain have been usually neglected by art historians and the art public. I think this is unfortunate. (Picasso and Dalí made their names in France, though Sorolla's reputation is on the rise.) One of several noteworthy Spanish painters active in the early twentieth century was Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (Hermenegild Anglada i Camarasa in Catalan) whose first name is often rendered Hermen (1871-1958). Although he was born in Barcalona, Anglada spent years in France, first as a student, later as an exile. And for a large share of his life he lived and painted landscapes in Majorca.

His English language Wikipedia entry is here, and a more detailed entry in Spanish is here.

Spanish artists have the reputation of being especially fond of the color black, and Anglada used his share. But he also made good use of bright colors to the point where some of his work has been associated with Fauvism, a movement he was well aware of. He also has been mentioned as a kind of Catalonian Gustav Klimt with respect to his treatment of women in some of his paintings.

I find Anglada something of a mixed bag. Much is rather heavily painted and, due to influence by the modernist styles that abounded in his day, there is inconsistency in his approach and little in the way of artistic progression. Nevertheless, several of his paintings are arrestingly interesting, particularly those featuring women and some of his later landscapes.

Here are examples of his work. Titles are in French, Spanish and Catalan, depending on the source. They are arranged in chronological order, though some are undated and their timing is speculative.

Gallery

Paisatge amb pont - 1890

El casino de Paris

Estudi de retrat de Mme. Berthe - c.1900

La morfinomana - 1902

La paon blanc - 1904

À la cafeteria - 1904

Champs Elysées - 1904

Granadina

Sonia de Klamery, Comtessa de Pradere - 1913

La Sibila - c.1913

La gata rosa

Calle mallorquina - 1935

Glackens Beyond the Ashcan

William Glackens (1870-1938) was a newspaper artist and painter usually associated with the Ashcan School of artists active in New York City in the early 1900s. His Wikipedia entry has more than the usual detail, and stresses that he was most heavily influenced by French Impressionist Auguste Renoir. Another useful biographical site is here.

In any case, Glackens' style evolved over his career, passing through the rough, realist Ashcan look through a Renoir-inspired era and ending with a dash of 1930s simplified solidity.

Unlike some of the other Ashcan artists such as John Sloan, Glackens did not strongly focus on the life and times of the lower elements of society, but seems to have preferred associating with and depicting the upper-middle class and those even higher such as art collector Albert Barnes.

Here are examples of his work dealing with people as opposed to landscapes and cityscapes, which he also painted at times.

Gallery

Figures in a Park, Paris - 1895

Seated Actress with Mirror - 1903

Chez Mouquin - 1905
Perhaps his most famous painting.

The Shoppers - 1907
That's Glackens' wife in the center.

Cafe Lafayette - Kay Laurel - 1914
She was a Ziegfeld Follies performer also known as Kay Laurell.

Kay Laurel - 1915

Nude, unfinished - 1920s
Very Renoir-like.

The Soda Fountain - 1935
Glackens slides slightly from Renoir to 1930s simplified-solids style not long before his death.

Packards Everywhere

They call it the Antique Car Museum, but it's really mostly about Packards.

My wife was getting in a tennis session plus some poolside sunning, and I was at loose ends because those activities aren't for me. A dive into the guidebook entry for Fort Lauderdale, Florida mentioned a car museum, something up my alley. So off I went. The museum lies a mile or so south of the city's downtown on a sidestreet so, like me, you might have to grope around a little to find it. But the price of admission is very reasonable, and the collection is interesting.

What the museum's not is glitzy or over-curated. No shiny black floors and spotlights like the Blackhawk museum in California. No faux street scenes as in the ex-Harrah museum in Reno, the Petersen museum in Los Angeles or the Henry Ford museum near Detroit. Just all kinds of stuff everywhere. That stuff includes custom car designer renderings from the 1930s, framed car ads for many brands, cases containing shelves of hood ornaments, gasoline station and car dealer service signs, and much more potentially fascinating clutter. There's even a small room in homage of Franklin D. Roosevelt who for some reason didn't seem to favor Packards. Nobody's perfect.

Here are some of my photos. The quality varies because the museum walls are pierced by many small windows that let in the intense south Florida daylight that contrasts with the otherwise fairly dark interior.

Gallery

Touring car - 1931
This is one of the more elegant Packards from the marque's heyday as America's top luxury automobile.

Runabout - 1928
The golf bag in the rumble seat is a nice touch. Note the huge spotlight mounted aft of the front fender. 23-skidoo!

Convertible - 1939
Seen 74 years later, this Packard seems very impressive. But at the time, its styling lagged behind its Cadillac and Lincoln competition which were featuring more streamlined shapes.

Caribbean - 1955
One of the last of the "real" Packards. After the 1956 model year, Packards were built, but their bodies were facelifted Studebakers. That's called dying with a whimper.

Station wagon - 1948
The greenhouse rear treatment makes it sort of a "woodie," but nearly all the body was metal. The photo doesn't show how narrow the woodie part was; this wagon wasn't all that functional.

Convertible - 1950
This car and the wagon in the previous photo represent facelifts of the attractive 1941-47 Clipper body. The facelift included clumsy flow-through fenders that enhanced the awkward, bulky appearance of the cars. The convertible shown here was the top-of-the-line model and somehow seems slightly impressive nowadays.

Light Eight - 1932
Luxury car makers were hit especially hard by the Great Depression. For 1932, Packard added the Light Eight line in an attempt to offer lower prices without tarnishing the Packard mystique. From what I read, the Light Eight was still expensive to produce, and it did little to stanch declining sales. The line was abandoned for the 1933 model year.

Light Eight grille
The styling feature I like best on the Light Eight is its grill, popularly called "shovel nose." To me, it combines the traditional Packard iconography at the top with a gesture to streamlining at the bottom.

Mystery Painting

Above is a reference photo I took in December, 2011 at a gallery in Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian hotel. The photo doesn't show it, but the handling of the paint was nicely, skillfully done. It looks like it was made after about 1910-1915.

Problem is, I don't know who painted it.

I might have jotted down the artist's name, but if I did, the scrap of paper became lost and I'm left to grind my teeth in frustration.

What I remember is that the artist was Austrian, and for a time was something like a court painter during the dying years of the Chinese Empire. A while ago I tried Googling using various search phrases based on those scraps of information, but nothing turned up.

Can anyone out there help me?

Pietro Piccoli's Vaguely Cubist Mediterranean

Paintings by Pietro Piccoli (b. 1954) are usually found in galleries in wealthy, but non-big city places such as Carmel-by-the Sea and Palm Desert in California. That's because his paintings are bright, stylized, reality-based works with none of the snark and irony found in the art scenes of New York or San Francisco.

I think they're pretty nice even though some of the effects he uses to set his work apart can interfere. And of course, viewing a bunch of them together makes them seem stereotypical. Actually, seeing a collection of works by almost any artist reveals a sameness. That might be because it's simply due to a painter's personality or perhaps because economic survival requires producing work in a distinctive manner. In any case, Piccoli's style has evolved slightly over time, perhaps because his stuff seems to sell well and he can now trade on his name rather than the exact kind of paintings that launched his career in the American galley scene.

I haven't been able to find much biographical information on the Internet; this at least goes on for a couple of hundred words.

Gallery

Alghero - Sardegna

Barconi a Riposo
The square, lens-like shape in the middle is typical of the Picolli works that I first noticed eight or nine years ago in Carmel. He seems to have abandoned this career-launching quirk, generally a good move on his part.

Harbor scene

Warm Harbor

Still life

Paese sui Colle Romani

Bits of Fancy Florida Hotels

It can be fun to visit fancy hotels even if you don't (or can't) pay the fancy fare to stay. We were in Florida the first half of February and did some hotel-crawling while there. Although we didn't rent rooms, we did dine at each of those shown below.

So far as I'm concerned, the grandest of the lot is The Breakers in Palm Beach. Its Web site is here and the Wikipedia entry here.

Not so grand, but about as old and still pretty nice is the Don Cesar on St. Pete Beach in the Tampa Bay area. The Wikipedia entry is here.

In Coral Gables, near Miami, is another 1920s grand hotel, the Biltmore, whose Wikipedia write-up can be found here.

Below are some photos I took. No thorough studies here, just snippets to provide a taste.

Gallery

The Breakers main lobby

The Breakers, at one end of the lobby hall

The Breakers HMF bar
Originally this room was the main dining area, but has been a bar for years. It was recently redecorated, perhaps with too large a dash of contemporary feeling.

The Breakers HMF bar
A close-up of the bar itself. The illustration is mid 1950s, but I don't know who did it. Nor do I know if it dates back to then or is a retro piece.

Don Cesar from the beach

Don Cesar, poolside

Don Cesar interior

Biltmore Coral Gables pool
The Biltmore has a huge pool. This was taken from the bar area.

Biltmore Coral Gables
Another view of the pool and main hotel structure from not far from where the previous photo was taken.