Well!!! What a trip.

And back at home the Rangers were astounding the city and the world by winning the playoff's (though sadly not the World Series). En route back to Dallas, with harpsichord music on the headset and some mystical beautiful movie about Eastern-futurist-ancient-fire-versus-water-and-ice science-fiction-a-la-the-Dali-Lama playing silently on the movie screen above, Cole sat quietly sketching beside me.

I will call this the Frieze trip.

Frieze: noun (frēz)
·         An architecture term
·         A part of the entablature between the architrave and the cornice
·         A sculpted or richly ornamented band

First about London…  There is the Frieze Art Fair, named for a magazine by the same name evidently.

This show takes modern art to a new level... well not a higher level maybe, since there were plenty of mediocre and artworks which seemed to be for the sake of shock or just being new. This Fair is primarily for well established galleries focusing on Avante Garde work but due to the recession they do have a section for galleries less than six years old to show their work. Some of the pieces we saw were quite odd, such as a video of a man with a donkey head interviewing various government officials and others... (Katy Couric, you might try this).

Playing around with the term “frieze”, when you entered the Fair you walked over a glass covered hole in the floor which appeared to be an excavation of an old ruin from Londinium. And yes, there was fragment of a Pompeii-esque style frieze in fantastic weathered plaster with the accouterments of a dig all around it.

Wow, I thought....no wonder they call this place the "frieze". Only later did I begin to notice more and more glassed over holes in the floor and upon study realize that they were all "faux" excavations. The prize winning artist for the Fair or some awards group had actually created these mock digs as his art submittal.

Simon Fujiwara is the winner of the 2010 Cartier Award, for his installation Frozen, based on the fictive premise that an ancient lost city has been discovered beneath the site of the fair. So the next morning we needed to cleanse our art palette... we loved all the contemporary work but were ready to delve into a bit more than the last 10 minutes of art history and see a wider span.

We started with the Tate Modern and pushed back a hundred years to Gauguin... what a fantastic exhibit!! We were captivated by his colors, his Tahitian women, by the mystery of his work, by the intricate lacing of his life with his paintings. And yes, he had a marvelous frieze example painted as part of a larger work…

Every floor of the Tate Modern revealed new treasures, from Kandinsky to Andy Warhol to Mark Rothko. The building is a strong venue for art but Cole is still mourning the removal of the fabulous turbines that revealed and honored the original purpose of the building. We both saw them years ago and really loved the idea of the counterpoint of industrial function at its best with the elegantly useless but essential quality of art. Now the building works but lacks a total heart.

Then we were off to the British Museum, pushing back a few thousand years or so to yet another frieze. After pausing, along with a few score of British school children, to wonder at the Rosetta Stone, we made our way to see the Elgin Marbles... a recurring visit but one we try not to miss in case these treasures get repatriated to Greece and we never see them again.

And I guess you could say that here we found the ultimate FRIEZE. The British Museum (so fondly referred to as the BM) has a magnificent explanation and exhibit showing how the Marbles were placed around the Parthenon before colonialism, erosion and the odd Turkish war displaced them. Something interesting that I just learned is that the main Frieze was not over the columns on the outer edge of the Portico but underneath against the main structure at the top of the wall.

From London we went straight to Barcelona to find examples of friezes and other wonders by everyone from Mies van der Rohe to Gaudi....but more about that later.

As I said at the onset, What a trip!!!

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