Five favorites of the week – culture

Kengo Kuma

With all the justified criticism of major events like the Olympics, World Championships or Expo, these usually offer the chance to get to know a place, often even an entire country, better. The pandemic has also suspended this rule. At the Olympic Games as well as at the Paralympics in Tokyo, visitors were or are not allowed. It’s a shame, because hardly any other country is as fascinating in its peculiarity as Japan. For architecture fans, the island state even ranks as a pilgrimage destination that you want to have visited at least once in your life. In order to console yourself about the time until that will be possible again, a heavy and visually strong volume on the work of the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma (Ed .: Kengo Kuma, Philip Jodidio: Kuma. Complete Works 1988-Today; Taschen Verlag) helps , taschen.com, Cologne 2021, 460 pages, 150 euros). Kuma and his office – together with Taisei Corporation and Azusa Sekkei – are responsible for the design of the Japanese national stadium. In a way, this closes a circle, as the neighboring Yoyogi National Sports Hall, owned by Grandmaster Kenzo Tange in 1964, is said to have awakened the then 10-year-old Kuma’s desire to become an architect: “I wanted to be like Kenzo Tange,” he writes in the foreword of the illustrated book. “I wanted to design buildings that touch the sky.” But unlike Tange, the pillar saint of modern Japanese architecture, Kengo Kuma is today very critical of the achievements of the 20th century and his firm belief in steel, glass and concrete as the only building materials that make sense. Kuma, meanwhile also a star, relies on wood, mostly processed with traditional craft techniques. What he creates with it, regardless of whether it is the wooden bridge museum in rural Yusuhara, the Sunny Hills shop on the elegant Omotesando in Tokyo or the museum building of the V&A Dundee in Scotland, is like a feat: The buildings are contemporary and traditional at the same time . In this way, they meet today’s requirements, but still exude something human, even warm. Obviously, Kengo Kuma is no longer about touching the sky, but about people. Laura Weissmüller

Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott

Some will immediately slip out: Kitsch! Certainly the arrangements of famous songs from the world’s songbooks for cello and piano – from “Amazing Grace” to “Solveig’s Lied” from Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” music, from “Ol ‘Man River” from the musical “Show Boat” From Oscar Hammerstein to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s “Song without Words op. 109”, the only original composition for this combination on the double vinyl album “Songs of Comfort and Hope” (Sony) – there is something all too unresistible, even cheap. But how the grandiose Yo-Yo Ma and his long-time piano partner Kathryn Stott balance along the melody lines in the most delicate sound nuances and values ​​without ever becoming clumsy or sticky is astonishing. It’s not kitsch-free, but always classy and fine. Harald Eggebrecht

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Berlin in lockdown

“It would be nicer if it were nicer”, the sentence is always correct, but it was especially true during the lockdown winter in Berlin. Precisely for this reason, the photographers Christian Reister and Christoph Schieder set out on nightly forays, loosely playing around the curfew. The result is an exhibition in the Berlin gallery Artificial gamethat ends on Sunday, and a Illustrated book, in which Reister’s dry black and white photographs and Scherer’s psychedelic color photos show a wonderfully animated emptiness. The viewer stands in front of closed doors and pub windows, looks at walls and into tiled S-Bahn shafts. But the colors and lines set the rooms in motion. The abandoned city is not boring. Because where people are missing, there are still animals like the fox at the Chancellery (Photo: Christian Reister, “it would be nicer if it were nicer”). Sonja Zekri

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Goya’s sketchbook

One of the great pleasures of traveling is visiting foreign bookshops. In Barcelona and Madrid there are five branches of “La Central”, a company founded in 1995, which inspires with a huge range of bookings, many books are unusual for Spain, not Spanish: French, English, German … It is out of the question, that a visit to La Central ends without a rucksack overflowing with books that one hardly has enough strength to carry. The most surprising find now in Barcelona’s once infamous Raval district: a facsimile edition of “Cuaderno C” by Francisco Goya (Skira, 38 euros). As a court painter, Goya had to create many well-mannered portraits. On the side, however, he kept diaries, in which he documented the brutalities and bizarre things of everyday life as well as his visions and nightmares, which often escaped into the grotesque. These are whims that are poisonously commented on by the painter, “Caprichos” in Spanish: This is the name of the most famous of these books, launched in 1779 but withdrawn for fear of the Inquisition; Goya gave the 80 printing plates to the king. There is also a series of eight drawing books that Goya did not publish, all of which are incomplete. The Goya researcher Pierre Gassier published it 50 years ago in an unwieldy and therefore unfit for travel giant volume, a brilliant rummaging table of life. The “Cuaderno C” is the most extensive of these books, the more than 100 drawings that have survived are almost all in the possession of the Prado. The new Prado edition impresses with its simplicity: behind an inconspicuous gray, soft cover are the pictures in their original size, 20 x 14 centimeters. Goya only ever painted the front of the now yellowed paper, but the ink ran through and forms sophisticated shadow plays on the back. There are torture and prison scenes, nightmares, erotica, crudities, the inscriptions of which are transcribed and translated in the appendix. It is a tape that is nice to travel with and that seduces you to create your own everyday drawings. Reinhard J. Brembeck

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The bob haired

Away with the old pigtails, departure, emancipation: This is what the first women who asked for a bobbed head a good 100 years ago thought. The straight or wavy short hairstyle, which was invented in Paris, was a revolution at the beginning of the Weimar Republic and shook the classic role model. There are hair-raising stories of how the men, the churches, the Nazis, even the hairdressers themselves wanted to stop the trend. Women with “jacks” were defamed as lesbians, “boys”, prostitutes and “un-German”. They were not allowed to go to church services, were expelled from their workplaces and needed a “certificate of authorization” from their husband if they asked for a bobbed head at the hairdresser’s – but the practical hairstyle could not be stopped. Helga Lüdtke has compiled all of these stories (Wallstein Verlag 2021, 24 euros) – a skilful and beautiful step into cultural history. Marc Hoch