Detroit and art

I feel sated after a day of - well, I could call this work, since it was work, in part - but there is so much to look at in Detroit (probably helped by it being a mild, sunny early fall day, and with the center being unexpectedly easy to walk around, although public transport turned out to be much like LA - coming back from the DIA, someone collapsed completely on the bus floor (fentanyl?) and we all got off and walked while they called the EMS ... ).  But here is the Guardian Building's interior - quite the poshest B of A I've ever been in;

the Fox theatre, which looked to be in fine and vibrant form (having absorbed much Detroit ruin porn over the years, I've been expecting all theatres and movie houses to be derelict structures - instead of which there's been much city rehabbing - even the Book Depository, I see, is just reopening as part of the Ford Mobility Center, although I'll always think of the symbolism of trees poking their way through stacks of moldering school books).

Here are some fine felines outside the Detroit Tigers stadium - you'll see that all the adorable big cats along the side of the building have baseballs stuck in their mouths.

And here's the picture that, above all, I wanted to see: William Egley's The Talking Tree - based on Tennyson's weird poem of that name.  In the poem, the girl's human lover, Walter, has carved her name, Olivia, in the trunk - I wanted to check that Egley hadn't been faithful to the poem's narrative, here - it didn't look in any of the reproductions that he had, but I wanted to be sure.  Maybe, the bark is formed in a heart-like shape where she's looking (sign of the tree's passionate attachment to her?) - but I don't think there's any incision.

On the other hand, I did find a peacock butterfly on the trunk I'd not noticed before - a token of the soul, and resurrection (like acorns?) - or just a butterfly?

And then - almost next to it - the strangest picture, William Frederick Yeames' Staunch Friends (1859).  Surely this is deeply, deeply Darwinian?  A very humanized monkey, in 1859?  

But holding an apple?  Can one paint an apple without invoking Eve, in the mid C19th?  And those ... hands?  Paws?

At least I knew where I was with some John Brett seaweed - a detail of a painting that seems to have a seaweed gatherer in a far corner.

Though soon one was back with trees doing very strange things.

And cats hiding in furniture.

For decades, I've wanted to see the Diego Rivera murals - and they were every bit as magnificent as I'd hoped, or more so.

I have taken so many pictures of images that I didn't know at all - both the whole painting, and details - and then met some old friends (like Millais' Leisure Hours, and, yes, Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold - Falling Rocket) - and seen other terrific stuff, like a whole ranges of paintings by the Peales, and the Edmonia Lewis busts ... I'm sated, and yet very far from having exhausted even the art on show here.