Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

The Guidebooks warned us that museums in Zagreb tended to be closed on Sunday afternoon and all day Monday. Happily, that was only true of some of them, so I was able to spend most of the day museum-hopping and saw some interesting modern art.

I started with the Modern Gallery, which was in the same block as our hotel. There were some interesting Symbolist works there, and some contemporary pieces that I liked.

I took the Funicular up to the old town, where I spent some time at the Naive Art Museum, which shows the works of a school of painters who were not formally trained. One of the interesting techniques that they used was painting on the back side of a sheet of glass. This required the image to be created from foreground to back, which seems a little like building up a woodcut.

The tower at the top of the funicular, in addition to providing great views of the city, was having an exhibition of posters from rock shows at a local club. It was interesting to see the styles evolve over the years.

The other standout museum in the old town was the Museum of Failed Relationships, which contains objects and descriptions of their significances, collected from regular folks with stories to tell.

For lunch I had a traditional Croatian dish: štruklji, which consists of pastry filled with cheese, then covered with cheese in a casserole dish and baked. The restaurant was also serving homemade drinks (they'd be called "aguas frescas" in Austin or San Francisco). After having a glass of the mint/honey/lime one, I ordered a liter.

Back by our hotel was the Art Pavillion, which was hosting an audio-visual art piece by Ivan Marušić Klif entitled "Between Frequencies 2", which was focused on ambient sound, televisions, cameras, feedback, and wobbulators.

My last art stop was a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art. There was a lot of conceptual work there that didn't do much for me, but I found some interesting geometric art and discovered the "New Tendencies" movement that did a lot of work that presaged the GIF Op Art that I've been collecting recently.