Escaping to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York at this time of year means discovering an intense and extraordinary cultural activity that ranges from retrospective exhibitions that are currently enjoying great public success, to quality shows that opera houses and ballets or musicals have been strategically programmed for the general public. However, each city has its characteristic corner that, whether on the banks of the Seine with the second-hand bookstores, or in the botanical garden of Berlin, make the visitor participate in everyday life.
In addition to the permanent collections of the Roman museums, the Italian capital has temporary exhibitions of great interest these days. The most anticipated of the year is a retrospective dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh at the Bonaparte Palace, with some of the most famous works of the Dutch genius such as his Self-portrait, The Sower, Garden of the Saint-Rémy hospital or Les Peiroulets ravine. Up to 50 works and portraits to reconstruct his tragic story, in a rare opportunity in Italy to get closer to his work.
Another exhibition that has aroused a good response from the public is the one dedicated to the legacy of singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla at the Ara Pacis Museum, a stone's throw from the Mausoleum of Augustus, on the centenary of his death. After opening in his native Bologna, the Italian capital, which pays homage to the author of the famous Caruso through photos, records, his eccentric objects, the wardrobe designed for him by Armani or his hat collection.
The Borghese Gallery also proposes an unusual experience with Timeless Wonders, which recovers 16th-century painting on stone, exhibiting some examples of this original technique born after the Sack of Rome at the hands of Emperor Charles V in 1527, which does not not only destroyed the city but also caused much of its artistic jewels to be lost. Sebastiano Del Piombo, of Venetian origin, then came to the conclusion that it was necessary to paint on stone to give art more resistance.
Another traditional exhibition in the Christmas period is the one installed by the Vatican in San Pedro, under Bernini's colonnade, with one hundred cribs gathered by artists from all over the world, from Venezuela or Taiwan. One of the most emotional this year is the one carried out by the Ukrainian Theodosia Polotniuk, who has represented the Nativity scene in a structure reminiscent of the Azovstal metallurgical plant, in Mariupol, but there are also others that recall the drama of migration in the Central Mediterranean or the climate emergency.
Despite being a dirty city, worn by human traffic, apparently not at all spruced up, New York overflows with beauty. Inside and outside, in a conflict between the Diogenes syndrome and the Stendhal syndrome, which just as easily falls into depression as hedonism soars.
Next to mountains of garbage emerges a Fifth Avenue in Manhattan decorated for Christmas with designer shop windows, something unique to unbridled global capitalism, an inerrant display of color that this year includes the lighting for the first time of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, a project created and led by the Spanish Ana Calvo de Luis.
You have to kick around the Big Apple, look for your own corners like the one in the Dyker Heights neighborhood (Brooklyn), where the neighbors compete to decorate their houses at this time better than anyone else.
But you have to have an alternative plan in the face of cold, rain or snow. The museum offer is once again spectacular, a health crisis that is still going on although it is ignored has been settled. In the Metropolitan Museum, among others, the positions dedicated to the Mayan gods and cubism coincide, two distant worlds but not so much.
Near the Met, in the Neue Gallery, movie buffs can enjoy a room dedicated to Casablanca, a film that has celebrated its 80th anniversary.
At the Whitney Museum, in a building that itself is a piece of art, this is Edward Hopper's moment with a montage of his work dedicated to New York, which he painted with a look of love and which he portrayed as if they were photographs of an era, except for the skyscrapers. By the way, once in the Whitney it is worth visiting the neighboring exhibition dedicated to Puerto Rican artists under the title, in Spanish, There is no post-hurricane world.
Since a lot is already known about the Rockettes, here it is time to talk about Patti Smith who, after the lapse of Covid, returns to her end-of-year concerts.
Tucked away in an alley between Charing Cross and Covent Garden festooned with Christmas lights, the Donmar Warehouse is one of London's theatrical gems. Small, with capacity for a hundred people, its productions are usually first class. Now there's a Watch on the Rhine revival that pits an American family from the Washington suburbs against the dilemma of fighting fascism. Lilian Hellman, the author, places it in 1940, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when politicians flirted with turning a blind eye to the atrocities of Hitler and Mussolini.
Another excellent American political thriller (Best of Enemies) draws attention at the Noel Coward Theater in London's West End. In this case, the action takes place in 1968, with Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House after Kennedy's assassination and a country as divided as it is now. Modern-day Star Trek's Zachary Quinto plays progressive writer Gore Vidal, and David Harewodd (Homeland) plays Broadway-like right-wing intellectual William Buckley.
An opera at Covent Garden is almost always worth seeing, and visitors to London have the chance to combine Tosca with The Magic Flute, and an excellent production of the Nutcracker ballet along the way. The English National Opera offers a musical version of Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life (How beautiful it is to live!) (1946), with Danielle de Niese in the role of angel.
The National Gallery, for art aficionados, offers two magnificent exhibitions, a monumental retrospective of Lucian Freud on the centenary of his birth, and the introduction to the British public of the work of realist painter Winslow Homer. The Tate Modern delves into Cezanne, who said that he would conquer Paris by painting apples, and he did, and the Royal Academy of Piccadilly presents the first exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to German artists of the early s. XX (Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollowitz, Gabriele Munter and Marianne Werefkin) who, although less known than a Kandinsky, contributed to the rise of modernism.
Apart from the Christmas markets, a must as a manifestation of popular and commercial culture, Berlin offers a light show in the botanical garden with motifs such as Santa Claus and his reindeer, fairy tales, and scenes of palaces and little angels, but also images of the modernity. There are thirty luminous installations in different parts of the garden, a custom inaugurated in 2016 that devastates despite the cold.
At the Museum of Photography in Berlin, where the Helmut Newton Foundation is located, an exhibition covers the collaboration with the advertising brands of this famous photographer for his look at the female nude. There are 200 photos taken by Helmut Newton (1920-2004) for brands such as Swarovski, Saint Laurent, Wolford, Blumarine, Lavazza or Chanel, destined for magazines and advertisements. In Potsdam, half an hour by train from Berlin, the Barberini museum displays the exhibition Surrealism and magic: enchanted modernism, with 90 works by some twenty artists, such as Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington or Remedios Varo, on the relationship of this current with myth and magic.
In Vienna, the New Year's concert has, as usual, three performances with the same program: on December 30 and 31 and on January 1. This traditional concert by the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein is taking place this year under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, who conducted it in 2011 and 2013. As always, tickets are already sold, as they are allocated by lottery due to the great demand. But the appointment can be followed on television; It is broadcast in 90 countries and attracts millions of viewers. On the program are waltzes and polkas by the Strausses and by Ziehrer, Von Suppè and Hellmesberger Jr.
Also in Vienna, the Albertina museum is offering an exhibition on the symbols of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), a member of the vibrant New York art scene of the eighties.
This Christmas there may not be any exhibitions in Paris with huge media coverage, but there are plenty of little pearls that can arouse interest in a sensitive visitor. The Louis Vuitton Foundation, in the spectacular Frank Gehry building in the Bois de Bologna, houses Monet-Mitchell, an unprecedented aesthetic dialogue between the French Impressionist and the American abstract expressionist artist.
Fans of painting have a sample of Edvard Munch at the d'Orsay that covers the 60-year career of the Norwegian painter. Another tempting destination is the Jacquemart-André, which presents Füssli, between dreams and the fantastic, dedicated to the British of Swiss origin Johann Heinrich Füssli, with 60 works that illustrate his Shakespearean-inspired themes: dreams, nightmares, mythologies and biblical scenes.
A very current exhibition that helps to understand France is Parisiennes citoyennes, at the Carnavalet museum, a historical review of female emancipation from the French Revolution to 2000. For lovers of everything Japanese, Kimono, on Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, about the evolution of the traditional Japanese garment and its influence on modern styling.
In the musical field, La Seine Musicale puts on Starmania, a new version of the show that premiered in 1979 and is already a cult piece. Those who opt for the classic, and if they are lucky to get tickets, the Bastille opera stages La forza del destino and the Garnier Le nozze di Figaro.
Another Parisian cultural delight consists of getting lost in its fabulous bookstores, such as those on the rive gauche of the Seine, with flagships such as Gibert Joseph, on Boulevard Saint Michel. Christmas visitors can take the opportunity to buy a work by the last Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Annie Ernaux, or, if they are in Paris on January 6, take home the latest essay by sociologist Edgar Morin, who is still writing at 101 years of age. That day his booklet Entre guerre et guerre goes on sale, his vision of the conflict in Ukraine with the perspective that his experience as an anti-Nazi resistant gives him.
