This may be a bit rough. I am trying a blog entry for the first time in a few years! There had been problems with folks accessing the entries from FB last time around. Here goes, though. Yesterday’s adventure, compliments of a recommendation from Nigel Grant, was a visit to the Klimt Immersion Experience at ‘The Brick House,’ located just off Brick Lane, a pleasant walk from the Aldgate Tube Station. I was familiar with Klimt from seeing some of his works in Vienna at the Belvedere Museum. The exhibition was done in an interesting way, starting with a multimedia presentation on the Secessionist Movement (the Viennese Art Nouveau movement).

This brought “The Kiss” to life in a different form.

In the next part of the experience, we moved into a dark room where Klimt’s works were deconstructed and then slowly reconstructed on the walls of the room as each work moved around the four exterior walls and the walls of an interior cube in the center. Plenty of seating was around the exterior. Classical music played in the background. Beethoven’s 5th stays memorably with me, as a child of Huntley and Brinkley’s newscasts in the US.

This part of the exhibition was something that allowed me to simply sit back and be amazed at the brilliance of the art, and to enjoy the interplay of form and color on the walls as the they morphed into new shaped and stylized symbols. For me, always hanging over it, was the sadness of knowing that Klimt died young and the terrible connection his works later had with the Nazi terror of World War II, but, at least, ultimately, some small justice was restored to, at least one family.

After leaving this part of the experience, I thought the whole thing was over, but a surprise awaited me. There was an offer of a Virtual Reality viewing of Klimt’s works (for a small additional fee). I jumped at the chance. Let me admit that I have not been really high in many decades. This was the closest my memory comes to what that was like. The way the works were shown (there were snakes and fish and beautiful women and flowers and landscapes and colors and music). All of these were coming at me and moving away. I had such a blast sitting there simply experiencing this. It was definitely worth the extra “five quid.”

A final note about Brick Lane. It is one of those wonderful ethnically alive streets one sees in London. I saw so many great looking Indian restaurants that made my mouth water along with all kinds of shops and tourists and Londoners of every description walking along. It is definitely a place I will be returning to. I really hope that the next UK PM and her government (in all likelihood it appears to be a “her’), will find a way to avoid economic disaster this winter for the people and small businesses all over the country, but especially for the thriving small businesses, just coming back from the pandemic and the families who are afraid of freezing this winter.

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