I’m late in posting, but since it was my last night in the city I was enjoying the sights instead of writing. I apologize if this post is a little long, but I really do like to talk about art.
Yesterday, Saturday, was one of my favorite days. In the morning we got going pretty early so that we could miss some of the tourist traffic and head back towards Fifth Avenue. But this time we were not there to shop, we were there to admire. We jumped out of the cab and walked directly into the doors of the Museum of Modern Art. This is a place that I have never been before, and as an art history major, I felt compelled to go to at least one museum while I was in New York.
I have spent a lot of time in museums and visited sites all around America and Europe, but there is nothing that quite compares to the vast entryway of the MoMA when you come in on the first floor, the center of all the floors is open and you can see all the way up to the fifth floor. It is a breathtakingly simplistic architectural style, just white walls and flat planes. There’s nothing to distract you, but also you can’t stop looking at it. Inside the foyer of the museum there is very little to no art work. They hang advertising posters showing you what exhibitions are currently running, but there are no paintings hanging on the wall. I loved the simple no froo-froo walls. This museum is clearly all about the art. There’s no fooling around with ground breaking architecture to distract the viewer from art education.
One reason that I think the MoMA chose such simple architecture was because their art collection can stand on its own. It needs no introduction. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we visited their permanent collection, we went all the way to the top floor and saw the new de Kooning exhibit. It was a very interesting exhibit because they had his art ranging from his early years of 1926 to right before his death in the late 1980s. The exhibit spanned almost 70 years of his career. We started in the space looking at some of his academic drawing, completed in Holland. He was clearly a trained artist. And then his work developed into the broken up style that we commonly think of as de Kooning. As much as he denied it, he was an abstract painter.
As we moved toward the middle of the exhibit, in the paintings, de Kooning began exploring the idea of distinction and blending of the background with this figures. He worked to make the perfect painting using this concept for almost two years. And out of that work came one of his most famous paintings, Woman I. The viewer can clearly see the female figure, especially her face, but the edges of her body seem almost smeared to meld into the background. The palette is typical of de Kooning, many muddy pink, reds for the mouth, some black to help define the edges, and splotches of seeming incongruous colors splashed here and there. Toward the end of the exhibit and of de Kooning’s life, we could see the progression of his abstract conceptualization of his paintings and the deterioration of his mind. De Kooning suffered from Alzheimer’s and this affected the way he painted. Some of his last paintings are his most brilliant and yet, there is a simplicity, almost as if something was missing. Instead of a canvas full of intriguing colors and broad lines, he had used two or three shades of the same color to paint lines that weave through the canvas, creating interesting geometric shapes inside the negative space. Each of these paintings was just as thought provoking as his earlier works.
The rest of the museum and its permanent collection need very little introduction. Inside the walls of MoMA are some of the most infamous and celebrated works of art. Just to name a few – Starry Night by Van Gogh, Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon by Picasso and the Persistence of Memory by Dali. (You all know it, it’s the melting clocks.) You could walk into the rooms that held these paintings and have no trouble finding them, just look for the massive knot of people blocking the entire pathway. I do not intend to make fun that these are the only works the people knew, I am so glad that the observers were all there, even if they only looked at one piece of art. I was incredibly happy to see so many people, especially young kids and high school aged students. I think art education is vital, even if you only visit one museum in your lifetime and only ever see the Starry Night. There is just nothing quite like seeing a piece of art in person. No photograph will ever again be good enough.
Beyond these famous works there were dozens, possibly even hundreds, of other worthy artists. I left with my brain reeling. Thinking about Seurat, Hopper, Wyeth, Oppenheim, Ernst, Tanquy, Calder, Cezanne and O’Keeffe. It was one of the most incredible displays of modern art that I have ever seen. I do especially love my surrealists and here they had a room all to themselves.
We also spent a little bit of time on the contemporary art floor. I think that this could be a confusing term, so just for clarification, it was used here to describe art that had been made, primarily in New York, from 1980 to the present. I am a proudly professed lover of modern art, but sometimes even this kind of contemporary art goes over my head. Many of these pieces were “found object,” which often creates a strange combination of things pulled from the trash. There was also one piece that looked like silver covered dinosaur poop. It was very strange, even to me. But two pieces of notice were installation pieces. Meaning that the artist came to the museum and built the piece, which is often intended to interact with the audience. One of these was similar to a installation piece that was at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth. It had thousands of pieces of wrapped hard candy laid out on the floor to form what looks like carpet. But, the best part, visitors are encouraged to take a piece of candy with them. By my interpretation, this allows the viewers to control the art and for it to fluctuate according to their desires. The art changes with it’s audience throughout time. The other installation piece that I thought was very interesting was what looked like a construction site. Bare wooden boards and planks had been put up to form the skeleton of a room. Inside, there were tables, chairs and self serve steamed veggies. The art is intended to house the audience. To allow them to come inside and sit down. It’s a living, breathing and functional piece of art.
After the museum we were starving. It takes quite a bit out of you to look at all that art. We went to a local traditional Italian restaurant where my aunt knows the owner and the chef. I had a penne pasta with fresh grape tomato and basil sauce. With buffalo mozzarella and parmesan cheese. And, for the continued celebration of my 21st birthday, we had prosecco with our lunch.
After lunch we continued our small-business Saturday support and visited some vintage and thrift stores. We saw some fabulous clothes and jewelry. But it’s so tough to find vintage shoes or gloves, people back then were so much smaller!
After our hectic day of shopping and museum-going, we took a quick trip home to recover and change clothes. Next we headed out for our Broadway show.
Our tickets were scheduled for 8 p.m. at the St. James theatre, right on Broadway. The show we were seeing was On A Clear Day starring Harry Connick Jr. We dashed through all of the tourists ogling at the video screens in Times Square and arrived at our theatre. We shoe-horned ourselves into our very-little-knee room original 1940s seats and got ready for the show.
Since the show is still in previews, we were worried that it might not be very good, but it was. The cast was high energy and very entertaining. And Harry sang as good as ever. This musical was about a Freudian psychologist in the 1970s. Played by Harry Connick Jr., the main character meets a friend of one of his students who is easily hypnotized. During a session where the psychologist is trying to help Davey top smoking, he meets a woman who he believes was Davey in a past life. And over time, he falls in love with this woman. Who is actually not real and lives inside another man’s imagination. Keep in mind, this takes place in the 70s. It was a psychedelic time. The story line was odd at times, but the cast was such incredible singers and dancers and we were only a few feet away from them, it was enchanting. And I am really good at suspension of disbelief.
After the musical we took the subway home and watched a bit of SNL to wind down. Then it’s off to sleep.
simplysalmagundi 