Smiles and Shadows

The New York day was jammed – with heat, with tourists, with smells, and with action.  Three museums, two plays, a movie, and a partridge…

Best of all though was walking the streets and letting New York happen.

Seeing “Skeleton Crew” by Dominique Morrisseau was brilliant enough in itself-so assuredly written and acted, characters thick with their (extra)ordinary struggles that transcend when put in Detroit in 2008.  The genuine acknowledgement of the craft at its peak with sustained applause through two curtain calls.  The wonder of discovering a gloriously talented playwright.

After, I had nowhere to be fast or slow.  As I strolled out the door onto the sweltering street, I smiled at a woman sitting on her stoop (Atlantic is on a residential street in Chelsea), and she smiled.

A tiny women, all bent over, asked, “so how was it?”

“Excellent”…”so good,” a young man and I answered together.

“I’ll get my ticket,” she said tottering toward the theater.

The young man, so pretty and sweet and gay and put together, and I compared notes, admiring the playwright, whom he worked with when he first moved to the City.  Turns out he’s 39, although he looked 23 at most, and an actor.  Of course.   We chatted amiably until parting for the next adventure.

I turned the corner, scanning for Blossom where I was planning to have a vegan burger with the onion ring and vegan bacon inside–crunchy and yummy by the way.  I stopped in front of a movie theater playing “Love and Friendship.”

Nothing feels so good as the cinema on a really beastly day.  Okay, I thought, I’ll just see what time it’s playing.

In 30 minutes.  So I got a ticket, now involving selecting an exact seat.

“You have such beautiful diction,” commented the ticket sales woman.

“I narrate for the blind.”

“See there?  I’m so smart.  I just at knew it,” she said proudly, handing over my ticket as she peered over her cheaters with a smile.

I smiled right back, then went outside to find Blossom.  The girl working as a greeter at the entrance to the theater looked with me across the street.  “I don’t know it,” she mourned, throwing her hands up in resignation.

I went across the street anyway in search and found its tiny storefront camouflaged behind the only tree on the block.

After my burger, I found the same girl stationed by the door, and she seemed delighted I came back to report to her.  We shared a moment about that tree.

The movie based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan promised to be her most biting, with its true antiheroine.  But alas it was unfinished, and the movie feels the same.  Its sour cynicism is enormously amusing though.

After, even though the evening was still oppressively hot, I decided to walk the 20 blocks to the Broadway theater.  Still in Chelsea, virtually everyone responded to my sparkly glasses and goofy grim with a smile right back.  The tall, slim young man waiting for the 8th Ave bus, the bagel peddler, the barista selling iced, cold brew coffee.

My first sip exploded like a crunched, toasted coffee bean in my mouth, round, smooth, and strong.  Was anything ever so delicious?

Of course, entering the Penn Station  area, then Times Square, sobered me up fast, and I got back to people watching with my game face on.  The two girls, all brown flesh and swagger, in their rainbow-colored, twisted balloon crowns.  The three sailor boys in their Navy whites.  Wait!  One was a girl, her blonde hair braided and tucked under her cocked cap, and her thin, wire-rimmed glasses just cloaking her Times-Square-neon blue eyes.  The long, sweaty lines of theater goers waiting for that first whoosh of theater-cold air and relief.

Summer in New York can be horrible, but its neighborhoods and people never are.  The best part of any day.

Wonderful exhibits.  I was captured by the shadows, creating new works of art.

Moholy-Nagy, Twisted Planes, plexiglass and steel, 1946

Moholy-Nagy, Twisted Planes, plexiglass and steel, 1946 at the Guggenheim

Hellenistic Wrestlers

Hellenistic Wrestlers at the Met

Zeus' head and fist

Zeus’ head and fist at the Met

Greek theatrical masks

Greek theatrical masks at the Met

The wonder of faces

Faces–ancient, privileged, unfinished.  That was the theme of my day in the galleries.

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Satyr and Maenad, Egypt, 4th century; note the halos

If you haven’t seen the ancient textiles exhibit at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, rush quickly.  It’s a small show, focused on a narrow window in time.  You can linger over each object.

These are primarily tapestries and tunics, surviving because they were used in funerary rites, created during that chaotic period when the Middle East and Europe were shifting from polytheism to Christianity.  Polytheistic traditions were observed in secret during the 300s and 400s, still at home as was traditional.  Temples became churches, but carried the ancient aesthetics forward to new subject matter.

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Dionysus and Pan, c.4th century, Egypt

Most of the textiles were from Egypt, where Greco-Roman traditions had already been merged with ancient Egyptian sensibilities.  I just loved Dionysus, god of wine, with Pan, both encircled in halos, a Christian allusion, used to warm an Egyptian home and then entombed.

Dionysus was the right god to depict, as the Romans inherited the tomb party concept, celebrating the life of the dead, from the Etruscans.  Tunics were worn to such parties and banquets where Dionysus ruled!

Bust of Spring (small)

Bust of Spring, see her halo?

You will marvel at the colors–lustrous greens and corals, probably faded from red, that have remarkably survived for 1500-1800 years.  My clothes only last a few months before falling apart.

The figures show such delicacy along with the Egyptian love of patterning.  Animals and birds and intricaScreen Shot 2016-04-16 at 6.40.55 PMte geometric patterns, which may reference Islamic influences.

You can click on the photo to enlarge it.  People take magnifying glasses to these works to see how they are constructed.  Remarkable.

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Gorgeous, intriguing, each is a story.

The Comtesse Du Barry in a Straw Hat, c.1781

 

The portraits of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun each tell a story, too, mostly subservient in interest to her own.  She was a favorite of Marie Antoinette as a young artist, making grand, official family depictions.  She also was the master of the intimate, bust length portrait, making all the aristocrats look fresh, young, and lively.

 

 

 

 

Marie Antoinette with a Rose, 1783, a breathtakingly beautiful painting

That is until they started losing their heads.

Vigee-Lebrun hit the road, before settling for several years at the Russian court of Catherine the Great.  She seemed to do well with powerful women.

Eventually, she returned to France where a new generation of artists kept her from regaining her popularity.  She kept painting and lived a long life until the mid-19th century.

Thank you to the Met for hosting an exhibit of an historic woman artist.  That’s a rarity.  Perhaps it was no accident, though, that a light bulb was burned out, with its sole job to illuminate the one self-portrait in the show.  I guess we still have a way to go to get these women out of the dark.

Self-portrait, 1790

The exhibit did play on the surface, with few new ah ha’s.  Yes, there was the light reference to the turbulent relationship with her daughter, who fled France as a girl with her resourceful mother.  (The self-portrait with Julia, alas, is not in this show.)  Few other insights came out of the dark.

Although very uneven, the Unfinished show at the Met’s new Breuer building is more interesting.  For the life of me, this building, for all the hoopla, still like just like the Whitney did. There’s even the same overly humid HVAC system.  You’ll have to tell me the differences you see.

Meantime, the opening exhibit works a little too hard to make its point and would have been served by some culling. Still many of the unfinished works tell good stories.

James Hunter Black Draftee, by Alice Neel, 1965 What’s he thinking about?

Alice Neel.  A powerhouse.  She taps into the poignant so seemingly effortlessly.  Look at this portrait of James Hunter from 1965.  It’s unfinished because after the first sitting, James didn’t return for the second.  Why?  He was off to Vietnam.

Gustav Klimt wasn’t the only artist in the exhibit to have trouble finishing a portrait out of frustration.  Manet gave up on a painting of his wife after three failed attempts.  He scraped the paint off her face each time, dissatisfied.  Hmmm.  Knowing Manet, this may say something about that marriage.

Madame Édouard Manet, c.1873

Manet gave up; Klimt died.  But not before his sitter died, and her family rejected two other portraits.  Sheesh!  Still this painting shows something joyous, even as the object label describes the placement of color as tentative.  After two rejections, you might be a little leery, too!  Klimt seemed to die to get out of finishing it!

Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, by Gustav Klimt, 1917-8

I was captivated by this hauntingly modern, surreal portrait of Mariana da Silva by Mengs.  He couldn’t get the placement of the little lapdog quit right and apparently was unhappy with the face.  So he painted a gauzy veil over it.

Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, by Anton Raphael Mengs, 1775

Not all the painting in the show were portraits, but those were the ones I was attracted to, I think for the way they blurred identity.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and this day shows in pictures how identity is mutable in the moment and in reflection later, even centuries later.

Fascinating stuff.  Let me know what you think.

 

Decorative Delights

Everywhere I turn, I’m seeing beauty in the world.  Yes, the snow, and also the handwork of so many startlingly talented people from today and history.

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The Guilford Arts Center has a crisp show of Connecticut-made contemporary quilts, “Local Color: Connecticut Stories.”

I was impressed by the landscape and genre character of many of the quilts.

Paula Klingerman, Happily Every After

Paula Klingerman, Happily Every After

And the number of artists using the photographer as part of the image.

Rita Daley Hannafin, Snapshot

Rita Daley Hannafin, Snapshot

Kate Themel, Self-Portrait

Kate Themel, Self-Portrait

Talk about mixed media!

With quilts, part of the pleasure is the texture.  I like this work that mixes different kinds of needlework.

Detail, Karen Loprete, Joy

Detail, Karen Loprete

This work reminded me of Miriam Schapiro’s exhibit at the National Academy of Design Museum.  A must see!

Once she got past what the art world was doing and found her own voice, in alignment with 1970s feminism, Schapiro’s work is simply breathtaking in its decorative design and message power.

Miriam Schapiro, Blue Burst Fan, 1979, acrylic and collage on canvas

Miriam Schapiro, Blue Burst Fan, 1979, acrylic and collage on canvas

Here, she shows us a traditional female object–the fan–and creates a form of high art from what male critics deemed low-art.  Together, with Judy Chicago, Schapiro reshaped the dialogue about what art was and how to bring the woman artist out of anonymity.

On the wall label, she is quoted from 1977, “I wanted to validate the traditional activiites of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who had made quilts, who had done the invisible ‘women’s work’ of civilization.”

Detail, Blue Burst Fan

Detail, Blue Burst Fan

Schapiro coined a term femmage to describe this art form that is created by a woman, has women-centric themes, and uses mixed media, patterns, and narrative.  The definition is even more detailed that I just relayed and is a bit prescriptive for me.  I don’t know that the term has taken off, but this outstanding show demonstrates how important she was for opening doors to today’s artists, including the quilters at the Guilford Arts Center.

I love this piece, which my friend Helen describes as a transition from her early work of hard-edge abstraction to her own voice of femmage.

Miriam Schapiro, Lady Gengi's Maze, 1972 is she referencing the amazing illustrations in Tales of Genji, the world's first novel?

Miriam Schapiro, Lady Gengi’s Maze, 1972
is she referencing the amazing illustrations in Tales of Genji, the world’s first novel?

For a little wow factor, it never hurts to stop in at the Met.  Although I was headed to another exhibit, I was delayed by Diana and Her Chariot.  This video gives you some sense of her magic.

Automaton Clock in the form of Diana and Her Chariot, German, c1610

Automaton Clock in the form of Diana and Her Chariot, German, c1610

Her eyes move with the tick-tock of the seconds, the leopards leap up and down, the wheels of the chariot move, the monkey raises and lowers that hand with the ball, and yes, Diana shoots the arrow!

The “Luxury of Time” exhibit is full of such beauty and grace and magic.  Fun, too, when the clocks go off on the quarter hour.

Mantel clock (pendule de chiminée)

Clockmaker: Paul Gudin Le Jeune, figures by the Meissen Factory, Flowers by Vincennes Manufactory, c1750

I was enchanted by this Rococo clock, with it’s ‘hand-kiss’ group and elegant flowers.  Charmant!

How’s this for a souvenir?

Watch

Watchmaker: Firm of Vacheron and Constantin, c1844

If you went on the Grand Tour, and didn’t want to schlep a lot of art around, you could pick up this pocket watch, with its view of St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican etched in.  Pretty nifty.

I would like one of these though, even better.

Watch

Watchmaker: Abraham Vacheron Girod (Swiss), 1832

The Great Ruby Watch

Watchmaker: Nicolaus Rugendas the Younger, c1670

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I was actually headed toward is the special exhibition of Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age.  Oh my goodness!

Detail of the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room

Dazzling.  Ah, what a little money will do.  Here are some of my favorites.

Cabinet, made in New York City, 1884-5, Rosewood, mahogany, cherry, pine, pewter, brass, mother-of-pearl inlay

Cabinet, made in New York City, 1884-5, Rosewood, mahogany, cherry, pine, pewter, brass, mother-of-pearl inlay

Imagine the mother-of-pearl inlay in the star pattern shimmering in candlelight.

Side Chair, New York City, 1881-5, mahogany, other woods, mother-of-pearl, brass, copper, pewter, upholstery

Side Chair, New York City, 1881-5, mahogany, other woods, mother-of-pearl, brass, copper, pewter, upholstery

Who’s sitting in this chair?  Well, everyone who comes to visit (and hopefully has a small bum).  It’s one of a set.

Herter Brothers, Secretary, from the Jay Gould House, New York City, 1882

Herter Brothers, Secretary, from the Jay Gould House, New York City, 1882

As with many of the objects I was attracted to, this dense inlay in the floral pattern recalls the then-fashionable Near Eastern patterns.  I talked with a woodworker who was mesmerized by the piece.  They just don’t make ’em like this any more…

Bedstead, carved for Elizabeth Love Marquand (daughter of the 2nd president of the Met), 1881-4

Bedstead, carved for Elizabeth Love Marquand (daughter of the 2nd president of the Met), 1881-4

Women weren’t the only anonymous artists.  This bed was likely carved by an expert immigrant who brought his skills to the U.S.

Those anonymous artists are lost to us today, but fortunately, we can still melt into the magnificence of what they left behind.

Politics and painting, and so much more

George Caleb Bingham, Jolly Flatboatmen, 1846

George Caleb Bingham, a mid-19th-century, self-taught American artist, was also a state senator from the new state of Missouri.  His wonderful “Jolly Flatboatman” can be read as a political document.  Bingham advocated for Congressional funding to develop the Mississippi River.  See, the river was wild, and in order to access all those western resources, the river needed to be ‘improved’.  Man over Nature, and all that.

So here we see a placid, wide Mississippi River and a boat sailing easily into a future full of riches in them thar hills.  These men don’t have to work hard, as if the West wasn’t quite as dangerous as Eastern investors feared.  Everyone could dance for joy.  That is, if the river was cleared and re-routed as needed.

Landscape, Rural Scenery, 1845

What the current show at the Met also shows is the development of an artist.  His early awkward scenes, like this one, show his lack of training.  Here, we see its monstrous Hudson-River-School-inspired plants and trees dominating the scene all out of proportion and the blatant use of red to draw our eye to…a piece of laundry.  Hmmm.

But in that same year of 1845, Bingham begins his remarkable series of Mississippi and Missouri River scenes and becomes an art star in the Art Union, putting reproduction prints in the hands of the middle class everywhere.

The exhibit also demonstrates his method, which starts with intricate drawings until he gets the face and pose just right.  Then he lines up the drawing and his canvas to accomplish his planned composition and basically retraces his drawing until it transfers to the canvas.  At least, that’s the sense I could make of the description on the wall label.

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He also could make a drawing on one side of a thin page (as above), put it by a window, and in its light, trace the reverse, to voila, reuse the pose in another work.

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Storyteller, study, possibly 1849

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Wood boatman, 1850

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Skillet-beater, 1857

 

I was mesmerized by the beauty of these drawings, so much more subtle and sophisticated than his paintings full of types.  The curators explain this, too.  The Bingham brand sold better, especially in the eastern U.S. and Europe, with these rougher types.

He reused favorite characters and compositions again and again.  Like Gilbert Stuart and his portrait of George Washington, these were Bingham’s dollar bills.

My favorite painting in the show is just such a recycled character, “Mississippi Boatman” from 1850.  Note the much better use of attention-grabbing red, now drawing our eye to this riverman’s grizzled features.  I’d love to break bread with this man, since he clearly has seen a thing or two.

Taxpayer dollars rescued (as in purchased) the discovered drawings, now lent to this exhibit by “The People of Missouri.”  Bingham, who served these same people, would surely approve.