Freedom from Want

As you know, my argument is that we’re in another economic depression now, and my day in New York made the comparisons to the 1930s striking.

Thomas Hart Benton Instruments of Power America Today mural series 1930-1

Thomas Hart Benton
Instruments of Power
America Today mural series
1930-1

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America Today

I started at the Met, where I finally got to see America Today, the murals by Thomas Hart Benton that have been re-homed from the New School.  Over the years there, students had rammed chairs into the murals, and they were otherwise degrading.  Now revitalized in glorious color, made richer through the darkened exhibition space, the murals tell the story of America in a moment–1930-1, when the Great Depression was just sucking away the country’s vitality.
 

 

Reginald Marsh The Bowery 1930

Reginald Marsh
The Bowery
1930 an artist also known for pulsating energy

 

Benton celebrates though.  America’s pulse, its chaos and determination, its strengths and its smarts.

Certainly compared with Reginald Marsh’s nearby The Bowery from the same year, 1930, the murals are propagandistically optimistic.  The glory of work, the ingenuity of technology, the voice of entertainment, all punctuated with clarifying red.

Benton loved red.

 

 

 

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America Today

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America Today

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Look at that red and those gestures!

Pieter Coecke van Aelst
Conversion of St. Paul
1563
Look at that red and those gestures!

 

While the curators draw connection to Baroque painting as an influence on Benton’s energetic compositions, I was also taken by the drama of the Renaissance tapestries, a newly opened, scintillating exhibition at the Met.  Surely Benton was influenced by the Renaissance body and borrowed from religious ecstasy for his modern passions.

 

 

 

 

Jackson Pollack Pasiphae 1943

Jackson Pollack
Pasiphae
1943

 

Detail America Today

Detail America Today

 

And where would Jackson Pollack be if he hadn’t been under the influence of his teacher’s, Benton’s, quivering, pulsating storytelling?  And Benton was completely modern, as you can see here.

But the art historian digresses.

 

 
Back on point, we, too, today crave celebrity entertainment and the refuge of technological wizardry to forget our troubles with work and the sour economy. We like to think of America’s strength, even as evidence shows the contrary.

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From the Met, I walked over to the newly-open-for-tours Roosevelt House.  After Sara Roosevelt’s death, in 1942, Hunter College bought the house and has been using it for classrooms.  Just about the only thing left from the quiet wealth of the Roosevelts is the staircase bannister.  I ran my hand up the rail where Eleanor may have, too. I haven’t washed my hand since!

I joined a tour/lecture, led by a history doctoral student.  As he told us about FDR’s and Eleanor’s accomplishments, I was most taken by the Four Freedoms speech, so relevant today.  Only the names have changed.  Have we progressed at all?

I was interested in the speech’s afterlife.  Norman Rockwell had a hard time getting support to make his monumental paintings of the same name.  Finally, the Saturday Evening  Post printed the series, which became phenomenally popular, driven by a Bentonesque vision of America.  Then the war bonds office came up with a program.  For an $18.75 war bond purchase, you would receive a set of the four posters.  And the rest is history.

Or is it?  How much do we tolerate freedom of religion post 9/11?  In light of a string of natural disasters and Ebola, how free from fear are we?  In an era of political correctness, changing mores, and lax gun laws, are we really free to speak our minds?

Grand CAnd freedom from want?  That issue was actually secondary in “Grand Concourse,” now at Playwrights.  Yes, it takes place in the Bronx today in a soup kitchen.  Yes, one of the four characters is a homeless man who teeters on the ability to get and hold a job and function well,  but I think playwright  Heidi Schrek uses her setting as a metaphor, a rumination on the nature of giving and how generosity of spirit can get twisted.  People younger than I am, though, may see the play through different eyes.  Check it out, and see what you think.

Regardless, may you be free from want this harvest season, on all levels of body and being.

Mesmerized

Garry Winogrand is getting the full treatment at the Met, with an exhibition of previously unprinted images.  Regardless of the controversy about that (what was the artist’s intention?), his work has all the freshness, immediacy, sadness, and irreverence it ever had.

El Morocco, 1955

 

What a way to see New York in the 50s through the 70s.  How did he get those shots?  Did he zoom from a distance?  He has a right-fhereness sensibility.  He puts us on the scene.

 

 

Central Park Zoo, 1967

What do you make of this image?  Of course, this is one of his more provocative works.  I’m immediately reminded of Karen Joy Fowler’s remarkable sibling novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.  But that’s not how most have seen it.  The wall text argues that because the man was a famous animal handler, this is more an image of love than miscegenation.

Los Angeles, 1969

I find this image more disturbing.  Winogrand refuses to discuss the content of his images, saying this one is about light.  Boy, is it!  Look at how the light tells this particular story.  How do you interpret the boy’s thoughts and experience?

State Fair of Texas, Dallas, 1964

State Fair of Texas, Dallas, 1964

 

 

Of course, Winogrand is wry and funny, too.  I liked the implied commentary in this image of my Dallas hometown.  I couldn’t agree more, on every level.

Las Vegas, 1957

 

 

 

 

Some images are just beautiful…

 

 

 

New York, 1960

 

 

 

 

…many are wistful

 

 

New York, 1960

 

 

 

 

…and empty

 

 

 

 

 

 

…and mesmerizing.

1964 World’s Fair

 

The way the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Whitney mesmerized me was a surprise.  They’ve given the whole building over to him, the swan song show for their Upper East Side location.  Well, I gave it 15 minutes, which is all the fame I think he deserves.

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What fascinated me was the number of children, little children, there.  You don’t see children at most exhibits, none at the Winogrand show.  An unknowing visitor could think you were at a children’s museum.

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Here, the children responded with unrestrained glee at the Koons oversized toys and balloons, while the uber-sophisticates were trying to make his readymades into high art.  I put my Winogrand lens on and started taking images of the people.

Balloon Venus

Balloon Venus

 

 

Koons gets the last laugh.  His balloon antiquities, like this riff on the Venus of Willendorf, and over-sized pop icons sell for millions, even if the only people who seem to really enjoy them are the very young.

 

 

 

 

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The best moment?  “Let’s go look at the train, Grandma!”  That’s how I think Koons will live into posterity!

 

 

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Such a serious young man.

 

 

 

 

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) Biennial–yes, they are doing one, too–comes out of the same sensibility as Koons.  Appropriation, twists on the readymades.  But even in this jumble of a show, there’s more inventiveness, wonder, and genuine delight.

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I couldn’t move from the Noa Zilberman video where the woman was applying wrinkles that were strands of gold.

 

 

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Like Koons, many of the artists play with materials.  Todd Pavlisko uses retail tag fasteners to create his huge  portrait of Richard Pryor.  Can you make out the texture?

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I’m partial to MAD chairs.  Every exhibit has them.  Here are three I really liked this time.

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The terrarium room is mesmerizing.  I felt like I was underwater, swaying with the rhythm you may hear in this video.