SHARING WITH FRIENDS IN NEW YORK

This was to be a new experience ! Travelling with my two closest friends to a city which they had never visited. New York. It all started sometime ago when Helena from Finland,

 (see GLORIOUS COLOURS AND NEW DISCOVERIES)

 said she would like to see New York. When I suggested that we go together,  dates were set up at once and I asked Pierrette to join us.

I wonder how many times I have visited New York in the last 40 years? The count doesn’t matter but as with so many cities, there is a purpose to my visit and it is rarely if ever as a tourist. This made me a little nervous as just how much could I show them?  All the major museums of course - and yet as we will see, there was one I didn’t know at all.

As my plane was four hours late, I was the last to arrive instead of the first but they were both settled into their hotel room. Dinner and bed were next on the menu.

So the first day it was going to be the Whitney but when we walked there - it was closed! I had not done my homework at all. But the Frick Collection was just around the corner. A museum which I had never been to. Yet Marielle in Paris had spoken about it. Helena and Pierrette had looked it up too.

The Collection includes some of th best-known painting by the greatest European artists, major works of sculpture, 18th century French furniture and porcelains, Limoges enamels, Oriental rugs and other work. The ambiance of Mr Frick’s private house is maintained.

West  Gallery

West Gallery_

Dining room

 

The current exhibition was "The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec": Drawings and Prints from the Clark Collection.

«Courbet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other masters are on view. Ranging widely in subject matter and technique and spanning the entire second half of the nineteenth century, these works represent the diverse interests of Realist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artists in a rapidly changing world»

 Berthe Morisot - Before a Yacht 1875

Toulouse Lautrec - The Jockey  -1899

Breton Bathers, from the Volpini Suite, 1889 - Gaugin

Study for Dead Fox in Forest - Degas1861-64

Boy with dog 1862 - E. Manet

Claude Monet "Caricature of a man with a snuff box" 1858

 

Even if we know these artists - or don’t, that is incidental. There were 17 and  what I found most interesting is that some of those well known figures had a palette larger than I imagined. Claude Monet I have seen his caricatures before but it came as a surprise in this collection. Morisot is better known I would think for her portraits, so the sea scene was different from what I knew, just as Edward Manet with the Boy and dog or Toulouse Lautrec  with his jockey. And I would not have recognized either the Gaugin bathers or the Degas dead fox.

There is always something new to discover with well known artists away from those reassuring paintings we know so well.

The rest of the day was one of discovery but as the weather was mediocre and the wind howling down the avenues as it does in New York we didn’t dawdle.

But the following day the sun was shining brightly and the blue sky was so blue that all the blossoms and trees seem to have flowered over night. The sight was glorious. I had forgotten how colourful New York can be in the Springtime, not to mention Autumn. 

 

Close to Washington square

Sunning themselves

Can you see the sign?

We were off to Staten Island on the ferry. Everyone was slightly taken aback that the ferry was free of charge - so little is these days. We did the round trip and of course, you know what we saw.....         

Staten Island wharf

Of course.....

Return trip

Freedom  Tower

but what is so much view on the return to trip is Freedom Tower. 

Just one question : Why did it have to be bigger, taller than the twin towers? There is a memorial which my granddaughter described to me and perhaps we should have gone to see it. Wouldn’t a memorial have been enough?

China town in a good restaurant with Ken who had flown down from Montreal to see me.  We knew the spot and it was as good as ever. Later we started wandering back to the hotel. I have done that walk back to Times Square on many occasions. Finally we took a taxi returning to the Rockfeller centre and  it seemed like miles away and certainly took time in the traffic

Times Square

Days go by fast and there was the Whitney - the American museum of art - which I always enjoy but this time even more as there was the discovery of an artist I should surely have known. Jacob Lawrence.

"Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter; he was married to a fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.
Lawrence is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters, a distinction shared with Romare Bearden. Lawrence was only in his twenties when his "Migration Series" made him nationally famous. A part of this series was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune magazine. The series depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The collection has been split into two parts for public viewing."

War Series: Alert, 1947

We saw «The War series» and from  little way off I thought some paintings were abstract cubist. When the painting was studied other images appeared and were all very much related to war. The three of us were somewhat overwhelmed.  

The paintings can be discovered at http://whitney.org/Collection/JacobLawrence.

The Letter 1946

The war series - J. Lawrence  Another Patrol - 1946

As Pierrette and Helena were off to the opera - I was off to the Apple Store. Another home in New York. 

Tomorrow would be my theatre night but the booking was a mistake of evening. I should have booked on the night they went to the opera. The musical comedy was not a mistake. «The Book of Mormon»
It is a religious satyre musical which in «my book» only the Americans could do.
The Book of Mormon tells the story of two young Mormon missionaries sent to a remote village in northern Uganda, where a brutal warlord is threatening the local population. Naïve and optimistic, the two missionaries try to share the Book of Mormon, one of their scriptures—which only one of them has read—but have trouble connecting with the locals, who are more worried about war, famine, poverty, and AIDS than about religion.
If you imagine the story from then on,  you can see what will happen. The music is good, the songs and the two young men quite brilliant

 

Outside the theatre

Before the curtain went up

Drinking and chatting at interval

 I loved every second of it which cannot be said perhaps for the opera goers who were a little disappointed with the Rigoletto. Not with the opera itself but with the constant interruption of clapping and cheering after each aria. 

 

There was of course the MOMA and here it was like soaking up old favourites 

 

Moma looking down at an installation

That copter always surprises me

 

Yves Tanguy  SLowly toward the North 1942

Pollock - Echo number 25 - 1951

Easter and the Totel 1953 - Pollock

Les Demoiselles - Picasso of course

Woman with pears - 1909 - Picasso

and here too we saw the series of the «Great Migration» by Lawrence. Around the time of the first world war, large numbers of African Americans began leaving their homes in the rural South in search of employment in the industrial cities of the North. In 1940, Lawrence chronicled their journey of hope in a flowing narrative sequence of paintings. This is just a few example of this series. In many respects it is naif and the cubic abstract approach does not come through for me as it did in the war series. 

The Migration of the Negro Panel no. 57, 1940–1941.

Migration series  1940-41

From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.” 1940-41

“The migrants arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North.”

To go further you can also look at this.
http://www.phillipscollection.org/migration_series/flash/explore.cf

You don’t do the Metropilitan in one day. I had already seen the temporary exhibition in Paris «Impressionism, Modernism and Fashion"  but was keen on re-seeing the modern and contemporary art which I had had to skip through when last there. It’s like finding old friends and also discovering new ones. The really contemporary and installations I can still do without but the early 20th century Americans, Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, William de Kooning , Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko.... The sculptor David Smith - Abstract Expressionim which is undoubtedly one of my favorite periods then come Frank Stella, and Donald Judd. Cy Twombly's vigorous graphic script and Robert Rauschenberg's multimedia, combines  a new generation's response to Abstract Expressionism. I’ll go back another day and just wander blissfully in at least 5 or 6 of those galleries. Here are some other painters too which I love to see.....

Clyford Still

Clyford Still

Judith Ruigi - Outburst

Adolf Gotlieb - 1950

David Smith

Lee Krasner 1948

William de Kooning - 1936

Otto Dix - The Business man 1922

The Clyford Still Gallery

 

El Anatsui - Ghanian 1944 Dusasa 11 - 2007

Mark Rothko - 1949

George Conde - rush Hour - 2010 an artist I did not know but liked at once...

Central Park had put on her most beautiful springtime clothes for us and it was a pleasure to wander through on the Sunday, looking at the ducks, the tortoises and most of all those trees in flowers.

In New York this time, I had become a tourist.

 Thanks to Pierrette and Helena I discovered  many new monuments, churches and even the obessive way I shopped surprised me! I forgot to add our two visits to Soho, the Village....The entire week was called «Sharing».