This is my bit of a blog. Rambling words about rambling days. No focus and nothing ambitious. I seem to write most about local color, nature, and animals, and there is an incomplete chunk about my road trips of 2011.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Neue Galerie

I scooted into Manhattan, to the Neue Galerie, a museum, I knew, devoted to German and Austrian art. Because: I'd never been there before, to check out the Beaux Arts mansion, and, most of all, truth be told, to reconnoiter a certain Viennese chocolate cake, the Sachertorte. Admittedly, I wasn't going for the art.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the museum also houses decorative art. That, I'll go places to see. Also pleasantly surprised to find everything was early twentieth-century - one of my favorite design periods.

Highlights

  • Seeing Gustav Klimt's painting, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I." I went through a bit of a Klimt phase in my teens and twenties, yet I'm not sure I'd ever actually seen a major work before. According to the Washington Post in 2006, Neue Galerie bought this particular painting for something like 135 million dollars, the most money ever paid for a painting.
  • Imagining what it was like to live in and use the building as a residence. Realized the size of this grand, Fifth Avenue mansion, especially of its individual rooms, is comparable to, and smaller than, many a Toll Brothers McMansion. Would love to explore its off-limits upper and basement stories.
  • Reading the paper over tea and cake in the museum's atmospheric CafĂ© Sabarsky. It's a single, graciously proportioned, ground-floor room, perhaps the original drawing room. And the menu is (Gasp!) totally affordable - on Museum Mile of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I read about a 5,500-year-old shoe and about misery in North Korea.
  • My favorite thing was a beautiful light fixture, five strands descending seven feet from the ceiling, to rude, early light bulbs.

The Sachertorte totally bombed. The icing wasn't even hard, and the cake wasn't great either.

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