Glen Alton 6/29/2013

Glen Alton 6/29/2013, a set on Flickr.

Current Exhibitions at the Met

It was a beautiful day, and so I decided to walk from the Neue Galerie to the Container Store, 25 blocks or so, mostly Fifth Avenue along Central Park. Shortly along, I realized I had to pee. I popped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Just a penny to use the facilities!) And got totally sidetracked from what had seemed a pressing bodily urge.

I was on a Vienna kick, so I checked out "Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered." Blech.

On to "An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo." I like drawings. Like books, they leave the details to the imagination. I'm not big on the period though. There was, however, one nice frame.

Quickly through "Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980." Meh.

Finally, "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity." Nothing new. Easily digestible. I liked it all right.

I really liked the floral arrangements in the main hall.

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 Café 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.

Fall

Is 'rhythm' the word to describe that visual pleasure of a crooked crack in stone, a crooked branch of blossoms in the sky?

Fall definitely lends itself to images of decay, dying, dryness.

The Spring of Fall

It's that tipping moment right now, where enough leaves have dropped from the tree that you can see more/better. Yet enough leaves remain on the trees that that bareness and death aren't glaring.

Yellow school buses and construction machinery never look so good as they do in autumn.

Glass Sculpture at the Hunterdon Art Museum

Visited the Hunterdon Art Museum again today. The museum attracts and shows better art than one might expect in a small town. Curators do a good job of choosing work that both is accessible to laypeople and has artistic merit.

And of course the gallery space itself is special. The museum building was a grist mill in the nineteenth century, and renovations preserved the mill's rustic rafters and wide floor boards. Today, contemporary art is hung between live little pastorals: casement windows, set deep into the mill's stone walls, frame scenes of ducks gliding along the glassy river top.

Sculpture by Hank Murta Adams was showing on the first floor today. Most of the work combined glass with found metal objects. I liked the "Produce" installation best. It combined icy looking glass work with metal objects the artist might have found around old kitchens. The museum's Material Color exhibition, on the second floor, was also worth seeing.

"Produce," by Hank Murta Adams

"Bomb Cluster," by Hank Murta Adams

I always seem to enjoy the museum's first-floor gallery most, and I realized today why that may be. The museum seems to show sculpture on the first floor and more two-dimensional work on the upper floors. I may just prefer sculpture, generally, to painting and the like.

The Bronx Zoo

Two western lowland gorillas

Free NYC: Admission to the zoo is 'pay what you wish' on Thursdays.

The Cloisters

The Cloisters museum of the Medieval art, in Washington Heights, New York City (Manhattan). Ran through the museum like children new to a big house. I'm commonly attracted more to the buildings of art museums than to their contents. Highlights included:

1. View through partially stained glass windows, off the ridge of Manhattan, over the Hudson River, to part of New Jersey's Palisades, (preserved with great foresight by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)


2. One of the galleries in particular—rectilinear, stone, spare but redolent with natural texture—which could be my whole living space. Summer-style kitchen in separate bungalow accessible via short teak boardwalk through the trees.


3. Espaliered pear tree


4. Sweetheart (?) brooch—tangled gold, like bine stems (“The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/Like strings of broken lyres”) littered with tiny, irregular gems.


5. Father smacking girl upside the head when she—they all, actually, didn't obey the docent quickly enough.

Official highlight: the Unicorn Tapestries.

‘First Saturday’ at the Brooklyn Museum

(Is it my imagination? Didn't the museum used to be called the Brooklyn Museum of Art?)

Finally made it to a ‘First Saturday’ of the month at the Brooklyn Museum, when admission is free and hours are extended until 11 PM. Went vaguely intending to hear a special curator talk; but ended up so delighted and stimulated by current exhibitions, that I hadn't the capacity for anything more or special.

Started in the museum vestibule, with an exhibition of versions of figures from the Burghers of Calais monument, by Auguste Rodin, always a favorite of mine. Remembered how much I love Rodin's at once fine and strong figures. Isn't that what ‘heroic’ looks like, fine and strong? Thought that any right man for me must have hands like a Rodin man!

Then ascended straight to the fifth floor. Wandered through the American Identities exhibition, which included several pieces worth looking at, and happened upon the museum's Visible Storage/Study Center, which I loved! All kinds of pieces of American, mostly, applied art, chocked and spotlit inside tall, glass and steel cases, in an otherwise dimly lit room. Many lovely Art Nouveau and Mid-Century pieces. I may actually prefer this storage presentation, to regular gallery space.

But I'd come to the fifth floor, really for the paintings by Asher Brown Durand, apparently a major figure of the Hudson River School. The paintings were, as hoped, masterful renditions of the awesome beauty of ordinary nature. A side note, the exhibition reminded me of the expression ‘en plein air’, which is simply pleasant to behold.

American trees are better than English trees.

Also recollected that, as a child, I didn't like Hudson River School paintings. Perhaps especially, the trees in the paintings. They seemed messy, gangly. Not the crisp idealization of trees I preferred, trunks thick and straight, limbs in all the right places and nowhere else. It wasn't until some years later that I first saw my hometown American countryside for what it really was: full of this kind of taller, unkempt, magnificent trees.

These trees are American, belonging to a large country with a short history of land ownership, where, even yet, much ground escapes manicure. The idealization I'd preferred was English, of a small country with a long history of land ownership, whose every hectare has been manicured, by farmer or gardener.

While viewing the Durand paintings, I found a parallel. The difference between idealized English trees and natural American trees is like the difference between idealized figures in Medieval art and realistic figures in Renaissance and later art. In the book My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk, there is the drawn figure of, indeed, a tree, which speaks and, in defense of its Oriental/Medieval, idealized style of rendering, says, “I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.” (I am currently reading My Name is Red for the World Literature Book Club, which I organize.)

I grant the famed beauty of English countryside. The aesthetic has bequeathed its legacy to America, in the form of some of our finest urban parks; bastardized, in our suburban landscapes; and in the country aesthetic Angloxified into our appreciation for nature. A childhood neighbor of mine, in the country rapidly developing into suburban sprawl, cleared all the underbrush from her small forest, because she, "wanted to make an enchanted forest for the kids."

But what I want to tell you is this: an American tree is better than an English tree, and a natural tree is better than an idealized tree. For two reasons.

First, an idealized tree is imbued with a meaning. While this meaning may be useful, perhaps beautiful, to those who believe it, it is only a meaning, not the tree itself. To give a tree but one meaning is to exclude all others, as well as the tree's independent existence. It is creative to believe, to ascribe meaning; but it is destructive to believe in one superlative meaning. It is destructive to idealize.

Second, a natural, American tree is better than an idealized, English tree, because nature is infinitely more sophisticated than human consciousness, individual or collective. Sophistication proffers better instruction to the intellect, intelligent and spiritual. Learning about natural harmony and beauty from a mere idealized tree is like learning about the ocean from a cup of tea.

Back down on the first floor of the museum, I perused the book shop. I bought a William Morris Postcard Book. Thirty postcards for just $9.95—suhweet! I'm hanging them, in series, in my “garden room.” They are themselves idealizations of flora. Simplifying texture into pattern. They are pretty, they are comfortable.

Tortoise

Saw Tortoise at the Bowery Ballroom.

Sunday Drive

Sunday drive. Visited the Solitude House Museum, a local history museum in High Bridge (Hunterdon County, New Jersey). Stopped by the dam and waterfall at Lake Solitude, also in High Bridge. Drove along Raritan River Road through Ken Lockwood Gorge, in Califon, stopping to skip rocks and take photographs.





Ambled up towards Hackettstown (Warren County) and happened upon a corn maze, which of course we successfully completed.

Nature Walk at Duke Farms

Headed over to Duke Farms, in Hillsborough, New Jersey, for their self-guided "Walk on the Wild Side" nature walk. It cost $5 per person and is the second of two tours at Duke Farms not worth the money (the other being the $15 "Country Manor Tour"). The short walk, with little actually demonstrated and shown, should be free or cost a suggested donation.

The stone irrigation poles in the abandoned tree nursery are interesting. The highlight of the walk, though, is the stone hay barn, gutted by fire, later repurposed to a sculpture garden. The stone, outer walls remain, climbed high by trumpet vines and open to the sky. Grass covers the ground, and ornamental small trees and shrubs line the inside perimeter, punctuated by a few stone sculptures of human forms. Half the sculptures are missing or badly broken. Nonetheless, this is indeed a magic little eerie, romantic, empty, secret garden of a space.

Toshiko Takaezu at the Hunterdon Museum of Art

Tea, Hunterdon Museum of Art, and ice cream. On view at the museum: extremely pleasing porcelain forms by "Living Treasure of Hawaii" Toshiko Takaezu.

Bethlehem

Explored Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with former resident and new friend JS. I had no idea Bethlehem was so large and historic. It's a proper little city, with public transport and everything. Centered on the Lehigh River. Stopped in at the Moravian Book Shop, which, founded in 1745, touts itself as the oldest book shop in the world. Also at Central Moravian Church. And for tea and scones at Granny McCarthy's Tea Room (my rating, 4/10).

Ambled around JS's alma mater Lehigh University - beautiful campus - and happened upon a wedding in progress at the chapel (which is as big as a large church). JS recognized the playing of the organist as that of his own old organ teacher, Mr. CM. Stopped in later and chatted with Mr. CM. Ridiculously delightful man! He played us a piece and demonstrated all the different parts of the console for me. You thought it was difficult coordinating two hands playing piano? These guys coordinate two hands and two feet! There are so many foot pedals, they form a whole other keyboard!

United Nations

Finally took the guided tour of the United Nations. The tour unfortunately excludes the secretariat. My rating, 4/10.

Cartoons of Me

By Jeff, in the mid 2000s

Pen Drawings

By Greg; date unknown, maybe 2001?

Self

Late 1990s