Last weekend we spent one very busy Saturday in New York City museuming. We started in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum. This time we took the 2 train from 125th St in Harlem. After 45 minutes and a bit of subway back and forth caused by track work, we emerged from the subway walking up to look straight at the new glass entrance hall of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Brooklyn Museum

Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea

We visited a number of galleries. I found the exhibition, “Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings From Paris to the Sea” very interesting. Unlike the New York Time’s reviewer Holland Cotter,¹ I am not too bothered with issues of exactly where any particular artist fits into the taxonomy that art critics and historians use.

Unlike most taxonomies of the physical world, art taxonomy seems to obscure more than enlighten. At any rate I really enjoyed the industrial and street scenes. His perspectives are frequently novel.((pictures of Caillebotte’s work shown here borrowed without permission from the Brooklyn Museum website))

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” is now on permanent display. I must admit that very few of the 1038 women honored in this piece were familiar to me. The “Heritage Panels” that are part of this work offer a timeline and some hints about why the women included at the dinner are there. The Brooklyn Museum has wonderful web pages on the Dinner Party, including a 360⁰ virtual tour here.

“American Identities: A New Look”

We made a return visit to the the fifth floor for the “American Identities: A New Look” permanent installation. This is proving to be worth a trot around whenever we get to this museum. The topics are great and the juxtapositions of art from different eras about similar topics provides an unusual view on artists  and topics.

The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell

We also stopped by “The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell” (web information here) on the way out the door. Large conventional portraits of notable people. This part of  “a documentary project that explores being Black in America.”. Not sure how they chose the people included, but with such a large population to pick from any selections would probably raise that question.

The Brooklyn Museum continues to be a very reliable source of good exhibitions without the crushes of the MET and MOMA. Good place to take the grandchildren.

MOMA

“Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West”

Stephen Shore 1973 photo Klamath Falls, OR in MOMA show

With that we got back on the subway and headed back to Manhattan and a visit to MOMA. Fortified by one of the wonders of urban life, a hot dog from a street vendor, we went into MOMA and first looked at “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West”. This topically arranged visit to photographs of the American West was great fun for me. Lots of famous photographers juxtaposed with people unknown to me but shooting photos on a similar topic but perhaps from a completely different time. Leaving aside the pedagogical intent of the show, “the American West is a produced cultural artifact” – the quality of most of the images was very good. Lots to enjoy.²

“The Printed Picture”

I also returned briefly to look at an exhibition that I had stumbled on during an earlier visit. “The Printed Picture” explores the development of printing pictures, something that we take for granted. It is not so long ago that color pictures did not appear in daily newspapers. Color was reserved for the Sunday paper pullouts and magazines. On a daily basis one was used to quite grainy black and whites. Now color is ubiquitous, expected, and black and white images are the more unusual. One technology really caught my attention.  The Hewlett Packard Indigo press. This digital press prints in full four color at 120 pages per minute with variable page content on the fly. The age of on demand printing is here now. Maybe this should be obvious from the flourishing self-publication sites.

Karen has now purchased the book that accompanies this exhibition,  The Printed Picture, a book by Richard Benson that traces the changing technology of picture making from the Renaissance to the present, focusing on the vital role of images in multiple copies.

Paul Graham, “a shimmer of possibility”

I also went back to look again at a series of photos by Paul Graham, “a shimmer of possibility”. Working predominantly in series format, these photos are really compelling. I found myself spending more than my usual 10 seconds studying these series. “New Orleans (Woman Eating) is a wonderful series which is occupied with a woman sitting in a bus stop eating chicken. But, the series seems also to be about accidental art found in the rubbish at her feet.³

In another series, “Texas 2005″,  8 pictures taken around sunset. Only on close examination of the first, taken at a low angle through trees between two houses looking towards a setting sun, do you realize that there are two figures, very faint figures, playing basketball. Later photos in the series show this play up close. In none is there any connection displayed between the photographer and the basketball players. We seem to be an unseen observer. But, as the title of this show suggests, these events are just “a shimmer of possibility”. What in fact are we observing?

Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective

We also rode the escalators to the top floor to look at “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”. This strange fellow made an enormous amount of “art” in his short life. Most of this seems to fit into the genre of art which MFA and PhD students will worry about. Not much for me to say about this except for repeating my distain for this genere of self-indulgent silli-business masquerading contemporary art. Nevertheless,  I did take a few shots of the exhibition.

Here is a shot from above of Kippenberger large installation on the second floor.

 

I got more interested in some strange reflections as I was taking a few photos from the sixth floor balcony.

 

MET

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

After a brief bus ride, we trooped in to the MET. By this time I was pretty museumed out. Reinforced by a stop in the cafeteria (I can get there blind folded), we did look at the exhbition,    
“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors”. Could be the end of the day or my general lack of interest in Impressionist flowers, but, I was underwhelmed and glad to board the M2 for Harlem.

 

1. see his review March 27, 2009 “The Reluctant Impressionist here [↩]
2. Stephen Shore photo borrowed without permission from NYTimes [↩]
3. The picture here of the series was taken by me. The second is borrowed without permission from MOMA’s website [↩]