People who know me are tired, I am sure, of hearing this, but I still think that Chicago is the greatest American city, mostly because New York is another country. The most exciting place on the planet — and basically, the center of the universe.
I started my first day of a long weekend there with a stroll up Madison Avenue in the 60s, home to the priciest retail in the Western Hemisphere, certainly.
For somebody interested in art and design, it’s hugely frustrating and aggravating that so many places ostensibly open to the public have an absolute prohibition on photography. I understand that museums have all sorts of issues with image rights, so there are lots of issues regarding image reproduction.
But why do stores get so crazy when you try to take a picture inside?
This didn’t occur to me at all until last year when I wanted to take pictures in Barneys on Oak Street because I was writing a post about Peter Marino. So now if I’m in a store and I’m dazzled by the interior, I ask if I can take a picture and the answer is always “No.” Such was the case when I walked into the Tom Ford store. It is exquisitely rich in detail, with astonishingly sumptuous materials. In a retail environment, you’re always concerned about wear and maintenance, but the luxury and delicacy of it all makes it clear that Mr. Ford isn’t concerned about heavy foot traffic.
When I asked the clerk who designed the interior, I was more than amazed that he actually knew the answer — or sort of. He said “Sofeld,” but I realized he meant William Sofield, who, I remembered, had designed all of the Gucci stores during Ford’s reign there, as well as stores for Bottega Veneta and the interior of the SoHo Grand hotel.
Of course he told me I couldn’t take any pictures. What are they worried about? A Google image search for “Tom Ford store” yields a couple of shots - including this one of the “Suit Room”
that appeared in New York magazine, which pretty much sums up the residential feel of the whole place. So if they ran the shot in New York magazine, why can’t a blogger come in the store and take a picture of his own? Equally frustrating is that I couldn’t find a shot of the curved ebony staircase or the velvet-lined elevator.
No matter. My destination that morning was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While all comparisons are by their nature invidious and unfair, I can’t help comparing institutions in New York to those in other American cities, and by and large, none of them measure up to what you find in Gotham. I mean, I love the Art Institute of Chicago — and particularly with the addition of the Modern Wing, it’s really a first class encyclopedic museum. But there is just nothing in America like the Met, and not only because of the collections. It’s the place itself.
The Louvre, after all, was a palace at one point [and a French palace at that], so of course it is absurdly grand. But just look at the architecture of the Met — the proportions, the detailing, the materials.
The parquet floors alone could bring you to tears.
The current big exhibition is Stieglitz and his Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe.
Again, no pictures permitted here, which surprised me. Because New York museums so often mount these comprehensive thematic shows completely from their own collections, they usually are generous about allowing photographs, but once again, I discovered I couldn’t take pictures inside the show. A knowledgeable source [my aunt] suggested this was because there were a number of photographs in the show, and — for kind of obvious reasons — no museum ever permits pictures of photographs.
Stieglitz is certainly a famous photographer, but the focus of this show is his role as a dealer, and the extent of his activity in that role took me completely by surprise. I didn’t realize his New York gallery was the first place in America to show either Picasso or Matisse — both of whom were unknown in the US before he exhibited their work. He was really the first champion of modernism, although according to the didactic materials in the show, after the Armory Show of 1913, other dealers jumped on the bandwagon, and after that he restricted his energies to American artists.
The Stieglitz collection is really spectacular, because he showed so many great artists: Kandinsky, Severini, Brancusi, Hartley, Dove. I have always been drawn to the work of Charles Demuth, who seems to have lobbied extensively to get Stieglitz interested in his work, but again, according to the didactic material, the dealer was unimpressed by his regular output of pretty watercolors. When the artist made his series of “poster portraits,” though, Stieglitz jumped at the chance to display them, and you can understand why when you look at “The Figure 5 In Gold,”
which — like so much work in this show — you have to imagine was earth-shattering to the artgoing public at the time [1929] — even the sophisticated crowd you would expect to find in New York. I used to think that Stuart Davis was really the first “pop” artist — or at least the first one to appropriate imagery from the consumer culture.
But Demuth’s painting — which is actually a conceptualist portrait of his friend Marsden Hartley —makes me think Demuth was really the great grandaddy of the movement. [The image here unfortunately can’t capture the impact of the actual figure 5 in gold leaf.]
Of course there’s a lot of Georgia O’Keefe.
While I know she is among the most popular artists in the pantheon, I’ve just never been a fan, because she really didn’t change anything about what she did over her very long career. While I know she was immensely talented, I just think an artist has to grow, and she stayed pretty much the same.
Next stop, Chelsea. Here, there are different admonitions against photography. There’s a great show at Danzinger Gallery of Steichen photographs [ although there’s a large selection of his work in the Met Steiglitz show, none of these seem to be there], which illustrate how important he was in helping create a cultural standard of glamour and beauty. His famous shot of a veiled Gloria Swanson sums up an entire era of Hollywood.
[ Danzinger is asking $12k if you are in the market.]
At one of Pace Gallery’s spaces on 24th St is a show of “Gray” paintings by Agnes Martin. I know there are many people who don’t understand or like minimalism, but if you do, this exhibition [which is what this is; none of the works are for sale] should be Nirvana. I stood in the center of the room for several minutes, completely blissed out. The only thing that sort of spoiled the experience for me were the hulking presence of mean-looking, completely intimidating guards who are virtually indistinguishable from similar types who create a similarly hostile environment at the high end retailers on Madison. I was told, as usual, that I couldn’t take photographs, but I found this image of the installation on someone else’s site [thank you Joanne Mattera Art Blog]
so I guess you just have to know the right people to get the right pictures.
I love the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto [look here], who is exhibiting at Pace’s other gallery on the street. I’m encouraged to see that [unlike Georgia O’Keeffe, for example] he is consistently innovating what he does, both in terms of medium and concept. I’m familiar with his photography, but I didn’t really get the installation of glass “pagodas” mounted on poles
until the gallery assistant explained to me that they were photographs — I just had to look at them closely, from a specific angle, to realize that they are seascapes embedded in the transparent housings.
And in a way, they’re remarkable meditative and serene, like the Martin paintings down the street.
But I love that the artist is also experimenting with different and clever ideas, as with his take on Duchamp’s “Large Glass” piece — actually a print wedged between two plates of glass, and then installed inside a glass box — which I can’t believe he hasn’t intended as a sort of ironic amusement.
Luhring Augustine Gallery has a show of Richard Pousette-Dart: the “East River” work. I have always liked his paintings [so, apparently does Ross Bleckner]; I didn’t know he did these wild, expressionistic sculptures, too.
I liked that they had no problem with really high prices — $750K and up — in print on their price lists. Usually I just find that with really high-priced pieces, the galleries will just write “On Request” or some such obfuscation.
Finally, you cannot help but be impressed — and maybe a bit overwhelmed — by the Richard Serra pieces at Gagosian on 23rd Street. I find it hard to believe he makes pieces like this on spec, but apparently it’s so. They are large, sweeping, house-size arcs of rusted steel [Cor-Ten?] that are spectacularly powerful, not just because of their scale, but their color, texture and geometry. Walking through the spiraling spaces they create, you literally get lost, even though you know eventually you will emerge.
Again, there are multiple hulking, intimidating guards, and again, I just don’t get it. How could anyone possible steal one of these things? They’ve got to weigh several tons and are the size of small airplanes.
