Paris, November 2007

Paris, looking off the Pont Neuf still looked like a Marquet painting somewhere in my memory.



A very lyrical Cezanne at Orangerie Museum. It's very formal surface hold's it intact. It has stayed in my mind almost as three paintings, the right part the left and the lone boat bobbing between.






The Waterlilies are probably the most influential to myself and my thoughts over the years. I saw them in 1972 and again in 1987. The Modern's Waterlilies were my resting place each visit to the Modern in NY for years, after visiting with the Pollock and Newman.









They used to be installed in a permanent room at the old Modern. Now they migrate from place to place. Lucily they were saved from their use as an emblem in the outsized atrium. They seemed very naked and exposed there. This is the Modern's
Monet below.

SERRA

A Richard Serra sculpture is elemental and mythic. One feels the weight as ones mortality.

The curve is a mythic shape of the Illiad and a shadow of the Greek form of war. There is a blackness like Achilles "black look." The sculpture slices through space like the boat on the sea of Oddyseus. They are a metaphor for the weight of pure form heightened by the memory of-- echoing, to some origin.

The weight is like a history containing all shape and weight, a color of memory that doesn't get in the way of remembering.




It is like a Pollock whose form takes one to the stars. A Keifer that wonders of that same depth. A Newman that hails that same, vertical moment of eternity.

They are scary and one wants to get out of the way. They are a part of our best art and they leave so much behind.

The photos are from Ft Worth Museum of Modern Art, Texas and Pulitzer Foundation, St Louis.

Richard Serra at the Modern

I only just got to see the Serra Show on Sunday. I lined up at 9:30 Sunday morning and was one of the first in the gallery upstairs. Even then soon the galleries were filled with Disney like tourists with their necks craned out this and that way in obvious pleasure.

Not me. I could only remember my earlier pleasure with similar sculpture at other times in my life.

The big card like sculpture that lent on Franklin Street in the late seventies, with a neighborhood kid's sneakers thrown up on it. I was amazed when it was removed, it was so great, I thought it would always be there.

Then the Rotary near the Holland Tunnel in the early eighties. I was there late one night and hurled a spearlike 2x4 over the sculpture. I ripped my hand as a nail passing in the night drew blood. We were the Achaeans at the WALL.






We found drawings lying near the not yet covered concrete footings. Big rolls of Arches paper with 8 foot arcs of oil stick. I told John Chamberlain about them one night at a bar he said , "So what, kid?"

A little later Richard himself tried to hit me when I disturbed him late at night at the bar, One University, trying to tell him I had them.

I think later that night I tossed them out on the street.

Recently I was up at DIA Beacon early in the morning and spent some time with the sculpture there, and also at the Pulitzer in St Louis there is a sculpture really great, I saw last summer.

But I don't know? The new sculpture, they seem mannered? A little too curvy, too pretty now and easy-- a good test is, the tourist, they wouldn't like as much the plain elemental sculpture of 15 years ago. It was a big deal when one recognized they arced just a bit inward!

I just don't get what pleasure the curators and artists themselves are getting? Anybody want to go back for a second look wrangling with those crowds?

Getty Villa, Los Angeles

These pictures are from 2006. I thought I'd make a comparison to the new Met Galleries.








The Getty Villa is alot about being in Southern California. It is sunny and warm, the ocean light is magnificent.








There is a lightness of being just in California itself, its newness and lack of western history.

There is something of the contemporary shopping mall in the restoration. And the site also exudes the "faux" of the transporting of Greek and Roman culture to California and then presenting as Authentic.

I was amazed at realizing the bronze sculpture like I'd seen years ago in Naples Italy was unlabeled as reproduction.









Nothing has the weight to support say, the actual Greek sculpture, incidentally they now have to give back to Italy. This sculpture's head looks a bit out of kilter reattached. The body drapery classical like the Parthenon Sculptures in London.











I had a hard time telling if I thought the Greek sculpture was great? It all seems Hellenistic, I guess meaning late? Its all very clean and new looking.There is nothing to compare it to in California, except my minds memory of European Museums. The Naples Museum which I saw some time ago was dark and the sculpture stained and worn.









Malibu is already so much like the Pompeii of Rome and then to transport culture to its furthest western edge is breathtaking.

I later went to the Getty on the hill and stood in the sunset watching a traffic jam of hundreds of thousands of cars extending over southern California, all inching their ways home on a friday evening.

Yes, there was something of the apocalyptic in the scene. The conversation being the return of the Getty sculpture to it's rightful home.

New NY Metropolitan Museum of Art Greek and Roman Galleries

The Galleries in the morning light of a sunny day are wonderful. The sculpture lends it's elegance to this light.




I'm not sure the architecture is worth description, good that it included lots of light, and on a rainy day in winter one will forget it is new.





The sculpture is wonderful but by now feels provincial, and democraticly parceled around the historical galleries. But I guess nothing is really that good to take the lead or warrant a special setting. One realizes how far the examples are from the spoils that London, Paris, and Rome have in their Museums.



I wonder if the best examples of French Canova and the American sculptor, Powers, compare with these lesser Roman copies.

There is almost no real Greek sculpture in America, most are Roman copies. I have wanted to do some research to find out exactly what there is.







Have these three graces been in storage these last years, I havent know it? There are some wonderful heads I haven't seen or are displayed differently to allow them new profiles.






Are these Frescoes embedded in sheet rock? I don't think either installation is very remarkable. There is some interest in how contemporary it looks without any trim, but Im not sure that is good.

Carnegie Museum of Art

It's not as easy to stop in Pittsburgh. You have to drive a half hour off the Turnpike and the roads go up hills and down winding around and I got lost numerous times.









So part of the judging is was it worth it? I was surprised as I'd been here before but I guess under distracting circumstances, a Carnegie International show back in the eighties and then besides a wedding, we rushed through.


Yes, that is another Sol Lewitt.

Right off a surprise. A Joe Zucker from back in 1978.





I thought I knew the Museum but not even a bit.

Like this Monet.







They have twice the interesting things as anything I visited this trip.

At first I was disconcerted as I entered the Renaissance galleries all painted a steel wedgewood like blue.





And then this salon style? I figure a toss up as to be able to present more but look where this Ryder, a premier painting in America hangs!
















But the there are astounding examples, a Stuart Davis which should have changed his place in History. The walls were a greyer blue now which felt good.







A Rothko that I havent seen look this good anywhere.












Alex Katz a just natural here, and then again beside a Keifer!
















Well that was great.

Indianapolis Museum of Art

I got interested in posting these things as there is so much out there one doesn't know of, happening all the time.

Indianapolis has a new building which swallowed its old one. It looks a bit like an old Worlds Fair pavillion to me. Then a bit like a government building of this day.



So the architecture is nothing to remark upon.

But then one is thankful somehow for the plain space that is allowed the art.

But first this rather remarkable entry to the Galleries, like the curators don't quite agree with the architecture either and tried to spiff it up. This little Rodin sculpture is there in the middle of the floor.



As one enters the galleries, I felt I was in someones home that really cared about the art a lot of really great juxtapositions.







I had a great time here in the Western Art Galleries, then

the 2nd floor has remarkable ancient chinese pottery --amazing really I think, so very much like is happening in other stages of man's consciousness in other places at other times.



Then what happens-- I was looking so forward to it--

The 3rd floor contemporarary art just fizzles? Nada, nothing there-- bunch of lame installation and video of no interest at all to me, a Turrell with no light, grey and a video of a plane wreck, or I wasn't going to spend the rest of my afternoon to be more disappointed.



It exhausted me and I half forgot how great the other galleries were.

Pulitzer Foundation, St Louis

The Pulitzer is an Ando Museum, and along with his Ft Worth, Museum of Modern Art, I think the most beautiful of Museums.



This one is built around an Ellsworth Kelley which sets an aesthetic surface and they show different ecumenical, is that the word -- all religions of Art, beside it.

I think this is a bit like the way curators use John McCracken these days at Art Fairs, and especially this year's Documenta, to organize the fray.

Well, it was closed today and I was very disappointed.





But I had pictures from a few years ago. This was an amazing exhibition, and among the best things done since the de Menils had the power to put together such things.

Richard Serras have been in St Louis for along time, I remember driving through St Louis more than 10 years ago and the morning news program was-- what did you think of the Richard Serra? They had one installed somewhere?

St Louis Art Museum and the Pulitzer Foundation

I'm back in the green country. It is 105' here and humid and worse than anywhere I've been this summer.





This is the painting that greets me, though. I really like Caleb Bingham, look how good this other figure is too. Precursor to Benton and then Disney-- real connections. He's got a bit of a that Rousseau like-- naivety.



They have really good Pre Columbian things that belonged to the psychologist, Rollo May, I'm not sure if he owned the Max Beckmann's also but they are really good too.







There are really a lot of German Paintings, this Kiefer, another down stairs and a bunch of Richter and Polke.