The Peggy Guggenheim Museum

The Peggy Guggenheim Museum is irresistible to me. I've seen the paintings many times, yet they are some of my favorites. The many Max Ernsts (she helped him get his green card by marrying him so he could escape the war), the sexy Leonor Fini, the roomful of Pollocks (she was a great champion of his), the good Picassos, Brancusis et al. Unlike many collections, this one is so personal, and the homelike setting is so congenial to the art.  Like Dominique de Menil she had a strong personal relationship to her artists and it comes through in the idiosyncratic collection.  

Also there is the Albers in Mexico show, which I missed in NY and is small but pithy. The Albers fell in love with Mexico and New Mexico and returned time and again to the Mayan and Inca ruins for inspiration.  Contact sheets of their travels show the intense level of engagement and the reflection in so much of the work. Missing are Annie's weavings. Why?  This was the only thing that rankled.

The Palazzo Cini

The Palazzo Cini is right next door to the Peggy Guggenheim but it is largely skipped by tourists and so they are giving discount passes at the Peggy.

The Cini family also founded the San Giorgio Island install. This is merely an earlier iteration of the Prada/Pinault concept. Cini was a rich industrialist collector who also had a religious bent.  Two Palazzi were converted by his daughter for a pot pourri of paintings sculptures and porcelains. 

There are some nice things (a della Francesca Madonna and child and a great Pontormo portrait of Two Friends) but the discovery for me is the superior circular staircase by Tomaso Buzzi which was added in the fifties.  An Imaginary Architecture show of drawings is up to coincide with the Biennale.

Carlo Scarpa room at the Ca Foscari public university in Venice

After three tries, I finally was able to get into the famous Carlo Scarpa room at the Ca Foscari public university in Venice.  

This university seems a wonderful environment with this once in a lifetime situated campus and I was told it has excellent faculty and courses which can be had for a quarter the price of American universities. 

In addition, it holds a rare Scarpa room which he designed for lectures including the chairs, the dais with its removable tile floor,, the folding window screens and wood fretted ceiling.  Having done the Scarpa route outside Venice on one of my last trips, this was the excellent dessert. There is a tour which is given and I recommend it as my way of getting upstairs was entirely too random and complicated.

Fondazione Carriero

Situated behind a red brick facade with barely a number outside is the Fondazione Carriero,  yet another private foundation begun by a wealthy founder.  

Tucked away inside a 14th-15th century private Milanese home, redone by Gae Aulenti (this much more successful than the Musee d'Orsay) originally for a bank, the quiet galleries are both hidden and free and open to the public. 

Still, this one is so tasteful as to be modest and for two more weeks, an elegant Sol Le Witt show curated by Rem Koolhaas and Francesco Stocchi is on view.  Le Witt is mostly represented at Dia and at Mass Moca in huge installations where he loses me. Here, I found a measure of contemplation that worked.

Museo Del Novecento

The Museo de Novecento is stuffed into a wonderfully fascistic building Palazzo dell'Arengario next to the Duomo, which I never recognize anymore, as it is white now instead of the black I remember. Tourists throng the square but Milan is still mostly free of American tourists (to their detriment. It is a wonderfully rich city).

Though poorly retrofitted, the collection inspires a certain admiration: it is filled with Italian futurists and local artists, unknown to us, but worthy of attention.  And at the top, the view of the Piazza is splendid. 

Chaim Soutine at the Jewish Museum: Flesh

Chaim Soutine was an outsider in Montparnasse, a Russian Jewish expat who came, like many others, both to flee repression and to immerse himself in the flourishing artistic culture of Paris at the turn of the century.  (He was a close friend of Modigliani's)

An exhibition at The Jewish Museum is flat out gorgeous.  There are no portraits, or rather the portraits are of beef carcasses, broken turkey necks, and all manner of fish and fowl.  The thick impasto is rich enough to provoke thoughts of eating, yet the degree of intimacy is also off putting.  

It helps not to be a vegetarian to see the show. Apparently because of kosher dietary restrictions about how animals must be slaughtered (quickly, then drained of blood), Soutine had to refresh his subjects with new blood from time to time to achieve the intense saturated color palette he desired.

Soutine was more reverent towards his elders. Cezanne, Courbet, Chardin and Weenix all figure in these luscious tableaux.  He can be a Matisse on steroids.

But the paintings and their subject matter are so original as to be utterly contemporary.  Who would have thought that rabbits, pheasants, steer and geese could elicit so much emotion? 

Soutine grew gentler at the end. Instead of innards, he portrayed the whole animal. And thus the late work pales by comparison.  

I am so grateful to have seen these masterworks which are largely new to me. To see the ascetic Giacometti work and the libertine Soutine creations in the same day left the more famous artist in the dust. 

Giacometti at the Guggenheim

I have to 'fess right off the top that I have not traditionally been a Giacometti girl. The attenuated, anorexic figures so well known and well distributed to many museums and collections around the world have always disturbed me despite their elegance. (One of the best installations is at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.)  Here’s a case where “you can never be too rich (to own one,they are very price-y) or too thin (in form)” does not actually hold up.

Nevertheless, the Guggenheim has mounted an appropriately gracious show in conjunction with the Giacometti Foundation, Paris: spare, quiet and in some ways, revelatory.

The great thing about this show is a chance to see the early work with which we are less familiar. The white sculptures for example have a solidity that the black ones don’t.  Somehow Giacometti approached these with a different eye. 

The bronzes are the stars.  Though MoMA owns two of the best, I don’t recall communing with them there, they are haunted by Giacometti’s visits to the Trocadero ethnographic museum.  In particular the Femme Egorgee (Woman with her Throat Cut) from 1932, a Louise Bourgeois-ian surreal work he made for Peggy Guggenheim, is beautiful and leapt out at me as a perfect symbol for the #MeToo movement.

Born in Switzerland of a distinguished artist father, he soon moved to a studio in Montparnasse where he worked most of his life. He studied with Bourdelle (whose studio is now one of my favorite Paris museums if you haven’t been) but was soon influenced by Brancusi, Laurens, Picasso and Lipchitz.  He worked largely from live models, his brother and his wife. When he was not permitted to re enter France during the war, he began the “smalls” that are diminutive versions of his “talls” but have an outsize impact.  (I’m told his studio will be open to the public next year) He grew preoccupied with existentialism and death, and these motifs come across in most of the late work. 

A documentary film at the top of the ramp is worth seeing for the uncanny resemblance of Giacometti to his work: his sunken cheeks, long neck, pointed chin, protruding lips, his wiry, grey hair all speak to an auto-portraiture that made me fonder of the drawings. “When you look at a man, you look at his eyes,’ he said, “the expression of the eyes is the most important thing in the face.” Giacometti had very soulful eyes.

‘I think I know what I’m doing and then when I start working everything is lost,” he explained to an interviewer.  I know just how he felt. 

Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams at MoMA reminds of the power of art

When you walk into MoMA’s third floor galleries and come upon the Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams show you think Lego, perhaps, or Stotsass.  The colors are rich and varied, the fanciful structures charming. You might see the sparkle of gold and silver.

Then you get closer. You see urban purpose: the hospitals, the city streets, the libraries, the schools. You also see vision. You see that Kingelez calls his blue wraparound tiling, “butterflies”.

I’ve been in a lot of architectural model shops.  All of them have a certain degree of ingenuity.  Some are highly sophisticated, team efforts. 

But Kingelez was a solo act, a shaman of sculpture, design and art.  He cut and pasted his way to his version of an urban utopia. He wanted to help his country enter the free world armed with the tools it needed to survive.

Born in 1948 in an agricultural village in the then Belgian Congo, he came from a large family, received a missionary education, and moved to the capital Kinshasa in what became, after independence, Zaire. He studied to be a magistrate, a civil servant, became a school teacher, then a restorer.  After six years of work at the local museum, he took his outsider art inside and became the artist he was destined to be. 

In a fever of creativity, with razors, paper and glue, he began his lifelong quest to deliver an environment that defied violent regime change, illness, divisions among peoples.

In 1989 at Centre Pompidou, in an exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated to have 50 percent 'marginal' artists, he was finally introduced to the world.  He received commissions in many countries. Still he always returned to his homeland.  

Sarah Suzuki, the curator, says in spite of his vast artistic ambition, “the work is ordered, symmetrical, meticulously constructed.”

“He was forward facing and optimistic”, a creator of “extreme maquettes”.

Extreme how? In their civic-mindedness?  In their quest for progress in the public sphere?  Yes, today those realms may seem extreme as they slip through our President’s short, stubby fingers. “His work explores urgent questions around urban growth, economic inequity, how communities and societies function, and the rehabilitative power of architecture,” Suzuki writes, “with an incredible range of everyday materials and found objects—colored paper, commercial packaging, plastic, soda cans, and bottle caps.”

I have not had a chance to read the David Adjaye catalog essay, but I can see Adjaye being an excellent spokesperson for Kingelez. Any architect who sees this show will come away feeling somewhat chastened. It's so easy to be beaten down by the challenge of getting your vision built. 

There’s a VR short film to “help people to understand it”says Suzuki—but really I don’t think you need VR to be responsive to Kingelez. Are we to have nothing left to our own imaginations with the advent of VR?  It’s so literal-minded. 

Carsten Holler did the install and it’s audacious. Almost all the maquettes are not in vitrines, but on lazy Susans or entirely exposed on low platforms. Suzuki has been brave about leaving most of the pieces within easy reach and the lenders too have been brave about letting such complex fragile work out of their sight. It befits the artist’s welcoming vision.

Jean Pigozzi has been collecting Kingelez (and many other African artists) for many years and is a major lender to the show. He says, “ He was fun, very bright and talkative.  And a great dancer.” Pigozzi is proud that Kingelez is the first contemporary African artist to have a show at MoMA. 

Attention all artists: People have been asking what artists can do in our current political climate to make a difference.  Bodys Isek Kingelez, had the answer. He stayed true to his optimistic vision of a society where art commingled with education, religion and could make progress in spite of corruption. His glorious, colorful remix of paper, glue and a razor’s edge is a welcome, joyous reminder of the power of art.

Heavenly Bodies at the Met Fifth and Cloisters: a truly spiritual experience

I had read a lot about the Heavenly Bodies exhibition at the Met.  There were quibbles from the pious(how could the Pope have allowed the Vatican garments to commingle with the outré lay  fashion designers), the fashionistas (how could the strictly fashionable collections be held up alongside couture garments not made with an eye toward wearability) and the art press (the same old saw: what is fashion doing at the Met amidst so much real antique splendor). 

None of this is relevant.  The show is a blockbuster because it is fantastic.  The installation by Diller Scofidio is suitably dramatic, the clothes, both vintage and contemporary, divine (and I mean divine in the spiritual sense), the settings in the galleries, unparalleled.  Curator Andrew Bolton is a genius. As someone who grew up going to the foisty Cloisters (a hodgepodge of European remnants), the Cloisters is truly transformed into a star of the show and it is there that the exhibition makes the most sense. The chapels and arcades breathe with a perfect synchronicity that is rare with architecture and art. Right now, as a bonus, the gardens of Fort Tyron park and the interior courtyards awash in spring flowers.

Here’s the takeaway: the Catholic church once again, shows itself to be the receptacle of many lifetimes of labors of devotion.  Those Vatican robes have embroidery that in one case is identified as having fifteen women working for fifteen years. Mulitply that.  As with architecture and art, the church has in effect been the uber fashion patron for centuries. 

Valentino, Galliano, McQueen, all Catholics, are imbued with this tradition: their designs which often mimic the opulence of the church vestments, are certainly magnificent.

But it is the quiet, white cotton dress of Miucca Prada with crosses carefully cut out of the fabric itself, the charming construction of Elsa Schiaparelli’s short black cape with its faux necklace of embroidered religious charms, the dress Ava Gardner wore that resembles the Roman priest's coat or the severe Balenciaga wedding gown which echoes but does not precisely copy the eccleciastical robes that instead steal the show. (I think these designers are all Catholic too. This show could be a conversion vehicle!)

I can safely say that the Cloisters will never look better than they do with this installation, and the Met Fifth itself never more lively.  The sculpture show at the Met Breuer is also an excellent companion to this show, as is the Mexican painting show: the dresses in these portraits another example of the commingling of fashion with the Catholic church. 

The Met Fifth Avenue is jammed. Go early or go late.  But the Cloisters on a sunny weekday right now is perfection and it’s worth playing hooky to have the place less encumbered. The show is open until October 8th.

Tom Wolfe, a brilliant writer, and a gentleman

Tom Wolfe has died. There are many others who knew him longer and better than me.  But I was lucky enough to have a taste of this brilliant writer and gentleman, one for whom the words ‘politically correct’ were anathema.  Tom influenced generations of writers, there is not one among us who doesn’t wish she could imbue her words with the canny observation, sly wit and copious gift for narrative that Tom demonstrated over and over again.  Tom was conservative, but it was a learned conservativism, one that harked back both to his southern roots and his wish to uphold certain standards. The white suit wasn’t just sartorial, it was a candle amidst the gloom and the everyday. Tom's fans weren't just his own generation, but had a reach well into the millennials where he was revered for his writing about the sixties. A few times he and his wife Sheila accompanied me on my forays into the art world.  The vivid image of Tom at the Whitney, still confronting the contemporary artwork he found so challenging is one that will stay with me forever. Also pictured, Tom at the New York Public Library where his papers reside, with fellow writer Gay Talese at a Hunter College dinner in his honor, and with fellow Virginian, photographer Sally Mann at the Gagosian opening of her show and his wife Sheila. He will be very much missed. 

All images by PZ

Surrender to Wayne McGregor's AFTERITE premiering at ABT

I first saw British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s work at the New York City Ballet Architecture of Dance Festival in 2010. 

Even then, I found him a Gladwell-ian outlier, a renegade who did not allow traditional dance borders to constrain his work.  

Eight years later, I am even more under the spell of this gifted iconoclast. I was lucky enough to meet McGregor at this year’s Rolex Arts Weekend.  We ended up chatting outside one of the events, I, having no idea I was talking with him, was insufferably candid about some things we were seeing, or about to see, and he, modest to a fault, did not identify himself into well into the conversation.  

In a way, this is also his sublime gift to dance: he absorbs, reflects, reprocesses and gives back in a hugely collaborative way, always crediting the music and the dancers well before allowing any recognition of his own substantial gifts.

Next week, American Ballet Theater will present McGregor’s AFTERITE ,so called, says the choreographer, because Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a piece that has already had, according to Wikipedia, 150 productions,  “sits on your shoulders”.  The dance is an “afterimage”, a “palimpset’ with many layers, a prism through which he is filtering fragments of the past, but mostly just striking out on his own.

McGregor presented a ‘rehearsal’ of some duets at Works and Process at the Guggenheim in anticipation of the world premiere. It’s always a wonderful place to see things in formation, but I have never felt as stimulated by an evening there and it’s due to the generosity of McGregor and three of his dancers Alessandra Ferri, Herman Cornejo and Jeffrey Cirio. 

There is a lot to go up against in The Rite of Spring, all the way from Diaghilev and Nijinsky through MacMillan, Tetley, Graham and Bausch.  The ballet which depicted a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death premiered in 1913 in Paris and caused a sensation but will have been created anew by McGregor who originally began thinking about this piece for the Bolshoi. He arrived in Moscow two days after the acid attacks which understandably destabilized the company, and after a respite, Alexei Ratmansky encouraged him to take it up again at ABT.

Each company “sits in its own cultural and political context’ says McGregor, so he started from scratch, four years ago.  McGregor points out the “hunger” of American dancers, their speed and alertness, their ‘can-do’  but at Works and Process, the Italian and the Argentinian were equally deft at inhabiting McGregors taffy-pulling, undulating, wraparound aesthetic with athleticism and grace. His own company, now in its 25th year, is permanently imbued with this muscle memory. 

But about the other dancers he works with, McGregor says in the end its really about the individual. “You find them or they gravitate toward you….and they surrender to the process.” At Works and Process, these dancers, erstwhile Swan Queens and Princes, had clearly surrendered. McGregor circled them like a cameraman or photographer, matching their attenuated, undulating bodies with his own gliding steps and patter of “wrap, mwas, great, easys, yeahs, chays, choomps, whooshes, aways” and, always, always, “more”.  In his black sneakers, black workout pants and black leather shirt he was something of the John Travolta fanboy he once was in his early days in Manchester when Grease and Saturday Night Fever made him want to move.  He begged his parents for lessons in ballroom, disco and Latin but he thinks it doesn’t matter how you start, though his degree in choreography at Leeds helps him organize time, space and bodies, and gave him some technical skills of composition he prizes.  

His ’burning need’ to choreograph is still present.  You can see how his curiosity, enthusiasm, and openness infects his dancers who become at once sinewy and torqued: on cue they are willing to give him that last bit of elasticity and fearlessness his choreography demands. He calls them “co-authors” and they honor this responsibility. “We’re doing it together,” he insists. They reminded me of vines, growing, seeking, a bit wild, but always finding the crack or space in which they could safely pause for the next growth spurt.   McGregor wants to be inclusive in other ways: his dancers span an age range (in this piece there are 13) all the way up to Ferri who is 55 though she looks like the ethereal sprite she always has.  

He is slightly coy about what we are to expect: a mother and two children, perhaps a maiden, but more than that he won’t reveal.  He says his images for the production—he has always liked spec fiction-- which contains film as well, came from the Atacama desert in Chile, where Pinochet buried his prisoners. He wants the viewer to react to ,” a series of tensions, of the cosmos and the forces of love” in real time without preconception, to follow “the golden thread”, the “mosaic” with openness and to come fresh to a work which has a great deal of baggage.  He thinks big, he has not only the dance vocabulary but a literary and architectural base of knowledge that defines him as the polymath he most surely is.

In an onstage Q and A after the rehearsal, Ferri says, “he feeds us with this quality, this fun thing of going into a new world, a world where you are out of control”. Cornejo says, “he lets us go where our bodies go”, and Cirio summarizes, “ he keeps the personality of all dancers”.“We can go [back] to the classics later with a wider view, ” adds Cornejo.  

I think we too, as the audience, will feel equally enriched. 

All images courtesy of American Ballet Theater and Works and Process

Double Vision: a joint biography of the de Menils

The art world and its patrons, dealers, museums, auction houses and hangers on have become front page news.  Art fairs, biennials, art storage, hidden transactions, repatriation of stolen masterpieces, all these are the subjects of our continuing fascination. 

But the essential work, the ability of the artist to make things, is in constant precarious flux. Artists are in and out, auction prices up and down.  Collectors are busy scrambling for the right thing to put on the wall, looking over their shoulders most of the time at what the market is doing instead of buying things they love.

“The gifted artists are the great benefactors of the world,” said Dominique de Menil, a patron who is the subject of Double Vision a new joint biography with her husband John by William Middleton. de Menil and Middleton remind us that the ability to wisely commission things, to spot things before they are a la mode, to exhibit them in a cohesive, personal fashion is equally as rare.

She, an heiress to the French Schlumberger oil fortune, he, a baron who became the head of the enterprise, had a long and productive marriage.  Together they discovered their love for certain artists, their passion for introducing them to a wider world, their understanding of the capricious nature of creativity, their recognition that they need be in it for the long haul to make a profound difference..  

After stints in Paris and Venezuela they moved their growing family to Houston to be at the center of the oil world. They made a conscious decision to focus on Texas and were both ardent researchers and citizens in their quest to build a world class collection, one that grew organically out of admiration and was not stage managed by dealers.  Aristocrats who plunked themselves down in a town where rodeos were what passed for sophistication, who did not disdain their Texas neighbors but instead included them in their journey to make a collection and a museum were, and are, rarer still. A photograph of Magritte in a cowboy hat at the rodeo instead of his signature bowler is proof that they were also able to remix the two worlds in a wholly original way

Certain artists were more favored than others.  Besides Magritte, Ernst, Rothko, Twombly, Flavin, Warhol, and certain architects, Pierre Barbe, Johnson, Piano. These became friends and cohorts in the drive to push Texas, New York, Paris and by extension the rest of the world up the art hill. But they also bought indigenous objects and sculptures. (At any one time the Menil is only showing a portion of  the collection. A new wing for drawings by LA architects Johnston and Marklee is opening in the fall).

By all accounts a devoted but occasionally irascible man, John built out the oil business and then stayed to watch over it. Dominique variously a shop owner, a gallerist, a decorator, a patron, reserved and no nonsense, became the sole engine after his death and actually got the Renzo Piano building built, no small feat in the conservative town.  Both inspired acolytes as well as a certain measure of fear. John is rumored to have had a long affair but author Middleton does not confirm it.  (A new book by Simone Swan, his alleged mistress, is supposedly on its way.) Middleton instead quotes at length from love letters they sent each other through the years. “On collecting they were absolutely a partnership,” he affirms.  “They always shared this together no matter what else was going on in their life”.  . Other things were surprising to learn, for example, Dominique’s lifelong quest for religious enlightenment. 

As parents to their children they were largely absent but not indifferent.  They loved their children, but had no guilt and were far from American style helicopter parents. Middleton gives them a pass on this because of the times, their French-ness, etc. What they were doing was evidently more important than burping, jiggling, homework.   Coziness and stability came instead from beloved nannies. Nor were the children always able to leap over the high bar that was set for them. (full disclosure: I knew Francois in the seventies.)

But as identifiers of curatorial and managerial expertise (Walter Hopps was their first museum director) the parents were second to none. Bringing up curators is easier than bringing up babies for sure.

The de Menils have largely abandoned Houston.  But their museum stands, in my opinion, still Renzo Piano’s best work.  Just recently I was at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, the much smaller but equally poignant home of patrons who had deep and abiding relationships with those they collected. Big is not always better, but in the case of the Menil collection, the work is of a very high, very original caliber (just take a look at the Rockefeller or other Texas collections that have been and are going up for auction: much tamer, much less ambitious, more blue chip-y) The de Menils followed their own instincts, well ahead of the herd.

Middleton reportedly spent ten years on this book, and its scholarship and reach is commendable. The photographs are wonderful, both the black and white ‘family’ snaps, and the color plates of the incredible art.  It does what all good biographies should: urge you to discover their life’s work first hand.   

All images courtesy Random House

Like Life: a remix of ancient and contemporary sculpture at the Met Breuer

Like Life, the century bending, gender bending, mind bending show at the Met Breuer which mixes ancient sarcophogai and a Sleeping Beauty with aplomb is a sculpture show that in juxtaposition of unlike delivers new ways of seeing. As with the Monet show at the Orangerie, another venerable institution wanting to spice things up and draw new crowds, the curators have thought big, very big, so big as to sometimes confound our definitions of sculpture per se.   The spare presentation is elegant and thoughtful, and without its more classic settings at the Met momma, the ancient or medieval works look surprisingly contemporary.  Some polychrome efforts of these earlier periods are so specific and lifelike, with eyes that truly see, that there is an uncanny spiritual effect, almost like a séance has summoned them back. A Pavlova head and a head of Christ take on a similar importance but that is to the good after all dancers can be like goddesses.  The decorative mingles with hardscape: Dorothea Tanning deconstructs poor Madame Bovary’s dresses she made out of curtains to impress Rodolfo, Kusama affixes colorful penile protuberances to the outside of a dress, Lucio Fontana makes gorgeous enameled crucifixes that look like necklaces.  This show has something for everyone, and dare I say, worthy of the $$$ the Met is now charging out of towners. While I was at the entry,  a local gave a nickel to get in.  And there you have their dilemma.

Danh Vo at the Guggenheim did take my breath away

Danh Vo, the Vietnamese-Danish conceptual artist who is part archivist, collector, finder, fabricator, disrupter, juxtaposer-of-things the way the surrealists were meant to be, is leaving the Guggenheim by May 8  (for Bordeaux) but he will leave with me a few gems.  

Vo has bought up entire collections of ephemera with an eye towards socio political commentary. Most striking:  letters of Leonard Lyons, erstwhile NY Post critic to Henry Kissinger, hilarious with a macabre twist.   Lyons who apparently was nothing if not a suck up, routinely wrote to Henry the K to offer house seats to various NY productions, Hello Dolly, the Royal Ballet. From time to time Kissinger did get the ducats.  I’m not sure what the pay off for Lyons was, except maybe these letters. Kissinger is mostly begging off for White House dinners, Eisenhower’s funeral, trips to Cambodia and other fun stuff in the 70’s as the war rages.  Robert MacNamara’s pen nibs for signing treaties intermingles with giant molds of a re cast Statue of Liberty and small snaps of napalm victims. Here’s a show where I went straight for the wall labels first but it felt ok. I was remarkably moved.

Julian Barnes and Lorrie Moore: the new Nichols and May?

Julian Barnes and Lorrie Moore appeared together last night at the 92ndSt Y. Theoretically they were there to read from and promote their new books, The Only Story, a novel (Barnes) , and See What Can be Done  (Moore),  a collection of mostly-published essays.  As seen in the attached photo, they are close: as correspondents of over 20 years, as reviewers of each others work (Barnes to Moore) and as friends. Barnes, with his sly wit, read from his very moving, very sad story of the affair of a much younger man with an older woman.  Moore with her impeccable comic timing and deadpan asides read from a story about her wedding and honeymoon. Though love gone wrong was their joint theme, together their timing was spot on.

The new Nichols and May!

National Geographic Genius tries its hand at Picasso

National Geographic’s Series on Geniuses continues tonight with Picasso.

Javier Bardem who plays the older Picasso is perfect casting as is Alex Rich for the younger Picasso—if looks are what is important.

And if you don’t know anything about Picasso, this lavish production which intermingles periods with an anarchist's aplomb is as good a way to start to get familiar with the Picasso and the by now legendary muses that populated his long, productive life.

Like many people trying to make sense of Picasso’s life and work which were entirely connected, they have made the women the focal point of the series ( I’ve seen only the first four parts)

But it’s so confusing! We jump back and forth from Dora Maar, Marie Therese, Fernande and Francoise, with a soupcon of Germaine. I’m not sure why they missed Eva (maybe she’s on deck) or most importantly Olga, who was the only wife until Jacqueline (also in the next parts?). 

The male friends assume an importance that is occasionally overbearing though it's nice that they are there more than usual: Casagemas, who died tragically young, Apollinaire and Max Jacob the merry pranksters(did Jacob hit on Picasso quite so much?!), the dealers who at first gave him a hard time and then begged for crumbs, and Matisse who appears, so far,only in his work but was Picasso’s supposed great rival.

There are catfights (real fights), chaste love scenes, lots of melodrama.

The accents are a disaster. I have never heard so many bad French ones, actors slipping in and out of them with impunity.(I normally adore Clemence Poesy who plays Francoise. I've met the real Francoise. She is much more dynamic. Read her Life With Picasso which he tried and failed to suppress. That will give you a jolt)

The acting, not the fault of the actors I don’t think, is stilted and formulaic.

In short there is not an ounce of subtlety. Exec Produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, I don't know, maybe this is what has to pass for artists bios in Hollywood.  Twas ever thus.  Take a look at the old Van Gogh film with Kirk Douglas and the Goya with Ava Gardner. I long to see what Julian Schnabel is doing with Van Gogh, however, coming soon. 

So many historians, filmmakers, writers, critics and ordinary folk too have had their try at parsing Picasso.  I am enclosing here some other, in my opinion more successful hands. (We are all breathlessly awaiting John Richardson’s final installment of the biography)  Still: if you want an introduction to the artist who along with Monet apparently is still the biggest draw in museums worldwide, tune in. It premieres tonight, Tuesday, on the National Geographic Channel. 

*Follow the links to some of my previous extensive posting on Picasso and scroll down to my recent London blog where I discuss the current wonderful exhibition at the Tate Modern on 1932, one of his most productive years.  I worked on a docu that was done in conjunction with WNET and the big MoMA retrospective after his death.  I'm just another one of the many women who has devoted a chunk of her life to Picasso. 

David Ives's brilliant wordplay in The Metromaniacs

I have been an admirer of David Ives for a long time, once even approached him to work together after I saw All in the Timing,his first ‘hit’, a collection of shorts which displayed his gift for gab and pacing.  If Balanchine was the master of the quick- stepped ballet, Ives is the king of quick-witted theater.  Ives does not believe in letting you get bored or think about how long the line will be at the bathroom during the interval. Ives worked with Roman Polanski on an adaptation of his also spectacular Venus in Fur which was much,much better as a play(though I understood the temptation.)

Now Ives has rediscovered a Moliere-ish/Feydau-ish French farce by the largely forgotten Alexis Piron from 1738 which depends on mistaken identity, painted wooden glades, convoluted verse, pushed-up poitrines, and impeccable comic timing. The Metromaniacs has all this and more.  Ives has made a silk purse out of an obscure play by an author who could not get into the Comedie Francaise, wholly reinventing, in English, a story of love, betrayal, jurisprudence, class, and alls-fair-in-love-and-war filled with nonsensical rhymes-- which make perfect sense. Double entendres, loopy-ended couplets, he is calling it a ‘transladaptation”.  Whatever you call it, it is very engaging, fleet of foot and mouth, and altogether worth seeing unless farce is not at all your thing.  Describing the plot would take too long, and spoil the fun.

The cast is uniformly brilliant.  A ditzy maid, Dina Thomas who reminded me of Bette Midler, a ditzy heiress, Amelia Pedlow who reminded me of Marilyn Monroe, and Christian Conn, Noah Averbach-Katz, Adam Green and Adam Lefervre as the misguided gentlemen.  But the star of the show is Ives’s wordplay. It’s at the Red Bull Theater at the Duke on 42ndStreet until May 26.

8 Reasons to Visit Paris right now

First things first. As usual, the French are on strike.  Through June. I cannot recall how many times I have arrived to an embouteillage on the Route Nationale or a train or plane strike.  Macron is trying again where others have failed to disable the crippling pensions and work rules of the syndicats (we have the same problem in the US) where minimal number of hours per week and early retirement are the norm. The SNCF have even published a calendar of advance dates when the strike is on and off, and weekly and daily updates. However it’s not totally working. The Eurostar made an unscheduled stop in Lille for precisely 24 minutes announced in advance for a technical problem (how did they know it would take 24 minutes?!) and which we presumed to be a union effort to go into overtime. 

Nevertheless, as usual, though still a bit chilly and rainy, Paris is the best, the Luxembourg gardens already planted and blooming (hey ouvriers, this planting is where the state money is going), everything green and gorgeous.

There is lots to see and do, and here again, in no particular order, a list of suggestions.

1.    The Musee d’Orsay (which has my least favorite museum architecture in the world) has a lovely show of Baltic Symbolist art.  I had never seen any of these paintings, and they are pretty, mysterious, fanciful.  Some look quite contemporary.  

2.    The Orangerie has a revelatory exhibit of selected Monets alongside the New York school of Abstract Expressionists.   At first hearing about this I was skeptical as there seems to be a virus of Monet exhibits worldwide. I instead came away feeling these paintings had been  ‘separated at birth’. Monet became very abstract and Alfred Barr at MoMA organized a show in 1955, here partially revisited. Clement Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler, then an item, came to see the Monets together in Paris.  Greenberg made an impression himself with his endorsement of Monet’s canvases in a famous essay extolling his late work which produced an ''all-over' sensation'. Joan Mitchell, de Kooning, Kelly, Pollock and more--the parallels are unmistakeable.   

3.    Ah Delacroix. This historic exhibition at the Louvre, a complete career survey, will travel to the Metropolitan in the fall. Still: I’m not sure some of the most important canvases will make the trip.  The Louvre has done yeoman work in pulling all this together, it’s very moving.  Delacroix who began at a very young age to understand his own gifts and importance was very careful both about his subject matter and his politics. The portraits are intense and specific, the historical scenes grand and documentary, the paintings like Femmes D’Algers clearly outliers in their genre. In the later work, he too is so abstract. And what of the bed sheets he paints, erhaps my favorite image in the whole show.  Many do not know you can visit the home of Delacroix in the 6th arrondissment.   Go see both. 

4.    After seeing the many Picassos at the Tate, you would think that would be enough for one week. However, the Guernica exhibit at the Musee Picasso is also worthwhile.  The museum highlights the precursors in Picasso’s work, and the effect the painting had on others. It tells of the actual journey the painting took around the world as a symbol of resistance and hope for peace. It has a slide show of Dora Maar’s photographs which she took as the painting took shape at the rue des Grands Augustins.   

For an entire year I chased Dora, the eternal Weeping Woman, to get a copy of these images (and of course to interview her) for our PBS film.  She played cat and mouse with me, first agreeing to see me, then changing her mind at the last minute.Dora had been dumped by Picasso and knew her archive was ever more precious and highly desirable. I think she no longer wanted to contribute to the deification of Picasso.  Plus she needed money. The Guernica was Picasso at his best, drawing from multiple sources, but spitting out something entirely revolutionary.  When I worked at MoMA and the painting still lived there (now at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the co organizer of this exhibition), I would often stand in front of it and mourn with the mother holding her child, the horse in agony, the fallen soldier.  In a lifetime of Picasso's important works, this painting often holds pride of place.

5.The Fondation Cartier, the erstwhile site of my beloved American Center on the Boul Raspail, home to my modern dance class, Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman yippeeing their way across the stage, is now the very elegant see-thru Fondation, at this moment home to an architectural exhibition by Junya Ishigami, Freeing Architecture. A poet/architect who thinks perhaps first in cadence and then in building specifics, has designed excised grottos as restaurant/houses, botanical farms, villas, chapels, cloud gardens, forest kindegartens, home for the elderly, restaurants, museums, universities, and a house of peace. 

Not all the projects are built. You see he is ‘son of Sanaa’, the echoes of their River project in Connecticut, their museum in Kanazawa, the way they use glass, their long snakelike open air pavillions.  Some had me wondering how he was going to heat and cool his constructions and whether in situ they might not appear folly-like instead of practical. If only all clients had unlimited budgets and vision.  

The Fondation Gardens are looking particularly green and inviting, the pairing of the Jean Nouvel building (one of his less overweaning) and Ishigami a good one.  Maguy Marin is doing a project in the building on April 23. If you are in Paris, I would do!

5.    The Maison Rouge, a small museum near the Bastille is hosting the first exhibition outside the US of the collection of Deborah Neff’s Black Dolls. Neff has assembled a world class collection of a century’s worth of what we used to call rag dolls made of buttons and thread, stuffed with whatever was handy, dressed meticulously in the outfits of the day. The salient fact that Neff wishes to convey: when asked about which doll they preferred, black children most often went for the white dolls. Black dolls were “bad”. This self loathing however is not present in the dolls themselves who are engaging and modest and who, in artfully arranged groups on simple wooden plinths, stare out at us.  Sometimes they feel accusatory and I don't blame them. At least one is crying. 

6.    The saga of getting a ticket to the sold out Romeo and Juliet by the combined Paris Opera ballet and chorus shall not be repeated here. Suffice to say it was worth it.  The very contemporary, ambitious production by German choreographer Sasha Waltz, the rare one when ballet takes precedence over singing---has music by Berlioz.  In somber black and white on a severely raked platform, the tragedy unfolds, most effectively in the extended pas de deux.  I did not know Waltz’s work which was very repetitive if challenging, but I found the ensemble with chorus dramatic and powerful.  

8. There’s always something to see at the Museum of Arts Decoratifs.  This time I stopped in for the Margiela/Hermes but was instead captivated by the jewelry by artists show.  So many lovely things, my acquisitive nature was in high gear at every vitrine.   Here’s the case of another visionary collector, Diane Venet, making me feel small. Still, just to imagine wearing the Ernst Fish or the Tanning Octopus is a treat. 

8 Reasons to Visit London right now

A long break from London delivered a fresh eye on the city which under Brexit and the disbursement of the oligarchs is having its own moments of Trump-ian anguish. London's shards and pickles, the tall, oddly-shaped contemporary buildings that are now dotting the skyline in all quarters and which seem to be in competition with each other for masculine folly of the year, appear  instead to look like so many weeds sticking up.There are however other wonderful things to see this spring, and in no particular order, here they are:

1. 

The newly-extended Kettles Yard Museum in Cambridge falls well within the parameters of my favorite things as it answers the question: How do creative people live? The museum grew out of the very personal home and collection of Jim Ede, a polymath Tate curator and his wife Helen, who seemed to have an egalitarian and communal impulse from the very outset of life and career. The home is eccentric in the best sense.  A personal collection that has drawings, painting and sculpture from artists like Ben Nicolson and Brancusi and also delicate golden filegreed glass, stones in concentric circles that remind of the Spiral Jetty, porcelain, books and objets is a testament to unpretentious passion.

 In its charter, it is forbidden to alter anything. That’s ok. The paintings are often hung at eye level if you are sitting in a slipper chair, or cached behind a jug, or hung akimbo over a sofa.  

The new wing of the museum gives them the space they need to stay current. But what stays with you are the well chosen drawings in the attic, the light coming in through the bay windows, the sense of contemplative but lively space.  The man and his wife were loyal patrons, and friends and collaborators. Listen to the oral histories on the website for first hand glimpses into their thinking.

Like Charleston, the home of the Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in Sussex,  it’s a glimpse into the life of those who cared deeply about art and artists and wished to show by example how one can live fairly simply, buy what one likes, share the wealth of that.  It’s collecting and philanthropy by another name and puts many of todays trophy collectors in their place.

2.

The Picasso show at the Tate Modern is expansive in two senses: first, we think after the plethora of Picasso shows for the last thirty years since his death we know everything there is to know about Picasso. We don’t.

Second: in one year, 1932, Picasso produced more work than is humanly thought possible. Good and mostly great work.  

And it was all due to the high, the joy, the delight he had in his largely sexual relationship with the young Marie Therese Walter.

He was 45. She was 17.

It certainly wasn’t intellectual.  She was a shop girl, one who looks almost butch to me in her short blonde hair and criss crossed bathing suits.  Athletic and capable.

But in paint and on paper and in the many sculptures he did of her, he transformed her into this coiled, dreamy creature who was  just waiting for him to show up.

Being the object of this kind of attention, the attention of a genius who wanted you 24/7,  must have been heady stuff for this young woman. One passes from tableau to tableau marking the swirls, the colors, her blonde hair, her feline energy waiting to spring into his arms/bed.

It drove poor Olga, already unhappy from a ballet injury, already the mother of his child Paolo, already the matron of Boisgeloup and a life of respectability, bonkers.

Once Marie Therese had their daughter Maya, Picasso split definitvely from Olga.  

Its always a treat to see Picassos that have been more or less hiding in private collections, and that is usually a euphemism for the various branches of family.  It reminds me of the stress I had procuring images for our PBS documentary done in conjunction with the MoMA retrospective, a time when Picasso heirs were not nearly as out of the closet.

3.

I wish I could feel more kindly towards the ambitious show of Abstract women artists of many generations at the Victoria Miro gallery. It is alas the result of too much #metoo: these artists deserve better.  While the Helen Frankenthaler and Popova paintings are standout, some examples are are second rate and they suffer from being juxtaposed with these earlier gems.   However: if you have not been to the Miro space on the Regents Canal with its very own lake and rotating installations, I highly recommend a visit. 

4.

The Tate Britain All Too Human show also gets the short end in comparison with the London Calling show from a few years back at the Getty, a more tightly focused show that shone a light on these artists with more focus.  Still for those who haven't seen the Tate's rich collection of Freuds and Bacons and the London school of figurative artists it is worth catching up.   Above a Freud I had not seen before which shows his consummate facility with things other than human. 

5.

From the Royal Box at the Royal Opera House, replete with two royal chairs purportedly given to Victoria and a his and hers bathroom not far away (a royal fanny on the loo!) we were warned we would not have perfect sightlines. Instead we felt supremely cosseted and royal by extension.  Covent Garden is still one of the most elegant halls, and it’s a delight to see dance there.

The program of three Bernstein commissions felt flat by comparison. And alas, I do not love Bernstein's music (with the exception of West Side Story).  But the absolutely fantastic sinewed bodies on display on this, the last night of the series, made me sorry not to see more of them. 

Of the three pieces, Wayne McGregor's Yugen is the simplest and most effective.  The red costumes,  the haunting historic Hebrew text choruses of the Chichester Psalms (which I knew only from synagogue) are a very moving counterpoint to the stripped down choreography and sets from Edmund de Waal. 

The Liam Scarlett The Age of Anxiety was a bit of  shock. I mean, hasn’t he seen Fancy Free?  The first movement was a direct steal from the earlier,much better Robbins ballet down to the bar and stools and soldiers etc.Story ballets and me, except if they are Swan Lake, do not go down easy. I find them dated, amusing like a vintage dress which you wear once or twice and then realize its got holes under the arms and a tear in the hem.

And the Chris Wheeldon? Well, the faux Greek dancers, girls in old fashioned bras and girdles with black criss crossed tails hanging from various body parts in Corybantic Games felt like the Olympics with an S and M overlay.  Huh? The marcelled hair like something out of Nijinsky and Afternoon of a Faun, early Russian but unlike Ratmansky’s Namouna, utterly at odds with its music.

Bernstein, like Robbins, wanted to have lasting impact with more “serious” works beyond West Side Story. Robbins went on to have a much more successful career hors Broadway. This music has elements of WSS, riffs and trills that make you wish they would just dispense with the other and give us WSS. There is always a risk with these large scale 'festival' commissions and I remember feeling similarly with the Balanchine Stravinsky fest etc. I hope that at least the McGregor will survive beyond. (This program can now be seen in the US at selected theaters)

6.

The Ocean Liner show at the V and A was a surprise.  Probably one of the most expensively produced I have ever seen, replete with a fake swimming pool and bathers and divers, a grand golden mural from first class,  a descending staircase and a skydeck of twinkling stars, films, beautiful Gio Ponti chairs, etc it made the impoverished but enormous Airbus double decked and filled with 500 people I flew over in, but a pathetic example of mass travel. I am not a cruise person and once even turned down a free crossing with my family on the QE 2 (5 days in the middle of the Atlantic with my extended family?!!!). But this show made me pine for a time of grace and elegance even if Hitler is seen communing with German soldiers out the window in a film extract.

7.

The Charles 1 show at the Royal Academy in its last days was packed full of Brits enraptured by the hefty collection of the most acquisitive of kings, re- gathered together here in a most regal fashion. Charles with his pointed red nose (too much Bordeaux?), his dandified outfits, his many horses, his hunting equipes, his many royal babies, made me happy to have Thomas Jefferson (if not DJT) as an political ancestor. So many portraits! I can understand while though an excellent patron of Van Dyke, Rembrandt and other northern artists, of Titian and Tintoretto and other Italians, he was clearly someone for whom noble birth had brought an onslaught of envy and anger in the populace: he was the only English monarch to be executed.

8.

The Brutalist architecture at the Southbank complex, particularly the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room  have been reopened after theree years of renovaton. Some might quibble with the costs, after all they’ve just torn down the Robin Hood Gardens complex also a Brutalist landmark, but the hall looks just ravishing, the lobby especially with its mushroom columns, the skylights, the brass bars as welcoming as any could be. People have hated these heavy structures, but luckily one has a chance to revisit previous procilivities .  A tour which takes you backstage including a live girl gyrating over the seats, a sixties music mashup (the hall is primariy a home to classical music), an overly long stop at an archive, a stage elevator ride, and a 60s son et lumiere that is silly and overblown surely was produced to help justify the costs of public financing of the project. It’s not necessary. What they need to add is a viewing of the QE hall, the main event. I wish I could return for a concert, and I will. But in the meantime, a tea in the lobby and a look at the Purcell with its sixties wooden walls (gorgeous) is a new must on any tour of London. (The Hayward Gallery next door, part of the complex has a Gursky show on). 

LA Dance Project in Beverly Hills

The LA Dance Project returned to the Wallis Theater in Bev Hills. Now that Benjamin has installed them in their own space in the Arts District, these forays to the west side might become less frequent. He did not pander however to any ‘westside mentality’ in programming this stand which includes two Martha Graham duets, Helix, an LADP commission by Justin Peck, Millepied’s own Sarabande and Ohad Naharin’s Yag, an early Gaga piece.

The Grahams are Graham, her signature ‘crunches’ on full display and as I am not so much a Graham girl, these not my favorite, but they are as contemporary as ever and shocking to believe they were created in 1948 and 1952.

The Peck is a slender work, after seeing his Rodeo at NYCB recently, you can see that Peck has really matured as a choreographer. He knew he was working on a small company, perhaps that is the reason for it feeling less than.

But Benjamin’s own Sarabande looks better all the time.  It smells and tastes of Jerome Robbins so clearly, yet has the twirls and hand movements of Millepied. It has Bach, and that makes its connective to a piece like Goldberg Variations even stronger. 

Yag was a revelation. I had heard Naharin speak at Rolex Berlin and have his protégé demonstrate some of his Gaga theories. It was just after his father died and he appeared subdued and exhausted. But this piece about a family—who “loved loved loved to dance”—and the fractures and togetherness that tear them apart and bring them close summoned all kinds of narratives—in our group alone words like abuse and holocaust were tested. It’s very compelling, very original and made me understand in a deeper way what Naharin and his no-mirror philosophy of dance training is all about. He is a brave choreographer.

Benjamin did a Q and A after with some of his dancers (there are some new dancers, some older ones were missing, the company remains strong). He is clearer than ever about being “done” with ballet, ballet companies (I guess he is not going to take over for Peter Martins) and that what for him seems to be a hermetic, airless tradition. Yet Sarabande is so full of Robbins that it’s hard to recommend him dumping the baby out with the bathwater. (He says his new piece going up in Paris in a few weeks has toe shoes so...)  Whether he can pull off the hat trick of remaining an LA company with the modest philanthropic base for dance in LA remains to be seen.  I can only commend him for trying.