New York Bound

New York midtown skyline

Every few months I need to make a trip to New York to do some heavy looking. Luckily, my dear friend Binnie invites me to stay at her beautiful home in Connecticut when the need for an arting trip makes itself felt, and the city is just an hour away from there by commuter rail. This time, joining Binnie and me, is our good friend Greg Wright. This threesome is a sure bet for many laughs, a lot of discussion of art and innumerable other topics.

Since the Chelsea galleries are closed on Saturdays during the summer, we will be heading there on Friday instead and have quite a list of special interests, recommendations and favorites. If we managed to hit them all, we'd take more than one day, I'm sure.

Brian Dickerson, Autumn's End II, 2011
Oil, wax and mixed media on wood, 42 x 21 x 9 inches

One gallery not located in Chelsea but on East 73rd Street is Kouros Gallery. A show of Constructed Paintings by Brian Dickerson has just opened there this week and that is a special destination for me. I have only seen Brian's work online, but he sent me a wonderful catalog that the gallery printed with many images of his work and an interview by Eve Bowen of The New York Review of Books. The interview relates how Brian developed this work and continues to make it, his motivation, his inspiration and the context in which he places his work. This well-written piece was very insightful and illuminating. I hope to include a post about Brian's show when I return from my visit.

The Cone sisters on either side of Gertrude Stein.  Claribel (left) was a doctor and Etta (right) was rumored to have had an affair with Gertrude before Alice B. Toklas came on the scene. Stein wrote of them in Two Women: "There were two of them, they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich, they were very different one from the other."

On Saturday, we are headed to the Jewish Museum to see a wonderful show of work on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art that was collected by the Cone sisters of Baltimore directly from the artists beginning in 1905. This is the most intact collection of early work by Matisse, Picasso, van Gogh, Gaugin, Cezanne and other modern masters. To see about 50 works from their collection, which at one time numbered about 3000 pieces, is a remarkable opportunity.

Also on view at the Jewish Museum is an exhibition by Maira Kalman, whose paintings and observations I have often enjoyed in The New Yorker and the New York Times.

Alexander McQueen dress made of razor clam shells, 2001

Then, of course, there is always the Metropolitan Museum, which has so much to offer. We would love to see the Alexander McQueen show but don't want to stand in line forever, so we may see instead the Richard Serra drawings. There is also a piece by Liza Lou that I would like to see of a mile-long coil of white beadwork.

For dinner Saturday, we have a reservation at Robert at the Museum of Art and Design. Binnie raved about this when she went there before, so this time we're all going.

Wow, it sounds action packed and I left out a lot on purpose.