We are off for a three day trip to The Breakers Hotel, Spring Lake, New Jersey, on the Jersey Atlantic Shore. We will walk one block to Penn Station, catch a New Jersey Transit North Jersey Coast Train. and ride down the Atlantic coast for 1.5 hours.
Neue Galerie: Museum for German and Austrian Art
The Frick Collection
Neue Galerie Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937
On March 13, 2014 Neue Galerie New York will open the exhibition "Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937." This will be the first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the infamous display of modern art by the Nazis since the 1991 presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The term "degenerate" was adopted by the National Socialist regime as part of its campaign against modern art. Many works branded as such by the Nazis were seized from museums and private collections. Following the showing on these works in a three-year traveling exhibition that criss-crossed Germany and Austria, most were sold, lost, or presumed destroyed. In this light, the recent discovery in Munich of the Gurlitt trove of such artwork has attracted considerable attention. The film "The Monuments Men,"directed by George Clooney and due to open in February 2014, suggests the level of popular interest in the subject.
Highlights of the show include a number of works shown in Munich in the summer of 1937, such as Max Beckmann's Cattle in a Barn (1933); George Grosz's Portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse (1925); Erich Heckel'sBarbershop (1913); Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Winter Landscape in Moonlight (1919), The Brücke-Artists (1926/27); Paul Klee's The Angler(1921), The Twittering Machine (1922), and Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (1925); Oskar Kokoschka's The Duchess of Montesquiou-Fezensac (1910); Ewald Mataré's Lurking Cat (1928); Karel Niestrath'sHungry Girl (1925); Emil Nolde's Still-Life with Wooden Figure (1911),Red-Haired Girl (1919), and Milk Cows (1913); Christian Rohlf's The Towers of Soest (ca. 1916) and Acrobats (ca. 1916); Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's Pharisees (1912); and Lasar Segall's The Eternal Wanderers(1919), among others.
The Neue Galerie exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by Prestel Verlag. The publication provides a complete historical overview of the period and examines not only the genesis of the "Degenerate Art" show but also the rise of the topic "degenerate." Additional essays examine the National Socialist policy on art, the treatment of "Degenerate Art" in film, and the impact of this campaign in post-war Germany, and the world at large, as the claims of restitution arose. Dr. Olaf Peters serves as the catalogue editor, which features contributions from scholars Bernhard Fulda, Ruth Heftrig, Mario-Andreas von Luttichau, Karsten Müller, Olaf Peters, Jonathan Petropoulos, Ernst Ploil, Ines Schlenker, Aya Soika, and Karl Stamm.
The Frick Collection
Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face
From 1570 to 1576, El Greco (1541–1614) worked in Rome, where he endeavored to establish himself as a portrait painter. The artist’s magnificent Vincenzo Anastagi ― a full-length standing portrait representing the largest of only three examples of his work in this genre to survive from the period ― offers a vital expression of his ambition and invention. To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick pairs Vincenzo Anastagi, purchased by Henry Clay Frick in 1913, with the rarely seen Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone (ca. 1540/42–1598), on loan from a private collection. Both subjects are depicted wearing armor, which communicated a complex range of associations with masculinity, military valor, wealth, and social status. Pulzone’s refined portrait of Boncompagni, commander of the papal army during the reign of his father, Pope Gregory XIII, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in late sixteenth-century Rome. El Greco’s expressive portrayal of Anastagi, appointed by Boncompagni as sergeant major of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo in 1575, stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow.
Enlightenment and Beauty: Sculptures by Houdon and Clodion
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) and Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738–1814), were two of the foremost sculptors in France during the late eighteenth century, and the Frick houses an important group of their works. In 1915, founder Henry Clay Frick acquired Clodion’s terracotta Zephyrus and Flora and, the following year, Houdon’s marble bust of the Comtesse du Cayla. Other works that were subsequently added to the collection will be shown together for the first time, highlighting the artists’ expressive ranges, as well as their defining contributions to the sculpture of Enlightenment-era France.
Displayed in the brilliant natural light of the Frick’s Portico Gallery, exquisitely carved, lifelike marble portraits by Houdon and virtuoso terracotta figures and reliefs by Clodion will epitomize each artist’s best-known achievements. Important examples from New York–area private collections will complement the Frick’s sculptures and introduce other aspects of the artists’ oeuvres not represented at the museum. The ensemble will illustrate the beauty, naturalism, and classical motifs that connect the works of both artists, who were fellow students in Rome, while also drawing attention to their respective goals and sensibilities as the dominant French sculptors of their day.
‘Men in Armor’: El Greco and Pulzone at the Frick Collection
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"Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face": Portraits of Jacopo Boncompagni, left, and Vincenzo Anastagi make up this show at the Frick.CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times
The quadrennial celebration of the death of El Greco, the great painter of the Spanish Renaissance, will eventually include six East Coast museums this fall, but it is already off to a roaring start with a mouse-size exhibition at the Frick Collection. “Men in Armor” brings together only two canvases, both portraits of bearded Italian gentlemen wearing gleaming cuirasses, as upper-body armor has been called since the time of the Romans. One is a stalwart of the Frick’s collection by El Greco, purchased in 1913, when Henry Clay Frick was building the Fifth Avenue mansion that was ultimately intended to become a museum for his extensive collection. The other painting, on loan from a private collection and rarely exhibited, is by El Greco’s Roman contemporary, Scipione Pulzone.
The show is, simply put, a stunner. The works share a lot — subject, dress (including helmets), stance, steady stare and the usual velvet swag — yet they are profoundly different. Worlds apart. And the great thing is how much of this you can see for yourself.
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El Greco’s “Vincenzo Anastagi” (circa 1575).CreditThe Frick Collection, New York
The El Greco, “Vincenzo Anastagi,” is one of only two full-length portraits he painted. It is an astounding, assertive likeness made around 1575 when the artist was an ambitious upstart from the sticks of Crete, struggling for a foothold in the highly competitive cultural milieu of Baroque Rome. It brims with formal innovation and derring-do, while skillfully synthesizing the forthright brushwork of Titian (who died that year). El Greco spent a few years in Venice before going to Rome, around 1570, determined to make his way.
The guest painting is Pulzone’s “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni.” Refined and as realistic as trompe l’oeil, it is a three-quarter-length portrayal. It bespeaks an admiration for the uncanny precision that originated with Jan van Eyck and had become a style popular with European nobility. Its subject has a pampered, beguiling but slightly stiff doll-like quality. It was painted in Rome, in 1574, about a year before the El Greco, when Pulzone was hands down the most sought-after portraitist in the city. The commissioning, display and exchanging of self-promoting portraits was something of a blood sport among the city’s powerbrookers, and finely wrought armor, a costly status symbol, was often de rigueur.
Organized by Jeongho Park, a Frick curatorial fellow, this show is a leading contender for the season’s best museum show of less than five artworks. There’s a fascinating back story outlined in the wall text and fleshed out in his catalog. In brief, at a time when Pulzone was a star and El Greco was a striving newcomer, Boncompagni was a favored member of the ruling class: governor of the Castel Sant’Angelo, leader of the pontifical armed forces, and, not least, legitimized son of the reigning pope. He had recently named Anastagi — a lesser nobleman and experienced infantry officer — to sergeant major of the Castel. This may have led to the commissioning of the El Greco portrait.
El Greco, who is almost certain to have been familiar with Pulzone’s “Boncompagni,” wagered that his Anastagi portrait would bring him to the attention of that nobleman, a very active patron of the arts, and possibly gain the notice of the pope himself. This was probably a correct calculation. Less accurate was El Greco’s decision to flaunt the fashion for precision and assume that since Titian was widely admired and actively collected in Rome, working under his influence would guarantee success. It didn’t. Among other things, Mr. Park points out that giving a man of Anastagi’s middling rank the full-length portrait treatment almost crossed the line. In any event, in 1576 El Greco, left for Spain, where he spent the rest of his life.
Having all these dots connected is wonderful, the resulting diagram explains the boldness of both sitter and painter exuded by the El Greco. But the show is most impressive as a vigorous affirmation that the best explanation for a work of art is, simply, another well-chosen work of art. The exchange of these two portraits ranges across the history and craft of painting, notions of progress and modernity, the role played by context in understanding art and the matter of how much can be learned by simply looking at paintings as opposed to reading about them.
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Scipione Pulzone’s “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni” (1574).CreditPrivate collection, Jean-Luc Baroni
No matter how much time you’ve spent with El Greco’s Anastagi, which is usually on view in the Frick’s grand West Gallery, you will see it anew here all because of its companion. And this for a painting that is almost always something of a jolt. (If you’re like me, you’re often impressed by and drawn to the Anastagi and then surprised to be reminded that it is by El Greco.)
The pairing underscores that this particular El Greco was something of a historical anomaly, ahead of its time and in a way that differs from his mature style — the distorted figures, levitating compositions, rough surfaces and shards of color that have long been seen as the proto-modernist precursors of Expressionism and Cubism. The Anastagi portrait fast-forwards not to the 20th-century but to the 19th, to late Goya and then Manet in its love of paint and structure. (That’s still around 300 years in advance.) Helpfully, there are works by both these masters as well as a small, more characteristic El Greco hanging next to this show, which — text panel included — occupies a single wall.
El Greco’s subject is a robust man who seems larger than life, posing with his right hand planted on his hip, his left slightly lower, almost touching the golden hilt of his sword. He stands as solidly as he can on a plane that is more russet paint than specified floor, against an expanse of cream that is also a plaster wall. As important as their ambiguity is the way these planes meet. They form an emphatic line that cuts decisively through his knees, accenting his powerful calves.
While El Greco was awake to the wonders of paint, Pulzone was wild about details and polish. His portrait feels somewhat archaic in its skillful, nearly molecular enumeration of high-end reality. Boncompagni is too perfect. Yet he commands by withdrawing and seems uncomfortable, even awkward, like the unconvincing tilt of the velvet-covered tabletop displaying his helmet and gauntlet. He holds a folded paper in his right hand (fastidiously inscribed with the names of both sitter and artist) and in the other a wood letter carrier used by diplomats. The main character here is his parade armor. Pulzone has obsessively accounted for nearly all its raised decorations, both Christian and mythological, just as he has the many exquisite stitches of gold and silver highlighting his subject’s short, puffy breeches.
El Greco seems to be at pains to make sure we realize that everything is paint. He all but drizzles gold across Anastagi’s green velvet breeches, intimating embroidery. And even though Anastagi’s armor is of the plainer field variety, El Greco nonetheless abbreviates. In contrast to the metallic sheen and well-placed gleams of Pulzone’s armor, Anastagi has a bladelike slash of white tearing down his breastplate. The light hitting his left arm creates an X-ray strangeness. All this can seem highly symbolic — power, guilt and death come to mind — even more so with the dark crimson velvet drape that almost oozes downward into the painting like blood (as opposed to Pulzone’s carefully tied-back and fringed blue velvet curtain). These are definitely contemporary readings, but such readings help a great work of art live in the present.
Ultimately, the pairing escalates into a quiet but pitched battle of competing views of art and maybe life. Pulzone believes that everything can be seen by the eye and venerated in art and ends up with seductive artifice. El Greco’s faith lies with paint’s ability to be itself while conveying a sense of the limits of vision, which feels like a more natural way of seeing.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
LINCOLN CENTER
Avery Fisher Hall
Mostly Mozart Festival
Boyce: Symphony No. 1
Mozart: Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”)
"Grammy Award–winning violinist Joshua Bell is joined by violist Lawrence Power for Mozart’s breathtaking, lyrical Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. The esteemed David Zinman conducts the program, culminating in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the monumental “Eroica.”
Monday, August 18, 2014
MOVIE
Bryant Park
The Shining
The Great Lawn of Bryant Park every Monday evening in the summer turns into a movie theater. Tonight was the final performance of this summer. It was packed!
A woman that had staked out her seats and table at 4:00 PM this afternoon let us sit at her table since her guests didn't show. That really helped since there wasn't a square foot of space on the entire lawn.
Monday, August 11, 2014
FIRE ISLAND
We are off for three days of sitting on the beach on the North Atlantic side of Fire Island, a barrier island off of Long Island.
It's two hour train ride on the Long Island Rail Road to Bay Shore and then a short ferry ride to Fair Harbor. Then, transportation is reduced to feet and bicycles.
Saturday, August 9, 2014
DEMONSTRATION
On our way to the 59E59 Theater on East 59th, just east of the southeast corner of Central Park, we chose to ride the subway to Columbus Circle, the southwest corner of Central Park, and walk eastward along the southern border of Central Park on 59th to the theater.
At Columbus Circle we saw small groups marching around.
We attended the performance and decided to walk home down 5th Avenue. Around 50th & 5th we came upon a demonstration of over 1,000 people marching from Columbus Circle to the United Nations. They were spewing hate for Israel.
Interestingly, we had just come from an emotional performance based on, literally, killing and displacing Jews and we, then, come upon this.
There was also the solitary, omnipresent anti-Jew sign holder.
But seeing a large crowd of muslims, liberal Jews, socialists, and others marching together in unity against Israel was a bit more disturbing.
THEATER
59E59
The Pianist of Willesden Lane
This was the most emotional performance we have attended since moving to New York. The story, the relationship of the performer to the story, and the music produced a moving experience. "Set in Vienna in 1938 and in London during the Blitz, The Pianist of Willesden Lane tells the true story of Lisa Jura, a young Jewish pianist who is dreaming about her concert debut at Vienna's storied Musikverein concert hall. But with the issuing of new ordinances under the Nazi regime, everything for Lisa changes, except for her love of music and the pursuit of her dream.
Featuring some of the world's most beloved piano music played live, The Pianist of Willesden Lane is performer Mona Golabek's true family story; a story of music, family survival, and hope.
The Pianist of Willesden Lane makes its New York premiere after critically acclaimed, sold out runs in Chicago, Boston, Berkeley, and Los Angeles."
"A STIRRING CASE OF ART PRESERVING LIFE."
-Chicago Tribune
"A RESONANT TALE OF SURVIVAL."
-Los Angeles Times
"STUNNINGLY GOOD!"
-San Francisco Chronicle
"MONA GOLABEK IS TRIUMPHANT!"
-San Diego Jewish World
‘The Pianist of Willesden Lane,’ a Jewish Girl’s War Story
NYT Critics' Pick
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Mona Golabek as a Jewish teenager who escapes the Nazis in “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” at 59E59 Theaters.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
Playing your mom onstage would be a challenge for even a seasoned actress. Playing your mom at 14? Yikes! So it’s all the more remarkable that Mona Golabek, who is undertaking this feat in “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” seems to slip so effortlessly into the persona of her mother, the pianist Lisa Jura, during her tumultuous adolescence in Vienna and London.
For Ms. Golabek is not a trained actress, but a concert pianist herself. In this deeply affecting memoir-once-removed, adapted and directed by Hershey Felder, and based on a book by Ms. Golabek and Lee Cohen, Ms. Golabek tells the story of her mother’s youth during World War II in her mother’s voice. Underpinning the story are selections from the classical piano repertoire — Bach and Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff — which Ms. Golabek performs on the Steinway grand piano that gleams on a gilt-edged platform at center stage and is her sole co-star.
After introducing herself, Ms. Golabek glides to the piano and plays a few bars from the Grieg Piano Concerto, as the sound of a recorded orchestra swells behind her. “My name is Lisa Jura, and I’m 14 years old,” she says, her voice taking on a girlish lilt and a slight accent. “It’s Vienna, 1938, and it’s a Friday afternoon. I’m preparing for the most important hour of my week — my piano lesson.”
But this week the lesson will not take place. After Lisa makes it past the German soldier with the rifle at the front door, her beloved instructor tells her he has been forbidden to teach Jewish students. “I’m not a brave man,” he says, and bids her goodbye.
This melancholy farewell will be only the first for Lisa, who soon finds herself separated from her family. Her father, a tailor whose work has fallen off as the authorities begin destroying Jewish businesses, takes to gambling to keep the family afloat. With his winnings at a card game, he scrapes together enough money to buy a seat on the kindertransport, the “children’s trains” supported by British charities that moved thousands of European children to safety in England as the full terror of the Nazis loomed.
But the windfall purchases only one seat — and Lisa has two sisters. They will be left behind as she sets out for London, where her father’s cousin has agreed to take her in. Yet when she arrives, there is more disappointment: The family has to leave London and does not have room in its new home to take Lisa with them. Eventually she ends up at a group home for children of the kindertransport, run with loving sternness by a Mrs. Cohen, on the street that gives the play its title.
“The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” which opened on Tuesday at the 59E59 Theaters, tells the remarkable story of Lisa’s years in wartime London with an economy of means and a simplicity that only enhance the emotional effect. Packed with startling setbacks (the house at Willesden Lane is destroyed during the Blitz) and equally dramatic triumphs (against all odds, Mrs. Cohen has it rebuilt), it’s the kind of tale that would probably seem melodramatic if it were fiction.
Mr. Felder, who has experience mixing music and drama onstage — he wrote and performed “George Gershwin Alone” on Broadway, and last week played Leonard Bernstein in a similar show at Town Hall — has captured the voice of the adolescent Lisa effectively. And while Ms. Golabek doesn’t entirely disappear into the other characters in the story, her performance is graceful, restrained and quietly captivating. (I wish she’d managed to acquire a less distracting red wig, however.)
The musical selections are mostly classical favorites: Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor, representing the standard repertoire that a young woman of Lisa’s age and background would have learned. The story takes a romantic turn when Lisa begins earning a living by playing the piano at a hotel frequented by soldiers, and finds herself wooed by several. Here the music turns briefly to standards: a slow-tempoed “Strike Up the Band” and “These Foolish Things.”
The story of Lisa’s life in London has both dark passages, as the war cuts off communication from Europe, and all the children at the home lose track of their families, and moments of unexpected joy. Throughout, the bedrock of Lisa’s emotional support remains her almost desperate love of music, which sustains her in the face of calamity, confusion, loss.
“Never stop playing,” her mother told her just before she boarded the train in Vienna, “and I will be with you every step of the way.” Lisa took the words to heart. Spiritually speaking, her fingers never left the keys, because only through her music could she maintain a connection to the vanished happiness of her Vienna childhood and the love of the family she feared lost forever.
I did not take as many pictures as I might have in the past since a visit to the two websites above includes several photographs.
This was our visit to the Lower East Side to the tenements and congestion of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to New York. Between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, about 2,000,000 Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from diaspora communities in Eastern Europe, where repeated pogroms made life untenable.
The generally wealthier and more educated German Jews who came earlier, 1840 - 1880, by then lived in the Upper West Side.
The synagogue on Eldridge Street was and remains Orthodox and suffered when the neighborhood Jews moved away, other groups of immigrants, primarily Chinese, moved in, and those Jews moving away could not attend survices on the Sabbath since they had to walk to worship. The building went into deep disrepair.
This is another vacant synagogue on the Lower East Side.
Tenements like the early 1900s with clothing still being hung out to dry on the fire excapes.
The Henry Street Settlement House was started in 1893 to address the problems of poverty and healthcare resulting from the wave of immigration into the Lower East Side.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
PERFORMANCE
Bryant Park, Fountain Terrace
Abiah
This summer has been much more comfortable than the summer of 2013. It's actually been fairly nice.
Tonight we "slow-walked" to Bryant Park and watched Abiah. They were better than the previous performance at Bryant Park.
It is a pleasant summer evening in New York City. We took advantage of the weather, walked to Bryant Park, and heard a jazz performance. Cutting edge jazz.
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