New York Art Notes

I was lured to MoMA by the opening of “Vital Signs,” subtitled “Artists and the Body,” although it could more descriptively be called “Women Artists in our Collection and What they Thought of Themselves.” For most pieces, it seemed clear, the artist was more concerned with expressing something they felt than in communicating anything to the viewer. For example, scraps of a diary the artist kept each day her baby was growing up, paired with a handprint. Or, photographic self-portraits wearing different expressions and wigs. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to buy, let alone hang in their home, anything in this show. Visual beauty was nowhere on display. The point was even clearer when I moved to the galleries of the permanent collection. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Kirchner, Magritte, et al., were of course expressing themselves but in a way that made you feel you were part of the communication, not an outsider to the artist’s private life.

Going through the fifth floor of MoMA was the closest approximation I’ve felt in New York to our experience at the Uffizi. Only at MoMA the route wasn’t one-directional, so people were crowding from both directions. And there were probably as few New Yorkers, or Americans, in the crowd as there were Florentines, or Italians, at the Uffizi. Once again, I felt how poorly designed the layout of MoMA is. One has no idea what stairs, or elevator, will take you where. Once on a floor you need to find the sign to know where an exhibit is. The escalators from the upper floors don’t flow one to the next. And labels have been eliminated in the galleries, probably to keep people from camping in front of works in favor of iPhone audio away from the object for those who need that service.

I visited two museum-quality one-person exhibitions on the Upper East Side. Mnuchin Gallery generally has first-class examples of major artists, and their homage to Frank Stella was no exception. Bringing together  works from his lengthy career allowed my mixed judgments: his early black and straight-line paintings are classics; his colorful geometric series are distinctive and refreshing; his late-career 3-D painted aluminum wall sculptures are daring but ultimately empty. Still, you have to admire an artist who can create such different bodies of work, all with power and majesty. At the very opposite end of the spectrum we found Giorgio Morandi, also in a career retrospective that traveled from Rome to a pop-up brownstone gallery on 63rd St. Where Stella’s works are big and bold, Morandi’s are small and discreet, and for 30 years he seems to have painted the same bottles, jars and pitchers. Presumably he had to change the flowers he painted over the same period. There were lovely works at the start and at the end of his career. Rather than try to analyze how his style evolved, it was enough to love one composition after another. Seeing so many together didn’t dull the pleasure; it was a treat.

The other memorably fun show was works on paper from the collection of the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) at the Drawing Center. There were hundreds, but all shared a spirit of fun, much like the work of KAWS himself.