December 2008

(An Appropriate Distance)
FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP
by Piri Halasz

NO. 81: 1 (really 21) DECEMBER 2008..... FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE... Don’t kill yourselves laughing, friends, but after 14 years, I have finally sent my manuscript to its publisher! How long it will take for said publisher to turn it into a real book is anybody’s guess, but from hints I’ve received, I gather a lot of people are bored with me writing about it – so I promise not to discuss it again before I am actually able to produce it, and my readers are able to buy it. I will be trying to mount a sales campaign, but part of that campaign involves getting this column back on schedule, so I will be bending my best efforts to that. By the time most of my subscribers receive this belated December 1 issue, Christmas will be over, and with it, the necessity to cook and shop for the big day – meaning that they’re free to visit the museums. Many (though not all) galleries will be closed between Christmas and New Year’s, so the focus of this column will be on what’s worth looking at in museums, all of it historical. There are a number of museum exhibitions of contemporary artists that I know about but didn’t see. I want to get to at least some of them for my January issue, but since I didn’t think too many of my readers would care terribly about not getting to those shows themselves, I decided to focus on what they might really want to see.

Before I start on art, I rejoice to report that the Good Guy won the presidential election (and has become, in consequence, Time magazine’s Person of the Year). Ever since the election, a sizeable segment of the Democratic email population has been indulging in an orgy of post-election humor. This is my favorite report, from my stepsister Bethie Herwood in Paris (where people are even happier about the election’s outcome than they are in the U.S.):

“Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

Stunning Break with Last Eight Years

“In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

“Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS's ‘Sixty Minutes’ on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

“According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it ‘alienating’ to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"’Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,’ says Mr. Logsdon. ‘If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.’

“The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, ‘Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate – we get it, stop showing off.’

“The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. ‘Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also,’ she said.”

HOW DID HE DO IT?

Kidding aside, the election was historic in choosing America’s first African American president, but that’s neither the beginning nor the end of the story. Obama won by a handsome majority – nearly 10 million more votes than his opponent nationally. He certainly deserves high marks for his eloquence, charm and intelligence, but let us not ignore the organizational skills he displayed and the spectacular amounts of money he raised. Nor should we ignore the fact that circumstances that he had nothing to do with – specifically, the way that the economy has tanked – had at least as much to do with his victory. And no matter how many newspaper cartoons celebrated his election as symbolizing the death of bigotry, the sad fact of the matter is that it is by no means dead.

$$$$$$$$$

First, to the staggering amounts of money, which enabled Obama to broadcast not only fleets of campaign ads, but also his own “advertorial” program over TV, thereby countering the negative publicity he got from so many members of the press (especially on TV – here in New York, I didn’t see so much of it, but I was in Pittsburgh over the Labor Day weekend, and horrified to see how heavily the local TV news was biased upon behalf of John McCain). According to Michael Luo in the New York Times for December 5, describing a report filed with the Federal Election Commission, Obama raised nearly $750 million, a record-shattering amount that surpassed what all of the candidates combined collected in private donations in the 2004 presidential election. In fact, as of November 24, despite spending lavishly on advertising and other ways of rallying public support, Obama still had nearly $30 million left in the bank. Much publicity has been given to the number of small donors who contributed to the Obama campaign, and it’s true that nearly half of its donations came in individual contributions of $200 or less. However, since many of these contributors then made additional donations, only about a quarter of these donors contributed $200 or less to the campaign as a whole, according to another story by Michael Luo in the Times for November 25 that reported a study by the Campaign Finance Institute, a non-partisan group. The report said that this statistic was actually in the same range as the 25 percent that President Bush raised in 2004 from donors whose contributions totaled $200 or less, the 20 percent that John Kerry collected in 2004 and the 21 percent that McCain got from this same category of donors. On the other hand, it’s true that large donors, who gave $1,000 or more, still accounted for a smaller slice of Obama’s income than other candidates. Contributions from such large donors accounted for 47 percent of his money through August 31, compared with 56 percent for Kerry, 60 percent for Bush and 59 percent for McCain.

HOW THEY VOTED

Second, to the vote. On November 6, the Times ran a lovely colored map, showing in varying shades of blue and red how the voting had shifted between 2004 and 2008 in one direction or another, by electoral district. Most of the country was depicted in varying shades of peaceful blue, even in states that had still wound up in the Republican column, but in a row of Southern states, ranging from eastern Texas through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, northern Alabama and southern Kentucky and West Virginia, the heightened colors of red showed up like bloody gashes on the map. This was the bigotry belt, stronghold apparently of small-town and rural elderly white Protestant males – to judge from a most illuminating chart of “Social Groups and the Presidential Vote, 2008,” based on CNN exit polls and posted online by Wikipedia (a website that as a source in general I blow hot and cold on, but whose reports of presidential elections seem to be derived from reliable sources). According to this chart, it was the minorities, younger folk and women who did most to send Obama to the White House.

In the breakdown by race, only 43 percent of white voters–less than half – cast their ballots for Obama, but nowadays white voters are only 74 percent of the electorate. Among black voters, who trooped in record numbers to the polls and wound up constituting 13 percent of the electorate, 95 percent voted for Obama. Latinos, representing 9 percent of the electorate, cast 67 percent of their votes for Obama, as did 62 percent of Asian voters (although they are only 2 percent of the electorate).

In terms of religion, only 45 percent of Protestants voted for Obama (54 percent for McCain), but these figures were exactly reversed for Catholics (Protestants constituting 54 percent of the electorate, Catholics 27 percent). Despite the rumor-mongers who tried to convince Jewish voters that Obama was a Moslem, 78 percent of Jewish voters went for him (although Jews are only 2 percent of the electorate, too).

In terms of sex, only 49 percent of our all-American boys cast ballots for Obama, versus 56 percent of the ladies – but women nowadays constitute 53 percent of the electorate, gents, whereas men constitute only 47 percent. Hear us roar!

By age, the older you were, the more likely you were to vote for McCain. Among 18-to-29-year-olds (18 percent of the electorate), 66 percent went for Obama. Among those 65 years of age and older (16 percent of the electorate), only 45 percent did (I blush for my contemporaries). The age groups in the middle years didn’t do so badly, either. Those 30 to 44 years old (29 percent of the electorate) gave Obama a respectable majority: 52 percent. The most numerous age group was those 46-to-64; they constitute 37 percent of the electorate, and they voted by a very slight majority in favor of Obama (50 percent for him, 49 percent for McCain).

In terms of income and education, no real surprises. Those with the least education and those with the most voted most enthusiastically for Obama – 63 percent of those of with no high school, 58 percent of those with postgraduate study. The less money you make, the more likely you were to vote for Obama, though the percentages level off in the $50,000 and up brackets – 73 percent of those earning less than $15,000, 48 percent of those earning $50,000 to $74,999, but then 52 percent of those earning more than $200,000. Go figure.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE:

MIDDLE AMERICA MADE THE DIFFERENCE

It was something of a foregone conclusion that the Northeast Corridor, the West Coast and those northern Middle Western states with liberal proclivities (Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Illinois) would go for Obama: those regions of the country, after all, had gone blue in both 2004 and 2008. Up for grabs, however, were the South, lower Middle West (Ohio, Indiana) and Far West (states in the Southwest, Great Plains & Rockies). In all of these areas, the Republicans were generally believed to have the edge, and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean deserves a lot of the credit for arguing that instead of staying within those areas where the Democrats could rely on victories, they should go out and do battle in these less promising regions. Maybe today these areas are best known as “middle America.” Back in the ‘60s, I learned to call them “the heartland.” The term, although certainly not new, wasn’t as widely used then as it is now, but my colleagues on Time were very aware of it, as it constituted Time’s target audience (not that anybody much thought in terms of target audiences in those days, either, it was just something that was somehow in the air). Obama followed Dean’s path out to the heartland (building upon the gains that Democrats had made in the congressional and senatorial elections of 2006). And it was these states that gave him a majority in the electoral college of 365 to McCain’s 173. The states that went for Obama, having gone for Bush in 2004, are (in alphabetical order): Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Together, they accounted for 112 of Obama’s electoral college votes–in other words, his margin of victory.

Maybe because I was at least dimly conscious of this heartland on Time, I may know more about it than most New Yorkers (coastal types have even been known to refer to it privately & contemptuously as “flyover country”). Middle America is also a state of mind: although its characteristics may be commonest in the heartland, there are plenty of people who share its values in other parts of the country as well, so a presidential candidate ignores it at his (or her) peril. It was very much the part of America society that McCain & Palin tried to appeal to with their prattle about “Joe Six Pack” and “Joe the Plumber.” They obviously had an image of a conservative white Protestant working-class voter with a beer belly in mind, to contrast with the Obama image of skinny black latte-drinking liberal, and some stories in the Times have attempted to explain Obama’s victory by suggesting or implying that the average voter was simply better educated, more affluent and therefore more sophisticated than Joe Six-Pack or even Joe the Plumber: such voters looked down upon these Republican stereotypes instead of identifying with them. I don’t gainsay this argument entirely, but I also think that what really weaned a smaller but still sufficient number of Six Packs and Plumbers away from the red column was the lousy state of the economy, and a big story by Michael Sokolove in the Sunday Times for November 9 told it the way I see it – even to using the very phrase that had been buzzing around in my mind:

“self-interest trumped racism.”

Sokolove had been following the voting decisions of a heavily Democratic but lily-white, blue-collar Levittown in Pennsylvania, where 3 out of 4 voters had gone for Hillary Clinton in the primary – a performance that had encouraged McCain to believe he might be able to garner her votes. Sokolove had been raised in Levittown himself, and done an article about it for the Times in the spring, describing how Obama’s message of hope and change was connecting with its population. Short form: it wasn’t. Yet when the reporter returned in November, many people to whom he spoke said they’d be voting for Obama, even though one was quoted as saying, “I have to admit, his race made my decision harder.” In the end, Obama got a bigger majority than even Kerry had gotten in ‘04. “What had changed for Mr. Obama?” the story asked. “The financial meltdown obviously made a huge difference,” though other factors listed included Obama’s ad blitz, McCain’s choice of Palin, and Iraq, which many voters linked to the economy. “We’re like a trillion dollars in debt and spending what, $10 billion a month on the war,” Sokolow quoted a 25-year-waiter as saying. He also interviewed Tina Davis, council president in the township with the highest concentration of Levittown voters. She described the many conversations she’d had with constituents who said they’d never vote for Obama, though they wouldn’t really say why. She thought the real reason was because of his race, and that even when they voted for Obama, they wouldn’t admit they had, but that in the end, they voted “out of a different kind of fear – fear for their own economic survival. Self-interest trumped racism. ‘They had to ask themselves if they wanted a really smart young black guy, or a stodgy old white guy from the same crowd who put us in this hole,’ she said.”

WHAT’S HE UP AGAINST?

It isn’t only Iraq that’s posing problems for the U.S. at present. Although the country’s quieter, it’s still plagued by corruption, governmental ineptitude, and more occasional violence. The situation in Afghanistan is steadily deteriorating, with the Taliban ever more recovering from their nadir, seven years ago. Pakistan doesn’t really have a central government on which to rely: it harbors terrorists who prey not only upon Afghans to the west of it, but also Indians to the east, as witness the devastating attacks in Mumbai. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a letter congratulating Obama upon his election, even though the two countries haven’t had diplomatic relations with each other in nearly 30 years; one hopes that Obama responded to it politely, since Ahmadinejad has no intention of cutting back on his country’s plans to go nuclear, and will require truly diplomatic handling Israel is a little dubious about Obama. He’s never talked hawkishly enough to suit it, but the only really negative response to the U.S. election that has emerged in the Middle East seems to be that of Osama bin Laden: one of his spokesmen labeled our incoming president nothing more than a “house Negro” who would continue the supposed campaign against Islam. Most of the rest of the world is hurting from the economic downturn that may have begun in the U.S. but has spread around the world. Banks in Europe appear to have been indulging in subprime mortgages even more heavily than in the U.S., and are now suffering the consequences. Banks in India have been more prudent, but that doesn’t mean Indians aren’t getting hit by the downtown, too. Even China’s exports have been affected; apparently it’s doing some serious rethinking about its twenty-year commitment to a market economy; up until now its progress has been one upward glorious path. Then of course there are the Augean stables that Bush has left behind in the U.S. government, with the situation in at least two departments so bad that the Times has written editorials recommending “Fixing Interior” (December 17) and “Fixing Agriculture” (December 19). The SEC also badly needs a going over, considering how miserably it has failed to police the stock market, allowing con men like Bernard L. Madoff to bilk billions out of investors with his elaborate “Ponzi’s Schemes”. I could go on, but you get the idea: mountains of problems to confront on every side.

WHAT’S TOP PRIORITY?

If you ask me, it’s the economy. .Unemployment is up, industrial production and home construction and consumer spending are all down (although stores in the New York area anyhow have been advertising sales in the newspapers as if there were no tomorrow, the discounts being offered are going to cut into store profits and therefore future ads). Even the Bush administration has finally gotten around to admitting that the recession began last December, and at least one gentleman whom I know with a background in Wall Street is forecasting that the situation will get worse, much worse. I deeply respect his judgment, and yet as Pollyanna the Glad Girl I can’t help wondering if the stock market at least isn’t maybe bottoming out along about now. The Dow-Jones industrials average closed on Friday, December 19, at 8579.11. Although this is still a far cry from its 52-week high of 13,614.53, hit on December 26, 2007, it’s also somewhat up from its 52-week low of 7392.27, hit just a month ago, on November 21. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all going to be roses, roses from now on. My admittedly foggy recollection of market behavior (from when I worked on Time’s Business section, all those years ago) is that normally in a bear market, the averages go down and stay down until volume dwindles and everybody starts to ignore them. Then, after bumping along on the bottom for a while, they slowly, slowly start working back up. In this (as in their downward movements) they’re what’s known as a “leading indicator”, meaning that the direction they’re taking will later on be taken by other statistical indicators of economic activity (unemployment, by contrast, is a lagging indicator–it falls or rises after most of the other indicators have taken a given direction). I do feel obligated to report, however, that the Conference Board’s index of leading indicators (composed of the stock market plus 9 others), according to an AP dispatch in the Times on December 19, declined for the second straight month in November by .4 percent, and this brought its six-month decline to the lowest level since ‘91. Still, the Times chose to headline the “most since ‘91" aspect of it, while merely mentioning in the body of the text that the November performance was slightly better than expected. This I feel reflects the pessimistic point of view so commonly being taken just now, and people who are really into the stock market will tell you that just when everybody is at their most bearish is exactly when the smart money starts to buy.

NOT EVERYBODY AGREES WITH ME, OF COURSE

After having spent a month or so patting itself on the back for having singlehandedly elected Obama, MoveOn, this online liberal lobbying organization to which I belong, polled its members to find out what its Number One priority should be in 2009. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that universal health care came in first, and economic recovery and jobs only second: it’s about what I’d expect from five million activists who trend en masse somewhat toward the flaky end of the political spectrum. Not that Obama didn’t promise universal health care, and not that it isn’t extremely important. Being a senior citizen, I know how lucky I am to enjoy the benefits of Medicare, but even Medicare isn’t on the soundest possible financial footing, and how the U.S. is ever going to pay for health care for every other American in its current economic state escapes me – that is, without watering its currency down to levels that may even recall Weimar Germany in the 1920s, when senior citizens in particular saw their savings dwindle into nothingness. As far as I’m concerned, getting the U.S. out of its present downward economic spiral is the first and most basic step toward underwriting all the rest of Obama’s ambitious wish list, from tax cuts for lower-income groups to bailing out homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages to increased funding for education (especially for preschoolers) and ending global warming (as well as universal health care).

HOW DO WE DEAL WITH THE ECONOMY?

Just at present, Obama is still in a planning stage, though he has made no secret of it. At his very first press conference as president-elect, Jeff Zeleny reported in the Times for November 8, Obama called for Bush and the current session of Congress to enact a stimulus program, and promised that if they didn’t do it, he and the new, much more heavily Democratic Congress would do it in 2009. On November 23, Jackie Calmes and Jeff Zeleny reported in the Times on the talk that the President-elect had given in the Democrats’ weekly radio address. Obama said that he would direct his economic team to develop a two-year stimulus plan with the goal of saving or creating 2.5 million jobs. He was already coordinating efforts with Democratic leaders in Congress, in hopes that they would have a package that he could sign into law as soon as he takes office on January 20. His advisors were reportedly saying that they wanted to use this package to address other issues that Obama emphasized during the campaign, including those lower-income tax cuts, dealing with neglected infrastructure like schools and roads, plus creating “green jobs” through business incentives for energy alternatives and other environmentally constructive technologies. On December 17, Edmund L. Andrews and Jackie Calmes reported that the Federal Reserve was doing its part to stimulate the economy by lowering its interest rate to virtually zero–and by printing as much money as needed to revive the frozen credit markets; meanwhile Obama met with his recently-appointed economics team in a 4-hour session in Chicago to map out an apparently even more expansive stimulus package that could cost anywhere from $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next two years. On Sunday, December 21, Jackie Calmes reported that Obama was expanding his economic recovery plan, and would now seek to create 3 million jobs instead of only 2.5 million, in a package to cost between $675 billion and $775 billion. This was because at a meeting earlier in the week, Christina D. Romer, Obama’s choice as chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers, reported that the current downturn is likely to be “more severe than anything we’ve experienced in the past half-century.” I do so hope she’s wrong, but government action may be able to counteract it.

WHAT ELSE HAS OBAMA DONE?

Before the president-elect flew off to Hawaii for a two-week Christmas vacation, he had completed most of his appointments, not only for his Cabinet but also a raft of other positions, within the White House as well as in other branches of the government. Voters who voted for “change” will have to deal with the fact that Inside the Beltway is very well represented, especially in the persons of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner (currently president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and formerly an aide in Bill Clinton’s administration) and Lawrence H. Summers as head of the National Economics Council (formerly Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary). As the Times noted in its November 25 editorial on these appointments, both men “have played central roles in policies that helped provoke today’s financial crisis.” The way I’m inclined to put it, this is like setting two foxes to look after the henhouse, but maybe they’ve learned from their mistakes. One can only hope so. Then we have Obama’s choice for secretary of defense: the current incumbent, Robert M. Gates. Well, admittedly he’s done a better job than Donald Rumsfeld, but does this really square with Obama’s long-standing promise to get us speedily out of Iraq? Finally, we have as secretary of state none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Obama campaigned and campaigned against – among other reasons, for being too close to the administration in her original endorsement of going to war in Iraq (though in the campaign she’d changed her tune). Oh, to be a fly on the wall in some of those Cabinet meetings! I can see Hillary & Bob having some interesting debates, or at least I hope so. Obama says he likes to stimulate discussion, and indeed has set up other crisis points as well: for instance, appointing a secretary of labor, Hilda L. Solis, who is skeptical of trade agreements, and also a trade representative, Ron Kirk, who is all for them. On the other hand, even Cabinet conflicts may not turn to be all that important, suggests Peter Baker, in the Times for December 20. Baker pointed out that “with new offices in the White House to coordinate health care, urban policy and energy intiatives, Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to keep real power over domestic issues close at hand.” I would also say that most of his appointments indicate that he is a moderate, even a centrist. Some liberals are not too happy with this, but I think it’s just being realistic, and recognizing that the U.S. electorate is on balance pretty centrist itself

WELL, & SO NOW WE HAVE THIS MAMMOTH INAUGURATION

looming on January 20, with untold millions converging on the Capitol, and presumably people from one end of the country to the other glued to their TV sets. Unless deterred by some really catastrophic event, I suspect I’ll be glued to my set as well, and yet I am made vaguely uncomfortable by the revival meeting atmosphere that seems to infect so many Obama occasions (nor am I soothed by the fact that Obama has chosen the Rev. Rick Warren, a right-wing Evangelical who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, to deliver the invocation at the ceremony). Emotion (especially religious fervor) & politics for me is a poor mix–I really prefer to feel that the cool sweetness of reason is dictating political choices. At least – and at last – we are beginning to get a little humor at Obama’s expense on late night TV, with Conan O’Brien and David Letterman (probably also Jay Leno, though I practically never watch him). What a relief. Four or maybe even eight years of not being able to laugh (at least a little) at the White House was a truly depressing prospect.

AND AT THE GALLERIES,

THREE ESPECIALLY FINE SHOWS

Below are two reviews that I’ve already published in artcritical.com, but are so dear to my heart that I feel this column wouldn’t be complete without them. Besides, I shall have additional comments to make in relation to each, and there’s a third show that belongs in the same general class:

“Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades” at Knoedler (through January 10, gallery will be closed December 25 and January 1, and closing at 3 pm on December 24 and 31, but otherwise, on its normal business schedule)

“Frankenthaler at Eighty” is a richly rewarding experience. What I got from it was not raw feeling but what some call “the esthetic emotion;” and what Susanne Langer has equated to “exhilaration.” The artist who would evoke it can’t simply pour paint onto canvas. First, she must learn to combine discipline with devotion. Frankenthaler has. In the early 1950s, when she was going around with Clement Greenberg, the two cased Manhattan galleries together, seeing everything from Pollock to Sir Alfred Munnings, the British horse painter. They’d get a catalogue of each show, and grade the paintings in it. One check meant they liked it, two meant they really liked it, three checks was “wow!” Then they’d try to analyze why some paintings “worked” better than others.

During this period, Frankenthaler painted “Mountains and Sea” (1952), the famous painting that bridged the gap between Pollock and the future. It led the way for Noland and Louis, but Frankenthaler’s own painting continued to develop elsewhere, into a highly personal but diverse idiom. Its range can be seen in the current show, curated by Karen Wilkin: included are just nine paintings from the artist’s personal collection.

Only one of the nine got no checkmarks from me: “Rake’s Progress” (1991) is a noble experiment that just doesn’t come off. Still, an artist has to take risks if she is to renew her art, and Frankenthaler deserves marks for daring to paint a postmodernist picture (alas, I‘m an incorrigible modernist). I also felt that Sphinx (1975) is not quite up to the standard set by other paintings here, though I liked it well enough to give it one check. Its large, soft, succulent central areas of peach and tan are garnished with touches of crimson, are very satisfying, but I felt vaguely let down by how one side was covered with greige and the other left bare. “Aerie” (1995), a painting of greater stature, suffers from its context. Its sprightly linear pattern of red arches and a blue wave across the bottom of the paper is delightful, and would dominate an exhibition all of work on paper. Here, every other painting is on canvas, and the way paint sinks more into canvas leaves “Aerie” looking by comparison a bit dry.

On the other hand, “Western Dream” ( 1957), “Snow Basin” (1990), and “Warming Trend” (2002) are all excellent, rating two, maybe two-and-a-half checks. “Western Dream” is incredibly complex, invigorating and ambitious, with many smaller shapes – in soft, romantic pinks or light reds, blues from light to darker, brownish olive, gray – natural but also cultural (suggesting flowers and plants but also fine synthetic fabrics). Maybe just a tiny bit too much is going on here (the artist was only twenty-eight when she made it). “Snow Basin” is a horizontal picture with bands of pale colors, partially blotted out by masses of white. Parts of the paint surface are raised, but more effectively than in “Rake’s Progress” (the paint’s opaque, not shiny). If you look at this painting long enough, you’ll feel yourself dizzied by its dazzling whiteness. “Warming Trend” also becomes very moving upon long contemplation. Its nearly monochromatic dark blue with purple highlights reminds me of late Rothko.

The three greatest paintings in this show are “A Green Thought in a Green Shade” (1981), “Provincetown I” (1961) and “Pink Lady” (1963). Not only are all three “wows” in themselves, but together they show Frankenthaler’s range. “A Green Thought” is named after a passage in “The Garden,” a 17th century poem by Andrew Marvell The painting’s sumptuous green field suggests a garden, especially as embellished with floating dabs and flecks of flower-like reds, mustard, white, blue, deeper green and pink – but its overall-ness endows it with a second, formal dimension, echoing but also embroidering upon Pollock’s classic “drip” paintings. “Provincetown” is even better. I’d give it four checks instead of three, for its extraordinary dynamism and balance, with the vehemently but cleanly delineated pink-and-brown square surrounding a central blue-and-brown image set high upon the canvas. This height cows the viewer while he (or she) contemplates the savagely but gracefully pinioned bird-like or Crucifixion shape in the center. (Like all true abstractions, “Provincetown” is ambiguous, reflecting many different sources in the external world but committing itself to none; the title may relate to where the picture was painted). Still more alive with energy is “Pink Lady,” another four check painting, though it abandons mean, clean lines in favor of seething but still serene clouds of color. A “pink lady” is a cocktail made with gin, Grenadine, cream and egg white – the gin packs a punch masked by the more ladylike ingredients. The punch in this painting lies in how its image, suggesting (among much else) an orchid and a human heart, boils upward and outward, from its slate-blue core through the billowing peach and fuchsia of its sides to the splattering blast of blue and reds at the top.

“Willard Boepple: Looms” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art (through January 3, but closed from December 25 to January 1)

Prior to this exhibition, Willard Boepple’s most recent New York appearance was last winter at Francis J. Greenberger’s Maiden Lane Exhibition Space. There, two of the artist’s well-known “Room” sculptures were on view. I remarked upon their resemblance to architecture, if a fantasy form of it, and even in retrospect, find myself thinking in architectural terms: these “rooms” resembled nothing so much as the skeleton of a classic post-and-beam type of house under construction, before the exterior and interior sidings are added. In retrospect, however, another analogy also haunts me: I’m reminded of Alberto Giacometti’s famous small surrealist house-like construction, “The Palace at 4 a.m.” (1932–33).The Bookstein show differs from the Maiden Lane one in that the basic thrust of these new sculptures is horizontal and not vertical, rectangular skeletonic forms that sit on small pedestals. Yet, oddly, they still remind me of another equally surrealistic Giacometti sculpture, “Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)” (1934). This is not because I see any direct resemblance between this piece and Boepple’s “looms,” but partially because all are concerned with the concept of delineating space, and partially because of the spirit that animates them.

It would surprise me if Boepple were to call himself a surrealist. His background is impeccably modernist, even to having been born and raised in Bennington, VT, where Helen Frankenthaler went to college, Jules Olitski taught and Kenneth Noland lived. He learned a lot from looking at David Smith’s sculpture, and at a certain moment, felt the need to escape the aura of Anthony Caro (a feat long since accomplished). Yet there is still that vein of feeling which reminds me of what I learned from the first exhibition staged at the Museum of Modern Art by William Rubin, longtime chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. The show (in 1968) was “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” and it featured transitional works by Pollock, Rothko, Newman and several other abstract expressionists, from when they were still in their youthful surrealist phases.

Rubin argued that these abstract expressionists, even after they achieved their mature work, still retained the “peinture-poésie” of the surrealists. “While it is true,” he wrote “that they expunged the quasi-literary imagery that had earlier related their paintings to Surrealism, the visionary spirit of their wholly abstract art retained much of Surrealism’s concern with poetry albeit in a less obvious form.” Though Rubin didn’t say so, the work of abstract expressionists like Franz Kline and Bradley Walker Tomlin, who didn’t go through a surrealist phase, is wooden by comparison, and I’d make much the same comparison between Boepple and some of our leading minimalists. Somehow, the “peinture-poésie” of the surrealists has descended through David Smith (as well as the painters of his generation) to Boepple, and lends his work a gracefulness, subtlety, complexity and vitality that I too often look for in vain.

To Boepple, the sculptures at Lori Bookstein resemble looms, and he’s named them after various British textile centers, but being abstract, they’re also richly ambiguous, suggesting other horizontal skeletal structures as well: chicken coops, for example, or orange crates, symbolic of farmland and transport as well as North Country industry. As they’re all different, they evoke individual associations as well. “Burnley,” for example, made of rust-colored poplar beams, has lots of long diagonals and narrow crisscrossing shapes, reminiscent of the “cat’s cradles” I used to make as a child with string. “Preston,” a stocky piece made with bright yellow poplar beams, somehow bears a charming resemblance to a baby’s crib. “Blackburn,” most serene yet strangely crisp, is all horizontals and verticals, a severe aluminum presence that looks dark gray (though I understand that it’s really a very dark green).Somewhat incongruously, it suggests the bleachers in a ball park, or an open toolbox–yet remains the most impressive piece in a very impressive show.

Here a postscript to Boepple. At artcritical, I feel a tad self-conscious, as I know I’m on display to a wider audience, but in these more cloistered surroundings, I have two things to add....First, when I said that Boepple’s work, with its inner core of poesia, made “some of our leading minimalists” look wooden by comparison, I was being polite. Here I’d like to amend “some” to”virtually all” of our leading minimalists, and cite as a particularly egregious example Sol LeWitt. According to The New Yorker for December 8, the Museum of Modern Art is installing a room-sized white-on-black “Wall Drawing #260" by Lewitt in a gallery on its fourth floor, and, according to the New York Times for November 17, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams has opened “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective,” a show that displays more than 100 large-scale wall drawings executed between 1969 and 2007 and that (get this, folks) will remain on view for 25 years. I saw a LeWitt retrospective at the Whitney a few years ago, and if ever there was a no-talent type, this was it. Elephantiasis and gaudy colors couldn’t conceal the fact that the work was mechanical, impersonal, and totally without feeling - yet this is what is held up for contemplation and admiration by our museological Establishment - sad commentary on the fact that more deeply-felt work, such as that of Boepple, evidently touches a nerve that our museum-going public doesn‘t want to have touched. That’s one of the observations I have to add to my Boepple review. The other is a confession: there are two sculptures in the show that I didn’t mention earlier because I didn’t think they came off as well - two in burnished aluminum, named “Irish Corners” and “Bradford.” I can’t say quite why they left me cooler, but they did.

Before I pass on to my postscript to Frankenthaler, I call your attention to “Esteban Vicente: Paintings with Paper,” at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art (only through December 15 alas). Born in Spain in 1903, Vicente was chronologically a first generation abstract expressionist, but throughout his early life, he painted representational pictures, not arriving at an abstract expressionist idiom until the later 1940s, and not apparently exhibiting such work until he was chosen by Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro for inclusion in the “Talent 1950" show at the Sam Kootz Gallery. By my arithmetic, this makes him artistically a member of the second generation, though fortunately he didn’t slather on the paint the way that so many others of this generation did. I’d seen Vicente’s paintings before now, and found them often lovely, but this was my first exposure to his collages, and it seems to have been for these collages that he was particularly well-known (he died in 2001 at the age of 97). In the ‘50s, Art News ran a regular feature describing well-known artists creating typical work, and when Elaine de Kooning chose to feature Vicente in this series, in 1953, she took as her topic “Vicente Paints a Collage.” What ‘s most appealing about these collages is that the artist used mostly monochromatic colored pieces of paper as building blocks in his compositions, sometimes adding paint, but not employing newspaper or anything else with lettering or other anecdotal material on it - seeing the pieces of paper purely for their formal value, with no interest in them as nostalgia, urban detritus or whatever. Sometimes (on the down side) these collages look a little too much like Conrad Marca-Relli; sometimes (on the up side, but still unsatisfactory) they look a little too much like Matisse. Vicente was at his best when he was being uniquely himself, crisp but mellow, with either soft, radiant blocks of color or black and white (only gray didn’t seem to work too well for him).

POSTSCRIPT TO FRANKENTHALER:

EMAIL TO ODILE

Here I think I shall just depart a little from my normal format, and become (if possible) even chattier than usual. The reason is that I received an email from Odile, a French friend of my stepsister Bethie. Odile said she was visiting New York and had been to MoMA but wanted to know what other art to see, so Bethie had given her my email address and told her to ask me. Little did she know what response she’d get! I’d just finished doing all the research for this issue of my column, and was (as usual) procrastinating about sitting down to write it, so I gave her two full pages of small (10-point) type (what you’re looking at is 12-point, much bigger). Having done all that, it occurred to me that I could then flesh out the email into a chatty little report for the column that covered a lot of ground in record time, so here goes. To be honest, I’ve edited in a great deal, starting with the correct names of shows, the organizers, bold-facing, closing dates and lots of additional details and comments, but only here and there have I cluttered up my text with brackets. What you do see in brackets indicates large portions of the text that I didn’t share with Odile, but there’s lots of other material in here that may surprise her if she reads this embellished text & compares it with what I sent her originally.

“Hi, Odile,” I wrote, “I'm very flattered that Bethie told you to ask me about what's on, but since I don't know your tastes in art, it's a little hard for me to advise you. Specifically, do you like contemporary art, or prefer work from ages past? We have both kinds in NYC, so not knowing what you like, I'm going to advise you on both.

“To start with: contemporary: If you aren't turned off by abstraction, there is one really great show that I can strongly recommend, paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street (between Madison & Fifth Avenues). I wrote a long review of this show for a website called www.artcritical.com If you want to know why I liked the show, read that. A second show that I also wrote up for artcritical and that I can recommend is sculpture by Willard Boepple at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 37 West 57th Street (between 5th Avenue & the Avenue of the Americas, better known as 6th Avenue). There's also what's probably a reasonably decent show of Tony Smith, sculptor, and Ad Reinhardt, painter, at PaceWildenstein's uptown gallery, 32 East 57th Street (between Madison & Park Avenues–through January 24). I haven't seen this show myself yet but I respect both artists (don't love their work but respect it). Both artists specialized in art that's colored black.

“Beyond that, I recommend that you get hold of a small magazine called the Gallery Guide. Most of the galleries have it and will give you a copy free if you ask for it. In there you can find what else is going on, particularly in Chelsea, which is where the Salon art of the 21st Century is on view (that is, what I consider Salon art, though people who consider themselves more hip than I will say it's the cutting edge, and call me fearfully old-fashioned). The Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea is the center of the action: you can always find the latest fashionable artist there, together with crowds of people admiring him or her. If you want to check out the rest of the chic scene, try strolling along the 23rd, 24th and 25th Street blocks between 10th & 11th Avenues. Many of the biggest galleries are right there at street level and you can just walk along & take your pick.”

DETOUR THROUGH CHELSEA

[Although I didn’t tell Odile this, I’d seen some contemporary art in Chelsea, as well as the Upper East Side, on December 6, in company with Daniel Larkin, a budding art critic who writes for a webzine named artcal.net. He had a list of eight shows of contemporary artists in lesser Chelsea galleries that he wanted to look at, but was also amenable to my suggestions, so we started with Frankenthaler, and progressed through a couple more uptown galleries that I’d nominated, before descending to Chelsea, where again I added a couple of shows to his list. Seeing the Frankenthaler first, however, proved fatal: in top form, she’s an exceedingly tough act to follow. Neither of the shows that Larkin and I saw on the Upper East Side could stand up to this kind of competition, though we both liked the single examples of ‘60s Noland and Olitski that we saw in the viewing room at Leslie Feely, and the group of watercolors by William Tillyer at Jacobson Howard. It was an even sadder story in Chelsea – not only with most of the shows on Larkin’s list, but even with one of my two nominees: “Beyond the Canon: Small Scale American Abstraction 1954-1965" at Robert Miller (through January 3). I’d heard about this show at Woodward on the Lower East Side, where I’d been to see “In the Minds of Me,” an exhibition of letters, sketches and other memorabilia by Ad Reinhardt, sent between 1946 and 1967 to a former student and ongoing lady friend of his, Olga Sheirr (through December 27). Here I’d run into Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, who indicated she wanted to see the Miller show, & somehow gave me the idea that it was small-scale abstract expressionist work, without any reference to the “canon.”

Still, it’s hard to escape the “canonical” aspects of the Miller show. Many gallerists (to use a term that implies “dealer” is a pejorative) love expanding “the canon.” Prices (even in these sorry times) are still high for artists within the canon (i.e. artists of genuine merit, as discerned in particular by Clement Greenberg). Therefore, if we can persuade everybody that “the canon” was only a myth, and artists outside of it are just as good as those inside of it, we can sell a lot of these lesser artists’ paintings, and into the bargain win the favor of anti-Greenbergian art historians who write books “expanding” the canon by including a lot of really third-rate art. Trouble is, one can only persuade viewers that artists outside the canon are just as good as artists inside of it by mounting a show with first-rate examples of artists outside the canon and second-rate examples of artists within it. After all, we all know that great artists sometimes paint bad pictures, and that even minor artists can on occasion produce very fine ones, so if your appetite is for this sort of atypicality, Robert Miller’s the place to go. Among the 91 small-scale abstractions on view, I saw less than great examples of work by Hofmann, Gorky, Pollock, Dzubas, Frankenthaler, Louis and Anne Ryan – combined with better-than-average to downright good examples of work by Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm (1 of the 2 by him on display), Beauford Delaney, Bea Mandelman, Charlotte Park, Lee Krasner, and Norman Lewis (again, 1 of 2). Still, on the whole, there weren’t too many surprises: most of the time, the big names looked better than the little names, with especially good work by Olitski, Gottlieb (particularly the 2 later ones), Motherwell, de Kooning and Stamos.

[Only after Larkin and I got to Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects did we find contemporary art whom both he and I liked well enough to want to write about. This was paintings by Ali Banisadr, a 32-year-old native of Tehran who emigrated as a teenager with his family to California and subsequently earned his BFA and his MFA in Manhattan. His paintings combined rich, dark colors with lush, loose brushwork and many very small semi-abstract forms, suggestive of tiny people in fantasy landscapes. Some paintings attempted to combine this central image with areas covered by flat, geometric shapes: these were the least successful in the show. The P.C. press release related the people-in-landscape motifs to Persian miniature paintings, Persian legends, and the artist’s childhood recollections of bombings during the Iran-Iraq war, but Larkin, myself and also Karen Rosenberg, who reviewed the show for the New York Times, remarked on these paintings’ further similarities to Bosch and Breugel (I would further add Persian tapestries and rugs). At any rate, although this was Banisadr’s first solo exhibition, he has been well and truly discovered: every painting in the show was sold, and he will be featured in an exhibition of new art from the Middle East at the hyper-hip Saatchi Gallery in London in February. I certainly wouldn’t put him on a level with Frankenthaler, but at the moment he seemed to be about the best that Chelsea had to offer. Larkin and I also enjoyed ourselves at the last show on his list, two digital animations (aka videos) by Ann Lislegaard at Murray Guy. They went by so fast that I can’t really describe them in detail, beyond saying they were all gray and white, incorporating angular crystal shapes, biomorphic vegetal ones and/or architectural elements.

[I also saw four other contemporary gallery shows, either that day or at other times. First, I’d mention the paintings by Ron Milewicz at Elizabeth Harris. This was my other Chelsea suggestion on the day Larkin & I made the rounds together, and we both liked it. The painting were nothing very radical, but very appealingly done: crystalline clear and glowing rooftop views of water-towers, chimneys, skylines in the distance and bridges front and center. My favorite was the glowing sunset scene facing the gallery entrance, “A Day for Songs and Contests.” The second contemporary show I’m mentioning in this paragraph was “Exposure,” a group at Ceres in Chelsea that featured droll collages by Laurence Neron-Bancel and thinly painted abstracts by Yukako, as well as “Day into Night (to E.M.),” an installation by Fran Kornfeld of flower-like, multicolored rounded pieces of handmade paper arranged on a pure white wall. As a rule, installations don’t do much for me, but this one read more like a large painting and was clearly the most attractive piece in the show. Third, in the depths of Tribeca, the Allen Gallery of Chelsea has mounted an exhibition of four abstract painters in Room, a furniture/interior showroom (through January 7). The four artists I saw when I was there are Helen Brough, Peter Bocour, Jim Napierala and Benjamin J. Krell. Bocour works with bright colors and gestural brushwork and/or a spatula; his smaller canvases came off best. Krell employs a more somber palette, and pours on his paint in a manner reminiscent of 70s and 80s Jules Olitski... Fourth, on the Upper West Side, Peg Alston staged “Two Takes on Tuscany,” an exhibition of two Albanian-born artists who have escaped to Italy. Alfred Mirashi Milot is predominantly an abstract painter, Alkan Nalbani is a representational one. The show as a whole was uneven, but there were some diverting pieces in it, including Nalbani’s “Pienza” and “Farm in Ciena,” and Mirashi Milot’s “Motifs of Tuscany Diptych.”

[A Chelsea show I haven’t seen, but read about in a New York Times review by Holland Cotter on December 19, is “Indirect Object,” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (through January 10). This exhibition of assemblages features four artists, of whom three were also part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial: Amanda Ross-Ho, Frances Stark and Matt Mullican. The fourth is Cady Noland, who wasn’t seen in that Biennial, but whose influence was, according to Cotter. “A whole generation of younger artists carry forward her spirit,” he wrote. “Her cumulative work seems to grow bigger the more we see it.”]

MANHATTAN MUSEUMS FOR ODILE

To return to my email to Odile. “Also in terms of the currently fashionable: There's a reasonably new museum building that houses The New Museum, way the hell and gone downtown (subway to Prince or Spring Streets, then walk east). At the moment, this museum has shows of two much-admired contemporary artists, Mary Heilman, an abstractionist (through January 26), and Elizabeth Peyton, a representational painter (through January 11). I didn't think much of the work of either from the samples of it that I’ve seen in recent Whitney Biennials, but I know I am in a minority on that, and the building is kind of interesting, if you want to see le dernier cri in museum architecture.

“Now we come to historical art: I don't know whether this is your first or your tenth visit to New York, Odile, so I don't know how familiar you are with its museums, but if you've never been to see The Frick Collection, at 1 East 70th Street, I strongly recommend it. It's big old rich man's mansion, filled with a stellar collection of Old Masters. I took another one of Bethie's friends there some years ago, and she liked it. Most of what makes it wonderful is the permanent collection (and that permanent collection also currently includes recently-added long-term loans by Guardi and Poussin, as well as a recent acquisition by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, a little-known 18th century French master). The Frick also has small special exhibitions, and the current one of those is “Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze,” organized by Denise Allen of the Frick and Peta Motture of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (through January 18). Riccio (1470-1532) worked in Padua, which was especially celebrated at the time for its scholarly accomplishments. The lion’s share of the 30 pieces in this show are small, exquisitely crafted free-standing figure studies and other objects intended as ornaments and/or objects for meditation, to be given to scholars and kept in their studies. It’s an enchanting show, although it left me wondering what Riccio’s full-scale sculpture was like. If you want to see both the Frick and Helen Frankenthaler, they are on the very same block.”

[Odile said that she’d been to MoMA, so I didn’t tell her about that. For the benefit of readers of this column who haven’t been to MoMA recently, here I report on its two current historical shows. “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” is a relatively small one with only 23 paintings and 10 works on paper, all showing nocturnal scenes. It was organized by Joachim Pissarro and Jennifer Field of MoMA, together with Sjraar van Heugten of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and after it ends its run in New York (on January 5) it will be at the Van Gogh Museum (February 13 to June 7). I have to admit that I’m a little tired of Van Gogh, having seen three huge shows of his work at the Met in the past decade or so, but again I’m in the minority, so you have to get a special time-release ticket to see the MoMA exhibition, and you have to see it in the company of too many other people. It does have some landmark pictures, including “The Potato Eaters,” “The Starry Night” and “The Night Café at Arles.” If you’ve never seen them, they are certainly smash performances, but I was more interested in work that I hadn’t seen, including one of the early landscapes done before Van Gogh got to Paris and was still under the influence of Anton Mauve and the Hague School, as well as a really sweet little “Sunset at Montmartre,” done in 1887, soon after the artist arrived in Paris and was catching fire from the Impressionists.

[A much bigger historical show at MoMA is “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937,” organized by Anne Umland of MoMA, and including some 90 paintings, collages, objects and drawings (through January 12). I yield to no one in my admiration for Miró, but I have to say that I had a better time at the big retrospective organized by Carolyn Lanchner for MoMA in 1993–94. Of course, that show was able to cull the greatest Miró works from the artist’s entire career, whereas this one limits itself to a single decade, but what really makes the difference is that Umland has chosen this decade because it was a period when Miró was saying that he was out to “assassinate painting” and the phrase gives her the franchise to include a lot of what I would consider lesser Miró instead of greater. There are still many splendid works, and I hope that any reader within spitting distance of MoMA will get to this show, if only because so many lesser artists in Chelsea are still trying to do so much the same thing, and not doing it nearly as well. Still, be prepared for a typically uneven postmodernist selection, with more emphasis on the ideological of how the works were made, and less emphasis on how good they actually look. Admittedly, there is much in the later parts of the show to admire, but for me the high point is the first gallery, with 7 paintings done on unprimed canvas in 1927. Doubtless the canvases have turned a deeper brown with age, but this only dramatizes the spare white clouds of paint that bedeck them, and the graceful, slender spidery writing and numerals that render them the original “peinture-poésie.” The three truly celestial paintings in this lovely gallery are “Un Oiseau pursuit une abeille et la baisse,” “48,” and “Painting (Head).”]”

“Odile, if you're interested in moderately modern art (same vintage as Miro at MoMA), there's a show of theatrical art from Russia in the wake of the Revolution at the Jewish Museum (92nd & Fifth Avenue). The show is called “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949,” and it was organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman of the Jewish Museum (through March 22; thereafter at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, April 25 through September 7). Most of this exhibition is kind of cute little costume sketches and set designs, done in vaguely avant-garde style by artists whose fame never extended beyond their own country (Natan Altman, Robert Falk, Ignaty Nivinsky, etc.). There are also photographs, posters, other memorabilia and film clips showing productions of the two Jewish theater companies, GOSET and Habima, whom this exhibition celebrates. But the real reason for going to this show is a whole small gallery displaying 6 huge theatrical murals, done on canvas in tempera and gouache by Chagall in 1920, to decorate the GOSET theater; they are really quite something to see! [Indeed, I should have added, if you’re passionate about Chagall, you might also want to take in “Chagall’s Bible: Mystical Storytelling,” at the Museum of Biblical Art, 1865 Broadway at 61st Street (through January 18). This show, organized by Paul Tabor, is mostly prints, and mostly created after World War II, when the artist in his old age became both slapdash and sentimental, but there are also two bays displaying 49 etchings of Old Testament subjects created in the 1930s upon commission for Ambroise Vollard, that legendary dealer who in his later years especially commissioned prints by other distinguished artists as well. These 49 etchings are really fine, especially the first bay with topics from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Joshua.]

“Another museum with a good show of early modernism is the Neue Galerie, at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue. The show is “Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909,” organized by Annegret Hoberg, curator of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Kubin (1877-1959) created these really weird but fascinating little fantasy drawings, beginning roughly when he went to Munich to study art, and became part of an art scene that included Klee and Kandinsky. These drawings employ very delicate shades of gray and black to depict mysterious topics, like a female abasing herself before a giant horse in “Adoration” (1900-01), a huge spider-like figure emptying a bag of germs onto a house in “Epidemic” (ca.1900-1901), and a giant slug, with six tiny human figures seated on its back, in “Rapid Journey” (1898-99) (but pay attention to the days that the museum is open-it's Thursday through Monday, closed Tuesday & Wednesday-also pay attention to the hours for the Jewish Museum & the Guggenheim, both of which are unconventional in their schedules).

“At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (89th and Fifth Avenue) is a photography show by a contemporary named Catherine Opie (through January 7). What I read of her made me decide that I didn't have to see her show right away, either, but if you've never seen the Guggenheim, from an architectural standpoint you don't want to miss it (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, America's greatest architect, and recently refurbished). Also, the permanent collection has some fine late 19th & early 20th century work.

SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST

“Finally, Odile, I've saved the best for last: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street). Again, I don't know how much of its permanent collection you've seen, but within the last year or so it's reinstalled its Roman collection, and you might want to take a look at that. This is not because the art begins to compare with anything you'd find in European museums - America got into the collecting game too late to compete with France & Germany & Italy in antiquities - but the installation is kind of nice, and some of the Roman wall paintings are exceptionally good-looking.

“Just opened a month or so ago are the rehung medieval galleries--again, nothing in terms of the art to compare with antiquities in Europe, but everything very neatly in its place, and the huge Christmas tree there is really something to see, with its dozens of little baroque Neapolitan creche figures at the base. An English friend of mine who spent years living in New York always made a pilgrimage to the Met at this time of year to see this tree! In the same gallery there’s also a modest little temporary display called “Choirs of Angels: Painting in Italy Choir Books, 1300-1500,” organized by Barbara Drake Boehm of the Met, and showcasing medieval manuscripts with glorious illuminated letters coupled with musical scores instead of writing (through April 12)

“There are currently 3 big special exhibitions at the Met [plus a fourth somewhat smaller one that I didn’t mention to Odile, entitled “Landscapes Pure and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717).” This exhibition of mostly scroll paintings (vertical and horizontal) by the most celebrated artist of late 17th century China was organized by the Met’s Maxwell K. Hearn (through January 4). I didn’t mention it because it didn’t overwhelm me. Although Wang’s renditions of mountains, trees, waterfalls and other landscape features are very impressive, the best thing about him is the excellent taste he showed in modeling himself upon certain earlier masters of the 10th through 12th centuries: three of the four examples of such work that the Met is also showing are to die for, far better than anything Wang created. Another show of Chinese art that I didn’t recommend to Odile is “Art and China’s Revolution” at the Asia Society, with paintings, drawings, etc., executed from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, the heyday of Chinese communism, a show organized by Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian (through January 11). I didn’t recommend it because I was made deeply unhappy by almost all of its large propaganda paintings of heroic Mao and his happy followers, at one and the same time academic and amateurish. Even the non-propagandistic portraits by students sent into the countryside for “re-education” are at best only highly skilled mid-19th century realism, explaining why Chinese art today is so completely caught in the iron grip of dada. Not only did this country never have a renaissance to compare with the Western one, but its artists have never passed through any of the stages of true Western modernism, from impressionism onward. The sole ray of light in this big show was “On the March” (1976), a very powerful painting by Muli Tang, who today signs his name the way Westerners do, with the surname at the end, and who lives in Montreal.]

“Odile, the first of these big three shows at the Met is “Beyond Babylon: Art Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.,” organized by the Met’s Joan Aruz (through March 15). This exhibition of some 350 objects from palaces, temples, tombs and a shipwreck focuses on the trade patterns and interactions between civilizations during the period between 2000 and 1200 B.C. in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean (today’s Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon and Israel). Sounds great, but I’m afraid I found it a bit dry, lots of little pieces of sculpture that are very ingeniously made but not all that beautiful, and the installation is like an archaeological exhibit, with a big fake ship’s hull, a little theater with an educational movie, and mountains of rather dull documentation. The voluminous wall texts go on and on about trading patterns and battles and the rise and fall of empires, and I found myself asking, but what were these people really like? What did they do, in their ordinary lives? Art history to me is really a kind of crutch, enabling people who have trouble with art to relate to it better, and I’m all in favor of giving people a helping hand, but for me, in this case, the art history outweighs the art – but don't let me discourage you, it may be just your thing.

“By contrast, the second big show at the Met has absolutely no art history - only one very modest wall text, at the beginning. It explains that the works in the show are arranged, not upon the basis of when or by whom they were made, but rather upon the basis of when the Met acquired them, for the show as a whole documents the 31 years that the current director the museum has been on the job (he retires at the end of 2008). Called “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions,” the show was coordinated by Helen C. Evans, curator in the Met’s department of Byzantine art, but based upon the nominations of curators in all the museum’s 17 departments, for there’s everything here. The show has paintings, sculpture, tapestry, furniture, costumes, drawings, photographs, musical instruments and so forth, from the ancient world to the contemporary, and every corner of the globe: approximately 300 works out of the more than 84,000 acquired during de Montebello’s tenure. It's a very distinguished show, Odile, and encourages you to exercise your own skills of connoisseurship (as contemplation of work for its own sake is sometimes known in art-historical circles). [I might have added that, as far as I’m concerned, this show also tells a good deal about the taste of the period when these works were acquired and selected for this show. It’s like a time capsule for current and recent art scene group think, with the choice of work – especially in Western art since the Renaissance – ever so slightly influenced by what is generally considered great art in the present. This means that for me, at least, there’s a little too much preciosity & 18th century costumes & Louis Seize furniture on the one hand and a little too much campy baroque painting & sculpture on the other, with a slight shortage of the more robust but serene mainstream in the middle, but at least we’re spared most of the horrors that currently hang in the Met galleries devoted to recent art. Besides, I didn’t want to say anything that might have spoiled the show for Odile, as there’s certainly a lot of very enjoyable art here.]

“My favorite show at the Met right now (and indeed my favorite show at any of the museums) is “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy,” with 150 art objects and paintings, dating from around 1400 to 1550, organized jointly by the Met and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (at the Met, through February 16; at the Kimbell, March 15 through June 14). The jewel of a catalogue, chock-a-block with all kinds of information about how people really lived, and gorgeous illustrations, is edited by Andrea Bayer, curator in the Met’s department of European paintings, who also organized the show at the Met (except for the smallish section coyly titled “Profane Love,” which was organized by Linda Wolk-Simon, in the Met’s department of prints and drawings, and offers what passed in the Renaissance for erotic art – by the standards of the 21st century, mostly pretty tame stuff). Although this show, too, has plenty of art-historical documentation, Odile, the art itself is just so splendid that it isn't overwhelmed. However, I should warn you that the way in which the museum is promoting this show is very misleading. Many of the posters and announcements reproduce perfectly lovely paintings by Titian, which is to say High Renaissance art – but the show itself is predominantly early Renaissance art, Quattrocento instead of Cinquecento. There's only one gallery at the end which focuses on the Cinquecento, and only 2 paintings by Titian.

Personally, I love the early Renaissance almost as much as I love Titian, but when I went in to see this show, I'd been so conditioned by all this misleading advertising that it took me quite a while to appreciate what I was seeing. Don't make the same mistake! Get yourself set for tempera on panel instead of oil on canvas, and lots of luxurious gold leaf. Think pure clear outlines and the freshly-discovered joys of perspective and anatomy, not the suave command of sfumato on faces and atmospheric hazes. Think of all those deliciously rounded plump-rumped little horsies, caparisoned with elegant trappings and very correctly foreshortened. Think those marvelously pure marriage portraits, with husband and wife facing each other in the most severe of full profile poses – and don’t worry if not every label is a big name painter. Yes, the show does have big names – not only Titian, but also Giorgione, Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandiao, Fra Filippo Lippi and others – but paintings by artists you’ve never heard of are eminently beautiful as well. And I think this is the first show where I’ve ever really enjoyed the objects, too, including the wedding chests and the cradle and especially all the maiolica, from the childbirth platters to the quaint designs dealing with the “cruelty of love.” This is a feast for the eyes – and the heart. Go and enjoy.

"Hope this has been some help, and have a great time in New York. If you get a minute when you're back in Paris, drop me a line & tell me what you saw & liked. Best regards, Piri"

ADDENDA: OUT OF TOWN.....”Vertical Burn,” by Peter Reginato, was at Elaine Baker in Boca Raton in November, while Jonathan Forrest was displaying “Cross Section” at art placement in Saskatoon.......In early December, when Miami Basel was in bloom, Sean Smith organized “Current” in the Wynwood art quarter of Miami. Included were himself, Darby Bannard, Tatua Boshell, George Bethea, Brian Curtis, Lise Drost, Ryan Farrell, Sergio Rodriguez, Kathleen Staples, and Runcie Tatnall. All are present or former graduate students or colleagues of Bannard’s at the University of Miami, and I’m willing to bet that at least half of them are painting better than anybody else in Florida... Roy Lerner is exhibiting recent paintings in “Spolète à Montréal,”at the Galerie d’Arts Contemporains in Montreal (through December 30).... William Noland, sculptor, photographer and video artist, is currently represented in two exhibitions, “Dans la Nuit, des Images,” at the Grand Palais in Paris (through January 1) and “Scenes of Secrecy: Visual Studies on Suspicion, Intelligence and Security,” in the Porch and University Galleries of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in North Carolina (through January 4)...

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