Nicholas Roerich Museum

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Time spent 69 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Nicholas Roerich was a major collaborator with Stravinsky on “The Rite of Spring,” helping him sketch out the plot and designing the costumes and scenery. He did a ton of other things, too, but for me, this notable contribution to the most scandalous classical music event of the 20th century is  huge.

Nicholas Roerich and his wife were Russians by birth (he was born in 1874), seekers and spiritualists by inclination.  He had a varied education and early career, but started painting based on Russia’s long and mystical past.

nicholas roerich museumAnd for reasons that I have yet to quite figure out, a brownstone tucked away on a side street in Morningside Heights is home to a museum of his art, along with works he collected in his journeys.

Architecturally, the Nicholas Roerich Museum is a place after my own heart.  It’s a beautifully intact rowhouse, three stories of which are open to the public, with lots of period detail–fancy fireplaces, beautiful ceiling moldings, a terrific staircase–that in most similar New York buildings was lost during apartment conversions long ago.  The big windows on the parlor floor are blocked out, so that the former living room functions better as a gallery space.  But the museum conversion was very gentle and you can clearly see the house’s past in its present.

nicholas roerich museumRoerich’s early paintings led to him working on stage design for operas and ballets for the many of the great late 19th/early 20th century Russian composers, including Stravinsky as mentioned above.  His stage work extended to Wagner and designs for plays by playwrights outside Russia as well. Even his later paintings often have a sort of backdroppy, set designish look to me.  His landscapes are very still and serene, often distant mountains. It’s easy to imagine great events unfolding in some unpainted foreground.

Nicolas Roerich, “Star of the Hero,” 1936. Tempera on canvas.

There’s also something Georgia O’Keefe-light about some of his works, which sounds somewhat like a criticism, and I guess it is that, although I also mean it as a compliment as well.  Both worked to convey in paint a sense of place distilled down to its essence in color and form.

nicholas roerich museum
Roerich himself, painted by his son, in the land he loved

But my favorite thing about the way the museum is curated is the mix of objects from the Roerich’s travels alongside his work.   Buddhas, Native American ceramics, Russian Orthodox icons, and a gigantic geode all happily and serenely coexist in the syncretic world Roerich’s paintings create.  A painting of St. Francis right above one of Kuan-Yin makes perfect sense.

nicholas roerich museumThe Roerichs moved around a lot during the tumultuous 20th century.  They got into yoga and developed their own brand of theosophy, creating a group called the Agni Yoga Society, which was (quoting from the museum brochure) “dedicated to the recording and dissemination of a living ethic that would encompass and synthesize the philosophies and religious teachings of all ages.”  Small dreams…

Eventually their wanderings took them from New York to India, where they lived in the Himalayas and studied and explored the region, and, judging by the number of mountainous paintings, thoroughly loved the place.  Roerich died there in 1947 and the museum was founded in New York in 1949.

nicholas roerich museumI’m amazed it’s taken me this long to go to the Nicholas Roerich Museum.  I live literally three blocks from it, I have no excuses. Is it mind boggling?  Does everyone have to go?  No, and no.  But it’s a perfect example of how this city hides treasures behind anonymous rowhouse facades on anonymous streets in random neighborhoods.  If you’re nearby and feeling stressed, take 30 minutes and drop in.  I wager you will leave feeling better for it.

For Reference:

Address 319 West 107th Street, Manhattan
Website roerich.org
Cost  Free
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The Grolier Club

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Time spent 67 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A lovely custom-made wooden set of drawers holding a collection of tiny, beautifully bound books.  I had no idea that tiny, beautifully bound books were a thing, much less a collectible thing, and this was like a treasure chest of wonderful suprises.

The Grolier Club is one of the surprisingly large number of private clubs scattered throughout the city, but unlike say the New York Yacht Club, the Grolier puts on free exhibits a couple of times a year that nonmembers can visit.

Exhibits are often inspired by the collections or obsessions of members, and hold to the Grolier’s general theme of printing and the art of the book.

The club is currently buried under massive scaffolding as a new skyscraper is built next to and over it, but happily it remains open despite that.

There were two exhibits the day I went, one on the Aesthetic Movement, and the other called “Images of Value: The Artwork Behind U.S. Security Engraving, 1830s-1980s.”

The engraving show was great, and eye-opening.  At least two firms of professional engravers existed to create libraries of stock images (pun intended) for use on securities certificates, bank notes, etc. They’d also do custom work as well, if you wanted your bank’s president, or a particular picture. Engravings — especially  the human face– were important to make valuable documents prettier, but also to make them harder to counterfeit, so the fineness of the engraving was important.

The show included examples of the original art, sometimes the actual engraving plate, and one or more uses of the engraving on actual currency or tickets or stocks.

It went chronologically, and showed the work of individual engravers in different eras, right up until the demise of fancy stock certificates and the rise of electronic media that spelled the end of the industry.

Just a few highlights:

Martha Washington was the first woman on US federal currency, in the late 19th century.

 

A set of bank notes for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, designed by A. E. Forrester around 1914 and featuring allegorical scenes of the Greek pantheon, are perhaps the most beautiful currency of the 20th century.

Want to see me on your corporation’s stock certificates? Just ask how!

And finally, at some point around midcentury, someone thought that a naked dude covering himself with a circuit diagram and contemplating some kind of atomic vacuum tube, while Armageddon starts in the background, would be a great image for a technology company stock certificate.

There’s no accounting for taste.

The other show, on the Aesthetic Movement was great too, full of beautiful books reflecting a design moment that took a whole bunch of exotic things and threw them together to create trendy and interesting combinations.  It also created the aesthete him (or her) self,  the hipster of the day, which led to much mockery of “nincompoopiana,” a word I intend to use at the first opportunity.

The Grolier has a great space and a focus that I find fascinating, making this  one of my happiest discoveries in this project so far. I’ll definitely keep an eye on future exhibitions there.  Should you visit?  The only reason I gave the Club 3 stars rather than 4 is because book arts are just a little specialized as a field.  So it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

19th century “aesthete” teapot

References:

Korea Society Gallery

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Time spent 7 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned “Lonely Heart,” by Hyong Nam Ahn, a wireframe of a bent-over person with neon blasting through and all around him. 

I’m not sure why the Korea Society has a gallery space, but I have two theories.

  • The Korea Society had two lightless cheerless spaces that they didn’t want to use for offices or conference rooms and thought, “well what the heck let’s throw some gallery space in there.”  Or
  • The Japan Society has gallery space (in fact great gallery space) so the Korea Society had to have some too.

Continue reading “Korea Society Gallery”

Korean Cultural Center Gallery

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Time spent 19 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A set of embroidered Bodhisattvas and Buddhas,  inspired by statues in a particular grotto. Spectacular and almost three-dimensional even though they’re flat pieces of textile

Yesterday was both International Women’s Day and the start of Asia week and so it was appropriate (though if I’m being honest, unplanned) that I celebrated by going to the Korean Cultural Center to see a small show on the life and art of Young Yang Chung, a contemporary female Korean embroiderer.

The Korean Cultural Center has a small space for art tucked away on the eighth floor of an anonymous office building on Park Avenue in Midtown. Still, it’s well appointed and well lit and good for a small-scale show like this one.

It was interesting to me that Dr. Young does both very contemporary-looking pieces and much more traditional ones as well. Her large screens with deer and flowers and fish and such are impressive technically and in terms of the time it must’ve taken to make them.  But I was much more partial to her more experimental, contemporary pieces. In addition to the Buddhas I mention as the “best thing I saw,” the show included a series on Venice that consisted of pieced fabric and quilting and embroidery that were just beautiful, and a fairly adorable frog based on a Japanese woodblock print by Kitagawa Utamaro.

The larger point of the show is that embroidery was always considered “women’s work” and not really “art,” and people like Dr. Young have done much to show that there’s high aesthetic and artistic value in it, and it shouldn’t be overlooked.  It’s a good example that you don’t need a big show, or a large exhibition space, to say something interesting and important.

Should you go?  I liked the space.  If “The Movement of Herstory” is a good example of how well they curate it, I’d definitely recommend checking out future shows there.

Reference:  The Korean Cultural Center

Socrates Sculpture Park

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Time spent 28 minutes (it was chilly)
Best thing I saw or learned Bryan Zanisnik’s “Monument to Walken” (2016) A bunch of cement heads of Christopher Walken, sprouting from the ground like malevolent mushrooms.  If I had a garden, I would absolutely want one or two for it.

Socrates Sculpture Park is a fantastic place to see, well, sculpture.  Located on the East River waterfront in Queens, it hosts changing exhibitions of works designed for an outdoor environment. Continue reading “Socrates Sculpture Park”

Isamu Noguchi Museum

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Time spent 100 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned It’s surprisingly difficult to pick a favorite! But I will call out Walking Void #2 (1970), which is a highly finished piece of granite, utterly harmonious and balanced.Isamu Noguchi Museum, Walking Void #2

Noguchi. I’d always meant to visit the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens.  I love Japan, and it always sounded like a good little museum to visit.  But then again, I only really knew Noguchi from blocks of stone that looked unfinished to me, like the sculptor gave up halfway through, and that famous curvy wood and glass coffee table from the 1950s.

So it never made it to the top of my to-do list.

To sum up, it’s amazing. I won’t look at or think about his work the same way again.  Seeing it in its own company, and understanding how it evolved, or how he evolved, was joyous and eye-opening. Continue reading “Isamu Noguchi Museum”

The Frick Collection

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Time spent 125 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Contemporary critics weren’t always kind to JMW Turner, accusing him of being “unrealistic” and using “blinding” light effects. So he painted the story of Regulus, a Roman general who was captured by Carthage and (among other tortures) had his eyelids cut out and was forced to stare at the sun until he was blinded, before being killed. Turner painted a port where you can barely make out Regulus, and dominating the painting is light, light light.  Touche, Turner.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Frick Collection’s 5th Avenue mansion is closed for the next several years for a major renovation. The good news is Mr. Frick’s art has an temporary home in the old Whitney Building, the former Met Breuer, giving it a chance to recontextualize the art and juxtapose and present its art in exciting new ways. I’ll be writing about it soon, I hope. Spoiler alert: I love it!

This is going to be a hard one to write.  I’ve been going to the Frick Collection regularly for over 20 years.  I’m a member there.  It’s my second favorite museum in New York City (the Cloisters is number one).  Everyone needs to go to the Frick Collection. 

Henry Clay Frick may have been a plutocrat industrialist, but he had such an eye for art.  And the Frick, like the Gardner in Boston or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, is his collection of art, much of it hung as he liked it, in rooms that were his rooms, now open to the public. 

Continue reading “The Frick Collection”

Merchant’s House Museum

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Time spent 104 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned In mid-19th C. New York rowhouse-style mansions, bedrooms were semi-public space.  When you came calling, you’d first go upstairs to a bedroom where you’d leave your coat and hat and change from street shoes to indoor shoes.  Only then would you go down to the parlor.  Seems strange to me– like they should’ve had a changing room as part of the floorplan.  But even in these grand houses, space was at a premium.

The Merchant’s House Museum is a venerable 19th century home and maybe the only historic house in the city where so many of the furnishings on display are actually original to the house, owned by the home’s owners and maintained by the museum to this day.

The merchant in question is a guy named Seabury Treadwell, who bought the house for $18,000 in 1835.  His family lived there for 90 odd years, and by a series of fortuitous events, the house and all the stuff in it became a museum in 1936.  In 1965, when the Landmarks law was passed, the Merchant’s House Museum was among the very first places to be landmarked by the city. Continue reading “Merchant’s House Museum”

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS)

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Time spent 19 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Micro-mini exhibit on activist technology over time

The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space occupies a classic old-school East Village squat, and consists of some artifacts, photos, and other memorabilia documenting the East Village of the 80s and 90s.  It and its denizens focus mainly on squats (abandoned buildings that individuals made habitable and moved into), community gardens, bike lanes, and other aspects of a time and culture that feels increasingly at odds with the hyper-gentrified city of today. Continue reading “Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS)”

Ukrainian Museum

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Time spent 41 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Marko Shuhan’s 2016 work “Space Needed, Apply Within,” a crazy hodgepodge of paintings and paints and liquor bottles on shelves.  Like an artist’s studio compressed into a single wall installation. 

The Ukrainian Museum is one that I definitely wouldn’t go to barring this project.  It occupies a sort of blah, to be honest, modern building on a side street off Cooper Square, and has moderate gallery space with temporary exhibits.

Currently on show were contemporary works by Ukrainian American artists, a textile exhibit comparing traditional textiles of the Romanian and Ukrainian parts of the Carpathian Mountains, a small display of traditional woodcarving, and some of the artwork coming out of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. Continue reading “Ukrainian Museum”