Tag: art

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Isamu Noguchi Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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”

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The Frick Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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”

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