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March 26, 2007

All Around the Town: Contrasts & Connections

It's rare that I am uptown, midtown, and downtown in a single evening. What sent me northward was a fancy preview for “Van Gogh and Expressionism” at the Neue Galerie, at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. The gracious chambers downstairs rapidly filled with mink coats, gold and silver, and other accoutrements of gentility -- as polished hirelings proffered champagne and costly canapés and a sprightly pianist thundered and tinkled away at a baby grand.

Upstairs was a breathtaking exhibition of Van Goghs and dozens of great Expressionist paintings that bear his influence. On a landing between floors was a huge, back-lit photo of Vincent at 18. He had no idea, then, that in one decade he’d become an artist and in two he’d be dead. He never knew how important he would be to the world. In the photo he looks guileless, earnest and somehow alone; psychologically rather like an Outsider artist.

Downstairs, in the gallery shop, I bought a card with a painting by Max Pechstein: a young girl in a verdant setting, sitting in an insouciant position, brown knees raised, a white cat curled at her seat. Then I hurried off to a second opening, this one in Times Square, in an SRO hotel on 43rd -- the home of over 600 “adults in need.”

The artists and some other residents were sitting at small tables along the wrap-around mezzanine. They sipped Poland Spring water from bottles or plastic cups. Everyone had an air of cheerful eccentricity. Unlike the bedizened uptowners, who were equally elderly, these folks seemed enthusiastic and excited. One man, very old, with a long white beard, leaned frailly on a cane and spoke with a Yorkshire-like accent. His right eye and cheek were bright magenta from a recent fall in the street. He smiled and sparkled when I said, “How about the other guy?”

The walls were swathed with talent. One landscape, like a dramatic Vlaminck, portrayed a lone shocked tree in a wild and wasted heath and a furious white sky. The colors and brushstrokes were sharp, dark, self-assured; full of harmony and rage.

One small painting made me gasp: it was so much like the Pechstein in my backpack. Same size, colors, composition, subject. A young girl in a green field, brown knees up. Instead of a cat there was a basketball, on which she sat. The artist was a tall African-American man who also used a cane, though he wasn’t old. I’m sure he’d never heard of Pechstein. I held the card next to his painting and said the original was in a museum. He exclaimed, “Oh, wow.” I gave him the card to keep. He tucked it in a pocket and turned the conversation to his sweatshirt, on which he’d painted an enormous glittery face.

From midtown I went home. I got off at Franklin Street, a huge stretch of which was dug up for pipe work. The street looked like a sculpture park with all those steel plates, fresh tar, sawhorse barriers, traffic cones, iron tubes, and mounds of dirt. The exhumed cobblestones, much thicker than one would think, were stacked in great, respectful piles, like artifacts, and gave off the faint, sewerish tang of spent centuries.

Posted by Jane on March 26, 2007 6:13 PM

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