28th Apr 2002
A Day at the MOMA
A Day at the MOMA
My wife and I spent the afternoon Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite museum in the world. We saw two of the current exhibits: “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” and “Life of the City”, an excellent photo exhibit about New York City.
Gerhard Richter
I had known relatively little about the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter before I saw the exhibit, but the exhibition was a broad retrospective with 180 paintings spanning from the late 1950s into the new millennium. My one complaint about the exhibit was the signage left something to be desired. At the outset of the exhibit was a succinct overview of the painter’s life and importance to the art world, but I felt it left out some important details to help me interpret what I was seeing. For example, some of his work was overtly political, but it was not clear to me from the introduction that he had left his native East Germany (Dresden) to West Germany (Dusseldorf) when he was 29 years old in 1961 (something I clarified only later on the Net). Of course we would have learned much from the recorded tour you could rent, but we were too cheap for that (admission is already $12 for adults).
Aside from that quibble, I really enjoyed the exhibit. The main thing I can now tell you about Richter, as a casual art observer at best, was that he had three distinct styles: 1) a love of gray and photo-like images that were distorted with a strange blurring effect (achieved, we learned long into the exhibit, with a squeegee), predominantly through the 1960s (as seen in “Frau Niepenberg,” 1965, the first image shown in this blog); 2) beautiful abstracts in vivid colors with fascinating compositions, ranging throughout the ’70s and ’80s (as see in “Korn,” 1982, the second image shown here), and 3) sharp color photo-realism, through the ’90s (as seen in “Lesende 2,” 1994, the third image shown here).
In the late ’90s and in the last couple of years, there were examples of paintings where he began further merging his various motifs, creating wild abstracts all in greytones, and photo-realist portraits overlaid with abstract themes in vibrant colors.
All in all, highly recommended. The exhibit runs through May 21.
Related Links
- Tricky Mickey’s Art Pages on Gerhard Richter
- Artcyclopedia’s Links to Gerhard Richter pages
- Book: “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” a complete catalog of the MOMA show, sold on Amazon.
- MOMA’s current exhibits listings
“Life of the City”
The other exibit, meanwhile, we cruised through rather quickly, but it was beautiful and moving, and I wish I could have spent more time at it. The exhibit features hundreds of photos of New York City over the years crammed together on the walls like a crazy quilt along the walls throughout three gallery rooms.
The exibit is actually there separate exhibits in one. First are 150 photos from the museum’s own collection. Many are from famous photographers, such as Diane Arbus, as well as photojournalists and amateurs alike. One of my favorites was of a long landscape shot of a New York street from 1948 (I wasn’t taking notes at the time, so I forget what steet it was) showing store fronts including a bar proclaiming “Television” (a novelty at the time), a record store promoting “prices as low as 9 cents,” and a second-storey school offering traing in “the talking pictures.”
On the opposite wall throughout the gallery are hundreds of photos lovingly portaying New York through the eyes of amateur photographers. These are posted to the walls with just clear push pins, and obviously some visitors have simply pulled photos out of their wallets and added them to the collection with chewing gum, such as the charming closeup of someone’s chiuaua.
In the center of the last room of the exhibit is a screen with an endless series of projected photos from September 11th. These images, still so horrifying yet entrancing, held a few dozen musuem goers silently transfixed as the real centerpiece of the exhibit.
The second and third part of the exhibit were inspired by “Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs,” an impromptu installation that first opened soon after September 11th in a vacant storefront in Soho that exhibited hundreds of contribributed photos and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. (It is worth noting that “Here Is New York” borrowed its name from a long essay of the same name by E.B. White, the book version of which has surged in popularity since September 11th.
I never saw the original Soho exibit of these photos, but the effect was still quite moving in this setting, and I admire the museum for giving home within its hallowed walls to this truly democratic collection.
The exhibit runs through May 21.
Related Links
- “Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photos” official site of the original exhibit
- Here Is New York book by E.B. White sold on Amazon
- MOMA’s current exhibits listings
No tags for this post
Are you gay?