The Met through my eyes. Monet.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse. Claude Monet. 1867.

Remembering nothing is accidental in a masterpiece, I took some time studying why Monet places us, the viewers, so far above this gathering. The vanishing point is high up on the left of the canvas, nearly off the painting.

In placing us there, he divides the canvas up into three even planes: land, sea, and air. Take the fence off the water's edge and measure for yourself. And where else do you see three even fields in the painting? It is a very French work indeed, and almost patriotic in its geometry.

It is also rather two-dimensional with plane sitting on plane, in a nod to the Japanese wood-block prints with which Monet had been recently enthralled.

Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family in Sainte-Adresse, a channel resort near Le Havre where my grandmother would be met by my grandparents some 90 years later. I love the painting for that bit of trivia. I also love the fact that clearly Monet was at odds with his father that season, placing him in the foreground but with his back to us. His cousins fare no better, featureless as they are.

But they are not the stars here. It is the light. And perhaps the light hitting that one parasol, not accidentally dead center and also in the fore, the blazing yellow-white cut off crisply by a sharp shadow, perfectly, on a perfect summer's day. I look at that, at the sunlight hitting the silk brocade of the dresses, striking the men's collars and cuffs, the glint on a shoe, a Panama hat, and I feel the afternoon sun in my soul radiating from this canvas from which Monet seems to have sucked every bit of humidity. It is dry and warm and breezy. One can hear meteorologists brag about this kind of day in one's head today, as if they were responsible for it themselves, but it is the kind of day, one perfect day, accidental perhaps, but purposefully immortalized in Monet's hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

Much of the painting is filled with smooth unnoticeable brush strokes. But most of it is dappled with Monet's signature strikes and dabs, playful and perfectly placed. He was a master manipulator of the medium and boasted in letters home that crowds would gather to watch his virtuosity before the easel.

A painting of perfect sunlight from me to you in the midsts of a blustery brutal winter.

The Met through my eyes. Hammershøi.

Moonlight, Strandgade 30. Vilhelm Hammershøi. 1906.

A few seasons back, The Met curated a show about window paintings through the ages. And that is where I first saw this Hammershøi, which is part of the permanent collection.

Windows are both portals and barriers, creating a simultaneous sense of danger and safety, community and isolation. 

While it may seem nothing is happening here, there is a tension inherent to the window, one that Hammershøi exploits even further by adding the closed door, inviting us to stay and to leave at the same time.

Bathing the entire vignette is the soft glow of moonlight, the night light of the forest, keeping elves and whatnøt away in the enchanted Danish kingdom, both frosty and warm, a chilled light, if you will, leaving everything mauve in its wake.

Hammershøi displays a masterful skill rendering all of this symbolism in this perfectly balanced painting of his very own apartment in Copenhagen, mystery and comfort dancing on a quiet tense tightrope in my mind when I encounter this work, thick with silence as it is.

The Met through my eyes. Renoir.

Eugène Murer. Auguste Renoir, 1877

Eugène Maurer was an enigma.

He owned a pastry shop at 93 Boulevard Voltaire and worked long hours at the oven to amass a bit of a fortune. He was something of a poet, a published novelist, a largely self-taught but minor painter, and he loved the company of unknown artists, names that would have elicited a laugh or two perhaps in their day, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Pissarro. He would receive his friends at his pastry shop and support them as best he could. At one point, he owned 122 Impressionist paintings, many of them the masterpieces of today's collections, particularly those found on the walls of the Musée d'Orsay. The hotel he bought in Rouen towards the turn of the century would spell his financial ruin and he died broke and nearly friendless in 1906.

But much earlier, in 1877, he sat for Renoir.

I've written before, Renoir is not the artist I run to at The Met. I find his works too pretty. But this painting's honesty is urgent, with an edge, and it catches me off guard each time it catches my eye. Murer's enigmatic stare is so deep, so full, so full of the glamour of youth and almost self-indulgent, the self-indulgence of one in love with poetry and sadness that only youth has the luxury of time for, the silly sadness of the self-possessed, and utterly forgivable, the studied pose, the poseur with his aquiline features at their height and set against the beauty of nature as if to dare the blooming flowers behind him in competition. I know him, that fellow: Wasting time, luxuriantly, unaware the bloom falls off the primrose. 

This is Renoir at his best, painting his enigmatic friend with deep affection.

Victory victorious.

The Victory Theatre opened in 1900 on the cobbled prairie known as 42nd Street as The Theatre Republic, built by Oscar Hammerstein I with a play starring John Barrymore. 

In 1902, impresario David Belasco named it for himself and opened the famous play Abie's Irish Rose, the longest running play in its day. After Belasco named another theatre for himself on 44th Street, the house was renamed simply The Republic.

From 1931 to 1941, Bill Minsky owned it as ran it as NYCs first big burlesque house called Minsky's Burlesque. Its most famous act was Gypsy Rose Lee. His most infamous act? Tearing the grand staircase off the front of the building.

!n 1941, it became a movie theatre named The Victory to support American troops in WWII.

It did a stint as a television studio!

In 1972, it became the first theatre to show pornographic films.

Times Square and 42nd Street fell into neglect, poverty, and despair.

But in the early 1990s, and you hear me say this all the time, the artists moved in. The city had taken control of The Victory and all of the the theaters along 42nd Street and invited artists to do installations in the deteriorating spaces. The marquees along the stretch were filled with poetic aphorisms that made commuters stop and look and think.

The Theatre for a New Audience staged Romeo and Juliet in the water-stained filthy shell of The New Victory. People showed up.

And people started to notice. 

(Including the Disney Corporation who struck a deal with the city to revitalize the entire block.)

The New Victory was entirely restored to its Edwardian splendor, the grand staircase was rebuilt, magnificent torchieres greeted audience members, and the New Victory now does a season of vital, well-attended, children's programming.

A beautiful important theatre, visually and historically, falls on hard times, is abandoned, and it is the artists that make us see it new again so that new life is breathed into the forgotten.