Echoes: Shakespeare and the new World Trade Center.

Shakespeare mostly wrote in meters. He also mostly wrote in dia-meters, or diametrics, phrases on either side of a diameter, often in opposition. He knew we humans, a debating species by nature, instinctively listen for them, hear them in those careful enough to deliver them with their intended weight.

This plays out most obviously perhaps, in the Beethoven Fifth of Shakespearean monologues, To be, or not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. 

Contrast 'to be' with 'or not to be.' Contrast 'whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune' with 'Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.' Contrast 'or by opposing' with 'end them.' Contrast 'to die' with 'to sleep.' And then contrast the way he goes on to define and differentiate kinds of sleep, a resting in peace, say, versus a tormented endless dream. 

I invite you to scour Shakespeare's texts. He uses this 'this or that' construct throughout the entire canon. And that is only part of his genius. Because he knew we would hear that. He knew that these diametrically opposed notions would reverberate in our heads, and that we would absorb an enormous density of thought as a result. For you teachers, remember: Like Beethoven's Fifth, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be heard, not read. But if you read them with this paradigm in mind, they are eminently more readable. They are also much easier to memorize, by the way. Shakespeare helped his actors as much as he helped his audience.

(Let me tangentially add here that Hamlet falls off the verse in this first line. If the line read, 'To be or not to be that is the quest,' that is the iambic pentameter Shakespeare establishes. By adding one more syllable, '-tion,' he tells us--and the actor playing Hamlet--something is wrong with our poor ponderous Prince. Indeed.)

This was on my mind today as I wandered through the plaza of the new World Trade Center. 

I walked up the gently sloping stairs of the new Liberty Park to survey the ground below. And all around me I saw contrasts. The stonework of the paths is laid out in parallel lines, an echo of the hallmark outer columns of the original Towers One and Two. But they lie horizontally, of course, a reminder of the fallen. They are punctuated by harsh angular gardens, reminding one of the harsh jagged twisted tons of steel that punctuated thousands of our loved ones. Flowering inside these beds however are blooms and grasses stirring softer senses, like pillows of comfort. Splendid stone and steel accents are interspersed among wooden benches that feel more inviting, more human. And all this angularity leads into the comforting round arms of Santiago Calatrava's St. Nicholas Church, currently under construction.

I looked out onto the hundreds of leafy green oak trees giving shade to hundreds of visitors, how they yielded only to the waterfalls, how the waterfalls remind one of the gravity of that day fifteen years ago, but softened one's harshest memories with their coolness, their gentle sounds. I looked up at the extraordinary crystalline towers rising overhead, how the architecture at their bases echoes those outer-wall columns of the original Towers One and Two as well, how they stand guard over the emptiness of sunken waterfalls, how "Reflecting Absences" is in itself a diametric.

I looked across at The Oculus, the transportation hub that is both spiky and white, piercing and virginal, a parabola of stillness that somehow evokes movement, the flapping wing of a peace dove at the center of an act of war. 

And I took in David Childs' new Tower One of the new World Trade Center. Each of its four sides rise up in defiance, drawing our eyes to the heights of humanity, to the heavens, while each of its four corners draw our eyes down to earth, in remembrance perhaps, in a nod to our humility, a call instead to humbleness, angular reminders of everything it means to be soft and tender in community.

Not everyone is in love with the new World Trade Center. And I have yet to form a full opinion, honestly, allowing it the time it will take to flower into its fruition. But if one looks carefully for everything I think was intended, I believe its echoes of 'What was once' bouncing off 'What has come' fusing into 'What will be' in our minds might, in our minds, be as satisfying as the shared sadness, devastation, and resolution we feel together when tragedy corrects itself and all is set right in Denmark.

September 10th. My annual reflection.

As the dawn rose on August 7th, 1974, a lithe figure stepped out into the space between Towers One and Two of the brand new World Trade Center. 

For the next forty-five minutes, he made eight passes between the towers on a cable barely visible from the ground carrying a 55-pound balancing pole of his own design and even lying down at one point on nothing it seemed to the delight of a mob of commuters 1,350 feet below.

Philippe Petite turned 25 the next week and for his birthday, New York City dropped the litany of charges leveled against him, consigning him to a mandated performance for children in Central Park, provided he use a net.

This extraordinary event in New York City history has been pushed into a smaller corner of our collective memories by the terrible events that would transpire on that site twenty-seven years later. And it was foolish perhaps. But as we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the worst day in my life, I'd like to recall this day, when a bit of derring-do captured our imaginations and cemented a vision of joy paving the way for many days of joy over many years to come at the original World Trade Center. 

Our memories of loss might better be sprinkled with any number of happy memories that give loss its center and its meaning, a testament to our extraordinarily human resilience when it comes time to cope.

MoMA with Jeff. Andy Warhol: Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962.

Nearly every artist represented in the collection at MoMA suffered the scorn of his or her contemporaries, let alone their colleagues and the already established art community and whatever norms had settled from the dust of the previous artistic revolution. But perhaps none more so than Andy Warhol. Warhol continues to be one of the most polarizing figures in the landscape of art history and criticism, an artist, in fact, who created a great schism at the very institution we are talking about in these posts after a 1962 exhibition at MoMA catapulted him to the apex or nadir, depending upon your perspective, of the discussion of what, exactly, is art.

Warhol was a first-generation American, the son of Lemko immigrants from present-day Slovakia. His father worked in the coal mines of southwest Pennsylvania and the growing family moved a few times in and around the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. As a young boy, Warhol was stricken with what is believed today to have been scarlet fever, leaving him weak, blotchy, bedridden months on end, outcast by peers, and ultimately, a rather neurotic hypochondriac. He found salvation in art and after toying with the idea of attending Pitt, then teaching, he settled instead on the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today's Carnegie Mellon) to become an artist in his own right.

What is often overlooked in the bright burning spotlight that was his life and career, the swirl that surrounded all of it, Warhol was a supremely gifted artist. An excellent draftsman and illustrator, his line could be brilliantly executed. Second, and more important for me, his use of color was beyond even that of the Fauvists. He pushed that envelope to new emotional heights and were I to ask you, I can almost guarantee you could summon up the red of his Campbell soup can in your mind's eye. It is not the red Campbell's uses, by the way, it is Warhol's slightly altered version and to maximum effect. 

Through his painting, his silk-screening, his films, his sculptural installations, his writing, Warhol did much to succeed in an effort attempted by many of his predecessors: Compose an all-encompassing artistic aesthetic that touched every part of the human experience.

Why so controversial, then? Well, first, I think because his silk-screening techniques allowed him to mass produce his work, something other artists and collectors likely feared as the market place shifted between what is good art and what is simply valuable because of its rarity. It was a good, well-timed, and much-needed thumb to the nose, if you ask me.

Secondly, with further-reaching implications, the mirror he held up to us was not entirely flattering. In an ever-increasing consumer culture, we are attracted to the popular, to the manipulated, to the ordinary dressed up in emperor's clothes. Why is a box of Brillo pads art? Because by re-contextualizing it, we examine what draws us to it in the first place. This is at least part of what is at the core of popular art, or Pop Art as it became to be known. That is why it is good art. 

But if we use the construct that good art reflects the human condition, whereas great art predicts the human condition, why might Warhol be great? 

Because he predicts the Kardashians, he predicts the internet, or mass communication at least, he predicts the downfall of celebrity, the loss of its cache, in an age when anyone can become famous simply for being famous, recognizable for nothing but exposure, and with fame accessible to absolutely everyone, the value of it bottoms out. He lived in a time when celebrity meant everything. He predicts our decade when it is utterly meaningless.

I also would like to mention for a moment his often forgotten good heart. He went on to mentor hundreds of artists and the world might never have known the genius of Jean-Michel Basquiat alone, for example, were it not for his eagle eye and generosity, spiritually and financially.

The painting I chose today, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, underscores some of these premises, and another emerging theory of mine, to boot.

Of the three women Warhol returned to repeatedly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I think two were in on the joke and one never thought any of it funny to begin with. Monroe and Taylor sought fame, but the fame they enjoyed (or didn't) was the crapshoot of genetics, their beauty was their slingshot. They understood that. And could be self-deprecating and remarkably humble and prescient as their stars rose. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' beauty was part of her equation, but it was the worst day of her life and one of the worst in the world that cemented her celebrity status.

Here we have Marilyn Monroe, painted days after her suicide. Alone is a sea of gold. And my emerging theory plays out before us: That great artists have an innate or deeply cultivated sense of their moment in history which sets them apart uniquely able to change the course of theirs and in their wake, ours as well.

This is more than a nod to the iconoclastic paintings of Orthodox Byzantium after the great schisms where the Kingdom of God was not representational but beyond the representational, where gold stood in for the perfection of the next world. Warhol's Byzantine Catholic upbringing is referenced here, as is the sweep of five centuries of subsequent artistic achievement. It is from this fully realized moment in time he paints. As such, we are invited to worship, as we had Marilyn in life, so much so that I can refer to her as we all do by her first name, a familiarity that is assumed we must remember. But she is set small, an insinuation she is not worthy of worship as much as she is of understanding, lost as she is among the vast universe of this canvas she inhabits barely. And she is 'painted Marilyn,' almost clown-like, Warhol's garish use of color a reminder that this was the painted face Marilyn applied as mask, a persona created perfectly for our mass consumption, successful in its execution, but resembling nearly nothing underneath. 

She got the joke until she didn't, the weight of the illusion snapped the tether connecting her to humanity, and the joke, sadly, intensely sadly, turned deadly in her case.

This painting is a cautionary note to the world, I think. And one maybe even lost on its creator. Warhol would go on to become a caricature of himself, lost to the allure of the popping flashbulbs of the paparazzi, wasting time in the night clubs of New York where his sense of authenticity and authentic human connection may have been bruised and broken, his art dimmed and diminished, his trust shattered as much as his body was by the bullets of a 'friend' who nearly assassinated him in 1968, an event from which this hypochondriac never fully recovered, physically, mentally, or spiritually. Fame is a powerful and addictive lie and a fatal one at that. Warhol understood that for us. Until he didn't.

MoMA with Jeff: Marc Chagall: I And The Village, 1911.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Lionza, a suburb of Vitebsk, then part of the Russian Empire and a small city of 60,000, half of whose population was Jewish like Chagall himself. Vitebsk was sometimes called the Toledo of Russia for its wooden charm and charming selection of sacred and secular buildings, its slightly cosmopolitan resemblance to its Spanish counterpart. Wood does not weather well a world war or two and nothing Chagall might recognize exists any longer, except for Chagall's talent and his relentless need to capture his memories in paint. 

And none of those painted memories would have been possible without Chagall's mother who bribed the local high school headmaster with 50 rubles to allow her son to finish his education in a world where the stigmatization of Jews had reached the beginning of its worst slippery slope in an already troubled history. By the turn of the century, Russian Jews had been consigned to the Pale, Jewish settlements in the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Chagall's Belarus. Chagall's father hauled herring for a living, back-breaking, demeaning, barely compensated work while his mother operated a small market out of the family living room. And yet Chagall recalls never going hungry, the luxury of buttered bread always in his belly. 

He discovered drawing from a friend who told him to borrow books and copy pictures. Chagall thought it was magic and told his parents he wanted to be an artist. 

When I was a boy, I told my parents I wanted guitar lessons. For years, once a week, my mother took me to Mr. Costello's music store and I had guitar lessons. It hadn't occurred to me the sacrifice of this endeavor until one windy night the five dollar bill due for my instruction flew out of my mother's hand and we spent frantic hours on a chilly autumn night roaming the streets looking for it, finally finding it miraculously among a pile of leaves in a doorway. What our parents do to nourish us, how their selflessness replaces hunger, how we might never know save for some whipped up molecules on a planet spinning in space. This is what comes to mind when I think of Mrs. Chagall risking her life and a fortune to boot so that her son could study among the Christian boys of Vitebsk.

Chagall hit the art world as Cubism was all the rage and the last word in Paris and its effect on his entire body of work is obvious. But like Matisse, he was a master of color. Perhaps even more so, at least enough for Picasso to proclaim, "Once Matisse is dead, only Chagall will understand what color really is." More symbolic than abstract, his canvases are fantastical, the things of which dreams are made, flirtations with surrealism, but more rooted in reality, rooted nearly always in sentiment, but not gooey syrup-y sentiment, rather the well deserved and hard-won sentiment of loss and remembrance of things past.

Chagall is thought of as a Modernist, but more so as the preeminent Jewish Modernist, and his life was fittingly composed of many exoduses far from the home he loved. He studied in Paris, returned through Germany to his fiancé at home, barely survived the terrors of the first World War, escaped the second through the dangers of Vichy France from where he had to be recused by the United States, very nearly a victim of The Holocaust. Certainly too many of his paintings were, deemed 'degenerate' by the Nazis and burned in bonfires of vanity. He eventually settled in the south of France where he died what seems like yesterday to me, in 1985, at the age of 97.

I pass his murals, The Source and The Triumph of Music at The Met, several times a week. I bring every group visiting the UN to his breathlessly blue stained Peaceglass window. A few years ago, I glimpsed up at his ceiling at the Palais Garner, the old Paris Opera, to see his quadrants of colors celebrating the luminaries of ballet and opera. 

And today, I chose this: I And The Village, 1911, from MoMAs collection.

This painting is a love-letter to his childhood, his boyhood home, and like love, it is hard to describe sequentially all that is happening. But let's try. The figures in the fore, a green man (add Fauvist to Chagall's lengthy resume) is connected by a barely perceptible line to the eye of a goat, reminding us the line between animal and man was as inextricable as it was tenuous to peasant life. Circles abound like planets, creating orbits and planes, one containing the tree of life exploding like stardust, another, a hillside where churches stand next to upside down houses, gravity giving way to memory, crosses coexisting with a Jewish peasant dressed in black and portentously carrying a scythe but in a living ballet with a lovely woman playing the ubiquitous Chagall fiddle. (The fiddler on the roof is not a Chagall convention, it is a Chagall invention.) It is nighttime, it is daytime, it is quiet, it is lively, it is as celestial as it is earthbound, and all of it bathed in the most magnificent jewel tones, like a tapestry for the downtrodden, like the backdrop for an opera in which the hero is the lowest born and most deserving. 

Chagall was in Paris when he painted this, and didn't know a word of French. Alone and lonesome he retreated to the recesses of his warmest memories, a place where his parents bathed him in love and where his bride-to-be waited in a window for his return, before some mysterious divide presented itself between Jew and Gentile, before the world fell apart, and we can watch all of it unfold one hundred years later, his mind spinning out of control on this canvas with the sweetest symbols of love and remembrance.

MoMA with Jeff: Milton Glaser: I (heart) N Y concept sketch, 1976.

Milton Glaser was born in NYC in 1929, attended the High School For Music and Art, got his undergrad from the Cooper Union in the East Village, co-founded and designed the logo for New York Magazine, and that of Brooklyn Brewery. And at 87, he still roams our streets like the thoroughly New York royalty he is because once upon a time he saved us from the trash heap of history.

In 1975, the largest city in the nation was on the brink of bankruptcy. Major corporations were leaving in droves, manufacturing had dried up, and container vessels had outgrown the docks of Manhattan. We had been a company town that made clothing, sugar, household products, appliances, and shipped and received from what had been the busiest port in the world for 120 years. None of that was true any longer.

The red-lining of minority neighborhoods like Harlem, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1930s broiled over in racial tension and violence, slum lords sat in comfort in homes in Florida, absentee, as their properties crumbled to the ground in NYC. Entire blocks, in Manhattan mind you, had simply disappeared. Crime raged through the streets, and as a young boy, I recall the first ten minutes of every local newscast in the evening, before the first commercial, was a litany of the murder and violent crime that had ravaged lives just the night before.

President Ford initially refused federal aid to the unofficial capital of the United States of America. It is understandable. The city seemed beyond salvation. New York City very nearly ceased to be. Who knows where that trajectory may have led, except for the displacement of millions, and the dispersement of the greatest concentration of creativity and innovation the world has ever known.

One thing NYC still had in 1976 were its Mad Men, if you will. and none were better than Milton Glaser. In an effort revitalize the city merely through perception, not in accounts, not in bank vaults, not in rehabilitation of neighborhoods, but first in the minds of the watching world, Mr. Glaser took four characters and strung them in a line (yes, in a line at first): the capital letter I, followed by a red heart symbol, followed by the capital letters N and Y, while riding in the back seat of a moving taxi cab.

Originally conceived as a statewide effort to bring back businesses stretching from Buffalo to Brooklyn, it was also to be a short-lived ad campaign, a shot in the dark without much promise, and Mr. Glaser produced the work pro bono.

Formalized with black letters set in a rounded slab serif typeface called American Typewriter, eventually stacked into the cube we recognize today, and coupled with a catchy tune and showcasing in update after updated version current Broadway hits and their casts, the campaign somehow caught the imagination of a sleeping nation who finally saw potential where only years, months, perhaps a few weeks earlier, they had only seen decay. 

The city divided itself up into smaller business improvement districts, neighborhood pride replaced an overburdened bureaucracy, Mayor David Dinkins doubled the size of the police force, and with Broadway still the golden carrot dangled above the world, the Big Apple polished itself up in a forty year project that spans my lifetime. The changes I have seen...

So after yesterday's challenging submission, I give you an easy Monday morning: Milton Glaser's original pitch for I (heart) NY hangs augustly at MoMA, a piece of popular art, derived from another medium as Pop Art often is, but elevated by purpose, by performance, and by recognition. This logo is instantly recognized around the world, is copied for effect, for satire, or, movingly, after 9/11 for example, resurrected for charity. But for its power to steer the most cosmopolitan city the world has ever known away from an iceberg, this four-character logo deserves its own museum in my mind. 

It saved my home.

MoMA with Jeff: Kasimir Malevich: White on White, 1918.

It is time. 

Time to delve into the kind of painting that may most frustrate and confound those who bravely confront modernism with me, with open minds and hearts.

Kasimir Malevich was born in 1878 in Kiev when Kiev was part of the Russian Empire, but inhabited by Poles whose country had been dissolved during one of the many times in history Poland would simply be absorbed cruelly and fatally by its neighbors. One of fourteen children, his family was on the move constantly throughout the Ukraine in search of farm work on sugar beet plantations, exposing the young boy to the local culture, particularly embroidery, throughout his youth. At the age of 12, Kasimir began to draw, influenced by Russian folk art which took him to Moscow to formally study art.

His early works are representational, charming, one might say Chekovian in their sentiments. But a major exhibition by Russian Cubist Aristarkh Lentulov transformed the young rebel at heart to his core. So taken by this directness, by the growing definition of art, he tweaked the movement to his own proclivities and by 1915, he had produced a manifesto on a movement he christened Suprematism, based on 'the supremecy of artistic feeling' rather than the depiction of representational objects. 

The palette would be minimal, the planes, flat in execution, perhaps more dimensional in perception, the subjects, geometrical. (And the more I study the Russians of this period, Chagall, Kandinsky, this gravitational leaning towards geometry seems to be cultural or genetic or proximal.)

You may be surprised as I to learn this painting I chose for today from MoMAs collection, Malevich's White on White, dates from 1918. We are nearly one hundred years away from the kind of utter abstraction we often forget has roots so deep in our artistic history.

There is one paramount notion to remember when approaching a painting with this kind of surface simplicity: It has anything but. Malevich was capable of painting the kind of representational work we might consider a masterpiece at face value as much as any neoclassicist. This work does not define his limitations artistically. On the contrary, so avant-garde a work is this, it is a demonstration of how far this artist could think outside of his history, his milieu, his moment in time.

The second notion to bear in mind reminds me of a scene in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Young Cordelia Flyte asks family friend Charles Ryder, "Modern art, it's all bosh, isn't it?" And Charles fobs her off, "Great bosh." But this is Waugh at his satirical best, writing in a memory novel during World War II, a moment that takes place between the Great Wars. As much as abstractionism has been part of our vernacular for nearly a century, we must think back to these artists, Europeans largely, who saw fathers, brothers, sons, marched off to wars, firing squads, camps, blistering gas attacks, whose villages were bombed capriciously, whose families were flung into unwilling diasporas, a rootlessness that haunts later generations even today. The horrors of an entire world at war, the carnage, the terror, the agonizing years of it, only to be plunged into the hell of it some twenty years later, shattered everyone, particularly those whose hearts traded in the human condition, those who chose to document it, and as I suggested at the outset of this journey into MoMA, those who chose to predict where we might go as a community, as a people, as a civilization.

Nothing meant what it had any longer. And the value of everything had to build up a language of currency.

So, after a World War, the death of an empire, a regicide, a Russian, in revolution mind you, paints a white square, off balance, floating in a slightly warmer white field. The elements are so simple as to be discussed in a sentence, the feeling of hovering, the eternity of white, the movement suggested by the tilted square within the square. Malevich will not pretend to have answers, and for someone who produced a fiery manifesto at the age of 37, I find this notion of him supremely egoless. But the implications are legion. I believe at least he is suggesting, we, we humans, we emerge from these crucibles of terror baptismal, transformed by consequence, but unsullied in our capacity for goodness, floating for now, but floating, if anything is for certain, back to earth, where we shall proceed in spite of ourselves, forward. 

I look at this painting, admittedly a lover of Russian plays, Russian music, Russian dance (nearly everything Russian but Russian policy and centuries of oppression), this painting of purity rendered between years of unimaginable bloodshed, and I feel the most unlikely feeling in the midsts of everything chaotic and sentimental and sweeping and inhuman, unbearably beautiful and horrifying that is Russian: Hope.

MoMA with Jeff: Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1915.

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamps were a trinity of talent and theory, the triumvirate that propelled the direction of the 'plastic arts,' arts that flowed easily from painting to ceramics to sculpture to stagecraft, during the bulk of the 20th Century. But it was Picasso who had the personality to prod his contemporaries like no other, infuriate them into response, and cultivate their own styles simply to challenge his own it seems at times. He was seductive, manipulative, tireless, prodigious, and possessed of a talent that allowed him to glide effortlessly from style to style, many of which he helmed, to incomparable effect.

For someone who enjoyed his ability to steer the lives of others, someone who might be described as 'impresario,' someone who understood the theatricality and drama of his life force and artistic achievement, I think it no accident Picasso culled a 16th Century commedia dell'arte image for himself and rendered it dozens of times in painting after painting as a fitting self-image, particularly in the period between 1901 and 1905, that of The Harlequin. That he would revisit the subject in 1915 was a message in a bottle to all of us who wish inside his head.

To begin with, there is something so graphically pleasing about Harlequin, so iconically recognizable in the diamond motif of his costume, that it had to be appealing to the man for whom three of his periods have been named Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, and Crystal. But for someone with Picasso's emotional breadth, his courage to enter dark places, and his ability to convey great love and joy, Harlequin is emotionally iconic as well, painted, for example and just as often, by Picasso's predecessor of some two hundred years, Watteau.

Harlequin is the meddler, cheeky, agile, skillful, yes, manipulative, attractive, street smart, wily. But he is an outsider, stuck in a lower social circle, pulling the strings from below. Despite how high he could fly by the seat of his pants and with the wiles between his ears, he always risks scorched wings, he always settles back to his station. Pull back the cheerful mask from this often-masked character, I suspect a tear would reflect off a stage lamp more often than not. How Picasso, the swarthy Spaniard living among the stratified Parisians, must have identified, how well he must have thought he could render these thoughts abstractly, straight to the heart, in the two dimensions favored by Cézanne and his protégées, how directly he must have hoped he could tell us his secrets with the utmost authenticity but maintaining the plausible deniability one might need to bar the vultures, the beasts, the obtuse from a tender heart.

For today, I spring ten years forward from the height of Picasso's identification with Harlequin and offer up MoMAs 1915 painting.

Here, the Harlequin is ambiguous. Where we see diamonds from expectation are sometimes, actually, polygrams, loosely knit together, bleeding into one another on a form that barely resembles the human, block-like as it is. Faceless, but in front of an easel, I think it is clearly the artist. But if anything breaks the flatness of dimension, it is that which the artist holds out to us, a white canvas with the outline of a silouhette. The nose and slope of the forehead are clues it is indeed Picasso, but from the side and featureless it is, anything but a self-portrait in a conventional sense. Surrounding the entire field is a sea of black. 

It is important to note that during the execution of this painting, Picasso spent hours everyday visiting the hospital where his mistress, Eva Gouel, lay sick and dying. He wrote as much to Gertrude Stein (the company these people kept, astounding) on December 9th, 1915, the day he completed the work. Five days later, Eva was dead.

This painting is thoroughly modern, in its palette, in its abstraction, in its dimensionality, but more so in its content. Picasso had exhausted Cubism and lost his lover. Grief-stricken and wandering emotionally and artistically, he gives us this study in anxiety, floating in a vacuum. What courage it must have taken to lay into this canvas with anything like doubt for this mountain of a personality: I am no longer who I was, the clown is dead, but where am I? 

And how often is every step of every day in our lives riddled with that question if we are brave enough to ask it? How often is life derailed in an unforeseen instant by loss, by love? And how often do we present an unfinished portrait of who we are to our loved ones with this humble plaintive plea, please to tell me whom you see? Who am I? Please. Where do I go?

MoMA with Jeff: Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916.

Henri Matisse came to art a little later in his 84 years, in 1889, at the age of eighteen, when his mother gave him a box of paints to help him while away the hours of convalescence after a bout with appendicitis. He was said to have 'discovered paradise' in that box, and given the stunning breadth of his contribution to the art world, that is difficult to argue.

He fast became a student of the world, studying in Paris, reveling in the neoclassicists like Poussin and Flandrin, but traveling throughout Europe where he would encounter John Peter Russell in Brittany and discover the Impressionism ironically born in his own backyard at home. His works are influenced by perhaps a wider array of 19th Century European painters than any of his contemporaries, Turner, Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin. Braque, Pissarro, Picasso, among others can all be seen in his evolution. And while his blurring the line between painting and sculpture might be seen as his most significant artistic advancement, it is his color theory and nod to the Japanese printmakers that were making a mark in France at the time that speak loudest to me.

He is well represented at MoMA. And I chose his Piano Lesson to speak of today.

Painted in 1916, Matisse had already earned himself a seat at the head of the table of the Fauvists, the 'beasts,' for their nearly heretical adaptation of the color wheel. The abstraction of color was one step ahead of the abstraction of form, perhaps, but no one was ahead of Matisse on both fronts.

The painting here is a study of time. And in its execution, Matisse painted in great detail the great room of his home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb just slightly southwest of the heart of Paris. But then he began to scrape away the minutiae leaving only the barest essentials, splashing swaths of color to bear the weight of lost detail. The result is highly emotional, fractured, nearly Cubist, and telling. Because it is also a painting of light, or more accurately, the passing of light, the measurement by which essentially we tell time.

At the piano sits Matisse's son Pierre, younger than he would have been in 1916, as World War I raged and Pierre himself was already conscripted and awaiting orders. Here, instead, he practices, grimly, with the plodding metronome echoed on his face and then extended outward beyond the lovely French windows and their scrolled grille-work as the sun angles itself off the empty sumptuous lawn for the night, sundials everywhere.

Matisse references himself on the canvas with a rendering of his bronze reclining woman in the lower left, and looming like a stern piano teacher over Pierre's shoulder, Matisse's Woman on a High Stool. They are his contributions to immortality. These objets d'art and his son. And therein lies the secret of this painting for me.

Imagine if you can (or remember if you will) awaiting orders for your son to go off to a war from which the wrong fraction returned, from which a worse fraction returned scarred for life, your son, set to leave the safety of your gaze, at any age, your heart wandering outside of yourself, anywhere, really, but if you can, on a battlefield, and imagine then, trying to decipher time, to fracture it into photons, to fragment every possible moment before your heart might break and you are plunged into the gray that haunts this painting on the periphery like the very coldest shadow in the valley of death. I think that is what Matisse is up to here. He would rather the pissy look on his son's face, stuck at the piano and stealing a wickedly mean glance back at him while the joys of the lawn squander themselves outside and alone, yes, he would rather suffer the silly petty hatred of his littler boy for eternity, than offer him up to a bullet in the blink of an eye.

So, the father surrounds his son with beloved objects in the heart of his home, sets him younger and lower on a bench, as simply as possible, safe, behind a massive piece of furniture, making music until time plays itself out, and all the clocks stop, forever.

MoMA with Jeff. Paul Cézanne. The Bather, 1885.

The beginning of the "modern" era typically refers to the advent of psychology. In the art world, this introspection, this distinct delineation between sensation and perception, not only gives rise to a uniquely new individual dignity (where you sit in the universe is just as compelling as where I sit), but an individual aspect and validation regarding what is art, what can be art, whom can art represent, and whom can art enoble, that is, everyone and everything. Art is everywhere, among all of us, each of us.

It is no coincidence then that Paul Cézanne painted during the rise of the bourgeoisie, a middle-class that asserted itself, demanding dignity, and responded to by artists like Cézanne who shared their aesthetic and led the way to a vocabulary that could be as precise as it could be frighteningly, decidedly ambiguous. While Freud may have defined the epoch, Cézanne gave it a meaning beyond words and as such, is often referred to as the Father of Modern Art. It was his revolution that would give us the Impressionists, Fauvism, Abstraction, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, in almost direct lineage. He sits at the head of an unprecedented artistic dynasty.

For today, I chose one of his early, more representational paintings from MoMAs collection: The Bather, 1885.

I chose it for several reasons. It is indeed representational for the most part and is perhaps, an easier segue into the more confusing aspects that we may generalize as Modern. But this is distinctly modern in many many respects. Let me begin with execution for starters. George Eastman had invented film a year before. For the young man, Cézanne is working from a photograph rather than a live model. This will become increasingly popular among many other artists including Picasso as photography becomes more available to the general public.

But well beyond that bit of technique, regard the line. Cézanne is a master of line, and his 'outline.' if you will of a young adolescent not only defines the figure, defines dimensions Cezanne is almost willing to dispense with, like the third (the painting yields itself to the reality and flatness of the two dimensions of a canvas, something Cezanne was quite happy to remind us whenever he could), but also defines a kind of holiness, a setting apart of subject his from his environment in an almost sacred way, not accidentally I would assert, in the way that lead separates the carefully cut pieces in a spiritual stained glass window, the way, say, Picasso and Max Beckmann and even Mondrian and Roy Lichtenstein would go on to do.

This is not a conventional sacred figure, however. It is not The Christ, certainly, although one, I think, is invited to make comparisons. It is you. It is I. Holy and imperfect as we are. A little short, maybe, a little wide. And in the most modern sense, afraid, trepid at least, placed in an ambiguous environment, undefined conventionally, painted in an unsettling palette, and suggesting both movement in his legs and paralysis in his torso. Like the last moments of Godot, he seems to plan to move, but waits instead. He is more Hamlet than saint (and you'll forgive the reference but Shakespeare is one of those authors who transcends time, he could be entirely modern three hundred years before his time), and further, we are denied the truth of his eyes.

Everything about this painting says vulnerability to me, but courage as well. He is alone. Except for all of us who share the moment, understand the feeling, share his vulnerability. It is the most intimate of communions when you enter his space, hoping me may look up.

MoMA with Jeff: Umberto Boccioni. States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, 1911.

Follow me here. Much has been written about how little has been written about Futurism, a movement that burned brightly at the top of the 20th Century but had essentially been reduced to embers once it became entirely misunderstood, co-opted, and recallibrated after the death of its youngest, fiercest, most gifted proponent, Umberto Boccioni in 1916 at the tender age of 33.

Boccioni co-authored a manifesto in fact, calling for an art that addressed the everyday, the worker, but most visually telling, a dynamism of radiating energy through line and color that placed the viewer at the heart of the work, at the heart of the artist's vision, a connectivity between artist and audience, ergo, all of us.

The Cubists would deconstruct and abstract, the Futurists were more interested in creating an emotional landscape that was active and intuitively recognizable. I find it less nihilistic. And profoundly moving.

Here, his States of Mind III: Those Who Stay is the third painting of a triptych that hangs together at MoMA thanks to an extraordinary gift of curation by Nelson Rockefeller.

The third hits me hardest. At a train station, The Farewells are frantic, Those Who Go have their anxious fear countered by anticipation, but Those Who Stay, they are the people I want to know, their loneliness occupying a space transformed simply by the lack of a loved one, the familiar rendered unbearable.

And look how Boccioni enshrines that loss here. Monochromatic, as though the only thing that connects the leftovers is the blue of their mood, but solid vertical lines in close proximity cut them off from one another and even parts of themselves like some kind of cruel solitary confinement, like a rain that obscures, with a power that is almost heartless, but an evenness and egalitarianism that conveys an understanding that is full of grace and compassion.

MoMA with Jeff: René Magritte: The Empire of Light II, 1950.

René Magritte was a Belgian artist, born at the very end of the 19th Century, whose oeuvre spanned nearly the entire Modern movement from Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to Pop Art, but largely and more famously hovering around Surrealism. 

As someone who supported himself in advertising, there is something graphic, immediate, witty, and eye-catching among his most enduring works, less disturbing perhaps than the works of Dali, but often just as striking, as Jungian in their attempt to connect with our collective unconscious.

Here, among a trilogy of paintings he entitled L'Empire des lumières or The Empire of Light, is the one in the collection at MoMA. (Another hangs just up the street at the Guggenheim and for the third, one must, fittingly, travel to Brussels to encounter.)

A single streetlamp illuminates a haunting lonely streetscape, made more eery by the disconnect of the bright blue daytime sky hanging incongruously overhead, complete with one of his hallmarks, an array of rather evenly placed jolly puffy clouds, like clowns, clowns where they shouldn't be. What is more unnerving?

So potent was the image it was used by the producers of The Exorcist for their advertising material.