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.

In remembrance, 9/11/2015.

It's a lovely day here in NYC, the sun creeping lower in the sky now and casting the distinctly yellower shades of Autumn on the sidewalks, calm and fair. It is much like that morning fourteen years ago before the calm was shattered. And so my mind went reeling back to my thirties, to who I was that morning, memorizing lines of a play by an author who sadly has since passed away. Many people have since passed away, of course.

I thought I might keep quiet this September 11th, because I wondered if I now felt compelled and falsely so to plunge myself into the grief of that day by the sheer force of voices calling us to remember it. So much has happened to you and to me and to us since then. I will share that among my initial thoughts as the towers came down, beyond the horror of the unfolding chaos, was a soul-scorching realization that we were being plunged into darkness, a darkness like the Dark Ages, like the Armenian Genocide, like the Khmer Rouge, the dark cloud that roams the Earth and descends upon a population occasionally and cruelly, something perhaps like the Holocaust, dark years that stain humanity and culture and everything we know to be true and good from which, I fear, we never fully recover. I was not necessarily wrong in these feelings; the fear that gripped us is evident in the barricades we must cross every single day now to access our most public and cherished institutions, the court house, the ferry boat to Liberty, the friendly skies. But the barricades around the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square have come down I was thrilled to see the other day, and I wondered that anything I said today might fan the flames of fear that I hoped may be subsiding these fourteen years later.

But the confluence of today's anniversary and a recent discovery drives me to write to you and to join in your voices of shared community. 

In South Africa earlier this week, the remains of what may be a new species of hominid were discovered in a cave, remote and undisturbed. Smaller brained than we, its hands and feet were uniquely like ours. What made the discovery most astounding is that anthropologists may have stumbled upon the first hominid gravesite. Which begs the good question: What does it mean to be human?

Perhaps it means we are self-aware, aware of our mortality and that of others. Other species exhibit behavior that suggests this awareness as well, elephants for example. But the ritualized burial of these early hominids by their fellows indicates something more profound. Humans recognize one another's dignity and in a cruel and fearful world, work together to memorialize this journey through life's difficult days and fitful nights. "They were here," is a good cry in the dark and we can learn something from that journey if it is indeed remembered.

So I join all of you in remembering today. We all must go the way of the departed. We remember them to tell their good stories, how they survived until they didn't, how they moved the human condition forward, how their stories of light and love and laughter are more important and brave than the stories of cruelty and fear, how their destruction fails our sense of justice, how their creation fuels every good human endeavor.

A sweet Cymbeline.

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's enigmatic late plays, where the lines of comedy and tragedy blur into deeply rendered psychological layers, where the poetry of our greatest poet seems effortless by now, where the master wrights four and five and six plots together with both dizzying complexity and surprising clarity. 

In Central Park's current and free production, the set looks like an exploded theatrical trunk from which the actors seem to have scavenged their own anachronistic costumes. It is pure whimsy, but so carefully wrought that nine actors fill out the dozens of roles. And it is altogether fitting that we crown the real-life couple of Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe our reigning actors of the venue. They are accomplished artists with many splendid gifts, but more alluring to me is the way they have endeared themselves to the festival atmosphere of Shakespeare in the Park. Their gusto is utterly infectious.

The evening is at times silly and rambunctious but in its more affecting moments (and there are a remarkable number of them) it had me in tears. More seems to be at stake for these lovers than in the earlier tragedies. Or comedies for that matter. Shakespeare trods a middle ground here that punches me in my gut a little harder, because we are so off kilter throughout this play, laughing when we've been crying, only to be plunged into Imogen and Posthumus' sorrow all over again.

Underscoring much of the evening is a truly wondrous musical score that pointedly aids the complicated story line, but wisely gets out of the way when Shakespeare's images float unaided into the trees of Central Park. The funeral dirge, Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, touched me with such a sweet sadness that I never wanted it to end.

The evening is three hours long. And again, I never wanted it to end. To hear a pin drop in New York City as Imogen pleads for her death from grief is as magical as hearing thousands of people scream with laughter at Linklater's other antics in his dual role as the loutish peevish Napolean Dynamite-esque Cloten or Raul Esparza's oily and hilarious lounge-y turn as Iachimo.

I got to see the show tonight, forgoing the day-long line, thanks to my talented friend Kate DeWall who is now Master Electrician for The Public Theatre. She was an intern when I met her. She is a star. But mostly, like all the interns I've met, she is a star because she is a star of a person.

Dear friends, if anyone ever offers you the chance to see Shakespeare, go see it? I was bone-weary after a long tour today. And there is nothing like sitting in community, in the dark, while the most beautiful words in the English language parade themselves through your head. It is ennobling. It is a great grand joy.

Tower Two, 2.0

As the outrage mushrooms over the internet, let me share my initial thoughts on Bjark Ingels' design for the new Two World Trade Center.

I, too, was looking forward to Norman Foster's quadri-diamonded crystal of a tower as the most anticipated building after Santiago Calatrava's transportation hub that is easily my favorite bit of architecture going up on the site.

Foster was not scrapped for artistic reasons, but for the practical. Tower Two will host television production studios and their offices and the Dow Jones. The layout of Foster's tower did not efficiently maximize the space towards those ends. Ingels' does.

But Ingels' does more. It pushes the envelope.

We are a predictable lot when it comes to our art. I'm as guilty as the next. We hate the newest thing until it is old and shoved by proxy into the warmer parts of our heart by the next newly vilified adventure.

This design is worth our praise.

It is not so much unlike anything we've ever seen (the new cantilevered apartment building One Madison Square springs to mind) as it is unlike anything we ever expected of an office tower. It has a precariousness to it that flies in the face of corporate power and the corporate towers that precede it. In fact, it is in many ways, the reverse of a NYC skyscraper. Or, better put, the inverse.

Look at its silhouette and notice the World Financial Center at its feet. NYC is known for its setbacks, a design element that was mandated after the nearby Equitable Building cut off the sun as early as 1915, one hundred years ago.

Tower Two does the opposite, on two of its sides, filling in that negative space in the skyline, in our minds, but granting sun past its other edges simultaneously.

Some architecture is driven by narcissism. "I am here. Are you?" But this building is having a conversation with its neighboring buildings, responding to them, sharing the sky.

I love that it is unexpected, I love that it surprises with its overhangs, I love that it plays nicely with its neighbors, but mostly, I love that it dares us to catch up with it.

Christie's breaks a record.

Pablo Picasso's Les femmes d’Alger sold at auction for $179.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. While art prices have inflated for dubious reasons in the last decade with pieces often trading beyond their intrinsic artistic merit, this is indeed a masterpiece of the highest order and the culmination of a series Picasso painted, fifteen works in fact on this subject, that were a poignant expression of his love for two artists, one a predecessor, Eugene Delacroix, and one a recently deceased contemporary, Henri Matisse.

In 1834, Delacroix had painted his Women of Algiers in the bold colors that Picasso loved, in a nod to the Orient whose subject matter and aesthetic fascinated Picasso.

While Picasso's rendering here is uniquely his own, one can easily see the conversation he is having with a previous master. And too, one can see the graphic abstraction of form and shape and the sense of collage that his chief rival Matisse often employed, indeed in his own work entitled The Woman of Algiers. Picasso references these with care and affection, and in the very months after Matisse's death.

Matisse and Picasso were actually friends, but intense competitors as well, and this legendary adversarial posture was responsible for some of the greatest art in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Great artists have a sense of history and subvert their mighty egos to their place in time. Picasso does that here in a composition of such complexity that the work stands alone. But it rises to greater heights in this astounding gesture of gratitude.

New York City preserves itself.

The NYC Landmarks Law turns 50 this week. And this is the story of just one building it saved.

John Jacob Astor III and his wife Charlotte founded The New York City Cancer Hospital in 1884 in a fortress of a building at Central Park West and 106th Street, largely in response to former President Ulysses S. Grant's inoperable throat cancer. It is important to remember how much the entire nation loved Grant for his efforts to bring the North and South together again.

Cancer was thought of as a dirty disease, a disease of bad hygiene and poverty. It ruined people's lives with humiliation, let alone the deadly consequences. Grant's illness brought national attention to cancer.

This building's sumptuous design owed as much to the French gothic as it did to turn of the century advances in hospital care: round rooms to provide cleanliness and ample head space between beds and massive central ventilation shafts to clear the air of germs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose practiced nursing here.

Because cancer continued to be so deadly, however, the hospital was stigmatized by New Yorkers and even nicknamed The Bastille. It deteriorated from lack of funds. In 1955, it closed its doors as a hospital and moved its services across town to become the new Memorial Sloane-Kettering hospital for Cancer Research.

It suffered a few poor incarnations, abandoned at certain times, jerry-rigged as a nursing home at others, and falling apart as NYC did in the 70s. But fortunately, it was granted landmark status in 1976.

Many developers tried to use the building, but most certainly it would have been torn down if not for this protection. Finally in 2000, it was purchased and developed into condominiums.

After a massive restoration and repurposing which included adding a residential tower behind the original building, today the round rooms are exquisite apartments fetching upwards of seven million dollars a pop.

I'll never get near one of those apartments, but thanks to this law, I get to pass this building several times a week, and I always point out its captured glory to captive and captivated visitors.

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.

Christmas card, NYC, December, 2014.

There is a small evergreen in the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel. Nothing much, but it stood there today on such an historic spot, in the cemetery that dates from 1766, on land that suffered two devastating city fires over the centuries, and, of course, land buried more lately under the weight of two fallen 110-story buildings that awful day in September, well, there it stood, as did I, a wee tree and me, but as it was all dressed up in lights, I felt compelled to take its picture. It obliged.

In the frame of the first photo is the tree, then the new WTC Transportation Hub by Santiago Calatrava, a few sycamore trees, the new One WTC, and the churchyard bell.

The way they all stood side by side made me happy. A new happy conversation of form and shape informing one another, informing the historic and the future, and here was I, present, a silent witness eavesdropping in the middle of it all.

I wandered through the gravestones and took the second picture. Nothing can, and this, from me, who is there five times a week, nothing can prepare one for the majesty of this new sweeping sculptural architecture. It seems impossible the way I'm sure the Brooklyn Bridge once seemed to those eyes that first fell there. And so I thought,

"My. Here, in the dead of winter, in an urban cemetery of all places, anything seems possible."