Elizabeth Peyton's Snapshot Romanticism: New Work at GBE (A Review)

"Snapshot romanticism" may seem like an oxymoron, but it was the first phrase that fired in my brain while thinking of Elizabeth Peyton's small paintings and drawings currently on exhibit at Gavin Brown's Enterprise on Greenwich St. Her use of photographic sources, especially the snapshot genre, with its qualities of chance and candid gesture, and her thought-out brush strokes, belying the choices of a careful painter, combine to create intriguing small portraits. They all pack a lot of punch for their size.

I remember seeing one of Peyton's portraits in MoMA just after the museum reopened and thinking how well she held her own in a room full of super-sized art. I think a big Andreas Gursky photo was nearby. At the GBE gallery, the paintings and drawings are more in competition with themselves, with most holding up under scrutiny. One of the largest paintings here, titled "The Age of Innocence," at 14 1/4 x 10 inches, an oil on board, revels in the beautiful kissing faces of Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis, the stars of the 1993 film by Martin Scorsese. Known for her celebrity portraits, Peyton revels in the beautiful.

Other recognizable figures include a stunning monochromatic portrait of Alice Neel, a sepia-toned painting of the handsome face of Diaghilev, a painting of the poet and artist John Giorno in his study, and a pastel and pencil drawing of Bob Dylan. In another work, Peyton paints a still life featuring flowers, the mythological figure of Actaeon (a hunter that Artemis turns into a stag after she catches him looking at her naked), and a couple of stacked books, one on Dylan, the other Truffaut. Isn't it romantic?

Without pop and myth references, the portraits of individual friends we may not know, such as the ones of Darren, Joe, Matthew and Pati, invite more interest and attention, as if we were meeting someone for the first time. We can look at the blue denim jackets, indigo jeans, a floral print sofa, and in the case of Matthew, his intense blue eyes. I once read that Peyton has a hard time parting with her paintings, and while separation anxiety is not unusual with artists, I can see that with these more intimate paintings, it would be hard to let them go.

Peyton demonstrates she knows the different rules for painting and drawing as opposed to photography. With her paintings, applied on top of copious amounts of dripping gesso that spread beyond the underlying frame, she shows off her strokes, often committed in transparent colorful washes with careful touches of solid color. With her drawings, she's economical in line. Of these works at GBE that I liked best is a painting of hurried pedestrians at an intersection on W. 11th. near Greenwich St. In the middle is the mid-century modern Curran/O'Toole building, a white structure with scalloped overhangs, or portholes, that's currently at risk of demolition. For 9 x 6 inches, she creates an enormous amount of visual interest with the "portrait" of this building. The bottom line might be, however, that the medium is the message. Friends and buildings can come and go. Oil paint lasts forever.

Image: Gallery, 620 Greenwich Street. "Elizabeth Peyton," through May 17, 2008. Gavin Brown's Enterprise.

Spring Art Cleaning: Out with the Junk-Yard Aesthetic and In with the Small Paintings

Can you smell the roses and linseed oil? There's a linen-fresh and sometimes, new mossy scent in the spring art air this week, a sign that this season's winter of artfully messy assemblage has started to off-gas a little and will soon be dragged back to the street from whence it came. At least that's the smell I'm picking up from the big boys and girls of New York's art critical print press, many of whom are publicly exhaling their weariness with the Unmonumentals and Whitneys of our late winter's discontent and are now bathing in the refreshing glows of Olafur Eliasson and elsewhere, all the small paintings. Smells like teen spirit!

Evidence abounds:

• "Stand Still; A Spectacle Will Happen," a review of the Olafur Eliasson retrospective at MoMA by Holland Cotter (and an excellent use of the semi-colon in headline, btw) for The New York Times.
Quote: "What a relief. Near the end of a decade crammed with junk-art collectibles geared to junk-bond budgets, and a museum season of ragbag sculptures and wallpapered words, we get bare walls and open space in the Olafur Eliasson survey..."

• Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Eliasson exhibit at MoMA for The New Yorker is titled "Uncluttered," signaling that the antidote to Unmonumental has arrived. Schjeldahl describes Eliasson's wall of moss as "exotic (and odorous)."

• "Wasted Youth," a review of Dan Cohen and Nate Lowman by Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine:
Quote: "looks too much like too many other shows—many of them excellent, some at Maccarone—to be taken as anything other than bad-boy shtick and hammy caricature. It radiates hipness and camaraderie, and is a warning that artists need to be wary of the point where influence turns into derivativeness."

• Roberta Smith's "Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?" for The New York Times. Smith looks at the new phenomenon of petite abstract paintings in reviews of several painters.

You want to see wonderful small paintings by a major contemporary artist? Stay tuned for my review of Elizabeth Peyton's new small portraits at GBE on Greenwich Street. Roses, oil, linen canvases, and a portrait of Bob Dylan. Hmmm...nice...In comes the good air...hold, hold, hold....release gently....now exhale deeply....ahhhhhh.

See related posts from Walking Off the Big Apple:
Pack Arts Journalism in the Age of Un-Art: Writing About the Whitney Biennial
Unmonumental at the New Museum: Just Like Your Messy Friend's Place

The Shadows Cast Upon the Wall: Paul Chan's Luminous Narrative at the New Museum

When I walked by St. Patrick's Old Cathedral on my way to the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, I had little idea that I'd soon find a relationship between the aged church with the exhibit I would soon see in the museum. Yet, while contemplating the secular and worldly engagement of Paul Chan's The 7 Lights, with its digital projections of falling objects in the light and darkness, I fell into a state of meditation that, while not worship, was like a religious pilgrimage in search of the truth. I could have been in a church, I thought, or at least the kind Le Corbusier would have designed.

Chan began the project of these digital projected loops of Lights, deconstructed with this titular strikethrough, in 2005, and the assembly of seven of them here, placed well on the smooth floors and finished walls of the third floor of the museum, creates an effective and moving exhibit. Framed as the lights and camera obscura images of the shadows cast through a window, the fourteen-minute loops begin with the warm colors of the break of day, proceed through the bright light of the afternoon, and end with the blue-purples of the evening. And begin again, without a seam. As the day unfolds, objects appear and fall or float or ascend. In 1st Light, it's a telephone poll, then a flock of birds, and at some point a falling body, and then more falling bodies. It's horrifically beautiful (or beautifully horrific).

With the 3rd Light, a long table adds an additional surface for the casting shadows, and the table becomes the Last Supper. One sequence in the beamed light in this iteration seems more uncannily like natural daylight than the light in the other projections, and the preternatural white glow strikes both awe and respect, even as the falling objects include chairs, forks, spoons, and dogs. Birds fly by as bodies still fall. The nightmare continues. The only break is some peace at the falling of a new day.

As individuals sometimes walked in front of the projectors, usually by accident or just to shift their points of view, they seemed to not be intrusions but appropriate additions to the passing objects.

The exhibit includes Chan's drawings, collages of paper and charcoal on Styrofoam, and a special drawing of the Marquis de Sade installed in an alcove. The Sade drawing, presented in the genre of costume design, is humorous on the surface, but there's a social message embedded in it, one with a point, so to speak. I can't say more, or I'll ruin it.

It was good to visit the New Museum again after all the hub-bub of the opening exhibit, Unmonumental, and see how well Chan's moving images work in there. I didn't feel the same about the configuration of Tomma Abts paintings on another floor, by the way, - they're too low on the wall, I think, and some a little crooked. Intriguing, well-crafted paintings, yes, but they're lost in space.

For more on the Chan exhibit, see the illuminating online exhibit of Paul Chan's The 7 Lights at the New Museum's website.

Image: First floor, New Museum of Contemporary Art. Walking Off the Big Apple. April 16, 2008.

Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis

A 20-dollar bill doesn't go far in Manhattan, but it's enough to cover the price of the signature Red Snapper at the King Cole Bar inside the St. Regis Hotel at 2 E. 55th St. and over which you can see not only Maxfield Parrish's sublime and recently restored Old King Cole Mural above the elegantly paneled bar but also the means by which you can experience New York through rose-colored glasses.

The "Red Snapper" is the name for the St. Regis Hotel's "Blood Mary," the now-ubiquitous concoction the hotel introduced to the United States. When I visited the bar yesterday afternoon, I already knew I wanted to try one, rationalizing mid-day vodka consumption with the conviction that tomato juice and pepper would help me get over the final stages of a cold. Amply served in a tall curvy glass and with just the right amount of peppery spice, the drink, accompanied by bar snacks of wasabi crunches, pretzels, and mixed nuts, along with the visual wonder of the Old King Cole narrative playing above, helped propel me to a higher state of consciousness.

I visited the bar and the St. Regis as part of this week's exploration of the Classic New York of Mame Dennis. Before I set out on my midtown trip, knowing my destination in advance, I dressed myself in Classic Fashion, ransacking the closet for tailored black clothes and appropriate accessories. I let the spirit of Mame transform my appearance from the scholarly spectacled Agnes Gooch of my morning attire into a dame that seemed at home in the St. Regis. It's not the clothes that open doors to Classic New York, I know, but rather qualities of confidence and posture. Still, it's best to dress up. I also wore dark sunglasses, a powerful fashion addition for reporting from the field.

When I walked through the lobby of the hotel and past the dining area toward the King Cole Bar, at that point shifting the sunglasses to the top of my head, I couldn't count the number of well-groomed service staff members waiting to help the hotel guests. Classic New York, I learned, involves a high ratio of well-trained and polite experts to the willing, and preferably monied, customer. When Mame becomes Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, she moved to ten rooms at the St. Regis Hotel, lifting her out of the impoverished embarrassment of a carriage house in Murray Hill. Lucky her. In the timeline of Patrick Dennis' memoir, she would have arrived at the hotel at just about the time (give or take a couple of years, who's counting?), in 1934, when bartender Fernand Petiot took a job at the bar and invented the "Red Snapper."

Website for the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel

Next up: After the King Cole Bar, negotiating the conga line of Henri Bendel makeup experts.

Image: Arriving at the St. Regis Hotel. April 8, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival & 2008 Festival Highlights

"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."- Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver (1976)

After the attacks of September 11, life in lower Manhattan took a long time to recover. The neighborhood of Tribeca, just north of the WTC site, had already become an attractive destination for artists and families, but after the shocking events of that day potential new residents grew cautious. Area businesses suffered as streets were blocked to traffic, and only residents or those on official business could pass through checkpoints.

Actor Robert De Niro joined with producer Jane Rosenthal and her spouse, the philanthropist and writer Craig Hatkoff, to found the Tribeca Film Festival as a way to help filmmakers in New York and, specifically, to spur the economic recovery of lower Manhattan. Even before the September 11 attacks the three had invested money in the Tribeca neighborhood.

The Tribeca Film Festival, which will take place April 23 -May 4, 2008, continues to grow each year and generate millions of dollars in economic activity for the city.

The festival has just released the lineup for this year's festival, and I've started making a list of features that I would enjoy seeing.

Spotlight Section:

• Lou Reed’s Berlin, directed by Julian Schnabel. (USA) - New York Premiere, Documentary. I failed to get tickets for Reed's 2006 Berlin performance at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, so I'm glad Julian was there.

• My Winnipeg, directed by Guy Maddin, written by George Toles and Maddin. (Canada) - Premiere, Narrative. The imaginative Canadian filmmaker turns his attention to his hometown.

• Man On Wire, directed by James Marsh. (UK) - New York Premiere, Documentary. French daredevil Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974.

• The Universe of Keith Haring, directed by Christina Clausen. (Italy, France) - Premiere, Documentary.

Special Screenings:

• Empire II, directed by Amos Poe. (USA) - North American Premiere, Documentary. 3-hour film about the magic of NYC.

• Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West), directed by Sergio Leone, written by Sergio Donati and Leone, English dialogue by Mickey Knox. (Italy, USA, 1968) - New York Premiere Restoration. My spouse saw this a few weeks ago at the Miami Film Festival and thought it truly beautiful.

Discovery (emerging filmmakers):

• Paraiso Travel, directed and written by Simon Brand. International Premiere, Narrative. Colombians illegally travel from Medellín to New York and find romantic drama.

• Waiting For Hockney, directed by Julie Checkoway. World Premiere, Documentary. Aspiring artist Billy Pappas spent 10 years painting his masterpiece in his parents' attic and needs to show it to David Hockney.

• The Wild Man of the Navidad (link to Shoe Leather, my blog for Reframe), directed and written by Duane Graves and Justin Meeks. World Premiere, Narrative. An urban legend in Texas about a community frightened by a creature in the woods.

Tribeca Film Festival website

Image above by Walking Off the Big Apple

See related Tribeca posts:
The Woolworth Building
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Reflections on Reviewing Art and Culture in the Blogosphere

Google Alert! Here's a post with your name on it!

During the glamorous days of the New York theater on opening night, actors would head to a swell place like Sardi's after the performance to anxiously wait for the reviews. I imagine that during the wait, amidst a boozy haze of cigarette smoke and clinking glasses of scotch-on-the-rocks, one actor would breathlessly run in with the freshly printed early editions of the newspapers, and then someone at the table would start reading the reviews out loud to the assembled party.

Google Alert has now replaced the breathless actor as the delivery device. After posting an art review on this website, for example, I can then trace, thanks to common analytics programs, a "hit" from the location where the artist may live. I don't know for sure if it's the artist or his or her "people," but since I know that many art professionals have created Google Alerts for themselves, I think it's most likely the artist.

There have been occasions, after posting a review, when I can analytically deduce that only the artist has read the post. At these times, I regret not writing the review as a letter: "Dear Artist, I like your work, but I didn't care for the red thing in the corner."

Sorry. A good opening, but Clement Greenberg won't be seeing it.

While many artists protest that they don't pay attention to reviews, it's always good to have someone who takes notice. Many artists work hard all the time and particularly drive themselves hard to prepare for an opening. I walk around New York feeling frustrated that there are too many artists in search of one decent review.

I'm not talking about promotional puff pieces of two sentences with a picture. I'm talking a 500-word review with description, evaluation and interpretation, one that gives the reader a sense of the artist. Writing a real review is hard.

There's little method to my own madness. Sometimes, I will seek out a particular exhibit, but often it's one I've encountered by chance. Out of the zillions of exhibits, I select for review a handful that inspire me to write. That's how I felt with my recent reviews of Rosalind Solomon, Luc Tuymans, Macbeth, and Jasper Johns. And, in my case, I have other things on my blogging agenda. I have to keep walking.

While I've found some excellent examples of arts writing in new media, the blogosphere and the expansion of internet journalism has not yet produced a new golden age of art criticism, I'm afraid. It's very easy to write, "I ate pancakes this morning. Last night I went to the Whitney opening party. The tequila drinks were good. I just broke up with my boyfriend."

When blogging about art becomes as lucrative as blogging about blogging, this new golden age may come to pass. I can't wait.

Image: Man reading newspaper while waiting for streetcar. Streetcar station, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Russell Lee, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-012324-M3 DLC (b&w film nitrate neg.)

Pack Arts Journalism in the Age of Un-Art: Writing About the Whitney Biennial

Though I have yet to see the newly-opened Whitney Biennial, I enjoy my biennial hobby of reading all the reviews before I go. I'm always looking to test my thesis that something I call "pack arts criticism" is at work. I'll explain. "Pack journalism" is a term often used to characterize the tendency of political journalists to cover a story with a single mindset, and I think arts journalism works the same way. Within days of the opening of any Biennial, I start to see a consensus building among the critics, often lead by critics at the major news outlets. The critical reception of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which opened yesterday, is shaping up in a similar way.

Holland Cotter, in today's review of the Whitney Biennial for The New York Times connects the exhibition with an economy in recession. He characterizes the Biennial, with its "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories," as an "unglamorous, even prosaic affair." Later in the review, he describes the biennial as a "hermetic, uningratiating show." Now that Cotter has set this tone, I'm watching other critics who are less sure of their art critical skills to follow his un-lead.

David Cohen and Alexandra Peers joined Cotter in setting the tone for future critics, penning early reviews, for their respective media outlets. Cohen, in his review at the New York Sun, prefers "anti" over "un" for his evaluation. He writes of the Biennial, "Instead, it is simply the lack of formal cohesion that suffices as the deflationary, antiheroic, anti-Art-with-a-big-A statement for most of these artists." Peers, writing about the opening for New York Magazine, veers toward the word "unfinished." She writes of the less-than-enthusiastic response, "The dominant aesthetic was so tentative and half-done that one rival institution’s curator wondered if artists racing to make deadlines hadn’t finished."

The curators set the tone themselves. Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch pitched the themes of un-ness in their conceptualization for the exhibit. Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo asked them their thoughts while organizing the show, especially what Huldisch terms as "lessness," a theme on which she elaborates more in the catalogue. In a blog post for Time, Huldisch defined "lessness" for Lucayo as follows: "One is a tendency towards non-spectable, non-monumentalism. I talk about three different directions. One is failure as a key motif. Another is an inclination to use modest, humble materials. And lastly there's this notion of people making smaller, more localized gestures that have an 'in the moment' aspect."

Well. Talk about lowering expectations. And she sure knows how to make up words. "Lessness" is the title of a Samuel Beckett story, but that's about the extent of its use as a real word, as far as I know. "Non-spectable" is also a non-starter. If the curator is arguing, and she may be, that the Whitney Biennial is less than spectacular, without any "spectable" attraction and in which failure is certainly an option, then I'm not too surprised that critics seem to be searching for an artist here and there about whose work there would be something nice to say.

Following the high-profile opening of "Unmonumental" (not a real word either), the inaugural exhibit at the New Museum, the Whitney has ushered in The Age of "Whatever." These early reviews, all restrained and tentative and probably more polite than they wanted, will likely set the tone for others over the next few weeks. In summation: Here's the Whitney Biennial. Come see it or not. Whatever.

Image: Photo of a chair in a gutter in Tribeca, an un-art artifact by Walking Off the Big Apple. March 2008.

See related posts: Best Chance to Get Into the Whitney Biennial? Don't Turn 40 and More on the 2008 Whitney Biennial Selections: The Global M.F.A.

Earning Her Wrinkles: Rosalind Solomon at Silverstein Photography (A Review)

Looking at photographer Rosalind Solomon's well-composed black-and-white self-portraits – the wrinkles around the mouth, her puffed eyes, the wild gray hair, ample sagging breasts, and the age spots that she presents to the world, I thought anyone mired in our youth-obsessed culture needs to visit this solo exhibit at Silverstein Photography in Chelsea and ask themselves, honestly, if they would have the guts to pull off anything as real as this body of work.

Two fingers on my mouth, one of several imposing self-portraits dating from Solomon's residency at the Macdowell Colony in 2002, says several things. Raising her fingers to cover her mouth and staring straight into the camera, she shows us the gesture of silence. Be quiet. Don't speak. Two fingers on the mouth can also be a thinking person's gesture. One of the other photographs from Macdowell - beautifully printed gelatin silver prints, by the way, presents the aging self in metaphorical terms. She's nude, naked even, squatting on a snow-covered stone path before a white gate. Squeezing the shutter release cable in her right hand, resting her chin on her left hand, she's not quite ready for the pearly gate to open.

Inside Out functions as a mini retrospective, including representative images of her early doll photographs from the 1970s, a collage about the confining expectations and duties of her married life, images from previous monographs, a sculptural configuration representing her dead and buried selves, and a terrific video installation.

With the video, Don’t Eat my Flowers!, displayed on three monitors in the back room of the gallery, Solomon performs the words of intimidating parental interjections -"Don't your dare!," being a memorable one, through menacing close-ups of her moving lips and jutting chin. There's little doubt that the little girl who might be on the receiving end of such words would end up as a defiant one.

The influence of Lisette Model, Solomon's teacher, is apparent, especially in the technical aspects of the work and in some of the content, such as with Nursing home, Lima Peru and Blind girl with dolls, South Africa, but Solomon turned out quite different than Diane Arbus, Model's most famous student. Solomon relies more on herself than Arbus, and she is hyper self-aware, articulate and probing of her own social masks. Photographing close-ups of the dolls that she found in Alabama establish the obsession with the social conventions of appearances, especially within the strict confines of gender expectations, but her other visual investigations outside the U.S. also point to the universality of mask-making.

She is her own best subject. I can't think of many photographs better than After 9/11, Self with frozen turkey, Macdowell, Peterborough, NH. Dressed in sleeveless black clothes and sitting on a stool off-center, Solomon stares matter-of-factly toward the camera, shutter release in hand. Night has fallen. The flash hits the place where two door frames come together. Solomon grasps the leg of a limp feathered turkey splayed out on her lap. After that, I thought, what else is there to say?

Rosalind Solomon's Inside Out continues through April 5, 2008. Silverstein Photography. 535 West 24th Street. New York, NY 10011. Gallery information.

Roundup: The Plaza Hotel, Sondheim's Seurat, the Texas Primary, and the Upcoming Gelato Showdown in the Village

As I gather my thoughts about the Chichester Festival Theatre's entertaining production of Macbeth that I saw last night at BAM, I would like to pass on a few updates and news items:

• I've now assembled all the posts from The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect self-guided walk onto new pages and placed them under the list of walks on the site's sidebar. I've added a small slideshow of more images of the buildings.

• The Plaza Hotel reopens Saturday, March 1, and I look forward to visiting. I've been meaning to comment on the story, "It's Lonely at the Plaza Hotel," by Christine Haughney from the February 17, 2008 edition of The New York Times. Apparently, the new condo owners are lonesome, as not everyone can afford a place in their legendary hotel. The story quotes one woman who told the reporter that she "wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments." I know exactly how she feels. All I can say is that I'm available. I would love to hang out in The Plaza. Anyone living at The Plaza who might be reading this and who would enjoy some company, please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com.

• Mapping Texas for the Primary. As a native Texan, I have many opinions about the upcoming Texas presidential primary. I recommend reading Randy Kennedy's NYT article, "Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle," that explains the diversity of the vast Texas political landscape. My mother, a proper East Texan who wore skirts, hose, and high heels her entire life, thought I would become uncivilized if I spent any time with West Texans. Of course, I rebelled. No further evidence is necessary beyond looking in my closet and seeing what is not there.

• Art lovers suffering from a Seurat withdrawal after the closing of the exhibit at MoMA should make note that a new production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street), has received good reviews and extended its run through June 15, 2008.

• (Image) Yesterday, I spotted the sign for the new gelato place coming to Bleecker Street later this spring. GROM's first NY location is up on Broadway on the Upper West Side. The Village location, an excellent site on Father Demo Square, will set up a showdown between this Turin-based upstart and L'Arte del Gelato on Seventh Ave. It will be like a spaghetti western but with gelato. As I posted earlier, I am observing a strict gelato diet for Lent. It's not going well.

Schnabel, WOTBA, and Venetian Masks: Most Popular Search Terms

I like to know the means by which new readers come to this website, and perusing the list of most popular search terms from time to time, I begin to ascertain patterns. I am also curious how well I help new readers find the information they need and how I can better meet the needs of the global audience.

Here is the list of the five most popular search terms from the past month that have directed people to Walking Off the Big Apple. I will follow the list with a brief analysis of these findings:

1. "Julian Schnabel"
2. "Julian Schnabel building"
3. "Walking Off the Big Apple"
4. "Venetian masks"
5. "How to make Venetian masks"

Julian Schnabel: recent Academy Award nominee, major contemporary visual artist, friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, raised in Brownsville, Texas, interior designer for the Gramercy Park Hotel, mover and shaker. I don't know Julian personally. What else do you need?

Oh. His building in the West Village. I wrote about his "Tower of Pink Power" lo, these many months ago, when WOTBA was just a wee thing, but for each new week this particular post continues to rank high on the visitor's list. Indeed, you MUST come walk the neighborhood and see his building with your own eyes. I have come to love it in every way – its whatever pink-rose-red mottled facade, its brazen Italianate trimmings, its soaring height on the western edges of the Village.

Walking Off the Big Apple: I have high confidence that people have come to the right place when they type in this search term. I imagine it's the result of a conversation involving my far-flung friends. Since 1990, the colonel (the title I give my Kentucky-born spouse on this website) and I have lived in Austin, Texas, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Columbia, South Carolina, and now Greenwich Village, USA. In that order. Beat that with a stick! So, I think the conversation goes like this:

"You hear anything from Teri lately?"
"Naw. Living in New York! Heard she had a popular blog." (Note: I tell people I have a "popular" blog as a PR technique.)
"What's it called?"
"I think it's called..."

Venetian masks: Time for the masked ball, or as a South Carolina friend commented when he saw some Venetian masks in a flower shop, "They must be having an Eyes Wide Shut party!" As I explained in one of the Weekend Frivolities, I visited the shop in Venice that made the masks for the Kubrick film. I stumbled upon the place while strolling the small streets near the Guggenheim Venice. From time to time, I make masks based on molds I made of our two dogs and deceased cat. I'm going to make more this year and will try to sell them to you.

In conclusion, Julian, raised on the Texas-Mexican border, and me, raised in Big D, and both in love with Art, sometimes dream in Italian. Prego, y'all. Welcome to the West Village. Welcome to Walking Off the Big Apple.

The 6th most popular search term is "cupcakes."

Image: Julian Schnabel's Palazzo Chupi, W. 11th Street, with cupcake and coffee from the nearby Magnolia Bakery. Photo from the morning of February 26, 2008. Walking Off the Big Apple –"Giving readers what they want since 2007."

Jasper Johns: On the Cold Gray Stones (A Review)

“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Jasper Johns, the seafaring stranger," I thought. The sea kept sweeping through the galleries during my visit to Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met - images of a drowning poet, symbolized by Periscope (Hart Crane), Tennyson, the Poet Laureate who lived on the Isle of Wight, and the bridges, evoked by the Catenary series, leading voyagers to the edge of the sea. Johns has lived on many islands - Manhattan, the island, Edisto, the haunted sea island off the South Carolina shore, and the island of St. Martin, one of Johns' homes. Even circumstances of Johns' friends bring to mind the sea - Bob Rauschenberg, a child of Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf, and Frank O'Hara, the poet who died on Fire Island.

The Met arranges the grays thematically and, more or less, chronologically. After stating the thesis, well-made in the presentation of False Start and Jubilee, two paintings with the same subject, one with color and one with gray, the exhibit walks the visitor through the visual language of the artist - the objects (drawer, coat hanger, etc.), American flags in gray, the maps and targets leached of their colors, and then the splendid numbers and alphabets.

The targets, alphabets, and numbers function as our artist's semaphore - the "words" of his language, the "things the mind already knows." They are Johns' vocabulary, conveyed with all the tools of the trade - paints, graphite, encaustic, charcoal, watercolor, conté pencils, found objects, collage. Drawing is a gray medium. Letters and numbers - H means Hard, B means Black, and the HBs of the middle - 4, 5, 6, render grays.

And then comes Edisto. A drama unfolds. What happened to Johns here? It's the early 1960s, he's turned 30, and he's gone dark, sensitive, bleak, even tragic. Here's the room of Frank O'Hara and Hart Crane and a painting titled Liar and another titled No. Edisto, an old sea home of the Gullah people, is a moody, rocky, beautiful hard place. On those windswept days of gray rain and clouds, especially near the sea, pigmented colors announce themselves loudly, but at the same time a mood is struck. This sea island is the province of uncertainty, a place adrift, a Samuel Beckett play.

Beyond Edisto, the exhibit moves through a sculpture room and then to the hatch mark paintings. These short parallel lines become a new important part of the artist's pattern language. He's said that he saw the pattern on the side of a van. While crosshatching is a known technique in drawing, employed to render shading, Johns' hatch marks don't really cross. They're held in tension, graphic and flat, but full of motion in two dimensions.

Then comes the 80's room, shocking in its representations, the collage aesthetic, the busy bits of art history and the autobiographical archive. Winter, by the way, with the foregrounded snowflakes, its little snowman, and its looming outlined human figure, reeks of a midlife crisis. It's a moment where Johns looks like he's been swept up in a larger self-referential art history breakout and not really in his own element. He's included his own paintings in his paintings. They're all so social and conversational, even if it's mostly with the art history textbook. It feels like a phase.

He came out of it. Upon reaching the tenth room of the Gray exhibit, I sat on a bench and stayed long enough among the large gray Catenary paintings to watch the slight swaying of the ropes. Peace and quiet. With Near the Lagoon, 2002-3, a vertical canvas, the catenary becomes a drawing device and also a cosmic curtain. These gray surfaces are richer, bluer and creamier than the earlier paintings. Here's the Milky Way and the hints of the harlequin trickster. The jig is up. Johns has moved from his winter into night. I can smell the salt air in the astronomical twilight, the creaking of the pier underneath.

Upon leaving the exhibit, the gray flagstone pathway of Within, with its hints of many-colored lava underneath, carries the artist-as-Prospero, perhaps accompanied by a dog or two, to a new place on the island.

Jasper Johns: Gray continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 4, 2008.

See also the review of the drawings at Matthew Marks.

"Things the Mind Already Knows:" The Drawings of Jasper Johns (A Review)

Forty of Jasper Johns' drawings of the last ten years, currently on exhibit at Matthew Marks (522 W. 22 St.) in Chelsea, recommend themselves on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin. I was struck not just by his continuing obsession with the images he's made famous over the years but by his obvious love for drawing and drawing materials. He's said this before, but it's clear he loves seeing how his targets, flags, numbers, etc. change from one medium to the next, how they emerge so differently on various material surfaces. He makes them all look new.

As much as I like looking at Johns' canvases, I love seeing these images played out on paper, created with all sorts of combinations of ink, acrylic, pencil, graphite, watercolor, etc. Artists with a large body of drawings gain my trust, as I believe that there's something deep about a compelling need among true artists to express themselves visually with whatever materials are at hand.

The exhibit at Matthew Marks certainly dissuades one from thinking that any one of Johns' images belongs to a specific decade and then abandoned in later years. He continues to recycle the whole bag of tricks - flags, flagstones, numerals, crosshatch patterns, alphabet letters, harlequin imagery, the bridge catenary, cruciforms, and maps of the United States. He's referred to these images, most of them from everyday life, as the "things the mind already knows." They're in his artistic DNA now and perhaps emerge involuntarily.

Johns' interpretation of Juan Gris, as depicted in a pair of drawings, suggests that he acknowledges his connection to many of the Cubists. Indeed, the imagery of the cubists find new echoes in Johns' works - the harlequins of Pablo Picasso, the target-like objects of Robert Delauney, and the presence of letters in cubist collage. "After Picasso," an ink and graphite drawing from 1998, explores the kind of hands and eyes that Picasso created in Guernica and related works, combined with Johns' characteristic crosshatching. The fact that Johns points to a longer artistic heritage in which he plays a part, in addition to his habits of drawing, elevates his work above that of many contemporary younger artists who feel compelled to substitute concepts for actual work.

I had one overarching impulsive reaction to seeing all this fine recent work by the elder statesman of American arts. It was "Johns wins."

Jasper Johns: Drawings 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 W. 22 St., continues through April 12, 2008

See also the review of Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met.

FOCUS on POTUS: The Two Washingtons of the Washington Square Arch

Officially, it's still called Washington's Birthday, though President's Day has become the accepted name, mostly as a way to include President Lincoln.

The day's meaning usually signifies a break from work or school or the arrival of a sale. In the United States Senate, however, there's at least one formality. One senator is selected to read Washington's Farewell Address. The practice began in 1862 as a way to cope with the dark days of the Civil War.

This morning I visited the statues of the two Washingtons - the military George and the civilian man of peace that grace the north side of the Washington Square Arch in Washington Square Park. Sadly, in the ever increasing disruption caused by the renovation of the park, the arch itself is now inaccessible behind a metal fence.

The arch served to commemorate the Centennial of Washington's Inauguration, an event that took place downtown. The pier statues were added later -"Washington at War" on the left of the arch by Herman MacNeil in 1916 and "Washington at Peace" on the right by Alexander Stirling Calder in 1918. Yes, Calder was the father of the famous mobile artist, Alexander Calder.

While it's not surprising that two different sculptors should interpret Washington differently, especially given the separate tasks, I'm struck how the civilian Washington, the one by Calder, presents the tougher image. While MacNeil's warrior George seems to retreat behind all those formal clothes and hat, Calder's peacetime George is bold and struttin' his stuff. Casually resting his left hand on the pedestal, his massive strong right hand shows off serious knuckles. This POTUS has got some legs, and I'd be afraid of that extra muscle he's got behind him.

Images of "Washington at War" by Herman MacNeil (1916) and "Washington at Peace" by Alexander Stirling Calder (1918) by Walking Off the Big Apple, February 18, 2008, Washington's Birthday.

Luc Tuymans' Wonderful World of Painting (A Review)

Belgian-born artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) brings his painterly virtuosity to the kingdom of the mouse in his new solo exhibit, Forever, The Management of Magic, at David Zwirner. The image fragments of Walt Disney's electric magic empire, painted here like faded film stock in the blues and mauves of cotton candy, conjure a dusty collection of peripheral memorabilia. With these eight wonderful paintings and a side room of gouache drawings, Tuymans opens up a service entrance to the back lot of utopia. No mice here, this is Walt, the utopian urban planner, the maestro of the energy-draining world of tomorrow, the extravagant Robert Moses with electric turtles. Pay no attention to that man that Tuymans has almost cropped out of the painting.

Wonderland, one of the two largest paintings (at 138.98 x 215.35 inches), is based on a still from a family home movie made at Disneyland. Tuymans paints the trip through the Alice in Wonderland attraction from the perspective of the amateur filmmaker, and the painting functions as its own amusement, a kind of old fashioned play for the virtual reality that paintings once represented.

It took a trip to the Internet to get a fix on what I was looking at with the equally enormous Turtle, because I didn't recall that Disney's twinkling turtle from the Main Street Electrical Parade sported large round spectacles. These circles, then, of glowing light poking off the turtle's head represent the turtle's "vision." What a weird thing to think about - a glorious painted representation of the Disney electric twinkling turtle that needs glasses. What a ghostly spectral spectacular!

Wow - paintings. You remember them - stretched canvas and the application of paints with a paintbrush. Oils, no less, as Tuymans could not possibly make this work in the plastic technicolor world of acrylic but only with the creamy applications of oils. In passages, they remind me of seascapes. Tuymans has this wavy surf-like action going on with his brush strokes that leave marks that look like angel's wings. After coming across so much assemblage this year, I thought it wonderful to encounter aesthetically-pleasing two-dimensional painted canvases in seductive oils. Some of the works were so fresh I could smell them.

Walt Disney, famously frozen in time and space, manipulated and shaped the American psyche in profound ways - from the everlasting orphan search for Daddy to escaping unpredictable American reality for the safe ordered haven of Disneyland. I'm not sure we learn anything new here. I think types who show up at David Zwirner already see through the ideology of the mouse and the production of desire. There have been books. Actually, when I was looking at Tuymans' Wonderland, I think my mouth dropped open a little as I imagined myself riding on the train through the tunnel. Daddy, it was like magic. I want to go on that ride again.

Luc Tuymans, Forever, The Management of Magic continues through March 22, 2008. David Zwirner. Chelsea.

The Aesthetics of "Slow": Reflections on The Slow Movement and the Arts

I'm a slow poke, as they say. I hate to rush, and as the proponents of the Slow Movement advocate, I like to engage in activities that just creep along and force a break with the frantic rhythms of the city. I like knitting, all sorts of crafts, baking bread, growing plants from seeds, and strolling more than I like race walking.

The Slow Life Picks Up Speed, an article by Penelope Green from the January 31, 2008 issue of The New York Times, calls attention to the emergence of Slow Design as an aspect of the slow movement. One designer, Natalie Chanin, sells crafted items made out of recycled goods. Another group of designers in London have refurbished a cast-out sofa with fictional visualizations about the sofa's past.

Is "slow," with its emphasis on the recycled, repurposed, and handmade, emerging as the cohesive aesthetic in the contemporary visual arts? Perhaps. The New Museum's inaugural exhibit, Unmonumental, is all about the repurposing of both found or cast-off objects and insistent mass media images. Archive Fever-Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography takes as its curatorial point of departure the images of photography's past. In addition, many photographers now prefer the slow-cooked older photographic methods over the digital revolution.

Slow is a way to deal with our increasing guilt as over-consumers, and I think it's not a coincidence that the slow movement arrives at a time of economic slowdown. What will be interesting is how the American economy, dependent as it is upon consumer spending, will recover if consumers slow down not out of absolute necessity but out of desire. For so long marketing professionals have linked the words "consumer" and "desire," but what happens if we are sick of the pace of our own spending and want to stop or at least slow down?

The slow aesthetic, especially in its collage form, may look like a crazy quilt, or just crazy, and that upsets the minimalists. I think that the reason some people who don't like the artwork in Unmonumental is that they don't like the surface messiness and the funk. They find disorder, randomness, and too many rough edges. The slow aesthetic makes visual the irrefutable fact that we've accumulated too many goods, and for some people, slow art looks too much like the compost heap. On the other hand, slow art, like those handmade items of clothing that bear a "warning" label of their own imperfections, can produce objects of lasting beauty.

What about the fast Internet in the age of Slow? Sometimes I would like to write faster posts so I can be as popular as Gawker. But it's just me here, and I like to take my time. I'm a deliberate slow-poke. I like to think and ponder. I won't write a post just to fill a daily quota. In a way, this website, with its accumulation of eclectic stories of New York cultural history, archival sensibility, and an emphasis on the hand-made, exemplifies the Slow aesthetic. I want readers to think of it as a big homemade cake. Walking Off the Big Apple is a Slow Blog.

Walking Art Video: Mesmerizing Animated Wall Painting by the Artist Blu

I enjoy this animated wall painting from the artist Blu. I also like Blu's website, not only for its clever design but for the sketchbooks.
I haven't sketched in a long time. I usually sketch outside, but it's too cold, and I'm getting cabin fever. I get vicarious pleasure from watching Blu's walking/sketching on the walls, something I know I can't get away with at home.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: The Art Pilgrimage to the West

See related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.

Readers of this site who also regularly peruse The New York Times may have picked up today's NYT (January 25, 2008) art section to see yet another article on art in New Mexico. In this case, Roberta Smith reviews Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, a new exhibit at the Grey Art Gallery (NYU) that features a selection of paintings that the Ab-Exer Diebenkorn made while living in Albuquerque in the early 1950s. Smith gives the exhibit a glowing review - you can't miss it, a large reproduction covers the front page of the art section, and I plan to write something about the exhibit myself here over the next few days.

O'Keeffe's visit to New Mexico was certainly just one among many. John Sloan, who I've written a lot about here, visited Santa Fe in 1919, the same year as Mabel Dodge made her move, and he bought a house there in 1920. He spent four months of every year in Santa Fe from 1920 to 1950. Sloan learned of the place from his pioneering mentor, Robert Henri, who had visited in 1916 an 1917. It was a craze really, one that also attracted Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Stuart Davis. American modernism, with its taste for the exotic, couldn't do without the New Mexican landscape and its people.

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, New Mexico continued to attract more artists, many from New York. Some stayed permanently, and others divided their time between the two places. Marfa, Texas has a similar appeal, one made even more enticing by its easy lack of access.

Another group of artists began to make their way to New Mexican outposts in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist artists like Judy Chicago, whose flower paintings were directly inspired by O'Keeffe's core imagery, found the region congenial. Lucy Lippard, one of feminist art's important theorists, makes her home there as well.

The reasons New Mexico continues to lure new residents remain the same as a century ago. After the busy syncopated rhythms of a large metropolis and where skyscrapers block the setting sun, the uninterrupted desert vista, with its warm daytime sun and cool nights, forces a steadier and slower pace. The land and its people seem to belong to the long cycles of human history as opposed to the short ones of the city and the fashionable whims of manufactured fads and consent.

It made sense that galleries and the art business would follow the artistic pilgrimage out west. Santa Fe is the third largest art market in the United States after New York and Los Angeles. Canyon Road, where many of the galleries are located, is always a pleasure to walk.

Images: Landscape panorama by Walking off the Big Green Chili Pepper, and Robert Henri. Gregorita with the Santa Clara Bowl, 1917, oil on canvas, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe at The Met

I went to the Met on Tuesday to look at Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, but first I had to find them. A couple of museum workers thought they had seen one or two in the Modern Art section, but they also recommended that I check with the woman that runs the tiny shop next to the American Wing on the opposite side of the museum. I hadn't planned on my visit being another athletic adventure, but I nevertheless ended up pounding a couple of miles inside the Met.

Fortunately, I found the O'Keeffe paintings early on. After winding my way through Roman art and through the Michael Rockefeller Oceanic galleries, I made my way through the first rooms of the Modern Art section and could reassure myself I was in the right century. After a turn to the right and then around another corner, I saw paintings by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove. Surely she is near. And, yes, voila!, a room of Georgia O'Keeffes, and more than a couple. Ten.

After spending the week with her story, I was happy to see these particular paintings. While the Met routinely switches out artworks, the O'Keeffe paintings on display on Tuesday included (in chronological order here, not how they were displayed):

Corn, Dark, Number 1 (1924). Painted at Lake George
Grey Tree, Lake George (1925)
Black Iris (1926) The magnified iris, painted in plums and grey pinks, fills and pushes the boundaries of the canvas - a terrific tension of light and dark and the scandalous vulval core imagery that shaped the direction of feminist art in the 1970s.
Clam Shell (1930)
Ranchos Church (1930) O'Keeffe ventured out to Taos to stay at Mabel Dodge's and discovered the Saint Francis of Assissi Mission in the Hispanic community of Ranchos de Taos. Painting the church from the back side, the church takes on the essence of a natural earth formation. I love how the grey sky pushes on the outer surfaces of the structure.
Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue (1931) See image. O'Keeffe's satire on the search for the Great American painting at the time of the Great Depression and the blossoming of American regional painting. In reaction to the depictions of decrepit buildings in the heartland, O'Keeffe sets a cow's skull, like a crucifix, on top of red, white, and blue, as her homage to American Art.
From the Faraway, Nearby (1937) A turn toward surrealism with the scale of the mountain range dwarfed by the hovering antlered creature that dominates the scene and sky.
Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) The view of the striated coral and ochre cliffs from Ghost Ranch.
Pelvis II (1944) Highly sculptural and abstract, the blue sky seen through the interior of the bones renders the image a metaphor for mortality. She applies the white paint on the pelvis in strips, maybe with a palette knife, that gives a cracked texture to the bones.
Black Place II (1944) A dark and desolate but beautiful image of a stretch of hills she often liked to paint.

I decided to check to see if there were more O'Keeffe paintings by visiting the American Wing on the other side of the museum, but I knew that several galleries in that wing were closed and that access was tricky. So I spent the next hour, I think, wandering through room and after room of decorative art from various centuries, taking the wrong turn in musical instruments and again in medieval armor and then winding my way back to the main entrance. At that point I was told that the only way to get to the American Wing was from the Temple of Dendur, the expansive room that houses the Nubian temple to the goddess Isis. After passing the entirety of Egyptian civilization to get there, I felt like I was in an old video game.

I walked through many rooms in the American Wing but I didn't see another O'Keeffe. I found the woman who tended the gift shop, and yes, she said, I had seen all of them in Modern. Somewhere in the American Wing, a man approached a security guard and asked him how to get out of there.

Note: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the final stop on the Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos self-guided walking tour.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe's Long Road Home

See the complete walk on new pages.

When Mabel Dodge invited Georgia O'Keeffe to spend the summer with her in Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe accepted the invitation without first consulting her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a dominating spouse. She spent the summer there without him anyway, awakening to the possibility she had found a new place that seemed like home.

"She wrote to Henry McBride from Taos in 1929, 'You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here-and finally feeling in the right place again-I feel like myself-and I like it- . . . Out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields-then the sage brush and beyond-a most perfect mountain-it makes me feel like flying-and I don't care what becomes of art.' - Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton

Stieglitz was an aging New Yorker, embedded in the cultural life of the city, and far-away New Mexico was a place best left to his wife. In February of 1930 he exhibited her New Mexico-inspired paintings at An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue, his third and final gallery in New York. The gallery presented O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings every year until the gallery's closing in 1950.

Any artist would have relished O'Keeffe's life - time alone in New Mexico to paint a serious body of work as well as a successful artist-gallerist spouse back in New York to exhibit them on Madison Avenue every year. In addition, the two often enjoyed time at the expansive Stieglitz estate up on Lake George. But...

Enter Radio City Music Hall (1260 Avenue of the Americas), an odd tangent on our Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos walk. In the spring of 1932 O'Keeffe accepted a $1500 commission to paint a mural on the walls of the Ladies Powder Room. Wanting to paint something big, she accepted the challenge over her husband's objections. By October, after spending the summer in Canada, she grew frustrated with some technical difficulties with the mural and abandoned the project. In early 1933 she became ill and was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for psychoneurosis, a condition often brought on by acute stress.

Meanwhile, Stieglitz, who was 23 years older than O'Keeffe, had started a relationship with a young married woman, Dorothy Norman, his gallery manager, an artist, arts patron and a proponent of the photographic arts. He started taking photos of her, the same sort of sensational erotic images he made of O'Keeffe early in their marriage. The two spent a lot of time in the darkroom together. All this while his wife is sick. O'Keeffe knew what was going on.

O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934, first staying at Ghost Ranch seventy miles west of Taos, and until Stieglitz's death she returned there most every summer. In 1936 she and Stieglitz moved from the Shelton Hotel to a penthouse apartment at 405 East 54th St., a place nearer Stieglitz's gallery. In 1942 they moved to a small apartment at 59 East 54th St., even closer. During the summer of 1945 she bought an adobe house on three acres in Abiquiu. In 1946, Stieglitz, after a massive stroke, died in New York at the age of 82.

After spending a couple of years in New York, consumed with settling the Stieglitz estate, O'Keeffe permanently moved to New Mexico in 1949, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. She had spent thirty years going back and forth from her home in the west to an apartment in midtown Manhattan, and she didn't have to do that anymore. She died March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe at the age of 98.

I've learned from this story that finding your own ranch buys you an extra 17 years.

Image: interior, New York Marriott Hotel East Side (formerly the Shelton Hotel), 525 Lexington Avenue at 49th St.

The Building that Would Glow at Night: Raymond Hood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the American Radiator Building

From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.

Whenever I come upon the Radiator Building on 40th Street on the south side of Bryant Park I am immediately struck by its drama. It's unusual to see a building made of black brick, much less one with gold trim. Designed by Raymond Hood, the American Radiator Building of 1924 fit the bill of the clients - it was massive, solid, and it would glow at night. While Hood wanted the building to look like a cathedral, he knew that the many window openings would overly lighten the heaviness. He solved the problem by making the facade black. He didn't want lights turned on in the building after dark but directed the upper floors to be illuminated with floodlights.

O'Keeffe not only painted the Radiator Building at night but with all the windows illuminated. The painting is one of several O'Keeffe made in the mid 1920s in response to the changing New York skyline. At the time she and Alfred Stieglitz lived on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel at 49th and Lexington, and O'Keeffe frequently walked near the new building.

Her painting of the Radiator from 1927 (the same year as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, tellingly) is remarkable for its color and for the depiction of the artificial light of the city night - the purple/blue tints of floodlights and the fluorescent whites of the office towers. There's a touch of warm incandescent in windows here and there. The stylized smoky steam arising from the building at the right echoes the flipped curved cornices of the Radiator's top floors. It's pure theater.

After Stieglitz died in 1946, his personal art collection of some 1,000 works was divided up among six museums. One benefactor was Fisk University in Nashville, a university Carl Van Vechten suggested to O'Keeffe. Among the artworks in the bequest was O'Keeffe's painting, Radiator Building–Night, New York. For a couple of years, the cash-strapped university has tried to sell the painting, now valued around $20 million, and at one point worked out a co-ownership deal with a new Walton-backed museum in Arkansas. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is attempting to legally block the agreement, and the matter is scheduled to go to court next month.

See