A Visit to MoMA

Friday, 15 May 1998

Admission to the Museum of Modern Art is usually US$9.50, but on Fridays from 4:30 PM till closing at 8:30 it's "Pay what you wish," which makes it ideal visiting time for cheapskates. I've become interested in modern art, which used to bore me, and particularly wanted to see the current exhibit of works drawn from nature, so I figured it was a good place to get out of the apartment to.

Seeing a photographic reproduction of a painting in a book is no substitute for seeing the real thing in person. This is especially true of much modern art. I'd never thought much of Vassily Kandinsky or Marc Chagall before, but seeing their work up close was a much more intense experience. Part of it is that the brush strokes on some works take on a real three-dimensional quality (MoMA has Van Gogh's "Starry Night" on display; I'd never realized how thickly he laid on his paint). Another part is that many of the paintings are very large. Looking at a painting that's larger than I am, and takes up most of my field of vision, is just a more intense experience than looking at a book in my hand.

On the other hand, I though that John Dine's "A Tree That Shatters the Dancing" (1980), the work MoMA chose the accompany the entry on the exhibitions page of their website about the exhibit of works inspired by nature, looked better as a JPEG.

I hadn't realized that Salvador Dali worked so small. "The Persistence of Memory" was only about 9" by 15". ("Sleep," the piece that Phaidon Press chose to represent Dali in The Art Book, is larger, at 20" by 30".) The colors are really rich in person.

I was deeply impressed by the work of Umberto Boccioni, one of the Futurists. I'm not the only one; there was a small crowd gathered staring at his Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1912), a fascinating work full of movement and light. It looks sort of like the paths a soccer player's limbs take as he kicks, traced with the petals of an opening flower made of stained glass. A security guard said she didn't know what it was supposed to be, but wanted to take it home with her. I also liked his "States of Mind" series (1911), and just all of his work in general.

At first, I thought I liked Georges Braque's and Juan Gris's cubist paintings better than Picassos's, largely because the Picasso works I've seen tended to use a lot of lines and flat plains of color, while Braque and Gris worked more with shadows and plains that seemed to be three-dimensional, and had more interesting textures. I take it back after seeing some of Picasso's earlier Cubist work, "Violin and Grapes" (1912) and "Woman with Pears" (1909). There must have been something in the air in 1912 that caused artists to paint works that I really respond to.

You've seen Edvard Munch's "The Scream" -- it's one of the most famous paintings in the world, and has been parodied more times than I can think of. (You probably haven't seen it recently, unless you're one of the thieves who stole it a few years back.) It's the one with the figure on a bridge, hands clapped to cheeks, screaming in anguish. Well, he seems to have been fond of painting figures with their hands on the heads. This motif appears in "Ashes" (1899) and "The Storm" (1893). In fact, every figure in both of those paintings has at least one hand on its head. However, none of the figures do in his lithograph "The Death Chamber" (1896).

I've never really liked Georges Seurat's Pontillist paintings, and I still don't after seeing them in person. But the museum has a couple of his drawings, in conté crayon, on display, and they're just gorgeous, especially "At the 'Concert Européen'" (1887). I wonder if he got the inspiration for Pontillism from the way the crayon pigment breaks up on the surface of rough paper.

I didn't spend much time, or see much that impressed me, at the natural inspirations exhibit, probably because my head was still spinning from the famous art in the regular Painting and Sculpture gallery. There was also an exhibit of Chuck Close's work, which I hadn't intended to look at, but wound up enjoying. Close is a Photorealist who works entirely from facial shots, usually frontal. If you've seen any of his work, you've probably seen the paintings in which he takes a photo and reproduces every little detail, every wrinkle and pore and bit of stubble, on a big canvas. (His "Big Self Portrait" is nine feet tall.) I've always though these were a bit spooky and repulsive, these giant, greasy-looking faces with their glassy staring eyes. But Close works in a variety of media (though always with the same subject matter). There were paintings done in fingerprints, or (most recently) with little squares each filled with an oval or stripe of color. There were also prints, woven thread, and portraits done in blobs of homemade paper. Close generally works with a square-based grid, but for one of his subjects, "Lucas," he sometimes used a radial grid that makes Lucas's face seem almost hypnotic.

When I left the Close exhibit it was almost time for the galleries to close, so I left. The timing proved to be sub-optimal in one respect -- Today was also the day of the Daytime Emmy award presentation at Radio City Music Hall, which lies on the most natural path to the museum (53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) from the most convenient subway stop (Rockefeller Center, on the D and Q lines). On the way there, I could still walk through the crowd, but on the way back, the area was blocked off by police barricades and screaming teenage girls. I wound up taking the Seventh Avenue line instead.