More Merce!

We went to hear French dance company CNDC Angers in a program of all Cunningham.  We saw them last year doing a Cunningham "Event", a mixture of different Cunningham pieces.  This year, they did three distinct pieces.  The first, "Inlets 2", was set to a score by John Cage, which featured three people doing things with different size conch shells and water.   They performed with the original shells from Cage's performance, courtesy of the John Cage trust.

The piece was a "nature" inspired piece.  I was fascinated by the rhythms that emerge from dancers who move without reference to a musical score.  It's hard to explain how it feels; it's just that the rhythms of body movement are somehow fundamentally different from the rhythms of music, and I find it so compelling when the dancers are moving together to their own, unheard rhythms.

The highlight of the program was the next piece, "Places", created in 1966, and set to recorded score by Gordon Mumma for bandoneon and computer.  The piece was last performed in 1971 until its very recent reconstruction by CNDC Angers artistic director Robert Swinston.   It was very dramatic (for Cunningham) and I was mesmerized by the performance of the dancers.   Mumma's score was not dramatic, of course; it was a series of drawn out sonorities.   Which which worked perfectly for the piece.

The last piece was set to readings from John Cage's stories, with two live readers who sometimes overlapped with each other.  The choreography was in a lighter, humorous vein.   I initially found it somewhat disconcerting to be listening to a verbal narrative; I found it hard to focus on the movement when I was listening to a story.   But eventually I got to a place where it started to work, and once again Cunningham had expanded my perceptual abilities.  
The evening reinforced the notion that Cunningham is truly one of the greatest choreographers; and that I need to see much, much more of his work.  I can't praise the CNDC Angers enough for keeping this work alive; I wish more small dance companies over the world would do his work.   It does need to be stated, however, that Cunningham is not audience friendly in the way today's world thinks that art should be, especially in the realm of music.  Audiences are easily turned off by music that sounds really strange.



The choreographer Trisha Brown died recently.  In summing up her career, several people noted that in the beginning of her career she used no music.  Eventually she did start using music, and when she was asked why, she only half facetiously said, "I got tired of the coughing".  


One of the highlights of last fall was the performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporis" set to Grisey's  piece of the same name.  Recently  MOMA announced that an "installation" version of the piece, lasting some eight hours, would be performed in the atrium during museum hours.   Apparently Keersmaeker has created this version of the  piece and it has been performed before; the work has somehow been deconstructed and reconfigured to be performed in an open gallery space over an extended period of time.   I was curious to see and hear what this would be; but, on the other hand, I was pretty sure that I would dislike it, and that I would not be happy hearing Grisey performed in the noisy, cavernous space of MOMA's atrium.   So I didn't go.   I should have, I suppose.   But I was very amused to read of the review of the piece in the New York Times, when the reviewer mentioned the pleasure of hearing Grisey's avant-garde music echoing through the halls of MOMA.   For, as the reviewer put it, MOMA is really not "comfortable" with avant-garde music.   It's too modern for them.  They like Bjork better.

Idomeneo and Fidelio

The only Mozart operas I have ever heard have been the three DaPonte operas and the Magic Flute.   Since Vera wanted to go to hear Mozart's "Idomeneo", I decided to go.   "Idomeneo" is a opera seria; that is what Mozart was commissioned to write.  For those not familiar with the genre, it was a kind of opera that focused on serious dramatic subjects (usually the ancient Greeks), with a fairly rigid form, mostly a series of solo arias with virtuoso displays of singing.  Solo singing took preference over dramatic necessity.  Handel's operas are the most famous opera seria.
Not surprisingly, Mozart transformed opera seria into something Mozartian.   The opera was superb, featuring some of the best Mozart music I have ever heard.  There are people who sometimes claim that "Idomeno" is his best opera.   I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly has extraordinary moments.   One very interesting thing Mozart does is to write orchestral recitative, where the sung dialog is accompanied by very expressive short bits of orchestral music.  On the whole, though, the opera is not nearly as tight as the DaPonte operas; some of the arias go on for too long, and the libretto has its unwieldy moments, and the whole thing was over just barely before midnight.   The singers were all excellent in their very demanding roles, and the orchestra under James Levine was superb.   I had thought that Levine was near the end of his conducting career a year ago, but he seems to have regained physical control, and few people know more about conducting Mozart than he does.  There were some moments of imprecision, but that did not diminish the overall effectiveness of the performance.

A week later, we went to hear Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio", which is not often done.   Beethoven was not an opera composer and his opera was the result of a long and arduous struggle.   It's not really a successful opera in the conventional sense; it's really a curious hybrid of Beethoven's instrumental style of composing and the conventions of opera.   And you end up listening to it in that way, which is nevertheless very interesting.   The singers were mostly excellent, but for once I found the performance of the Met orchestra to be substandard.  There was very little in the way of dynamic nuance, and the orchestra seemed to be operating mostly in a fortissimo mode.  
The last scene of the opera is very special; a heroic ode to liberty and freedom with soloists, choir and orchestra.  And yes, it sounds very much like the last movement of the 9th symphony.   With the newly liberated prisoners and the villagers celebrating on stage, it was certainly music to cheer for.

Mark Morris Does Opera and Schumann

We went to BAM to hear and see the Mark Morris Dance Company perform what was billed as an evening of opera.   The first piece was a performance of Britten's "Curlew River".  It was performed as an opera, with no dancers, but it was directed and choreographed by Morris.  "Curlew River" is really a chamber opera; for seven instrumentalists on stage and a cast of male singers and an all male choir.   It was inspired by Britten's encounter with Noh theatre on a trip to Japan, and contains many elements of Noh, as well as things like Gregorian chant, etc.   It is really quite austere and spartan, especially in the use of instrumental resources.   The directing and singing were excellent, but there was one major problem: you could not understand the words.  Sung in English, the singers had little sense of diction.   Normally these days, one gets supertitles, so that it doesn't matter, but, in this case there were none.   The program helpfully printed the entire libretto, but then the house lights were turned all the way down so there was no hope of reading it.   This problem certainly diminished the effectiveness of the performance, and, perhaps in a smaller house than BAM's opera house, the diction might have been clearer.  But the direction was superb; Morris and choreographed the movements of the musicians in a way which added a great deal to the performance.

The second half of the program was a performance of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas".  The orchestra and singers were in the pit, and the dancers had the stage to themselves.   Morris himself conducted.   It was an astonishing performance.   The piece dates from 1989, when Morris was in Brussels.   What is striking when you first experience the piece is that you are getting two strands of narrative at once.   There is an onstage dancer for each vocal soloist, and a larger group of dancers which embodies the choir.  So the movement literally follows the musical structure and meaning.  So when the Sorceress sings about doing nasty things, the dancer "dances" doing nasty things.   This is fairly normal practice for Morris, and sometimes verges on cliches.   But at the same time, once you enter this realm, astonishing things begin to happen.   First of all, the movement is anything but "baroque"; it is very angular, modern, and energetic and even outlandish or transgressive at times.   I was reminded of both Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch at various times in the way the movement incorporates very stylized versions of routine, pedestrian gestures.   At times, I felt Morris was doing everything he could to contradict the style of the baroque music; there are moments of pure slapstick that made the audience burst into laughter.   At the same time, this opera is a tragedy.  To my eyes and ears, this was an unsettling juxtaposition.   Which is good.    Morris also makes point of being indifferent to the gender of his dancers.   The parts of Dido the Queen and the Sorceress were danced by the same woman in this performance, but in the original production, the same parts were danced by Morris himself. You can see excerpts on YouTube.  
The musical performances, with an excellent period orchestra, were excellent.   The singers were good, though again there was very little in the way of understanding the words that were sung.   I should also mention that the soloists were singing nicely in the now normal baroque style, except for Stephanie Blythe.   Blythe is normally featured in Wagnerian roles, and her voice has a full, auditorium-filling heft and presence.   It was thrilling when she belted out Dido's Lament at full volume, although to my ears it jarred with the stylistic norms of the rest of the ensemble.   But maybe that was part of Morris's intentions.

Web photos:

A week later we went to hear another Mark Morris work "V", set to Schumann's Piano Quintet and performed by the Juilliard students at their annual repertory show.   It was again extraordinary.   The piece was created in 2001, and performed by 14 dancers, with (as always) a live performance of the music.  It is very difficult to describe how Morris works with the music; he is certainly heir to the Balachine tradition of creating ballets which are only about the music and the dance, but Morris does something quite different from Balachine.   With Balanchine, I always get a sense of a dialog, or counterpoint between the music and the dance. There are two independent lines which interact.  Morris, on the surface, seems to be almost literally illustrating the music.   Dance movements closely correspond with musical counterparts, and when a theme in the music returns, so does the movement associated with it.   But at a certain point, I get beyond the point of thinking about it that way, and the dance and music merge into one single thing.   And then you also begin to appreciate exactly what kinds of movements Morris has chosen, and sometimes they are very striking.   The slow march of the second movement, for example, is done with the dancers on all fours, moving irregularly across the stage. It was both totally unexpected and totally right; I may never be able to hear that movement again without visualizing that movement.  And the last movement is pure joy, both witty and exultant.   I can't wait until my next chance to hear and see it.   Mark Morris really deserves the overused term "genius".   His next premiere is in Liverpool, in a festival to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, with a score based on Sgt. Pepper composed by the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson. I can't imagine what that will be!

And, by the way, the Juilliard students, both musicians and dancers, were great.

Hercules Segers, Eliot Greene, Anne Ryan

I saw an amazing exhibit at the Met Museum of works by the early 17th century Dutch  artist Hercules Segers. Very little is known about him, and not many of his works survive, but most of them were at the Met.   What is interesting about Segers is primarily his print making.   He was an inveterate experimenter, and devised all kinds of ways of making prints, often times from the same plate.  He was even using sugar at a certain point.  (I was reminded of the Degas show we saw last year; Degas was also experimenting.   The prints are mostly landscapes, with a fascinating variety of colors and textures.
Here are some of my favorites:

Could he have seen any Japanese or Chinese art?

Speaking of landscapes, I also saw a show of paintings by Elliott Green at a Lower East Side gallery.  Greene works with paint and landscape ideas; the paintings are of mostly mountain landscapes, but also work with different ways of representing these landscapes with paint.  I liked them.

I also saw a great show of the work of Anne Ryan, a painter who was hanging out with the abstract expressionist crowd in the late 1940's.   She had a moment of revelation when she saw her first show of Schwitters collages, and spent the last six years of her life (1948-1954) making collages.   They are small, intimate works, carefully detailed with a wide variety of material and textures.   Photographs give you some idea of the visual appearance of the works, but cannot convey the textures of the works.

Red Hook

Continuing in my efforts to walk through most of New York, I went to the neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn.  Red Hook has a more complex streetscape  than many New York neighborhoods.   Surrounded by water on three sides, it was originally a port area (and still is, in part), and what residential community that was there was there for the people who worked in the port and the industry around the water.  It then became home to the Red Hook projects, one of the city's largest public housing projects, which eventually became a high crime area.   And now it has become home to both new artisanal industries like a winery, home to artists and other urban frontier types, and, of course, eventual gentrification.  It is far from any subway, though, which helps keep its character a little more distinct from other areas of the city.  So now you have scrapyards, polluted sites, wineries, artisanal gelato, empty lots with junk, an IKEA store, art galleries, abandoned buildings, etc.   It's all there.  Red Hook also took a big hit from Hurricane Sandy; the flood level was about six feet above the streets.  It all makes for fascinating walking.   Here are some things I saw:

I loved these bundles of scrunched up scrap metal:

 A typical view of a vacant lot with random debris:

Some of the industrial areas are painted bright colors, though:

This is an amazing enormous abandoned building, built as a grain terminal for barges coming down the Hudson River from the Erie Canal.   It was quickly made obsolete by the railroads, and has been empty ever since.  It's made of very solid concrete.

In front of this building are several ball-playing fields, except that they are now closed on account of too much pollution in the ground.

Detail of above:

Storage for those wire scaffoldings they use in concrete:

The main street of Red Hook is a curious combination of high-end bicycle shops, hip restaurants, and assorted abandoned lots like these.   Though they will clearly be gone in a few years.

And some odd store windows:

And some colorful piles of assorted stuff along the same street:

Eventually you get to some very active modern port facilities for container ships, etc.

But there are still the odd buildings overlooking the container port.   This one was isolated on a corner, and had views of the port.   Me too!

Don't know what this was about:

Or this:   (If I removed the green barrel, it would make an excellent red, yellow, blue picture.

And finally, home for the ice cream trucks:

There is a lot more that I didn't see, so I will be back for more.

More Orchestras: Philadelphia and New York

Well, we couldn't resist going back to Carnegie Hall for another concert because Yannick and his Phabulous Phillies were in town to play Bartok's opera "Bluebeard" in a concert version.  It was a remarkable performance; I liked it far better than the staged performance we heard last year at the Met.   In fact, I think "Bluebeard" is one of the operas where the orchestral part is so vivid and dramatic that any staging and scenery is superfluous.  I can't imagine a better orchestral performance; the moment of the opening of the fifth door, when the orchestra on stage along with the three trumpets and three trombones in the balcony and the organ play with a fearsome fortissimo was awesome in the real sense.  Throughout the piece, the orchestra created extraordinary sounds.   The two singers, (including Vancouver's John Relyea) were excellent to my ears, though with the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, the singers project more clearly to the orchestral seats, and less so up to the balcony where we were.  (The same is in general true of the strings.)  I was OK with that, Vera not so much.


The concert began with excerpts from Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".   I am not a fan of Tchaikovsky, and even less so of "Swan Lake".  (Not that I have ever seen the ballet or heard the music in concert before.)   But I seem to know all the tunes.   What the performance brought back to me was memories of watching late night movies on TV many, many years ago, when one of the staples of advertising was a company that offered LP's of something like "The World's Greatest Romantic Melodies".   And you would inevitably hear snippets of Tchaikovsky, because he wrote a lot of them.   And hearing Swan Lake performed made me realize what so many of contemporary classical music audiences want to hear is their favorite tunes, untrammeled by any musical complications.  Tchaikovsky does do some musically interesting things at times, but I don't really see the point of doing this work in a concert performance.  Let the ballet people have it.  The orchestra's performance was spirited and lively without any particular precision or detail.


Two nights later, it was Geffen Hall (no climbing to the balcony!) and American music's turn when we went to hear an all John Adams concert in honor of his 70th birthday, with Alan Gilbert and the NY Philharmonic.  There were two pieces on the program, "Harmonielehre" and "Absolute Jest".   Adams, who was there, said that both pieces were "atypical" for him.   "Absolute Jest" was absolutely confounding to my ears.  Which is a good thing, I think.   It is written for string quartet and large orchestra, and based on some fragments from Beethoven's string quartets.   Adams actually had the quartet play the Beethoven originals in his introduction.   The piece uses more than just these fragments, though; there are many other references to other Beethoven works.   The reason I say that the work is confounding is that it moves between Beethoven's musical language and Adam's musical language, sometimes doing both at the same time.  It's not a collage or pastiche.  Nothing is really "in quotes".   It is, to my ears, a sincere attempt to write in the style of both Beethoven and Adams at the same time.   So you really don't know what to make of what you are hearing.   It's kind of like hearing hearing someone speak in two different languages at the same time.  My sense is that once you get used to it, the piece would probably make a lot of sense.  Adams has said that he was very interested in counterpoint when he was writing this piece, and that he worked extremely hard on it. There was initially a lot of unfavorable critical, but it seems to be better received now.   I would happily hear it again.
Harmonielehre is a different story.  It was written in the 1980's and was Adam's big breakthrough in freeing himself from the influence of Schoenberg and the postwar avant-garde.  It's also kind of a mashup, in this case between minimalism and heavy-duty late 19th century romanticism.  A kind of exorcism, if you will.    I liked parts of the piece, but the middle movement is very slow, with long and beautifully shaped melodic lines, some interesting harmonic touches, but not much else.   I like the fast parts, though.   The audience was enthusiastic, and the performance was excellent.

I will certainly miss Alan Gilbert when he leaves the NY Philharmonic at the end of this season.  He has done some wonderful and adventurous things while being director, though I have a sense that the Philharmonic is struggling with audiences, with the eternal dilemma of trying to please their aging subscribers who want their Tchaikovsky and their soloist superstars while also at the same time trying to attract new audiences for new music.   It's a very difficult thing to pull off, and I am not sure that Gilbert had the ability to make it happen.

Concerts

After a bit of a fallow stretch, suddenly there were lots of concerts.    We began by hearing the Juilliard Jazz Big Band in a concert of the music of Oliver Nelson.  Our friend Michael from Vancouver was there, with his stepmother Shelley.   Nelson is most known for his 1961 album "Blues and the Abstract Truth" featuring people like Bill Evans and Eric Dolphy.   He saw himself primarily as a composer (he studied with Elliot Carter), and with opportunities for an African-American composer being what they were in the mid-century, he spent most of his career doing arranging, film scores and the like.   The Juilliard band played some of his compositions and arrangements; they were wonderful to hear.  There is nothing like hearing a big band live to hear the subtle voicing and timbres of a big band.  It was an enjoyable concert, and I was very impressed with with Nelson's music.

Two nights later, it was back to Juilliard, this tim to hear the orchestra in a concert featuring Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Mahler's 4th symphony.    The Schoenberg is virtually never performed by orchestras, and I give great credit to the people at Juilliard for performing it.    (The Mahler 4th, on the other hand, was being performed by two other orchestras at Lincoln Center in the following few days.)   The Schoenberg was amazing, brilliant and absolutely absorbing; I was totally immersed.   Schoenberg's reputation as a difficult composer to listen to is not entirely undeserved; his music demands very close attention, but when you do that it is extremely expressive.   While many people obsess about "twelve-tone music" being difficult, I think Schoenberg's rhythmic ideas are perhaps even more disconcerting for the average listener.   Schoenberg doesn't do regular patterns or pulses; there are many recognizable little rhythmic motives, but they are constantly shifting, like a kaleidoscope, and changing and evolving very quickly.
The performance by the orchestra and the conductor, Edward Gardner, was excellent.  But the highest praise had to be reserved for the Juilliard student Brian Wong who was the soloist.   He really was extraordinary, playing with impeccable technique and intense commitment.  It is a fearsomely difficult part, and he pulled it off.   If there is any justice in the world, he should have an amazing career in the future.

The Mahler 4 was a pleasure to hear.   (Though I could have gone home happy after the Schoenberg.)  One of the delights of hearing the Juilliard Orchestra is hearing them in Alice Tully Hall, a much smaller hall than New York's normal symphonic halls.  The sound is both clear and very rich and full, and all the wonderful details of Mahler's inventive permutations of his little themes were clearly heard.

The next day, I went to a rehearsal of the Vienna Philharmonic, mostly to hear Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin".  (The concert was sold out, except for a few tickets that required a mortgage to buy.)   I was not disappointed, though in the rehearsal, the conductor, Franz Welser-Most, was mostly fixing up problematic spots.  It's an interesting way to get some perspective on a piece, even though you don't get to hear the whole thing.

The next day, it was back to Carnegie Hall for an afternoon concert of Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht"  and Schubert's 9th symphony.    Vienna does Vienna.   The Schoenberg  is an early work, a hyper-romantic tone poem, originally written for string sextet, and here performed in Schoenberg's arrangement for string orchestra.   It has some astonishing passages of intense expression and beauty, but to be honest, I don't really go for that kind of music.  It has some interest as an early example of Schoenberg's musical thinking.   The Schubert 9th is a an epic length symphony, which Schmann called the first romantic symphony.  It's a kind of confounding piece which doesn't really fit in with any of our conceived notions about Schubert's music.   It has wonderful tunes, but, on the other hand, it can be extremely repetitious rhythmically, to the point where it sounds like some proto-minimalist piece.  The rhythms are extremely square, the beats overly insistent and regular.   It is however, extremely enjoyable.   The Vienna Philharmonic did a respectable job, but I didn't walk away from the concert thinking that they were a truly great orchestra.   Or maybe it was the musical "bonbon" that they played as an encore.   Perhaps they having been playing more Strauss waltzes than is good for their health.

Two days later, Vienna was gone, and it was back to Carnegie Hall for an all Russian concert by the Boston Symphony, conducted by Andris Nelsons.   The concert began with a new work by Sofia Gubaidulina, a triple concerto for violin, cello, and bayan (A Russian kind of accordion).  I have always liked Gubaidulina's music, and the new work was very interesting and exciting to hear.   She uses quite simple melodic ideas, but they are combined and juxtaposed in ways that are fascinating.   The concerto begins with a low sustained cluster on the bayan, which is soon joined by the tubas.   In fact the tubas play a big role in the piece, and owing to the acoustics of the Carnegie Hall balcony it felt like a concerto for tuba, too.  Gubaidulina shepherds her orchestral resources masterfully; I would happily hear the piece again soon, and hope to understand it better.
The same cannot be said for the other piece on the program, Shostakovich's 7th Symphony.  Readers of this blog will know of my relative ignorance of Shostakovich's music.   In this case, I really didn't like the piece at all; by the end of its endless eighty minutes, I had really had enough.   The piece is known and culturally defined by its history, having been written to commemorate the siege of Leningrad in World War 2.  The first movement features the famous "invasion theme", a march repeated twelve times over a very Bolero-like drum obstinato.   A "problem" emerges, though, when it was recently discovered that Shostakovich wrote the first movement before the Germans had even invaded Russia.   The problem here is what happens when a piece of music becomes very closely associated with the extra-musical circumstances surrounding its origins or purpose.  Thus to criticize the musical qualities is considered to besides the point, given the story of its creation and performance.  (Or, to put it bluntly, if you don't like it, you are against the heroism of the Russian people and implicitly for the Nazis.)   For me, there are various stunning moments in the piece, but there are also long, long tedious and repetitious passages where virtually nothing happens musically.  An editor would have been very useful!  There is a very funny and nasty review written by Virgil Thomson at the time (and often quoted), where, among other things, he says it has been written for eight year olds.   (There is also a very interesting article by Christopher Gibbs about the reception of the work in the US.)   In any case, the performance was certainly excellent, and I know now what the symphony is about.

Two nights later, it was back to Carnegie Hall for a second Boston Symphony concert.   (I don't think I need to ask anyone how to get to Carnegie Hall anymore; I practice going every other day.)   Vera skipped this one, opting instead for a show with Sanda Weigl.
The point of going for me was to hear a new work by George Benjamin, one of my favorite living composers.   It was wonderful.  It is written for countertenor, a small female choir, and a relatively small orchestra.    Benjamin uses 11th century Hebrew poetry from Andalusia, as well as some Garcia Lorca fragments.  Benjamin has such an ear for subtle orchestral textures and gradually shifting harmonies.  His music is both dramatic and very individual.   I think he must work very hard.
The rest of the program was French, Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" and the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Berlioz.    The Ravel reminded me of some contemporary French spectral music at times, with some busy and layered ostinati in different colors.   I haven't heard the Symphonie Fantastique since I taught it in a music appreciation class many, many years ago.   It was a knockout performance, and I came away with a renewed appreciation for the sheer imaginativeness of Berlioz's musical ideas.   When you hear it live, you realize how audacious Berlioz was.  Nothing is routine, and very little sounds like what came before him (or after him).  On the other hand, it does sound like music written by a desperately romantic drug imbibing young man.
The Boston Symphony was excellent in all these performances, and, despite the Shostakovich 7th, I though the programming was well conceived.  Andris Nelsons is at times annoying to watch, though; he has a habit of leaning with his left on on the podium bar behind him while conducting with his right hand.   Unless there is some physical disability I don't know about, I don't see why he can't stand upright on his own two feet.   He also does some rather exaggerated crouches, as well.   So I don't look at him...

The Museum of Non-Objective Art

There was a show at the Guggenheim Museum entitled "Visionaries".   The visionaries were the founders of the museum, Solomon Guggenheim, his artistic adviser Hilla Rebay, and other art world people who made major contributions to the collection.  The show was taken entirely from the Guggenheim's own collection.   Rebay and Guggenheim were passionate about "non-objective" art, that is, abstract art that had a spiritual dimension.  They felt that art could only reach a higher dimension of meaning by abandoning the notion of representation of the objective work, i.e things and people.   Kandinsky was the ideal exponent of this art.  And they gradually amassed a huge collection, which ultimately became the Guggenheim Museum, to be housed in the building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.   The building was designed as a "temple" for this art, with the notion of ascending the ramp evoking the notion of a spiritual ascension.
Those who have been going to the Guggenheim over the years will have noticed that the Guggenheim has entirely abandoned this notion of art, unless you think shows like the Armani one and the motorcycle one are leading you to a high spiritual plane.   But they still have most of the collection.  (Though they have sold some of it over the years to buy other stuff.)   So what you saw in the show was a fabulous collection of modern art, mostly exemplifying the classical paradigm as constructed by art historians of the twentieth century.   Cezanne to Kandinsky to Pollock, it is all there, some familiar, some not.  It was a pleasure to see, if not exactly earth-shaking.    For me, the most interesting part was seeing a few works by some relatively unknown artists, mostly Americans who were in the circles of Rebay and Guggenheim.   And it's always fascinating to see who became well known and who stayed obscure.   I was fascinated by the works of one "Penrod Centurion", who was listed as born around 1895, but with no death date.   Googling at home, it turns out he was a very mysterious figure who seems to have disappeared.   Penrod Centurion was a pseudonym  (Penny Cent!), and he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
Here are a few examples from the show:

Penrod Centurion:

An Albert Gleizes painting of the Brooklyn Bridge:

An outstanding Kandinsky, one of many:

Robert Delaunay in widescreen:

This small collage by Georges Valmier was made in 1920 and entitled "Fugue"

There were a number of works by Hilla Rebay, including this collage:

And this by Victor Brauner.   This was part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which was not so focused on non-objective art, and included a number of surrealists.

A stunning Pollock, owned by Peggy:

There was another show at a gallery in Chelsea of early works from the Museum of Objective Art.   There were more interesting examples that could have easily been in the Guggenheim show.

Penrod Centurion:

Irene Rice Pereira, a very interesting painter.  The painting has some very complex and interesting surface textures.

While at the Guggenheim I did get to experience a very famous piece of non-objective art, a worked entitled "America" by Maurizio Cattelan.   This is in fact a fully functional solid gold toilet, installed in one of the restrooms at the Guggenheim.   It is guarded by an attendant, and no chisels (or anything else) are allowed inside.  But you do get to use it as you would a normal toilet.  In the age of Drumpf, it seems more appropriate then ever.  Peeing on solid gold.     I took a picture. It looked spectacular as you flushed it.   Vera asked me why didn't I take a selfie while on the toilet.  I didn't.   I have my limits.

I went to some other galleries recently.   One show I saw was of recent work of Vija Celmins, an artist in her mid-eighties, originally from Latvia.   I really liked her work; it reminded me a bit of Agnes Martin in its subtlety.   A lot of the work in the show was what might be called starry sky paintings, which, at first glance, look like what you might produce if you tried to paint a night sky filled with stars.   But, like Martin's paintings, things start to happen after you look for a while.  Subtle colors begin to emerge, and what might look at first glance like stars in the random patterns of outer space start to become something else.   You can take pictures of these paintings, but they don't do justice at all to the experience.    This was about five feet square:

An inverted sky:

Another set of small sized paintings in the show was a series of variations on painting from the same photograph of the sea.   Again the subtlety of what Celmins is doing doesn't transfer in photographs.   They were truly fascinating.

On the opposite end of the subtlety spectrum, there was a show of the work of Katharina Grosse at the Gagosian Gallery.  Grosse works on extremely large canvases, about twelve feet tall in this first example, and works with a wide spectrum of colors.   She also uses spray painting as well.  (She has been known to spray paint entire buildings.)  With my weakness for color, I throughly enjoyed these paintings.  She does create an interesting sense of depth in her images, and seeing these large colorful canvases in the large and spacious white galleries at the Gagosian is striking.

But if you really want to understand the paintings, read this from the Gagosian website:

Grosse approaches painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity. With a spray gun, she disconnects the artistic act from the hand, stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark. The resulting pictures are distinct, but never predetermined. Spatial tensions rise through shifts in chromatic temperature. Challenging boundaries, she reintroduces her body as an active agent within a vision of contemporary existence that is at once physically isolated and densely networked.

Does she hold the spray gun in her hand?   How is it disconnected?

A detail from the above painting, which is about 20 feet long.

Finally, there was a interesting show by Jack Whitten.   His current work involves layering acrylic paint into very thick slabs, and then chopping them up and applying them to canvas.   Before I read about the paintings, I thought the thick slabs were some kind of ceramic material.    Viewing the paintings is a dynamic process; they look very differently from a distance than from close up.

From a distance...

Then a close up of the same painting:

I passed on the Armory Show and all the other art fairs happening in the first week of March.   Too many people!