Manhattan 2012: Guggenheim and Whitney Museums

On the past two visits to Manhattan, we had always wanted to visit the Guggenheim Museum, but it never quite made it to the top of our short list of places to see.  This time we were determined to make this a priority. We upgraded to the next level of our Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) membership, so that we could get reciprocal entry into the Guggenheim and the Whitney museums (as well as other museums around the world) for free. The cost of the entry fees were more than the cost of the upgrade, so this was a good deal.

 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a gorgeous building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The highlight is a circular "Starship Enterprise-like" section with a stunning skylight at its pinnacle and spiraled ramps leading to each floor.  This area acted as a showcase for the current feature exhibition while smaller wings that offshoot from each level of the spiral hosted smaller exhibits. A cafe on the third level has floor to ceiling windows overlooking Central Park.

 When we visited, the main exhibit was entitled "Picasso Black and White" and concentrated on art that Picasso created in monotone or pale shades.  The pieces progressed chronologically through his career as you moved up the ramps from level to level. Viewing works by Picasso is always a treat, and would have been even more impactful if we had not already attended larger Picasso exhibitions at the AGO and in Barcelona, as well as viewing famous works of his in Paris and multiple cities in the USA. We had seen coloured versions of many of the paintings and sculptures before, such as The Kiss, his surrealistic sculpture of Marie-Thérèse Walter and his homages to Les Meninas.

It did make us pause to consider what an eclectic and prolific artist Picasso was. His works could be curated in so many different ways.  Each potential theme would result in a formidable collection of art and there would always be something new to experience.

The museum had a good audio guide for the Picasso and other exhibits as well as a guided tour of the Black and White exhibit. It was enlightening to hear thoughts and anecdotes from Picasso's daughter Maya.  She described being liberated by American soldiers after WWII and how they mistook her paintings as "new Picasso's". We learned how to identify renderings of Marie-Thérèse by her distinctive nose, and that in images of women seated or reclining in chairs, the chair was a stand-in for Picasso.

A pair of sculptures were a new revelation both in subject matter and in form and material. They were of Sylvette David, a new muse that was not featured in previous exhibitions. Picasso met her towards the end of his career and created many works based on her image.  The sculptures on display were created from sheet metal which he bent and shaped, then painted. Sylvette's trademark high ponytail was prominent in each piece, leading the hairstyle to be adopted by actress Brigette Bardot.

Beyond the main Picasso exhibit, there were smaller rooms displaying the gallery's permanent collection, new acquisitions, a very sparse selection of Vasily Kandinsky paintings and an installation by Gabriel Orozco called Asterisms. This last exhibit was the most unique and interesting.  It consisted of a collection of debris that Orozco accumulated from a ball field in New York and from the coastline of Baja California, Mexico. He catalogued and photographed his finds, then arranged them on the ground as a sculptural piece that seemed to comment on the impact of humans on nature.

We had lunch in the Guggenheim restaurant called "The Wright", whose vibrant design by architect Andre Kikosk made it feel like you were sitting in the middle of an abstract expressionist painting.  My roasted pepper and goat cheese terrain also looked like a work of art, with its layers reminding me of a Mark Rothko.  Rich's crab cake was one of the best we've ever tasted with light breading and large chunks of crab meat.

For a building that looked fairly large, the Guggenheim held what seemed like a surprisingly small number of works. In the end, we found the architecture and design of the building itself to be so impressive that it distracted from the art it held.

The Whitney Museum was partially under renovation so there were even fewer exhibits to see and what we saw was difficult to understand. However some outstanding guided tours really shed light on the works and helped us appreciate what the artists were trying to convey.

When we first surveyed Wade Guyton's works, we were mystified by the floor-to-ceiling large images of what looked like the letters "X" or "U" in various shades, laid on top of different backgrounds. Imagine our surprise when the guide compared Guyton to Jackson Pollack, explaining that each artist revolutionized the concept of "painting" in his time. Pollack  rejected the notion that paintings should represent recognizable people, objects or places and celebrated the idea that application of the paint itself was the art.

In contrast, Guyton eschews paint all together and moves "painting" into the modern digital world. He uses computer programs like Microsoft Word to create images from alphabet or shapes, then prints them onto various medium.  He started out by printing on top of photographs from magazines, but eventually moved to printing on large sheets of linen. He would fold his material in half, print one side of the image, flip it over, then print the other side, resulting in a line down the centre of his "paintings".  If his printer jammed, misaligned the two sides, ran out of ink or tore the work, he embraced these random accidents as part of the art.  He started with the letter "X" since it held so many meanings, such as a negation, an illiterate's signature, or preface for words like "X-rated", "X-files", "X-Men".  Later he moved to the letter "U" for the arbitrary reason that "it was not the letter X". Without the tour, we would have looked at the "X" and "U" works, shrugged and walked away.

Richard Artschwager's art was described to us as uncategorizable - "too cerebral for pop art, too playful for minimalism and too whimsical for conceptualism". His sculptures make you do a double-take. For example, "Description of Table" looks like a table with four legs covered by a white tablecloth.  It is actually a block of plywood covered with formica (the stuff used for fake wood floors or furniture) of different colours, with the white simulating a tablecloth and the black simulating the void between the legs of a table. He paints on top of celotex (the material used to make ceilings bumpy), allowing the uneven surface to impact his paint strokes. One series of Artschwager's works were a set of wooden crates like those used to deliver art to galleries. The deliverymen had to be carefully instructed not to accidentally "uncrate" the actual art pieces.

In a precursor to modern day graffiti, in the 1960s, Artschwager developed the BLP, a black oval shape that he innocuously placed throughout and around the grounds of the gallery that was showing his work. It was meant to cause people to slow down and really look at their surroundings. As part of the Whitney exhibition, the BLPs have been painted on building walls, windows and smokestacks all along the High Line Trail. Later, Artschwager reinvented his BLP, turning it into a 3-dimensional sculpture that looked more like an exclamation mark.

The last exhibit at the Whitney, called "Sinister Pop", was more accessible to us, but still benefited from the additional information provided by the guided tour.  It dealt with the darker, more subversive attempts at Pop Art, which Andy Warhol obviously embraced since several of his works were included.  Warhol's "Before and After" was based on a National Enquirer ad for Rhineoplasty and feeds into concepts of loss of ethnic identity, assimilation, and conformity as people try to aspire to media-driven perception of beauty. Warhol painted "Vote McGovern" to promote the presidential campaign of Democrat candidate George McGovern against Richard Nixon. Rather than portraying a positive image of McGovern, the painting shows a sinister, demonized, green-faced Nixon as a "reverse message" of what not to vote for.

Madonna and Child by Allan D'Arcangelo show the outlines of Jackie and Caroline Kennedy, depicted as saints with halos over their heads, without rendering their faces.  Drawn after the death of JFK, the painting highlights how celebrities have replaced religious figures in a secular world. It is interesting that that with only hairstyles and clothing to go by, these iconic images are instantly recognizable.

Jim Dine's "Drag - Johnson and Mao" depicts US President Lyndon Johnson and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-Tung as drag queens decked out in makeup, rouge and lipstick.  At the time, these two powerful men were promoting unpopular policies in the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution. Spoofing them in this emasculating fashion was possibly an attempt to make them seem less invincible in the eyes of the public.

There are so many excellent art galleries and museums in New York that it is hard to pick which ones to go to.  We had a great time and learned so much on this trip, without even getting to revisit the Metropolitan or MOMA.  We'll save those for the next visit.