dimanche 11 mai 2008

Un long week-end à New-York - mai 2008






















Un long week-end à New-York

3 jours d’activités culturelles à New-York ; une tradition? Suffirait-il de 2 fois en 2 ans ? Et pour voir les filles et Eric.

30 avril.
Sommes descendus à l’hôtel the Pod, sur la 51e entre la 2e et la 3e ; l’ancien Pickwick Arms, apprend-on, sérieusement retappé. Dans le cœur du mid-town, côté est. Compact, très hip – haute vitesse sans fil, téléviseur écran plat, « iPod craddle ». Chambre lit double ; ne fait pas plus de 12’ par 12’. Salle de bain très étudiée dans l’art de l’aménagement de l’espace ! Douche, genre pluie douce. Somme toute, çà rencontre nos besoins, étant donné la proximité relative des théâtres…et le prix des hôtels à New-York…
http://www.thepodhotel.com/

Dîner au chic et hip DB Bistro Moderne, avec André et France.
http://danielnyc.com/dbbistro/


1er mai.
Après une journée de travail pour moi, retrouvons les filles et Eric en soirée, pour un verre et une bouchée; aboutissons dans un bar sushi, un de ceux-là très nombreux dans Manhattan.


2 mai.
Visite au Neue Galerie Museum, Klimt

A good look at the “portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer”, the original, in this museum since last year. This painting, as I understand it, had a long history and voyage. Commissioned first by the Jewish family Block-Bauer in Vienna at the turn of the century, it was stolen by the Nazis at the time of the Anschluss in 1938; then restituted to the Austrian Government after the war. It is then when the heirs to the family went after the government in courts to get its property back, to succeed only in 2006, at which time Adele’s heirs sold it to Ronald Lauder (for a reported US$135M!), one of the 2 founders of the Neue Galerie. (pour plus:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_dI)

Well-worth seeing, along with the whole exhibition, rather small in terms of paintings (only 8) but lots of drawings and vignettes of Klimt’s history, including a reproduction of paintings he made to celebrate the 4th movement of Beethoven 9th symphony, which was prepared for an exhibition of the Succession Group in Vienna, and that were save when transferred to adorn the large living room of an industrialist’s home in Belgium! Klimt is all about women and clothing (with jewelry, a good sample of them are in the adjoining exhibition, the “Wiener Werkstatte Jewelry” see below the exhibition’s description). His drawings, mostly croquis in preparation for paintings, are very explicit, putting in evidence the pelvis region of the body… More on Klimt at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klimt

Klimt is at the center of this intense period known as “Turn-of-the century Vienna”, a time when converged in Vienna several cultural, social and intellectual currents that were to mark the rest of the century: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and others around the Secession Group for painting; Gustav Mahler for music; Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann for architecture, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler for psychology, Ludwig Wittgenstein for philosophy (neo-positivism), and Josef Popper for social theory (utopia). Inspired me to buy “Vienna 1900” book, a collection of essays on the period by Austrian and German scholars, well illustrated.

From Neue Galerie’s website
http://www.neuegalerie.org/main.html?langkey=english:

GUSTAV KLIMT: THE RONALD S. LAUDER AND SERGE SABARSKY COLLECTIONSOctober 18, 2007 - June 30, 2008
On October 18, the Neue Galerie New York opens “Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections,” with eight paintings and more than 120 drawings by the controversial artist, on view together for the first time. The exhibition will also feature a reconstruction, with original furnishings, of the receiving parlor from the second Klimt studio. “Gustav Klimt” unites the collections of Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky, co-founders of the Neue Galerie, and will fill all the gallery spaces in the museum. Together their collections comprise the finest gathering of works by Klimt in the United States. The exhibition is organized by Renée Price, Director of the Neue Galerie. This is its sole venue, where it will be on view through June 30, 2008.
“Gustav Klimt is an artist of paramount importance in the development of modern art,” said Ronald S. Lauder, President of the Neue Galerie. “He is central to our museum’s collection and mission.”
“Klimt’s work embodies the quintessence of fin de siècle Vienna: its richness, its sensuality, and its capacity for innovation,” said Renée Price, Director of the Neue Galerie. “It is a tremendous honor to present this remarkable exhibition at the Neue Galerie, which has become the premiere destination outside of Austria for admirers of the art created by this complex and very private man.”
This exhibition is the first museum retrospective of the work of Gustav Klimt ever held in the United States. Klimt was little known in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. In the decades immediately following his death, there was virtually no American interest in the artist. His reputation gradually began to grow in the 1960s, with Klimt eventually reaching cult status. Today, he is internationally recognized as a major figure of twentieth-century art.
Besides paintings and drawings, the exhibition will contain rare vintage documentary material, ranging from letters, photographs, and personal effects, such as the artist’s cufflinks and seal (both designed by the architect Josef Hoffmann), to the only known surviving example of the painting smock that Klimt wore.
As a special addition to the exhibition, the Neue Galerie is presenting the re-created interior—based on original floor plans and a 1912 photograph—of the receiving room from Klimt’s studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21, Vienna, which was occupied by the artist from 1892 until the summer of 1912. The display includes the original furnishings designed by Josef Hoffmann, executed by the Wiener Werkstätte, and generously loaned from the collection of Ernst Ploil, Vienna. The installation will be accompanied by period music, including works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert that Klimt was known to have admired…

WIENER WERKSTÄTTE JEWELRYMarch 27 - September 1, 2008
On March 27, 2008, the Neue Galerie opens “Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry,” with more than forty precious objects drawn from public and private collections. The exhibition will highlight masterpieces created by the Wiener Werkstätte between the firm’s inception in 1903 and 1920. It will feature significant pieces by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Carl Otto Czeschka, and Dagobert Peche, among others. Supplemental materials will include design drawings and photographs of prominent clients, with an emphasis on fashion designer Emilie Flöge, confidante of Gustav Klimt, who assembled a large collection of Wiener Werkstätte jewelry.
The exhibition is organized by Janis Staggs, Assistant Curator, Neue Galerie New York. It will be on view at the Neue Galerie through September 1, 2008. Additional venues will be announced.
The Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshops, was established in 1903. The firm’s artistic co-founders—Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser—subscribed to the English Arts and Crafts ideal of exceptionally well-made objects designed by artists and executed by specialized craftsmen. Jewelry was among the first objects produced by the firm. Following the example of near contemporaries René Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany, Hoffmann and Moser shared the belief that jewelry should be valued for its artistic merit and not simply for its monetary value…

Lunch at the Balcony Café, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Glimpse at Courbet, the same retrospective I had seen in Paris last year, with the iconic “l’origine du monde” painting… (See blog October 2007 – Un week-end à Paris)

Theater
August: Osage County
Music Box Theatre

Description
Tracy Letts’s scorchingly funny play is the dysfunctional-family drama supersized: a hideous, bulging scrapbook of misery, grudge-holding and poisoned heritage. The work’s three acts possess the heft and weave of lifetimes, but are leavened by the author’s dark humor and fondness for pulpy flourishes. The result is a tremendous achievement in American playwriting, a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and its tougher people. Deanna Dunagan is delectably bilious as the drug-addled, splenetic matriarch. And the entire Steppenwolf Theatre Company cast shines in Anna D. Shapiro’s whip-smart, rollicking production. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.—David Cote (TimeOut NYC)

Description is right on! Intense, harsh, yet full of humoristic moments, if not for the extreme situations that are led to! 3h25min – leaves you psychologically exhausted.


3 mai
Visites de musées continue; avec Laurence, Eric et Dominique.
D’abord les japonais au Brooklyn Museum of Art. Les prints de l’école Utagawa, fin XVIIIe, jusqu’au début XXe. Puis, l’attraction du jour : Takashi Muratami. Chose assez inusité : Une boutique de Louis Vitton, dont la marque de commerce est associée à certaines créations de Muratami, fait partie intégrante de l’exposition !


Extraits du site du musée:
Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900 presents more than seventy prints from the renowned Van Vleck collection of Japanese woodblock prints at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison and approximately twenty prints from the Brooklyn Museum. The Utagawa School, founded by Utagawa Toyoharu, dominated the Japanese print market in the nineteenth century and is responsible for more than half of all surviving ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures of the floating world.” Colorful, technically innovative, and sometimes defiant of government regulations, these prints were created for a popular audience and documented the pleasures of urban life and leisure. The prints represent famous places, landscapes, warriors, and kabuki actors; they were reproduced in books, posters, and other printed materials for mass consumption, and they fed a thriving Edo publishing industry.

Murakami: The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami includes more than ninety works in various media that span the artist’s entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.
Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, “it was more representative of modern day Japanese life.” American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences on his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products.

The exhibition © MURAKAMI explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000. Two works examining these subjects were a part of a group show, My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001.

Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami’s artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003–4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist’s signature characters; and Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002).

Puis visite au PS1, une succursale du MoMA située dans le Queens. Place d’abord à une rétrospective de l’art féministe des années 60 et 70 (on a fait un bout de chemin depuis !) et puis du finlandais

Extraits du site du musée :
WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution
Opening February 17, 2008 through May 12, 2008
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art. Organized by MOCA Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow Connie Butler for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, WACK! focuses on the crucial period of the 1970s, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. Praising the exhibition, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Director Alanna Heiss notes: "In addition to exploring international occurrences of feminist art, the show emphasizes New York's role in the movement, as well as its relationship with each artist involved. This is a particularly happy coincidence for P.S.1, as Connie Butler, the curator of WACK! in Los Angeles, has since last year joined the staff at the Museum of Modern Art, and will work on the very special installation of the exhibition with P.S.1 Director of Operations and Exhibitions Design Antoine Guerrero". This exhibition will be displayed on the entire First and Second Floors, and in the Third Floor Main Gallery from February 17, 2008 through May 12, 2008.
The exhibition spans the period of 1965 to 1980 and includes 120 artists and artist groups from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. WACK! includes work by women who operated within the political structure of feminism as well as women who did not necessarily embrace feminism as part of their practice, but were impacted by the movement. Comprising work in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.


Drinks au bar de l’hôtel Roosevelt (Madison et 45e) avec les enfants, et puis place au théâtre :

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Broadhurst Theatre
Description
The historic, all-black revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic is a bona fide revelation. The A-list actors—Anika Noni Rose, Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad—fully inhabit the steamy, sexually repressed Southern milieu as if the parts were tailor-made for them. Film-star Howard is the weak link, but even his slack pace and lack of stage experience are ameliorated by passion and natural charisma. Director Debbie Allen’s production is a bit ham-fisted in the tacky sets and lights, but the superb cast is the reason to see it. It’s a masterpiece in which lying is a major theme, and we won’t see a truer version for a long time. Note: Through May 22, the role of Brick will be taken over by Boris Kodjoe. Howard returns on May 23.—DC (TimeOut NYC)
Toujours aussi intense. Interprétation magistrale de Jones, Rashad et Rose. Mandacity is the theme !

Dîner au Pigalle (8e et 48e); moules et vin d’Alsace (sauf pour Dominique qui tient bon à son sixième jour de faste !)


4 mai

Petit déjeuner chez Norma’s, au Méridien (6e et 57e) ; partie de la tradition (4e visite en un peu plus d’un an). ¾ heure d’attente !

Théâtre :
Spamalot
Shubert Theatre
Description
While undiscriminating Monty Python fans may thrill to hear reenactments of the troupe’s classic routines, its anarchic, zany spirit has been dulled and sweetened to make for commercial pliability. Despite Mike Nichols’s witty staging, Spamalot just isn’t as hilarious or daring as the material that inspired it.—DC (TimeOut NYC)
Une grosse farce populaire, qui attire une foule (90% féminine, ma foi, et tout en enbonpoint!) fervente de l’émission American Idol, dont le gagnant d’il y a quelques années, Aiken, en est une des vedettes qui se mérite d’ailleurs les applaudissements let les hurlements es plus tonitruants ! On ne nous y reprendra plus !
Un dernier verre sur la terrasse extérieure du Rockefeller Café, pour profiter des rayons déclinants d’un soleil qui ne fut de la partie que ce dimanche.
Vol sur Toronto à 20h30 (AC727)