I've got to admit, the New Jersey Transit trains are quite enjoyable if you travel in off peak hours, buy the ticket at vending machines (You save 5$ - which at the 43X factor is quite a bit)and don't try to use the waiting room. A gentleman of chinese origin left his luggage there, stepped outside to get some air and realised that he could not get back in. The door would not open till the next morning.
I reached New York Penn Station - stepped outside and got my first impression of New York. It was full of oversize buildings that were drab and gray, and reeked of big money. No wonder bin Laden and his ilk thought they had bulls-eyes painted on them.
During the week-end I managed to wear out my new jelly-filled insoled footwear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It was a dream experience - pictures I'd spent a lifetime admiring in print, seen in reality. It takes a long time to sink in that you are in a room where every itty bitty piece of work is worth millions of dollars. And then it hits you again - they are worth every bit of it. What impressed me even more is the way these paintings and exhibits are displayed. I wish the curators of the dusty galleries and museums of India could take a look at how beautifully these exhibits are displayed to maximise their effect.
I was most impressed by a special exhibit, called "An American In Paris", about how the most famous among the artists in America - Whistler, Homer, Copley, Sargent, among others - studied art in Paris, and exhibited their works at the salon there. The exhibit, garnished with quotes of extravagent quotes in praise of Paris (Sample: When a good American dies, he goes to Paris - Oscar Wilde), are a touching counterpoint to the sneering ill will the American media harbours for France today. I was also a bit amused to note the tremendous similarity between the style favoured by a majority of the American artists with the neo-realistic school of Russian art. Two nations, at opposite poles of the Cold War world, influenced culturally by the same nation! An irony, at least... in both countries, impressionism was held in genteel contempt.
The MoMA was of course far more bewildering. A room with lights switching on and off (that was the exhibit!), a video of a young woman smashing the windows of cars while people look on admiringly, a room where the roof appear to have fallen in, the insane paint splashes of Pollock, a wallpaper of a pharmacy (made to look like the visual identification page from Physician's Desk Reference, except that the text are the names of chapters from the Bible). In comparison the Picassos and Henry Moores are quite accessible and sensible. The section on modern design was fascinating - you'd seldom think of a table lamp, or an airport flight announce ment board to be highly artistic design, but then they are! The fan blades of a GE turboprop engine, carefully whittles out by a 5-axes CNC lathe, also hardly appears like art. I guess, beyond a point, art, science and engineering all tend to overlap.
Tucked away in one corner of MoMA is Andrew Wyeth's famous Christina's World. This famous painting certainly deserves greater prominence - the careful detail of the painting, never captured in the most accurate reproduction, certainly heightens the pathos. It deserved a room to itself, not a corner of a 5th floor.
Of course I loved a special exhibition of Manet's The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. While trying to figure out the origin of the name of Delhi's Benito Juares Marg, I'd come across the history of Mexico's freedom struggle, and how Maximilian, the puppet king set up by the French, had offered Juarez a post in his cabinet. Juarez had refused, and having overthrown Maximilian and his rather inept generals, had them executed, to great outrage in Europe. I'd seen reproductions of the painting, but never knew that Manet had painted three versions. With studies of the painting and lithographic reproductions of other illustrators of the execution, it was quite a study into the influence of a well known painting.
I returned to Parsippany late on Sunday. At the Morris Plains station, I saw a note on the door of the waiting room:
The gentleman who left his luggage in the waiting room last night is requested
to collect his belongings from the office.
Poor man, I wonder if he did get his luggage back!
1 comment:
Very nice - I wish you could have made it to this coast as well - it would have been interesting I think. Keep writing!
Post a Comment