HANDS

A little wealth comes in handy for one of an acquisitive nature. This was the thought that occurred to me was we visited the mansion on Madison Avenue that has become the Pierpoint Morgan Library & Museum. With a new extension designed by Renzo Piano, it is now much bigger than when we last visited--I suspect that was in the 1970s--and has more space devoted to education centers, research facilities, an auditorium... It has gallery spaces that offer several exhibitions, including one on Mark Twain that we had intended to see, but never quite got to because we were so mesmerized by Morgan's private library and his collections of art (some magnificent paintings by Hans Memling and many small objects of exquisite beauty,) books, manuscripts, jewelry from throughout the ages and of every culture... (No pictures allowed. Check this out online.)

And as we gazed at all these amazing relics of past human cultures, I could not help thinking of the hands that made them: the hand of Abraham Lincoln penning a letter, for example, or of

Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson; the hand of Mozart or Chopin jotting down those little marks along ruled lines that would become the music that I love; the hands of those ancient people fashioning jewels to wear, the hands of those who wore the rings they made; the hands of the master illustrators and bookmakers who put together the Bibles and concordances, the books of prayer. Hands once so passionate and dedicated to the work, and now long since dead.

Heading south, we found our way to the New Museum in its fine new building on the Bowery(well, relatively new: it has been a while since we were in New York.) Still thinking of hands as we walked through the current exhibitions there, "The Last Newspaper"...

... and "Free," I was reflecting upon the continuing influence of the conceptual movement in contemporary art of the 1970s, and regretting that so much in this kind of art, these days, has to do with the brain, and how little with hand and heart. There's so much "reading" to be done--both in the literal and the metaphorical sense--that the mind (my mind, at least) soon tires of it and wants to wander off into the richer territory of the whole human experience, which includes the physical body, the emotions and the spirit.

A block or so further north, at the grand new Norman Foster-designed Sperone Westwater gallery on the Bowery...

... and were left rather unmoved by the work of Guillermo Kuitca. I found myself in agreement with the New York Times critic Ken Johnson, who called it "a tiresome, postmodernist meditation on the aesthetics and sociology of cosmopolitan modernity." We did, however, like the huge elevator, called "the moving room" by the gallery. It currently features an installation of baby mattresses painted with maps by Kuitca, called "Le Sacre"...

And we loved the stairwell...

On to the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street...

... on the Lower East side. It's a changing neighborhood, where Ellie noticed this Seventh Day Adventist cruficix superimposed on a star of David...

and I liked the odd storefronts with furniture and appliances...

This was the low-rent district to which immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe flooded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The museum offers tours of the tenement buildings these unfortunate people were obliged to inhabit and where they first found their roots in the new country. We took the basic tour, through the tiny, three-room apartments of a German and an Italian family, and learned something of their moving history. Here again, I was reflecting on hands at work--the hands that earned a meagre living making shoes or dresses for the wealthier, uptown folk, cleaning their houses, and doing their best to take care of their own growing children. Hardy times, hardy people.

And finally, we stopped by to visit our friend Marcia Hafif in her SoHo loft...

... in where I was much refreshed and restored by the presence of years' worth of her paintings. And where I reflected on the contrast between the deceptively simple profundity of her largely monochromatic paintings and the emptiness of much of what we had seen in the course of the day. The hand is very much present in the surfaces of Marcia's work, where every brush stroke and every level of paint acquires meaning as it is applied. The result is a rich and deeply human experience: it's not just something to glance at, "get," and move on. I particularly loved her newest work, where the carefully worked, dark gray monochromatic surface has been enriched with expertly thrown "spatters" of simple color, red and white. I did not presume to take my usual snapshots, which would have done a disservice to her paintings, but you can find many examples of her work online.

We had dinner at the famous Brooklyn Diner on West 57th Street, and got home in good time to watch Barack Obama's press conference on the laptop. I continue to believe that this a man of remarkable intelligence and vision. As the bumper sticker says, I BACK BARACK.