MORE RAIN...

Tonight I get an early start on tomorrow's blog entry.  It has been a long, wet day, and we came back to our hotel much earlier than last night, to be ready for an early start tomorrow.

And tonight I get to start with a peeve, because what is a long, weary day without a peeve at the end of it.  Here's the peeve: it's about tipping.  I much prefer the European system, where they jut add the tip to the bill and have done with it.  If you're overjoyed with the service, you can leave a little spare change and everybody's happy.  Over here, we've been suffering from tip inflation, and it's getting serious.  There's something new going on here in New York City, and I don't like it.  When you get the bill, there's often a notation that reminds you that service is NOT included, and kindly suggests the kind of tip that is acceptable.  It STARTS at 18 percent.  The next step up is 20 percent.  And the third suggestion is 22 or 25 percent.  Was a time, not so long ago, when 10 percent was an acceptable tip.  The 15 percent was considered perfectly adequate.  Nowadays the suggestion is that you're cheap if you only add on 18 percent, and 20 percent is considered the norm.  Now, I don't like to be cheap, particularly with those who work hard and get underpaid for it.  But this strikes me as nothing more nor less than extortion.  If the restaurant is too cheap to pay their employees a decent wage, why should the patron be left to make up for their parsimony?  It just doesn't seem right to me.  Am I alone in this?  I'd really like to know.

That said, phew, let's get back to another terrific day in this great (and expensive!) city.  We were out late.  Ellie slept in, and I was working on the blog, which took me some considerable time.  After a lousy cup of room-machine coffee in the hotel, a Starbucks stop was unfortunately a prerequisite, along with a shared slice of banana bread.  Then on, through wind and rain, to Pace Gallery on 57th Street, where we expected, mistakenly, to see Ai Wei Wei and instead found a show of rather extraordinary portrait prints by Chuck Close and, on the lower level, "Fierce Creativity"--a group show curated by Chuck Close and Jessica Craig Martin to benefit a charitable organization called Artists for Peace and Justice.  It's a noble cause, and one which artists are to be commended for supporting with the gift of their work, but the show itself was honestly to terribly fierce not terribly creative.  Ellie and I were simply astounded by the prices...  But, well, this is New York, and this is the weird world of contemporary art.

On to Mary Boone's gallery on Fifth Avenue, and an much fiercer and more creative show by E.V, Day, whose prior work was unfamiliar to me.  The main installation, "Semi-Feral," reconstructed, in cleverly articulated stretched wire and skeletal fragments, the battle between two saber-tooth tigers...

All images are iPhone snaps, taken without gallery objection

In the adjacent gallery, enclosed in a box-like cage, a bridal veil and dress were as if torn asunder, their fragments caught at the moment of their flying apart...

... in an explosion that suggested at once the finality and the potential dangers of the marital commitment.  Engaging work.  Next door, at McKee Gallery, another group show, where it was fun to see some old acquaintances, including Vija Celmins, Philip Guston...

 and Harvey Quaytman...

 I liked, particularly, the installation of multiple terra-cotta Buddhas by Leonid Lerman...

A walk across to Madison and an interminable cab ride (street works!) up to 9rd Street, where we stopped at the Jewish Museum to see their dual exhibition of Lee Krasner and the African American artist of the Abstract Expressionist period, Norman Lewis.  There were some excelled paintings by both artists on display, but Lee Krasner came across as the more consistently interesting of the two, and it was good to see a solid exhibition of her work with barely a mention of her more famous husband Jackson Pollock.  Ellie managed to snap an image of her personal favorite...  

We both found it hard to find an intelligible reason for bringing these two very different artists to ether, and agreed that it did no favor to Lewis, whose work would probably be better seen on its own account.

A few block south, we waited in line outside the Neue Gallerie for the main event of the day, the exhibition of portraits by Egon Schiele.  (Sorry, no images.  Pictures not allowed.  Try the link to the website...) But first... lunch!  By this time it was three in the afternoon, and Starbucks banana bread had long since been digested and forgotten.  We were forewarned of an hour's wait for the restaurant--but found, downstairs, a cafeteria that served the same (excellent!) food with no wait and speedy (also excellent!) service.  Upstairs, the portrait show was a stunner, though it almost seemed there were two different Schieles at work--the one a skilled traditional draftsman, the other an agonized observer of the dark side of the human experience.  I found the latter spoke to me with far greater emotional appeal--the angular, distorted bodies, often set at dramatic, diagonal angles across the canvas or the paper.  The hands, particularly, are eloquent of suffering--elongated, claw-like creatures that seem almost independent of the body.  A sad thing, indeed, that this gifted and inventive artist survived that terrible "Great" War, only to be snatched away from us by something so mundane as the Spanish flu, at the age of less than thirty.  

We enjoyed a brief tour of the famous--and fabulous--Wiener Werkstatte design work on display in the permanent collection and left the museum near closing time.  Walked east to Lexington...

Love those water towers...!

 ... and the long way south to our hotel, pausing for a dinner stop at the Olive and Fig, a nice restaurant where we managed to eat less lavishly than the night before.  And back early, as I mentioned above, to the hotel.