STARBUCKS...

... in the morning, right next to the hotel.  A cup of tea for Ellie, coffee for me, and two oatmeals with nuts and raisins.  I brought them back to our hotel room, where we enjoyed a quiet breakfast before showering and heading out for the day.  An unsuccessful search, to start with, for an ATT store, to calm my nerves about roaming charges (we resolved these later in the day); then a brisk walk up to 53rd Street and west across Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenue to the Museum of Modern Art.  What a pleasure to be in New York City, where even the crowded sidewalks are filled with an irresistible energy.  Let alone the art...

Ellie at MoMA

We started out at MoMA with the currently-installed Robert Gober exhibition.  Having seen a smaller exhibit of this artist's work in Los Angeles a few years ago, we were nonetheless amazed by the breath and depth of Gober's vision.  There's a surrealist quality in the hairy body parts that project from the walls, and the white, fabricated sinks whose missing faucet holes look like vacant eyes.  Particularly vivid were two of these half-buried in a grass plot beyond a large window pane, upright like tombstones staring back at you as if from "beyond the grave."  And these but the introduction to gallery-scale installations, wall-papered floor-to-ceiling with (in one instance) images of male and female genitalia in chalk white against a black background.  One such installation, devoted to images and memories of the World Trade Center attacks, was especially poignant.

All good art, of course, can be seen from many different points of view.  What I came away with from the Robert Gober show was a profound sense of the pain and confusion that we humans carry around inside, and the compassion to make it bearable.

Lunch at the bustling MoMA cafeteria.  Long lines, thankfully fast-moving.  And an excellent menu.  Ellie had a variety of bruschetta, I a cauliflower quiche, and we shared a bowl of butternut squash soup.  Quite nice...

Then up the series of connecting escalators to the Matisse cut-out show on the seventh floor...

No pictures allow inside... Sorry!

I know, you're thinking colorful flowery extravaganzas and elegantly posed blue female nudes.  Me too,  And they were plentifully there.  A sense of irrepressible, exuberant joy in color and shape, as well as in the human form.  What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer quantity of these works, made for the most part in the last few years of the artist's life.  I last wrote about them, I recall, in the early 1990s, at the time of another Matisse show at the modern.  We had just received a call from my sister in England, to say that my father, who had been ill for some time, was now near death.  Having booked the first available flight back to the UK, we still had time for a stop at MoMA, and I was profoundly moved by the overflowing creative energy of this old man's work, recalling ruefully that my father's advancing age and disability had forced him to abandon his own creative work in his wood shop several years before.  It was a poignant moment, reflecting on both the potential, and the debilities of old age.  And I'm now twenty years older than I was back then!

This time, Ellie and I both found ourselves attracted by the more abstract of the cut-outs, small, simple, elegant works that seemed to foreshadow the geometric work of many of Matisse's artistic heirs in the 20th century--not to mention Ellie's own paintings in her Laguna Beach studio!

Leaving MoMA, we took a long, delicious walk up Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, heading up the east side of the park towards the Met.  To our surprise--we had been expecting rain and cold--the weather was quite wonderful, sunny, with drifting white clouds...

A well-deserved rest!

... and warm enough to walk without a jacket.  The park was at its most beautiful, the leaves only just beginning to turn from their summer green to the browns, reds and oranges of autumn.  Lots of wildlife...

We took the path that cuts through the zoo, and paused to watch a pool filled with seal lions at play.  They seemed to be channeling their inner porpoise, leaping joyfully out of the water as they swam, one of them even hoisting itself out of the water at the edge of the pool, as though posing for the cameras of a family standing by to watch.  A lovely scene.  Then on, past numerous grandparents with their grandchildren--we're specially attentive to these right now, and thought often of our little Luka...

After our unhurried walk, we arrived only late afternoon at the Met, where we were panning to see the current exhibition of Cubist works from the Lauder collection.

With only an hour left before closing time, we decided on a quick preliminary visit, to be followed up later in the week.  Though I recognize its historical importance and admire the work of Picasso and Braque, I have never felt that attuned to Cubist painting, and was surprised to hear Ellie say the same.  Their innovative compositional intricacies are endlessly fascinating, but they lack, for me, the kind of simplicity and there-ness I have come to love in works of art.  Their busy-ness has far greater appeal for the eye than for the heart.  No matter, the Lauder collection is an amazing revelation, a wealth of art history that commands respect.  Tired though the eyes were by this time, and still swamped by the colors of Matisse, I did find a lot to look at in our brief time there.  We will go back.

A walk across to Madison Avenue and a turn to the south, heading back towards our hotel.  Though it was still early evening, we were ready for food, and found it at a restaurant called, simply, EAT.  Shared a salad and a chicken dish.  Okay food, indifferent, offhand service.  But good artwork by Ellie...

Ellie Blankfort, 2014, Untitled, gravy on white plate, cutlery

Then, walking south again, we stopped at the still-open new Gagosian Gallery extension, to see a show of new work by Richard Prince--hugely enlarged "selfie" images with Twitter comments by the image's creators and responses by the artist.  Nothing could be more different from Matisse, Braque and Picasso.  Ellie was not enthusiastic, but I found the work quite fascinating, sometimes erotic, often quite funny with its multiple social cross-references.

We were left, then, with the long walk down Madison Avenue--from the mid-70s to our hotel at the corner of 47th and Lexington.  Plenty to look at in the storefront windows, ranging from uptown extravagance (Cartier, Ralph Lauren) to the more modest shops in the midtown area.  And of course the tall buildings and the city lights...

Very tired on our return to the hotel, and myself not a little irritable, trying to locate these images on the computer...