The Met, NYC

Turn of the 19th/20th century stained glass, Hudson School landscapes, John Steuart Curry's "John Brown" (1939), a scattering of Klees, "Reimagining Modernism" (1900 - 1950), a bit of contemporary, 19th century European painting, some Old Masters.

Martin Johnson Heade - "Newburyport Meadows" (1876-81)

Georgia O'Keeffe - "Corn, Dark, No. 1" (1924) ... struck anew by how great she is, which is quite something given how much of her work I've seen over the last few weeks

Edward Hopper - "Tables for Ladies" (1930) ... the composition of this one is remarkable - the diagonal lines, the whites and blacks

Edward Hopper - "From Williamsburg Bridge" (1928) ... as I now know, the view today from this spot isn't so different

Kay Sage - "Tomorrow is Never" (1955)

Anselm Kiefer - "Bohemia Lies by the Sea" (1996) ... this image completely doesn't do justice to the monumentality of the work - size, texture, colour

Vincent Van Gogh - "Wheat Field with Cypresses" (1889)

Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini - "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist" (ca 1523)

Fra Filippo Lippi - "Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement" (ca 1440)

"This Alien Nation" @ Joe's Pub, NYC

A monthly event in which Sofija Stefanovic hosts a range of people, each speaking or otherwise performing in celebration of immigration (as does Stefanovic herself). This one: Casey Legler (writer, model, and former Olympic swimmer), Xochitl Gonzalez (writer and retired wedding planner), Masha Dakic (writer and actor), Maysoon Zayid (comedian, actress, disability advocate, and tap dancer), Patricia Okoumou (activist, Statue of Liberty climber), and DJ Tikka Masala and friend. Terrific concept, strong execution - funny and real.

(w/ Nenad)

Usual Girls (Roundabout @ Black Box Theatre)

A colourful splash of vignettes from third grade through to early-mid adulthood (time: 1980s - 2018), interwoven with darkness all the way through - which turns out to be because, as it sets up in its opening scene, the play's major concern turns out to be toxic masculinity, which it builds upon and elaborates as it jumps through time and builds to its gut-punch final scenes. An extra layer is that the protagonist, Kyeoung, is a woman of colour - as is the older woman / version of her who is a character in her own right. Director: Ming Peiffer. It was very good.

Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel

Another excellent, crunchy, unforcedly meaningful record from Courtney Barnett. I like Sometimes I Sit and Think more though - that one just keeps on being great.

Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Signature Theater)

A 70 minute monologue, full of digression, bathos and other types of anti-climax; Thom Pain attempts to tell a story, with jokes and other entertainments, but can't. Its spirit reminded me of Beckett, including in its insistence on the human-ness of the entire encounter, but its existentialism is contemporary. I picked it (apart from the good reviews) because Will Eno - of Middletown and The Realistic Jones - wrote it (it was his debut), and it didn't hurt that the performer was Michael C Hall, famous because of Dexter but famous to me because of Six Feet Under.

"Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" @ Guggenheim Museum, NYC

I was thinking while walking to the Guggenheim that my tastes in art have become very defined - movements, styles, individual artists, even types of colours, motifs and so on. Having experienced a concentrated dose of af Klint's work, I wouldn't say she's exactly a category-breaker, but I did enjoy it a lot, and she does exist somewhat outside of my familiar frames.

I think I first encountered her fairly recently, at the 'Museum of Everything' exhibition at MONA, but it turns out she was a successful part of the art establishment in the early part of her year, before following a path into spiritualism which coincided with her beginning to produce a range of striking and sometimes remarkable paintings in the terrain of abstraction separately from and before the recognised canonical figures began blazing their own trails.

Part of her method was to paint in series, seemingly often around a dozen or twenty works, the pieces leading to each other in powerful ways. The Swan (1915), in particular, is amazing, and cumulatively quite intensely moving. From the exhibition notes: "the swan symbolizes the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher's stone ... after the forces embodied by the swans come into conflict and begin to combine - a process signaled by the shift from representational to abstract imagery - they ascend into higher realms, until they are ultimately unified."

Joy Williams - Ninety-Nine Stories of God

"The letter, in time, though only rumored to be, caused her children, though grown, much worry."

That's the only sentence like it across the 99 stories and I'm sure it's deliberately placed at the end of the first story. Yet I couldn't say where that conviction comes from; that's how this entirely puzzling and brilliant collection works. They're remarkably compressed and at the same time wide open, often offering up suggestive connections between their component elements without going to far as to explain. For example:

21

If there is a crash at an American airport, the wreckage is removed immediately so as not to alarm the passengers on the flights that will come after.

This is not true at Russian airports.

While at some airports in the major cities, such as Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the wreckage might be taken away quite as if nothing had occurred, small runways in Siberia are littered with failed flights, their rusting hulks simply pushed to one side.

On a recent flight from Nome to Chukotka, the woman in the seat opposite us became quite agitated as we dropped rather peremptorily through the dark skies. She began loudly praying to God for deliverance. My companion remarked that her fervent request was useless, as God had long ago turned His great back on Russia. She might just as well have prayed to the luxurious black sable coat that enveloped her from chin to ankle. We had earlier been half-hypnotized by its beauty, what my companion had dared to describe as the glimmering, endless depths in the fur of so many little animals.

COAT 

This was my second read - and first since falling deep into Williams' universe with The Visiting Privilege - and this, whatever this is, it's more and more under my skin.

(first read)

MoMA, NYC

The art binge continues ... but in the interests of time, the notes here on extemporanea are going to be shorter from now on. Of course this was amazing - and in this case a return visit, some ten years on, though I won't pretend I clearly remember every piece I saw last time (and of course what's on display will have shuffled since).

Edward Hopper's "New York Movie" (1939) and Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (1948) were in the first trio of paintings I saw when I started off, on the fifth floor (the other was a Horace Pippin).

Other collection highlights - Van Gogh (what is there to say ... such a sense of swirling motion), Cezanne, Matisse, Boccioni (not normally a particular favourite but this one was magnificent), Magritte, and many more.

Plus a Brancusi exhibition (always cool), a Bruce Nauman retrospective (I didn't engage too much with many individual pieces, instead letting it wash over me a bit, though the one - "Days", I think - in which you walk through a room installed with a dozen or a couple more speakers of people saying days of the week out of sequence was great), the usual mix of contemporary, so ho-hum, just generally great.

Wings of Desire

Been on the to-watch list for a very long time so I took the opportunity to see it on a big screen (at Film Forum). Contemplative, poetic, and overtly lusciously romantic by its end; black and white with telling shifts to colour; Nick Cave; and the reassurance of the idea that angels are among us.

New Museum, NYC

A range of good contemporary art.

Marguerite Humeau - "Birth Canal"

Sculptures invoking both Venus figures and animal brains, representing shamanic women and with names like "Venus of Frasassi, A 10-year old female human has ingested a rabbit's brain". The installation includes a polyphonic soundtrack and a scent supposedly inspired by bodily liquids associated with birth; it felt like a passage to an older time.

Marianna Simnett - "Blood in My Milk"

This was excellent! Five channels, featuring creepy children, surgical procedures, singing (multiple times), threats to make birds sing, a worm emerging from a woman's mouth, mastitis, cows' udders, a 'watchman' with a speech impediment who encourages children to take a vow of chastity, a young girl who seems to meet a doubled version of herself and so on.

Sarah Lucas - "Au Naturel"

A survey exhibition, and I enjoyed it a lot (this despite not being in a vein especially in my usual wheelhouse).

"Eugene Richards: The Run-on of Time", International Center of Photography, NYC

I didn't get that into these; thinking about the contemporary photographers who I most like, it strikes me that they all favour at least one of extensive staging and significant post-shooting manipulation.

"Enrico David: Gradations of Slow Release", Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Liked some of these a lot.

Art Institute of Chicago

A spectacular museum - the best I've visited on this trip so far.

Chagall - "America Windows" (1975-77) - the panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theatre and dance

It was a couple of days ago that I visited, and what's most endured has been the trio of Magrittes that were on display: "Time Transfixed" (1938) or, in the French, "La duree poignarder", apparently "ongoing time stabbed by a dagger" and indeed appearing like a stab in its full dimensions; the Magritte-motif remix "On the Threshold of Liberty" (1937); and a final one which was less familiar, "The Banquet" (1958), but/and which has most lingered, glaringly. In fact, surrealism in general was particularly well represented, with strong examples from all its best exponents.

Dali - "A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Caution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano" (1936)

Yves Tanguy - "Untitled" (1940)

Paul Delvaux - "The Lamps" (1937). I don't know much about Delvaux, but the couple of his on display were striking - I remember being quite captivated by one of his several years ago in Vienna too

More generally, there was a heap of good stuff by the European moderns; in addition to the above (not even mentioning a great de Chirico), there was a trio of Kandinskys, a couple of Chaim Soutine's (including another landscape at Cagnes), an interesting pointillist Klee ("Sunset", 1930), some intriguing Ernst Kirchners, sculpture and paintings by Giacometti, iconic Van Gogh, etc.

Kandinsky - "Painting with Green Center" (1913)

Giacometti - "Diego Seated in the Studio" (1950), which (a) reminded me of Bacon and (b) made me realise I'm drawn to representations of tortured human figures!

Van Gogh - "Self Portrait" (1887)

Really, the breadth and quality of what was on show was nearly overwhelming. The impressionists are very well represented too, including multiple examples of all Monet's most famous subjects - haystacks, water lilies, and bridges (and other buildings near water) ... my liking and admiration for him just keeps growing. The numerous Degas pieces are almost incidental in this setting, as good as they are.

Monet - "Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)" (1890-91)

The hits keep on coming. Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884" (1884-86) is vastly more impressive, not least because of sheer size, when seen in the actuality; Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930) to a lesser extent but still; and still more Georgia O'Keeffe, of course. A great Jackson Pollock ("Number 17A", 1948), and heading into the contemporary period, Gerhard Richter and some very charged Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman - "Untitled #87" (1981). I don't know if I've ever seen any of hers that were as sheerly erotic as the ones here.

And of course, there was a lot of remarkable stuff by artists who I'd never heard of before, though if I'm honest, in this company, it was probably harder than it otherwise would have been for them to pierce through.

Hughie Lee-Smith - "Desert Forms" (1957). Actually, I have come across him before, but only very recently, in Boston.

Charles Sheeler - "The Artist Looks at Nature" (1943)

Eric Fischl - "Slumber Party" (1983)

Amy Sherald - "A clear unspoken granted magic" (2017)

One disappointment: "Nighthawks" was on loan as part of a travelling exhibition.

Downstate (Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago)

Convicted paedophiles who've served their sentences but can never again lead normal lives due to their social pariah-dom and the restrictions on their movement and access to online communication, victims claiming absolute authority in relation to their experiences and factual recollections, the extent and limits of responsibility for one's actions and for one's recovery from trauma - tricky stuff, which Downstate takes on head-first in staging these as issues in messy tension with each other, without particularly playing to conventional social outrage at such acts. I found it thought provoking and well-performed, but a bit dramatically unsatisfying, although I wonder whether that last is because the play is a bit unfocused, or rather just that it doesn't present clear answers.

Hamilton (CIBC Theatre, Chicago)

So good, so much fun and filled with terrific and varied songs. Maybe its greatest trick was to make me feel that its depiction was, in some meaningful (though obviously not literal) sense, how things actually happened - including through its all-POC cast and African American-styled music.

(w/ my aunt Sheal and uncle Tim)

Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad

As he did in both Zone One and The Intuitionist, in The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead finds a mode and register which serves the story he's telling - here, one that preserves a sense of concrete reality (which can only be valuable when slavery is the subject) as it melds in carefully controlled fabulism (the literalised railroad itself, as well as a general thread of feeling that runs through ... the episode in South Carolina, for example, made me think of a similar one in Watership Down). I appreciated the novel's commitment to giving voice and representation to many of its secondary characters, and while I felt a certain distance from its central figure Cora, that seemed fair enough given the type of character she is, and the circumstances that form her. 

"Global Shorts Forum: Woman Walks Ahead" @ SCAD Savannah Film Festival

'A wide range of topics from the feminine perspective', which meant ten shorts ranging from about 5 to 25 minutes. Best was "Period. End of Sentence.", a documentary about the provision of cheap menstrual pad manufacturing machinery to a group of women in a village outside Delhi, serving hygienic and medical, educative, empowerment and stigma-combating purposes.

Jepson Center for the Arts, Savannah

A range of good stuff here, in a fairly spectacular building (designed by Moshe Safdie). Mainly:

Walking the Horizon: Works by Bertha Husband

My introduction to Husband (Scottish, 1948-2017) and she is excellent! Politically engaged contemporary surrealist collage and mixed media.

'When Night Falls', 2005

'Hail Erinyes #3 ... the first death' (two of three panels), 1994

Therman Statom - 'Glass House', 2005

Complex Uncertainties: Artists in Postwar America

An 'evolving' exhibition; the current iteration includes a few artists I knew, including a couple as of very recently. Most strikingly, another pair of photos by Sheila Pree Bright, 'Anjre Kerr' (2007) and 'Jenny Liu' (2008), both from her Young Americans series.

Monet to Matisse: Masterworks of French Impressionism

Selected from the collection of the Dixon Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee, which must be quite some collection given the quality of the artists represented in this exhibition - admittedly not always particularly standout examples of their work/style, and spanning a number of artists who were 'around the time of the impressionists', and in some cases quite a while after, rather than actually painting in anything like an impressionist style.

Renoir - 'The Wave', 1882

Monet - 'Village Street', about 1869-71

I found myself having trouble turning off the intellectual and categorising part of my brain, making it difficult to really immerse myself and open up to the art, probably for a bunch of reasons (quite a lot of exposure to most of these artists, somewhat disconnected - ie not very concrete - frame of mind).

Chaim Soutine - 'Landscape at Cagnes', about 1922

Chagall - 'Dreamer', 1945

Interestingly, Maximilien Luce's 'The Cathedral at Gisors, View of the Ramparts' (1898) really popped in this context, by contrast to my overall somewhat lukewarm recollections of the neo-impressionism exhibition at the NGV a few years back (though I see I liked his stuff then too).

Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye

Marvellous; its simple lyricism and humaneness accentuate the suffering and sorrow of the black American experience on which it sets its sights, and its movement between characters to successively layer in their respective stories is, well, moving. In her afterword, Morrison faults herself for not giving greater shape to the 'unbeing' at the novel's centre - that is, 11 year old Pecola Breedlove's. But even in its form at it is, The Bluest Eye has both power and grace.

Forrest Gump

Sentimental and homily-dependent, and Jenny's character is frustrating, but nonetheless nice. Turns out I walked past the spot where he sits (the bench was a prop though) in Savannah yesterday all unawares.

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

Neat contemporary art museum embedded on campus, where SCAD = Savannah College of Art and Design.

Highlights: the Elaine Mayes retrospective, especially the 1960s Haight Ashbury portraits, and "Inverso Mundo", a film by Russian collective AES+F filled with shiny inversions.