Museum Mile
After leaving the grand dame of New York museums , stroll up 5th Avenue for a few blocks and you will land at the Neue Gallerie , a jewel box of a museum in an ethereal townhouse specializing in early 20th Century Austrian and German art . “ Vasily Kandinsky : From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus , 1910 – 1925 ” covers Kandinsky ’ s move from figuration to abstraction and the influence of music and theater on his work . Approximately 80 works are shown , including four 1914 wall panels on loan from MoMA . They were commissioned by Edwin R . Campbell , founder of the Chevrolet Motor Company , for the foyer of his New York apartment . The Neue Gallerie is a delightfully refined place to look at art , and the Kaffee and Mokka at
Café Sabarsky are the perfect pickme-up for the stroll up Museum Mile . The period cafe itself is in the spirit of the Wiener Werkstätte , the Austrian movement that viewed all manner of craft as high art , and it is fitted out with furniture by Adolf Loos , light fixtures by Josef Hoffmann and banquettes that are upholstered with a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric .
Walk just a few more blocks up 5th Avenue , and you will arrive at the day ’ s final destination , the Guggenheim . The dazzling summer show was a James Turrell retrospective , and the manner in which that light-oriented show filled the atrium and took command of the museum ( as did Maurizio Cattelan : All and Cai Guo- Qiang : I Want to Believe ) makes it a bit taxing for the next exhibit at the museum to keep up the buzz . But the Christopher Wool retrospective on display at the Guggenheim does not disappoint . It reveals the artist ’ s extended push-pull relationship with painting .
Although it is a shame that there are none of Wool ’ s earliest paintings on display , you will sense as you climb the rotunda that Wool carefully culled from the art he found around him at any given time , not only from Minimalist painting and Conceptual art , but also from appropriation art , film , street graffiti and punk rock . Many of his best known works are paintings with stenciled letters or words . These works sprang from an unlikely epiphany : Wool saw a white van that had been vandalized and the words “ sex ” and “ luv ” had been spray painted in black on the vehicle . What Wool saw was not a misdemeanor , but inspiration . He transferred the idea to painting , but he guardedly kept his hand out of his work , using stencils , spray guns and house-painter rollers to apply the paint .
86 PEACHY