Photo By Gail
I spotted this ornate chandelier in a restaurant called Santina, which is on Washington Street underneath the Highline, just half a block uptown from The Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street. It looks pretty fancy with all of these nice chandeliers installed. I would eat there.
All Photos By Gail
A distinguishing feature of the new Whitney Museum in the meatpacking district is this work by Mary Heilmann, attached to the northern facade of the building, which is called Sunset. A burst of bright pink, Sunset is a site specific installation that inaugurates the museum’s largest outdoor gallery and transforms it into a place of reverie, memory and leisure.
Mary Heilmann became known in the 197os for vibrant paintings that married taut, abstract forms with quivering line and vivid color. For more than thirty years, she has intermittently explored a stair-step motif bushed within rectangular fields or expressed through irregularly-shaped canvases, which happen to rhyme with the dramatic setbacks and grid lines of the Whitney’s new building. This serendipitous connection inspired Heilmann to enlarge a detail of one such painting and print it onto two large panels that playfully turn the building itself into her canvas and tweak its sharp geometries.
Heilmann’s intervention extends to a group of sculptural chairs scattered on the terrace like a shower of confetti. Adapted from furniture that she has displayed in homes and exhibitions, the chairs serve as elements in her larger composition and encourage visitors to interact with one another and the cityscape beyond.
Photo By Gail
In The Seasons (1957), Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984) combined a traditional subject with modern, pictorial form, the all-over composition. Historically, the subject of the four seasons has offered artists the opportunity for allegorical mediations on the life cycle. Krasner’s version exemplifies the regenerative portion of that cycle, with boldly, almost garishly colored plant forms that seem to morph into sexual organs.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lee Krasner, The Seasons
Photo By Gail
For The Subway (1950), George Tooker used a claustrophobic, labyrinthine subway station to portray the alienation and the isolation of contemporary urban life. These urban dwellers — all of whom seem to have the same face — seem frozen, trapped by the architecture of the subway station. Tooker rendered this distinctly modern subject in egg tempera, a medium associated almost exclusively with the Renaissance.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: George Tooker, The Subway
All Photos By Gail
The past weekend, Geoffrey and I paid our first visit to the new and — dare I say — much improved Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street in the Meat Packing District, and we had the time of our lives! I took hundreds of rad photos, some of which I will be sharing with you in the coming weeks. Continue reading George Segal: Walk, Don’t Walk at the Whitney Museum