[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: September 8, 2008]
Just a brief note on two exhibits which certainly should be seen as we quietly await Fall's onslaught of Van Gogh, Miró, Marlene Dumas, Gilbert and George and all.
"Kirchner and the Berlin Street" - at MOMA through November 10 - expands somewhat on last summer's focussed presentation of "Berlin Street Scene" at the Neue Galerie.
I spoke lyrically at the time of the throbbing eroticism of Kirhcner's urban space, and I would only repeat my cursory pictorial analysis if I reviewed the pictures in the current show.
Of modest size, by MOMA standards, the exhibit is based around half a dozen large oils of Berlin streets scenes featuring women pausing and soaking up the male gaze. As ever, there's a lot of curatorial excitement about the profession of the women - all perfectly accurate I'm sure, but also less important than the pressure-cooker urban environment and its general implications for sexuality and sexual encounters, represented as much in Kirchner's twisted, sinuous perspectives as in giveaway details of moral concupiscence.
Kirchner buckles and sexualises the street the way Schiele does the human body.
Another city boy is the subject of a huge show at the Met, although J.M.W. Turner - child of Covent Garden, denizen of Wapping and Chelsea - is regarded more as a painter of the great open air than an urbanist. Nevertheless, there's a strong, briny hint of the dockyards in much of his work, and his land and seascapes are usually peopled - peopled with tiny, busy, straining, surviving figures.
Suffice to say that the narrative of the show follows is the modern and wholly justifiable view of Turner as a painter of light, whose pursuit of its specific effects led him inexorably through increasingly indistinct, shimmering landscapes toward a sort of proto-abstraction. As one passes from the realistic detail of his earlier portraits of sea and shipping, and his earnest efforts at classical and religious subjects, it becomes ever clearer that his real interest lies in the elements which illuminate the pictorial matter rather than the matter itself.
I'd just throw out one suggestion. Everyone knows that Turner painted light and sea and air brilliantly. Look out for fire too. It breaks out regularly, and with great, controlled force. God, he is supposed to have said on his deathbed, is the sun.
It's not a comprehensive show of the masterpieces. "The Fighting Temeraire" didn't make it over from the National Gallery. But it's extensive enough, after all. Through September 21: hurry up.
