[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: May 19, 2008]
Rain, shine, rain, and whatever... A stumble bum halfway season when one stays indoors thumbing through dusty old pages and making playlists of Kevin Coyne and Peter Hammill and Black Dice when one ought to be gambolling across Central Park and dining under the grimy stars on the city's makeshift terrazzas.
My gambolling has been recently restricted, in any case, by the need to refurbish worn parts of the skeletal chassis. Any excuse to bring out the silver-topped evening cane - and I still occasionally attempt to unscrew it, in case there's an undiscovered rapier inside.
A Beggar Boy on the UES
I did make it to the jaw-droppingly posh annual joint openings hosted by several private galleries around Madison in the seventies. Posh in the sense that one has the pleasure of casting a critical eye over works which are, well, cheap - only in the sense that if one owned the stately home in which they could appropriately displayed, they would be easily affordable.
One gallery stood out from the rest, not least because it troubled to offer a decent champagne. Lawrence Steigard specializes exclusively in 16th-18th century fine art, and this show promotes "The Exalted and the Forgotten in Portraiture and Genre".
It's an unexpectedly funny show. "A Merry Musical Company", by Jan Van Bijlert, defines bawdy: the cavalier customer of a tavern works his way heartily through tall flutes of pilsner and a plate oysters, a 'wench' spilling her charms on his lap, while the band pores hopelessly over the score of the music intended to accompany the bacchanale.
The highlight, however, is hung high in a side gallery. Johan Heinrich Ramberg's "A Beggar Boy" must be the downright cheekiest picture you can see in the city right now. The lad, looming large in the frame, and giving you the glad eye, is ratty-haired and festooned in rags. The grin, though, is something special. Nobody could look at this painting and fail to smile back.
If you happen to find yourself with a spare ten minutes on the UES, the time could be worse spent. The building itself is a treasure. More here.
Mercantile Library Ups 'n' Moves
I had much to say about this almost two hundred year-old institution last October, when it embarked on the glorious project of opening its stacks. The narrow old mansion just off Fifth Avenue looked all set to complete its portfolio of a second floor reading room and writers' studios on the upper floors, with a K-Z section on floor 5 to complement the superbly dusty and unpredictable A-J cornucopia beckoning members to the floor 4.
Then, suddenly, we were out of there. The 1932 Henry Otis Chapman building is, we are told, not appropriate the library's future requirements, so in a trice it was up for sale and a new location is sought. It all seems rather hasty after the elaborate re-stacking of half the collection.
Anyway, right now you can't go there: and here's the website. I just hope all those first editions of Dr Kildare novels don't get further mangled in the move.
Louise Bourgeois: This Way Something Creepy Comes
Finally, I see the travelling major retrospective of the Spider Lady is due to hit the Guggenheim this summer. My personal problem with the work is that, while she conjures multi-layered and deeply personal symbolism from the figure of the spider, I am simply a life-time arachnophobe and can't deal with it. I practically skulked around Rockefeller Plaza the summer her ghastly, gigantic eight-legger stood guard.
But of course there's more to her art, and I wanted to mention the feature and portfolio of paintings in the current edition of Modern Painters. Her recent drawings explore and express the human body in its essential functions of touch, sex and birth, and do so with great passion and simplicity - tender explosions of red (gouache) on white.
It's humbling to witness this productivity, and one is almost ashamed to observe that she is ninety-six years old. Her late period, evidently, is yet to come. I assume these works won't be in the show which reaches the Guggenheim, which is a pity.
In any case, more from the Gugg! here.
