The New York art world will provide analysts visiting the city this December another cornucopia of visual pleasures.
The first stop at this time of the year should be the annual Christmas tree exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fifth Avenue at 82nd), where splendid sculptural figures adorn the tree in the Medieval Court. The featured exhibit is “Origins of Impressionism,” with works by familiar figures of that movement. Of special interest to analysts are the works of Willem de Kooning. A much-acclaimed exhibit at the Metropolitan presents seventy-five of his paintings from the late 1930s through the mid-eighties.
Apart from his luscious abstractions, de Kooning is perhaps best known for his ambivalent depictions of Woman, represented as monstrous, sensual, and primordial. His Abstract Expressionist housepainter's brush slashed and fragmented, but could not obliterate,
Her. The painter's wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, discounts the possibility that she is the woman depicted; she points instead to her mother-in-law, a Rotterdam lady bartender who was “no pink nice old lady. She could walk through a brick wall!“ (The Met is open on Friday and Saturday evenings until 8:45. Chamber music is played on the balcony, where art and music lovers can sit at candlelit tables and sip wine.)
A few blocks uptown from the Met, at Fifth Avenue and 89th, is the spiraling Frank Lloyd Wright building occupied by the Guggenheim Museum, where “The Italian Metamorphosis: 1943-1980” is on display. This multidisciplinary survey of postwar painting, architecture, jewelry, fashion, photography, etc. includes artists ranging from Fontana and Manzoni to Pucci and Valentino. (Open Friday and Saturday until 8:00; closed Thursdays.) And don't miss the vast space of the Guggenheim in SoHo (Broadway at Prince Street) and the T-Room in its basement, where “Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky” serves as analogue to the exhibit uptown. (Open Saturdays until 8:00.)
At the Whitney Museum of American Art (Madison Avenue at 75th) is mounted a retrospective show entitled “Franz Kline: Black and White 1950–1961.” Featuring approximately thirty-five paintings and fifteen works on paper, the exhibit documents Kline's major contribution to Abstract Expressionism. The essential innovations and achievements of Kline's rigorous black and white palette are recognized as a distinct body of work that evolved from an earlier figurative period. Also of interest is “The Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which chronicles changing perceptions of African-American masculinity as interpreted in painting, photography, film, and video. (The Whitney stays open until 8:00 on Thursday evenings.)
Closest to the Waldorf-Astoria, and easily visited during a lunch break from the meetings, is the Museum of Modern Art (53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), where the works of Cy Twombly, known best for the blackboard scribble-like markings in his paintings, are on display along with the prints of Louise Bourgeois.
Bourgeois, noted for sculptures that abstract aspects of intimate relationships and feminine and masculine sexuality, is less well known for her printmaking. (MOMA is open on Thursday and Friday until 8:30.)
New York has endless numbers of art galleries along upper Madison Avenue, on 57th Street, and in SoHo. New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and the New York Times on Fridays and Sundays, as well as the small magazine Art
Now: Gallery Guide, are the best sources for listings. Some major galleries and their shows in December (as of press time) are:
Gagosian (980 Madison Avenue at 77th), Richard Serra: New Works on Paper; (130 Wooster Street), Cy Twombly.
Robert Miller (41 East 57th), Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bruce Weber: The Gentle Giant.
Pace (32 East 57th), Claes Oldenburg: New York Monuments (drawings).
Leo Castelli (420 West Broadway), Roy Lichtenstein.
Mary Boone (417 West Broadway), Richard Artschwager.
Janice S. Lieberman