May 25, 2007

New in the museums: Dragons, Summer of Love

Here is a look at what the critics had to say this week about some of the new exhibitions in New York City:

“Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies” at Grand Central Terminal (free, open daily 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. through June 22)

"The exhibition and its offshoots, including a series on Turner Classic Movies and special material added to Grand Central’s tours, do more than take viewers behind the scenes and through the city’s history on screen. They illustrate how film has made New York a communal experience, familiar even to people who have never been here." - New York Times
"There will be six never-before-exhibited enormous scenic paintings of New York, created at MGM, for such movies as North by Northwest. Background footage from Paramount, from the 1930s on will be screened, and you'll be able to put yourself in the shot." - Manhattan User's Guide

Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids opening Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History (through January 6)

"Sea monsters, yetis, dragons - all, says museum president Ellen Futter, derive from "an insatiable human impulse to explore, explain and figure out where we fit in the larger scheme of things." So goes the natural-historical rationale of the show, a mix of superstition and science built around fossils, paintings and models - like the 17-foot-long winged dragon that greets you at the door. It looks like what might happen if a stegosaurus mated with a bat, then moved to an amusement park. " - Post
"Why then devote attention to them in a natural history museum, when there are no remains to piece together, no habitats to construct, no evolutionary lineage to outline? One of the remarkable things about this exhibition — the curators were Mark A. Norell, Laurel Kendall and Richard Ellis — is that while it may seem at first as if it were simply a bid for popular attention, by the end you are convinced that these creatures should find permanent dwelling places in such halls, not because they are real but because they allow us to glean something about how humanity struggles to make sense of the natural world." - New York Times

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Sept. 16.)

"But tear gas, with its weird-sweet burn, is missing in a show that remembers a lot, but forgets much more, about what was happening 40 years ago, when America was losing its mind to save, some would say, its soul." - New York Times
"Eying the scores of icons on display - from the mind-bending re-creation of the Joshua Light Show to footage of Timothy Leary pushing acid tests in Central Park - inspired not just the expected rush of smug memory, but an awareness of something made palpable by its very absence from the current climate: a sense of openness, a faith in change, and thus, a very special type of romance." - Daily News
"Bummer. The Whitney Museum's "Summer of Love" show (to Sept. 16), which devotes two full floors to psychedelic relics of limited artistic or sociological value, does have a modicum of documentary interest. If it were augmented with some Jimi Hendrix guitars and John Lennon poetry, it might just work for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the Experience Music Project. But not the Whitney." - CultureGrrl
"The exhibition is slim on the era's bouncy politics but rich in swirling paintings, sculpture and installations. (Kids will love a crawl-in carpeted furniture ``landscape'' by Verner Panton.) And the Whitney's shiny black floors suit it all just right." - Bloomberg

"Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through August 19)

"The highlights of the exhibit are the Cézannes, Picassos, and Niceand Moroccan-period Matisses, as well as the show's reunions, such as that of van Gogh's "The Night Café" (1888) with Cézanne's "Still Life With Apples and Pears" (1891-92), a painting that is equally in upheaval. Both pictures teeter and totter, as if their worlds were held precariously in a balance. Cézanne's golden tabletop is strewn, at one end, with large, at times peculiarly weightless, fruit. Smaller, denser apples and pears anchor the opposite end of the table. As in van Gogh's "Café," Cézanne's intensified universe of heightened color jumps, drops, turns, and surges." - Sun
"Robert Sterling Clark and Stephen Carlton Clark were siblings, connoisseurs, and, after years of intimacy, cool antagonists. They didn't speak to each other for almost 30 years, but they amassed impressive art collections and competed in the arenas of taste and patronage. Heirs to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, they had the resources and the commitment not only to accumulate fine objects, but also to endow institutions ranging from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The Metropolitan Museum brings their separately impressive holdings together for a family reunion of different but overlapping sensibilities." - Newsday
"For viewers intimately acquainted with these paintings the accompanying photographs of “Circus Sideshow” as it was installed in Stephen Clark’s home and then at MoMA add a new layer to understanding their provenance. (The image of the Seurat hung in Stephen’s home, with its Gothic windows, resembles an outtake from Louise Lawler’s photographs of contemporary art in collectors’ homes.)" - New York Times

"Neo Rauch at the Met: para" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Through Oct. 14.)

"Neo Rauch: para" is the third in an annual series devoted to young(ish) contemporary artists. The show is titled "para" after a number of words dependent on that prefix: paranormal, paranoid, paradox." - Sun
"Firemen struggle above a fissure in the earth, and three figures dressed for a sock hop float to the sky in Neo Rauch's stupendous, confounding 'Die Fuge' (the Gap or the Fugue). It takes a moment to realize how incongruous things are in this, the largest of 14 expertly painted canvases in the German painter's exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art" - Bloomberg

And there’s more:

"By including the washouts along with the breakouts, the show re-creates the gritty, unvarnished texture of a crucial period in photography’s history both as a medium and a market. A wall of pictures taken along the entire length of Fourteenth Street by Sy Rubin in the late seventies and early eighties grounds the show in a neighborhood that’s seen it all." - The New Yorker on Midtown Y Photography Gallery; Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. at the main branch of the New York Public Library through Sept. 16.

"The DC Moore show is notable because this particular group of watercolors hasn’t been exhibited for more than three decades. Each work consists of an already “finished” piece that was subsequently enlarged by the addition of strips of paper. As many as 26 years could separate the initial state of one of these pictures from its eventual reworking. “Sometimes,” he remarked, “the better [pictures] have to evolve over a period of years.”" - The Observer on "Charles Burchfield: Ecstatic Light" at the DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Ave., through June 22.

"“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance,” wrote Carl Sandburg. Substitute drawing for poetry and you’ve got a pretty good description of the hard-to-describe work of Gego (1912–1994), the Latin American artist who is the subject of a ravishing show at the Drawing Center." - Time Out on Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible at The Drawing Center, through July 21.

May 25, 2007 11:29 AM in Cheap Stuff, Kids, Midtown, Museums, Romance, Sightsology, Upper East Side, Upper West Side

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