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May 18, 2004
TT: Consumables
I lunched with Supermaud at our preferred downtown hangout, La Palapa Rockola (this time we played it smart and stayed out of the sun!), and spent most of the evening at a banquet. Nevertheless, I managed to quaff a good-sized portion of art before, in between, and after those two meals:- I paid a visit to the press view of The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, the first of three planned exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, and drawings left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Henri Matisse's son, a noted New York art dealer who died in 1989, and his wife, who died three years ago. Alas, it didn't do much for me, which isn't to say that it doesn't contain a number of beautiful pieces, most of them by Matisse the elder. But even the Matisses (most of them works on paper) didn't really gain from being shown as a group, while the more distinguished items by other artists seemed oddly familiar. "Tall Figure," for instance, is a first-class Giacometti bronze, but I've seen plenty of Giacometti bronzes that are just as good and look pretty much the same as this one. In any case, most of the really memorable pieces aren't even from the so-called Matisse Collection: they were purchased from Pierre Matisse's gallery long ago, either by the Met or by private collectors, and were already part of the Met's permanent collection. As for the "new" pieces by artists other than Matisse pére, I would have been more than happy to hang a pair of small Miró etchings in my apartment, but I didn't see a whole lot of other showstoppers on display. I mean, Reg Butler? Leonora Carrington? Paul Delvaux? Raymond Mason?
No doubt the Met's main interest in the Matisse Collection was and is its 30-odd Matisses, which is undoubtedly why the museum's curators romanced Pierre Matisse and his widow for a half-century and agreed to house and exhibit their collection as a collection. I don't mean to sound cynical--that's how big museums work--but as I looked at the Matisse Collection, I couldn't help but think how much wiser and more unselfish it would have been for the Matisses to break up their collection and donate it piece by piece to a couple of dozen smaller regional museums. Instead, they salved their egos by leaving the whole thing to the biggest and richest museum in America, which is why I spent my Monday morning walking briskly through yet another unadventurous school-of-Paris museum exhibition, wondering why I'd bothered to come.
- I watched a second chunk of Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (unavailable on DVD or videocassette, damn it), which continues to impress me as one of the strongest debuts ever made by an American film director. I also started watching Fred Zinnemann's film version of The Day of the Jackal, but it proved to be sluggishly unentertaining, so I bailed out after twenty tiresome minutes and treated myself to the opening battle scene of Master and Commander, which is every bit as good as I remembered from seeing it in the theater late last year.
- I reread "Gimpel the Fool," the first story in the first volume of the Library of America's forthcoming three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer's complete short stories. (I'm planning to write a long piece about Singer for Commentary later this summer.) I love Singer, but it'd been a while since I last read any of his stories, and I was delighted all over again by "Gimpel."
This passage jumped out at me:
However, I resolved that I would always believe what I was told. What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.
- My subway-and-bus book for the week is Kate Buford's Burt Lancaster: An American Life, which is error-prone and overwritten but great fun all the same--not unlike Lancaster himself, if you see what I mean.
- Now playing on iTunes: Benjamin Britten's 1968 recording of the Mozart G Minor Symphony. It's my personal favorite, though I also like Furtwängler, Szell, and Toscanini. Still, it never fails to give me an extra-special frisson to know that I'm listening to a great composer's interpretation of the music of another great composer.
Warning: I'm taking an overnight trip to Washington on Thursday, and I also need to concentrate on work-for-hire for the next three or four days. I'll post when possible and think fondly of you at all other times.
Posted May 18, 2004 9:32 AM
