Not a Jew, But Close Enough

Edouard Vulliard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 at the Jewish Museum

            Edouard Vulliard, though a gentile, spent his career in the company of the Jewish people or, at least, wealthy supporters of the Jewish people.  He was, in addition, a member of post-Impressionist group of artists called the Nabis (nabi meaning “prophet” in Hebrew), so titled because, according to the poet Henri Cazalis, “most of them wore beards, some were Jews and all were desperately earnest.”  So it is fitting (right?) that the Jewish Museum (at 92^nd and 5^th, for those of you so interested) would stage an exhibition of Vulliard’s greatest works over his fifty-year career, Edouard Vulliard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940.  Said muses, incidentally, are Vulliard’s mother, whom he lived with until her death, and two of Vulliard’s lovers who happened to be married to two of his best friends.  They do say art comes from strange places!

            Regardless, Vulliard’s work is beautiful, specific and a perfect view of the beautiful French meadows, apartments, and city streets on which he made his various homes.  Each brushstroke, one can see, is meant for a higher purpose, to convey a bigger picture, literally.  The greatest thing about Vulliard is that he is the classic observer, rarely taking part in the antics of the Nabis at their estates in the south of France.  Rather, he would simply paint what he saw, regardless of what it was or whether it was at an unusual angle, and had the rare talent of putting it to canvas in as many different ways as could be imagined—hyper-realistic portraiture, two-dimensional but still impressive landscape as seen from above, sketch-like crude but aesthetically pleasing views of one of his inamoratas, Misia Natanson, and many more.

            Vulliard’s many fortes span all sorts of visual art, including photography, to which portions of the exhibit are devoted.  To him, as the exhibit puts it, social interaction was a sort of a “game,” something to be looked at and appreciated—or mocked.  So he took photographs of Nabis and their benefactors at dinner, sitting in chairs, watching children play hide-and-seek… It seems no activity was beyond the sphere of his work, beyond the treatment of a representation springing from his ever-ready brush or camera.

            Socialization was not Vulliard’s only interest.  Of course, one of his muses, either his seamstress mother or one of his ingénues, was always waiting in the wings to model for him whenever he wished it.  But he was also fascinated with mirrors.  Strange, but true, Vulliard painted people reflecting in mirrors, or bottles, or vases, or one person facing another, one of which was facing a mirror, or any such number of reflected points of interest.  I expected at some point to find a representation of a mirror reflected in a mirror, but I suppose this is too difficult for even a painter such as he to tackle.  Still, Vulliard handles mirrors with surprising precision, keeping everything exactly symmetrical but slightly shimmering on the other side of his painted versions of smooth glass.  The world through the looking glass, so to speak, seems interesting, but not so much that, like Alice, we would wish to escape this one for that.  The world Vulliard has created before the looking glass is just as exciting, and equally beautiful.

            Whatever Edouard Vulliard’s background, personal life, or faith, the importance of the exhibit one can view at the Jewish Museum through September 23^rd lies in the images he has created.  Like windows into another world strangely parallel to our own, his paintings and sketches of various sizes line the walls of an enjoyable exhibition indeed.  Perhaps if the artist were still here, wondering visitors tiptoeing through the quiet halls of an altar to his talent would be a sight worth his photographing.

Get Happy

The Most Happy Fella at the Dicapo Opera Theater

            Frank Loesser’s third magnum opus (alongside How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Guys and Dolls), The Most Happy Fella, is currently playing at the Dicapo Opera Theater (through July 8th) at East 76^th and 3^rd.  Is it an opera, though, or a musical?  No one is exactly sure, as it is not entirely operatic but too dominated by score throughout to be considered a traditional musical.  Regardless, The Most Happy Fella is entertaining in any format, if less in some forums than others.

            In Fella, an elderly vineyard manager named Tony (a talented and dynamic Michael Corvino), falls instantly in love with a San Franciscan Italian restaurant waitress who he calls Rosabella (played on the night I attended by an understudy, Christian Sineath).  (“Rosabella”’s real name is Amy, but that’s beside the point.)  Tony courts her from afar by letter, but the exercise reaches a head when Rosabella sends him her picture and asks him for his.  Tony’s cynical sister, Marie (Lisa Chavez), tells him he’s “not good-looking” and inadvertently convinces him to send Rosabella a picture of his restless foreman, Joe (Peter Kendall Clark, who has a beautiful voice but a lackluster acting ability).  Rosabella comes to Tony’s vineyard in Napa Valley as a mail-order bride, and, as they so often do, complications ensue.

Dicapo’s production is fun and nearly irresistible during the musical numbers.  Loesser’s score, as with all his work (his singles include “Heart and Soul” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”), is brilliant, and delivered by the right voices it comes across more than Loesser himself could have hoped to imagine.   This is especially true in this staging, because Dicapo uses no electronic amplification in its intimate 204-seat theater, and the result is auditory magnificence as the audience hears the cast members as they were meant to be heard. 

Again, this is all very well during the numbers, but during the non-musical portions of the operetta most of the actors are hard to read, and their performances are not fully believable.  In simpler terms, I don’t buy it, especially turns like that of Lauren Hoffmeier as Cleo, Rosabella’s best friend, who gives the audience so many eye-rolling looks we become convinced we are watching an especially musical episode of “Jersey Shore.”  Few roles stand out but the lead, the Fella himself, Michael Corvino, whose Chico-esque accent and memorable performances essentially save the libretto.  Equally significant are the roles of Pasquale, Giuseppe and Ciccio, the three chefs who sing the magnificent “Abbondanza” number, and played unforgettably by Paolo Buffagni, Neil Darling, and Brian Carter.  The ensemble is average, not cardboard cutouts per se but near enough to cause cringes when they freeze, unnatural smiles on their faces, at the end of songs.

But somehow, what’s good about The Most Happy Fella is enough.  The score is fantastic and well-played by a full orchestra behind a screen onstage (and conducted with great panache by Pacien Mazzagatti), some actors do not entirely foul up the book, and the vocal talent is perhaps not unmatched but certainly great.  When Frank Loesser wrote this show (musical, opera, or whatever you wish to call it) in 1956, he meant it to be a comedy—Cleo states it explicitly.  But more than that, he meant to create something that could cause those who viewed it to become infected with the elation of his lead role.  When the cast rallies around Tony as he jumps for joy with Rosabella’s letter clutched to his chest, we can feel his delight.  We leave the theater with it.  That, for a stage show of any form, is enough.

Castle on a Cloud

Cloud City on the Met Roof

            One of the frequent but always impressive installations in the beautiful roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue), Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud City (running through November 4th), much like its predecessors, does not fail to impress.  Complex geometric oddities composed of thick glass and mirrored surfaces come together into an oddly shaped construction resembling a habitat.  The resulting structure arches up, with no discernible pattern, above the roof.  The Argentinian Saraceno’s intended goal is, as he says, “to defy gravity,” and he has accomplished this, up to a point.  Cloud City does not actually leave the ground, of course, but it has a strange but pleasing way of resting that implies that it might, at any minute, if supplied with a crew and the right sort of fuel.

            The exterior of Cloud City, while visually astounding from an analytical and logical standpoint, is not the only attraction.  Similarly to an earlier Met roof creation, Doug and Mike Starn’s Big Bambú, Cloud City contains, within its rigid, reflective walls, an iron spiral staircase reaching slowly up to its highest point.  Each receptacle that forms a part of Cloud City serves as its own viewing platform, offering amazing panoramas of the New York skyline, above the greenery of the surrounding Central Park.  Some are sturdier than others.  A few had little or no support, and the highest would only support two people at once and was worrying creaky with just one occupant.  Leaning into the rails at the edge of Cloud City’s many openings to the outside world gives one the feeling of resting against the prow of a ship moving against the wind to New York, but a far-off port in the distance.

            Space is different in Cloud City, especially considering the difficulty telling the difference between mirror and window.  This can cause some confusion but also wonderment.  It’s another world inside, a world where the three dimensions collide entertainingly, and all seemingly held together by thin black wire that pools into balls like metallic yarn in the center of some clusters of mirrored boxes.  (Is boxes the right word? Cloud City’s shape is tough to define.)  Occasionally one will look for one’s self in the mirror and discover the edge of a taller-than-average tree, or vice versa.  It’s an unusual experience Saraceno has created, but not an unpleasant one.

            I can’t say if Cloud City has any specific meaning (Saraceno only reveals that it’s “[about] the ways we inhabit… our environment”), but it seems to me a friendly and hopeful exhibition of the artist’s beliefs about taking part in art.  A passive view of an opus may be a fine experience, for those who prefer it, but, Saraceno seems to say, art should take up more space, literally and in the viewer’s life.  People who take in art must also act as components of it in order to achieve the full experience the art intends.  Cloud City is interactive without being childish, and beautiful without being haughty.  One could say it’s the meeting of two worlds, and a good intersection it is.  That Saraceno means to make Cloud Cities mainstream as more personal ways of “inhabiting our environment” (that is to say, houses) is unlikely, unless he is more radical than previously thought.  But it’s nice to imagine that, one day, we will all live in asymmetrical boxes of metal on wide roof gardens on the Upper East Side with unbelievable views across the park.  It may be wishful thinking, or perhaps even stupid, but making one’s home among such beauty couldn’t help but change a person’s outlook for the better.  One afternoon spent in Cloud City, for the time being, will do the trick.

They've Been Expecting You

Spy: The Exhibit at the Discovery Times Square Exposition

            Espionage, insist the advertisements, posters, lead-ups, and docents at and about Spy: The Exhibit (currently running at the Discovery Expo in Times Square at 226 West 44th Street), is not what it seems in the movies.  In this business, say they, there are few if any tuxedo-adorned Brits with incredible marksmanship who order their drinks shaken, not stirred.  There is instead a range of spy between excited engineers developing remote-controlled catfish and raging maniacs who spear Trotsky through the skull with an ice axe.  The key, it seems, is to find the difference, and apply the correct saboteur to the correct sabotage.

            Spy is earnest in its interest and loyalty to the American intelligence system—in fact, it appears to be almost a fanboy’s idolization of it—but somehow overzealous.  The exhibit, perhaps in an attempt to come off as “family-friendly,” strips the artifacts of some but not all of their punch, and lays them out with the same complexity with which they’d be presented to the family cat.  What is of interest here, or so it is to be believed what with the priorities the exhibition has established, are the artifacts themselves, and there are a lot of them. 

Spy spans two floors, packed floor to ceiling with every stray item that may have fallen out of a spy’s back pocket in the last fifty years, and spy cameras stuffed in everything from smoke alarms to matchboxes.  Careful attention is paid to every major development of intelligence in recent history; most of which took place during the Cold War.  The Cuban missile crisis and Oleg Penkovsky, the man who stopped it, are covered, as well as the chillingly recent discovery of the Russian Illegals, spies left over from the Cold War effort in American cities including New York and its suburbs who went undiscovered until 2010.  By then, they’d already started families and created American lives.  This, truly, is a modern representation of the impact of international espionage.

Many of the artifacts that appear, especially on the lower level of the exhibition, are genuinely interesting.  The inquisitive visitor may find a piece of Hitler’s stationery on which an OSS member has scrawled a triumphant message to his then three-year-old son.  A piece of the Berlin Wall and the last flag to fly atop it rest victoriously against the wall.  There are full vehicles used during World War II, including collapsible motorbikes used by British paratroopers and the so-called Sleeping Beauty, a mechanical longboat that traveled just below the water, with only the helmsman’s head emerging.  There are even recorded memories of real spies scattered between displays, as if to remind us that the stories we are watching play out are more real than we could possibly imagine.

And that’s the goal of the exhibit, unless I’m mistaken.  The researchers who built it and the agents who consulted for it want, nay, need us to understand how difficult it is keeping us safe every day, in more ways than one.  They need us to see how hard they work, the amount of danger they put themselves in, that they’re not just sepia-tone photos in a cutesy “For Your Eyes Only” photo on the wall (which, at the exhibit, they are).  It seems an easy goal to achieve, but somehow, Spy just misses its aim.  The exhibit, hard though it may try, just isn’t interesting enough.  When some piece of technology or history appeared I found intriguing, it surprised me.  The visitor to a museum should feel that elation at learning throughout.  One should still head to the Expo if only for these few moments of recognition, but in simple terms, Spy: The Exhibit is good—not great.

Bright Ideas

Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence at the American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at 79th Street)

                Who but the Museum of Natural History, one of New York City’s greatest and longest-existing institutions, would begin an exhibit that is patently about light in the silent, unabashed dark?
                Yes, perhaps for our enjoyment more than anything else, the darkness at the entrance to the museum’s new exhibition, Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence (running through January 6th), is all-encompassing, but for the glow, at the end of the metaphorical tunnel, of a ten-foot honey mushroom, glowing proudly as if to welcome us, with great pride in its surroundings, to its less-than-humble abode.
                Creatures of Light is, unexpectedly, relaxing, and bears resemblance not only to the pinnacle of scientific research that it undoubtedly is but also the quieted office of a psychiatrist. The lights, as mentioned, are dimmed, the better to bring the quiet luster of the surrounding plants and animals (live or otherwise) into focus, and a simple, elegant soundtrack of harp and piano plays unobtrusively over the loudspeaker. It is a symphony for the night, or for the depths of the ocean—the realms that Creatures celebrates, and its subjects seem to flourish within almost as much as, if not more than, they would in their respective natural habitats. The information is fascinating, detailing, as would be expected, the scientific processes, benefits, and flaws of the bioluminescent and fluorescent systems of the world’s living and close to nonliving things; as well as their uses in the natural world. Light, evidently, can serve any message from “Mate with me” to “Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.” And so many things in the animal world seem to convey both messages.
                The Museum of Natural History never fails at whipping up, near from nowhere, special exhibitions that document subjects too diverse to be imagined and yet getting each exactly right. So many museums can try and only succeed occasionally, but it is amazing that there is one that exists—and so close to home, too!—that always, always puts on a show worth visiting, seeing, and recommending to whatever passers-by you may manage to stop on the street post-exhibit and, of course, post-quick brunch jaunt to Isabella’s.  Creatures is no exception.
                Intricately worked and thrillingly accurate models of jellyfish, overinflated fireflies, millipedes and fish are rendered, immobile but appearing always in motion, overhead. Interactive touchscreens allow tours of the Bloody Bay Wall, a drop-off in Little Cayman, using both white and fluorescent light to detect the beautiful reactions of the coral and fish. And speaking of fish, the museum has no lack of them, either, as the exhibit boasts two tanks full of tiny flashlight fish with eye-pouches full of bioluminescent bacteria. In the darkness one can only see the two “headlights” at the front of the fish’s lithe bodies, darting around uncertainly as if unsure what is expected of
                But this is only among the most beautiful displays Creatures has to offer. Near the portion of the hallowed, dark hall exploring Mosquito Bay in Puerto Rico, a so-called Bioluminescent Bay filled with miniature dinoflagellates (millions of which would fit on the head of a pin) that glow when disturbed, there lies a long portion of gently sloping ground immersed in the light show originating above. The dinoflagellates, as tiny points of light, flow down the slope, making it appear a long stretch of shallow water—one that invites wading. (Completing the illusion is the wooden bridge used to enter this section and an overturned boat towards the wall.) Wherever the visitor steps, there the dinoflagellates follow with gusto, glowing brightly and creating a halo around the feet of whomsoever deigns to step on them. Perhaps the folks at the museum could be subjected to a metaphor based on the phenomenon they’ve created here. All they want is for willing learners to flock to their doors and spend a blissful day within. In return, they’ll create something almost unbelievably entertaining and informative—but above all, beautiful.

It's in the Name

The Museum of the City of New York

            It can be to no one’s surprise that I declare New York City a metropolis worthy of study.  But then, it can be to no one’s use either, as historians even today, with or without my say-so, would go so far as to clamber over each other for glimpses of the rust from Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg, if they knew it would teach them something about the greatest city on Earth, a city that has been built by and, in turn, inspired the greatest minds of our time.  It is a city that has raised majesty to the next level, convenience to an art form, and incorporated the accumulated brilliance of generations into its every move.  And the city that never sleeps, as one could imagine, spends very little of its time immobile.

            It is because I love New York City so much that I love equally altars to its greatness.  One such altar is the Museum of the City of New York, at 103^rd Street and 5^th Avenue, in a beautiful neo-Georgian mansion overlooking Central Park.  Within, MCNY contains some of the most interesting and diverting exhibitions one is likely to find anywhere up and down Museum Mile.  For just a few examples, the museum details the inception of the New York City grid, a triumph of engineering and metropolitan planning almost universally rejected in its earliest stages but, of course, coming to successful fruition despite the almost impossible task of leveling hills and chopping up farms for miles around in an attempt to modernize New York.  The exhibition dedicated to the grid is itself separated into blocks in a room with mirrored walls, creating the illusion that one is in the center of a smaller network of streets within the larger one outside.

            The museum deals with this and other topics with nimble and tasteful precision.  Stories of the activist causes of New York’s history are displayed, ideas for improving both the grid and the East River Esplanade are shared, and unabridged histories of the city are exhibited in multimedia.  NYC’s past is recreated through transportation toys from all eras, as well as recreated furnished rooms to represent all imaginable family styles and classes from the four-hundred-year history of the city. 

Art, too, is given a fair place.  Hyperrealist paintings by New York native Stone Roberts adorn the walls of a small but aesthetically pleasing gallery.  Roberts lays out bustling street corners, a somehow peaceful, brightly lit Grand Central Station, and New Yorkers hailing cabs with equal exactitude, and there is something calming about the utter quiet that accompanies them, as if Roberts has frozen moments in a New York day and put them on display.  His beautiful works certainly do look almost photographic.

But photographs share space with all the rest, in this case the work of video and pictorial artist Neil Goldberg, who takes New York moments most take for granted—the elbows of truck drivers protruding from their windows, the uncertain faces of visitors to a salad bar and the same anguished faces of those missing their trains—and increases them, makes them more visible, to the point where it’s clear that they are the true souls of New York City: the people.  The people who built it from the ground up just as much as the people who live in it, embodying it, becoming it, until they, too, are New York, and their hustle and bustle is its.  No other city in the world can claim that kind of connection with its inhabitants.  Maybe, as they say, it’s something in the water.

Works of a Kind Decidedly Other, if Not Unfamiliar

Art of Another Kind at the Guggenheim Museum

            Abstract art is a revolution against the status quo.  It is a rejection of art as a method of representing life in an exact, cardboard form, and a celebration of the idea that the beliefs of the artist can be transferred to the canvas without a model, without any set of rules, or, often, without a brush.  And indeed, the pieces collectively making up Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960, the new exhibition at said museum, which runs through this September, originated in periods of national strife in which more actualized revolution seemed imminent—dictatorial Spain, or oppressive, vehemently anti-Marxist Italy, or France finding its shaky footing post-World War II.  In any of these cases, restless artists coalesced into groups like the French Art Brut, founded by Jean Dubuffet, or Scandinavia’s Cobra, and created and maintained (for as long a period as they could coexist) a new form of expressionism, or what French art critic Michel Tapié called, in his book discussing the movement, Un art autre, or art of another kind.

            The work displayed in the gently descending halls of the Guggenheim (located, incidentally, at 1071 5th Avenue) is certainly of another kind, though of what kind it is difficult to pinpoint.  The artists on each floor come from different countries, different walks of life, and different philosophies on art.  In fact, artworks on view in the exhibit range from wide, bold paintings by Yves Klein (created by covering naked women in blue paint and smearing them across the canvas) to small, unobtrusive squares built by Jean Tinguely covered in tiny white strips of metal that just happen to move, by clockwork, every half hour until they are noticeably different than they were only a moment before.  But what links this art together, at least according to the museum, is that it has no predestined form or meaning, that it was brought together to convey little meaning without careful scrutiny, or perhaps no meaning at all.  In a way, the true meaning of abstraction may be that we, the viewers, never find out.

            The exhibit is organized so subtly that, like an abstract painting, one might fail to realize that it has any order at all.  Few paintings are described in detail, and one is given only a brief overview as to the period and reasoning from which each set of paintings spring.  With the Guggenheim as one’s only informer, the artists behind the works presented seem enigmatic and mysterious, far back into the shadows in comparison with their works, which are little analyzed and detailed blatantly, without pondering meaning or motivation. 

The real attraction at Art of Another Kind is, as the name might (or should) reveal, the art itself, and the pure visual enjoyment derived from it.  Abstraction may seem to be a form of art that invites further speculation and introspection as to the precise reasoning behind each painting.  But with further study, or rather little of it, one can concur that an artwork can mean nothing if one chooses it to—it can simply be visually pleasing, or not.  (Very little of the artwork at the Guggenheim, thankfully, is not visually pleasing.)  What it means or doesn’t mean is truly up to the viewer, unless one is up against a particularly vocal artist who insists upon the true significance of two circles and a square.  That is the true beauty of abstract art—that the inference of the aesthete is the only real validity.  It may be the artist’s revolution, but it is the common man’s art.

Merely Players

As You Like It at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park

            Is there any quote of William Shakespeare’s that more defines him than the monologue of the Seven Ages as humbly pronounced by Jacques, depressed courtier in As You Like It (playing through June 30 as part of Shakespeare in the Park)?  In the somewhat cynical but certainly accurate summation of the lives and purpose of the ambling human race, Jacques (a name pronounced, like “Rosalind,” an infinite number of ways) proclaims, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.”  (This Jacques, incidentally, is played by a heavily disguised and appropriately funny Stephen Spinella.)  It would of course be cliché and redundant, perhaps even too much so to bear in any critical explanation of a work by Shakespeare, to explore the relation of the nuances of this speech to the Bard himself and his outlook on life.  So I’ll just remind you, as you take in this new production, to eat, drink, and be merry!  This is a comedy, after all.

            And there is little introspection, to make way for good tidings, dance, and happiness all ‘round at this version of As You Like It, the first production of this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park.  The woods feature prominently in the summer’s chosen entertainments (Sondheim’s Into the Woods is to follow in August), and As You Like It is, of course, no exception, as it deals with the government-in-exile of the good Duke Senior (Andre Braugher of The Wire fame), banished from his dukedom by his wicked, top-hatted brother, Frederick (also Braugher).  Senior’s new court is to be found in the Forest of Arden, where unrequited love flourishes, takes hold of any willing participants, and eventually (spoiler alert) is requited after all.  The onstage antics are accompanied by a rousing and extremely entertaining bluegrass score by Steve Martin—with lyrics by an unknowing Shakespeare, whose rhyming prose is employed by a jubilant troupe of performers.   Yes, bluegrass, for in this incarnation As You Like It takes place in the Civil War-era American South.  Costumes and locations (designed, respectively, by the Tony-nominated Jane Greenwood and the Tony-winning John Lee Beatty) are changed, but the prose remains the same, and most theatergoers wouldn’t have it any other way.  The comedies, and As You Like It in particular, are uncomplicated, joyous, and entertaining, not to mention funny, and when delivered with a cast of players like Lily Rabe (daughter of David Rabe and the late Jill Clayburgh and veteran of the original cast of Seminar) as a feisty Rosalind; Oliver Platt portraying a sly Touchstone the clown; and as many other talented Shakespeareans as can fit on a stage at one time, such a play as this can be transcendently good.  It’s no surprise that this one is.

            A play like this one, that can survive the test of time and remain appropriately comical, deserves recognition and performance.  It especially deserves the kind of performance that whips the audience into a frenzy, hands clapping, feet stomping, and funny bones tickled at the loves between Orlando (David Furr) and Rosalind (or Ganymede), Silvius (Will Rogers) and Phoebe (Susannah Flood), Touchstone and Audrey (Donna Lynne Champlin)—Well, there’s a lot of love onstage.  And the audience, too, can feel it wash over them.

            It’s a wonderful thing to watch dedicated actors perform Shakespeare, because it’s obvious that they love it so much.  To speak the words of the greatest writer ever to live is a privilege, and the actors at the Delacorte Theater embrace that.  They speak with passion and power, and when watching them one gets the feeling that every audience member, too, is merely playing a part in a long and extensive Shakespeare work; that he has written your life, so to speak, and that your parts, your exits and your entrances, are only an extension of the work you’ve just seen performed.  A play as all-encompassing as that, one that manages to mirror real life from over four centuries in the past, could only be written by William Shakespeare.  Who better to celebrate?