A Freezing Day in New York
The
new year has just opened, and before
heading to MOMA to see the new Abstraction show, which seems both
enormous and inescapable, I thought I should take a turn around Switzerland. Ferdinand
Hodler and his self-portraits again. To take another look at those scenes out his window, over Lake Geneva toward Mont Blanc, from dawn to sunset, in which those streaks of orange I remember so well, invade the blue of
the mountains. The audioguide mentions that Klimt saw fourteen of the Hodler
paintings at the 19th Secession in Vienna in 1904, and was
deeply impressed: how not?
On such a day, when you have to keep your gloved hands in
your pockets if you possibly can, the thing to have is a Belgian hot chocolate
in one of the omnipresent branches of Le Pain Quotidien, or of course, you
could move from one to another. Or then a mint tea and share an immense
meringue with whomever you are having tea or chocolate with – or enjoy anything
alone, and then go back to the Matisse show at the Met, if you have had enough
of the 60 other ways of looking at Warhol.
At the other Met, the
opera, Les Troyens of Berlioz went on
and on, but then, so do many wars and recoveries and plots. It sets you up for
seeing Parsifal again, no brief
experience, no matter how many times you endure and are exalted by it.
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