freezing days

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 19^th 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. 

picasso, warhol, hodler

How typical, and that's what one tries not to mind (presumably) -- I wrote a piece for the Oxford Gazette, as usual, on the various exhibitions I'd been privileged to see recently, on and on about Picasso in Black and White, Matisse in twos and threes, and the 60 artists looking at Warhol, some of which was delightfully illuminating, AND the second time, they didn't pop the silver balloons in the last room.. thinking I would just transfer it to here, a blog i sometimes feels like writing, and guess what? now on AOL, I can't call up under "sent" the messages to find out what I wrote, AND THAT IS JUST FINE.

if you don't feel like writing something the second time, it may not have been worth it the first...

Anyway, and this is delightful, if on Fcebook you are looking up the Neue Galerie, and you had longed, as I  had, to see the Hodler show, and you hadn't gotten there (as so often happens, you are going but then, oh, you have time, and you don't), well, I do, another week, AND there is a 5 dollar off the admission if you are looking it up, so I will certainly (my "certainly" means, I hope) go sometimes when family has left (alas) and things are back to whatever one would consider normal... I love his doublings, and those strange symmetries and elongated figures -- like Jacques Bellange, that strange French mannerist I keep thinking of, well, sometimes..

we saw Amour.. and it truly is about just that, and I  have something to say about the pigeon, which comes from Kay Sage writing about the superstition of a bird coming in the house to announce death, well, that is actually what I have to say about the pigeon. Not just comic relief at all, and his writing at the end: I set it free, when he has smothered it, relates to the wife, WHAT a film...

Christmas Eve tonight, and my Acquacize class is again this morning, so I should go back to bed, I imagine. That doesn't mean I will. Interesting: what ever means what...