now dance!

Finally, from the New York Times,  a clear photograph of the new hanging of Matisse's Dance.  I imagine that the landing is larger than it appears in the picture.  I'm also sure it will be very exciting to head up the stairs, see Dance coming closer over the heads of a buzzing New York crowd - a very urban, modern moment.  But what an awful way to actually look at a painting!  Who was the genius who decided to hang this in a traffic flow, with a limited number of good, close vantage points?  Dance seems fated to be part of the ambience of MoMA, something one walks by feeling giddy or views from afar, rather than a great painting one can actually examine - at least without being jostled constantly.  That's a shame.

Looking at another photograph the Times features, I again see Newman.  I'm thinking it's a trend . . .

A couple of other thoughts: first the conclusion of this sentence from Kimmelman's article -

I wrote "by and large" earlier because I can't help finding it infinitely sad that the museum, which many New Yorkers, not all of them art buffs, fondly recall from decades ago as an intimate and congenial place to commune with the gods of modern art and to pass an idle hour or two in its garden, our urban Eden, has now become, like so much of the rest of our culture, grandiose.

- reminded me of an idea I've been wanting to post on for a while regarding theatricality and contemporary culture.  Crackpot bonus: it will involve a comparison to the later Roman empire!

Aside from that, look at the review closely.  Maybe it's just me, but . . . it really feels like the subtext of the article is that Kimmelman has been reading a lot of art blogs.

Comments

[Tyler Green]

That is an enormously deceptive, cleverly cropped photograph. The installation looks very little like that. The stairway is much wider, and there is a lot of white space on the wall surrounding the painting. And the staircase is a "double-wide."