what about the plastic animals?

Two Bridges, Two Islands, Two Waterfalls

Not in a writing mood this week.  Here are bits of two bridges, two islands and two waterfalls.

Waterfalls

Waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Eva Quadtych

A quadtych from Eva, or someone obsessed with Eva. Recently found, in a soggy condition, in Morningside Park.

Eva, or the artist obsessed with Eva, is probably more mature than the people in the White House who concluded that refusing to open an email message from the EPA would mean they could willfully remain ignorant of the EPA's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled.  There's probably no connection between those legal eagles and the Justice Department illegally using ideological criteria so they could hire lesser qualified, yet more politically acceptable, non-partisan career attorneys.  January 20th can't get here soon enough.

Focus, Focus, Focus

Looking up through a new, hopefully temporary, artwork at Union Square.  Same view, different focal points.

Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped (1975)

People loved looking into Three Piece.   I could have spend an hour just watching everyone interact with the sculpture.  It was located off the beaten path in a corner of the botanical garden.  Thus, no foul-mouthed pre-K gangsters!

J. R. Simplot died last week.  He was 99.  I had never heard of him until I read his obituary.  He was one of the richest people in America because his country perfected the frozen french fry back in the 1960s.  He then made a deal with Ray Kroc to be the frozen fry supplier to McDonald's.  The description of how he got started in business is pretty amazing.  He left home at 14 after his father refused to let him go to a basketball game. Then...

His mother gave him $20 in gold coins, and he moved into a $1-a-night hotel in a nearby town. There were teachers living in the hotel who were being paid in interest-bearing scrip. Jack bought them at 50 cents on the dollar and sold them to a bank for 90 cents on the dollar.

He used this profit to buy a rifle, an old truck and either 600 or 700 hogs (accounts vary) at $1 a head. He used the rifle to shoot wild horses, which — after stripping the hides for future sale at $2 each — he mixed with potatoes and cooked on sagebrush-fueled flames. The hogs ate the result. When he sold the fattened pigs, Mr. Simplot made more than $7,000.

That gave him capital to buy farm machinery and six horses and become a potato farmer...

To honor him we should all eat McDonald's french fries.

Hill Arches

I have a charming story to relate!  Before last fall I hadn't been to the New York Botanical Garden in years.  On Sunday I went for the third time in six months.  The garden is having two exhibits I wanted to see:  Darwin's Garden and Moore in America.  The latter is the largest collection of Henry Moore's works ever exhibited in North America.  Both exhibits are excellent and well-worth seeing.  If that's not enough excitement there's a giant turtle in the Bronx River.

On to the charming story!  There were two boys, about four years old each, and a guy I took for their father when I approached Hill Arches, the sculpture above.  Then I noticed the guy wasn't paying attention to the kids and subsequently went away.  I waited for the kids to return to their nowhere nearby parents so I could take a clean photo of the sculpture.  A different family walked up.  Their son, who was about the same age as the original kids, tentatively approached the sculpture.  The original kids stopped playing, threw back their shoulders, balled up their tiny fists and got in the face of the new guy.  One kid started yelling "F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!" 

Charming, right? 

The new kid ran bawling back to his mother.  Mom, and everyone else within earshot, was astonished.  A woman walked over from the row of tulip trees to the left.  The mother of the offended boy said "Your son said 'F*** you a$$' to my child."  The arriving woman replied "That's not my son," then grabbed him and his companion and walked away.  Everyone but me took their leave of the Henry Moore sculpture and I got my picture.

Stripes

Three mostly horizontal works in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Fabiola Was Fab

Fabiola was a Roman woman who lived in the fourth century AD.  She lived such a saintly life that she was made a saint.  In 1885 a French artist named Jean-Jacques Henner painted a portrait of Fabiola.  The painting was fictitious because there's no record of what she looked like.  In the mid-19th century there was something of a cult devoted to her.

About 15 years ago, Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs began collecting portraits of Fabiola that he found in flea markets and similar places around the world.  The odd thing was that almost all the portraits are near copies of Henner's original fictitious portrait.  Alÿs now has about 300 portraits.  Since September they have been hanging in the North Building Galleries at the Hispanic Society of America as a joint exhibit between the Society and the Dia Art Foundation.  I finally remembered to pay a visit today, one day before the exhibit closes.

It is an interesting show.  The paintings are nearly identical, down to the folds in her red clothing to the tuft of hair that peeks out from her cloak.  A couple of portraits used a different color, or had her looking to the right, but were mostly the same except for the skill of the artist.  It was a nice change from the very stuffy, but excellent, artwork usually displayed by the Hispanic Society.  The Goya's, El Greco's and amazing tiles are still all on display in the south building.  There were a good dozen people in the museum today.  That more than doubles the total number of people I've seen in my two previous visits.

Even though Fabs is closing tomorrow, the works will be displayed elsewhere in the future.

Museum Visits

Photographic evidence that I was at the Museum of Modern Art today.  I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday but didn't take any pictures.

At the Met I recommend the Jasper Johns: Gray exhibit an the tiny, out of the way Radiance from the Rain Forest:  Featherwork in Ancient Peru.  The latter is pretty amazing.  Also good is the modern photography exhibit.  The Lee Friedlander:  A Ramble in Olmsted Parks didn't do much for me.

Color Chart:  Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is entertaining at MoMA.  Design and the Elastic Mind was equal parts fascinating and way-too-clever designer wankfest.  I also enjoyed the Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now.

Tomorrow's art show is Domestic Matters:  Schumacher gets a haircut, goes grocery shopping, and cleans his apartment.

Mr. Bubbles in San Francisco

An Indian-American, a German-American and a Canadian go into a bar.  One of them had enough beer to make coherent blogging difficult.  Instead he scrolled through his image directory and found a picture he took of a mural in San Francisco.  The End.