NYC Museum Exhibitions, 1999

Here are some notes on visits to NYC museums that I wrote in December of 1999, long before this blog.

The MTA Transit Museum

Industrial Art: evolution of subway cars, ceramic tiles in stations, they thought they could make people more moral by giving them beautiful stations. The early cars were wood, but that proved dangerous. Fabric straps went out in the 1940s.

Museum of the City of New York

Exhibition on circus art. Very telling -- use of wild exaggerations (e.g. elephants putting on skits dressed as people and standing up, gesturing in character, etc.) Adults accept because believing itslef is fun? Because impossible to disabuse kids? Big gestures in posters, big swaths of color, big sweep to ignore smaller details -- three rings.

The Frick Collection

The worst mansion ever. No wonder he willed it away: who in the family would live there? Huge, daunting rooms, none small, with no natural relation to one another. Starts with courtyard plan but "magnificence" of rooms overwhelms the courtyard. All conspicuous consumption.

Mostly the paintings are safe. Saw only one Impressionist, an OK Monet, and 2 Vermeers, though of course Vermeer is nice and safe too. Lots of portraits: Van Dyck, Constable, Turner.

"Jump Cut"

This was a film at the MoMA. It follows the plot of Faust in the manner of "live film." It shows how film, lighted a certain way, can make a face or gesture more dramatic than the real thing.

The film follows the main lines of Goethe's play -- the study, the bargain, the jewels, the wildride, the trial. There is no death of Faust at the end, no God and Mephistopheles at the beginning. It samples the Murnau film on a screen that covers the width of the upper third of the stage, as if a screen had been lowered only that far and then stopped.

What is its theme? Beats me. It's more of a jouissance with, a tootling of the story, using multimedia. Not theme but like theme: faces and persona(lities) are merged, demerged, emerged. Gretchen is Gretchen but also (Help Me) Rhonda and finally demi-asserted to be Mephistopheles himself. (Upon this demi-discovery, Faust gives her/him a big kiss. Whom is he kissing? What does he mean? The motion as dance or gesture is more important, gets to you more, than it is a theme or "message.")

Interesting riff on the killing of the child. It is an abortion, and the devil blames her for it, is the prosecutor at her trial.

Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition at the Guggenheim

Rauschenberg started by studying art at Black Mountain College in 1948. Then he went to NYC in 1949, had some influence from Abstract Expressionism but soon got into "ongoing dialogue between mediums" of painting and sculpture and also handmades and machine-made. Some of the works:

• First work: "This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time," 1949. It is a handmade "book" of 14 woodcuts. It opens from the bottom, topped by (all that's visible) a piece of tracing paper with the penciled title of the piece.
• On the wall: A "documentary photograph" of the 14 pages -- black with white horizontal streaks.
• "Autobiography" (1968): three 6' x 4' panels ranged vertically. The top one is a fluoroscope of a full-size person with a compass and a crazy flying gizmo, which is semi-repeated in the bottom / a photo of a skater with an inverted parasail attached to his back: Art expresses its affection for all science: crazy gizmos but also serious stuff: the background of the lower panel is a nautical relief of a Texas bay for use in sailing, and the central panel is a spiral of biotext with the same center as a photo of the child Rauschenberg (?) taken rowboating by his (?) parents in (?) Texas where R was born.
• The same room has blown-glass auto tires, a blown-glass and glass rod kitchen broom (1997). Science loves art, as Bridget loves Bernie.
• Tire track print on a long paper scroll (20 sheets mounted on linen), 1953. The tire track is sciencelike because manufactured, artlike because individual.
• Also in this room: a sort of pillow of "slumped glass" with all the foldiness and rumpledness of a pillow, except that it is of glass. So the bounds being explored are greater than art/science.
• "Hydro (night Shade)": Tarnishes on a 4 x 7'aluminum sheet: hydrant, swishes.
• Two blueprints from the 1950s with someone named Susan Weil dong a dance pose or something. Photos 5 x 3'.
• Painting: "Mother of God" plays with a cut-out phrase, apparently a review of something.
• Painting: "The Invaluable Spiritual Road Map": Big white empty space imposed on the middle of an assemblage of city road maps. Is he resisting the merger of "road map" (industrial) and "spiritual"?
• "Crucifixion"
• Painting: A white on white as if gameboard, with numbers and a few words ("The lily white")
• Sculpture: "Greenhouse" I love this. Again, soft nature is embraced by hard art/technology. It is 4 feet high and 15" square on base mesh structure in three tiers, proportioned 7:3:1. The lowest tier has big tree twigs, the highest has lots of little twig ends, and the middle has an assemblage of twigs suggesting the (3D) outline of a nest, plus a 3" radius glass globe suggesing an egg. This is from 1950. Not green.
• Untitled work from the collection of Jasper Johns, 22" wide by 20" canvas. Mostly black, with the left 1/5 done over in a silvery something and the right 1/5 a collage of photos, a map, newspaper clipping -- all very small and under a glass plate. Pictures in that panel have the same human-nervousness-verging-on-sexual-aggression composition.
• Now here is one big room that gives an amazing look at how varied Rauschenberg's work was in 1950-55: All-white and all-black paintings, gold paintings inside shadowbox frames, photography, little collections of "scatole personali" (sewing threads, feathers, etc., and a little box to hold them), a box of dirt and mold for John Cage, assemblages of paper and clippings -- he was into everything.
• Continuing on the ramp: from 1953 and 1954, red and black paintings with oil and paper (newsprint in the black) and fabric (red only): thick, lush effect, lots of depth given by the folds in the paper. All threee have composition in the sense of spaces blocked out and against each other -- like the blocking in a Renaissance Adoration of the Magi but without the figures and landscape.
• Now three more smaller paintings -- same idea, same almost classical composition. A conservative among the NYC zanies! One of them ("Untitled" 1954) has pages from the Sunday comics below the dabs of paint and stuff, and out in front is a cheeseball version of Monet's Little Girl with Watering Can -- A U Paint It version or something, just three inches square. Also a crushed (I think it's a) bird nest.
• Next, "Minutiae" from 1954: a "combine" done as a set for a dance piece of the same name by Merce Cunningham. Same materials as the paintings but now in 3D. Still with that affection for the classical or at least the passé (kind of a still life of apples is one of the panels of the front frame)
• Paint Cans 1954 -- real cans in a real wood box, along with flattened-out tin from real cans, with labels reaffixed!
• Interview 1955: a combine like a cupboard -- blows you away. A paean to all art: neoclassical, sentimental, nudie, baseball, toreror, a brick aimed at a coastscape like the one in the background of Boticelli's Venus, an industrial promotion, a smile as if for Pepsodent, etc. Veryy sunny of disposition.
• 14 Illustrations from the Inferno 1958-60. Though 2D, they have Rauschenberg's layered feel. He is not afraid to be literal. Satan has sinners in his mouth, the violent vs. nature are shown by a penissy thing thrusting comet-like into the lower foreground.
• Odalisque 1955 uses what must have been a phot from a nudist magazine. Another combine with a rooster atop (pun for cock?). He uses a lot of them. It's basically a box set atop a single pillar whose bottom pierces a pillow. Hm.

Egon Schiele Exhibition at the MoMA

Dark, angry paintings and drawings, mostly of nudes with challenge in their faces and spread legs. Landscapes of dead-looking cities (one called Todt Stadt). He married in 1918, got the flu, died at 28. The label says he was well respected even after he withdrew from the Vienna Academy and was included in an official government show during the war. (It was for showing in neutral countries.) It is hard to imagine softening people with the violent nudes in this particular show, but the ones of Russian POWs or cities would probably have appeal. The style is very angular, seems to have design reasons also for repeatedly showing women in angled positions (knees down, cheeks up, all boney).

Manhattan as Art

December 19 I walked Manhattan from tip to tip with my son Christian. We started from the Broadway Bridge, which takes Broadway across to the Bronx, and then walked all the way to Battery Park. Surely the city is an artwork that ought to be studied by anyone serious about the Humanities. First there is the design that goes into the building of an expansion to a city -- the technological, the aesthetic, the political, even the moral. As for that, the "slums" of NYC that we saw were hardly slums at all, certainly not like I've seen in Chicago or the worst parts of Augusta, but vibrant and brimming with life. Every block of Amsterdam Avenue that we walked had hozens of small businesses, many with sidewalk components, all briskly engaged with a lively clientele whose look betrayed none of that despair that social "thinkers" attribute to life in upper Manhattan. This seems due to a long established policy in NYC of mixing income groups together. Thus design decisions have impact on moral life. Also the life on these streets is itself a fit subject of humane studies: the aesthetic decisions, the life decisions, attested by hte merchandise and its presentations. Envios were probably the most advertized service.

Downtown and Central Park / Midtown were also revealing. Park design, evolving styles of architecture.

Imagine a Broadway Web Site dedicated to the architecture and life of just this one street, from tip to tip of the metropolis. What a study that would be.

Pre-Baroque Italian paintings

That’s my name for a number of 16th-century canvases at the Metropolitan characterized by large size and spaciousness of composition:

Francesco Granacci, Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist, ca. 1510, about 4½ feet wide.



Bugiardini, Adam and Eve, turn of 16th century, double-frame about 7½ feet wide.



Granacci’s workshop, John the Baptist preaching, a good five feet wide, about 1520



All three use size to gain spaciousness. In the Preaching, the saint’s auditors arrange themselves casually on various rock features, sitting or leaning ad lib, except for the two Pharisees, who stand at the far left, one of them pointing to the approaching Christ. The auditors form not a circle, as one would naturally expect, but a broken line. They are grouped 3-1-John-1-4-2, and each group has lots of space between, above, and behind them. In the background one sees a nicely executed landscape – a woods, then a lake then high mountains. Why is the Pharisee the one who first spots Christ’s approach? Christ is on a path that will lead him behind the Pharisees, then around their right, then face to face with the Baptist – all with plenty of room.

The Granacci is similar. We see three arches of a sort of porch of a structure that is not entirely in the frame. Each arch has a scene from John’s life: the Visitation, the boy’s birth (with the BVM in attendance), and a scene of Elizabeth and Zechariah sitting at a fireplace with a veil of some sort. From the interior of the building, female attendants enter the visible area by two different doors. Left of the house is a rendition of the scene with Zechariah in the tabernacle, where the tabernacle is portrayed as unattached to any other building and entirely open to the air!

Here are comments from the Met

On the Adam and Eve--

Towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century Bugiardini painted a number of oblong paintings on canvas with male and female nudes in a landscape. These may have been intended to hang in a bedroom framed in a wainscoting. This pair is unusual in illustrating a Biblical rather than a classical theme: the temptation of Eve. The landscape and figure types, with their angular contours, recall Northern paintings and prints, which Bugiardini must have studied closely. The picture was long ascribed to Piero di Cosimo.
Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini (Italian, Florentine, 1475–1554)
Oil on canvas; Each 26 3/8 x 61 3/4 in. (67 x 156.8 cm)
Bequest of Edward Fowles, 1971 (1971.115.3ab)

On the Life of Baptist
Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1510
Francesco Granacci (Francesco di Andrea di Marco) (Italian, Florentine, 1469–1543)
Oil, tempera, and gold on wood; 31 1/2 x 60 in. (80 x 152.4 cm)
Purchase, Gwynne Andrews, Harris Brisbane Dick, Dodge, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds, funds from various donors, Ella Morris de Peyster Gift, Mrs. Donald Oenslager Gift, and Gifts in memory of Robert Lehman, 1970 (1970.134.1)
Left to right are shown: the Annunciation to Zacharias, the future father of John the Baptist; Elizabeth's visit with Mary (the Visitation); the Birth of John the Baptist, with Zacharias warming himself at a fireplace. The panel, which is cut at the right, was completed by a fourth scene showing the infant John taken to his father (Cleveland Museum of Art). The architecture is decorated with allegorical motifs apparently derived from Roman coins. Granacci would have become familiar with such classical details in the studio of his teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, where he worked alongside the young Michelangelo. This engaging picture belongs to a series of three panels recounting the life of John the Baptist (the second is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the third is displayed nearby). They were doubtless painted to decorate a chapel or oratory and date from about 1510.

On the Baptist Preaching
The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1510
Workshop of Francesco Granacci (Italian, Florentine, 1469–1543)
Oil, tempera, and gold on wood; 29 3/4 x 82 1/2 in. (75.6 x 209.6 cm)
Purchase, Gwynne Andrews, Harris Brisbane Dick, Dodge, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds, funds from various donors, Ella Morris de Peyster Gift, Mrs. Donald Oenslager Gift, and Gifts in memory of Robert Lehman, 1970 (1970.134.2)
This panel concluded the series to which the adjacent picture belonged. It shows Saint John the Baptist preaching. The two Pharisees at the left gesture towards the advancing figure of Christ. A work of great distinction, the picture is in many respects superior to the companion panel and must be by another artist. Collaborations of this sort were common in the Renaissance. A tentative attribution has been made to Raffaello Botticini, whose later works, however, never attain this quality. The affinities some of the figures show with the Doni Tondo of Michelangelo further point up the stature of the piece. Michelangelo and Granacci were friends and fellow pupils in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Outerborough

A ten-minute film by Bill Morrison, using Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899). The lit says that’s what Morrison does, take old footage and goof around with it. This time he uses a split screen, with the film running forward on the left and backward on the right. (The film simply shoots the view from the front of the car as the bridge train crosses the bridge.) Then he makes the film go faster! Wow! According to the lit, “the director engages the viewer . . . via subtle visual trickery.” Yeah, trickery all right.

Saw it Sunday Jan. 16, 2005 at 2p at the MoMA.

The Mandarin (Austrian, 1918)

The director is Fritz Freisler. The titles are in Italian, but there is a strong German Expressionist bent to both the plot and the cinematography. A young rake, the Baron di Stroong, buys a curious Chinese statuette that turns out to be a diabolical spirit named “Mandarino,” who procures men for the man. When he finally becomes disgusted with himself and with the endless chain of conquests, he tries to dismiss the spirit – but learns that on his own he’s just no good at picking up chicks. This makes him insane, and his story is told in retrospect to an author who is touring an asylum looking for good stories. But what about that asylum director? Doesn’t he look a lot like Mandarino? Could it be . . .

The story is a set of realizations of the very lust for power that underlay the original lust of the young rake. Aristocrat is to conquise as devil is aristocrat and as keeper is to lunatic and as the author is to his character.

Click here for IMDb's information on Freisler.

Hämnaren

Swedish film, 1915, directed by Mauritz Stiller.

I saw the film at MoMA on Sunday, January 16, 2005, and wrote these notes:

This is a recently discovered print of this film, and in pretty good shape. The plot concerns a Jewish girl whose Swedish seminarian lover jilts her. When her father finds out, he kicks her out, so of course she dies in penurious childbirth, attended only by the Jewish boy who loved her all along. Baby boy grows up in his Jewish grandfather’s home, eventually falls in love with a Christian girl, who turns out to be his half-sister.

Cinematically, the most interesting thing is the way Stiller uses the space being shot by the camera. Presumably because of technical constraints, the camera just sits in place and grinds away while action occurs. But Stiller shows how you can still make the space before the camera lively and plastic. The best example is the scene in which the girl, tossed out by Papa, goes to the gate of the seminary in hopes of seeing her lover again and talking him back into her life. As she stands shyly to the side of the gate (camera left), the screen fills with a crowd of young men going lightheartedly off for the afternoon, their confidently upright postures and snappy dress contrasting handsomely with the figure of the girl, who soon disappears behind all these fellows. Then the father-to-be is seen in the group, then the group is finished exiting, and then the girl herself, dowdy and stooped and small against the seminary wall, is seen alone. She gathers her small courage and walks diagonally off left, leaving the scene empty of humans. Pretty striking.

Another cinematic effect, mighty hokey, occurs when the seminarian marries his proper Swedish bride, in a church where one sees a Madonna on the wall where in a Catholic church one would see the retable. The ceremony begins, but then the young man is stricken when he looks up and sees – yes! – the Jewish girl and her baby in place of the Madonna and child.

His reaction is guilt-ridden, but he is not guilt-ridden enough to, say, find that baby and see that he is properly supported. Indeed, the film is suffused with Christian ambiguity over mistreatment of Jews, which is puzzling since I imagine from the director’s name that he must be Jewish. For example, at the end, the boy finally encounters his father – quondam seminarian and now minister of the Gospel – and instead of punching him out for mistreating his mother falls into his arms: “My son is mine,” the minister proclaims, while the much-abused grandfather, whom the film characterizes as a heartless usurer, weeps.

The titles divide the film into “Acts” just as in the 1918 The Mandarin. This must have been the practice in Europe – in the D. W. Griffith epics of this era there is nothing so stagey.

There is information on Stiller in the Internet Movie Database.

NYC Subway Art: The 4 Line

Over the past few years New York’s MTA has commissioned dozens of works by NYC artists for its subway stations. Most of them are on subway walls in ceramic tile, but there are plenty of surprises. People just walk past them, but they are really worth a look, so a friend and I took an afternoon to tour the 12 stations on the 4 line that feature commissioned art.

In writing up the tour, I’m going to try to give you more specific directions than we had, so you can do more looking and less walking. If you want to follow our trail, you might want to get an “unlimited ride” Metrocard for at least the day, so you can leave the subway system from time to time and have a snack or a cup of coffee or a bathroom break. We started at the Brooklyn end of the line and worked our way up to 161st Street in Manhattan.

Utica Avenue: Hugo Consuegra, “Good Morning, Good Night”

We started at the Brooklyn terminus of the 4 line, Utica Avenue. The art is easy to find: when you arrive you are in the platform of the Brooklyn-bound tunnel, whose walls are adorned on both sides with the “Good Night” tiles that are half of the work. Directly above is the Manhattan-bound platform with the “Good Morning” tiles.

Presumably people in this neighborhood travel into Manhattan in the morning and return at night, so the platform walls on the Manhattan-bound track have “morning” scenes (10 in all, repeated on each long wall) all featuring a cheery sun looking down on various bits of scenery: a barnyard, a beach, etc. Correspondingly, the Brooklyn-bound platform has scenes featuring a cheerful crescent moon.

Like many of the works we looked at on this tour, this one subsumes the rhythm of subway by repeating a motif with variations at regular intervals. Both the repetition and the variation are essential to the effect: same sun, different scenes; on the other wall, same series, different order of scenes; in the other tunnel, same idea but with a moon. The scenes are themselves static and universal (the beach could be any beach); but a sense of movement and vibrancy comes from their serial positioning (you have to walk or ride along to view them) and from variations in the way the sun (or moon) relates to each scene. For example, in the beach scene the sun is sweating profusely, a quick touch of humor that also has a role to play in the rhythm because it is so accessible and encourages the viewer not to linger but to step to the next scene for the next bit of levity.

Out of four stars, we give this work 2.75.

Hugo Consuegra died on Jan. 24, 2003. Here is a news feed from that day that includes an obituary.

Franklin Avenue / Botanic Gardens: Millie Burns, "IL7/Square"

This was the second-biggest disappointment on the whole line. It's a wrought-iron fence that surrounds the park above the station. The verticals form a wavy, as-if-windblown pattern and are festooned with wrought-iron maple leaves, but that's all the arty you get and Robert Moses fenced all his parks this way, with different locale-specific designs for each one, over 50 years ago right here in New York City. Besides, the black paint is already coming off the iron in streaks, dots, and chunks.

Our rating: one star.

Atlantic Avenue / Pacific Street: George Trakas, "Hook, Line, and Sinker"

To find this work go to the grand high-ceilinged stairway at the point where the people coming into the station from the 4 and 5 meet the ones coming in from the 2 and 3. Stand on the stairway and look up, way up. The uppermost reach of the ceiling is actually the shell of the small original station from 1908, located at street level in the triangle formed by Atlantic, 4th, and Flatbush Avenues. The shell has a double-pitched roof of glass that illuminates the stairway below. Set into it is a construction of metal rods that is kind of a stylized sailing ship. I'm guessing the reference is to the names of the station and the maritime phase in Brooklyn's history. All in all, it's a fun sight to see.

The old station itself is also a fine gem when seen from outside at street level, though it looks dwarfed and lonely in its little triangle amid the traffic.

Across 4th Avenue is an interesting-looking Victorian-Gothic church with a sign out front that says it is the "Church of the Redeemer" and "Episcopal-Anglican."

Our rating for the sculpture: 2.5 stars.

Nevins Street: Antonio van Dalen, “Work and Nature”

This work is a pair of images in ceramic tile. You will find it on either side of the token booth. It’s ok.

Our rating: 1.5 stars


Fulton Street / Broadway Nassau: Nancy Holt, “Astral Gallery”

This work is in the corridor leading from the entrance to the uptown 4 line toward the exit marked “Fulton Street / Broadway NW Corner.” It is just a group of circular light fixtures, with 2 to 6 bare bulbs per fixture, in an array of straight bars above a corridor, supposedly arranged as they would be in certain constellations in the sky. It took us forever to find this work, partly because it did not look that different from all the other lights in the station, and all the other peeling cast iron. Some of the bulbs were blown, which is understandable in a station as vast as this one but not in an artwork that purports to represent an arrangement of stars. Stars don’t burn out in the lifetime of a 60-watt bulb, and when they do they are not replaced by someone from Housekeeping.

Our rating: 1 star

Fulton Street / Broadway Nassau: Fred Dana Marsh, “Marine Grill Murals” (1912)
These are six large ceramic images of ships, each about five or six feet square. The MTA acquired them in 1989 from the McAlpin Hotel, whose “Marine Grill” took its name from their subject matter. In one we see Indians bringing gifts to the first European ship, in another a British gunboat blasting away at the Battery, and so on. The technique could be a little more accomplished, but the enthusiasm and the harmonious compositions make them very enjoyable. Location: one of the many corridors of this huge station, but alas I did not make a note of which one. But you won’t overlook them; they command attention.

Our rating: 3.25 stars

Brooklyn Bridge / City Hall: Mark Gibian, “Cable Crossing”

This exciting installation is in the token-booth area at the exit to City Hall Park and Centre Street. It uses cable like that which holds up the nearby Brooklyn Bridge. It comprises two sculptures: a vertical arrangement next to the booth and a horizontal one overhead. Both arrange the cables in a rhythm that expresses the rush of traffic across the bridge but with the solidity of the cables and their connectors counterpoised against that dynamism.

Our rating: 2 stars


14th Street / Union Square: Mary Miss, “Framing Union Square”

This is a series of paired columns, one a slender red U bar with mirrored backing on the inside of the U and the other a vertically cut section from the original tiling of this station, surmounted by an ornate escutcheon with a bold “14.” The backs of the original sections are solid stone, cut with a huge circular saw that left marks one can feel with one’s hands. Like the Gibian at the Brooklyn Bridge station, its appeal is largely in its rhythm: the pairs follow each other in a straight and ceremonious line along a long corridor, the severity relieved by the fact that the last two are broken off at the tops of the wall sections, so that one sees only a bit of the escutcheons.

Miss has also installed a long rectangle, framed in the same red, along a nearby corridor.

There are a few other columns nearby in the same red, these being round rather than U-shaped and apparently structural in function. Did the artist paint these to appropriate them for her installation? Cannot say.

Our rating: 3.5 stars

Grand Central Station: Dan Sinclair, “Speedball” and “Fast Track”

These are chrome-and-bronze (I’m guessing) installations that express the feel of this grandest of all stations by suggesting both speed (in their rhythmic arrangement – a recurring point in these works) and 1930s technological confidence and gleam. They are in a long, wide corridor that connects the “S” shuttle platforms to the area where one takes the 4, 5, 6, and 7 trains. “Speedball,” the larger of the two, ranges across the wall above the gateway from the corridor as one leaves the shuttle.

Our rating: 3 stars

Grand Central Station: Jackie Ferrara, “Arches, Towers, Pyramids”

This comprises long bands of stylized images of monuments, one on each side of the tunnel where the “S” shuttle arrives and departs and another in the corridor that leads from the 7 platform toward the “S.” Like the Consuegra at the Utica Avenue station, they gain a trainride-like rhythm by repeating similar designs and/or duplicates at regular intervals, but they are not as effective. It is pretty corny to respond to the name “Grand Central Station” by stylizing “grand” and “central” edifices dimly remembered from History class. And were the edifices in fact “central” in the world-views of their own societies? This is an open question that frays the edges of one’s experience of this work.

Here's a little more information about Jackie Ferrara.

Our rating: 2.5 stars

Grand Central Station: Christopher Sproat, “V-Beam”

This is a sequence of light fixtures above the platform of the 7 line. They illuminate the entire platform. Each is a triangle of fluorescent bulbs, with the base up and the apex down and terminating in a grand sculpture of polished metal drums and circles that, like Sinclair’s installation, give that 1930s-technology-makes-us-confident feel. And there’s the trainride rhythm again – each fixture is the same, so the way they march off toward the blessedly unobstructed end of the platform is stately and musical.

Our rating: 3 stars


59th Street: Elizabeth Murray, “Blooming”

Along this stretch of the 4 line the downtown track runs directly below the uptown track. An escalator leads from the north end of the lower platform to a mezzanine and then another escalator takes one the rest of the way to the upper platform. Murray’s mosaics are in that mezzanine, and they are swell. She uses shoes and coffee cups of green and red-to-tan, some huge, some small, all of them playful and exuberant. She uses just about all of the four large walls of the space, so the impact is strong. This is one of my favorites on this tour!

For more information on Murray, see this article in "ArtCyclopedia"

Our rating: 4 stars

86th Street: Peter Sís, “Happy City”

This is a pair of mosaics on the walls to the right and left of the exit turnstiles on the northbound platform. The Upper East Side is a pretty happy place to be, and this is a happy evocation of it. Each is a big eye composed of architectural and other features of the neighborhood. The eye on the right is blue and has a gray Guggenheim Museum positioned off to one side and (for some reason) a gray turtle off to the other. Its excitement seems just right for 86th Street.

Peter Sís has a website that is worth a look.

Our rating: 2.75 stars

125th Street: Houston Conwill, “The Open Secret”

This work comprises six triangles of cast iron set into the tiling of the area just inside the turnstiles at this station’s “125th and Lexington Avenue” exit. Three of the triangles are done in some kind of maybe lost wax technique so the iron has the look and feel of textured cloth pieces and other objects; the other three are subdivided into little compartments such as printers used for the pieces of type they would set by hand. In the compartments are nonrepresentational bits and pieces. The plaque on the wall beside this work says Conwill did it in memory of a poet named Larry Neal and quotes a poem the latter wrote. In different but complementary ways, the poem and the installation speak to the experience of African-American slavery and its aftermath.

Our rating: 3.25 stars

125th Street: Valerie Maynard, “Polyrhythmics of Consciousness and Light”

This is just past the Conwill installation. Glass mosaic. Colorful and rhythmic, but not very interesting.

Our rating: 2 stars


161st Street: Helene Brandt, “Room of Tranquility”

This work faces the turnstiles at the “4” line exit. It is a long, horizontal mosaic in glass, stone, and marble. It does playful things with trompe-l’oeil, bringing together the spaces its room connects but at the same time “lengthening” the distance between them through visual trumpery and making the traversal of that space more interesting.

Here is a personal statement by Helene Brandt.

Our rating: 3 stars

161st Street: Vito Acconci, “Wall-Slide”

This work in tiles, stone, and fiberglass is on a wall perpendicular to the police station in the area where one gets the B or D train. Imagine that the midsection of a “161st Street” sign just decided to jump up 6 feet in the air. That’s what this looks like, with rich black stone (or fiberglass made to look like stone?) in the back space against which this feat of resurrection has taken place. The flat, well organized design of the “subway tunnel wall” that would be the setting for the sign tilts down from right to left, so staidness is losing out, but not without retaining its geometric serenity.

ArtCyclopedia has an article on Acconci.

Our rating: 2.5 stars.

There you are, 12 stations, 17 artists, and you’ve done the 4 line! I also have a Photosite blog of the tour -- the pictures bigger, better, and more plentiful, but not there is not much text. While looking around on the internet I found an official MTA web tour of all their artworks, so you might want to take a look there too.

My thanks to UBS: the exhibition in their Manhattan lobby is what got us interested in subway art, and their how-to-find-it leaflet made our tour possible.