This past week I went to NYC to see the first art shows of the season  – Wow! What a season it is…this year the museums and galleries are really hitting it out of the park with major retrospectives and beautifully produced shows.  De Kooning at MoMA heads the pack, but there were great shows everywhere.  The galleries are ambitious – they are showing an awful lot of incredibly expensive works (moderately priced works in the $100k-500k+ range) – I did see works range from as little as $500 going beyond  the $1m mark.  

Of course there is no real way to cover it all, especially in 4 days.  I only barely scratched the surface but what I did get to see was amazing.  I walked up and down the city (100-200 blocks a day) and managed to squeeze in 5 museums and about 60 galleries.  Of course I experienced the NY gallery snobbery… I understand it though as I was out of uniform. I wore my sneakers  instead of Pradas and I opted for a white jacket instead of Black…I was actually told that I looked like I was auditioning for “Miami Vice.”

I tend to have a voracious appetite for all things visual so I ate it up; there were a lot of shows that I could have lingered over for hours to look at all the nuances of the works, but I set out with a mission to take in as much as I could so I literally kept moving the entire time. 

Usually when I travel I like to compile a “Top 10” as a record for myself and to share, but with a so much going on, I couldn’t really bare to whittle it down past 7 museum shows and 15 gallery exhibitions:

Museums

• De Kooning @ MoMA
• Cy Twombly Sculptures @ MoMA
• Lyonel Feininger @ Whitney
• David Smith @Whitney
• Master Painters of India (1100-1900) @ the Metropolitan
• Frans Hals @ the Metropolitan
• Hans Peter Feldman @ Guggenheim

Galleries

• Do Ho Suh @ Lehmann Maupin
• Leandro Erlich @ Sean Kelly
• Agnes Martin @ Pace
• Frank Stella @ Paul Kasmin
• Milton Resnick @ Cheim & Read
• Nicholas Krushenick @ Gary Snyder
• Ronnie Landfield @ Stephen Haller
• Ad Reinhardt @ Pace
• Nick Cave @ Jack Shainman
• Jenny Saville @ Gagosian
• Ethan Murrow @ Winston Wӓchter Fine Art
• Nathan Slate Joseph @ Sundaram Tagore
• Monroe Hodder @ Andre Zarre
• Andy Denzler @ Claire Oliver
• Paul Winstanley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash

With any luck I will get to go back in November and continue the expedition  – places I was really eager to see but missed this time around included the Neue Galerie (they are installing an exhibition of works from Ronald S. Lauder’s Collection), The Noguchi Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum down in the Bowery. I didn’t make it over to Williamsburg or DUMBO this visit so they will be a must and I only got through about half of the Chelsea neighborhood. 

 

Do Ho Suh @ Lehmann Maupin Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frank Stella at Paul Kasmin Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas Krushenick at Gary Snyder Gallery