NY MOMA
Started: 2024-11-25 20:56:14
Submitted: 2024-11-25 22:38:22
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Seeing art in Midtown and flying home to SFO
On the last day of my quick fall weekend trip to New York, I had enough time to drop by one art museum, so I walked to MOMA in Midtown with my sister Bethany.
MOMA has many amazing works of art, including "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dalí, which we saw on the museum's fifth floor. I was surprised by how small the original painting is, and how much detail the artist put into the tiny canvas. I have a framed print of the painting, and my print is about the same size as the original; somehow I expect major works of art to be more physically imposing but this was not.
In the next room was a large diorama built out of painted wooden blocks representing Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for Broadacre City, a city built around the idea that everyone would have one acre to farm and that everyone would still be connected via the new technologies of phone, radio, and car. The model dominated the room, letting us get up close and see it from three sides and study the blocky models to try to figure out what they were trying to represent. It was an interesting idea, trying to apply new technology to address the perceived problems of the day, but not an environment where I would really want to live; I like my cities bigger and denser, so I can walk across the neighborhood to MOMA. (And the description on the wall pointed out that it was exclusionary in practice, because of the implicit assumption that only white people would get land.)
Opposite Broadacre City was a small display case showing paper bags, elevating industrial design to art and showing it in context of the industrialization of the beginning of the twentieth century. I want to see more industrial design in museums, because it's overlooked and unappreciated despite creatively solving difficult problems. (Industrial design and commercial art are often overlooked precisely because of their connection to industry and commerce, which is unfortunate.)
One of the paintings I saw that I especially liked was "And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur" by Leonora Carrington, which appealed to me mostly because it reminds me of some dreams I've had, with a scene filled with random characters juxtaposed together in a surreal scene.
Around the corner from that painting was another work by Dali, "The Little Theater", which was painted on multiple pieces of glass (I think it was seven or eight) that together formed a complex three-dimensional scene. The perspective would change as one moved in front of the painting, changing the placement of the objects in the foreground with the towers and landscape in the background. It seemed like it would be impossible to photograph effectively so I didn't try. It reminded me of matte paintings for film, especially those painted on glass in front of a mounted camera to optically composite the scene as it was being filmed.
In contrast to the intricate surrealism of Dali and Carrington was "Dance" by Henri Matisse. I recognized this painting from the canon of modern art, but I was also attracted by the minimalism of its color palette and the motion implied in its composition. What's not obvious from my picture is the massive scale of the work, more than 12 feet wide and 8 feet high, which make the apparently simplicity of the painting that much more stark.
We saw a bunch of other works, including masterpieces from the canon of modern art by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, and a room surrounded by Monet's water lilies. We saw van Gogh's "Starry Night" in a crowd of people, all trying to get their own pictures on their own phones of this famous work of art. This seemed like it was part of the experience, and also a commentary on living life mediated through the pictures one takes and posts on social media. (And here I am, posting a meta-picture of other people taking pictures, which I myself took on my phone and I am posting it as part of my recollection of standing in the museum gallery.)
We exited via the gift shop, where I got sketchbooks for the kids and a set of Piet Mondrian coasters. (When I got home and presented the sketchbooks Julian took his and immediately started drawing a comic, which I'm taking as a good sign.)
On our way back through Midtown we stopped at a tiny hole-in-the-wall bagel shop on Second Ave around the corner from Bethany's apartment which I am reliably informed has the best bagels in New York City. We stopped for ice cream on Second Ave, then I headed to the Lexington Ave-53rd St station to catch an E train to JFK to fly home to SFO.
Unlike the last time I took the train from Midtown to JFK the trains were running just fine. The train came on time not long after I descended to the platform to wait for it. At no point did the train stop in a tunnel for any period of time. I did not feel compelled to escape to the surface and walk a half-mile to Jamaica Station. My train took me right to Jamaica Station and from there I caught the AirTrain to JFK terminal 4. (Construction at the airport meant that the normally-circular AirTrain route around the terminals had been modified into a one-line out-and-back route ending at my terminal.)
The security line was a bit long, but otherwise JFK terminal 4 was efficient. I got a burrito to eat on the plane, then boarded the 757-200 waiting at the gate to fly across the country. The flight was long and uneventful, except for some bumpiness over the midwest that happened to correlate with the air combat training at the beginning of the second act of Top Gun: Maverick that was a bit too real so I paused the movie until we found smoother air, then I could watch the rest of the movie without feeling like Maverick was shaking my cockpit as part of a training exercise.
SFO also has an airport people-mover called AirTrain so I got to ride two different AirTrains on opposite sides of the country on the same day. I caught BART to my car at San Bruno, then drove the rest of the way home after a quick weekend trip to New York.
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