Sunday, October 6, 2013

Art

I love small museums. I don't do well at large museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I have been to one time, for about 20 minutes - long enough to run in, look at a particular painting that my friend David told me to look at, and leave. I have been to Paris three times and never gone to the Lourve (and not for the same reason David Sedaris said he's never been to the Louvre: "Why would I go to the only place in Paris where you're not allowed to smoke?" [he has since, quit smoking - good for him]), but I have been to lots of small museums where you can see every single thing on display in one visit, like the Neue Gallery on the Upper East Side, which is where we went after stopping at Rex Cafe on the recommendation of my friend Chris who lives in Detroit; his friend Peter owns the place (as much as I love getting recommendations from friends about places to visit, especially if there's a personal connection, it took Herculean effort to skip the trip to Dominique Ansel's, but we did it).

The museum had some beautiful decorative pieces on display as part of their permanent collection - furniture, silverware, glassware, and some cool paintings, like this famous one above.

But the real star was a special Kandinsky exhibition. It was a stunning collection of paintings which of course I was not allowed to take pictures of (the Klimpt is off the museum's website) so here are some from the web that we saw. Nothing reproduced could come close to doing justice to the real things, but I don't want to forget them.






me, Peter, and the baristas as Rex Cafe