
At The Museum of Modern Art with one of my favorite paintings in their collection, “Ladybug” by Joan Mitchell. (And no, I didn’t intentionally dress to match it!)
1/11/2025 Saturday
Finally caught up on sleep. I woke with a headache again, maybe sinus, but it lifted after a long hot shower and some breakfast in the room. Our plan was to meet B. at MoMA in the afternoon. We made sandwiches in the room for an early lunch and then walked up Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Outside Macy's, fervent Korean evangelists with bullhorns and banners proclaimed “Jesus is Lord”. Onward to Times Square, where we stopped to take photographs. It's hard to know whether to photograph the incredible digital advertising displays, which seem to have multiplied every time we're here, or the people taking selfies with Times Square behind them. And in this center of capitalism stands a large cube, covered with a glowing neon flag, and a sign saying “US Armed Forces Recruiting Center”.

We turned right on 46th and noticed the facade of an Episcopal Church tucked between the office buildings - St Mary the Virgin. Do you want to go in, J asked and I said yes, even if it's just to warm up. A large interior, very beautiful and old, and a noontime Mass just finishing. Clouds of incense, Rite 1 from the old prayer book, four robed priests at the high altar, perhaps a dozen communicants seated beyond the altar rail, and someone playing what sounded like a very good organ.

Anglo-Catholic, I decided, but not conservative in mission. The current prayer book lay on a prie-dieu in one of the chapels, and the literature at the back of the church indicated welcome to all, an open door policy and a lot of social ministry for immigrants. Several homeless people slept in the pews with their belongings piled nearby. The list of upcoming organ recitals included David Hurd, whose name I recognized - we’ve sung some of his music at the cathedral – and he was listed as the organist and music director there. Wikipedia later confirmed that it's Anglo-Catholic, and considered one of the best neo-Gothic structures of the late 19th century. Its nickname is "Smoky Mary's" because of the copious amounts of incense they use.

Paul Cézanne. Still Life with Apples. 1895–98. Oil on canvas.
At MoMA, we visited an exhibition of paintings from the Lillie Bliss collection, where crowds stood predictably taking selfies in front of “Starry Night,” while a gorgeous, glowing Cezanne still life next to it had no viewers at all except me. Bliss had valued that still life so much that, unusually, she stipulated that once given to the museum, it could never be sold. (note: What I especially liked about this painting was that, instead of the primary colors that often dominate Cezanne’s still lives, this one uses a lot of beige and greyed blues in the beautiful background curtain and the tablecloth, which set off the brilliant fruit even more. The effect is both peaceful and harmonious — and can’t have been simple to achieve.) I also appreciated the chance to study Picasso's early portrait of a woman in white.

My sketch of Picasso’s “Woman in White.”
We sat for a while near the new installation of a floor-to-ceiling tapestry, ceramic and rope hangings, floor rocks and sound recording by Otobong Nkanga, and then went to the cafe to have a coffee and wait for B., who arrived soon after a morning of struggling with cancelled trains on his way up to Harlem and back down to the Village to leave off his instruments.

Otobong Nkanga, Cadence. “An all-encompassing environment of tapestry, sculpture, sound, and text that explores the turbulent rhythms of nature and society.”
We wandered through the fourth floor galleries, which present works from the 1950s through the 1970s. Unlike us, B. knew many of the performance artists whose videos were displayed so we had a personal guide. When the museum closed at 5:30 we had made it to the Thomas Schutte exhibition on 6th floor and were sorry not to have time for more than a fast walkthrough.
Back down to LaGuardia Place, pizza takeout dinner from the Italian restaurant downstairs. B. turns down the lights and the three of us hold hands in silence before we eat. At 75 he still has ten irons in the fire and is busy all the time, as well as composing and recording folk tales with other world musicians. Having the pandemic come so soon after J.'s death must have made everything so much harder, especially with their children far away on the west coast, but he’s done amazingly well. The apartment is a little like a shrine, but it's comforting too, with B.'s huge library and desk and all the figurines and carvings and instruments from Africa, Latin America, the Pacific in the heart of it. That's what happens when you never move.
1/12/2025. Sunday
A late brunch with B. at the Noortwyck on Bleeker Street, then back to his place to talk some more and wait with him until his friend C. came to practice some songs for a concert of B.’s songs, planned in the spring. The two of them had tickets to a concert of Middle Eastern music in a club that had sounded too crowded to us. But C. hadn't arrived before we left at 4:00; the trains from the Upper East Side were still all screwed up.
1/13/2025. Monday
Weather chilly but a lot warmer than home, and today was above 40 F.

Ambroglio Lorenzetti, The Annunciation, 1344, tempera on panel.
letter to a friend: “Today we saw the Siena exhibition at the Met, with T. who had come down to go to it with us. They've assembled treasures from all over the world, including the eight panels of Duccio's back predella of the Maesta. The panels are in various states of restoration, depending on the wealth and inclinations of the lending institutions, but Duccio's narrative power is clear in all of them. And the colors! I was especially struck by the panel where Jesus calls Peter and Andrew who are in a boat with a net full of fish by its side, in the water – ‘I will teach you to be fishers of men’ and ‘The Raising of Lazarus,’ which I've loved for years but never seen in person (it's in Houston). There were also some astonishing ivory carvings. (How were they made? Where and how did they procure such large pieces of ivory?) and many works by the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini. The installation is extremely thoughtful and well-done down to the last detail — black walls, black columns mimicking a cathedral, and widely-spaced objects lit like jewels — and of course they are jewel-like, with all the gilding. A triumph of curation, to assemble these works, and I feel so fortunate to have seen them.”

Duccio. The two right-most panels of the back predella of the Maesta, about 1308-11.
In retrospect, I keep thinking about those eight panels by Duccio, separated for centuries, and together now, briefly, for this exhibition here and in London. Paintings aren’t living beings, but I can’t help but think of them that way, as if they are siblings reunited for this brief time, with some awareness of that fact. You stand before them and sense Duccio’s hand and his mind as well, making so many decisions that broke with the iconographic past. He told the story in such a human way, with a cohesive vision from panel to panel, carried out not only through color and composition, but with emotional content. When the panels are separated, most of this original intent cannot be seen or felt. As I look at the reproductions in the catalog, beautifully printed in Italy, even there you cannot see or feel half of what it is like to stand in front of the real works themselves. So perhaps that was what moved me so much: this brief moment of coherence when Duccio’s idea, and his brilliant execution of it, could again be appreciated by those of us who were privileged to be there in person.

A sketch of “The Raising of Lazarus”, done from my photograph after coming back, in order to study Duccio’s composition.
We also saw an exhibition of works by Jesse Krimes, who was incarcerated for six years and conceived several very large installations during that time, using materials that were issued to him or available at low cost in the prison commissary. It’s hard to describe these powerful works; you can see more about them in the video linked above. One installation was a whole wall of tiny pebbles, wrapped with different colors of string, and suspended from sewing needles stuck in cloth-covered panels. There are 10,000 pebbles in the artwork, collected by inmates and sent to Krimes at his request for “the ideal pebble from your prison yard.” I was stunned when I realized what I was looking at, and what this piece says about the vastness and anonymity of incarceration in the U.S.

Detail of installation by Jesse Krimes
—to be continued