Queenee and I drove to NYC on Thursday morning. The weather was miserable until we got near Providence, when we were out of the snow and rain. I dropped her and our one suitcase at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which is still open for business!) at about 2pm, then rushed to park the car at a small garage on 30th Street. I had made the hotel reservation a couple months ago, but didn't really give much thought to parking until this past week. Valet parking at the hotel is $100/night, not including the tip - yikes! It's bad enough that three eggs for breakfast go for $11.95. I got on the internet and found a garage a few blocks away that was half that, and if I booked online, I would have a guaranteed spot. The trick is, you have to know when you'll be dropping the car off, because they'll only hold the space for 30 minutes either side of your booked time. I booked for 2pm, and at 2:15pm, I pulled in behind a Range Rover who seemed to be a regular. The man at the garage waved to me and said, "No room, no room," at which point I leapt out of the car and produced my printed guarantee. He smiled at me, then turned to the Range Rover man and said, "Ah, she has the guarantee." I was in. The moral of the story is that reserving a spot online actually works! I left my car and walked to the hotel, two long blocks and two short blocks away.
We went to
Macy's that first night, since it was just a block away, and it was mobbed. The hotel and stores were crowded with Europeans; what with the very favorable exchange rate, everything here is half-price for them. We had hoped that it might not be too bad at dinnertime, but were wrong. We heard later that some 40% of New Yorkers hadn't even started their Christmas shopping yet. Wall-to-wall people, but most everyone seemed pretty cheerful. Macy's is open 24/7 until Christmas, and I suspect it is just as crowded at 3am as it is at 6pm. We went downstairs and had dinner in the Cellar, but other than admiring the usual spectacular job Macy's does with decorating the store and their windows, we escaped without a purchase.
Friday was museum day. Queenee knows a woman who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we had hoped to hook up with her at lunchtime to say hello, but this happened to be her vacation week and she wasn't there. She did, however, leave us buttons, so we got in for free. Bless her. We made sure we got there early so we wouldn't be bugging someone for buttons during a crunch time.
Our first stop was the
Age of Rembrandt exhibit. It is an excellent exhibit, with not only the Met's very fine collection of Rembrandts, but also other Dutch masters such as Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Aelbert Cuyp. Subjects ranged from landscapes to genre pictures, still lifes, seascapes, portraiture, and historical and religious paintings. Holland Cotter, an art critic for the NY Times, had a series of
mp3s online with an interactive guide. I set us up with a map and the mp3s on a couple small players, which worked out very well. We didn't bother renting the museum's audio tour, we had our own.
Next we went to see the
Met's Christmas tree with its baroque decorations. There was a group of Chinese tourists there, snapping photos despite the signs that clearly ask you not to take pictures. The guard was pissed, and not quiet about it either, reading the riot act to the tourguide who should have given clear instructions to the tour. The guard went on to say, "They sell us toys full of lead, then come over here and see how much more they can get away with. If they were Japanese, they wouldn't behave like this." The tour group moved on and we got a good view of the tree and the decorations. It is beautiful, and even though I've seen it several times, it's still something to see the creche and the angels on the tree.
On to
the tapestries. The Met has many tapestries in their permanent collection, but this exhibit was spectacular. Even if you aren't a fan of tapestry, you couldn't help but be impressed by what was on display, the first comprehensive survey of high-quality seventeenth-century European tapestry. About forty tapestries made in Brussels, Delft, Florence, London, Munich, Paris, and Rome between 1590 and 1720 are in the exhibit, along with approximately twenty-five drawings, engravings, and oil sketches. It was very interesting to see the drawings and oil sketches displayed next to the relevant tapestries, and amazing to see how precise the weavers were with even the most difficult designs. The tapestries were loaned from fifteen (or more) countries. Some were faded and worn, but some were in excellent condition, especially considering their age. We learned that a 'common' tapestry might be woven at a pace of one square yard per month, but the finer tapestries took twice as long, and we're talking about some massive tapestries. Very impressive.
We also saw Lorenzo Ghiberti’s
Gates of Paradise, or at least the few restored panels that are currently on tour. These doors are enormous in real life, weighing thirty tons each. The relief sculptures for the panels are very deep, not at all like flatter Greek and Roman reliefs.
There were other exhibits I would have liked to see, but you can only do so much in one day, and we were heading for
MOMA next. As it was Friday night, Target sponsors free admission to MOMA from 4-8pm. We took a cab over to 53rd and got in line, a very very long line, and I remembered why I never used to come to MOMA on free admission nights. Still, free is free and the line moved along pretty well. I stood in line even longer to check our coats.
There were three shows at MOMA I wanted to see. The
Lucian Freud etchings were on the third floor, so we went there first. I quite like his paintings, but the etchings are very different, completely linear and spare. You really see Freud's ability to draw in these etchings, where there isn't any paint to hide behind. Still, had there been no paintings in the exhibit, I would not have been as interested.
On the sixth floor were the other two exhibits.
Martin Puryear is a sculptor who uses a lot of wood, which he sometimes weaves. Had I not known some of these pieces were his, I would not have guessed it, although a few, like 1985's Ole Mole, were familiar.
Finally, we got to the show I most wanted to see, the
drawings of George Seurat. When I was first taking art classes, I had one class called Master Drawing, where we were assigned an artist whose style we were meant to emulate. One of the artists I was assigned was Seurat, and let me say right now, it is a LOT harder to do these than it looks. If I had seen nothing else in New York this trip, it was worth seeing this. Seurat was an amazing, gifted artist, with a prodigious output considering he died at 31. He is best known for his pointillist paintings, but the drawings are what I really love. They are almost all done on a heavily textured paper with conte crayon, and they glow. MOMA's exhibit tells us that the drawings were
once described as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence" and seeing them in person, I believe it. The Seurat show is worth standing in line for, worth the $20 admission fee, worth whatever you have to do to see, it is the best drawing exhibit I can recall seeing, period. I barely slept that night, my head was so full of Seurat's drawings. I have no hope of producing anything close to a Seurat, but I'm itching to get my hands on some textured paper and give it another go.
From MOMA, we walked to Rockefeller Center to see
the tree. This is the first year they've use LED lights, but it's just as pretty as ever. There were too many people to get anywhere near even seeing the skating rink, so we headed back to the hotel to give our tired feet a break.
And that was our trip to the big apple. We took our time getting organized on Saturday morning, then checked out before 11am. I walked over to 30th Street to reclaim my car, and you can imagine how happy I was to pay $80
including a good tip for two days of indoor parking. It was a great couple of days, and our Christmas present to each other. What do you give someone who doesn't need anything? A couple days in NYC is just the thing. We were home by 4pm and happy to put our dogs up and relax. Sophia isn't letting me out of her sight.
