The guard was standing in the corner of a 4th floor gallery in the Museum of Modern Art. She was keeping a watchful eye down the length of a wall of Jackson Pollack paintings. "You’re ready to pounce on anyone who gets too close, aren’t you," I said. (I just saw this happen upstairs, in front of Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" which was framed under glass.) "I let them get closer here," she said. "People want to see the texture. But I have my limit." I said, "Yes, these paintings are really different when you get close to them."
I had never properly appreciated Pollack before. We all know his drip paintings from the endless reproductions. They hadn’t ever struck me as powerfully as the other abstract expressionists, like Motherwell or Rothko. I’ll swoon in front of nearly any one of those any day. I stood a foot away from a large Pollack painting, and I felt I was floating in dense, deep space full of glittering bright strings and glowing nebulae. The work is wonderfully complex, and each painting has its own story to tell. You practically have to stick your head in one to hear it.
The new MOMA works, with its bare, cathedral-like atrium, six stories high, and intimate galleries of indeterminate sequence. It’s cold though, off-putting in the blankness of the spaces, and I miss the old MOMA. I haven’t visited the museum since before they gave back Picasso’s "Guernica," so my judgement may be tinged more by nostalgia than memory, but nonetheless I am not hopeful that this structure is going to age as gracefully.
I sat by the window in Café 2 (on the 2nd floor, get it?), facing the wall of townhouses on 53th, sipping my coffee and losing myself in that calm reverie that descends on me anytime I visit a good museum. In an instant the reverie was broken, by a bird. Was that a Peregrine that just flew past? I reviewed the field marks I had just seen, playing back the memory of the sighting—the black moustasche mark on the head, the lightly barred breast (Goshawk maybe? No way! It’s wings looked rounded though). Then it flew back the other direction. The second sighting just made me more confused, as I was trying to observe and process at the same instant. Now I don’t know what I saw.
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