I seem to find myself at the Whitney Museum every time I’m in New York. I should think about a membership—it would probably save me money. It is sized to the perfect scale for a museum, big enough to carry a substantial presence, but small enough for me to take it all in with a single gulp.
On the Modernist floor my eye was drawn to an unusual landscape by George Bellows, whom you probably know from his monumental boxing ring paintings. It was a winter landscape, river, hill on the opposite bank, trees, but done in a way that flickered between a document of a felt scene and the abstract expressionists that were to follow 20 years hence. Marsden Hartley does the same thing to me, holding both attibutes of paint-as-window, paint-as-paint in equal tension. Seeing the Edward Hopper work in the flesh reminded me again that he is not the illustrator we think he is from the ubiquitous posters, but a complex and rigorous painter. At scale you see the six or more colors, separate brushstrokes, that he uses to make a skin tone.
I hiked to the Whitney across Central Park, after first taking the 1 line to the approximate latitude. Here was a veritable "stick picture" wilderness surrounding frozen lakes within which I framed Minor White lookalike images. The birds were abundant, and I regretted that my binoculars were in my camera bag, which was in my hotel room closet, and not on my shoulder. The sparrow flocks were White-throated, not House, a Red-bellied Woodpecker flew into a nearby tree, and crested Cardinals and Tufted Titmice sang and flitted, respectively. I came across another photographer, with an ancient 4x5 Crown Graflex on a fat Gitzo tripod, and taping closed his exposed film holders. "Two days ago I was here, and the ice was grayer and more even, without the sheen it had this morning." Someone else using a camera to deepen his attention to a place.
I'm sorry I wasn't there for this meeting of artists!
Posted by: Eric Hancock | February 10, 2007 at 04:58 PM