NEW YORK: THE ARMORY SHOW & WHITNEY BIENNIAL plus BEATRIX POTTER in PERTHSHIRE. 

Can u have too much art? A visit to the Tay - the longest river in Scotland and Loch Tay one of the most beautiful - got me thinking. With so much capital committed to art today, & international trends gaining ground among the rich in Russia, the Arab States & China, how can Joe Public keep up, or indeed want to keep up? 

The Armory is New York’s leading fair for contemporary & modern art: 200 leading galleries from 29 countries with 65,000 visitors. This year the fair's focus was China. Plus there's the original establishment ADAA show at Park Avenue Armory (yes, names very confusing) of  72 leading art dealers, plus 10 satellite fairs, Meanwhile the Whitney Biennial, where 103 artists chosen by 3 curators spread over 3 floors. Reports not good: "nebulous, inert & perplexing." & "Handicrafts carry the day."

One curator loves poetry, another looks to Latin American & Asian art while the 3rd, Michelle Grabner, says: "New Materialism and Affect Theory are politically compelling to me. The free market & its influence on art making, distribution, & value construction have to be looked at carefully if one is to truly understand contemporary art." 

With Sotheby's & Christie's sponsoring these events & having at least an auction or 2 a day somewhere in the world, u may wonder at this art saturation, and how art dealers are coping. Answer - not well. 

Also in NYC is GAUGUIN at MoMA: 150 prints & drawings from 1889 to his death in 1903. Called "dark, bizarre & much more challenging than his lush Tahitian paintings" according to the Guardian, it's the first exhibition to take an in-depth look at these experimental radically “primitive” woodcuts etc. www.moma.org

As if this overload is not enough The Whitney Biennial has a spinoff in the form of the Brucennial, a rammed exhibition featuring around 600 female artists, (can 600 be true?) organised by Vito, Schnabel's son. (Women’s representation had been getting better in recent Whitney Biennials, but they account for less than a third this year.)

So - HOW Beatrix Potter?? 

Potter spent her childhood holidays around Dunkeld & wrote the first Peter Rabbit here. She was also an eminent botanical illustrator & naturalist. In Dunkeld she met Charles McIntosh the local postman, who was also an expert on fungi & discovered previously unknown species. He boxed them up & sent them to Beatrix in London where they arrived - very smelly- for her to draw. While in Dunkeld she borrowed books from the Birnam Institute and on the strength of this, they have an extension, cafe & Potter play area, video etc and in June will exhibit the original fungi watercolours, normally helded in Perth Art Gallery.  

                                                 Beatrix as a child & her parents in Perthshire

                                        Birnam Arts   
Back in Manhattan ASIA WEEK is now on, till 22nd March: 47 specialist dealers from all over the world + shows in 19 museums and institutes including the Met which has Contemporary Ink Art & Edo prior paintings. I love traditional Asian art but we all have to learn about  their contemporary work. 

                         Video by Nalini Malini at the Asia Society NY. 

           Indian 1780

                                                                M Wang 2010

 ancient chinese

MICHIO IHARA      

MICHIO IHARA's most famous & well seen work is in the great entrance hall of the Rockefeller Center, NY. This spacious 35ft high space has, since 1978, been enhanced by his ten elegant, huge, luminous panels of small shimmering gold & copper-plated steel fragments which cascade from ceiling to floor. Like leaves fluttering on a tree or vibrating in the breeze, each unique individual panel is up-lit by a warm glow. 

 Rockefeller Center,NY

Called the 'Vivaldi of metal', Ihara was born in Paris, educated in Japan & lives in Massachusetts. His large sculptures are sited all over the world: Tokyo, New Zealand, Australia, Boston, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, & across North America. But I got to know his work in my husband's apartment, where maquettes & models for large commissions were displayed. Now they have a home at the Mitchener Museum. I miss them! Especially I loved a beautiful piece from 1970 which hung on the wall above my computer! The giant version was for a Tokyo steel company.  

Another 1984 kinetic sculpture, (for the Tokushima Press building in Shikoku,) perched high up while a 1991 spinning cube work for Tokyo City Hall sat on our cocktail table. Variations of the City Hall model were later given as awards by the Fulbright Organization in Japan

 Tokyo City Hall. 

Now 85, Ihara was a minimalist well before minimalism. His Japanese ethic of clean, simple, delicate design coupled with a gift for collaboration with architects and engineers, has made him a star. And he's not done yet. A big retrospective this summer left several big outdoor pieces beside Concord's Art Association & his modernist work, "Wind" sits near Boston City Hall on State St. Lovely.       http://www.michioihara.com

SATURDAY  in  MANHATTAN 

The Upper East Side is like a multicultural village. Buildings themselves can be a vertical village where everyone knows everyone else. And there are more dogs and babies than people. Big guys with tiny dogs, and vice versa! Lots of designer dogs too. All adorable. And it seems if u have a baby u get a dog too!

The play park opposite is always full of buggies and black (African American to be proper) nannies, but on Saturday one can occasionally see a dad or 3. The queue from BagelWorks trails across the sidewalk with multi millionaires as eager as the Mexican delivery boys. Sam the magic & speedy shoe repair man is from the Ukraine; the helpful pharmacist Russian; the copyshop guys Coptic Egyptian, the laundry Chinese of course, the seamstress Asian, dressmaker Greek, my wonderful hairdresser Gloria is from Colombia, restaurants Persian, Italian, Jananese & French, and the local Farmer's Market star attraction foodwise, are the Amish from Pennsylvania. The market also has stalls selling everything from food, nuts, scarfs, socks, $10 orchids (normal shops 40 dollars) to wonderful jewellery: second hand, Indian, South American and new. The new is sold by a Russian lady. I get a pair of big diamond earrings. Irresistible. More fun that Bulgari. us.bulgari.com  No wonder I love the Saturday market! 

"Beautiful. I don't know much, but I know Beautiful," the orchid seller tells me. He's right, his plants are beautiful so I buy a white one.

Churches and synagogues abound. The nearby beautiful church serves the Yugoslav community and services are always full. The nice thing about a neighbourhood is that they deliver. And u are supposed to "send out" for stuff. I never do. But I should.

Fifth Avenue is always near and the famous glass cube Apple Store available 24/7 when u need a new  laptop cord. A multilevel activity extravaganza - my husband says "So many people it would almost suggest things are being given away." 

 Bergdorf Goodman windows are the best in town. Diane Vreeland's new book "Memo" is celebrated currently with lots of witty quotes along with 1960s models.

Best restaurant L'Absinthe . Best exhibitions Magritte at MoMA, Postdigital at MAD, Armory at Historical Soc, Valdes at Marlborough - and next week VERMEER at the FRICK!

MAGRITTE at MoMA, New York

                                          Le Faux Miroir; The False Mirror 1929

Magritte's mysterious, unsettling signature Surrealist images are very well known today: ordinary objects - curtains, bowler hats, clouds, mirrors, nudes, that infamous pipe - painted in deadpan style. But do we understand them any better than when they appeared almost 100 years ago?

Magritte would hope not! What does it mean? "It doesn't mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable,"he said. But he also wanted to make "everyday objects shriek out loud."

This major show of 80 works focuses on a mere 12 years, 1926-38, when he worked flat out in his hometown, Brussels and Paris, the centre of Surrealism, creating his most radical work. It was all produced in a modest working class house with no studio. Despite help from his wife's father, the couple lived on the bread line. So in 1930 Magritte returned to commercial art work, until 1937 when an eccentric British patron commissioned paintings, including one here. This portrait shows a man looking at himself in a mirror, but instead of his face we see, again, the back of his head.

Loans come from Japan, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, the Tate, Jasper Johns, plus Chicago and Houston where the show goes next year. www.moma.org

      Le Viol, The Rape 1934 

More later.        http://moma.org

FOLLOW ME this week as I tour MAJOR NEW SHOWS IN NYC.

FOLLOW ME this week as I tour MAJOR NEW SHOWS IN NYC.

                                          1200 year old Feathers from Peru.

Today NEW YORK's Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org from top to bottom; ground to roof.

                                         Imram Qureshi's painted floor on the roof of the Met.

How wonderful to live 7 minutes from the Met. Their new slogan is One Met. Many Worlds.
All exemplified by 3 new shows opening today: Masterpieces from Tibet and Nepal; Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, Germany, and Feathers from Ancient Peru! Let me tell you it's a long 4 block walk from Peru to Nepal. I had almost forgotten how huge the Met is - and how breathtaking. And how busy!

The Peruvian feathered hangings date from c 750 AD yet its by far the most modern exhibit. Think Sean Scully. Here 12 rectangular panels - divided exactly into quarters of blue and yellow made out of thousands of Macaw bird feathers - make an impressive 88 ft long wall installation of bold minimal art. The hangings, related to a shrine or ceremony, were found in 1943 rolled up in large ceramic jars, themselves richly decorated. Back then feathers were, I'm told, luxury objects and the birds were carried over the Andes! Dead or alive? We'll never know. The Wari people did not write.
Max Ernst owned one of the panels. That says it all.

Next 50 medieval ecclesiastical treasures: gem and pearl encrusted crosses, silver cruxifixes, metalwork, carving, and copper and opulent gold statues from Lower Saxony where Bishop Bernward was a busy patron. The Golden Madonna has lost her head but is still amazing. And I was glad to see one special Reliquary for St Oswald, King of Northumbria, was probably English.

With all this 10th & 11th century European creativity, how to follow that?

Well, try 13 ancient Himalayan iconic paintings just acquired from a pioneering couple who started collecting in 1964. Buddhas, goddesses, Indian saints in vibrant colours hang along with a rare fierce  copper mask which has a hole in his mouth for beer drinking during the festival processions!

Last The Roof Garden.
Each year the Met commissions a project for its Roof Garden, usually sculpture. For this year, (May to October,) young Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi painted the floor with blood red foliage and ornamental flowers influenced by Islamic art combined with abstraction. Normally a miniature painter, his recent site-specific works in Sydney, Berlin, Istanbul have been political and on an architectural scale.  Here his splatters and stains among the flowers reference the recent Boston bombings, made more poignant by their faded aspect from a summer of feet and baking sun. http://metmuseum.org

close up of roof painting. 

TOMORROW MAGRITTE at MoMA www.moma.org  All you have to do is read. I am the one with sore feet!

NEW YORK is revving up for the Fall/Autumn season!

NEW YORK is revving up for the Fall/Autumn season! Lots of wonderful shows - Magritte, Chagall, Vermeer, George Rickey, (who grew up in Scotland) Robert Indiana, Matisse, Robert Ryman and more.
But there are only a few days left to see the Guggenheim's James Turrell. Ends Sept 25th. He has turned the already breathtaking centre spiral rotunda into a play of computerised light and colour as pink turns to pale mauve becomes intense blue, blood red, gradations of green and then, slowly slowly, dissolves into grey and misty white before beginning the sequence all over again. Purists will like the grey. I rather enjoyed the stronger shades.

Of course there's a problem or two. The young lie flat on the floor and gaze upwards. The old kink their arthritic necks and fight for space on the sloping loungers arrayed around the ellipse. After a while I decided I'd seen enough, my neck hurt, and I moved on to other small, more simple installations from the 1960s and 70s. The main installation cost millions. Theatre designers used to playing with lightbulbs scrims are no doubt envious!
www.guggenheim.org     guggenheim
Aten Reign, the centerpiece of James Turrell’s first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980, recasts the Guggenheim rotunda as an enormous volume filled with shifting artificial & natural light.
Now that the horrid humid heat - 90+ sauna-like weather has gone, I am enjoying NYC's blue blue sky.
But in Scotland u all have a chance for a wonderful week-long Glasgow Open Doors Days.  http://glasgowdoorsopenday.com. Don't miss it! It's wonderful.