Author: Paul

If Picasso is a monster of art Matisse is the master. Like anyone, Matisse made mistakes. He worked on life size models of his wall mural for the Barnes Museum for years before discovering he had the wrong dimensions. But unlike most people he learned from his mistakes and he got better and better up to the end. “Jazz,” the greatest illustrated book of all time, is aptly titled even though most of the pages depict circus scenes. It is the visual equivalent of jazz.

The flatly painted, cut paper that Matisse worked with during the last decade of his life is impossibly vibrant and three dimensional when cut by the master. The scale, the visible cuts and layering, the tactileness of the cut-outs needs to be seen in person. You most go now to MoMa.

MoMa’s “Matisse:The Cut-Outs” recreated the swimming pool from the walls of Matisse’s dining room. The “Blue Nudes,” which masterfully depict human form in 2D, are are my pick for best room in the show but I made that choice before we experienced the last two rooms where each wall had a knockout large scale piece. The Parakeet and the Mermaid, The Sheaf, Acanthuses and the Snail are all mind blowing. And then we walked bcak through the show in reverse chronological order and determined the Jazz book from the beginning of the show was our favorite. It is all killer. No filler.

We came to New York for two reasons. “Matisse: The Cut Outs” and “Egon Scheile: Portraits.” Sunday was reserved for Egon who died at 28 of the Spanish Flu but left a rich body of work. I love the German Expressionists and Egon Scheile is my favorite.

The four rooms on the third floor of the Neue Gallery were full of his portraits, sometimes three high, a layout that borrows from design principles popular in Austria during the early twentieth century. You could just stand in one place and take in an eyeful of the most expressive, gorgeous depictions of of the human body imaginable.

No photos were allowed but I was able to snag this one of a copy of Egon’s death mask which was in the small room with his prison drawings. He was in prison on pornography charges and while there he titled his pictures provacatively like this one. “Art Cannot Be Modern; Art is Primordially Eternal” 1912.

We took the train back to Chelsea on Saturday with no real agenda other than seeing the rest of the Picasso show at Pace and gorging on more art. We fortified ourselves at a cafe on the corner of 23rd and Ninth and walked a block west where we ran into Boo Poulin from Rochester. She said this meeting was inevitable. It was also fortuitous because she recommended a few shows that were just spectacular.

The David Zwirner gallery on 20th, with its wood grain, concrete walls and gorgeous wood doors, was featuring Richard Serra’s “Vertical and Hoizontal Reversals,” minimal, thickly applied, black and creamy white paintings of black on white and white on black rectangles. Purely seductive and meditative.

And a bit further down the same street, as impossible as it sounds, another gigantic Picasso show, this time at Gagosian. The hallucinatory, 30 collotypes with Andre Villers from 1962, 15 studies for the 1957 Unesco mural and at least a hundred powerful paintings. “Boom, boom, boom. Like being pistol whipped,” is how Duane described the show. Picasso is so good you just want to see him show off.

Francesco Clemente created two tents with painted canvas in the front room of Rochester’s Mary Boone Gallery and beautiful small watercolors in the back room. He then hired a miniature painter to paint the backgrounds. Rochester’s Nathan Lyons has a great show of new work at Bruce Silverstein on 24th.

We did ourselves in at the second Picasso show in the Pace Gallery. I should say Picasso did us in. The guy is a monster. We stopped in Chinatown at a Lo Mein noodle shop called New Wong Rest. Inc. and had three dinners and tea for a total of $19.

The bottom right portion of this painting came back after being scrubbed out and over painted in white. I was unhappy with the way I had painted the neck in the first place and then unhappy with the buildup left under the white when I painted it out. So I’m circling the wagons. Fred Lipp says I “paint the neck like I don’t care about it.” Unless I can rise to this challenge this basketball player looks better without it. So I just took it out again.

The kids’ show, up now at the Creative Workshop, has a series of still life’s by students of Johnny Lee Smith that really pack a wallop. They are joy to look at. Kids are guided by their innate sense. A good teacher keeps the focus where it belongs.

Pear by James P, a student in Johnny Lee Smith’s “drawing Better” class

Somewhere I picked up a 1957 yearbook for Mynderse Academy, a small private school in Seneca Falls. The cover of the Myndersian looked like a Sun Ra album. The page devoted to the basketball team only showed six players. One sub. The head on the page read, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” I painted the six guys about twenty years ago. They were my first oil paintings.

I decided to revisit them and stated with charcoal on canvas. I kinda like the drawing and and I’m pausing to figure out why it is I want to paint them.