A damp Druidic day at Storm King

Saturday in NW Connecticut was one of those perfect days - friends, art, music, good food - and a blissfully perfect, sunny but cooler day after all the heat. But on Sunday when we headed south towards home the skies were damp and cloudy, and we almost scuttled our plans to stop at Storm King, the fabled sculpture park on 500 acres just south of Newburgh, NY. Persevering through the rain and some museum quality potholes along the route was, however, one of our better decisions. Storm King at any time and in any weather is worth the trip, but on this gray moist day it took on mystical, Druidic associations that multiplied the many pleasures of the place. After all, Stonehenge itself is a monumental man-made structure centered in a vast landscape gently shaped by human intelligence, swirling out of a dampened mist to send a shiver of significance up your spine. The march of towering Mark di Suvero sculptures across a broad field and onto the crown of a rise will surely speak to future archeologists of some spiritual rite and purpose, even more so by the geometry of form and the bright orange steel against the more subtle shades of nature. We set off, passing great globes of rock among the cedars, followed by smaller concrete pieces that seemed a bit naked out in the woods, then crunched our way up a path onto Museum Hill where we could see sculptures above and below - rods of steel swaying in a valley, bright red metal shapes topping a hill. On the way down we found a meandering cage of bamboo climbing a ridge and spied below us an artist at work on a new construction, then rose again to come face to face with the spiky black notes of Chakaia Booker's parentheses around a distant Calder, and the carefully detailed monumental wooden works of Ursula von Rydingsvard. Down the road, past the many di Suveros, we spotted Andy Goldsworthy's wall (the first - there are now two), snaking out of the stream and into the woods, adding gravitas and humor in some kind of balance, with Roy Lichtenstein's Mermaid Boat nearby to inject an unexpected note of Pop Art zing into the soulful peace and quiet. One of the newest pieces is Maya Lin's Wave Field, created of earth itself - it seems to undulates as you watch, as though humming a soft tune of eternal presence. Here and there on this damp day an umbrella bobbed and swayed, recalling Christo's Umbrella Project of 1991, making for a nice contemporary art move out of the physical present into the mind (he is not represented at Storm King, to my knowledge.) Trekking back to the parking lot we passed a great black Calder highlighted against a field of high grass, thrilling in the effect of scale as it stood solidly dwarfing a couple beneath its arch, in something of a counterpoint to the ambitious scale of human efforts on display. No matter how large and ambitious, they pay a debt of humility to the grandeur of their setting.

Thinking of Blue: Matisse at MOMA

Thinking of the Matisse show at MOMA - Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917 - fills my head with the color blue. There are plenty of artists known for blue - Vermeer and Yves Klein, to name a couple - but there is something about Matisse's blues that makes your mouth water in a different way. Seductive, charming, often with a tinge of rosy undertone that somehow brings a little bit of peace to the soul - Matisse makes this most primary of colors speak with an elegant, eloquent voice. The color, rich and satisfying on its own merits, is also part of the story the show is telling. The dates refer to the years between the time Matisse arrives back in Paris after his momentous trip to Morocco and when he leaves for Nice, where he enters one of his most defining periods. In between is World War I, and the earthshaking consequences of the development of Cubism by his rival Picasso (and others) - two mighty forces that Matisse must contend with as he lands back in France. The grim conditions imposed by war make themselves felt; small intimate drawings of spouses of artists off in the war, created by Matisse to be sold to help refugees in France, are a sober reminder of real lives disrupted, and the skeletal shapes of Notre Dame's towers in a popular painting in MOMA's permanent collection become apocalyptic in the context of 1914 Europe. During these years Cubism challenged Matisse with its mix of intellectualized, minimalized, monochromatic rules - his striving for solutions seems obvious once explained, though I hadn't thought about it before. His choice of monochrome, in contrast to the greys and browns of Picasso and Braque, is blue, a color that allows him to keep the element of sensuality that is his trademark, while also allowing him to focus in new ways. Again, a painting from MOMA's collection is the best example: The Blue Window (1913) can in fact be seen as a Cubist-inspired work, with evident geometry in objects and a palette that, while not that of a monochrome purist, is restrained to a few yellows and reds swimming in a gorgeous sea of blue. This is a satisfying show, designed to teach, to please, and to make you think.

Deep Woods, Clean Lakes

In a world of global warming and devastating oil disasters, it's easy to forget that nature can still exist in a pristine spiritual state, that there are places where humans, animals, birds, trees, and water can get along with no more impact on each other than absolutely necessary. I was fortunate to spend a few days last week at a lake camp deep in the Adirondacks and can thus testify that this is, in fact, the case. This camp, deep in the Keene Valley area, is one of those relics of an amazing era, when massive tracts of these lands could - and were - bought by forward-looking, intrepid individuals for 50 cents an acre in order to save them from the logging industry. (Of the original tract, much now belongs to NY State as a wilderness preserve.) They put up sturdy, rustic cabins, rowed in with goods and families, and stayed for the long summers, with few comforts but with plenty of peace, quiet, and almost unbearable beauty all around them. The friends with whom we stayed are the current generation of one of the original families, which included an artist who was at one time well-known as an American Modernist. His name is Howard Weston, and while his story includes successful gallery shows in Manhattan, years in a small village in the French Pyrenees, and a commitment to humanitarian issues during WWII, his heart was always in the Adirondacks. His work, as shown in these samples, glows with the rich depth of color and emotion that he saw and felt in this amazing world. My photos are a paler connection to the place that rooted so deeply into his soul.