Last week, wandering through Neuberger Museum of Art, I was transported to the Greenwich Village and Lower East Side of my youth. Graphic and sculptural interpretations of Campbell Soup cans, bathrobes, lipsticks and other ordinary objects were suddenly appearing in galleries as high ticket items. The movement that started in the fifties seemed to flourish and expand […]
The recent focus on women’s issues has got me thinking about women I admire. Growing up in the age of lush movie musicals, I had this visual image of Debbie Reynolds as a cheery, romantic ingenue, tenaciously clinging to her perkiness and proper upbringing. Indeed, she fit the mold of “everyone’s sweetheart.” Her passing in […]
It seems that ever since the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was created, it has been under siege. Although it is a tiny agency, less than 0.006% of the $3.54 Trillion federal budget, it has had enormous impact on the quality, abundance and diversity of the arts in America through its 140,000 grants, totaling […]
There is something so very elegant about Henri Matisse. He can take a line and magically turn it into a portrait so recognizable that only a few strokes of his pen are necessary. This French master was known to have said: “If I trust my drawing hand it is because in training it to serve […]
Who among us does not remember the parental admonition “It’s not the gift, but the thought that counts”? I always think of my mother and my proper upbringing at this time of year. I re-live the powerful Gift of the Magi story and revel in the beauty of the sacrificial spirit of love between a […]
At my ripe-but-not-old age, I have finally, yet reluctantly, concluded that mothers know best. This message was brought home to me Saturday night by the mother of the famous clarinetist Derek Bermel. She whispered (entre nous) to me “I told him not to play the trumpet.” Thus, she took credit for his world renown as […]
I cheered to myself when I heard Bob Dylan was chosen for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Days later, I was crushed when he didn’t accept the honor. His answer is probably still “blowin’ in the wind.” But, OMG, what a missed moment for the arts! My delight at first was due to the “bravo” […]
A feisty man with a wide-brimmed hat breezed into my office one day in 1978 at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. He walked with a cane while playing a harmonica to my staff’s delight. That is how I first met Mark di Suvero, the sculptor whose work will be on view at […]
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