Peter Hujar and Tennessee Williams at The Morgan Library

Morgan Library Director Colin Bailey welcomed guests.
TD and I recently headed up to The Morgan Library & Museum for a special event called LGBTQ & Friends Night Out at The Morgan, presented in partnership with Out Professionals, the gay and lesbian networking organization. The Morgan Library is one of my favorite places in New York and I still love the light, airy, modern renovation of The Library undertaken by architect Renzo Piano in 2006.
The evening was organized because The Library is now presenting two wonderful exhibitions of two iconic American gay artists - photographer Peter Hujar and playwright Tennessee Williams. At the beginning of the evening, Director Colin Bailey offered a warm welcome to guests. After a glass of wine in the atrium, TD and I headed off to see the exhibitions.
Peter Hujar Self-Portrait Jumping (1974)

In simple black and white, Peter Hujar photographed the New York City East Village art scene and the worlds of avant-garde dance, music, art and drag in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. At the same time he witnessed the beginning of gay life and gay liberation in New York and then the AIDS crisis. Including 160 photographs, this is the first major retrospective of this artist who The New Yorker says "was among the greatest of all American photographers." Hujar passed away from AIDS in 1987 at the age of 53.
TD and I were moved to see in the exhibit photographs of Peter with our beloved friend Robert Levithan, who passed away about one year ago. 

Robert and Peter had been a couple, and maybe we knew that but we forgot. TD illustrated Robert's children's book about his dog Sophie called Sophie's Story. There were more pictures of Robert throughout the show, which made it especially poignant for us.
In Peter Hujar's words, he took “uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects.” Here is English artist Malcolm Morley in East Hampton in 1976 looking cranky but I like his pea coat –

And artist Louise Nevelson in 1969. TD and I once say a great Off-Broadway play about Louise Nevelson called Edward Albee's Occupant.

The empty downtown streets in Hujar's photographs and the eccentric characters capture a city that I knew once but is gone now. I found the show to be moving and elegiac as it evoked a simpler time in New York before it was a city in overdrive.
Upstairs we went to find a tribute to Mr. Tennessee Williams (pictured here by Irving Penn for Vogue in 1951). Called "No Refuge but Writing," which describes the only place Williams found peace, the exhibition includes original drafts, private diaries and personal letters with paintings, photographs and objects.

I have a great book called Five O'Clock Angel, which is the letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, the title referring to cocktail hour when a drink would arrive. Williams was such a beautiful, poetic writer. Like Truman Capote, another lyrical, Southern writer, Williams suffered from alcohol and drug abuse. TD once saw Williams in a restaurant near Lincoln Center in the daytime when the playwright was so drunk, he was incomprehensible. He came to sad end, choking on a bottle cap in the middle of the night at the Hotel Elysee on Lexington Avenue at 54th Street in 1983, age 71.
A self-portrait of Tennessee Williams –

What a writer he was. TD and I had the good fortune to see his memory play The Glass Menagerie on Broadway with Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto, which was breathtaking. In its first versions, the play was called The Gentleman Caller, and here is Williams' casually elegant description:

"The story is very simple." Ha!
These are two excellent shows housed in a lovely building. Visit The Morgan!

New York City Art Explored in Two Current Exhibitions

Untitled collage by Robert Rauschenberg from 1957
There is a never-ending stream of interesting art shows to see in New York, and coincidentally two now explore art produced in almost contiguous periods during the twentieth century. Inventing Downtown at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University on Washington Square is about artist-run galleries in New York from 1952 to 1965, and Fast Forward at the Whitney Museum of American Art is comprised of paintings produced in the 80s. TD and I thought it would be fun to have a look at both.
At mid-century in New York City, art galleries were located in midtown on 57th Street. The exhibit at the Grey Art Gallery shows how the art scene was transformed when it moved downtown as artists created their own galleries.
The cover of the catalogue pictures artist Red Grooms transporting art downtown in a baby carriage. Ah, those were the days – 

At the Grey Art Gallery, admission is free –

There was lots to look at. I particularly liked the Rauschenberg collage pictured at the top. The work of this artist has always hit me. It's abstract and a mix of various media but something about it strikes me emotionally. How did he do that? I was also drawn to the painting below of the great American poet Frank O'Hara by Wolf Kahn from 1954. In 1966, Frank O'Hara fell asleep on the beach on Fire Island and was hit by a Jeep in the dark and killed at age 40.

A wall was hung with a colorful mix of art –

Downstairs was a section devoted to Judson Memorial Church, where TD and I are members. Judson has always been committed to social justice and the arts, and in the 60s, Judson invited artists including Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg to exhibit their work in its basement gallery. It's fascinating history.

At the new Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District, architect Renzo Piano has designed a wonderful building. I like it much more than the Marcel Breuer-designed Whitney uptown on Madison Avenue, which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the new Whitney, outdoor decks and stairways offer striking views of the city.

The Fast Forward exhibit states that in the 80s when artists were turning to new media like video and art installations, many artists actively embraced painting. As the elevator doors open on the top floor on this exhibit, the visitor is greeted by an eye-popping Kenny Scharf painting layered on top of a Keith Haring panel.

On the other side of the entrance, a Jean Michel Basquiat painting is hung on the same. The combination is strikingly graphic. When I moved to New York I once saw Andy Warhol come into the nightclub Area with Jean Michel Basquiat. And the Palladium club had a room painted by Kenny Scharf. This all takes me back.

This exhibition was only in three gallery rooms. We were surprised that it was not bigger. Surely a show on 80s paintings could be more extensive. Also, two whole floors of the Whitney are now closed where the 2017 Biennial, which opens on March 17, is now being mounted.
The exhibit includes a giant Julian Schnabel painting on velvet, and a serene abstract painting by Ross Bleckner, which looks like lights glowing in the dark.
I've always been a fan of Eric Fischl's lush figurative painting, and this very large canvas below depicts contrasting scenes on a tropical island. On the left, a family of vacationers frolic blithely in the sea while on the right a group of desperate refugees arrive on the shore. A timely statement for right now –

We headed down one flight of stairs at the Whitney to an exhibition of portraits. We'd seen this show already but we took a quick spin through.
A self-portrait of sorts is a painting called Cocktail by Gerald Murphy who is one of my very favorite characters. 

If you haven't read about the fabulous Murphy's do yourself a favor and read Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tompkins and then read Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill.
I've always liked the colorful, sparely elegant paintings of Fairfield Porter. The label for this one below, called The Screen Porch, said it pictures Porter's two daughters on the left and his wife on the right and in the middle is poet James Schuyler, with whom Porter was having an open affair...

No wonder no one looks happy. Porter and Schuyler were also friendly with Frank O'Hara.
At the entrance of this exhibit is a handsome wall displaying a variety of portraits in different media – 



– a fitting expression of the range and diversity of American art, which has been fostered and nurtured in New York City.

Ernest Heminingway at The Morgan Library

Ernest Hemingway in Paris in 1923.

"You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it."
Ernest Hemingway

So begins the exhibition on Ernest Hemingway now up at The Morgan Library on Madison Avenue, which we went to see on Sunday, the day after the big blizzard here in New York City. Like many, I am fascinated by Hemingway, particularly during the Paris years in the 1920s when he was hanging out with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Juan Gris, Diaghilev from the Ballets Russes, Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and many more. One of my very favorite books, which I have read numerous times, is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which is about this period and, which I learned in this exhibit, was published posthumously. This one-room show at The Morgan focuses on Hemingway's work between the two world wars, presenting early manuscripts, galley proofs and letters. 

Hemingway was raised outside of Chicago and eshewed college to work for a short time as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star newspaper where he adopted his writing style from the newspaper copy guide: Use short sentences, use vigorous English, eliminate superfluous words. He was enlisted to the Italian front in World War I and so began Ernest Hemingway's adventures, far from the American Midwest. In Paris, he and F. Scott Fitzgerald really invented a new American literature. 

Hemingway in uniform in 1918 -

There are many interesting documents in this simply mounted show including an interview with George Plimpton at The Paris Review in which Hemingway reveals that he wrote the last page of Farewell to Arms 39 times. "Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you?" asks Plimpton. "Getting the words right," replied Hemingway.

Hemingway at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in 1923 -

Also presented is a reading list which Hemingway gave to a young writer - Flaubert, Tolstoy, E. E. Cummings and Henry James make the cut (click to enlarge and read) -

The exhibit notes that Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954. This show steers clear of Hemingway's personal life - there is no mention of his four wives or his suicide by self-inflicted gun shot wound in 1961. (Hemingway's father also committed suicide and his granddaughter, the stunningly beautiful American model Margaux Hemingway, died of a drug overdose at age 41 in 1996.) I think some personal context would have been helpful and that The Morgan might improve the design quality of its installations. But I really enjoyed this up-close look at an American genius, there until January 31.

Afterwards we wondered around the museum and into Mr. Pierpont Morgan's libary, which was completed in 1906 and is one of the great rooms in New York -

Then we repaired to the Cafe in the sunny glass atrium where we sat under a green leafy tree and ordered lunch and a glass of Chardonnay. It was a lovely way to spend the day after the blizzard.

Blog bonus:
Read Lillian Ross's profile of Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker from 1950.
Read George Plimpton's interview with Hemingway in The Paris Review from 1958.
(Don't you love the internet?)