Fantastic Metropolis

In early April 2003, my brother Steve and I took a trip to New York City, he coming from Denver, me from Atlanta. There was no structured agenda for the weekend—just hanging out with some New Yorker friends, goofing off, and enjoying the newly smoke-free bars. Walking around the Village, eating in Little Italy, lounging in Central Park, and sipping on a Belgian Westvleteren 12 at the Ginger Man pub were also definitely on the list.

And we can’t forget about museums. Steve and I are both avid consumers of art, whether high brow or low, classical or modern. Steve, though, is particularly into modern art, so he suggested we hit the MoMA and the Guggenheim. Having never been to either, I happily agreed. Little did we know that the visits to these two museums would, in a long weekend full of festivity, turn out to be the highlights of the trip. The Guggenheim stop, in fact, turned out to be a life-changing experience for both of us.

Friday’s trip to the Museum of Modern Art turned out to be the perfect setup for the following day’s trip to the Guggenheim. The MoMA is temporarily set up in a warehouse in Queens while its permanent home is under construction in Manhattan. Not having figured out the whole subway thing yet, we took a cab over the bridge through the last gasp of winter rain.

Serendipity was definitely on our side that weekend. In order to attract patrons to the more remote temporary location, the MoMA was putting on a special exhibit featuring a full retrospective of the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. This was a most pleasant surprise. The exhibit displayed works—mostly paintings, but also sculpture and drawings—by both artists in parallel chronological order, demonstrating vividly how the two men borrowed from and competed with one another throughout their careers, sometimes with affection, sometimes with animosity.

This was a first-class exhibit, not a cobbled together collection of secondary works. The MoMA had dozens of works on display: Picasso’s Three Musicians and Two Nudes, as well as The Guitar Player and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (personal favorites of mine). From Matisse’s huge body of work, the curators appeared to emphasize pieces that juxtaposed nicely with the Picassos on display, either because of stylistic, thematic, or subject matter similarities, or because of specific instances of competition, friendly or otherwise, between the artists. I particularly enjoyed Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette, Interior with a Violin, and Music, but there were many others I cannot remember the names of.

The numbing brilliance of this collection of works, including several masterpieces, would have been more than enough great art to satisfy our needs for the weekend, but little did we know that the next day at the Guggenheim our entire conception of what art can be would be exploded.

As 30-something Americans, my brother and I can mostly relate in an intellectual sense, and much less in a visceral sense, to the work of these great modernists. We are not of their time, nor their respective sensibilities. We can marvel at the genius of the ideas and the flawless execution of the handiwork, we can comment on how revolutionary that still life of a vase and fruit must have been ninety years ago, but when it comes down to it, Steve and I are children of the postmodern and pop culture ages.