Tuesday – The Met - Roof Garden. This Is It! The view is so spectacular, you can see the skyscrapers south across the tree tops, you can also see most of Central Park West and a little of Fifth Avenue. Plus you can enjoy the view with a cup of coffee or a drink in your hand and absorb the last rays of sun. This Is It! Because there is just enough time to go back home and close the suitcases and go back to “Prosecco country”. We have had a great time, it’s been mostly a foodie trip and the icing on the cake, was the fabulous weather.
Detail. A Detail of the Frank Stella’s carbon epoxy composite, 2007 sculpture, entitled, Chinese Pavilion. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden on top of The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in 1987. The first annual installations featured selection of modern sculpture from the Met’s collection. More recently, each installation has focused on the achievements of an individual artist. This year Frank Stella’s recent explorations in sculpture and architecture were on view.
Contessanally tip: remember you can click on photos to enlarge them.
Photograph by Manfredi Bellati
The Met. - Special exhibition - Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor. The Special exhibition Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, until January 6th, 2008, must not be missed, it is daunting, awesome and the gigantic billboard sized tapestries are well hung and superbly lit. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of high quality seventeenth-century European Tapestry. Drawing from collections in more than fifteen countries, it presents some forty rare tapestries made in Europe between 1590 and 1720, along with twenty-five drawings, engravings and oil sketches. The exhibition investigates the stylistic and technical development of this prestigious figurative medium and explores the contributions of artist such as Peter Paul Ruben, Jacob Jordaens, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Pietro da Cortona and Giovanni Romanelli as they respond to the challenges of the medium in unique and spectacular ways. Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times “…this exhibition is stupefying, a king-size display of a space-eating art, awesome in its exacting detail.”
The Met. – Special exhibition – The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met. Is home to the finest collection of Dutch art outside Europe, including twenty works by Rembrandt himself, and all 228 of these masterpieces are displayed for the first time in the exhibition, The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, until January 6th, 2008. The exhibition also celebrates Rembrandt’s 400th birthday. The works on view date mostly between 1600 and 1700 – landscapes, genre pictures, still lifes, marine views, portraiture and historical and biblical paintings, by Rembrandt and other celebrated Dutch masters such as Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob Van Ruisdael and Aelbert Cuyp. Shown above. Jan Davidsz de Heem, Stiff Life: A banqueting Scene, Oil on Canvas. I thought this still life was appropriate for this New York foodie blog. The ambitious still life caused some head scratching among the scholarly community, but the co-census now is that de Heem painted the picture in Antwerp about 1639 or 1640 as a pioneering work of its type. The lavish display of objects and delicacies find a discordant note in the provincial clock at the upper right, as if a local preacher intruded upon festivities at a great country house. It is signed JDH in the lower left on a napkin.
