a couple of favorites from the Guggenheim

It’s pouring rain now, making even the most basic things a mess. But still nice to be in New York, though the rain has cancelled my plan to just walk and walk endlessly and enjoy the city.

Not only have I been deprived by circumstance of never coming here much over the years, but the few occasions when I did come in the past were all brief visits to friends, and thus were dominated by interactions with those friends, generally in quiet neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I never really had time here as a tourist, and so hadn’t really seen any “New York stuff” (other than the World Trade Center, just two months before 9/11), and a couple of strolls through Central Park.

So, I walked this morning past the United Nations, the Empire State Building, and other such attractions.

This morning, I went over to the Guggenheim. The building itself is already an artwork, of course, having been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is physically much smaller than photographs led me to believe, but obviously the permanent collection is great– the sorts of things where you recognize them from 30 feet away as soon as entering the room, or at least so emblematic of a certain style and period that you can take an accurate guess at who the painter was and almost always be right.

My two favorite piece in the permanent collection are below. The top one is by the Rose Period Picasso, the bottom one is Kandinsky (which I really like, though the lower left-hand portion feels a bit cluttered to me– I mean, I don’t like the three overlapping small circles with the red one in the center, too tense).