Dance at Bougival

The Frick Collection:

Dancing with Pierre-Auguste Renoir... 

Dance at Bougival

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art are special places. Millions of people come here from all over the world to explore their treasures. It is exhilarating to visit these museums anytime but especially when there is a major event, even if it means waiting on long lines.

I crawled with hundreds of people through the Iris & B. Gerald Canter Exhibition Hall at The MET in the summer of 2011. During a three month stretch almost 662,000 people visited the late Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty" exhibit. They came to see his “bumster” trouser, three-point origami frockcoat, S&M jewelry, spray-painted dresses, futuristic styles, a life size hologram of Kate Moss, and many more of his ultra creative costumes. They came not out of sympathy for the famed British fashion designer who committed suicide at 40, a year before his exhibit opened, but to be dazzled by his uninhibited sense of fashion, art, history, and workmanship.

In 2012 I saw CindySherman’s Retrospective at MOMA, also heavily attended. It featured more than 170 photographs, all self-portraits that traced her artistic career from the 1970’s to the present. A master of disguise Sherman dressed as a faded movie star, sex kitten, naïve ingénue, straight-laced secretary, housewife and more. She accomplished this by physically altering herself with wigs, costumes, makeup, and prosthetic-body parts. She meshed art, cultural influences, pornography, fairy tales and horror films. In one work she appeared as Grandma Moses in a banana leather jacket and a sky-blue taffeta, another as a Renaissance Lady in an elegant dress, jewel adorned hair with a fake nose.

No exhibit inspired me more than the Renoir, Impressionism and Full-Length Painting at The Frick Collection in 2012.

Small in size, it featured just nine large life-size paintings, several measuring almost six-foot in height displayed in the Frick’s East Gallery, a long classical styled room with an arched portal, elegant keystone, fluted Ionic pilasters. Colin B. Bailey, the Frick’s Associate Director brought these works together for the first time. Built around The Frick’s La Promenade (1875-76), a mother walking in the park with her two young daughters, the museum’s most important impressionist work, the exhibit studied Renoir’s portraits and subjects from the mid-1870’s to the mid 1880’s. 

The other eight paintings included La Parisienne (1874) from the National Museum of Art, Cardiff; The Umbrellas (1881-1885) from The National Gallery of London; Dance in the City and Dance in the Country (1882-83) from the Musee d’Orsay, Paris; The Dancer (1874) from the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Madame Henriot “en travesty” (1875-76) from the Columbus Museum of Art; Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (1879) from the Art Institute of Chicago; and my favorite, the reason I write this article, Dance at Bougival (1882-83) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Born at Limoges, France in 1841, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is considered one of the great artists of the French Impressionists movement. The size of these paintings and their bright colors gives the illusion his characters, specifically the trio of paintings of dancing couples, are ready to lurch off the canvass. But Bougival is why I returned to the Frick three times with a different friend each visit.

Bougival drips with gusto, life, and lust. It is earthy and sexy. The outdoor setting – painted in a studio - is a Sunday country-dance near Paris. Art critics chat about the dirt floor littered with cigarette buts, chestnut trees and people drinking beer from plain mugs sitting at an oak table in the background, but the male dancer’s passion and assertiveness mesmerized me. Standing in this very large wing with maybe only fifteen other visitors I am free to savor Bougival from many vantage points, and I too, wanted to whisk my partner, all three, around this beautiful gallery.

The young woman in Bougival, is Suzanne Valadon, a trapeze artist turned model, Renoir’s one-time lover, and mother of artist Maurice Utrillo whose father was rumored to be one of several men including Renoir. The gent, a working-man, with clunky brown boots and straw hat, holds her firmly against his body and stares intently at her beautiful face and head wrapped in a long flowing red bonnet. She looks away, her eyes cast downward in a shy yet flirtatious way as if desire stirs within her as they dance oblivious to the festivities around them.

Standing in front of Dance at Bougival I think of Leonard Cohen’s song….

"Dance Me To The End Of Love"

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

The Renoir exhibit  completed its United States run September 3, 2013 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Paul Busse's Enchanted City: Creator of the 
New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show 

Macy's Flagship Store Herald Square

I am sitting at my desk on a beautiful afternoon in August. This day has all the ingredients of what I call a million dollar day: brilliant blue skies, a few puffy white clouds, gentle winds, and comfortable temperatures.

Something is wrong with me. Instead of planning weekend getaways, beach outings, picnics, exploring New York City on bike or foot, kayaking on the Hudson, camping, and hiking I have lingering thoughts of the recent 2012 Christmas holidays.  No I am not daydreaming about Santa Claus, the Rockefeller Christmas tree, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or Macy’s Herald Square’s Toyland.

What makes me smile is the New York Botanical Garden’s holiday train show. I went there in early January. I frowned when I saw a long line of people with hundreds of kids waitingto enter the Garden’s sprawling Victorian style Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.

 Empire State, Chrysler, Met Life (5 Madison Sq.), St.Patrick's

Upon entering the Conservatory I realized I had entered an Oz-like world one filled with a Lilliputian version of a New York City featuring many current landmarks and several long forgotten ones as well. All were crafted from natural materials – berries, pinecones, bark, beechnuts, seeds, twigs, pistachio shells, sea grape leaves, eucalyptus buds, and palm tree husks.

The New York Botanical Train show is the work of Landscape architect Paul Busse. He has built over 140 structures. The smallest is an 8-inch-high town house. The tallest is the 14-foot replica of the Brooklyn Bridge (although trains zip across his version). Current landmarks include the New York Public Library, Yankee Stadium, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and City Hall. Lesser-known ones such as the Bronx’s Edgar Allen Poe cottage, Wave Hill House and Van Cortlandt House are also on display.

Clark Mansion 79th & Fifth Avenue

Busse pays tributes to some of the city’s long forgotten buildings as well. There are replicas of the magnificent 1907 Clark Mansion at 77^th and Fifth Avenue. The 121-room, 31-bath building with swimming pool, considered the avenue’s most incredible private home, stood for only 20 years. There is also Eero Saarinen’s futuristic 1962 TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport, and McKim Meade & White’s marvelous Penn Station, torn down in 1964 to make way for Madison Square Garden, an office tower and a now dismal train station. Busse’s Penn Station is about 20 square feet. The roof is made of magnolia, pinecone scales and columns of honeysuckle.

 

Original Penn Station, 31 to 33 Street - Seventh to Eight Ave.

Paul Busse, 63, is more than just a landscape architect. He is a master builder with a unique vision for creating enchanting venues. Busse’s company, Applied Imagination, with a staff of about 20 people including his son Brian, and his nephew Jason, have built similar exhibits across the country. His works are on display at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the United States Botanic Garden in Washington D.C., and the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia.

Fourteen-foot replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with trains

At the New York exhibit Busse offer more than just great buildings. There are late 1800’s American steam engine trains, streetcars, freight trains and trolleys travelling over a quarter of mile of tracks spread out over the course of the entire exhibit moving over bridges and trestles, through tunnels, past waterfalls, streams, the Conservatory’s reflecting pool, and old train stations.

Over 200,000 people have visited the seasonal exhibit since it began in 1992.

The 2012 exhibit featured for the first time: the Brooks Brothers Madison Avenue flagship store, LED lights for Yankee Stadium, and Penn Station, which took over 1000 hours to build.

The 2013 Holiday Train show is less than five months away. Check the New York Botanical Garden’s website for info their events and educational programs.

Photos by Rudi Papiri

The Fifth Avenue Easter Parade: 

A Link to Old New York

“In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,

you’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade!

On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue the photographers will snap us

and you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.”

New York City’s Easter Parade, immortalized in song by Irving Berlin in the 1948 movie, both with the same title, starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, dates back to late 1800’s.

There are no marching bands at this parade. Thousands of people do not stand behind barricades lining Fifth Avenue to cheer as the procession of schools, dignitaries, uniformed members of the police and fire departments march by. There are no floats towering above the street or celebrities in vintage cars waving to the crowds. It is older than the Columbus Day and Thanksgiving parades, two of the city’s largest events. Still it is not a parade.

It is a holiday tradition dating back to the late 1800’s

when the city’s blue bloods, members of powerful banking, shipping and industrial families who built the city and lived in mansions on or near Fifth Avenue, now one of the world’s premiere retail destinations. They worshipped at one of the four architecturally rich and important churches along this part of Fifth Avenue all completed within an eighteen year time frame of each other; St. Thomas Episcopal Church at 53^rd in 1870; Fifth Avenue Presbyterian at 55^th in 1875; the landmarked church of Teddy Roosevelt’s youth, St. Nicholas Collegiate Church at 48^th in 1872, and demolished in 1949; and St. Patrick's Cathedral, the upstart church built in 1888 by Irish immigrants at 50^th.

It began as an informal procession with the city’s aristocracy, heading to and from the church, showcasing their prestige and the fashionable and opulent styles of the day. As the event grew the churches decorated the fronts of their buildings with large floral displays. The poor and working classes came to admire the latest fashions and to watch the hoity-toity as they walked the avenue or rode in horse drawn carriages. Eventually retailers and large department stores realized the importance of the holiday and began promoting their merchandise around the event.

Irving Berlin created the melody for his song Easter Parade in 1917 and titled it “Smile and Show Your Dimple.” But it never caught on. He filed it until 1933 when it surfaced on Broadway in the musical revue As Thousands Cheer with Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb.  In 1942 Bing Crosby sang Easter Parade in the movie Holiday Inn, and featured again in The First Easter Rabbit in 1976 on television. There is also a George M. Cohan song The Easter Parade.

At the height of its popularity almost a million people showed up. Crowds have tailed off significantly and for the past few decades the parades is less reverent and more zany and colorful.  There is  less focus on the latest fashion trends and it is geared more towards the exotic, creative, although good style abounds.

Easter Parades are popular in many other cities too. Atlantic City lays claim to the first parade in 1876. Almost 500,000 spectators filled the boardwalk in the late1930’s. A far smaller event today, it is held at the boardwalk’s famed Steele Pier. San Francisco’s 21-year-old event, along its upscale Union Street, features rides, games, roller-balding cows, mini floats, and vintage cars. There is also an Easter Bonnet contest with prizes awarded for the "Best Couple, Pet, Family and Largest Hat."

New Orleans loves Easter and parades so much it has four including a gay event and two in the French Quarter; a wild one on Bourbon Street and a traditional parade by the St. Louis Cathedral.

New York’s Parade is held on Easter Sunday, on Fifth Avenue from 50^th to 57^th Street from about 11 a.m. to 3pm.

Photos: Color Easter Parade photo by Rudi Papiri 2009