cityArts February 9, 2010 by CityArts NYC

FEBRUARY 9, 2010 Volume 2, Issue 3 American Symphony Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall.

Staatliche Kunstsamlungen, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden

PLUS GALLERY REVIEWS, JAZZ, NEW BOOKS AND MORE.

Bronzino is being celebrated at the Met with an exhibition of nearly all of his 61 known drawings, including “Crawling Male Nude,” ca. 1548–52.

Stretching the Standards In the ﬁrst exhibition dedicated solely to Bronzino, we see the ideals of the High Renaissance being left behind BY LANCE ESPLUND Early in my writing career, I described a work of modern sculpture as “Michelangelesque.” My editor shot back: “Use another word; there is no such thing—or can there ever be such a thing—as ‘Michelangelesque.’” My editor was right: A work of art either is or isn’t by Michelangelo—arguably the most inﬂuential sculptor, painter and architect in the Western canon. That may be why the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s long-termloan exhibition of the fragmentary marble ﬁgure “Young Archer” (c. 1490), a sculpture attributed to the adolescent Michelangelo, is dubious. The exhibit asks “Is it or isn’t it?” It seems that Renaissance scholars, identifying “Michelangelesque” qualities in the work, are in a quandary. But if “Young Archer” is by Michelangelo, it falls short of Michelangelo— even a ﬂedgling Michelangelo. Lacking Michelangelo’s inimitable harmony, torsion

and rhythmic complexity—signs of an inner life—the sculpture, ultimately, is soulless. Michelangelo may not weigh heavily on the minds of contemporary artists, who are still dealing with the innovations of Matisse, Mondrian, Klee and Picasso—modern masters who turned Renaissance conventions upside down and inside out. Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism and Postmodernism, in part, are all forms of acting out against those Modernist titans.

But imagine being born in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century, coming of age as an artist at the end of the High Renaissance, around 1520, and having to follow in the footsteps of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Dürer—artists so astonishing and innovative that the early Renaissance masters preceding them are still referred to as “the Primitives.” Faced with the divine establishment

BRONZINO on page 8

ArtNews lliance for Downtown New York has named Robin Schatell as executive director of the annual River To River Festival in Lower Manhattan… The New York City Opera announced its March gala in honor of chairman Susan L. Baker; the night will center around a performance of Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’Étoile, a lively opera about disguises and mistaken identities… Starting Feb. 27, The Brooklyn Heights Association will sponsor Brooklyn in Prints: A Special Gathering, a show featuring rare and unusual prints of the borough throughout its history, to celebrate the group’s 100th anniversary… Continuing the craze for Tennessee Williams revivals, The Roundabout Theatre Company will mount The Glass Menagerie, starring Michael Mosley of television’s Scrubs… This is your last week to check out the Athena Theatre Company’s production of Sam Shepard’s True West, which has been extended through Feb. 14 at The Lion Theatre on West 42nd Street… Flux Factory will christen its new Long Island City Home Feb. 19 with “eclectic performances and unparalleled reverie,” not to mention an open bar… On Feb. 3, Barnard College celebrated the opening of The Diana Center, a new, seven-story building on Upper Broadway with ascending double-height glass atria and a facade of clear and etched colored-glass panels, to house the school’s art, architecture and performing arts programs… Mar. 1 through 5, World Financial Center will host “Chopin Week,” a weeklong celebration of Frederic Chopin’s 200th birthday, featuring 200 hours of the composer’s works performed by artists including NPR’s From the Top host Christopher O’Riley, Vassily Primakov, Claire Huangci, winner of the Chopin Competition of Europe and more… Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery has left its perch at The Fuller Building and moved to 980 Madison Ave. in the Carlyle Galleries space. In March, the gallery will show Irving Kriesberg: Works on Paper… On Mar. 14, English pianist Leon McCawley makes his Lincoln Center recital debut with a “Sunday Morning Coffee Concert” at Walter Reade Theater. This hourlong concert, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Samuel Barber’s birth, will include Barber’s Nocturne (Homage to John Field ) Op. 33 and his Sonata Op. 26 and Chopin’s Sonata in B-ﬂat minor Op. 35, Nocturne in C-sharp minor Op. 27 No. 1… William Kentridge is going to be the busiest visitor in town this month as an exhibition of three decades of his work will be at MoMA from Feb. 24 through May 17, and in March, he’ll direct a production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera House. Then, on Mar. 21 and 22, Sounds from the Black Box, Kentridge’s most recent animation work and the latest in his long series of collaborations with South African composer Philip Miller, will screen at World Financial Center and combine Kentridge’s stunning animations with scores by Miller, performed live by the New York City-based Ensemble Pi… In addition to her Feb. 16 show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Thurston Moore, Paul Simon, Bette Midler and others, Yoko Ono has added another night, opening doors to the Feb. 15 dress rehearsal of the show that will feature Ono as well as Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda and the rest of the Plastic Ono Band.

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InBrief

Rocio Molina performs at Flamenco Festival.

Strike a Pose With pounding feet, rustling gowns and plaintive cries, Flamenco Festival is in New York Feb. 11 through 21 with the theme “Todo Cambio” (Everything Changes). To prove it, director Miguel Marin is expanding the popular festival to embrace much more than the usual lineup of captivating performers—which includes Rocío Molina, María Pagés and Israel Galván, the romantic guitarist José Antonio Rodríguez, the hip flamenco/punk/jazz band Canteca de Macao and the haunting Chekara Arab-Andalusian Orchestra of Tetouan. For the first time in its 10-year history, the festival has collaborated on events with Aperture Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “My mission has always been to expand knowledge of flamenco,” Marin says. “I like asking audiences to go beyond the familiar. Flamenco comes from a rich history and encompasses far more than dance and song.” Audiences can experience a performance by the festival’s top dancers Feb. 10 at the

Guggenheim in a work created just for the space by choreographer Carlos Chamorro and directed by Margaret Jova. While it’s being performed, dancers will come down the ramps and flow through the audience. “You will be completely engulfed by flamenco,” Jova says. Plus, two great teachers, Omayra Amaya and La China, will teach various flamenco styles at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through Feb. 19. The Aperture Gallery and the Cervantes Institute are co-hosting the riveting photography exhibition, No Singing Allowed: Flamenco and Photography, which originated at de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville last spring. “Our exhibitions often showcase social content,” explains Juan Garcia de Oteyza, executive director of Aperture. “Flamenco fits right in because it’s linked with social and political resistance in Spain, as it sprang from the outcast, gypsy culture. But it lends itself to many other approaches as well, for foreign travelers in the 19th century greatly romanticized its birthplace, Andalusia. One sees in their photographic images how flamenco influenced the other arts, particularly painting.” Spanning more than 150 years with over 200 photographs, the exhibit documents flamenco culture in all its multi-faceted glory and features works by legends like Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Brassaï, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath and Man Ray as well as a film by the acclaimed Carlos Saura, who directed Blood Wedding, based on García Lorca’s play. It also presents newcomers such as New York photographer Ariane Delacampagne, author of Duende: Visages et Voix du Flamenco. “I’m fascinated with flamenco,” Delacampagne says, “because it’s so elusive and difficult to photograph. I am attracted by its dark colors, the colors of the night, its burning intensity, its fierceness, its tragic side. Flamenco is an art of the late night, when suddenly a singer starts to sing, a dancer starts to dance, something incredible starts to take place, a spectacle of extreme intensity occurs, within maximum constraints, with minimal gestures and in a minimal amount of time.” (Valerie Gladstone)

Making It Up The Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange would have never made it to Broadway if it hadn’t been for some dedicated theater folk who went out on a limb to help Stew and Heidi Rodewald develop it into more than the onstage ramblings of a musician with a microphone. Now the rock duo has taken its experiences and will present them as a new multimedia performance piece, Making It, at St. Ann’s Warehouse Feb. 17 through 22. Musical partners Stew and Rodewald (who also used to be romantically involved) had been performing regular gigs over the years at Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater’s hothouse for difﬁcult-to-classify talent, as the band The Negro Problem. Bill Bragin, the director of Joe’s Pub, urged the group to develop its show into something more structured. When I spoke to Stew in 2008, before Passing Strange opened on Broadway, he explained his initial hesitation: “I was terriﬁed of doing anything close to theater. To me, theater meant kicking in unison. And people really being eager to be loved on stage—which is the opposite of rock. You know, rock swaggers out and says, ‘I’m going to dare you to love me.’

Stew in Passing Strange on Broadway.

Rock is the bad boyfriend that the girl really likes. Theater is somehow a little more desperate in its need for love.” Now, after a successful commercial theater production, which was subsequently shot as a ﬁlm by Spike Lee and released on DVD last month, Stew and Rodewald are returning to the stage to ask the questions that plague so many people who endeavor to live an artistic life dedicated to: Are you making it? When do you know you’ve made it? And are you having fun making it? Or are you just barely making it? Like all of their projects, Making It is music driven, and the duo will be accompanied by a full band that includes Marty Beller (drums), Michael McGinnis (brass), Joe McGinty (keyboard), Dan Peck (tuba) and Brian Drye (trombone). The big question will be how much the pair reveals about what broke them up. As Stew explained to me, he and Rodewald had dated for 10 years before they began working on Passing Strange. “What 10 years of rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t do, one year of theater did.” (Jerry Portwood)

Off the Menu Chanterelle spent 30 years being as famous for its French cuisine and role in introducing ﬁne dining to downtown Manhattan as it was for its unrivaled collection of artist-created menu covers. The restaurant displayed the works of more than 60 artists—including Edward Albee, Matthew Barney, Merce Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe, Marisol, Allen Ginsberg and Annie Leibovitz—until it was shuttered last summer. This one-of-a-kind art collection seemed destined to be forgotten. But last weekend, the collection of menu covers could be seen in its entirety in an exhibition at the Kill Devil Hill antique store located in Greenpoint. Kill Devil Hill co-owners Mark Straiton and Mary Brockman happened across Chanterelle’s cover collection much as they do with the other the antiques ﬁnd—through a mixture of circumstance, luck and the sense to know when they’ve found something special. Brockman had been helping out a friend who worked at Chanterelle. When she heard about the closing, she approached Karen Waltuck,

February 9, 2010 | City Arts

InBrief

FEBRUARY BOOKS Several of this year’s ﬁlms also provide intriguing perspectives on African and African-American culture, including a biography of author Zora Neale Hurston and Nora, a chronicle of choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s return to her childhood home in Zimbabwe. Perhaps the best hope for a robust audience can be found in the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of the series itself. “There are ﬁlms about painting, sculpture, photography, music, dance, literature, architecture,” Covert says. “There is something to interest almost everyone.” (Matt Connolly)

Now, Composers, Now The Oslo Opera House screens at the Center for Architecture Feb. 26. who co-owned Chanterelle with her husband David, about exhibiting the menu covers. “I was just blown away that they had done this for the past 30 years, and how it created the most amazing collection of artwork,” Brockman explains. “I loved it so much. I thought it was such a beautiful idea, and it became such a really cool thing.” Karen Waltuck shares Brockman’s sentiment, as the menu covers chronicle Chanterelle’s story. “We’ve always had the pieces as a collection, so as to preserve the integrity of the entire work over the last three decades. It’s just so historical,” Waltuck says. “It’s vibrant and alive and new but also historical because so many of the artists that we knew are gone. We always had a group with artists that were both quite well known and new, and now the artists that were new are quite well known. We’ve been very, very, very, very honored.” The framed covers were displayed Feb. 7 and 8 at Kill Devil Hill. Having been appraised by Christie’s, select covers will be for sale for approximately $350 to $1,000, depending on the cover. The Waltucks had the collection appraised when they originally considered selling it to the New York Public Library. (Jordan Galloway)

A Series to Remember “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” goes the quip. But what about the ﬁlming of architecture, or dance, or painting? This refraction of various mediums through the camera’s lens forms the heart of Art on Screen, a month-long series of selections from the 27th Montreal International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). From an examination of how 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters represented people of African descent to an exploration of the tragic life of Russian poet Boris Ryzhy, the ﬁlms offer insights into the process and politics of artistic

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creation, as well as the creators themselves. “When people go to a gallery or museum, statistically they spend maybe 30 seconds or so looking at a work of art,” says Nadine Covert, the New York delegate for FIFA and a curator for the series. “The camera holds your eye and you can look very closely at the work of art. A film can help you to understand the artist’s point of view and see the work in a new way.” The series, now in its fourth year, has also expanded to a new venue. Screenings will not only take place in the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Morgan Library and Museum, but also at the Center for Architecture, located Downtown on LaGuardia Place. According to Covert, this addition reflects the continuing popularity of films about architectural design, six of which will be screened at the Center Feb. 26 and 27. Asked why these films hold such an interest, Covert noted that architecture’s visual nature translates well to the screen. In the case of The Oslo Opera House, a documentary chronicling the creation of Norway’s biggest cultural construction project ever—designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta—the building of a structure can also handily double as a kind of cinematic narrative. “It’s a way of seeing the process of construction,” Covert explains. “The film takes us from the opera house’s conception all the way to the opening of the building. You see the process of working with the builders, the politicians, those who commissioned the building: the whole progression.” Covert hopes that the series—which is co-sponsored by MUSE Film and Television, FIFA and the three screening venues—will continue to attract a wide variety of viewers. In addition to screenings of those films given awards at FIFA, Covert has also selected several works specifically aimed at New York audiences, such as a portrait of sculptor Alexander Calder, a popular figure within the mid-century Manhattan art world.

We’re used to gawping at a diva’s range while she delivers a tricky tune. Or feeling that chest-ﬂutter when a musician transports us through his astounding ability to pluck those strings or pound those keys. But contemporary composers, who continue to create the notes for these performers, rarely get time to shine in the spotlight. Save for a few creators with quirky personalities that may be lucky enough to attract media attention, most of the time the composer remains invisible. During the weeklong Composers Now event, however, living composers receive a platform to stand out and welcome the sort of respect they deserve. It was spearheaded by composers Tania León and Laura Kaminsky, who also happens to be associate artistic director at Symphony Space and the coordinator of Composers Now. “As a composer and presenter, I am delighted to see how so many of us in the ﬁeld came together to create this initiative that puts the spotlight on living composers,” says Kaminsky. “Making as wide a stylistic range of music available and accessible to all and celebrating it in venues across the city is a wonderful way to brighten the darkness of mid-February.” The festival begins Feb. 22 with a “marathon” concert at Symphony Space that starts at noon and continues through 6 p.m. Designed as a collaborative celebration, performances, lectures and workshops are scheduled citywide at concert halls, museums and other distinctive spaces. And we’re not just talking the traditional sounds of a classical orchestra either. The festival includes everything from jazz innovators Wycliffe Gordon and Eric Reed to new works from Michael Nyman and David Longstreth, known for his work with indie band Dirty Projectors. Whether you’re up for a world premiere such as Du Yun’s “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” performed by the iO String Quartet or the Cassatt Quartet’s interpretation of Steve Reich’s groundbreaking work Different Trains piece with three parts, there’s bound to be new respect for what those composers are capable of. (Molly Garcia)

The Esquire Covers @ MoMA by George Lois

If you missed the yearlong exhibition of famed adman George Lois’ Esquire covers at MoMA, now you can catch up without digging through boxes of old magazines. This month a gorgeous hardcover book with all 120 of Lois’ covers—from boxer Sonny Liston on the Dec. 1963 cover in a Santa hat to a battered-looking Ursula Andress in 1967—reproduced at full size is available from Assouline. Each image is paired with text from Lois himself explaining the magazine cover’s genesis, its impact and its place in the world. For some, this book will be a collector’s item but for anyone not familiar with Lois’ work, it’s an exciting and luxurious way to look at a sliver of American history. (Jeremiah Garﬁeld)

Library of Dust by David Maisel

David Maisel’s Library of Dust attempts to beautify the morbid with its collection of artfully oxidized copper canisters. It’s not the colorful, textured cans that look as if someone has molded seascapes out of clay onto them that draw attention, but the contents within. Each battered, weary canister contains the cremated remains of a patient of the Oregon State Insane Asylum (the same one where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes place) who died with no next of kin between 1883 and the 1970s. The book also features photos of the decrepit, closed-down hospital, as well as essays on dust, copper and the history of treatment of those deemed insane from Geoff Manuagh, Terry Toedtemeier and Michael S. Roth, respectively. The photographs that make up the book are on display at Von Lintel Gallery in Chelsea through Feb. 27. (Danny Gold)

Kazan on Directing by Elia Kazan

Culling material from legendary director Elia Kazan’s interviews, letters, autobiography and papers, this 300plus-page collection offers insight on Kazan’s own work as well as advice for those who want to be directors (or actors or writers) themselves. The book, now available in paperback, features a foreword by theater critic John Lahr and a preface by Martin Scorsese—not to mention a closing piece from the book’s editor—is a meticulously arranged peek at how an acclaimed director found his way through Broadway shows and ﬁlms, and what each experience left him with. (JG)

DecorativeARTS

”...a spellbin d of his times er… a symbol .”

The Stuff of Life

—TH E NE W YO RK ER

BY BRICE BROWN Flea markets are curious things. Like clearinghouses set up to re-cast discarded or forgotten objects back into cultural circulation, these mostly outdoor events epitomize the fascinating occurrence of trash-to-treasure-totrash. Andy Warhol routinely scoured them “looking for masterpieces”––which was often code for cookie jars––while André Breton felt they contained a “forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences and reflexes particular to each individual.” Indeed, the fleas are not just simple marketplaces. They are social arenas where a broad range of people are connected with various levels of diverse cultures, both past and present, creating an energetic highlow-and-everything-in-between aesthetic and cultural mash-up. Here, exiled objects exist out of time, caught in a holding pattern until revivified by a patron’s sharp eye. For a decorative arts enthusiast, flea markets are museums without walls and glass barriers, allowing immediate, intimate contact with the object. In fact, anyone at all interested in visual culture should make the flea market an essential haunt. Though the golden age of New York’s Chelsea outdoor flea markets has been somewhat tarnished by the relentless need to dodge the march of real estate development, we are still very lucky to have numerous high-quality flea markets on our doorstep. Not surprisingly, the main markets are still located in Manhattan and mostly still clustered in Chelsea. These are, in no particular order, the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market at West 39th Street (betw. Ninth & 10th Aves.); the Antiques Garage at 112 W. 25th St. (betw. Sixth & Seventh Aves.); GreenFlea at Columbus Avenue (betw. W. 76th & W. 77th Sts.); and the slightly more refined, though still choc-ablock, Showplace Antique and Design Center at 40 W. 25th St. (betw. Broadway & W. 25th St.). Brooklyn Flea, operating at One Hanson Place for the winter, is Brooklyn’s main flea market, which is more popular with foodies. The flavor of the flea depends on what day, and time of day, you decide to attend. But because there is an organic, constantly shifting array of product, dealers and attendees, there are no hard and fast rules of engagement. My favorite is the Antiques Garage, and the general rule here holds Saturday as the day when the suburban or out-of-state dealers set up, while the NYC-based dealers arrive Sunday. Saturday’s wares tend toward household goods (though there is a textile dealer consistently selling pieces worthy of placement in the Met). Sunday you’ll see more silver,

Photo: Looky, by Michael Lutch

Exploring other people’s discards, looking for unexpected treasures

jewelry and expensive smaller items. The early hours are when other antiques dealers troll the booths as they’re being unpacked; the prelunch crowd is comprised of serious collectors and artists scrounging for inspiration; and post-lunch you’ll find the leisurely looky-loos. Of course, experience has taught me there are always deals no matter when you go. On recent excursions to the Antiques Garage, my antiquing partner (who also happens to be a seasoned dealer, a definite advantage when trying to suss out treasures from the trash) found a stack of 12 rare, 18th-century Sévres plates decorated in the service ordinaire pattern, a stack of late-19th-century handtinted silver prints of baby chicks posed in decorative boxes and a pair of 1880s handspun and woven wool sheets signed in cross-stitch by the woman who made them. And because what often defines a flea market treasure is the direct, personal affiliation with a particular object rather than rarity or value for the dollar, we also came away with multi-colored children’s game blocks, vintage barware and campy Santa Claus tree ornaments. For many people, though, the hunt is more exciting than the catch, and the real draw of the flea market is the event itself. Navigating the stalls overcrowded with merchandise often requires the dodge and weave agility of a pugilist, generating an addictive adrenaline rush. And unless you’re on a mission for a very specific item—like a cookie jar—I suggest approaching a flea market’s mayhem much like Breton and the Surrealists: make a game out of stream-of-conscious chance encounters, and invariably the more interesting items, regardless of provenance, will step forward out of the fray. So bring an open mind and receptive eye along with your checkbook, and while you’re out discovering that long-lost vase you never knew you wanted, you’ll be experiencing the pleasing strangeness that is the stuff of life. <

CHOREOGRAPHY BY MARK MORRIS LOOKY NY PREMIERE SOCRATES WORLD PREMIERE BEHEMOTH

FEB 23—27 ONLY! TICKETS START AT $20

BAM 2010 Spring Season TICKETS: BAM.ORG / 718.636.4100 BAM, PETER JAY SHARP BUILDING, 30 LAFAYETTE AVE, BROOKLYN

BAM 2010 Spring Season sponsor:

Leadership support provided by The Jerome Robbins Foundation, Inc.

Charles Dickens’

Adapted by Stephen Jeffreys Directed by J.R. Sullivan

“A fluid adaptation… True to Dickens’ language and spirit” -The New York Times

NOW PLAYING! AT NEW YORK CITY CENTER STAGE II www.pearltheatre.org

February 9, 2010 | City Arts

DANCE Elebash Presents

Concerts & Conversations The

Graduate Center The City University of New York Elebash Recital Hall

The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street), New York City

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 7:00 P.M.

Music and the Iraq War TUESDAY, MARCH 2, 7:00 P.M.

Lauren Flanigan: The Art of the Monodrama MONDAY, MAY 3, 7:00 P.M.

An Evening with Paquito D’Rivera

Admission: $25, $10 students To purchase tickets online visit: www.gc.cuny.edu/ concertsandconversations For further information, call 212-817-8215

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What’s Up, ‘Doc?’ A new interpretation of Martha Graham’s ‘American Document’ pushes all the right buttons BY JOEL LOBENTHAL For those who say that polemics and aesthetics can’t entwine without mutual nullification—or can’t do it so far as dance is concerned—I say balderdash. Then I direct the skeptic to a “re-imagining” of Martha Graham’s 1938 “American Document” that proved riveting and cathartic when shown as a “work-in-progress” at Dance Theatre Workshop last month. It’s a collaborative project between today’s Graham troupe and SITI Company, an ensemble-based theater group, along with its artistic director Anne Bogart and playwright Charles L. Mee, Jr. They’ll bring it to the Joyce in June for a oneweek season—and it’s not to be missed. Graham originally conceived “American Document” as a response to the shrieking Fascists whose rants were filling her radio waves. She devised a highly personal, national self-portrait as eclectic as the country’s own population, which resonated with the vigorous agit-prop theater staged during the Depression. Recitation and movement provided a platform in “American Document” for a retrospective of iconic American voices, weighted toward the progressive. In 1989, Graham rechoreographed it and used different texts and a new score that replaced Ray Green’s original. The current revision references what remains of the 1938 original: a few minutes of filmed record as well as Graham’s surviving notebooks and scenario. The texts have been updated as well, addressing issues as topical as curtain time. Today, when it sometimes seems unlikely that a functioning democracy can survive in this country, “American Document”’s proud but unflinching look at what has made this country great and what has diminished it is singularly apropos. Graham organized her original “American Document” around the pretext of a minstrel show. I would imagine that she was using that frame with some sense of irony as well as a genuine awareness of the long centrality of this institution to American popular performance. Nevertheless that would probably not go over so well today, and the conceit has been largely jettisoned and is referred to as “vaudevillian.” Vestigial homage is paid to Graham’s idea, however, when the new “American Document” opens with a high-stepping cakewalk, essential component of the minstrel show, performed by the entire cast of actors and dancers. They launch the piece on a note of jubilation, a surge of history and a surge of high spirits. The purported host for the evening titles himself Tom the Interlocutor, another conceit borrowed from minstrelsy.

By Costas

Winter/Spring 2010 schedule

“American Document.” Throughout this “American Document,” text does what it does best: It give us an explicit, if sometimes ambivalent, message. And dance does what it does best by ﬁnding formal correlatives both more universal but also more content to principally provide sensual, architectural and decorative interest. Rather than recreate any stretch of the irretrievable choreography, the current production uses known steps from the archival material as motival elements that are combined and recombined. The stage pictures are dotted with islands of autonomous movement, or crisscrossed with polyphonic strands. Often the movement is closely synchronized to the text, while not precisely illustrative. Interpreters of text and movement each get to exchange roles. Speaking is not the strongest point of dancers, but the Graham performers are not bad at all when they transgress the dancer’s traditional silence. When the SITI actors, not all of whom are svelte, take the plunge and move in exact tandem with the professional dancers, they seem to convey (in classic Graham style) that where there’s a will, there’s a way. American “can-do” could be the epitaph to Graham’s own career. She was a very late starter in dance who made an indelible contribution to it. The indomitable will of a heroine in the process of self-actualization was an everlasting subject of her work. Graham’s original “Document” included critiques of the founding Puritans, and this contemporary redux provides national manifestos of reform and empowerment as well: the way that those ideals have been betrayed, most notably in a harrowing series of dispatches from Iraq. “That’s as far as we’ve gotten,” Bogart announced after a last unison ensemble. Less than 10 percent of the roughly hour-long work remains to be constructed. I don’t think anybody—performer nor spectator—will leave “American Document” with his complacency intact.

JAZZ

Juilliard

Kick the Blues Tune in to the sustaining sounds of America’s music with some of the best

Thurs, Feb 11 at 8 • Paul Hall

Considerably Carter

New York Woodwind Quintet with Rolf Schulte, violin; Fred Sherry, cello; students from the NYWQ Seminar at Juilliard 6 works by ELLIOTT CARTER, including 1 American & 2 World premieres & FRANÇAIX Quintette plus an intermission conversation with the composer and Juilliard Dean Ara Guzelimian FREE Standby line forms at 7

Mon, Feb 15 at 8 • Peter Jay Sharp Theater

AXIOM Finnish Lions Jeffery Milarsky Conductor works by SAARIAHO & LINDBERG FREE tickets, Juilliard Box Office

Mon, Wed, Fri, Feb 15 – 19 at 8 Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater at Juilliard B.B. King and Lucille.

Transformations Conrad Susa /Anne Sexton

Opera in 2 acts Edward Berkeley, Directs; Steven Osgood, Conducts singers from Juilliard Opera and the Juilliard Orchestra FREE Standby line forms at 7 each performance night

Sat, Feb 20 at 8 • Carnegie Hall, 57th St & 7th Ave

Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall James DePreist Conductor; Oliver Jia, Piano STRAUSS Ein Heldenleben works by PROKOFIEV, BÖRTZ Tickets: $25, $10, CarnegieHall.org or (212) 247-7800 1/2-price students/seniors, only at Carnegie Hall Box Office

Sun, Feb 21 at 2 • Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Approach to Innovation I

Peter Gelb, Metropolitan Opera General Manager Interviewed by Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard President

Christian Steiner

Chuck Berry, Etta James, Bo Diddley and others into rock ‘n’ roll. It’s why the blues is party music, too. Which is rather how the blues manifests itself in Manhattan: not as lugubrious lament, but as soundtrack for revelry that nonetheless watches its back. When the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis focuses on “Basie and the Blues” Feb. 11 through 13, it revives the uplifting, smoothly synchronized swing that framed lyrics about careless love, hard work, short money and intoxicating escapism. Saxophonist Dave Sanborn and organist Joey DeFrancesco do the same without the lyrics at the Blue Note through Feb. 14, imitating the grits ’n’ greens instrumental model saxophonist Lou Donaldson proposed back in the ’50s—which he will demonstrate again with his organ quartet at Birdland, Feb. 24 through 27. When guitarist Leo Nocentelli and basssist George Porter of the great New Orleans band The Meters unfold their funk at B.B. King’s Feb. 16, they’ll add the proud strut of Hurricane Katrina survivors to the blues’ eternal chord progressions. Guitarists Dave Stryker (Feb. 24 at Iridium) and Mike Stern (frequently at 55 Bar, where hot blues diva Sweet Georgia Brown also holds forth) and electric bassist Gordon Edwards (with a standing Wednesday night gig at Creole) give the blues some fusion twists. Terra Blues on Bleecker Street is the lone pure blues club still in Manhattan; little noted but ﬁne local blues artists including Bill Sims, Jr., Junior Mack, Michael Powers and Bobby Radcliffe play there for no cover, no minimum year-round, because the blues (like Black History) can’t be held to one month. In fact, next month will be bluesy, too, with Cassandra Wilson, cool diva of the blues, at the Blue Note Mar. 9 through 11, and Robert Cray’s band Mar. 19.

Dario Acosta

BY HOWARD MANDEL It’s February, Black History Month, season of the blues. Still dark and so cold that Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day and Martin Luther King’s birthday are celebrated (in part) to combat seasonal affective disorder, it’s a good time to turn to the melodic, harmonic and emotionally fulfilling strains that have run through American popular music for more than a century. New York is not generally regarded as a blues-steeped city—it lacked the industrial jobs to attract or support the millions of African-American laborers who sought escape from the agricultural south to the urban north during the Great Migration of the 1920s through the ’50s—but there’s plenty of blues to be heard here. Often it’s underground or disguised—though that isn’t the case Feb. 12, when B.B. King and Buddy Guy are scheduled to play the United Palace Theatre in Washington Heights. They’re the two best-known bluesmen alive, exerting significant influence, recognized or not, on anyone slinging a guitar and singing in the U.S. today. B.B., at age 84, is the tradition’s dean and namesake of clubs in six other cities besides the plush bar and grill we have on West 42nd Street. He performs frequently enough to substantiate his claim “Every Day I Have the Blues.” Guy, 73, played a Louisiana musician last year in Bertrand Tavernier’s movie, In The Electric Mist, and has just relocated his Chicago club, Legends, to a larger space. He’s also aptly titled his autobiography Damn Right I Have the Blues, though his unstoppable energy subverts the notion that the blues is a sad, sad song. That’s right: It needn’t be. The blues is, strictly speaking, the African-American music identified independently by both W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey back around 1903, a mournful, three-line form that employs melisma and bent notes to evoke hard luck and trouble. But it has been employed throughout decades of stylistic variation with little change to its core values and strategies. You play the blues to kick the blues. This was a big theme of the blues divas who sang on New York stages backed by the best jazz musicians in the Roaring ’20s. It was the story of most famous blues songsters, guitarists, harmonica players and pianists, as depicted in movies like Cadillac Records and the forthcoming Who Do You Love, both taking off on Chicago’s Chess Records, where country pickin’ and strummin’ was transformed by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf,

Joseph W. Polisi, President

Peter Gelb

Joseph W. Polisi

A discussion about the artistic, technical, broadcast and entrepreneurial innovations that position the Met in the 21st century with Question & Answer period FREE tickets, Juilliard Box Office

Mon, Feb 22 at 8 • Alice Tully Hall

Juilliard String Quartet Nick Eanet and Ronald Copes, Violins; Samuel Rhodes, Viola; Joel Krosnick, Cello with Robert Mann, Viola works by MENDELSSOHN, DAVIDOVSKY, MOZART Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital Series LIMITED FREE tickets 2/8, Juilliard Box Office

Fri, Feb 26 at 8 • Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Juilliard Orchestra/Juilliard Composers Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Conor Hanick, Piano; Catherine Hancock, Soprano World Premieres by JUDE VACLAVIK; HYEON-JOON SOHN; NICCO ATHENS; MICHAEL GILBERTSON FREE tickets 2/12, Juilliard Box Office

Juilliard

155 W. 65th St. • Box Office open M-F, 11AM-6PM • (212) 769-7406 www.juilliard.edu

February 9, 2010 | City Arts

of the High Renaissance, is it any wonder that what immediately came in its wake were the elongations, exaggerations and anxious effusions of Mannerism—works not “Michelangelesque” but, rather, made “in the manner of” artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo, titans whose art, it was believed, could not be equaled, let alone bettered, but could be imitated and distorted? The virtuosic Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino, a leading Mannerist, was born at about the same time that Leonardo was painting the “Mona Lisa,” Giorgione was working on “The Tempest,” Dürer was engraving his canonical “Adam and Eve” and Michelangelo was carving the “David.” Bronzino is being celebrated at the Met with an exhibition of nearly all of his 61 known, or attributed, drawings. The show, surprisingly, is the ﬁrst devoted to Bronzino—a painter of frescoes, designer of tapestries, court painter to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, poet and, during his prime in the mid-16th century, the foremost portraitist in Florence. ronzino is more cool and restrained yet often more melodramatic than his fellow practitioners of Mannerism. A movement that continues to be presented as that muddled, 60-year-long proto-expressionist period between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, Mannerism is thought of as the tamer prequel to the go-for-broke exuberance and extravagance of Baroque masters Rubens and Bernini. Mannerism produced cloyingly academic works in which classically idealized Renaissance ﬁgures were appropriated and plunked down willy-nilly in pictures all over Europe. But Mannerists, to stand out from their forefathers, were also inspired to rebel, or at least to look inward enough to express the self, rather than to produce yet another watered-down or hardboiled version of Michelangelo. The most talented Mannerists—Parmigianino in Rome, Tintoretto in Venice, El Greco in Spain and Pontormo and his student and collaborator Bronzino—did more than appropriate the past or distort for the sake of distortion. They convinced us of their forms’ inner needs to stretch—almost unwillingly so—to the point of emotional overload and divine grace. Parmigianino, bridging Raphael and Ingres (and perhaps anticipating Art Nouveau), produced long-necked, boneless wonders— swan-like Madonnas. Tintoretto shot us like cannonballs deep into space, only to ricochet

us back to the plane. El Greco, one of the most willful distortionists in the history of art, and the most inventive among Mannerists, belongs in a category all by himself. Reinventing Byzantine, or pre-Renaissance conventions, El Greco created transcendent expressions of divinity that are wholly modern. Undaunted by High-Renaissance standards, he shattered Michelangelo’s classicism (he even suggested that, if the Papacy were offended by all that nudity, he could repaint a “better and more decorous” version of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment”). New Yorkers are probably familiar with Bronzino’s oil portraits at the Met and The Frick. Both The Frick’s “Lodovico Capponi” and the Met’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” which is included at the end of this exhibit, are masterful, cool, crystalline paintings in which the figures, seductive yet unapproachable, have been poised and polished to an erotically charged state of self-awareness. They look out at us as if from behind a sheet of glass. More infamous is Bronzino’s over-the-top “The Allegory of Venus and Cupid” (c. 1545), in London’s National Gallery. A surreal collage of figures—including an adolescent Cupid tweaking Venus’ nipple, scissorlike, between his fingers—the painting is a cornucopian orgy of wildly conflicting spaces, characters and emotions—all of which are displayed like vignettes yet held at arm’s length. Nothing that racy is on view in the Met’s show, which was organized by Carmen Bambach, Janet Cox-Rearick and George Goldner. And none of the drawings are “finished” in the modern sense of the word. A few of the drawings, in chalk and gouache, are fully worked-up, multi-figured compositions. Mostly, though, we are treated to a solid chronological survey of red or black chalk drawings by Bronzino (and occasionally by Pontormo), mostly studies

Articulating and inventing pockets of shimmering muscle across a male torso, Bronzino can seem to have forgotten exactly where he is and to have run off on a delicious tangent.

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for paintings or tapestries, of unfurling drapery and ﬁgures in a variety of poses; men’s backs, torsos, heads, hands, feet and legs; cherubic, doe-eyed children and lovely, blissful women with churning, powdersoft hair, some of whom foretell Bernini’s full-blown-Baroque “Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” One spiraling, linear web-like drawing, “Madonna and Child with St. John” by

Courtesy of Musée du Louvre

BRONZINO from page 1

“Seated Nude Youth Playing Panpipes,” ca. 1530-32.

Pontormo, looks like it could have come out of de Kooning’s studio. Bronzino does not rise to the restrained grace of Raphael, the subtle light of Leonardo or the sublime distortion of Ingres. Many of Bronzino’s decisions—the extension of a long, twisted ﬁnger or an acute tilt of a head—feel staged and overstated, even sentimental or campy. Articulating and inventing pockets of shimmering muscle across a male torso, Bronzino can seem to have forgotten exactly where he is and to have run off on a delicious tangent. (Sometimes Michelangelo, though without ever forgetting where he is, appears to do the same thing.) And Bronzino’s multi-ﬁgure drawings and paintings can feel like accumulations of separate tableaux—of actors, unaware of one another, hamming up their parts. Small, competing moves can arrest the paintings of larger harmonies. Bronzino’s art, beautiful, reserved

and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, also never attempts—even when it is quoting Michelangelo—to be “Michelangelesque.” In Bronzino, the sacred, classical ideals of the High Renaissance are being deftly left behind. But Bronzino knows how to entertain and how to anthropomorphize emotions—even when those emotions overact or misbehave. He is not without facility, expressive bravura, a sense of humor and a clear knowledge that eroticism, even in a dead Christ, can be a driving force that will reel in onlookers by the boatload. Bronzino’s art has its drawbacks, namely that his characters can seem too self-aware of their purpose in the pictures and, by extension, too aware of us, the audience. But it’s all part of the show. Bronzino’s ﬁgures sometimes look as startled by their actions as we are. <

The Drawings of Bronzino, through April 18. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave. (at E. 82nd St.), 212-535-7710.

ClassicalMUSIC

Two Orchestras, One Opera and a Hearing Aid Levine’s long concerts and an unexpected Carmen at a recent performance BY JAY NORDLINGER owing to such chefs as Monteux and Munch. ames Levine spends a fair amount of time Under Levine, did Daphnis et Chloé sound on Carnegie Hall’s stage. He brings his French? Not really. But its clarity, correctness, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra out of the straightforwardness and oomph were to be pit, to demonstrate some concert fare; and appreciated. Incidentally, Levine favors long he brings his Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, which assures that people have their down, to show New Yorkers what the New money’s worth, and then some. The average England band can do. It was the BSO—once concert is two hours, maybe a little under. known as “the aristocrat of orchestras”—that Levine rarely goes for less than two and a Levine led on a recent Monday night. half—and this is a conductor you truly want He had arranged an eclectic program, to hear. The next BSO concert at Carnegie beginning with Elliott Carter, one of his will be April 5, when the music will be Elijah, favorite composers. Carter turned 101 in Mendelssohn’s oratorio. December. He was already eight years old One more incidental note: There is when the United States entered World War nothing more ruinous during a concert or an I, and he remembers it well. I interviewed opera than a hearing aid that goes off-kilter Carter on the occasion of his 100th birthday, and whistles, piercingly. There are other and I don’t believe I have ever interviewed menaces: cell phones, talking, coughing, anyone sharper. snoring, plastic-bag fondling, teeth-sucking, In any case, Levine conducted his heavy breathing (not of the X-rated kind). But Dialogues for piano and orchestra, written in the worst, by far, is the hearing aid. And one 2003. It is a lively, interesting, semi-tuneful sang, maddeningly, through most of the recent work, probably as “accessible” as anything BSO concert. Some in the hall you will ﬁnd by Carter. And Levine and his were homicidal. soloist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, did it justice. he American Symphony Orchestra, As the audience applauded, Carter took a under Leon Botstein, renders a public bow, smiling and waving appreciatively. service: It performs music of the past Next came Harold in Italy, the symphony, that is almost never heard these days— of a sort, by Berlioz. Levine typically injects and which deserves a hearing, or two. It is some Classical discipline into Romantic commonly said that new music needs to be music; and so he did with Harold. The piece programmed. But much old music, gathering was taut, crisp, vivid, dramatic—thrilling, dust, cries out for programming too. actually. Berlioz is not supposed to sound like At the end of January, the ASO and Beethoven, at least according to most, but it can be wonderful when he does. Harold in Italy calls The average concert is two for a viola soloist, giving hours, maybe a little under. Levine that instrument one of rarely goes for less than two and its few opportunities to a half—and this is a conductor you show off. The BSO’s principal, Steven Ansell, truly want to hear. took full advantage, sharing Botstein did a concert of music by Henry with Levine what you might call a manful Cowell at Avery Fisher Hall. Cowell? Romanticism. After intermission, it was all Ravel. Aimard California composer who lived from 1897 to 1965 and did a great deal to establish returned for the left-hand concerto, which American music. His output reﬂects a lively, he handled satisfactorily. And, in Levine’s somewhat restless mind and considerable hands, the work overall had unusual rigor. talent. Some of his pieces are quintessentially The program ended with Daphnis et Chloé, American, such as his Hymn and Fuguing Suite No. 2. The performers were taking a Tunes, of which there are 18. Botstein victory lap, so to speak—an unplanned one. conducted No. 3. Also on the program was a Earlier in the day, it was announced that their harmonica concerto. Did you ever hear one recording of Daphnis et Chloé—the complete of those? ballet—had won a Grammy award. There are three ASO programs left The “aristocrat of orchestras” was once known, too, as a “French” orchestra. This was this season, the soonest of which is Feb.

Richard Termine

Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra. 24. Titled “After the Thaw,” it brings us composers in the Soviet Union who had more leeway than they once did in that horrid environment. One of the composers is Boris Tchaikovsky—no relation. What a cross that must have been to bear. he Met scheduled three Carmens for this season: three singers for the title role of Bizet’s immortal hit, in a new production by Sir Richard Eyre. They are Elina Garanca, the Latvian mezzo; Olga Borodina, the Russian mezzo; and Angela Gheorghiu, the Romanian soprano. All are different, one from the other, and all have much to bring to “La Carmencita.” Having seen and heard Garanca, I went, on a Saturday night, to check out Borodina (a famous Carmen for years). Alas, she had canceled. In her place was a fourth Carmen, a Hungarian mezzo named Viktoria Vizin. She was musical, personable, skilled, smart. She was also severely underpowered, having not nearly enough voice for this part. Not her fault—she was just miscast, vocally. Micaëla was Maija Kovalevska, the Latvian soprano. She has an appealing lyric voice,

although it at times could use more bend, more pliancy. Don José was the young tenor from Billings, Mont., Brandon Jovanovich. What a beautiful voice, kissed by youth. Not large, but adequate to this task. And he knows what to do with his voice, musically. Escamillo was the dashing Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien: smooth, as usual, but, like his Carmen, underpowered. Routinely, voices that are too small are booked for grand opera. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Marilyn Horne and others have noted. Also, note this about the four principals from this Carmen: They are very attractive. I mean, really, this is the kind of quartet you’d ﬁnd in a movie or a sitcom. And I will say about Vizin what I said about Garanca: Nice gams. But opera needs more than gams. This is true even in a sexed-up production like Sir Richard’s (an excellent production in many ways). Opera is a vocal and musical realm above all. And if looks ever gained priority— we, and the art, would be in serious trouble. Gheorghiu is scheduled to do her Carmen in late April. She’s a looker, to be sure. And, to be sure, she can sing. Yes, you can sometimes have it all. Sometimes. < February 9, 2010 | City Arts

AttheGALLERIES two to a frame, are painted and lashed together with thin cord that crisscrosses each segment. The overall visual effect is similar to the riggings of a sailboat. Within each little box are selectively edited inversions and displacements of parts of older paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne and Levine himself. Internal forms are highlighted by overlays of twisted wire, cording or, here and there, rusted spiral springs. Each rectangle, some enhanced with collage elements, becomes a tiny artwork in itself. In all, a spirited performance. (Maureen Mullarkey) Through Mar. 27. Washburn Gallery, 20 W. 57th St., 212-397-6780.

David Reed: Works on Paper

“Current” by Lloyd Martin.

Lloyd Martin: Shift All art is conditioned by its environment, but Lloyd Martin’s paintings connect to their surroundings in a particularly direct way. For many years, the fading, peeling walls of the old textile mill that houses his studio have surfaced, semiabstracted, in the lyrical grids of his canvases. His painting’s combination of somber architectural lines and pale, richly textured ﬁelds—repeatedly scraped and overpainted, with occasional drips and splatters—plys an evocative vein midway between the concrete and the ephemeral. At Stephen Haller, his 11 recent canvases (all dated 2009) add some new twists. The light backgrounds are now set off by brightly colored bars, and while earlier compositions were stabilized by bracketing forms, several of the recent paintings are dominated by horizontals that stream almost unchecked by vertical notes; titles like “Scan,” “Rake” and “Current” capture, appropriately enough, their effect of scenes whirring past the viewer’s standpoint. The multiplying of movements—speeding horizontals and pops of color, in addition to the familiar, layered depths—produces varying results. The rushing bars of “Scan” compete equally with the pale background in a satisfying, if not gripping, fashion; intervals are faintly periodic rather than

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momentous. My favorite paintings preserve the spacious cadences of his earlier work. The 12foot-wide “Current” vibrates with a hierarchy of pressures; its spare horizontals, gathering in denser and looser sequences, palpably stretch to cover the dominating off-white ﬁelds, which in turn show off their layered depths of cool and warm tints over earthy yellows. Particularly intriguing are the “simple” oppositions of “Notch,” in which the obtuse note of a single dark “L” at the bottom edge talks across broad expanses to several horizontals lifting above. Hovering in-between, twin ghostly rectangles subtly punctuate the ﬂood of off-white textures. In this prolonged, contained meditation, every call has its response. (John Goodrich) Through Feb. 20. Stephen Haller Gallery, 542 W. 26th St., 212-741-7777.

Tom Levine: Stringed Instruments & Other Recent Works The crisis of ﬂatness and the challenge of modernist painting is long over. By now, it is acceptable to admit that painting, like music, has no meaning outside of itself. Every painting is a material object that can be fragmented, reinvented and reorganized. This is a good time to cut art up and have some fun with it. Tom Levine does just that in his third show

at Washburn. (His previous exhibitions were held primarily in Germany.) He has worked the modernist grid for several decades, combining variations of a single image on multiple square panels. His current work is a lively rummage through the art historical bin for cultural icons to be retooled and embellished. Contemporary artists routinely appropriate wellknown images by their predecessors, a way of treading water in the postmodern seas. Against the odds, Levine creates work that loses nothing in originality or aesthetic appeal by comparison with its art historical antecedent. And he refashions even his own older inventory with gusto. Tom is the younger brother of James Levine, music director of the Boston Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera. In his day job, so to speak, he acts as the conductor’s right-hand man, and that sibling relationship has significance for Tom Levine’s art. Both brothers share a gift for personal interpretation of canonical works that is stylish but never flashy, never glib. One brother brings to playful translations of Picasso or Matisse a spirit of reenactment that bears affinity with the other’s probing renditions of Berlioz or Ravel. Tom Levine’s boxed miniatures—part painting, part readymade, part assemblage—are conceived in a minor key, which is part of their charm. Dominating the exhibition is a suite of 16 identically sized arrangements of four rectangles each. Small, flat boxes,

Given the state of the economy, it’s worth pondering the timing of David Reed’s exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery in Soho. It is, we are told, the first time “anywhere” that the veteran New York painter has exhibited drawings—studies done on graph paper and covered with sketches, measurements, color swatches and handwritten notations. Fans of the artist’s abstract canvases—cinematic exegeses on the primacy of the brushstroke—did a double take upon learning that Reed made drawings. Who knew? The willingness to go public with them could be attributable to the relative affordability of workson-paper—relative, that is, to the encompassing (and expensive) paintings for which Reed is best known. But cynicism shouldn’t be an obstacle to the attractions of following an artist’s running commentary on paintings-in-progress, of watching him sort through the vagaries of his art and re-think pictorial strategies. Several sheets contain ruled geometric structures, compositional underpinnings offering evidence of Reed’s debt to the great California painter John McLaughlin. But the drawings also point to less austere precedents—a reproduction of Domenico Vezziano’s “St. John In The Desert” is affixed to one page; elsewhere, Andy Warhol is listed as a possible inspiration for “new color ideas/ sequences.” Reed’s notes mention studio visits, failed color choices, technical issues (“worried about the [paint] drying in this heavy humidity”) and, less frequently, the world outside. “Saw the end of the world,” Reed declaims after recalling the “clear golden light after 9/11.” Then there are the signature ribbon-like brushstrokes rendered in the signature Jolly Rancher palette—sickly sweet lavenders, icy blues and livid, pinkish oranges predominate. Stained halos of oil surround each mark, evidence that Reed left the surfaces of the drawings unprimed. This characteristic is likewise apparent in an independent suite of small works, wherein the artist’s chilly dramatics are downsized into prettified totems of color, light and texture. Would that the pieces were without the nagging strain of self-consciousness they so assiduously try to transcend. But this is a light and lively exhibition all the same. (Mario Naves) Through Mar. 6. Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster St., 212-343-0441.

“Working Drawing for Painting 561” by David Reed.

Courtesy of the artist and Lesley Heller Workspace

“Running Subway” at Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop.

getting to know better. Maybe curator Andrew will take the hint. (MN)

“Rio Pueblo, 1959” by Naomi Tatum, oil on canvas

Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop is an ingratiating tour de force that succeeds as spectacle, if light as history. From the introductory film, through the digital recreations of “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa,” to the interactive displays and wooden models of Leonardo’s sundry engineering designs, the exhibition has all the ingredients for an absorbing outing. There are Disneyesque touches to captivate any youngster: that age-blackened skeleton, a mechanical lion, leather bound quartos in period stage sets, a lifesized robotic soldier, war machines—the whole panoply of detailed simulations of Leonardo’s technological visions. Historians consider it unlikely that any of the schemes sketched in the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo’s encyclopedic collection of notes and drawings, were ever realized. Exhibition blurbs admit that the artist’s designs are incomplete and the notes difficult to decipher. Yet whether these plans existed off the page is beside the point. The models aim to demonstrate that they “could have” worked if constructed in particular ways. More significantly, they make concrete the character and breadth of Leonardo’s prodigious curiosity. In that sense, the models are exhilarating, even instructive in unintended ways. They suggest that our inner lives—and certainly our children’s— would be richer if we stopped texting and carried a notebook instead. The project is the brainchild of Leonardo3, an entrepreneurial venture that blends technical savvy with showmanship to popularize knowledge of Leonardo. Think P.T. Barnum for the digital age. Apotheosizing da Vinci as “the greatest genius that ever lived” is infotainment hyperbole that plucks the artist from the context that nourished his ingenuity. It understates his training and removes his technical interests from the long history of classical mechanics, an Aristotelian legacy. (Leonardo’s flying machine owes its soul as much to Aristotle as to Icarus.) It overlooks the 15thcentury’s inheritance of the advances in medieval technology. Finally, it ignores Leonardo’s firsthand debt to the inventive hoists, cranes and engineering projects of Filippo Brunelleschi, a Renaissance giant. That said, as popular heroes go, far better Leonardo da Vinci than the latest American Idol winner or the stock offerings of celebrity culture. At

the risk of sounding corny, the exhibit is inspiring. It is designed to excite the imagination, particularly of the young. Here is a goad to put down ﬁrstshooter video games and observe the world with an impassioned eye. (MM) Through Mar. 14. Discovery Times Square Exposition, 226 W. 44th St., 866-987-9692.

Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then And Now Any time history is broadened, or at least cracked open a bit, for the greater good of art, everyone benefits. In that regard, Jason Andrew, curator of the Jack Tworkov Estate and indefatigable booster of the Bushwick art scene, has done a mitzvah in organizing The Wells Street Gallery Revisited, a small but thoughtful exhibition at the Lesley Heller Workspace. It focuses on mid-20thcentury Chicago and a cadre of (as a critic of the time described them) “young, fire-eating vanguard artists” who made a principled stand for abstraction in the face of an entrenched gallery scene. Inspired by Willem de Kooning’s “Excavation”— the Ab Ex masterpiece won first prize at the Art Institute of Chicago’s 1951 annual—these Second City avant-gardists embraced abstraction with a fervor typical of the recently converted. They began mounting a yearly series of anti-establishment shows titled Exhibition Momentum, the Midwestern equivalent of the salon des refuses and a showplace for like-minds. In 1957, they opened a storefront gallery on, yes, Wells Street. Spearheaded primarily by husband-and-wife painters Robert Natkin and Judith Dolnick— leftover cash from their nuptials was, in fact, used to fund the space—Wells Street Gallery quickly gained notoriety as the city’s hub for advanced art. The Heller exhibition includes old and new works by several of the Wells Street artists, and features a display of period announcements that still crackle with headlong excitement. Not a few of the artists, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, the photographer Aaron Siskind, and Natkin and Dolnick, would gain renown upon leaving Chicago, but that doesn’t relegate the rest of the Wells Street crew to the dusty precincts of provincialism or obscurity. As seen at Heller, Richard Bogart, Ronald Slowinski and Naomi Tatum stand out for their quality, ambition and, in Tatum’s case especially, beguiling strangeness. Here, we think, are painters worth

Through Feb. 28, Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard St., 212-410-6120.

You Are Now X by Y You are now on display at Bit Forms gallery where artist Daniel Rozin has created five interactive sculptures that merge humans and machines into seamless works of art. Using interactive video, algorithms, and mechanical engineering, Rozin creates mirrors made of metal, wood or computer screens that react to your presence. Rozin’s art machines can see you, and they both respond to and encourage your behavior. “Mirrors Mirror” measures 88 x 66 inches, and is made up of 768 polished steel tiles with a camera placed in the center of the vertical rectangle. Your movements are translated into digital pixels that appear on, or move the work’s reflective surface; creating both abstract and figurative patterns. People waving their hands and jumping around may look more like entertainment than art to some, but what we’re witnessing is the essences of the creative process as the conceptual is made

interactive, and the viewer becomes the creator/ performer. The works themselves are beautifully built. Nearly silence, they whirl and flip into patterns we recognize as ourselves. “Rust Mirror” is similar to “Mirrors Mirror” in construction. Set on a gravel carpet with its metal tiles rusted, however, the work’s meaning takes on an ecological aspect. When not in use its surface tiles flip down the face in a pattern that mimics raindrops. The piece “X by Y” randomly moves through all the possibilities of the Cartesian axes that organizes the picture plane, bring the minimalist beauty of the grit to life like no static drawing or sculpture could. With computers and cell phones—and soon iPads—in hand, our evolving relationship with technology is no longer science fiction. For Rozin and the artists of Bit Forms, interactivity is not a limited branch of history like Kinetic, or Op Art was, because it’s not confined by any one theory or style, instead they are commenting, each in their own way, on our present condition and the future of art with machines. Through Mar. 20, Bit Forms, 529 W 20 St. 2fl., 212366-6939.

February 9, 2010 | City Arts

ArtsAGENDA Gallery listings courtesy of

DCKT CONTEMPORARY: Josh Azzarella. Opens Feb. 19,

195 Bowery, 212-741-9955. DAVID ZWIRNER: Thomas Ruff. Opens Feb. 11. Diana

Thater: “Between Science and Magic.” Opens Feb. 11, 519 W. 19th St., 212-517-8677. GEORGE BILLIS GALLERY: Kurt Solmssen, Stephen Hicks and Tony Brown. Open Feb. 9, 555 W. 25th St., 212-645-2621. GLADSTONE GALLERY: Banks Violette. Opens Feb. 12, 530 W. 21st St., 212-206-7606. HESKIN CONTEMPORARY: Nikki Lindt: “Recent Paintings and Works on Paper.” Opens Feb. 18, 443 W. 37th, Ground Floor, 212-967-4972. LOWER EASTSIDE GIRLS CLUB: Wahala Temi: “Body Work.” Opens Feb. 18, 56 E. 1st St., 212-982-1633. LUHRING AUGUSTINE: Daido Moriyama. Opens Feb. 13, 531 W. 24th St., 212-206-9100. MIGHTY TANAKA: Alexandra Pacula: “Turbulent Utopia.” Opens Feb. 19, 68 Jay St., 718-596-8781. PACEWILDENSTEIN: Robert Ryman: “Large-Small, Thick-Thin, Light Reﬂecting, Light Absorbing.” Opens Feb. 19, 32 E. 57th St., 212-421-3292. RECESS: Bruce High Quality Foundation. Opens Feb. 10, 41 Grand St., 646-836-3765. ZIEHERSMITH: “Band of Bikers.” Opens Feb. 18, 516 W. 20th St., 212-229-1088.

GALLERIES

PRISKA C. JUSCHKA FINE ART: Ryan Schneider: “Send

Me Through.” Ends Feb. 20, 547 W. 27th St., 2nd Fl., 212-244-4320. RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS: “One Part Human.” Ends Feb. 15, 31 Mercer St., 212-226-3232. SMACK MELLON: John von Bergen. Ends Feb. 21. Michelle Weinstein. Ends Feb. 21, 92 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, 718-834-8761. YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY: Alex Prager: “WeekEnd.” Ends Feb. 20, 535 W. 22nd St., 3rd Fl., 646-230-9610. YVON LAMBERT: Markus Schinwald. Ends Feb. 20. Koo Jeong-A. Ends Feb. 20, 550 W. 21st St., 212-242-3611. ZIEHERSMITH: Eddie Martinez. Ends Feb. 13, 516 W. 20th St., 212-229-1088.

AUCTIONS CHRISTIE’S: Christie’s Interiors. Feb. 9 & 10, 10 a.m.

and 2, 20 Rockefeller Plz., 212-636-2000. DOYLE NEW YORK: Doyle at Home. Feb. 10, 10 a.m.,

175 E. 87th St., 212-427-2730. ROGALLERY.COM: Fine art buyers and sellers in

online live art auctions. 800-888-1063, www.rogallery.com. SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES: Signed Historical Photographs from the Jerome Shochet Collection. Feb. 11, 1:30, 104 E. 25th St., 212-254-4710.

JAZZ

41 COOPER GALLERY: “Rites of Passage: 1995-2009.”

Ends Feb. 11, The Cooper Union School of Art, 41 Cooper Gallery, 212-353-4200. 303 GALLERY: Inka Essenhigh. Ends Feb. 20, 547 W. 21st St., 212-255-1121. APEXART: “The Incidental Person.” Ends Feb. 20, 291 Church St., 212-431-5270. ARTISTS SPACE: “Rip It Up and Start Again.” Ends Feb. 20, 38 Greene St., 3rd Fl., 212-226-3970. CHEIM & READ: Diane Arbus: “In the Absence of Others.” Ends Feb. 13. William Eggleston: “21st Century.” Ends Feb. 13, 547 W. 25th St., 212242-7727. FIRST STREET GALLERY: Suzi Evalenko: “What Mattered Most: A Life in Art and Letters.” Ends Feb. 27, 526 W. 26th St., Rm. 915, 646-336-8053. FISCHBACH GALLERY: Brad Marshall: “Outlook: Small Paintings.” Ends Mar. 13, 210 11th Ave., 8th Fl., 212-759-2345. GAGOSIAN GALLERY: Philip Taaffe: “Works on Paper.” Ends Feb. 20, 555 W. 24th St., 212-741-1111. HESKIN CONTEMPORARY: Erick Johnson. Ends Feb. 13, 443 W. 37th, Ground Floor, 212-967-4972. HOGAR COLLECTION: Lee Ranaldo: “A random collection of cells.” Ends Feb. 22, 362 Grand St., Brooklyn, 718-388-5022. JAMES COHAN GALLERY NEW YORK: “Demons, Yarns & Tales.” Ends Feb. 13, 533 W. 26th St., 212-7149500. LEHMANN MAUPIN: Christian Hellmich: “The Array/ Transfer-Domino.” Ends Feb. 20, 540 W. 26th St., 212-255-2923. LUDLOW 38: Kriwet. Ends Feb. 21, 38 Ludlow St., 212-228-6848. MARLBOROUGH GALLERY: “Look Again.” Ends Feb. 13, 545 W. 25th St., 212-463-8634. MIKE WEISS GALLERY: Stefanie Gutheil: “Kopftheater.” Ends Feb. 20, 520 W. 24th St., 212-691-6899. PACEWILDENSTEIN: Richard Misrach. Ends Feb. 20, 534 W. 25th St., 212-929-7000. PACEWILDENSTEIN: “On the Square.” Ends Feb. 13, 32 E. 57th St., 212-421-3292. PAULA COOPER GALLERY: Joel Shapiro. Ends Feb. 13, 521 W. 21st St., 212-255-1105. PAULA COOPER GALLERY: “Photography.” Ends Feb. 19, 465 W. 23rd St., 212-255-1105.

City Arts | www.cityarts.info

ALLEN ROOM: Singer Leslie Uggams performs. Feb.

20, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Time Warner Center, Broadway at W. 60th St., 212-721-6500; 8:30 & 10:30, $45+. DIZZY’S CLUB COCA COLA: Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Freddy Cole and Valentine Swing. Feb. 9-14, 33 W. 60th St., 212-258-9595; times vary, $15+. HARLEM STAGE: Pianist Vijay Iyer’s Holding It Down takes place as part of the WaterWorks commissioning series. Feb. 10, 150 Convent Ave., 212-281-9240; 7:30, $15. JAZZ STANDARD: Emilio Solla & The Tango Jazz Conspiracy. Feb. 9. Steve Kuhn and the Ravi Coltrane Duo. Feb. 10. Rene Marie. Feb. 11-14, 116 E. 27th St., 212-576-2232; 7:30, $20+. OAK ROOM SUPPER CLUB: Husband-and-wife team Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano begin their ﬁrst joint extended engagement at the Oak Room, debuting their show This Thing Called Love. Feb. 9-Mar. 6, 59 W. 44th St., 212-419-9331; times vary, $50+. VILLAGE VANGUARD: Gerald Clayton Trio. Feb. 9-14. Robert Glasper Trio. Feb. 16-21, 178 7th Ave. S., 212-255-4037; times vary, $30+. ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH: As part of the Charles Mingus Festival, St. Bartholomew’s hosts a free concert with the Mingus Orchestra. Feb. 13, 325 Park Ave., 917-493-4429; 7, free.

MUSIC & OPERA ALICE TULLY HALL: Beethoven Cycles: Quartets III:

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents the complete quartets of Beethoven. Feb. 9, Starr Theater, 1941 Broadway, 212-6714050; 7:30, $65. CARNEGIE HALL: Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Feb. 9. Pianist Michael Feinstein. Feb. 10. Pianist Emanual Ax. Feb. 10. New York Philharmonic with Alan Gilbert. Feb. 13. Singer and guitarist Richie Havens. Feb. 19, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; times vary, $34+. CELL THEATRE: The Center for Contemporary Opera presents Susan Hurley’s Anaïs, a psychological drama about the deep confessions that surfaced

courtesy DCKT Contemporary

GALLERY OPENINGS

“Untitled #86 (Lopez),” by Josh Azzarella. during the last hours of Anaïs Nin’s life. Feb. 11, 338 W. 23rd St., 800-838-3006; 8, $20. CITY WINERY: The duo of Daniel Binelli, bandoneon, and Polly Ferman, piano, presents Entre Dos on a Tango and Wine Night. Feb. 18, 155 Varick St., 212-608-0555; $15+. FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN: A performance by New York City-based Threeﬁfty Duo kicks off the inaugural season of Music at First. Feb. 19, 124 Henry St.; 7:30, $10. JUILLIARD SCHOOL: Juilliard Organists. Feb. 10. New York Woodwind Quintet. Feb. 11, Paul Hall, 155 W. 65th St., 212-799-5000; 8, free. MANHATTAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC: David Gilbert conducts world premieres of works by eight students in the school’s composition department. Feb. 12, 120 Claremont Ave., 212-749-2802; 7:30, free. METROPOLITAN OPERA: Diana Damrau and Juan Diego Flórez star in La Fille du Régiment, Donizetti’s comedy about the tough-hearted young woman who was rescued and raised by the 21st regiment of the French army, and her romance with a soldier. Ends Feb. 22, West 62nd Street (betw. Columbus & Amsterdam Aves.), 212-362-6000; times vary, $27+. PETER JAY SHARP THEATRE: The week-long Composers Now launches at Symphony Space, bringing living composers together through concerts and activities in various spaces. Feb. 22-28, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400; times & prices vary. WEILL RECITAL HALL: Soprano Amaya Arberas, pianist Eric Clark and cellist Ana Bermúdez perform Cuba: Songs of Love and Hate, as part of the Valentine’s Day gala concert. Feb. 13, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 5:30, $20. WMP CONCERT HALL: Duo MSM with violinist Regi Papa and pianist Kyoung Im Kim performs works by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Feb. 12, 31 E. 28th St., 212-582-7536; 7:30, $10+.

ART EVENTS SEPHARDIC JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: The 14th annual

New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival brings 13 ﬁlms, talkbacks with directors, gala receptions and more. Ends Feb. 11, Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St., www.sephardicﬁlmfest.org. SVA LECTURES: Megan Craig is a painter and an assistant professor of philosophy and art at SUNY Stony Brook. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Lines of Flight,” was presented at New York’s Sundaram Tagore Gallery. Feb. 16, 133/144 W. 21 St., Rm. 101C, 212-592-2010; 6:30.

DANCE ALEX ESCALANTE: Alex Escalante and his dancers

draw inspiration from propaganda techniques found in advertising, politics and public relations. Feb. 18-20, The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St., 212-255-5793; 8, $12. DANCE ENTROPY: Green Space is proud to present Kinetic Architecture’s Forever Hold Your Peace (for now) as part of its Take Root performance. Feb. 20, Green Space, 37-24 24th St., Long Island City, 718-956-3037; 8:30, $15. DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP: DTW presents the Fresh Tracks performance and residency program. Feb. 11-13, 219 W. 19th St., 212-691-6500; times vary, $12+. JOSÉ LIMÓN DANCE COMPANY: As part of the Anna Sokolow Centennial Celebration, this program features Anna Sokolow’s Rooms and José Limón’s There is a Time with live music in collaboration with the Manhattan School of Music. Feb. 9 & 10, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St.; 8, $20. NEW YORK CITY BALLET: New York City Ballet presents All Robbins, a program of choreography by

Jerome Robbins. Feb. 18-24, David H. Koch Theater, 212-870-5570; times vary, $20+. Parsons Dance: Parsons Dance presents Remember Me, an all-new version of the dance/rock opera with the lead vocalists and music of the Grammynominated East Village Opera Company. Ends Feb. 21, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-2420800; times vary, $10+. Works and Process: Works and Process at the Guggenheim presents Dressed to Dance, a program performed by the world’s greatest flamenco dancers on the occasion of Flamenco Festival 2010 in historic costumes by Spanish artists including Picasso and Dali. Feb. 10, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3587; 9, $10+.

Museums Abrons Art Center: “Where They At: A Multi-

Media Archive of New Orleans Bounce.” Feb. 11-Mar. 27, 466 Grand St., 212-598-0400. American Museum of Natural History: “Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World.” Ends August 2010. The Butterfly Conservatory. Ends May 2010, Central Park West at West 79th Street, 212-769-5100. Asia Society and Museum: “Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea.” Ends May 2, 725 Park Ave., 212-288-6400. Brooklyn Academy of Music: “Archive Exhibition.” Ends spring 2010, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave., 3rd Fl., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100. Brooklyn Historical Society: “It Happened in Brooklyn.” Ongoing, 128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, 718-222-4111. Brooklyn Museum: “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanity Fair of 1864.” Ends Oct. 17, 200 Eastern Pkwy., Brooklyn, 718-638-5000. Chelsea Art Museum: “IN/SIGHT 2010.” Ends Feb. 13, 556 W. 22nd St., 212-255-0719. Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: “Quicktake: Rodarte.” Opens Feb. 11. “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation.” Ends Apr. 4, 2 E. 91st St., 212-849-8400. The Drawing Center: Iannis Xenakis: “Composer, Architect, Visionary.” Ends Apr. 8, 35 Wooster St., 212-219-2166. The Frick Collection: “Masterpieces of European Painting from Dulwich Picture Gallery.” Opens Mar. 9, 1 E. 70th St., 212-288-0700. Japan Society: “Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection.” Opens Mar. 12, 333 E. 47th St., 212-832-1155. Jewish Museum: “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention.” Ends Mar. 14, 1109 5th Ave., 212423-3200. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Cinnabar: The Chinese Art of Carved Lacquer.” Ends Feb. 21. “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.” Ends May 9, 1000 5th Ave., 212535-7710. The Morgan Library & Museum: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” Ends Mar. 14. “Rome After Raphael.” Ends May 9, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008. El Museo del Barrio: “Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis.” Ends Feb. 28, 1230 5th Ave., 212-831-7272. Museum of American Finance: “Women of Wall Street.” Ends Mar. 2010, 48 Wall St., 212-908-4110. Museum of Arts and Design: “Slash: Paper Under the Knife.” Ends Apr. 4, 2 Columbus Cir., 212-299-7777. Museum of Jewish Heritage: “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges.” Ends Feb. 21, 36 Battery Pl., 646437-4200.

.info

Museum of Modern Art: “In Situ: Architecture and

Landscape.” Ends Feb. 22. “Gabriel Orozco.” Ends Mar. 1. “Tim Burton.” Ends Apr. 26, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400. National Museum of the American Indian: “Beauty Surrounds Us.” Ends Mar. 31, 1 Bowling Green, 212-514-3700. New Museum: “Nikhil Chopra: Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX.” Ends Feb. 14, 235 Bowery, 212-219-1222. New-York Historical Society: “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society.” Ends Mar. 25. “Lincoln and New York.” Ends Mar. 25. 170 Central Park West, 212-873-3400. New York Public Library: “The Jazz Loft Project.” Opens Feb. 17. “Candide at 250: Scandal and Success.” Ends April 2010. “Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009.” Ends June 26, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, West 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, 917-275-6975. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s.” Ends Mar. 20, 40 Lincoln Center Plz., 212-870-1630. Noguchi Museum: “Noguchi ReINstalled.” Ends Oct. 24, 33rd Road at Vernon Boulevard, Queens, 718-721-2308. Rubin Museum of Art: “The Red Book of C.G. Jung.” Ends Feb. 15, 150 W. 17th St., 212-620-5000. Skyscraper Museum: “China Prophecy: Shanghai.” Ends Mar. 2010, 39 Battery Pl., 212-968-1961. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: “Tino Sehgal.” Ends Mar. 10. “Anish Kapoor: Memory.” Ends Mar. 28, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3500. Spazio522: Bonnie Edelman: “Sermo Per Equus.” Ends Feb. 15, 526 W. 26th St., ste. 522, 212929-1981. Studio Museum of Harlem: “Wardell Milan: Drawings of Harlem.” Ends Mar. 14. “30 Seconds off an Inch.” Ends Mar. 14, 144 W. 125th St., 212-864-4500.

cityarts.info

and be eligible to win a pair of tickets to

The Philadelphia Flower Show February 28 – March 7

www.cityarts.info | 212.268.8600

N OFebruary C T11-March U R20,N ES 2010 Giglio Dante

Theater

Albert Fayngold

As You Like It: The Bridge Project presents Shake-

Simon Gaon

speare, as Mendes and company explore outcasts, power and magical lands. Ends Mar. 13, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., 718-636-4100. Billy Elliot: This Tony-winning adaptation of the 2000 film chronicles a young British boy’s desire to dance ballet in a poverty-choked coal-mining town. Open run, Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200. Chicago: The long-running revival of Kander and Ebb’s musical about sex, murder, and celebrity continues to razzle-dazzle. Open run, Ambassador Theatre, 219 W. 49 St., 212-239-6200. Fuerza Bruta: Look Up: A visual dance-rave, techno-ride, Latino walking-on-the-ceiling fiesta from Buenos Aires. Open run, Daryl Roth Theatre, 101 E. 15th St., 212-239-2600. Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical: Diane Paulus’ celebrated revival of the 1967 hippie-centered musical continues its rocking Broadway run. Open run, Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200. In the Heights: This heartfelt and high-spirited love letter to Washington Heights features a salsa and hip-hop flavored score by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Open run, Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46 St., 212-221-1211. Memphis: A New Musical: Set in the titular city during the segregated 1950s, this musical charts the romance between a white DJ and a black singer as rock-and-roll begins to emerge.

David Geiser Dae Woong Nam Han Hong Park “Rain #5,” 2009, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Han Hong Park

NABI GALLERY 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001212 929 6063 | www.nabigallery.com

February 09, 2010 | City Arts

ArtsAGENDA

“The Davis House In Snow,” by Kurt Solmssen. Open run, Shubert Theatre, 225 W. 44 St., 212-239-6200. MOMENTS AND LEMONS: Thom Fogarty directs the work of playwright Fred Giacinto, which follows the mishaps of an unfortunate man named Casper. Opens Feb. 18, Theater for the New City, 155 1st Ave., 212-254-1109. NEXT TO NORMAL: A woman and her family struggle to

City Arts | www.cityarts.info

cope with her bipolar disorder in this emotional, Tony-winning musical. Open run, Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: Prep yourself for the forthcoming sequel by seeing (or re-seeing) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Gothic musical romance. Open run, Majestic Theatre, 245 W. 44 St., 212-239-6200.

SOUTH PACIFIC: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical in

its ﬁrst Broadway revival. Ends May 30, Lincoln Center Theater, 150 W. 65th St., 212-239-6210. TOSCA AND THE TWO DOWNSTAIRS: Kairos Italy Theater and The Cell present the U.S. premiere of the satirical play based on Puccini’s Tosca. Ends Feb. 21, The Cell, 338 W. 23rd St., 800-838-3006; times vary, $15+.

To submit a gallery listing, please visit www.artcat.com/submission. For any other type of submission, please email all relevant information to cityarts@manhattanmedia.com at least three weeks prior to the event. Listings run on a space-available basis and cannot be guaranteed to appear.

PainttheTOWN

By Amanda Gordon

ART WITH A HEART When the art world converged on Gagosian Gallery’s Chelsea outpost to raise money for the Partnership for the Homeless, there wasn’t much time to sip Cleaver Co.’s Pear Sparklers. Guests were focused on scribbling their names on bid sheets posted to the walls for works by Dustin Yellin, Jane Kaplowitz, Mark di Suvero and many others. “The thing to do here is to come with an eraser,” said John Silberman, a lawyer who represents the artist Richard Serra. Rachel Judlowe, an arts publicist for Ruder Finn, placed multiple bids for a Sol LeWitt print, but lost out to Jo Carole Lauder. The competition was also ﬁerce during the live auction conducted by Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s. There were no telephone bidders, just collectors such as Randy Slifka, who snapped up a deKooning charcoal on paper for $28,000 (no buyer’s premium here). The total amount raised topped $2 million. Serra, who masterminded the event with his wife Clara, noted that the Partnership for the Homeless and the art world are “two seemingly different worlds,” but that “they share the potential for transformation.” P.S. 1’s new leader, Klaus Biesenbach, made a more bleak connection. “It’s so cold outside tonight, I think that drives home the point that we need to support the homeless.”

Clockwise, from top left: Agnes Gund with Warrie Price, who reports bids are out to build Battery Park’s aquaticthemed carousel; Jessye Norman; Klaus Biesenbach; Richard and Clara Serra; Larry Gagosian checks out a Kelly bag tricked out by Tom Sachs; Sotheby’s guys Tobias Meyer and Anthony Grant; Shalom Harlow and artist Dustin Yellin, who donated his “Cherry Nut,” 2009, for auction; Alberto Mugrabi and Peter Brant. At right: Guggenheim Museum director Richard Armstrong.

FOOD AND FUNDRAISING

NEXTS & NOTES... FOR HAITI

The diminutive, Russian-born, New York-raised singersongwriter Regina Spektor extended her hand to take another elderﬂower tartlet. “I’m usually into olives, pickles and herring,” Spektor said, “but these are amazing. It’s like perfume, in a good way.” Spektor was standing in the kitchen of Joshua Bell’s Flatiron District apartment, where the culinary team of Bedford Post Inn (owned by Richard Gere and Cary Lowell) had set up shop to feed more than 100 guests. The celebrated violinist had thrown open his home to raise money for Education Through Music, which provides music instruction in inner-city elementary and middle schools. “Music is essential,” said Bell, before playing for the crowd seated in his living room. The event also celebrated the new group Music Unites, which is taking a more pop-driven approach to getting children excited about music. It has put together a citywide student choir that will debut March 2 at Carnegie Hall, in a tribute concert to The Who. But there wasn’t too much time to talk about music, thanks to the temptations of Bedford Post’s lavish spread. Bell was won over after tasting the butternut squash soup. “Having my kitchen used for food like this—it’s amazing,” he said.

COMING UP: On Feb. 12 (one month after the earthquake), model Naomi Campbell is staging a Fashion for Relief show in the tents of Bryant Park, one day after Fashion Week kicks off. The public is invited for $100-$150... Michael Dorf’s City Winery has already raised $75,000 for Partners in Health, Doctors Without Borders and Jewish Renaissance Medical Center with concerts featuring The Swell Season, Patti Smith and Josh Ritter. To bring the total to $100,000, the music club with a vino spin will be hosting a Feb. 22 wine auction... The piano phenom Lang Lang and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival will perform Mar. 12 at Carnegie Hall to raise money for UNICEF relief efforts. The program includes Beethoven, Mozart and Prokofiev... At The Bell House in Brooklyn, Jimmy Fallon, the band The Walkmen and Lauren Ambrose and the Leisure Class (that’s the Six Feet Under actress’ new band) entertained to raise $35,000 on behalf of Save the Children and Partners in Health... Judah Friedlander, Susan Sarandon and model Doutzen Kroes scored $20,000 for a pediatric hospital in Port-au-Prince during a benefit at the ping-pong social club SPiN NYC... The auction of an “I’m With Coco” poster by Mike Mitchell, signed by Conan O’Brien, brought the total for Partners in Health to $10,000 at the Comix Club’s “I’m With Coco” Haiti benefit. The event featured stand-up from Janeane Garofalo and Dave Attell among others. And, just in case you missed it, MTV’s Hope for Haiti telethon raised more than $58 million, with help in New York from Wyclef Jean, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Shakira and Sting.

Clockwise, from top: Joshua Bell; Lawrence Robins and Michelle Edgar; Regina Spektor. At right: Carl Pforzheimer passes out Bedford Post Inn’s vanilla-sugared doughnuts to Yuki Oakley and Lotti Oakley

For more party coverage, visit www.cityarts.info. To contact the author or purchase photos, email Amanda. Gordon@rocketmail.com; bit.ly/agphotos February 9, 2010 | City Arts