Daily Blague

On Friday afternoon, I persuaded Ms NOLA to go to the Guggenheim. She had planned to go home and do responsible things, but I begged, "Aw, c'mon," and when she told her mother about her dilemma, her mother (who is a great lady) said, "What's to decide?," So we met at the Met for lunch, and took a quick run through the Lehman wing, which Ms NOLA never seen and which I always forget to explore. This is where financier Robert Lehman's collection is displayed, in settings that imitate the rooms of his town house, much as they were when Lehman enjoyed them. The Lehman Wing is therefore a museum within the museum. There are lots of terrific pictures: many Italian "primitives," as Lehman might have called them, the Met's great Ingres (La princesse de Broglie), and just enough tacky stuff to heighten the personality. Ms NOLA had a lot of fun with the dollhouse-like Life of Jesus, an amateur sculpture from the eighteenth century that uses a lot of little shells.

Then we went to see "Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints." Occupying three circuits of the ramp, the show is a gimmick - as you may suspect from the museum's page. The superficial similarities pound home the wholly antagonistic aesthetics of Mapplethorpe on the one hand and the Mannerists on the other. Mannerist nudes are cluttered and almost violently wound up. The mood is one of hysteria and anxiety. It's easy to see why this might be so: the Mannerist period coincided with the systematic anatomization of the human body. Artists knew muscle groups but, given the lack of gyms and so forth, rarely saw them fully developed, so they used their imaginations, and came up with the wildly hypertrophic and sexually unappealing nudes that characterize the period. Their work has a documentary feel, and is almost academic.

Mapplethorpe, in contrast, is a cool classicist, sleek, understated, and calm - even when his subjects are not. His aesthetic is art moderne: regulated, calibrated, beautifully lighted. It is about beauty and the dangers to beauty. The show's selection of photographs was almost coy, given Mapplethorpe's reputation and total output. Genitalia could be seen here and there, but never in sexualized circumstances. The busyness and unpleasantness of leather and chains, ironically, would have brought his work closer to the Mannerist prints, but it was clear that the museum didn't want to open that can of worms. Mapplethorpe's mildly naughty but not "indecent" photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger makes it plain as day that even today's most overbuilt men do not have the bodies that Mannerist artists imagined, and that the contours of skin covering developed muscles is not sharp but sheer. This show is clever, certainly, but it is empty, too.

Unsatisfied, I wanted something more when we left Frank Lloyd Wright's peculiar and hip-paining structure. The National Academy of Design was right there, just half a block up Fifth. The NAD's current exhibit is devoted to paintings by Jean Hélion (1904-1987). Hélion started out with very agreeable abstractions in color combinations that I found fetching. Then he took up figurative painting, at just about the time that Abstract Expressionism was taking off. His apostasy cost him his reputation among the Clement Greenbergs of this world, which is why you may not have heard of him, even though he was married for a while to Peggy Guggenheim's daughter. The figurative work is always jolly and at times agreeably surreal. There are a few pictures that suggest Magritte gone wild. The catalogue cost $50; non, merci. But here is a Web page from which you can learn a thing or two about Hélion before and after 1947.

On Saturday, I met Ms NOLA at the Angelika Film Center for the 3:15 show of The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté). It was beyond brilliant. "Brilliant" for me usually connotes "clever," but this is not a clever picture. It's an intensely emotional one, working inward from intense sensations. Because any synopsis would either be open to wild misinterpretation or else spill the beans on a very suspenseful story, I will saying nothing more than this remake of James Toback's Fingers (1974) features an Oscar-worthy performance by Romain Duris as a tightly-wound young man who has to decide between the allure of vice and the ardor of beauty. When it comes out on DVD, I shall have more to say. 

Not having been to a cinema in over a year, and having grown quite comfortable with my little LED screen, viewed across a room, I found the opening of The Beat That My Heart Skipped really unpleasant, physically. The scene wasn't violent, but menacing, and it was hard to follow visually. My heart was racing - not good. It's not quite two hours long, but, frankly, I couldn't have taken much more of its intense was its drama, and Ms NOLA and I agreed afterward that we were never happier to see a film end when and where it did.

Afterward, we strolled down Broadway. Zut, what crowds! I felt that I'd come out for the Luxury Brand Shopping Day Parade, an event taking place on SoHo's exiguous sidewalks. Especially fetching was a clot of Indian glamour girls from New Jersey, discussing what to do next and not looking happy about it. Oblivious to la circulation, of course. When we passed by the downtown branch of Bloomingdale's, I saw, with mild, it's-about-time surprise, that the mannequins were grouped as gay couples. At first, I wished that I had my camera, but then I thought better of diffusing such an image on the Internet, where it might be seen out of context - that is, by people who might find such a window display offensive, and who might use the picture to fuel their outrage &c. I don't regard this as self-censorship - but I'm curious as to why I don't.

At Canal Street, we parted ways to our respective subway lines.