Friday, May 22, 2009

Reunions

Took an old friend from Paris to MoMA this morning, and so had a chance to gambol through the standing collection, and be charmed again by David Smith's "Australia" (whose name I had not noticed before), and to see the show "Tangled Alphabets," dedicated to the work of two Latin American artists who've not been the subject of an exhibition in the US before, and didn't know each other. I'm not sure what showing them together achieved, but it was good to get to know them, especially the Argentinian Léon Ferrari, whose drawings in incredibly fine lines inspired by writing (and music) entered further dimensions of wonder when translated into dense sculptures of finest wire. And then I popped into "Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West," which was a hoot: photography and the West do come into their own at the same time, as the exhibition argues. Home! And then I encountered another old friend, Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM" (I was a big Ansel Adams fan as a teenager, and probably had this picture on my wall even before I lived in New Mexico). For some reason, seeing it again made me tear up.