A walk on Staten Island and a bit of art

I feel like time passes so quickly here - maybe because I'm working later and there's less time left in the evenings to get everything done. I'm really not sure. But in any case, I'm just now writing a bit about what I did last weekend - and it seems eons ago.

On Saturday, I took the train to the Upper East Side to see two museum shows, one at the Met and one at the Jewish Museum. The show at the JM was about Yiddish/Jewish theater in Moscow in the 1920s, when Marc Chagall was still living there and designing sets. The canvas banners he painted as backdrops for a show at one of the theaters had been rolled up and stored in the theater’s cellar for decades – through the worst of times in Russia – and were then rediscovered. It was amazing being in the gallery surrounded by these immense Chagall paintings filled with floating people, animals, food, etc. – experiencing them in the same way as the Russians who had attended the theater for which they were painted. Chagall signed some of them in Russian script and others in French.

The Met had a really great show of pictures by Pierre Bonnard – a painter I knew little about but had always lumped together with the Impressionists and thought of as a still life painter – pretty bowls of fruit and vases of flowers. Boy, was I wrong.

These paintings were all done when he was older and all are of domestic scenes. But the more you look at them the more you realize these are not pretty pictures. Bonnard’s wife, Marthe, is often a ghostly presence on the edge of the scene, or an unhappy lump sitting at a food-filled table. She’s almost not there. In one heart-rending painting, he shows her pushed out to the corner of the frame, looking towards a smiling young woman. The young woman is Bonnard’s long-dead mistress, who had committed suicide years before when she learned he was marrying another woman. But the real specter in the picture is his living wife.
I hope this makes some sense. Here’s the picture so you can see what I mean. All of the paintings share the very tight framing that this one has. The colors are gorgeous but the people and objects seemed trapped or locked in. Great show.

Sunday marked my first excursion to Staten Island, for a 7-mile walk with a group called Shorewalkers. It was a warm, overcast day – so perfect for walking. I’m beginning to thing you can’t leave the house here without running into a writer. One of my fellow hikers was Gloria Naylor, who won a National Book Award in the 1980s for a book called The Women of Brewster Place (Oprah was in a movie made from the book). I would not have recognized Naylor, but someone else pointed her out, saying, “She says she writes books. Her name is Gloria something.” Look her up on Wikipedia – interesting story.

The hike was great, especially as a way to get a little bit of geographic orientation, and the free Staten Island Ferry takes you by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Best freebie in NYC. I’m told that it’s especially great at sunset – and it’s one subway stop from my house.

Shorewalkers does an annual walk around the entire island of Manhattan – 32 miles, 14 hours. Anyone want to join me?