Guggenheim

Fresh from our great experience at the Whitney, we resolved to try the Guggenheim, another "modern" museum of note. It was "pay what you wish" night, we chipped in a cautious $5 each, and left an hour later feeling we had been robbed. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is one of our favorites, we've been there a couple times or more, and are sure to return when we can. But not the Guggenheim in New York. Once in a lifetime is once too many. And Vicki has actually been twice!

Frank Lloyd Wright's "masterpiece": his monstrosity, some say; 
apparently no one showed FLW any pix of 5th Ave. nor of Central
Park for the new museum to "blend" into (think: Falling Waters);
he should have stuck with Prairie style; you're supposed to take the
elevator to the top and then spiral down, like a corkscrew, looking
at the "art"; alas the size and shape of the walls is quite restrictive... 

Interior, looking up; the lighting color changes periodically
(like Singapore) but the barrage of gibberish continues...

Pano of ground floor gibberish; designed to make you "think"...

Our main interest was the Thannhauser collection of

impressionist and post-impressionist art; here, Eduoard

Vuillard, two panels of Place Vintimille, 1909-1910; it

didn't help one's appreciation to learn that Thannhauser,

himself Jewish, as an art dealer had profited inordinately

from fellow Jews desperately fleeing Germany in the 30s;

there have been lawsuits and restitutions...

Picasso, Moulin de la Galette, 1900; 19 year-old Picasso: the guy could
paint!

Claude Monet, The Ducal Palace from San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908 

Manet, Woman in a Striped Dress, 1867; not your best
Manet, IMHO

Renoir, Woman with a Parakeet, 1871; Renoir before he was Renoir

Van Gogh, Landscape with Snow, 1888; among his first paintings
in Arles, finding his voice

Picasso, The Fourteenth of July, 1901; still Picasso before he was
Picasso

Cezanne, The Neighborhood of Jas de Bouffan, 1886

Cezanne, Bibemus, 1895-99; Bibemus was a quarry near Aix-en-Provence
that he frequented

So that was it for the more conventional art at the
Guggenheim; the next several floors were of contemporary
stuff such as the above

Leaking, like bedbugs, into adjacent spaces

Truly profound thought

More truly profound thought

No end to the bombardment of truly profound thought; what you're
not seeing is the upward spiraling of the truly profound thoughts

One art work took a collection of scores of Trump's Twits, printed 
them (as above), lined them up along 100 feet or more of the spiraling wall,
then had them falling into a heap of Twits

The crowd loved it

The Guggenheim must keep the AI gibberish-generators running

around the clock

Another floor or so was given to reminders of McCarthyism,

1984, Big Brother, etc.

Mercifully, there were many lengths of empty space

Actually, the gift shoppe was better than the museum itself