Go Big or Go Home

This from my boy Henri Matisse ...

Wow.  Painted by an 80-year old man who couldn't get out of bed.  "Painted" might be the wrong word, and "couldn't get out of bed" is a bit of an exaggeration, but still.

If I had to pick a set of museum galleries I visit more than any other, it would be the Asian rooms at the Met.  You look at some of that stuff, screens and scrolls and hand rolls, many of them hundreds and hundreds of years old, and marvel at how sharply modern they appear.  Likewise my boy Matisse.  Look at that thing.

On a related note, there used to be a Tex-Mex/Asian fusion restaurant on 8th Avenue in Chelsea that made a moo shu handroll with hoisin that, even if I can't think of the name of the place, I still remember quite vividly.  They made a caesar salad with cornbread croutons that was also quite something.

The good news?  After it finishes a run at the Tate Modern, the biggest Matisse cutout show in history is headed to New York.  Nice story here.  Mark your calendars for mid-October.

This from Joan Mitchell, just so you're paying attention ...

That girl could really paint.

Me?  I'm feeling anger at MoMA.  In fact, I've let my membership lapse, mostly in response to the excresance (my word) they've proposed as their massive new expansion/redesign.  Horrible on any number of levels, its greatest sin, it seems to me, is that we so rarely get a chance to reinvent ourselves (in this case, I'm referring to the opportunity to turn the single worst bit of recent museum design, that being the current MoMA, into something good at last; but we could be talking about Henri Matisse, hamstrung by his declining physical condition, saying to himself that he had to either go big or go home, home in this case meaning creative death, and proceeding to think up a whole new medium), that the shameful banality of what they came up with seems all the more disappointing.

Dude, really?  Is there anything you'd like to say to the assembled group?
That I'm sorry about that last sentence?
Thank you.  
Eleven commas seems like a lot for anybody.
Here you're treating the phrase 'eleven commas' as a collective singular?
I guess.
Don't forget the semicolon.
Guilty as charged.
Apology accepted.

Anyway, I may renew just so I can go see the Matisse show more than once without having to cough up the 25 bucks twice.  Or a third time.

Back to the Met for a moment:  This never fails to slay me ...

Painted in 1825 by a guy named Suzuki Kiitsu.  Which is not old at all, compared to some of the stuff.  But if I could steal just one thing from a museum, and had a room big enough to put it up, this might be it.