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After my trek to the Guggenheim, we headed to a few other places, including the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery to see an exhibit of collages and box constructions by Hannelore Baron, an artist Benedicte spoke very highly of.  The pieces on display were primarily from private collections and her estate. I found the work haunting.  The more I read about her, the more I found myself looking deeper into her pieces.  I learned Ms. Baron was born in 1926 in Dilligen, Germany to Jewish parents who were the owners of a small textile shop.  During “the Night of Broken Glass,” she witnessed Nazis horrors, including the destruction of the shop and her father beaten with a hammer. You can read more about her from this news release from Stanford News Service  and this Wikipedia page. Eventually she and some of her family managed to get out of Europe and settled in the Bronx where she studied costume design.  Sadly, she suffered from depression throughout her life, had the first of three nervous breakdowns after age 20.  She died in 1987.

– Michael Kimmelman, from a The New York Times, October 1, 1993 described the defining characteristic of her work as fragile, “both physical and spiritual-the sense of quiet, private anguish expressed through forlorn materials and cryptic, edgy scrawls.”  Here is another New York Times review on her work.

Photographs were allowed, and I share several images below.

From the catalog, ” Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition…the way other people march to Washington, or set themselves on fire, or write protest letters, or go to assassinate someone. Well, I’ve had all the same feelings that these people had about various things, and my way out, because of my inability to do anything else for various reasons, has been to make the protest through my artwork…” H.B.

On Wednesday I joined Benedicte and some new friends — Teri, Shirley, and Pat — for a whirlwind day of art-related fun. We started at the Guggenheim where Picasso Black and White is on exhibit through January 23rd (photos were not allowed). The exhibit is the first to explore his his use of black and white (gray, cream) to create his 118 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. There’s good information about the exhibit on the Guggenheim website, and a gorgeous book that includes more than 150 reproductions. The book is a hefty 228 pages and is available from the website.  Pat also posted some wonderful sketches she did on her iPad while at the show which you can see on her blog.

We also visited the Kandinsky Gallery that was featuring pieces created during 1911–1913.  Again, no photos were allowed.

From any vantage point in the main lobby, where photos are allowed, you cannot see any of the artwork on the walls. However, on the seventh floor, photographs were allowed and even encouraged at Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms exhibit, a “two-part sculptural and photographic installation” that includes “traces of erosion, poetic encounters with mundane materials, and the ever-present tension between nature and culture.”  The exhibit is made up of thousands of items that the artist collected from a playing field near his NY home and a protected coastal biosphere in Baja California Sur, Mexico, which also happens to collect industrial and commercial waste from across the Pacific.

Next up was lunch, then a visit to a gallery for what we hoped would be paintings by Bob Dylan, but that show had concluded, and then a visit to Leslie Feely Fine Art to see Hannelore Baron’s superb exhibit. More photos in the next few days.