Central Park, New York City

Central Park in New York City, in my imagination, was a dangerous and filthy ground, therefore I avoided it in my previous trip there. However, I felt that the reputation of the Park had improved enough therefore I explored it between my trips to the Guggenheim Museum and The Frick Collection.

Central Park, a vast urban park, turned out to be a jewel of Manhattan. It was clean, becoming and welcoming. I enjoyed the view of the lake and its breeze greatly. There were abundant families and lovers by the shore and many lovely birds and squirrels as well.

Under a beautiful and ornate pathway, several musician entertained the pleasure seekers and the real birds competed charm with reliefs. What a treasure!





















>> New York City Report, September 2010, Part III: The Frick Collection
<< New York City Report, September 2010, Part I: Guggenheim Museum Collections

Guggenheim Museum Collections

Only on my fourth trip to New York City, did I visit Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. I didn't know that it had a quite extensive painting collections, since it is mostly connected to photography. I did walk by it during my second trip to New York, when I bravely drove into Manhattan.

When I arrived, its iconic ramp was closed due to exhibition installation. It was a very slight disappointment since I was attracted to a special exhibit: The Geometry of Kandinsky and Malevich which ended the day after my arrival from San Fransisco.

It was an interesting exhibit but at the end I was overwhelmed by its own permanent painting collection. Below are a sample of its impressive works:


Portrait of Johann Harms, 1916. Oil with wax on canvas, Egon Schiele


Saint-Séverin No. 3, 1909–10. Oil on canvas, Robert Delaunay


Still Life Flask, Glass, and Jug (Fiasque, verre et poterie), ca. 1877. Oil on canvas, Paul Cézanne


Paris Through the Window (Paris par la fenêtre), 1913. Oil on canvas, Marc Chagall


Landscape with Snow (Paysage enneigé), Late February 1888. Oil on canvas, Vincent van Gogh


Mountains at Saint-Rémy (Montagnes à Saint-Rémy), July 1889. Oil on canvas, Vincent van Gogh

The museum showed another special exhibit: Grey Area, which showcased a young talent, Julie Mehretu (born 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Her works were deceptively simple and extremely complex. According to Guggenheim Museum, "inspired in part by Berlin, the city in which Mehretu created the works, the paintings evoke the psychogeography of a place and the effects of the built environment on individuals, while at the same time contemplating the past and the surviving traces of lived history."



It was a wonderful re-visiting her work. I have seen some of her work in Berkeley Art Museum in 2004 - Matrix 211. The catalogue in that exhibition stated that "In her large-scale canvases Julie Mehretu aspires to produce “over-the-top epic narratives,” stories of our time. Painting on vellum and Mylar, Mehretu methodically builds with abstract marks to create emotionally charged worlds."



As for the building itself, it is a truly marvel. Though I was not able to walk on the ramp, view it from below, side gallery and from without, was satisfying enough.























>> New York City Report, September 2010, Part II: Central Park, New York City

Art Gallery at San Francisco International Airport (SFO)

On my recent trip to New York City, I passed through San Francisco International Airport, which continued its long tradition of showcasing artworks in the concourses.

There were many magnificent Asian ceramic, jade and other decorative and utilitarian artifacts. They were very lovely to behold and also very calming in sometimes frenetic airports.

Bravo!

The Beauty of Lines

While having work lunch on the balcony of my office building - a modern and slightly musclar structure, I was struck by the light and shadow interplay on the wall. The straight lines of the shawdow cast by the huge overhead beam and the reflection from the metal surfaces created a wonderful pattern of bright and dark interplay and the beauty of these lines were wonderful to behold.

Botticelli and Art Academy

A few years ago, when I was waiting for subway in San Francisco, I read a new artist monograph I just bought. A young woman with a large portfolio approached me and introduced herself as an art student from Israel. At that time, there are many such Israeli art students roaming in the city with portfolios trying to make some quick sales.

After I told her that I was not able to buy any of her works, she asked about the large art book I was reading. I told her that it was on Botticelli but she showed no recognition of the name. I wondered if the name should have difference sound in Hebrew so I showed her several images as iconic as Venus de Milo and Leonardo's Mona Lisa, such as Birth of Venus and Primavera. To my amusement, she recognized none of these images either.

I asked her about the education she received from her art academy and to my dismay, they didn't deem necessary to enlighten their students of the masterpieces in the past. Understandably, one don't want to become Botticelli the Minor, but being ignorant of these old masters only limited art student's vision and knowledge. Many times, when a "new" thing was made, it could be very well traced to the old creations. Quite often, I was startled by how modern an old painting was.

Artworks are not just interesting patterns. It should have layers and layers of meanings, like drama and sonnets of William Shakespeare, however big or small the format. Without the solid understanding of the things past, one must struggle to express anything meaningful and new, to the vast sediment of human history.

It's hard to image that if a person wants to be a writer but has not learned the existence of Goethe or Shakespeare. Is fine art so inferior? I hope not.


Nascita di Venere (Birth of Venus), Sandro Botticelli


Primavera


Venus and Mars

More on Fidelity of Translations

John M Morrison wrote for Guardian on how dramatic works were given cavalier treatment on stages by the translators who often rewrote, Lost in translation: why have we declared war on foreign dramatists?

Whatever will these silly foreigners get up to next? Did you hear about the Chinese version of Hamlet that gave the play a happy ending? Surely we all know you can't rewrite the classics, and my Chinese example is imaginary. But British theatre commits artistic assault and battery of this kind on an increasingly regular basis. The victims, sprawled in the wings with their scripts torn to shreds are invariably playwrights who had the misfortune not to write in English.

The latest example is Heinrich von Kleist, who has been dead for nearly 200 years, but that's no excuse for the version of his Prince of Homburg at London's Donmar Warehouse. At the end, the audience sees the prince dying in a hail of bullets as the Elector of Brandenburg, a prototype fascist dictator clad in black, supervises his execution by firing squad. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what happens in Kleist's original, in which the final scene is a mock execution. The Donmar's rewrite man, Dennis Kelly, has turned the play on its head, substituting a scene of superficial drama for the original's dream-like ambiguity. For me it spoiled the evening. As Michael Billington exclaimed at the end of his review, "Oh Kleist!".

Germans aren't the only casualties in this war on foreign dramatists; eminent Russians have also been run over by the National Theatre juggernaut.

One can argue that in the theatre anything goes, particularly when the author is safely dead and long out of copyright. But one of the principles that marks off theatre from film is respect for the artistic integrity of the author's text, even when he or she is no longer around to complain.

Treating foreign works in this cavalier fashion sends the same message as the decline of language teaching in schools; we are increasingly a monoglot culture, treating classic plays in other languages as mere raw material for our own theatre.

I remembered that years ago, I had an argument with a friend on if Chinese people can understand Shakespeare. I thought he was being dismissive when he claimed that Chinese could not get Shakespeare. I told him that the very best Shakespeare theater experiences I ever had was a magnificent King Lear in Manchurian Shenyang, China in 1980s. I was also pride in having read all the dramatic works by Shakespeare. Or sort of. At the time I was reading him, I was in middle school therefore I only read translation done in 1930s!

Chinese can get the essence and spirit of Shakespeare for sure but much of the poetry would have lost in translation for sure, no matter how faithful the translator had been.

One thing I was sure was that that particular translator did not dare to tinker with the dramatic contour. In general, the quality of translation in then China was good. The proof was that almost all translated literature didn't read like written in colloquial Chinese. The structure of sentences were maintained as much as possible. Reading translated literature were usually treated as serious lessons other than entertainment the British and American reader or theater goers demand now.

I have repeated fretted over the bad translations we got in my previous blogs: Scrupulous Germans? Nein!, Art of Translation, Lost in Translation, and The Arabian Nights, Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm and Anderson.

It is a sad fact that readers of translated literature didn't get our respect, with few exceptions such as the wonderful translator team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

My advise: Try to understand great works in its original languages, otherwise, prepare to be fooled.

Limelight © Matthew Felix Sun
www.matthewfelixsun.com