Another belated discovery of NYC life.
On yet another rainy day in June, Father's Day, we went to the Brooklyn Museum, a wonderful surprise. The immediate destination was the Gustave Caillebotte exhibition. Unknown to me before the exhibition opened several months ago, Caillebotte turns out to not only to have been an influential early impressionist himself, a patron to others -- Renoir, Monet -- and, in the last decade of his short life, a world-class yacht designer and racer who designed some of the first keeled yachts. He is known for his long (recession) views of street and water scenes and for his detailing of light and shadow on surfaces, especially water. The one above is titled Factories in Argenteuil.
Most of the pictures in the exhibition came from private collections rather than from other museums. A reflection of Caillebotte's relative and -- on the merits of this show -- undeserved obscurity?
If we went for the Caillebotte show, we were maybe even more impressed by the Luce Center for American Art, which through eight galleries collects American art by each epoch of the nation's life. Exhibiting paintings side-by-side with, e.g., sculpture, Native American artifacts, and items of daily life is an inspired innovation for understanding multiple artistic elements in play at the same time, but even that innovation pales next to the Visible Storage Center, where a visitor can actually wander into a temperature controlled environment and see over a thousand different pieces from the Museum's American collections as -- in other places -- only a curator might see them.
All this takes places in open, remodeled spaces free of the crowds that would have been found in the Big Four or Five -- AMNH, Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney -- back in Manhattan on a rainy Sunday.
We'll be back.
