We took the train back to Chelsea on Saturday with no real agenda other than seeing the rest of the Picasso show at Pace and gorging on more art. We fortified ourselves at a cafe on the corner of 23rd and Ninth and walked a block west where we ran into Boo Poulin from Rochester. She said this meeting was inevitable. It was also fortuitous because she recommended a few shows that were just spectacular.
The David Zwirner gallery on 20th, with its wood grain, concrete walls and gorgeous wood doors, was featuring Richard Serra’s “Vertical and Hoizontal Reversals,” minimal, thickly applied, black and creamy white paintings of black on white and white on black rectangles. Purely seductive and meditative.
And a bit further down the same street, as impossible as it sounds, another gigantic Picasso show, this time at Gagosian. The hallucinatory, 30 collotypes with Andre Villers from 1962, 15 studies for the 1957 Unesco mural and at least a hundred powerful paintings. “Boom, boom, boom. Like being pistol whipped,” is how Duane described the show. Picasso is so good you just want to see him show off.
Francesco Clemente created two tents with painted canvas in the front room of Rochester’s Mary Boone Gallery and beautiful small watercolors in the back room. He then hired a miniature painter to paint the backgrounds. Rochester’s Nathan Lyons has a great show of new work at Bruce Silverstein on 24th.
We did ourselves in at the second Picasso show in the Pace Gallery. I should say Picasso did us in. The guy is a monster. We stopped in Chinatown at a Lo Mein noodle shop called New Wong Rest. Inc. and had three dinners and tea for a total of $19.
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