Art and Alinea in Chicago

I love living in my small town, but I also love visiting big cities and getting caught up in the hustle and bustle for a few days. Brad and I just spent 4 nights in Chicago on a Wellesley College Davis Museum Friends of Art tour, which gave us access to unbelievable private art collections and stunning real estate, as well as time together with other art lovers.

We had lovely weather during most of our visit except for a drizzly Saturday. This is the view from our 26th floor hotel room. It's a city!

We also were fortunate enough to have a friend help us secure a reservation at Alinea, the temple of molecular gastronomy which was just ranked the number 7 restaurant in the world.

This post mostly consists of course by course documentation of the dining experience, so if you're not a foodie you may want to skip this one — although it's fun to watch Brad on video after experiencing his green apple helium balloon dessert.

We were among the first people seated, which turned out to be really nice because we were the first to receive each amazing new course and could have the complete element of visual surprise. We sat side by side on the banquette so that the experience felt even more like a performance. It was actually nice to be just the two of us so that we could focus on the food and not be distracted at all by conversation.

At Alinea they do a wonderful thing and give you a copy of your menu without the guests even asking.

To begin: an ice sculpture is placed on the bare table -

First food: Steelhead roe with carrot, coconut, and curry flavors

Served with Cocktail of Gimonnet Brut with St. Germain and Esterhazy Beerenauslese

Then what we called the Swamp Thing Collection: oyster leaf mignonette, king crab with passionfruit, heart of palm, allspice; mussel with saffron and oregano; razor clam with shiso, soy, daikon, served in a bed of kelp and seaweed from the Pacific.

Shells after eating, along with mystery iceberg

The server then brings a Bunsen burner machine with vegetables that the water boils up around while you're eating your next course -

A single bite for each of us -

Then a scallop "acting like agedashi tofu" with absurdly precise vegetables arrayed about –

Broth from the Bunsen burner is poured over to make soup -

Then you are presented with a rubbery ring (not from the space shuttle) -

Upon which is placed toro tuna with thai banana, sea salt, and kaffir lime foam –

Then it's time to approach the iceberg with a glass straw –

Which contains a liquid of beet, hibiscus, and licorice – a bracing palate cleanser and a signal that the flavors move from the ocean to the earth -

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Burn Morel mushrooms with ramps, fiddlehead fern, miner's lettuce and a quail egg served on hot stones and a burned plank that is still warm. This was amazing, full of spring flavors -

Another earthy course: Hot potato, cold potato, black truffle, butter, served in a wax dish with the ingredients separated on a pin that you pull to let them drop into the soup and then drink in one swallow. Incredible flavors –

The empty wax cup

And after all this theater, this was the most visually intriguing part: an array of accompaniments, including candied pecan, mint jelly, cinnamon, various and sundry herbs, and a blue gel of anise

To be eaten in whatever combination the diner pleases in combination with turbot prepared 3 ways -

And the messy tray after we'd had our way with it -

Another single bite: the black truffle explosion, with broth and romaine and parmesan inside. Unbelievable –

And another performance art course. The server brings a metal vessel containing a lavender infused bath of hot water which sends the aromatic essence around. Then individual bites are placed in a display inspired by a Miro painting with silverware in the title -

As you eat each bite you place the utensil in the lavender bath so that at the end all the silverware is gathered neatly together -

The next course is served in an intriguing metal pronged device. This was Anjou pear fried with onion and brie, served on a flaming cinnamon stick. While this was visually interesting, and smelled wonderful, it was my least favorite in terms of texture and flavor -

But it's fun and dangerous to have fire at the table –

The pre-dessert palate cleanser was tiny but incredibly intense flavored assortment of gingers. My favorite was Indian influenced with turmeric and yogurt –

The metal pins after the tidbits are eaten -

The presentation of a metal straw for the first dessert course -

Blueberry with buttermilk, sorrel, and macadamia flavors –

You remove the glass stopper in the middle and liquid is poured in to make smoke and create a cold broth to complement the sweetness of the dessert flavors.

After eating -

The next dessert course is mostly for the visual mastery of a green apple balloon filled with helium -

The server told Brad to remove his glasses to prevent the sticky balloon from getting all over. I didn't love getting sticky stuff on my face, but Brad enjoyed his helium. His commentary:

The final dessert: white chocolate vessel with strawberry, English pea, and lemon powders in a signature Alinea moment -

After pouring liquid into the white chocolate vessel, the server spreads Chantilly cream, English pea, strawberry, and lemon powders as well as flower petals and tiny meringues and assorted other spring accessories to create a Monet on the table -

The server gives the white chocolate vessel a sharp thwack and shatters it and then leaves you to figure out where to begin -

And that's all, and surely, that's enough. Amazing.

I'm including a link to Brad's iPhone photos, documenting his wine pairings and giving a different perspective -

The kitchen -

And I'll take a day or two to rest and then post about our other lovely dinner at Sepia

I'm sorry we're leaving just as the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective opens at the Art Institute of Chicago. Maybe we'll make a return trip to see that and eat some more!

Contemporary Dallas II

We finished our Dallas art extravaganza with two more private collections in contemporary homes, both of which confirmed for me that I want to build a fantastic contemporary house of my own. The first house we saw belongs to Deedie and Rusty Rose and was designed by Antoine Predock. I had been fortunate enough to see the house once before when Deedie Rose was kind enough to guide me through the process of choosing an architect. The current art in the house is primarily by emerging artists, particularly from South America, although the Sol LeWitt in the entry is pretty recognizable.

The second house and collection we saw was designed by Bill Booziotis as guest house and gallery for Marguerite Hoffman and her late husband, Robert. They have what I would call a seriously important collection, including multiple works by Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Philip Guston, Joseph Cornell, Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins and other major post-World War II artists. I think the only thing I would want to add is a Rothko. Since we only saw the guest house, perhaps they have one or two in their living room.

After being completely satiated with art and architecture, we headed to New York for more.

Contemporary Dallas

We’re in Dallas for a Wellesley art trip with our in-laws and yesterday had access to two extraordinary homes designed by contemporary architects and filled with amazing art. We first went to the collection of Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, whose home was designed by Richard Meier as basically a one bedroom museum. The current selections from their collection are all created between the years of 2004-2007 by emerging artists. It was great to see major collectors supporting the work of living artists. The second home we visited was designed by Steven Holl for Jessie and Charles Price, whose collection includes works by Joan Mitchell, Ed Ruscha, old master drawings, Brice Marden, and my favorite, a Robert Irwin light installation.

In the afternoon we skipped the curated tour of the Turner exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, dashed through the Nasher sculpture museum with its terrific design by Renzo Piano, and went back to the hotel for a nice long nap.

We had dinner at Stephan Pyles Restaurant, where the food was lovely (a selection of 4 iced gazpacho was wonderful), but the waiter was very agressive and intrusive.

Today we’re off to Ft. Worth to see the Tadao Ando designed museum as well as the Art of the American Snapshot exhibit at the Amon Carter.

Scribbles: Cy Twombly

Last night, after a full day of writing work at my Spruce Street office with Brad, I was tired in that good way you get after really concentrated work. We watched the first episode of the final season of The Sopranos. After such a long hiatus between episodes, I had forgotten both how violent it is, and how sad. Then we turned OFF the television and read books. What a revolutionary concept! I took one of the big art monographs off the top of one of several Unread Books piles on the coffee table and got lost in the world of Cy Twombly, who is one of my very favorite artists. He has used similar motifs of writing and scribbles and letters and fragments of words throughout his long working life. I like art that includes text and words and have been fortunate enough to see Twombly’s work in person in San Francisco and New York. After a long day of writing by hand and typing, it was very restorative to slowly savor books of creative art that incorporates myth and language, too.

William Eggleston: In the Real World

I went to the IFC Center in Greenwich Village yesterday afternoon with my friend, Scott Moody, to see a documentary film about photographer William Eggleston, who is one of my favorite photographers. His official website generously shows the images from each of his monographs, as well as John Szarkowski’s introductory essay to the monograph William Eggleston’s Guide which accompanied the first solo exhibition of color photographs ever shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. I saw a large exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from the Los Alamos Project, which continues his richly colored images of the ordinary. I describe him to myself as a Buddhist photographer because of the way his work seems to say that everything is worthy of notice, which turns out to be similar to the way he describes himself.

“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important," William Eggleston once said. This radical attitude guided his ground-breaking work in color photography, work that has prefigured many recent developments in art and photography. Los Alamos presents a series of photographs that has never before been shown, yet it contains a blueprint of Eggleston’s aesthetics, his subtle use of subdued color hues, the casual elegance of his trenchant observations of the mysteries of the mundane. The photographs in Los Alamos were shot in Eggleston’s native Memphis and on countless road trips across the American South from 1964 to 1968 and from 1972 to 1974. Initially, Eggleston wanted to create a vast compendium of more than 2000 photographs to be contained in 20 volumes; he wanted the viewer to look at the photographs the way one looks at the world. He eventually abandoned this project–and hardly any of the negatives were ever printed. Now, 30 years later, we finally get to see a selection of this encyclopedia of Southern everyday life and vernacular culture. It’s a stunning discovery that makes the so-called snapshot photography of recent years pale in comparison. Eggleston’s astonishingly timeless portraits, still lives, landscapes, and photographs of buildings add up to a profound investigation of the world and our way of looking at it, a poetics of pleasures hidden in full view. They transcend the merely descriptive and uncover the universal encapsulated in the details and the detritus of life in a consumer culture. (from Amazon.com)

The film offered intimate, often painful, looks into Eggleston’s life. My favorite part of the film is a segment where you get to see him framing and taking shots of a house on the side of the road, and then see the resulting prints of those shots. His pace is rapid and unpremeditated, the shots unstaged and lit with natural light, and he rarely takes a second shot. He speaks eloquently during the film about this; but then seems stubbornly unwilling to analyze his work and process in other contexts. The awards ceremony for the Hasselblad Prize is shown, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was drunk when receiving the award. I kept wanting to leap up and remind Eggleston and his drinking/drunken friends that they were being filmed — which is useless — and they seemed entirely comfortable showing what turns out to be a thoroughly alcohol soaked life to the camera. At the beginning of the film his hands tremble perceptibly while he is working, and it isn’t until later in the film that I connected this with his problems with alcohol. I’ve always regarded artistic work separate from the life of the artist, and think that the cult of personality thing is entirely out of hand. When I learn about an artist’s private life, it frequently negatively impacts my assessment of the work (e.g. Ayn Rand). In Eggleston’s case, this film starkly juxtaposes the ease of his work with the difficulties he apparently has navigating his daily life.

The architect we’ve been working with on plans for our dream house, Coleman Coker, gave us the book accompanying the Hasselblad Prize in 1998, which was probably my first in-depth exposure to Eggleston’s work. Thanks, Coleman.

The film itself was fascinating. Unfortunately, one of the short films before the main attraction had so much swirling and whirling imagery (trains, ferris wheels, camera whizzing in circles) that I actually got motion sickness from watching and had to turn away from any blurry, whirrying, rapidly cut images in the documentary itself, including some rare and early video work by Eggleston. I’m finding that my susceptibility to motion sickness is getting worse as I get older. It’s a mystery to me..

Emily Eveleth Paintings

Emily Eveleth is another favorite artist of Brad and mine, who we’ve collected for many years. We own several of her large paintings of donuts and are delighted to add Pass to our collection. You can see other images of her work at Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and the Danese Gallery in New York.

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Pass, Oil on Canvas, 31" x 50", image courtesy of Howard Yezerski Gallery

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Brace, 2002, oil on canvas, 54 x 82, image from Danese Gallery website

From the Press Release for the fall 2004 show:

Howard Yezerski Gallery is very pleased to present a new evocative body of work by Emily Eveleth. Growing out of the figurative work that she had done in her last show at the gallery in 2002, this recent body of work features an archetypal figure in a suit and tie playing out an ambiguous scenario of hula hooping. The close, cinematic cropping of the scenes draws attention to the movement of the hoop, and emphasizes the sequencing of events that happens throughout this new series. The close-up nature of each scene in these paintings creates a feeling of intimacy, as though they are suggesting that the viewer has caught this figure indulging in a private moment. By not giving any details as to surroundings, time, or place the figure remains anonymous.

“Emily Eveleth’s paintings conceal as the reveal. At once theatrical and restrained,…yet somehow private, they seem to invite the viewer’s gaze, acknowledge it, and them absorb it, folding it into their own particular dramas.” – Nico Israel

New Cindy Kane Paintings

I have been a longtime admirer and collector of the artwork of Cindy Kane. Anyone who has met with Brad at the Mobius offices in Colorado has likely seen her work hanging there. Several of her pieces from our collection are also on loan to The Nature Conservancy building in Boulder. She currently has a show at the Carol Craven Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard and is also represented by the PLUS Gallery in Denver. I am delighted to add "Spin" to our collection.

Spin, mixed media on wood (80" x 80"), image courtesy of the artist

Clusters, acrylic on wood (42" x 48"), image from Carol Craven Gallery website

Carol Craven Gallery Installation photos courtesy of the artist

Museums of Paris

In the past couple of weeks I have seen many of the major art museums in this great city, including the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Picasso Museum, the Rodin Museum, and the Matisse exhibit at the Senat, all of them with Renee.

The Louvre is a very big place. Renee and I were in there for close to five hours, which is probably a personal attention span record. I’m usually a very fast-paced museum goer. We saw a lot of old stuff — obviously the big three (Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Mona Lisa in her new special display room, plus Antonio Canova’s Cupid and Psyche, ancient Egyptian artifacts, ancient frescoes, ancient mosaics, ancient statuary, ancient Napoleonic apartments, lots of other ancient stuff, and one of my personal favorites, the French Crown Jewels. I last saw them in July 1995 when I was doing the youth hostel / backpack thing for six weeks with my cousin, Mario. We came across them by fortuitous accident; but this time I sought them out deliberately. I think the British have done a much better job of displaying their Crown Jewels with people movers that get people in and out in an orderly fashion and give everyone an equal chance to see. At both the Crown Jewels and the Mona Lisa people form rings around the object and it’s not clear when it’s your turn or why the person behind you is pushing. I wish I had been able to see some of the goodies better. And I certainly need to read some more French history. Who are all of these people? I know a lot more about the British royal succession, perhaps because it’s more orderly and tidy than the French. Fewer revolutions. I did get to be closer and spend more time in front of the Mona Lisa than I ever had before. And I asked myself again, what’s the big deal? I think it’s beautiful and superbly executed and mysterious and all that; but what’s all the mystique about? The enormous painting on the wall across the room from Mona, The Wedding Feast at Cana, is a monumental and massive work. Why isn’t it famous? Is Mona our oldest celebrity? More photographed than Diana, Princess of Wales? My real love is 20th century art (and is likely to become 21st century art), but I can see and appreciate the long foundation underneath the things I love. I’d still rather have a Van Gogh than the Mona Lisa any day. I’m making my fantasy list of paintings I’d love to live with, and Mona isn’t on it.

The Louvre has done a masterful job on their website. Their collection is so vast. They’ve provided an incredible level of detail and access to information. Kudos to the people who did this monumental work.

Renee and I also spent quite a long time in the Musee d’Orsay, which is a beautiful building housing a large swath of French painting as well as sculptures and decorative arts. It’s the place to go to see art after 1848.

The Rodin Museum is also housed in a beautiful building. It’s great to see The Thinker and The Kiss, but my favorite part of this exhibit was seeing what art Rodin collected for himself, especially the Van Gogh paintings that he owned. I saw a painting I’d never seen before, even as a reproduction, that I just love. It’s called Portrait of Père Tanguy and has an homage to Japanese woodblock works in the background. I could spend hours with this painting.

I also got to see a great Matisse exhibit of his late work, called A Second Life. This show had several of his monumental cutouts, and the Jazz Series, as well as many of his late paintings. This exhibit was quite crowded, and I gave up on the claustrophobic gift shop after being bumped around. I’ll buy the exhibition catalog from my friend Jenny’s bookstore. Matisse is one of my favorite artists.

And surprisingly, the Musee Picasso is housed in a beautiful building in the Marais near the Place des Vosges. They had a fantastic exhibit of Francis Bacon’s work juxtaposed with Picasso. There were several enormous Bacon works on loan from the Tate Modern in London, which has a great website of its own. I’ll need to buy this exhibition catalog from Jenny’s bookstore, too.

During my six week experiment with city living, I’ve really tried to take advantage of the things that Paris has to offer. The art museums are certainly an incredible part of this city.

New York, New York

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

I took my almost 16-year old niece, Morgan, to Manhattan last week for her first visit to the Big Apple. I love the city, and love sharing it with friends and family. We ran ourselves ragged, mostly seeing art and braving the cold. The highs were only in the 20’s and the wind was relentless, but we’re both originally from Alaska and won’t let a little thing like cold stop us. Morgan attends an alternative high school in Boulder, The Watershed School, which is based on experiential learning and expeditions to different environments. Her dean of students created a project assignment for Morgan centering on art, New York as a melting pot and as a destination for artists. And we managed to find time to do some shopping, too!

Thursday morning we went to The Whitney to see a retrospective of 50 years of works on paper by the artist Cy Twombly. I’m always interested in an artist’s work over time, especially recurring motifs. Twombly’s work has used a consistent visual vocabulary of text or writing or representations of writing. His large chalkboard paintings of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s are the most explicit “writing” but many of his works contain words. His work has also been inspired by Greek and Roman mythology for a long time. I loved this show. The Whitney’s collection also includes some wonderful 20^th century art.

I wanted to go to the Whitney before going to the Metroplitan Museum of Art, since I know that I can spend entire days there. The Met has so much to see; but I find myself returning to their Impressionist and 20^th century galleries, which is where my real interests lie. It was great to see Morgan seeing Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, etc etc etc. She noted how from far away the Monet haystacks look soft and smooth, but when you stand right next to the canvas it’s messy and thickly painted. We went to the Costume Institute show of Wild: Fashion Untamed, which shows different uses of animal motifs in fashion. It was both beautiful and repulsive to see all the fur and feathers on display. Much easier to enjoy the Temple of Dendur.

We went back to our hotel for a quick change and then to dinner at Picholine, which is perfectly located for Lincoln Center events. Wonderful flash seared white tuna appetizer for me and warm lobster salad for Morgan. Rich food. We went to an all-Balanchine performance of the New York City Ballet. Agon and Apollo, the first and last pieces of the program, were wonderful, with the outrageous extension and rapid footwork that typifies Balanchine’s choreography. The middle piece, Orpheus, was a story ballet with costumes by Noguchi; and it was too strange for both of us. Morgan’s assessment was that several of the costumes looked like they had puppy tails sewn on them. Neither of us liked this piece. Morgan noted that virtually every member of the audience was old and was Caucasian, which I fear signals the future demise of ballet. But it’s certainly alive and beautiful and being danced right now.

Friday morning we went to the new MoMA. As we walked from our hotel on Lexington toward the MoMA I could see a long line already formed in the cold. I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude to wait to get in; but the tickets I had purchased in advance from their website allowed us to immediately enter the museum without any wait at all. Praise to the internet!

The new building feels to me much like the old building, with large white-walled galleries and several dead ends that force you to walk back through the art you’ve already looked at. I’m not sure how much museums should be about architecture versus being about places to see art; so I think the new building works well as an enormous glorified gallery. The audio tour which I reserved for Morgan was full of the usual pretentious art critic language. Why can’t they just tell you about Malevich’s life and work and historical context in plain English? By the time we were going through the upper floors the museum started to get crowded, but our timely entry gave us a leisurely art viewing and discussing experience. It’s great to have the MoMA opened again.

We spent Friday afternoon with a childhood friend of mine from Alaska who is now a successful visual artist in New York. Theresa Chong, who is represented by Danese Gallery, grew up in Fairbanks and played cello in school orchestra and youth symphony and the Fairbanks Symphony with me. We reconnected last spring after drifting apart after our college years. It’s a special experience to go gallery hopping with an artist. We hit many of the Chelsea galleries: Gagosian, Matthew Marks, Cheim and Read, and about 15 others. Morgan was a really good sport to keep looking at art and listen to Theresa and I talk about it. We went back to Theresa’s studio to look at her current work, and then went to dinner at Meet Restaurant on Gansevort Street, which is possibly the loudest restaurant I’ve ever been to. It’s interesting to see formerly marginal neighborhoods get swallowed up by the gentrification/gallerification of downtown. After dinner Theresa and her husband, Brian, gave us a ride through Times Square so Morgan could see the lights.

Saturday we wandered through SoHo and did some shopping at stores that don’t exist in Colorado, and then came home. It’s great to spend time there, and remember why we moved away from the big city (Boston) to live in a place where our golden retrievers run free and we can’t see another house from our house and the pace is livable. But New York is one of my very favorite places to visit – and I look forward to my next trip with Morgan.