New York City.2

The real point of the New York City trip, though (okay, okay, one of the points!), was to visit the Neue Galerie, which has a wonderful exhibit: "Vienna 1900: Style and Identity."

The Neue Galerie (which means "new gallery") is housed in a lovely old house. It's one of those reasonably sized museums in which the content and the form complement each other (the wonderful staircase and the intricately ornamented wood paneling are a much more suitable frame for the art than the plain, neutral colored walls of most museums).

The Neue Galerie focuses on Austrian and German art in the early 20th century. This exhibit was remarkable in the way that it integrated painting and drawing, furniture, fashion and wallpaper and carpet and jewelry and even stationery! (I definitely wanted the stationery and a couple of the dressers.) The exhibit considered psychology and medicine and it's overlap with art, with particular attention to Freud. It also considered changing attitudes toward women and sexuality (who knew that changing attitudes toward sexuality is a euphemism for drawings of masturbation??). I'm not really at all familiar with this aspect of the woman's movement. There was an incredibly interesting early moving picture in which a couple of people took of about half of their many clothes off and crawled into bed together. It was about as erotic as a Charlie Chaplain film. It was still sort of awkward, though, to be watching it with a small crowd in a museum.

The artist I liked the most was Gustav Klimt. One of his most famous pictures is there, as are lots of other ones. I was struck by the diversity of his work--in addition to his trademark gold pictures with swirls and bright colors, there was one that looked Pre-Raphaelite, another that looked like pointillism, and some roughly drawn sketches, as well (the picture to the left is called "Hope"--there are women's heads at the bottom of the picture that blend into the woman at the top's skirt, as if they've emerged from her).

After the Neue and some time in Central Park, we found a special Halal truck on 53rd and 6th. There are countless other Halal trucks on other corners, but you can tell you've found the right one because the line goes halfway up the block!


(picture, picture, picture)