I lunched with Supermaud at our preferred downtown hangout, La Palapa Rockola (this time we played it smart and stayed out of the sun!), and spent most of the evening at a banquet. Nevertheless, I managed to quaff a good-sized portion of art before, in between, and after those two meals:
– I paid a visit to the press view of The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, the first of three planned exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, and drawings left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Henri Matisse’s son, a noted New York art dealer who died in 1989, and his wife, who died three years ago. Alas, it didn’t do much for me, which isn’t to say that it doesn’t contain a number of beautiful pieces, most of them by Matisse the elder. But even the Matisses (most of them works on paper) didn’t really gain from being shown as a group, while the more distinguished items by other artists seemed oddly familiar. “Tall Figure,” for instance, is a first-class Giacometti bronze, but I’ve seen plenty of Giacometti bronzes that are just as good and look pretty much the same as this one. In any case, most of the really memorable pieces aren’t even from the so-called Matisse Collection: they were purchased from Pierre Matisse’s gallery long ago, either by the Met or by private collectors, and were already part of the Met’s permanent collection. As for the “new” pieces by artists other than Matisse p