Revving up for Mexico

June 30, 2025July 2, 2025 ~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

With a trip to Mexico City planned for early November, I’ve been flipping through a couple of travel guides to see what I’m in for. (I smell tacos al pastor. Dog-ear that page!)

The place is ginormous, the sixth largest city in the world and the most populous city in North America, with 22 million people. I plan to weep as I inevitably get lost in the grand sprawling Spanish-speaking metropolis. What’s the Spanish word for “mommy”?

Yes, I am going to eat tacos on an epic scale and drink tequila and mezcal with stupid abandon and avoid the sun while lapping up kaleidoscopic art and archeological thingamabobs and trying to figure out why everyone’s so batshit about Frida Kahlo.

There’s a Kahlo museum set in her childhood home or some such, but I’m more interested in the massive murals painted by her lecher hubby Diego Rivera — he had more mistresses than murals. Either way, it’ll be an art orgy.

I’m staying in the leafy, shady, unspeakably bougie La Condesa neighborhood, where a gorgeous park resides and is evidently the city’s dog capital, which makes me serene about the fact my hotel is charging me two year’s salary for a six day stay. Perros! 🐶

But my canine pals are just a bonus on a trip that promises heaps of highlights, be it the spectacular, art-stuffed Palacio de Belles Artes or insane, masked Lucha Libre wrestling; the lavish Catedral Metropolitana or self-explanatory Museum of Tequila and Mezcal. And, of course, street tacos out the wazoo.

I really don’t know what to expect. When I was 14 we took a cruise down the Pacific Coast of Mexico, strictly beach stops — Cabo, Mazatlan, Acapulco. But Mexico City is a landlocked, high-altitude megalopolis teeming with fine dining, clubs, bars, galleries, museums and such. (Like any major city, it also has unfortunate pockets of crime and squalor that shouldn’t be ignored.)

Mexico City. What am I doing? I ask that before almost every journey — Budapest, huh? — and almost always return enlightened, brightened. It’s about discovery, learning, seeing, and in this case, a lot about tacos al pastor. I’m seriously considering taking a $70 class on how to make these scrumptious finger foods while I’m there.

That sound you hear is me turning pages in my guide books with increasing excitement, the revelations and expectations. It’s all part of the trip — an expedition of the known and the unknown blended in a zesty imperative: show me what you’ve got.

Dorothea Lange’s luminous despair

March 12, 2024March 12, 2024 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Last week I choo-choo-trained to Washington, D.C. to scavenge through its bulging bounty of museums. (And also to get all gourmandy and eat at delish restaurants like Josè Andrès’ Mexican palace Oyamel; do order the guac and the tacos.) The US capital boasts like a billion halls of paintings, history, culture, science and more, and I visited seven in two days. Not a world’s record, but I was pacing myself. Huff, puff.

Tops for me was the National Gallery of Art — more on that in a bit. A close second was the transformative and seam-bursting National Museum of African American History and Culture, where everything from slavery and “Sanford and Son” to the Harlem Renaissance and “Harlem Shuffle” are gorgeously limned. Go.

While the National Gallery’s Rembrandts, Turners and Vermeers made me one of those vexing viewers who stands too long in front of a painting, till other patrons wonder crankily What’s he gawping at?, it was a special exhibition that really got me and did what great art can do: split open your world.

The show, “Dorothea Lange — Seeing People,” presents some 100 black and white photographs by the great, socially astute 20th-century shutterbug. Her most enduring photo, part of the show, is probably this one from 1936, “Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)”:

Gaze at that picture. A little harder. Its masterpiece status is unshakable.

Steeped in jagged beauty and more (prematurely) creased flesh than a dozen old folks’ homes, the exhibit “addresses Lange’s innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism,” the museum says.

Alright. Uplifting it’s not. It unfurls a timely, tattered tapestry of naked despair and down-on-your-luck dignity. Yet it’s so filled with shuddering pathos and raw humanity it’s hard not to be moved, shaken, taken.

Lange’s photos are untouched authenticity — keep your Photoshop sorcery — real people with sun-baked skin and hollowed eyes, capturing the American experience of a time, the 1930s to ‘50s, and places, the Dust Bowl to San Francisco. They don’t let you off the hook.

Exhausting, yes, but exhilarating too …

*“Migratory cotton picker, Eloy, Arizona”* (1940)

*“Mexican workers leaving for melon fields, Imperial Valley, California”* (1935)

*“Nettie Featherston, wife of a migratory laborer with three children, near Childress, Texas”* (1938)

*“Young girl looks up from her work. She picks and sacks potatoes on large-scale ranch, Edison, Kern County, California”* (1940)

“*On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering*” (1938)

Human figures, so creepy, so astonishing

April 3, 2018April 7, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

For many, Easter Sunday is a time to reflect on one very important body, the one that rose from the dead to make thunderous proclamations and upend the world forever.

For me, Easter Sunday, a few days ago, was a time to reflect on scores of bodies congregated in a Manhattan museum, a reflection that furnished its own transcendence, its own religious experience, if you will.

These bodies — from the gorgeous to the gruesome; the hyper-realistic to the freakily figurative — comprise the knockout exhibit “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-Now)” at The Met Breuer, through July 22.

willem-danielsz-van-tetrode-hercules-greer-lankton-rachel.jpg — **The old and the new, juxtaposed.**

“Like Life” nimbly and epically presents some 120 works spanning 700 years, from classical Greek to contemporary bad boy Jeff Koons, and oodles in between: Donatello, El Greco, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Rodin, Degas, Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Isa Genzken, Charles Ray, and so many more.

The show’s thrills (and chills) include an awesome array of wax effigies, reliquaries, mannequins and anatomical models — including graphic autopsy depictions — plus tiny-scale sculptures from the Renaissance and beyond. There is lots of nakedness.

My visit was a promenade amid faces and bodies, hands and limbs and heads, some bloody, some immaculate. Many of the life-size bodies, often made of wax, are so realistic I practically did double-takes. Once in a while I flinched and muttered, “Christ.”

Juxtapositions with ancient and new figures are clever and provocative, almost none of them without wit and wonder. Throughout, spellbound, I contemplated mortality and deformity, the genius of art and the supremacy of the visionary. Gladly, I was just as often captivated as creeped-out. It’s a sweet and savory affair.

Below is part of the population crowding the best show I’ve seen since the Irving Penn photography exhibit at The Met last summer:

merlin_135783267_595a2783-5d78-4264-9a02-2e23f409c9e2-superjumbo.jpg — **Detail from “The Whistlers” (2005), a sculpture by Tip Toland. Jarringly realistic, profound and whimsical. Just look at that face.**

merlin_135783831_4340e86d-7749-4a67-a2ac-4c52da29427f-master1050.jpg — **In “The Digger” (1857), is this skinless man shoveling his own grave? In the background, an especially grisly crucifixion from medieval Germany.**

merlin_135854523_26608341-e02a-4dd8-b473-331280b85578-superJumbo.jpg — **Faces from the ages: Center is the ethereal “Mask of Hanako, Type E” by Auguste Rodin (1911). At right is “Self,” a frozen-blood self-portrait by Marc Quinn (2006).**

merlin_135784095_17f377b1-3c72-491b-9260-4f2699c76120-master675.jpg — **“Housewife” (1969-1970) by Duane Hanson. Commentary that is both witty and withering, this snapshot of quotidian, housebound tedium is a diorama of depression.**

**“Michael Jackson and Bubbles” by Jeff Koons. A porcelain monstrosity that’s actually pretty hilarious depending on your mood and/or critical perspective. (I think the** **consensus is that it’s hideous.)**

merlin_135854517_800fbba9-338b-47a0-af48-2478006fb3f4-superJumbo.jpg — “To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll” (2016) by Goshka Macuga, a speaking, moving android that pontificates with chilling verisimilitude about life, death and global concerns for 38 minutes. Eerie and mouth-agape mesmerizing, he’s the spiky, intellectual counterpoint to Disney’s anodyne animatronics.

**“Self-Portrait with Sculpture” by John De Andrea, 1980**. These are *not* real people. The frontal view is firmly R-rated, the tableau slightly disturbing and thought-stirring and so true-to-life, it makes you start. (Can you name the extremely famous painting in the background, left? It’s a beautiful juxtaposition with the sculpture. Answer: “**Pygmalion** **and** **Galatea.**“)

**I don’t know who this is, or who made him. But he emanates a special brand of banal magnificence.**

The playful elegance of Irving Penn’s photos

July 20, 2017April 5, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I’ve recently done some traveling to Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal and London, art-encrusted metropolises boasting drop-dead, world-class museums, from D.C.’s National Gallery to London’s twin Tates and the mighty Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was spun around (picture Mary Tyler Moore giddy and agape in the big city) by the sheer voluminous quality around almost every corner, be it the say-what size of the magnificent Turner collections in London or the rare “Chagall: Colour and Music” show in Montreal.

Yet, for all that sublime perambulation, meandering among masterpieces, the best art show I’ve seen in a spell, hands-down, is the Irving Penn photography exhibit at The Met in New York. “Irving Penn: Centennial” features over 200 photos — glamorous portraits of writers, artists, actors, dancers and other outsize personalities; insane food still lifes; leonine fashion divas; and worlds more. It’s an exhilarating joy.

Avers the show catalog: It’s the “most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the great American photographer,” who, after a sensational stint at Vogue, died in 2009. “Penn mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail.”

Yes, but there’s so much more than that clinical description suggests, and you can see it in the work itself. (Time is of the essence: the exhibit closes July 30. The Met has posted a nice video preview of the show here.) A smoky elegance and playful naturalism imbue the hugely influential pictures — hello, Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz — whose complexity and sophistication are on full display, if rarely peacocky.

Below are a few of Penn’s famous black and white celebrity portraits — some of my favorites — lucid, lush, deceptively simple images that pierce into the personalities to become indelibly iconic. (Try and identify the subjects.)