At the end of August, I went over to the Museum of Modern Art for a last look at “Matisse in Morocco.” This perfect, small-scaled show, with its unearthly combination of the voluptuous and the severe, was still pulling in the crowds. Matisse’s mostly thinly painted portraits of dusky men and women in bright, loose-fitting clothes are a distillation of many traditions—the Byzantine, the Asian, the nineteenth-century Romanticism of France—and they had become a magnet for people from around the world. The museums of Barcelona and London, where I’d been a few weeks before, could not boast an exhibition of this quality, or an audience so attuned to the glamour of a great show. Of course, a good number of the people at the Modern were Europeans, here to take advantage of a sinking dollar. But it was to New York that they had all come, and there was nothing that they could tell the New York gals in short-short skirts and the New York guys in knee-length bermudas about throwaway elegance. The scene in the museum’s glass-enclosed lobby was as terrific-looking as on the opening night of the Warhol show, only this wasn’t opening night, it was an ordinary Thursday afternoon, and the magnet wasn’t our master hype-artist, it was Matisse working his miracles. There was no better point at which to re-enter New York; but there was also something a little unnerving about the blooming health of the scene at the Modern, because everybody one talked to
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New York stories
On Still Life Anthology at the Borgenicht Gallery, Robert Bermelin & other matters.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 3, on page 62
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