Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

On a tip we started at the Corner Bistro, an amazingly unrenovated bar a few blocks away. Lynda had a grilled cheese sandwich, la specialite de la maison, and I admired the pressed-tin ceiling, the pressed-copper panelling, the oak bar and floor and the beer-motifed stained glass over the bar. Just brilliant old New York.


From there, we took the subway to the (Solomon R.) Guggenheim Museum uptown, in a part of town known as the Museum Mile and not Struggle Street.



The museum was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as a series of spiral ramps creating a cylinder wider at the top than the bottom. It's light, airy and looks futuristic in a retro way.






Outside, the street vendors sell a higher quality of art than usual and the gelati is - but of course - both Artisanal and Organic.

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Inside - well not much. Despite spiral after spiral of wall space, there's only three side galleries of any substance and while we like the "Kandinsky in Paris" display and some early surrealist paintings, and a couple of really nice Picassos, there's not a lot to see. The James Turrell installation, including a colour show in the central atrium, was pretty dull for a light show imo. No photos allowed inside, and only a tiny fraction of the museum's collection on display.

I buy a nice hoodie and a T-shirt from the gift shop for Art's Sake.

We were motivated to have another go at visiting Serendipity3, a famous uptown eatery known best for its sundaes, and started to walk down Madison Avenue, noting the upscale establishments ...



... but then the clouds opened and that was the end of that. We took a cab to S3, but it was as full as, bro; the streets having emptied of people as ducking into an eatery - any eatery - was a major rain-avoidance strategy. I believe we'll get there. The rain seemed to be going on and on, so we took another cab home to West Village and - blue skies. The weather is much better in our part of the island :-)

As we missed lunch, searching online for interesting restaurants became quite frenzied, and I booked a couple for the next few days - L'Artusi on Saturday and Blue Hill (West Village) on Monday.

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