Pictures at an Exhibition

A sketch in the bathroom at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. 

Austrian artist Hundert Wasser once said it is not the lines in the museum that matter nearly as much as the lines we take to get to the museum.  These lines connecting our lives, desires, history and imagination, these squiggly, messy, zigg zagging lines, these are the lines that that matter. 

Lines connecting winter days in Garrison, Washington Square Park, and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, my other favorite museum in New York City.

It was a long winter's break.  So we talked about what to do Saturday. 

“Lets go to the Met” number two had declared the week prior.

And so we walked to the Met in the majestic winter, winding through the familiar streets from the Brooklyn to the Lower East Side up to past the Central Park, where we meandered a few blocks to the majestic old museum.   We had gone the week before.  But this did not seem enough. 

Strolling to get the museum.  Bottom.
 The Ballet from Robert le Diable, 1871

We went strolling through the 19^th Century paintings, enjoying the pictures at from the permanent exhibition, the paintings, the blurry space between the painter and the subject. Was it the ballet or the man watching his friends while at the ballet, which was the subject of the Degas painting, The Ballet from Robert le Diable, 1871?  For me the fun part is the blurry line between the subject of the paintings and the girls looking at paintings and other materials, photographing each other, relating leaning, Scarlett taking us to her favorite “princess bed” the Lauzun Room, the optimism of the Steward Davis American paintings I drove to DC to see years ago, jumping between New York and Paris, the Meissen porcelain materials we see here and we visited there, the gold figure and its harrowing stories of the people who extracted the materials to make it.  You could pile bodies from here to heaven with the people who died in gold mines in Equator.  The trip for coffee usually wraps up such a day.  And we went to visit friends on the Upper West Side.  The trip to the pictures at the exhibition opens us up to a world of stories and experiences, but the most important line we see there really is the line between our life and the way to the museum.