Winter Wonderwhirling: Day 4
Viewing Klimt’s art at the Neue Galerie and becoming one of his paintings at a vintage shop!
“I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.”
Gustav Klimt and his Cat
My first introduction to Gustav Klimt was the bold-faced little girl with a defiant hand on her hip who meets you on your way to the impressionist wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The realism of her face contrasted with the almost whimsical nature of the background draws you into her gaze that is easy to read. She’s dressed in ribbons and frills but there is no mistaking this little girl for nothing less than a strong-willed tomboy.
This clarity of emotion and understanding of the sitter’s person is a prevalent theme in Klimt’s works. You may know his work best from the 2015 film, Woman in Gold, which tells the story of his most famous painting, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” that was stolen by Nazis during WW2 and eventually returned to the granddaughter of the sitter.
On my fourth day in New York, my friend Kelly, who was also hosting me, decided to take the day off so we could go wonderwhirl together. Neither of us had ever been to the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side to see New York’s largest collection of Klimt works, so we decided that this would be the perfect day to go.
No adventure is properly undertaken without ample subsidence, so we had to start the day at the Caffè De Martini on Vanderbilt Ave where we both ordered cake for breakfast accompanied by OJ and a cafe au lait.
The cafe is an Italian-style little hole-in-the-wall with about three tables and a gorgeous cascade of silk flowers adorning the facade. They serve proper Italian breakfast and brunch, but when tasked to choose from a chalkboard full of nourishing things and a glass case full of gorgeous cakes/tarts, there is only one option and that is of the things you can see.
We got slices of berry cream tart and pistachio ricotta cheesecake.
The berry was incredibly tart and tangy, but the creamy layer under the berries and the buttery crust bit softened the bite perfectly. The pistachio was divine, with a purely creamy consistency and smooth finish that cream cheese can’t hold a candle to with ricotta on the table.
Whenever I go somewhere that has pistachio anything as an option, even if there is something a little more “me,” I always get it because it was my dad’s favorite, and eating pistachio always feels like a dad-hug to me. We always joked that he only liked it because as a farmer he was obsessed with the color green, so far that even our countertops and roof of the house he built us were green. Like Klimt, my father expressed himself in his work more than in words and you could learn everything you needed to know about the man by standing in his workshop or watching him run his battered hands over his crops.
Kelly and I hung onto every bite of our divine little breakfast cakes, and when I’d licked both plates clean, we skipped out of the colorful and warm cafe back out into the greyness of NYC winter. This harsh welcome back to reality came with the knowledge that our morning should also include some protein to help fuel the miles we were about to walk around the city, so we planned and bought a salmon and lox bagel to share later after the lingering bright flavors of breakfast had left us.
We took the train about 40 minutes to the Upper East Side, at which point we couldn’t taste our cake so it was safe to eat our bagel. We got to the Neue Galerie around 11 a.m. and climbed the stairs to the first floor of exhibits.
Established in 2001, the Neue Galerie New York is a museum of early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design located in the William Starr Miller House at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue. The first section houses works by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele and decorative objects by the artisans of the Wiener Werkstaette and their contemporaries.
The first room was interesting enough, but we were both giddy with cake and anticipation of seeing the Klimpt paintings.
When we got to their room, we were speechless at the colors of his flower backgrounds, the softness of his skin rendering, and the purity of the sitter’s faces. His method of painting skin was something I’d never seen before. He achieved his soft pearlescent skin with several small pastel brushstrokes in shades of blue, pink, yellow, and even orange. Standing back you only see soft pink skin, but up close you can see it come together from all of those dappled shades.
This room is home to the "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” where she is given an entire wall to hang on and look down at you from her flowing golden gown from. This painting was purchased for 135 million dollars in 2006, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at the time.
You get to the upper floor by climbing a beautiful black and white spiral staircase. The staircase is where my enjoyment of the museum mostly ends, as I found the German art movements featured at the top level to be extremely disturbing and garish. Good art must make you feel something, so I do appreciate that German Expressionism made me feel something but I mostly felt dirty afterward.
Klimt’s female nudes and portraits are all incredibly feminine and graceful, yet genuine. Looking at them makes me proud to be a woman and to identify myself with his expression of our bodies. You can look at them and see a sense of integrity and personhood in the delicate faces, and feel the colorful floral backgrounds as an extension of her beauty and complexity of her spirit.
The grotesque, angry, and even frightened faces and bodies shown on the top floor made me feel almost ashamed of my womanness, and just looking at them made me want to put on more clothes and hide.
Kelly had a similar aversion to the works on the top floor, so we decided to cut back down to the Klimt room to cleanse our eyeballs with the happy paintings. Feeling redeemed and re-charged after the extra 20 minutes enjoying the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, Portrait of Ria Munk III, and the Portrait of Gertha Loew.
We left arm in arm, promising each other to go home and practice drawing whimsical pastel flowers on brown paper like Klimt.
Our next destination was Williamsburg in Brooklyn, so we walked to the station, pricing up a few snacks on the way.
“Let’s go get soup in a cup!” Kelly grabbed my arm and started putting me towards a little storefront.
“What do you mean, soup in a cup??” I wasn’t too sure about this and was expecting something lumpy and not at all interesting.
“Come on, trust me, I’ll show you,” she said. Into the shop, we went.
It looked like a tiny trendy coffee shop and not like a lunch restaurant. I then noticed the back wall had a line of tap handles coming out as you would see in a brewery. We ordered our “soup in a cup” and I watched the server dispense a liquid into our coffee cup and put the lid on. It turns out this was a coffee shop like a place where you order flavored bone broth to drink as a savory hot beverage. The kegerator even makes the broth come out with a layer of microfoam on top as you would get with beer.
I took a sip and it was so flavorful and wholesome that I was speechless!
“Now, you get it, right?” Kelly smiled and took her sip. We’d ordered chicken bone broth with rosemary oil, garlic, and lemon added. It was just the thing to warm us from the inside out as we walked on through the crisp NY winter air.
I was intrigued by a bakery window we were passing by, so we went in and Kelly showed me their beautiful Korean pastries. At first, you would think they were classical french goods, but on closer inspection, you find that they have Korean flare. Instead of an almond croissant, you see coconut cream, and their croquettes were filled with sweet potato and curry and rolled in sesame seeds. We ordered the sesame croquette, a passionfruit jelly donut, and a sweet potato babka to sample and bring home for our tea party later on.
Display at Paris Baguette
We explored shops in Williamsburg. The first was an antique/junk shop that reminded me of going through my grandparents’ basement. If only they knew how much their old dusty trinkets could sell for in New York City to the hipsters! We wandered through the china aisle and found a few antique plates for Kelly to add to her China collection and for our tea party.
Next, we went to a high-end vintage clothing shop called “Stella Dallas Living” that had the best selection of museum-quality 1930’s dresses and nighties I have ever seen. I tried on a midnight blue silk velvet evening gown that was cut on the bias. It was $540. I also tried on a silk bias cut pink slip/nighty that made me feel like I was a Klimt painting. I took detailed photographs and promised that I would try to re-create it when I got home. Kelly tried on some lovely wool trousers and we rifled through the stacks of vintage linens before wandering on to our next destination.
The Brooklyn Art Library was closed when we got there, but the employees were working on some organization so they let us in regardless. This unusual NYC gem is a library of artists’ sketchbooks from around the world that you can check out and return like at any other public library. Thousands of little brown sketchbooks are crammed into floor-celling shelves that line the walls. We went through a basket of the little books titled “travel” and admired a watercolor series from a popular garden in Japan, and in another basket, we found a series of drawing of creatures with the top half of one animal and bottom half of another.
We spent an hour or so there drinking all the magical little creations people had contributed to the library before heading home to prepare for our tea party.
Kelly made some shrimp soup with glass noodles for dinner and we set the table for our guests Angeline and Audrey. We all know each other from the church we went to in Brooklyn. Audrey was a sort of surrogate mother to all of us who were in NYC by ourselves with no family. I would go all week without human touch, but I knew that every Sunday I would get an Audrey hug and that was a small thing that make a big difference in my week.
Kelly’s yummy shrimp soup!
Angeline loves food as much as Kelly and I do and is just in general delightful and fun to be around. She lightens the room and delights in the little things that the rest of us can maybe overlook.
Kelly placed Madeleines straight out of the oven onto her new vintage plate and set it on the table with our pastries collected earlier and my baklava from Brighton Beach. We sat around Kelly’s table catching up and talking about the places we’ve traveled and want yet to see. We talked about what God is teaching us how and where we are headed. It was the first time we have all been together in four years, so there was plenty of life to catch up on.
It felt restorative to break bread together again like family and it brought me so much joy to realize that just because I don’t live in New York doesn’t mean I can’t see my favorite people, just like this, at just a direct flight’s notice.
The reality had hit that I was leaving in the morning, but Angeline stayed late and I packed my bag up in the living room with her, Kelly, and BooBear the cat there as a happy distraction. I was anxious about leaving but excited that the trip wasn’t quite over yet as I would head to Boston in the morning for two days with my friend Delaney before coming back to Oregon. I missed Alex plenty by then and it felt ok to be drawing near to the end of the trip, but it’s never easy saying goodbye to my favorite city and the part of me that comes to life there.
I had gathered a great hoard of memories on this trip already, but childlike greed in me came alive and I stayed up far too late gathering each one up like a hungry little chipmunk stuffing more and more crumbs of joy into his cheeks until they look like golf-balls. When midnight came there was no going back, so I fell into sleep with the acceptance that tomorrow would be another great day and my trip would stay with me and keep me full for months to come.
