[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll hear about an exhibit at the Met which explores the collection of the silversmith and creative force behind Tiffany and Co. Jewelry. We'll also discuss a provocative new installation at Governor's Island spotlighting mental health. Plus, we'll speak to the director and the star of a new independent film, The Good One. We'll hear all about the highlights and the drama out of the Paris Olympics with our resident sports guy, producer Luke Green. That's the plan. Let's get this started with our hundred pieces of art, which celebrates WNYC centennial through the lens of art.

[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison Stewart: The WNYC centennial is off to a great start. We've had concerts, audio, flashbacks, and an upcoming event in Central Park on September 9th. We here at All Of It are celebrating WNYC with a yearlong project to identify 100 pieces of art you should see in New York City. We live in a city where you can take a train to see extraordinary works, or maybe enjoy the art in the subway, or a park, or a building. Art is everywhere around you in New York City.

Each month, we're going to talk to an expert in the field who will give us their 10 picks today. My guest is the editor in chief of Art News, Sarah Douglas. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Douglas: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, what is a piece of art that moves you? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or reach out via social media @AllOfItWNYC. We want to know a piece of art that just really stays with you and tell us why 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. Now, Sarah, I know you put a lot of thought into this list.

Sarah Douglas: I did, but it was also a lot of fun for me because I'm very passionate about this. Also, as the editor of a publication, I just don't get out enough. This enabled me to pretend I was getting out. My staff does a lot of the footwork these days.

Alison Stewart: Your first choice on the list is just great. I've walked by this location so many times, taking my kid to the dentist, and I always wondered what it was. It's right up the street from WNYC, actually. You have chosen a living piece of art called time landscape. Tell us who this is by.

Sarah Douglas: This is by an artist, Alan Sonfist, who I believe is still alive and living in New York. He was one of the founders of the Land Art Movement. The Land Art Movement, people may know of that from larger works out in the desert southwest, like Michael Heitzer's city or some of the Walter de Maria pieces, who we'll also be talking about. He created this artwork, Time Landscape, in 1978. What he really did was he planted plants and trees there that would have been there in pre-colonial times, so when New York was just a forest and was populated by indigenous peoples.

Alison Stewart: Where is it located?

Sarah Douglas: This is at the corner of LaGuardia and Houston. I actually discovered this piece when I was studying art history at NYU, and I just had walked by it and saw this little sign. I've been fascinated by it since then.

Alison Stewart: All right, we'll stick with the soil as canvas with the New York Earth Room. Can you describe the New York Earth Room?

Sarah Douglas: Yes. This is an amazing piece that, again, I would go and visit when I was in college because it was close by. It actually just reopened last year after, being closed for maintenance for almost a year, I think. This became a permanent installation in 1980. It's by another artist who's associated with the Land Art Movement, Walter DeMaria. What he did is it said it's essentially a room full of earth. You go there and you have a quiet, contemplative experience.

I don't want to get too discursive, but within the art world, there's a bit of a controversy about the renovation of it, because you have all this earth in the room, and it used to be that it was quite humid in there, and they actually redid the HVAC system. Some people will complain there's not enough of a smell anymore. I have to agree. I might be right there with them, because the smell and the humidity and the fact that there were little mushrooms growing in there that had to be taken care of was part of the experience.

I'll say one more thing about this. The same guy has been taking care of it since 1989, this guy, Bill Dilworth. I don't know. I feel like with these two pieces, in a world that's constantly changing, they're always there. I like that idea.

Alison Stewart: Well, it's been interesting because there have been two other earth rooms, I believe they were in Germany, that have since been dismantled. How is this one able to stay awake, stay available?

Sarah Douglas: Well, because it's supported by the Dia foundation, which is a foundation that was really created when some of these first earthworks were being made, and Dia preserves another Walter de Maria piece, the Lightning Fields, which is, again, in the desert southwest. Dia is really an amazing foundation that does this preservation of these very difficult artworks.

I would just say about this piece it really was foundational. It's an interesting reference point for some pieces that have been made since then. Some people may remember when Urs Fischer dug up the floor of Gavin Brown's gallery in 2007, just this massive hole. I think that's very related to what Walter DeMaria did, although he was bringing earth in, and Urs Fischer was taking it out.

You also have an artist whose show just closed at Dia in Chelsea, Delcy Morales, who created this huge landscape out of earth and aromatics, and there's tobacco in there. Again, the smell was part of that. Yes, I guess I have a lot of nature-related art in here. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: I was going to suggest that this must change over time because it was created in 1977. The Environmental Protection Agency was only seven years old. Same with Earth Day. We're now in the 21st century. Is its message different as time goes by?

Sarah Douglas: I think so. I think they did replace the dirt at one time. I guess with both of these pieces, they were made so far in advance of the idea of the awareness of climate change. Of course, there was the 1970s environmentalism, but I think just paying attention to the earth, the soil, the untouched-- Remember in the 1970s, when both of these pieces were being created, you had the World Trade Center going up downtown. I don't know. They change and they remain the same at the same time, in a way.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sarah Douglas, editor in chief of Art News. She's joining us for our WNYC centennial series, 100 pieces of art you should see in New York City, our monthly take on great art in New York. Let's get to some calls. Sarah Anthony from Nutley, New Jersey. Hi, Anthony. Thanks for calling, Oliver.

Anthony: Oh, thank you. Welcome back. I'm enjoying the show as always. Now, we're talking about art in the subways. This is the Newark area, and there is a light rail line that runs from Pennsylvania station Newark about five or six miles out to north Newark. There are four tunnel stops.

Now, in these four tunnel stops, there are 1935 WPA fire tile murals by a guy named Domenico Mortelito. They're about 4x5. They all have canal motifs because this was the bed of the old Morris Canal in the Newark area. They are spectacularly beautiful masterpieces, and I recommend that people, you could google them and see them. That's why I had to get in here and tell you about that.

Alison Stewart: Anthony, appreciate your contribution. Thanks for calling. Also, Dwayne is giving us a call. Hi, Dwayne.

Dwayne: Yes, hi. Good afternoon. Great show. I'd like to give a shout-out to the shoe line, the second Avenue line, the 86th Street station, which has just an amazing amount of chuck Close in tiles all over the station. Those of us that are familiar with Chuck Close, we know that his later work is so conducive to that mosaic tile format anyway, but it's just a terrific station. You can just walk around there and just see gobs of Chuck Close all over the place. It's just terrific.

Alison Stewart: I agree with you. Listeners, we want to hear what piece of art really moves you, what really speaks to you. Call us or text us at 212-433-9692, 212-2433-WNYC, or reach out via social media @AllOfItWNYC.

Sarah, your next choices date back to the 15th century. The first takes us to Italy. It's Bellini St. Francis. It's in the Frick collection. Now, the Frick is set to reopen after a massive renovation, but you can see it online. First of all, who's Bellini?

Sarah Douglas: Bellini was an Italian painter, 15th century during the Renaissance. I was trained as an art historian, but I feel like this is one of these paintings that you can appreciate. You don't have to know any of the art history. It's in some ways like a perfect painting. Of course, St. Francis was the saint who was out in nature and a friend to the animals. This scene depicts him receiving the stigmata. In other words, he's becoming divine, and so he's standing with his palms out.

What I think is so beautiful about it is just the descriptions in paint of each of the animals. It's so precise, but it also seems to be somehow infused with light. In my mind, I always thought that's an interesting metaphor where this saint is becoming divine. There's something about the creation of an artwork where everything comes together, and it's this source of transcendence itself, but it really is just a stunning painting.

Alison Stewart: That's Bellini-

Sarah Douglas: Just beautiful.

Alison Stewart: -Bellini St. Francis. Our next stop is the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1449. A Goldsmith in His Shop. Who's this by?

Sarah Douglas: This is, again, we're in the 15th century. This is Petrus Christus. He's a painter from Bruges, painted in 1449. This is actually a very personal choice for me, because going back to when I was in college studying art history, whenever I would get stuck on something and I was writing or something, couldn't figure something out, I would go to the Met and I would sit in a room with this painting. There was this old couch in there. It was a green velvet couch, and you could sit on it and look at this painting.

In the painting, what's fascinating about it is you have a gold seller. Inside the gold seller's shop, there's a couple, which has caused some historians to believe this is a wedding portrait, because you have a couple standing in there, and then you have the gold seller. Then you have a little mirror. In the mirror, you can see two men who are standing outside the shop. It's one of these fascinating Renaissance- many different dimensions to the painting. You see this in Velasquez, too, with the use of the mirror, and where do we stand in this painting?

I love that there's this extra dimension and that this painting contains much more than just the interior space. It always, for me, helped me think for some reason, because it had these different dimensions. That's my personal story about this painting.

Alison Stewart: That's A Goldsmith in His Shop at the Metropolitan Museum at art. We stay at the Met with a cheeky painting from Mark Tansey, a modern painter called The Innocent's Eye Test. It involves a cow. What is the cow doing?

Sarah Douglas: Well, so they have a cow. This has been one of my favorite paintings forever and ever and ever. I have to say, this painting has been written about and written about and reproduced and reproduced, but I have to say, and I actually don't know if it's on view right now, but this painting really well worth seeing it in person, because when you see it in reproduction, you can't tell quite how big it is. It is big.

The cow, when you actually go see it, is almost like a life-size cow. Well, both cows.

[laughter]

Sarah Douglas: You've got these guys who seem to be scientists or something, and they're doing this test on this cow, and they've brought in this painting by Paulus Potter. I think it's a 17th-century painting, of a bull. They're seeing how this cow, a real cow, reacts to the bull. Of course, the funny thing here is that neither one of them is real because here we are looking at this painting.

I would just say, and this, again, it's been written about many, many times, but this is a painting for art history nerds. Ultimately, what Tansey is reaching back to is this story about these two Greek painters in ancient Greece who had a competition, and the competition was who was the better painter. You would determine this purely through naturalism. They both painted some grapes, and they would determine which grapes were more realistic, but the one that won was that the birds came and pecked at the grapes, thinking the grapes were real.

Mark Tanzey is playing with all these different ideas in this painting. For me, just the idea of having a bunch of scientists there, it's like the idea that you could judge a painting in that way is just hilarious because paintings, by their very nature, defy science. It's very subjective. I love this painting.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Leanne from Manhattan. Leanne, thanks for calling All Of It.

Leanne: Hi. Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. My favorite public sculpture in Manhattan is behind a building at 787 7th Avenue. There's a passageway sitting place, plaza between two buildings between 7th and 6th. There's a pair of sculptures featuring gigantic hares. One is on top of a bell, and the other one, the hare is striding on top of an elephant, which is also walking and this hare, with its legs open and its arms swinging, striding right on top of the elephant. It's bronze. It's fantastic.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling, Leann. Also going to talk to Brooke. Excuse me. Will from Brooklyn. Hi, Will.

Will: Hi. Good afternoon. Love the show. Today, I just wanted to give a shout-out to the Salvatore Mundi Museum. It's a great, fascinating exhibit in the Columbia Waterfall district in Brooklyn. If you ever get a chance to see it, it's this contemporary exhibit dedicated to Salvatore Mundi and this local artist. He's a sculptor. He's really interesting guy. He's very friendly to talk to, and he always likes to really provide an interactive exhibit of this. His name is- it's coming to me- Elliot Arkin.

Sarah Douglas: I actually know him.

Alison Stewart: Oh, hang on. You know him? Sarah, tell us more.

Sarah Douglas: Well, I know him. Many, many years ago, in 2004, when I used to work at Artnet, he was just in the mix, and I emailed with him from time to time. He's a very funny guy. He really has a sense of humor. He used to have an ice cream truck that he would ride around. It was like an art truck kind of thing. Anyhow, he's funny.

Alison Stewart: Love that. Love that. We had a little coincidence there. My guest is Sarah Douglas, editor in chief of Art News. We are discussing the great art that's around New York that you need to check out. Listeners call in, let us know what is a piece of art that moves you? Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or hit us up on social media @AllOfItWNYC via social media. After the break, we're going to talk about what's going on at the Whitney. Stay with us.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sarah Douglas, the editor in chief of Art News. She's joining us for our WNYC centennial series, 100 Pieces of Art you should see in New York City. It's our monthly take on great art in the city. Sarah is giving us her top 10. I do want to read one text to you, Sarah.

"Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. It's owned by the Met, but you can see it for free. It's beautiful, has an incredible history, and is a marker for a time capsule buried beneath it that includes Shakespeare's complete works and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. I could sit there for hours taking in its history in this beautiful park."

Sarah Douglas: Really cool piece.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about it. Yes, please.

Sarah Douglas: You can run in the park and see that piece, get some exercise at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Well, actually, somebody texted us. "Does the park count as a masterpiece?" I think so. [chuckles]

Sarah Douglas: It's true. Olmsted, also Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which I live right across from.

Alison Stewart: All right, we're going to talk, talk about the Whitney now. We actually got a text about this. They said that Calder Circus at the Whitney was their favorite. It's on your list as well. It's up on the 7th floor now. It's not the spiral statues that we expect of space and mobiles with color. Is this a series that goes together? What makes this Calder Circus?

Sarah Douglas: This is exactly why I picked this out is because I think Calder, there's the Calder Foundation, which is run by Calder's grandson, and he's done a great job of really keeping Calder in the conversation, put exhibitions, Calder, Picasso, Calder Moreau, and really showing what you may call the serious side of Calder, which is the mobiles, the stabiles, and the masterpieces of modernism.

Early in his career, from 1926 to 1931, Calder was in Paris and he, I think, had an assignment to do an illustration. He started sketching these circus figures and then he started making them as tiny little sculptures, mostly out of wire and wood and fabric. He would pack them up into trunks and then he would actually perform the circus. I think they're still online. You can find a video of him doing this.

I guess the idea that this is like the whimsical, non-serious, maybe like, oh, it's for kids, side of Calder. I think that's totally wrong because I think what art is, at the end of the day, is experimentation with materials and the idea that, like, oh, could I make this out of this? Any of us could sit down and open our mind and become an artist and see if we can make a little figure out of a wine cork or something. That's what he was doing. There's something really pure about that and amazing.

Alison Stewart: Also, staying at the Whitney, The Rose by Jay DeFeo. This was hidden behind a wall for years. This has a very mythological quality to it. The artist couldn't pay for storage. It's actually a big long story. You should read about it online, but this is huge. How big is it? What do you get by looking at The Rose, which doesn't look like a rose necessarily?

Sarah Douglas: Well, I think it's easily like 8ft or more tall. No, it doesn't look like a rose. It looks like a starburst. I guess what I really love about this piece is it has these layers and layers and layers of paint. She worked on it for 10 years, from 1958 to '66, she was in San Francisco, so really outside of the art world. Like you just said, it didn't get rediscovered until 1994. It was actually five years after she died, so a sad occurrence.

What's so amazing about this painting, when you look at it, is just the density of the layers on it, and its extraordinary weight, and you can sense that about it. Again, like, when you think about materials, she's pushed these materials to the limits of what they can do. You can see how this could easily fall off the can. I think it's had to be restored, but I think that that's part of art, is this obsessive quality.

It's the idea that I think someone wrote an Art Forum, I wrote this in my notes as I was thinking about this, DeFeo didn't so much finish the rose as simply stop working on it. Maybe some people who are listening will remember that Met did a show some years ago called Unfinished, and it was all about unfinished artworks. Really, it's an issue, like with art. Is it finished? Some artists come back to a piece and work on it years later. It's just something interesting to consider.

Alison Stewart: As long as we're down by the Whitney, you can go to the fabulous bakery there, but you mentioned that there's art in the bakery we should pay attention to, Rashid Johnson.

Sarah Douglas: Yes. He's one of the two artists who was commissioned to make something for that space. One of the reasons I put this on is that, again, a big part of this artwork is plants. There are many, many plants on these shelves. It looks like a modular- almost like a huge set of bookshelves, open bookshelves. There are ceramics there. There are videos that he's made that he's displayed there. This is something, he's made a lot of enormous artworks of this type.

What I love about it is it references minimalism in this the grid, the modular, but then you have plants and things that are not minimalist at all. There's a. There's a wildness to it, and it extends outside the restaurant.

Again, I mentioned you had a caller who talked about that piece in Central Park. This is something where you can be eating and looking at art, and not everyone might know that's an artwork. It's not decorations. It's artwork. I love the idea. I think it was Frank O'Hara said, like, we should be able to bring our lunch into the museum and eat lunch and look at paintings. I like that idea.

Alison Stewart: We got a text here that says, "The collection of Buddhas at the Met is wonderful. That section of the museum is usually not crowded," so that's a good tip. "We love the larger-than-life-size old tailor stooped over his sewing machine wearing a yarmulke in the garment district." We got another one that says The Kiss by Gustavo Klimt. It evokes erotic and romantic at the same time."

Sarah Douglas: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Wendy, calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Wendy.

Wendy: Hi, thank you. I wanted to shout out another subway piece. Do want to say, I used to work for MTA Arts and Design, so I don't want to pick a favorite. There are hundreds and hundreds of really great art in the subway and metro north and Long Island Railroad, but Al Held's piece called Passing Through, the connection between the 6th and Lexington Avenue, 53rd Street, E and N lines, are absolutely worth taking a look at and staring at for a while.

What Al Held was doing was creating abstract ideas and pieces with a renaissance perspective. When you stand by it and walk by it, you just keep getting intrigued more and more by the different colors and variations that he used to create this piece. The wall is also undulating, so that adds to the dimensionality of the work. It's fabulous.

Alison Stewart: Love that. Wendy, thanks for calling. Karen is calling us from White Plains. Hi, Karen. Thanks for calling. All of it.

Karen: Hi. Thank you. Alison, I love your show, and I am so enjoying this conversation with you and Sarah Douglas.

Alison Stewart: Oh, fantastic. Tell us about what you're thinking about.

Karen: Well, what I'm thinking about, there were so many mentions to the Met, and first of all, A Goldsmith in His Shop, wonderful. Right now, I'm going to give you a plug. I just retired as of July 1st, I was director of visual arts for New York City Public Schools. Each year from June to October, we have an exhibition on the lower level in the Euro Center entitled PS Art. Right now, my favorite works are the 126 works, pre k through 12th grade, of our New York City Public School students. Just wanted to give a shout out and mention that we love it.

Alison Stewart: We gave it big hearts in the studio.

Sarah Douglas: I have a nine-year-old in New York City public schools, so I appreciate that. She's quite the artist.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much. All right, your last two rock stars, you have Cézanne The Bather, and you have Henri Rousseau, The Football Players at the Guggenheim. He was interesting because he really didn't start painting till he was 40.

Sarah Douglas: Yes. I think it's good we talk about these two together because, first of all, Cézanne's bather-- As I was thinking about this before this show, I was thinking, like people always ask, what's your favorite artwork? I can't answer that question because I'm an art historian by training. How could I? I think if I had to say, what is the most perfect painting in New York, I would say this painting.

This painting, it stands at the crossroads of history between the 19th century and the 20th century and Cézanne, of course, paved the way for cubism- huge model for Matisse and Picasso. This painting in particular, you can see there's no fixed, really, perspective. The bather is seen from a lot of different perspectives at the same time. I think aside from that, and I could go on and on about this, the art historical aspects of it, but I'm not sure that's what your listeners want to hear.

I think that outside of that, all the stylistic elements, this is just when you look at the bather himself, there's an amazing melancholy to it, and there's a tentativeness in the way that he steps forward. The color is just exquisite, the blues and greens and his foot in the pool of water. It's just an exquisite painting.

I think just when you're looking at this and you're saying, "Well the perspective's all over the place. We're seeing him from all different perspectives at the same time," and you think about what Picasso was doing much later, you have to remember that Henri Rousseau, which is the painting at the Guggenheim of these men in these funny striped costumes actually playing rugby--

Rousseau was an untrained painter. He spent most of his life as a tax collector or a ticket collector. He was known as the Douanier Rousseau, which was like the ticket collector Rousseau, and he was not trained. When you see the lack of perspective in this painting, it's because he was what was called a naive painter.

I think just on the level of an enjoyable artwork, there's a lot of joy sense in this. It's very playful and whimsical and beautiful, but I think it's also interesting to think about those twin strains that go into modernism, like the trained artist Cézanne, who creates these new ways of thinking about how we look, but also at the same time, someone like Rousseau. Then you think about the tradition that goes forward of outsider art or untrained artist. There's a lot there to talk about and think about with those two pieces.

Alison Stewart: Sarah Douglas is the editor in chief of Art News. Sarah, thank you so much for making this list for us. We really appreciate you contributing to the 100 paintings or pieces of art we should see in New York City.

Sarah Douglas: Yes, this was really fun.

Alison Stewart: Thanks to all our callers who called in.

 

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