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Alison Stewart: We are celebrating 100 pieces of art to see in New York City, a completely unscientific but heartfelt recognition that we live in a city with some of the finest art around. We just have to take the time to look. As we've been celebrating WNYC's 100th, we've been asking experts in the field for their recommendations for pieces of art that people here should make time to see. We've spoken to ARTnews editor Sarah Douglas and New York Times critic Will Heinrich. Thelma Golden's on the list for November. Today, we are welcoming Pulitzer Prize winner Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine. So good to see you, Jerry.

Jerry Saltz: Great to see you, Alison Stewart.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want you in on this. What is your favorite piece of art to see? 212-433-9692, 212-433. Our social media is available @AllOfItWNYC. What is your favorite piece of art to see? Then you got to tell us why. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. When you were thinking about the list, we're going to get right into it, but what criteria did you use?

Jerry Saltz: I wanted to give people the sense that anything can be art, that I've picked a giant public sculpture that's almost invisible. I picked an enormous panorama that might not even be seen as art. If there were cave paintings in New York, I would have picked them to say that those are the greatest portraits of mammals ever made. I picked contemporary art, modernism, and art that was deemed to be no good, and one work of art that floored me.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's start with Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise.

Jerry Saltz: I have to say, in 1445, it turns out that my chaos might have been organized into one idea of beauty. As there are 100 people, there are 100 beauties. I'm going to tell a little bit of a sad story. My aspirational Jewish mother drove me in from our suburb in Chicago to the Art Institute of Chicago when I was 10 and parked me there and left me there alone. I know that I never paid attention to art. I didn't like art. It wasn't baseball. I did not care about it.

I wandered around until I saw one diptych by Giovanni di Paolo, but I was not even bothering to read the labels of a man on the left standing in a prison cell. There were guards around him. He was being visited by an angel, talking to people. On the right, I saw his neck had been extended outside the prison cell. A swordsman had just lopped off his head that was being placed on a plate. There was blood everywhere.

I looked back and forth and back and forth to this gorgeous Sienese, Renaissance painting in blues and pinks and salmons. I suddenly understood. This painting was telling a story, and that organized my visual thinking instantaneously around it. Giovanni de Paolo turns out to be the painter of The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, which I saw the first time I was in New York when I visited here and slept in Central Park, had no place to go but had to come.

I visited The Met and I saw what I think may be the most beautiful painting ever, and then everything became beautiful and ugly. I just want to tell people to go to the Lehman wing at The Met and prepare to surrender because that's what you have to do to art. You cannot stand in front of a work of art and ask, "What does this mean?" We never ask, "What does Mozart mean?" We experience a work of art. Open yourself up, silence the critics, and listen to the voices in your head.

Alison Stewart: That piece is so interesting because there's almost a mosaic quality to it.

Jerry Saltz: Yes, very much. It's different parts. That's brilliant. I wish I had said that.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] What do you think the piece does expand on the trope of Adam and Eve leaving the garden?

Jerry Saltz: Well, in Christianity, we all exist in a fallen state. We experience that every minute of our lives as the eye that lives inside of each one of us is also a stranger to us. We feel happy one second and then lost and confused on the other. This beautiful portrayal of our first parents being executed as it were because of Eve's bravery. The story is told backwards. Eve finds the apple, eats it even though she knows what this means.

What does she do? Something that no man would ever do. She picks a second apple and brings it back to Adam and says, "Eat." He has a freak-out. I don't think we should. He eats half of it. Eve has eaten a full apple and a half. Adam has eaten one-half apple. This painting, I think, tells that story of that bravery and knowledge of our first mother, Eve, and then the subsequent image on the right-hand side of the painting of them being moved out of the garden by the archangel.

Alison Stewart: Our phone lines are buzzing. Let's say a couple of calls. Bob from Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Hi, Bob. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Bob: Hello. You can hear me, I'm sure.

Alison Stewart: We can.

Bob: The favorite work of art of mine is Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hopper at the Whitney. It is wonderfully painted. It has bright colors. It has a rhythm to it because you're looking at a row of windows of townhouses and the shades are open to different links. It's just gorgeous. The shadows are very strong. It's pure Hopper.

Jerry Saltz: You are so right. What's his name?

Alison Stewart: Bob.

Jerry Saltz: Bob. Bob, you have a good eye. That painting by Hopper gets an idea not of loneliness as been pointed out elsewhere but of a deeper idea of solitude, of that sense of being ourselves in an empty space before it's occupied by other people. When we notice the shadows, the light, we smell the atmosphere. We experience a form of joy and a form of loneliness, which is solitude. Good eye, Bob.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Judith on three calling in from the Upper West Side. Hi, Judith.

Judith: Hi. I love Eleanor Roosevelt in a very-- She's just wonderful. It's on 72nd Street at the beginning of Riverside Park. It's right out there for the whole world to enjoy.

Alison Stewart: What do you like about it?

Judith: Well, it's just her. She's in such a nice, contemplative state. We used to gather there and read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July. It was just so nice to hang out with her and read that. Now, we do it at a different location.

Jerry Saltz: Sorry to interrupt. Isn't public sculpture interesting because it exists in public and we experience it in private, and yet it can become the focal point of incredible tension, political, religious. We saw the confederate statues, which are supercharged, that were put up in the '30s and the '40s, becoming the focus. In this coming election, I'm sure we're going to have to hear about that. That is called "iconoclasm," the fear and hatred of images.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jerry Saltz. He is senior art critic for New York Magazine. He's helping us put together our list of 100 pieces of art to see in New York City. Listeners, what is your favorite piece of art to look at? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call that number or text us. Also, social media is available @AllOfItWNYC. Back to your list. The Queen's Museum Panorama of the City of New York. This is so exciting.

Jerry Saltz: You've seen it.

Alison Stewart: I love it.

Jerry Saltz: Everybody has seen it. If you haven't, get thee to the Queens Museum out in Queens. It was built in 1964 in the "American Century" by the American centrist Robert effing Moses, who had visions for our city to tear it down, to rebuild it. Nothing could stand in his way. Read the Robert Caro biography. This is a 9,335-square-foot model of the city that I live in, that you live in. We go there and we see where Walt Whitman stood when he wrote Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. We see where the Titanic might have docked had she made it. You see your city, but a city you've never seen before. I look at that every time, Alison, and I think, "What neighborhood is that? I have to go there." What's your experience of it?

Alison Stewart: I love watching the little plane take off. [laughs] I don't know why. I can see the wires. I can see the hangers, but I love watching the little plane take off.

Jerry Saltz: Yes, that's artifice visible that you don't-- It's not magic, but it's magical. It's from LaGuardia, this crappy little airport that they have not remodeled yet. If you want to see the old LaGuardia that I grew up with and loved because it's so close to my house, go to the Queens Museum because you're seeing almost a Borges idea of a 1:1 scale of something so gigantic that it shouldn't be attempted, but there it is. I've been lucky enough to walk on it when they cleaned it, I think, in 1992.

Alison Stewart: That's pretty cool. Good to be Jerry Saltz. Number two. Yesterday, I went for a little walk down the West Side Highway. It still amazes me when I see it. David Hammons' the Day's End. It's this beautiful, beautiful sculpture on the West Side, on the piers. Would you describe it for folks who haven't seen it or maybe wondering what it was?

Jerry Saltz: That's a great question because it's there and not there. It's sort of a very large aluminum outline of what appears like it was once one of the piers. In fact, right off Gansevoort and the West Side Highway, it is a recreation of a former pier, a pier where there were slaves sold appear, that saw amazing strikes industry and appear when I moved here in the 1980s that was still being used by the queer community for cruising, a pier that was used by a very famous late artist named Gordon Matta-Clark, who took a chainsaw to it and cut it up.

This sculpture is a ghost sculpture by a hero, anti-artist. David Hammons has never been represented by a gallery, yet he has appeared outside of Cooper Union and sold snowballs. He urinated on a large Richard Serra sculpture. He's one of the most famous artists in the world, and yet he channels a dark, anti-heroic, insider-outsider energy. I want to call your attention, since I'm yammering about it, to the Whitney Museum, which is just across the West Side Highway, which is your museum.

Like the shows, hate them. Like the biennial, hate the biennial. It doesn't matter because it's a downtown museum. Also, much to my chagrin and delight, Little Island, I think it's called, by, for me, the worst public architect of all time, Thomas Heatherwick, who built the awful schwarm thing in the god-awful Hudson Yards that should be torn down instantly. He came up with this thing. It's pretty, pretty good.

Alison Stewart: It's pretty good. Also, from the museum, from the Whitney, you can see David Hammons from a different direction, which is kind of exciting.

Jerry Saltz: Yes, beautiful view of it.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Nick. Nick is on Line 2. Hi, Nick. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Nick: Yes, hi. I just wanted to put in a word, a plug for the old municipal building at 1 Centre Street. That building takes my breath away and it just inspires incredible awe and reverence every time I see it. It's so majestic and everyone should see that building. It's just the architecture just blows me away.

Alison Stewart: Used to be WNYC's first home, so there you go. Let's talk to Kathy. Hi, Kat. Kathy's calling from Manhattan. Hi, Kathy. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Kathy: Hi. Thank you. Yes, my suggestion. Hi, Jerry. I've met you through SVA and lots of other things.

Jerry Saltz: Hi, Kathy.

Kathy: One of my favorite pieces that probably a lot of people don't know about is James Turrell's the Meeting, which is in MoMA's PS1. I don't know how many people have been to PS1, but it is an unusual piece. First of all, PS1 used to be a public school. You're on this third floor and you're walking down what feels like a funky old school corridor. You open up this door and then you enter into this magical, spiritual, beautiful sky space that just leaves you in this reverie of solitude and contemplation and beauty of what Turrell does with his work.

Jerry Saltz: Kathy, I just want to add for people that may not know it. They pulled the ceiling back and you lie down on the bench and you look up at the sky. It could be dark. It could be clear blue. You could see birds float by. It could be anything. It takes you out of yourself, Kathy.

Alison Stewart: We'll have more with Jerry Saltz after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We've been celebrating WNYC's 100th birthday by asking experts in the field for their recommendations for our list of 100 pieces of art you should see when you live in New York City. Jerry Saltz is a senior art critic for New York Magazine. He's given us some suggestions for our list. Let's go in at number five that you put in your list. Jasper Johns. The American flag from MoMA. One blurb read, "One night, I dreamed that I painted a large American flag. The next morning, I got up, I went out, and I bought the materials to begin it," Jasper Johns says.

Jerry Saltz: Think of that, Alison. How many artists listening to this, how many people listening to this were given a whole career in their dream? How many of you dreamt last night something and you thought, "Oh, that's cool," and then you just forgot it or you didn't pay attention to it? This young gay man, when he was 24 years old, never went to art school, was living with Robert Rauschenberg, his lover, who every time people come in contact with Robert Rauschenberg, extraordinary things came out of them. He was a great artist. Johns was painting icky, abstract, expressionist paintings just like all of you.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Jerry Saltz: Then he had this dream, like Alison said, that he painted the flag. He went out and he started to paint it, but the paint he was using was too messy and wouldn't dry fast enough. He picked up a material he heard about called encaustic. This is heated bees honey wax mixed with pigment. It was used to wrap mummies. It was used for Roman wall paintings. It embodies every mark, every stroke, every thought. It embodies the process. Is it a real flag? It's an image of a flag. It's a triptych, or is it a picture of a flag?

Is it satiric or is it patriotic? What is the flag? He asked a question that still finds no answer. The course of American art history jumped off the tracks with Jasper Johns. He said, "You do everything you can do." Artists, listen to this. "You do everything you can do. If you can avoid it, avoid it. Then you do what is helpless and unavoidable." In other words, you lose your fear or you keep it and still do things that you know will embarrass you. When you're being embarrassed and are afraid of what you're doing, keep doing it.

Alison Stewart: You have a Pablo Picasso on the list at the Museum of Modern Art. It's a very angular piece of work. Tell us about this work when it was done.

Jerry Saltz: Whoa. Well, that is a resurrection, insurrection, revolution. It may be the greatest single shot ever fired over the bow of modern art history in 1909 by the young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso, who was short, I'd like to say. My height and shorter. The big baby. He had a very high voice. "[imitates Pablo Picasso's voice] He spoke like that a little bit," but he was an amazing person that went immediately to war, aesthetic war, with the most famous painter in town, Henri Matisse.

You had the succulent Frenchman and the truculent Spaniard. You had this painter of a new beauty and this painter of revolution. Picasso painted the five whores of Avignon Street. That is what the title means. They look at us like they mean business. You cannot be holding a book. You cannot be having a small talk with them. They are naked. They look directly at you. There's a very phallic still-life right in front of the painting in this shattered ice field of space where space is finally collapsed.

The space of 400 years of the prison of perspective was finally shattered in this painting, and so begins. Matisse is one of the first people to see it. He doesn't like the painting, but he says it's cubistic. He knew what it meant. He knew he had to fire back. The two of them began dueling with each other. The results are very moving and very powerful for modernism. Of course, I need to finish with-- I know this is all capturing the Great Man Theory of art history and it does. That time is over, thank God.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about The Met. You had three things at The Met you wanted people to see. One was already on somebody else's list, so we'll forget that. We'll talk about the kouros and the Roman wall paintings at The Met.

Jerry Saltz: What was the first?

Alison Stewart: The kouros. Anyway, tell us about the Roman wall paintings.

Jerry Saltz: Oh, Roman wall paintings. Go into the Roman-- oh, the kouros and the Roman--

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry. I'm Jersey. [laughs]

Jerry Saltz: I'm an idiot. I'm pronouncing it right. It's like saying "Van Gok" instead of "Van Gogh." Anyway, The Met is fantastic because the minute you walk into it, you're seeing art unlike the Louvre, which you have to go through a stupid glass-- Have you been there?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Jerry Saltz: A glass pyramid down a single escalator. You buy a ticket and you're instantaneously lost in a basement.

Alison Stewart: I feel like you're going to a mall. You're going down to an escalator.

Jerry Saltz: It's like going to a mall, which we love, but Jesus. At The Met, you walk in. You go left. You look at Rome. At right, you look at Egypt. Upstairs, you look at Western civilization. If you go to the left to see Greece and Rome, you will walk through a gallery to see the kouros, which is a large standing sculpture made in about 500 BC by the Greeks. The Greeks woke up in the middle of the Mediterranean back then.

They looked at Egypt and Palestine and Italy and all the countries around them. It was busy there. You could sail to Barcelona in 10 days. They traded constantly. Everybody knew everybody. The Greeks woke up and they realized they were incredibly advanced. They had these ideas and they started making this figurative, naturalistic work of, "Here is a sculpture with one foot striding forward."

That is Egypt, which never changed, which was perfect and never changed for 5,000 years. You can still conjure up an Egyptian cat sculpture, which is unbeatable, or those great sphinxes. In Greece, there was suddenly motion in the figure stepping forward from immortality to mortality, to the shadowless realm of Egypt, to the shadows of our world, and it is amazing.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Steve. Hi, Steve, thanks for calling All Of It.

Steve: Hi, Alison. Thank you for taking my call. I was thrilled when I just popped onto your broadcast because you were talking about the di Paolo creation and expulsion, which is a piece of art that I present on my tours. I'm a tour guide at The Met. Also, it's a very small piece in two separate sections. The creation and the expulsion. It's amazing how much is in that small piece. A couple of things I love about it is it looks very modern because the creation on the left is a circle. It looks abstract in a way compared to the right-hand part of the picture.

The thing that's so special to me and maybe to your guest as well, when I looked at the expulsion part where the angel, who is completely nude, which is very unusual, it's considered perhaps as sympathetic to the terrible thing that's happened to Adam and Eve, but the artist has made Adam and Eve look back at the angel as if they're saying, "Oh, please don't send us out. We'll be good. We won't make a mistake again." That tiny, little picture has that wonderful, emotional power, at least for me. That, I wanted to share, but I know I don't probably have enough time. Go ahead.

Jerry Saltz: That's beautiful. I also hope that I can come to one of your tours someday. DM me @jerrysaltz on Instagram. People, follow me.

Alison Stewart: You have a Van Gogh. I didn't say "Van Gok" but "Van Gogh."

Jerry Saltz: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You put the MoMA and The Met. Why did you put down two different places? Is there a special thing you want people to see or just want people to see Van Gogh?

Jerry Saltz: I want people to see Van Gogh. Here's what I want you to see. When you look at a Picasso, you're seeing everything he wants you to see on one surface. Vagina, penis, belly button, anus, buttocks, face, whatever. You're seeing it all outlaid, laid out. In Van Gogh, we see surface. What do you see when you see a Van Gogh? You see a picture of some sunflowers or a landscape, but then shut up.

What are you really seeing? You're seeing paint strokes, surface, color, texture. Every line, every mark, every motion is equally important to every other one. That is the beginning of the end of hierarchical composition. I want anybody to have a good time with Van Gogh. I'll finish only by saying Van Gogh was lifestyles of the poor and famous. He was very well-known in his lifetime.

Alison Stewart: But poor.

Jerry Saltz: Very poor, but every artist is poor. You're poor, I'm poor. We hate that. Van Gogh was very well-known to all of the artists in Paris and elsewhere. He sold two paintings and he got a very, very positive review by Roberta Smith, my wife, the equivalent art critic in The New York Times of that time. His brother worked at the Gagosian Gallery, the most famous gallery of that period.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tina. Hi, Tina, calling in from Brooklyn. How are you?

Tina: Hi. I'm good. Thank you for taking my call. I just want to say how much I appreciate the work that both of you do. My favorite piece of art in New York City is The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau at MoMA. When I was a child, I grew up in West Berlin. When I was a child, my dad built a dollhouse for me. That piece was in one of the rooms. I grew up looking at it. Then when I came to New York, I was so excited to be able to see it in person. Every time I go to MoMA, I visit it like an old friend.

What I love about it so much is the delight. The painting is by Henri Rousseau, who was a self-taught artist in Paris in the early 20th century. I myself am a self-taught artist, so maybe that's another relationship that I feel. This painting is of a sleeping nomad, who is sleeping under the full moon in a desert type of landscape. She has her instrument by her side. There is a lion who is sniffing her, kind of, and she is unaware of it because she is sleeping. This lion is very peaceful. The moment is magical and the light is magical.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much, Tina, for calling. We do appreciate it. We're running out of time, so I'm going to give you three. You had Kara Walker, Fragonard, The Progress of Love, and The High Line.

Jerry Saltz: Oh, I want to do them all.

Alison Stewart: Which one do you want to talk about?

Jerry Saltz: I'll do Karl Walker because she made the greatest public sculpture of the 21st century. It was called A Subtlety. You saw it?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Jerry Saltz: I saw it. It was in an abandoned or a decrepit, a derelict sugar factory in Brooklyn put on by Anne Pasternak. Now, the great first female director-

Alison Stewart: Brooklyn Museum.

Jerry Saltz: -of an encyclopedic art museum, Brooklyn Museum. Everybody came before that sculpture and just went into shock. What was your response to it? Do you remember?

Alison Stewart: Oh, it was wild. I was speechless actually.

Jerry Saltz: Yes, it rendered us speechless. I thought it was a great sphinx, all white, made out of sugar.

Alison Stewart: It had the Aunt Jemima head to it. Yes, right?

Jerry Saltz: Yes, it hit you in the face and took you by the throat and then coaxed you into hypnosis. I always thought that that should have been placed on a huge float and driven across the United States and just unbelievable. I would say that one of the great works of art now at MoMA is a huge drawing that she made in 2017, immediately after The Long American Night resumed in America called Christ's Entry into Journalism. I'll just wrap it up by saying it's very large. It's a drawing. There's no color in it or very little of lynching, minstrel shows, Trump, the KKK, blackface plantation owners, little Nells, mammys, a panoply of chaos, sex, incredible endurance, graphic genius, and our long, beautiful, tremendous American story encaptured.

Alison Stewart: We will have all of Jerry's 10 suggestions for you so you can add them to your list. Jerry, thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it.

Jerry Saltz: I loved it. Thank you, Alison.

 

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