New York City offers whatever you want, quickly and without much fuss. You just gotta walk the walk. I was excited to see the art in the city’s museums. So I walked the walk, between museums.
Whitney Museum
We visited the Whitney Museum on Halloween eve. The museum was open until 10 pm and entrance was free.
We started directly from the 5th floor, the top of the museum. The floor was dedicated to artist Minnie Evans whom I’d never heard of before. Her mandala-like paintings have a lot of Ancient American motifs, so I thought she was Mexican or Peruvian or maybe a Native American. After walking around the floor, my wife, Gule, whispered to me “I think Evans is a black woman”. I couldn’t understand how she intuited that, but it was true:
I liked her paintings overall, although they were a bit too Christian for my taste. However, one of them made me stop immediately:
After seeing Paula Modersohn-Becker’s last painting in Bremen, paintings with thick textures started to fascinate me. Evans’ Airlie Oak is almost a relief and it’s beautiful.
On the 4th floor, I got hit in the face by another sculpture-like painting:
Jay DeFeo’s The Rose might be the most impressive piece of art in all of New York. Its scale, the center and the cracks on the concrete… I don’t remember having a somatic reaction this intense in front of an artwork. I was getting sucked into it. I think I spent at least 10 minutes looking at it, mesmerized.
The following are the other paintings I liked at the Whitney Museum in no particular order:
For more details about the Lichtenstein show, check this video from Liza Banks.
MoMA
Our next stop was The Museum of Modern Art, the famous MoMA. I knew it had a good collection of Magritte, Rothko, Pollock and Matisse. So this was the museum I was most excited about.
I don’t know what it is about it, but seeing The Lovers by Magritte in real life was even more impressive. This surprised me because I had looked at this piece maybe dozens of times. Usually artworks I didn’t know about affect me more. Some artworks move you in some way when you share the same physical space with them, like how I felt looking at DeFeo’s Rose at the Whitney.
Walking around the floor, I noticed a long line of people. They were waiting for their turn to take a photo of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Having visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and honestly not being that impressed with his paintings, I didn’t care much about it before visiting the MoMA. Since I had no intention of photographing a painting that has probably already been photographed a bazillion times, I started looking at the Starry Night from the side. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I could swear the light around the stars and the swirls were moving, rotating, vibrating…
Being fascinated by two paintings that I had digitally seen multiple times encouraged me even more to see Rothko’s and Pollock’s works, neither of which I’m fond of.
Especially with Mark Rothko, even though I never get why people make such a fuss about him, I suspended my judgement until I saw one of his paintings. People were saying how his paintings affected them when they experienced them at their true scale in three dimensions.
I saw six of Rothko’s paintings: No. 1, No. 10, No. 5/No. 22, No. 5/No. 24, No. 37/No. 19, Untitled (Black on Gray). They didn’t do much for me. I’m not an art critic. I’m not well versed in art history either. So you can easily say “ege, you simply didn’t understand what you saw!” and you would probably be right. However, I would respond by asking why the same ignorance of mine didn’t prevent me from enjoying looking at DeFeo or Van Gogh?
(I gotta admit the plum background in No. 37/No. 19 was such a pleasant color in person. In the picture above it looks like a shitty red.)
I had similar thoughts about Jackson Pollock and almost had the same experience after seeing his Echo Number 25 at MoMA. But at the Met, I had the chance to see the new Pollock&Krasner show in which you can see the development of both artists together from the time when they were complete strangers to each other, to marriage and breakup. That show made me appreciate Pollock and his abstract paintings more. What I’m trying to say is maybe seeing a Rothko show that’s curated with care would make me appreciate him more.
It was a surprise to see one of Duchamp’s readymades at MoMA. I hunted for a frame of other visitors taking a photo of the shovel. I believe this photo properly contextualizes the work because the shovel becomes art once it’s put in a museum and treated as such by visitors.
The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre of North America, has such a vast collection that it’s humanly impossible to see everything it has to offer in a single day. We visited the Met on the day of midterm elections and spent almost the whole day there. We were thinking of picking 3-4 wings to see and skipping the rest at the beginning, but each wing has an aura of its own; once you catch a glimpse of it, you want more.
The highlight of the collection—for me—was Auguste Rodin. Seeing Rodin at Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2025 made me wanna be a sculptor and seeing works of the great master again was great. Some of the pieces at the Met I had seen before: the Sorrow at Musée d’Orsay and the Martyr in the Prague National Gallery. Maybe these pieces were cast into multiple editions.
In Paris, I hadn’t had the chance to see much of his stone works, though. The Met had a great collection of these:
I really like how Rodin kept some of the stone almost raw (although probably it’s more like No-Makeup Makeup than raw). The first time I noticed this was in Paris, when I saw the bust of his wife, in which he perfectly carved the face but kept below the shoulders uncarved.
Guggenheim
On the evening of election day, the Guggenheim was offering 1.5 hours of access to their collection for as little as 1 dollar per person. At first I was nervous about the short duration, but it turned out to be more than enough.
We started from the top floor because I heard the building, which by the way is a piece of art on its own, is designed to be a descension. At the top we saw a sign pointing to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room. After waiting in the line for a few minutes, we went in. It was a room with mirrors on every surface and many LED balls dimly shining. Rest in peace to Kusama, but I found it dull. Once the allocated time (~1 minute) had passed, I was simply happy because we didn’t waste more time with that.
After leaving the Infinity Room, we had the most pleasant surprise and bumped into Cattelan’s Comedian. I was completely unaware that it’s still on display at Guggenheim. Seeing that banana perfectly placed on the wall and imagining the museum staff periodically replacing the banana as Cattelan instructed made me giggle inside and appreciate the Comedian more.
We descended through each rotunda displaying the museum’s Pop Collection that includes art from 1960 to today. I found them not very engaging. The majority were photos and videos and some interactive games here and there. At this point, though, I was still thinking we were very short on time. If I had known the Thannhauser collection was that small, I’d have spent more time looking at the Pop pieces.
On the second floor, we entered the Thannhauser collection. As I said, the collection is small, but it has zest. Especially the paintings of Kandinsky were great to see.
New York ignited a new appreciation of Van Gogh and Picasso in me. It started at MoMA with Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles. However, I didn’t realize this until I visited the Guggenheim and saw these:
The art scene of New York is much wider than its museums of course. There are many smaller galleries exhibiting shows of contemporary artists. But even working through the collections of the big ones was a laborious process.
I was excited to see art and I feel satisfied with what I’ve seen.