New York Holiday

 Spending Christmas with a family you love and treasure is a wonderful experience.  You've surmised we had a lovely 2025 Christmas complete with a Hyper Marble Track and a Pirate Playhouse.  Santa was a big hit this year with the 7 yr old and the 3 yr old.  Our daughter made a Cajun turkey dinner for Christmas day.  We ate too much, laid around, listened to the marbles go down the gigantic three foot high track, and said "Arg" a lot - the 3 yr old is entranced with pirates, and that's the clue she's a pirate when you hear that.  We played some of the new games, read some books, and were glad to collapse into the silence of our hotel room!  

New York City is always packed with people coming to enjoy the abundant holiday decorations and the specialty performances.  We went to one of the most iconic celebrations:  The 100th Anniversary of the New York City Radio Music Hall Rockettes Christmas Extravaganza.  Sorry there are no pictures, but the audience was asked not to photograph the performance.  Here's a stock photo which captures the costume of the marching soldier, a Rockette favorite.

Everybody had a great time, not only at this performance, but for the entire holiday thanks to all the pre-planning by our daughter.  

I was also very excited to find three excellent exhibitions at my three favorite museums.  First, the Metropolitan has a great exhibition called "Divine Egypt" which was less about mummies and more about the Egyptian gods and their interrelationships.  I walked away with a much better understanding of the ancient Egyptian gods, and the realization the organization of the mythic Greek gods are actually modeled on the Egyptian gods.  As a double bonus, we also saw a Sargent exhibition as well as my favorite Christmas tree in all of New York City.

The Christmas Tree, & Jan, age 75

The base of the tree is decorated with 
antique creches

The tree decorations are
19th century porcelain angels

The Egypt exhibition was full of descriptions of of the individual gods and their relationships.  Of course, there were beautiful examples.  This chart is a genealogy of the Egyptian gods.  If you read the small print, you can see the same type of themes which flow through all the religions of the world.  (Creator - of air, water, earth, sky)

The major Egyptian gods represented by their animal heads on human bodies descend from the four gods at the bottom of the chart.

Hathor

Horus (left) - son of Isis

Neit

Serpent god

Feline God

Isis with the infant Horus

As always, there are more photos of the Egyptian exhibition.  You can click on the link to see them:   https://photos.app.goo.gl/9Ms2H2QuA21jJDz66

As an added bonus, the MET has acquired several additional paintings from the John Sargent family.  Once again, a very talented artist has languished in obscurity because of gender.  John Sargent, a widely acclaimed portrait painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had a very unusual upbringing.  John and Emily (his sister) were both born in Florence, Italy, and traveled Europe with their expatriate parents studying art and learning how to create art.  John burst onto the art scene in Europe as a very young man while his sister, Emily, equally talented in creating watercolors, was relegated to the background and her artistic endeavors never surfaced during her lifetime.  Instead, she promoted John's work.  Neither ever married, and they have a much younger sister, Violet.  John died in 1925; Emily in 1936; and Violet in 1952.  The MET has acquired additional paintings by both John and Emily.  Here are two examples:

Watercolor, Emily Sargent

Oil Painting, John Sargent {Violet in the hat, Emily painting, mother in background}

There are more of these paintings at the end of the previous link. 

Let's move onto another famous NYC Museum - the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).  The MOMA used to be difficult to see.  They own legions of famous paintings and sculptures which used to be scattered all over the place.  When they remodeled a few years ago, they reassembled their permanent collection into four floors of art sorted by date.  There are easily accessed by escalators as well as elevators and stairs.  This freed up two floors for the 'exhibitions' which come and leave.

I was so excited to see a Ruth Asawa exhibition - a large retrospective of her work.  I first saw her art in North Carolina.  She mainly works in 'wire'.  She's a Japanese/American woman who was interred as a child in a camp in Arkansas.  She learned to draw while being held prisoner during her late childhood and teens.  When the Japanese were released, they faced extreme prejudice from their fellow Americans.  (Reminds you of how we treat Muslim/Americans, doesn't it?)  She was rejected from all the Fine Arts schools she applied to because she was Japanese. 

 A small college outside of Ashville, North Caroline - the Black Mountain College accepted her, and boy, what a jackpot for them.  She went on to become very famous in the art world.  In addition to her individual work in wire, paint and lithographs, she has done major outdoor fountains and monuments in California.  Here are examples of her work:

These are made out of wire

Here's a closer look

When she accepted commissions to do large projects which used casting in bronze, she experimented with dipping her wire sculptures in wax and then casting them.  Here's an example:

One of her famous fountains is the Mermaids and Babies Fountain in Ghirardelli Square.

Sorry about the picture quality - this is actually a film about the fountain

 

Here's a little better picture: 

She did this work in the late 1960's.  She also created a wall of memory for the Japanese from California who were interred.  

I find her work interesting, identifiable, and if you don't know her work, I'm pleased to introduce you to it.

The second artist I was excited to see at the MOMA is a Cuban artist, Wilfred Lam, who worked from the 1920's to the 1970's.  He's considered one of the great Cuban artists.  I think his work reflects the time he lived.  This picture is considered his most famous.

"The Jungle" by Wilfred Lam

I took pictures, pictures, pictures of Ruth Asawa, Wilfred Lam as well as some famous pictures which I snapped as we walked past them.  

Here's the link:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/vVXDmNArdAh8A8tZA

If you haven't had enough art, pull up your socks, and let's do one more:  The Brooklyn Museum of Art has a wonderful exhibition called 'Monet in Venice'.  Monet and his wife traveled to Venice at the beginning of the 20th century, and he painted over thirty pictures while he was there.  The exhibition has not only a big number of these pictures, but also a Givenchy bridge picture - in Spring, and his work is contrasted with Canaletto one of the first artists to master perspective.  Venice was also one of his favorite places to paint.  There is also a fabulous Thomas Moran picture of Venice with an awesome treatment of the light.   There's even a John Sargent picture.  Here's a little sample of this exhibition:

Monet - Canal scene

Canaletto - St. Mark's from the canal 

Monet - Givenchy Bridge in Spring
 

Thomas Moran - Venice

If you want to see the Brooklyn Museum pictures, click on the link:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/J4fxUnPgzjVG3wLP8

And, yes, everything hurt after spending hours walking around and looking at pictures and sculptures, but I didn't care.  It was exciting to be able to see so many new pieces, and to learn so much about Ruth Asawa.  The train up and back from Virginia to New York is definitely the way to travel over a major holiday.  Happy New Year!