BOOKMAN BEATTIE ON THE CULTURAL PROWL

There are more than 60 museums in New York and so far we have visited three of them.

First up, and a first time visit for me, was the Queens Museum of Art which came to my attention while reading the just-released New York 2008 in the Time Out Shortlist guidebook series.

This is a handy pocket-sized guide packed with most everything you need to know when visiting the city, including subway and street maps. There are of course loads of NY guides, many of them with much more detail than this one, but for me this is the one to have in your pocket at all times. Price in the US $11.95, UK pds.6.99.

Queens Museum of Art is located in the grounds of the 1939 & 1964 World’s Fairs, adjacent to Flushing Meadows tennis stadium and Shea Stadium. The premiere attraction is the quite amazing 9335 sq.ft scale model of New York City accurate down to the square inch. It is reputed to be the world’s largest scale model and was the reason for our visit.
It was built for New York City’s display at the 1964-65 World’s Fair and later served as a urban planning tool. It took 100 fulltime workers three years to build and is updated every few years. There are approximately 865,000 buildings featured.
The model occupies a former inside ice-skating rink and you view it by walking around an elevated path. Very impressive indeed.

As was the next museum. The just-opened New Museum of Contemporary Art. The building itself is quite sensational and looks like a pile of large silver blocks stacked unevenly on top of one another.(Sorry about the poor quality of my photo). The exterior surface is made up of corrugated-aluminium panels painted silver grey with an aluminium mesh suspended an inch and a half in front of them. It is on the Bowery just south of East Houston, has 60,000 square feet of floor space, and was designed by a Japanese architectural team who have not worked in New York previously. I read somewhere where it is the first purpose built museum to have been built south of 14th street.

The Museum’s first exhibition is “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century”, which I have to say held no appeal for me, (but I loved the building!), and features sculpture mostly made from junk and all either freestanding or hanging.

Since we were last at The Morgan Library & Museum it has undergone a huge expansion and renovation at the hands of architectural genius Renzo Piano and the previous dark entry is now a light filled space with glass walls everywhere.

This is an inspiring place with an awe-inspiring collection of books and maps, prints and other treasures. I was most interested to view Charles Dickens’ original A Christmas Carol manuscript, one of their three (!!) Gutenberg Bibles, one of the 15 original copies of The Declaration of Independence, a number of spectacular illuminated manuscripts, a self-portrait by Henri Matisse, and an exhibition of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Emile Bernard which acted by way of illustration for an exhibition "Painted with Words", a large collection of letters sent between the two artists.

One of my favourite places in NYC, and on a scale you can manage.