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BC and I started the day at the Neue Galerie, to see an exhibition of works by the Brücke, an early 20th Century group of artists who ushered in German Expressionism with their utopian scribbly primary-colored green-peopled bridge between past and future post-impressionism. Downstairs I spent most of my time oogling the Josef Hoffmann objects from the Wiener Werkstätte, and the beautiful Klimt and eerily beautiful Schiele paintings. Across the street at the Met, we viewed an exhibition of late interiors by Pierre Bonnard, made over a 20 year period in which neither his palette, subject matter, nor style changed in the slightest. They are dazzling works of color and form, and the compositions made me more aware of framing than any art in recent memory. For instance, lines of painted surfaces are almost always parallel to the lines of the picture frame. He even alters rules of perspective to bend this table or that window into proper alignment. The compositions are also crammed into the picture space, creating a claustrophobic visual and sensual experience of light, fruit and french charcuterie.
For dinner we went to Lidia Bastianich’s Becco on W. 46th. We shared a perfect Caesar salad and mixed appetizers including a squid salad, poached swordfish, marinated beans and miscellaneous vegetables. For our primi piatti, we each had the presso fisso meal, which included 3 pastas each: an asparagus risotto; rigatoni with tomato and basil; and fettuccine with a bolognese meat sauce. Desert for two was like desert for 10 in San Francisco and consisted of a ricotta cheesecake, bread pudding, passionfruit sorbet, vanilla panna cotta… and I’m sure some other fabulously tasty thing that I’m forgetting about. There is so much pleasure in her cooking and so much flavor. You can’t go there and not overeat.
The women sitting next to us at Becco were straight out of The Sopranos. One sounded exactly like Rosalie Aprile. The waiter even called her “Ro!” I couldn’t tell if her name was given by her parents or non-ironic viewers of the show. The two from New Jersey loudly discussed how lucky they were to be surviving in this economy with only two houses each. “We are so lucky, Ro.”
Continuing with the Sopranos theme, we then went to see James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. What a knockout play! Two couples get together to discuss a fight that their kids had. They try very sincerely to be nice to each other, but end up drunk, mercilessly tearing into each other, and nearly destroying the apartment. And 50 tulips.