John Gimlette

New York: Dives of the artists

This is still a city of artists, but perhaps no longer a bohemian one

Fernand Léger’s old studio now has squatters living on the doorstep. They’re an unusual sight in the new New York, especially around Bowery. These ones, at no. 222, are African and live in a huge cardboard box decorated with industrial plastic. As a pioneering modernist, Léger would have appreciated their geometry — and poverty. He’d have been less sure about the building opposite: the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s covered in silvery mesh, and looks like a giant speaker with a fishing boat dangling off the top. How, he might wonder, had art become so extravagant and obscure?

Poor Léger, he needn’t worry. Styles may have changed, but the world’s artists are still drifting to New York, and it’s still the capital of modern art. It’s not just about great concrete hangars stuffed with novelty and genius (The Whitney,-Guggenheim and MoMA). No other city is so brilliant, so spontaneous and so cheerfully manic. But I’ve often wondered how the artists coped with its outrageous stimuli, and what has become of their haunts. Do they still go to parties and pee in the fireplace (like Jackson Pollock did), or has the scene somehow moved on? I decided to give myself a week in NYC.

Before heading downtown, I paid a visit to the old world and dropped in on The Frick. The man who-created this urban Chatsworth (or is it a Greek temple with curtains?) was a farm boy from Pennsylvania who’d made his fortune in coal. But Henry Frick also had an eye for old masterpieces and by the time of his death in 1919 he’d acquired 3,500 works, including Titians, Tiepolos and two Vermeers. I enjoyed the thought of him sitting down to terrapins and strawberry tarts under the delicious gaze of Gainsborough’s girls. Respectability hadn’t come cheap, but then it was European.

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