Ray Soleil and I went to the Museum this afternoon. We saw the Matisse show and the Bellows show. Ray had seen both already; I’d seen the latter. The best thing about the Matisse show was the collection of three paintings of the same hotel room in Nice, written up very nicely at The Nation by Barry Schwabsky. The Bellows show is full of marvels, but they are not the images selected for postcards and other ephemera, so I left that exhibition’s mini gift shop empty-handed. We checked out a number of miscellaneous items, including a vitrine of Fabergé treats (none of them eggs) from which I’d have had a terrible time choosing a favorite to take home. Also a lovely sketchbook page by Lancret. (The vitality imparted by chalk in the hands of eighteenth-century French artists is always surprising.) In the gift shop, I bought a couple of tote bags, for the housing of my various foreign-language reading programs. The big excitement of the visit, though, was an hour spent in the new balcony lounge, which is open to some classes of members.

The big excitement was the sheer perversity, the deranged lunacy, of hanging out sipping drinks in a room that most airport designers would find unadventurous — everything grey, and nothing on the walls but paint — when we could have been looking at great art. But you have to do everything once. I came upon what turns out to be the back door of the lounge on a recent visit, and understood from the lettering on the door that I was not eligible to enter. But that turned out to be wrong, as I found when, for the second time, I was urged today by a nice lady handing out admission pins at the membership desk to check out the new balcony lounge. This time, I tried to open the door, but it was locked. There was a small panel with a red light mounted next to the door, and it occurred to Ray and to me at the same moment that I ought to try exposing my membership card to its faint beam — how I wish I had a photograph of that! When nothing happened (duh), I asked a nearby staffer how to get in, and she kindly directed me to go around and try the front door. The front door opened easily enough, and a woman seated at a long table gestured to see my membership card, which was, happily, intelligible to her. She wrote something down on in a notebook, and we were in! Not since the palmy days of Élan, the Houston night club right across the way from my father’s apartment, have I felt so elect. The balcony lounge! We had glimpsed it through the glass back door, but not until Ray and I were looking for a nice place to sit down did we hear the faint raspberry of utter underwhelmment.

We ordered drinks from a menu and looked around some more. “It’s a trial balloon,” I said. “If people come in  and use it, then maybe somebody will pull the sofas away from the wall and hang up some art to look at.” (Whoever set this room up has never really seen a painting by Matisse.) Museum publications, and three copies of the Times, were laid out for perusal, but the lack of decoration was as studied as it is in that room where the ageing astronaut breathes his last in 2001. It will be interesting to see what the lounge is like on Friday evenings in the summer, when the Roof Garden is hopping with smart young things out on the prowl. I envision a sort of sauna experience, going from the warm and sunny rooftop to the chilly bare lounge (or vice versa). The balcony lounge is a great idea — a clubby space where you can meet someone before a concert at Grace Rainey Rogers, or take a break from conducting out-of-towners on a comprehensive tour of the Museum. But, gosh, even Frank Campbell’s is cheerier.

The drinks were fine, though, and the staff’s attitude welcoming. Considering how strangely dead the Museum was today, the balcony lounge was doing a good business, with five or six other seatings occupied. I ought to make it clear, however, that the view in the photo at the head of this entry, showing the Kravis/Petrie Court (that’s the Museum’s second façade on the right), is not the view from the balcony lounge. There is no view from the balcony lounge. Only grey. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 at 7:30 pm.