Saturday, July 9, 2011

Jewish Museum and the Upper East Side (UES) in the 90's

The Cone sisters were two independently wealthy women from Baltimore who, at the turn of the last century,  liked to shop for art and to travel.  Friends of Leo and Gertrude Stein, they visited Paris frequently and amassed a nice collection of Impressionist art which was left to the Baltimore Art Museum. The Jewish Museum has borrowed some of these and supplemented them with a lot of historical material about those two Jewish collectors.  You can read more on the Jewish Museum site.
Nancy and I drove into NYC, found a cheap garage and walked to the museum which is in the French Gothic Chateau style Warburg mansion on Fifth Avenue.  It is quite impressive.  Needless to say one is not allowed to take photographs in the museum so I don't have any of all the Matisse and other artists works.  The exhibit was great and the emphasis on the sisters and collecting during that time made a great human interest story. 
We also saw the Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) show which was whimsical and entertaining.
We finished off with lunch at Square Meal - lovely salads (grilled rosemary shrimp and Maryland crab cakes), wonderful muffins with homemade raspberry jam - at a price commensurate with the neighborhood but more than we would normally pay.  Very good, though, and Nancy says we can afford almost everything.

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