NEW YORK CITY 2026: THE MET

 June 1, 2026

On my last day in New York City, I met A at Elbow Bread for one last strawberry lemon sheep's cheese Danish (my third one in three days), and then he went off to work and I was on my own.

I'm starting to feel a lot more confident in the city, and I was able to find my way via subway and walking to my next destination. The subway took me to the west side of Central Park, and then I walked through the park to the east side, passing by this deliightful bronze sculpture of Prospero and his daughter Miranda from Shakespeare's The Tempest, appropriately located in front of the theater that is home to the summer Shakespeare in the Park festival.

I eventually made it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fondly called "The Met," the fifth largest art museum in the world by gallery space. (In case you are wondering, #1 is the Louvre in Paris, #2 is the British Museum in London, #3 is the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and #4 is the National Museum of China in Beijing). Last year it had 5.7 million visitors, making it the most-visited museum of any kind in the United States.

The Met has a permanent collection of 1.5 million works grouped in seventeen separate departments. I only had a few hours, so I decided to start in the European section and see how far I got from there.

NEW YORK CITY 2026: MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, A BIT OF CENTRAL PARK, AN ART OPENING, AND MOMBAR'S

 May 31, 2026

MoMA is a tough museum to top. With its 708,000 square feet, there is so much to see that you can spend an entire day there, and its eclectic collection has something for everyone. We followed our visit to MoMA with a visit to the Upper East Side Museum of the City of New York, a relatively puny 113,750 square feet. In spite of its small size, it contained one of the most expansive artworks I have ever seen: He Built This City (2004-2025) by Joe Macken, a work that rivaled almost anything in MoMA.

In 2004, New York truck driver Joe Macken began a little project in his basement that he worked on in his free time for the next 21 years: a scale-model of the entire city of New York. He had no prior artistic training, no building experience other than constructing a few miniature models, just a vision of his beloved city in miniature. He began with a single structure--30 Rockefeller Plaza. Using a scale of 1 mm = 10 feet and balsa wood, an X-acto knife, his home ruler, Elmer's Glue, and acrylic paint, he expanded from Rockefeller Plaza to Midtown Manhattan, then to the whole borough, then to Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island. After 21 years of work, he had created a 1,350 square-foot replica of NYC that includes every street, every building, every park, every bridge. Iconic buildings such as the Empire State Building, the World Trade Centre, the Chrysler Building, and the Woolworth Building are incredibly detailed.

In 2025, Macken's TikTok posts of his project went viral, accumulating over 10 million views. The Museum of the City of New York took notice, and the rest is history.

Mr. Macken's model is simply spectacular. Photos don't do it justice.

View from north end

View from south end

NEW YORK CITY 2026: MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (MoMA)

May 31, 2026

 On my third day in New York City, I met A & M at my new favorite bakery, Elbow Bread, then we took our morning treats to a park about a block away. It was really fun to sit on a bench and watch the residents of New York's Chinatown doing their morning exercises. One man was doing tai chi off to the side, a couple was playing badminton, and a group of about ten women were following a leader in a synchronized dance routine.  See a short video here.

M had an art opening that evening, so we said goodbye to her so that she could go do all the last-minute things that needed to be done, and A and I headed off for an artsy day.

We had gotten an early start because it was Memorial Day, and we knew the city would be bursting with the energy reserved for holidays. We made our way past massive St. Patrick's Cathedral, which takes up a full city block on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st street. However, I am not one to walk past a church when its doors are open, so I made a quick stop to take a look.

There was a service in progress, so we couldn't walk around inside, but I appreciated even this glimpse of St. Patrick's lofty Gothic Revival ceilings.

One of the wonderful things about NYC is the variety of architecture. Just down the street from St. Patrick's, for example, is the wonderful Art Deco-style International Building of the Rockefeller Center.

 

About this time we realized it was going to be very, very difficult to get to MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art), which we had planned to be our first destination. The Israel Day on 5th Parade was slated to move up Fifth Avenue between 62nd and 74th streets, starting at 11:30 AM. Activities were scheduled until 4:00 PM.  The theme of the parade was "Proud Americans, Proud Zionists."

NEW YORK CITY 2026: MAGAZZINO ITALIAN ART MUSEUM, DIA BEACON, AND A HOME-COOKED MEAL

 May 30, 2026

On my second day in New York, A and M had a great out-of-city excursion planned. We started by catching a train in the iconic Grand Central Station. If you look closely at the picture of A and me on the left, you'll see a red dot on the ceiling. It's a heart-shaped mylar balloon that floated there months ago (maybe Valentine's Day?) and hasn't wanted to return to earth! Those things last forever.

We took a 1.25 hour train to Magazzino Italian Art Museum in Cold Spring, New York, a village about 50 miles north of Manhattan with a population of approximately 2,000 and located across the Hudson River from West Point.

The museum, which contains a collection of postwar and contemporary Italian art owned by married art collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, opened in 2017 at the site of a former computer chip factory (Magazzino means "warehouse" in Italian). It consists of two buildings, the original warehouse and a second building opened in 2023.

I tend to go a bit crazy in an art museum. I like to take a lot of pictures that I can then examine in more detail on my computer at home. Here are a few of the photos I took of my favorite pieces.

They had an exhibit by the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti that I especially liked. On first glance, you see a mercator map of the world.

But look closer and you'll see the world depicted by the national flag of each country. The embroidery for this and other works by the same artist was completed by Afghan women in refugee camps.

GERMANY: HITLER'S MUNICH

 May 25, 2025

Our very last joint activity on our family trip to Germany was a guided tour of Hitler's Munich. But before I get to that, I just have to throw in this photo of a silver lion that we passed in the Old Town square. Munich has several statues of lions, once a symbol of Bavarian strength. Besides the Old Town Square, they can be found flanking the entrance to the Munich Palace, on the top of the triumphal arch, and at the Lowenbrau Brewery. My high school mascot was a lion, and I'm a big fan of the books The Wizard of Oz and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both of which prominently feature a lion, so I am always drawn to statues of lions. This one looks powerful. I like it!

Munich is considered the birthplace of the Nazi Party (aka National Socialism or NSDAP), and a visit to Munich is not complete without seeing a few of the sites involved with the Nazi Party, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.

Our first stop on the tour was the Hofbrauhaus, a historic beer hall that started as a supplier for the Bavarian court. 

Our guide took us up a long stairway . . .

. . . to this dining hall. It was here in February 1920 (so early!) that 30-year-old Hitler, the propaganda chief of the National Socialist Party, announced the party's official program to a gathering of about 2,000 people. Seventeen months later, on July 29, 1921, he was elected to be the head of the Nazi Party here.

IRELAND, DUBLIN: THE NATIONAL GALLERY

 July 12, 2024

Our next stop was the National Gallery of Ireland, located in Merrion Square, which is in walking distance of Grafton Street. Opened in 1864, the museum has quite an extensive collection of European and Irish art.

This is going to be a simple post of photos of some of my favorite artworks from the museum--some by well-known artists, and others that are relatively unknown or at least new to me. I like keeping a record of my favorite art, and it is fun for me to see how my favorite artists keep popping up in various museums. So here we go.

Bust of Diego (1955/56)
by Alberto Giacometti

Still Life with a Mandolin (1924)
by Pablo Picasso 

Saint Peter Denying Christ (c.1610-1625)
Artist unknown

The Immaculate Conception (early 1660s)
by Francisco de Zurbaran

(Poor little angels being crushed by the Virgin's feet!)

Saint Joseph with the Christ Child (c.1637)
by Guercino

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (1570s)
by Luis de Morales

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1590-1595)
El Greco

Ecce Homo (1558-1560)
by Titian

Triptych with the Crucifixion and Donors (1540s)
by Pieter Coecke van Aelst

The Virgin (1530s) by Ligier Richier

Rest on the Flight into Egypt with the
Infant Saint John the Baptist (c.1494)
by Francesco Granacci

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1495)
by Perugino (left to right: Nicodemus, St. John
the Evangelist, body of Christ, Virgin Mary, Mary
Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea)

The Arrest of Christ (c.1641) by Matthias Storm

The Assumption of Saint Mary
Magdalene (1380s)
by Silvestro del Geraducci

Frances Katherine Chadwyk-Healey and
Her Daughter Elizabeth (1900)
by Walter Frederick Osborne

For a quick break from the artwork, take a look at the architecture of the museum. I love this shot, which looks like a piece of art itself! I really love the rich colors of the walls as well.

Only 35 paintings by Vermeer are known to exist today, and there were at least two in the National Gallery that were part of a traveling exhibit.

Mistress and Maid (c.1666-1667)
by Johannes Vermeer

Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid (c. 1670)
by Johannes Vermeer

And another pause to check out the architectural details of this beautiful gallery:

To finish off our quick tour of the museum, we visited a gallery of portraits of great writers and one theater luminary. Seeing a room full of Ireland's artists made me realize the substantial contributions Ireland has made to the literary world.

William Butler Yeats (1900)
by his father, John Butler Yeats

Garry Hynes, Theatre Director,
Co-founder of Druid (2017)
by Vera Klute

Seamus Heaney, poet, playwright, translator,
Nobel Laureate (2007)
by Jackie Nickerson

The Composition--A Portrait
of Marian Keyes (2023) [Irish author]
by Margaret Corcoran

Samuel Beckett: Novelist, Dramatist,
Theatre Director, Literary Translator (1961)
by Reginald Gray