Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation.  It’s hard to recall what happened yesterday, or in this morning’s dreams.  It’s as if we’re lost within our own stories or, sometimes, as if there is no story at all.  I’ve tried in various ways to capture the relentless assault of experience, including photo-taking, memento-collecting, and journal-writing.  But even when carried out diligently these methods are inadequate.  They can’t always capture the shocking, disruptive impact of small moments, and the deeper shifts in mood that underline the weeks.  They don’t get it.

Riitta Ikonen’s warm and rigorous conceptual art project Mail Art, gets a great deal of it.  Over the past several years, once every week, she has mailed an A5 format “postcard” to a professor at an art school she attended in Brighton, England.  They’re dispatched from wherever she happens to be that week, and crafted from whatever materials she has on hand.  She’s sent over two hundred of them so far, all of which her professor has saved and returned to her.  Ikonen has a liberated graphic sensibility: she has mailed, among other things: a stone, the sole of a boot, a stack of MetroCards, and a chunk of little fish sealed in glue.  Each missive is packaged, titled, addressed and stamped distinctively yet unfussily.  When taken together, as they were at an exhibit last year, the postcards make up a vibrant personal, physical and psychic history.  They’re alive with the tactility and pungency of everyday experience.

“Found paper clips” from Mail Art, by Riita Ikonen.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has mounted an exhibit about Doris Duke’s Hawaiian pleasure palace Shangri La.  Duke built the estate in Honolulu in the 1930’s, when she was a young woman, to house her expanding collection of Islamic art and artefacts.  She built it in a broadly Islamic style, consulting designers in Iran and India to complete ornamental stone and wood work.  But the estate is less impressive for its design, which is modern in plan and pastiche in detail, than for its ambition.  It’s Duke’s innocent enthusiasm for all things Islamic that lights up the place.

It’s easy to dismiss the entire project as a rich girl’s fantasy of Islam, a term that’s used in the exhibit wall texts to describe any culture in the world that has come into historical contact with the religion.  There are on display pieces from Spain, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and North India.  One elegant wood table with white stone inlay and curved steel supports is attributed, hilariously, to “India (Goa), or Venice.”  (My guess is Venice, because the ornament depicts human figures with a expressiveness that’s highly unusual for Indian art.)  There are some exquisite ceramics, tapestries and jewelry, but the quality of the work is irregular.  The most powerful items are large format vintage color photographs that show views of the rooms and courtyard in delirious technicolor.  Here two fantasies collide: the stately, sensuous Islamic palace and the easy, idyllic Hawaiian landscape.  It seems strange that Duke traveled so far away, to a place with its own marvelously exotic history, only to bring another kind of exotic to it.  But I admire Duke for choosing the fantasy of Islam.  For a privileged young American woman in the 1930’s, it was highly original.  Walking through the exhibit, one senses that it hit her hard.

Photo by Horst from Vogue, 1966.

If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots.  The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings.  But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality.  They’re strange.

The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is.  The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence.  This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree.  The work’s single-mindedness — its disregard for proportion and balance — make it hard to understand as art.  This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses.  As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this.”  Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling.  It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is.

What was it was like for George Harrison, a talented musician playing in a band beside two men who might have been the greatest pop artists of all time?  And what was it like for Francoise Gilot, a talented painter living with a man who might have been the greatest painter of all time?  The most recent of the Gagosian Gallery’s thrilling, museum-quality Picasso shows, Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, makes one wonder.  The show is organized in three parts: two galleries with Picasso’s work from that period, a gallery with photos showing the life of the two artists together, and finally, a gallery with Gilot’s work.  As we entered that room a gentleman behind me declared, “Well, she was no Picasso,” an assessment that seemed terribly unfair.

Gilot’s work is serious but there isn’t enough of it at the exhibit to get a strong sense of what her deep interests are.  Picasso’s work, on the other hand, illuminated what we already know of him.  There are lovely, colorful paintings of Gilot, their children, their pets, and their toys, scenes lighter and more joyous than we thought he was capable of.  But the most moving pieces in the show are Picasso’s two drawings and painting, all titled Femme Designe, that show Francoise at work.  Today Gilot is remarkably good-humored about the time she spent with the master, however much it overshadowed her own work.  She thinks she made it through those years because she had a strong sense of herself, and, as she puts it, “He did not try to destroy me.”  She remembers that Picasso supported her work at first but lost interest as she began to gain recognition.  But there’s a tenderness in his depictions of her as an artist that I’d like to understand as an endorsement, however complicated it was.

In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo.  They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled.  But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields.  There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule.  The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked.

I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way.  If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread.  Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality — an energy in the line — that trumps modeling and space.  His most poweful paintings, however,  don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color.  In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another.  In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them.  Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky.  The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life.

It’s hard work being modern, and it must have been especially so for the Steins.  Siblings Gertrude, Michael and Leo were middle-class Americans, heirs to a modest fortune, who moved to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century determined to find the future.  They attended exhibitions, held salons, and amassed an astounding collection of early modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries that’s on view now at the Met.  Then, as a kind of coup de grace, the Steins commissioned what might be the most modern house ever, the Villa Garches by Le Corbusier.

Tucked deep inside the exhibit, in the corner of a small gallery, there’s a one-minute loop of vintage black and white film footage documenting the house.  The clips (like everybody’s home movies, they’re tilted, jittery and out-of-focus) show kids running around in the yard and adults parading about in their finery rather than the house itself, which looks like a big, white spaceship that just landed behind them.  The house still looks terrifically modern, a complex, idealized concoction of planes, ramps and ribbon windows.  In the film footage the Steins, wearing heavy wools, hose and hats, look like Victorians lost in a future that’s not their own.  Their foresight and fearlessness is remarkable.

At L&M Arts there’s a show of Andy Warhol’s illustrations titled, cheerfully, Who’s Who in Holiday Hats.  Framed and hung, in a profusion that calls to mind Allan McCollum’s installations, are two folios of ink and watercolor illustrations: one of the aforementioned hats from a 1964 McCall’s spread, and another from 1955 called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu.  The drawings of the hats, each one named after a historical or literary character, are witty, but the drawings of the shoes are super sweet.  Rendered on large sheets of stiff, slightly bruised, yellowing paper, with wavering India ink outlines and translucent candy-colored washes, they feel a bit like pages torn from an illuminated manuscript, one all about shopping and dressing.  And the drawings are brilliantly condensed, without a single errant gesture.  Warhol the illustrator gives us only what we need to see each shoe.

The show proves to me once and for all that while Warhol had a prescient flair for self-promotion and not-ironic detachment, he was at heart a superb graphic designer.  The shoe drawings will be familiar to many museum-goers because they’ve been reproduced on Warhol Foundation-licensed merchandise: a children’s book, tote bags and note cards.  But I wish that you all could see them in person, framed, on the wall.  The artist has rendered each shoe with tremendous precision and attention.  These drawings are small, true gems.