Revisiting the Art of My Youth

The group of young Asian Americans beside me gaze at The Starry Night with its sharp spears of cypress piercing the swirling patterns of the sky.

"Is it real?" one of them asks.

"It is," I say. "Those are the real colors Van Gogh painted and the real brushstrokes. You won't see those in the immersive digitized version. This exhibition from the 1880s to the 1940s is only a fraction of what we got to look at every week when I was a kid. But the art from the 1960s to the 2020s hadn't been painted yet."

On the day of this conversation, I'd just scored a free year's MoMA membership, usually three figures, as a perk of the NYC ID that New York residents are entitled to as photo ID with numerous benefits. When I was in high school, I spent every Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. We took the subway from Queens and feasted on art for free. Now, they've curated the hell out of the bits of the collection on display. My very favorite, Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek, doesn't fit any category so may never make the cut.

The Cubists have plenty of wall space. I've been reading a mystery series based on art crimes, the Genevieve Lenard novels by Estelle Ryan. The Braque Connection gave me a new appreciation of Cubism and Georges Braque in particular, as seen through the eyes of its autistic protagonist. I'd never liked Braque because his art at MoMA in the 1950s was limited to a few brown and gray paintings, which hung next to similar brown and gray canvases by his buddy Picasso. A visit to Google Images taught me that Braque had an enormous stylistic range and a broad and vivid palette. Back at MoMA in 2025, I looked at his work and that of Picasso, Juan Gris, and the other Cubists with fresh eyes. Braque's Road near l'Estaque, which I don't remember, is a Cubist abstraction with the colors of a Cézanne.

Some of the paintings I visited many times in my teens made me feel as if I'd come home. Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Chagall's I and the Village, and Cézanne's Château Noir all put a huge smile on my face.