On Monday evening, the British Museum hosted a cocktail hour in a board member's apartment on the Upper East Side. After Nicholas Cullinan-the director of the British Museum, who, in his first two years on the job, has already boldly transformed the institution into something bloody exciting again-gave remarks, I was introduced to one of his London-based colleagues, who had just arrived in New York, minutes ago, for the first time. Recommendations? What a conundrum!
The Met's Raphael show, the Duchamp show at MoMA, and the Matisse show at Acquavella. The new New Museum? Oh, yes, it's worth the trip downtown. Perhaps after a stroll over to Russ & Daughters-as I can only imagine what it would be like to visit Russ & Daughters during one's firstever hours on the island of Manhattan.
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The attendees at the British Museum cocktail party, surrounded by masterworks of 20th-century art, couldn't help but gush about one single gallery show on view in New York City. That would be "Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony" at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side. The multigenerational art-dealing family has sold many Matisses throughout the decades, and borrowed many of them back for an exhibition that's basically unheard of these days at a commercial gallery. There are 50 works. One hundred people can be inside at one time. Nothing is for sale.
Walking up 79th Street on Thursday morning, I saw a line down the stairs that extended most of the way to the Park. I don't know how to convey how strange that is-for an exhibition of an Impressionist painter at a townhouse gallery off Madison to have a Banksy-esque line of influencer-status length.
Inside, in the first gallery, is Odalisque couché aux magnolias. It's a stunner that was last seen in public when it sold for $80.75 million at Christie's, consigned by the estate of Peggy and David Rockefeller. Perhaps just as mind-blowing, maybe more so, is Nu au châle vert, a radical nude portrait from 1921-1922. The painting was a part of the Bouvier Affair. According to court documents, Yves Bouvier purchased the work for $60 million privately from Sotheby's, then sold it to Dmitry Rybolovlev for $85 million, part of the series of markups that constituted the alleged scam. By 2022, Acquavella had the painting on its booth at Art Basel's Paris fair, reportedly for a price of $45 million.
But right now, until the show closes on May 22, you can see Nu au châle vert for free-if you're willing to stand in line.
