A Better Yellow

I’m in New York City on the third day of a ten-day vacation. I lived here for so long and am so comfortable being here that in many ways it feels like I’m home. And yet, as the taxi from the airport rode the approaches to the Midtown Tunnel Sunday morning, I looked out over the Manhattan skyline and felt, I don’t live here anymore. I used to live here, but now I live somewhere else—now there’s a place where I’ve put down roots and watered them and fertilized them and weeded and hoed around them. Maybe some day I’ll transplant again. But not today.
Speaking of that taxicab, my JetBlue flight landed at 11:15, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. My friend Matthew from San Francisco is here for a month, and over the past few years he and I have independently made acquaintance with some of the same people. He and a friend were going to be in the West Village at noon, and suggested I meet them there, but getting from JFK to the West Village in forty-five minutes would be impossible by public transportation and would be a miracle by cab. My jetway, however, happened to be only a few doors down from the exit to the taxi area, and I was the second one in line, and as I climbed in I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there in forty-five minutes? As the cab sped along the Van Wyck and the Grand Central, I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there five minutes late? As we moved through the Midtown Tunnel, I thought, I’m going to get there on time. Sure enough, I pulled up in front of the address where I was to meet them with two minutes to spare.
I’m staying at the apartment of my friend Nancy, who left for Paris Monday afternoon. We spend most of Sunday afternoon trying to wrestle with her computer problems. She’s been working on a book for some time, and having had two computers crash on her in rapid succession, fears she may have lost the manuscript. I sure hope she hasn’t, and feel terrible for her. Just the stress of thinking she may have lost the MS is hard on her. I pray she finds the files.
Monday morning I went to the press preview for the Turner show at the Met. If there is such a thing as a Turner masterpiece it is both rare and flawed, yet I’d argue (as others have done, and better) that those few canvases—like Rain, Steam and Speed or The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons—and many of his sketches, watercolors, and oils have a power and energy with no like in the history of art. Their dynamism and Impressionism are often directly related to their subjects: the ocean, the sky, a train, weather. At times Turner’s dynamics were manipulated or marshaled, as with the precise angle of the flames and their reflection in the Thames in the picture of the Parliament buildings on fire, and the artist was criticized for that during his career. The power in his work pulls from within the subject and the composition, but from beyond the canvas as well, from the historical currents—the manifold industrial changes, social changes, political changes—that surrounded Turner and were part of his life and times. Their charge anticipates the Henry Adams essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin” and the canvases of Boccioni and other Futurists. In the sidebar for one canvas I read that during Turner's career oil paints themselves significantly developed and evolved, that there would appear something like a better yellow. He was known for touching up his work on Varnishing Days at the Royal Academy; musing over the retrospective, you get a sense that Turner was so caught up in his work that proprietary fell by the wayside.
By the way, I also learned that Turner is the artist for whom Britain's Turner Prize is named. I hadn't made that connection and in fact must have thought it was Ted Turner! The Royal Academicians would not be pleased, but what do I know? I'm just a Yank...and an Indian at that...