MUSEUMS

Rating: A Must See; Memorable

Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum.

Through October 10, 2011

Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA)

1000 Fifth Avenue. & 82nd St.

212-535-7710

Frans Hals’s Merrymakers at Shrovetide

This painting by Hals dates from about 1615 and recalls contemporary works by the Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens in its coloring, brushwork, and crowded composition. The subject is Vastenavond (Shrovetide or Mardi Gras), a pre-Lenten feast devoted to fools. Two of the figures are recognizable as stock characters from comic theater: Peeckelhaering (Pickled Herring) with the garland of eggs and sausages, and Hans Wurst with sausages on his cap. The young woman (a male actor, perhaps?) is surrounded by food, objects such as the bagpipe.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the most important collection of paintings in America by a favorite of mine and my grandkids: the celebrated Dutch artist Frans Hals (1582-1666), whose portraits and genre scenes were famous in his lifetime for their immediacy and dazzling brushwork. On view are 13 paintings of Hals’s, 11 owned by the Met including two lent from private collections, plus several works by other Netherlandish masters.. Frans Hals is one of the most familiar and accessible of the Old Master painters. His name is second only to Rembrandt’s in The Netherlands and equals Vermeer’s in its evocation of the Golden Age of Dutch art. After falling out of favor in the 18th century, Hals’s work was championed from the 1860s onward by such Realist and Impressionist masters as Courbet, Manet, and another favorite of mine, Sargent.

Several of the Museum’s paintings by Hals are famous, especially the early Merrymakers at Shrovetide (ca. 1616) and the so-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart (1623), both bequeathed to the Museum by Benjamin Altman in 1913. The Metropolitan Museum has two other genre scenes by Hals as well as seven fine portraits dating from the 1620s through the 1650s. Also included in the exhibition are two loans from private collections in New York—the small, exquisite Portrait of Samuel Ampzing (1630), on copper, and the well-known Fisher Girl (1630-32). A selection of other Netherlandish paintings from the Museum’s collection by artists including Rubens, Van Dyck, Steen, and Brouwer will set Hals’s work in the context of his native Haarlem and will help clarify how exceptional his animated poses and virtuoso brushwork were at the time.

THEATER

Reeve Carney is Spider-Man (aka Peter Parker)

Spider-Man

Turn Off the Dark

Foxwoods Theater

213 W.42nd St.

977-250-2929

Officially opened June 14, 2011

Guest Reviewer: Jon Drucker

After all the turmoil, injuries, firings (see Julie Taymor) and late night comedian jokes, the reality is, that the so-called aerial choreography I witnessed went off happily, not haplessly and brought the audience to its feet, no doubt due to the big bucks shelled out for the seats from which they leaped. Bono and The Edge's music and lyrics are decidedly middle-drawer and the stage-based choreography is leaden. Should this deter you from taking a child or grandchild? I think not, especially if they iron out a few more kinks from the book and staging, and the word of mouth inevitably becomes more favorable