miércoles

For a final excursion, I taxied through the posh neighborhoods to MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art. It's a small but fine collection, organizing Latin American aesthetics chronologically according to decade. The space is clean and modern, with both indoor and outdoor exhibits. A retrospective of Tarsila do Amaral (female, born 1886) was particularly captivating. A friend of Blaise Cendrars, Amaral's career began in the 20s with drab impressionism and geometric primitivism. After brief flirtations with cubism, her style evolved into sweet and simple line drawings: a few suggestions of a skyline or hills, with rooftops floating above walls, brief tastes of whimsy and delicacy. It then took a turn toward Henri Rousseau with surreal and distorted landscapes, suns like lemon slices, cruciform trees, and tangled limbs. In the 30s, after a trip to the Soviet Union, her painting shifted toward social realism, depicting illness, poverty, despair, and fatigue.

Other highlights of the collection include the watercolors of Alejandro Xul Solar (to whose work there is devoted an entire other museum in BA) and Botero's rotund fleshballs. A strange and wonderful contemporary exhibit down a wide staircase and behind a red velvet curtain is called "Autopsia de lo Invisible." Mario García Torres shows letters faxed to a dead artist in Kabul, describing a fruitless search for a hotel Torres wants to use as a film location. Dated 2001 but referencing events that happened long after, the fragile letters narrate a history of destruction in a ghostly, reverent, neurotic voice. Ignacio Lang matches images to the "Weird but True" column published everyday in the New York Post, documenting appendectomies performed by the light of a cell phone, Chinese dinosaur bone soup, an underwater cemetary, the pardoning of a witch in Virginia. Teresa Margolles settles accounts with "Ajuste de Cuentas," commissioning jewelry to be made from the detritus of violent deaths. From the scenes of drug-related assassinations, she collects glass, transforms them into earrings, rings, cufflinks, bracelets, and necklaces, and presents them along with police reports that anatomize the murder. Margolles turns grave-robbing from a crime into an act of witness.

Before coming to the museum, I had dithered about where to have lunch. The final days, and so much left uneaten! But I decided that because I love museum restaurants, I would check out MALBA's. Good choice: it was opening day, and I was seated at a communal table next to the owner, a Frenchman who also owns the most highly regarded French restaurant in the city. We spoke in French as he sampled all the food that was coming out of the kitchen, greeted friends and well-wishers who approached with a constant stream of hearty congratulations, and discussed business and marriage with a companion. Hedonism and capitalism flowed in his veins, animated his gestures, and raised his voice to chastise the staff when a dish wasn't quite up to snuff. The food and the space, looking out into a sunny park, were both superb.