Bury Me on the Lone Prairie

Earlier this month I rode the Amtrak rails south to Kansas City, Missouri. Please don’t call my former hometown a cow town. It’s neither flat nor barren and cattle do not roam the hills Downtown. The worst thing that happened to me in this great city on the great Missouri River was eating a plate of deep-fried chicken livers and gizzards. If you’re thinking that kind of food defines K.C., you’re wrong.

Only seven hours from Chicago (on the Southwest Chief), it’s a snap getting there. The train shuttles between New York and Los Angeles. I jumped off at the Union Station, a once glorious place in the days when train travel was glamorous. In the distance I could see “Quality Hill,” the spot where boys of my teen-hood took girls, usually in a convertible. Not that we took advantage of the spectacular view. Oh those summer-soft Kansas City nights of my youth!

Because I write frequently about art-related matters, I made several trips to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art near the 1920’s shopping complex at the Country Club Plaza where once-upon-a-time I sold rhinestone jewelry to matrons with money. The Plaza (like everything else in the city) has changed, though it still retains a wealth of splashing fountains. The shops, formerly owned by Kansas City families, are currently occupied by the likes of Gap, Express, and Urban Outfitters. There’s a fine multi-plex theater where I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary about the cave drawings in the Loire Valley of France.

It was a good way to begin my visits to the Nelson-Atkins, a museum of high repute, built with Kansas City money. Recently the “Bloch Museum” was designed and attached to the older building, and if you can believe The New Yorker’s review, it is indeed the finest museum addition built in the past century. It is brilliant and beautiful. The first day of my visit was given over to viewing the Monet exhibition and three huge paintings from his many water-lily paintings. Hung in tandem in a Monet-blue room designed for the exhibition, it was, like all blockbusters, more about the event than the art. Imagine sitting on cushy lily-pad shaped banquettes in front of these masterful works which, alas, for all his bountiful brush strokes, can never capture the beauty of Monet’s gardens in Giverny. Plato had it right.

But let’s not diss Monet, okay? The balance of the glassy Bloch is given over to a marvelous contemporary collection, including something we sorely need at the MAM…a permanent gallery for photography. An entire nearby interior space is given over to a superb arrangement of the sculptural works of Noguchi. You can lounge on them should you care to.

The Nelson-Atkins is glory unto itself, and their collection of Asian art is the best in the world. I had lunch in the museum’s Roselle Court and as I ate my Thai Wrap, a friend pointed out a chap with long gray hair. “He’s from Venezuela, and is the new Executive Director,” she chirped. Earlier in the day, I encountered two friends, art educators now retired (Carolyn White and Leon Travanti) who live a few blocks south of me in Milwaukee. They were touring with MAM’s Fine Art Society and mentioned that the chap from Venezuela gave them an early morning personal tour.

But if art is the focus here, I have to blather a bit about the Roxy Paine “tree” newly installed on the grounds fronting the museum. High on a hill, with genuine trees as neighbors, the stainless steel structure is marvelous. It’s actually as much about dendrons and such as it is about “trees.” Oh, to have one of his superior pieces in Milwaukee. This is the best of privately funded public art.

During my visit there was a fire in the Ceramics Building of the Kansas City Art Institute, a complex that shares space a block or so from the Atkins. The senior students were sleeping while the kilns fired their final projects, but no one was injured and well, sometimes art ends up as ashes. As do we.

Put K.C. on your list of things to do before you die. It’s in “Missoura,” not Missouri — and not Kansas.