Amazingly—despite the September 11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing economic woes for New York City—two brand-new Manhattan museums opened to loud acclaim late in 2001: the American Folk Art Museum, in its innovative building on 53rd Street near the Museum of Modern Art, and the Neue Galerie New York, at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, 1846-1848. Oil on canvas. (©2000 John Bigelow Taylor, New York)

I went first to the Folk Art Museum. The New York Times was right in praising both the building and the current show. It’s a treat. A bit overwhelming, it is loaded with five floors full of treasures. For this visit, I skipped the impressive Henry Darger Collection on the second floor to concentrate on the exhibit “American Radiance,” culled from the Ralph Esmerian collection of nearly 400 artworks.

The fifth floor (I usually start at the top and make my way down) begins with a marvelous centaur weather vane from 1852-67, near which is a 1930 sculpture Tin Man and a small child’s sled, the top of which serves as the “canvas” for June Ewing’s  incredibly realistic, detailed 1983 painting titled Opening Night. Numerous portraits line the walls, looking like ancestors I never had, meticulous, symmetrical, and paradoxically real and unnatural at the same time. There are also entire conserved walls covered with murals, numbers of weather vanes, and wooden figures, including the 19th-century Dapper Dan, a stunningly up-to-the-moment fellow, garbed in red, white, and blue.

Weathervane: St. Tammany; Artist unknown; Mid-19th century. Molded and painted copper. (Museum of American Folk Art)

On other floors there are furniture, fraktur (embellished texts), textiles, toys, dishes, shop signs, portraits, landscape paintings, and much more. Smiling, even giggling, viewers enjoy the whimsical folk art, not bad during troubled times. And the continuity of folk art is somehow reassuring. There’s a sense of encompassing beauty. This museum celebrates the human impulse to decorate and beautify everything. Even arithmetic books, accounts books, and, especially, “tune books,” resemble medieval manuscripts with their intricate penmanship.

Undeterred by the sheer amount of labor, be it in needlework or scrimshaw, penmanship, or huge, elaborate sculpture, many folk artists create in an obsessive-compulsive manner. The work is strangely real and abstract at the same time, old and modern, and timeless too. Some of the landscapes, such as those by John Rasmussen (1828-1895), seem so real, despite distortions, that you can practically smell and feel the freshness of the fields. They remind me a bit of Grandma Moses.

Kolomon Moser, Armchair, ca. 1903. Beech painted white, woven raffia-string painted black and white. (Photo by David Schlegel/Neue Galerie New York)

The most famous work in the show is probably Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom, one of many moving but amusing versions he made of an imaginative, Bible-based (“The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them”), magical kingdom. People laughed lovingly at this, someone commenting that this should be placed everywhere. The second-most famous work is Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog by Ammi Philips (1788-1865). Elegant, simple and balanced, strands of red necklace rhythmically balance the huge glob of red dress, and outsized cat with curling tail, and dog at her feet. This exemplifies that paradoxical interplay between lifelike and believable, and abstract.

Above the atrium of the new building, the “St. Tammany” weather vane stands guard. Perhaps the largest weather vane ever made, in 1890 it topped a building that housed a fraternal group called “the Improved Order of Red Men.” So this is the origin of the name Tammany Hall! The label explains that Tammany was a legendary chief of the Delaware Indians. I do wish that the generally informative wall labels included medium and dimensions.

Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll (Fränzi), 1910. Oil on canvas. (Serge Sabarsky Collection)

Like African, Oceanic, and other arts that Western Europeans and Americans used to label “primitive,” folk art is all one, demonstrating that art is everything, and everything is art. Indeed, the art world today is far more international, and inclined to fuse the arts than ever before.

The second new museum, the Neue Galerie New York, is totally different, but equally wonderful. The architecture of the renovated Fifth Avenue mansion dating from 1914 nicely complements the German and Austrian art from the first half of the 20th century exhibited inside.

The many paintings and drawings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka are a strong addition to these artists who remain underrepresented in New York City museums. You will see examples on the second floor. Do not miss Klimt’s Dancer (1916-18), a fine featured, partially nude figure, surrounded by flowers, patterns, with tiny figures in Mandarin gowns behind her. Schiele’s drawings are particularly powerful, and include a portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, along with numerous self-portraits. The weird Alfred Kubin is also represented; and alongside paintings and drawings are cases with glassware, ceramics, silver, and jewelry. Furniture is not neglected either.

Josef Hoffman, Brooch, 1904. Silver, partly gilt, diamonds, moonstones, opal, lapis lazuli, corals, leopardite. (Photo by David Schlegel/Neue Galerie New York)

On the third floor, one can see representative works by artists of both “Die Brücke” and “Der Blaue Reiter,” subsets of German Expressionism, as well as “Neue Sachlichkeit” (“New Objectivity”) painters. You can think of the former artists as depicting an extroverted, screaming, bad dream, while the latter convey the feeling of a silent nightmare in which you try, but cannot force out, the strangled scream inside. The Kirchners, Schmidt-Rottluffs, Noldes, and Pechsteins seem almost pleasant, compared to the horrors of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Christian Schad. Somehow the tight control and cruelty in these “New Objectivity” painters do not convey objectivity at all. The lack of bright color and invisible brushstroke are all the more shocking. Fortunately, the horrors of the pre-war years in Germany are counterbalanced by the joyful paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, as well as the utilitarian furniture and crafts of the Bauhaus.

It is fascinating to me that both these two new museums include fine arts and crafts in their displays. Perhaps in the 21st century, these artificial distinctions will gradually melt away, to be replaced by all encompassing “Gesamtkunstwerk,” as foreseen by Richard Wagner. 

By the way, both museums have special programs and tours. Get schedules and information at the museums or on their Web sites: www.folkartmuseum.org and www.neuegalerie.org. Both also have nice shops and cafes.