Gardens, of course, can offer some of the most exotic trips on earth in the span of a few feet. Claude Monet's half-blind summer strolls in his gardens at Giverny were interstellar. To his failing, deepening vision, the image of flowers, rippling water and reflected clouds was a trip to an alternative universe, one at once cosmic and materialistic. Is there a difference? He seemed to pose the question.
The Modern has its own garden, the Sculpture Garden. And it too is overgrown this summer, though not with plants. It is almost entirely taken up by two humongous sculptures by Richard Serra, whose work also claims the special exhibition gallery on the sixth floor and the second-floor space usually assigned to the museum's contemporary collection. The garden still has plantings and trees, but mostly you stare at towering rusted-steel Serra walls.
But haven't you had enough of nature tamed, of summer indoors, of autumnal introspection in July? If so, dash back to the design department, rev up the 1963 Jaguar convertible roadster on display there (top speed: a blistering 240kph), grab a Cady Noland license plate drawing from Rattemeyer's show and speed out of town, choosing the route as you go.
In the museum's atrium you'll pass large, grassy Joan Mitchell paintings, fragrant with heat and loam. Upstairs you'll encounter a fleet, blocky watercolor of a mill that Picasso knocked out in the Spanish town of Horta de Ebro in 1909, when he vacationed there and started getting Cubism off the ground. Nearby you'll see Georges Braque's tawny, deciduous Road Near L'Estaque, a late-summer scene of hills, dense trees and a distant view of the sea.
MoMA is thick with trees right now. Max Ernst's tiny Forest and Sun (1931) is all linear arches and loop. Agnes Martin's 1964 painting The Tree is a cage of light built from thousands of twiglike lines. For greenery, though, nothing is greener than Jasper Johns' Green Target (1955): leaf-green, hope-green, it's a traffic light set on "go."
And if you obey it, you'll soon clear the woods and find yourself on a rise, approaching the sea. You can catch its glint in Mondrian's easy-to-miss View From the Dunes With Beach and Piers, Domburg (1909). By the time Milton Avery's Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (1958) comes into sight, you can smell the salt air. You're there.
Back on the highway you slow down to take in a series of four Seurat landscape paintings, of harbor scenes at different times of day. The last one, Evening, Honfleur, is a tender portrait of the seaside resort on the Normandy coast where the young artist passed the summer of 1886. The sea is rough and the winds brisk year round in this part of the world. But you'd never know this from Seurat's scene of a beach, a wedge of sea and a stretch of cloud-banded sky, brought into being one dot of paint at a time, with the dots spreading, like sand, or pollen, or a humid haze, out of the picture and across the frame.
Drink in its tranquillity, its cool grace. Soon you'll be back in town. Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43), that beeping, dancing geometric sizzler, automatically puts you there. But Honfleur at dusk stays in your eyes, ends your tour and carries you out to the street to the end of a perfect getaway summer day.
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