March 29, 2007 6:04
The Rogers Report
When I was done with what I had to say about Richard Rogers it looked longer than a blogpost to me, so I put it up in all it's multi-illustrated glory directly on time.com instead.
March 29, 2007 12:08
Department of Amplification
I don't think it's a confusion she intended to create, but I notice that art blogger Lee Rosenbaum has a post today that could leave the mistaken impression that I broke an embargo yesterday by reporting in advance of the official announcement -- it comes later today -- that the architect Richard Rogers had won the Pritzker Prize.
Not so. A few weeks ago the good people who award the Pritzker sent a heads up to various media outlets and individual critics, including me, to let us know that Rogers would be the winner. But yesterday they sent me an e-mail to say the embargo had been lifted because the web site of the Spanish daily El Pais had gone public with the news. I assume the same word went out from the Pritzker folks to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which have also now posted about the Rogers award on their websites and published stories in their morning editions.
It's important to clear this up so that other institutions don't get the impression that I take embargoes less seriously at Time.com than I do at the globe devouring, innocent tree consuming venerable Time magazine. I take them seriously at both places.
March 28, 2007 1:22
The Pritzker Goes to Richard Rogers
Tomorrow the Hyatt Foundation will announce that this year's Pritzker Prize, architecture's most visible honor, will go to Richard Rogers, the British pioneer of high tech, designer of the furiously imagined Lloyd's of London headquarters in London and co-designer (with Renzo Piano) of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Lloyd's of London headquarters/Richard Rogers --
It's a safe decision no doubt -- a lot of people probably assume that Rogers had already won the thing years ago -- but well deserved. Rogers went beyond the Modernist dictum to make the elements of a building express their functions. He virtually turned some of his buildings inside out. I'll have a lot more to say tomorrow.
March 27, 2007 1:09
Gee That was Fast, Too
Just last Thursday the Senate, at the instigation of Iowa's non-profit-institution-spanking Sen. Charles Grassley, voted to freeze a $17 million budget increase for the Smithsonian as a way to create pressure for reform in the operations of the office of Lawrence M. Small, the high living ex-banker who is the Smithsonian's Secretary. Or was. Yesterday Small demonstrated in the only way that counts that he got the message.
So Small is gone, but the investigations spurred by his management practices are still gearing up. Meanwhile, his departure may mean a chance for some fresh thinking at the Smithsonian, a national museum that seems forever unsure how to play that role. For years I've travelled frequently in Canada to review shows there. I've always been struck by how the National Gallery of Canada, based in Ottawa, operates as a kind of mother ship, sending out exhibitions to museums all around the country. And I always wondered why the Smithsonian couldn't perform the same function in the U.S., especially for smaller institutions that don't have the kind of permanent collection that gives them leverage to be included on the touring circuit of big loan shows from other museums. Why not get that ball rolling now? Tyler Green makes a similar suggestion today.
Advice to Cristian Samper, the new acting Secretary of the Smithsonian -- how about a phone call to Pierre Theberge, director of the National Gallery, to pick his brain? ( I know the Smithsonian is feeling squeezed these days, but on most calling plans rates are low after 5 PM. )
March 26, 2007 4:46
The Renzo Piano-ish Office Tower?
A few weeks ago I posted about the threat of demolition faced by a Paul Rudolph office building in Boston that was in the way of a planned new tower and plaza by the architect Renzo Piano. Now it turns out that Piano has quit the project. He had been hinting earlier in the press that he had disagreements with the developer, Steve Belkin, over Belkin's desire to widen the 80-story tower. What Belkin plans to do now is turn over Piano's design to a Boston firm for them to execute -- and presumably to revise in ways that Piano couldn't stomach.
Which opens an interesting question. It happens all the time that architects are forced to compromise with their clients. But what happens when they've submitted a completed design that the client then hands over to another firm? Daniel Libeskind eventually removed his name altogether from the final design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center, which was being billed for a while as a Libeskind-David Childs collaboration. Will Belkin attempt to describe his project as "Piano-inspired" -- the words Boston Mayor Tom Menino used the other day after Piano pulled out? I have a feeling Renzo won't like that. The more that the finished product adulterates his original design, the less he'll want the glamor of his name attached to it in any way. But other than publically disowning the project, what are his options?
March 23, 2007 12:15
Gee, That was Fast
Just yesterday, after having spent days reading about the travails of the free spending Smithsonian Secretary, Lawrence J. Small, and then about the somewhat helter skelter collection and exhibition policies at the Smithsonian American Art Museums, I posted this fleeting thought:
"What's up with me? I just can't seem to get into spanking big institutions today. Am I just counting on Charles Grassley -- ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and flaming-sword-bearing scourge of the non-profit world - to do it for me?"
Turns out I didn't have to wait long.
On other business, it occured to me just now -- while I'm blogging, why not direct helpless readers to my piece on feminist art in the new issue of Time? Big fans of The Dinner Party can send abusive e-mails to the usual address.
March 22, 2007 2:33
Alert the Media! Critic Says: "I'm Not Sure"
Let's see, lots of museum news this week. Bad day for the Smithsonian, check. The Albright-Knox counting the new millions from its de-accessioning binge, check. But what's up with me? I just can't seem to get into spanking big institutions today. Am I just counting on Charles Grassley -- ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and flaming-sword-bearing scourge of the non-profit world - to do it for me?
Well, at least in the case of the Albright-Knox fight -- about whether the museum was right to sell off 207 objects from its collection at Sotheby's to increase its acquisition funds for contemporary art -- it's more complicated. I've also been standing back because -- is it ok to say this in the blog world? -- I haven't formed a solid opinion.
For the record, I'm not someone who thinks de-accessioning is always a bad thing. For instance, my own preferred solution for the predicament of the Barnes Foundation -- a problem for which there may be no good solution other than some notional white knight who has not turned up so far -- would have been for the court to permit a one time sale of one or more of its works. Put that Rose period Picasso on the block and right there you have a new endowment of over $100 million. Granted, chances are good the Picasso would end up over the commode of some Russian kleptocrat, but the Barnes would be on a solid footing.
So what about those sales by the Albright-Knox? It all depends on how true it is that the museum can't raise sizeable funds any other way, the position that the museum's director Louis Grachos has taken in the press and in a conversation a few weeks ago with art blogger Tyler Green. I know something about cities in upstate New York whose glory days are behind them and I can believe that the Albright-Knox, which is located in Buffalo, might have a declining donor base.
But then along comes former museum administrator and Buffalo native Tom Freudenheim in his Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pieces and conversations with blogger Lee Rosenbaum. Freudenheim claims there's plenty of big money sloshing around in the Buffalo area, some of it in the hands of Albright-Knox trustees, but that the museum has failed in its fundraising mission, so it's fallen back on the stratagem of selling off the family jewels. (This is one of those controversies, by the way, in which the bloggers have been more informative than the mainstream media.) Okay, somebody call him on it. His insistence that there are untapped millions around Buffalo, or that the museum has been laggard about fund raising or its trustees have failed in their role as donors, is the kind of story The Buffalo News could help to sort out.
Meanwhile, having no easy way to confirm Freudenheim's claims, I'm inclined to stay on the sidelines on this one, at least for now. Sometimes a critic's opinion is a public service. Sometimes it's anything but.
(This is, by the way, no more than a momentary lapse of journalistic egomania. Tune in tomorrow. I still have plenty of opinions on just about everything else.)
March 21, 2007 4:07
The Best Show I've Seen in New York
Van Gogh and Expressionism at the Neue Gallerie. Ok, not the best show I've ever seen in N.Y., but certainly the best for a while, enlightening, well focused and full of powerful canvases. And not just by Van Gogh, but by the German and Austrian artists the Neue was established to elevate, like Schiele, Klimt, Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Franz Marc.
Van Gogh was introduced into the bloodstream of German and Austrian art through an escalating series of gallery and museum shows, in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Dresden, that started around 1900, ten years after his death. Within another decade he would become the force that ignited German Expressionism. His acid yellows, mauves and ultramarines would discharge into the pallette of an astonished and even worshipful generation of painters. For many of them Van Gogh's influence was brief, but decisive and above all liberating. They responded not only to his formal qualities, the blunt impasto, the fearless juxtapositions of impossibly vivid colors, but to his conviction that painting could be the channel through which powerful feeling could find equivalent form. One the catalogue essays quotes Kafka on literature. "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us". For German and Austrian painting at the beginning of the last century, Van Gogh was an ax.
Field with Flowers Near Arles, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888 -- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
So, the "anxious", coiling line in Kokoshchka's portraits? From Van Gogh, of course. Kokoschka used Van Gogh's intensities as a permission slip to move off from his own stalemated beginnings in Viennese Jugendstil -- the Austrian variant of art nouveau -- and to find his way to the blunt, crackling energies of his later canvases. The ferociously colored, bluntly modeled forms in Franz Marc? Van Gogh again. Marc, Kandinsky and the other artists of Der Blaue Reiter group all succcumbed to him at one time or another. The self-portrait by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff that all but disintegrates into a cascade of thrashing pigment squeezed straight from the tube? Van Gogh, pushed to the point of no return.
Self-Portrait, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, 1906 -- Nolde Stifftung, Seebull
The Neue show was organized by guest curators Jill Lloyd,a London based art historian, and her husband Michael Peppiatt, the publisher of Art International (And author of an excellent book on Francis Bacon.) They also put together the terrific Neue show five years ago that gave a lot of people in the U.S. -- this is another way of saying "me" -- their first sustained look at the delectable perversities of Christian Schad. Give these people something else to do.
March 20, 2007 1:22
My Dinner with Olafur
Met last night for drinks and a bite to eat with Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-born artist of Icelandic descent who now lives in Berlin, and who became suddenly famous three years ago for "The Weather Event", his immensely popular installation in the Great Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London. I described it in TIME a while back this way:
In a nimble rethinking of the atmospheric sublime, Eliasson mirrored the hall's 115-ft. ceiling, then hung from it a patently artificial but weirdly persuasive "sun" made from 144 yellow lightbulbs behind a giant semicircular screen. Then he pumped the room full of mist. During a six-month run that ended in March 2004, Eliasson's make-believe sky drew some 2 million visitors. A lot of them spent long stretches lying on their backs, gazing blissfully upward.
The Weather Project/Olafur Eliasson, 2003 -- Photo: Tate, London
Eliasson is in the U.S. this week to help with a major survey of his work that opens in September at the San Francisco MoMA and then moves to MoMA in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, MOCA in Sydney Australila and possibly elsewhere. One interesting thing he mentioned last night -- he may install a temporary work in the giant, problematic atrium of MoMA in New York, a space the museum has still never quite figured what to do with. MoMA's temporary installation of Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody -- good idea. Their temporary installation of Monet's Water Lilies -- bad idea. Best idea -- do as the Tate does and commission artists to make new projects that use the space to the fullest.
There's always a danger they'll come up with something as silly as the Carsten Holler sliding ponds that were at the Tate when I last visited in November. But it could just as easily produce work that would get MoMA seriously involved with the contemporary art scene. Eliasson would be a great way to start -- though he has reservations about not wanting to be known as "the guy who does lobby art".
As we were talking about this the hostess at our restaurant came by to fiddle with the dimmers that controlled light in the dining room. I considered telling her that I was sitting with just the guy who should handle that job. But I decided against it. These days he has enough to do.
March 19, 2007 12:02
The Best Show I Saw in LA
I spent a few days in Los Angeles last week to catch up on shows there. My favorite: the restrospective of drawings by Vija Celmins at the Hammer Museum. You see her work everywhere, I'm always running into one or two, but this was the first show to pull it together for me and lead me all the way into her complicated intentions, a trip worth making.
Celmins, who has lived in New York since 1981, was born in Latvia in 1938. She's had one of those quintessentially 20th century lives, passing through both the disintegration of Europe and the brief postwar idyll in the U.S. That's another way of saying that during World War II she escaped with her family from both the Germans and the Russians to start a new life in Indianapolis. From there she eventually made her way to art school at UCLA.
It was the early 1960s, the moment when Abstract Expressionism was sputtering to a messy conclusion. With Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg as the pioneers, and Giorgio Morandi as a forerunner, artists looking for a way out of all that inner turmoil,— Warhol and the other Pop artists, serene realists like William Bailey, unclassifiable hipsters like Ed Ruscha — were making pictures of ordinary things from the workaday world, imagined as straightforwardly as possible.
This was how Celmins, too, found her way out of the impasse of AbEx, making intensely observed grisaille paintings of household objects like a utility lamp or a hotplate, seen against bare backgrounds and removed from all notions of purpose or social context. What she cared about were things in their thingness. It's a miracle she didn't end up as a Minimalist sculptor.
Before long she was also making more loaded images like War World II bomber planes, pictures that referred obliquely to her tumultuous childhood and the Vietnam War. Incredibly even those feel neutralized, seen from a distance. (It matters here that she almost always worked from photographs.) Even when the image was literally loaded -- she made quite a few involving guns -- Celmins pulled back to a cool position. In one series she showed a gun being fired by a person whom we see only as a disembodied arm entering the picture from one side -- violence without psychology. She made another of a handgun twice-removed from reality, a Peto-ish drawing of a news photo of a pistol, a picture of a picture.
Clipping With Pistol, 1968/Vija Velmins, 1968 -- The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In the late '60s Celmins made the crucial move into the kind of imagery that continues to obsess her. "All over" images of desert floors, outer space or the ocean surface, their apparent uniformity is built from a superabundance of subdued visual incidents. At that time she also moved temporarily out of painting and into pencil drawing. Its with these resolute, tough minded pictures that she's made her richest discoveries. What did she learn? That the "all over" field of AbEx could be found in nature. That the all black paintings of Ad Reinhardt could be repurposed as a system of black, grey and white gradations that describe actual scenes. That flat space -- the desert floor -- could be made infinite. That deep space -- the cosmos -- could be flat. And that the ocean, that timeworn site of the sublime, could be, you might say, desublimated.
Untitled (Big Sea #1), 1969/Vija Celmins -- Courtesy McKee Gallery, N.Y.
After all those World War II bombers, history has been expelled from these pictures, unless you think in geological or cosmic time. What you see when you look into them is a granular surface of meticulously applied graphite marks that fluctuate in your understanding between abstract marks and specific representations. They anchor your eye to the thick applications of graphite, but anchor it where? They dislocate as quickly as they locate. They're rigorous in what they exclude, and exciting in how they summon the power of exclusion, how they mobilize their reduced means to open the way to new perceptual and psychological vistas. You might say that what they show is that paradox Wallace Stevens once pointed us towards -- "the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
Star Field 1, 1982/Vija Celmins -- Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson
March 16, 2007 2:39
The Art Police, Part 2
I got an interesting comment to my recent post about museums and galleries policing their artists as part of their deals with governments that don't share Western views about free expression. Here's the most pertinent part:
The rulers of Abu Dhabi are not "unenlightened," as you put it;.... rather, they recognize that this is an extremely sensitive subject within the Arab world, and they know that they and their American and French partners will have to find the right balance between Muslim tradition and a progressive agenda as they introduce Western-style museums and exhibitions to this part of the world. It'll be quite interesting to see how popular attitudes are tested in Abu Dhabi once these museums open; my bet is that, inevitably, taboos will be broken by art, as they always are.
I can agree with that in part, which I suggested in the portion of my own post that talked about the usefulness of cultural exchange. The Guggenheim deal with Abu Dhabi has already been a good thing in as much as it means that an Arab Emirate has not only welcomed a museum with Jewish founders, but one that will be designed by Frank Gehry, who's also Jewish. Which no doubt will be another reason why the Guggenheim will be on its best behavior in Abu Dhabi.
But as mentioned, the Guggenheim's promise that the art in Abu Dhabi will not offend Muslim sensitivities means that an institution that's usually more comfortable defending the prerogatives of art will now be holding up each work to the light to inspect it for any ingredient that could offend local sensibilities. That may be the price you pay for incremental progress in the field of cultural understanding. But it's bound to put the Guggenheim in an uncomfortable position.
Or to put it another way, goodbye Ghada Amer.
March 15, 2007 12:20
Best Idea of the Week
Send appreciative e-mails to Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who is thinking out loud about the possibility that LACMA might acquire a few architecturally important modernist homes in the LA area, including -- possibly -- Frank Gehry's own famously deconstructed bungalow in Santa Monica.
Gehry House/Photo: New York Times
This is a move I wish every museum with an acquisitions budget (or a few generous donors) would consider. Frank Lloyd Wright houses disappear all the time. And just last week I blogged about the unhappy fate of two houses by Paul Rudolph. Though it's now a National Trust Historic Site, even Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House was in play for a while.
And while we're at it, let's save the Doo Wop Motels!
March 14, 2007 12:10
The Art Police
I see from last Sunday's New York Times that Charles Saatchi has started up a Chinese version of Stuart, the sort of MySpace for art students that's a heavily visited subdivision of the Saatchi gallery website. If you don't already know it, it's a place where students can chat, show examples of their work, and post comments and links to friends' pages and to their own websites.
What especially caught my eye in the Times piece was a statement by a Saatchi rep that the gallery did not anticipate interference from the Chinese government about the content of the art posted on the Chinese site. Maybe. The Chinese haven't been shy about putting their great big foot down to block unwelcome Internet content. Just ask the good people at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Then, from the Saatchi spokeswoman, came this:
"We don't foresee our site becoming a platform for anti-government propaganda, but we do of course aim to be respectful to the wishes of our host nation if our site starts being abused."
Anti-government propaganda? I would have thought there might be a better term for art that dared to be critical of a one party state, but maybe I need to get with the program. Will Saatchi also be taking down art from the English-language version of Stuart that criticizes the Iraq war, or is it only dictatorships that get their delicate sensibilities protected? It only gets better when you recall that it was art from Saatchi's collection that formed the basis of the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum eight years ago, the one that got Rudy Giuliani so upset because of a Chris Ofili portrait of the Virgin Mary festooned with elephant dung. I guess that was back when Saatchi was into snubbing authorities, not being "respectful" to their wishes.
But we live in strange times, when museums and galleries, which used to be the first line of defense against government censorship -- remember Jesse Helms vs. The Ghost of Robert Mapplethorpe? -- have decided that it's in their interests to play ball with touchy regimes. Keep in mind that Tom Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, has promised that the Guggenheim's Frank Gehry-designed satellite museum that will be part of the massive new Abu Dhabi arts district, will avoid showing work that offends Moslem sensibilities, including female nudes. The Louvre, which will also have a spinoff museum there, has made a similar arrangement, though it hasn't specified what to do about nudes. But hey, there's enormous money on the table here. The Louvre will get a whopping $1.3 billion for the deal, including $525 million merely for the use of its name. And Saatchi, a major collector of contemporary Chinese art, may have reasons of his own to want to stay on the good side of Chinese authorities.
I can see the virtue of cultural exchange, and even the need sometimes to conduct the exchange within more narrow parameters than the agreeable free for all that is freedom of expression in the West. But make no mistake, Western museums and galleries are now going to find themselves acting as enforcers for unenlightened rulers. And I will bet that's going to put them in some very tight spots. But if any of them really feel it's necessary to take on that role, I have a candidate with first rate credentials to become their next chief curator.
March 11, 2007 10:24
Travel is So Broadening
On the road for a few days on art-biz. Back to the blog on Wednesday. Where am
I? Well, you might say that's for me to know and you to figure out.
March 9, 2007 12:14
I'll Buy a Window Sill and Two Bannisters
I thought it was pretty funny to read earlier this week that The Los Angelese County Museum of Art, which is in the midst of a three part expansion designed by the inevitable Renzo Piano, was going to name the entryway of the newly expanded museum "the BP Grand Entrance". This in gratitude for a $25 million contribution from the British oil company to LACMA's rebuilding campaign.
It's nothing new for museums to name wings and galleries and courtyards after donors, but when did they start selling off the doors? (For good measure the BP entrance will have solar panels on top -- oil companies are big on demonstrating their eco-awareness these days.) I found myself wondering about the whole practice of donor recognition. Just what was the first institution to name a gallery for a benefactor with deep pockets? I don't know if this is the answer, but as it happens yesterday I was reading Basilica by R.A. Scotti, a history of the building of St. Peter's published last year. It includes this anecdote about how construction on the hugely expensive project slowed after the death of its first architect, Donato Bramante, in 1514:
Some progress was made on the south arm of the church. [Pope] Leo christened it the Capella del Re di Francia — "the Chapel of the King of France" -- hoping that by giving the king's name to a significant portion of the Basilica, Francis I would be induced to pay the construction costs.
For the record, Francis didn't go for the bait. I think the lesson here is don't chisel the name in stone until the check arrives. And then make sure it clears.
March 8, 2007 12:30
Up Against Jeff Wall
Photo-bloggers like the indispensable Alec Soth have been having a field day with Jeff Wall lately -- for instance, here and here and here.
All of this comes in response to Wall's coronation by way of a traveling MoMA retrospective that just opened in Manhattan and an adoring cover story in the New York Times Sunday magazine. (To say nothing of my own humble contribution in Time.)
Early last year I visited Wall in his studio in Vancouver to see what he was up to. What he showed me turned out to be a painstakingly constructed illustration of a scene from a Yukio Mishima novel. That picture confirmed for me my general impression of his paradoxical career. Wall approaches each picture or series of pictures (like his total of three book illustrations) as a way to inquire into a new set of problems. But one thing he does again and again. He uses the anti-art strategies of conceptualism to give himself ideological cover as he re-examines the most retrograde and even sentimental practices of the past. History painting, genre, literary illustration, even "beauty" -- he yearns for them all. He's a resolute modern artist with a longing for the past, a radical softie. And if you're drawn to his pictures at all, and sometimes I am, it's probably because, by way of those practices, he offers pleasures that painting has largely left behind.
But even when he tries to regain the power and pleasures of representational painting, he's careful not to be too easy to grasp. (A shortcoming in a lot of Gregory Crewdson pictures.) In particular, Wall's been interested in a problem that has pre-occupied painters from the time that clear narrative started to leach out of painting in the 19th century -- how to balance meaning and ambiguity. A few bloggers and their readers have shrugged over one of the biggest and most recent images in his MoMA show, In front of a nightclub, 2006, so let me tackle just that one.
In front of a nightclub-- Jeff Wall/Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
This is a picture that's apparently as "pointless" as the most accidental snapshot. But in fact it's an insanely conscientious creation that took weeks of effort, set building, costuming and lighting, all for the purpose of producing a false impression of slice-of-life instantaneousness. Then it invites you to examine this pointless scene -- which he has also blown up to epic size; to the scale of 19th century history painting -- with the equivalent effort.
What we can learn from the most formless moments of life and how to learn from them is a longstanding preoccupation of art. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had been reading Milan Kundera's new book length essay about fiction called The Curtain, in which he argues that sifting through the quotidian is one ofthe most important things the novel can do. Something he says in there reminded me of Wall's picture. "The novel alone could reveal the immense mysterious power of the pointless." The novel alone? Maybe not. Pictures make the attempt all the time. I think this is what Garry Winogrand was after towards the end of his life, when he sometimes simply hung his camera out the window of a moving car and took pictures of everything that went by.
One other thing. Interweaving layers of reality and falsehood are a post-modern obsession but by no means something that the post-modern '70s ushered in. For one thing, the fluctuations between reality and fiction in Wall's Nightclub picture remind me of Shakespearean theatre. I mean actual Shakespearean theater, at the time of Shakespeare, when adolescent boys played all of the women's roles. Which means that in, say, Tweflth Night, in the scenes in which the lady Olivia falls in love with "Cesario", who is in fact the lady Viola disguised as a boy, what the Elizabethan audience was seeing was a boy pretending to be Olivia courting a boy pretending to be a woman who was pretending to be a boy. Which means a boy pretending to be a boy. You do the math.
Final point. For the record, there is no substitute for painting. And no substitute for photography either.
March 7, 2007 12:59
The Hits Just Keep on Coming
I see in today's New York Times that Boston is thinking of demolishing a 13 story building by Paul Rudolph to make way for an 80 story skyscraper by Renzo Piano.
PHOTO:The New York Times/Jodi Hilton
Rudolph, who died ten years ago, wasn't always the easiest architect to love. (What can you expect when you make your name in a style called "Brutalism"?) All the same, at times he coaxed some wonderful results out of all that forbidding concrete. Taking lessons from the thrusting planes of Frank Lloyd Wright and the power of Le Corbusier's later work, he found ingenious ways to express a building's structure. But lately he seems to have become a state of the art wrecking-ball magnet. Two Rudolph-designed houses were demolished in recent years, one of them just two months ago in Westport, Conn.
PHOTO:The New York Times/Doug Healey
And Riverview High School in Sarasota, Fla., the city where Rudolph started his career in the 1940 and '50s, is now in danger of being sacrificed for a parking lot.
PHOTO:Sarasota Herald-Tribune/Dan Wagner
The mid-century Modernists could be pretty dry eyed themselves when it came to tearing down earlier work to make way for their own. Rudolph once even proposed a mammoth structure in lower Manhattan that would have pretty much wiped out SoHo. It took a while for the Modernists to accept the idea of preservation. And now when it comes to their own work, it looks like the lessons need to be learned all over again.
One other thing. Supposedly Rudolph's Boston building has to go to make room for a public plaza as part of the project that Piano is designing. But -- golly -- I notice that in the Times story today Piano also mentions that he's under pressure from the developer to widen the proposed tower. If the Rudolph goes, let's see how much space "the public" -- that would be you and me and everybody else who isn't getting a cut of the rents -- actually gains in the end.
March 6, 2007 5:40
We Had to Destroy the Village to Save It
Just last week the county commissioners of Montgomery County, Pa., where the Barnes Foundation is located, voted unanimously to go in search of outside legal assistance to explore ways to keep the Barnes collection from being relocated to an as yet unbuilt facility in downtown Philadelphia. The commissioners also voted to have their lobbyists in the Pennsylvania state legislature try to slow the release of some of the $100 million the state authorized five years ago to subsidize the relocation.
Those commissioners need to move fast, because it turns out that the Barnes is moving faster. On Tuesday afternoon it announced that that "it has issued a request for qualifications to an extensive group of leading national and international architecture firms. Architects will be selected based on design philosophy, technical approach, organization, experience, innovation, creativity and sensitivity to the goals of the Barnes Foundation."
The Barnes press release goes on: "The Foundation plans to review the responses in April, select a short list later in the spring and announce its selection by August 1, 2007. Design will begin immediately, and the site will be prepared from the end of 2007. Construction will start on completion of design work."
I was out at the Barnes just last Friday, in a fairly discouraged mood. There's still an organization devoted to keeping the Barnes where it is, but for the powers that be it's strictly Philadelphia, Here I Come. Albert Barnes was a truculent, combative man, and his aesthetic theories tend to devolve into simplistic pseudo-science. But he put together an incomparable collection in a unique setting. Even if you grant that it has too many mediocre Renoirs and that Barnes placed a comically heavy bet on Jules Pascin, an all too scrumptious art historical loser, there is nothing else in the U.S. like the cheek-by-jowl assemblage of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani in the relatively intimate Paul Cret-designed mansion. It simply will not be possible to "recreate" the Barnes in a much larger new building on Ben Franklin Parkway, any more than the Dulwich Picture Gallery outside London could be stuffed into the Great Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. In an era of big box museums, the Barnes is the ultimate jewel box. The financial problems of the Foundation are real, but the snatch-and-grab solution of relocating the collection to Philadelphia is no solution at all. It isn't salvation. It isn't even euthanasia. It's death by disembowelment.
March 6, 2007 2:15
Even More About MoMA and Money
I spoke earlier today with John Elderfield, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, who wanted to elaborate on an episode that I mentioned in an earlier blogpost about the very imaginative compensation arrangements devised some years ago for MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, which came to light recently in the New York Times.
First some re-cap. When MoMA re-opened three years ago after its huge expansion, many people -- I was one of them -- were surprised that the first picture to greet you in the newly re-hung permanent collection was no longer Cezanne's The Bather -- a pivotal work that had long been in that important first position in the galleries -- but a relatively secondary picture by Signac, a portrait of the writer Felix Feneon. That Signac happened to be from the collection of David Rockefeller. And Rockefeller happened to be one of three trustees whom we now know had quietly funded a trust that supplemented Lowry's income by more than $5 million over a period of years.
So in my earlier post I wondered out loud what role if any Lowry might have played in the decision to hang so prominently a picture from the collection of one of his primary benefactors. And even if he had played no role, I wrote at the time, this would be a good example of how the trust could create appearances of conflict of interest.
Elderfield was in touch today to assure me that Lowry had no role in the Signac decision. "I had been pondering that whole issue of what had been on the wall facing the main entrance for a long time," he said. "What I thought was really interesting about the Feneon painting was that he represented the audience for art. He was a critic, a writer."
The important point here is Elderfield's assurance that the decision to substitute Signac for Cezanne was entirely his own. In fact, Elderfield told me, Lowry only learned of it when he saw the Signac placed prominently in a scale model of the galleries that Elderfield and his fellow curators were using as a way to play with ideas for re-hanging the permanent collection. I'm happy to take that on faith. I've interviewed John a few times over the years and have never had reason to doubt anything he tells me. (And by the way, he also didn't insist or even ask me to publish this post with his version of events, though I asked for his ok to do it.)
That said, the problem of appearances remains exactly what I said it was last week. Now that we know about it, that complex and very quietly established fund will continually prompt people to ask questions about MoMA's curatorial and acquisition decisions, to wonder if they might possibly be of benefit to any of the three trustees who compensated Lowry from their own pockets. Sometimes it's just easier to be paid as openly and directly as possible.
March 5, 2007 2:23
Abu Dhabi Dilemma
In the British newspaper The Guardian Frank Gehry posted a few reflections today about his upcoming new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. The most interesting part is this:
"Abu Dhabi does throw up some very particular issues for the Guggenheim and the display of art. I don't think we'll be allowed to display nudes, and there are all sorts of concerns about the way women are allowed to be shown."
Will the Guggenheim be submitting shows for approval to a governing body in the emirate? Will they remove offending works pre-emptively? This global franchising of the museum business apparently comes with some built in problems.
March 5, 2007 11:18
Letter Imperfect
After maintaining silence on the questions raised by the disclosure of MoMA Director Glenn Lowry's wonderfully intricate compensation package, MoMA's Chairman Robert Menschel and President Marie-Josee Kravis have spoken up by way of a letter to the editor in last Saturday's New York Times, though not one that does much to clarify the questions about conflict of interest that the unusual funding arrangement created. Their brief letter also fudges some important issues. Two useful commentaries here and here.
March 1, 2007 5:32
London Calling
A Brit weighs in on the New York street art splatterer.
(I think I may have just wanted to put up a post that consisted almost entirely of links. Blogging is an art form too!)
March 1, 2007 11:31
Mean Streets: Just Got Meaner
It wasn't bad enough that guerilla marketers ripped off street art ideas to panic the whole innocent city of Boston. Now the New York Times is reporting about another development that's had street art people buzzing in New York for a while. Somebody is going around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan and trashing their work with paint splatters. Worse, the point the vandalizer seems to be making -- it's hard to be sure -- is that street art is now just another stepping stone to the corrupt world of galleries and museums or to marketing franchises like Shepard Fairey's spin offs of his pictures of Andre the Giant.
If you've devoted your life to running around pasting up home made posters and stickers in ratty ass parts of town, that hurts. But whoever is doing the vandalizing -- and yes, yes, we know, there's an irony involved here in the idea of vandalizing work that already qualifies in the eyes of the law as vandalism; ok, noted -- needs to keep in mind what Herbert Marcuse explained long ago. Of course street art can be re-absorbed back into the system it supposedly resists. There is no escaping the system. There are no "transgressive gestures" that a market economy can't turn into merchandise.
Including paint splatters over somebody else's street art. Note to street art splatterer: call your agent.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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