May 15, 2008 4:43

Bad News About the Barnes

It looks like the judge in the court battle over moving the Barnes collection out of Merion, Pa. won't be revisiting his earlier ruling that the art could be relocated to Philadelphia.

Judge Stanley R. Ott of the Montgomery County Orphans Court, which has jurisdiction over the Barnes trust, decided today to dismiss the petitions of the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, an ad hoc group that opposes the move, and the Montgomery County Commissioners. They both wanted him to reconsider his 2004 decison in light of subsequent developments. But Ott never addressed himself to the substance of the question. He decided the case on a common threshold issue —  that the petitioners didn't have standing to bring suit in the first place.

That petition was always a very long shot. Judges don't like to be asked to reverse themselves. And it probably didn't help that the first petition submitted by the Friends' earlier attorney was a very free ranging set of accusations about the motives behind the proposed move. In his ruling, Judge Ott calls that one "a 231-paragraph diatribe, rampant with scattershot accusations, arguments and conjecture." Not long after it was filed the Friends and that attorney parted company, apparently to the judge's relief. Ott says "the real issues, as honed by current counsel [Lacayo: that would be the Friend's new lawyer] in his brief and argument, are much more manageable."

But since Ott then goes on to reject the idea that the Friends or even the County has standing to bring suit in the first place, he never has to come to grips with those issues. He did find that the Friends had made their filing in good faith and not arbitrarily, meaning they won't be assessed fees for the legal costs of the other side.

And what will this mean for the Barnes? I'll stick with what I said last year.

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 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.

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May 15, 2008 9:32

Kaufmann House Update

I spent two days earlier this week blogging about the pending sale by Christie's of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. But the news on Tuesday morning of Robert Rauschenberg's death overshadowed for me the outcome of the auction that night. So let's back up. For the record, the house sold for $15 million — $16.84 million with the purchase premium — the bottom of its $15 to $25 million pre-sale estimate.

Christie's wouldn't identify the buyer, but Carol Vogel in yesterday's New York Times tells us that he or she also "exercised an option to purchase an orchard adjacent to the property for an additional $2.1 million that includes three cacti that were a present from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mr. Kaufmann on his first visit to the home."

I had to laugh when I was reminded about the cactus. I wondered if these were part of the "scores of cholla cacti" trucked in from Wright's compound at Taliesin West that Franklin Toker mentions in his book Fallingwater Rising. (Toker says Edgar J. Kaufmann, who had commissioned the house, "wheedled" them out of Wright.) Whether they are or not, I find it hard to think of them as house warming gifts. Wright had been furious that Kaufmann, who had commissioned him to design Fallingwater in the 1930s, didn't also give him the Palm Springs job. Worse, Kaufmann had turned to Neutra, who had worked briefly for Wright in the 1920s. By the '40s Wright considered Neutra an apostate for adopting the astringent lines of bare bones Modernism, a style Wright detested but which was rapidly making his own work look dated. He even felt that Kaufmann had chosen Neutra deliberately to hurt him.

In which case, for a prickly character like Wright, maybe cactus was the perfect house warming gift after all — at least for a house that he couldn't stand.

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May 14, 2008 10:07

Rauschenberg: A Tribute

It's not possible to sum up briefly all of the ways that Rauschenberg changed the way we think about art. Here's my attempt to summarize some of them.

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May 13, 2008 11:45

Robert Rauschenberg: 1925-2008

Rauschenberg in 1953. / ALLAN GRANT© TIME WARNER, INC./RAUSCHENBRG/VAGA

One of the pivotal American artists is gone. I'll have more to say later. Meanwhile, here's a link to what I had to say in 2006, when his "Combines" show opened at the Metroplitan Museum in New York.

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May 12, 2008 9:42

More Thinking About the Kaufmann House

With Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House set to be auctioned tonight, lets get back to the subject of how to preserve great Modernist houses from the wrecking ball. (Or almost as bad, tacky renovations.)

As I said yesterday, to the extent that they publicize the value of Modernist houses as important works, auctions as a way to sell them could be a good thing. It could even be good that they tend to boost prices. Nothing alerts a buyer to the value of what they just bought like a high price tag. All the same, nothing about an auction sale obligates that buyer not to adulterate the house or even demolish it.

One partial solution is to persuade buyers to adopt preservation easements, which amount to an agreement to protect the historic character of their homes. (That doesn't mean they can't alter them at all; updates and even expansions can be permitted.) An incentive for buyers is that easements can come with a tax break. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a lot of information about easements on its website.

Ultimately the best outcome is for the houses to pass into the possession of museums that will open them to the public. Three years ago the Dallas-area collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky agreed that they would leave the Dallas Art Museum not only their contemporary art collection but also the Richard Meier-designed house where part of it is always on view and open by appointment to small groups. And the Indianapolis Museum of Art is looking into ways it might acquire the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, one of only two houses by Eero Saarinen.

And as I mentioned yesterday, Jean Prouve's Maison Tropicale was sold at auction last year to the hotelier Andre Balazs. But a few years earlier another of them — there are three altogether — was bought by Robert Rubin, a retired commodities trader who refurbished it, toured it to a couple of museums and then donated it to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Happy ending.

As it happens, I grabbed lunch in New York recently with Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and one of the things we talked about was the idea he floated last year that LACMA might some day acquire great Modernist houses in the L.A. area. While he didn't envision his museum having the purchasing power to buy them, he's also thinking ahead to a day when benefactors might buy the houses and donate them.

So — message to whoever buys the Kaufmann House. Whenever you get tired of it...you know who to call.

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May 12, 2008 10:42

Thinking About The Kaufmann House

Kaufmann House, Richard Neutra, 1946. /JULIUS SHULMAN

I've been thinking lately about the best way to preserve Modernist houses, some of which have been going to the auction block and some to the chopping block. As you may have heard, the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Richard Neutra's suave little exercise in High Modernism, is going to be auctioned Tuesday by Christie's as part of its New York sale of postwar and contemporary art. The pre-sale estimate is $15 to $25 million. Then on Sunday, May 18, the Esherick House, a Philadelphia residence by Louis Kahn that was completed in 1961, goes up for bids in Chicago with an estimate of $2 to $3 million.

Esherick House, Louis Kahn, 1961/ CHRISTIAN SCHAULIN

By now, auctions of Modernist homes are nothing new. The first big one was Christie's 2000 sale of Blanchette Rockefeller's 1950 guesthouse in Manhattan, a Philip Johnson design, for $11.1 million. Then there was Sotheby's sale five years ago of Mies van der Rohe's 1951 Farnsworth House. It went for $7.5 million to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which now operates the house as a museum in conjunction with the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. And then there was Christie's sale last year of Jean Prouve's Maison Tropicale, one of three metal prefabs from 1949-51 that were prototypes for an abandoned scheme to house colonial officials in French Equatorial Africa. It was bought by the hotelier Andre Balazs for $5 million, rebuilt temporarily on the grounds of Tate Modern in London and will eventually be re-purposed as an outdoor bar for one of his hotels.

Whoever buys the Kaufmann House, which was commissioned by the same Edgar J. Kaufmann who got Frank Lloyd Wright to design Falling Water, it probably won't be re-opened as a taco stand. But what will happen to it? The best way to think about these auctions, and the glamorama that surrounds them, is to ask what's the public interest here — that would be your's and mine — and what's the best way to arrive at it?

Let's define the public interest this way. First, we want to preserve architecturally significant houses. Second, we'd like them eventually to be open to the public.

The sellers of the Kaufmann House, Brent Harris, head of an investment firm, and Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian, are selling the house because they've split up. They're widely credited with having scrupulously restored the place. In addition to sun and weather damage, the house had suffered numerous updates by previous owners, including Barry Manilow. Those "improvements" had enclosed a patio, sandblasted wood ceilings and dumped air conditioning compressors up top. With the L.A.-area architects Leo Marmol and Rod Radziner, the Harrises brought the house back to its good bones, the ones made famous by those great and shrewdly fetishizing Julius Shulman photos from the 50s.

All the same, the house has no historic designation or even a "preservation easement", which provides a tax break to owners in exchange for a promise not to demolish the structure or even sometimes not to change particular features. What that means is whoever buys it tomorrow night — assuming there's a buyer at all — won't be under any obligation to treat the place in any particular way.

As a worst case scenario, keep in mind the 2002 sale of another Neutra in the Palm Springs area, the 1963 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, which was torn down just weeks after it was purchased through Sotheby's (in a brokered sale, not an auction) for $2.45 million. The city of Rancho Mirage required nothing more complicated than an asbestos review before granting the demolition permit. A couple of Paul Rudolph houses in Rhode Island and Conneticutt met the same fate last year.

So as a first question, when classic Modernist houses go back on the market, are auction sales the best way to protect them? Auctions are a market mechanism designed to maximize prices. That $15 to $25 million pre-sale estimate for the Kaufmann House puts it well out of the price range that a preservation group like the National Trust can afford. To get the Farnsworth House was a huge fund raising effort for the Trust. The other Modernist house that it owns and operates, the Philip Johnson Glass House in Connecticutt, was gifted to the Trust by Johnson before he died.

Then again, if that price is met or exceeded at Tuesday night's sale, it's much less likely — though not impossible — that the Kaufmann house will be treated by the buyer as a tear down. Christie's has mounted a media campaign to make sure the pedigree of the house is widely understood. (And to hoist it into the stratosphere of deluxe consumer objects.) That should help to ensure — but not guarantee — that the buyer will understand that the house is a kind of cultural touchstone and should be handled with care.

All the same, it will be private property, unencumbered by any kind of legal guarantees. So is there more that could be done to preserve it for the future? I'll get to that in a later post.

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May 9, 2008 9:26

Everything is Less Than Zero

Proposal for World Trade Center PATH Station, Santiago Calatrava/PORT AUTHORITY

I see that the big transit center by Santiago Calatrava that's planned for the World Trade Center site is being whittled away again for cost-cutting reasons. This doesn't come as a surprise. The New York and New Jersey Port Authority, which is overseeing the project, has watched the budget climb to $2.5 billion. (Actually higher for a while, until it was yanked back down.) But it's also in keeping with the general willingness to walk away from the idea that Ground Zero should re-emerge as anything other than a business-as-usual business district that happens to be built around a memorial. The cultural facilities that were supposed to be a feature of the place are either gone from the plan or iffy. (Museums? We don't need no stinking museums.)

A few weeks ago it was the design for the separate subway hub nearby, which has already been dumbed down once, that was put under pressure again. Part of the thinking now for that dwindling project involves moving the planned Frank Gehry-designed theater off the Trade Center site and plunking it on top what was supposed to be the light flooded, glass domed station, thereby screwing up two projects at one time. (Theaters? We don't need no stinking theaters.)

That leaves the Calatrava station, which is scheduled to be complete in 2011, as one of the few surviving elements of the Trade Center master plan that isn't just one more office building. It's been undergoing a slimming process almost from the time it was proposed. Now we're promised more "value engineering", which any architect will tell you is a process that has a way of arriving at "blander and cheaper". The Port Authority promises that the overall integrity of Calatrava's bird-like design will be respected. But it also says that more revisions to the design may be needed if it can't find a contractor to build the station within the $2.5 billion budget.

I'm just waiting for the other wing to drop.

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May 8, 2008 8:30

Their Kingdom for a Horse?

Back in January I posted about a British competition to choose the design for a massive outdoor sculpture at the site of a planned new transit center in Kent. I've been envious for a while of the way the Brits can create interest in contemporary art by way of public competitions, but I was also a little wary of this one because of the requirement that the sculpture should be around 165 ft. (50 m.) tall. It's not often that "big" gets you "good." Granted, I never saw the Colossus of Rhodes.

Yesterday the proposals of the five finalists were unveiled. They include Rachel Whiteread's artificial mountain with a cast interior of a house on top, an open-work abstract steel tower by Richard Deacon, a vertical concrete disc by Christopher Le Brun, a giant signal tower by Daniel Buren and the strangest, a white horse, 33 times life size, by Mark Wallinger, the most recent winner of the Turner Prize, who has a thing for horses.

You can see images here. On first impression, I'm inclined to agree with Adrian Searle at the British daily the Guardian that most of them look like contemporary art, blown up and stuck in a field.

The winner will be announced this fall. I'm betting on the horse.

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May 7, 2008 8:38

Rich People Shopping Update

I don't actually care much about the art market, since, like 99% of the human race, I'm not in it. But the big spring auction season started last night at Christie's in New York and naturally the results are being sifted for signs that the market is poised for a fall. The results? Monet, Rodin and Giacometti broke records. But 14 of the 58 lots failed to sell — including another Monet and a Van Gogh — and the sale as a whole brought in $277.2 million, a figure below it's pre-sale low estimate of $286.8 million.

After days of pre-sale speculation about where the market was headed, it's funny to see the different ways that last night's mixed numbers were interpreted this morning at different New York media outlets.

The New York Times thinks that on the whole everything is still fine.

The Sun sees mixed sun and clouds.

Bloomberg.com doesn't buy it.

But I think the most pertinent piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal before the sale. Its point was that the market has already corrected itself on the quiet. Among other things, fewer works were going to auction and sales of less than blue chip works, the ones that don't make headlines, are already falling.

Meanwhile, most people I know were focused last night on an entirely different set of numbers.

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May 5, 2008 9:02

Sunday in the Park with George(s)

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Seurat, 1884/ ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

A few nights ago I made it over to the New York revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George. In its first act, as a way to talk about the personal isolation of artists generally meaning Sondheim — it uses a fictionalized version of Georges Seurat at work on his most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. I had seen the original production 25 years ago with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin. At that performance Peters abruptly stopped singing in the middle of Act I, looked down to the orchestra pit and said: "What?" Somebody in the pit shouted something up to her, then she faced the audience and said "Ladies and gentlemen, I need to ask you to evacuate the theater." Bomb threat.

This was pre-9/11, so it didn't create a panic, though it wasn't the greatest news for the two people sitting next to me. Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston had rushed into the adjoining seats at the last possible moment at the beginning of Act I, just as the house lights went down, presumably so they wouldn't be mobbed by fans. But after we were all herded into the street for 15 minutes of "bomb scare" they both chatted with anybody who came over to them, and there were quite a few. I was impressed. I made a mental note that if I ever became an international superstar I too would talk to ordinary people. When we returned to our seats I also made a point of not talking to Nicholson and Huston so they would see what a cool New Yorker I was. To call my bluff Nicholson initiated a conversation. I thought that was a very suave move. All the while my inner fanboy banged at the bars of his cage.

But I digress.

As mentioned, Sondheim and James Lapine, who wrote the book for this show, weren't trying to produce a bio-pic about Seurat. They changed many of the facts of his life. But I was interested to see how they would use elements of Seurat's art to work out their themes. Not just through set design, though this production makes some clever use of animated projections to reproduce La Grande Jatte, but as what you might call correlatives for the ideas in the show about the ways that art does and does not serve life.

As it turns out, they hit upon quite a few. And the best one turns out to be about stillness. Seurat was a good choice for a show that's partly about the one man's impulse to convert living people into inert objects — art — which makes them easier to deal with. In his own art Seurat was attempting to take the most fleeting and ordinary moments of daily life — a bunch of people whiling away an afternoon in a suburban park — and make them feel eternal by giving them the heft and monumentality of Egyptian sculpture. To immortalize them by immobilizing them.

Four years ago I wrote this about a Seurat show at the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns La Grande Jatte.

Seurat was also looking closely at the Impressionist works of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. By the 1880s Impressionism was coming under attack not just from the usual academic conservatives but from a new generation who wanted art to reclaim its larger purposes, to represent moral hierarchies, eternal values, history — anything that imposed an order of the mind on the hectic gatherings of the eye. The Impressionists had no use for any of that. Their working method was to record the fleeting effects of light at a particular moment, and that moment was always now.

Seurat had a longer arc in mind. He wanted to adapt the bright staccato of Impressionist technique to forms that would be as weighty and enduring as the art he saw at the Louvre.

One of the ironies of La Grand Jatte, of course, is that when painting it Seurat chose to experiment with a newly available pigment, zinc yellow, that turned out to be highly unstable. Over time, it turned dull brown. Within a few years, wide areas of the painting had darkened.

No matter how hard to you try to make time stop, things have a way of changing all the time.

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May 1, 2008 3:30

The Drawings of Philip Guston

Untitled (Cherries), Guston, 1980 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

I got an advance look last week at "Philip Guston: Works on Paper", which opened Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. There are over 100 drawings in the show, which originated in Germany and was organized in New York by Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan's curator of modern drawings, Quite a few of the drawings were in the big Guston retrospective that toured five years ago, but in that show they were overshadowed somewhat by the heroic canvases. At the Morgan you can see them more clearly for what they are, the great anguished laboratory of Guston's art and the intellectual forecourt to his paintings, the place where ideas entered first.

My favorite moment of the show comes about midway, in the series of untitled drawings that represent Guston almost literally wiping the slate clean. He made them in 1967, a famous period of crisis for him. One year earlier, he had stopped painting. He no longer knew what he wanted to paint. But he continued to draw as the way to find out.

Guston had begun his career as a figurative painter in the 1930s, but by the mid-50s had arrived at the abstract fields that first made his name. Those paintings, built out of hundreds of insistent strokes, had a nervous shimmer. In his drawings of the same period the shimmer is subordinated to the line. The tectonics of the picture show through more strongly. Some of the drawings leave the impression of charred armatures, networks wonderfully but precariously balanced.

Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19), Guston, 1954 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

But as early as 1960 something like recognizable figures were surfacing again from within Guston's drawings. At the height of his prestige as an abstract artist, he found himself being drawn back powerfully to representation. That was the predicament he was still struggling with in 1967. The drawings he made in that year, with black ink brushed on white paper, were the most basic marks and shapes — two parallel vertical lines, or a single short stroke at the top of a blank sheet or a jittery circle. That circle made me think of Giotto's "O", the one he's supposed to have dashed off when he was asked to provide the Pope with a sample of his skills. But Giotto's assured loop was a mark of supreme confidence. Guston's lumpish circle is a much more tentative thing, an exercise in doubt. He's not sure yet where this period of aesthetic cleansing will lead him.

Untitled, Guston, 1967/ © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

We of course do know where everything was headed. By the following year he was making the cartoonish drawings and paintings that would the basis of his work until his death in 1980, the scrappy pile up of shoes, eyeballs, Klansmen, clocks, nails and food that puzzled and even infuriated a lot of people when he first showed them in 1970. Those were mostly people who couldn't abide the thought of a distinguished abstract painter not only venturing back into representational work but doing it by way of images that owed so much to old comic strips. It was well known that the Early Renaissance Italians — Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca — were gods to Guston. But until the 1970 show not many people knew how much he loved Krazy Kat.

Untitled, Guston, 1968 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

It turns out that he had arrived at one of the great late styles in American art. The late work looks now like a giant permission slip for American artists generally to return to figuration if they wanted to. Obviously, Pop artists had already done that, but in a strictly ironic way. Guston's drawings were different. Even when they were funny, and they usually were, they were dead earnest, which is one of the things that gives them their paradoxical power. In the last decade of his life, Guston had a sharp sense of his own mortality. (Those clocks!) He was drinking and smoking too much — he would die of a heart attack at age 67 — and discouraged about the direction the country was taking. (His monstrous drawing of Nixon is a classic.) All of it comes through in his art. In a drawing like Web — that's Guston's head on the left, one big cyclops eye gazing upwards, and the top of his wife Musa's head on the right — you get the feeling that some serious personal demons are being tackled.

Web, Guston, 1975 / © ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON

There are a lot of drawings like that in this show. The pictures are funny, but the laughs come hard.

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