Charioteer: A discussion about art
Under the rubric of art, Charioteer will discuss the pre-eminence worldwide of Western ideas in art, architecture, engineering and design, which is the result of the idealization and harmonization of the highest forms to produce a function. The function of art is beauty and intellectual stimulation. The function of great architecture and engineering is beauty too, but also the holding of, say, hundreds of viewers for a play, or thousands of passengers in a sublime airport design like Eero Saarinen's Dulles International terminal outside Washington, DC.
The first essay below, Lamborghini Splendor is a look at contemporary Italian design. Boldini? An Artist We Need to Know Better is a review of an exhibit of a lesser-known European. El Greco's Early Years considers the great artist's early roots in Crete. Christian Devotion in the Early Renaissance Home focuses on panel paintings of religious origins. Toulouse-Lautrec: A Smile and a Wink reviews an exhibit of this French artist's work. Sol LeWitt Walls Up New England concerns a retrospective of this modernist master. Plus: Renaissance Drawing with a Powerful Narrative Element is a review of a lively exhibit at The Clark Art Institute. Then: The Keystone Arches describes a series of 19th century granite arch bridges in Western Massachusetts by the engineer Maj. George Washington Whistler. Below that is Saarinen's Sublime Curves, an essay about the architect's work at Dulles, along with his renowned St. Louis Gateway Arch. Following that is an observation of an exhibit of paintings, drawings and sculptures by Frederic Remington, and some newly-acquired drawings by Claude Lorrain, both at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. Then, there's Loving Abstract Art in One Easy Lesson. It concerns the way we think about this challenging art form. Below that is a review of a timeless and treasured text, H.W. Janson's History of Art. Under that is a photo-essay called Art of the Passenger Train, which concerns two terminals, one famous, the other not so famous. Then there is a review of a cluster of exhibits at The Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Under that is an overview of an architectural project at The Clark by Osaka-based Tadao Ando. It involves new construction to add exhibition space and patron facilities to the renowned museum.
Charioteer also includes a review of the exhibit "Athens-Sparta" at the Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue (in the Olympic Tower, enter on 51st Street) in New York City. The show ran from December 6, 2006 through May 12, 2007. For more information, call up the center's website at www.onassisusa.org
Below "Athens-Sparta" is an explanation of why this column is called "Charioteer" in the first place.
Lamborghini Splendor
A classic Italian sports car shows us superb design. Bellisimo!
After World War II, Italian auto maker Enzo Ferrari started to
manufacture his elite passenger cars in order to generate cash
for his existing racing pursuits. Most people think it is the other way around -
that Ferrari was going merrily along building his passenger cars and then
decided one day to go racing with the profits.
Not true.
Ferrucio Lamborghini is known as father of the “other” Italian
maker of elite sports cars. Lamborghini, who was a wealthy manufacturer of farm
equipment, purchased several Ferraris for himself but considered them too noisy and rough, and likened them to race
cars. He started his own company in 1963 to make speedy touring coupes and today his brand is considered superior to Ferrari in many
ways.
Lambos today are some of the most highly prized vehicles on the road, and are assembled by hand, one-by-one, in a factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese Italy. The company produces less than 3,000 cars per year with only about 600 employees.
The sight of a Lamborghini Murcielago on the
streets of Upstate New York is rare. I spotted this canary masterpiece in Rhinebeck, a
chic little tourist town 100 miles north of
Murcielago is named for a bull that
survived 24 sword strokes in an 1879 fight at the arena of
Lamborghini today is owned by Audi. The Murcielago model, which was rolled out in 2002,
Murcielago oozes style. No matter what you think about the
socialist Euros and their slacker/siesta culture, they do have an awesome and
historically developed sense of design, which comes out of centuries of art and
architecture dating back to the Renaissance. Perhaps we can forgive the Italians their loafer lifestyle as
long as they continue to produce gems like Murcielago.
Earlier in the same day that I spotted
the Murcielago, I was in
Then when I spotted the Murcielago that afternoon, I knew that
God was smiling on me. Several other locals on the streets of Rhinebeck joined
me in photographing the car and we hoped that the owner would happen along and
offer us all rides. Not to be. But just having the pleasure of seeing this piece
of sculpture was enough for me.
European auto designs always have been top notch. And certainly Mr. Lamborghini wanted to set his cars apart from those of Ferrari and so Lamborghini seems always to take a more assertive and 'masculine' stance toward styling.
The
notorious Lamborghini Countache model looked like something out of a stealth fighter hangar
and the Murcielago has an aggressive posture, as the picture shows. Does
it not simply look like it wants to eat the road in front of it at very high
speed?
Look at that rear wheel, set way back of the engine, which is
situated under the louvers on the car’s rear deck, where its weight can give the
car maximum stability. Cool… And yes, the luggage goes up front. But if you
drive this rod, you don’t need any luggage.
Murcielago is composed of a symphony of subtle curved and straight lines. Curved lines are considered feminine, while straight lines are called manly. The 20th century artist Piet Mondrian, who used only straight lines in his masterpieces, once said that "curved lines are too emotional".
The ample curves of the Ferrari are wholly apart from the
stingy, spare curves of the Lambo which appear to be struggling to be straight, and this certainly looks like an
intentional counter to Enzo Ferrari by Lamborghini, with form always leading the
way to function in the most cunning ways.
So how does a designer use straight lines and angles married to the subtlest of
curves to create a geometry of pure beauty?
Indeed, that is an interesting conundrum. But a great designer indeed can do it through the four principles - order, proportion, harmony and balance.
Just look at the Lambo’s taillights. They appear almost clumsy if
taken out of context, as if they belong on a truck or one of
Mr. Lamborghini’s tractors. Yet set within the overall montage of forms in the Murcielago, they appear completely dynamic and at home, as if they are among the fastest taillights
in the world. Which they truly are.
Indeed from the rear, the Murcielago looks like something that
will be pulling away real fast. Check out all the cacophony of rectangular forms
in the rear section. How does the designer create such beauty with a
straightedge in such a counter-intuitive way?
Sheer genius, friends. Artful genius. It’s almost as if the designer did some magic, making us forget the trees for the integrated beauty of the forest.
Look at the details like the elfin running lights behind the rear wheel and in front of the front wheel. Taken by themselves, you would not see much elegance in them. They look like something awkward out of a geometry book, perhaps the definition of a humble trapezoid. And their placement seems almost random, not lining up symmetrically with anything else. But integrated into the overall car, they become part of a dazzling puzzle. Ditto the mirrors, the boxy front air dams, and the 'scissor doors' that pivot forward in an arc, not out. No parking lot dings there.
This all adds up to a sly and intelligent design that you
will find in objets d'art like the Lamborghini. The whole thing is understated, as if playing a
cosmic joke on the observer and causing him to embrace the design despite its
inconsistencies.
The Lamborghini’s design is so spare as to be almost deceptive. And that proves that once again that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, and that the maker needs to use every tool at his disposal to create synergy. And that once integrated, it becomes a gazelle of a machine.
Boldini? An Artist We Need to Know Better
Giovanni Boldini in
Impressionist Paris, a survey of paintings by the Italian master
focusing on the period from roughly 1871 to 1900. This is the first major
exhibit of Boldini’s work in the
If you have never heard the name
Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), join the club. But it is no surprise. After all
Boldini was a traditional painter in the Beaux Arts style in
And so Boldini was standing his time-honored ground as Degas
and Monet became the stars of the day and the legends later on, leaving poor
Boldini in the historical dust. This exhibit revives him well.
After vowing “to never exhibit in public exhibitions”,
Boldini kept his word for much of his life, painting masterful images in the
same vein as his contemporaries like Giussepi De Nittis and Francesco Paolo
Michetti. His goal was to build a legacy by placing his art in the homes of
wealthy and influential collectors through his principal gallerist Adolphe
Goupil. And he succeeded. Wildly.
Boldini was born in
The first picture in this exhibit is a
self-portrait from 1865 and shows a keen awareness of form, gesture and
painterly style - Boldini in a studio holding a painting in his hands and
studying it. By 1874, he was producing scenes like The Laundresses, a
detailed landscape of washerwomen on a
Place Clichy of 1874 shows the maturing Boldini at
his best. The picture portrays a busy Paris intersection with a big sky overhead
– more than half the canvas’ height as if to remind us how small we all are
under God’s creation. It is an open, sunny street scene jam-packed with workers of
every type from a house painter carrying his ladder to a flower vender to a
laundress. The sense of urban energy is rife, and the detail in this panting is
extraordinary - like the tiny horse and carriage - and a joy to look at, as
are all of Boldini’s works.
One of the most striking canvases in
the exhibit is the small, somber The Dispatch Bearer of 1879, owned by
the
The White Horses of 1881-6 is Boldini at his most
effusive, perhaps even a little over the top. It is six feet tall and shows two
horse heads in a life-sized snorting fury. The brushwork is energetic to say the
least and the picture seems geared toward that raw, dramatic punch that was
Boldini’s specialty.
Boldini was a superb draughtsman as well. There are more than a dozen drawings in this show, and every one portrays prowess. In studies for The Pont des Saints-Peres, he uses a sharp pencil on this tiny sketch to portray horses, a distant cityscape and, in just a black stroke or two, an elongated man in a top hat, like a humorous grace note. Other drawings include cityscapes, the opera, evocative pictures of crowds at the theater capturing wonderful gestures and expressions, and a portrait of Degas which looks surprisingly like a work by Degas himself.
Beginning around 1880 Boldini began to focus on portraiture
and this is where his reputation finally was sealed. While his Belle Epoque
pictures of royalty and celebrities are the crowning achievement of his life,
Boldini’s real prowess again shows in smaller canvases like his 1882 portrait of
artist Joaquin Araujo y Ruano. This small picture – only about 12 inches tall –
shows a mastery of detail right down to the artist’s bony fingers and
distinctive hair line.
But Boldini knew that size mattered. And fame. And so the
grand paintings in this show are all large-scale portraits of celebrities like
James McNeil Whistler, the American artist, one of Boldini’s most famous
canvases from 1897; a 1901 picture of Cleo Merode; and his awesome, roguish portrait of
composer Giuseppe Verdi (above, bottom image), which really rocks the world of portraiture and is one of the
high points of Boldini's oeuvre.
So what are we to make of Boldini?
Well, several thoughts come to mind.
He was a traditionalist who was interested in traditional
types of success. They say the Impressionists got all of the media, but none of
the sales. Because artists like Boldini had that market pretty well cornered.
He was an excellent painter. He was well versed in form,
gesture, and the nuances of the human figure and face.
But what pops out of this exhibit is what we often see in
art, the way that artists become more refined, more restrained and often less
interesting as they progress and become more famous.
Boldini certainly developed a comfortable and dramatic style
and reputation by the time he was peaking in the 1890s, and the pictures are
pretty impressive. But there is something staged about many of them, as if he is interested
more in the success behind the paintings, and not in the paintings themselves as
discrete artistic challenges. His celebrity paintings sometimes appear to be
flattering romantic portraits designed for dinner-party chatter, not challenging expressions of art.
It is in Boldini’s smaller works that we see the real artist
in him. Indeed as some of the later canvases seem bent on sycophancy toward the
wealthy subject, his humble 1882 portrait of artist Ruano looks more like a work
of passion, where each detail is lovingly crafted from the heart, without a sale in mind. After
all, what artist - besides a highly successful one - could afford to purchase a
painting of himself?
Boldini certainly was a type of artist who is seen as “old
fashioned” by today’s standards. But the fact is that he was a superb painter
well deserving of the Medal of Honor that he was granted at the Exposition
Universelle in 1889. And what we will discover going forth is how much of
the “modern art” that overshadowed him is a sham and how much Boldini represents the real deal.
But there are aspects of his art that go in the other
direction, that seem safe and superfluous, and which
spurred artists to reject tradition. Whether those new horizons will
stand the test of time is one question. Whether Boldini will stand the test of
time for his impressive oeuvre is another issue altogether.
El Greco's Early Years
The
Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete, a survey of
Christian religious paintings from
If you don’t
think that one art show can’t strongly influence your thinking about everything
from faith to commerce, think again. This awesome exhibit explores the
intersection of creativity, Christianity, cultural ferment and the evolving
genius of one of Western art’s masters Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614),
also known as El Greco. Working in his early years on the Greek
Revered for his youthful prowess,
El Greco showed the Cretans how to move beyond the Byzantine and Gothic styles
that dominated, surely his embrace of Renaissance artists’ long-term adoption of
religious themes, taking Christian imagery out of the churches and into the
mainstream of art, culture and international exchange.
Multicultural
Crete had become a center for several styles, alla greca or a stricter
Greek or Byzantine style, and a la latina, a more late Gothic style
that appealed to the Roman Catholic minority that held power after Venice took
control of Crete in 1211. The island’s hospitable climate appealed to icon
painters from
Top: A tiny portrait by El Greco within The Entombment of Christ shows his mastery of detail. This head is less than 2 inches tall. Below: Detail from The Crucifixion by Andre Pavias shows the classical icon style, which El Greco challenged.
It always is
suggested than an artist put his best paintings by the exhibit door so that
visitors will see them first, to set the tone. The
El Greco
brought an even more modernist and mannerist thinking to
In El Greco’s rough study for
Coronation of the Virgin, emotions run wild. Despite its sketchy and
gestural appearance, it radiates mastery of painterly form. In the The
Entombment of Christ, painted on a curved panel, we have another example of
what the show’s curator calls “organized tumult” in the composition, certainly a
departure from icon painters’ generally reverent, staid compositions. El
Greco also moves away from the flat icon style to experiment with space of all
kinds. Tiny heads and garment folds are painted with absolute aplomb, revealing
the kind of craftsmanship and attention to detail that created modern Western
art.
In one El Greco panel that provokes
a smile, St. Luke the Evangelist Painting the Icon of the Virgin of
1560-1567 is a classical ‘painting within a painting’. St. Luke himself long has
been eroded away from the panel leaving a gritty outline behind, but the Virgin
remains bright as ever as if she is, well, somehow blessed(?!) St. Luke’s
painting of her, on an easel, in gold gilt, is painted parallel to the picture
plane while the easel itself is set dimensionally. Is El Greco playing sly
spatial mind games here? The Christ child’s head is but an inch tall and El
Greco somehow paints even something so preciously small with stunning verve and
accuracy.
Aside the work
of El Greco, this exhibit shows us centuries of icon paintings by
Nikolas
Tzafouris is one of the big names of the traditional icon style. In The Road
to Calvary, from late in the 15th century, Christ is depicted
with all of the attention to detail that makes art lovers swoon. The energetic
and intensely detailed rendering of angular rocks done in the style of icon
painting – to separate it from worldly art - along with the delicate grain in
the wood of the cross would make Tzafouris stand out in any era.
The Crucifixion by Andre
Pavias from the late 15th century has all the hallmarks of a classical religious
icon and much more – a crucified Savior, crowds of mourners, castles thrusting
into the sky, angels, soldiers, priests, warriors, hell, and even bodies arising
from their caskets. It looks like Pavias may have been directly influenced by
the bizarre tableaux paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the Flemish artist whose
canvases were chock full of tiny figures in every disposition. Yet Pavias’
composition is surprisingly orderly and geometric, as if the artist does not
want to detract from its real meaning, which is veneration of the God-ly order
that makes all life possible.
Other icon painters like Geroge
Klontzas (1540-1608) offer us a 24-inch-tall panel with literally hundreds of
tiny figures, with everything from Adam and Eve and the serpent, to Adam and Eve
expelled, all in one. Michael Damaskenos, one of the most famous icon
artists in all of the Mediterranean basin, also is represented in this show. Out
of more than 40 religious paintings, however, most are not attributed but every
one is unmistakably Christian, recognizable for the religion but not for the
artist.
So what is it about this exhibit
that reveals so much?
It is this: By
placing El Greco side-by-side with the renowned icon painters of
Christian icon painters in fact are
more like illustrators who are subservient to the greater glory of God. Their
work is generally formulaic (elongated figures, halos, stylized rocks and
drapery folds etc.). The icon maker does not seek to elevate himself – ideally,
that is - and is not in any way as significant culturally as the fervor that his
work is intended to engender in the worshipping congregations.
No, the icon painter is offering
himself as a servant to God, while the worldly artist like El Greco
sees his inspiration coming from God. Their relationships with the
Heavenly Father are diametrically opposed. To be perfectly crass about it, we
might say that El Greco and the Renaissance masters simply used religious
iconography as a tool to advance their careers because that is where the broader
public mind was at at the time.
What genuine icon painter would put
himself above Our Father who art in Heaven?
None. And if you did so, you would
probably need to find another line of work. Your spirit would become highly
conflicted, and that never is a good idea.
That is made
clear here. These religious icons show us traditional styles that shifted in a
fascinating way with the cultural winds as Renaissance prints made their way
across the
El Greco, on
the other hand, in his secular role as a prodigy of unmatched proportion,
certainly had the freedom to pursue his own agenda without the formal boundaries
or intense personal commitment and fervor of the icon makers. He was innovative
and individualistic, certainly a negative in the sphere of Christian deference
to the Supreme Being. He surely broke out of parochial
Does that make him more significant
historically that George Klontzas or Nikolas Tzafouris?
Well, it depends on what you think
is really important in life.
If your
interest is in cultural advancement, artistic transcendence or temporal
originality, then El Greco wins. He certainly is the drawing card for this show
which has been wildly popular in its brief run in
If, on the other hand, you
understand that God makes everything possible, perhaps you might take a
different view, that Klontzas and Tzafouris, in their humble service to the
glory of God, are the real stars of this show. And that even if their work had
remained anonymous like most of the icons on exhibit, that that would ultimately
make no difference at all. And therein lies the real story of this wonderful
exhibition.
Christian Devotion in the Renaissance Home
The Art of Devotion: Panel
Painting in Early Renaissance
The above sentence in the
In other words, the popularization of
religious art.
The exhibit focuses on panel paintings done by lesser-known
artists who were commissioned by families who wished to embellish
their homes and sometimes their churches or private chapels, artists like Giovanni del Biondo, Sano di Pietro, Lippo d’Andrea and Ventura Di Moro. The works are
nothing less than superb. And in their time, they represented something new –
individualistic styles serving the commercial interest of the artist and the
patron, interests that certainly would have been frowned upon by the monastic
icon makers who lived and worked in the service of God
in the millennium preceding the Renaissance.
The exhibition includes single panels, diptychs, triptychs
and even a 5-station altarpiece by d’Andrea that are elegantly painted and
stylishly gilded and framed in a way that represents a time and place in history
that is indisputably and forever Italian Renaissance.
The works span the Early Renaissance years from 1385 to
1475 – the High Renaissance itself is centered around the year 1500 when both
Leonardo and Michelangelo were working – and show devotion not only in an
artistic way but in a traditionally Christian form as well.
But it is Christian art in transition. The paintings in the show
appear to begin to morph ever so slightly from the muted colors, elongated
forms, faces and fingers and hard geometric drapery folds of traditional Medieval icons
toward the High Renaissance style in which artists melded the imagery into a
classical style, which was the public art of the era.
That classical style, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, shocked many religious leaders by, for instance, portraying Adam nude and as a muscular Classical Greek figure like all the others. Or even by portraying God Himself. Because it lacked the restraint and the religious stylization that was intended to separate Christian icons from worldly art.
Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari (1410) by Florentine Lippo d’Andrea
The works in The Art of Devotion well represented wealthy Early
Renaissance Florence in all its splendor when even middle-class families
commissioned art. Gold leaf abounds, gilt frames are de rigeur, and the Middle
Age and Medieval forms are devolving away from a long and subdued tradition
during which the known religion, art, culture and history since Ancient Greece
ended up being preserved in the only known refuges from the brutal world outside
– tranquil, disciplined and scholarly Christian monasteries.
In the tradition of a rich benefactor purchasing icons or
chandeliers for the local church, these home devotional panels manifested both
artistic prestige and knowledge, and affluent exhibitionism. And to look at them
today, who would not want such awesome objects in the home? They are, in a word,
beautiful.
These pictures obviously are not part
of a run-of-the-mill exhibit, and Middlebury College should be commended for
undertaking this show. It was planned after Middlebury bid successfully in 2005
at a
And since the exhibit involves panel paintings before linen
was widely used like canvas is today, the show also is informational about
technique, and includes both the front
image and then, in an adjoining room, the backside of one wooden panel exposed
to show the nature of panel painting. It was typically done with gessoed linen
glued on a thick poplar panel and then carefully drawn on, adorned with gold leaf
that was burnished and then worked with a compass and a punch for the halo effects, and then
painted with hues from
ordinary to precious. An accompanying video shows the process in detail.
The Middlebury acquisition is a sight to behold. Its has the
popular acanthus-leaf frame up top and pairs of auger-like columns on each
side, columns that have been used in Christian art and architecture - famously
in the 90-foot pillars of Bernini's baldachin for St. Peter's
chair in the Basilica in Rome - to separate them from worldly
fluted columns by the Greeks. In the Middlebury panel, two family
crests, or stemmi, are
seen in the bottom corners under each column pair suggesting the interests of
two separate families which may have commissioned the painting for a marriage. The left crest is said to
represent the della Rena family, and on the right the crest is unidentified.
Coming from 1410, this is one of the older works in the show and before
preservation it was dark and drab with some later overpainting. Post-preservation it is bright and lively.
In another of the well-preserved pictures, Madonna and Child, Saint John
the Baptist, and Saint Catherine (1385) by Giovanni del Biondo, space
is convoluted; there is an odd asymmetry in its overall appearance; halos are
more intricately worked in the gold leaf; tiny
figurines and the hand of God float around the upper edges; and St. Catherine
is holding the longest plume pen of all time. She is the patron saint of
education, and we certainly know that after looking at this work. The Virgin Mary is
depicted as the perfect Mother in this work, teaching her child to read.
Another awesome picture is Virgin and Child, 1415, by Battista di Biagio Sanguigni from the Ackland Collection, a simple portrait in a flamboyant bright gold frame that reeks of wealthy patronage with enough ornament to please even the most materialistic Italian. No wonder devout priests and monks became wary. They knew scripture and its warning about the love of ostentatious wealth.
In this image the Virgin appears to be sitting or kneeling on
the ground, and thus it is referred to as the Madonna of Humility. A bulbous body,
robe trimmed in elegant gold finery, and an over-the-top frame with two countering
auger columns on each side of the main panel mark an especially evocative
art object as well as religious icon portrait. Perhaps the flat gold background
was intended to remind us, through contrast, that devout Christianity and material wealth
in fact originate in separate worlds.
Patrons of such works were known to be quite picky about
exactly what they were getting. Says the catalogue essay by Katherine Smith
Abbott, a professor in the Department of Art at Middlebury, ‘patrons were liable
to specify the quantity of gold leaf or the quality of blue pigment they wanted
incorporated into a painting.’
So perhaps it wasn’t all just about fire and brimstone and salvation…
Abbott writes in her essay that ‘Art historians often bemoan
the loss that occurs when paintings are hung on gallery walls, rather than in
the homes and churches for which they were originally intended.’ This is an
noteworthy commentary, particularly as she discusses further in her essay that
one patron who had died had listed under the property in his home “ten
paintings; two are of saints, one is a birth tray, one is simply called a ‘panel
with a painted tabernacle,’ the rest are images of the Virgin with the infant
Christ”.
No painter is listed for any of the works, which gives
insight into both the quotidian nature of the works and the status of the
artists themselves. Only today, with time, do we appreciate the
quality to be found in these treasures, and we want to know their makers better.
Toulouse-Lautrec: A Smile and a Wink
Toulouse-Lautrec and Paris,
an exhibition of prints, drawings and paintings by Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec and others at The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, February 1 – April 26, 2009.
Utter the name Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and you
are bound to evoke smiles. The Pint-Sized Purveyor of Prints, Posters, Paintings
and Pencil Sketches of Paris and its Pleasure-seeking Populace is something of a
comic presence in the arts with his lively and sometimes bawdy depictions of
street life, night life, cabarets, brothels and circuses.
His life was no joke,
however. Born of aristocracy, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was
the son of married first cousins and suffered many physical maladies resulting
from the inbreeding of the family. His legs ceased to grow after an accident at
the age of 13 and as an adult he was only 4 feet 6 inches tall.
But with a prodigious talent and work ethic, his trademark
cane, beard and bowler hat, and a flair for the telling detail – after all,
isn’t that what artists do? – Toulouse-Lautrec built a famous and immediately
identifiable body of work that was curtailed by his shortened life of 36 years
at his death from alcoholism and syphilis.
In this thoroughly
enjoyable exhibit at The Clark Art Institute – a place that always mounts
top-drawer shows - using material taken from the Clark’s own vast collection of drawings, pastels and prints, one gets a peek into the life of “the
quintessential chronicler of Paris, as it is understood by those who come here
seeking bright lights and wild pleasures,” said one observer.
From leering old men to
top-hatted aristocrats to the self-absorbed and cockamamy cabaret stars of the
day, the characters are all depicted with verve and laser precision.
Toulouse-Lautrec insinuated himself handily into this culture with his artistic
flair, although his amusing caricature certainly offered
him physical entrée into this sometimes freakish bohemian world. HTL became a
favorite artist of the owners of the famous clubs – Moulin Rouge, Le Mirliton,
Moulin de la Galette, Folies Bergeres - and was frequently commissioned to do
promotional lithographic posters for their shows. And while Pierre Bonnard,
Edgar Degas and others are included in this exhibit, their work pales next to Henri's whose draughtsman skills bubble with individuality as if to
say “this is MY territory”.
His forte always was that subtle gesture that only the cocky
little artist/voyeur could detect. Just observe the wonderful expressions in the
detail (below) from The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, a litho from
1892. He certainly intended to send up his older British artist friend, the gray
man depicted against the colorful but unsettled younger women offering a
hilarious window on one creepy sexual pursuit that is as old as time.
HTL depicted actors in plays, rapt
audiences, street life, couples dancing in the clubs, nighthawks out seeing and
being seen, and all the other moods and mannerisms of a city not just of lights,
but of life. And dynamism is everywhere in the work from his comical 8-part
study of Yvette Guilbert, the most famous
That work is very modern, breaking down the picture into a
series of flat planes that represented the shift in art that was going on as
Toulouse-Lautrec worked. Avril certainly must have liked the work.
Other celebrities of the day who found themselves at the tip
of HTL’s pencil include Madame Rijane, Sybil Sanderson and the naughty La Goulue
(“the glutton”) who took the notorious CanCan just a little further than most.
She is featured as a ghostly white presence in a litho called At the Moulin
Rouge: La Goulue and her Sister, a lithograph of 1892.
HTL’s street scenes are open-air
theater and while Bonnard’s street work is more encompassing landscape,
Toulouse-Lautrec focuses in on just a few figures in gestures that are as
evocative as the cabaret stars that he befriended in his career. In In the
Bois de Boulogne, (above) he captures a scene in the famous
The direct process of lithography offered Toulouse-Lautrec
the opportunity to transmit his draughtsman’s skills to a large audience through
reproduction. Without lithography, perhaps we’d never have heard of him. In one
etching in this exhibit called The Ladies of the Chariots by James
Jacques Joseph Tissot (there’s a mouthful) the fine marks of the stylus and the
other techniques of etching like aquatint offer a much more modulated and rich
detail and tone that reminds us of the limitations of lithography in which HTL
often used simple blocks of color. That in no way is intended to diminish Henri;
it is just an observation of his style. He never would have taken to etching
because it is far too indirect and cumbersome a process for his lively gestural
approach.
Some of the most striking pictures in
this exhibit are drawn from an album that HTL produced in 1896 called Elles
which can be translated to Them or Those Women. This is
Toulouse-Lautrec’s portfolio done in the brothels of
This grouping demonstrates an
interesting shift in psychology. While his main body of work traditionally
evokes theatricality and life, the behind-the-scenes tableaux at the whorehouses
of
The Elles lithos offer a unique perspective on the
pleasure culture that HTL was so famous for portraying, but this time backstage
without the costumes, the lights, the makeup and the masks. These works are
almost in the genre of fellow Frenchman Millet who chronicled the truth about
the rural peasantry as people without much hope and no glamour whatsoever. As
well, perhaps Elles was a mirror of HTL’s life itself.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s last works had the circus as their subject and were done from memory as he was institutionalized for his many congenital maladies along with lifelong alcoholism. He is credited with the invention of a drink called The Earthquake - 3 parts absinthe and 3 parts cognac.
KABOOM…
During his life,
Toulouse-Lautrec made 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters and
more than 5,000 drawings, along with ceramics and stained glass.
This exhibit is as much a historical document as an artistic one. While Renaissance painting, for instance, covered centuries and often depicts historical events that occurred a millennia and a half before and were reinterpreted over and over, Toulouse-Lautrec is no Raphael.
Because his oeuvre chronicles its
period more like a news reporter than a novelist. We are seeing in his work the birth of the modern age. We
see the electric lights that did not exist just 20 years previous. We see the
evolving dress of the modern era, and sophisticated urban women liberated from
their cloistered lives. We see the lively city that
Sol LeWitt Walls Up New England
I, Nikitas, have a theory that most of so-called ‘modern art’
is junk, that just a handful of modern artists are true masters, and that the
reason that ‘modern art’ has fallen into such disrepute is that industrial
prosperity offered big-minded people more opportunity in technological
innovation and commerce than in art, and so they took it.
You may disagree that people can cross over into seemingly
polar pursuits, but it’s not so far-fetched. After all sculptor Alexander
Calder, one of the giants of 20th century modernism, studied
engineering, and Leonardo da Vinci was as comfortable designing helicopters as
dabbling away at Virgin of the Rocks.
Enter Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), a modernist leviathan who came
along in the wake of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism with art that looks
almost scientific, breaking art down to its molecular essence of precisely
described geometric forms.
In
Yes, for 25 years, there will be an exhibit of Sol LeWitt’s
famous wall drawings at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA)
in the old Sprague Electric mill that once housed real manufacturing and now is
one of the nation’s foremost avant-garde art spaces. Its copious manufacturing
floors - one looks larger than a
football field and has a 40 foot ceiling - are perfect for some of today’s
large-scale art, although the LeWitt exhibit, on 3 floors of a more modest
L-shaped building in the complex, is relatively more modest in scale. The total
wall surface for LeWitt’s drawings, however, is more than one acre.
LeWitt came along at a time when the modern art world was
looking beyond the slapdash qualities of expressionism and the lollipop
aspirations of Pop. Critic Clement Greenberg said that most of modernism was
"novelty art" and LeWitt wanted to go beyond it with something hefty to think
about as well as to look at.
He began by making reductive drawings on the wall using only
lines that were horizontal, vertical and diagonal – very simple and elementary
marks that would expand to populate his ideas over almost 40 years. The wall
drawings, like Renaissance frescoes, are works that offer the viewer a
larger-than-life window on the very origins of form which are the basis of art,
geometry, engineering and everything else. LeWitt not only started to build the
Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but he began
composing manifestos, line by line, about what art meant. “The idea becomes the
machine that makes art,” he famously wrote, along with a slew of other LeWitt-isms.
He had his first major exhibit at the
LeWitt then took the idea another step - he began to further
conceptualize his art by authorizing others to make the drawings for him, and
that is how his work is disseminated throughout the world today, like a symphony
that can be played by any orchestra in any land.
But the use of artistic assistants is not so unusual. After
all, the great artists of history always had assistants who did much of the work
after the master had laid down the outlines. But LeWitt was different. He wrote
instructions for others to make the work in his stead, often giving the drafter
leeway.
In 1971, for instance, LeWitt created Wall Drawing 86,
which is reproduced in the MoCA show. It is simply a white wall covered with
10,000 separate pencil lines and, knowing LeWitt’s style, there probably was a
precise count kept. Every line is 6 inches long, every one is the same weight
and length, and they are spread evenly over the wall, as per his instructions.
The effect is mesmerizing, almost like a snowstorm of geometric rightness, these
fine lines floating on the surface doing… nothing at all.
It is interesting to think that LeWitt conceived of such
discipline and then found the people to execute it so well, people who must
certainly have highly disciplined robotic or computer-like qualities because
every single inch of every single work in the MoCA exhibit is absolutely
perfectly composed and executed, like engineering drawings or fighter jet parts.
Above is Wall Drawing 289 (detail) (1978) (fourth wall
only), which is described by LeWitt in this way:
‘A 6 inch (15 cm) grid covering each of four black walls.
White lines to points on the grids. Fourth wall: twenty-four lines from the
center, twelve lines from the midpoint of each of the sides, twelve lines from
each corner. (The length of the lines and their placement are determined by the
drafter.)’
Wall Drawing 289,
which like all the work in this show is about 12 feet tall,
could be anything, and that is its beauty: A fireworks display, an architectural
drawing of Heaven, a sketch for the basis of atomic power, a schematic for a war
attack. It has the universality that LeWitt was seeking to express in his art.
Is it art? Sure. Is it enjoyable? You bet. Is it cool? Mais
oui. Are we moved by its dynamic nature and its brilliance of execution?
Positively.
Above, in Wall Drawing 1112 (2003) Square with
broken bands of color, (left side) and Wall Drawing 1152 (2005)
Whirls and twirls, (right side) LeWitt uses varying blocks of bold color in
a rectangular format, and then in a wavelike format, to give two contradictory
but similar takes on color and movement. They are child-like in their vigor and
their brightness, as are many of LeWitt’s works, as if an adult has
re-discovered what kids already know.
Above in
Wall Drawing 999, Parallel curves
(2005), right, and Wall Drawing 1005, Isometric form, (2001) left,
we see two sides of LeWitt – his use of fanciful organic
forms in simple black and white, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum,
bright colors and rigid geometry.
Throughout the exhibit there are signs asking visitors not to
touch the art. Obviously people are not supposed to touch the art in any museum,
but LeWitt’s work really offers a challenge. First, since the exhibit will be in
place until 2033, it needs to maintain its cleanliness and integrity. And
second, every work is so perfectly executed that any mark – even the slightest
remains from a clean hand – can upset the perfection. In visiting the show, one
gets the feeling of something wound up tight, like a spring, that must not be
unleashed.
If indeed “art is something that you look at,” as modernist
sculptor Donald Judd once said, then LeWitt fills the bill. But like good art,
he really goes beyond, giving us something to ponder as well.
What is the ultimate power of the work?
LeWitt seems to straddle the worlds of art and science. He
wants to make us think about the very nature of art, like a theoretical
cosmologist wants us to think about the origins of the universe. And LeWitt’s
work really is some of the most vital of the 20th century, leaving
artists like Warhol in the class of ‘entertainer’.
LeWitt’s art truly has meat on its bones but not everyone is
going to agree. Traditionalists are going to see LeWitt’s ideas as more sign of
the decline of art. But the opposite is true. Artistic imagery and painterly
mastery are taking a century-long hiatus and they will be back in due course.
What LeWitt does is introduce us to a new form of art that lies at the heart of
all that we know, from architecture to engineering, to the forms of classical
Greek building to the compositional integrity of Jacques Louis David’s
portrait of Napoleon on a rearing horse. In that genuine artists are supposed to
inform us of things we really should know, LeWitt succeeds magnificently, and
purely on his own terms.
Renaissance Drawing with a Powerful Narrative Element
Drawn to Drama;
Italian Works on Paper, 1500-1800, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, October 12, 2008 – January 4, 2009
If you ever wonder how much total fun art can be when demonstrating maximum
discipline, intense powers of observation and over-the-top creative flair, you
should really see an exhibit like Drawn to Drama at The Clark Art
Institute in northwestern
Plato’s Cratylus said that “man is the measure of all things” and the Italian
Renaissance artists on display here, being re-discoverers of the wisdom and
creative power of Ancient Greece, depict men and women in their effusion of
roles as heroes, victims, saints, seductresses, seers, hermits, gods, Virgins
and saviors. The drawing is simply a pleasure to behold with dynamic human forms in poses from the sublime to the gallant to the fanciful, a rollicking
trek into the world of pen, ink, wash, chalk, line and colored papers – i.e.,
all the great draughtsmanly traditions that make European art the joy that it is
to observe today.
Classical European styles and techniques, which never will fall out of
fashion by dint of their universal quality and elegance, abound in Drawn to
Drama – superhuman figures, centaurs, putti, cherubs, coronations, flying
figures, child-eating gods, rearing horses and mythical heroes along with
crucifixions and other Christian iconography all joining to create a world of
narrative spectacle. There’s even a 17th century manuscript in
Italian (boy, do I wish I could read Italian) by Leonardo (1452-1519) called
Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura), but illustrated by a later
artist. It covers issues like perspective, light, color, motion, gesture and
drapery, all those things that make these drawings what they are.
Perhaps the most smile-inducing work in this show – and there are many – is the
pen, ink and wash drawing on blue paper by Paolo de’ Matteis (1662-1728) of
The Choice of Hercules of 1712 (see accompanying illustration above, bottom image)
showing the mythical figure with his trademark lion skin clothing and club.
Beckoning seductively at his right is the half-draped female figure of Pleasure,
while the fully-clothed Virtue stands to the left pointing off toward the
heavens to indicate the fame and immortality awaiting Hercules in a life of
hardship and toil. Hercules, amusingly, appears to be merely distracted to the
pleadings of Virtue, as Pleasure seeks his attentions.
All three figures are hefty in proportion, reflecting the aesthetic of another era. Notice Pleasure's hand on Hercules' club, obviously a wink from the artist that the viewer feels throughout this show.
In Sheet of Studies for a Frescoed Ceiling of 1578 by Jacopo Palma il
Giovane (1548-1628), a classic sketch page, this time of heads from profile to
three-quarter view, shows how artists once indeed understood and appreciated the human figure
and head as “the measure of all things”. Giovane worked in pen and ink, and so
there is little room for error. And he makes none, for these portraits are
spot-on descriptions of the human head and face in a variety of poses and
gestures, all seemingly dashed off by an artist little known to history but
displaying the type of draughtsmanly discipline with which great art once was equated.
In Standing Male Nude of 1735 (see accompanying illustration above, upper
right) by Francesco Fontebasso (1707-1769) we see the heroic man's body from the
back with the artist perhaps flaunting his knowledge of anatomy and
three-dimensional form. Today such a muscular figure might be mistaken for a
body builder or some other extreme athlete, but in those days, such a build
apparently was just another vehicle for a heroic tableau expressing a tale of
morality, virtue, humility and the like. The tipsy nature of the figure, as if
possibly is in the process of falling backward - in awe and veneration of Heavenly
God perhaps? - shows the artist’s genuine talent in describing the human form in
its infinite dispositions from resting to standing to whatever other gesture it
may take.
In Head of a Woman (1490s, see accompanying illustration above, upper left) by
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1466-1516), we see a student of Leonardo’s using
some of the classic techniques developed by his mentor including an idealized
head type, gentle strokes of the
silverpoint tool, careful shading to evoke the head’s dimensionality and
the ‘sfumato’ method of evoking a smoky atmosphere around the subject. This drawing
even has Leonardo’s name printed at the bottom, which apparently was a
practice for students in that day.
Other wonderful examples of draughtsmanship married to serious narrative include Saint Benedict Raising a Child (1740) by Giuseppi Marchese. In the pen, brown ink and brown wash work, a grieving father has lain his dead child before St. Benedict in order to seek the child’s rebirth as Benedict looks to Heaven and points to the child as an indication of himself as merely the link between God and man, and to indicate that God is the source of any miracle. In Galloping Centaur of (roughly) 1760, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo portrays a centaur (half man, half horse) with a bow in hand and galloping through a Renaissance landscape. Don’t see many of those around any more. In St. Onophrius in the Wilderness of (roughly) 1615, Jacopo Palma il Giovane (1548-1628) portrays the haggard, mythical hermit with his trademark walking staff who was said to have lived in the Egyptian desert for 60 years.
The show also discusses the Renaissance tradition of ceiling painting, which
included churches, civic buildings and private residences. Being large areas,
ceilings offered big blank canvases to artists and so sometimes
were subdivided. Secular buildings offered mythological and allegorical
pictures, while churches focused only on Christian images. And ceilings offered
unique pictorial challenges and opportunities. Figures could float and fly and
be suspended in air since, in concept, they were. Foreshortening abounded. In one study, by Johan Paul Schor
(1615-1679) called Saturn Devouring his Children of 1635, the Roman god
is represented reclining in a cloudlike, floating mass with one child’s arm in
his mouth, preparing to consume those children who might challenge his power.
Somehow the allegorical significance and the superb draughtsmanship ease us into the
gruesome nature of the scene which is portrayed like many such tableaus, as a
fact of some other world’s life to be depicted in the best form possible.
Another rougher sketch in pen and ink is The Coronation of the Virgin
of (roughly) 1795 by Giuseppe Cades (1750-1799). In a flurry of pen
strokes, the crowning of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, is depicted in a cloudlike
atmosphere. Coronations were popular images in this narrative genre. This sketch
apparently was preparation for a ceiling painting.
In Studies of Horses of 1530 by Perino del Vaga (1501-47), one of the few
animal subjects in this show, classical European drawing again is shown at its
best, with rearing, snorting, turning and bolting horses pictured in one of
those timeless multi-image sketch pages indicating every gesture that a horse
could make, all shrunk down to 11 by 15 inches. No wonder all those horse
sculptures and paintings dot European history; the subject is second only to man
in its drama, it seems. This drawing reminds us in a small way of the Parthenon's
marble
relief friezes of 2,000 years previous, which set the standard for equine
imagery.
An exhibit like Drawn to Drama is one of those rare gems that puts
together in one space ideas that marked an entire era or epoch. Many of these
drawing come from Mr. Loper's private collection and never have been seen before in
public. How lucky we are to be able to enjoy them.
It is plain to see that the Renaissance was an intellectually prosperous time
when ideas of Greek Classicism were reborn in new media and subject matter.
We do have Greek vase paintings to show us how the Ancients interpreted heroic
figures in two dimensions… on curved surfaces, even!... that never would have
survived the ages on paper or
canvas.
These Drawn to Drama drawings show us things that time has not had
the power to destroy, and never will.
The Keystone Arches, a 19th Century Engineering Marvel
The Western
Railroad of Massachusetts, started in 1830 and completed in 1841, was derided as
“a railroad to the moon” by one
The Western
Railroad confronted a great wilderness in the so-called 'hills’ of
But the need for a
railroad was clear.
The route of the
Western was surveyed by the ingenious engineer Maj. George Washington Whistler
(1800-1849), a
Whistler earlier
had worked on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, running through mountainous areas
of
Top: The tallest of the Arches is 70 feet. It no longer carries trains. In summertime, the swimming underneath is like a trip into another world, a unique venue in all of New England. Notice the massive leaning buttress wall visible through the arch. Center: These leaning buttresses keep the structure from shifting. It is a show of brute force. Notice the 'sharp' corners on the blocks. Those corners line up perfectly, and were intended to quickly reveal any shift in the structure. There has been none except for the lower corner where the Westfield River has eroded the base. Bottom: The easternmost bridge, this double-arch span still carries the railroad tracks. Talk about form and function! Beauty is the hallmark of these structures.
The rail route
roughly follows the serpentine
The Arches themselves are based on Roman designs developed
1,700 years previous. They are constructed of local granite without any mortar
using a 'keystone' design where the arch’s own weight and that of the train on
top is dissipated through its legs through simple geometry.
In 1830, small steam locomotive weighed
only 12,000 lbs. The heaviest locomotives to have crossed the Arches in the
early 20th century were 215,000 pounds, while today modern diesels
using the route weigh more than 400,000 pounds and cross the arches
with no ill effect.
Arch construction was expensive and therefore was used only
in remote locations where there was no alternative. They were built block by
block on wooden forms that were the shape of the arch. After the keystone was
set, the wooden forms were removed and gravity held the arches in place.
The grade along the
route of the
Arches is one of the steeper slopes in the
Eight of the original ten Keystone Arches still are in use.
The main track was realigned in 1912 leading to the abandonment of the structure
pictured in the top photo above, and another nearby arch 65 feet in height.
The Arches
themselves were constructed under the supervision of stonemason Alexander Birnie
of nearby Stockbridge,
If the name Whistler sounds familiar,
it should be. Maj. Whistler was the father of James Abbot McNeil Whistler, the
artist of the portrait called Whistler’s Mother,
also known as Portrait of a
Painter’s Mother
Engineer Whistler’s
accomplishment in
Whistler died of
cholera in
Today, the Keystone Arches are accessible along hiking trails. Many hikers access the Arches along the railroad right-of-way which is trespassing and is discouraged. Trains can be moving downhill quickly without making much noise.
The artistic elegance of the Arches shows once again that form and function always rise together, and that a great engineer also is an artist. The Arches are structures of great beauty in a fantastic rural setting. They are technically located in Middlefield, Massachusetts if you would like to do a MapQuest search.
For more information, the official website of the Keystone Arches is www.keystonearches.org
Architecture in Review
Saarinen's Sublime Curves
A master in his field accomplishes things that are separate
from the ordinary, things that reveal the essences of a higher, ‘hidden world’
that holds all the mysteries. The Ancient Greeks had knowledge so extraordinary
that their finest temples to this day are considered timeless models of
dimension, proportion and subtle harmony, structures that hew to a heavenly
ethos and understanding of form, mathematics and the ever-volatile
concept of what defines “beauty”.
The temple to Athena Parthenos – the Parthenon - atop the
Acropolis in
In our times, engineering masterpieces like the
At the same time, our museums hold paintings and sculptures
that express
perfection, from Renaissance masterpieces that articulate genuine originality of
form and color, to grid-like canvases by 20th century master Piet Mondrian that
reflect a unique concord of rectangular forms. Like all great art from
Polyclitus to Leonardo, Mondrian’s paintings appear at the same time casual in
nature yet highly organized and even strong and rigid, which is the true mark of
a master. They reveal to us a natural geometric order that only an original mind
can comprehend and communicate through art.
One of the great modern masters of form was the 20th century
architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), a Finnish-born American who sadly died
prematurely of a stroke. Son of the great Eliel Saarinen, he excelled in design
throughout his childhood, was encouraged in his creativity by his mother, and
rose up through the ranks of his father’s Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan to become one of the brightest lights of the so-called Second
Generation of the modern architectural movement that also included Edward Durell
Stone and Wallace K. Harrison.
Sometimes maligned in his lifetime as an architect with no
‘signature’ style who worked in an eclectic world of forms that did not measure
up to the theoretical austerity of Bauhaus legends like Mies van der Rohe and Le
Corbusier, Saarinen’s oeuvre indeed included the straight-line Bauhaus aesthetic. But
it went on to distinguish itself in its foray into a world of curvaceous beauty that
includes the St. Louis Gateway Arch in Missouri and the Dulles
International Airport Terminal 25 miles west of Washington, DC.
Saarinen was charged as being too willing to please and
excite viewers with startling forms. His architecture was called “corporate”.
His Arch in
Sandy Isenstadt, assistant professor of art history at Yale
writes of Saarinen... “function was abstracted and visually and often lyrically
expressed… the threat Saarinen posed to contemporaries may be seen in the
denouement he achieved between an architecture based on the conditions of its
making and one based on the performance of its meaning.”
So whatever one wishes to say about any given artist/architect/designer, the proof is in the pudding. And Saarinen’s forms ultimately were expressive of nature’s organic energy, timeless, elegant and thoroughly considered and seen; they spoke the sublime language of order, harmony, proportion and balance that few designers have captured in their lives. And thus few have attained the status of Eero Saarinen, and the criticisms have been revealed as mere intellectual poofery.
Top to bottom: 1) Dulles International Airport Terminal outside Washington, DC. Awesome! 2) The St. Louis Gateway Arch at the installation of the keystone piece in 1965. This black-and-white photo does not show the arch's shiny stainless exterior. The profiles of the inner arch and the outer arch are smartly conceived and calculated to create a totally dynamic form. 3) Chair designs by Saarinen. Aren't they beautiful!? 4) A catenary arch is made by hanging a chain from two nails that are the same height from the floor. Saarinen had considered making the Gateway Arch a parabola, but considered it too harsh a form. The catenary is more gentle in its geometry. (Photos courtesy of Eero Saarinen, Shaping the Future)
The Gateway Arch
The St. Louis Gateway Arch first was
proposed by a civic commission in 1933 to establish a federal memorial to the
Buildings were demolished in the
construction zone along the
It was not until 1958 that President Eisenhower signed the
bill to fund the monument by authorizing $17.25 million in federal dollars.
Eero Saarien died
Saarinen made a wise choice for the
Arch, not bogging down in details, but instead stating with the striking form not only the beauty that is requisite, but the metaphorical substance of a
“gateway”, all captured in one dazzling shape. The Arch is
as much a mark of
No American could rightfully object to the Arch.
There is nothing that could displease a critic except a nagging monologue about architectures true intent. Indeed the monument pleases us
on many levels. And that is the joy of it.
The book Eero Saarinen, Shaping
the Future, was published in conjunction with an overview exhibit of Saarinen’s
work in cooperation with the Finnish Cultural Institute of New York; the
Here's a quote from the book by a former Saarinen detractor,
architecture critic Vincent Scully:
‘A recent earnest study of Eero Saarinen characterizes the
criticism of some of his buildings that I wrote in the 1960s as “derisive” and
“even hostile”. I’m sorry for that if it’s so, but it is true that at the time
most of us, as evangelical modernists tended to be more categorical and
exclusive in our judgments than I for one would be today…’
‘I think I wasn’t entirely wrong in much of that, but times
have changed… He (Saarinen) clearly was much more, at once more complex
and more deeply serious, and more directly concerned with human use and meaning,
than I thought he was so many years ago…’
It is not that often that you see a major critic eating crow in such fashion but that is the nature of Saarinen’s longevity. Because those who dismissed him themselves were consumed by simple intellectual hubris.
So what about the graceful curves that Saarinen’s two projects here engender? What is it about curves that awaken us and stimulate us? Is it the fact that the human form – notably the female form – is but a bundle of magnificent curves? Is it that the masculine form represents the no-nonsense straight-line aesthetic of Bauhaus minimalism, while curves are feminine and thus seductive? Is this why painter Mondrian said that curved lines are “too emotional”?
Is it man versus woman all over again?
Curves, curves, curves.
Throughout the brief history of
railroads, their tracks have needed to curve based on specific mathematical formulae that
have come to be known as 'railroad curves' and that give speeding trains a way to change course through numerical precision. The
same for superhighways, from the Autobahn in
Curves have informed artists and architects for millennia, but they
have been mostly intuitive and not mathematical. The proportions and harmonies of the
human form itself are said to be at the heart of all of man’s attempts to better
nature in the creation of objects of the highest form and
function, to reflect what Frank Lloyd Wright called the "hidden forms" that lurk
"behind" nature.
In the Arch, Saarinen rejected mathematics in favor of artistic intuition. Originally it was a purely mathematical form (a parabola) that finally was dropped in favor of a catenary arch that was created by simple physical means. He wrote:
“The arch, in stainless steel, has a core of concrete. An absolutely pure shape where the compression line goes right through the center line of the structure directly to the ground. In other words, a perfect catenary. The absolutely simplest shape with the greatest impact and with a great deal of thought on its lasting qualities."
The catenary is a form derived when you
take a chain and hang its ends from two nails hammered into the wall at the same
height (see drawing above). Depending on the distance between the nails, the
arch is narrower or wider. And of course, upside down vis a
The catenary was ultimately chosen over the somewhat similar
parabola because, as Saarinen said, they had “worked at first with a
mathematical shape (the parabola), but finally adjusted (the arch) according to
the eye.” This comports with Saarinen’s assessment of genuine architecture:
"When I speak of ‘architecture’, I am speaking of
architecture as an art… its driving force comes from its art characteristics.”
Combined with the 20th century’s technological advances in materials, he said
that his so-called Second Generation of modernists was fortunate in that “there
are new and unexplored materials… they are now probing in many different
directions and the vocabulary of modern architecture is being greatly expanded.”
Regarding his thought processes in creating the Arch, he
said, “The problem of a chapel is an obvious one. Imagine what Chartres
Cathedral would look like if the Gothic master builders had not placed their
main effort on the inner meaning and emotional impact of this building, but
instead concentrated their efforts on making the plan work functionally.”
Saarinen loved the soaring and weightless Gothic interiors and was less
impressed with what followed:
“The Renaissance was another kind of period – great in many
ways but perhaps a bit overrated architecturally. Not because they did not solve
architectural problems well, but because their aims in architecture were
limited. They were not able to create a form for their time. They borrowed Roman
sub-assemblies and their main concern was how to use these in new, ingenious and
well-related ways.”
Saarinen had a studio with a series of catenary chains hung on its wall in order to be able to observe them to make his final
choice. The question is why did he choose the square format (same height and
width)?
Certainly because he knew that the Arch would be viewed from
many angles. The more obtuse the view, the more its geometry favors
height over width. So he certainly chose the “neutral” format so as to create a
dynamic. Because the inner edge of the arch in fact is significantly taller than wide, where height is
favored by 613 feet versus 522 feet wide. So he was able to create a tension
between the two forms (inner and outer), while avoiding
its taking on too severe a height/width aspect when viewed from increasingly
obtuse angles, which are going to be those from which most people will see it.
For a series of views of the Arch, please visit www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Gateway_Arch.html
The Arch consists of stacked sections of equilateral triangles narrowing from 54
feet per side at the base to 17 feet at the top. It is made of reflective stainless steel
that causes the whole structure to "pop" visually in virtually any state of
light. Its construction required a pair of “creeper” cranes (see photo) attached to
each leg that rose with the tower, methodically loading on new sections whose
equal sides shrank incrementally as the Arch rose. On the day
that the final keystone piece was installed, as shown in the picture, fire departments needed to
spray water on the south leg to cool it because the mathematics of the Arch are so
precise that the sun’s heat knocked it slightly out of line, and thus had to be accounted
for.
Another example of Saarinen’s boldness
was his design for
Saarinen’s design uses a swooping roof to suggest flight, contravening the hyper-modernist ideal that architecture is just function shoehorned into minimalist rectangular form, a cerebral stubbornness that has driven a wedge between the Bauhaus aesthetic and the public.
Dulles is the perfect antidote. It remains thoroughly modern in its uninterrupted interior that is a testament to the elasticity of 20th century materials and engineering. It is neither reclusive nor arrogant. It is a celebration of form, and darned well made. Its details speak volumes about “quality” in design, and therein lies its wonder. Like Mondrian’s art it stands immobile yet is highly energetic.
Dulles is made of forms that fit. Nary an inch of waste can
be found, no redundant forms or needless spaces. Every measure is precise. It is pure function wrapped in
a package of boisterous beauty.
Arriving at the Terminal in anticipation of a flight to faraway places, one can sense
immediately what Saarinen's plan is supposed to instill --
integrity, emotion and
excitement wrapped in a neat package as weightless as a soaring airliner.
And the large variety of interacting forms in
Dulles – as opposed to the single arch in
Its open plan allows daylight to pour
in
in heavenly ways. And at night,
those same windows allow Dulles’ interior glow to radiate out. For more pictures of this
structure visit
www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Dulles_Airport.html
Finally, Saarinen needed to reduce the terminal down to its single
rectangular footprint, and that required the development of bus-like
height-adjustable transporters to move passengers out to the planes on the tarmac, avoiding the
necessity of making sprawling terminal ‘fingers’ that reached out to
accommodate the aircraft.
Frederic Remington Looking West (As Always)
Remington Looking West,
paintings and drawing by Frederic Remington at The Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts, February 17 – May 4, 2008. Also, drawings by Claude
Lorrain at the Clark. Visit www.clarkart.edu
for more
The name Frederic Remington is synonymous with artistic depictions of the
American West. Yet he was a born-and-bred Easterner who worked during his adult
life in a studio near
This exhibit is a compact survey of Remington’s oeuvre which
introduced Easterners to the American West at a time when the Old West in fact
was disappearing into history. And perhaps that is the beauty of Remington, that
he captured it so adroitly while it still was genuine, at the end of the
sheriff-and-outlaw and cowboy-and-Indian eras, but before the advent of the
automobile.
Whether Remington was merely an illustrator or a real artist
is open to a debate that plagued him throughout his life. But in light of the
sharp decline in standards in art today, we should give all benefit to this man
who singularly captured the spirit of all things Western. His works are a
delight to the eye.
In a painting like
Indian Trapper of 1889 (above), Remington offers a trademark vision of a
lone Native American on a horse. The sheen of the horse’s hind quarter, the
Indian’s dramatic gesture in turning to the painter, the horse’s static but at
the same time dynamic pose with its tail and mane in motion, make this painting
quintessential Remington. Meanwhile, the impressionistic quality of the
landscape in Indian Trapper was
another Remington style, showing a lesser concern for landscape than for the
people he pictured.
In a highly charged composition like
Past All Surgery (Aiding A Comrade)
(below) from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, we see full-bore Remington, a
hotshot action picture with dust and hooves flying, bridles snapping, three men
splashed across the canvas in wild bodily gesticulations and horses straining in
every possible contortion. The picture is centered, and brightly lit, like many
of his works, showing the folks back East that ‘Home on the Range’ indeed was
where ‘the skies are not cloudy all day’. The reference to “surgery” indicates
that the fallen man probably cannot be saved.
What is interesting is the dissimilar treatment of the two
different subjects. The US Calvary and cowboys generally are depicted in wild
motion, while Indians are seen more stoically and serenely, perhaps Remington’s
interpretation of the polar civilizations confronting one another on the plains
and mountains of the West.
The Defiance
of 1890 shows us “a brave warrior, noble and solitary, rebelliously resisting
the regrettable but inevitable invasion onto his land”, says the wall label. And
the painting is almost inert, of a Native American holding a talisman high in a
defiant gesture, his horse relaxed in a foreshortened perspective, his headdress
impressionistic in nature, the entire composition set in a bright, golden
sunshine on this small canvas, about two feet tall.
Meanwhile Cowboy
of 1890 is horizontal, and shows a rider on a horse that is positively clipping
across the land, its four legs off the ground in a dazzling gesture of speed,
the cowboy leaning forward, and the entire composition resembling a speeding
bullet.
In 1895, Remington decided to try his hand at bronze casting, and his first
effort is included in the
In an effort to make his paintings as accessible as his
illustrations, Remington made some canvases in black and white for reproduction
purposes, which offers an interesting departure for a gallery exhibit.
Pursuing the Indians of 1896 is one
such B&W, a group of cavalry men firing rifles in a planar composition. It was
reproduced as part of the biography of a man named Nelson Miles.
Later in his career, Remington experimented with a variety of
nighttime compositions using only the moon as the light source. These paintings
tend to be dank green, blue, grey and brown, are far less detailed than his
sunlit compositions, and include pictures like
Indian Scouts at Evening of 1906, in
which Remington said he wished to study “how to do the silver sheen of
moonlight.” Another, A Reconnaisance
of 1902, shows a group of horseback trackers near a dark and menacing forest
under the stars, with danger suggested in the brush. All in all, he captured
nighttime scenes with as much aplomb – although a different type of aplomb – as
his daylit pictures.
Remington’s few drawings in this small but wonderful exhibit
show his efforts to be more illustrational than draughtsmanly. But no matter.
His paintings are a joy to look at as lively documentation of a time and place
now gone, like most in art’s history.
Claude Lorrain Drawings acquired by the
These drawings are so classically European that it stirs the soul to see them
here in
Other nice touches include
Cascades of Tivoli (1640), which
shows a rocky, tumbling landscape that looks like a waterfall; and
A Wooded Landscape and Distant Buildings,
which demonstrates the artist’s multiple talents in handling both the natural
and the man-made in the same image.
Pastoral Landscape and Trees
of 1640 is another classically Euro drawing with brown wash applied only
partially and almost haphazardly, as if the artist decided against it halfway
through. The only painting in this group, the elliptical
Rest on the Flight into Egypt shows
Lorrain deftly using the tiniest of his brushes to its fullest potential in a
way that makes us long for more
Assault of a Citadel
of 1658 presents a small army marching through a treescape toward a fortress
bastion, with much human action simply and astutely captured in the surging
crowd of soldiers.
In Lorrain’s cattle, landscapes, cityscapes, rocks, seaports and trees, we see a
world long gone that thankfully is preserved for us to relive in this fortuitous
exhibit. The
Loving Abstract Art in One Easy Lesson:
Thinking about an art form some find difficult to
appreciate.
Many people are skeptical of what is called "abstract art".
They look at such a painting and they say “So what. Where’s the substance? Why
should I care?”
To start, the name is wrong. 'Abstract
art' should more properly be called ‘form art’. The reason is that the word
‘abstract’ has otherworldly or negative connotations, carries a lot of baggage,
and is defined in the dictionary as ‘conceived apart from matter’ or ‘not
clear’. Therefore art that is composed of only forms like the rectangles and
black bands in the painting above by 20th century master Piet
Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, should instead be
called ‘form art’ because that is a positive term that says unequivocally what
the painting is made of – forms.
Artist Jean Arp referred to 'form art' as ‘concrete art’
because he believed that there is nothing in the world so certain and so
‘concrete’ as the underlying, unifying and universal forms that are discovered
and re-discovered over and over again through the ages in great art,
architecture and design.
The opposite of 'form art' is that which is
composed of ‘images’ as in portraits, human figures, landscapes, cityscapes and
other identifiable subjects. But all artistic images in fact are composed of
individual forms or, more properly, sub-forms that are synthesized and arranged
to make the most perfect image that the artist is capable of. Thus forms always
have existed in art – indeed they have always been the essence of art – but just
not as ends in themselves.
'Form art' has been
recognized in its own right in Western culture for about 150 years since the
French painter Paul Cezanne started to break up the picture plane of his
landscapes into simpler geometric shapes. By the opening of the 20th
century, Kasimir Malevich, working in
Still many people today look at 'form
art' and see little in it. And in many cases they are right. Like much of 20th
century art, 'form art' has been exploited by charlatans who paint shapes
randomly and call it art so that they do not have to do any hard work. But if
the same ‘artists’ painted figures or portraits with the talent that they have,
the paintings would look clumsy and the artist would be exposed. So they paint
forms alone and pass it off as art. The question is: How do you know what is
good?
The select few artists who have successfully created the
highest level of 'form art', like Mondrian, did so by becoming aware of
the four principles of all art: Order, Proportion, Harmony and Balance. All
lasting art, architecture, engineering and design are based on these principles,
while 'form art' itself can be seen as exploring Order, Proportion, Harmony and
Balance on the most elementary level, i.e., a level on which forms alone, like
molecules, reveal the underlying structure on which all art is built.
The greatest
sculptor of all time was Polyclitus of the 5th century BC in
It is said that Polyclitus made the most perfect figurative
sculptures of all time, and that his feat never has been equaled. Interestingly
Polyclitus employed opposing forces -- pure mathematics melded with human
intuition -- to arrive at perfection and to establish his own version of Order,
Proportion, Harmony and Balance.
But imagine if he had not put the sub-forms together as a
human figure, but instead had completely rearranged them by eye, with an arm
here attached to an upside-down torso with a leg sticking out there and a foot
attached on top. He still would have created greatness (the first 'form
sculpture') because in order for the overall form to be worthy, its sub-forms
must be worthy too. And only a legendary artist like Polyclitus can make either.
Imagine that you are going to fly to
A highly developed jetliner in fact is much akin to a piece
of art because, like a great sculpture, it is attaining the highest function for
which it is designed. All of its pieces are calculated, designed and assembled
in the most intelligent and premeditated way, as Polyclitus’ figures were, in
order to attain that function (flight) by using the critical element of human
intuition. It is this intuition that actually makes things work, and that allows
certain special people to create the best forms for the job (the flying of an
airplane, the making of a memorable piece of art). All the computers in the
world could not make it fly without human intuition, which is the opposing force
that finally acts as a balance to pure mathematics to create the harmony
necessary for great engineering and art.
That is why art and engineering are two
sides of the same coin; because they both are concerned with the perfection of
harmonizing forms. Leonardo da Vinci had a great scientific mind and described
even in his drawings of flowing water a dynamism and order that is historically
original and perceptive. Sculptor Alexander Calder started out life as an
engineer. And the great Greek architects Ictinus and Callicrates were the
driving forces behind the masterful creation of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece,
considered the most complex and mathematically perfect building ever, a
structure that will be discussed in the future on
Nikitas3.com. Both art and
engineering are based in the pure rationality of Order, Proportion, Harmony and
Balance. For instance, the great bridges of the world, particularly the dramatic
suspension bridges, like The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, are designed by the most skilled engineers. In them you see
beauty, elegance and… function in
Order, Proportion, Harmony and Balance.
It is interesting to watch a television
show like American Chopper where a
bunch of guys in Upstate New York design some of the sleekest, most artistic
motorcycles imaginable. Naturally elitists would think of these men as brutal,
uneducated motorheads, but that is far from the truth. To watch the
Chopper guys talk about design and
form -- that the shape of this gas tank looks good; that those muffler pipes
flow nicely; but that that fender does not fit into the overall design -- you
can see that they are very sensitive to form and harmony and balance in the most
abstract way and in the most human way. It cannot be explained. It is something
that these builders have learned by looking at motorcycle designs from the past
and assimilating them, and building on them. And then injecting their own
creative intuition to make motorcycles that are unique and appealing to the eye.
Like the designers of the Boeing 787, or the motorcycle
builders, or Polyclitus assembling the sub-forms he created into fantastic
bronze sculptures, the question remains: “How perfect can man be? What is he
capable of achieving in his own field?”
Now imagine that you are waiting at the airport and that it
is not a 787 Boeing Dreamliner that pulls up to your gate but a plane with one
wing shorter than the other, a fuselage that is crooked, a tail section that is
off-angle and engines that are placed willy-nilly on the wings. You would
immediately be suspicious. You would not see Order (it would appear very
disorderly), Proportion (its proportions would be disturbing) Harmony (no, those
parts do not go together well) or Balance (that thing will tip over before it
takes off). By visual intuition alone, having known what perfection is, you
would decline to fly in that plane because the plane has not followed the four
principles that would allow it to reach its highest function which is flight.
Man’s highest pursuit is pure,
unadulterated beauty through art. All great art has followed the four
principles. And 'form art' is no different. The great form artists like
Mondrian and Calder are among the few who have discovered how to create and
arrange forms alone in order to have Order, Proportion, Harmony and Balance. Of
course an artist must start with a ‘concept’ that is validated through his art,
that must be as brilliant as his execution.
The ‘concept’ for the engineer, meanwhile, is the function.
Beauty (as in the The Golden Gate Bridge) is merely a happy byproduct.
In his paintings, Mondrian might be said to have been
seeking, in just a few simple, reductive forms the ‘concept’ of the ultimate
expression of the modern, industrial world. And he certainly has succeeded, but
only via flawless execution based on a heightened intuition. In other words,
less indeed is more. His art has appeared, reappeared and is copied and evoked
over and over again in many different contexts -- as stage sets, in fashions, as
backdrops for discussions of the modern world -- always to make light of the
concept of “modernity”.
If a gifted artist were to take a Boeing 787 Dreamliner and
cut it into pieces, and rearrange the pieces into a sculpture, it would probably
be a pretty good sculpture. Because the artist would be starting with sub-forms
that already are proven to be beautiful in their own right by dint of the fact
that they are capable of attaining their highest function, of allowing a 200-ton
airplane to fly at 600 miles per hour. A Piper Cub or other small or amateur
plane would offer much less refined forms, and make a much less beautiful
sculpture, because its concept is lower, i.e., its speeds are much less while
its physical achievements are minimal.
Form and function always rise together.
But the finished 787 sculpture would never be great or
timeless because it would be lacking in originality since the forms themselves
would not be the original work of the artist, but would be the work of another
type of artist, the engineer who designed them. Still, objectively, it would be
in many ways an interesting sculpture.
Perhaps the artist then could move on, and cut apart an
advanced fighter jet like the FA-22 Raptor. Since an airliner like the Boeing 787
is more like a Greyhound bus than a race car, an FA-22 Raptor is, in comparison,
a much more dynamic and advanced design, like a race car, that is designed by
much more highly skilled engineers who are seeking a higher level of
sophistication and performance. So if you cut it up and re-assembled the FA-22
into a sculpture, it would be much more dynamic than if you cut up a 787.
Of course the artist then could advance even further to the
most advanced aircraft in the entire American military, the B-2 Flying Wing
Stealth bomber. Since it has the most daring and futuristic design of all, and
the highest capabilities of all, and has risen highest above the pedestrian
function of ordinary flight, it is closest to art.
The people who designed the B-2 are the most forward-thinking
of all. Its design also is the one of the most reductive in the American
military, with the simplest form, which shows a correlation between simplicity
and high concept, the way that the reductive paintings of Piet Mondrian are so
highly expressive of the whole concept of modernity.
In fact, it would be difficult to cut
up the B-2 and remake it into a sculpture. As it exists, it is like a modern
sculpture in its own right. And if you put it side-by-side with one of the
renowned 'form sculptures' of the 20th century like Constantin
Brancusi’s Bird In Space,
here you can see
how the concepts behind a great work of engineering and a great work of art can
begin to converge.
Brancusi wanted
to express the concept of dynamic flight in his sculpture. The only thing
holding back the B-2 is that it is dedicated to real flight, a lower and more
pedestrian function than pure beauty. Besides beauty and intellectual
stimulation, no other function can enter into the realm of art. Art must stand
alone. That is why it is art. It is separate. And that is why Brancusi’s
Bird In Space never will fly halfway
around the world on a bombing run over
And so the B-2 never can be art although it often has been
referred to as “a work of art” because that is often how we describe something
that has reached its highest level, like a baseball pitcher who is said to have
taken pitching to the “level of an art.” What is noteworthy about the baseball
pitcher is that his perfection of pitching also depends on the refinement of
forms – the form of his body, the arc of his arm, the dynamic thrust as he hurls
the ball at the batter -- all are idealized and harmonized to produce the finest
pitch.
As casual observers, most people can look at a portrait or
landscape painting and make a judgment about it. But they may feel that they do
not have an eye well-trained enough to discern whether a 'form painting' or
'form sculpture' is authentic. So like a wine taster, one must train one’s eye
over time as the wine taster trains his palette. But once you do train your eye,
you can discern which 'form art' is authentic and which is not. And which artist
is attaining the highest function of beauty, and which is not.
When you see art that is composed of forms alone, feel free
to judge it by your visual instinct alone. Because many times over you have seen
great bridges and cathedrals and race cars that all employed the finest
designers, so indeed you do have a reference point of departure. You already
have experienced the highest level of form outside of art, and so should be
trustful of your eye when looking at art.
Does the painting or sculpture subscribe to the four
principles of Order, Proportion, Harmony and Balance?
It is up to you to decide.
Professor Janson’s Big Black Book
A Trusted Art Text Still is Pertinent as Ever
For anyone who has immersed himself or
herself in a one-semester college survey course on the whole history of art, you
probably have owned or come into contact with a copy of H.W. Janson’s
History of Art, A Survey of the Major
Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day, published by
Prentice-Hall Inc., of Englewood Cliffs, N.J. and Harry N. Abrams Inc., New
York.
From its first printing in 1962 to my copy, the sixteenth
printing in July 1971, Janson has been the ultimate source for millions of Art
History 101 aficionados. Like an excursion to the Louvre, the study and
appreciation of art can be seen either as a serious long-term commitment or a
short-term elective, and for most who have read Janson – or acted as if they had
read it, or dozed through it or skimmed it – it today remains the quintessential
text for those grappling with the big question: Why should I care about art?
And the answer is: Because art is all of history compressed
into one cultural niche.
And art is fun.
Throughout
Janson’s 578 pages of text, 883 black-and-white illustrations, 87 color plates,
and chronological tables of the various eras in political history, religion,
literature, science, technology, architecture, sculpture and painting,
History of Art is one-stop shopping
for the essential facts about, for instance, what Mannerism was (“More recently,
the cold and rather barren formalism of (the Mannerists’ art) has been
recognized as a special form of a wider movement that placed ‘inner vision’,
however subjective or fantastic, above the twin authority of nature and the
ancients.” (Atta go Janson!)); what two Greek temples were built side-by-side in
southern
Beginning with the well-known cave
paintings at
If one were to peruse Janson and to try
and pick the major demarcation lines of art history, one might choose ancient
Egypt; then jump 2,000 years to the Classical period of Greece; segue a few
centuries into inferior Rome; experience the politically violent but
artistically nascent period of the Middle Ages, which included one major
innovation in the muscular Romanesque style of architecture (rediscovered in the
19th century by H.H. Richardson); leap with joy into the Renaissance
(which was called a revival of Classical Greece); and then stride onward into
the very active 500 years since during which the established societies of
Euro-centric art history maintained relatively high levels of stability,
productivity, prosperity and year-after-year historical relevance to our modern
times.
But what is most fascinating about flipping through History of Art is not necessarily the periods of great art, which are well known, but the slack periods in between. For instance, following centuries of Greek dominance by legendary artists from Calamis (460 BC, maker of the famous Poseidon bronze) to Chares (creator of the supermonumental Colossus of Rhodes (280 BC) and ending in Apollonius’ ultra-expressive bronze The Prize Fighter of 100 BC, truly one of the most overlooked sculptures of all time, the Western world became focused in Rome. And unfortunately Roman art spiraled down into a pantheon of relatively dismal and hideous sculptural portraits of dismal and hideous emperors, while relying on domestically produced copies of Classical Greek masterpieces to give beauty to an empire known more for its brutality and its engineering expertise than for its aesthetics.
Four great Greek sculptures in Janson's text all are
Roman copies
In fact on two
succeeding pages of History of Art
discussing the Classical Greek era, we see pictured four of the great figurative
marble sculptures The Apollo Belvedere,
Apoxymenos,
The Barberini Faun and
Dying Gaul. But each sculpture
pictured is not original, but is a Roman copy of a Greek original, few of which
exist. So obviously the Romans’ most noble service to the world of art was not
in their indigenous works but in their preservation of Greek ideals through
copies, itself more of a feat of mechanical precision than of artistic
originality and profundity. Thus in the case of much Greek sculpture, we would
not even know
Leading up to and following the fall of
Rome in 410 AD, Europe descended into centuries of chaos dominated by rampaging
Goths, Vandals, Huns, Franks, Norse, Lombards and more, a series of marauding,
conquering and thieving peoples wandering across a rural continent that lacked
any physical focus beyond the ruin of Roma.
To us studying today, the question is
more likely “Benedetto who”? But perhaps we should once again point to the
overwhelming authority and standing of
So throughout this artist-less Middle Ages interim, the wall
paintings and mosaics, religious manuscripts and their gold, bejeweled covers,
sarcophagi, cathedral sculpture and reliefs discussed in Janson are largely
Christian in nature, are simply anonymous and are somewhat homogeneous,
sometimes even primitive in style as if the reigns of the various tribal leaders
from the Visigothic king Alaric I (who lived 370-410 AD) to the all-powerful and
legendary Charlemagne (who ruled 768-814 AD) through the First Crusade (1095 AD)
show a continent with promise, but struggling to right itself.
It would seem appropriate therefore to
conjecture that the artistic output of that era thus was limited to the only
social sanctuaries of the times, the non-individualist Christian monasteries and
churches that took root as
But any student of history knows that
the real focus of “our” civilization after
Centuries earlier, however, in 537 AD, the die was cast by
Byzantine Emperor Justinian, the Constantine of the new Eastern faith, who saw
to completion the original, and one of the most astounding Christian cathedrals
of all time, Constantinople’s monumental Hagia Sophia which came to symbolize a
whole new dimension in art and architecture. Named for Saint Sophia, who was
martyred for sacrificing herself and her three daughters rather than renouncing
her Christianity, this massive church, says Janson, “achieved such fame that the
names of the architects too were remembered – Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus
of Miletus,” an interesting commentary considering that history’s tyrants seem
always to be remembered, or that the Parthenon’s architects Ictinus and
Callicrates are better known to us from almost 10 centuries previous.
More daring than the staid Romanesque style back on “the
continent”, Hagia Sophia was a conglomeration never seen before, like an
earthquake of forms rising from the soil and thrusting skyward. It took
advantage of Roman advances in engineering to create the most spectacular house
of Christian worship in the first millennium of the faith, with the highest dome
in the world (184 feet) representing a structure more revolutionary than any
other since the pagan Parthenon itself. Janson refers to its soaring interior:
“…the dome seems to float… because it rests upon a closely spaced ring of
windows, and the nave walls are pierced by so many openings that they have the
transparency of lace curtains.”
So astounding an achievement was Hagia
Sophia that the Mosque of Ahmed I, built nearby in 1609-1616 after the Ottoman
Turks took power from the Christians in 1453, is directly based on Hagia
Sophia’s design, and the two might even be confused, both today even surrounded
by minarets which the Muslim Ottomans installed around Hagia Sophia to convert
it too to Islam. Janson’s pictures of the two buildings, 20 pages apart, might
look like a misprint, but in fact is one of the quirks of art/architectural
history that this excellent text reveals, the two structures just similar and
dissimilar enough to slyly evoke the side-by-side Greek temples at
Thus from the Pyramids to the Parthenon
to Hagia Sophia, we see in Janson the stages in the evolution of form in
architecture that is more telling than the more predictable forces in painting
or sculpture in the same 3,000-year period. From minimalist triangular geometry
to elegant post-and-lintel Greek temple architecture to the domed beauty of
“The origin of no previous
(architectural) style can be pinpointed as exactly as the Gothic,” says
Professor Janson with certainty. “It was born between 1137 and 1144 in the
rebuilding by Abbot Suger, of the Royal Abbey Church of St.-Denis, just outside
the city of
The names are legend:
But where there are cathedrals, there is sculpture, and huge
amounts of it, in every nook, cranny, pulpit, pilaster and portal. Some of the
names noted in Janson – Pisano, Dalle Masegne and Maitani -- are much less well
known to us than the Renaissance masters like Michelangelo, but still they
represented a step forward in the momentum of the growing Christian millennium.
And as the early Renaissance dawned,
the new era introduced us to a new and more historically important phase in the
long lost art of painting, that of the religious image transmuted to the secular
world. While authentic Christian icons picture elongated, angular and stylized
figures, fingers, toes and robes in order to distinguish their holy pedigrees,
the late Gothic-early Renaissance period saw the transformation of Christian art
into the echelons of “high” culture of Europe. The works of masters like Giotto,
Cimabue, Massacio and Duccio, who worked around 1300, has come down to us as a
new generation of highly theatrical representations of Christianity’s birth
replete with sprawling narratives, crowd scenes, facial expressivity of every
type, glorious color, cityscapes, palaces and thrones that offered the growing
religion a newer and wider interpretive berth. By 1423, Gentila da Fabriano has
taken us well over the edge with The
Adoration of the Magi, a multipanel 9 by 9 extravaganza of gold, gilt,
silver, jewels, drapery, halos, horses, leopards, and camels never before seen
in art. “The Holy family on the left almost seems in danger of being overwhelmed
by the gay and festive pageant pouring down upon it from the hills in the
distance,” says Janson.
Indeed.
With the dawning of the Renaissance, we
encounter our old friends Michelangelo and Leonardo, rivals in art and in life,
both working around 1500 AD and producing masterworks like
The Virgin of the Rocks a rare
painting by “lazy” Leonardo, and Michelangelo’s
Moses, a seated depiction of the Old
Testament superstar in San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Janson devotes a full 16
pages to the duo, with deep psychological and formal analyses of each… “This
dualism of body and spirit endows his (Michelangelo’s) figures with their
extraordinary pathos; outwardly calm they seem stirred by an overwhelmingly
psychic energy that has no release in physical action,” Janson opines on
Michelangelo’s Dying
Slave and
Rebellious
Slave.
Or of Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa: “The smile too may be read
in two ways; as the echo of a momentary mood, and as a timeless, symbolic
expression” that goes back to Archaic Greek sculpture. “Even the landscape in
the background, composed mainly of rocks and water, suggests elemental
generative forces.”
Is there life after the The Dynamic Duo?
Yes, there is. Plenty of it
Along comes the greatest printmaker of
his time, Albrecht Durer whom Janson describes thus: “After the breadth and
lyricism of the (watercolor)
We move into Mannerism and its
exponents Tintoretto and El Greco (“perhaps the greatest Mannerist painter”) and
art also goes north into the canvases of Hans Holbein the Younger and his
portly, robed and jeweled Henry VIII
of 1540.
As Janson whisks
us through the Baroque, we see the arts exploding into decorative effect of
stifling intensity. Baroque’s original meaning of “irregular, contorted,
grotesque” which Janson ultimately rejects, sometimes seems appropriate.
Dominikus
Zimmermann’s Interior,
Franz Hals' The Jolly Topper (detail) of 1627
Peter Paul Rubens is seen as the figure
who “finished what Durer had started a hundred years earlier – the breakdown of
the artistic barriers between North and South.”
Van Dyck, Franz Hals and Rembrandt soon are
everywhere. “The Return of the Prodigal
Son, painted a few years (in 1665) before (Rembrandt’s) death, is perhaps
his most moving religious picture,”
Professor Janson claims, “a humble world of bare
feet and ragged clothes”, he adds, perhaps a paean to mortality itself. Jacob
Van Ruisdael’s The Jewish Graveyard
of 1655, is even more foreboding.
By
the mid-18th century, we see a new nation emerging in the arts…
But
Throughout the
late 19th and 20th centuries, we see what seems to be a
postscript, an as-yet-unwritten history that is not yet vetted by the centuries.
“Modern” painting still seems fresh on its easel and far from thoroughly
examined. And while some of it seems destined to move us for the ages, like
Mondrian’s startlingly frank intuitive grids, other of it appears forgettable,
like Pop Art, which looks fabricated and crass. But the architecture of the 20th
century has much revolutionary fervor in the work of Wright, Gropius and Mies, a
restatement, perhaps, of the essential conceptual and structural ideals seen at
the side-by-side temples at
What Janson teaches us throughout his
text is that art is fun. His book is like a romp through millennia of visual
treats, authentic masterpieces achieved by history’s most distinguished minds.
The good professor’s prose is extraordinarily informative, and at the same time
accessible and entertaining. What more could we want to know about Jan Van
Eyck’s 1434 multipally-pregnant Giovanni
Arnolfini and His Bride (the bride and the bulbous mirror on the wall are
both highly rounded) than “the single candle in the chandelier, burning in broad
daylight, stands for the all-seeing Christ.”
A good reading reveals, however, that
it too is Professor Janson who is all-seeing. He awakens us to the foibles,
restive details, labyrinthine rationales and inscrutable intricacies and
sensibilities of world art in a fluid and digestible manner. Art history,
considered by many to be best left on the shelf, is not ponderous and heavy in
his hands, but in fact is a gossamer veil that the good professor lifts for us
with wit, precision and darned good writing. So if you’ve put your copy of
History of Art aside for 30 years,
take it down and look it over. You will be glad you did. In its
world-inside-a-world, you will find it is like an old friend rediscovered, one
who you always knew you loved, and could trust.
Art of the Passenger Train
I was thinking of writing an essay on certain edifying
aspects of architecture when I went through my photo files and came up with
three recent pictures that together express much, as in “a picture is worth a
thousand words.” And for those new to Nikitas3.com
who may not already know, trains are one of my passions, usually big, brutish
freight trains that thunder through the countryside with an implacable roar. But
the photographs presented here are from the softer side of trains, and are
related to two passenger terminals, one in
The first photograph, whose theme is “gold”, shows an ornate globe lamp in Grand
Central Terminal at
Anyone who has walked through Grand Central knows the heavenly power of its
interior arched ceiling, one of the highest in the world, and its massive iron
grillwork windows on the east and west flanks that give the place an air of air,
with light pouring in to the magnificent interior. But off to the south side in
a great hallway, where the light does not penetrate so well, these golden globe
lamps light those areas in ways that only a masterful design can.
What can you say about these lamps and their environs except that they truly
define excellence in form and in color. Just look at the gold plate and how it
utterly transforms, magnifies and intensifies the unadorned bulbs’ light in
contrast to the somber but forceful masonry and ironwork of the walls, interior
windows and skylight. These lamps make even the workaday light bulb an essential
element in creating sublime form.
Grand Central was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. A
total of 500,000 commuters are said to pass through the terminal daily. No
long-distance trains today call at Grand Central, however.
Step outside Grand Central onto
But what would the Golden Age of American passenger trains
be without the classic small-town passenger depot, as shown here in Chatham, a
town that once served as an intersection point for 5 railroads. The acclaimed 19th
century architect H. H. Richardson designed several stations along
The
Monet, with Pencil and Paper
The Unknown Monet,
Pastels and Drawings, Clark Art Institute,
Since time immemorial drawing has been the core discipline of
art, a challenging, frustrating, evocative, simple, and straightforward way for
the artist, with only pencil and paper, to show his cards and to say “this is
what I have”. Although drawings from ancient times have been lost through
millennia of decay, works on paper from the Medieval period forth have survived
and enriched our understanding of the underlying tradition that has produced the
triumph of Western art.
“Bring my paper and pencils, I absolutely need them,” French
painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) once said. And for those for whom “Monet” is
synonymous with Impressionist painting and radiant tracts of color, The
Unknown Monet, the small and elegant exhibit at The Clark Art Institute
in Williamstown, Massachusetts (in the northwest corner of the state), mounted
in association with the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and with the
cooperation of the Musee Marmottan-Monet in Paris, is eye-opening in more ways
than one.
Monet began as a caricaturist, and
based his early work on images he saw in
An early nature sketch like
Alley of Trees, Gournay (1857)
demonstrates mastery of form and space, a few wisps of pencil defining the whole
concept of a rural mystique. Another 1857 drawing,
Tree Trunks at La Mare au Clerc, shows an increasingly confident and
bold style describing nature directly. By 1864,
Port at Touques pictures a boat in harbor, with notable maritime
detail, an obvious testament to Monet’s power of observation and attention to
detail which later would manifest itself in another way – through the fastidious
application of highly-organized dabs of color to his Impressionist canvases.
His 1865 drawing Mouth of the Sea at Honfleur is said to be his only known
pen-and-ink drawing, and uses a dashing scribble technique that adds flair to
the seascape it describes. A later study of
Michel Monet Reading from 1885
accurately shows the intensity of a young boy lost in study, in a
rough-and-tumble sketch.
Throughout his career, “painter” Monet filled sketch pads
with drawings that served two purposes: First as utilitarian studies which he
did not in any way consider to be artworks in their own right. And second, and
revealingly, as a means of promoting his work through the expanding mass media
of the age. “It is important to recognize that in our epoch, you can’t do
anything without the press,” savvy Monet is reported to have said. And being an
astute marketer of his art, he used his black-and-white graphic work as entrée
into the world of media and mass reproduction, not possible with color.
Besides the drawings, this exhibit
smartly shows paintings that indicate where the drawings were going.
Towing a Boat, Honfleur (oil on canvas, 1864) shows not only
masterful gestures in the struggling fishermen at water’s edge, but a brilliant
control of color to reflect the atmospherics of coastal France, which are
further expressed in a series of pastels that also are included in this exhibit.
Seascape Storm (1866-67),
an oil on canvas from The Clark’s own collection, shows a dark, blunt,
straightforward style and composition that could be confused for Winslow Homer.
Two Anglers of 1882 also is a small oil on canvas that is shown with
two lead-up pencil studies nearby. The evolution is noteworthy.
Cliffs at Etretat (1885), oil on
canvas, also from the
Through media reproduction, print
lithography and repetitive series of paintings like his famous "haystack"
series, and his 30(!) canvases of the façade of the Flamboyant Gothic Rouen
Cathedral done in 1892-94, Monet used duplication, repetition and edition
techniques to spread his art, and his reputation, farther and wider. One of the
Past the turn of the century, Monet’s
draughtsmanship and painting were moving beyond the fringe. His loopy pencil
twirls represent the lily pads made famous in his series of paintings stretching
into the 1920s, two lesser examples of which are included in the
In another very small exhibit at the
Clark, two works side-by-side by Vincent Van Gogh and Jean-Francois Millet show
an almost identical figure sowing the fields of 19th century France.
Millet’s small oil on canvas, The Sower
(1865-66), was one study for his famous painting. In Millet’s harsh social
realism, Van Gogh saw the nobility of rural peasants as heroic figures. So right
next to the Millet is Van Gogh’s The Sower
(After Millet) pencil drawing of 1881, an homage to both Millet and his
subjects and cause. These two works are striking in their similarity and their
intent – to ennoble the struggling classes that art had ignored for centuries.
And they make clear that art never represents any single point in time, but is a
continuum of exploration, expression and vision.
A selection of drawings and paintings
on view in two smaller Clark galleries during the Summer of 2007 exhibits part
of a $40 million bequest by insurance industry magnate Sir Edwin AG Manton of
200 oil paintings, water colors and studies by Britons Thomas Gainsborough, one
of the premier portraitists of the Georgian era; John Constable, who
nostalgically rendered the English countryside in a way that tugged at the heart
of 20th century collector Manton; JMW Turner, known for his explosive renderings
of atmospherics, shipwrecks and natural disasters; and others.
In this exhibit, Gainsborough
(1727-1788) shows his wide-reaching talent by taking the genre of landscape and
executing it with aplomb. Rocky Wooded
Landscape with a Winding Track shows delicate detail in every inch, quite a
feat for a man known as a portraitist. JMW Turner (1775-1851) is represented
here by, among others, Sky and Sea of
1826, which could be mistaken for a 20th century modernist work, with
slashes of gray showing a turbulent seascape in minimalist fashion. One of the
most interesting studies in this group is Turner’s
Wrecked Cathedral, a small 1822 work
which shows a shattered cathedral, with light pouring in through the remaining
standing window. And John Constable (1776-1837) who said that “painting is but
another word for feeling” is represented by several works including
The Wheatfield, an oil on canvas from
1816 which evokes rural British life in relatively straightforward terms, with
the wheat lovingly detailed as if the artist truly adored the land he was
describing.
Ultimately, this entire exhibit begs a question: What is the role of landscape in Western art? Will it continue to play second fiddle to the masterful figures and portraits of the ages, or did it come to challenge us to see the canvas in a broader context in which color, form and line can converge in creating original visions that are outside of the history of artistic imagery, perhaps the basis for the abstract art of Jackson Pollock. Monet certainly showed a penchant for that theory; his Rouen paintings are close to Pollock in the vitality of their flatness. While landscapes in Renaissance works like Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks of 1485 or even Mona Lisa of 1503-05 (a painting which Leonardo is said to have carried with him and worked on until his death) serve as a dramatic backdrop and counterpoint to the main figures of the works -- possibly as a way to further push the entire canvas toward originality -- perhaps the new possibilities posed by landscape art, along with the endlessly expressive subject of rural Europe itself started to develop an artistic following later on in the millennium. Was it a reaction to increasingly urbanized society’s detachment from a much-idealized rural past?
By the time Millet was working, however, any sentimental
attachment to the landscape was subsumed in the artistic elite’s final
recognition, out loud, that there was nothing nostalgic about the brutal life in
the countryside, a life from which the great artists, patrons, critics and
collectors of any era traditionally have been thoroughly detached and insulated.
The review below was posted May 25, 2007
Clark Art Institute Expansion: Progress or Problematic?
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts is one of the nation's leading cultural venues. Opened in 1955 to exhibit paintings, drawings, sculpture, antiques and silver collected by Sterling and Francine Clark, Williamstown was chosen over Cooperstown, New York and over a site at 72nd Street and Park Avenue in New York City. Mr. Clark's father and grandfather had served as trustees of Williams College, which is contiguous to the museum site. Housing art from the Renaissance through the 20th century, "The Clark" is a treasure for the people of the region, and a center for the study of art for Williams students. It also has served since 1972 as host of a prestigious masters degree program in art history, in conjunction with the college.
Designed by architect Daniel Perry under the close supervision of Mr. Clark, the original museum is an elegant one-floor neoclassical design that is clad in white Vermont marble. It is one of the most beautiful museums in America and shows Mr. Clark - a Singer sewing machine heir, military man, engineer and swashbuckling explorer - as not only an epicurean in collecting fine art but as a discerning and intelligent conceptualist as well. From its columned portico to its sublime galleries that are lit both naturally and artificially, The Clark is based on tasteful old-world sensibilities, while its collection is a joy to behold. From Piero della Francesca's Virgin Enthroned with Four Angels (1460-70, one of Mr. Clark's first acquisitions) to William Bouguereau's racy Nymphs and Satyr (1873, it hung for years opposite the bar in the Hoffman House Hotel in New York City) to John Singer Sargent's exotic Smoke of Ambergris (1880), the museum exudes dignity and grace. Gorgeous interior spaces akin to those of an intimate mansion offer human-scale galleries for observing the collection, and for viewing the pastoral land and lilypad pond outside.
In 1973, new exhibition, office, conference, study and library spaces were opened to accommodate the increasing activity associated with The Clark. Designed by Pietro Belluschi and The Architects' Collaborative of Cambridge, Massachusetts, this separate structure also became the new museum entrance and is connected to the 1955 building by an enclosed, elevated walkway. It is routinely modernist in subdued mauve granite and has a three-story skylit atrium for a lobby, a space that could better have been used to reduce all the climbing that the current layout requires, with exhibition spaces on the ground floor, and then way up on the third floor. This atrium is a reminder of the power of style over substance. In contrast to Perry/Clark's more modest but more natural and thoughtful design, Belluschi's seems overly conscious.
In 2001 the Clark board of directors began to consider a new master plan for the 140-acre campus. Eventually 1995 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Tadao Ando was chosen to develop a finalized design for The Clark's new century, and he has proposed two buildings (with construction on the first begun in 2006) along with a stepped artificial reflecting pool, and new parking lots and roadways to totally re-make the Clark site. Unfortunately Ando's idea not only adds a third architectural style to the museum, but has a scattered site plan that seems geared to the prevailing trend in museum design that "more is more".
Top to bottom: 1) Daniel Perry and Sterling Clark collaborated to produce a one-floor museum of refined sensibilities and proportions. This was the original entrance. 2) Pietro Belluschi's 1973 addition is serviceable modernism, but hardly equal to Perry/Clark's vision. 3) Ando's blank running walls will block the view of this beautiful lily pond. 4) Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center is what might be called Microwave Modernism, a tepid attempt to recreate the genuine modernist architecture of the Bauhaus. The running walls (left and right) have no structural meaning. They are only design elements, and thus are superfluous. The extensive land clearing required for this center was unnecessary because The Clark (5) easily could have attached its new entry, patron facilities, galleries and conservation center to the rear of the original museum, with significantly less enviro impact than Ando's plan. It certainly would have been advisable to put all new public spaces on the same level as the existing galleries (behind the taller windows) to accommodate a growing elderly demographic. Ando's entry pavilion will be located to the left, in a separate building. Photographer is standing where the reflecting pools will be located.
Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York City was opened in 1959, a battle between function and form has been waged in the construction of art museums. Since its inception, Wright's spiraling ramp design has been considered architecturally brilliant, but an awkward space for the display of art. An austere box-like addition in the 1990s has remedied some of the Guggenheim's problems, but in a less than aesthetic way. The trend since Wright, however, has been to employ "famous" architects to make new museums more splashy in order to draw attention to and, ostensibly, to add prestige to the collection at hand. Lamentably contemporary architecture has suffered as much as contemporary art, and the result has been less than promising. Frank Gehry's garish Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, a sister to the New York institution, is a sterling example - overwrought, overstyled, and clumsy in appearance. And the new Museum of Modern Art headquarters in New York City by Yoshio Taniguchi is another example of backfire. It is but a series of flamboyant, oversized minimalist boxes disconnected from any cohesive plan, contravening the core concept of Western modernism that reduction still demands high order.
Ando's plan for the Clark is more of the same. For photos and renderings, see www.clarkart.edu/the_clark_story/content.cfm?ID=257&nav=2#
First it seems strange that in a museum culture so intensely attuned to modern-day "environmentalism" that Ando's plan has been allowed to proceed. It includes two separate buildings that are scattered across the beautiful Clark property. The Stone Hill Center, currently under construction 800 feet south of the Belluschi building on a once-wooded hillside that has been clear-cut, will include "contemporary" art galleries and an art conservation center that has been associated with the museum since 1977, while the other closer-in structure will act as the Clark's new gateway pavilion - entry, ticket desk, bookstore, lobby, exhibition spaces, restaurant and conference rooms. In a true test of environmental awareness, these two buildings should simply have been attached to the existing Perry/Clark or Belluschi structures in order to reduce widespread disruption of The Clark's pastoral setting.
The new entry pavilion is problematic in its own right. New England obviously is a cool or cold region most of the year, with only temperate summers. Therefore New England architecture should reflect its environment with heavily insulated buildings and with glass expanses minimized in order to reduce heat migration out of the interior in winter. But Ando's plan for the Clark gateway (which is not yet under construction but which has been revealed in models and renderings) is the opposite. Its south-facing facade is all glass, an apparent attempt to portray the museum's ecological awareness by taking advantage of solar energy to heat the building. But solar has proven ineffective in New England. Insulated curtains inside the glass would need to be manipulated constantly to prevent heat from escaping from the interior on cloudy days in winter or at night, or to keep out the blinding sun and excess heat in the spring, summer and fall.
What is more noteworthy about the Ando plan is the way that the minimalist entry pavilion blends (or rather fails to blend) with the original 1955 Clark galleries. First it is severe in style, and not in a positive way. Second it incorporates a series of unnecessary and blank running walls (an Ando trademark) that appear as if they are intended to herd visitors, or otherwise restrict their movement. But third, it is not even attached to the museum but is 100 feet away. Thus to access the main galleries after buying a ticket, one must either walk back outside and then re-enter the museum (not good in winter, or in rain, after you have checked your coat) or descend into an underground gallery, then go up again inside the museum. With the Clark's target adult demographic statistically increasing in age, this is hardly an auspicious choice. And why would anyone wish to put art treasures, along with many museum offices, underground with a reflecting pool nearby holding thousands of gallons of water overhead?
Meanwhile the shallow stepped reflecting pools (designed by the firm Reed Hillenbrand of Watertown, Massachusetts, a total of an entire acre of water. Pools are another Ando trademark) will make this rural New England site look more like Los Angeles. The Ando plan also has suggested that one of the pools will be used for public skating in winter. This seems unlikely to come to fruition. Towns all over New England long ago abandoned outdoor skating rinks because of endless maintenance demands in the fickle weather (snow removal, uneven melting and re-freezing, a constant need to flood the rink to keep it flat and free from bumps) to sky-high insurance costs over potential injuries to skaters. Meanwhile the large amounts of electricity needed to pump and purify the water to keep the pools clean in spring, summer and fall is yet another wasteful aspect of the plan.
Added up, all these modifications are neither ecological nor in tune with the Clark's natural environment. And they are in fact expensive. What we are seeing in Ando's plan is the triumph of style over substance. Art museums should consider the exhibition of their works first and foremost. But the new focus on architecture is yet another distraction from the role of the museum, particularly in the case of a low-key and highly distinguished one like the Clark Art Institute.
The Clark's directors have been drawn into a public relations joust in a way that Sterling Clark would not have approved of, while the questionable style of Ando reflects a trendy ethic that is sweeping the world anew today, a love affair with a 20th century minimalist style that never really will go out of style. But like all art, reductive architecture is a challenge; it can appear cold and lifeless in the hands of an unskilled designer, or within an incongruous environment, and the trained eye eventually will unmask that which is disingenuous as happened with the Museum of Modern Art in New York which got skeptical reviews after years of breathless anticipation. But no matter, The Clark is moving full steam ahead, and its directors will recognize the light of the locomotive coming toward them only after it is too late to realize that it indeed is not the end of the tunnel.
Tadao Ando said about the project: "My design for the Clark integrates with the beauty of the natural surroundings and creates opportunities for people to commune with nature." This isn't Sophocles, but rather is a pedestrian declaration that reflects a somewhat banal but comforting and politically-correct thought. More crucial, however, is that it is false. His plan does not harmonize with nature, but seeks to marginalize nature with a heavy-handed footprint and a style that is executed in a way that is out of character with the Williamstown environment. The directors of the Clark Art Institute could have done much better than this. It will be interesting to see how it is received when completed, especially among those willing to look beyond the ballyhoo.
The review below was posted on March 24, 2007
Athens-Sparta
When the names "Athens" and "Sparta" are mentioned, a panoply of emotions and associations is evoked. "Culture" and "democracy" are tied to Athens, while "militarism", "modesty" and "deprivation" are connected with Sparta. These two physically small but mythologically grand Greek city-states were alternately allies, adversaries and enemies. They were "oil and water" to the casual observer, but in fact they were more like whiskey and gasoline - volatile, forceful, explosive and truly memorable in their own ways. Whatever the thought, they were two of the most noteworthy social constructs in history, and this exhibit brings to light their similarities (after all, they both were Greek) and differences, and some surprising ironies.
Entering the exhibit in the intimate, subterranean Onassis Cultural Center just off Fifth Avenue in New York City, one is struck by many familiar-looking artifacts like vases, sculptures, reliefs and coins. But one of the characteristics of the story of Greece is its ability to surprise us over and over, like the fact that Athena, patron goddess of Athens, was revered even in Sparta and was often portrayed in Spartan art. The reason is simple: She is said to have sprung from the split skull of the greatest Greek god of all, Zeus.
Or that coins themselves long were considered too materialistic for the immaterial life of Sparta.
Sparta ultimately turned to martial life because the small 15,000-square-mile southern Greek Peloponnesian peninsula that includes it was stirred by the in-migration of northern tribes including Dorians. Athens, on the other hand, remained little affected by this particular migration. Ancient Greece, like many locales in human history, was a place of ongoing warfare among rudimentary tribes. Because of the peninsula's rugged topography, moving small distances of only 30 miles could mean entry into enemy territory, so Spartan preparedness became essential.
In addition, Spartan dependency on slave labor (helots) needed to be supported by physical force.
Starting in the Geometric period (1125 BC - 700 BC, after the fall of the Mycenean culture) Greek vases were decorated not with human figures but in simple geometric patterns, several of which are exhibited at Onassis. In this period, Greece saw the beginning of the development of the Greek alphabet ("alpha" and "beta" are the first 2 letters); the life of Homer; the establishment of the Olympic Games, and more. Athens and Sparta were insignificant settlements that worked to survive against the long odds offered by nature and war. They evolved slowly, and life was brutal and short. Beginning in the 6th century, however, with the rise of Solon at its start and Cleisthenes at its end, Athens began to emerge into the light of history with the revolutionary idea called human freedom which encouraged its greatness in every way, politically, intellectually, artistically and technologically.
The Greek Archaic period in art (700 BC - 480 BC) marked the birth of a shift away from the Egyptian and Persian styles to authentically Greek and Western form that shapes our world today. Archaic sculpture remained stiff and mechanical, like Goddess with a Pomegranate, at the very bottom of this page (scroll down, on the right) an image from 580 BC. Slowly, however, Athenian art moved away from Archaicism, shifting dramatically during the Golden Age of Pericles (mid 400s BC), while Spartan art simply ceased to develop.
But "Athens-Sparta" shows us something striking, as evidenced in the Spartan bronze called Figurine of a Girl Runner from around 550 BC (above, left). Sparta was located in a rural, landlocked and poor part of Greece called Laconia, which gives us the word "laconic" meaning "of few words" and "unembellished", as Sparta itself was. Laconian art too was modest, no doubt by dint of its isolation and poverty. It specialized in small bronzes, and avoided heroic or outsized stone carving which would have been considered an extravagance.
While the time period of Figurine would seem appropriately Archaic, this bronze (only about 5 inches tall) of a muscular, running girl is representative first of the physical prowess of the Spartan woman, but more importantly and surprisingly of modernist audacity for its time, breaking the stiff Archaic mold long before the later Athenian bronze Statuette of an Athlete (above, middle) restated Archaicism fully 50 years later. Her lively physical gesture, with its characteristically thick warrior legs, was virtually unknown at the time, so the advanced capabilities of the Spartans in art is evident. Thus their shift to militarism represented not a lack of talent, but a necessary channeling of their social energy into military precision, just as Western art has declined precipitously since the 1850s as great minds have fled into the exploding field of technology.
There are many examples in this exhibit of Spartan achievement in bronze casting, including a nice mirror with a female's form as its handle. But perhaps the ultimate story of Sparta is told in the somewhat primitive Grave Stele of a Young Man, from around 460 BC (above, right), made when the legendary Greek sculptors like Calamis and Phidias were creating revolutionary art in Athens, while this work shows stasis in Laconia. This stele certainly may not represent the highest in Spartan art for its time, but for the purpose of history, it might as well do so.
The rest of "Athens-Sparta" is replete with the fare that makes any show of Greek art worth our time. You never know what you will see. It is telling that the Black Figure Lekythos by Athenian vase painter Taleides (540 BC) pictures a warrior readying himself to leave home, surrounded by family, as was the tradition. Thus even Athenian art makes repeated references to the glory of military preparedness, while one entire marble stele exhibited in "Athens-Sparta" is dedicated to Accounts of Expenses of Athenian Naval Operations in Corcyra, a reminder of how much the ancient world, including Athens, relied on military strength, and how the Athenians themselves wished to preserve, even in stone, the history of their warfare. Athena herself was a war goddess! So the idea of Athens as only a pacifist and intellectual polis is debunked. Such places perished quickly in a world ruled by the sword.
Athens and Sparta finally clashed for 25 years over a convoluted set of self-perceptions, alliances and allegiances that brought them into conflict. Athens lost in 404 BC, but remained a focal point for Greek culture for the rest of antiquity. Meanwhile the remembered contribution of Sparta to the world has been the regimented style of history's militaries, another cultural "art form" perhaps? But wait, there's more. As those famous 300 Spartan warriors' stood valiantly at Thermopylae, it is said that their defiance alone marked a turning point and saved Greek culture from eastern domination, paving the way for the triumph of the West.
In other words, whatever the Greeks did, it persisted into our times in one way or another. The repeated references to the warrior culture in Greek history, mythology and art is but a reminder that the martial and deprived life of Sparta was as much an influence on, and model for, our world as Athenian epicureanism was. The Greeks just had a special way of doing things that made the world stand up and take notice, both then... and now.
Why Charioteer?
In Delphi, Greece, archeologists unearthed a statue which is the earliest bronze original from the Classical 5th century BC of Greek life. The Delphi Charioteer, pictured below, left, which now is in the Delphi Museum, is dated from 474 BC, and originally was part of a larger sculpture that included four horses and a chariot (or quadrigae in Latin). It was made to glorify a winning charioteer whose name, and whose horses and chariot as well, are lost to time, and was dedicated to the Delphi Apollo by Polyzalos, the ruler of Gela.
Charioteer is not attributed to any of the great Greek artists, but his very form speaks volumes. It is the first known sculpture from the Greek world to have a "modern" and natural physical disposition and drapery design. Previously sculpture in Greece reflected the ethos of Persia and even Egypt 2,000 years before. It was called Archaic, and figures were stiff, looked dead ahead, and had mechanical drapery forms. Goddess With A Pomegranate from 580 BC, below right, which today is in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin, is typical Greek Archaic. It looks wooden, is poorly proportioned, and has a schematized and unnatural drapery.
So the ideas and forms in Archaic art represented that which the Greeks would come to see as anathema to a forward-looking Western culture. Imagine an airliner that did not describe natural principles, like the Goddess' unnatural drapery, or that was ungainly and oddly proportioned. It would not fly. So Charioteer represents a great leap ahead for art, and for "modern" form in general, and thus a conversation about our concept of form, and its triumph, can appropriately be tied to this seminal bronze. No longer was this upstart race called The Greeks willing to hew to ancient superstitions and styles. They planned to move forward in every way -- artistically, politically, philosophically and technologically. Charioteer marks the first step of our long and very interesting journey toward Western supremacy in form.
