The Hispanic Society of America, New York City

It has been forty years since my last visit to this Museum. I am happy to report that it remains exactly as I remember having seen it all those many years ago. Happy because it retains the old style museum presentation: there are wood and glass fronted vitrines stuffed with artifacts, the paintings and the decorative arts are mixed together, and throughout the exhibition area things all seem to be on top of one another. Almost everything is dimly lighted as if there has never been an awareness here of the history of modern light bulbs. I am all in favor of this kind of thing: the United States has more than enough of those bland, antiseptic display houses that pass for museums.

The museum sits just off Broadway with its back along 155th Street. An entrance at the Broadway side takes the visitor across a paved brick courtyard to the museum building. When it was originally built the entrance was from 156th Street and the museum property filled three quarters of the length of that long city block. The campus was divided into three long horizontal parts on the width of the block. The first was a set of stairs up from the street, the next was the open courtyard and the museum then occupied the last third of the width of the block. That would make the building approximately fifty feet deep by about one hundred fifty feet long. Later constructions on either side of the building were added for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Numismatic Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian. Those latter two have moved to the former U.S. Customs House at the foot of Broadway in Battery Park. Those buildings here are empty at present and it appears that all of this has been long forgotten by the powers that be. The area of the original stairway off the street was closed many years ago and The North Building was erected there. On the Museum web site the hours for this building are posted but it is never revealed what is on exhibit there: I believe it is used for special exhibits.

Built in 1908 the building is, as was the custom in those days, Beaux Arts Classic Revival. But the interior is Spanish Renaissance. It consists of an entry room with two small stairways on either side, some rooms further off to the sides, and then one passes into the main room which has the dimensions of the exterior of the building running to the visitor’s left and right. This room is open to the skylighted ceiling and there is on the second level a gallery all around the room. The whole of the interior is covered in unglazed molded, decorative terra cotte. Had I not been told that it was Spanish Renaissance I would have thought it was English so pronounced is the sense of Robert Adam and Grinling Gibbons. The main floor is covered with three inch hexagonal terra cotte tiles and they have that beautiful soft warmth of old tile that looks like leather.

Among the decorative items there are things here that one will not see in any other museum in the City, writing desks, cabinets, etc., and in marquetry that is truly exquisite. As might be expected of a catholic culture there are many beautiful religious pieces in gold, silver, and wood. There is also a superb collection of Spanish ceramics, or as it is sometimes called, Hispano Moresque ceramics. As I have fallen in love with ceramics these past few years I was thrilled to discover this. Having seen approximately 70 American museums in the last three years, each of which has a collection of ceramics of one or another nationality, I cannot name another one that has a Hispano Moresque collection the equal of this.

In the space on the main floor under the overhead galleries there are more decorative pieces and some of the paintings. Originally there were windows in the back wall but those have been closed and on the first floor those openings now hold mounted textiles…the Moorish pieces are dazzling!

Upstairs the walls are lined with the vitrines and above them the larger paintings. There are, on view during my visit, three Goya’s and three Velasquez’s. I believe there is also the work of Ribera, Zurbaran, and Murillo…I didn’t add that in my notes. There are three by El Greco which is interesting in that his work was not “rediscovered” until just about the time this museum was built.

I was first taken to this museum by a Colombian friend who was, if nothing else, a Spanish chauvinist. He had taken it upon himself to educate me in Spanish art, claiming that it was far superior to that of the Italian Renaissance. As a person educated in the American public school system, of course I would have found it almost impossible to agree with his bias.

However, in my museum travels the past few years I have been astounded by the richness and the majesty and the poetry of the paintings from the Spanish golden age that I have encountered: on this visit I wanted to retrace the original ground. While I greatly admire the Italian Renaissance works with their translucent and dazzling colors I have now fallen in love with the rich earth tones and the golden light of classic Spanish paintings. In no other school of painting do those depicted live so deliberately and so intensely. They all seem to have what the Spanish describe as solero, soul, and they have it to the nth degree.

Unfortunately, I did not find the paintings here to be of that kind. In fact they were rather more similar to the Italian school and so I can understand why I was not so terribly impressed those many years ago.

The most renowned painting in the collection is Goya’s The Duchess of Alba. This painting was from the artist’s personal collection and there is the ongoing dispute, were they are were they not lovers. Regardless of that it is a painting which shows the mastery of the artist with its black lace skirt over a black dress and the loose and dramatic brush work of a man well up on his craft. As in all of Goya’s work there is the evident love of painting and of humanity.

Recently I have been looking at the work of Velasquez trying to understand the basis for his acclaim. Last year in Boston, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I studied his portrait of Phillip IV and tried to decide why it would be considered a great painting. It is a life size figure dressed in black, similar to a painting of another man here. The ground is a suffused light. It is simple and straight forward but there cannot be any doubt that this man, standing quietly but high above us, is The King. Facing that painting from across the room there is a similar portrait of a woman of the court painted by another artist and she stands against a wall on a tile floor. She wears so much jewelry we know she has to be wealthy. Her black dress is a master work of intricate tailoring. In sum, the painting is overly busy; it has too much information. Turning again to the Velasquez I could understand that the King was the subject of an exercise in the art of understatement.

There is a similar Velasquez painting in this museum, Portrait of a Little Girl. It is a small painting and it hangs beside and near the bottom of the full sized figure of the man. This young girl wears a simple chemise, her hair is neatly combed, her gaze is relaxed and she sits quietly and obediently for the artist. She has given him her complete attention. In the course of his work the artist has captured her essence.

The portrait hangs on the east wall of the upstairs gallery. Turning your back to it and looking across the whole of the museum and seeing the paintings of the richly costumed royal personalities and the writhing saints and the theatrical drama of the great themes reenacted in oil on canvas, you turn back to it realizing that it is the only painting of its kind in this museum. Its power is in its simplicity. As it should be for a girl this age, she is humility, charm, and innocence personified. And so that is the key, for me, of Velasquez’ art: the tremendous power of the understatement, the tremendous power of purity and simplicity. In this life that is so rare that it is surely the greatest of the great themes.

This collection was the concept and the work of Archer Milton Huntington, (1870-1955.) In addition to being fascinated by collections within museums, I am also fascinated by those we acknowledge as connoisseurs: unless one knows his subject and has extremely fine discernment, a collection can be an embarrassment. In fact, there are examples in American museums of those who bought “everything” in order to cover their bets. Sad. Because the work here is so extraordinary, I think we should want to know more about Mr. Huntington and why a person would choose, at nineteen, to be a connoisseur rather than an artist.

Since its establishment, this museum has continued to acquisition artworks. The brochure claims 15,000 prints and 176,000 photographs, none of which are on view. This makes me wonder where those items are, why they are kept in storage, (for what purpose?), and to wonder if the museum has plans to expand their facilities. If so, I would think the two empty buildings on the campus would be the logical space. As they have been empty for many years, I also wonder if there might be something wrong with those buildings?

If the museum does expand I hope they will not conform to the prevailing norm and give us a nondescript “modern” museum with an exterior designer shell: I would much prefer to see someone with the courage to continue the Old Style: a living still life rich with textures and colors.

There was an unexpected bonus in my visit: a greater understanding of Picasso. We know that Picasso was a Spanish artist but he is so identified with the school of Paris that we sometimes forget that. This has to do as well with our own lack of knowledge regarding Spanish art. But having just read three volumes of the Richardson biography I know that when in Spain Picasso traveled extensively to see Spanish museums. In this museum I believe I can see what he might have seen there.

An artist well represented here, and one I do not care for, Sorolla, exemplifies for me the decadent end of the western tradition. Having mastered that tradition at the age of fourteen, I can imagine that Picasso might have had somewhat the same response to Sorolla’s work. He then asked himself, as an artist, where can I go, what can I do? There were abundant examples in Spanish art to show him the way forward.

For example: on a column behind The Duchess of Alba there is a small, six by nine inch, carved wood panel, Christ Bearing the Cross. The cross is on a diagonal across the top of the format, the figure is weighed down, the knees are bent, and the head rolls back. The body fills the format. The cross is across the shoulders but the right arm, supporting it, seems to rise out of the head. Anatomically it is wrong but compositionally it is right. On the column next over there is a depiction of one of the female saints. The folds of her skirt have the sharp accordion geometry of a folded paper fan. In both of these works we can see the human figure as expressive form just as Picasso used it. And we can also see in these details that there are similarities in works that Picasso made.

Under the overhead east gallery there are two marble tombs which were originally quite tall. In order to show the whole of them within this reduced space, they have been dismantled and the various components have been reassembled as an artwork within a new format. If Picasso had seen something like this in a Spanish museum it can be understood as one of the inspirations for cubism as well as his later work with its dislocations and reassignments.

But the strongest influence is in the ceramics. In particular, on one of the chargers, against a geometric Moorish ground, a cobalt blue line meanders until it returns to its starting point and concludes the silhouette of a bull. The head of that bull turns his face to look at us wide eyed with wonder. That painted line is pure Picasso…just as there is so much in this museum that calls him to mind. Yes, he is first and foremost a Spanish painter and if we do not recognize that the fault is ours. It is interesting that while an awareness of his presence is so constant here, there is not one of his works on view. Hispanic Society? Shame. Shame. Shame.

http://www.hispanicsociety.org/

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City: Sejima+Nishizawa/SANAA

Back in the 1980’s when the art world was awash with loose money and names and reputations were being made on a daily basis by the mere opening of arriviste designer handbags, and considering the art that was achieving success and renown, mostly works executed overnight in East Village cold water flats in shades of day glow orange and chartreuse, with nary an indication of draftsmanship, or, if so, the worse the better, so it seemed to me, I made the decision to remove myself from this too, too heady environment. Thus I have missed knowing first hand almost all of the history of what has come to be known as Contemporary Art. Reading in a recent New York Times article that a New Museum of Contemporary Art had opened I thought I should wander down to one of my old stomping grounds, The Bowery, to check it out. Doing some research on their web site I was astonished to learn that the museum has been in existence, in one setting or another, some thirty years.

The photographs of the new building were rather impressive and the Times had many nice things to say about the venue. But that made me somewhat wary as I have discerned of late that the Times has something nice to say about every art venue in the City. It has made we wonder if perhaps they have joined the tourist industry alliance known as the CVB, The Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, one of which every self promoting American city now has. (When times are tough the tough hang together for those Yankee dollars.) On the other hand the present crop of Times reporters might very well be the sons and daughters of those moneyed art collectors of the 80’s and perhaps they simply don’t know any better, even with the overlay of their many MFA’s.

From the outside the museum is a stack of rectangular boxes shifted off-axis around a central core, the elevator shaft. In silhouette it looks like a generic, vertical slice of the New York skyline. Whereas the museum guide states that this off-axis provides a variety of open and fluid galleries, the three galleries are in fact each like the others but in different dimensions. From the elevator one enters each rectangular gallery in exactly the same way and sees in each a polished cement floor and soft off white standard museum walls. Because this area of the Bowery is the center for the restaurant supply business, the origin of the High Tech look of the seventies when neighboring SoHo first took off as the art center in New York, acknowledgement of that industrial presence has been made…there are no fine materials here, nor is there any designer chic.

The interior of the elevator is chartreuse. It is a rather jolting surprise when the doors open. But because the rest of the building is so conservative and so “old style” in the standard new museum vernacular, it made me want to laugh. If the management is so fond of chartreuse, I was sorry they had not hired Rem Koolhaus. His Seattle Public Library is one of the great buildings in America. It is twelve stories high; it has no walls, no doors, and no windows. (Only Rem Koolhaus could figure that one out and make it happen.) As in this building, all of the fittings in that building are standard supply house issue. There is no opulence in the material or the in impression created. But where he uses red the red is used as both design and decoration. Where he uses orange the orange is both design and decoration. And where he uses chartreuse the chartreuse is both design and decoration. It does not shock, it celebrates: Rem Koolhaus is a man who knows what to do with chartreuse. Needless to say I found a cement and off white building with a chartreuse elevator extremely pale by comparison and, as I have said, laughable, with mirth rather than derision.

The exterior of this building is covered by a mesh that looks to be stainless steel somewhat reminiscent of a chain link fence. Rem Koolhaus draped a diamond lattice of 2 by 6 inch I-beams over the whole of his space, (his library is not a building but a defined space), twelve stories high by one block square at ground level. This museum building creates the impression of coolness and soft reverence: Koolhaus throws caution to the wind. This building has settled into place…on the Bowery. At The Seattle Public Library the future has arrived.

As with the new Morgan Library and Museum I am once again perplexed why so much time and work would go to making a building that has such limited gallery space. There are only three here in a building with seven floors. (Because museum floors have high ceilings, this translates to about fourteen stories.) The gallery showing the work of Tomma Abts has fifteen painting each 15 by 18 inches. They almost fill the gallery and I cannot image that much more work than this could have been displayed, or that many very large works could be accommodated. The public spaces on the street level are small, minimalist and comfortable, and I am happy to report that the coffee bar has, for a museum dining experience, less pretension, thank goodness, than the average SoHo eatery just a few blocks west.

The most interesting and exciting architectural moment at this museum is in the stairway leading from the fourth floor gallery to the third, or vice versa depending on your route of travel. Every new museum of art being built these days has one area, usually the atrium, in which the architects are allowed to develop a space which is a statement of pure architecture. I understand architecture as an intellectual discipline in which three components, form, scale, and proportion are employed to define a space, that space generally understood to have a function which the form then follows. When the atrium is not the moment, it is sometimes a stairway, and that stairway is not always on the main path, as were the Grand Staircases of the museums of the Beaux Arts era, but a private moment tucked away for the adventurous visitor and the exploring mind. The best of that lot is a stairway at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art: rising in a straight run in six stages it is all elegance all the time.

In this museum the stairway is only about three or four feet wide in two long flights with one landing. In keeping with the low income working class character of the neighborhood, the steps are cement, the walls are painted white, and the railing is standard industrial pipe railing. As with all great architecture this is wonderful because of the dimensions and the proportions. Here the proportions are exquisite made all the more exciting by the narrowness and the pitch. Giving it a sudden and unexpected moment of bliss is a large window on the landing with a frank and open view onto the roof of the commercial/industrial building next door…a standard New York City tar papered rooftop. The contrast of that to this white interior space is delightful. Seeing it, I thought how wonderful it would be to pass this window and to see the people who live in that building sun bathing in the nude, in the sense of being a living tableau. It made me aware that in New York City one is able to live an anonymous life but that one has no privacy whatsoever. (That does not, however, stop some New Yorkers from sun bathing nude.)

The architects are Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA. A nice exhibition of their work and working method is shown at the back of the street level floor behind the café. It appears that they have embraced the rectangular box as their signature shape and their work shows a preoccupation for arranging the boxes in various configurations, both horizontally and vertically, as attached or separated entities. Considering that for the last one hundred years reinforced concrete has made it possible to make buildings in any shape whatsoever, I am always mystified why architects continue to think…inside the box. I am also perplexed why an architect would make a building that blends with its neighbors when those neighbors are industrial suppliers and skid row flop houses. (And so obviously en route to being eradicated by the visibly rising wave of the next generation.) At the beginning of the twentieth century architects were shouting: “Come! Let me lead you to the future!” Recently built American museums indicate that architects have become the Uriah Heeps of the corporate sponsors.

If museums of modern and contemporary art want to impress the public with their modern and contemporary sensibilities I would suggest that they start by commissioning buildings that look other than as if they had been Made Yesterday. To that end I suspect that they will have to educate their corporate backers, those rigid guardians of the discrete and conservative architectural utterance, to an awareness that architecture can be, and should be, something more than merely an inoffensive, nondescript rectangular box, whether at attention, in recline, or askew.

http://www.newmuseum.org/about/new_building/

Compare the “new” museum to this old Seattle Library.
http://www.spl.org/images/slideshow/slideshow.asp