It seems to me that when I was in Washington in 1964 I went to the National Portrait Gallery. I don’t remember where it was. But I think I remember seeing lots of portraits of George Washington and many now forgotten members of the early congress. It was the kind of exhibition that can make you think that American history is dull. With that in mind I had no intention on this visit to see it again or to visit the American Art Museum. Knowing that the Smithsonian was once referred to as the nation’s attic, I imagined that the collection would be nothing more than the rejects from other museums. But I wanted to see this museum specifically to see the glass canopy that Norman Foster, Foster and Partners, had designed and built over the courtyard, 2007. Having seen that I decided to give the museum a little attention. In making my plans I had left Sunday open in the event that I wanted to see one of the other museums a second time and after spending five hours here on Saturday I returned and gave it another five hours on Sunday: this museum is a great discovery!
The building, originally the Patent Office, is Greek revival and was built in four stages. It has National Landmark status. It is almost two city blocks long and one city block wide. During the Civil war it was used as a hospital for the injured troops. Walt Whitman worked here as a nurse. He called this the noblest building in the city. It is indeed grand. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball was held on the third floor.
The Courtyard canopy and the public space created beneath it are wonderful. But I have read that other public organizations have subsequently engaged Foster and Partners to do the same for their buildings. I am always flabbergasted that this country is such a land of conformists and that art museums, of all places, represent the high end of this will to conformity. Why can’t one canopy be enough?
Historic architecture is that which has both original design and original engineering. Almost every building that Frank Lloyd Wright designed was considered historic architecture from the moment it was completed. He designed over 600 buildings. While each of them bears the stamp of his genius, no two are alike. Let’s see the current crop of contemporary starchitects step to the plate! But first, let’s see museums and public institutions demand buildings that are original works of art! …as is this lovely canopy!
The canopy is one of those art works that is experienced and felt rather than analyzed and comprehended. It is modern art with traditional values. While it is an overhead cover it is at the same time embracing. Sitting in the courtyard I could feel my spirit rise …not high or into another time dimension…it simply rose above the situation and hovered. “Oh, the achieve of …the thing!”
This museum is huge. The woman at the information desk told me that if you just walk through all the galleries it is the equivalent of walking 16 blocks. I figure that is probably a little over a mile. Imagine art works on the walls on both sides. That is a lot of art. The literature claims that 7,000 artists are represented in paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography, folk art, and crafts. And these are not left over’s or also ran’s; the whole who’s who of American art is represented and on display.
In the third floor contemporary galleries Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral can be seen. It too is huge, about thirty feet long and ten feet high. Next to it, and holding its own, at about eight feet high and three and one half feet wide is Jesus Moroles’ Granite Weaving, a wall mounted construction in gray granite with a wonderful texture. I have seen Moroles’ work in public settings and in several museums outside New York and I think he is one of the very best 20th Century American sculptors. He works always in granite, which he loves, usually rose granite, and his work always glows with his love of his medium and his material. Another of his works, smaller but equally impressive, is on the first floor. I am tone deaf when it comes to sculpture but his work always rings with a note of purity.
At the G Street entrance there is Vaquero, the Luis Jimenez larger than life-sized bucking bronco with the vaquero hanging on for dear life with a pistol high over head blasting the silence. I had seen this outside the El Paso Art Museum. Jimenez is another unknown great American sculptor, a master of form, a latter day Rodin. He works in fiberglass and color. Bravo!
Down the hall there are works by Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Milton Avery, and one of the best Larry Rivers paintings: Identification Manual. …then the Raphael Soyers’s, the Paul Cadmus’s, and the Jess’s. As well there are the William de Kooning’s, the Joe Smith’s and the John Doe’s. Arranged beautifully in galleries in chronological order on three floors it is nothing so much as an encyclopedia of American art. And rather than having my fear of seeing second rate works realized, I came to discover that there are works here one cannot see in any other American Art museum.
The National Portrait Gallery is for the most part in the south section of the building but portraits are mixed in with the other paintings in the American section. When I last saw it there were 500 works in the collection. Now there are thousands and for the modern tourist there are sections on movie stars and sports figures. Prominently displayed in front of a large and wonderful Katherine Hepburn portrait, circa 1957, are her four Oscars. Not only did she not go to the awards ceremonies to receive them, I guess she had no desire to keep them.
A particularly nice gallery is the American Experience. In this gallery almost all of the works are great works by well known artists, Georgia O’Keefe, Milton Avery, Diebenkorn, Hockney, Arthur Dove, Martin Puryear, Noguchi … a moderately sized gallery but really stunning in it’s impact.
In addition to displaying an incredibly large number of works from the collection, the museum has sufficient space for several special exhibits as well. At the present time there are nine. On the Portrait Gallery web site there were two exhibitions listed of photographs on the Old West.
Because it was at the front door I began to wander through the exhibit, William T. Wiley. Wiley is described as a hip California artist and although he is a superior draftsman and obviously loves to draw, the repetition of his funky mindset, as represented by fifty years work, was more funk than I cared to experience, not being charmed by it in the first place. But I was fascinated by the size of the exhibition …88 often large works…it meandered for what seemed to me several city blocks. As I turned to walk away I said to the attendant: “Looks like this guy worked 24/7”. “He kept at it”, he replied.
In an exhibit one floor above that, 1934, A New Deal for Artists, over two hundred paintings from the collection made under the sponsorship of the WPA program were shown. Almost without exception these were representational works in the regionalist style …there were strong hints of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry. At the University of Arizona Art Museum in Tucson I saw an exhibition of etchings from the WPA program and what is so remarkable about both the etchings and the paintings is that all of the artists were masters of their craft and made artworks that met all the requirements for the achievement of fine art. But in contrast to the march of the modern art vanguard, theirs was a lesser fame. I can well understand why someone like Benton could be embittered by this. It is sad to realize that very accomplished and talented persons receive so little recognition and esteem. It is also interesting that these works of regionalism are considered secondary art works whereas the photography of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, et al, covering the same period and subjects, are considered first rank fine art contemporary photography.
Next door was an exhibition of American folk art, including what I thought were some good examples of obsessive/compulsive outsider art. To emphasize again the size of this museum, there were three hundred works displayed here. But all of the works were dynamic, creative, sincerely felt, and tremendously inspiring. The highlight of course was James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven…only a portion of this was shown, perhaps 25 of 180 pieces, but enough of it to define the tradition!
The great discovery though was on the third floor of the west wing, The Luce Foundation Center. This is set up as a museum storage area. Large sculptures are on the main floor and above this on two levels of mezzanines are areas similar to the stacks in libraries and in each of which hang paintings, small sculptures, and the museum’s collection of twentieth century crafts. There are ten-pull out drawers of handmade jewelry. Every item here has the title, the artist’s name, and the acquisition number. Computer terminals spaced throughout can be used to search the object’s history and provide a biography for the artist. In this, granted, very large room, there are three thousand five hundred works. I saw them all.
I discovered this room late on Saturday and it was the reason I decided to return the next day and spend a longer time here. I was well rewarded. The Smithsonian’s Craft Collection is on view in the Renwick Gallery, across from the White House. I saw that the first day after leaving the Phillips Collection. I have to say I was disappointed. Many of the items from the permanent collection appeared to have been removed because of special exhibits of contemporary crafts …those works that attempt to break down the boundaries between art and craft and fancy themselves on the art side. Usually I disagree and in this case I did. Here in the Luce Gallery I was able to see about ten vitrines with the permanent works and look into all those drawers close up. Works for me!
I was also able to see one of Marsden Hartley’s first paintings, a decidedly Bleu Reiter influenced work …also one of his last, Maine Lobster: so simple but pure magic!
Sharing the third floor is an art preservation workshop with floor to ceiling glass walls so that the visitors can observe what goes into caring for works of art. This was closed on the weekend but it seemed to me a great idea to foster an appreciation of the arts.
This museum is not a wing or a section of a larger museum; it is a whole museum with the whole spectrum of American art. While that might not pique the curiosity of some, the vastness of this collection and the sheer numbers of the works on display will completely change your perceptions about American art. The United States does have a fine art tradition and it is far more vibrant and alive than I had thought it to be. This is the first American Art museum to bring that achievement to my awareness, perhaps because of what I perceive as an emphasis on all of the 20th century artists and the way that is blended with the better known, and lesser known, 18th or 19th century names, giving each movement and school equal importance.
It is a welcome change from the usual American art museum practice that satisfies itself by showing one work each of only about fifty different artists, and in all of those museums the same artists doing similar work, most of them habitués of the New York art scene. How nice to see all of these others. It could almost make you believe there is indeed a real America out there inhabited by real Americans.
The web site feels pretty antique. There are few photographs of the art works, although some entries have links to Flickr …look for that. I find the search engine for the art works impossible. Apparently you need the acquisition number to find them. You will be directed sometimes to an Advanced Search, but I don’t find it. I wrote to them and received a lengthy reply as to all the bells and whistles I had to tweak to get results. Why not just upgrade the system? But, yes, it’s a matter of budgetary constraints. So just go see the museum. You will NOT be disappointed! Overwhelmed, yes, but not disappointed.
The Museum web site:
http://americanart.si.edu/
The Courtyard:
http://americanart.si.edu/visit/about/architecture/kogod/
History of the Collection:
http://americanart.si.edu/visit/about/history/
Throne of the Third Heaven:
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=989
The National Portrait Gallery: see current exhibitions for The Old Westhttp://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/current.html
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, The Sackler Gallery, and the Freer Gallery
The Smithsonian Castle sits about midway on The Mall’s south side. It is a twelfth century French Romanesque structure designed by James Renwick and built in 1847-1855. (Renwick designed as well St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.) It is one of those American buildings that broke with the stronghold of Greek revival architecture and is similar in spirit to the work of, later, Frank Furness, H.H. Richardson and Richard Morris Hunt. It is the earliest building on the Mall if not the first. While it stands today as something akin to a Victorian folly, architecturally it adds a bit of spice to the now more common beaux arts revival buildings and the more recent 60’s modern structures that continued to adhere to the dictates of classical symmetry and balance. All of these provide an example of the late development of American architecture: until the construction of I.M. Pei’s National Gallery East Building in 1974 all of the architectural entities on the Mall referenced European precedents.
When I visited Washington in 1964 I believe this building was closed to the public. It is now open although there is little to see here. In the main hallway, its sense of open space frustrated by two rows of tall columns down the length of the room, there is a gift shop, an information counter, and a cafeteria which serves soup, sandwiches and an assortment of breads, pastries, and beverages. There are tables set up for dining in the Great Hall, or one can take his lunch outside into the gardens at the back of the building. The restoration is lovely and while it presents no overall impression due to the vertical distractions, it is a welcome break from the architectural pretensions of its neighbors.
Two of the most unusual museums in Washington, or elsewhere for that matter, are the National Museum of African Art and the Sackler Gallery. Both of these museums are underground beneath what is now the Enid Haupt Gardens behind the Smithsonian Castle. In the late 1980’s these four and half acres were excavated to a depth of 57 feet, about seven stories, and the African Museum was built on the east side, the Sackler on the west. The museums are accessed from Post Modern kiosks in the far back corners of the garden, one on either side. Underground it is possible to access one museum from the other, (they are in essence one structure), as well as the Smithsonian Information Center which sits to the west of the Castle. I think I read in the literature that the hallway leading from the two museums toward the Castle is 231 feet long. There is a sharp left turn and then an escalator four floors long up to the elevators for the Information Center. Knowing that you are six floors underground gives all of this corridor a real sense of doom. Little about the use of the space there, which is sparsely decorated, dispels that gloom.
Both these museums have a central stairway that winds down an atrium. Hanging in the center of the open space at the African Museum there is an art work of stylized monkeys cut from black ¾ stock, possibly ebony. Each monkey is actually a calligraphic ideogram that means “monkey” in different languages. Each is about eighteen inches wide and thirty or so inches tall. Each has an upward reaching arm and a hanging tail that ends in a hook. The overhead hand of one fits into the hanging tail of the one above it creating a chain of monkeys seen first on edge and then full face, rather like the chains of colored paper children make at Christmas time. As you pass through the museum and descend the levels down to the “top” on the bottom floor these monkeys are always present but you think little of them. However, at the bottom, there is a pool of water continuously fed by a fountain and the bottom monkey hovers about one half inch above the water. “Damn!” I said to myself: someone knows how to use a tape measure. Suddenly, looking up 57 feet, it was all very exciting and wonderful.
The works displayed in the museum are really wonderful but it is yet another new museum that appears to have more public space that display space. I would have no objection to wandering through galleries filled with overstuffed vitrines of objects d’art. I know that is the “old way” of doing things, but I have found that where the old prevails, such as the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, I can have just as much fun, if not more, visually rummaging through the thousands of things that are piled together, picking out for myself the occasional masterpiece.
I was also surprised by how much space was given to the special exhibition of works by Yinka Shonibare MBE, British born (1962) Nigerian artist. Shonibare uses Dutch wax printed fabrics that have the colors of African fabrics but I think the design motifs might be those and others. I’m uncertain if he designs and makes them. But from them he makes, or causes to be made, European period costumes which he then puts on headless white manikins and arranges in tableaux depicting his view of European history or recreating moments from great European paintings such as Watteau’s The Swing,.
These are charming, funny, and many-layered having a strong political undertone, so the museum writes. Much of that political sensibility comes from his having heard Margaret Thatcher suggest a return to Victorian values. As an African, Victorian England was, to his experience, a colonial power which exerted its will through rape and plunder, as he shows us here.
What was most extraordinary to me was the time and expense required for some of these (many are room size) as well as for all of them as a series of art works. Either the artist is independently wealthy or someone is funding his projects.
I was very happy to find that the entrance to one of the largest of the works was boldly marked as for adult audiences. (This showed a social grouping paired off and the couples, or triads, engaged in anal intercourse …a political statement. Ahem.) In the area around the Mall there is a very strong sense of a dedication to tourism and especially to touring families. There are very few examples of the nude in art in the art galleries, even by the great masters. Several times during my week here I have had a passing thought that too many things are being under represented or watered down, there is a too strong patronage to so called “family values” and too little to the best traditions of the fine arts. The danger of this is that it nurtures the belief of sexually hysterical Americans that nudity is the equivalent of explicit sexuality, that it is immoral. I disagree: sexuality and morality are two different things. The nude, expressive form, is something yet again. Museums should help the public understand that.
On the next level there is an exhibition of 58 works from the 525 piece Tishman-Walt Disney World Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Tishman put the collection together beginning in 1969 and in 1984, when it was recognized as the premier African Art collection in America, it was sold to the Disney group who intended to make a museum for it in Florida. That did not pan out and so in 2005 it was given to the Smithsonian. It is a superb collection; each of the pieces is really wonderful. But, again, there was not enough of it. More! More! Encore!
The Sackler Gallery.
I had high hopes for the Sackler, hoping to see something to equal what I have seen at the Chicago Art Institute or the Minneapolis Art Institute but was soon discourage to find that I was to be disappointed. It is a fine collection but there seems to be little of it that is on view and by the time I had made my way down another atrium with spiral staircase it seemed to have run out of energy or interest or perhaps both.
There was a beautiful exhibition of a Middle Eastern Book of Omens, extremely old but in excellent condition, and while I appreciated seeing it I was aware that at this time of my life I don’t really need or want to go off on yet another tangent of a new found interest.
I saved my energy here for the permanent collection only to be greatly disappointed. It begins with an exhibition of bronze and jade for which I have little interest at all. And I’m afraid the ceramics, which I love, when I finally made my way down to them, could not overcome the sense of malaise creeping over me.
In the atrium at the bottom level there were six very oversized pieces in what might have been porcelain …bowls two feet in diameter and a vase eighteen inches high. These were contemporary works referencing the old style in enamels rather than glazes, a technique in which the old techniques are used to create bright contemporary works. I would say that all six of the pieces succeeded admirably.
The Freer Gallery.
With a focus on the Asian arts, both Near East and Far East, the Freer Gallery is an absolute gem of a museum. In a very self contained, modest, classic revival building, on the Mall to the west and behind the castle, creating the feeling of what it must have been like to be in a Roman villa, there are 19 galleries around a beautiful, quiet courtyard. The art works are beautifully placed in these galleries and in the hallways as well as the hallways downstairs where there is a bookstore and public rooms. Each of the galleries is exquisite and I would think that this is the finest collection of Asian arts in this country. Though I often lament that the works on display are too few, the things shown here are so wonderful and so command the attention that anything more would exhaust the visitor.
Among the standouts in the collection were a gallery of illuminated Islamic manuscripts, a gallery of Japanese screens that are the finest I have ever seen, magnificent Chinese ceramics including a Sung Dynasty sgaffito, a design cut through the white slip to reveal the gray body clay, a pottery style that I have always regarded as my favorite …masterful hand drawing on an object’s surface …and six or so vessels from the Sung Dynasty with rabbit’s fur glaze …of which there is nothing finer.
But the most extraordinary are the first two large pieces at the entrance to the Chinese ceramics gallery, each piece with a painted design over the unglazed body. The interpretation tells us that when these were made, c. 2,500 BCE, the ceramics tradition in China was already two thousand years old. That is so hard to imagine.
Mr. Freer, a Detroit industrialist, was introduced to the Asian arts by James McNeill Whistler. Not only did he introduce him to those arts he encouraged him to build a collection. Advice well taken. In addition he collected Whistler’s work and there are two galleries here showing it, as well as the Peacock Room, a room Whistler designed and decorated for a gentleman in London. When that man died Freer bought it and had it moved and installed in his home in Detroit.
When I saw this museum in 1964 I thought it odd that someone could amass so many objects that seemed to me of secondary or minor importance. But with forty five years of art study under my belt, I am now bowled over by the excellence displayed here. I had the opposite responses to the Peacock Room: forty five years ago it was the epitome of elegance and refinement. Now it seems to me just another hand decorated room, of which I now know there are many. Many! I don’t know that I now find it all that interesting, especially in light of the fact that I don’t remember knowing many years ago, that this room was made for the display of the tenant’s vast collection of blue and white ceramics. I’ve seen so many of those collections in country houses presided over by yuppie decorator/housewives that I have pretty much lost my taste for it.
As a child I was aware that Whistler’s name was well known, especially in connection to the painting Whistler’s Mother. But over the years I have seen very few of his works in American museums. I was curious if Whistler’s reputation might not be somewhat lessened because Mr. Freer owned so many of his works: they number in the hundreds. If so, that is obviously a down side to having a wealthy patron.
I know from my own experience that there are American museums with larger collections of Asian Arts that might possibly have even greater depth and breadth. But none of them can equal the character of this museum, nor are their wares displayed in such a way as to command the attention and elicit the response as this one does. If you are in Washington and have time for only one event, do not miss the Freer.
Monkeys grasping for the moon:
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/xuBing.htm
The African Museum:
http://africa.si.edu/index2.html
The Freer and Sackler:
http://www.asia.si.edu/
Online exhibitions at the Freer and Sackler.
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online.htm#
When I visited Washington in 1964 I believe this building was closed to the public. It is now open although there is little to see here. In the main hallway, its sense of open space frustrated by two rows of tall columns down the length of the room, there is a gift shop, an information counter, and a cafeteria which serves soup, sandwiches and an assortment of breads, pastries, and beverages. There are tables set up for dining in the Great Hall, or one can take his lunch outside into the gardens at the back of the building. The restoration is lovely and while it presents no overall impression due to the vertical distractions, it is a welcome break from the architectural pretensions of its neighbors.
Two of the most unusual museums in Washington, or elsewhere for that matter, are the National Museum of African Art and the Sackler Gallery. Both of these museums are underground beneath what is now the Enid Haupt Gardens behind the Smithsonian Castle. In the late 1980’s these four and half acres were excavated to a depth of 57 feet, about seven stories, and the African Museum was built on the east side, the Sackler on the west. The museums are accessed from Post Modern kiosks in the far back corners of the garden, one on either side. Underground it is possible to access one museum from the other, (they are in essence one structure), as well as the Smithsonian Information Center which sits to the west of the Castle. I think I read in the literature that the hallway leading from the two museums toward the Castle is 231 feet long. There is a sharp left turn and then an escalator four floors long up to the elevators for the Information Center. Knowing that you are six floors underground gives all of this corridor a real sense of doom. Little about the use of the space there, which is sparsely decorated, dispels that gloom.
Both these museums have a central stairway that winds down an atrium. Hanging in the center of the open space at the African Museum there is an art work of stylized monkeys cut from black ¾ stock, possibly ebony. Each monkey is actually a calligraphic ideogram that means “monkey” in different languages. Each is about eighteen inches wide and thirty or so inches tall. Each has an upward reaching arm and a hanging tail that ends in a hook. The overhead hand of one fits into the hanging tail of the one above it creating a chain of monkeys seen first on edge and then full face, rather like the chains of colored paper children make at Christmas time. As you pass through the museum and descend the levels down to the “top” on the bottom floor these monkeys are always present but you think little of them. However, at the bottom, there is a pool of water continuously fed by a fountain and the bottom monkey hovers about one half inch above the water. “Damn!” I said to myself: someone knows how to use a tape measure. Suddenly, looking up 57 feet, it was all very exciting and wonderful.
The works displayed in the museum are really wonderful but it is yet another new museum that appears to have more public space that display space. I would have no objection to wandering through galleries filled with overstuffed vitrines of objects d’art. I know that is the “old way” of doing things, but I have found that where the old prevails, such as the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, I can have just as much fun, if not more, visually rummaging through the thousands of things that are piled together, picking out for myself the occasional masterpiece.
I was also surprised by how much space was given to the special exhibition of works by Yinka Shonibare MBE, British born (1962) Nigerian artist. Shonibare uses Dutch wax printed fabrics that have the colors of African fabrics but I think the design motifs might be those and others. I’m uncertain if he designs and makes them. But from them he makes, or causes to be made, European period costumes which he then puts on headless white manikins and arranges in tableaux depicting his view of European history or recreating moments from great European paintings such as Watteau’s The Swing,.
These are charming, funny, and many-layered having a strong political undertone, so the museum writes. Much of that political sensibility comes from his having heard Margaret Thatcher suggest a return to Victorian values. As an African, Victorian England was, to his experience, a colonial power which exerted its will through rape and plunder, as he shows us here.
What was most extraordinary to me was the time and expense required for some of these (many are room size) as well as for all of them as a series of art works. Either the artist is independently wealthy or someone is funding his projects.
I was very happy to find that the entrance to one of the largest of the works was boldly marked as for adult audiences. (This showed a social grouping paired off and the couples, or triads, engaged in anal intercourse …a political statement. Ahem.) In the area around the Mall there is a very strong sense of a dedication to tourism and especially to touring families. There are very few examples of the nude in art in the art galleries, even by the great masters. Several times during my week here I have had a passing thought that too many things are being under represented or watered down, there is a too strong patronage to so called “family values” and too little to the best traditions of the fine arts. The danger of this is that it nurtures the belief of sexually hysterical Americans that nudity is the equivalent of explicit sexuality, that it is immoral. I disagree: sexuality and morality are two different things. The nude, expressive form, is something yet again. Museums should help the public understand that.
On the next level there is an exhibition of 58 works from the 525 piece Tishman-Walt Disney World Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Tishman put the collection together beginning in 1969 and in 1984, when it was recognized as the premier African Art collection in America, it was sold to the Disney group who intended to make a museum for it in Florida. That did not pan out and so in 2005 it was given to the Smithsonian. It is a superb collection; each of the pieces is really wonderful. But, again, there was not enough of it. More! More! Encore!
The Sackler Gallery.
I had high hopes for the Sackler, hoping to see something to equal what I have seen at the Chicago Art Institute or the Minneapolis Art Institute but was soon discourage to find that I was to be disappointed. It is a fine collection but there seems to be little of it that is on view and by the time I had made my way down another atrium with spiral staircase it seemed to have run out of energy or interest or perhaps both.
There was a beautiful exhibition of a Middle Eastern Book of Omens, extremely old but in excellent condition, and while I appreciated seeing it I was aware that at this time of my life I don’t really need or want to go off on yet another tangent of a new found interest.
I saved my energy here for the permanent collection only to be greatly disappointed. It begins with an exhibition of bronze and jade for which I have little interest at all. And I’m afraid the ceramics, which I love, when I finally made my way down to them, could not overcome the sense of malaise creeping over me.
In the atrium at the bottom level there were six very oversized pieces in what might have been porcelain …bowls two feet in diameter and a vase eighteen inches high. These were contemporary works referencing the old style in enamels rather than glazes, a technique in which the old techniques are used to create bright contemporary works. I would say that all six of the pieces succeeded admirably.
The Freer Gallery.
With a focus on the Asian arts, both Near East and Far East, the Freer Gallery is an absolute gem of a museum. In a very self contained, modest, classic revival building, on the Mall to the west and behind the castle, creating the feeling of what it must have been like to be in a Roman villa, there are 19 galleries around a beautiful, quiet courtyard. The art works are beautifully placed in these galleries and in the hallways as well as the hallways downstairs where there is a bookstore and public rooms. Each of the galleries is exquisite and I would think that this is the finest collection of Asian arts in this country. Though I often lament that the works on display are too few, the things shown here are so wonderful and so command the attention that anything more would exhaust the visitor.
Among the standouts in the collection were a gallery of illuminated Islamic manuscripts, a gallery of Japanese screens that are the finest I have ever seen, magnificent Chinese ceramics including a Sung Dynasty sgaffito, a design cut through the white slip to reveal the gray body clay, a pottery style that I have always regarded as my favorite …masterful hand drawing on an object’s surface …and six or so vessels from the Sung Dynasty with rabbit’s fur glaze …of which there is nothing finer.
But the most extraordinary are the first two large pieces at the entrance to the Chinese ceramics gallery, each piece with a painted design over the unglazed body. The interpretation tells us that when these were made, c. 2,500 BCE, the ceramics tradition in China was already two thousand years old. That is so hard to imagine.
Mr. Freer, a Detroit industrialist, was introduced to the Asian arts by James McNeill Whistler. Not only did he introduce him to those arts he encouraged him to build a collection. Advice well taken. In addition he collected Whistler’s work and there are two galleries here showing it, as well as the Peacock Room, a room Whistler designed and decorated for a gentleman in London. When that man died Freer bought it and had it moved and installed in his home in Detroit.
When I saw this museum in 1964 I thought it odd that someone could amass so many objects that seemed to me of secondary or minor importance. But with forty five years of art study under my belt, I am now bowled over by the excellence displayed here. I had the opposite responses to the Peacock Room: forty five years ago it was the epitome of elegance and refinement. Now it seems to me just another hand decorated room, of which I now know there are many. Many! I don’t know that I now find it all that interesting, especially in light of the fact that I don’t remember knowing many years ago, that this room was made for the display of the tenant’s vast collection of blue and white ceramics. I’ve seen so many of those collections in country houses presided over by yuppie decorator/housewives that I have pretty much lost my taste for it.
As a child I was aware that Whistler’s name was well known, especially in connection to the painting Whistler’s Mother. But over the years I have seen very few of his works in American museums. I was curious if Whistler’s reputation might not be somewhat lessened because Mr. Freer owned so many of his works: they number in the hundreds. If so, that is obviously a down side to having a wealthy patron.
I know from my own experience that there are American museums with larger collections of Asian Arts that might possibly have even greater depth and breadth. But none of them can equal the character of this museum, nor are their wares displayed in such a way as to command the attention and elicit the response as this one does. If you are in Washington and have time for only one event, do not miss the Freer.
Monkeys grasping for the moon:
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/xuBing.htm
The African Museum:
http://africa.si.edu/index2.html
The Freer and Sackler:
http://www.asia.si.edu/
Online exhibitions at the Freer and Sackler.
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online.htm#
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
House of Cars at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.
I had been planning a museum trip to Washington for some time and when I came across the web site for this museum and this exhibition I decided to go at once. I am intrigued by the concept of the architectural museum and curious how the various venues overcome the inherent problems in the exhibition of architectural subjects. I won’t repeat here what I have already written on this subject and which you can read in the first few paragraphs of my blog post of July 2009, Frank Lloyd Wright, From Within Outward, at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC.
I’m happy to report that this museum has the best solution to those problems although with some reservations, those reservations having to do with the museum, not with their exhibitions. As the greater part of this building appears to be unused empty space, I had the sense that having established the museum, the federal government has subsequently given it short shrift. With greater support through a vibrant organization of friends and supporters, this could become a first class institution performing an important service to the American people by enhancing the appreciation of our architectural heritage and our understanding of architecture as a major art form. Conveniently located in the Capitol Hill area it is a prime candidate for a first class venue with that function.
The Building.
The building was erected in 1887 as the Pension Bureau. It has a very large foot print: it is two blocks long and one block deep. The style is Italian Renaissance in red brick. On the exterior it references the Farnese Palace. It appears to be about five stories high but has only three levels of windows. There is a raised section in the center running almost the length of the building and a raised center section that is another five stories high. Both the elevated main and the central section have the typical low rising Italianate gabled roofs.
Above the first level of windows there is a buff colored glazed terracotta frieze which illustrates the civil war troops on the move. This frieze extends all around the building. I suppose the “pension” in the building name and function refers to the veterans of that historical event. Each tile in the frieze is about eighteen by twenty four inches. It breaks down into four or so sections: profile portraits of the marching troops (many of them appearing to be African Americans), the officers mounted on horseback, the artillery mounted on caissons, etc. Each episode is composed of five or six of the large tiles.
It is a lovely idea and while looking at the details I became aware that in many of the sections certain of the tiles were repeated so that the episodes were made longer. The tiles that were repeated were not the same as each episode was repeated. I was curious why this had been done. Did someone not read the plans carefully and specify fewer tiles than were needed or was this planned from the beginning in order to cut costs …having to design only five molds when six tiles would be needed? Or, and possibly more likely, were molds made during the restoration from some of the tiles and new tiles inserted as replacements? I am a big fan of architectural details that incorporate the local flora, fauna, and history, so obviously I was delighted to discover this.
A terracotta band of single tiles with one design motif encircles the building above the second story windows.
Going inside one steps almost immediately into an enormous atrium: the whole center of the building, about the size of a city block, is hollow. The offices are only along the exterior walls and they are likely only one room deep. While this seems a tremendous waste of space, the building as conceived was required to have a second function of providing a venue in Washington for large indoor public events: this atrium has often been used for presidential balls, most recently being one of the sites of an inaugural ball for President Obama. It is also the stage for the annual Christmas from Washington television program and while I was there theater lighting, draperies, and scaffolding were being erected.
As mentioned the center section rises another five or so stories above the main building and this section rests on eight enormous columns across the building width, four per side. As seen in the photographs documenting the construction, these columns are made of red brick, plastered over, and painted with a raw sienna faux marble. It is claimed that these are the tallest interior columns in the world. I don’t doubt it … they are eight feet in diameter at the base and rest on plinths with a pressed terracotta fascia. Awesome!
Windows all around just under the roofline allow wonderful diffused light into the interior. The roof is now made of metal trusses and what looks like a metal roofing material. I would love to know what the original roof had been …I suppose wooden trusses but as the building was required to be fireproof, perhaps not. They might have been cast iron but in a fire cast iron will melt …hence, reinforced concrete was invented!
The stairways to the upper floors are recessed within the outside section between the offices and there are uninterrupted balconies or a mezzanine all around each of those two floors. These are supported by an abundance of cast iron railings, columns, and brackets and although it is a wonderful preservation of the architectural past, it is a great example, albeit a negative example, of a conglomeration of syntactical architectural clichés used to define “The Great Hall”. Surprisingly, in all this metal, there are no interesting details whatsoever. It is a perfect example of a new technology used to replicate design concepts from the past. It bears a resemblance to the past but it is a manufactured, contrived, resemblance, it is not the past. Architectural students should be required to come here to see this so that they better understand Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bauhaus, and Charles and Ray Eames, all of whom championed using the new technologies and prefabricated elements to create new design concepts. The only reference this building makes to the age in which it was made is in the evidence of the achievement of wealth and abundance in the Victorian era.
The Museum.
When I say that the building appears to be largely unused it is because the museum has used three spaces for galleries and one for the bookstore on the west end and all of the rest of the building appears to be empty. While there is security staff at the four entry doors, there is no information desk or staff presence except for the docents within each gallery.
On the second level there is an exhibition of the photography of Phillip Trager. Mr. Trager is known as an architectural photographer. (Prior to this, I was unaware of his name.) The work here includes examples of his work in the United States, Paris, and on the subject of Italian Villas. He has also done a series on dancers. His work is sold as individual photographs and in very expensive books. According to the interpretation he has been very successful, but his work seemed to me extremely commonplace …with a rather retro thirties/fifties feel to it it seemed to reference both Henri Cartier Bresson and Cecil Beaton. The prints in the exhibition are from the Library of Congress which has his archives.
Back on the main floor an exhibition whose name I did not record is in a sense an overview of the museum collection. They have the archives for the Northwestern Tile Company of over 50,000 drawings. Northwestern, located in Chicago, made decorative glazed terracotta tile, including work for Louis Sullivan. The exhibition includes drawings, tiles and ornamental figures. There is a very large façade of a dormer window. The museum has as well the archives of the Kress Company, of the early twentieth century five and dime empire. Kress maintained a staff architect and was determined that their stores would have a superior design and sense of elegance beyond that of their competitors. Many of those stores have been razed but in 2005 I saw the Kress Store on the city square in downtown El Paso and thought it one of the best designed buildings in that city.
Mindful of the need to provide a shifting focus within an exhibition, to vary the attention from photographs, plans and elevations, to actual pieces of ornamentation and architectural details, this museum has the best approach to the architectural museum that I have seen.
House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage.
Back in the days when I would drive a car in an American city I knew when it came time to park it that I had to be on the lookout for the site of a razed building, the land now leveled and jammed with other cars and with a country outhouse posted out front proclaiming itself an office …or a four or five story building with no windows, looking like a bombed out shell. In I don’t know how many cities I have had strangers waving parking lot stubs rush up and ask if I knew where such and such a parking place was. It has been my understanding that the parking garage is so common an eyesore in the urban landscape that we tend not to see it; it has become an invisible public icon. Once we have availed ourselves of its function we tend to forget it …both what it looks like and where it is. Yet there they are in city after city replicating like rabbits. I have often wondered why something better isn’t done. But, of course, they are not there as a civic enhancement but as a means to make money and in the best American tradition the less that is spent to make the most money the better the investment. The public be damned.
Often it has seemed to me that the public parking garage would make a fine exercise for architecture students. So far as I know only a few architects have taken the automobile into consideration in their work. Very few cities seem to have been willing to tackle the subject. In Portland, Oregon a strong zoning law requires that each building over a certain size must include retail on the street level and ample parking space inside to service the anticipated population use of the building. That is an excellent solution although there are many buildings in downtown Portland that seem ghostly empty on floors two through four. In Washington I became aware that each new building of a certain size has parking underground. If there is no money to be made in a well designed building I suppose that is the best solution.
This exhibition is excellent. It is comprehensive in its coverage of the subject, beginning with the history of the first appearance of the automobile, showing how it shared the streets with horses and buggies, how cars were first parked first come first served in the middle of the streets, how the stables and liveries eventually became garages for the cars, and how garages were then erected specifically for the cars. It is a multimedia exhibition using everything from photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, and even a mint condition Ford Model A.
There is a section on the solutions proposed, and sometimes actually built, by such architects as Adolph Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei, and Rosenberg in Chicago. One section illustrates the various mechanical systems used to park cars …in drawings, photographs and a short film.
Another section is an art exhibit in which the parking garage was the subject of paintings, drawings, and photographs. A film on a continuous loop shows scenes from well known movies wherein scenes made inside the parking garage are played …West Side Story, Some Like it Hot, crime films, science fiction, etc.
Ironically the last section presents an overview of the efforts made by those interested in historic preservation to save the oldest of the earlier examples. Once again, I think this should be required viewing for architectural students.
I also embarrassed myself while here. At one point, looking at a selection of material from which architects select a building’s cover, I ran my hand over a surface to see exactly what it was. “Please do not touch the art works”, the young female docent scolded. I swear I have never touched a museum art work before in my life! I don’t know what came over me.
There is no museum restaurant here but there is a niche in the wall from which two lovely Mexican girls serve from a cauldron of soup along with a variety of breads, rolls, and pastries, as well as coffee and other drinks. Tables arranged around the Great Hall under the overhang of the above balconies offer a great place to sit and lunch while enjoying the vastness of the restored building. While I enjoyed the quiet I was at the same time sorry that this wonderful venue was not more popular with the museum going crowd.
The Great Hall
http://www.nbm.org/about-us/historic-building/
The Collection:
http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/collections/
I’m happy to report that this museum has the best solution to those problems although with some reservations, those reservations having to do with the museum, not with their exhibitions. As the greater part of this building appears to be unused empty space, I had the sense that having established the museum, the federal government has subsequently given it short shrift. With greater support through a vibrant organization of friends and supporters, this could become a first class institution performing an important service to the American people by enhancing the appreciation of our architectural heritage and our understanding of architecture as a major art form. Conveniently located in the Capitol Hill area it is a prime candidate for a first class venue with that function.
The Building.
The building was erected in 1887 as the Pension Bureau. It has a very large foot print: it is two blocks long and one block deep. The style is Italian Renaissance in red brick. On the exterior it references the Farnese Palace. It appears to be about five stories high but has only three levels of windows. There is a raised section in the center running almost the length of the building and a raised center section that is another five stories high. Both the elevated main and the central section have the typical low rising Italianate gabled roofs.
Above the first level of windows there is a buff colored glazed terracotta frieze which illustrates the civil war troops on the move. This frieze extends all around the building. I suppose the “pension” in the building name and function refers to the veterans of that historical event. Each tile in the frieze is about eighteen by twenty four inches. It breaks down into four or so sections: profile portraits of the marching troops (many of them appearing to be African Americans), the officers mounted on horseback, the artillery mounted on caissons, etc. Each episode is composed of five or six of the large tiles.
It is a lovely idea and while looking at the details I became aware that in many of the sections certain of the tiles were repeated so that the episodes were made longer. The tiles that were repeated were not the same as each episode was repeated. I was curious why this had been done. Did someone not read the plans carefully and specify fewer tiles than were needed or was this planned from the beginning in order to cut costs …having to design only five molds when six tiles would be needed? Or, and possibly more likely, were molds made during the restoration from some of the tiles and new tiles inserted as replacements? I am a big fan of architectural details that incorporate the local flora, fauna, and history, so obviously I was delighted to discover this.
A terracotta band of single tiles with one design motif encircles the building above the second story windows.
Going inside one steps almost immediately into an enormous atrium: the whole center of the building, about the size of a city block, is hollow. The offices are only along the exterior walls and they are likely only one room deep. While this seems a tremendous waste of space, the building as conceived was required to have a second function of providing a venue in Washington for large indoor public events: this atrium has often been used for presidential balls, most recently being one of the sites of an inaugural ball for President Obama. It is also the stage for the annual Christmas from Washington television program and while I was there theater lighting, draperies, and scaffolding were being erected.
As mentioned the center section rises another five or so stories above the main building and this section rests on eight enormous columns across the building width, four per side. As seen in the photographs documenting the construction, these columns are made of red brick, plastered over, and painted with a raw sienna faux marble. It is claimed that these are the tallest interior columns in the world. I don’t doubt it … they are eight feet in diameter at the base and rest on plinths with a pressed terracotta fascia. Awesome!
Windows all around just under the roofline allow wonderful diffused light into the interior. The roof is now made of metal trusses and what looks like a metal roofing material. I would love to know what the original roof had been …I suppose wooden trusses but as the building was required to be fireproof, perhaps not. They might have been cast iron but in a fire cast iron will melt …hence, reinforced concrete was invented!
The stairways to the upper floors are recessed within the outside section between the offices and there are uninterrupted balconies or a mezzanine all around each of those two floors. These are supported by an abundance of cast iron railings, columns, and brackets and although it is a wonderful preservation of the architectural past, it is a great example, albeit a negative example, of a conglomeration of syntactical architectural clichés used to define “The Great Hall”. Surprisingly, in all this metal, there are no interesting details whatsoever. It is a perfect example of a new technology used to replicate design concepts from the past. It bears a resemblance to the past but it is a manufactured, contrived, resemblance, it is not the past. Architectural students should be required to come here to see this so that they better understand Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bauhaus, and Charles and Ray Eames, all of whom championed using the new technologies and prefabricated elements to create new design concepts. The only reference this building makes to the age in which it was made is in the evidence of the achievement of wealth and abundance in the Victorian era.
The Museum.
When I say that the building appears to be largely unused it is because the museum has used three spaces for galleries and one for the bookstore on the west end and all of the rest of the building appears to be empty. While there is security staff at the four entry doors, there is no information desk or staff presence except for the docents within each gallery.
On the second level there is an exhibition of the photography of Phillip Trager. Mr. Trager is known as an architectural photographer. (Prior to this, I was unaware of his name.) The work here includes examples of his work in the United States, Paris, and on the subject of Italian Villas. He has also done a series on dancers. His work is sold as individual photographs and in very expensive books. According to the interpretation he has been very successful, but his work seemed to me extremely commonplace …with a rather retro thirties/fifties feel to it it seemed to reference both Henri Cartier Bresson and Cecil Beaton. The prints in the exhibition are from the Library of Congress which has his archives.
Back on the main floor an exhibition whose name I did not record is in a sense an overview of the museum collection. They have the archives for the Northwestern Tile Company of over 50,000 drawings. Northwestern, located in Chicago, made decorative glazed terracotta tile, including work for Louis Sullivan. The exhibition includes drawings, tiles and ornamental figures. There is a very large façade of a dormer window. The museum has as well the archives of the Kress Company, of the early twentieth century five and dime empire. Kress maintained a staff architect and was determined that their stores would have a superior design and sense of elegance beyond that of their competitors. Many of those stores have been razed but in 2005 I saw the Kress Store on the city square in downtown El Paso and thought it one of the best designed buildings in that city.
Mindful of the need to provide a shifting focus within an exhibition, to vary the attention from photographs, plans and elevations, to actual pieces of ornamentation and architectural details, this museum has the best approach to the architectural museum that I have seen.
House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage.
Back in the days when I would drive a car in an American city I knew when it came time to park it that I had to be on the lookout for the site of a razed building, the land now leveled and jammed with other cars and with a country outhouse posted out front proclaiming itself an office …or a four or five story building with no windows, looking like a bombed out shell. In I don’t know how many cities I have had strangers waving parking lot stubs rush up and ask if I knew where such and such a parking place was. It has been my understanding that the parking garage is so common an eyesore in the urban landscape that we tend not to see it; it has become an invisible public icon. Once we have availed ourselves of its function we tend to forget it …both what it looks like and where it is. Yet there they are in city after city replicating like rabbits. I have often wondered why something better isn’t done. But, of course, they are not there as a civic enhancement but as a means to make money and in the best American tradition the less that is spent to make the most money the better the investment. The public be damned.
Often it has seemed to me that the public parking garage would make a fine exercise for architecture students. So far as I know only a few architects have taken the automobile into consideration in their work. Very few cities seem to have been willing to tackle the subject. In Portland, Oregon a strong zoning law requires that each building over a certain size must include retail on the street level and ample parking space inside to service the anticipated population use of the building. That is an excellent solution although there are many buildings in downtown Portland that seem ghostly empty on floors two through four. In Washington I became aware that each new building of a certain size has parking underground. If there is no money to be made in a well designed building I suppose that is the best solution.
This exhibition is excellent. It is comprehensive in its coverage of the subject, beginning with the history of the first appearance of the automobile, showing how it shared the streets with horses and buggies, how cars were first parked first come first served in the middle of the streets, how the stables and liveries eventually became garages for the cars, and how garages were then erected specifically for the cars. It is a multimedia exhibition using everything from photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, and even a mint condition Ford Model A.
There is a section on the solutions proposed, and sometimes actually built, by such architects as Adolph Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei, and Rosenberg in Chicago. One section illustrates the various mechanical systems used to park cars …in drawings, photographs and a short film.
Another section is an art exhibit in which the parking garage was the subject of paintings, drawings, and photographs. A film on a continuous loop shows scenes from well known movies wherein scenes made inside the parking garage are played …West Side Story, Some Like it Hot, crime films, science fiction, etc.
Ironically the last section presents an overview of the efforts made by those interested in historic preservation to save the oldest of the earlier examples. Once again, I think this should be required viewing for architectural students.
I also embarrassed myself while here. At one point, looking at a selection of material from which architects select a building’s cover, I ran my hand over a surface to see exactly what it was. “Please do not touch the art works”, the young female docent scolded. I swear I have never touched a museum art work before in my life! I don’t know what came over me.
There is no museum restaurant here but there is a niche in the wall from which two lovely Mexican girls serve from a cauldron of soup along with a variety of breads, rolls, and pastries, as well as coffee and other drinks. Tables arranged around the Great Hall under the overhang of the above balconies offer a great place to sit and lunch while enjoying the vastness of the restored building. While I enjoyed the quiet I was at the same time sorry that this wonderful venue was not more popular with the museum going crowd.
The Great Hall
http://www.nbm.org/about-us/historic-building/
The Collection:
http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/collections/
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.
The Building.
The Hirshhorn is the well known round building erected in 1969-1970 next to the Smithsonian Castle on the south side of the National Mall. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owens and Merrill (SOM) was the architect. It is in his 60’s Brutalism style similar to his LBJ Library in Texas and the Beineke Rare Book Library at Yale. Others of his buildings are more in keeping with the corporate image of the usual SOM entities, Chase Bank, Marine Midland Trust, and Lever House, all in Manhattan.
The building has often been described as a bunker, and having seen an anti-aircraft bunker from World War II in Dover, Kent, overlooking the English Channel, I have to agree.
The building is elevated 15 feet above the ground, resting on four cores, as the literature describes them, from which the outer and the inner rings are cantilevered. From the underside the ceiling above has nine foot coffers. This is rather impressive and suggests a monumental character. The outside ring is 231 feet in diameter and the inner ring 115 feet.
Made of reinforced concrete and covered with pulverized pink granite aggregate, which looks like cement, the inhospitable exterior walls are interrupted only by a long horizontal ribbon window on the Mall side …emphasizing the bunker reference. From the inside that window looks out over the Mall from almost to the Capitol on the east to almost to the Washington Monument on the west. Standing at that window I was perplexed as to why it had not been extended another three feet on both ends to provide a view that would encompass the two. It was a real missed opportunity. But I suppose you can only stretch a cantilever so far.
The inside diameter wall is a continuous window wall divided into cement frames. It is the more pleasing side of the building being a direct quotation of the neo-classical fantasies of de Chirico.
Although it is not an entrance into the building, a grand stairway brings the visitors up from the Mall into the museum plaza and under the building to the entrance into the structure on Independence Avenue, the side opposite the Mall It is enclosed with glass. A long escalator carries the visitors up to the galleries on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and the offices are on the 4th floor. The escalator deposits the visitor to The Collection into a third floor hallway before a large opening. On the wall inside the gallery facing the opening one can see a large painting by Thomas Hart Benton (more later). If you know your modern art history that is as good a sign as any that this is the entrance.
Each of the two gallery floors is divided into two rings, an outer ring where there are paintings, and a narrower inner ring where there are many pieces of sculpture, none of them very large: the ceilings in the galleries are 15 feet high with 3 foot coffers. None of the sculptures require that much overhead space. As you move into the galleries and from work to work there is always a sense of forward movement, never that sense you find in most museums of walking in circles within each gallery from one end of a building to the other. This is a pleasant change. However, once you exit a gallery into a large hallway and see the Thomas Hart Benton painting again, there is a real sense of “been there done that” …the abruptness of it made me homesick for the Guggenheim spiral.
The building was designed specifically to be “different” from the others on the Mall. It is different and if I seem not overly fond of it it is because I find round buildings completely absurd. Nor am I a fan of brutalism. As a presence on the Mall it is cold, austere, and unwelcoming. It also seems small.
One of an architect’s first considerations is the building site. This should include not only the square footage of the property but the surrounding area as well. The Mall stretches for fourteen blocks from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The largest of the buildings are two blocks long. None of the buildings is higher than seven or so floors. (Museums with three floors are about seven floors high.) There are four buildings on the north side of the Mall and two large and several smaller buildings to the south. The Hirshhorn is of medium size. The National Gallery East Building, I. M. Pei, is about one third the size of its neighbor, the West Building and petite compared to its other neighbor, the US Capitol. With one side of the property touching Pennsylvania Avenue, it has the most contact with the city beyond the Mall. It overcomes its size and location by being intriguingly complex. The simplicity of the Hirshhorn makes it appear to be very small in comparison to the breadth of the Mall. I read that as a fault of the design.
The Collection.
One of the problems with having lived in New York for thirty years is that you get overly accustomed to being in the presence of masterpieces. For instance, there are more Corot paintings in the United States than anywhere else in the world. It is nice to travel around the country and see them in so many different museums but when you walk into the Frick Collection on upper 5th Avenue and see the two there, you know at once that you are looking at masterpieces. Thus when seeing museums “out of town” you have to keep in mind that at best you are likely to see only a few really good things. It seems to me that there are indeed some really good things at this museum and, on the whole, I would think it has a better collection than the National Gallery East Building across the Mall (see below).
On the museum web site there is a good biographical sketch of Mr. Hirshhorn. He was a Latvian immigrant to this country, he dropped out of school at thirteen and went to work as a runner on Wall Street, he bought a seat on the stock exchange at sixteen, and bought his first art work at eighteen. Through various mining investments he became enormously wealthy. He collected art all his life, befriended most of the artists whose works he bought, and in the 1960’s gave his collection of 6000 works to the people of the United States, through the Smithsonian Institute, with the proviso that they build a museum to house his. At his death he willed the government another 6000 artworks.
Like the Phillips Collection and MOMA this collection heavily favors the French School of Modern art and most of the twentieth century American schools. In the first gallery it begins, surprisingly, with a Thomas Hart Benton, an Edward Hopper, and a Walt Kuhn, and moves on quickly to Calder and de Kooning. Picasso and Matisse are represented, in the present configuration of the works that I saw, only in the area of sculpture. It concludes with what seemed to me an overload of Dubuffet, but as I like seeing more than one work by an artist in a museum, more was fine in this case, it’s just that I’m not a big Dubuffet fan.
There were few examples of early German modern art and little of the Americans after the first blooming of abstract expressionism. Hirshhorn died in 1981 and while the collection continues to grow, apparently his contributions to it did not include too many works from the New York school of the last half of the twentieth century. There is one gallery with the mid career work of de Kooning and it is really fine.
Pieces I noted on my circuit of the third floor included a nice Joan Mitchell. I always enjoy her work. I sense that she is in command of her medium, that she knows what she wants to attempt, that she works from the inside of the painting, and that she allows the work as it naturally progresses to drive the process. It is always pleasant to discover her work in a museum because she is one of the artists not everyone feels compelled to display.
I was also happy to see another early, 1915, Marsden Hartley and two of the best Arthur Dove paintings to be seen in Washington, Haystack, 1931, and City Moon, 1938.
I was very bothered, however, by the Thomas Hart Benton painting. You can get a look at it at this link:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/visit/collection_object.asp?key=32&subkey=3937
Thomas Hart Benton is known as a regionalist and had a very successful career in the thirties and into the forties as a teacher at the Art Students League in New York and at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is likely the most successful muralist in America. His work is always anecdotal, representational, and he is a master of the human figure, not in the Eakins sense of anatomical perfection but in the modern art sense of the human figure as expressive form. His politics were left leaning in that he championed the working class man and he spoke out, in his work especially, against social injustice. He achieved an early recognition and fame but eventually his stature was eclipsed by the rise of abstract expressionism.
In the early 1940’s Benton was dismissed from the Kansas City Art Institute after a dispute with the management, during which he referred to the director as “limp wristed”. During his later years he apparently became something of a crank and railed against homosexuals and their influence and decadent modern art.
The Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City has devoted two galleries to his work …at his death he left them a large number of his paintings. In addition to those galleries there is in a nearby hallway two murals he painted, each composed of six panels. The themes of the murals are the success of the United States in Industry and in Agriculture. What stands out in these two murals is that all of the figures in these large American landscapes are men and, strangely, all of these twentieth century working men are nude …or more precisely, naked. (Apparently in Benton’s world a woman’s place was in the home …or in the bushes naked …see Susannah and The Elders.) Both murals sizzle with homoeroticism, not in the anecdote but in the artist’s pleasure in brushing out the human flesh ...he comes off as a Midwestern Caravaggio.
The Hirshhorn painting that welcomes the visitors is titled The People of Chilmark and subtitled Figure Composition. Chilmark is a community on Cape Cod. There are five men and four women in the painting. The choreography of the figures within the format is dynamic if not just a wee bit forced. For the most part the female figures are secondary, they are background. The male figures have more purpose …although there is no anecdote at all in this work …it is, as stated, a figure study. The dominant figure is the center male. But what is most dominant is his crotch at the very center of the painting. The viewer cannot help but notice that the genitals are perfectly delineated under the fabric of the bathing suit. This is enhanced by a black line that describes the outside curve of the penis. As this appears to the viewer at exactly eye level, those genitals have importance. It is also noteworthy that while presenting himself full front, that man has turned his head away from the viewer: we can see him but he implies that he is innocent of our presence. Just to the left of center there is the silhouette of what appears to be a large dog with gapping maw. This creature appears about to bite into that crotch.
I have always considered it profoundly sad that a person who can be so eloquent in his politics and his art can be so lacking in self understanding, can be so estranged from the content of his unconscious, can be so conflicted. Benton’s public railing suggests that he might have suffered painfully from something that caused him great distress. That distress forced him to “speak out”. When I am in the company of persons like that I am on my guard, I am wary. When I come upon certain Thomas Hart Benton paintings I am equally wary and equally on my guard. I don’t trust his motives. That is not what he intended in his paintings but, with or without an anecdote, that is what he conveys. He is a strong personality, that personality dominates his work. His paintings disturb me, not because of what they represent, but because of who and what he presents himself to be. I almost always sense that he is dishonest.
Fortunately the rest of the Hirshhorn Collection was more benign.
I did not walk across the street to see the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. When it comes to modern sculpture I am completely tone deaf: I can’t imagine why anyone makes it nor can I understand why anyone wants to look at it. Besides, having seen several sculpture gardens that have become de rigueur in American Museums, I realize that they all look alike. And at the mention of the names …Henry Moore, Hepworth, Zorach, David Smith, et al … the iconic images repeated ad infinitum by those persons comes to mind immediately. So why bother looking at any more of it?
The Special Exhibition: Anne Truitt.
I am always happy that museums recognize local artists and give space to artists who are not The Big Names. Anne Truitt lives in the Washington area and has some national recognition. Her work is best described, I suppose, as color field. Using free standing columns of various diameters and various heights, she paints each side a different color, some in horizontal bands and others with stripes of different colors on each side. It is the kind of work that looks best in a gallery installation. Seen as an individual piece alongside the work of other artists, I would image that each would seem negligible. Seen in a very large grouping such as this, they quickly become not very interesting. Other than a few thoughts about the formal values, they lack anything that would induce a viewer to share the artist’s concerns. They lack the engagement of a sentient experience. They are lifeless.
From Goethe to Kandinsky and beyond there have been many writings and theories on the emotional value of color. But seen as a merely formal value color by itself soon ceases to evoke a response. It needs context. Without context it seems nothing more than a component of a decoration. Anne Truitt’s is the kind of work that I think of as exploring the far edges of the envelope. It is gallery art that I cannot imagine a person making for an extended period of time. However, the interpretation states that she has been making these pieces for fifty years. That implies to me that she is probably a very fixed and rigid person with few interests. A potter once told me that every pot a potter throws is a self portrait. How true that is.
The Hirshhorn web site:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/
The Hirshhorn web site biography of the founder:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/info/column.asp?key=92
The Hirshhorn is the well known round building erected in 1969-1970 next to the Smithsonian Castle on the south side of the National Mall. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owens and Merrill (SOM) was the architect. It is in his 60’s Brutalism style similar to his LBJ Library in Texas and the Beineke Rare Book Library at Yale. Others of his buildings are more in keeping with the corporate image of the usual SOM entities, Chase Bank, Marine Midland Trust, and Lever House, all in Manhattan.
The building has often been described as a bunker, and having seen an anti-aircraft bunker from World War II in Dover, Kent, overlooking the English Channel, I have to agree.
The building is elevated 15 feet above the ground, resting on four cores, as the literature describes them, from which the outer and the inner rings are cantilevered. From the underside the ceiling above has nine foot coffers. This is rather impressive and suggests a monumental character. The outside ring is 231 feet in diameter and the inner ring 115 feet.
Made of reinforced concrete and covered with pulverized pink granite aggregate, which looks like cement, the inhospitable exterior walls are interrupted only by a long horizontal ribbon window on the Mall side …emphasizing the bunker reference. From the inside that window looks out over the Mall from almost to the Capitol on the east to almost to the Washington Monument on the west. Standing at that window I was perplexed as to why it had not been extended another three feet on both ends to provide a view that would encompass the two. It was a real missed opportunity. But I suppose you can only stretch a cantilever so far.
The inside diameter wall is a continuous window wall divided into cement frames. It is the more pleasing side of the building being a direct quotation of the neo-classical fantasies of de Chirico.
Although it is not an entrance into the building, a grand stairway brings the visitors up from the Mall into the museum plaza and under the building to the entrance into the structure on Independence Avenue, the side opposite the Mall It is enclosed with glass. A long escalator carries the visitors up to the galleries on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and the offices are on the 4th floor. The escalator deposits the visitor to The Collection into a third floor hallway before a large opening. On the wall inside the gallery facing the opening one can see a large painting by Thomas Hart Benton (more later). If you know your modern art history that is as good a sign as any that this is the entrance.
Each of the two gallery floors is divided into two rings, an outer ring where there are paintings, and a narrower inner ring where there are many pieces of sculpture, none of them very large: the ceilings in the galleries are 15 feet high with 3 foot coffers. None of the sculptures require that much overhead space. As you move into the galleries and from work to work there is always a sense of forward movement, never that sense you find in most museums of walking in circles within each gallery from one end of a building to the other. This is a pleasant change. However, once you exit a gallery into a large hallway and see the Thomas Hart Benton painting again, there is a real sense of “been there done that” …the abruptness of it made me homesick for the Guggenheim spiral.
The building was designed specifically to be “different” from the others on the Mall. It is different and if I seem not overly fond of it it is because I find round buildings completely absurd. Nor am I a fan of brutalism. As a presence on the Mall it is cold, austere, and unwelcoming. It also seems small.
One of an architect’s first considerations is the building site. This should include not only the square footage of the property but the surrounding area as well. The Mall stretches for fourteen blocks from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The largest of the buildings are two blocks long. None of the buildings is higher than seven or so floors. (Museums with three floors are about seven floors high.) There are four buildings on the north side of the Mall and two large and several smaller buildings to the south. The Hirshhorn is of medium size. The National Gallery East Building, I. M. Pei, is about one third the size of its neighbor, the West Building and petite compared to its other neighbor, the US Capitol. With one side of the property touching Pennsylvania Avenue, it has the most contact with the city beyond the Mall. It overcomes its size and location by being intriguingly complex. The simplicity of the Hirshhorn makes it appear to be very small in comparison to the breadth of the Mall. I read that as a fault of the design.
The Collection.
One of the problems with having lived in New York for thirty years is that you get overly accustomed to being in the presence of masterpieces. For instance, there are more Corot paintings in the United States than anywhere else in the world. It is nice to travel around the country and see them in so many different museums but when you walk into the Frick Collection on upper 5th Avenue and see the two there, you know at once that you are looking at masterpieces. Thus when seeing museums “out of town” you have to keep in mind that at best you are likely to see only a few really good things. It seems to me that there are indeed some really good things at this museum and, on the whole, I would think it has a better collection than the National Gallery East Building across the Mall (see below).
On the museum web site there is a good biographical sketch of Mr. Hirshhorn. He was a Latvian immigrant to this country, he dropped out of school at thirteen and went to work as a runner on Wall Street, he bought a seat on the stock exchange at sixteen, and bought his first art work at eighteen. Through various mining investments he became enormously wealthy. He collected art all his life, befriended most of the artists whose works he bought, and in the 1960’s gave his collection of 6000 works to the people of the United States, through the Smithsonian Institute, with the proviso that they build a museum to house his. At his death he willed the government another 6000 artworks.
Like the Phillips Collection and MOMA this collection heavily favors the French School of Modern art and most of the twentieth century American schools. In the first gallery it begins, surprisingly, with a Thomas Hart Benton, an Edward Hopper, and a Walt Kuhn, and moves on quickly to Calder and de Kooning. Picasso and Matisse are represented, in the present configuration of the works that I saw, only in the area of sculpture. It concludes with what seemed to me an overload of Dubuffet, but as I like seeing more than one work by an artist in a museum, more was fine in this case, it’s just that I’m not a big Dubuffet fan.
There were few examples of early German modern art and little of the Americans after the first blooming of abstract expressionism. Hirshhorn died in 1981 and while the collection continues to grow, apparently his contributions to it did not include too many works from the New York school of the last half of the twentieth century. There is one gallery with the mid career work of de Kooning and it is really fine.
Pieces I noted on my circuit of the third floor included a nice Joan Mitchell. I always enjoy her work. I sense that she is in command of her medium, that she knows what she wants to attempt, that she works from the inside of the painting, and that she allows the work as it naturally progresses to drive the process. It is always pleasant to discover her work in a museum because she is one of the artists not everyone feels compelled to display.
I was also happy to see another early, 1915, Marsden Hartley and two of the best Arthur Dove paintings to be seen in Washington, Haystack, 1931, and City Moon, 1938.
I was very bothered, however, by the Thomas Hart Benton painting. You can get a look at it at this link:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/visit/collection_object.asp?key=32&subkey=3937
Thomas Hart Benton is known as a regionalist and had a very successful career in the thirties and into the forties as a teacher at the Art Students League in New York and at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is likely the most successful muralist in America. His work is always anecdotal, representational, and he is a master of the human figure, not in the Eakins sense of anatomical perfection but in the modern art sense of the human figure as expressive form. His politics were left leaning in that he championed the working class man and he spoke out, in his work especially, against social injustice. He achieved an early recognition and fame but eventually his stature was eclipsed by the rise of abstract expressionism.
In the early 1940’s Benton was dismissed from the Kansas City Art Institute after a dispute with the management, during which he referred to the director as “limp wristed”. During his later years he apparently became something of a crank and railed against homosexuals and their influence and decadent modern art.
The Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City has devoted two galleries to his work …at his death he left them a large number of his paintings. In addition to those galleries there is in a nearby hallway two murals he painted, each composed of six panels. The themes of the murals are the success of the United States in Industry and in Agriculture. What stands out in these two murals is that all of the figures in these large American landscapes are men and, strangely, all of these twentieth century working men are nude …or more precisely, naked. (Apparently in Benton’s world a woman’s place was in the home …or in the bushes naked …see Susannah and The Elders.) Both murals sizzle with homoeroticism, not in the anecdote but in the artist’s pleasure in brushing out the human flesh ...he comes off as a Midwestern Caravaggio.
The Hirshhorn painting that welcomes the visitors is titled The People of Chilmark and subtitled Figure Composition. Chilmark is a community on Cape Cod. There are five men and four women in the painting. The choreography of the figures within the format is dynamic if not just a wee bit forced. For the most part the female figures are secondary, they are background. The male figures have more purpose …although there is no anecdote at all in this work …it is, as stated, a figure study. The dominant figure is the center male. But what is most dominant is his crotch at the very center of the painting. The viewer cannot help but notice that the genitals are perfectly delineated under the fabric of the bathing suit. This is enhanced by a black line that describes the outside curve of the penis. As this appears to the viewer at exactly eye level, those genitals have importance. It is also noteworthy that while presenting himself full front, that man has turned his head away from the viewer: we can see him but he implies that he is innocent of our presence. Just to the left of center there is the silhouette of what appears to be a large dog with gapping maw. This creature appears about to bite into that crotch.
I have always considered it profoundly sad that a person who can be so eloquent in his politics and his art can be so lacking in self understanding, can be so estranged from the content of his unconscious, can be so conflicted. Benton’s public railing suggests that he might have suffered painfully from something that caused him great distress. That distress forced him to “speak out”. When I am in the company of persons like that I am on my guard, I am wary. When I come upon certain Thomas Hart Benton paintings I am equally wary and equally on my guard. I don’t trust his motives. That is not what he intended in his paintings but, with or without an anecdote, that is what he conveys. He is a strong personality, that personality dominates his work. His paintings disturb me, not because of what they represent, but because of who and what he presents himself to be. I almost always sense that he is dishonest.
Fortunately the rest of the Hirshhorn Collection was more benign.
I did not walk across the street to see the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. When it comes to modern sculpture I am completely tone deaf: I can’t imagine why anyone makes it nor can I understand why anyone wants to look at it. Besides, having seen several sculpture gardens that have become de rigueur in American Museums, I realize that they all look alike. And at the mention of the names …Henry Moore, Hepworth, Zorach, David Smith, et al … the iconic images repeated ad infinitum by those persons comes to mind immediately. So why bother looking at any more of it?
The Special Exhibition: Anne Truitt.
I am always happy that museums recognize local artists and give space to artists who are not The Big Names. Anne Truitt lives in the Washington area and has some national recognition. Her work is best described, I suppose, as color field. Using free standing columns of various diameters and various heights, she paints each side a different color, some in horizontal bands and others with stripes of different colors on each side. It is the kind of work that looks best in a gallery installation. Seen as an individual piece alongside the work of other artists, I would image that each would seem negligible. Seen in a very large grouping such as this, they quickly become not very interesting. Other than a few thoughts about the formal values, they lack anything that would induce a viewer to share the artist’s concerns. They lack the engagement of a sentient experience. They are lifeless.
From Goethe to Kandinsky and beyond there have been many writings and theories on the emotional value of color. But seen as a merely formal value color by itself soon ceases to evoke a response. It needs context. Without context it seems nothing more than a component of a decoration. Anne Truitt’s is the kind of work that I think of as exploring the far edges of the envelope. It is gallery art that I cannot imagine a person making for an extended period of time. However, the interpretation states that she has been making these pieces for fifty years. That implies to me that she is probably a very fixed and rigid person with few interests. A potter once told me that every pot a potter throws is a self portrait. How true that is.
The Hirshhorn web site:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/
The Hirshhorn web site biography of the founder:
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/info/column.asp?key=92
Thursday, December 24, 2009
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
I. The West Building.
In my museum going the last few years I have been reminded by several sources that The National Gallery is the outstanding Fine Art Museum in this country, an interesting appraisal because of its youth: the museum was not opened until 1941. I have been hesitant to agree as I have not been here since 1967, and although I remember it fondly it is as if through a glass darkly.
Having now seen it again I can report that there is no other museum in this country that has the presence, the grandeur, and the elegance of this institution. I suspect the secret of that success lies in its simplicity, its less-is-more philosophy: the focus here is on great painting …with some few pieces of small sculpture …there are no period rooms, no vast collections of Romanian silver or tomb figures from the Dalmatian Islands.
This is not to say that the museumgoer is stymied. Other venues in the city allow for this specialization: just across the Mall are the Smithsonian Museums of African Art, the Sackler Collection of Asian Art, the Hirshhorn Collection of Modern Art, and the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. As far as I am concerned museums in this country would do well to place large areas of their collections in buildings other than the main building, as is done in Philadelphia which shares exhibition spaces with galleries at the University of Pennsylvania. Museums need to get over the mentality that a museum is a five ring circus, a midway of brick-a-brack for the out of town tourists.
This building stretches for two blocks along the Mall and is probably the last of the great American museums built in the beaux arts classic revival, the City Beautiful, style. As a late arrival but with high ambitions, every effort was made to make it the largest and the purest. As the most august presence on the Mall, it makes its neighbor, the U.S. Capitol, seems frivolous and rococo by comparison. I am mindful, however, that despite its presence, it is exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he called certain architectural entities copies of copies of copies.
A large stairway in the center leads from the street into the Great Hall, a rotunda with a coffered dome resting on sixteen dark marble columns each four feet in diameter at the base. Central corridors lead off the Hall and run the length of the building, with a cross corridor some way distant and a large Palm Court in the transepts. All of the galleries are on this main floor. Below the main floor, as the long exterior stairway would indicate, there is a lower floor. There one finds the galleries for the works on paper …drawings and photographs …as well as the museum shops, I assume the offices of the staff, and the restaurant which, I am sorry to report, is as bad and as over priced as any other museum restaurant.
The corridors are kept open for the foot traffic. There are pieces of sculpture placed here and there but they offer no interference to the movement. Parallel to the corridors there are galleries on both sides two rooms deep all along the way. Those looking at pictures in the galleries are not swarmed by the hordes making their way to one or the other end of the building. The galleries are decorated in styles compatible to the time and culture of the paintings hanging there. There is a clear cut sense of organization and with that a sense of calm and order that is the epitome of elegance. Appearing now much as it did to me forty five years ago, there is about it a sense of timelessness that I think is not at all inappropriate for a venue of works of fine art.
I believe no other museum has so many really great paintings side by side as can be seen here. They are exclusively European and American and begin with Gothic religious works dating from probably 1200. The most recent works are the late Cézannes. All of them are hanging in the modern style with one painting in each unit of vertical space and all at approximately the same eye level. I cannot remember, nor did I note, that any one of them was overly large …there is no Coronation of Napoleon or Raft of the Medusa such as one can see at The Louvre.
When visiting a museum for the first time I usually just allow myself to wander about and to admire what I see, not looking for any one work in particular and not worrying whether what I see is a Rubens or a Hoch. I can imagine someone spending a day here as one of those treats that comes from being in a really magnificent space.
Of course there is always that one painting that stands out and commands one’s attention and in this case it was a work by Duccio de Buoninsigna, Sienna, 1308-1311, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew. It is about 18 inches square in tempera on wood panel. The Christ figure is seen standing against a raw sienna rocky mountain in the center of the left one third of the painting. In the center of the other two thirds the two who are called stand in a small simple boat on the sea lifting their net full of small fish. The sea is a wash of sea green color. The men, standing before a gold leafed sky, are dressed one in pale red and the other in pale blue. The Christ figure is dressed in a darker blue and darker red. Everything in the painting is simplified to illustrate the story without confusion. There are shapes but there are no forms, there is no modeling. There are contour lines indicating the flow of the robes. This is a tale told by a man who loved to paint and every brush stroke is lovingly made, and then, as a final gesture, a thread thin line of gold follows all around the edge of the Christ’s garment Yes indeed, this man loved to paint. And for all its loving detail, he knew exactly when to stop.
Another painting that stood out was a Marsden Hartley. As stated above the most recent work in this collection dates from 1906 and the death of Cezanne. Yet in the American section, the last I visited although I made no effort to see anything in any order, the last painting hanging beside the door leading out of that gallery was a landscape with mountain and clouds, Mount Katahdin, dated 1942. My first response to this was to think that this museum does not consider him a modern. It is a wonderful painting with a profound emotional quality, one of those last paintings of his that make me think he is the Eugene O’Neill of American painting. And so it became my second thought that this museum considers him one of the great “old masters”. While I agree with the assessment, I still think it odd that a painting forty years younger than the next oldest can be found in these galleries. It is, however, a great honor to a deserving artist who has yet to receive his due.
The museum has one of the best museum web sites: any of the works on view in the galleries is available to view online. For each work or artist listed one can find all the necessary information regarding the work, the artist, the provenance of the work, and the biographical material of the persons named in the provenance. This museum and these art works belong to the government, to the American people. There is a very strong sense in everything the museum does that, short of taking the works home, everything possible is being done to enhance the experience of these works …they make films available on a wide range of subjects free of charge.
http://www.nga.gov/home.htm
In my museum going the last few years I have been reminded by several sources that The National Gallery is the outstanding Fine Art Museum in this country, an interesting appraisal because of its youth: the museum was not opened until 1941. I have been hesitant to agree as I have not been here since 1967, and although I remember it fondly it is as if through a glass darkly.
Having now seen it again I can report that there is no other museum in this country that has the presence, the grandeur, and the elegance of this institution. I suspect the secret of that success lies in its simplicity, its less-is-more philosophy: the focus here is on great painting …with some few pieces of small sculpture …there are no period rooms, no vast collections of Romanian silver or tomb figures from the Dalmatian Islands.
This is not to say that the museumgoer is stymied. Other venues in the city allow for this specialization: just across the Mall are the Smithsonian Museums of African Art, the Sackler Collection of Asian Art, the Hirshhorn Collection of Modern Art, and the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. As far as I am concerned museums in this country would do well to place large areas of their collections in buildings other than the main building, as is done in Philadelphia which shares exhibition spaces with galleries at the University of Pennsylvania. Museums need to get over the mentality that a museum is a five ring circus, a midway of brick-a-brack for the out of town tourists.
This building stretches for two blocks along the Mall and is probably the last of the great American museums built in the beaux arts classic revival, the City Beautiful, style. As a late arrival but with high ambitions, every effort was made to make it the largest and the purest. As the most august presence on the Mall, it makes its neighbor, the U.S. Capitol, seems frivolous and rococo by comparison. I am mindful, however, that despite its presence, it is exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he called certain architectural entities copies of copies of copies.
A large stairway in the center leads from the street into the Great Hall, a rotunda with a coffered dome resting on sixteen dark marble columns each four feet in diameter at the base. Central corridors lead off the Hall and run the length of the building, with a cross corridor some way distant and a large Palm Court in the transepts. All of the galleries are on this main floor. Below the main floor, as the long exterior stairway would indicate, there is a lower floor. There one finds the galleries for the works on paper …drawings and photographs …as well as the museum shops, I assume the offices of the staff, and the restaurant which, I am sorry to report, is as bad and as over priced as any other museum restaurant.
The corridors are kept open for the foot traffic. There are pieces of sculpture placed here and there but they offer no interference to the movement. Parallel to the corridors there are galleries on both sides two rooms deep all along the way. Those looking at pictures in the galleries are not swarmed by the hordes making their way to one or the other end of the building. The galleries are decorated in styles compatible to the time and culture of the paintings hanging there. There is a clear cut sense of organization and with that a sense of calm and order that is the epitome of elegance. Appearing now much as it did to me forty five years ago, there is about it a sense of timelessness that I think is not at all inappropriate for a venue of works of fine art.
I believe no other museum has so many really great paintings side by side as can be seen here. They are exclusively European and American and begin with Gothic religious works dating from probably 1200. The most recent works are the late Cézannes. All of them are hanging in the modern style with one painting in each unit of vertical space and all at approximately the same eye level. I cannot remember, nor did I note, that any one of them was overly large …there is no Coronation of Napoleon or Raft of the Medusa such as one can see at The Louvre.
When visiting a museum for the first time I usually just allow myself to wander about and to admire what I see, not looking for any one work in particular and not worrying whether what I see is a Rubens or a Hoch. I can imagine someone spending a day here as one of those treats that comes from being in a really magnificent space.
Of course there is always that one painting that stands out and commands one’s attention and in this case it was a work by Duccio de Buoninsigna, Sienna, 1308-1311, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew. It is about 18 inches square in tempera on wood panel. The Christ figure is seen standing against a raw sienna rocky mountain in the center of the left one third of the painting. In the center of the other two thirds the two who are called stand in a small simple boat on the sea lifting their net full of small fish. The sea is a wash of sea green color. The men, standing before a gold leafed sky, are dressed one in pale red and the other in pale blue. The Christ figure is dressed in a darker blue and darker red. Everything in the painting is simplified to illustrate the story without confusion. There are shapes but there are no forms, there is no modeling. There are contour lines indicating the flow of the robes. This is a tale told by a man who loved to paint and every brush stroke is lovingly made, and then, as a final gesture, a thread thin line of gold follows all around the edge of the Christ’s garment Yes indeed, this man loved to paint. And for all its loving detail, he knew exactly when to stop.
Another painting that stood out was a Marsden Hartley. As stated above the most recent work in this collection dates from 1906 and the death of Cezanne. Yet in the American section, the last I visited although I made no effort to see anything in any order, the last painting hanging beside the door leading out of that gallery was a landscape with mountain and clouds, Mount Katahdin, dated 1942. My first response to this was to think that this museum does not consider him a modern. It is a wonderful painting with a profound emotional quality, one of those last paintings of his that make me think he is the Eugene O’Neill of American painting. And so it became my second thought that this museum considers him one of the great “old masters”. While I agree with the assessment, I still think it odd that a painting forty years younger than the next oldest can be found in these galleries. It is, however, a great honor to a deserving artist who has yet to receive his due.
The museum has one of the best museum web sites: any of the works on view in the galleries is available to view online. For each work or artist listed one can find all the necessary information regarding the work, the artist, the provenance of the work, and the biographical material of the persons named in the provenance. This museum and these art works belong to the government, to the American people. There is a very strong sense in everything the museum does that, short of taking the works home, everything possible is being done to enhance the experience of these works …they make films available on a wide range of subjects free of charge.
http://www.nga.gov/home.htm
In the Darkroom, at The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
II. The National Gallery of Art.
Despite having been given the 1700 works of the Stieglitz archive by Georgia O’Keefe in 1948, The National Gallery did not establish a Department of Photography until 1990. Since that time it has amassed a collection of over 10,000 photographs. In that twenty years time that amounts to 500 photographs a year or just over one a day. Frankly I am rather suspicious of this haul: are there really that many fine art photographs swirling about in the ether? Are they truly putting together a unique collection with a strong point of view, which would be my preference, or are they merely buying copies of the standard American art museum holdings …all the well known names and all the standard shots? American museums are so devoted to playing the game of keeping up with the Joneses, in which all of them have collections that look like all of the other collections, that all of them lessen the importance of the works they hold. Be that as it may…
In the Darkroom is an exhibition of photographic prints made in all the darkroom techniques prior to the advent of digital photography. They are arranged in chronological order of the development of these methods and in many of the methods the work of more than one photographer is shown to illustrate the range of that technique. In addition there are examples of photographers who have printed in a number of methods from the same negative.
There are as well several examples of photo reproduction methods. One of my criticisms of the exhibition is that no means was provided to show the details of these different processes, such as a magnifying glass or enlargements of sections of the works. It is interesting to read about the difference in half tone screens and gravure but much more informative to see how the dots vary in the different processes.
I think it might have been more informative to have had a darkroom set up on hand as well so that the various terms used in the interpretation could have been seen first hand…developing tanks, pans, enlargers, drying racks and lines. I would have liked to have seen paper, glass, and acetate negatives and to have seen a demonstration of how each of them was used for printing …through the wet or the dry processes. I know there are photographs showing the printing of negatives on photographic papers out of doors using the sun as the light source.
I had hoped before seeing this exhibition that it would have covered all of that.
As it is it is fine. And it is something I would like to see made available in more museums. I think it would greatly enhance the appreciation of fine art photography if the public could be shown in all its complexity exactly what goes into making a negative and from that a print: we could have been shown photographs made from the same negative and printed on different papers. Museums would do well to remember that the general public is the market for point and shoot and the one hour foto shop. I remember seeing at the Los Angeles County Art Museum a few years ago a small …about six square feet …exhibition explaining the lost wax technique featuring a small Rodin work as the example. An art work can be greatly more appreciated if one is made aware that the mastery of craft, often extremely complicated, is prior to the production of something that is expressive of one’s feelings.
For example: on the museum web site under Irving Penn there is a wonderful, brief history of the twenty years of trials that he went through in order to revive the platinum print…going so far as to involve the DuPont Chemical Company in his research and process.
Prior to going to Washington I bought a copy of the catalogue for the exhibition and while it is good, after reading it I felt I had not been told anything I could not have found in others of my reference books, including the Time/Life Photography series, or that can be found on Wikipedia.
I think the museum might also have shared its thoughts with us on what all this has to do with digital photography and the future of the art form. Can just anyone with a digital camera and the Adobe Photoshop now create photographs the equal the masterworks of the past? Is there something more to it than just craft? What is it about a photograph that distinguishes it as a fine art photograph?
One aspect of the installation that bothered me very much was the poor lighting on the photographs. Because of the position of the overhead lights I could see myself reflected in the glass over each one of them. I found it necessary to step around until that reflection was minimized enough for me to see the work. There is really no excuse for a major museum using such poor lighting. To learn what the correct lighting should be, I am referring all museums to The International Photography Center, one of the few photography venues that knows how to illuminate exhibition photographs. (See this Blog, Richard Avedon, July 2009.)
But as I said, it is a fine exhibition; it just didn’t go as far as I would have liked to have seen it go.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/darkroominfo.shtm
Despite having been given the 1700 works of the Stieglitz archive by Georgia O’Keefe in 1948, The National Gallery did not establish a Department of Photography until 1990. Since that time it has amassed a collection of over 10,000 photographs. In that twenty years time that amounts to 500 photographs a year or just over one a day. Frankly I am rather suspicious of this haul: are there really that many fine art photographs swirling about in the ether? Are they truly putting together a unique collection with a strong point of view, which would be my preference, or are they merely buying copies of the standard American art museum holdings …all the well known names and all the standard shots? American museums are so devoted to playing the game of keeping up with the Joneses, in which all of them have collections that look like all of the other collections, that all of them lessen the importance of the works they hold. Be that as it may…
In the Darkroom is an exhibition of photographic prints made in all the darkroom techniques prior to the advent of digital photography. They are arranged in chronological order of the development of these methods and in many of the methods the work of more than one photographer is shown to illustrate the range of that technique. In addition there are examples of photographers who have printed in a number of methods from the same negative.
There are as well several examples of photo reproduction methods. One of my criticisms of the exhibition is that no means was provided to show the details of these different processes, such as a magnifying glass or enlargements of sections of the works. It is interesting to read about the difference in half tone screens and gravure but much more informative to see how the dots vary in the different processes.
I think it might have been more informative to have had a darkroom set up on hand as well so that the various terms used in the interpretation could have been seen first hand…developing tanks, pans, enlargers, drying racks and lines. I would have liked to have seen paper, glass, and acetate negatives and to have seen a demonstration of how each of them was used for printing …through the wet or the dry processes. I know there are photographs showing the printing of negatives on photographic papers out of doors using the sun as the light source.
I had hoped before seeing this exhibition that it would have covered all of that.
As it is it is fine. And it is something I would like to see made available in more museums. I think it would greatly enhance the appreciation of fine art photography if the public could be shown in all its complexity exactly what goes into making a negative and from that a print: we could have been shown photographs made from the same negative and printed on different papers. Museums would do well to remember that the general public is the market for point and shoot and the one hour foto shop. I remember seeing at the Los Angeles County Art Museum a few years ago a small …about six square feet …exhibition explaining the lost wax technique featuring a small Rodin work as the example. An art work can be greatly more appreciated if one is made aware that the mastery of craft, often extremely complicated, is prior to the production of something that is expressive of one’s feelings.
For example: on the museum web site under Irving Penn there is a wonderful, brief history of the twenty years of trials that he went through in order to revive the platinum print…going so far as to involve the DuPont Chemical Company in his research and process.
Prior to going to Washington I bought a copy of the catalogue for the exhibition and while it is good, after reading it I felt I had not been told anything I could not have found in others of my reference books, including the Time/Life Photography series, or that can be found on Wikipedia.
I think the museum might also have shared its thoughts with us on what all this has to do with digital photography and the future of the art form. Can just anyone with a digital camera and the Adobe Photoshop now create photographs the equal the masterworks of the past? Is there something more to it than just craft? What is it about a photograph that distinguishes it as a fine art photograph?
One aspect of the installation that bothered me very much was the poor lighting on the photographs. Because of the position of the overhead lights I could see myself reflected in the glass over each one of them. I found it necessary to step around until that reflection was minimized enough for me to see the work. There is really no excuse for a major museum using such poor lighting. To learn what the correct lighting should be, I am referring all museums to The International Photography Center, one of the few photography venues that knows how to illuminate exhibition photographs. (See this Blog, Richard Avedon, July 2009.)
But as I said, it is a fine exhibition; it just didn’t go as far as I would have liked to have seen it go.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/darkroominfo.shtm
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The National Gallery of Art. III. The East Building.
The East Building.
This is one of the art works in Washington that I have wanted to see since it was first erected (1974 -1978) and I am sorry that it has been so many years until I have come face to face with it. From the outside it is very likely the best designed building in the city. It is one of only a few government buildings in the city that does not reference the grandeur of ancient Rome and, by inference, presage the decline and fall of the American Civilization. But now that I have seen it and have gone through it I think it is probably more beautiful and exciting as a structure than it is practical as a museum. In modern architecture the dictum form follows function generally implies that the uses of the entity define the nature of the space that encloses them. In this building there is a distinct sense that the functions have been fitted into the architect’s resolution of the problems with the site and the needs of the staff.
Because of the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue on its north side the site presented a challenge to the designer, I.M. Pei. He has resolved this by making the sides parallel to the streets around it, creating a trapezoid in the plan. He has divided that into two triangles; one a right triangle, which houses the offices, and the other an isosceles triangle which houses the galleries and the atrium.
The isosceles triangle has been used as a template unit with a dimension of three and a half units high by two and one half units wide at the base, as measured by my foot. That pattern begins in the sidewalk tile outside the building and carries inside onto the floor of the atrium. The atrium repeats that shape and in the same proportion. The side between the triangles is open, with a sky light over head and floor to ceiling windows in the near and far walls. The galleries are in the solid areas along the two outside walls of the isosceles triangle.
Here again we find the usual museum expansion configuration in which there is more public space than gallery space: the atrium is enormous; the galleries feel small and cramped. I would guess that some of the larger contemporary works, those by Louise Nevelson or Murray Louis, would either not fit into these galleries or would consume all of the available wall space. I’m never sure why museums go to all the trouble to build such large expansions and then limit the gallery space so severely.
This museum design as realized creates the impression from both the inside and the outside of this being two buildings joined by a skylight and those windows; there is a real us and them, public and staff, feeling of division. The constant sense of “The Staff” in the isolated right angle tower dominating the atrium is a less than friendly feeling. In the West Building there is no awareness of the presence of the staff at all; it is the people’s building pure and simple.
As a senior citizen who relies on elevators and escalators, I was also very aware from my first entry into the atrium that there are escalators from the second to the third level, but none from the first to the second. Furthermore, I had to ask for the elevator which was not at all marked in the signage. Looking at the museum guide I have to say I was amused by the terms for the different levels: beginning at the bottom we have the concourse, the ground, the mezzanine, the upper level, and The Tower. I couldn’t image what image was being attempted here. Are B, 1, 2, 3, and 4 too mundane now for a fine arts entity?
Having then found another elevator that would take me to the Tower, to which there is access by only that one elevator and a hidden flight of stairs, I did find, however, that as one works his way back down through the galleries to the main floor, there was a nice meandering feeling to the journey. The stairway from level three to level two and another just like it at the apex of the triangle on the east side of the building are wonderful. There was a real attention to design and detail on the part of the architect. This is another example where a stairway has been used by the architect to create a moment of pure architecture, like the grand stairways in the beaux arts buildings but on a smaller scale.
In a way this museum, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, is a reconsideration of museum space and as both these museums work so beautifully as statements of the architect’s individuality it is rather sad to realize that they have had so little influence in subsequent museum design; the most common names now in museum expansions …Piano and Gehry …both repeating design ideas, facades really, in expansion after expansion …appear to have caved in to the corporate mentality of the various museum boards of directors.
As I have begun the discussion of the building from the atrium I will segue into the collection by pointing out that this is yet another museum that has an overly large Calder mobile suspended from the ceiling, up amongst the clutter of lighting fixtures and, here, the triangular shaped frames of the skylight. Because almost every museum has one and because they are so lost in space, those mobiles have assumed the character of obligatory decoration. Once they are recognized as obligatory, visitors no longer see them …they become like parking garages… invisible public icons. I doubt that many visitors gasp with awe at these or even consider them artworks, if they see them at all. This is all too bad because I like Calder’s work and I’m always sorry to see it treated in such a disrespectful fashion.
There are other objects in the atrium as well but they are so dwarfed as to seem merely decoration, something to break up the gray granite uniformity. Nothing about them made me curious to want to know what they were.
The Collection: The National Gallery East building.
Like the Metropolitan Museum in New York which missed the boat on modern art and has been playing catch up the last forty or so years, and which still has a really second string collection, this relatively new museum has a really disappointing offering as well. This is especially evident when compared to the superior collection in the West Building. Where that building opened with large bequests from the Samuel Kress, the Chester Dale, and the Paul Mellon Collections, large collections that each of those men had planned as the basis for a museum that could stand alone, there is a sense in this building that it started from scratch and that the collection is being built from what is available.
I began my visit in the Tower Gallery, a name that evokes a foreboding that was realized in its claustrophobia inducing isolation …it lacks light, it lacks air, it is small. That sense of dread was enhanced by the art work there, some six or so late painting by Phillip Guston. I am not a Guston fan.
Early in his career Guston achieved a level of name recognition for abstract expressionist work that was characterized by a lack of individuality. Whereas one can recognize at once the work of Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollack, Still, or Frankenthaler, Guston’s work never rose above the character of an also ran among others on the second and third tiers.
Later in his career he changed his approach and began to produce works that appear to me as simply self conscious efforts to create an iconic imagery, an iconic imagery being considered one of the de rigueur achievements of contemporary art. But there is a too evident sense of his attempting to do something very different, in the subject matter, but more especially in his palette, a selection of colors and keys that I find really off putting. I am all for individuality and new insights, new areas for exploration, but from what I see, Guston had the burning desire for fame and recognition but was never successful in his art; these late paintings are about “something” but none of them that I have seen have the presence of a valid visual experience: upon seeing them none creates the impact of an experience that we want to try to understand. Now the powers that be are attempting to turn him into a posthumous art world darling and I find it all rather tedious. Surely there are better things museums can do with their time.
One level down (sorry, I forget their names), can be found the masters of early twentieth century art. In my visit the day before to the West Building, I was disappointed to find that works I had wanted to see had been removed from several of the galleries. The attendant told me that they were to be repositioned in a new configuration, but that he didn’t know where. So imagine my delight when I discovered them here. Then, after seeing the whole of this collection, I wondered if they might not have been brought here specifically to dress the place up, repeating the MOMA layout that begins with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. (Three cheers for conformity amongst American museums!)
There are five wonderful Picasso’s from early in his career, from the blue and rose periods, especially The Family of Saltimbanques which, now that I’ve read Richardson’s biographies of the artist, I can understand as an opium induced dream, wonderful late Cezanne’s, The Young Man in the Red Waistcoat, and the Chateau Noir, a nice Matisse, Coullioure, and I was surprised and very pleased to find one of Marsden Hartley’s early works made in Germany. I was aware that he was one of a few Americans here but the only representative from the German school of modern art.
Among the permanent galleries there is one featuring Matisse’s papier colle works, which was just closing as I approached …it has limited hours to protect the works on paper from the light. (When I was at the Pompidou Center where they had a huge floor full of these things, I don’t recall that they were as careful…but maybe they’ve all since disintegrated!)
Further along there was a gallery devoted to the works of Calder and it was great to see him getting some personal attention and in a gallery where the works could be seen on the floor and at eye level rather than overlooked amongst the lighting fixtures on the ceiling.
In an almost hidden corner on the first floor there is what appears to be a permanent exhibition, Small French Paintings, from the late nineteenth century. It gives the impression that this is only more work from the West Building filling up unused space. It emphasized my observation that the collection appears to be scant.
After that it dwindled to nothing. While the building gives the impression of having more public space than gallery space, the collection as displayed suggests that there is not enough of it to fill what little space there is at the present time. Which raises the question, if the collection grows substantially over the next forty years, where will they put it?
The featured exhibition was The Meyerhoff Collection, American works from the last half of the twentieth Century. It is as dreary a collection of Modern art as I have ever seen. However, the museum boasts that this promised bequest will greatly enlarge the collection. That should give you some idea of how meager the collection is to start with.
Anyone who lived in New York in the 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s, could not avoid the ballyhoo of the so called Art World as covered by the newspapers, the magazines, and the television reportage. Beginning with the post war boom the art scene morphed into one of the most visible and boisterous celebrants of Reagan Republican sleaze and greed. It was really just a highly publicized world of nouveau riche hucksters. Names were made, fame bestowed, fortunes made and spent. And all of it for art works that were as thin and as dull as communion wafers. At its best it is all genre, a niche market of a specific time and place. Looking back on that era, as represented by this collection, I can understand why I lost my interest in painting; there was not enough in the work of that era to sustain it.
The 60’s! The 70’s! The 80’s! They are over. (Hallelujah!) Let’s move on.
And as I stood in this exhibition and watched the other visitors drift through in a daze of pronounced ennui, I experienced a rare moment of identifying with the public. Not my favorite feeling.
The Museum web site:
http://www.nga.gov/ginfo/aboutnga.shtm
The Meyerhoff Collection:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/meyerhoffinfo.shtm
This is one of the art works in Washington that I have wanted to see since it was first erected (1974 -1978) and I am sorry that it has been so many years until I have come face to face with it. From the outside it is very likely the best designed building in the city. It is one of only a few government buildings in the city that does not reference the grandeur of ancient Rome and, by inference, presage the decline and fall of the American Civilization. But now that I have seen it and have gone through it I think it is probably more beautiful and exciting as a structure than it is practical as a museum. In modern architecture the dictum form follows function generally implies that the uses of the entity define the nature of the space that encloses them. In this building there is a distinct sense that the functions have been fitted into the architect’s resolution of the problems with the site and the needs of the staff.
Because of the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue on its north side the site presented a challenge to the designer, I.M. Pei. He has resolved this by making the sides parallel to the streets around it, creating a trapezoid in the plan. He has divided that into two triangles; one a right triangle, which houses the offices, and the other an isosceles triangle which houses the galleries and the atrium.
The isosceles triangle has been used as a template unit with a dimension of three and a half units high by two and one half units wide at the base, as measured by my foot. That pattern begins in the sidewalk tile outside the building and carries inside onto the floor of the atrium. The atrium repeats that shape and in the same proportion. The side between the triangles is open, with a sky light over head and floor to ceiling windows in the near and far walls. The galleries are in the solid areas along the two outside walls of the isosceles triangle.
Here again we find the usual museum expansion configuration in which there is more public space than gallery space: the atrium is enormous; the galleries feel small and cramped. I would guess that some of the larger contemporary works, those by Louise Nevelson or Murray Louis, would either not fit into these galleries or would consume all of the available wall space. I’m never sure why museums go to all the trouble to build such large expansions and then limit the gallery space so severely.
This museum design as realized creates the impression from both the inside and the outside of this being two buildings joined by a skylight and those windows; there is a real us and them, public and staff, feeling of division. The constant sense of “The Staff” in the isolated right angle tower dominating the atrium is a less than friendly feeling. In the West Building there is no awareness of the presence of the staff at all; it is the people’s building pure and simple.
As a senior citizen who relies on elevators and escalators, I was also very aware from my first entry into the atrium that there are escalators from the second to the third level, but none from the first to the second. Furthermore, I had to ask for the elevator which was not at all marked in the signage. Looking at the museum guide I have to say I was amused by the terms for the different levels: beginning at the bottom we have the concourse, the ground, the mezzanine, the upper level, and The Tower. I couldn’t image what image was being attempted here. Are B, 1, 2, 3, and 4 too mundane now for a fine arts entity?
Having then found another elevator that would take me to the Tower, to which there is access by only that one elevator and a hidden flight of stairs, I did find, however, that as one works his way back down through the galleries to the main floor, there was a nice meandering feeling to the journey. The stairway from level three to level two and another just like it at the apex of the triangle on the east side of the building are wonderful. There was a real attention to design and detail on the part of the architect. This is another example where a stairway has been used by the architect to create a moment of pure architecture, like the grand stairways in the beaux arts buildings but on a smaller scale.
In a way this museum, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, is a reconsideration of museum space and as both these museums work so beautifully as statements of the architect’s individuality it is rather sad to realize that they have had so little influence in subsequent museum design; the most common names now in museum expansions …Piano and Gehry …both repeating design ideas, facades really, in expansion after expansion …appear to have caved in to the corporate mentality of the various museum boards of directors.
As I have begun the discussion of the building from the atrium I will segue into the collection by pointing out that this is yet another museum that has an overly large Calder mobile suspended from the ceiling, up amongst the clutter of lighting fixtures and, here, the triangular shaped frames of the skylight. Because almost every museum has one and because they are so lost in space, those mobiles have assumed the character of obligatory decoration. Once they are recognized as obligatory, visitors no longer see them …they become like parking garages… invisible public icons. I doubt that many visitors gasp with awe at these or even consider them artworks, if they see them at all. This is all too bad because I like Calder’s work and I’m always sorry to see it treated in such a disrespectful fashion.
There are other objects in the atrium as well but they are so dwarfed as to seem merely decoration, something to break up the gray granite uniformity. Nothing about them made me curious to want to know what they were.
The Collection: The National Gallery East building.
Like the Metropolitan Museum in New York which missed the boat on modern art and has been playing catch up the last forty or so years, and which still has a really second string collection, this relatively new museum has a really disappointing offering as well. This is especially evident when compared to the superior collection in the West Building. Where that building opened with large bequests from the Samuel Kress, the Chester Dale, and the Paul Mellon Collections, large collections that each of those men had planned as the basis for a museum that could stand alone, there is a sense in this building that it started from scratch and that the collection is being built from what is available.
I began my visit in the Tower Gallery, a name that evokes a foreboding that was realized in its claustrophobia inducing isolation …it lacks light, it lacks air, it is small. That sense of dread was enhanced by the art work there, some six or so late painting by Phillip Guston. I am not a Guston fan.
Early in his career Guston achieved a level of name recognition for abstract expressionist work that was characterized by a lack of individuality. Whereas one can recognize at once the work of Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollack, Still, or Frankenthaler, Guston’s work never rose above the character of an also ran among others on the second and third tiers.
Later in his career he changed his approach and began to produce works that appear to me as simply self conscious efforts to create an iconic imagery, an iconic imagery being considered one of the de rigueur achievements of contemporary art. But there is a too evident sense of his attempting to do something very different, in the subject matter, but more especially in his palette, a selection of colors and keys that I find really off putting. I am all for individuality and new insights, new areas for exploration, but from what I see, Guston had the burning desire for fame and recognition but was never successful in his art; these late paintings are about “something” but none of them that I have seen have the presence of a valid visual experience: upon seeing them none creates the impact of an experience that we want to try to understand. Now the powers that be are attempting to turn him into a posthumous art world darling and I find it all rather tedious. Surely there are better things museums can do with their time.
One level down (sorry, I forget their names), can be found the masters of early twentieth century art. In my visit the day before to the West Building, I was disappointed to find that works I had wanted to see had been removed from several of the galleries. The attendant told me that they were to be repositioned in a new configuration, but that he didn’t know where. So imagine my delight when I discovered them here. Then, after seeing the whole of this collection, I wondered if they might not have been brought here specifically to dress the place up, repeating the MOMA layout that begins with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. (Three cheers for conformity amongst American museums!)
There are five wonderful Picasso’s from early in his career, from the blue and rose periods, especially The Family of Saltimbanques which, now that I’ve read Richardson’s biographies of the artist, I can understand as an opium induced dream, wonderful late Cezanne’s, The Young Man in the Red Waistcoat, and the Chateau Noir, a nice Matisse, Coullioure, and I was surprised and very pleased to find one of Marsden Hartley’s early works made in Germany. I was aware that he was one of a few Americans here but the only representative from the German school of modern art.
Among the permanent galleries there is one featuring Matisse’s papier colle works, which was just closing as I approached …it has limited hours to protect the works on paper from the light. (When I was at the Pompidou Center where they had a huge floor full of these things, I don’t recall that they were as careful…but maybe they’ve all since disintegrated!)
Further along there was a gallery devoted to the works of Calder and it was great to see him getting some personal attention and in a gallery where the works could be seen on the floor and at eye level rather than overlooked amongst the lighting fixtures on the ceiling.
In an almost hidden corner on the first floor there is what appears to be a permanent exhibition, Small French Paintings, from the late nineteenth century. It gives the impression that this is only more work from the West Building filling up unused space. It emphasized my observation that the collection appears to be scant.
After that it dwindled to nothing. While the building gives the impression of having more public space than gallery space, the collection as displayed suggests that there is not enough of it to fill what little space there is at the present time. Which raises the question, if the collection grows substantially over the next forty years, where will they put it?
The featured exhibition was The Meyerhoff Collection, American works from the last half of the twentieth Century. It is as dreary a collection of Modern art as I have ever seen. However, the museum boasts that this promised bequest will greatly enlarge the collection. That should give you some idea of how meager the collection is to start with.
Anyone who lived in New York in the 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s, could not avoid the ballyhoo of the so called Art World as covered by the newspapers, the magazines, and the television reportage. Beginning with the post war boom the art scene morphed into one of the most visible and boisterous celebrants of Reagan Republican sleaze and greed. It was really just a highly publicized world of nouveau riche hucksters. Names were made, fame bestowed, fortunes made and spent. And all of it for art works that were as thin and as dull as communion wafers. At its best it is all genre, a niche market of a specific time and place. Looking back on that era, as represented by this collection, I can understand why I lost my interest in painting; there was not enough in the work of that era to sustain it.
The 60’s! The 70’s! The 80’s! They are over. (Hallelujah!) Let’s move on.
And as I stood in this exhibition and watched the other visitors drift through in a daze of pronounced ennui, I experienced a rare moment of identifying with the public. Not my favorite feeling.
The Museum web site:
http://www.nga.gov/ginfo/aboutnga.shtm
The Meyerhoff Collection:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/meyerhoffinfo.shtm
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Part I.
When it first opened, The Phillips Collection, near DuPont Circle in Washington, was one of those small private collections open to the public in the tradition of the Italian Cabinet as reimagined by Americans with money …The Morgan Library …The Frick Collection …or the small museum erected by self made men and women …The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Barnes Collection, the Hirshorn Museum, or the Marion Mc Nay Museum in San Antonio. Originally it was the family’s private residence but as this proved disruptive to the family’s life, another home was built elsewhere in the city. Since then the museum has been expanded in two or three buildings that maintain the look and the size of the town houses on the block where it sits.
Duncan Phillips Jr.was the second son of Duncan Phillips, of Pittsburgh Glass, and the grandson of the Jones and Laughlin Steel people, also of Pittsburgh. With the death of his father in 1917, and the death of his brother, of the Spanish flu, in 1918, Phillips decided to build an art collection to memorialize those two men.
The collection was begun with a number of 19th Century French paintings, Corot, Courbet, Chardin, Monet, and some of the other Impressionists, in fact the French school is the strongest element of the collection followed by American, a conscious effort Phillips made to include his fellow countrymen, especially living artists.
Originally Phillips had a strong dislike for modern art, a dislike he overcame after his marriage to Marjorie Acker, a woman who was studying painting at the time of their meeting. Eventually she was able to help him understand the concept of the new painting and where he had once scorned Cezanne, for example, he came to own five of the very important later works by that artist.
At the present time the collection numbers about 3000 works and as it presents itself it initially appears to be an odd assortment of paintings and contemporary photographs. Phillips had definite ideas about art and what constitutes a “great painting” and the works were often placed side by side, disregarding chronology or school, to emphasize his specific understanding of their relationships. Thus in the original Phillips house we see a large El Greco “Saint Peter” and on the wall at the far end of the same room we see Goya’s “Saint Peter”. The El Greco is wonderful painting but one cannot help but notice that the saint’s hands are so delicate as to be almost feminine, whereas in the Goya the large work-swollen hands are those of a man accustomed to hard labor. It can also be seen how both artists inspired the later generations of modernists, the brush work and the limited palette in the Goya is a technique similar to that in the Cezanne self portrait.
I’m not sure, however, that this juxtapostioning always works to the artist’s advantage. In one of the original parlours, there is on one side of a doorway a very strong and dynamic Courbet Landscape and on the other side of the doorway a landscape by George Innes, which I am afraid suffers by comparison. Recently I have begun to think that Innes is a far greater painter than his present low name recognition would indicate …I have seen some really fine Innes paintings in several museums these past few years. But placed next to the Courbet, which has the conviction of a strongly held philosophical world view, this particular landscape comes off as a decorative piece made for a late Victorian parlour. I am uncertain if that was the museum’s intention or if it is the unintended consequence of this museum’s philosophy.
Overall there seems to be a preference in this collection for works that are representational. Among the modern works there are two wonderful cubist works by George Braque, a Robert Henri of the New York Five fame, and the Stieglitz stable, O’Keefe, Marin, Hartley, and Dove. There is an early Jackson Pollack collage, made during the period when he was still dissecting Picasso’s work, and then, suddenly, Helen Frankenthaler and Murray Louis. There is a decided gap in which both Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were noticeable absent. One of the docents told me, in response to my question, that they were indeed included in the collection but that neither had work on view in the present hanging. So one lives with the idiosyncrasies of the collector and I have to say it is a welcome change to the standard municipal museum practice of hanging similar works by the same artists in look-alike museums all across the country.
Of special interest to me were the two Braque paintings, a very large “The Round Table”, which was featured on the dust jacket of the Rizzoli Braque book, and a wonderful long Still Life with Lemons. As the museum was not crowded …it being a chill winter day and very out of season for museum going… I was able to spend about thirty minutes sitting quietly and studying the larger of the two. Sand has been mixed into the white paint that has been applied as a ground over the drawing and over this the color has been applied in very thin paint, almost as if it were a glaze, except for two areas in the lower right between the table and the wainscoting where there is a thick impasto. As the thin paint is so fluidly and freely applied it made me wonder if Braque, Matisse, and Picasso might not have painted with glazes or glaze thin paint, as in the late Cezanne works, and that that accounts for the spontaneity and dynamic of their brush work …which can seem casual and careless unless that reference is understood. The nearby Cezanne, The Gardens of Les Lauves, 1906, is a good example of this influence.
However, as if to contradict my insights, near the Braque work was a small Picasso cubist work, dated 1918, which was done with a moderately think impasto and then varnished to create an overall even surface. Both Braque and Picasso forewent varnishing in their early cubist works and seeing this one that was so heavily varnish was rather jarring to me: it seemed to be suffocating.
And of very special note, in this same gallery with these paintings as well as the Cezanne self portrait, there was a late Marsden Hartley, Wild Roses, which held its own as an equal among equals. I am becoming more and more convinced the more I see of his work that Hartley is our very best 20th Century American painter.
Elsewhere in the collection two Arthur Doves, Sun something , and, something Moon, are among the least interesting of his works that I have seen… these don’t compare favorably with those in the Lane Collection in Boston. But the American painting section of the Phillips web site, see below, lists an additional 52 Doves. (He and Duncan Phillips carried on a long correspondence.) Wouldn’t it be nice to see them all hanging together!
This museum is the home of the first installed of the Rothko Rooms, four paintings facing one another in a dim space and with a bench for quiet contemplation. In the last five years I have seen at least 25 Rothko paintings, almost all of them this same color field concept. Sitting quietly here and looking at these four I almost convinced myself that they are simply a manufactured contrivance, their reputed “spiritual” experience as shallow as the culture from which they spring. I can imagine an artist doing a series of paintings like these over a period of a few months but I cannot understand how someone could devote years and years to something that was so very thin to start with. But then I have a very low tolerance for repetition. In my house the moving finger writes and having writ moves on.
One last negative note. The reputed center piece of the collection is the Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party. The more Renoir I see the more dreadful a painter I think he was. (In my defense I can add that Picasso agrees with me!!) Here there is a dynamic in the choreography of the figures as arranged across the format, but it cannot help but be noticed that each of the men is wearing a hat many times too small for his head, or else they have deformed heads under their hats. Each of the women looks to be a portrait lifted from another work. Once that is seen it is also noticed that none of these persons relate to one another; it is all pose and composition. But last and not least, at the bottom of the frame amongst the glasses and bottles on the table in the foreground there are a lot of smears of white that I suppose were meant to be read as sunlight glistening off the clear glass. But it is too heavy handed and out of harmony with the rest of the painting. It’s the kind of carelessness with the brush that one sees too often in John Singer Sargent.
But to end on a positive note! There is in one hallway a collection of mid twentieth century photographs…Minor White, Harry Callahan, Ansel Adams …photography as abstract expressionism. (Since Duncan Phillip’s death the collection has continued to grow and a department of photography has been added.) One of the Harry Callahan photographs, Aix en Provence, is tremendously exciting. In a work with a full range of rich tonal values the white ends of the branches of a leafless tree and the white seed heads lining the grasses in the lower section stand out as bright electric moments proving that photography can indeed be a fine art …and that Harry Callahan should be a household name.
Although the original impetus of the Museum was to present fine art paintings in a comfortable home-like setting, the two recent additions are more like small museum environments than living quarters…I suppose that comes from having such a large collection. But at least unlike most recent museum expansions the gallery space far exceeds the public spaces.
There is neither beginning nor end to the collection and so one is encouraged to wander about at leisure and to make his own discoveries and relationships. In the Phillips’ former residence the rooms have been left to suggest what they had been, the illumination comes from heavily draperied windows and drawing room lighting, and chairs, sofas, et al, are placed around the rooms to suggest “homey” and to provide a perch for quiet contemplation. On a cloudy day, such as it was when I was there, the outside greyness seems to overwhelm the rooms with drabness and to emphasize their lack of brick-a-brack.
The Phillips collection was built one piece at a time and has on the whole a wonderful selection of paintings. It is a welcome change from the usual museum going experience; it does not conform to the prevailing trends in museumology, it has a strong personal viewpoint, and it was wonderful to see a selective few pieces of the collection presented in a quiet and comfortable environment rather than to be overwhelmed by a massive collection presented in a rush of department store-like sale day madness. Every member of the staff, many of whom are art students, that I encountered on my rounds was as pleasant and cordial as they could be. The museum exudes good vibes. Good show!
http://www.phillipscollection.org/
http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/index.htm
When it first opened, The Phillips Collection, near DuPont Circle in Washington, was one of those small private collections open to the public in the tradition of the Italian Cabinet as reimagined by Americans with money …The Morgan Library …The Frick Collection …or the small museum erected by self made men and women …The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Barnes Collection, the Hirshorn Museum, or the Marion Mc Nay Museum in San Antonio. Originally it was the family’s private residence but as this proved disruptive to the family’s life, another home was built elsewhere in the city. Since then the museum has been expanded in two or three buildings that maintain the look and the size of the town houses on the block where it sits.
Duncan Phillips Jr.was the second son of Duncan Phillips, of Pittsburgh Glass, and the grandson of the Jones and Laughlin Steel people, also of Pittsburgh. With the death of his father in 1917, and the death of his brother, of the Spanish flu, in 1918, Phillips decided to build an art collection to memorialize those two men.
The collection was begun with a number of 19th Century French paintings, Corot, Courbet, Chardin, Monet, and some of the other Impressionists, in fact the French school is the strongest element of the collection followed by American, a conscious effort Phillips made to include his fellow countrymen, especially living artists.
Originally Phillips had a strong dislike for modern art, a dislike he overcame after his marriage to Marjorie Acker, a woman who was studying painting at the time of their meeting. Eventually she was able to help him understand the concept of the new painting and where he had once scorned Cezanne, for example, he came to own five of the very important later works by that artist.
At the present time the collection numbers about 3000 works and as it presents itself it initially appears to be an odd assortment of paintings and contemporary photographs. Phillips had definite ideas about art and what constitutes a “great painting” and the works were often placed side by side, disregarding chronology or school, to emphasize his specific understanding of their relationships. Thus in the original Phillips house we see a large El Greco “Saint Peter” and on the wall at the far end of the same room we see Goya’s “Saint Peter”. The El Greco is wonderful painting but one cannot help but notice that the saint’s hands are so delicate as to be almost feminine, whereas in the Goya the large work-swollen hands are those of a man accustomed to hard labor. It can also be seen how both artists inspired the later generations of modernists, the brush work and the limited palette in the Goya is a technique similar to that in the Cezanne self portrait.
I’m not sure, however, that this juxtapostioning always works to the artist’s advantage. In one of the original parlours, there is on one side of a doorway a very strong and dynamic Courbet Landscape and on the other side of the doorway a landscape by George Innes, which I am afraid suffers by comparison. Recently I have begun to think that Innes is a far greater painter than his present low name recognition would indicate …I have seen some really fine Innes paintings in several museums these past few years. But placed next to the Courbet, which has the conviction of a strongly held philosophical world view, this particular landscape comes off as a decorative piece made for a late Victorian parlour. I am uncertain if that was the museum’s intention or if it is the unintended consequence of this museum’s philosophy.
Overall there seems to be a preference in this collection for works that are representational. Among the modern works there are two wonderful cubist works by George Braque, a Robert Henri of the New York Five fame, and the Stieglitz stable, O’Keefe, Marin, Hartley, and Dove. There is an early Jackson Pollack collage, made during the period when he was still dissecting Picasso’s work, and then, suddenly, Helen Frankenthaler and Murray Louis. There is a decided gap in which both Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were noticeable absent. One of the docents told me, in response to my question, that they were indeed included in the collection but that neither had work on view in the present hanging. So one lives with the idiosyncrasies of the collector and I have to say it is a welcome change to the standard municipal museum practice of hanging similar works by the same artists in look-alike museums all across the country.
Of special interest to me were the two Braque paintings, a very large “The Round Table”, which was featured on the dust jacket of the Rizzoli Braque book, and a wonderful long Still Life with Lemons. As the museum was not crowded …it being a chill winter day and very out of season for museum going… I was able to spend about thirty minutes sitting quietly and studying the larger of the two. Sand has been mixed into the white paint that has been applied as a ground over the drawing and over this the color has been applied in very thin paint, almost as if it were a glaze, except for two areas in the lower right between the table and the wainscoting where there is a thick impasto. As the thin paint is so fluidly and freely applied it made me wonder if Braque, Matisse, and Picasso might not have painted with glazes or glaze thin paint, as in the late Cezanne works, and that that accounts for the spontaneity and dynamic of their brush work …which can seem casual and careless unless that reference is understood. The nearby Cezanne, The Gardens of Les Lauves, 1906, is a good example of this influence.
However, as if to contradict my insights, near the Braque work was a small Picasso cubist work, dated 1918, which was done with a moderately think impasto and then varnished to create an overall even surface. Both Braque and Picasso forewent varnishing in their early cubist works and seeing this one that was so heavily varnish was rather jarring to me: it seemed to be suffocating.
And of very special note, in this same gallery with these paintings as well as the Cezanne self portrait, there was a late Marsden Hartley, Wild Roses, which held its own as an equal among equals. I am becoming more and more convinced the more I see of his work that Hartley is our very best 20th Century American painter.
Elsewhere in the collection two Arthur Doves, Sun something , and, something Moon, are among the least interesting of his works that I have seen… these don’t compare favorably with those in the Lane Collection in Boston. But the American painting section of the Phillips web site, see below, lists an additional 52 Doves. (He and Duncan Phillips carried on a long correspondence.) Wouldn’t it be nice to see them all hanging together!
This museum is the home of the first installed of the Rothko Rooms, four paintings facing one another in a dim space and with a bench for quiet contemplation. In the last five years I have seen at least 25 Rothko paintings, almost all of them this same color field concept. Sitting quietly here and looking at these four I almost convinced myself that they are simply a manufactured contrivance, their reputed “spiritual” experience as shallow as the culture from which they spring. I can imagine an artist doing a series of paintings like these over a period of a few months but I cannot understand how someone could devote years and years to something that was so very thin to start with. But then I have a very low tolerance for repetition. In my house the moving finger writes and having writ moves on.
One last negative note. The reputed center piece of the collection is the Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party. The more Renoir I see the more dreadful a painter I think he was. (In my defense I can add that Picasso agrees with me!!) Here there is a dynamic in the choreography of the figures as arranged across the format, but it cannot help but be noticed that each of the men is wearing a hat many times too small for his head, or else they have deformed heads under their hats. Each of the women looks to be a portrait lifted from another work. Once that is seen it is also noticed that none of these persons relate to one another; it is all pose and composition. But last and not least, at the bottom of the frame amongst the glasses and bottles on the table in the foreground there are a lot of smears of white that I suppose were meant to be read as sunlight glistening off the clear glass. But it is too heavy handed and out of harmony with the rest of the painting. It’s the kind of carelessness with the brush that one sees too often in John Singer Sargent.
But to end on a positive note! There is in one hallway a collection of mid twentieth century photographs…Minor White, Harry Callahan, Ansel Adams …photography as abstract expressionism. (Since Duncan Phillip’s death the collection has continued to grow and a department of photography has been added.) One of the Harry Callahan photographs, Aix en Provence, is tremendously exciting. In a work with a full range of rich tonal values the white ends of the branches of a leafless tree and the white seed heads lining the grasses in the lower section stand out as bright electric moments proving that photography can indeed be a fine art …and that Harry Callahan should be a household name.
Although the original impetus of the Museum was to present fine art paintings in a comfortable home-like setting, the two recent additions are more like small museum environments than living quarters…I suppose that comes from having such a large collection. But at least unlike most recent museum expansions the gallery space far exceeds the public spaces.
There is neither beginning nor end to the collection and so one is encouraged to wander about at leisure and to make his own discoveries and relationships. In the Phillips’ former residence the rooms have been left to suggest what they had been, the illumination comes from heavily draperied windows and drawing room lighting, and chairs, sofas, et al, are placed around the rooms to suggest “homey” and to provide a perch for quiet contemplation. On a cloudy day, such as it was when I was there, the outside greyness seems to overwhelm the rooms with drabness and to emphasize their lack of brick-a-brack.
The Phillips collection was built one piece at a time and has on the whole a wonderful selection of paintings. It is a welcome change from the usual museum going experience; it does not conform to the prevailing trends in museumology, it has a strong personal viewpoint, and it was wonderful to see a selective few pieces of the collection presented in a quiet and comfortable environment rather than to be overwhelmed by a massive collection presented in a rush of department store-like sale day madness. Every member of the staff, many of whom are art students, that I encountered on my rounds was as pleasant and cordial as they could be. The museum exudes good vibes. Good show!
http://www.phillipscollection.org/
http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/index.htm
Monday, December 21, 2009
Man Ray,African Art and the Modernist Lens, at The Phillips Collection, Washington D. C.
I’m not sure that I understood this exhibition. The museum literature states that it explores the role of photography in shaping an understanding of African Art in the early 20th Century and documents its influence on modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, surrealism, high fashion and popular culture. It suggests that photography played a role equal to that of modern painting. It is a very substantial exhibition taking up four or five galleries and for the most part shows us photographs made of African objects as well as some twenty of the objects that were photographed.
I think it goes without saying that if there is a new cultural influence in Paris, the fashion capital of the world, it will make its way to the general public through newspapers and magazines from that city as well as through other popular cultural outlets. I agree that photography plays a large part in the transmission of that impulse.But, contrary to the claim made here, that influence has no where near the same impact as African Art had on painting wherein Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avingon lead to cubism and the reconceptualization of picture space and the subsequent explosion of modern art. Even photo collage, of which there are no examples here, could have been shown as an indicator of influence, but of course photo collage comes directly from cubism, painting.
I am confused as well because the name Man Ray appears above the title. In the exhibition only 50 of the 100 photographs are his. Other photographers represented are Alfred Stieglitz, Cecil Beaton, Raoul Ubac, Walker Evans, et al. The Evans photographs were made for the 1935 exhibition catalogue of African Art at MOMA, the Stieglitz photographs were made, I would think as a record, of the exhibition at his Gallery 291 in 1918, Beaton’s work of course had to do with fashion, and so on. Many of Man Ray’s photographs were made for a book written by an anthropologist but because they were artistic interpretation rather than documentary or illustration, they were not used. How unused photographs can be said to be influential is beyond my comprehension, nor did the museum explain that they had been exhibited elsewhere.
Walker Evans photographs are straight forward documentary and they are excellent prints with good composition and a full range of tonal values that illustrate the objects very nicely. They look to have been made with a medium format camera, likely a four by five that he had just begun to use at that time. One question these raised that was not answered was how these prints made for MOMA came to be the property now of The Smithsonian. I was curious if extra prints had been made for sale in addition to the MOMA prints, and if they were widely circulated, which would attest to their cultural influence, or, if they had not, if MOMA had passed them on to someone else before they made their way to Washington. Evans archives are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I am also curious if the Met has these negatives or a set of their own prints. But all that is beyond the scope of the exhibition. Sorry to have digressed.
What is immediately evident in this exhibition is that the objects themselves are far more interesting than the photographs regardless of who took them. Each one of them is an object exuding expressive form and with wonderful color and texture and bursting with symbolic experience expressing profound feelings. The implied comparison here could almost convince you that photography is not a fine art form after all.
As with every situation there is one exception to this observation and that is a photograph made by Walker Evans of an eight inch oval mask. This is so primarily, I think, because in the photograph the mask is tipped to one side and the eyes seems to be looking down with a sense of deep longing, whereas the mask on the pedestal is upright and stares straight ahead with a blank mindlessness: Evans’ photograph has imbued it with spirit,.
The outstanding Man Ray photo is his well known Noir et Blanche in which the black mask stands upright on the right and a woman with a made up white face rests her head on the table top. The oval of her head is a direct copy of the well known Brancusi work. Two different prints of this work are shown as well as a sketch he made before the picture was taken, two others with different cropping, and, finally, a copy of the magazine in which it appeared in yet a different cropping.
Included among the Ray works was one of his Rayograms, a photogram which made use of one of the items. I thought it a not very interesting work. It was of interest to me only because I have just read Moholy Nagy’ book, the New Vision, and he writes at length about photograms. I suspect that I won’t be trying to make any.
I was pleased to see here an early Lois Mailou Jones painting, from the Phillips Collection, which shows her working in a style that is African cum Picasso. I saw a career retrospective of her work in Philadelphia last year and it is always nice to see more of her work in other venues. (I have a hunch I saw this same painting in that exhibition.) Like Picasso Ms Jones was influenced by and worked in a number of styles. Unfortunately, unlike Picasso, she never made any of those styles her own; without exception they are all derivative. That’s too bad because her drawing was excellent and she had mastered the craft of painting. At one time she did fabric design for a firm in Boston, those florid forties floral prints used for draperies and upholstery. Apparently she was very successful at that but gave it up to be a fine artist. I’m sorry she didn’t achieve a voice of her own …her work is always well executed, just not interesting.
Again my comments are beside the point here …my mind wanders …but it was that kind of exhibition. It was interesting but not much beyond that. I can add that the lighting on the photographs was good …there were few reflections in the glass.
http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/current/index.aspx
I think it goes without saying that if there is a new cultural influence in Paris, the fashion capital of the world, it will make its way to the general public through newspapers and magazines from that city as well as through other popular cultural outlets. I agree that photography plays a large part in the transmission of that impulse.But, contrary to the claim made here, that influence has no where near the same impact as African Art had on painting wherein Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avingon lead to cubism and the reconceptualization of picture space and the subsequent explosion of modern art. Even photo collage, of which there are no examples here, could have been shown as an indicator of influence, but of course photo collage comes directly from cubism, painting.
I am confused as well because the name Man Ray appears above the title. In the exhibition only 50 of the 100 photographs are his. Other photographers represented are Alfred Stieglitz, Cecil Beaton, Raoul Ubac, Walker Evans, et al. The Evans photographs were made for the 1935 exhibition catalogue of African Art at MOMA, the Stieglitz photographs were made, I would think as a record, of the exhibition at his Gallery 291 in 1918, Beaton’s work of course had to do with fashion, and so on. Many of Man Ray’s photographs were made for a book written by an anthropologist but because they were artistic interpretation rather than documentary or illustration, they were not used. How unused photographs can be said to be influential is beyond my comprehension, nor did the museum explain that they had been exhibited elsewhere.
Walker Evans photographs are straight forward documentary and they are excellent prints with good composition and a full range of tonal values that illustrate the objects very nicely. They look to have been made with a medium format camera, likely a four by five that he had just begun to use at that time. One question these raised that was not answered was how these prints made for MOMA came to be the property now of The Smithsonian. I was curious if extra prints had been made for sale in addition to the MOMA prints, and if they were widely circulated, which would attest to their cultural influence, or, if they had not, if MOMA had passed them on to someone else before they made their way to Washington. Evans archives are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I am also curious if the Met has these negatives or a set of their own prints. But all that is beyond the scope of the exhibition. Sorry to have digressed.
What is immediately evident in this exhibition is that the objects themselves are far more interesting than the photographs regardless of who took them. Each one of them is an object exuding expressive form and with wonderful color and texture and bursting with symbolic experience expressing profound feelings. The implied comparison here could almost convince you that photography is not a fine art form after all.
As with every situation there is one exception to this observation and that is a photograph made by Walker Evans of an eight inch oval mask. This is so primarily, I think, because in the photograph the mask is tipped to one side and the eyes seems to be looking down with a sense of deep longing, whereas the mask on the pedestal is upright and stares straight ahead with a blank mindlessness: Evans’ photograph has imbued it with spirit,.
The outstanding Man Ray photo is his well known Noir et Blanche in which the black mask stands upright on the right and a woman with a made up white face rests her head on the table top. The oval of her head is a direct copy of the well known Brancusi work. Two different prints of this work are shown as well as a sketch he made before the picture was taken, two others with different cropping, and, finally, a copy of the magazine in which it appeared in yet a different cropping.
Included among the Ray works was one of his Rayograms, a photogram which made use of one of the items. I thought it a not very interesting work. It was of interest to me only because I have just read Moholy Nagy’ book, the New Vision, and he writes at length about photograms. I suspect that I won’t be trying to make any.
I was pleased to see here an early Lois Mailou Jones painting, from the Phillips Collection, which shows her working in a style that is African cum Picasso. I saw a career retrospective of her work in Philadelphia last year and it is always nice to see more of her work in other venues. (I have a hunch I saw this same painting in that exhibition.) Like Picasso Ms Jones was influenced by and worked in a number of styles. Unfortunately, unlike Picasso, she never made any of those styles her own; without exception they are all derivative. That’s too bad because her drawing was excellent and she had mastered the craft of painting. At one time she did fabric design for a firm in Boston, those florid forties floral prints used for draperies and upholstery. Apparently she was very successful at that but gave it up to be a fine artist. I’m sorry she didn’t achieve a voice of her own …her work is always well executed, just not interesting.
Again my comments are beside the point here …my mind wanders …but it was that kind of exhibition. It was interesting but not much beyond that. I can add that the lighting on the photographs was good …there were few reflections in the glass.
http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/current/index.aspx
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans. At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, NYC.
When I entered college in the fall of 1957 I was aware that there was a mainstream American culture and various counter cultures. In those days one of the most publicized of the latter was the beatniks, The Beat Generation. On the campus, aware of some badly dressed, look alike, and obviously antiestablishment persons in the university art department I quickly learned that everyone more or less conforms to the prevailing norm of his chosen social group: we are each of us conformist in his own way. As I have always been a supporter of individuality and individuation, the on campus “beats” did not elicit my interest or inspire my adulation.
By the fall of 1959 I had moved to New York City and if I was at all aware of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans at that time, I likely considered it but another tome in the beatnik canon. That suspicion would have been confirmed over the next few years when I became more aware of Grove Press, the American publisher of the book, and its publication, The Evergreen Review …some of these photographs were used as the magazine’s cover illustrations.
This is not to say that as a young New Yorker I was an uptown snob: I lived my years in New York almost exclusively in the West Village and at one time my ex wife was Barney Rosset’s secretary. While I might always have been counted upon to know “what was happening”, I was rarely a “player” in the prevailing trends.
Over the last fifty years I have likely had an exposure to many of these photographs in different venues, but it was not until I began to give more concentrated attention to photography in the last several years that the name and the work began to embed itself in my memory, most recently in the exhibition Made in Chicago, (see December, 2008, this blog.). Some of them have become familiar but they have not favorably impressed me. I have always felt that they were made as illustrations for Kerouac’s On the Road. (I like the book.).
When I read that the National Gallery was to present this Fiftieth Anniversary exhibition I decided that I would go down to Washington to see it. I was primarily interested in the process that went into the making of the book. At the National Gallery there was a second exhibition on the art of making the photography book. As an independent entity the book of photographs is one to which I have given little if any thought. The world is so full of them …it seems to me that the only thing more common than published photographs are published books of photographs …that I have never considered that there was ever very much creativity in their making, or that they were an art form separate unto themselves. But alas the weather last winter was colder than I wanted to experience and so instead of going to Washington I ordered the catalogue, Looking In.
At an estate auction several years ago I bought a box of photographs, family snapshots for the most part, thinking that I might someday make use of them somehow in a series of art works. Included in that box was an album of about 200+ photographs of one family, a man and a woman, their parents, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters, their children, their dogs and cats, and their houses and automobiles. In a burst of housecleaning I decided to get rid of it as I had done nothing with the photographs for years.
My copy of Looking In arrived just as I had changed my mind and had decided to make a series of collages using some of the auction snapshots. During that process, going through the album looking for suitable material for the project, I became aware that in every one of those pictures each person, dog and cat, was smiling broadly. These were the happiest people I had ever encountered. They personified the attainment of the working class American dream. The photographs were dated from 1940 to 1960, that period in American history that is often looked back on as the best years of our lives, ignoring that the 50’s lead to the protests of the 1960’s.
The dichotomy between those seen in the snapshots and those seen in the Robert Frank book was remarkable. I could hardly reconcile the evidence that all of these persons resided in the same country.
One of the first differences to be noticed is that in the snapshots all of the subjects are known to the photographer, they are looking into the lens and complicit in their understanding of the photographic genre in which they are participating. As successful members of an upwardly mobile society, each person gives the photographer his best side. By contrast, in the Robert Frank photographs many of the subjects are unaware of being photographed or, when they are aware, they look at someone they do not know who is holding a camera. When they are knowingly photographed they are allowing him to photograph only their social persona: they wear the mask of the withdrawn, the benign, the indifferent.
In the commentary Frank states that he has captured the essence of his subjects. Yousef Karsh has made a very similar statement about his work. I disagree that any photographer can do that. The human personality is so richly layered and complex I believe no one photograph can catch the essence of any one person. It might catch a moment of unguarded spontaneity or emotional honesty, but a moment is the not the whole of the experience. I will add to this Karl Jasper’s comment that a person cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming: at our demise all that is left are the subjective memories others have of us.
Reading the catalogue text and looking at the photographs I continued to be unimpressed with these pictures. They seemed to me nothing more than one would have anticipated from a work issued from a source that claimed a specific subcultural identity. But I was made aware that rather than just an American view there was a stronger European antecedent. It seemed to me that Robert Frank had come to America, he is Swiss, and traveled it widely and made photographs that illustrated his European background. And in fact he makes the claim that his photographs represent his felt response to what he saw, his subjective world view. That this was filtered through the background of his education called to mind Williams James’s statement: “A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.”
The exhibition and the catalogue that contains all of the same material are quite good in illustrating the work that went into the making of the book. Of the 1000 frames that were made, using a Leica and 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film, Frank winnowed them down to 83 photographs. We see the contact sheets and we see 8 by 10 prints pinned to the wall just as he had done to study the photographs and to work out the organization. We also see some of his earlier work.
The most commanding aspect of the exhibition, however, is the display of the 83 works in the sequence he finally determined for the layout of the book. Seen as a contiguous exhibition the photographs are suddenly far better and far more interesting than they are in the book. One reason for this is the size of the photographs. I am a firm believer that a photograph has a correct size. Here they range from 8 by 10’s to 11 by 14’s and even larger, 16 by 20. In the book, the Grove Press edition, they are almost all the same size, the book being about 8 by 10 inches with a horizontal format. In the catalogue they are slightly larger. As might be expected from 35mm negatives, many of them are grainy, often dark, and many with soft focus. Rather than a fault, for Frank and his mentors, this was a characteristic of their style.
But the difference also has to do with the physical layout. Here the photographs are side by side in four small galleries whereas in the book they are one per page with the next behind the first or in the same page position, i.e.: on pages one, three and five. While there is a vague sense of continuity in the book, in the exhibition the works have both continuity and a dynamic relationship. But most important, in this layout, each of the photographs stands out more successfully as an individual photograph.
The first section is a good illustration of this.
The book is in four sections, each section beginning with a photograph containing an American flag. In the first section, the first photograph in the book shows us two women standing and looking out the windows of their tenement apartments. A wind blown flag covers their faces. They face front. They are in shadow, they are isolated from the event they watch, they are passive, impotent. The next photograph, on page two, shows us five top hatted men in profile facing our left. Picture three, on page three, shows us a man on an architectural ledge with his arms outstretched in a grand gesture. In picture four, on page four, we see a group of well dressed black men leaning against cars. They face to our left. The caption reads: Funeral, St Helena, S.C. Photograph number five on page five shows us a cowboy with two young women. They face right. And in picture six, on page seven, we see a military man, likely a career man, who is overweight and paunchy, crossing a street toward the camera accompanied by a woman who is clearly working class but made up and dressed in the haute mode of her social set. It is unclear if she is his wife or a prostitute: both seem possible.
As seen in the book none of these photographs seem to have any relationship to one another. But if we have leafed through the catalogue before beginning to study it more closely, as one is wont to do, we recognize that the man with the outstretched hands is in almost the same pose as an earlier 1951 photograph in which we see a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Superman hot air balloon. Are we to infer that the man on the ledge is also full of hot air? If so, should we read him as “The Politician”? I think that’s a leap most mainstream folks are not likely to make, but one that most counter cultural folks would make readily. So if the interpretation is correct, the photograph preaches to the converted.
Further along in The Americans we see the same group of black men in another photograph of the same funeral. It is rather perplexing why we see them in this early page. The cowboy with the two women is very like another cowboy we see later standing on a New York City street. The couple crossing the street face, in the book, a blank white page. I think one would have to be a die hard puzzle fan to extract any sense of relationship out of these six photographs.
However, hanging on the wall next to one another, these read completely differently. Now the man in the center with outstretched arms can be seen as the locus for the others, he is the politician. The men on page two, looking, we suppose, at the crowd, are the committee men, the two women at the window are the constituency, the blacks, on the other side, are a separate constituency, the cowboy, with other fish to fry, looks to his business, he is at a rodeo, and the middle aged man and woman ignore the whole thing and are going out on the town or shopping. Seen all at once, it is a sociological/political overview of society. And seen all at once with a coherent narrative, each of the photographs assumes a greater depth. And once comprehended, they continue to maintain that more informed understanding.
For the most part the rest of the book repeats these contrasts, rich and poor, black and white, and at times gives us a series of parallels…the different social castes each separately at lunch, man and his automobile, etc. Thus the statement of the first section is reiterated and elaborated, but never more deeply explored. With its variations on a single theme, the work is one long sustained chord. The choice of 83 photographs was more than enough.
Just as no one photograph can capture the essence of the individual person, neither can a collection of photographs capture the essence of a geographically large society. There is too much in America that is left out of this essay. In the end this is a very one sided view, a very narrow interpretation. But it is not without validity: that which is documented …the social divisions between rich and poor, black and white, the street corner evangelicals, the shallow hedonism of materialism… continues, after 40 years of Republican misgovernance and voodoo economics, to be the prevailing mainstream social norm: ours is a culture in stasis. No doubt many foresaw this; many have attempted to redirect the course of history. But the mainstream could not or would not see it or hear it and they allowed themselves to be sucked into the slough of despond.
As photographs the photographs are often quite good and they consistently work as a suite. But I could not single out any one of them that I think is a great photograph. I had seen Plate 58, Political Rally –Chicago, 1956, last winter in Chicago in the LaSalle Bank Collection. There it was an 8 by 10 print and while intriguing it made little sense. In the book it is but one among many. But seen in this exhibition in a larger print, 16 by 20, with the large bell of the Sousaphone exactly at eye level, the personality of the man behind it completely subsumed by the political process in which he participates, it has tremendous impact …but only because it relates to the other photographs. The same can be said for the last photograph, the artist’s wife and children half asleep in a car at the side of a deserted highway. It is a poignant visual experience but only because of its relationship to the work as a whole. While that might be a weakness in the individual entities, that they all work together as an ensemble is the strength of the whole.
By showing us the contact sheets we can see that the young photographer was a man with eyes who was not afraid to turn his camera on a stranger and make a record of his feelings about that person and his place in his society. That takes a kind of courage. We can see that he traveled many, many miles looking, seeing, and recording, that he knew what he was looking for and that he could use that subject to make a specific kind of photograph when it presented itself to him.
But there is a too strong sense that he was looking for something specific to photograph rather than photographing what he happened to find. And there is too strong evidence of the influence of Frank’s European mentors …copies of their photography books are included in the exhibition… as well as a too strong evidence of Walker Evans’ influence on the young Frank …there is often a sense of this being their collaborative effort. Taken all together these influences suggest that Frank had yet to develop a personal style, his own voice. From his earlier work we can see that he repeats himself …the dividing line down the middle of 34th Street in an earlier photograph is rendered here as the dividing line down a remote southwestern highway, which is a variation on a photograph by Berenice Abbott, a friend of Walker Evans’. Ezra Pound once commented that the young writer begins by imitating a writer he admires, and that few ever develop a personal voice beyond that. Perhaps Robert Frank sensed that and perhaps that explains why, after this was published, he turned from still photography to film.
It is stated that the book has had a strong influence on subsequent American photography. But I think it is probably not so much because it is the work of a particular photographer, Robert Frank, but rather that he married American subject matter with European style. At that same time a new generation of film makers was inspired by the post war European Cinema that was invading small movie theatres all over America. Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus reconfigured our cities and our dwellings. Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were changing the face of American fine art painting. It was the American Century but the look was decidedly The New Europe. To me that infusion of European influence is like erecting a steel frame building in Chicago and giving it an Italian Renaissance or French Baroque façade: the overlay of a foreign style is applied ornamentation, not architecture.
The Catalogue.
“Looking In, Robert Frank’s The Americans” is excellent. The exhibition was conceived and created by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (They have the Robert Frank archives.) Sarah Greenough, the curator of the photography collection and the exhibition, has written four essays giving us a biography of the artist, his early years, his process in creating the book, and an afterward. Her writing should be a model for all future writers on the arts: she has a good writer’s voice, she brings the artist alive as a person, and her writing is completely lacking in grad school linguistic mumbo jumbo. The quality of her work as represented here should help us understand why The National Gallery is considered one of the world’s finest museums.
American museums are teaching institutions and the marriage of the catalogue and exhibition for this presentation is everything museum work should be. My disagreement with it is the claim that this photo essay is a major twentieth century artwork. I disagree. With its strong association to a specific historic moment, its still apparent identification with the beat generation, I think it does not transcend the level of genre: there is some very good work here but it lacks individuality.
Even though I saw this at the Met in New York, The National Gallery web site has better on line information. See their link on the right, Exhibition Feature, for detailed information.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frankinfo.shtm
The Met web site has several reproductions of the photographs.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={1FD57D4D-FE17-41FA-9025-E2667E36AD27}
By the fall of 1959 I had moved to New York City and if I was at all aware of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans at that time, I likely considered it but another tome in the beatnik canon. That suspicion would have been confirmed over the next few years when I became more aware of Grove Press, the American publisher of the book, and its publication, The Evergreen Review …some of these photographs were used as the magazine’s cover illustrations.
This is not to say that as a young New Yorker I was an uptown snob: I lived my years in New York almost exclusively in the West Village and at one time my ex wife was Barney Rosset’s secretary. While I might always have been counted upon to know “what was happening”, I was rarely a “player” in the prevailing trends.
Over the last fifty years I have likely had an exposure to many of these photographs in different venues, but it was not until I began to give more concentrated attention to photography in the last several years that the name and the work began to embed itself in my memory, most recently in the exhibition Made in Chicago, (see December, 2008, this blog.). Some of them have become familiar but they have not favorably impressed me. I have always felt that they were made as illustrations for Kerouac’s On the Road. (I like the book.).
When I read that the National Gallery was to present this Fiftieth Anniversary exhibition I decided that I would go down to Washington to see it. I was primarily interested in the process that went into the making of the book. At the National Gallery there was a second exhibition on the art of making the photography book. As an independent entity the book of photographs is one to which I have given little if any thought. The world is so full of them …it seems to me that the only thing more common than published photographs are published books of photographs …that I have never considered that there was ever very much creativity in their making, or that they were an art form separate unto themselves. But alas the weather last winter was colder than I wanted to experience and so instead of going to Washington I ordered the catalogue, Looking In.
At an estate auction several years ago I bought a box of photographs, family snapshots for the most part, thinking that I might someday make use of them somehow in a series of art works. Included in that box was an album of about 200+ photographs of one family, a man and a woman, their parents, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters, their children, their dogs and cats, and their houses and automobiles. In a burst of housecleaning I decided to get rid of it as I had done nothing with the photographs for years.
My copy of Looking In arrived just as I had changed my mind and had decided to make a series of collages using some of the auction snapshots. During that process, going through the album looking for suitable material for the project, I became aware that in every one of those pictures each person, dog and cat, was smiling broadly. These were the happiest people I had ever encountered. They personified the attainment of the working class American dream. The photographs were dated from 1940 to 1960, that period in American history that is often looked back on as the best years of our lives, ignoring that the 50’s lead to the protests of the 1960’s.
The dichotomy between those seen in the snapshots and those seen in the Robert Frank book was remarkable. I could hardly reconcile the evidence that all of these persons resided in the same country.
One of the first differences to be noticed is that in the snapshots all of the subjects are known to the photographer, they are looking into the lens and complicit in their understanding of the photographic genre in which they are participating. As successful members of an upwardly mobile society, each person gives the photographer his best side. By contrast, in the Robert Frank photographs many of the subjects are unaware of being photographed or, when they are aware, they look at someone they do not know who is holding a camera. When they are knowingly photographed they are allowing him to photograph only their social persona: they wear the mask of the withdrawn, the benign, the indifferent.
In the commentary Frank states that he has captured the essence of his subjects. Yousef Karsh has made a very similar statement about his work. I disagree that any photographer can do that. The human personality is so richly layered and complex I believe no one photograph can catch the essence of any one person. It might catch a moment of unguarded spontaneity or emotional honesty, but a moment is the not the whole of the experience. I will add to this Karl Jasper’s comment that a person cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming: at our demise all that is left are the subjective memories others have of us.
Reading the catalogue text and looking at the photographs I continued to be unimpressed with these pictures. They seemed to me nothing more than one would have anticipated from a work issued from a source that claimed a specific subcultural identity. But I was made aware that rather than just an American view there was a stronger European antecedent. It seemed to me that Robert Frank had come to America, he is Swiss, and traveled it widely and made photographs that illustrated his European background. And in fact he makes the claim that his photographs represent his felt response to what he saw, his subjective world view. That this was filtered through the background of his education called to mind Williams James’s statement: “A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.”
The exhibition and the catalogue that contains all of the same material are quite good in illustrating the work that went into the making of the book. Of the 1000 frames that were made, using a Leica and 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film, Frank winnowed them down to 83 photographs. We see the contact sheets and we see 8 by 10 prints pinned to the wall just as he had done to study the photographs and to work out the organization. We also see some of his earlier work.
The most commanding aspect of the exhibition, however, is the display of the 83 works in the sequence he finally determined for the layout of the book. Seen as a contiguous exhibition the photographs are suddenly far better and far more interesting than they are in the book. One reason for this is the size of the photographs. I am a firm believer that a photograph has a correct size. Here they range from 8 by 10’s to 11 by 14’s and even larger, 16 by 20. In the book, the Grove Press edition, they are almost all the same size, the book being about 8 by 10 inches with a horizontal format. In the catalogue they are slightly larger. As might be expected from 35mm negatives, many of them are grainy, often dark, and many with soft focus. Rather than a fault, for Frank and his mentors, this was a characteristic of their style.
But the difference also has to do with the physical layout. Here the photographs are side by side in four small galleries whereas in the book they are one per page with the next behind the first or in the same page position, i.e.: on pages one, three and five. While there is a vague sense of continuity in the book, in the exhibition the works have both continuity and a dynamic relationship. But most important, in this layout, each of the photographs stands out more successfully as an individual photograph.
The first section is a good illustration of this.
The book is in four sections, each section beginning with a photograph containing an American flag. In the first section, the first photograph in the book shows us two women standing and looking out the windows of their tenement apartments. A wind blown flag covers their faces. They face front. They are in shadow, they are isolated from the event they watch, they are passive, impotent. The next photograph, on page two, shows us five top hatted men in profile facing our left. Picture three, on page three, shows us a man on an architectural ledge with his arms outstretched in a grand gesture. In picture four, on page four, we see a group of well dressed black men leaning against cars. They face to our left. The caption reads: Funeral, St Helena, S.C. Photograph number five on page five shows us a cowboy with two young women. They face right. And in picture six, on page seven, we see a military man, likely a career man, who is overweight and paunchy, crossing a street toward the camera accompanied by a woman who is clearly working class but made up and dressed in the haute mode of her social set. It is unclear if she is his wife or a prostitute: both seem possible.
As seen in the book none of these photographs seem to have any relationship to one another. But if we have leafed through the catalogue before beginning to study it more closely, as one is wont to do, we recognize that the man with the outstretched hands is in almost the same pose as an earlier 1951 photograph in which we see a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Superman hot air balloon. Are we to infer that the man on the ledge is also full of hot air? If so, should we read him as “The Politician”? I think that’s a leap most mainstream folks are not likely to make, but one that most counter cultural folks would make readily. So if the interpretation is correct, the photograph preaches to the converted.
Further along in The Americans we see the same group of black men in another photograph of the same funeral. It is rather perplexing why we see them in this early page. The cowboy with the two women is very like another cowboy we see later standing on a New York City street. The couple crossing the street face, in the book, a blank white page. I think one would have to be a die hard puzzle fan to extract any sense of relationship out of these six photographs.
However, hanging on the wall next to one another, these read completely differently. Now the man in the center with outstretched arms can be seen as the locus for the others, he is the politician. The men on page two, looking, we suppose, at the crowd, are the committee men, the two women at the window are the constituency, the blacks, on the other side, are a separate constituency, the cowboy, with other fish to fry, looks to his business, he is at a rodeo, and the middle aged man and woman ignore the whole thing and are going out on the town or shopping. Seen all at once, it is a sociological/political overview of society. And seen all at once with a coherent narrative, each of the photographs assumes a greater depth. And once comprehended, they continue to maintain that more informed understanding.
For the most part the rest of the book repeats these contrasts, rich and poor, black and white, and at times gives us a series of parallels…the different social castes each separately at lunch, man and his automobile, etc. Thus the statement of the first section is reiterated and elaborated, but never more deeply explored. With its variations on a single theme, the work is one long sustained chord. The choice of 83 photographs was more than enough.
Just as no one photograph can capture the essence of the individual person, neither can a collection of photographs capture the essence of a geographically large society. There is too much in America that is left out of this essay. In the end this is a very one sided view, a very narrow interpretation. But it is not without validity: that which is documented …the social divisions between rich and poor, black and white, the street corner evangelicals, the shallow hedonism of materialism… continues, after 40 years of Republican misgovernance and voodoo economics, to be the prevailing mainstream social norm: ours is a culture in stasis. No doubt many foresaw this; many have attempted to redirect the course of history. But the mainstream could not or would not see it or hear it and they allowed themselves to be sucked into the slough of despond.
As photographs the photographs are often quite good and they consistently work as a suite. But I could not single out any one of them that I think is a great photograph. I had seen Plate 58, Political Rally –Chicago, 1956, last winter in Chicago in the LaSalle Bank Collection. There it was an 8 by 10 print and while intriguing it made little sense. In the book it is but one among many. But seen in this exhibition in a larger print, 16 by 20, with the large bell of the Sousaphone exactly at eye level, the personality of the man behind it completely subsumed by the political process in which he participates, it has tremendous impact …but only because it relates to the other photographs. The same can be said for the last photograph, the artist’s wife and children half asleep in a car at the side of a deserted highway. It is a poignant visual experience but only because of its relationship to the work as a whole. While that might be a weakness in the individual entities, that they all work together as an ensemble is the strength of the whole.
By showing us the contact sheets we can see that the young photographer was a man with eyes who was not afraid to turn his camera on a stranger and make a record of his feelings about that person and his place in his society. That takes a kind of courage. We can see that he traveled many, many miles looking, seeing, and recording, that he knew what he was looking for and that he could use that subject to make a specific kind of photograph when it presented itself to him.
But there is a too strong sense that he was looking for something specific to photograph rather than photographing what he happened to find. And there is too strong evidence of the influence of Frank’s European mentors …copies of their photography books are included in the exhibition… as well as a too strong evidence of Walker Evans’ influence on the young Frank …there is often a sense of this being their collaborative effort. Taken all together these influences suggest that Frank had yet to develop a personal style, his own voice. From his earlier work we can see that he repeats himself …the dividing line down the middle of 34th Street in an earlier photograph is rendered here as the dividing line down a remote southwestern highway, which is a variation on a photograph by Berenice Abbott, a friend of Walker Evans’. Ezra Pound once commented that the young writer begins by imitating a writer he admires, and that few ever develop a personal voice beyond that. Perhaps Robert Frank sensed that and perhaps that explains why, after this was published, he turned from still photography to film.
It is stated that the book has had a strong influence on subsequent American photography. But I think it is probably not so much because it is the work of a particular photographer, Robert Frank, but rather that he married American subject matter with European style. At that same time a new generation of film makers was inspired by the post war European Cinema that was invading small movie theatres all over America. Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus reconfigured our cities and our dwellings. Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were changing the face of American fine art painting. It was the American Century but the look was decidedly The New Europe. To me that infusion of European influence is like erecting a steel frame building in Chicago and giving it an Italian Renaissance or French Baroque façade: the overlay of a foreign style is applied ornamentation, not architecture.
The Catalogue.
“Looking In, Robert Frank’s The Americans” is excellent. The exhibition was conceived and created by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (They have the Robert Frank archives.) Sarah Greenough, the curator of the photography collection and the exhibition, has written four essays giving us a biography of the artist, his early years, his process in creating the book, and an afterward. Her writing should be a model for all future writers on the arts: she has a good writer’s voice, she brings the artist alive as a person, and her writing is completely lacking in grad school linguistic mumbo jumbo. The quality of her work as represented here should help us understand why The National Gallery is considered one of the world’s finest museums.
American museums are teaching institutions and the marriage of the catalogue and exhibition for this presentation is everything museum work should be. My disagreement with it is the claim that this photo essay is a major twentieth century artwork. I disagree. With its strong association to a specific historic moment, its still apparent identification with the beat generation, I think it does not transcend the level of genre: there is some very good work here but it lacks individuality.
Even though I saw this at the Met in New York, The National Gallery web site has better on line information. See their link on the right, Exhibition Feature, for detailed information.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frankinfo.shtm
The Met web site has several reproductions of the photographs.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={1FD57D4D-FE17-41FA-9025-E2667E36AD27}
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
