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
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