James Turrell, Houston, Texas: Two Site Specific Installations

In 2005 I had my first encounter with the work of James Turrell at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. There he has two permanent installations, one a room without light in which he asks the visitor to sit in the darkness until the eyes are adjusted to the lack of light and then try to determine what they see or what they think they might be seeing. In the other, also a dark room, a large luminous blue rectangle faces the visitor. Upon investigation the rectangle is discovered not to exist: it is merely blue light …framed. I was very favorably impressed by these two art works and I can still recall them vividly.

Later that same year, I visited his installation at the Gray Art Museum on the campus of The University of Washington in Seattle. There one sits in a white room and looks up through a round opening at the blue sky overhead. I found this less interesting than the Pittsburgh work. While it was a calm and meditative experience, I was uncertain exactly what Mr.Turrell wanted me to experience there: because I have been something of a Buddhist in the past that blue circle of sky was always just a blue circle of sky.

James Turrell has been making these installations and art works since the 1970’s and although I lived and worked in New York City during all these years, until going to Pittsburgh I had never heard of him or his work or remembered his name if I had heard it.

In preparation for my recent trip to Houston I discovered that there are three James Turrell works in Houston and I made plans to see two of them. The third, an installation at the Friends Meeting house suggested to me something very similar to the room at the Grey Art Museum in Seattle. I didn’t care to repeat that experience and so I did not schedule it for this trip. If one has not been to Seattle, I would recommend seeing this one in Houston for whatever its value might be.

Sunset Epiphany.

This is an installation on the lawn at Rice University which has seating for 120 guests. It is free but reservations are required. The viewers sit beneath a large flat white ceiling in which there is a square opening through which we see the sky. The forty minute program occurs every evening timed to coincide with the sunset…as the earth turns toward the darker east, the blue of the sky overhead appears to grow correspondingly deeper blue.

In a video interview, see the link below, Turrell states that he wants us to be aware of the light in which we live, not as something …“out there”…but as something in which we are immersed. Not too long after this program of colored lights projected on this white ceiling begins, we do in fact become aware that the blue square is not just air but that in reality it is a viscous substance with physical properties…it is, after all, that part of the light spectrum that we see reflected off the water molecules in the atmosphere that surrounds the planet.

Knowing that the program is to run for forty minutes and having understood the concept so soon, one begins to wonder if there might not be something else the artist wants us to see. There is. But I think this part of it is not addressed so much to the layman as to those who make their livings chit chatting in the art world. Just as the attention begins to wander, just as one is about to look at his watch to see how much longer he is expected to sit there, one notices that the sky is turning pale gray. Has it suddenly grown cloudy or is this a mirage? That square of sky then progresses through a nine point gray scale to black and before one can begin to try to figure that out that black square turns brown. And I was absolutely confidant that if those lights on the white ceiling were to be turned off, that square of sky would still be blue. So what was happening?

Well, I’m not certain that I know, but I was reminded of the work of Josef Albers and his Homage to the Square, in which he shows us that the perception of a color is altered by the colors that surround it. But whereas Albers worked with pigments, which have red, yellow, and blue as the primaries, Turrell is working with light wherein the primaries are magenta, cyan and green. All the pigments mixed together produce black, all the light mixed together produces white, no color in pigment is white and no color in light is black…or darkness… or lack of light and color.

The control of the perception of the color of light has to do with major and minor …the white ceiling, the major, is many times larger than the square opening, the minor, and so the color projected on the larger would greatly influence the perception of the color of the smaller. The color we think we see is mixed in the brain according to the recipe we have been given in agreement with the laws of physics…just as it is in divisionalism, or pointillism, or impressionism.

Despite this description the experience is rather exciting…although after about thirty minutes the attention begins to lag and falter. Many of the guests left long before the end. One feels that he has seen something momentous, that he has been pleasantly hoodwinked, and that a good time was had by all, or at least among those who stayed to the end. I was certainly happy to have seen it but I think there was not much more to it than what I have described …nor was I inspired to delve deeper into a study of the physics of light.

The Light Inside.
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts is situated in two large buildings joined by a passageway under the city street. James Turrell’s The Light Inside is an art installation through which one walks from building to building.

From either direction one approaches a dimly lit corridor with a facing wall, passes around the wall and finds himself confronting a brightly lit space as seen in the photograph, see the link below. Initially there is a perception of a very strict one point linear perspective making the floor below and the ceiling above black trapezoids. The bright colored light gives the impression of being a palpable substance through which one is expected to walk, as if to swim were it water.

Unfortunately, as soon as you begin to move through the passageway, you realize that the floor is raised, that the black ceiling is dropped and that those hide the lights which are being reflected off the white ceiling and floor and the walls about four feet away. And because this is a public passageway as well as an art installation there is a lot of foot traffic here …especially groups of school children. So I suspect that during normal museum hours this is less engrossing than it had been hoped it would be.

Sometimes the lights here are red and sometimes they are blue and my friend and I stood to one side to see if we could ascertain the tempo of the light change but it appeared to be so slow and the foot traffic so high that we gave up the effort. Thus this is an attraction that gets very limited attention and as such I suspect that it appeals to and seems quite normal to those who watch a lot of big screen HD TV moreso than to those who believe that easel painting is not dead and for whom the admiration of local color is not an embarrassment.

The Museum owns seven other works by James Turrell which will be shown opening in June of this year as part of a three museum retrospective of his work, the other two museums being the Guggenheim in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles.

Sunset Epiphany:
http://skyspace.rice.edu/about-skyspace/


The Light Inside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjRMs0izHSE

James Turrell video:
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/james-turrell

Portrait Of Spain: Paintings from the Prado, Houston Museum Of Fine Arts

Those who know me are familiar with my ongoing musings about trips I would like to take to one exotic locale or the other …Mexico, Morocco, Kazakhstan…although those trips never even make it into the planning stages. For the past several years now I have been heard to mutter that I’d like to go to Spain and see the Prado before I die. Of course thus far I have made no plans.

I have successfully avoided Spain and the Prado all my life. Fifty years ago, when just new to New York, I had a friend from Colombia who was eager for me to learn all about Spanish culture and who never tired of extolling the virtues of Spanish Painting. Well, of course I knew even then that the great paintings were the Italian Renaissance paintings and so I assumed that he was merely chauvinistic. Yet, slowly, over the years I have come to discern a very great difference between Spanish and Italian painting and I have been surprised to realize that when it comes down to the wire, I think I actually do prefer the Spanish.

The minute I read that the Prado exhibition would be travelling to Houston, where friends had been inviting me to visit for almost twenty five years, I determined to go at once! Having seen this exhibition I can now report that the proposed trip to Spain is entering the planning stage.

My objection to Spanish Painting was almost always because Spanish painting was religious painting. That seemed understandable to me what with Spain being such a completely Catholic country. My opposition stemmed from the fact that I was not catholic, not a Christian, and not at all religious. Because commissioned by the crown, it was also royalist and if I have any politics they are extremely to the left of the lowest duke. Since then and absent my friend’s company I have discovered on my own that there is a great deal more to Spanish painting. And then there is Goya, who has given us some of the most profoundly moving paintings in the cannon of western art …Cinco de Mayo being a favorite, and three sets of etching that not even Picasso could better …and if you scroll through these commentaries you will discover how greatly I love Picasso.

As to why I have come to love Spanish painting and to prefer it over the Italian is, I believe, because of the palette …the color. Spanish painting is earthy, it is human, it is local color in which its earthiness is emphasized and it can be very warm when warm and very cold when cold. The color of Italian painting is wonderful …the crystal clear blues and the warm rose and the delicious flesh tones …but after fifty years I have become sated and it has begun to seem sometimes contrived …brilliance for the sake of brilliance. (For the same reason I have tired of the high chroma palette of modern art and have started giving preference to modern artists who work in local color.) Above everything I love color and in particular that which I can see in nature with my own eyes.

If I had any reticence about seeing this exhibition it was in thinking that with so many paintings in their storerooms it was possible the Prado would send over many of their not best works …perhaps really good works but not the best. I am happy to say that fear was laid to rest the moment we walked into the galleries. Greeting us at the first wall was the beautiful portrait of Isabel Clara Eugenia by Alonso Sanchez Coello rich in color and with carefully executed details of pattern on pattern all creating one of the most exquisite examples of the richness that is possible in the making of an oil painting.

I was especially pleased to see two of the early paintings made by Goya as patterns for tapestries…he conveys all the color and dynamic of the life of Spain. Every great painter creates in his works a sense of his own presence and of them all no one is more charismatic and so delightful to know as Goya.

Velasquez is always a presence as well and of his many superb paintings there is probably none that I would rather face than his portrait here of Mars, the tired, exhausted, naked warrior who has given his all and who is so world weary he can hardly raise his arm to support his head.

And, yes, there are the saints and the martyrs and the kings and dukes and ladies of the court. (I have included a link which lists all the works in their various categories.) There are many paintings by painters whose names are unknown to me. And there is still life and among the still lifes there are two by one of my very favorite painters, Luis Melendez. I am a direct descendent of Charles Wilson Peale and I have always had an affinity to the still life of his sons Rembrandt and Raphael Peale, or the uncles, as I call them. As good as they are Melendez is even better…in 1650 he created photorealism long before anyone had ever thought of inventing a camera, tromp l’oeil with a capitol T. Three years ago I went up to Boston just to see an exhibition of his work. It was magnificent. (See this blog March, 2010.)

All of these paintings whatever their category are absolutely engrossing…one’s attention never wavers or tires. This was so engrossing, in fact that I could not possibly describe to you the galleries in which these works are presented…the paintings command your attention, they dominate the rooms. I attended the exhibition with two friends who rarely go to museums: they were spellbound.

The exhibition is a history of two hundred years of Spanish painting. It closes with a portrait laid out but not completed by Sorolla, whose work I know well from the Hispanic Society in New York. As a rule I dislike his work but this one has a great freedom and energy. But just prior to his painting we see The Dementia of Juana of Castile, by Valles, an academic/historical painting of 1866 that was the kind of painting the fourteen year old Pablo Picasso produced in 1894 and with which he won prizes in the annual competitions. It is also the kind of painting against which he rebelled. So in addition to this being a history of Spanish painting, for those of us who love Picasso, it is also a survey of the influences upon young Pablo …. he was always a Spanish painter and these are his antecedents, these are his uncles. Not one of these paintings is his; but he is very much present.

Those who know me well also know that of the arts I like architecture, painting and drawing …drawings, not prints. I dislike prints. Here we are treated to twenty some etchings by Goya from the last three series he made. They are superb. I am always delighted when my prejudices are so easily converted!

This is one of those exhibitions which require timed tickets. We were there at one thirty and there were only about twenty five others in the many galleries. That is wonderful as far as I am concerned; there is nothing I like better than a private showing. But I would like to believe that this will become a hot ticket exhibition. This is a rare opportunity to see really great paintings. It truly deserves a large audience.

This exhibition came to be in Houston through the contacts Gary Tinterow had made during his twenty five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he learned that this was being sent to Queensland in Australia, apparently he got on the phones and shepherded it here where he is now the Museum Director. (See the link below.) This will be followed by Picasso Black and White which I saw a few months ago at the Guggenheim …scroll down for my comments. In the coming years the people of Houston are in for some great experiences in the arts through the efforts of Mr. Tinterow. I hope he will be supported and appreciated.

The video produced by the Houston Museum:

http://vimeo.com/57228706

The list of the works in the exhibition. Click on the titles to see the works. Not all of them are shown:

http://www.museodelprado.es/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/travelling-exhibitions/retrato-de-espana-obras-maestras-del-prado/listado-de-obras/

The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.

The Building.

The architect, Renzo Piano, is the man of the hour insofar as designing museums is concerned. His resume includes the renovated Morgan Library in New York, the recently expanded Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago expansion, and the Broad Museum at LACMA in Los Angeles. All of these recent projects have a more or less sameness of character, a steel frame generally painted white or gray.  His present work includes the new Whitney Museum in New York, and expansions at the Kimball in Fort Worth and the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Of the completed work I know only the Morgan Library (I am not favorably impressed, see this blog 2009.) and his very earliest museum work, The Pompidou Center in Paris, designed in partnership with Richard Rodgers, which is excellent.

He is also the architect of London’s recently completed Shard, and the New York Times Building also in New York.

This past autumn I spent some time belatedly studying the architecture of Louis Kahn. I highly recommend the Robert McCarter monograph for its thorough analysis of his philosophy. Louis Kahn is well known as the designer of the original Kimball Museum, as well as two museums at Yale University and was originally asked to design the Menil in the early 1970’s. (Both he and Mr. de Menil died before that could happen.) In the early 1980’s Mrs. de Menil asked Renzo Piano to take the assignment. During my Louis Kahn studies I discovered that Renzo Piano had studied and worked with him, as did Richard Rodgers and Norman Foster two other busy contemporary architects.

As a result of those studies, when I first looked upon this long, typically Renzo Piano building I could not repress a smile at the number of obvious Louis Kahn references. In turn I cannot repress a smile at the number of Frank Lloyd Wright influences in the work of Louis Kahn who greatly admired Wright. All of these references are fine with me.

Mrs. de Menil asked for a structure that would feel larger on the inside than on the outside, so that it was compatible with the surrounding Montrose residential streets which contain one story pattern book quasi craftsman style cottages…or similar bungalows. She wanted a plan that would avoid museum fatigue.

While it is unusual for a museum to be set down in the midst of a residential neighborhood, it is not unheard of: the Kansas City Nelson Adkins Art Museum has facing urban residential neighbors as does the Minneapolis Museum of Art. The Menil Collection abuts St. Thomas University to the east and so the admixture is not all that disruptive here. In addition the de Menil’s seems to have purchased more than just one city block and have painted all of the facing houses an 80’s housewife/decorator mushroom gray with white trim. In the block front facing the museum the house opposite the entry has been razed and a wide path there leads to the parking lot on the next street over. To accommodate the parking lot about five houses on that street have been razed and it is only there that the disruptive eyesore of that lot expresses any sense of noblese oblige. This is enhanced by the number of houses across the street that have also been razed, by whom and for what reason I do not know.

From that path one has a full view of the museum front. Steel columns painted white divide it into ten bays, four on either side and two in the center. The structure is outlined in steel framing and additional steel I beams are set out about eight feet from the building. The louvered roof extends off the building to those beams and creates an arcade all around the building. While this arcade might be read as an indicator of Renzo Piano’s Mediterranean background, it reads as well as a statement of Louis Kahn’s philosophy that architecture has a function as a place for socializing and for the exchange of ideas.

The infill between the steel members is cypress painted a light neutral gray. The siding stops about one inch from the surrounding steel. It is this gap that Louis Kahn defined as the beginning of ornamentation. So we see clearly articulated here the steel structure, the infill, and the roof trusses each with its distinctive material and each with its distinctive character following Kahn’s dictum that the finished building should reveal the order in which it had been built.

Each of the bays between the steel beams is forty feet wide by twenty feet high, the height of the peaks of the neighboring one storey houses. (Yes, this makes the building four hundred feet long.) However, from the Kahn perspective this rectangle is not the building module, as the catalogue suggests, rather it is a double square. (For Frank Lloyd Wright the square was the symbol of integrity; the red square is his personal sign.) This is restated in the side elevations which are eight squares. Of the two center sections on the front that to the left is stepped back one rectangular unit and on the right the entry is stepped back another two, creating a square in front of the entrance. The roof extending over this and the glass front is a Frank Lloyd Wright concept: you are in the building before you are in the building.

Inside the lobby the plan is also square and it faces a double square wall with openings at either side. That wall states very definitely that the building does not continue in that direction, it goes to the left and right. And indeed two long corridors, together running the length of the building, come to our attention because of glass walls at the far ends and the bright light that beckons there. (Louis Kahn was all about light and shadow.)Elsewhere in the building various areas are given over to interior gardens, another Louis Kahn concept.

The south side of the building houses the offices and store rooms and conservation studios and that front is two stories high, an elevation mitigated by the dominant arcade roof. On the interior there is a strict Kahnian division of these two sections, divided by the long corridor, into served and serving spaces.

Referring again to the plan in the Guide it can be seen that almost all of the interior spaces are squares with some rectangular spaces as variation. Well and good. This agrees with Frank Lloyd Wright’s observation that nature repeats itself: when the honey bee makes its comb each of the cells is the same shape. The obvious problem with this plan is the traffic flow. Once in the lobby there is no indication as to where you should go. I fault the Morgan Library expansion for the same architectural indifference. Frank Lloyd Wright would not have left you in doubt for a moment; so much was he the master of footstep manipulation.

On my first visit, (I saw the collection twice in one week), we opted to go to the right, to the galleries of the Surrealist paintings and the two special exhibition galleries. Each of the three galleries there is square in plan. To my surprise all of those galleries had hard ceilings …there was no natural light whatsoever, contrary to what the exterior had promised. In fact, the few windows there were blocked with window shades as well. Once we had seen these rooms we then had to traipse back to the entry lobby and continue to the galleries on the other side. Fortunately I walk three miles every morning and so I avoided museum fatigue, but with no thanks to the design of this building.

The galleries on the east side of the lobby seem larger than on the other side, there are two square and one a smaller rectangle, and there is a pleasant open meander in the arrangement of the artifacts within those plans. All of the galleries have natural light from the overhead louvers. However, once you have seen one gallery you must return to the central hallway and progress further east to the next. Then having seen them all, you must traipse back to the lobby in order to exit the building.

I found this traffic pattern tedious, although it is certainly a welcome relief to the Metropolitan Museum where every gallery is now but a passage way to other galleries. I suppose I should not complain about a little weaving in and out here. But it is too exclusively straight forward; this is too rigidly a place to be seen in a specific order, there is little sense of a gracious welcome for casual wandering. And when you realize that not much of the collection is actually being shown, apparently it is changed often, or else it is smaller than I expected, you begin to suspect that the galleries seem larger on the inside than on the outside because of all the walking you are required to do…and especially in the same space over and over again.

I was much taken with the floor: what looked to be yellow pine painted black and which has been allowed to wear down to the raw wood here and there in a rather spontaneous and random patterning. I assumed that was a design by accident conceit but as there was noticeable atmospheric mold on the white columns on the exterior, it might be just poor maintenance.

Now, contrary to what it might seem, this analysis is not intended to suggest that Renzo Piano is without ideas of his own; the philosophy of this design very much echoes the philosophy of the collection: the architectural references, whether intentional or not, and far more often than not references are unintentional, create a sense of the continuum of valid architectural principles. And in the end this building reads as nothing so much as a Renzo Piano Museum, in large part, I suspect, because he has so often repeated himself. It is almost as if he has consciously set out to create an architectural syntax like his predecessors during the City Beautiful movement who in every museum of that era presented a classic revival façade to the street. Well, the king is dead: long live the king!

As a place this building is a lovely thing, elegant, lofty, white, and with lovely light …on the one side. However, I would not call it one of the best or most successful museum plants. In its overall effect it reads as too rigid and too one sided, unlike the collection it houses, although the collection does have a specific philosophy. But it does maintain the human scale and it is a pleasant communal space in which to share a common experience.

The Collection.

For the past year I have been making another stab at trying to understand mid twentieth century modern art, or what is referred to as The New York School. Let me digress with a few remarks to clarify this.

On my first visit to the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 I was perplexed when I went from the top floor to the second floor. On the top floor there was the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse …the School of Paris, if you please. And I found all of it exciting and wonderful and tremendously inspirational. I still do. Then going down to the next floor, The New York School, mid century modern art, I was shocked by the sudden severely downward drop to work that inspired little other than mute indifference. This is not to say that I am a rube and that I do not like “modern” art. I do like some of it.

As many times as I have been to MOMA, and they are many, I have never been able to overcome that first impression. This despite the ballyhoo that accompanies every opening. And now that I am fifty years familiar with it, I have come to see the New York School as a really minor and regional development in the larger scheme of things.

Earlier this past year when I was reading and listening to the Kirk Varnedoe Mellon lectures, Pictures of Nothing, see this blog, 2012, I was jolted by his remark that the art of the New York School was proved important because it was collected not only by wealthy Americans but by wealthy Europeans as well …he singled out the de Menil’s as proof positive. That statement smacked of nothing so much as a nineteenth century robber baron’s boast of his legitimacy…and it cemented for me my suspicion that modern art collecting was an activity limited to the 1% who pursued it not for its aesthetic value but as a tradable commodity …now that we are such an egalitarian society, the rich have retreated into the fine arts saying: If we create an artificial market value sufficiently high money will keep the riff raff out! Modern art: the gated community of the world of culture.

One of my complaints about American museums is that each of them is such a typically American conformist. Each of them shows the same 37 artists and the same iconic images for which each of those artists is famous and all of them hung in the same typical MOMA one painting per each vertical space on housewifely soft off white walls. It is sad to me that few of them have the courage to show artists beyond those 37, few of them give space to local artists despite the fact that American Universities and art schools churn out about fifty thousand MFA’s a year. Where do those people show their work and why don’t local museums support them? Why this mad race to conformity?

I am also tired of those collections museums are so proud of having secured that are nothing but an accumulation of these same name brand artists. I have seen several of these in recent years that were bequeathed to one museum or another and they are everyone one of them so politically correct as to be utterly dull. They read as collections assembled by Anonymous.

All of this is a way of saying that finding myself in Houston and with every intention of seeing the Menil Collection, I approached it with trepidation…fearful that I was about to see more of the same that had not inspired me elsewhere.

Instead, I experienced an epiphany. Well, if not an epiphany, an insight.

One of my fascinations with museums is the character of the collectors that is revealed in the various collections. And what one soon begins to understand in this collection is that the de Menil’s had a preference not for “Art” but for work that expresses a deep inexplicable yearning common to the human experience. From the earliest archaic figures to mid twentieth century surrealism it is work that is not simply figurative but that in which the human figure stands as expressive form…be it ancient Aegean, African, Pacific Oceana, or twentieth century surrealism. (Each of these areas of the collection contains excellent examples of the genre.) There is a void in the collection of those middle years of European art, such as can be seen in the Prado Collection currently at the Houston Museum of Fine Art, not to imply that that work is not expressive form in its own way, but that the Menil works are those that express something beyond verbal utterance. One of the common characteristic of European painting from the 1400’s to 1900 is that it can engender tomes of discourse regarding the anecdotal content of the artworks. I have never believed that the anecdotal is the raison d’être of art.

Of the paintings in the New York School I have always felt that Cy Twombley was all about the desire of that something that wanted to be said. His one painting on view reinforced that opinion. But not all of those other paintings or sculptures here relate to the overarching character of the collection. I can see in the Jasper Johns Gray Alphabet that the work is a tour de force of craftsmanship, that it bears a direct relationship to the Mayan Carved Lintel, as seen in the catalogue, Figure 61. But as for expressing something I believe that it does not …Johns insists that his work is about nothing …it is only about craft. And because this work is so readily identifiable as an appropriation, an object very much like something else, it lacks any sense of original insight, it expresses no yearning. Hanging next to this in the gallery is another Johns, Voice, 1964-67, a larger, gray work and as presented it is such a second rate concept and inept piece of workmanship that I was shocked to see it here.

The same can be said for the Robert Rauschenberg Crucifixion and Reflection, a completely sophomoric and second rate entity. In fact too many works from this school with this character create exactly the same schism that I experience at MOMA: the original unique and inspiring collection is weighed down by a large load of dead freight.

Others of the New York school read as too Politically Correct, the thing one Ought to Collect. And I wondered if the de Menil’s might not have been advised, perhaps against their will, to include the New York School in the collection so that their other, and superior but less famous, works did not suffer by being considered “minor”. God forbid one should have a muscular philosophy but create a “minor” collection. Specifically I refer to the Morris Louis work in the corridor near copies of which I have seen in every politically correct collection making the rounds. Works like these raise the question: is this a collection with a personal philosophy or is this a Whitman’s Sampler of the work of a specific time and place?

And so this was my epiphany, my insight: I like work that uses the human figure as expressive form. I believe I share this preference with Picasso and Matisse et al.; whether we understand the particulars of it or not, the art world blather, we respond to what we are seeing. I am disinterested in the New York School because the human presence has been minimized, omitted. It is only about painting and only that aspect of painting that is of interest to that particular artist. As described by Varnedoe it is a small, closed band with a parochial interest. I suppose a case could be made that the work focuses on the mental experience, the intellectual side of the beast, or that it has a verified literary/spiritual heritage, see the Phillip Golding Mellon lectures, this blog 2012. But somehow that doesn’t quite make it. In a country full of stupid people, ours, this will never inspire a populist assembly. And while I have no admiration whatsoever for the man in the street, he is an ass, without his inclusion art becomes a we and they enterprise…us and them. And I understand now that exclusion was never the impetus behind the desire for community: an artwork is a sign of and call to community and it is the sense of inclusion, the tribal, that makes an art work significant. And it must be a visual experience that is comprehended at once, whether one can verbalize that response or not. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. de Menil for that lovely insight.

Lovely. With exceptions. Well worth a visit.

I did not see the Dan Flavin installation in an old nearby neighborhood grocery store. There were four works there. I like Dan Flavin’s work but I have a rule about Dan Flavin: he should never be seen in units of fewer than twelve or twenty. Individually his things look silly.

The web site has good text regarding the building and the collection but it has very few photographs of the art works and no list that I can find of the artists in the collection. Neither is there any indication that the museum participates in Google Arts. Clearly this organization needs to get into the cyber age: it looks like a very old style organization…I think the word I’m looking for here is …dated. Modern art? Dated? Is that possible? (Yes.)

http://www.menil.org/

The Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The Building.

The museum web site has very good photographs of the building and a good text describing its components and so I do not have to repeat that here. But I do want to comment on the fact that it presents its side rather than its front to the street. A sidewalk leads from the street parallel to the entry door wall and so close to it that it is not possible to get a full view of the building design before entering into it. Architecturally I consider this a bad idea: wherever the entry door might be, and Frank Lloyd Wright was very good at hiding them, one should have a sense of the building’s form while he is on the inside.Renzo Piano did much the same thing in the Morgan Library renovation and I dislike it for the same reason.

Why this was done I do not know. However, in one of the photographs you can see that the walk to the door includes a slight rise in the terrain and so it is possible that if the building was sited on a hill, by entering at the side the architect could use the sidewalk rise to avoid adding a stairway or pedestal base at the entry. I am not at all sure, however, that this is the reason: Houston is a very flat city.

You can see as well from the photographs that the building appears to be square in plan. It is but with the addition of an entry lobby that is a thin rectangle across the entry side which extends the square on that side. Inside the gallery plan is square and it is divided into nine parts, three, three, and, on the north side, two …one gallery is two units.

Both times that I visited this building I turned to the left upon entry and moved clockwise from front to back to front, seeing the middle gallery last. It was not until leaving the second time that I realized that the long bare wall in the double unit gallery had been finished with white Venetian plaster. I asked the docent (attendant?) why just that one wall had been done and she informed me that all of the interior walls had that same treatment. Mr. Twombly had demanded that finish and had recommended the workman who came from Italy to do the job.

Venetian plaster is an old world technique. It is, nowadays, spackle made of marble dust, easily tinted to the desired color, and in the mid to late 1990’s it was all the rage in American interior decoration, especially among the moneyed set. (It is expensive.) Done in one color, or white, it is almost impossible to see in diffuse lighting …you can only really see it if you stand next to the wall and let your eyes rake the surface. Sometimes it is finished by being buffed with the stainless steel floats used in the application and in other instances it can be further buffed and waxed. When it is waxed and polished it looks like Formica. Because it is so hard to see, as it is here, I have always wondered why they bothered …apparently, here, to placate Mr. Twombly. (The interior of the new Herzog de Meuron wing of the Walker Art Center has the same finish and from the ripples in the wall you can discern that it has been applied over sheet rock laid horizontally.)

Mr. Twombly also required that the flooring be six inch yellow pine plank neither too red nor too yellow, neutral, so that it bounced a neutral light from the floor up onto the artwork. The docent assured me that each plank had been individually selected: also I assume by Mr. Twombly.

What are noticeable here are the large pieces of cotton fabric stretched tautly across the ceilings below the sunlight filtering roofing system. These huge pieces are hemmed on the sides and have grommets about every six inches. There are clips attached to turnbuckles that in turn attach to the walls. Originally it was estimated that they would probably hang for about ten years before the mid sections began to sag. Fortunately, in the eighteen years since they were installed, they have not needed to be replaced at all. In a display of masterful design and execution there are perfectly placed openings for the lighting fixture’s stems that pass through to the ceiling light grid. They supplement the illumination of the paintings. This fabric had been a requirement by Mr. Twombly as well.

Near the end of my conversation with the docent I was reminded of the 1895 exhibition in Paris, the first career retrospective of Cezanne’s work. After sending his work to Paris from his home in Aix, Cezanne made his way to the gallery with his son. Later, on their way home, Cezanne said to him, proudly: “Did you notice: every one of those paintings was framed!” Apparently he had made no suggestions regarding the decoration of the rooms in which the paintings had been shown or of the manner in which they were displayed. And for himself, an unframed Cezanne was fine …as I suspect it would be for any one lucky enough to own one.

At the end of his summer in Antibes where he had been provided a studio for his painting by the community, Picasso said to the mayor, “I’m giving you the work I did here this summer: make a museum.” I have yet to read that he had any requirements for its interior decoration.

I think it is possible that when a man is confident of his own genius he probably doesn’t need to concern himself with gilding the lily of his production with fussy decorator innovations: he knows full well that the work will stand, not stand or fall …stand… on its own and in whatever environment it happens to be placed.

When an artist does concern himself with the choice of draperies and hand towels in the exhibition hall  I think it’s possible that he suspects that his work is borderline decoration and furthermore it is likely that he believes that only old world elegance will give it that added something to boost it toward the awesome.

I find that much of the artwork of the New York School is merely decoration, which Corbusier defines as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. A lot of it looks like stuff you can find in any upscale furniture store. I have never considered Twombly’s work in that light, but as I was for the most part greatly disappointed by what I saw here, learning about his obsessive involvement in this project caused me to reconsider his achievement.

The  Work.

I believe it is correct to say that Cy Twombly is considered a member of the New York School even though he spent most of his working years in Rome. He was a recognized, commercially successful modern artist from the 1950’s until his recent death. Even though I lived and worked in New York during those years I was completely unaware of him or his work. He only came to my attention a few years ago when the Whitney did a retrospective of his work…more or less 2002.  At that same time I bought the catalogue to his 1977 Whitney retrospective at a flea market for a dollar.

That catalogue featured work from the years 1954 to 1977 and in looking through the book I was saddened to see that for that whole period it all looked much the same. I always respond with sadness when I see that an artist has boxed himself into a corner with the creation of an imagery that cannot be repeated by other artists without there being made claims of plagiarism and that he never allows himself to work outside that concept. (Rothko, Barnet Newman, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella, et al.) I am more inclined to like the work of Picasso who could work in six or more styles in one day, or by Warhol who appeared to flit from one thing to another: they give strong evidence of a lively and healthy mental life and seem to celebrate the great variety of the human experience.

From some source, (the Whitney catalogue?) I remember reading that in his early days Cy Twombly would arrange a paper so that he could not see it and make unpremeditated marks on it and then study the results. I suppose this was somewhat in the nature of the automatic writing/drawing that the surrealists had done. I can understand why the de Menil’s would have liked his work.

I think of those works as scribble drawings, the kind of thing my ex mother in law would look at and exclaim: “I can do That!” The truth is that even if she could, she didn’t. But there is also a feeling when looking at those works, and there are two galleries of them here at the Menil, that Twombly knew how much to put in and when to stop …my ex mother in law, by contrast, did not.

It is also true that while one or two of these might be interesting, they are all so much alike that two galleries of them are more than one needs to get the idea. From them I understand that there is a something that wants to be said. That is perfectly legitimate: I for one am ready to move on. Like my mother in law Mr. Twombly didn’t.

They also open themselves to ridicule: the friend who saw this work with me suggested that the paintings looked like pieces of sheet rock in a house under renovation. (In years past he did house renovation. As did I.) I could only agree. They do.

As writings/drawings I am more inclined to prefer the later work which bears a striking resemblance to sweeping arcs on a blackboard. I love the freedom of those and the looseness of the shoulder movement. (I love drawing.) But, again, I have a limited patience for too many of these. And as for Twombly’s work being decoration, I can think of several places in a number of homes where paintings like these would, as they say, look nice.

As for their being considered fine art, I think not. It should be impossible I would think to convince an audience that that which appears on a construction material as an act of public defacement is, on a well prepared length of linen an example of fine art. And while the concept is memorable in the aggregate, none of them individually achieves an iconic presence that would sufficiently intrigue a person to want to know more about them or the artist. When we, I, think of Cy Twombly’s work, there is no Marilyn or Jackie screen print, no Marie Therese sleeping, no Rape of Europa, no Burghers of Calais, nor fifty three Rembrandt self portraits …I can also recall specific Grecian urns, African masks, pre-Columbian figurines, and Han and Tang Dynasty tomb figures, etc.

In the three galleries across the back of the building there are paintings where Twombly worked with color, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What is so noteworthy about all of them is that he seemed not to know how to use color. The work is either very tentative or over wrought. In the last of these three galleries there are a series of paintings in green and black, lots of green and black, too much in fact. They are poorly done and rather third rate in their sensibility. To me they read as Fragonard in the New World. In fact I thought that they were embarrassing …likely the poorest work in the entire Menil Collection.

I have seen him do better with color elsewhere …at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, in a gallery to themselves, are a series of paintings: Fifty Day of Illiam, of which five or six are shown. They are magnificent. They are commanding but not too big. They evoke an incredibly strong visceral response. Even though mythic, this is a human engagement that altered the course of western history. I believe it and feel it as never before.

By contrast, here in the double square gallery hangs a large painting that I believe is a companion to those paintings. It is literally the length of a tennis court. And as if to extend that conceit, plain wooden bleachers have been provided for the spectators. But when sitting there and turning your head from this end to that and back again you become aware that the painting is too big. It is so big, in fact, that in the turning this way and that you lose interest in it. It evokes nothing like a visceral experience at all. Sans a tennis ball it is a non event. In an era of large scale paintings for which the New York school was so famous, this is simply the granddaddy of big paintings.

Hopefully no one will challenge its supremacy. I have had quite enough of oversized paintings. Few of them can do what Mondrian accomplished in a twenty four inch square. Kurt Schwitters could take the detritus at the bottom of an old desk drawer, glue it to a sheet of typing paper and create a world without end. The lesson here as in so many other places is simply this: less is more less is more less is more.

When I began writing this blog about my museum going a few years ago, I determined that I would not write about something if I had a negative response to it; I wanted my comments to be positive and to encourage those who read them to get out and see things that I thought were worthwhile. In rereading these notes I feel that I am being more negative than I should be. Allow me to amend this attitude: I like this work but it has its limitation. And in my comments in Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I stated that Cy Twombly was one of the few New York School artists whose work could be seen in large groups without being tiresome. I hereby amend that to read …groups … not large groups.

And I think if I were to erect a gallery to but one New York School artist it would be either a Jackson Pollack or an Andy Warhol gallery. In a properly arranged Pollack Gallery the museumgoer would see the history of his development as an artist and share in his intellectual growth, comprehension and development. One would also see that in his restless pursuit of what might be attainable, he never stopped or came to rest at any one place…he, like Picasso, was always moving on.

Andy Warhol’s work is an ongoing dialogue with western painting and much of it sets out to debunk the conventional wisdom of high art. There is one series of his work that is relevant here. In a group of very large paintings on beautifully prepared linen grounds he poured paint in three or four areas and achieved a result somewhat similar to these Iliad paintings. As you get nearer to study them up close, you can then lean over and read the wall label and you discovery that these are the famous Piss paintings: Andy poured out the paint here and there and then asked whoever was in the studio to urinate into the wet puddles creating spontaneous design by accident areas of color. When you discover that you have your face in a puddle of dry piddle the paintings evoke a response even more visceral than Twombly’s. Was that the intention? Which came first?

While I might have been more negative here than I had intended, I believe I am not as cynical as Andy Warhol could be. But what I admire about him is his honesty: when there was a something that wanted to be said, he didn’t diddle around: he just said it.

Because the front of the building is so on top of you as you enter, you might not see at the front four posts and a lintel which create the entrance. As you exit the galleries, you do notice two posts and a lintel forming a portal back to the lobby. I suspect that these have been made of precast reinforced cement. This unit is perfect in its proportions and evokes the strongest sense of an archaic passageway into an arena where secret rites might once have been performed. It also evokes the design philosophy of Louis Kahn, one of the great masters of twentieth century architecture. If the museum had been sited so that these entry portals were more clearly evident this would have been a deeper and richer experience. Discovered as you exit, this one simple building element is suddenly the most rewarding aspect of this installation. I urge you to see it: it’s that good.

http://www.menil.org/collection/CyTwomblyInDepth.php

The Mark Rothko Chapel at the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The web page for this attraction pretty much contains all the necessary information. Should you find my comments harsh I think you might come to agree with me after looking at the photographs.

The more I see of Mark Rothko’s work the less enamored of it I become. Scroll down to my comments on John Golding’s Mellon lectures for my more complete commentary. However, being at the Menil for likely the only time in my life I was under an obligation, to myself, to see this chapel. I have seen the Rothko Chapel at the Phillips Collection in Washington so I pretty much thought I knew what to expect. It is surprising how sometimes one can be so wrong.

Here, rather than the dimly lit room with benches of the Phillips I discovered a cement chamber jammed with folding chairs and so garishly lit, as seen even from the courtesy counter prior to entering the “room”, as to suggest that there was some construction underway. There was none. Thus this harsh glare from an unmodulated center skylight is the lighting that is supposed to transport the visitor into the higher levels of meditative experience. Frankly, I found this space about as spiritual as the waiting room of a Sears tire store. Of course if you are so superstitious as to give yourself up to the myth of religious experience I suspect you could as easily give yourself up to buying into the management’s sales pitch.

On six walls Mr. Rothko has had placed his usual overly large canvases, in this case all of them painted black with subtle variations of other dark colors. Prior to the opening Mr. Rothko committed suicide. Not to be unkind but I would not have been surprised to hear that.

As one exits the “chapel” one faces a terrace with Barnet Newman’s Broken Obelisk standing in a stagnant pool afloat with leaves and other scum. There were more metal chairs strewn about and a string of lights dangling from the trees dangerously at about neck height. This was intended as a memorial to Martin Luther King: on a nice day this might be attractive in a modern art sort of way but until the maintenance improves his family has grounds for complaint.

http://www.rothkochapel.org/