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/