At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
When I saw the announcement for this exhibition I was very excited and eager to see it. On my tour of American museums in 2005 I saw the very impressive “Near the Lagoon” (Catenary) at the Chicago Art Institute, the less than impressive “Fools House” at the Walker, and the lithographs “Alphabet” in Seattle and “No” in Tucson. In addition I saw the exhibition, “Jasper Johns; Forty years of Printmaking” at the De Young in San Francisco. I have always had a fondness for gray and have often pointed out to others the pale traces of color that are discernable in an overcast sky and in the landscape of an otherwise gray day. That ability to see those colors might have come from my admiration for the works of Corot. After the trip, impressed by his mutual affinity for gray, I determined that I would do some further study and become more familiar with Jasper Johns’ work
I lived in New York City from 1959 to 1988 and the name Jasper Johns was known to me. I know I had seen Flag and Target, but other than recognizing the name I had never paid much attention to his work. Seeing variations of those familiar works on my trip I gave them more time than I usually have done and I was very impressed that Johns was such a painterly painter.
It is with great sadness then that I have to say I found this exhibition really disappointing: except for “Catenary”, most of the work here is not interesting. This opens in a small gallery with “False Start”, an abstract in color with stenciled color names. Next to it is a variation in grays, “Jubilee”. Both of these are extremely well done, they show a mastery of craft and a cleverness of conception. However, in the next gallery we were presented with some very early works from the sixties that had the look of having been student work on inexpensive materials. I wondered if they might not have been included in order to pad out the exhibition.
The interpretation states that in the gray works the artist was creating work which removed the emotional values associated with color and that it was intended to focus the viewer on the concept and the craft of the process. In the third gallery, works in the Alphabet series, this is all readily apparent, it makes its point, and I fully expected that the remaining work, executed over a forty year period, would go somewhere beyond this. But it did not. Instead the work took on the character of an extension of something that was of only minor interest in its conception, something one might do in his off hours or as an exercise to “keep in shape”. This became a formed opinion in the fourth gallery where there were spoons and forks and knives hanging on strings over canvases to which they had no relationship and or meaning. In the fifth gallery there was “Between the Clock and the Bed”, a design the artist had seen painted on a car on the Long Island Expressway. As a large painting this was physically impressive but it did not sustain the interest of the observer, neither mine nor the others with me in the gallery. Facing it, across the room, there was one of the “Savarin” works in which this same motif was used as the ground and it immediately identified why the larger work cannot interest us: this motif works very well as a ground but not at all as a subject.
In that same gallery, facing Bed/Clock, we see, on loan from Chicago, “Near the Lagoon”, a gift of Muriel Kallis Newman (as in The Steinberg Newman Collection discussed below). And it is indeed a very impressive painting, in technique, craftsmanship, and concept. It is a definitive image: henceforth the catenary will always be associated in art with Jasper Johns. It made me aware that the allure of a suspension bridge might well reside in the sensuous drape of the cables uniting the rigidly horizontal and vertical supports. This work is vertical. Next to it, on the side wall, in a horizontal format, is “Study for a Painting”, another catenary variation that is every bit as good as the first. But on the other side wall is a third variation, with a band of harlequin diamonds that immediately recalled Cezanne and Picasso. Going to read the museum interpretation, it told me that indeed that reference was intended. Suddenly it seemed a very obvious and a very trite reference, an indication, perhaps, of over reaching.
In the last gallery there are works that are based on the pattern of a flagstone walk. I thought they looked like value studies for an Armstrong Linoleum floor covering under consideration for manufacture. Cezanne was able to find a variety of motifs in every setting: Ansel Adams traveled in a station wagon equipped so that he could stop at any place and make an artwork from what he termed a found photograph. Jasper Johns apparently has an eye for the found pattern. Fine. But these flagstone works made me aware that not every found pattern is able to sustain the observer’s interest.
Following the artist’s suggestion to study his technique I found that those works which incorporated small areas of color were far more satisfying than those which relied on gray alone. For example; “Two” has both color and interest while the smaller “0 to 9” is muddy and looks like a class room gray scale exercise. “Jubilee” is interesting because there was real risk taking with a values range that extended from 9 to 1 on the gray scale, but in most of the other works, including “Catenary”, the range was from only 5 to 3. In addition there seemed little development of the technique over the forty year period: “Tennyson”, 1958, has an almost identical ground as “Catenary”, 2002. Like Seurat’s conte drawings, (see Seurat below), this comes off as devotion to technique rather than exploration, fresh insight, or as an expression of profound interest.
I suppose it is a legitimate departure for an artist to direct our attention to his technique, in contrast to the usual method in which the effect of the work is only sometimes explained as having anything to do with the technique employed. In many of the great classic paintings technique is rarely taken into consideration, rather the anecdotal content forms the basis of the art commentary. I believe it was not until Roger Fry’s small book on Cezanne that technique ever came into consideration at all. And as for technique and its development over a span of many years, Cezanne is one of the great exemplars of genius extending his range into unknown areas through a constant and ongoing analysis of the plastic elements. Understanding his technique is a path to comprehending his profound interest, his expressive form, and his vital content. Jasper Johns’ technique is rather masturbatory in that it holds the attention of the artist, the doer, but, because there is so little involvement for us, it begins to appear as a rather tedious self involved artist’s exercise.
Finally, it seems to me that the mottled gray works beautifully in the lithographs and drawings but not as well in the paintings. In the former there is the sense of a drama on the flat surface, a sense of implied surface and depth; there are spontaneous accidents that work with the whole. In the latter there is only the sense of the gray being a methodically placed waxy, textured ground. One of the great pleasures for me in looking at paintings is that I am in intimacy with the sensual richness of the impasto. There is no sense of that in the encaustic medium.
What I did notice and to which I have a very favorable response, is that Jasper Johns’ draftsmanship is excellent. It makes me aware of a sadness I feel for modern artists, de Kooning, Larry Rivers, et al, who draw with great mastery but who cannot use their gifts, or can only use them sparingly, because of the dictates of modern art and that to do so would place their status, as true moderns, in jeopardy. It is as if, as makers of modern art, they have become prisoners of their own self description. To which I can only state: Create dangerously!
Despite Jasper Johns’ invitation that we see only the intellectual side of his work, there is another element that is very apparent in this exhibition: there is a very strong homosexual presence in these works. In one we see a hairy scrotum with an upright penis cut off by the edge of the format (ouch). In a painting featuring a frontal male nude the penis is uncircumcised. One painting references Frank O’Hara, another Hart Crane, the celebrated suicide and darling of the educated gay masses. Remembering how the gay culture of the 60’s relied on code in the correspondence among the initiates, I began to wonder if there were more coded and hidden messages in other of the works here or if the artist, having lived in that coded era, was unaware of the degree to which he has used that device. It is interesting because it seems so contrary to the parameters he established for the observers: despite his claim that there is no message, there is, however, a strong subtext.
I think Jasper Johns is authentic, I think he has talent, and I think he is the master of his craft. But I sense that he has spent his working days illustrating an art world polemic. He has spent forty years making not very interesting works, works that show a decided lack of personal growth. That seems to be a common feature among American artists…Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko, Calder, Dale Chihuly… I often wonder, having created a personal, signature, image, if these men haven’t opened a production facility to simply make product for the American art market and the many, many museums. This is a nation of cultural conformity: it is a shame that our artists cannot break free from the ties in which they have bound themselves.
And one last humorous observation. Merce Cunningham is almost always referred to in print as “the dancer choreographer”. John Cage is referred to as “the contemporary composer who often worked with Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. It seems to me that in just about everything I have read about Jasper Johns it is mentioned that in his early New York days, back in the 50’s and 60’s, “he formed a friendship with John Cage, the contemporary composer, and Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. Something could be made of this name tagged hierarchy, but perhaps you get the point.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection
At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
This collection has been described as being unique in that it is the only extant collection put together during the lifetime of the artists. Most of these works are American and were collected in New York City between 1950 and 1954 although there are other modern, European, works from other dates. I am uncertain if the entire collection was on view.
Lately I have become very interested in studying collections: I am curious to discern the common thread running through a body of collected works and to see if I can ascertain what the collector’s interests might be beyond the school or style. These works are mid century abstract expressionist works. That is the main theme. As a secondary theme many of the paintings were black and white with some small touches of color…or none. Where color was dominant the hues had a lowered chromaticity so that overall there was a mellow tone to the collection. The exceptions to this were in the works by Hans Hoffman and Alexander Calder. In Calder’s work the three primaries were softened by the addition of areas in black and white. In Hoffman’s work the green hue of two squares was softened by the red hue of the ground.
There were two main influences: those artists following Arshile Gorky began with a reference to the human figure and those following Hans Hoffman referenced “nature”, meaning, I believe, landscape.
One of the most interesting common threads, but not a factor in selecting the works, is that many of these paintings are works made before that particular artist created his familiar iconic image that is seen in almost every museum today. For example the Clyfford Still is a black on white ragged edged movement, but not the common black vertical tear with some additional bright color. While that later development can be seen everywhere to the point of having become common, this is by far the most interesting work of his that I have yet seen.
There is a de Kooning sketch from early in the Woman series, dedicated to the collectors, but the oil on canvas is of black lines of what appears to be several figures drawn one over the others. Where the forms remained open they were closed with additional, gratuitous, lines. This created an allover pattern and the areas defined by the crossing lines were then filled in as flat independent forms. White and a muddied white are predominant with slight touches of color here and there. As a result there is a sense of there being “something” here, but rather than seeing it clearly it has become a field of confusion: what do I see; what is here? I was reminded of Frost’s poem, The Watchers: “they cannot look out far; they cannot look in deep…” Too many museums ride the de Kooning bandwagon by exhibiting only his work from the Woman series. It was a great delight to find this really wonderful painting in this collection.
For all the look of modernism about these works, there is in the whole collection a very strong sense of classical repose. But the most interesting characteristic is that it reads as a personal collection representing personal interests within a specific time frame rather than being a group of works displayed in a museum in order to illustrate a particular school, an historic era, or an art world polemic.
The works by Murray Louis and Kenneth Nolan are stained raw canvas and here they are credited with having begun that tradition although in other reading I had understood that Helen Frankenthaler was the first to do this. Her work here has some staining in the early stages of the development but she then continued with a heavier impasto. She has used a long thin rectangular format and has made it even thinner by painting a wide black area on one side. Two distorted large circles almost appear to be mirror images of one another and these circles are repeated in smaller sizes. There is a wonderful and powerful sense of action, surface and depth. The painting is very dynamic, much more so than others of her works which I often find too cloying with their watercolor-like, ephemeral prettiness. This had not only a motif of circles, but, over all, it had real balls.
Facing the de Kooning across the room was a Phillip Guston work, an abstraction which had the structure of a cubist painting, in which all of the elements rushed to and built up a complexity in the center of the format, leaving the surrounding sides less developed. This was very pale and seemed almost an out of focus flower garden, saved from complete prettiness by some dirty beige scrumbling. I’m not a Guston fan, especially of the late works, and if I had to choose something of his for myself it would be from this period.
The Hans Hoffman, essentially two green squares on a red ground, has a very strong sense of surface. The greens do not leap out as might be expected, but rather seem calmed and almost subsumed by the red. They rest and seem very slightly to hover. Near and far are suggested. Despite Hoffman’s usual six colors, three primaries and three secondaries, these do not seem to be “rich” colors. But neither are they juicy and so overall there is a rather Spartan sense of “making do” with this limited palette. There is less the sense of exploiting the richness of color than there is of an artist at work in his studio using color as a tool.
Hoffman is very good and I enjoy his work, observing how he creates a sense of balance through variation of the elements within what is usually a standard format, how he creates a sense of forms by altering the direction of the brush strokes, but I think, despite his adherence to color, generally minus white and black, that he is not a colorist, he seems far more interested in form and in using color to suggest form. And despite his influence, I think that he is not “major”. Hoffman’s work lacks depth: what you see is what you get. The work of one of his students next to his had a beautiful sense of color used to define the work. It was beautiful and juicy color. It was every bit as good as Hoffman’s if not a more satisfying visual experience.
On the other side of the Hoffman was a small work painted by Richard Artschwagle, “Bread”. On pressed wood the heavy surface texture was given a black over white finish with a shaded oval in the center indicating a loaf of the title. Eschewing the grandiose values of abstract expressionism, this small jewel holds its own amongst the larger works with accomplishment, talent, and wit.
In the smaller room outside, a Larry Rivers work, a portrait of his mother in law, was done in the large format. The figure, a line drawing, is seen reposing in a stuffed overlarge arm chair. It is excellently drawn but the areas indicated then became suggestions for the development of the color, as if the line and the color had been maintained as two separate elements. (Contrary to the Cezanne dictum: The color is the drawing.) Worked up primarily in a dusty rose and a pale olive green, with some orange flesh tones, the motif is there but the painting has its own presence and authority. It is a very, very nice painting. It is very human and very respectful. I have always liked Larry River’s work and I am always so sorry that he is not more highly regarded than his frequent omission in American museums seems to imply. If status were based on talent alone he would have his due.
Of the paintings I would think that the Robert Motherwell, Ode to the Spanish Republic, is the star turn. The black and the white are both very clean and very forthrightly stated, with the black appearing to have been dramatically imposed over the white ground. Although nothing but shape, the black is very visceral and evokes the sense of the genitalia of a Picassian bull, Spain. The ochre just to the side of the lower center edge is exactly the right color and the right amount of it. And, yes, this is the well known Motherwell iconic image. But the fact that it still provokes a powerful response, indicates, I believe, its validity and authenticity. The same cannot be said for the Marin watercolor, the Rothko color field painting nearby, or the rather too pretty Jackson Pollock Lavender drip painting.
There were some pieces of sculpture in this collection as well; most of it set at the quadrants within the room. Without exception they were welded metal, looking heavy, overwrought, and rather hostile. But then I don’t like sculpture. Neither, apparently, did the other visitors: almost everyone discovered these just before bumping into them. They leapt back and then walked around them without giving them further attention.
While this is a very good collection it would be difficult to determine that it is a great collection. This genre is widely represented in American museums where the works are presented one by each of the artists displayed. This collection too has one by each artist, unless there were others that were not shown here. For the most part the collectors have avoided what I think can be considered the clichéd utterances. All of the “right” names are included and many of the lesser known names have created works that stand as equals to those of the stars. It is a handsome group of paintings and shows a consistency of taste and discrimination. If I have any reservations it is that this represents a very brief moment in art history; it has depth in numbers but lacks breadth in the long term overview.
Another work in the smaller room was a really fine collage made of paper and fabric by a woman artist who, it was stated, had name recognition and fame during the time these works were collected but who, with the lessening dominance of abstract expressionism, faded from public awareness. I consider abstract expressionism as but one of many twentieth century ism and I am certain that even many of the well known names will someday take their place in the store rooms of the art world as well. Except for the Larry Rivers work I did not see anything in this collection that I thought would occasion a reappraisal of the movement as it is presently defined.
Wanting to know more, to answer the questions this exhibition raised, outside the gallery, at one of the Met’s ubiquitous sales kiosks, I considered buying the catalogue but in thumbing through it I was very surprised to see that the color of the reproductions was extremely garish and hardly representative of the beautiful colors in this collection. Therefore, at $50.00, I passed on it, despite the vigorous protestations of the salesclerk. But then, that is her job: to sell the books.
This collection has been described as being unique in that it is the only extant collection put together during the lifetime of the artists. Most of these works are American and were collected in New York City between 1950 and 1954 although there are other modern, European, works from other dates. I am uncertain if the entire collection was on view.
Lately I have become very interested in studying collections: I am curious to discern the common thread running through a body of collected works and to see if I can ascertain what the collector’s interests might be beyond the school or style. These works are mid century abstract expressionist works. That is the main theme. As a secondary theme many of the paintings were black and white with some small touches of color…or none. Where color was dominant the hues had a lowered chromaticity so that overall there was a mellow tone to the collection. The exceptions to this were in the works by Hans Hoffman and Alexander Calder. In Calder’s work the three primaries were softened by the addition of areas in black and white. In Hoffman’s work the green hue of two squares was softened by the red hue of the ground.
There were two main influences: those artists following Arshile Gorky began with a reference to the human figure and those following Hans Hoffman referenced “nature”, meaning, I believe, landscape.
One of the most interesting common threads, but not a factor in selecting the works, is that many of these paintings are works made before that particular artist created his familiar iconic image that is seen in almost every museum today. For example the Clyfford Still is a black on white ragged edged movement, but not the common black vertical tear with some additional bright color. While that later development can be seen everywhere to the point of having become common, this is by far the most interesting work of his that I have yet seen.
There is a de Kooning sketch from early in the Woman series, dedicated to the collectors, but the oil on canvas is of black lines of what appears to be several figures drawn one over the others. Where the forms remained open they were closed with additional, gratuitous, lines. This created an allover pattern and the areas defined by the crossing lines were then filled in as flat independent forms. White and a muddied white are predominant with slight touches of color here and there. As a result there is a sense of there being “something” here, but rather than seeing it clearly it has become a field of confusion: what do I see; what is here? I was reminded of Frost’s poem, The Watchers: “they cannot look out far; they cannot look in deep…” Too many museums ride the de Kooning bandwagon by exhibiting only his work from the Woman series. It was a great delight to find this really wonderful painting in this collection.
For all the look of modernism about these works, there is in the whole collection a very strong sense of classical repose. But the most interesting characteristic is that it reads as a personal collection representing personal interests within a specific time frame rather than being a group of works displayed in a museum in order to illustrate a particular school, an historic era, or an art world polemic.
The works by Murray Louis and Kenneth Nolan are stained raw canvas and here they are credited with having begun that tradition although in other reading I had understood that Helen Frankenthaler was the first to do this. Her work here has some staining in the early stages of the development but she then continued with a heavier impasto. She has used a long thin rectangular format and has made it even thinner by painting a wide black area on one side. Two distorted large circles almost appear to be mirror images of one another and these circles are repeated in smaller sizes. There is a wonderful and powerful sense of action, surface and depth. The painting is very dynamic, much more so than others of her works which I often find too cloying with their watercolor-like, ephemeral prettiness. This had not only a motif of circles, but, over all, it had real balls.
Facing the de Kooning across the room was a Phillip Guston work, an abstraction which had the structure of a cubist painting, in which all of the elements rushed to and built up a complexity in the center of the format, leaving the surrounding sides less developed. This was very pale and seemed almost an out of focus flower garden, saved from complete prettiness by some dirty beige scrumbling. I’m not a Guston fan, especially of the late works, and if I had to choose something of his for myself it would be from this period.
The Hans Hoffman, essentially two green squares on a red ground, has a very strong sense of surface. The greens do not leap out as might be expected, but rather seem calmed and almost subsumed by the red. They rest and seem very slightly to hover. Near and far are suggested. Despite Hoffman’s usual six colors, three primaries and three secondaries, these do not seem to be “rich” colors. But neither are they juicy and so overall there is a rather Spartan sense of “making do” with this limited palette. There is less the sense of exploiting the richness of color than there is of an artist at work in his studio using color as a tool.
Hoffman is very good and I enjoy his work, observing how he creates a sense of balance through variation of the elements within what is usually a standard format, how he creates a sense of forms by altering the direction of the brush strokes, but I think, despite his adherence to color, generally minus white and black, that he is not a colorist, he seems far more interested in form and in using color to suggest form. And despite his influence, I think that he is not “major”. Hoffman’s work lacks depth: what you see is what you get. The work of one of his students next to his had a beautiful sense of color used to define the work. It was beautiful and juicy color. It was every bit as good as Hoffman’s if not a more satisfying visual experience.
On the other side of the Hoffman was a small work painted by Richard Artschwagle, “Bread”. On pressed wood the heavy surface texture was given a black over white finish with a shaded oval in the center indicating a loaf of the title. Eschewing the grandiose values of abstract expressionism, this small jewel holds its own amongst the larger works with accomplishment, talent, and wit.
In the smaller room outside, a Larry Rivers work, a portrait of his mother in law, was done in the large format. The figure, a line drawing, is seen reposing in a stuffed overlarge arm chair. It is excellently drawn but the areas indicated then became suggestions for the development of the color, as if the line and the color had been maintained as two separate elements. (Contrary to the Cezanne dictum: The color is the drawing.) Worked up primarily in a dusty rose and a pale olive green, with some orange flesh tones, the motif is there but the painting has its own presence and authority. It is a very, very nice painting. It is very human and very respectful. I have always liked Larry River’s work and I am always so sorry that he is not more highly regarded than his frequent omission in American museums seems to imply. If status were based on talent alone he would have his due.
Of the paintings I would think that the Robert Motherwell, Ode to the Spanish Republic, is the star turn. The black and the white are both very clean and very forthrightly stated, with the black appearing to have been dramatically imposed over the white ground. Although nothing but shape, the black is very visceral and evokes the sense of the genitalia of a Picassian bull, Spain. The ochre just to the side of the lower center edge is exactly the right color and the right amount of it. And, yes, this is the well known Motherwell iconic image. But the fact that it still provokes a powerful response, indicates, I believe, its validity and authenticity. The same cannot be said for the Marin watercolor, the Rothko color field painting nearby, or the rather too pretty Jackson Pollock Lavender drip painting.
There were some pieces of sculpture in this collection as well; most of it set at the quadrants within the room. Without exception they were welded metal, looking heavy, overwrought, and rather hostile. But then I don’t like sculpture. Neither, apparently, did the other visitors: almost everyone discovered these just before bumping into them. They leapt back and then walked around them without giving them further attention.
While this is a very good collection it would be difficult to determine that it is a great collection. This genre is widely represented in American museums where the works are presented one by each of the artists displayed. This collection too has one by each artist, unless there were others that were not shown here. For the most part the collectors have avoided what I think can be considered the clichéd utterances. All of the “right” names are included and many of the lesser known names have created works that stand as equals to those of the stars. It is a handsome group of paintings and shows a consistency of taste and discrimination. If I have any reservations it is that this represents a very brief moment in art history; it has depth in numbers but lacks breadth in the long term overview.
Another work in the smaller room was a really fine collage made of paper and fabric by a woman artist who, it was stated, had name recognition and fame during the time these works were collected but who, with the lessening dominance of abstract expressionism, faded from public awareness. I consider abstract expressionism as but one of many twentieth century ism and I am certain that even many of the well known names will someday take their place in the store rooms of the art world as well. Except for the Larry Rivers work I did not see anything in this collection that I thought would occasion a reappraisal of the movement as it is presently defined.
Wanting to know more, to answer the questions this exhibition raised, outside the gallery, at one of the Met’s ubiquitous sales kiosks, I considered buying the catalogue but in thumbing through it I was very surprised to see that the color of the reproductions was extremely garish and hardly representative of the beautiful colors in this collection. Therefore, at $50.00, I passed on it, despite the vigorous protestations of the salesclerk. But then, that is her job: to sell the books.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, January 2008
I have visited the Museum of Modern Art at least a dozen times: however, I have not been there in probably twenty years. I have not seen the latest renovation. On my first visit in 1960 it was one of the very few museums in the world focused exclusively on modern art. Then, in contrast to The Metropolitan Museum, it stood out as a unique and exciting and stimulating experience. Compared to the Whitney, at that time its neighbor, with its focus on American art, it had a greater value in that its collection had international status. The most recent museum, in those days, The Guggenheim, had a similar focus but less interesting artworks.
In 1960 the Edward Durrell Stone building still had the feel of being new: it was one of the few Modern buildings in New York City. Among the others at that time, the Seagram’s Building, Lever House, The United Nations building, and the Guggenheim, there was a strong sense that modern architecture was to be an exciting new era. The 1964 MOMA addition maintained that character and provided the museum with more gallery space and more public areas. The art seemed comfortable and with ample spaces around it.
There was always, however, a strong dichotomy in this museum: the top floor galleries housed the unique and stellar early 20th century European, primarily French, collection while the floor below it, with a narrower emphasis on mid century, primarily American art, seemed to be a far less important continuation. Many of the well-known names of modern art seemed to be missing. American museums are for the most part teaching institutions but there was always the sense here that this was not a survey of modern art so much as a collection created by a group of persons with a specific interest. There has been little indication over the years of there being a desire to see the collection grow, unlike the Mc Nay, in San Antonio, which was a fixed collection but which the trustees have understood must show growth in order to maintain the sense of a living institution. Other areas of interest, at MOMA, photography, prints, design, have always seemed fragmentary at best.
On this most recent trip, in the Architecture and Design galleries, there are works that I have seen many times over the years: I assume the models on display, by Fuller, Keisler, and Rietveld, are the only models in the collection. The design collection looks as if it had been conceived and built in the 1960’s, and then soon after neglected.
There are now galleries for prints and for drawings. These are welcome. The current exhibition, Latin American Prints, was uninspired however: certainly it did not compare favorably with a Latin American print show that I saw two years ago at the San Antonio Museum of Art, nor with that museum’s Nelson Rockefeller Collection of Latin American Art.
In the past the photography section was so small that I can hardly remember ever having seen it. There is now a nice sized gallery and each artist is represented with a selection of works. Most American Museums show only one work for each artist…apparently their holding as so “vast” that were they to show two or more works some artist would be omitted and the visitors would feel slighted. As a result most American museums look like boxes of Whitman Samplers.
But taken as a whole, these collections seem not so much a museum as a cabinet: it all seems limited and narrow.
I did appreciate that there is a gallery for the works of Mondrian and that an overview of his development is shown, as is that of Calder. The breadth of the Picasso collection is thrilling. And as always, the first gallery, the works of Cézanne, are breath taking. I once said to a friend that I thought it odd that the museum collection opened with eight Cézannes. Yes, he said, but each of them is a masterpiece. And so they are. But as other than antecedents to what follows these seem remarkably out of place.
Painting and sculpture continue to be segregated, painting on the inside and sculpture, for the most part, outside, as if they were two very distinct and different ways of thinking. I suppose, technically, they are but they do have a relationship that I do not sense here.
In my experience this is one of the few museums in America that does not have a collecion of twentieth century ceramics.
Every American city now boasts not only a Museum of Fine Arts but a museum of modern art as well Almost without exception those Museums of Modern, or perhaps Contemporary, Art are new buildings designed by name architects…unfortunately many of those architects are European, or more recently Japanese, continuing the 19th century American tradition of going “abroad” for truly “significant” cultural trappings. But, of course, American museums are surveys of world culture with a token reference to American art. Each of these museums makes the claim that their building is as beautiful as the works they contain. (This is not always true, however.) In each of these buildings the works are presented in a style first created by The New York Museum of Modern Art: all of the works are at eye level with one work in each vertical unit of space. The walls are almost always off white.
In its new space, MOMA continues this now universal presentation. And like the other museums, it offers a variety of dining configurations but all of them gourmet. I have come to believe that for many museumgoers being in close propinquity with the great wealth of the board members is that museum’s primary allure. The gourmet restaurants with their elitist menus are there to provide that opportunity: they do not serve the general public, only The Ladies Who Lunch.
The architecture of the new space, and I am not so sure I consider it architecture as more correctly interior design, is modern although in a regressive sense, perhaps to better harmonize with the original and well restored Stone building and the fifty story tower above it. Except that it represents a conservative corporate American architectural preference, it lacks a sense of contemporary design. Certainly it does not compare favorable with the Glass and the Fine Art museums in Tacoma, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, nor does it have the overly spacious quality of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art.
Upon entering the museum, the amorphous character of the lobby surprised me: after queuing for the wicket, there was no sense at all as to how one was to proceed. The architect has not directed us. (Perhaps the mass of humanity milling about obscured the path of discovery.) Frank Lloyd Wright would have made this perfectly clear. Once I saw the ticket takers, after an overly long search for the coatroom, the only indication of forward momentum was the view into the garden.
Climbing the grand staircase, such as it is, a reduced, modern reconcepualization, I felt dread seeing the helicopter over my head: I have seen this many, many times. I was hoping to discover something in industrial design of more recent vintage. Later, seeing the old Ferrari (Jaguar?), I was pleased that it had at least been mounted on the wall. Variety is always welcome.
On the second floor I found the escalators on my own and rather by default. (It was only when I came out of the galleries, after the visit, that I discovered that the escalators were indeed accessible on the ground floor.) I saw no indication for elevators and I was not about to climb six flights of stairs, in a museum twelve stories, although I saw none of those either. The information desks appeared to have been tucked into dark corners as if on second thought. Throughout the museum the design of the traffic flow is extremely poor.
The sixth floor gallery for special exhibits was poorly indicated, it seems to have the floor to itself and it comes off as a corner room high up in the attic. One visitor there announced to his companions that he was going out into the corridor: “I feel claustrophobic”, he said. I sympathized with him.
In every new museum there is one area where the architect is permitted to make a grand statement and to present a moment of architecture as an art form. Here, as in most of the others, this occurs in the atrium. Although large, this space is so much an “interior” space as to further induce claustrophobia. The catwalks on each floor at the side of the atrium are fun but the catwalk seven floors above and across the lobby below in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is magnificent.
But the greatest difference between this museum and all of the others is that this continues to be the definitive collection of early 20th Century European masterpieces. However, it now looks like an old collection; it shows us that modernism is dated. In fact, the sense of the dead past pervades this museum. I believe this is the fault of the design and the planning and the recent, desultory collecting. I did not sense the dead past at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I visited the Lane collection, nor at the Mc Nay, nor at the eternally evolving Metropolitan Museum of Art just up Fifth Avenue.
On the fifth floor front there is a floor to ceiling window looking out over Fifty Third Street at the small park behind the CBS Building. A new monolithic high rise beside that, across from the museum, the old Sperry Rand building on Fifty Second Street, and the RCA Building beyond created a distinctive, monumental cityscape. All of these building jammed together left only a small square of sky at the upper left of this composition. Although it was a sunny day, the sky without a cloud, there was no sunlight and shadow here; this view was dark and gray and seemed to be a twilight world, a Fritz Lang Metropolis. Looking down into this gray mass I could see that Frank Lloyd Wright’s warning that the city as conceived in the early twentieth century would eventually strangle itself had come to be the reality. Indeed: there is no sunlight, no air and no respect for others, or for anything other than rent money, in this world of the damned.
Nor was there sunlight in the museum garden. And that I think is the problem with this new museum building and with this museum: it sits in the center of the towering corporate world. Like that world it is insular and closed-minded. It too lacks air and light. Despite its new housing, it rests on its former success, a dated collection, as if that were complete, finished, and that under no circumstances will it be tampered with. The Museum of Modern Art: it is all about the past. The world, however, has moved on.
In 1960 the Edward Durrell Stone building still had the feel of being new: it was one of the few Modern buildings in New York City. Among the others at that time, the Seagram’s Building, Lever House, The United Nations building, and the Guggenheim, there was a strong sense that modern architecture was to be an exciting new era. The 1964 MOMA addition maintained that character and provided the museum with more gallery space and more public areas. The art seemed comfortable and with ample spaces around it.
There was always, however, a strong dichotomy in this museum: the top floor galleries housed the unique and stellar early 20th century European, primarily French, collection while the floor below it, with a narrower emphasis on mid century, primarily American art, seemed to be a far less important continuation. Many of the well-known names of modern art seemed to be missing. American museums are for the most part teaching institutions but there was always the sense here that this was not a survey of modern art so much as a collection created by a group of persons with a specific interest. There has been little indication over the years of there being a desire to see the collection grow, unlike the Mc Nay, in San Antonio, which was a fixed collection but which the trustees have understood must show growth in order to maintain the sense of a living institution. Other areas of interest, at MOMA, photography, prints, design, have always seemed fragmentary at best.
On this most recent trip, in the Architecture and Design galleries, there are works that I have seen many times over the years: I assume the models on display, by Fuller, Keisler, and Rietveld, are the only models in the collection. The design collection looks as if it had been conceived and built in the 1960’s, and then soon after neglected.
There are now galleries for prints and for drawings. These are welcome. The current exhibition, Latin American Prints, was uninspired however: certainly it did not compare favorably with a Latin American print show that I saw two years ago at the San Antonio Museum of Art, nor with that museum’s Nelson Rockefeller Collection of Latin American Art.
In the past the photography section was so small that I can hardly remember ever having seen it. There is now a nice sized gallery and each artist is represented with a selection of works. Most American Museums show only one work for each artist…apparently their holding as so “vast” that were they to show two or more works some artist would be omitted and the visitors would feel slighted. As a result most American museums look like boxes of Whitman Samplers.
But taken as a whole, these collections seem not so much a museum as a cabinet: it all seems limited and narrow.
I did appreciate that there is a gallery for the works of Mondrian and that an overview of his development is shown, as is that of Calder. The breadth of the Picasso collection is thrilling. And as always, the first gallery, the works of Cézanne, are breath taking. I once said to a friend that I thought it odd that the museum collection opened with eight Cézannes. Yes, he said, but each of them is a masterpiece. And so they are. But as other than antecedents to what follows these seem remarkably out of place.
Painting and sculpture continue to be segregated, painting on the inside and sculpture, for the most part, outside, as if they were two very distinct and different ways of thinking. I suppose, technically, they are but they do have a relationship that I do not sense here.
In my experience this is one of the few museums in America that does not have a collecion of twentieth century ceramics.
Every American city now boasts not only a Museum of Fine Arts but a museum of modern art as well Almost without exception those Museums of Modern, or perhaps Contemporary, Art are new buildings designed by name architects…unfortunately many of those architects are European, or more recently Japanese, continuing the 19th century American tradition of going “abroad” for truly “significant” cultural trappings. But, of course, American museums are surveys of world culture with a token reference to American art. Each of these museums makes the claim that their building is as beautiful as the works they contain. (This is not always true, however.) In each of these buildings the works are presented in a style first created by The New York Museum of Modern Art: all of the works are at eye level with one work in each vertical unit of space. The walls are almost always off white.
In its new space, MOMA continues this now universal presentation. And like the other museums, it offers a variety of dining configurations but all of them gourmet. I have come to believe that for many museumgoers being in close propinquity with the great wealth of the board members is that museum’s primary allure. The gourmet restaurants with their elitist menus are there to provide that opportunity: they do not serve the general public, only The Ladies Who Lunch.
The architecture of the new space, and I am not so sure I consider it architecture as more correctly interior design, is modern although in a regressive sense, perhaps to better harmonize with the original and well restored Stone building and the fifty story tower above it. Except that it represents a conservative corporate American architectural preference, it lacks a sense of contemporary design. Certainly it does not compare favorable with the Glass and the Fine Art museums in Tacoma, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, nor does it have the overly spacious quality of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art.
Upon entering the museum, the amorphous character of the lobby surprised me: after queuing for the wicket, there was no sense at all as to how one was to proceed. The architect has not directed us. (Perhaps the mass of humanity milling about obscured the path of discovery.) Frank Lloyd Wright would have made this perfectly clear. Once I saw the ticket takers, after an overly long search for the coatroom, the only indication of forward momentum was the view into the garden.
Climbing the grand staircase, such as it is, a reduced, modern reconcepualization, I felt dread seeing the helicopter over my head: I have seen this many, many times. I was hoping to discover something in industrial design of more recent vintage. Later, seeing the old Ferrari (Jaguar?), I was pleased that it had at least been mounted on the wall. Variety is always welcome.
On the second floor I found the escalators on my own and rather by default. (It was only when I came out of the galleries, after the visit, that I discovered that the escalators were indeed accessible on the ground floor.) I saw no indication for elevators and I was not about to climb six flights of stairs, in a museum twelve stories, although I saw none of those either. The information desks appeared to have been tucked into dark corners as if on second thought. Throughout the museum the design of the traffic flow is extremely poor.
The sixth floor gallery for special exhibits was poorly indicated, it seems to have the floor to itself and it comes off as a corner room high up in the attic. One visitor there announced to his companions that he was going out into the corridor: “I feel claustrophobic”, he said. I sympathized with him.
In every new museum there is one area where the architect is permitted to make a grand statement and to present a moment of architecture as an art form. Here, as in most of the others, this occurs in the atrium. Although large, this space is so much an “interior” space as to further induce claustrophobia. The catwalks on each floor at the side of the atrium are fun but the catwalk seven floors above and across the lobby below in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is magnificent.
But the greatest difference between this museum and all of the others is that this continues to be the definitive collection of early 20th Century European masterpieces. However, it now looks like an old collection; it shows us that modernism is dated. In fact, the sense of the dead past pervades this museum. I believe this is the fault of the design and the planning and the recent, desultory collecting. I did not sense the dead past at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I visited the Lane collection, nor at the Mc Nay, nor at the eternally evolving Metropolitan Museum of Art just up Fifth Avenue.
On the fifth floor front there is a floor to ceiling window looking out over Fifty Third Street at the small park behind the CBS Building. A new monolithic high rise beside that, across from the museum, the old Sperry Rand building on Fifty Second Street, and the RCA Building beyond created a distinctive, monumental cityscape. All of these building jammed together left only a small square of sky at the upper left of this composition. Although it was a sunny day, the sky without a cloud, there was no sunlight and shadow here; this view was dark and gray and seemed to be a twilight world, a Fritz Lang Metropolis. Looking down into this gray mass I could see that Frank Lloyd Wright’s warning that the city as conceived in the early twentieth century would eventually strangle itself had come to be the reality. Indeed: there is no sunlight, no air and no respect for others, or for anything other than rent money, in this world of the damned.
Nor was there sunlight in the museum garden. And that I think is the problem with this new museum building and with this museum: it sits in the center of the towering corporate world. Like that world it is insular and closed-minded. It too lacks air and light. Despite its new housing, it rests on its former success, a dated collection, as if that were complete, finished, and that under no circumstances will it be tampered with. The Museum of Modern Art: it is all about the past. The world, however, has moved on.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
George Seurat: The Drawings. Museum of Modern Art, NYC. January 2008
Seen most often one at a time and here and there, a retrospective of the drawings of Georges Seurat would seem to be a welcome opportunity. And certainly I made the effort to travel many miles to see this exhibition. But I am sorry to say that seen in great number, one hundred thirty five drawings, the work is greatly disappointing.
The beginning works were student work done in the Ecole des Beaux Arts academic manner. Pale gray pencil, or charcoal, is used to delineate the contours, through line, as well as to shade and suggest form. In a series of drawings from the classic examples, statuary, the craftsmanship is flawless: every area of the form is extremely well studied, the proportions are absolutely perfect, and the overall effect is of a drawing breathed onto the paper. As artworks, however, they have that rigid art school look and feel about them: one wonders, having made such a perfect drawing as each of these is, why a person would make yet another? As student work one can understand the concept of mastering a technique through repetition, yet as works in an exhibition they illustrate why the Ecole fell from favor at that time: they are without vital import, they are merely technique. As these drawings make very evident: a person can be trained to do this. And indeed they have been: we can see this same mastery in the works of Palko, Zick, and Tuscher, as well as in thousands of other classically trained artists.
One senses that Seurat somewhat shared that awareness of that school’s diminished reputation: once on his own he almost immediately began to draw in a different style. Perhaps aware of the impressionists concern with light and air, he began to focus on light as one of the necessary components for delineating form. Of the three plastic elements we can see that he was most interested in form, as, in his paintings, he would be most interested in color. In both the drawings and the paintings his concerns can be seen to be primarily intellectual. Intellectual content is perfectly fine in artworks but with Seurat it looks rather like the means for illustrating a polemic.
The museum’s interpretation tells us that the artist was very particular about the effect he wanted to achieve, using a specific paper because of the way it would react with his conte crayon. Most artists would understand this great pleasure that one feels using a specific medium. And certainly it is a beautiful effect, dragging the black crayon over the rough paper so that the sparkle of white glitters in the darkest areas. But I am always suspicious when an artist relies on the same materials over and over: I begin to suspect a devotion to effects.
The interpretation also tells us that he went out of the central city to an area known as “The Zone”, a sort of no man’s land between city and suburb. I think this indicates the problem with these works: neither the area nor these drawings have character, both lack vital import; the drawings are masterfully executed but they lack meaning. If an artwork is viewed as a shared experience, the artist must have and digest the experience before he can share it with us. These drawings from “The Zone” are merely exercises in a technique the artist was attempting to develop. By using “The Zone” he was presenting works for consideration that had no precedents: the observers would have to address the reality presented on these pieces of paper. There would be no familiar areas to serve as the basis for a critical comparison. In and of itself, that is fine. But, again, this lacks character, this lacks a shared experience. This is not a world in which the character of the people have given it personality: it is a drab, characterless no man’s land.
By contrast, in the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, in which light also models the forms rising out of darkness, even though the environment might be equally nondescript, the focus is on the vital import, the feelings expressed by the artist.
In another series of drawings, the nightlife of Paris, we see the usual scene as depicted by Manet, Degas, and Latrec but in the Seurat technique.
In regard to that technique, the drawn line has now vanished and we see merely modeled form, and, for the most part, form isolated in blackness and coming into roundness where the light touches it. There is the quality of the luminous as if these had been inspired by early photography. But where the light touches the form it is so limited as to suggest that the artist is exploring technique rather than a visual experience, as if he were exploring how much or how little he needed to state to manifest his concept. As a drawing within a series of drawings during an artist’s development, this would be interesting. But there are so many of these drawings that we only see that his development was extremely slow and that he perhaps too much loved his materials, they were not a means to an end but an end pleasure. Rembrandt’s pen and ink landscape drawings are wonderful because he used the medium to record an impression, a vision, and his delight. They are beautiful drawings because of that, not because of the way the pen scraped across the coarse paper; the medium was the vehicle not the raisone d’être.
Seen as a whole, there is a development in the works. The first drawings are pale, light gray on white paper with the modeling only on the form. In the middle period the forms rise out of blackness. And in the last period, the forms are modeled using the whole of the gray scale and in a midtone gray environment. Very likely this latter change was motivated by his preparation for moving on to the paintings. Except for a few, and most notably in the portrait of Andre -, there is little sense that these drawings were intended to be finished art works.
In that Seurat was a contemporary of the impressionists who used the devices of composition found in Japanese woodcuts to create new designs and arrangements within picture space, it is odd that rather than follow that development, or seek another, he adhered rigidly to the academic practice of a centered, classical balance.
There is an absence of a sense of time. In his writings on the Italian Renaissance painters, Berenson tells us that it was not linear perspective that made those work different from the Gothic artists, it was the introduction of the presence of time. There is in painting a double concept of time: time present and time passing. In Seurat there is form and light and materials, but there is no sense of time. These drawings, as a result, are little more than technical exercises.
There is also very little indication of spontaneity; each of these drawings began with a concept and each of them has the sense of being a contrivance to illustrate that concept. As many of these were executed in the studio from sketches done in situ, it would have been very interesting to have seen some of those sketches from the field.
I sense this same studio contrivance in Seurat’s paintings. Those have interest as an intellectual development within a larger art movement but as paintings considered on their own, they too are in the end only the exercise of a technique. Despite their flash of color, they lack the spark of life. They come off as brilliantly executed exercises that can be seen to have been time consuming and tedious to make. Pissarro, always curious about new ideas and new developments, tried only a few paintings in this style, and then he moved on. There is a tendency to wonder, had Seurat lived longer, how soon and in what other direction he might have moved. But considering that his is at heart a “rigid” personality I doubt that it would have been too far one way or the other.
The beginning works were student work done in the Ecole des Beaux Arts academic manner. Pale gray pencil, or charcoal, is used to delineate the contours, through line, as well as to shade and suggest form. In a series of drawings from the classic examples, statuary, the craftsmanship is flawless: every area of the form is extremely well studied, the proportions are absolutely perfect, and the overall effect is of a drawing breathed onto the paper. As artworks, however, they have that rigid art school look and feel about them: one wonders, having made such a perfect drawing as each of these is, why a person would make yet another? As student work one can understand the concept of mastering a technique through repetition, yet as works in an exhibition they illustrate why the Ecole fell from favor at that time: they are without vital import, they are merely technique. As these drawings make very evident: a person can be trained to do this. And indeed they have been: we can see this same mastery in the works of Palko, Zick, and Tuscher, as well as in thousands of other classically trained artists.
One senses that Seurat somewhat shared that awareness of that school’s diminished reputation: once on his own he almost immediately began to draw in a different style. Perhaps aware of the impressionists concern with light and air, he began to focus on light as one of the necessary components for delineating form. Of the three plastic elements we can see that he was most interested in form, as, in his paintings, he would be most interested in color. In both the drawings and the paintings his concerns can be seen to be primarily intellectual. Intellectual content is perfectly fine in artworks but with Seurat it looks rather like the means for illustrating a polemic.
The museum’s interpretation tells us that the artist was very particular about the effect he wanted to achieve, using a specific paper because of the way it would react with his conte crayon. Most artists would understand this great pleasure that one feels using a specific medium. And certainly it is a beautiful effect, dragging the black crayon over the rough paper so that the sparkle of white glitters in the darkest areas. But I am always suspicious when an artist relies on the same materials over and over: I begin to suspect a devotion to effects.
The interpretation also tells us that he went out of the central city to an area known as “The Zone”, a sort of no man’s land between city and suburb. I think this indicates the problem with these works: neither the area nor these drawings have character, both lack vital import; the drawings are masterfully executed but they lack meaning. If an artwork is viewed as a shared experience, the artist must have and digest the experience before he can share it with us. These drawings from “The Zone” are merely exercises in a technique the artist was attempting to develop. By using “The Zone” he was presenting works for consideration that had no precedents: the observers would have to address the reality presented on these pieces of paper. There would be no familiar areas to serve as the basis for a critical comparison. In and of itself, that is fine. But, again, this lacks character, this lacks a shared experience. This is not a world in which the character of the people have given it personality: it is a drab, characterless no man’s land.
By contrast, in the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, in which light also models the forms rising out of darkness, even though the environment might be equally nondescript, the focus is on the vital import, the feelings expressed by the artist.
In another series of drawings, the nightlife of Paris, we see the usual scene as depicted by Manet, Degas, and Latrec but in the Seurat technique.
In regard to that technique, the drawn line has now vanished and we see merely modeled form, and, for the most part, form isolated in blackness and coming into roundness where the light touches it. There is the quality of the luminous as if these had been inspired by early photography. But where the light touches the form it is so limited as to suggest that the artist is exploring technique rather than a visual experience, as if he were exploring how much or how little he needed to state to manifest his concept. As a drawing within a series of drawings during an artist’s development, this would be interesting. But there are so many of these drawings that we only see that his development was extremely slow and that he perhaps too much loved his materials, they were not a means to an end but an end pleasure. Rembrandt’s pen and ink landscape drawings are wonderful because he used the medium to record an impression, a vision, and his delight. They are beautiful drawings because of that, not because of the way the pen scraped across the coarse paper; the medium was the vehicle not the raisone d’être.
Seen as a whole, there is a development in the works. The first drawings are pale, light gray on white paper with the modeling only on the form. In the middle period the forms rise out of blackness. And in the last period, the forms are modeled using the whole of the gray scale and in a midtone gray environment. Very likely this latter change was motivated by his preparation for moving on to the paintings. Except for a few, and most notably in the portrait of Andre -, there is little sense that these drawings were intended to be finished art works.
In that Seurat was a contemporary of the impressionists who used the devices of composition found in Japanese woodcuts to create new designs and arrangements within picture space, it is odd that rather than follow that development, or seek another, he adhered rigidly to the academic practice of a centered, classical balance.
There is an absence of a sense of time. In his writings on the Italian Renaissance painters, Berenson tells us that it was not linear perspective that made those work different from the Gothic artists, it was the introduction of the presence of time. There is in painting a double concept of time: time present and time passing. In Seurat there is form and light and materials, but there is no sense of time. These drawings, as a result, are little more than technical exercises.
There is also very little indication of spontaneity; each of these drawings began with a concept and each of them has the sense of being a contrivance to illustrate that concept. As many of these were executed in the studio from sketches done in situ, it would have been very interesting to have seen some of those sketches from the field.
I sense this same studio contrivance in Seurat’s paintings. Those have interest as an intellectual development within a larger art movement but as paintings considered on their own, they too are in the end only the exercise of a technique. Despite their flash of color, they lack the spark of life. They come off as brilliantly executed exercises that can be seen to have been time consuming and tedious to make. Pissarro, always curious about new ideas and new developments, tried only a few paintings in this style, and then he moved on. There is a tendency to wonder, had Seurat lived longer, how soon and in what other direction he might have moved. But considering that his is at heart a “rigid” personality I doubt that it would have been too far one way or the other.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Frank Lloyd Wright, the Architect of Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright, the Architect of Fallingwater
An Architectural Appreciation by
Article Four
For the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Daniel Burnham, dean of the Chicago school of architects, was chosen to head the event. He chose Beaux Arts classic revival as the style for the buildings despite the fact that Chicago architects, following the great fire of ’71, were well on their way to creating a new architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright and his employer of the time, Louis Sullivan, agreed that Burnham’s choice had set American architecture back by fifty years.
At the time of that fair, iron had been used in commercial buildings. There was wrought iron and cast iron. There was Bessemer steel. But it was not fire proof and so its use would not prevent another Great Fire. Cement had been in use since the days of the Romans; but it too had its weaknesses. It occurred to another Chicago architect, William Lebaron Jenney, that if he could unite the two, the cement might make the steel fireproof. And so he invented ferrocement, or reinforced concrete. An engineer turned architect, he erected the first building with reinforced concrete, the Leitier II Building, 1895, on Congress Parkway and State Street. For years it was the Sears store: today it is a university.
Reinforced concrete united the best qualities of both materials and mitigated their weaknesses. The steel frame of a ten-story building could be erected in ten days, compared to the two years it took to erect the Allegheny County Court House. A steel frame building had one-third the weight of a stone building of comparable size. But most importantly, the engineering possibilities of reinforced concrete meant that buildings no longer had to be boxes.
Following the fair, and recognizing Frank Lloyd Wright’s budding natural talents, Daniel Burnham offered him a complete four-year education at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Without hesitation, Wright declined: it was his intention to create an American architecture. Reinforced concrete had now made that possible.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s career is divided into an apprenticeship and development period, and three twenty-year periods of creativity, each capped with a masterpiece. He apprenticed with Louis Sullivan. He worked with him on major Chicago buildings, among them the Auditorium Theatre and the Charnley House. In addition, Sullivan would direct his clients who wanted residential work to Wright, saying that he, Sullivan, would keep an eye on him. But Sullivan was interested only in the commercial projects. It wasn’t until clients began to come to the office requesting the services of Wright, that Sullivan realized the situation had gone beyond his intentions.
During this time Wright lived in suburban Oak Park and had designed and built a house for himself and twenty-seven other houses there in which he brought to full realization the Prairie style. All of those houses can be seen there today. In 1909 he completed Unity Temple, in Oak Park, and The Robie House, now absorbed onto the campus of The University of Chicago. That was his development period. In 1919 Wright capped his early years with The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. In the 1922 earthquake, it was the only building left standing in that city. That building established his international reputation.
In 1935, at the age of 68, Wright completed Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, a house cantilevered off a rock out over a waterfall. Almost all architectural authorities consider this the greatest building erected in the twentieth century. Then, when most men would have retired, Wright entered into his last and most creative twenty-year period. He worked non-stop during these years designing, building, and teaching. In 1959, at the age of 90, he died just before the completion of The Guggenheim Museum in New York City, his final great masterpiece: it appears to rise in defiance of gravity.
Almost 60 of his buildings are listed as National Historic Landmarks. They are authentic historic architecture, innovative in both their techniques and their designs. The American Institute of Architects has identified seventeen of his buildings which it insists must be considered American Treasures.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s achievement lies in his reconceptualizing a building. A home was not a box to be divided into smaller boxes but a place of security, privacy, comfort, and beauty. He first ascertained who would live in the house and what their needs were. He then looked at the building site. He reserved the best of the site as the view from the house.
Where possible, he eliminated post and beam construction, walls, windows, and doors. There were no basements, the houses did not sit up on cement pedestals; they were built on a platform that sat on the ground. Wright viewed man as a creature of the earth and he wanted man not to lose his sense of contact with the nurturing earth. The houses are never at the top of the hill, but below the crest and embraced by the land. They employed natural materials, wood and stone.
The interior space was open and embracing at the same time. There were no blank walls on which to hang pictures or other ornamentation, it was not a space that could be decorated and redecorated: the house was organic; every aspect of it flowed from its concept. Every detail was taken into consideration, carpets, furniture, china, heating and lighting.
In his commercial buildings form followed function. The structure was placed so that those inside had light and air: the building did not cast its shadow on the neighbors and rob them of their share of the light and air. In both his residential and commercial buildings he insisted that the building must stand as an artwork: his buildings are not merely pictorial; they have a sculptural integrity.
Frank Lloyd Wright grew up on his grandfather’s farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It became his home, Taliesin. His grandfather had emigrated from Wales. Wright understood first hand the possibilities of the idea of America. He loved this country dearly and felt that it would only be at its best when it would realize its democratic ideals. The American experience was always one of the first considerations of his work. He created a truly American architecture and made modern architecture truly modern.
His influence in the world of architecture has been tremendous: no other American artist in any discipline has ever achieved his stature in the eyes of the world. In March of this year the Pritzger Prize for Architecture, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, was awarded to the British architect, Richard Rodgers. In his statement to the press he included this comment: “Frank Lloyd Wright is my god.” Fifty years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright continues to strongly influence the modern creative world.
Postscript: There are seven examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania PBS video on the designing and making of Fallingwater is available at The Pike County Public Library. The house is open to view, as is the neighboring house, Wright’s Kentuck Knob.
Published in The Pike County Dispatch
An Architectural Appreciation by
Article Four
For the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Daniel Burnham, dean of the Chicago school of architects, was chosen to head the event. He chose Beaux Arts classic revival as the style for the buildings despite the fact that Chicago architects, following the great fire of ’71, were well on their way to creating a new architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright and his employer of the time, Louis Sullivan, agreed that Burnham’s choice had set American architecture back by fifty years.
At the time of that fair, iron had been used in commercial buildings. There was wrought iron and cast iron. There was Bessemer steel. But it was not fire proof and so its use would not prevent another Great Fire. Cement had been in use since the days of the Romans; but it too had its weaknesses. It occurred to another Chicago architect, William Lebaron Jenney, that if he could unite the two, the cement might make the steel fireproof. And so he invented ferrocement, or reinforced concrete. An engineer turned architect, he erected the first building with reinforced concrete, the Leitier II Building, 1895, on Congress Parkway and State Street. For years it was the Sears store: today it is a university.
Reinforced concrete united the best qualities of both materials and mitigated their weaknesses. The steel frame of a ten-story building could be erected in ten days, compared to the two years it took to erect the Allegheny County Court House. A steel frame building had one-third the weight of a stone building of comparable size. But most importantly, the engineering possibilities of reinforced concrete meant that buildings no longer had to be boxes.
Following the fair, and recognizing Frank Lloyd Wright’s budding natural talents, Daniel Burnham offered him a complete four-year education at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Without hesitation, Wright declined: it was his intention to create an American architecture. Reinforced concrete had now made that possible.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s career is divided into an apprenticeship and development period, and three twenty-year periods of creativity, each capped with a masterpiece. He apprenticed with Louis Sullivan. He worked with him on major Chicago buildings, among them the Auditorium Theatre and the Charnley House. In addition, Sullivan would direct his clients who wanted residential work to Wright, saying that he, Sullivan, would keep an eye on him. But Sullivan was interested only in the commercial projects. It wasn’t until clients began to come to the office requesting the services of Wright, that Sullivan realized the situation had gone beyond his intentions.
During this time Wright lived in suburban Oak Park and had designed and built a house for himself and twenty-seven other houses there in which he brought to full realization the Prairie style. All of those houses can be seen there today. In 1909 he completed Unity Temple, in Oak Park, and The Robie House, now absorbed onto the campus of The University of Chicago. That was his development period. In 1919 Wright capped his early years with The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. In the 1922 earthquake, it was the only building left standing in that city. That building established his international reputation.
In 1935, at the age of 68, Wright completed Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, a house cantilevered off a rock out over a waterfall. Almost all architectural authorities consider this the greatest building erected in the twentieth century. Then, when most men would have retired, Wright entered into his last and most creative twenty-year period. He worked non-stop during these years designing, building, and teaching. In 1959, at the age of 90, he died just before the completion of The Guggenheim Museum in New York City, his final great masterpiece: it appears to rise in defiance of gravity.
Almost 60 of his buildings are listed as National Historic Landmarks. They are authentic historic architecture, innovative in both their techniques and their designs. The American Institute of Architects has identified seventeen of his buildings which it insists must be considered American Treasures.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s achievement lies in his reconceptualizing a building. A home was not a box to be divided into smaller boxes but a place of security, privacy, comfort, and beauty. He first ascertained who would live in the house and what their needs were. He then looked at the building site. He reserved the best of the site as the view from the house.
Where possible, he eliminated post and beam construction, walls, windows, and doors. There were no basements, the houses did not sit up on cement pedestals; they were built on a platform that sat on the ground. Wright viewed man as a creature of the earth and he wanted man not to lose his sense of contact with the nurturing earth. The houses are never at the top of the hill, but below the crest and embraced by the land. They employed natural materials, wood and stone.
The interior space was open and embracing at the same time. There were no blank walls on which to hang pictures or other ornamentation, it was not a space that could be decorated and redecorated: the house was organic; every aspect of it flowed from its concept. Every detail was taken into consideration, carpets, furniture, china, heating and lighting.
In his commercial buildings form followed function. The structure was placed so that those inside had light and air: the building did not cast its shadow on the neighbors and rob them of their share of the light and air. In both his residential and commercial buildings he insisted that the building must stand as an artwork: his buildings are not merely pictorial; they have a sculptural integrity.
Frank Lloyd Wright grew up on his grandfather’s farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It became his home, Taliesin. His grandfather had emigrated from Wales. Wright understood first hand the possibilities of the idea of America. He loved this country dearly and felt that it would only be at its best when it would realize its democratic ideals. The American experience was always one of the first considerations of his work. He created a truly American architecture and made modern architecture truly modern.
His influence in the world of architecture has been tremendous: no other American artist in any discipline has ever achieved his stature in the eyes of the world. In March of this year the Pritzger Prize for Architecture, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, was awarded to the British architect, Richard Rodgers. In his statement to the press he included this comment: “Frank Lloyd Wright is my god.” Fifty years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright continues to strongly influence the modern creative world.
Postscript: There are seven examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania PBS video on the designing and making of Fallingwater is available at The Pike County Public Library. The house is open to view, as is the neighboring house, Wright’s Kentuck Knob.
Published in The Pike County Dispatch
Monday, October 29, 2007
Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers
Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers
An Architectural Appreciation
Third Article
Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In the mid 19th Century the Ecole had the highest esteem of any school in the West teaching the arts. In architecture it offered a rigorous eight-year course in the techniques and aesthetics of the classic Greek and Roman ideal as filtered through the Italian Renaissance. Not only was the course work rigid, but the aesthetics it taught were rigid as well. But there were many artists and architects who felt that it taught students to merely make copies of copies of copies. By the end of the nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor and was considered passé.
Hunt was born in Vermont to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His father, a U.S. Congressman, died when Hunt was six. His mother moved the family to Europe where he developed a love for antique Normandy architecture, a local variation of the Romanesque. That was the style he brought with him when he returned to America. With only one exception he never worked in the Beaux Arts style.
The Normandy style is characterized by large asymmetrical buildings in stone with towers and turrets. Grey Towers, in Milford, built for the James Pinchot family, (in 1886, the same year as The Allegheny County Court House), was an example of a summer country retreat on a domestic scale. A similar building, but on a very grand scale, is his Biltmore Estate in Ashville, N.C.
In essence, Hunt was a society architect, designing homes for the well to do. That is understandable: in those days that was where the money was. Inspired by the work done by Hunt and H.H. Richardson, that generation saw the monumental buildings erected by America’s robber barons to their self glorification. All of those buildings had the requirement that the buildings reflect European models; the most favored being the Beaux arts classic revival and the Gothic. The Woolworth Building in New York City is a Gothic cathedral of commerce. The Pennsylvania State Capitol Building is a masterpiece of Beaux Arts Classic Revival, although that architect never studied there.
Hunt is acknowledged as a good architect. But his work never realized a personal idiom, a signature quality. He is respected because he introduced an aesthetic beyond the prevailing style. By so doing he made it acceptable for others to explore beyond the boundaries of what was the accepted norm. He often worked in partnership with Frederick Olmstead who championed “naturalistic” architecture. We remember Hunt’s name because he was located in the cultural center of 19th Century America, the northeast corridor, Boston to Washington. He was active in arts circles: he opened the first American school for architecture and co-founded The American Institute of Architects.
Before leaving France for the United States, Hunt worked on the extension of the Louvre Museum. In Boston he designed the Fogg Art Museum. He designed the base for the Statue of Liberty and the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, as a man of his time, many of the residential buildings he designed have been razed.
Grey Towers is a National Historic Landmark. It is a fine building and it affords a good example of the work of a man who was important in the history of American architecture. It is built of native stone and it has one interesting detail in regard to its setting, Milford. The cut blocks of local bluestone at the corners and around the windows and doors are staggered quoins, alternating short and long sides of the blocks. They do not appear on the original drawings and might have been added by James Pinchot in reference to his French ancestry. The Pinchot buildings subsequent to Grey Towers, Forest Hall and Normandy Cottage, have that same detail.
That detail can also be found on the Penn DOT facility on Bennett Avenue, 1933. If that references the Pinchot buildings, it acknowledges the contribution of the Pinchot family to the history of the State. In architecture, those detail references are called Quotations and it is a common device of Post Modern Architecture. The Pennstar bank on West Harford street references a 19th Century gable end domestic structure: it is a Post Modern building with a pronounced quotation. The beautiful wisteria planted around the building can be understood as quoting the Pinchot’s Finger Bowl.
Hunt’s contribution aside, the Landmark designation is primarily for the work of Gifford Pinchot. It was there that his father, James, encouraged him to give his thoughts to forestry. When that home was built, the surrounding hills had been clear-cut of their chestnut trees. Photographs in the Pike County Historic Society show the house as the area looked at that time.
The Pinchot family’s interest in forestry can be understood as one of the forces for change in America’s relationship to its natural resources and to its environment. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that the Pinchot’s reverence for the American landscape contributed to that aspect of the development of an American architecture as well. That, and the earlier American architects, Richard Morris Hunt, H.H.Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan, all set the stage for the birth of an American architecture. With the invention of ferrocement in 1895, the year of Hunt’s death, the moment had arrived.
Published in The Pike County Dispatch
An Architectural Appreciation
Third Article
Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In the mid 19th Century the Ecole had the highest esteem of any school in the West teaching the arts. In architecture it offered a rigorous eight-year course in the techniques and aesthetics of the classic Greek and Roman ideal as filtered through the Italian Renaissance. Not only was the course work rigid, but the aesthetics it taught were rigid as well. But there were many artists and architects who felt that it taught students to merely make copies of copies of copies. By the end of the nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor and was considered passé.
Hunt was born in Vermont to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His father, a U.S. Congressman, died when Hunt was six. His mother moved the family to Europe where he developed a love for antique Normandy architecture, a local variation of the Romanesque. That was the style he brought with him when he returned to America. With only one exception he never worked in the Beaux Arts style.
The Normandy style is characterized by large asymmetrical buildings in stone with towers and turrets. Grey Towers, in Milford, built for the James Pinchot family, (in 1886, the same year as The Allegheny County Court House), was an example of a summer country retreat on a domestic scale. A similar building, but on a very grand scale, is his Biltmore Estate in Ashville, N.C.
In essence, Hunt was a society architect, designing homes for the well to do. That is understandable: in those days that was where the money was. Inspired by the work done by Hunt and H.H. Richardson, that generation saw the monumental buildings erected by America’s robber barons to their self glorification. All of those buildings had the requirement that the buildings reflect European models; the most favored being the Beaux arts classic revival and the Gothic. The Woolworth Building in New York City is a Gothic cathedral of commerce. The Pennsylvania State Capitol Building is a masterpiece of Beaux Arts Classic Revival, although that architect never studied there.
Hunt is acknowledged as a good architect. But his work never realized a personal idiom, a signature quality. He is respected because he introduced an aesthetic beyond the prevailing style. By so doing he made it acceptable for others to explore beyond the boundaries of what was the accepted norm. He often worked in partnership with Frederick Olmstead who championed “naturalistic” architecture. We remember Hunt’s name because he was located in the cultural center of 19th Century America, the northeast corridor, Boston to Washington. He was active in arts circles: he opened the first American school for architecture and co-founded The American Institute of Architects.
Before leaving France for the United States, Hunt worked on the extension of the Louvre Museum. In Boston he designed the Fogg Art Museum. He designed the base for the Statue of Liberty and the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, as a man of his time, many of the residential buildings he designed have been razed.
Grey Towers is a National Historic Landmark. It is a fine building and it affords a good example of the work of a man who was important in the history of American architecture. It is built of native stone and it has one interesting detail in regard to its setting, Milford. The cut blocks of local bluestone at the corners and around the windows and doors are staggered quoins, alternating short and long sides of the blocks. They do not appear on the original drawings and might have been added by James Pinchot in reference to his French ancestry. The Pinchot buildings subsequent to Grey Towers, Forest Hall and Normandy Cottage, have that same detail.
That detail can also be found on the Penn DOT facility on Bennett Avenue, 1933. If that references the Pinchot buildings, it acknowledges the contribution of the Pinchot family to the history of the State. In architecture, those detail references are called Quotations and it is a common device of Post Modern Architecture. The Pennstar bank on West Harford street references a 19th Century gable end domestic structure: it is a Post Modern building with a pronounced quotation. The beautiful wisteria planted around the building can be understood as quoting the Pinchot’s Finger Bowl.
Hunt’s contribution aside, the Landmark designation is primarily for the work of Gifford Pinchot. It was there that his father, James, encouraged him to give his thoughts to forestry. When that home was built, the surrounding hills had been clear-cut of their chestnut trees. Photographs in the Pike County Historic Society show the house as the area looked at that time.
The Pinchot family’s interest in forestry can be understood as one of the forces for change in America’s relationship to its natural resources and to its environment. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that the Pinchot’s reverence for the American landscape contributed to that aspect of the development of an American architecture as well. That, and the earlier American architects, Richard Morris Hunt, H.H.Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan, all set the stage for the birth of an American architecture. With the invention of ferrocement in 1895, the year of Hunt’s death, the moment had arrived.
Published in The Pike County Dispatch
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
H.H. Richardson and The Allegheny County Courthouse
H.H. Richardson and the Allegheny County Court House.
An Architectural Appreciation
Article Two
The Allegheny County Courthouse is one of five Historic Landmarks in Pittsburgh. The building occupies an entire city block, rising majestically from the property line at the sidewalk. It is the seat of Justice and it projects an august presence to the people. It was designed by the American architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and was completed just after his death in 1886. The style is Romanesque, or more specifically, Richardson Romanesque. Richardson is the only world-class architect whose name has been given to a building style.
He was the second American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After completing his studies he spent time in the south of France where he observed the native Romanesque style. Romanesque was the first architectural style in western civilization that did not follow the dictates of the classical order. In the south of France it was in essence a folk style which achieved a cultural identity. Its outstanding characteristics are Roman arches, barrel vaults, and flat walls. An earlier work of Richardson’s Romanesque reference is Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, his first major success.
A study of the two buildings, one at the beginning of his career and one at the end, will illustrate how the man used the historic reference to create a personal idiom. In the church, artistic decoration, as dictated by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was created by John La Farge in murals and stained glass windows. The exterior uses stones of different colors. In the courthouse the fully mature and confident Richardson has used only stone of one color to create surface textures and interest. He has allowed the flatness of the interior to be seen as having interest in and of its own. There is no need in Richardson Romanesque for applied ornamentation. Richardson Romanesque has its own integrity: it is organic.
Incidentally, when in Boston, do not fail to visit Richardson’s Sever Hall in Harvard Yard, a masterpiece in brick.
The Courthouse is six and seven stories high. Above the main block of the building there is a very high tower in the front and two smaller towers in the back. Square towers are at each corner. The construction is load-bearing walls. With load bearing walls, for every floor above the first an additional thickness of approximately six inches must be added to the first floor, thinning toward the top floors. This creates very thick walls on the ground floor and requires massive footings for the supporting piers. (In Boston, the footings for the piers for Trinity Church can be seen in that basement: those supports have a foot print the size of a Milford Mansion: it is a tall church.) One of the great challenges of architecture is to take this massive pile of stone and give it a sense of grace and lightness. Richardson succeeded.
The Courthouse building material is champagne colored granite. On the outside the stones are rough-hewn and on the inside the surfaces are flat but not polished. The floors are unpolished black marble. In early high-rise buildings one of the prime considerations was the need to supply light and air to the workers inside. Here Richardson created an open central courtyard that meets that need and gives him the opportunity to make a masterful display of architectural genius. The stones are varied in size, courses of large blocks alternate with courses of smaller blocks. The top floor is all small blocks, giving the building a sense of gracefulness. This is completed with a steeply pitched gable roof.
The doorways from the courtyard into the building are Romanesque arches, wide arches defined by several courses of stone and springing from low columns. The windows on each floor but the last are arched. On the top floor they are trabeate, with lintels. That, in effect, draws a straight line across the top of the building and indicates that the wall has come to an end. Because of the interplay between scale and proportion, this defined space is so beautiful one can sit in this courtyard and leisurely study this building for hours.
The highlight of the building’s interior is the grand staircase. It begins with a half flight of stairs framed by a Romanesque arch, one-third the width of the large area where it starts. It appears to have a vaulted ceiling, but it does not: it is a series of three arches, one at the bottom, one in the middle, and one at the top of those stairs. On the first landing, arches frame accesses to open hallways at both sides. The next level of stairs is also framed with an arch. At the top a landing directs the visitor to stairs at the left and to the right. There is a view from the windows down into the courtyard. The filtered sunlight is magnificent. The ascent continues through a series of arches, stairs, and landings for three floors. At the top landing one turns for the last half flight and sees a majestic arched doorway framing mahogany doors at the top. There can be no doubt that this is where Justice resides.
This stairway is a veritable symphony of arches, small, medium, and large. Climbing to the top I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s remark that when poetry becomes music it ceases to be poetry. I will not say that this architecture is music but it does ring with a sustained note of purity.
Filling the city block behind the courthouse is the Allegheny County Jail built of the same stone. It was inspired by the series of etching done by Piranesi, “Imaginary Prisons.” High above the street the two building are connected by a pedestrian bridge. Those just sentenced were escorted over the street to the jail. The bridge is a copy of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. The pun was intended by the architect. Great art works are human; they have their sense of humor.
Richardson grew up in New Orleans. He spent his adult years and did most of his work in the Boston area. But his self acknowledged masterpiece, The Allegheny County Courthouse, is in Pennsylvania. A gourmand, a man with a taste for the good life, Richardson died at the age of forty-six.
Post script: The example of Richardson Romanesque architecture nearest to Milford is The Thrall Library in Downtown Middletown. The original Erie Railroad Station was Richardson Romanesque. Richardson designed many railroad stations. He did not design this one; it merely indicates his influence. When the new library was built, the station was beautifully restored and the new building adjoining it was perfectly married to it in the modern idiom through a very careful match of design and materials. The station is now a reading room. When you step into that room you are immediately captivated by its many charming details. When you turn back to the library you will be awed by the magnificent golden oak, Richardson Romanesque arch way that once lead to the waiting trains. Through his work and his influence, H.H. Richardson continues to make it possible for us to understand why great architecture is our highest art form.
Published in the Pike County Dispatch
An Architectural Appreciation
Article Two
The Allegheny County Courthouse is one of five Historic Landmarks in Pittsburgh. The building occupies an entire city block, rising majestically from the property line at the sidewalk. It is the seat of Justice and it projects an august presence to the people. It was designed by the American architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and was completed just after his death in 1886. The style is Romanesque, or more specifically, Richardson Romanesque. Richardson is the only world-class architect whose name has been given to a building style.
He was the second American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After completing his studies he spent time in the south of France where he observed the native Romanesque style. Romanesque was the first architectural style in western civilization that did not follow the dictates of the classical order. In the south of France it was in essence a folk style which achieved a cultural identity. Its outstanding characteristics are Roman arches, barrel vaults, and flat walls. An earlier work of Richardson’s Romanesque reference is Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, his first major success.
A study of the two buildings, one at the beginning of his career and one at the end, will illustrate how the man used the historic reference to create a personal idiom. In the church, artistic decoration, as dictated by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was created by John La Farge in murals and stained glass windows. The exterior uses stones of different colors. In the courthouse the fully mature and confident Richardson has used only stone of one color to create surface textures and interest. He has allowed the flatness of the interior to be seen as having interest in and of its own. There is no need in Richardson Romanesque for applied ornamentation. Richardson Romanesque has its own integrity: it is organic.
Incidentally, when in Boston, do not fail to visit Richardson’s Sever Hall in Harvard Yard, a masterpiece in brick.
The Courthouse is six and seven stories high. Above the main block of the building there is a very high tower in the front and two smaller towers in the back. Square towers are at each corner. The construction is load-bearing walls. With load bearing walls, for every floor above the first an additional thickness of approximately six inches must be added to the first floor, thinning toward the top floors. This creates very thick walls on the ground floor and requires massive footings for the supporting piers. (In Boston, the footings for the piers for Trinity Church can be seen in that basement: those supports have a foot print the size of a Milford Mansion: it is a tall church.) One of the great challenges of architecture is to take this massive pile of stone and give it a sense of grace and lightness. Richardson succeeded.
The Courthouse building material is champagne colored granite. On the outside the stones are rough-hewn and on the inside the surfaces are flat but not polished. The floors are unpolished black marble. In early high-rise buildings one of the prime considerations was the need to supply light and air to the workers inside. Here Richardson created an open central courtyard that meets that need and gives him the opportunity to make a masterful display of architectural genius. The stones are varied in size, courses of large blocks alternate with courses of smaller blocks. The top floor is all small blocks, giving the building a sense of gracefulness. This is completed with a steeply pitched gable roof.
The doorways from the courtyard into the building are Romanesque arches, wide arches defined by several courses of stone and springing from low columns. The windows on each floor but the last are arched. On the top floor they are trabeate, with lintels. That, in effect, draws a straight line across the top of the building and indicates that the wall has come to an end. Because of the interplay between scale and proportion, this defined space is so beautiful one can sit in this courtyard and leisurely study this building for hours.
The highlight of the building’s interior is the grand staircase. It begins with a half flight of stairs framed by a Romanesque arch, one-third the width of the large area where it starts. It appears to have a vaulted ceiling, but it does not: it is a series of three arches, one at the bottom, one in the middle, and one at the top of those stairs. On the first landing, arches frame accesses to open hallways at both sides. The next level of stairs is also framed with an arch. At the top a landing directs the visitor to stairs at the left and to the right. There is a view from the windows down into the courtyard. The filtered sunlight is magnificent. The ascent continues through a series of arches, stairs, and landings for three floors. At the top landing one turns for the last half flight and sees a majestic arched doorway framing mahogany doors at the top. There can be no doubt that this is where Justice resides.
This stairway is a veritable symphony of arches, small, medium, and large. Climbing to the top I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s remark that when poetry becomes music it ceases to be poetry. I will not say that this architecture is music but it does ring with a sustained note of purity.
Filling the city block behind the courthouse is the Allegheny County Jail built of the same stone. It was inspired by the series of etching done by Piranesi, “Imaginary Prisons.” High above the street the two building are connected by a pedestrian bridge. Those just sentenced were escorted over the street to the jail. The bridge is a copy of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. The pun was intended by the architect. Great art works are human; they have their sense of humor.
Richardson grew up in New Orleans. He spent his adult years and did most of his work in the Boston area. But his self acknowledged masterpiece, The Allegheny County Courthouse, is in Pennsylvania. A gourmand, a man with a taste for the good life, Richardson died at the age of forty-six.
Post script: The example of Richardson Romanesque architecture nearest to Milford is The Thrall Library in Downtown Middletown. The original Erie Railroad Station was Richardson Romanesque. Richardson designed many railroad stations. He did not design this one; it merely indicates his influence. When the new library was built, the station was beautifully restored and the new building adjoining it was perfectly married to it in the modern idiom through a very careful match of design and materials. The station is now a reading room. When you step into that room you are immediately captivated by its many charming details. When you turn back to the library you will be awed by the magnificent golden oak, Richardson Romanesque arch way that once lead to the waiting trains. Through his work and his influence, H.H. Richardson continues to make it possible for us to understand why great architecture is our highest art form.
Published in the Pike County Dispatch
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