Rothko at the Vuitton Foundation

Originally posted March 27, 2024

Mark Rothko was found dead on the floor of his studio on February 25, 1970. What ensued from his death was the largest lawsuit ever to take place in the art world. Brought by Rothko's children, Mell and Christopher Rothko, the suit resulted in a 9 million dollar award against the Marlboro Gallery, the executors of his will were thrown out, and severe restrictions were placed on co-conspirators, agents, and fellow artists who were found to have been complicit in the fraudulent acquisitions.

Now, with the help of Rothko's children, the Vuitton Foundation has assembled one of the largest collections of Rothko's work ever exhibited, including many of his early works, as well as the "classic" works of the late 1950s and later "black" paintings of the 1960s.

Housed within a titanium butterfly designed by Frank Gehry, The Vuitton Foundation lies within the Bois de Boulogne, removed from the settings in which one normally sees Rothko. The magnitude of this exhibition and the care with which it has been hung makes for an overwhelming experience. The exhibition is not likely to travel as complete or intact, as only the Vuitton's resources have made it possible, and this adds to the sense that this is a once in a generation event.

Standing before a Rothko painting is to stand before an apparition. The paintings are large, in statuary terms, one and a half times life-size, so that you are surrounded. Hung near the floor, per Rothko’s protocol, you are a step away from being in them.

The paintings appear to have light emanating from within. These paintings cannot be successfully photographed or reproduced. Even the most expensive catalog or monograph produces cadaverous images by comparison to the real thing. This effect was not easily arrived at overnight, and one of the fascinating aspects of the exhibition was to see Rothko's evolution as a painter until he reached a chromatic peak in the early 1950s.

Rothko always rejected the term color-field painter, applied to him by the eminent critic, Clement Greenberg. He claimed not to be interested in color, but rather in light, and while this might sound dissembling, it is entirely accurate when you stand in front of one. The process began with raw canvas, stained in the palest of pigments, with successive layers of color applied, at first in more analogous and pale pigments, and later in more complementary, even lurid colors. With generous amounts of turpentine, each block appears as a kind of translucent cloud. Your mind insists on a virtual space behind the canvas, and this is reinforced subliminally as the color is held back from the edge of the canvas. The background, the original stained surface, is often modified with a pale coat of Zinc White, to create a kind of apparent perspective behind the color blocks, whose “sfumato” edges remain indeterminate.

The allusion of these paintings is aspirational or nuclear, depending upon your point of view. Rothko talked about raising the emotional level of painting to that of music, and it could be said that these paintings in the late 1950s were composed in a major key. Soon he began to compose in a minor key, at first deepening the register of his color palette to dark blues, maroons, and purples, sometimes with the introduction of black, and eventually in the late 1960s, to entirely black.

The phenomenon that emerges from the black paintings is one, paradoxically, of complete color. It is as if your mind refuses to accept that color is not there. You become, as Emily Dickinson said, "…accustomed to the dark." The condition exists entirely in your mind. It is why these works are, as Rothko said, not paintings, but experiences.

Toward the end of the exhibition, in one of the last galleries, sits Painting No. 8 (1964), one of the largest paintings in the exhibition. It is approximately seven feet wide by nine feet tall. Across the room, it exudes a soft, reflective glow, but as you approach, it becomes more immeasurable and unattainable. You turn your head to scan its vast and unknowable surface. I went back to view this painting several times, to fathom it, and did not succeed. On my last visit, I heard a cry coming from near the painting and soon realized it was a young woman. The guards came to console her.  “How can you look at this painting and not weep,” she said.

No. 8 (1964) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Louis Kahn: Building and Being

Originally posted March 13, 2022

The Kimball Art Museum is one of the last few works designed by the renowned, mid-century architect, Louis Kahn. Completed in 1972, it is now fifty years old, and looks no different than the day it was finished. Louis Kahn spent most of his life as an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his first major commission at age fifty in 1953. His knowledge of history was vast, and he was very much influenced by the French Enlightenment architect, Étienne-Louis Boullée. Some may be familiar with Kahn's library at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, which bears a strong resemblance to Boullée's metaphysical representations.

Left: Phillips Academy (Kahn)

Right: Cenotaph for Newton (Boullée)

The poetic impact of the Kimball is revealed in its details:  the arisses in the concrete formwork, the recessed control joints, the lead coins in the snap tie plugs, the reveals at the travertine, the rivulet at the portico where it meet the pool.  Each material retains its essential dignity.  Missing are the caulked expansion joints, the filler pieces, the crimpled, metal edge strips of modern construction.  Kimball is constructed of materials largely available to the Romans.

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?'  Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' You say to brick, 'I like an arch too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'" 

He is implying that materials themselves are embodied with intentionality. Discovering and respecting that intentionality is what brings a building to life.

None of this is to suggest a lack of sophistication and the vaults of the Kimball are a rather astonishing example of both a theoretical as well as empirical approach to a fundamental aspiration, that of bringing even, natural light into the galleries of the museum. It took several iterations to arrive at a vault that would deliver uniform light to the galleries, and it was August Kommendant, Kahn's trusted structural engineer and colleague, who finally proposed a cycloid vault with a brachistochrone curve.

A cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line.  A mathematical formula attributed to the ancient Greeks, it also represents the fastest path of descent between a point A and a lower point B, where B is not directly below A, under the influence of a uniform gravitational field to a given end point in the shortest time. For a better understanding of this concept, see this demonstration.

It is useful to point out that the precedent for a top lit vault in concrete was the Pantheon in Rome, constructed in the first century A.D. which remained the longest concrete span in the world until the construction of the Palazzo Dello Sport in 1939 by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.   In achieving a longer span Nervi used a lamella truss system based on the coffering in the Pantheon. 

Left: The Pantheon (cross section)

Right: Kimball (cross section)

The fundamental challenge of a concrete vault is to construct a system thick enough to span yet not too heavy to collapse.  By the time of the construction of Kimball, it was the development of pre-stressing and post stressing concrete with steel reinforcement cables that allowed for spans with thinner concrete.  Kommendant was a leading practitioner in this field, and for Kimball, he was proposing four inch thick concrete vaults with pre-stressed catenary cables.

The gravitational aspect of the cycloid is significant. Light seems to follow the same gravitational rules as the cycloid, resulting  a diaphanous, silver-pewter halo above the galleries, bringing out the true colors of the paintings and creating soft shadows in the works of sculpture.  During our time in the galleries we did not see a single light bulb aimed at any artwork.

Kahn was a mystic.  He operated outside the more dogmatic rules of mid-century architecture.   In suggesting what a building wanted to be, Kahn was engaging with the building as a being in an ontological way.  This idea stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries, for example le Corbusier's idea of the house as a "machine for living," or Frank Lloyd Wright's "organic," agrarian architecture, or the Bauhaus emigres, Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius, whose work stressed industrial production.

"When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true.  The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself."

Arcosanti: An Aquarian Utopia

Originally Published April 3, 2022

The Aquarian Mountains run north-south, parallel to a line connecting Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen with Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Both were visionary projects, schools and utopian models for society, and in fact, Paolo Soleri spent a year and a half at Taliesen early in his career. He and his wife eventually settled in Scottsdale Arizona, founding the Cosanti Studio in 1956, and Arcosanti in 1970. *

Today, however, Arcosanti thrives as an artisanal community, largely committed to the principles upon which it was founded, centered on arcology, a structured relationship to ecology formed by minimizing the impact of urban communities. While the residents number only in the double digits, far below the 5,000 originally envisioned, the core that remain are committed to a sustainable way of living.  They grow their own food, make and sell the ceramic and bronze bells to support the school.  The day we visited we were given a tour by a young artist who after her first year of apprenticeship was now learning to cast bronze.  When someone in our tour group asked about "governance" our guide seemed perplexed, as if to say, "You're asking the wrong question."

Like so many ventures of the 1970's, Biosphere 2 for example, Arcosanti is sometimes seen as merely a commune with no scalable significance.  Yet it's hard to deny the charm of the place, and that of its inhabitants.  It is essentially an Italian hill town, and operates much in the same way, free of the automobile, of the commute, of the meaningless separation that characterizes so much of modern American civilization. Founded in 1970, the same year as Earth Day, it represents an aspiration and a path surely better than the one we are on now.

• Soleri's reputation has been reconsidered after revelations in 2017 by his youngest daughter regarding his sexual abuse. These revelations may not have come entirely as a surprise, as Soleri had abruptly resigned from the Cosanti Foundation in 2011.

Taliesen West

Originally posted March 26, 2022

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most well known architect, was born in 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. He had several distinct careers, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in 1959, the year of his death at age ninety-one.  In that time he designed some 800 buildings, of which 380 were actually built. 

His personal life was equally callisthenic.  His first marriage ended after fleeing to Europe with a client's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Upon returning, and now ostracized from the Chicago community, he retreated to Spring Hill, Wisconsin where he built the first Taliesen compound.  There, on August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, a servant set fire to the living quarters, opened the lower half of a dutch door and murdered Mamah, her two children and four others with an axe as they tried to escape the flames.

Wright's second wife, Maude "Miriam" Noel, became addicted to morphine soon after their marriage, resulting in an early separation, and shortly afterward he met Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenburg. In 1925 he and Olgivanna moved together to Taliesen, where a fire yet again destroyed a significant portion of the compound. Ten years later, after spurned spouses had granted divorces, Taliesen East had been rebuilt, and Wright and Olgivanna had married, they moved to Arizona to start Taliesen West. He was seventy years old.

Wright had few resources at the time, however he had a considerable reputation. So in his final incarnation, he devised a school where apprentices would pay to come to Taliesen West, and would learn the arts of farming, building, cooking, and entertaining. They would also be expected to act as draftsmen for his remaining architectural projects. The winters were spent at Taliesen West, and the summers at Taliesen East with the apprentices handling the entire move between. It was a brilliant plan, providing Wright and Olga an extensive staff, a winter residence, and a steady income. Such an enterprise requires a certain suspension of disbelief and Taliesen West was informed by a certain theatricality in which the ritual of each of the activities was given an honorific significance. Over the years Taliesen developed a devotional following and a number of apprentices went on to brilliant, if idiosyncratic careers; Bruce Goff and John Lautner being noteworthy.

In all of the sycophancy, it's nevertheless hard to overlook the virtuosity of the design. Wright was a brilliant draftsman, and everywhere can be seen and felt the isometric effects of his draftsman board. The decorative filigrees, the stained glass windows, the dentils at the soffits, the patterns in the rug all submit to the furious pace of his T Square and triangles. The plan is set at forty-five degree angles throughout, the roofs and soffits at thirty degree angles, and where structural enclosures fail to sufficiently express the geometry, chevrons, spears, and cant strips are added.

In many ways, Taliesen West is a kind of geometric interpretation of nature, an expression of what Wright meant by an "organic” architecture.  It is a dance between Wright and the landscape that sometimes seems like symmetry, other times sometimes a submission.  It is relentless, unending, and comprehensive.  No detail is left undesigned.  No tree, rock or plant is not asked to pose for the audience.

It was the final act of the master.

Marfa: The Work of Donald Judd

Originally posted March 26, 2022

Texas is a set of extremes and contradictions, Marfa being one of them. In the middle of nowhere, it is a thriving art community and a smug, tourist attraction. When you arrive you are given no clues. Like SoHo in the 1970's, you just have to know where to go. We stood on a corner chatting with two other lost souls, older women with Italian sunglasses, sharp lipstick and smart looking coats. "We're from New York.”

Everything worth seeing in Marfa is out of town. There are works by several important mid-century artists, as well as the work of several contemporary artists, and we had come particularly to see the works of Donald Judd. He had made Marfa a place to visit after moving here from SoHo in 1971, buying 16 decaying buildings, an entire decommissioned Army base, and three ranches spread across 40,000 acres.

There are two major "pieces" by Judd at Marfa. The first is "15 Untitled Works in Concrete," large rectangular boxes, all identical in overall dimensions, but with alternate enclosures and in various groupings. It is difficult to convey the impact of these works when seen in their desert surroundings. It's not just the size. It's that the work mediates the relationship between you, the earth and the sky, and with shifting light, darkness, gravity and weightlessness, challenges every reliable sense of consciousness.

Judd studied philosophy at Columbia University before becoming an artist. He was interested in Heidegger and Husserl, phenomenology and the study of conscious experience from the first-person point of view, and ontology and the concepts of existence, being, becoming, and reality.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the "100 Untitled Works in Milled Aluminum" residing in the two artillery buildings abandoned at Fort Russell. Judd replaced the flanking doors with full-height windows so that the pieces, each exactingly fabricated, are engaged in the reflection of light from outside, from the polished concrete floor, as well as from surrounding pieces. They are ephemeral, at times reflective, at times transparent, at times devoid of all light with rectangular slots of utter nothingness. You sense you could put your hand through them, and yet there they stand, solid, silent, inert. Just as with the work of say, Mark Rothko, the elemental, experiential markers provoke an unidentifiable and deep emotional response.

We left town for the day, too exhausted to look at anything else. The following day, while traveling to our next venue, we passed the Prada store, a simulacrum in the middle of the desert, twenty-three miles outside of Marfa, just outside the town of Valentine. Everything about Marfa is elsewhere.

The Tracings

Originally posted March 11, 2021

One of the great mysteries of Greek architecture which defies rational explanation is something known as the Triglyph Dilemma. This occurred when the Greeks, insisting upon placing each triglyph (the three bar medallion) directly above each column, also insisted on having them meet at each corner. This resulted in an awkward condition where the column was forced outward at the corner to mediate between the two conflicting demands.

This “kicking out” of the column at the corner and the subsequent adjustment along the length of the entablature is one of the hallmarks of the “correct” classical interpretation of the orders.  It is one of the things that gives a properly conceived classical building “character.”  Even when the trigyph is not present, as in the Corinthian or Ionic order, this adjusted corner condition is present.

What is it about this “adjustment” or this desire to adhere to two conflicting conditions that adds such charm to an edifice? Is it the aspiration of perfection rendered through the imperfection of unique circumstance? If so, is that the reason Mount Vernon with its slightly asymmetrical arrangement of windows in its center façade has so much more charm than the platonic Monticello?

Like a beautiful but imperfect face that focuses our attention on more than simple perfection, asymmetry reveals a human condition, and the trace of life’s contradictions.