July 28, 2008 9:52

The Art of Doing Absolutely Nothing

Untitled, #696-05, Richard Misrach, 2005/FRAENKEL GALLERY, PACE/MacGILL, MARC SELWYN FINE ARTS

Criticizing things for a living, it gets strenuous. Even critics need a vacation. So this critic is taking off the next three weeks to vacate. Back on Monday August 18.

Meanwhile, if you have some free time of your own, you can check out the first examples of the new series of short films that the American Institute of Architects has on their website, a project connected to the poll they did last year of the 150 favorite American buildings, bridges and so forth.

Untitled, #517-02, Richard Misrach, 2002 /FRAENKEL GALLERY, PACE/MacGILL, MARC SELWYN FINE ARTS

July 25, 2008 9:27

More on Guernica

Earlier this week a conservator at the Reina Sofia in Madrid announced that Picasso's Guernica had suffered too much damage from previous travels ever to travel again, an announcement that I'm guessing was meant in part to discourage the Basque campaign to have the painting transferred to Bilbao or some other place in the Basque region. Now the director of the museum has chimed in. Manuel Borja-Villel has spoken to the Associated Press (via) and appears to be trying to pre-empt concerns that Guernica is in any kind of danger while still insisting it can never go out the door again.

For one thing, he clarifies that the 129 "changes" to the canvas — creases, stains and so forth — that were detected by the Reina Sofia's recent x-ray examination are the same number that were found by the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it performed the only previous analysis of Guernica's condition in 1957, when the painting was still in MOMA's temporary keeping.

Keep in mind that the AP story is a bit ambiguous when it says that after its debut at the Paris World's Fair in 1937 Guernica went "on the road for nearly 20 years." What it did was tour periodically. After the fair it traveled for a few years on fund raising tours for the Spanish loyalist cause before coming to rest with MOMA. Starting in January 1940 it also made an almost three-year tour around the U.S. Then in a four-year period starting in 1953 it went on several extended journeys, across Europe, to Brazil and around the U.S., when it was seen by millions of people — but not by Picasso, who was away from Paris when it stopped there in the summer of 1955. In fact he never saw the painting again after it was first shipped to New York in 1939. (For a complete account of Guernica's history I recommend Russell Martin's excellent little book Picasso's War.)

July 24, 2008 2:23

The Big Corbu Book

We hear a lot that the future of books is in weightless digital downloads. No more bulky volumes cluttering up your apartment. They must not have gotten the news at Phaidon, the art and architecture book publisher. Over the last few years they've been going the other way, turning out a few giant books, volumes much bigger than ordinary coffee table books. Some of them could double as coffee tables themselves.

The latest is Le Corbusier Le Grand, which lives up to its name, at least in dimensions. Almost a foot and a half tall and I'm guessing about 20 or so pounds, it's not the kind of book you curl up with in a hammock. But it's not a book in the conventional sense at all so much as a giant scrap book, with family pictures, letters, documents, architectural drawings, many period photographs of his projects and lots of pages from his sketchbooks. Text is kept to a minimum, just enough to introduce the events of Corbu's life from his birth in 1887 to his death in 1965.

Le Corbusier is still venerated in architectural circles, but his reputation has suffered a bit over the last 30 years as part of the general backlash against Modernist architecture and city planning. And it's true he can be pointed to as a prime source for the Modernist dictums about purity of structure and its taboo against ornament. Even today, when we're all accustomed to the look of Richard Meier houses, the resolute Cartesian spareness of Corbu's Purist Villas from the 1920s, their polemical asperity, can be a little startling. All those white boxes resting on skinny columns with long strips of "ribbon windows", they're the work of a man simply obliterating the world as he found it. And the much abused idea that a city should be an accumulation of isolated towers and wide plazas is also traceable to him, though in his visions of it the towers are set in parkland of a kind that real cities rarely provided for them.

But the early Modernist Corbu has long since been absorbed into the architectural mainstream (absorbed and sometimes spat out.) It's the later, more lyrical Corbu who's more influential now, the one who opened the way to a more sculptural treatment of a building with his chapel at Ronchamps. Le Corbusier Le Grand isn't as eye-popping as the other Phaidon behemoth in my office, Andy Warhol: "Giant" Size. (Andy's life was just more photogenic, and he didn't leave behind as many little scraps of paper.) But the sheer size of the thing does give a kind of cinematic sweep to Corbu's life and works. And with a few adjustments the cardboard slipcase it comes in could be converted into a comfortable weekend house.

July 23, 2008 1:15

Money Changes Everything

A few recent architecture developments loosely connected by the topic of cash:

Shigeru Ban will be doing his first American museum. The Aspen Art Museum, which has been housed for 30 years in a converted hydroelectric plant, has selected Ban to design its new 30,000 sq. ft. facility. (About the size of the typical Aspen ski chalet.) Ban hasn't worked much in the U.S., though his "Nomadic Museum", a temporary structure made from stacked boxcars, was set up a few years ago in Manhattan and moved from there to Santa Monica. He also has a condo project nearing completion in Manhattan.

Ban is often talked about for his use of cardboard as a building material. (There were cardboard columns around the inner perimeter of the Nomadic Museum, though in that case they weren't structural.) But I'm more interested in his devotion to Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect whose curvaceous lines made him the odd man out of Modernism when it was all about Miesian boxes, but whose reputation keeps rising in the age of Frank Gehry's wavy walls. A few years ago I visited Ban's little Issey Miyake design gallery in Tokyo and even that small project had interior walls of cardboard columns, one of which made a suave little curve that you could take as a reference to Aalto. But hey, it could just as well have been a reference to Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's. Or for that matter Stonehenge. My point is simply that Ban is interested in the expressive counterpoint of planes and curves. I'll be curious to see what he does with the Rockies.

And the money connection? The Aspen Museum claims to have commitments of $28 million towards the cost of their new building, but hasn't actually said what it expects the total cost to be. (UPDATE: The museum's press people have been in touch to tell me that the museum is conducting a $35 million capital campaign, $20 million for the new building, $15 million for the endowment.) It can't hurt to have all those rich vacationers as neighbors, but this is not a good time to be looking for big benefactors. Last year, even before the economy went in the tank, the Parrish Museum, which is located in South Hampton, the ultimate billionaire beach town, had to downsize its planned new Herzog & de Meuron building from a $100 million, 80,000 sq. ft. project to a more affordable 63,000 sq, ft. The Parrish also decided that the new museum would be built in three phases, the first of them expected to cost between $55 and 60 million. And even that amount may prove a challenge in, as they say, the current fund raising environment.

Revised proposal for Tate Modern addition, Herzog & de Meuron, 2008/© HAYES DAVIDSON and HERZOG & de MEURON

Speaking of which, earlier this week we learned that another Herzog & de Meuron project has been tweaked. The architects held a press conference with Tate Director Nicholas Serota to unveil a revised scheme for their forthcoming addition to Tate Modern. Out with the fractured glass pyramid. In with a folded brick polygon that still looks pretty interesting and may speak better to the Tate's former life as an electrical power station.

Everyone at the press conference insisted that the changes in the design weren't undertaken to contain costs. It's still expected to come in, as before, at 215 million pounds, of which the Tate has so far raised only 70 million. But as Farah Neyeri reported on Bloomberg.com, Serota did acknowledge that the building might not be completed in time for the London Olympics in 2012 and that if the remaining money couldn't be found ``we won't do the building. It's as simple as that.'' He also described the present as ``probably the most challenging time to raise money in the last 25 years.''

There's another Herzog & de Meuron museum project that's still in development, their evolving scheme for the Miami Art Museum. That one, which is scheduled for completion in 2011 — CORRECTION: make that 2012 — is budgeted at $131 million. But it starts out with the advantage of a $100 million bond approved by Miami voters four years ago. (The Museum also aims to raise an additional $89 million to cover "transitional expenses" and for an operating endowment.) And if the MAM has trouble raising the remaining funds, the Herzog & de Meuron design is so deliberately incomplete at this point that they could alter it significantly and no one would be the wiser.

July 22, 2008 7:20

Is Guernica Too Frail to Move?

Guernica, Picasso, 1937 /MUSEO NACIONAL REINA SOFIA

In recent months a team of curators and conservators at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid has been examining Picasso's great canvas Guernica. Now the museum's chief of restoration, Jorge García Gómez Tejedor, has told the Spanish daily El Pais that the picture has suffered damage from being moved in the past and must not move again. I wonder.

First a little background. Guernica, probably the most famous work of art about wartime suffering, has been for years at the center of a tug of war itself. Madrid has it. The Basques want it. The subject of the painting is of course the 1937 bombing raid on the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was an attack enthusiastically carried out by German pilots at the urging of the rebel general Francisco Franco. Not long after, Picasso, who was living in Paris, was approached by a delegation from the beleaguered Spanish Republic, who asked him to produce a major work for the Spanish pavilion at the upcoming Paris world's fair. His response was Guernica. When the fair ended the much publicized painting went on a tour of four Scandinavian cities to raise funds for the Loyalist cause, then on to London and the U.S. for the same purpose. All in vain. Franco prevailed in the Spanish war. Then came World War II and the German occupation of Paris, where Picasso would glumly sit out the war.

Meanwhile his painting would become a sort of war refugee in the U.S., held in trust by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso would always stipulate that it belonged to the Spanish people but shouldn't go to them until they were free of the Franco dictatorship. Picasso died in 1972, Franco three years later. With the generalissimo out of the way, Spain began the transition to democracy that eventually convinced Picasso's heirs that it was time for the painting to go "home".

But where exactly was home? Since not long after it arrived in Spain in 1981, the painting has been on display at the Reina Sofia. But because Guernica was a Basque town, Basque nationalists have been pressing from the start for the work to be transferred to the Basque region. The Bilbao Guggenheim, which didn't exist in 1981, would be the most likely place for it now.  

I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the still ongoing Reina Sofia study of Guernica's physical condition, which has so far turned up 129 "changes" to the canvas, many of them due to being repeatedly rolled up during that world tour 70 years ago. But the conclusion that it can't be moved again, which certainly serves the interests of the Reina Sofia, needs to be seen in the context of the regional struggle between Madrid and the Basques. I'm guessing a move could be handled much more gently this time. It's not like they'd be shipping it in a FedEx tube.