It’s late in the day, late in the summer, late in youth. The day has passed, the sun has set, yet our figure sits illuminated.

Originally published here at TheTracings

Moments of Light

Dawn, dusk, and moonlight. These are the moments of Winslow Homer’s paintings. Light remains while all else fades. Cover the figure for a moment, and you will see that the landscape is entirely in shadow. Even his companion fades into the background. The scene is like a dream.

It wasn’t until I became a painter that I understood how Homer went about his work. The landscape was a scene into which he inserted figures, often studied separately, and used in various other paintings and configurations. While the figures were the nominal subject of his paintings, as the titles of the paintings would suggest, the real subject was light, and the powerful emotions associated with it. It radiates within the painting, its source outside the painting, and it is the heat or the chill that we feel.

Look at his Gloucester Mackerel Fleet at Dawn, and at Dusk. It’s not so much the fleet as the moment, when the day breaks, and the sun’s first warm rays of light alight on the sails of the nearest of the fleet. Or, in the coolness of dusk, those same sails, with the sun still bright over the horizon now, now reflect the cool blue sky behind us.

Winslow Homer, Gloucester Mackerel Fleet at Dawn….and at Sunset (1884)

Complementary Color

The power of complementary color, the dull blue against the bright warm sky, this was something Edward Hopper learned as well, perhaps from Bonnard, that the tone in the shadows is complementary to the light above. Notice that shadows from the chimneys in his painting below are cobalt blue. Warm day - cool shadows. Yellow sky - blue shadows. And not just because this is Gloucester, once again.

Edward Hopper, Gloucester Harbor (1912)

By the way, what is a complement? The best way to understand this is to look at something bright green, and then close your eyes, and you will see red. What you’re seeing is that the visual cortex in your brain is constantly participating in what you see, balancing, imbuing, and implying. It is not simply a retinal image. It is not simply a neutral reality. The painter has studied these conditions, and they are not simply painting what is there, but rather what they see, and what they see is as much internal and psychological as it is perceptive.

This is what makes the work of great painters so powerful. It’s not the scenes so much as how they’ve chosen to render the scene, in that in a single “moment,” so to speak, a scene or an image starts to float, as if in a memory, apart from time.

Illustration as Abstraction

When I see such paintings, I am reminded that the so-called distinction between abstract and representational painting is a false distinction. All painting is abstract, in the sense that life, in whatever form, must be represented on a two-dimensional surface. In that sense, all painting is an abstraction, and it depends on both our visual and psychological engagement to be “perceived.”

It’s one of the things that fascinates me about these painters at the turn of the century who focused on color, its perceptual and psychological effects. They were already beginning to separate and isolate these conditions in a way that presages the work of the mid-century painters.

And this is not to imply that the mid-century painters represented “progress” but rather just a deeper exploration of the same phenomena, the psychological and emotional effect of color itself. In both cases, they were derived from nature, and from our nature of seeing.

The old criticism of representational painting was that it was merely illustration. This is sort of like complaining that ballet is merely miming to tell a story. Much of art criticism in the 20th Century tried to examine works of art instead like text, assuming that these could be interpreted, like works of literature, at more multiple and cerebral levels.

The Primacy of Seeing

But painting works differently than literature, because of the way that it is both created by the painter and internalized by the viewer. And while a great deal of effort goes into deciding “what is reality,” as a result, with Platonists on one side and Aristotelians on the other side, the fact is that the neurological attributes of seeing are fixed and operate independently of interpretation.

In other words, we recognize images before we learn to read, so we start out not “reading” images, but simply “seeing” them.

Originally published here at TheTracings

Franz Kline’s Black, White, and Gray (1959) is nearly nine feet tall and nearly seven feet wide. I came across it in person at the Met a few months ago. It’s overwhelming.

It’s also a departure from the minimalism of his earlier black and white paintings, and while leaving aside the doctrinal definitions of minimalism, a couple of things are apparent in works that fall under this definition. One is the lack of reference or narrative, such that the experience of the artwork is entirely subjective. Think of the Donald Judd aluminum cubes or a Rothko painting. They are not about anything else. They are only about themselves, and as such, they are understood directly, or not, depending on your disposition.

Black, White and the Infinite

Another characteristic is that they remain open, in that you can never quite get your head completely around them. They resist interpretation. There is a lack of middle ground, and that is particularly true in the earlier works of Franz Kline. They are black and white, black in the foreground, white in the infinite, beyond. They are not located in space, but rather imprinted in your mind, much as a Rorschach test. Close your eyes, and they are still there.

Kline famously got his start when William DeKooning introduced him to a Bell Opticon projector. With it, he found that he could take small sketches and enlarge them onto a wall, where, as fragmentary images, they became less recognizable and more monumental. Many of these came from sketches drawn on pages of old phone books. In the beginning, these small drawings might be of a chair which, when projected, gave the negative space, say between its slats, just as much presence as the slats themselves. He once famously said that he painted the white just as much as he painted the black.

It was the boundary between the black and white that became more ambiguous over time, where Kline discovered another emotional dimension. It was as if once again, he had taken the Bell Opticon to enlarge an unstable boundary to the point of nuclear fission.

In another departure, he introduced not simply black and white, but Ivory Black along with Mars Black, Flake White along with Zinc White, one cool and one warm in each case, and in addition, when certain whites were introduced to certain blacks (e.g., Zinc White to Ivory Black), blues were suddently implied.

And this is not just a visual phenomenon, but much more. It puts you in a liminal space. Every stroke, every shade is in the process of becoming. You are aware of time, what came before, what will come afterward, and while this painting has been described as an “action” painting (vis. Pollock), most of the action is taking place in your evolving awareness.

If all of this seems overwrought, I encourage you to go and take a look for yourself sometime, next time you’re in New York. It’s at the Met, on the third floor, in Gallery 919, along with some other extraordinary works of the mid-20th Century.

Hardly anyone is ever there.

Originally published here at TheTracings

Ingres is reputed to have said that he could paint a nude with only mud, provided he had a full palette for the background.* Nowhere is this more evident than in La Grande Odalisque (1814), where the cool shades of the background render the odalisque in luxuriant corporeality.

Like most of Ingres’ paintings, this one was constructed first as a “grisaille”, a neutral-colored sketch draughted directly on the ground of the painting, with charcoal, graphite, and ink. Here, the line could be studied and refined to establish the structure and proportion of the elements of the painting, elements whose perception will be altered when a series of glazes are applied, through a strict and complementary palette. Looking closely, you notice all of the tones of the background reflected in her skin, as are their complements. Some are there. Some are only implied by the proximity of the velvet against her gold skin. She could well have been painted in mud, against such a rich background.

Much of the effect of the painting is achieved not only in her pose, with its gaze, the curious matter of who is looking at whom, but in the way Ingres warps our view through the exaggeration of line. Her right arm stretches to her elbow over her hip, drawing our eye to her most prominent feature. Her left elbow nearly touches the left side of the frame as her right foot reaches to the other side. Her body commands the full space of the painting. She is turned slightly, beckoning us, into a void as dark as night.

While much is made of Ingres’ use of line, it is the psychological persuasion of his color, with all of its emotional suggestions, mysterious interrelationships, and unavoidable allusions, that always gets me.

I stood gazing at this painting at the Louvre for nearly forty minutes. No one came by. I was surprised. Then I looked into the gallery next door and realized where everybody was.

*I have no idea where this quote came from. My Uncle, a classical painter, mentioned it to me one day, and it made perfect sense. As the Italians say, se non e vero debessere - if it’s not true, it should be.

Originally published here at TheTracings

A couple of weekends ago I went to see Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus (Man, heroic and Sublime, 1950-51) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The great thing about the Met is that they treat this gallery like any other gallery in the museum. You find works by mid-century masters like Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and others. There are none of the distractions of MoMa or the Whitney, with multi-media events and temporary installations.

Barnett's painting is 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4" and mostly red, with three vertical strips that Barnett called "zips" that break or alter the field depending on your point of view. When you are within a few feet of this painting, you can no longer see where it begins or ends, and are simply gazing into its limitlessness. Though red, you no longer perceive it as a color but as a shifting and unfathomable depth.

One of the things Barnett had in common with his colleagues was to resist the color-field definition in favor of a larger objective. He believed that art should be an encounter with the sublime, offering viewers a space for introspection and a sense of connection to a broader human experience. It was anthropomorphic, humanistic, as in two people meeting for the first time, intimate yet mysterious, familiar but new.

The painting was prepared in layers, on unprimed canvas, first with a stain of Cadmium Orange. You can see this revealed in the second zip on the left. There was a subsequent layer of Alizarin or a similar cool red, with a result that feels both warm and cool, like swimming in a pond. Cool violets seem to float within, a violet seen in the zip three-quarters of the way down on the right. The whole experience is completely subjective.

Interestingly, Barnett was the only contemporary painter to have his work attacked and vandalized. The most notorious attack occurred in 1986 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Gerard Jan van Bladeren slashed Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III with a box cutter, resulting in fifty feet of cuts across the canvas.

The museum eventually enlisted the services of Daniel Goldreyer, an art conservator who claimed to have worked with Newman, and assured that he could faithfully restore the painting. Instead of selectively repairing the damaged areas, he repainted the entire surface with a roller. The result was a painting that was dead flat and lifeless. It was scandalous. A second vandalism, everybody cried. It was moved to the basement never to be seen again. Future vandalisms would be stitched back together with surgical sutures.

One of the reasons I'm drawn to this type of work is that it is physical and emotional, not an intellectual experience. All reason leaves you when you stand in front of it. And therein lies the pleasure---to be released from judgment, analytics, and explanation, and for a moment, to just be.

Originally published here at TheTracings

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.

This was the apogee of his work. In the late 1960s, Rothko embarked on a series of black and gray, largely lifeless paintings, along with self-derivative and repetitive variations of his earlier work.

It was as if the light had finally gone out of him.

Originally published here at TheTracings

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."

Originally published here at TheTracings

The Aquarian Mountain range in Arizona runs North-South on a tangent roughly paralleling Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen with Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Both were visionary projects, schools and utopian models for society. In fact, Paolo Soleri spent a year and a half at Taliesen starting at age twenty-two, and after returning to Italy, eventually settled in Scottsdale Arizona, founding the Cosanti Studio in 1956, and Arcosanti in 1970.

Soleri's reputation has since been seriously reconsidered since the revelations by his daughter about his sexual abuse. She resigned from the Cosanti board in 2010, with his resignation occurring the following year, suggesting that these revelations may have been known to the board.

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.

Originally published here at TheTracings

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.

Originally published here at TheTracings

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, and 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 travelling 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.

Originally published here at The Tracings

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 triglyph 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.