"Boisterous Effervescence"

A press release (.pdf) from the Frick Collection informs us that the museum has made an important purchase of a Lepaute clock with sculptural figures by Clodion (1738-1814). It won't be on exhibit at the Frick until this fall. But it sounds exciting.

It made me think of what Pierce Rice had to say about Clodion in Man as Hero: The Human Figure in Western Art (1987):

Clodion is commonly represented as the closest in spirit to Fragonard among sculptors. He is a sufficiently great master in his own right not to need the comparison which, in any case, is only true to a degree. Clodion was, for one thing, closer to actuality than Fragonard, but he also had a largeness of vision alongside a measure of boisterous effervescence never reached before or after in sculpture that at leasts suggests a parallel.

Rice wrote of Clodion and Fragonard in the chapter "The Body Etherealized."

The archaic Greek nude has its own beauties, but it was the Hellenistic nude, imported and imitated by the Romans, that determined the course of Western painting and sculpture, and almost by itself accounted for the Renaissance. Its lifelikeness revealed possibilities of execution that stunned the first beholders of these unearthed wonders. Of even greater consequence, it testified to the idea of art containing a spiritual life within itself. Even more than to the matchless surface, that lifelikeness was owed the wonderful animation achieved by the Greek sculptors, a measure of grace that had eluded (or not even been sought by) not only their Egyptian predecessors but every other school of sculpture in the world.

Rice looked to the French 18th century for some of the most outstanding examples of this "wonderful animation."

Here is that "wonderful animation" in painting:

Fragonard, The Progress of Love: The Pursuit, Frick Collection

Here is some more Clodion:

Nymph and Satyr, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Invention of the Balloon, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In his chapter "The Cherub," Rice wrote:

That the central theme of the West is Man, with the instrument of this the depiction of the human body at its most splendid, engaged in undertakings of deep consequence, is less oppressive than it might appear. It is gratifying to be able to note that the formula is modified by the presence throughout the art of the past twenty-five hundred years of an army of infants busy at perfectly frivolous tasks. These infants are like their adult counterparts in that they resemble only to a degree actual infants. In particular, the baby of art is a flying baby.

A half dozen or so books are with me every day of my life. Not physically with me, but mentally. Man as Hero is one of them, continually informing my perceptions of the city around me. Pierce Rice
(1916-2003), a native Brooklynite who attended the fabled Boys' High School and Pratt Institute, was the great theorist of classical art in our time. But he made his living illustrating comic books.

You can find a used copy of Man as Hero here.

Gandy Is Dandy

For those of us who came of architectural age at a certain moment, the writings of Sir John Summerson (1904-1992) hold a special place in our hearts. No one ever wrote with greater grace about architecture. Summerson's The Classical Language of Architecture is an essential ICA&CA text. Though Summerson himself had modernist sympathies, he put the case for classical architecture in such a way as to render irrefutable the claims of those who see it as a living tradition. Besides that book, Summerson wrote much else, not least a book people of my generation have read with the deepest pleasure, a volume of collected pieces, not even amounting to an adumbration, Heavenly Mansions (1963), that in its exegeses of Sir Christopher Wren, John Wood the Elder, and Viollet-le-Duc made each of these people, whom we should know all about anyway, into almost canonical names, simply because Summerson wrote about them. See also his Georgian London, containing some of the best architectural descriptions you will ever read. Summerson was also from 1945 to 1984 the curator of Sir John Soane's Museum in London.

Thus it is that the name of Joseph Gandy resonates with some of us. Not because we had an early encounter with Gandy, but because we had an early encounter with Summerson on Gandy. Because Gandy, and not Soane, got an essay in Heavenly Mansions, some of us first visited Sir John Soane's Museum first and foremost to see the drawings of Gandy, Soane's master draftsman and the second greatest architectural fantasist of all time, after Piranesi.

A great architectural writer can write with grace about the links between architecture and other arts.

Joseph Gandy may never be placed very high among the artists of early 19th-century England; but in his own particular kingdom--the kingdom of architectural fantasy--he reigns absolute. And that kingdom has its own unique constitution. This local sovereignty makes Gandy, in a sense, the companion if not the peer of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Walter Scott. Their work parallels his and sometimes touches it--as when Gandy, in 1807, showed Roslin Chapel as Scott had described it, two years before, in the 'Lay', glowing in the spectral light which presaged the death of the lovely Rosabelle. But there Gandy is an illustrator--an inspired one, perhaps, but still a worker at second hand. It is in his wholly independent creations that he is most admirable, and rises nearest to the level of his great contemporaries. The cottage designs, slight though they are, constitute a really extraordinary penetration of an architectural convention which, in 1805, was not by any means in decline. They are the work of an artist-critic not far removed in feeling from the Wordsworth of ' Michael' and ' Peter Bell'. Then, in the Tomb of Merlin and perhaps also in the Origin there is that Coleridgean echo which we have already observed.

Through July 22, the Richard L. Feigen Gallery is presenting the must-see exhibition Joseph Gandy: Visionary Architect. According to the Feigen web site, "At once the English Piranesi and the William Blake of architectural design, Gandy may now be viewed on his own terms in the first exhibition of his work to be held in North America." This is pretty special stuff. The show coincides with a major monograph, Joseph Gandy, An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (Thames & Hudson, 2006) by Brian Lukacher, Professor of Art History at Vassar. Works in the show have been drawn from Sir John Soane's Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and other collections. I am rather curious as to why the Feigen web site does not have the gallery's address. Is it an oversight--or a subtle form of snobbery? I hope the former. At any rate, I'm releasing the cat from the bag: The gallery is at 34 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, and is open Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm.

Having just re-read Summerson's essay on Gandy, I was struck by this, two of the finest paragraphs of architectural writing I have ever read:

Architecture is a chained and fettered art. Far from being 'frozen music', it is an art constantly attempting to realize in solid, stable form those effects which music is able to conjure up in an instant--effects which succeed each other rapidly during the progress of a musical work. Music can attain the  colossal in a way which, in architecture, only the rarest opportunities render even remotely possible. Music can, in a few moments, admit us through vast portals into avenues, courts and halls of infinite extent and variety. Music can suddenly raise up an entire structure and, by the device of modulation, lift it on to a podium, abruptly recess its façades and turn them bodily into the sunshine. Music can etch silhouettes ten times more intricate than those of Dresden or London City, repeat them, increase or reduce them, hurl them into the distance or bring them before us in precise detail. Most of the essentials of architecture--mass, rhythm, texture, outline--are within music's power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving, the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.

But has not architecture its own special attributes, which are no part of the world which it is music's function to create and recreate? Certainly it has. Architecture, by virtue of its actual limitations, can exploit our capacity for dramatizing ourselves, for heightening the action of ordinary life; it can increase man's psychological stature to an angel's. All this it does through its irrevocable attachment to function. The dramatizing of movements appropriate to architecture (and impossible without architecture), movements like entering through a door, looking out of a window--mounting steps or walking on a terrace--is something with which music has nothing to do. Here is architecture's special province which on the one hand constricts its movement and on the other intensifies its meaning.

These had special resonance in the week in which I received in the mail the Spring 2006 issue of American Arts Quarterly, which contains a fine essay by ICA&CA Fellow and holder of the Rooney Chair in Design and Theory at the Notre Dame School of Architecture Steven Semes. Steve's essay is called "Le Violon d'Ingres: Some Reflections on Music, Painting and Architecture." Steve writes:

In an architectural analogue to musical space, commuters entering Grand Central Terminal in New York from 42nd Street pass through a low vestibule into the generously proportioned Vanderbilt Hall, continue through a Piranesian passage where ramps lead to the lower levels, and finally emerge onto the great concourse, a crescendo worthy of Beethoven. It is not only the spaces themselves that impress us, but the way the elements enclosing them are organized compositionally. We see walls, floors and ceilings punctuated by openings and organized proportionally by the classical orders--the exact opposite of randomness. In the same way, a musical space has a hierarchical structure--'the essence of which is groups combined within groups'--with parts forming wholes that are themselves parts of larger wholes, extending from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Just as pictorial-spatial perspective orders the structural hierarchy of an architectural work, so the sonic perspective afforded by tonality orders the individual tones into coherent music.

Good stuff. The excellent American Arts Quarterly puts a few teasers up on the web with each issue, but Steve's piece isn't among them. You'll have to subscribe, but I imagine anyone reading this blog would want to subscribe anyway. Such outstanding writers on the arts as Frederick Turner and Meredith Bergmann are regular contributors.

Napoleon in Egypt

On July 1, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, along with 55,000 French troops (Armée d'Orient) and 167 "savants" (artists and scholars) arrived in Egypt on a complicated mission that had at least three goals. One was to impose French liberty upon the Egyptian people. Another was to create a roadblock between England and India. A third, and ultimately the only successful one, was to make a meticulous scholarly study of Egypt. It took till 1829, long after Napoleon, for the issuance of Déscription de l'Égypte, which is said to have laid the foundation of the modern field of Egyptology. (1829 was also the year in which Paris received the Luxor Obelisk, which the city sensibly put in the Place de la Concorde, whereas New York put its Obelisk in a very different setting, on a mound in Central Park, where the only framed axial view of the monument is from within the Petrie European Sculpture Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Luxor Obelisk, Place de la Concorde

Obelisk, Central Park

Through September 3, the fabulous Dahesh Museum is presenting Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt.

Déscription de l'Égypte, 2nd ed., frontispiece

The Déscription numbered thirteen volumes of plates that in addition to being an unexampled scholarly resource also influenced the "Orientalism" of 19th-century art that has been covered so beautifully over the years by the Dahesh. The current exhibition brings together 80 engraved plate illustrations from the Déscription, together with a wealth of materials, from letters and documents to Egyptian antiquities to artworks (by Doré, Alma-Tadema, and others) from the Dahesh collection. Sounds to us like the summer's must-see show.

N.B. There are 22 Egyptian obelisks left in the world. Thirteen are in Rome, one is in Paris, one is in Istanbul, one is in London, one is in New York, five are in Egypt. New Yorkers should show a little more love for theirs.

Celebrating Jane Jacobs

As most of you know, Jane Jacobs died this past April 25. She was 89. Roger Scruton once described her as "the woman who drew up the battle-lines against modernist architecture." I would amend that: She drew up the battle-lines against modernist planning. Classical architecture people love to tangle with New Urbanism people over whether there can be good urbanism without classical architecture. Jacobs would have said yes. Nonetheless, she provided a framework for looking at how cities are arranged that has proven of immense value to critics of modernist architecture as well as planning. In any reckoning of whom we most owe a debt to--pro or con, whether we like it or not--she's got to be up there, at the very top.

Next Wednesday, June 28, there will be a "public celebration" of Jane Jacobs in Washington Square. It starts at 5:00pm in front of Stanford White's arch.

It's sponsored by the Center for the Living City, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, and the New York City Parks Department. Don't know who will be speaking. And it's a little ironic that she's unhip, that the prevailing Rem Koolhaas Weltanschaaung is positively hostile toward her, and that the hypertrophied development in New York City today should be something she specifically spoke out against. We need her, now more than ever.

Read James Howard Kunstler's excellent interview with Jacobs.

Here are Jane Jacobs's books at Amazon.

Stanford White

The name Stanford White has entered into American lore, and not in a good way. For many social commentators White symbolizes an era of excess, of the too-large meal at Delmonico's, the cacophonous din of the Wurlitzer, the bloated voluptuary Jim Brady and the mother-of-pearl handlebars of his inamorata Lillian Russell's gold-plated bicycle, let-them-eat-cake parties at the Waldorf, the fatuous social pronouncements of Ward McAllister, the girl in the cake--in short, everything that right-thinking people have been taught to abhor in the vulgar materialism of the laissez-faire America of the turn of the 20th century.

That White was fatally shot by Harry Thaw in the roof garden of White's own Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906, seems the icing on the cake of a shabby era. E.L. Doctorow, in Ragtime, told us as much.

But is it a true picture? Historians will argue. The English novelist Arnold Bennett was a man of probity, the opposite, it would seem, of Stanford White in temperament. In 1912 the brilliant author of The Old Wives' Tale and Riceyman Steps, two of my favorite novels of all time, wrote Your United States, in my opinion the best book any European ever wrote about America. Bennett wrote of New York,

When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare I had ever seen anywhere.

He went on:

Fifth Avenue...always reminds me of Florence and the Strozzi...The cornices, you know.

The specific occasion was his viewing the Gorham Building, a Stanford White masterpiece still standing on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 36th Street. The ground floor was mutilated in the 1960s, and the cornice has lost its rich polychromatic enameling, but the building still possesses a stately majesty equaled by few other buildings in the city. White may have lived a life of sybaritic excess in a shabby age, but he also designed buildings that in their balance combined with radiance were equal to anything being done in the world at the time.

McKim, Mead & White vied with Chicago's D.H. Burnham & Co. for the title of world's largest architectural office, measured in dollar value of commissions. For many of us, it is axiomatic that McKim, Mead & White was New York's greatest architectural firm of all time. Though a building was credited to the firm, generally it was either McKim or White (or another designer in the firm) who designed it--just as it was usually either Lennon or McCartney, not the two together, who wrote all those great Beatles songs. McKim designed the Columbia campus, Pennsylvania Station, the Boston Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the University Club, and the Brooklyn Museum. White designed Madison Square Garden, the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Metropolitan Club, the Joseph Pulitzer house, the Tiffany Building, and the Gorham Building.

White's Madison Square Garden

White's Madison Square Presbyterian Church

White's Metropolitan Club

White's Rosecliff, in Newport

White was a total designer. Here is a picture frame he designed:

And here is the man himself:

This Sunday, June 25, 2006, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the murder of Stanford White. To commemorate the event, this Thursday, June 22, the Madison Square Park Conservancy is featuring talks by Suzannah Lessard, White's great-granddaughter and author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996) and Paula Uruburu, author of a forthcoming biography of White's mistress Evelyn Nesbit, introduced by Miriam Berman, author of Madison Square: The Park and Its Celebrated Landmarks. The event convenes at the Admiral Farragut Monument, just in from 26th Street about midway between Fifth and Madison Avenues, in Madison Square, at 6:30pm.

White collaborated with his close friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the design of the exedra of the Farragut Monument, before there was such a thing as McKim, Mead & White. An interesting bit of trivia is that the biographical inscriptions on the exedra were composed by Richard Grant White, Stanford's father and one of the leading men of letters of 19th-century New York. Alas, then as today you could be a leading man of letters yet be hard up for money. Stanford White could never afford to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. (Though the training there was free, the student still needed living and traveling expenses.) Ironically, the one other architect whom we associate with the Beaux-Arts generation who never actually attended the Ecole was Cass Gilbert, a onetime McKim, Mead & White employee, whose (excellent) New York Life Insurance Building now stands on the site of Madison Square Garden.

David Lowe wrote the best book on Stanford White.

(For a sense of White's versatility as a designer, see this earlier post of ours.)

Veronese at the Frick

No one interested in ICA&CA is not also a devotee of the Frick Collection. Everything about it resonates with us: the paintings, the decorative arts, the Carrère & Hastings architectue of the former home of Henry Clay Frick. Not the least of the Frick's virtues is that it is one of the precious few museums that has not fallen prey to megalomania and the blockbuster syndrome. We go there regularly to view the permanent collections. But in recent years the Frick has also offered special exhibitions, always of the highest scholarly and curatorial quality. These exhibitions are unfailingly excellent, and one that's up through July 16 is worth a trip to New York all by itself. It's called Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice, and it brings together five--yes, only five--paintings by the 16th-century Italian master. Bernard Berenson wrote of Veronese:

When I contemplate Veronese’s paintings, I experience a satisfaction so full and perfect that I feel seized by it in all of my being, in my senses, my feelings, my intellect, and then, all things considered, I love him at least as much as I love any other painter who has ever painted.

The Frick brings together the two Veroneses in its permanent collection with one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and two from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Veronese, Mars and Venus United by Love, Metropolitan Museum of Art Veronese, Allegory of Navigation with an Astrolabe, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Veronese, The Choice between Virtue and Vice, Frick Collection Veronese, Allegory of Navigation with a Cross-Staff, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Veronese, Wisdom and Strength, Frick Collection

The Frick Collection is on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street.

One thing the show cannot give you a sense of is how great Veronese was as a muralist. "He was made for Palladio," says Paul Johnson. Alas, only one of Veronese's villa commissions is intact, but it's hard to beat: the Villa Barbaro, at Maser.

Exhibition at the Grolier Club

An exhibition at Manhattan's august Grolier Club, the private club of bibliophiles, may be of interest to readers of this blog. It's called Teaching America to Draw: Instructional Manuals & Ephemera, 1794 to 1925, and is open to the public through July 29. According to the Grolier web site, the exhibition

presents an in-depth survey of drawing manuals, drawing cards, lithographs, copybooks, and other ephemera, curated by Albert A. Anderson, Jr., emeritus professor of Art Education at The Pennsylvania State University, and William L. Joyce and Sandra K. Stelts of The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. These wonderfully evocative books, which are seldom seen by scholars and educators, much less by contemporary Americans, were instructional in nature and widely used, often to the point of destruction. As a result, relatively few remain today; those that do are scarce, sometimes rare, highly collectible, and typically heavily worn. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to view the full range of this seldom-seen genre. The images themselves constitute an extraordinary window into nineteenth-century American culture.

An added bonus of visiting this show is the chance to see the clubhouse at 47 East 60th Street, a 1917 building designed by the great Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.

If any of you go to see it, leave a comment saying what you thought of it.