One-Way Street

Little Dorrit on a Little Screen

Ann Kirschner conducts an interesting experiment that I would be interested in conducting myself. She compared the experience of reading Little Dorrit on four platforms: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and the iPhone. At stake is more than a consumer choice. She asks herself, "Do I love books or do I love reading" In other words, how important are books as culturally significant objects. Are they simply the only possible medium for a rich narrative form, or a symbol in a cultural system that distinguishes between low (TV, movies, rock music) and high (books, films)?

Kirschner's trial has a surprising conclusion: the iPod is hands down the best reading experience--better than her grad school Penguin edition, and better than the Kindle, which "does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me." Besides, Kindles are for oldsters. She says most Kindle readers she knows are above 50 years old, suggesting that the Kindle won't have a long product life. 

From what I've seen--mostly on the CTA--Kindle readers are usually twentysomethings, and E Ink technologies are still relatively new, but Kirschner has a point: it's all about device convergence, and all about the story.

Rowing Into the Future

Walking through the “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe” exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I paused before a monitor playing a grainy film of Fuller speaking to a group of college students some time during the 1960s. He looked, and talked, like an IBM engineer on peyote. I wonder what his audience made of Fuller. He was speaking about how the education system trammels the mind, a very au courant topic, but his volubility was driven by his undying love for the radio he operated in World War I. The campus talk was a portentous moment: the last prophet of technological utopia speaking to the last vanguard of unfettered humanism.

Fuller started his career as a loopy visionary and canny businessman with a scheme to cover the globe with 4D Lightful Towers, which were glass and steel towers serviced by zeppelins. He wanted to place them everywhere, including the poles. The scheme was as audacious in its conception as it was crude in its design. In the 1920s Fuller had not yet developed his considerable skills as a designer. The 4D Lightful Towers—the wordplay hinted at his love of language—were the template for every major plan he ever devised. He never lost his fascination with the idea of stuffing people into hives.

Fuller refined his vision of a phalanstère throughout his long career. The most enduring product of his Fourierian labors was the geodesic dome, most commonly applied to the design of a piece of playground equipment beloved by a generation of grade school children, including me. As his design skills developed he came up with increasingly more intriguing vehicle designs, the coolest of which was his Aerodynamic Dymaxion car, a cross between a Volkswagen van and a B-29 bomber that Fuller designed to accompany his Dymaxion house (above).

Like all prophets, Fuller was not a modest man. “I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival,” he declares in the foreword to his book Critical Path. His brand of technological messianism fell out of favor by the 1960s only to be revived and transformed in the current decade through our mania for green technologies. 

By now we know we’re probably going to have to give up on our desire for a flying car; it’s too polluting. Late in his life Fuller, ever prescient, seemed to realize this, so he built himself a catamaran version of a scull. An actual Fuller scull is on display in the final room of the “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe” exhibit. Everyone focuses on the Montreal Biosphère when remembering Fuller, but, to my mind, this scull is a better way to understand the future as Fuller conceived of it: rowing along a smooth river in an over-engineered yet elegant craft, at one with nature.

Take Your Time

In his exhibition “Take Your Time,” Olafur Eliasson seems determined to upend museum art and our habituated responses to it. His work is immersive in the spatial sense. Eliasson creates what he calls “devices for the experience of reality.” However, in the exhibition currently running at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Eliasson’s reality experiences inadvertently reveal the awkwardness of the museum space itself. The MCA version of the exhibition succeeds in creating fascinating sensory experiences, but it is less rich as a temporal experience.

The problem can be traced to 360 Room for All Colours, which is one of the more pleasurable installations in “Take Your Time.” Eliasson updates the panorama, a form that first appeared in the Paris arcades in the early nineteenth century. Originally painted landscapes that rotated to simulate a riding tour, the panoramas were an important proto-cinematic technology. Eliasson strips out the images, leaving only a warm glow of subtly shifting hues—the glow of a television but without the sterile harshness.  The instillation gently reorients your senses away from a dependence on vision, the primary sensory mode for apprehending art. You can almost feel the light striking your eyes. The acoustics make it seem like the walls are talking. In fact, the voices are echoes of other people in the space. You can’t help but lean in to hear what’s being said. You also want to touch the foil surface of the artwork, but you don’t because it’s too perfect and a museum guard will yell at you. You exit the space feeling better than when you went in, which is more than one can say for a television show.

But then there’s the rest of the room and the other artworks. The MCA space is cavernous and, because of the internal illumination of 360 Room, very dim. Located nearby is Multiple Grotto, another enveloping space made of up stainless steel that’s supposed to reflect light. Unfortunately, in the shadow of 360 Room Grotto has all the ambiance of a bus stop shelter on a cloudy day. The room’s dimness made me miss Beauty, the earliest work in the exhibition and one of Eliasson’s best known works. It’s an instillation of mist and Fresnel lamps. It captures the ephemeral, insubstantial quality of Eliasson’s art. Alas, the entryway is hidden behind drawn black curtains, making it seem like a dead end in the exhibition. Another couple and I hesitated before the heavy black curtains, and we decided not to risk parting them, assuming that some sort of construction was going on. Indeed, it’s the nature of the MCA space, a converted armory, to feel perpetually under construction.

Other artworks occupy their spaces more comfortably. Ventilator has a room to itself, which at first seems to be another instance of a container that’s just a little too big for its instillation. Here, though, a fan is suspended from a ceiling and swings wildly just a few inches about your head. It’s a witty gesture worthy of Duchamp. Moss Wall is another one-to-a-room instillation, but the light is more even and natural, perfectly illuminating an entire wall covered in Icelandic moss. Sensory surprises await here as well: it smells good. One woman got so close to the moss she seemed to want to disappear into it.

Experiences like these are what Eliasson’s art is all about. Yet, because of the ill-fitting spaces, the exhibition doesn’t flow well enough to feel like one’s sense of time is being altered. “Take Your Time” doesn’t have the magical seamlessness of an exhibition of Vermeer paintings I once attended in the Smithsonian, which I couldn’t go through slowly enough. There’s dead space and some installations that seem out of place, like Model Room, which isn't a room at all, merely a shelf displaying a collection of wire models that are supposed to shed light on Eliasson’s creative process, but don’t. Room for One Colour feels like a cheapskate version of his famous Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2003. You don’t want to linger under the yellow monofrequency lights because you quickly realize nothing else is going to happen, in contrast to other works in the exhibition. If there's an experience here, it's the experience of having stomach flu.

Even as you pass quickly through Room for One Colour, there are other moments when “Take Your Time” really does seduce you into slowing down and reconsidering the reality around you. It’s weird to refer to free-standing studio lights and exposed projectors as old fashioned, yet Eliasson exposes the sources of his illusions without seeming gimmicky, without seeming like the projection equipment was purchased with art school materials fees, then dumped into a room, leaving us to puzzle through what’s expected of us as spectators. We stand or sit and let the experience unfold in a manner that’s reassuringly familiar—maybe too familiar for some tastes. There’s not much frisson to Eliasson. Then again, he doesn’t create neo-junk artworks so common in other contemporary art exhibitions. His work is also free of post-ironic references to consumer culture—provided one forgets about his work for BMW. You want to touch the artwork, but don’t dare, of course. Instead, you wait until it reaches out and touches you.

The MCA Chicago "Take Your Time" exhibition continues through September 13, 2009.

Eyes Wide Open

Sándor Márai died in obscurity in 1989, nine years before his novel Embers was translated into English and published to great acclaim. Like Irène Némirovsky, Márai was a minor writer plucked from history to reintroduce us to a vanished world. Esther's Inheritance (1940) is Márai’s fourth novel to be translated into English, this time by the Hungarian poet George Szirtes. Inheritance was written two years before Embers and shares the same basic plot structure: a cast of characters reunite after decades of separation, only to find not much has changed.

In her youth the title character and narrator was jilted by her one true love, Lajos, a charismatic con man. Well into her fifties in the present action of the novel and still pining for Lajos, who married her sister, Esther is surrounded by eminently sensible people to whom she barely pays any attention. When Lajos sends word that he wants to visit Esther, she immediately smells a rat—and she can’t wait.

Lajos arrives in a red car and an entourage of decadent Europeans that includes his conniving daughter and virtually inert son. As soon as he gets Esther alone he makes the demand for which she’s been waiting: he wants her house to pay his debts. She tries to resist, but not very hard. She’s enjoying his performance too much. Lajos, she observes, “lied the way the wind howls, with a certain natural energy, in high spirits.” She knows he’s just a garden-variety romantic dissembler, but she also sees a grander form of prevarication at work. When Esther points out that he rejected her for her unsavory sister Vilma, Lajos responds a Nietzschean outburst, blaming Esther for the collapse of their courtship. “We did not love each other courageously enough. And that is your fault... Love is of your making. It is the only respect in which you achieve greatness.”

As Esther herself notes, Lajos’s performance is “operatic.” The dramatic tension in this brief novel’s final pages comes from the clash between Esther’s steadfast faith and Lajos’s struggle to believe in something. Márai sets up a confrontation between two people who seem to have mismanaged their lives and their love. As far as Esther’s final decision is concerned, Márai gives the game away at the very beginning of the novel. The surprise comes when we realize Esther and Lajos neither seek nor receive any redemption for their failed lives.  Esther, it turns out, is every bit the Nietzschean Lajos is. Nietzsche must have had a life like hers in mind when he wondered aloud,

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?

Esther’s chaste surrender to the demonic has led some critics to detect an anti-fascist political allegory in Esther’s Inheritance: Esther as Europa sleepwalking her way into fascism. Márai was fiercely anti-fascist, but his novel, written during the darkest days of the way against fascism, isn’t polemical enough to fit into a clean allegorical mold.

The key moment in the novel occurs when Esther’s lawyer makes a half-hearted attempt to convince her of the irrationality of signing over her house to the scoundrel Lajos. She points out, however, that if she had lived her life rationally she would have eloped with Lajos two decades ago and her life would have probably turned out worse that it actually did. If Esther’s Inheritance had been a neat anti-fascist allegory, Márai would have presented a more plausible alternative to the demonic. If her world had offered a better alternative, Esther wouldn’t have tossed away her inheritance with such enigmatic resignation. In other words, she isn’t sleeping. She’s wide awake and enjoying watching her world evaporate.

Atlantic Yards Project Stumbles Along

Bruce Ratner, the developer of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, has scrapped plans for a Frank Gehry-designed $1 billion glass-walled basketball arena (above) for the Nets, who will move to Brooklyn from the New Jersey Meadowlands for the 2011 season.

The continuing troubles at the Atlantic Yards are something of a mixed blessing. The project established a troublesome precedent by largely excluding government involvement in a big urban planning project. This approach meant that bigger social concerns, like housing for mixed incomes, equal access to parks and transit, and vibrant communal spaces, which were once the public's purview, now increasingly fall to developers to address or not, as they see fit. In the case of Atlantic Yards, critics charged the project required condemning too many properties in Brooklyn, opponents have charged, and the original scope of the plan called for a cramming too many high rises into Brooklyn's neighborhoods of low historic buildings. To assuage criticism of the massive scale of his project, Ratner lined up an impressive roster of faux-grassroots supporters such as Al Sharpton and Jay-Z. But opponents regarded the outreach as part of a sinister campaign to divide opponents, co-opting those local figures who were interested but skeptical, and creating the appearance of broad support where little existed.

Now the market has intervened where the government could not. Collapsing real estate markets have forced Ratner to delay most of the housing and a proposed office tower. Ratner still plans to start the first residential tower, which would contain a large percentage of units for low-, moderate- and middle-income families. Whether or not the reduced scale of the project assuages its critics remains to be seen. 

But the market has also shattered Gehry’s glass arena in favor of a design from Ellerbe Becket, an architectural firm based in Kansas City that specializes in convention centers, stadiums and arenas. Each type of sport stadium has its own particular set of foibles. Baseball stadium design tends toward retro camouflage and cheap nostalgia. Football stadiums have become gargantuan machines for playing, part of a year-round, nonstop popular entertainment whirl in which a football game is just one option among many. The ur-form of basketball stadiums is the airplane hanger. Ellerbe Becket’s Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where the Indiana Pacers play, is a perfect example of the form. The Brooklyn Nets stadium promises to be another airplane hanger. So much for contextualization.

One element of Gehry’s arena will remain, however. Ratner’s 20-year, $400 million deal for the arena’s naming rights with Barclays Bank is still in effect. So the Nets have escaped the bad karma of the Meadowlands only to land in Barclays Arena, named for a British bank that is keeping afloat only by virtue of a £7billion bailout by Qatar and its royal family, a deal denounced by Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman Vince Cable as “a scandal of mammoth proportions.”

Saving St. Boniface

In the passions stirred by building preservation controversies it's not always clear why a particular building should be preserved. In some cases people want to preserve a building simply because it's old. In other cases one characteristic of the building overrides all other considerations. The controversy over the Mies van der Rohe's IIT building is a recent example. Some buildings people want around for sentimental reasons, even if they can't think of any current use for it.

St. Boniface Church in Chicago's River West neighborhood (see map) would seem to fall into the last category. Mass hasn't been celebrated in the church since 1990, when the Catholic church confiscated the church's prized relic, a piece of St. Ann's skull, and shut the doors for good. The attached Catholic school and two convent buildings have already been demolished. The church and rectory need millions of dollars of work just to stop them further decay. St. Boniface's current owner, the Archdiocese of Chicago, wants to demolish the building but retain ownership of the property, which is located in a gentrifying neighborhood just west of downtown. Local concerned citizens, former parishioners along with neighborhood residents, have been campaigning to preserve the church since 1999, when the church gave up on the St. Boniface complex and announced plans to raze the buildings and create a green space. Preservation Chicago named St. Boniface one of its seven most endangered buildings for 2009.

Why all the fuss about a neighborhood Catholic church when there are still plenty of distinguished, and still active, churches in the city? The church's story is typical of a lot of endangered buildings across the country: it's not associated with a major historical event, nor was it designed by an internationally famous architect. Its structure is so deteriorated that it would be much cheaper to simply build a new replacement. Time has passed it by.

St. Boniface was completed in 1904 to serve what was then a largely German Catholic congregation. The church was designed by Henry J. Schlacks, an architect familiar to architectural historians but hardly anyone else. It's a stately Romanesque church that takes up most of the northern end of a rather unlovely park. I used to live in the neighborhood and I would walk my dog in the park. The church was a striking sight. Despite its relatively modest size, the building is perfectly balanced between grace and monumentality. Its strong vertical lines and clean facade departs from typical ecclesiastical architecture from the period, which tends toward the florid and the ponderous. Even in the building's neglected state it's clear that Schlacks was a skilled architect.

There are two proposed uses for the property: A Coptic congregation has expressed interest in rehabilitating the church, but given its advanced state of decay, that plan seems impractical.  In 2005 a real estate developer expressed an interest in building a high rise condo building. With the city drowning in unsold condo units, those plans have probably been shelved. The city has offered to swap a property with the archdiocese, and negotiations are ongoing. Meanwhile, the archdiocese ripped out all the windows and submitted a demolition request to take care of the rest.

St. Boniface is never going to be a Catholic church again. It's not clear what the city would do with the property even if it gains ownership. At this point the issue is a problem of urban planning: how will the neighborhood evolve? Into a cluster of high rise condos for transient Loop office workers? Into a collection of phony Irish bars and generic low-rise rental units? Traces of its origins as a German (and later Italian) neighborhood are too fragile to stamp a unique identity on the area. The neighborhood is marooned by the Kennedy Expressway, which effectively severs it from downtown and the River North neighborhood just to the east.

Can a large church anchor a vital twenty-first century urban neighborhood? With its clean lines and perfect proportions, St. Boniface could provide an aesthetic and historical center to the neighborhood, especially if Eckhart Park continues to improve. It's a neighborhood rich in history with at least three incarnations as an immigrant neighborhood. The neighborhood even has a link to Al Capone from its days when it was known as Little Sicily. Losing St. Boniface would erase a critical part of the neighborhood's historical fabric. (The bank Capone used was torn down long ago.) For urban planners saving the church is no less of an urgent challenge than navigating their way between downscale nail salons and upscale sushi restaurants. The battle over St. Boniface isn't simply about preserving a nice-looking church for the benefit of its former parishioners; the battle is also over how an urban neighborhood will evolve.

If you want to get involved in the preservation effort on St. Boniface's behalf, you can find more information here. You can also join the Facebook group.

Summer Reading 2009

I've never really understood why summer books, like summer movies, are supposed to be less substantial and less challenging than books we read at any other time of the year. For most people summer is pretty much like every other time of year. Most of it is spent in climate-controlled environments--cars, trains, homes, offices, airports, hotels--that scarcely change with the season. How much time do people really spend reading at the beach or in a hammock? It seems that summer reading lists are all about the summer we wish we were having rather than the one we actually are having.

Generally my only concession to reading in the summer is that the book shouldn't be too long. I don't mind having to do some work unpacking an argument or a dense patch of prose fiction; I just don't want to feel like I'm going to spend the entire summer with one book.

So here's my ideal reading list for this summer. These are the books I intend to read this summer. I may not get through the list, although I'm determined to read a lot this summer because, for various reasons, I haven't been reading very much this spring. Midsummer I may find other books I'm more interested in reading. That's OK. Choosing books and wine are my favorite shopping activities, so I don't like to get too programmatic about reading lists.

Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn. It sounds like it could be a novel of fey miserablism, but I really liked The Master and the blurbs I've read so far reassured me that Tóibín's is more than the sum of its Brooklyn Irish cliches.

Ada Louise Huxtable, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. This has been on my to read list since it came out last fall. I've already started reading this collection of columns from Huxtable's years as the New York Times architecture critic. She was there when Modernism ran out of gas and Post-Modernism arrived with a jolt of energy and some questionable buildings.

Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image. Ordinarily I steer clear of philosophers writing about the cinema--has anyone, anywhere, really read both volumes of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema and learned anything from them?--but Rancière is one of the most interesting aesthetic philosophers around. Besides, it's a short book.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm . I've been meaning to read this for a long time, and this is the summer I'm finally going to pick it up.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice. This doesn't come out until August. I didn't love Against the Day, to say the least, but Pynchon is still Pynchon. He can't be ignored.

Francis Mallmann, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way. OK, so yes, summer reading should have an element of escapist fantasy about it, and without fantasy we will never change. The American in Provence/Tuscany genre is usually pretty reliable, but this year the crop is very thin, a sign that the genre is exhausted. What better way to escape the quotidian than to cook your way through another culture? 

Does anyone have any recommendations for a new book on the cinema?

Big Art: The Second Floor of the Modern Wing

Last week I spent an hour and a half on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing (more on that here), where European Modernism from 1900-1950 is exhibited. By the time I made it down to the second floor it was just after noon, and the place was packed. One minute I stood with my nose pressed against Jackson Pollack's Greyed Rainbow, and the next minute my view of a large Mark Rothko painting was blocked by a guy who went through the entire museum wearing his bike helmet. However, getting jostled by the crowds led me to notice something I might not have noticed otherwise: after World War II artists painted a lot of really big paintings. The lesson I got from the second floor was that art's relation to cultural institutions changed after High Modernism.

The second floor is split into two main galleries, Contemporary Art 1945-1960 and Contemporary Art after 1960. The 1945-60 gallery is particularly small, just one long, narrow room. Fortunately, the paintings are huge. The post-1960 gallery has even more elephantine works. These paintings were made for gallery spaces. Greyed Rainbow commands an entire wall, while upstairs important Braques and Matisses are lined up together, each a leaflet for an entire artistic revolution. They're like a hundred rabbit punches.

Most Modernist artworks faced uncertain exhibition fates. René Magritte was exasperated by the patron who owned his Time Transfixed (1938). Magritte wanted the painting hung on a stairway so that the train would appear to jab people. The owner hung the painting over his fireplace to Magritte's eternal frustation. The blockbuster Les Demoiselles d'Avignon sat in a corner of the artist's studio for nine years before the public got its first glimpse of Picasso's masterwork, and it wasn't on permanent public display until 1939.

Pollock and de Kooning knew their work would find its way to a big wall. Their successors worked under the same assumption. A lot of impressive work resulted. However, this means that in a museum context every painting thinks it's Rocky Marciano and it can knock you out in one punch. One can grant Franz Kline his big canvases, but there are more than a few works that are bigger than they need to be. Hanne Darboven's Seven Panels and Index (1973) is a virtuoso display of graphomania, but the way it's mounted in the Modern Wing it's hard to see the top panels very clearly. In isolation the vastness of Darboven's work would be meaningful in itself, but less so when every other work in the room is huge, too. Cy Twombley's paintings not only want to take up a lot of space, they seem to want to be space. Largeness isn't always convincing.

Perhaps the size of the contemporary paintings led the curators to change their pedagogical approach to post-war art. Upstairs in the Modernism galleries selected paintings have individual explanatory notes mounted next to them. Downstairs a brief essay on an artist's entire career is printed high up on a wall. This approach makes sense for artists whose paintings tend to look the same, but for a more protean artist like Gerhard Richter one can drift through his gallery and wonder what holds these disparate works together.

Not all the gestures on the second floor are so broad. The curators stage some interesting confrontations between individual artworks. Margherita Manzelli's enigmatic Dopo la fine (2008; not available in the AIC's online catalog) gazes steadily at Lucian Freud's blunt Sunny Morning–Eight Legs (1997). Too bad periodization prevents a call out from the Manzelli to Nathalija Gontcharov’s Spanish Dancer (1916), located upstairs.

After the disappointment of not seeing any Egon Schiele drawings on the third floor, they appear unexpectedly on the second. One problem, though: they're not drawn by Schiele. Sherrie Levine replicated 18 different drawings by Schiele, complete with gauche smears. Levine understands Schiele's line, but her figures lack the haunted glamor of Schiele's self-portraits and, therefore, a critical element in Schiele's unique form of narcissicism. Levine's faces look like male models; they're too clear-eyed, too well-fed to be fully convincing evocations of the Austrian artist's self-regard. Levine's images may refer to male narcissism, but not necessarily Schiele's.

Because it doesn't have any skylights, the second floor lacks the third floor's architectural panache. Yet there's one second floor gallery that best captures the spirit and intent of the Modern Wing.  The north wall of the Elliott Room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out upon the Chicago skyline. Exhibited in the room are a set of large canvases painted in simple white.  At first glance, Robert Ryman's Charter Series paintings seem too pale, too insubstantial to stand next to the skyline, but they form a liminal zone that thematizes the entire Modern Wing. The gallery is among the last in the Modern Wing, and by now it's clear that Renzo Piano has been framing the Chicago skyline as an artwork in its own right.

The Third Floor

Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing (see it here) gave the curators at the Art Institute of Chicago 264,000 square feet of extra space to play around with, so they’ve filled it with recently acquired art and some paintings they previously didn’t have room to exhibit. The curators are still toying with the space, trying to figure out which paintings should go where. Mostly the curators have it right.

The elegant third floor of the Modern Wing houses European Modernism from 1900-1950, with American art from this period sequestered in another wing of the museum. Historically for the Art Institute this period represents a tricky jumping off point. The museum is best known for its Impressionist collection. From there the museum fast forwards a bit, zipping through its Picassos, the inescapable Nighthawks, and the AIC’s blockbuster Jackson Pollock, Greyed Rainbow (1953). But with the new space, it can slow down and present a more studied view of European High Modernism.

The third floor collection starts off confidently on familiar ground with a display of Fauvist paintings from the usual suspects along with some surprises, including a Fauvist/Cubist fusion painting by Georges Braque, Little Harbor in Normandy (1909).  The story takes an abrupt turn with Matisse’s Bathers by a River, first painted as a Fauvist fantasy in 1909-10, then repainted in 1913 as Matisse's response to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, then repainted again in 1917. The full force of the artistic crisis in Teens art is exemplified by this single monumental painting: one third Fauvist, one third Cubist, one third chronic despair. But then—maybe I wasn’t proceeding through the gallery correctly—you move on and there’s Picasso back in his Blue Period funk with The Old Guitarist (1903-04).

Beyond the first gallery it becomes clear that while the AIC has a terrific collection of Modernist art, it’s not MoMA. The AIC doesn’t try to present a comprehensive display of Modernism. The AIC’s collection of German Modernism is limited, pretty much, to a pair of Beckmanns: his Reclining Nude (1929), a Cezanne/Matisse mashup painted during a visit to Paris, and a self portrait of the artist glowering in a tux, Beckmann’s last painting before fleeing Nazi Germany. There’s not a single genuine Egon Schiele on display, which is the biggest disappointment of the Modern Wing.  (There are some significant copies, which I’ll get to in the next post on the second floor of the Modern Wing.) It’s left to a handful of Lyonel Feininger paintings (Carnival in Arcueil [1911] in particular) to give a hint of the louche appeal of German Modernism.

What the Modern Wing offers, however, is a tour through some of the lesser known, but still fascinating, tributaries of Modernism. We get to see major artists during their formative years. For instance, there’s an astonishing landscape from Piet Mondrian, Farm Near Duivendrecht (1916). We get to see startling works from unfamiliar artists—in some cases, so unfamiliar they’re not even in the AIC’s online catalog. Nathalija Gontcharov’s Klimt-like Spanish Dancer (1916) is really a painting of a dress, but it’s rendered in such vivid detail that her painting jumps out from the crowd of smoky abstractions of male artists in the gallery.

The third floor galleries offer new insights into familiar Modernists. Three or four examples were enough to convince me that Man Ray was a crummy painter. I saw two terrific Klee paintings from 1929-30. I’ve always liked Klee, but I liked Fleeing Ghost (1929) and Sunset (1930) even more than his later work.  I finally found a Juan Gris painting I liked. Previously whenever I looked at a Gris painting all I ever saw was teal, but The Checkerboard (1915) had greens and browns that existed in nature, and not just in the painter’s head.

Curatorial design re-asserts itself midway through the third floor with a gallery labeled “A Call to Order.” A quick glance around this gallery of post-World War I art and the point is made. However, one gallery later the order quickly dissolves into Surrealism, one of the few Modernist schools AIC has in abundance. The Surrealist collection in the Modern Wing is very good, by which I mean it has not a single Salvador Dali.  Everyone else is there, including, of all people, Le Corbusier. His untitled painting from 1932 is a credible Surrealist pastiche, hung, I noticed, without comment. Next to it was his Purist Still Life Filled with Space (1924), which the curators explained thoroughly. For me the most intriguing Surrealist work on display was a multi-panel wood screen by Yves Tanguy. The screen was supposed to be the entry point into a dream world, but I was transfixed by the thingness of the screen itself—its rough wood, its unoiled hinges. That’s how Surrealism is supposed to work.

The Modern Wing’s European Modernism collection concludes thematically and spatially with Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954). It’s in an anteroom by itself. A bench has been placed there so that you can contemplate Bacon’s mid-century existential scream. However, the room has at least six closet doors in it, plus two sets of glass doors with egress to the hallway. The painting is haunting, but its spell is broken by proliferation of closed doors and people bumping up against the glass doors as they try to figure out whether they should push or pull.

I hope that the curators will find a better solution to the placement of the Bacon. Generally, however, they’ve done an excellent job of presenting European Modernism. The third floor is such an elegant space that it’s hard to go wrong. The second floor, however, is a very different experience.

The Machine for Viewing Art: Renzo Piano's Modern Wing

You don’t enter the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing so much as board it. A bridge reaches deep into Millennium Park, with its corporate-sponsored populism, then carries you into an elegant modernist space built by traditional art patronage. The juxtaposition of these two cultural modes of art consumption is reflected in the deep ambivalence, even confusion, of the first place you land upon within new building. The bridge delivers you to a roof deck offering a spectacular view of the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion, the AT&T Plaza with Anish Kapoor'’s Cloud Gate sculpture, and the Chicago skyline. The deck offers some Scott Burton sculptures which are essentially stone furniture. But the deck is also a white-tablecloth dining space, with a crew of black-clad waitresses hovering about to make sure no one touches the glassware. The view and the Burton sculptures are inviting, but one fears the waitresses are going to shoo everyone away.

The next problem is finding your way to the art. The elevator seems like it would be the most direct route, but it’s crowded with people in wheelchairs. You finally come upon a staircase that seems to be your only way of getting off the roof deck and into the galleries. Sure enough, after several flights you find yourself in front of the ticket office for the Modern Wing. You enter the paid section of the museum in the Griffin Court, a space that manages to be serene and beautiful despite being crowded (we all marched in free that day) and rather narrow. Natural light filters down from the high ceiling. The stairways and gallery entrances are visible along the north wall—a machine for consuming art. You have to pause here for a moment: you’re now fully integrated into the Modern Wing and in the hands of its architect, Renzo Piano. The marvelous details aren’t yet visible, but Piano’s command of proportion and his Cartesian rigor are immediately apparent.

Still a little uncertain how you arrived in the museum, you mount the stairs to the third floor galleries, dedicated to European Modernism from 1900 to 1950. On a sunny Friday all of the lights are off. The galleries are lit solely by sunlight filtering in through the glass roof. Even at noon the light isn’t optimal for viewing artwork, but the subdued light underscored the restless pessimism of art from that period. I will get to the artwork in the next post, but now you can finally appreciate the Piano’s meticulous details. The slender structural elements are joined together with masonic precision. There’s glass everywhere, and yet none of it is bare. White shades are pulled taunt and unusually well integrated into the window frames. The effect is one of unperturbed refinement.

Because it lacks the transparent roof of the third floor, the second floor is less captivating, but still a (mostly) excellent space. The second floor houses American and European contemporary art after 1945. The people to painting ratio shifts in favor of the former, however, and some familiar museum irritants start to intrude upon your experience. I was pressed up against a Jackson Pollack by the crowd, when I would have rather of stood further away. A guy who went through the entire museum wearing his bike helmet blocked my view of a large Mark Rothko. Even after some practice, it’s still not intuitively clear whether you should pull or push upon a door. (One embarrassing moment: I thought I was locked out of the men’s room until another guy pushed open the door and walked right in.)

Piano tucked away the commercial enterprises—the bookstore and the coffee shop—into the museum’s remote corners, which is appreciated. Unfortunately, the second floor Architecture and Design Gallery is also tucked into a corner, and a dark and warm one at that. The A & D gallery has none of Piano’s distinctive touches, such as windows. It’s surprisingly drab. Worse, it doesn’t flow. After reaching the end of the gallery you have to double back and retrace your steps to exit. The alleviate the boxcar-like feeling of the gallery Piano cut open some of the walls and placed display platforms in the gaps. It would seem that you could cut between the platforms and circle back, but there’s a guard there whose only job is to forbid people from slipping through. On a practical and metaphorical level, the experience is a dead end.

The unfortunate Architecture and Design gallery aside, the Modern Wing is exactly what a museum devoted to modern art should be. Piano’s classicism may seem slightly out of place, but some of the art is over a century old now and starting to achieve classical status. There are awkward spaces—the roof deck, the baby changing tables in the restrooms—but overall the building is masterful. Piano’s design has been criticized for lacking any truly distinctive features, but that’s what is so modernist about it. The Modern Wing has to be taken as a whole, like a Mies design.

This is a very sharp-edged design. There isn’t a single curve in the place. And yet it feels inviting without ever pandering. It’s a remarkably focused building, offering its own distinctive experience while mediating between the carnivalesque architecture of Millennium Park and the Gibson Girl dowdiness of the Art Institute’s main building.

In the next post I will look more closely at the art within the Modern Wing.