The Dubliners

At home, and thinking about Ireland on St. Pat’s Day.

Almost two years ago, I went to Ireland and had a grand time.

What’s grand about Dublin? The people, the parks, the pubs, the presence of history, the nearness of the sea, the museums, the Georgian architecture.

Always a dangerous and irresistible byproduct of travel is the impulse to generalize about a place, a city, a country, from a quick touching down, a mere matter of days, but what I felt there was Dubliners’ eagerness to enjoy life and one another, their being less focussed on smartphones, more on face to face.

Now, at a moment when close encounters have been replaced by social distancing (how fast did that phrase go viral?), with nary a parade in sight, I’m revisiting Dublin virtually and doing a little sharing of the green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Featured in these photographs are the National Gallery, the Long Room of Trinity College’s Old Library and Trinity’s campus, the Little Museum of Dublin, Fallon & Byrne Food Hall, Christ Church Cathedral, Matt the Thresher restaurant, Merrion Square Park, the Temple Bar Food Market, and Cavistons Food Emporium in Sandycove.

Explore more of Dublin in my blog posts about Bloomsday (June 16) in the city and my first trip there, and in this article for GoNomad.

 

Looking at the Met Breuer

Two splendid shows, brave architecture, and ample people-watching opportunities.

 

Photo by Glenda Altarejos 2018/Wikimedia Commons

I hadn’t been to the Met Breuer since it was the home of the Whitney Museum. The Whitney moved downtown in 2015, and a year later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art took over the landmark 1966 building and now operates it as a space dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

It’s not exactly a lovable landmark, more in your face than ingratiating. Designed by that master of Modernism Marcel Breuer, it sits saturnine among the Upper East Side apartment buildings and brownstones, each floor projecting farther into space, looking improbable in more ways than one. 

Improbable, but also confident, even brave. I like the jolt the exterior gives your expectations, and the interior’s capacious galleries, hospitable to the art on exhibit and to the people who come to see it. The windows are few and far between in the galleries; when you do come upon one, the view takes shape as an artwork.

 

Breuer’s use of luscious materials give the interior warmth and texture: walnut parquet, bluestone, and terrazzo floors, bronze fixtures, burnished teak banisters, coffered ceilings and rough-surfaced concrete walls. According to the Met’s website, Breuer himself worked on the lobby’s walls.  

On entering the Breuer, I felt a surge of affection rooted in much earlier visits, when I was a newly-minted grown-up exuberantly exploring the city’s glorious art collections for the first time. The building was young, and so was I. This visit, I was aware of the distance between then and now, but I was just as glad to be there.

 

 

Back to the present. I was there to see the show Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory (through January 12). Her drawings of waves and paintings of starry nights display her astounding artistry. It’s quiet virtuosity, and not just technically brilliant. Celmins uncovers the cosmos in, for instance, a near-microscopic close-up of a shell—mostly dots and tiny curves on a white plane but as much a complex marvel as the humble product of nature it portrays.

Some humor there, too. (What writer doesn’t warm to a giant pencil?)

And tragedy: In the Sixties, Celmins did disturbing, misty paintings of military plane crashes. The horror is veiled in beautiful watery brushstrokes, as if to reproduce the fuzzy nature of visual childhood memories reviewed years later. Or did she choose to blur the images because, mystifyingly, that makes them more terrifying, less easily dismissed?

For the first decade of her life, Celmins lived in the thick of World War II and its aftermath; air strikes from Allied planes were a constant threat as her family fled across Germany to escape the Russian army invasion of their native Latvia. “There was an incredible anxiety from that time that I didn’t really understand at all,” she has said about that period (more details here). And, of course, when she was making this art, the Vietnam War was ramping up.

The show was moving and beautiful (and I haven’t even talked about the moonscapes or the spiderwebs), but I ended up taking more pictures of the museum-goers, whose dress had the same coloration as the dominant palette of the show: white, black, and all the grays in between.

I was drawn to the look of the people, but beyond that, in museums I am sometimes enjoyably distracted by people looking, the interactions between the viewers and the viewed (unless they linger too long in front of something I want to see). When they really look, it’s wonderful to see. One of our better moments as humans. And this show especially rewards such close examination. As Roberta Smith in The New York Times advised in her review: “Bring your nose close. Let it slow you down.”

 

 

 

Museums make great backdrops; the aura of the art rubs off a little on the people in these settings, so the act of standing or taking a step forward takes on a dramatic element. And to get back to the architecture, people nicely set off its scale. Think of those snapshots of tourists posed beside an Egyptian pyramid or a redwood.

 

 

 

On the second floor, the Met Breuer shows off some outstanding recent museum acquisitions. Home Is a Foreign Place, the artwork from which the show’s title was taken, is a set of 36 elegant woodcuts by Zarina Hashmi, created in 1999. Each print can hold its own, but grouped together, the prints speak to their neighbors and form a whole, coherent artwork.

 

And that was just the beginning. Room after room, there was something, lots of surprising, delightful, gorgeous things. Three examples: “Tightrope 5.1” by Elias Sime (2009-14) is made of colored copper telephone wires, e-waste bought in the open-air markets of Addis Ababa; Faith Ringgold’s “Freedom of Speech” (1990) juxtaposes the ideal and the reality; and the installation “Untitled” by Kazuko Miyamoto (1977), is as much air as substance, composed of hundreds of yard of cotton tape yarn. “Home is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context” runs through June 21.

 

One more modern artifact caught my eye as I was leaving: a pay phone, complete with instructions on how to make collect calls. Talk about revisiting the days of my youth.

 

 

For a lucid exposition of the Met Breuer’s architecture, read this NYC Urbanism article. Vija Celmins’ story is told in detail, and the show reviewed, in this New Yorker piece by Calvin Tomkins. And Roberta Smith’s excellent review can be found here.

 

In the Hood

Visiting Dartmouth College’s art museum in Hanover, New Hampshire.

A leaping, frilly Hiroshige wave on an expansive felt panel looms before you as you enter the two-story atrium of the Hood Museum. Reopened last January after three years of renovation and expansion, the Hood makes a strong first impression, with lofty spaces and subtle effects. I was impressed by the textures and attention to detail: glazed bricks with a porcelain sheen, satiny concrete walls, burnt-orange piping along the edge of a tweedy charcoal-gray carpet.  

The Hood can be proud of its collection, 65,000 works of art from all over the world and across millennia, but rather than being simply a rich repository, it focuses first and foremost on its role as a teaching museum.

The highly regarded firm Tod Williams Billy Tsien Architects reconceptualized the original museum, by noted postmodern architect Charles Moore, which opened in 1985. Among the major changes Williams and Tsien made were to add five galleries and three classrooms and create a new entrance and the atrium.

According to the firm’s website, they sought to bolster the Hood’s teaching capabilities and “encourage a sense of curiosity by as much direct contact as possible.” I didn’t know the Moore building, but the new Hood is an airy, lucid structure. The galleries’ dimensions are gracious, and the lighting is excellent, with natural light introduced as much as possible. 

Nonetheless, at some point, my excitement about being there began to fade. As I wandered, I wondered: Can a museum be too perfect?

My first bump in the road came down a hall on the ground floor, when I spotted Mara Superior’s “Angelo Da Vendemmia—Castle Vase.” I was thrilled to see something in a museum by someone I know (at least to say hello to). An unforgiving medium, porcelain in Superior’s hands and sensibility becomes a witty, lyrical vehicle of expression, and this was a finely wrought piece of decorative art. 

Maybe it was the sight of the angel looking out with downcast wings, hands meekly folded in front of her. Maybe it was the vessel’s tucked-in-a-corner location, or the fact that it was sealed in a glass box… but, not for the first time in my museum-going, I felt a sense of dislocation. Not mine, the objects’. Seeing a Navajo rug high on a white wall, silver serving spoons supine within a vitrine, African ceremonial masks untouchable on rigid stands, I’m struck by how removed they are from their original homes, context, life.

Would their makers be dismayed or gratified to see them in these neutral spaces? 

It’s not possible, I know, for the vase to be filled with bachelor buttons, poppies, and Queen Anne’s lace and displayed on a scrubbed wooden table by a sunny window. Any museum would exhibit it as the Hood does. Still, my heart went out to it, and my mood clouded up a little, à la the overcast October sky outside. 

 

 

As I went on, the restrained design of this newly recast museum was having an untoward effect on me. Was the setting too understated, too neutral? Were the surfaces too bland, was there too much white space?  Instead of clearing the way for an energetic exploration, the cool atmosphere seemed to tamp down my enthusiasm, and the art’s vitality.

Seeking an antidote, I homed in on the many spectacular works on exhibit, such as the gorgeous Assyrian reliefs. Showcased on the ground floor, the massive slabs originally decorated the palace of a monstrous king, Ashurnasirpal II. They are a fascinating study in contrasts: larger-than-life scale/fine work, ancientness/realism. Wings/sandals.

 

In one, a divine bodyguard of sorts stands behind the king, a bracelet on his wrist (I had to resist reading it as a Swatch) and a pail in his hand. I was struck by how the anonymous artists from the ninth century BCE emphasized the arm, leg, and hand muscles and in so doing, conveyed the might of this genie, and the king and his empire.

 

 

In the Melanesian gallery, I met a crowd of personalities. Elaborate carving distinguished some objects; many of the suspension hooks, for instance, which served as both talismans and as a means of securing food and other valuables. Others, such as the fish (bottom row), were stylized, wonderfully simple. Whether there was a wealth of detail or the merest suggestion, the objects had mojo.

“Global Contemporary: A Focus on Africa,” an exhibition up through December 1, includes large-scale works that dominate the gallery they are in. My favorite was a dazzling textile sculpture by El Anatsui, an artist whose work I’d first seen at the Yale University Art Gallery. A massive piece (20 by 18 feet), “Hovor” had the awe-inspiring effect of the Assyrian reliefs. El Anatsui achieves a kind of alchemy, art conjured from aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. The title, derived from the Ewe words ho and vor, can be translated as “valuable cloth.”

 

 

In conversation with “Hovor” were the elegant, fantastical engine “V12 Laraki” by Eric Hove and Elias Sime’s “Tightrope: Infatuation,” in which castoff circuit boards have been combined to suggest an intricate aerial view of a city.

 

I gravitated to a variety of paintings that had in common color and energy.

Black Enigma, Adolph Gottlieb, 1946

In the gallery dedicated to Australian aboriginal art, the vivid orange tones and complex patterns of George Tjungurrayi’s “Karrukwarra,” left, and Naata Nungurrayi’s “Marapinti”  heated up the room (both photos are details).

 

 

“Floyd Dell,” John Sloan, 1914

 

Toward the end of my visit, I saw the meteorological mood had lifted. The clouds had broken up; sunlight was breaking through. The dramatic window wall that forms part of the Hood’s facade framed a classic New England vista: a town green, a spectrum of fall foliage, a sharp blue sky.

My own frame of mind had improved. Good intentions are not always enough when it comes to fruitfully spending time in a museum. Sometimes it all clicks, other times, not so much. That’s not necessarily the fault of the place. Is the Hood too perfect? Maybe. Maybe on another day, I’d have been more receptive to its atmosphere.

And since my visit, it’s dawned on me how terrific it is that in a small town in the wilds of northern New England, there’s a museum where you can see a 2,000-year-old Celtic bronze pitcher and a sculpture by Yayoi Kusama—for free, no less.

 

In any case, I would be a sorry thing if I weren’t touched by the many outstanding artworks I saw and—here’s the happy ending—the best came last.

Call me sentimental, I found Paul Sample‘s “The Return” really moving, with its powerful sense of place, its narrative strength, and its warmth of feeling.

Right down the center of the painting, a young G.I., duffle on his shoulder, makes his way along a slippery road. His khaki uniform is at one with the dun tones of the palette. He’s the only living thing on the scene; the only other sign of life is a puff of smoke from a train in the background. Most likely, the town portrayed is in New Hampshire or Vermont; Sample was a Dartmouth grad and taught art there for many years.

 

 

“The Return” represents a deeply emotional and personal experience. Soldiers and sailors went through years of combat en masse, but after demobilization, the last leg of the journey for many of them was making their solitary way back to a small town. There was no band playing at the train station, maybe not even a dog barking. This soldier just puts one foot in front of the other, much as he had done on the march; I hope he found a warm welcome waiting for him when he got to where he was going.

 

 

Tell me, what is the perfect museum in your eyes?

And to read more about the Hood’s expansion and mission, click here.

Art Riches at Yale University

 

What’s the best setting for an art collection? At Yale University, you can experience answers architects have proposed over the past 100 years, as you move through a sweeping art survey. Three connected buildings, one of them designed by noted twentieth-century architect Louis Kahn, form the oldest United States college art museum: the Yale University Art Gallery. The word gallery hardly conveys the scope of its enormous collection. Just across the street, is another treasure house, in another Kahn masterpiece, the Yale Center for British Art (a subject for another time).

To the right of the Gallery lobby is the 1928 neo-Gothic Old Yale Art Gallery, designed by a member of the Class of 1891, Egerton Swartwout (a name fit for a character in a Henry James novel). With no formal training in architecture, he gained entree into the field through a letter of introduction to the redoubtable Stanford White.

The first room you come to is the Sculpture Hall. “Be reverent, you are in the presence of Art” is the message of this nave-like place. And you comply.

 

Hard surfaces: marble and stone. Tough guys: warriors, rulers, statesmen, and the orator Demosthenes, reputed to have cured himself of stuttering by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. The softest thing in it may be the light falling through leaded glass.

Here and there, the unyielding substances’ vulnerability to hard knocks is revealed—noses lopped off, surfaces eroded. As is their capacity to freeze the ephemeral: a young girl’s stylish hairdo, the delicate folds of a boy’s tunic.

 

Date palms laden with fruit still sway in a wall-mounted Byzantine mosaic floor. (Mosaic photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.)

 

 

The seemingly ephemeral lingers, too, in the form of red pigment on a courtier’s sandals. If not for the museum’s enlightening captions, I might have overlooked the faint traces of paint on the platform wedge depicted on the Assyrian stone relief at one end of the hall.

The massive panel came from the palace of King Assurnasirpal II, in what is now Nimrud, Iraq. (One very nasty man, he reigned from 883 to 859 B.C. and had a penchant for lopping off the noses of those he conquered—while they were still alive.)  Touching, that touch of color having survived nearly 3,000 years. All the more touching, knowing that three years ago ISIS senselessly, deliberately destroyed reconstructed parts of the palace and other treasures in that city.

 

 

I also took a closer look at the Sumerian “Votive Statue of a Man” (ca. 2550-2250 B.C.) after reading its caption. The worshipper, it notes, wears his identity on his sleeve; an inscription there identifies him as the son of Ur-ur, “who seeks good health and long lives for his wife and children.”

His bare toes peek out beneath a “tufted skirt, with four layers of tassels resembling fleece,” a status item.

Such details bring us a breath closer to knowing humans separated from us by millennia.

 

 

 

And that’s just one room.

If you turn left from the gallery lobby, moving farther into the 1953 Louis Kahn building, you come to a big room full of extraordinary African art. The hall itself is subdued, neutral, its most noticeable architectural feature is the cast concrete tetrahedral ceiling. It’s a wonderful, surprisingly warm setting for the art.

 

 

I couldn’t get over “Fragment of a Male Figure,” from the Sokoto culture of Nigeria. Who was he? Cartoonish and tragic, woeful or dyspeptic? Not much is known about this long-ago culture (the figure is dated circa 500 B.C.E.–200 C.E). His story is lost, but what a face. 

 

Maybe it was starting off with the African art and the ancient busts, mosaics, and artifacts from around the Mediterranean, but in making my way around the gallery, I was particularly drawn to the modern artworks and  newly sensitive to the affinities between the old and the new. African art’s profound influence on Modernism is well-known; touring this collection brings it home.

 

The museum deserves a shout-out for its smart juxtapositions, a Jackson Pollock painting by a pair of Giacometti statues, for instance, and the deft, dramatic placement of artwork, such as Brancusi’s “Yellow Bird” (1919) and the wall of works by Bonnard and Vuillard. (Below, Vuillard’s “The Child at the Door”)

 

      

 

As usually happens to me in museums, I fell in love with artworks I’d never seen before, for instance, Nick Cave’s wonderful, mysterious, totemic “Soundsuit” (2006), made of paint, paper, cotton, wood, and fabricated fiberglass; and Florine Stettheimer’s sublime oil portrait of critic, author, and photographer Carl Van Vechten (the purple socks!).

 

 

I met “in person” iconic paintings, including Van Gogh’s “Night Cafe,” Hopper’s “Rooms by the Sea” …

 

 

 

… and used up the last bits of my store of concentration in another vast space, the room dedicated to spectacular Indo-Pacific art, on the third floor of the Louis Kahn building.

 

 

There’s more I could talk about, whole categories skipped, Asian art, European art, American art, contemporary design, but I’ll circle back to African art, to a 2006 assemblage by El Anatsui, a sculptor who works in Ghana and Nigeria.

 

 

From a distance, his immense “Society Woman’s Cloth (Gold)” shimmers with the radiance of precious metals. Up close, you see it’s an illusion—or is it?—the “cloth of gold” is painstakingly fabricated from thousands of aluminum liquor bottle caps linked by copper wire.

My photograph doesn’t do it justice. This piece has it all, scale, detail, originality, depth, artistry, beauty.

A good note to end on.

 

 

 Do you have a college museum near you?

Located in downtown New Haven, the Yale University Art Gallery is free, and you can spend hours exploring its collection on its extensive website.

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing the Light in Santa Fe

What Makes The City Different

In Santa Fe, there are five elements: earth, water, fire, air, light. I’m not the first to observe how it’s strong, but not harsh, how it has a way of delineating, accentuating, adding a glow to everything it touches, as if you were looking through special glasses. (Being someplace new does tend to do that, too.) It was the first thing I noticed about the city when I visited last September, and it’s what lingers.

And that clear, deep, deep-blue sky.

What else? The surprise of so much greenery—and silver-green sage and the not-quite-there silver-violet of Russian sage. I’d heard the Santa Fe area described as high desert; according to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden website, it’s a semiarid steppe. Neither designation suggests lushness, but Santa Feans cultivate herby, fragrant garden plots right in the city center. In nooks and crannies and courtyards, roses, hollyhocks, cardinal flowers, and caryopteris were blooming, in full-blown, luxuriant, late-summer exuberance. (Flowers live in the present, unconcerned about the cold ahead.) I even saw a micropatch of corn around the corner from Santa Fe Plaza.

In fact, Santa Fe was full of surprises for me, and not just because it was my first visit to the Southwest. Santa Fe is famous for its adobe buildings, for instance, but I didn’t realize until I saw them how approachable and sensuous they are. You want to give their smooth shoulders a pat. Adobe’s matte surface gives off a soft, warm glow, as if the sunshine was absorbed deep into those thick walls.

I warmed to the harmony between Santa Fe’s architecture and its natural surroundings. Oddly, it reminded me of a very different part of the world I visited years ago, another place where the built landscape seemed so in sync with the natural one: Nova Scotia. Along its coast, modest houses painted fire-engine red, turquoise, and lemon-yellow (someone told me that they were painted with the same paint used on the fishing boats) stood squarely on gray rock by a steel-blue sea, under untempered northern light.

Opuntia, “a tea house in a glasshouse.”

I didn’t expect to see so many good-looking contemporary structures around the city. (One example, Opuntia, selling teas, coffee, and meals, along with unusual plants, on Shoofly Street in the Railyard District.) The buildings’ neo-industrial style of clean lines and low profile complements the traditional architecture. They sit lightly on their sites, and walls of windows let in that beautiful light. A far cry from the characterless neo-chain-store-style development gobbling up many parts of the country.

Another surprise: Santa Fe is home to the world’s largest collection of folk art. And why not? In New Mexico exquisite, expressive art-making has been going on for a couple of  thousand years.

The Museum of International Folk Art (MoIFA) on Museum Hill houses 130,000 variously playful, joyous, peculiar, moving, original, and archetypal specimens of human creativity. Alexander Girard (1907–1993) and his wife, Susan, donated more than 106,000 of them, and 10,000 of those are on view in the Girard Wing, which he designed. (As you might guess, Girard was a fascinating man, a master designer of furniture, textiles, wallpaper, logos, and more in the post-war era.)

The stripped-down-but-grand warehouse of a hall is brimming with kachinas, embroidered samplers, rugs, model boats and houses, pagodas, and Ferris wheels, miniature tableaux, sculptures, tapestries, weavings, carvings, and unique objects that may just revive your faith in humanity.

Tramp art at MoIFA

I wasn’t so much surprised as entranced by the Santa Fe Farmers Market. Open indoors all year round and also outside when it’s warm enough, the market—a cheerful warehouse with cement floors and big garage doors—is brimming with cheeses, fresh produce, dried beans, herbs, meats, pies, breads, and ristras, of course (the wreaths made from dried chile peppers) as well as soaps, sachets, wool, candles, and more.

Even on an ordinary Saturday, the atmosphere is festive, as if everyone, sellers and shoppers, is buoyed by the beauty and abundance of the goods on display. Despite the size of the market, it has a homey feel to it, with its handmade signs, checked tablecloths, and friendly vendors. A great place for people-watching.

There’s more to say about Santa Fe, but maybe I’ll save it for another post. You can also read about my trip (with information on other museums, hotels, restaurants, and various diversions) on the travel website gonomad.com.

Have you been to Santa Fe? Are you a fan of The City Different? Leave a comment about what surprised you and what won you over. 

Taking In Taliesin

Entering into the world of Frank Lloyd Wright at his landmark Wisconsin estate

It’s been a struggle to figure out how to talk about Taliesin. It’s not as though there isn’t plenty to say; it’s more a matter of where to start and how to stop. Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work have been written about extensively, the former being as sensational in many ways as the latter, so the trick is to avoid saying more than I know or attempting to say it all.

I’m not sure anything less than seeing Taliesin for yourself conveys the pleasure of being there. It is an exquisite, full-blown aesthetic vision; everywhere you look, you’ll see something worth looking at, even if you don’t think of yourself as a Frank Lloyd Wright fan or even especially interested in architecture. If you are a fan of Wright’s work, you’ll find it an immersive experience, one that gets you up close to his passions, obsessions, and sources of inspiration.

It’s saying something that the four-hour tour offered by Taliesin Preservation (one of several tours), didn’t seem a second too long.

Our guide had a lot to do with that. Margaret (above) is a retired actor with a marvelous voice, a knack for storytelling, a wealth of knowledge, and the actor’s talent for shifting the emotional tenor of the moment from playful to dramatic. (And a little “party,” as she called it, about halfway through the tour, with coffee, lemonade, cookies, and other treats set out on the terrace of the house, gave us all our second wind.)

Taliesin is both the name of the 800-acre estate, and the house that is its centerpiece,  created by Wright over a span of nearly 50 years in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The setting is rural, mostly hills, fields, and woods; the village center is a few miles away. Chicago, incidentally, is a three-hour drive away; Madison, the state capital and home to the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus, is about 45 minutes away.

On the estate are the house that was Wright’s primary residence from 1911 to 1959, the Romeo and Juliet Tower, Tan-y-Deri, a house he built for his sister Jane Porter and her husband, the Midway Barns (above) and other farm buildings, including a couple converted by students in the school of architecture into dwellings, and Hillside (below). The last was originally the location of the school that Wright’s aunts, Jane and Ellen C. Lloyd Jones, founded in the late 1890s; it now is the warm-weather quarters for the School of Architecture at Taliesin.

Eight hundred acres seems to have been hardly enough space for Wright’s genius to express itself. It is a bit overwhelming to take in, all the more so when you start thinking about what it took–the money, the time, the labor–to create it and keep it all going and growing. The house alone has wings and levels and additions and courtyards, porches, walkways, terraces… In Hillside, there is an assembly room, a dining hall, a barn of a workroom, with row upon row of old-fashioned drafting tables, dormitory space for students, and a theater.

The heart of Taliesin is the house. Begun in 1911, it was Wright’s primary home, his studio, his refuge, and his creative wellspring. Experiencing it brings home the nature of Wright’s genius, nature being the key word.

Local limestone is the predominant building material. The walls, shelves, garden seats, balcony ledges, pools, inglenooks, hearths, and other structural elements appear as if they’ve always been there, as much a part of the setting as the trees and grasses, but a closer look reveals how the stone was masterfully worked to emphasize its intricate patterns and texture—to reveal its essence,.

Interior stucco walls are tinted with earthy pigments—shadowy ocher, raw sienna, deep rose—and punctuated by dark-stained wooden beams. Picture windows blur the distinction between outside and in, bringing in the landscape, extending the living space outward into the pastoral views. (Walls of glass have become so much the norm today, we may not realize how innovative they were a century ago.)

Big windows were one of the ways that Wright varied the mood from one room to the next. He made some spaces low-ceilinged, small, and intimate, and others impressive, airy, expansive.

Wright preferred to design the furniture that went into his buildings whenever resources and his clients permitted; there are stories about how he rearranged the furniture even in houses he was just visiting. Not all of his designs worked well: office staff at his iconic Johnson Wax headquarters regularly fell off his three-legged chairs.

At Taliesin, Wright went to town with the built-in furnishings he favored. Among the banquettes and bookcases are specimens of the  extraordinary collection of Asian art he amassed over his lifetime. Ancient Chinese screens, massive ceramic pots, blue-and-white vases, a carved sedan chair, Buddhist sculptures, cast-iron Foo dogs are precisely placed for maximum effect but, like the stonework, seem right at home.

Framing and enclosing the interiors are gardens that incorporate a variety of plantings: arbors of wisteria, lilacs cascading down a slope, may apples and columbines popping up in terraced beds, scraggy pines, a trio of birches.

The landscaping adds to the feeling of being in the “floating world” of one of Wright’s ukiyo-e prints. He once said, “If Japanese prints were to be deducted from my education, I don’t know what direction the whole might have taken.” (You can read about Wright’s own personal Japonisme in this Smithsonian.com article.) I didn’t fully understand how much Asian culture had influenced Wright, considered one of America’s greatest architects, born and bred in the heartland, the creator of the Prairie Houses and the Usonian (as in United States of North America) Houses, until I toured Taliesin.

Wright was “continuously  inventing and reinventing himself,” according to Brendan Gill’s biography, and “incessantly added to and tinkered with” his earlier Oak Park, Illinois house, in the two decades he lived there.

Calamity and tragedy made re-creating Taliesin a necessity several times over. It is still a work in progress, as its stewards, Taliesin Preservation, work to maintain, restore, and upgrade parts of the estate. But that necessity also provided an outlet for Wright’s tremendous creative restlessness and energy and seemingly infinite supply of ideas (he pretty much gave up sleeping toward the end of his life—too much to do).

Romeo and Juliet Tower, a replica of the windmill that stood a century or so longer than Wright’s uncles predicted it would.

Lunch is served … at Riverview Terrace Cafe, the Wright-designed restaurant in the Taliesin visitor center.

Although it was deeply satisfying to see how he brought his many ideas together into an irresistibly beautiful whole, I know that in four hours, I just scratched the surface of Taliesin’s splendors. If you go, you may be bitten by the bug and join the ranks of Wright pilgrims (a few were on the tour with me) who seek out more of his sites, such as Monona Terrace, the civic center in Madison, Wisconsin, built 59 years after Wright first proposed it.

In New York, Looking at Art

Earlier this month, New York City Marathoners were wending their way through the five boroughs. It was heartening to see how many thousands turned out to run and how many to cheer them on as they came through the warm drizzle, only five days after the terrorist attack in lower Manhattan. It was reassuring to see law enforcement officials of every stripe, the garbage trucks and dump trucks blocking access to the race route.

 

And it was cognitively dissonant, the contrast between the crowd’s roaring enthusiasm of and the somber effect of heavy-duty security everywhere.

That day, I wended my way down through the marshy, watery, sometimes wasted and stricken, sometimes strictly suburban, sometimes surprisingly lovely landscapes of southern Connecticut via Metro North, then from Grand Central up Fifth Avenue, around the fringes of the marathon, along the paths of Central Park to the Guggenheim.

At the southeast entrance to the park right now is Ai Weiwei’s “Gilded Cage,” just one of the artworks that make up “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” installed in 300 locations around the city.  Beautiful and unsettling–what a gilded cage is all about–the 24-foot-tall sculpture, fitted with turnstiles inside and designed to let you look up through the opening at the top at a sky you can’t reach, comments on the current desire of some people to keep some other people out, and the effects on all of us within, e.g., the confining, stultifying effects of control and ignorance borne of insularity.

Meanwhile, as tourists explored the cage’s ins and outs, an employee of Bendel’s on Fifth Avenue got ready for the shoppers about to come through its golden doors.

The main show at the Guggenheim is “Art and China After 1989,” sculpture, paintings, videos, made since the year of Tiananmen Square. I get why it’s worth spending time with, but I felt mostly more dutiful than excited by the show, heavy on the Conceptual art, which try as I might to meet it halfway, often doesn’t do it for me. On a different day, in a different mood, I might have been more receptive. Some of the art goers that afternoon, though, were riveted by it, and their giggles and hoots of delight were contagious among the more “mature” visitors.

More art lovers.

My receptivity cranked way up when I got to the room of Brancusi sculptures and photographs and the exhibition “Josef Albers in Mexico.”

 

Brancusi’s “The Muse” is a serene, silken marble bust on a rough-hewn oak pedestal, an essential pairing. Its backstory includes a legal tussle with the widow of  the Bulova watch magnate, confiscation by sheriffs, ownership by an art dealer who went to jail for tax evasion and evaded prison for much more heinous crimes,  and a long-awaited reunion with the museum and its then-director in 1985. I think I’m glad I didn’t know all that when I was absorbing its presence. Another piece in the gallery, a sleek, seamless, stylized, polished, and perfect swish of marble, immediately reads “seal.” And what is its title? “The Miracle (Seal [I]).”

 

The Albers show (through Feb. 18) focuses on Josef and wife Anni’s love affair with Mexico and the influence it had on Josef’s art. (Anni was an accomplished, original artist; more about them both here.) They started visiting its sacred sites after emigrating from Germany in 1933 to North Carolina (after the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus), and over the next three decades, they made 13 excursions there. You can see Albers’ fascination/fixation with color evolving. I never really appreciated his paintings before–they seemed cool, in the service of theory. In this exhibition, they have warmth, they glow. They struck me as being less about control, more about discovery. “In order to use color effectively, it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually,” Albers wrote in Interaction of Color. These paintings’ combinations of colors are sometimes tricky, often startling and emotional, and seeing them “live” rather than in reproduction, you see the texture, not from the oils but from the pasteboard they were painted on.

You have to get in close to see what’s going on in his photographs of pre-Columbian ancient monuments, especially the collages of contact sheet images cut up and painstakingly arranged together. In a quiet way, they reveal that desire toward containment, organization, classification that becomes full-blown in the iconic Albers “Homage” paintings of squares of reds, yellows, blues.

 

All wonderful, but the best was yet to come. Next: Louise Bourgeois at MoMA.