The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands: a beautiful show organized by a young curator that makes a cogent case for the work of a young artist. In a season when many New York museums are devoting a lot of energy to the past, the Whitney’s survey of work by Wade Guyton stands out as a cause for optimism. Yes, interesting art is being made here and now. And yes, there are serious ways that museums can present this art that are beyond the scope of even the richest commercial galleries.

Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,” referring to computer operating systems.

Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images, combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.

One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and architecture that permeates our culture from the artist’s loft to the corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday lives.

While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them; they emerge with glitches and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or stutters — that record the process of their own making, stress the almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life.

The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the exhibition’s first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s. Even more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art.

The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog essay illuminating this artist’s development, and he plotted, in collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80 works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U’s from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of 17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed in a tight row they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact individual works, temporarily brought together.

Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the 1970s and ’80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College, and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and mirrored plexiglass.

In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them through his printer, superimposing lines, X’s, thick bands or grids on their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed on an image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally necessary, not decorative.

By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on canvas, making paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the Black paintings of Frank Stella (especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts imposing white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark Rothko’s veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented X’s can summon more Stella Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate logos.

A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work of Color Field abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited side by side, where they are printed in similar scales but with quite different results in tone and texture. In both paintings two large black dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a clownish air.

The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original scale, in several computer drawings that are sandwiched between plexiglass in a big four-square frame that mimics both a window and a canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella aluminum stripe painting and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the stripes culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and much enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the other nearly 30 — that cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here they seem extravagant and bold, yet they also resemble large bolts of fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer creating trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The extreme magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the green as a twill pattern, the red as tweed fuzzy with little orange dots.

In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the big-statement grandeur of these works is played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by “Drawings for a Large Picture,” which consists of 85 unframed computer drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with eye-popping blue linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition of images in our time.

-By Roberta Smith

By Willard Spiegelman
Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a “foster-child of silence and slow time” and a “sylvan historian.” He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 

‘Lavender Disaster’ (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

 

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit “Silence” at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won’t experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano’s exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage’s remark that “there’s no such thing as silence.” The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein’s vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf “Untitled (Monogold).” Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer’s patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. “Silence” may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol’s depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, “Little Electric Chair,” is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black “Abstract Painting” in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word “Silence” above the electric chair in the death chamber. “Silence” surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some “talk” to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that “only silence and love do justice to a great work of art,” but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller’s “Cenotaph” (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2006 “AION” (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats’s “slow time” reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence’s major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage’s now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) “4’33”“: a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be “played” by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer’s film “Two Times 4’ 33”” stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It’s impossible to know if he’s playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer’s clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it’s Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer’s installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay “Some Words on Silence” appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.

 

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Ghosts in the Machine , at the New Museum, features some 140 works, including “Movie-Drome,” a mix of projected films, slides and drawings on the walls of a hemispherical room, by the filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 19, 2012

If “Ghosts in the Machine,” an ambitious, multitasking, somewhat austere exhibition at the New Museum were itself a machine, it would have lots of moving parts, but not all of them would be performing with equal efficiency.

Walking through this enormous show, which has been orchestrated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s associate director and head of exhibitions, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, its curator, can call to mind one of Marcel Duchamp’s lesser-known quips. In a 1963 interview in Vogue, cited in Calvin Tomkins’s 1996 biography of him, Duchamp claimed that the aesthetic life span of an art object — what he called its “emanation” — “doesn’t last more than 20 or 30 years.” Referring to his most famous painting, the 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” he added, “I mean, for example that my ‘Nude’ is dead, completely dead.” Mr. Tomkins suggests that his subject was half-joking, but only half.

The New Museum show repeatedly proves Duchamp about half right. As smart and thought stirring as this exhibition is, it is also a little short on living, breathing artworks, and slightly overloaded with rather stale ones and other objects and diagrams that, altogether, function primarily as interesting period pieces or historical artifacts.

In the catalog Mr. Gioni writes that the show was not conceived as “a classic historical survey” but as a “cabinet of curiosities.” Casting a wide net and moving quickly and a little capriciously across time and national boundaries, it sets out to examine some of the artistic reflections of our machine-haunted, technology-dependent era, especially in the second half of the last century. It is far less interested in bringing together established masterpieces than in using unfamiliar artworks to shed light on a machine-infested terrain that is as social and psychological as it is visual. The exhibition contains just enough powerful art — including some surprising resurrections — to pull it off.

The show’s mixture of marginal art movements and neglected objects ranges from 1960s Op Art paintings by Bridget Riley and Julian Stanczak to a reconstruction of Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone Energy Accumulator from 1940; sitting in it was supposed to unblock the flow of life energy. There are constant swings among decades, allowing you, for example, in the museum’s lobby, to peruse “The Way Things Go,” the brilliantly witty 1987 video of chain reactions involving ordinary objects by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that is often likened to the creations of Rube Goldberg, and then go upstairs and study some drawings from the 1930s by Goldberg himself, sharpening your appreciation of the analogy. There are works by machine-obsessed outsider artists, healers and mental patients, including a series of suspended wire constructions by the self-taught American sculptor Emery Blagdon (1907-86), who thought they could cure illness. One of the show’s few dips into the premodern era is an 1810 engraving based on the delusional drawing by James Tilly Matthews, an Englishman who is generally considered the first person to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that depicts his domination by a machine he called the Air Loom.

A majority of the show’s roughly 140 artworks, diagrams and related objects date from the mid 1950s to the mid-’70s — the halcyon years of postwar art and, not coincidentally, the beginning of the technological blossoming in which we currently find ourselves. The machine theme means that the show largely avoids the period’s dominant styles — especially Pop and Minimalism — favoring the more science- and technology-focused tendencies that they overrode or shunted aside. These include not only Op Art but also Kinetic art and what might be called op-kinetic hybrids, pursued in particular by little-known Italian artists. There are also several computer-generated films and a cache of wan computer-made drawings. This show repeatedly reminds you that every major scientific advance has artistic repercussions, artists who see it as the basis for something new and revolutionary, a way to go beyond conventional notions of touch, authorship and personal expression (even though it sometimes seems that the baby has been discarded with the bath water).

The largely abstract Op and kinetic works are balanced by profusely image-based efforts that predate Pop’s embrace of popular culture, or dissent from its emphasis on painting while also presaging 1980s appropriation art. These include two impressive resurrections of almost-never-seen works: “Man, Machine and Motion,” a large, rather stilted but nonetheless proto-Pop labyrinthine photo installation from 1955 by the British artist Richard Hamilton, and “Movie-Drome,” from 1963-66, by the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. A dense, hallucinatory mix of projected films, slides and drawings splayed across the walls of a hemispherical room — originally a converted silo in Stony Point, N.Y. — it saw action fewer than five times. An enthralling rediscovery suggestive of a cross between an animated Rauschenberg silk-screen painting and the Internet’s deluge of images, it is a tantalizing rediscovery.

Duchamp is of course one of the show’s foundational presences, represented by a 1959-60 reconstruction of “The Large Glass” from 1915-23, one of modernism’s earliest and certainly most significant depictions of the machine in art. Its subtitle — “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” — highlights the eroticized fusion of machines and humans that is one of the show’s underlying themes. Next to it stands a frightening bedlike structure inspired by the implement of torture central to Kafka’s 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” Complete with an overhead array of needles, it executed its victims by inscribing their crimes on their bodies and was commissioned by the influential Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for his 1975 Duchamp-inspired exhibition “The Bachelor Machines.” (Prior exhibitions about the machine are among this one’s subthemes.)

In another gallery you’ll come across “Crash!,” a short film that the British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard made with Harley Cokeliss in 1971 (more than 20 years before the release of David Cronenberg’s Ballard-based feature of the same name, without the exclamation point). A meditation on the car as the central form and fantasy of modern society — and on the car crash as a kind of wish-fulfillment or consummation — it is both insightful and noticeably dated, especially in its juxtaposition of scenes of a car moving through a carwash and close-ups of a woman showering.

As usual, the stronger works provide built-in criticisms of their neighbors. On the third floor, for example, the rather clinical inertness of the Hamilton photo installation is pointed up by “The History of Nothing,” a 12-minute film from 1963 by Eduardo Paolozzi, another proto-Pop artist working in Britain, that will be new to most viewers. Combining drawings, engravings and photographs with a grinding, spluttering sound track, it depicts a dreamlike urban landscape with a personal intensity that leaves the Hamilton in the dust, while suggesting a missing link between Max Ernst’s collages and the 1968 animation of “Yellow Submarine.”

On the second floor most of the mechanized kinetic works and the eye-buzzing Op reliefs and sculptures keep the eye busy without giving the mind enough to do. Some feel like precursors to nothing so much as screen savers. Exceptions include a piece by the French-Argentine artist Julio le Parc in which big black-and-white moiré circles amusingly suggest woozy eyes, and a small, sweetly solemn motorized aperturelike wall piece in painted wood by the Belgian Pol Bury. More convincing, however, is the straightforward kineticism of Hans Haacke’s 1964-65 “Blue Sail” — a big square of blue chiffon held aloft by the blowing of an electric fan — and Gianni Colombo’s small, dark 1968 walk-in environment, “Elastic Space.” It surrounds the viewer with a luminous, attenuated grid of white cord that is gently stretched this way and that by a quietly whirring motor. Standing inside this work is like inhabiting something akin to a living organism, a friendly, encompassing, unified ghost-machine.

“Ghosts in the Machine” continues through Sept. 30 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

Bernice Steinbaum — sporting giant, playfully baroque Prada eyeglasses and Chinese-inspired couture — is not her usual wisecracking self this afternoon. In a few days, she’ll shut down her two-story gallery, wedged between Wynwood and its chugging art scene and the increasingly tonyDesign District, now with Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Bulgari and Hermés on the way.

“I’m old, baby. I’m 70. I’ve been having lots of second thoughts about closing. But it’s time to recreate myself. And you only live once. And I suspect if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’’ she says about her decision to retire from full-time art dealing.

The still young gallery scene in Wynwood has had its casualties. For all of the buzz about the neighborhood’s rebirth as an art hub, there is no denying Miami still has a way to go before it catches up with deeper, more established art markets. The 10-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach, the most important contemporary art fair in the country, has done plenty to bolster the city’s cultural evolution. But sustaining year-round enthusiasm for art buying has been a struggle for both serious galleries and the upstarts. And recently, a few local artists, among them rising star Jen Stark, and the internationally-successful Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III of the collaborative FriendsWithYou, decided to bail for the more mature, lucrative art capital of Los Angeles.

But Steinbaum says her gallery has remained prosperous and that her decision to sell the property, which she bought in 1998 for $290,000 according to property records (assessed value in 2011 was nearly $1 million,) had nothing to do with the ups and downs of Miami’s art scene.

Two years ago, she lost her husband Harold, a retired physician. And for Steinbaum, that changed everything.

“Our marriage was 49 years in duration. I’m still reaching out to his pillow,” she says. “I had a wonderful life with him. In my naiveté, I thought this would go on forever. How silly. When someone so close to you dies, you are reminded of your own mortality. I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I want to go to the mall. I want to watch Days of Our Lives – is that what that soap opera is called?”

In 2000, when Steinbaum opened her gallery on the corner of 36th Street and North Miami Avenue after a successful 23-year run in Manhattan, there wasn’t much but dust flying off a neighboring 56-acre rail yard that no one imagined would one day sprout into the happening Midtown Miami. The Design District was a desolate if historic collection of low-slung buildings, some housing furniture and fixture showrooms, others waiting out the tumbleweeds. Wynwood, now home to more than 60 galleries and private collection spaces plus an ever-expanding compilation of murals by some of the world’s most important graffiti artists, was nothing but a rough patch of the city known for its early 1990s race riots.

But the New York-born Steinbaum, who moved to Miami to live near her three children who had landed careers here, saw only possibility.

“When I bought the building it was crack-infested,’’ she says. “There were no other galleries here yet. And while I understood that a gallery has to be in an area where other galleries exist, you have to be able to do more than sell. You have to have exchanges with artists. And there were already artists who had studios nearby. I was guaranteed they would come. Artists have an insatiable curiosity. ‘’

Continue...See full article via miamiherald.com

Gustav Klimt: 150 Anniversary Celebration
Neue Galerie
Through Aug. 27

New York

Few artists evoke the troubled opulence of Vienna before World War I as vividly as Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Neue Galerie has mounted an exhibition of paintings and drawings from its own and private collections.

"Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration" is not the exhausting blockbuster you might expect. Instead, having staged a larger Klimt show in 2007, the Neue Galerie has now zeroed in on some of his top works, offering a succinct and cogent presentation of Klimt's fairly rapid artistic evolution from polished academic realism toward his distinct, increasingly abstract style vividly linked to Art Nouveau.

Klimt absorbed old and recent influences as he needed them, from ancient Egypt and Byzantium through 19th-century Orientalism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Among the show's landscapes, "The Park of Schloss Kammer" (c. 1910) presents a shimmering blend of French influences—the massive trees and dappled background light rendered with Pointillist textures, the opalescent lake suggesting one of Monet's water-lily views. "Forester House in Weissenbach on the Attersee" (1914) is another wonderfully decorative composition, its textures of slate roof, flower-strewn lawn and vine-covered wall punctuated by the open casement windows whose slightly wavy delineation conjures up the flamelike intensity of Van Gogh.

Beyond the visual impact of Klimt's portraits and figure studies, their allure rides upon their libidinous candor. In the era when the essentially conservative Viennese were disquieted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical probing into the unconscious, Klimt's increasingly rebellious imagery disturbed the establishment. He loved women, and his posing, floating and reclining female subjects seem sexually aware—and willing. Even when they aren't nude, he implies they ought to be.

View Slideshow

Neue Galerie New York/Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer

"Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907).

 

Thus Klimt, who in 1897 co-founded the anticonservative artists group Vienna Secession, was at the artistic center of an imperial capital increasingly divided between the traditions of the Habsburg empire and the revolutionary ideas of a rising generation. Apart from their sexuality, Klimt's oil portraits and allegorical groups reflect this through persistent tension between naturalism and stylization.

"The Dancer" (1916) is a prime example. Her face, bare bosom and legs, painted in morbid blue-gray tones, are engulfed in a polychrome welter of stylized floral patterns. The riotous Japanesque background seems to flow from the dancer's flower-patterned chemise—provocatively unbuttoned. And so busy is that background and enigmatic the perspective, that you can easily miss the yellow daffodils in her left hand. Another naturalistic touch is the meticulous rendering of the dancer's shoes—Klimt pays conspicuous attention to their wide ribbon ties and gracefully curved "Louis" heels, then at the height of fashion. He was, after all, a close companion of the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, with whom he is depicted in several rare photographs hung in the adjoining room.

The stark sensuality of "Pale Face" (1903), suggests 17th-century Dutch portraiture seen through an Art Nouveau lens. The pale pinks and delicate modeling of the subject's calm, sculptural profile are set against softly defined, sinuous black-and-white passages of her hat, hair and coat. And the smokelike quality of these passages is sharply offset by a typical Klimtian touch—a silver-gray checkerboard pattern in the upper right corner further accented with the portrait's only stroke of red.

Not surprisingly, the place of honor is accorded the Neue Galierie's prized possession, the 1907 portrait of Klimt's possible lover, Adele Bloch-Bauer. In all its gleaming allure of gold and silver leaf, this portrait stands as a more modernist riposte to John Singer Sargent's once-notorious portraits of Madame X (1884) and of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888). Like many of Klimt's mature portraits, it is iconic not just because it is so familiar, but because it actually evokes the style of Byzantine and Russian icons, the latter with their characteristic gilt metal coverings. Bloch-Bauer's head, shoulders and arms seem to peer out from behind a carapace of gold, its surface a dazzling swirl of burnished and stippled textures.

It is hard to separate precisely Bloch-Bauer's gown from the elaborately patterned background, or to determine whether she is seated or standing. But in the adjoining gallery a series of eight preparatory drawings for the portrait reveal how painstakingly Klimt worked out the pose and composition that today seem so spontaneous. The drawings also reveal the various ways Klimt arranged her hands to conceal her deformed finger.

Klimt was associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, which was dedicated to raising the quality of design of domestic objects. Placing Klimt's paintings in the context of Viennese decoration are three important Modernist-style clocks, designed by architects Adolf Loos, Otto Prutscher and Josef Urban. And to provide a telling reflection of the jewel-like patterns of the Bloch-Bauer and "Dancer" portraits, the gallery also features a group of brooches and related jewelry whose burnished silver and gilt mounts glow with the seductive radiance of polished cabochon emeralds, opals, carnelians and other precious stones.

When Klimt died in 1918 at age 55, painting and music were at a crossroads, and his late imagery prompts us to speculate which path he'd have taken had he lived into the 1920s and '30s. Would he have reflected Arnold Schoenberg's atonality and become more abstract? Or would he have continued to vent his erotic nature by maintaining his increasingly stylized representational idiom, echoing the late-Romanticism of Richard Strauss? It's tantalizing to ponder.

Mr. Scherer writes about classical music and the fine arts for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared June 26, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Forever Between Two Worlds.

via online.wsj.com

May 23, 2012, 3:04 p.m. ET

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Tom Crane

The Barnes Foundation’s new Philadelphia campus.

Philadelphia

The richness and the eccentricity of the Barnes Collection is legendary; its unequaled concentration of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings far exceeds the number in any major art museum. (Imagine, if you can, 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses and 18 Rousseaus.) Installed in a dense mix of Asian, African and American Indian art and artifacts, with decorative ironwork scattered among the iconic images, it defies all rational curatorial practice. For Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), the physician who devoted a fortune made from a drug of his own invention, Argyrol, to the creation of this extraordinary collection, every item expressed his obsessively personal vision and idiosyncratic ideas about art.

The collection is owned by the Barnes Foundation, established in 1922 under a legal arrangement called an indenture of trust, with the specific stipulation that everything was always to remain exactly as it was in Dr. Barnes’s lifetime. It has been housed in a small building in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pa., commissioned by Dr. Barnes from the distinguished American classicist Paul Cret. The burlap-covered walls of the domestically scaled interiors were crowded with the unconventional groupings he called “ensembles,” meant to provide “teaching moments” about line, color and space to the students of the art school that was part of the foundation. He would wander between his home and the galleries at night, rearranging the unorthodox hangings. Access was limited and visibility was poor, but once you had been there you never forgot it. The Barnes’s quirky magnificence is increasingly rare in today’s corporatized and homogenized art world.

A sampling of some of his collection shown at the Philadelphia Academy in the 1920s was met with outrage and derision. Dr. Barnes retaliated by refusing entry to any member of the Philadelphia establishment, an embittered payback that he nurtured for the rest of his life. When he died in 1951, his will reconfirmed the terms of the indenture, including the stipulation that nothing could ever be moved or changed, to protect his legacy, but also to foreclose any attempt by the Philadelphia art establishment to take over the collection, no longer underappreciated and now enormously valuable.

Michael Moran/OTTO

An exterior detail of the new building.

The ensuing years brought problems of access, administration, deferred maintenance, and disputes and lawsuits with the local community. Mismanagement and the depletion of the endowment eventually led to insolvency and the need for large infusions of cash. A consortium of Philadelphia art institutions and philanthropists, all of whom Dr. Barnes detested, came up with the funds, but with the nonnegotiable provision that the collection had to be moved to Philadelphia. A petition to make the move was granted by the court as a permissible modification of the terms of the indenture. The enemy took over.

A new, vastly enlarged complex that contains the Barnes Collection and expanded administrative, educational and social facilities has just been completed on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, close to the Rodin Museum and not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Critics have denounced the relocation as a steal and a violation; defenders point to increased public access, enhanced programs and additional amenities. There were some conscientious objectors who suggested that the job should be turned down on principle. When Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of New York won the commission through a competition held by the Barnes Foundation, they even received the architectural equivalent of hate mail. They faced a formidable challenge: The one part of the indenture that could not be broken was the prohibition of change—the shapes and sizes of the galleries and the hanging arrangements must all remain the same. The architects had to create a replica that could pass for the real thing.

I take history and authenticity seriously. I have never disguised my defense of originals over copies, or my distaste for the Disneyfication of reality or the more genteel “authentic reproduction,” an oxymoron that devalues the creative act by glossing the knockoff with a false veneer of respectability, because a faux is a fake is a phony, by any other name. And I have been one of the most ardent defenders of the small, personal museum that you remember with particular affection, as opposed to the awe inspired by the increasingly affectless grandeur of our enormous arts institutions that expand relentlessly as their price of admission rises.

So how does it feel to have one’s core beliefs turned upside down? The “new” Barnes that contains the “old” Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. It has changed, but it is unchanged. The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.

The solution goes far toward resolving the problem of the accommodation of the auxiliary functions of today’s museums that increasingly dominate and destroy the art experience. The genius is in the plan. Architecture is not just buildings, but the way in which they are put together to direct our progress through a calculated sequence of spaces, and how those relationships control our movement and mood. In this case, they lead us, physically and emotionally, away from the distraction of the social entertainments and support services to the Barnes itself.

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Saving Dr. Barnes’s Vision

Two long, rectangular, parallel buildings are joined by a soaring interior court, surmounted by a lightbox that filters daylight through a series of baffles into the court as a softly diffused glow, supplanted by artificial light at night. The entry building has the support facilities; the facing building, across the court, contains the collection. At no point do the two buildings touch. Their only connection is through the court, which is also the only way to get to the collection and serves as barrier, buffer and lounge.

The carefully choreographed procession begins with an approach through an allée of trees flanked by long, flat pools of water in a parklike setting designed by landscape architect Laurie Olin. It takes you to a tall slit in the outermost building, where an offset door makes you turn right into an entry area, avoiding an immediate, direct full view of the interior. You turn again to face the serene void of the court, and only then do you see the entrance doors of the Barnes Collection, in the second long building, directly parallel, across the way.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien practice a kinder, gentler modernism, with an enormous sensitivity to materials and textures, and a particular affinity for crafts. They responded immediately to the love of pattern, color and craft that informed all of Dr. Barnes’s acquisitions. Because they knew that the long, flat expanses of wall would lack Cret’s enriching classical ornament, they did not go to the original quarries for the closest match. A warmer, more varied Negev stone is divided into elegantly proportioned sections mounted on stainless steel with slender bronze fins for accents. Delicate reveals for window setbacks add surface interest.

Behind its entrance doors, the “new” Barnes is an uncorrupted, enhanced experience. The paintings are rehung in their original configurations, in rooms of the same size and proportions, the walls covered in the same burlap, windows facing south, as at Merion. If you look closely, you will see many small, subtle details that keep the building from being a lifeless, born-dead replica. Every aspect of the design followed intensive study of the original architecture and the collection—for relevance, not reproduction.

There were infinite drawings and models of the profiles of door frames and ceiling moldings; the simplified woodwork departs from classical formulas to incorporate motifs from Dr. Barnes’s interest in native crafts and cultures. There are hanging fixtures, as at Merion, carefully updated. Fabrics are inspired by Dr. Barnes’s African textiles. Full daylight comes through the windows, and gently raised, coved ceilings that make the galleries feel much more spacious have concealed illumination by Fisher Marantz Stone for a balance of natural and artificial light that reveals the glory of the paintings. The second-floor balcony has been enlarged to permit a better view of Matisse’s spectacular “La Danse,” and his “Joy of Life,” once in a stairwell, has been given its own space. Brooklynites mourning the loss of their Coney Island boardwalk to a concrete replacement will find it in the handsomely recycled wood of the court floor.

The only obvious intervention, the insertion of a classroom and an interior garden between the galleries at either end, may disturb some, but they relieve the aesthetic overload without disturbing the illusion or the flow.

I have been waiting a long time for a building like this. It’s not about flashy starchitect bling, high-tech tricks, minimalist sensory deprivation or narcissistic egos. The Barnes is all about the Barnes. This is what architecture does, when it does it right.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

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By ERIC GIBSON

One of the longest and bitterest

Michael Moran/OTTO

The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the Barnes’s original installation.

Philadelphia

One of the longest and bitterest battles the art world has ever seen—the fight over the future of Philadelphia’s storied Barnes Foundation collection—has, for now, anyway, come to an end with the opening of the superb new facility on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is a win for both advocates and opponents of the move from the foundation’s original location in suburban Merion.

Long in financial peril thanks to a sorry, two-decade-long record of mismanagement, the institution is at last on a sound footing. At the same time, the integrity of Albert C. Barnes’s vision has been preserved. The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the original installation and makes Dr. Barnes himself present as never before.

Its successful outcome notwithstanding, this was a battle that needed to be joined. For at stake was the future of a one-of-a-kind collection and an important episode in the history of American taste, a subject the general public knows too little about.

For Dr. Barnes was a collector like no other, a man whose contributions to the art life of this country were unprecedented in his time and have been unmatched since. Unlike today’s Fashion-Victim Medicis, he didn’t chase after the latest hot thing but bought what moved him; didn’t regard art collecting as a means of social advancement but as an all-absorbing intellectual and spiritual quest; built a permanent home for his collection as an educational institution, not as a monument to himself.

Central to this didactic purpose were the installations, the so-called “ensembles,” nonchronological groupings of objects that mixed media, periods and styles, cultures, fine and decorative arts. Dr. Barnes’s aim was twofold: The point of the ensembles was to show the continuity of all art. In particular, Dr. Barnes wanted to show that modern artists were indebted to, rather than dismissive of, the traditions of the past. And in his teachings and writings, Dr. Barnes drew on his scientific background (as well as the writings of Henry James, John Dewey and George Santayana) to bring a new rigor to the criticism of art, replacing approaches he found intellectually flabby or simply beside the point. He emphasized the formal properties of painting—line, color, space and the like. Today his method might seem rather narrow. But it still has value, particularly as a way into a painting for someone with no prior knowledge—Dr. Barnes’s intended audience. And it’s a welcome antidote to the theory-drenched obscurantism that passes for art criticism today.

In the galleries, Dr. Barnes’s curatorial outlook made for some pretty strange artistic bedfellows. One typically head-snapping juxtaposition places a proto-Cubist Picasso painting of a head near a 16th-century French wood sculpture of the crucified Christ—and those are just two objects among more than two dozen on that wall. The total effect of a single room and certainly of a whole visit could be both confusing and exhilarating. Indeed, one might speak of the Four Stages of the Barnes Experience: Bewilderment, Curiosity, Insight, Appreciation. Whether or not they ultimately “got” the Barnes, all visitors who entered left knowing they had partaken of an art experience of unparalleled richness and intensity. Hence the protracted uproar over the proposed move and earlier rescue plans going back some 20 years. People who know and love the Barnes felt something precious and irreplaceable was in danger of being lost.

The more so because the Barnes’s future too often seemed to be hostage to other agendas. For example, it isn’t entirely clear if the idea hatched in 2002 to move the Barnes downtown happened because it really was thought to be the only way to save the financially beleaguered institution, or because relocation would help then-Gov. Ed Rendell to realize his dream of turning Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a center of cultural tourism. (Around the same time, the state was also negotiating to establish an Alexander Calder museum on the parkway, an effort that ultimately came to naught.)

Still, there was only one relevant issue once the decision to move was made: Would the result be a Disneyfied simulacrum—the Barnes in quotation marks, as it were? Or would visitors have the same intimate, revelatory encounter with works of art in the new locale as in Merion?

Thanks to the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who understood from the beginning the delicate nature of their task, the Barnes experience today is identical to what it was previously. They have created a carefully staged entrance, ensuring that the hurly-burly of the everyday world is left behind so the visitor enters the collection in the proper frame of mind to absorb its riches. It’s an arrangement that recalls Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with its new entrance pavilion by Renzo Piano, which now houses all the necessary but distracting museum functions such as ticketing and coat check to ensure that once inside the Venetian palazzo you are able to focus exclusively on art and taste.

Inside the Barnes’s galleries the architects have made subtle enhancements, such as using a special glass in the windows to admit more daylight than was possible in Dr. Barnes’s day, and reflecting artificial light off raised ceilings. The result is the best of both worlds: The works of art are more visible than previously, and yet the installation is so thoroughly and convincingly replicated that there are times you have to remind yourself that you’re on the parkway, not in Merion.

Especially welcome is the new temporary-exhibition gallery that will be used for shows exploring Dr. Barnes’s life and career in art. The inaugural exhibition, “Ensemble: Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education,” uses works of art and archival material to provide visitors with an excellent primer on Dr. Barnes, his collection and his aesthetic formation. There was nothing like this in Merion, and it is certain to go a long way to dispel the aura of strangeness that has long attached to Dr. Barnes, his vision and his method.

Not everything is perfect. The architects have broken the sequence by inserting an interior garden between two sets of lateral galleries at one end, and done the same thing at the other end with a classroom. It’s a decision that orphans the outermost rooms, thus diminishing the overall effect of the installation. We also could have done without Ellsworth Kelly’s banal geometric sculpture “Barnes Totem” gracing the forecourt. Talk about a downer.

Most perplexing of all, the large, day-lighted central atrium has been named in honor of Walter and Leonora Annenberg. Whatever his virtues as a collector and philanthropist, Annenberg was a longtime foe of Dr. Barnes. If any aspect of this new arrangement is likely to have Dr. Barnes fulminating in his grave, it’s the presence of the Annenberg name on this new museum.

Those are, however, details. The fact is that after touring this new facility, you come away convinced that the Barnes Foundation is poised at the beginning of a bright new future—one that will allow its magnificent collection to become better known, Dr. Barnes’s ideas to be more widely understood, and the man himself to be recognized as the generous, idealistic visionary he was instead of the eccentric curmudgeon of popular caricature. It’s a future that could scarcely be imagined until now, and one that everyone, including those of us critical of the Barnes’s stewards in the past, has a stake in seeing come to pass.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The new Barnes Foundation, in a new shell in Philadelphia. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 17, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — The Barnes Foundation’s move from suburban Philadelphia to the center of the city caused art lovers lots of worry.

Multimedia

Slide Show

The New Barnes

Interactive Feature

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The west wall of the main room of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, with Seurat’s “Models” over Cézanne’s “Card Players.” 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Matisse’s Fauve masterpiece “Joie de Vivre,” in a new spot.

Devotees of this great polyglot collection, heavy with Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse, which the omnivore art shopper Albert C. Barnes amassed between 1912 and his death in 1951, were appalled by the idea. Barnes spent years obsessively arranging his installation cheek-by-jowl in the mansion in Lower Merion, Pa., that he built for the purpose and opened in 1925, and he stipulated that, after he died, it should remain exactly as it was.

In 2002 the foundation’s board — constrained by limits on attendance and public hours imposed by zoning restrictions — announced plans to relocate. Many people, including a group that sued to stop the move, were sure that it could only desecrate this singular institution.

Others, myself included, did not object to the move per se, but felt that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space, as promised by the trustees, was a terrible idea. To us it seemed time to at least loosen up Barnes’s straitjacketed displays, wonderful as they often were. And why go to the trouble of moving the collection to a more accessible location when the galleries were not going to be any bigger?

And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong. Against all odds, the museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old Barnes, only better.

It is easier to get to, more comfortable and user-friendly, and, above all, blessed with state-of-the-art lighting that makes the collection much, much easier to see. And Barnes’s exuberant vision of art as a relatively egalitarian aggregate of the fine, the decorative and the functional comes across more clearly, justifying its perpetuation with a new force.

As a result, his quirky institution is suddenly on the verge of becoming the prominent and influential national treasure that it has long deserved to be. It is also positioned to make an important contribution to the way we look at and think about art.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who pulled off this feat — and somehow managed to avoid the feeling of plastic fakeness that Barnes purists and Barnes skeptics alike were anticipating — deserves our gratitude. The Merion building and its 24 galleries, and Barnes’s arrangements within them, have been recreated with amazing fidelity in terms of proportions, window placement and finishings, albeit in a slightly more modern style. The structure is oriented to the south, exactly as in Merion; the same mustard-colored burlap covers the walls; the same plain wood molding outlines doors and baseboards.

As for Barnes’s arrangements, almost nothing is out of place: not one of the hundreds of great French paintings, none of the pieces of Americana, nor any of the Greek or African sculptures, the small New Mexican wood-panel santos or the scores of wrought-iron hinges, locks, door handles and whatnot that dot the interstices like unusually tangible bits of wallpaper pattern, often subtly reiterating the compositions of the paintings.

The only change to the installation — a big improvement — is the removal of the colorful fantasy of nudes in a landscape that is Matisse’s great Fauve masterpiece, “Joie de Vivre,” from its humiliating position on the stairway landing to a large alcove on the balcony overlooking the main gallery.

At the same time, some major systemic improvements make everything breathe in a new way. Especially important is the lighting system, designed by Paul Marantz, which seamlessly mixes natural and artificial illumination into a diffuse, even light, and had early visitors asking if some of the paintings had been cleaned. (They hadn’t.) There is also the spatial largess: The recreated building is set within a larger structure that includes a raft of amenities, among them a cafe, an auditorium and a gracious garden court with lots of padded benches, as well as a 5,000-square-foot temporary exhibition gallery that pulses with curatorial possibility.

Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening, intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so. They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition unto itself — a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities — where you can spend hours parsing the echoes and divergences among the works in terms of color, composition, theme, surface and light.

In Room 4, two Chardins flank a (school of) El Greco beneath 16th-century carved-wood reliefs from France; almost all depict women engaged in various tasks. In Room 14, painted Chinese fans hover beside Matisse’s magnificent 1907 portrait of his wife in a red madras headdress, with a folkish Surrealist painting by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of Victor, positioned above. Several American Modernists make recurring appearances, including Charles Demuth, Maurice Prendergast and William Glackens, a former high school classmate of Barnes’s who turned him on to Modern art; so, to lesser extent, do artists who taught at the Barnes. In front of several Renoirs are wonderful pots by that painter’s son, the future filmmaker Jean.

The twin poles of Barnes’s world are Renoir, represented by 181 works (the largest concentration in the world), and Cézanne, represented by 69. Barnes never seemed to tire of playing these two giants off each other, alternating the fuzzy, sybaritic pinks of Renoir’s forms — whether female or floral — with Cézanne’s anxious, angular blues, greens and rusts, played out in landscapes, still lifes and numerous paintings of bathers, early and late, small and large.

Their back-and-forth dominates several galleries, and the Renoirs are so ubiquitous that at times they seem to become a kind of background noise. That is, until you come up against a great one, like “Leaving the Conservatory,” an imposing full-length grouping of several Parisians dressed in shades of gray that hangs above a predominantly gray-blue Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. These wonderful chests, of which there are several outstanding examples, as well as the numerous ceramics, affirm Barnes’s appreciation of painting as a free-range language expressed in various materials, not only oil on canvas.

There are also seemingly endless surprises, like the lone work by the postwar Italian artist Afro in Room 10, which also contains a veritable Matisse retrospective, including a small, early still life that you could swear is a Manet, and numerous works by Picasso and Modigliani.

And there are oddities everywhere that might not pass muster in a more conventional museum, like a European, possibly 15th-century, panel in Room 23, depicting a Flight Into Egypt. The colors are rich, the figures big and wonderfully drawn, but the real life of the picture emanates from the greenery, applied in loose splotches that bring to mind the brushy, sponged-on glazes of American redware ceramics. Looking at the slightly bizarre bits of green, you have no idea if they were part of the original picture or added later, but you don’t care, and perhaps Barnes did not, either. It made a point about continuities of human touch and technique, and he went for it.

In many ways the rebirth of the Barnes could not be better timed. It occurs at a point of intense public interest in art — witness the fact that since the project’s groundbreaking in November 2009, membership has jumped from 400 to nearly 20,000 — and it approaches art with an unfettered directness that is becoming rare among major American museums, of which the Barnes is now one.

At a moment when so many museums seem bent on turning themselves into entertainment and social centers, or frequently mount dry, overly academic exhibitions, the Barnes irrefutably foregrounds art and nonverbal visual experience. The galleries are devoid of text panels and even wall labels; most works have the artist’s last name or some other cultural identification nailed to their frames, and there are printed guides stored in benches in each gallery that identify the works on view.

Audio guides will be available, but really, there is nothing to do here but look at art and think for yourself. The dense clusters and juxtapositions provide more than enough to work with: a visual deluge of forms — in different mediums and materials, from widely spread times and places — that make looking and thinking reflexive, rapturous and liberating.

At the same time, the relocation of the Barnes, with all its mixings and juxtapositions, comes at a time when curators of all kinds — from museum professionals to artists organizing gallery group shows — are increasingly interested in cross-cultural, cross-medium presentations of artworks. In this regard the Barnes looks utterly prescient.

And let’s not overlook the implications of that temporary gallery, which is opening with an exhibition about Barnes’s life and the history of the foundation. This space creates the possibility of a new flexibility with regard to the meticulous re-creation of the Merion galleries. They suggest that the Barnes may be able to have its cake and eat it too, hold on to its past and also forge a new future.

Barnes purists may consider this heresy, but Barnes’s installation should sometimes change and move a little. There are moments, especially in the upstairs galleries among the plethora of drawings and Greek and African objects, where the presentation palls and oppresses a bit, even now. The symmetrical patchwork doesn’t always come across as meticulously assembled; it can seem arbitrary and maniacally crowded. More generally, there is simply too much there for everything to remain in perpetual lockdown.

The Barnes curators need to come up with creative ways — say for two or three months, every other year — to extract certain works from the gallery collection, walk them across the garden court and put them on view in the temporary-exhibition galleries for less encumbered viewing. Set out all the African works, for example. Give us a Cézanne or a Matisse retrospective. Or a survey of the Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chests and related Americana whose hues and surfaces Barnes was so alive to.

Barnes did so much, more than he was capable of knowing. We can know how much only if his orchestrations are taken apart and rearranged ever so slightly and briefly, once in a while. It is great that Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects, adhered to his vision so sensitively, providing a kind of unwaveringly accurate baseline. But every so often the pieces of even his most revelatory ensembles should be freed from his matrix, just as his amazing achievement has been liberated from Merion.

The Barnes Foundation is at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia; (215) 278-7000. It is open Wednesday through Monday from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., except Friday, when it stays open until 10 p.m. For reservations and information, go tobarnesfoundation.org.