ON Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a hearing on Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. National memorials are managed by the National Park Service, which is why the Congressional subcommittee involved itself, even though reviewing architectural design, as Representative Raúl M. Grijalva observed, involves “something well outside our purview.”

What has fueled the Eisenhower memorial controversy in the media are the public pronouncements of two of the president’s granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, who have proclaimed themselves dissatisfied with the design. Understandably, their position is being taken seriously. Yet I am concerned that the growing public brouhaha will ultimately weaken the memorial design.

The Eisenhower memorial is to be located on a parcel of land just south of the National Mall, between the National Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education building. It covers four acres, slightly more than the area of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The proposed memorial would not sprawl over the entire site, as some critics have maintained. What Mr. Gehry has done is to place the memorial to the 34th president in what is effectively a new public park.

The dominant feature of the memorial, and one of the design elements to which the Eisenhower family objects, is the 80-foot-high colonnade that rings the site. The design has been described, somewhat pejoratively, as “Gehryesque,” as if it were an alien presence.

But this is precisely what it is not. As my former colleague on the United States Commission of Fine Arts, Michael McKinnell, pointed out when the commission reviewed the design (we unanimously approved the general concept), this is, in effect, a roofless building; more specifically, it is a roofless classical temple — in a city replete with classical monuments. Moreover, it provides a sense of cohesion to this city’s currently fragmented urban space.

The colonnade supports a metal screen that carries images of the Kansas landscape in which Eisenhower grew up. When first confronted with this idea, I was concerned that mechanically imprinted screens, which the architect insisted on calling “tapestries,” would resemble large billboards.

Since then Mr. Gehry and his collaborators have developed hand-weaving techniques so that the screens really do resemble tapestries. Having seen full-size mock-ups of the screens on the site, I am convinced that their size will not be out of scale with the surroundings.

Another target of the critics is the proposal to include a statue of the president as a youth, recalling that he sometimes referred to himself as a “Kansas farm boy.” Some consider this an affront to a man who was a victorious five-star general as well as a successful two-term president; others find it a touching reminder of Eisenhower’s modest Midwestern roots.

I fall in the second camp, but in either case, it is important to recognize that the statue, whose design has not been finalized, will not be the only, or the largest, representation of the president on the site. The design, as it currently stands, includes two very large bas-reliefs of Eisenhower, one as military leader and one as president, as well as inscribed quotations. In this context, the small statue will have the effect of a footnote.

Still, the debates over the memorial give the impression that Mr. Gehry is effectively being forced on the family, the city and the president’s legacy. But that’s simply not true.

The four finalists who prepared designs for the memorial were picked, by a jury that included Eisenhower’s grandson David, from a list compiled by a panel of leading architects, who in turn chose from among 44 firms that submitted their names to the memorial commission. Ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition was won by Maya Lin, then a college student, it is taken for granted that the best memorial designs are the result of open competitions, in which hundreds of (largely unqualified) individuals compete.

But the accepted wisdom is wrong — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an exception. It’s worth remembering that the Lincoln Memorial was the result of a competition between only two young architects — Henry Bacon and John Russell Pope — and the loser, Pope, was later invited to design the Jefferson Memorial; no one else was considered.

What’s more, both the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial were the objects of criticism when they were proposed: why was Lincoln portrayed as a tired rather than a triumphant leader; why was Jefferson housed in a Roman temple? Today, of course, these memorials are among the country’s most beloved structures.

Presidential memorials take a long time to come to fruition — the Lincoln Memorial took more than 12 years — and the design team will continue refining its design for the Eisenhower memorial. Mr. Gehry, our finest living architect, has already shown himself willing to listen to critical suggestions.

But in this case, too many cooks will definitely spoil the broth. Compromise and consensus are important when devising legislation, but they are a poor recipe for creating a memorial.

Witold Rybczynski is a member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the author, most recently, of “The Biography of a Building.”

Inside the show were walls of sceney photographs, a re-creation of one of Haring’s installations at Performance Space 122 and another blast of music (accompanying a slide show of his famous subway drawings). It looked as if the museum had simply repackaged the mythic Haring — club kid, Warhol protégé and maker of friendly street art — for a younger generation, glamorizing the permissive culture of downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s.

It has done that, stopping well short of Haring’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, at 31. But within the exhibition’s party atmosphere other Harings emerge in early drawings, collages and journals, and, especially, on video. And each one is just as relevant, to young artists today, as the figure celebrated in shows like last year’s “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and on the reality television series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, this show includes equal quantities of works on paper and rarely seen archival objects (about 300 pieces in all). Also here are seven videos, a medium Haring took up as a student at the School of Visual Arts but later abandoned.

He shouldn’t have. He was great at it from the get-go. In his first video, “Painting Myself Into a Corner” (1979), a spry and shirtless Haring bops along to Devo as he works on a large drawing at his feet. He’s simultaneously a Bruce Nauman testing the limits of a confined space and a Jackson Pollock hovering over the floor. In “Phonics” and “Lick Fat Boys,” both from 1980, he plays games with language: breaking words into phonemes and rearranging them, physically with letters on a wall and orally by recitation.

These works sound dry but aren’t. Neither is “Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt,” in which Haring makes eyes at — and eventually makes out with — the camera while dancing spastically to a New Wave beat. One of the little gems of the exhibition, this piece does double duty as a dig at oversexed advertisements for designer jeans and an exuberant expression of queer identity.

The notebooks provide more evidence of Haring’s interest in linguistics and semiotics. The words from “Lick Fat Boys” reappear as poems, puzzles and anagrams, alongside studious jottings about Roland Barthes and the information theorist Abraham Moles.

In these books Haring also formulated his own theory of spatial relationships. “Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature,” a part of it reads.

And in his drawings he put those ideas into practice: first in a series of 25 individual Tetris-like shapes in red gouache, and later in his interlocking forms made from wriggling lines of Sumi ink on large scrolls of paper. The largest and most striking of the examples on view (“Matrix,” from 1983) generates unlikely synergies among pregnant women, U.F.O.’s, clocks, televisions, men with dog heads and crawling babies.

Some of the earlier works remind you that Haring started out, in Kutztown, Pa., as a cartoonist. In the silly series “Manhattan Penis Drawings” (1978), the World Trade Center appears as two phalluses. But other drawings from that same year evoke pre-Columbian art, Paul Klee, Stuart Davis and the Swiss outsider Adolf Wölfli.

Interspersed with the works on paper is plenty of archival material, which isn’t just there for ambience. It makes the point that Haring was a social-media savant in a Xerox and Polaroid age, distributing his art in the form of buttons, fliers and graffiti. (The Keith Haring Foundation is picking up where he left off, posting pages from Haring’s journals on its Tumblr account.)

In 1980, for instance, he photocopied and pasted around the city provocative collages made from cut-up and recombined New York Post headlines. One reads, “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop”; another, “Pope Killed for Freed Hostage.”

More famous are the chalk drawings he made in subway stations, on the sheets of black paper that covered old advertisements. The Brooklyn show ends with an entire gallery of them, though the accompanying slide show of photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi preserves more of the original, semi-illicit context.

At this point you will either have succumbed to the blaring punk and New Wave soundtrack — compiled by DJ Scott Ewalt and available as an iTunes playlist — or fled the galleries altogether. The show was organized by Raphaela Platow, the Contemporary Arts Center’s chief curator; the Brooklyn Museum’s nightclublike presentation has been supervised by its project curator, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, and Patrick Amsellem, a former associate curator of photography.

My advice: Go, and enjoy the party. Relive the Paradise Garage, if you are old enough to have been there; celebrate the progenitor of Banksy, if you weren’t. But keep an eye out for the other Harings: the theory head, the video whiz, the impresario, the cartoonist from Kutztown.

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” continues through July 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

 

Of all the important private art collections in Miami -- and there are many -- the Rubell Family Collection has long been one of the biggest and the best known. Founded by Don and Mera Rubell and today including son Jason in the collecting activities, the sprawling, 45,000-square-foot exhibition space was a Wynwood pioneer when it opened in 1993.

Thanks to the Rubells, Miamians have been exposed to some spectacular, world-class art that we otherwise might have missed. One of the best examples of this was the superb 30 Americans show that opened for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, which highlighted the works of 30 African-American artists, both emerging and established, in a unique, cohesive, informative survey. Those 30 moved on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where the president visited it, and opened on March 16 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.

This year’s exhibit, American Exuberance, is much larger, and maybe as a consequence not as tight in its delivery and thematic thread, intended to convey the changing American condition over several decades. Many of the 190 artworks from 64 artists — both Americans and foreigners who live here — are recent acquisitions to the collection, with 40 of them made in 2011 alone. Rather than trying to follow the rather broad concept, it may be most worthwhile to concentrate on these new works, as where the Rubells go in collecting, others soon follow.

Another way to divvy up this large show would be to tour it under the theme “The Exuberance of Los Angeles Art,” as almost every other work seems to have been made by an artist who calls that West Coast hotspot home. (In fact, another great show of the Rubells from several years ago, called Red Eye, was all about L.A. artists.)

One of those is Richard Jackson, who has created the wild and colorful introductory installations to the exhibit. He has splashed the walls, floor — and in a great touch, even the drinking fountain — in the first room with bright yellow paint, while covering other surfaces with canvases in similarly vibrant primary colors. In the middle is a stainless steel sculpture, called “Upside Down Duck General,” which is, indeed, an upside-down duck.

In a second room, the color and light are outrageously intense; orange light floods in from windows and a door to a deep blue room, in which a mannequin woman, also drenched and dripping in blue, sits at a desk. Jackson made both these rooms for the show, and they make an immediate, sensational impression.

One room is dedicated to popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby, who has four, gigantic spray-painted canvases, abstractions that nonetheless evoke layers of sediment, or horizons, in their horizontal composition. Gigantic is not an exaggeration; standing in front of one of these is simply engulfing.

It is nice to stumble (although hopefully not literally) across the work from Mike Kelley, a member of the influential Cal Arts group that includes another major player in this exhibit, John Baldessari. Kelley’s piece consists of some colorful throw rugs and found stuffed animals. In a death that shocked the arts world, Kelley took his life this past Feb. 1. Nearby is sculptural installation from one of L.A.’s most controversial inhabitants, a familiar piece from Paul McCarthy. It’s of a father, a boy and a goat, and the disquieting proximity of the boy behind the goat gives it a McCarthy signature.

PARIS — These days, the early 17th-century arches of Place des Vosges, the first planned square in Paris and one of King Henri IV’s pet projects, have been elegantly restored, and the linden trees in the garden neatly pruned. Yet when Maria Pergay opened a store there in 1960 to sell the furniture and silverware she had designed, it looked very different.

Philippe Pons

Maria Pergay’s career spans 55 years.

Enlarge This Image

Maria Pergay and Demisch Danant

Flying Carpet Daybed, designed by Maria Pergay in 1968.

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Maria Pergay and Demisch Danant

Chaise Anneaux (Ring Chair), designed by Maria Pergay in 1968.

“There were only four street lamps to light the entire square, and the pavements were so dirty,” she recalled. “Antiquarian book dealers sold books from wooden stalls in the arcades. There were three or four antique shops, and little workshops making jewelery. When I told my friends that I was opening a store on Place des Vosges, they said: ‘But why? No one goes there.’ But I loved this place so much.”

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

Published: March 17, 2012

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

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By CAROL VOGEL

Published: March 18, 2012

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — There’s nothing unusual about hearing French, Italian, German or even Russian spoken at the European Fine Art Fair. But this year, as the doors to the cavernous convention center here opened for the invitation-only preview on Thursday, Chinese was also a noticeable part of the mix.

Keenly aware that Asia is the fastest-growing segment of the art market right now, a group of the fair’s dealers and organizers made a visit to Beijing and Shanghai in September to meet with collectors’ clubs and private museums and to talk up the fair. As a result of that trip alone, officials here said, about 100 visas were issued to Chinese collectors for visits to the Netherlands. And by the time the 10-day fair ends, on Sunday, they expect that 250 to 500 collectors, dealers and other art world figures will have made a trip here from China.

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WHEN Eli Broad, the art collector and philanthropist, decided to build a museum in downtown Los Angeles, he named it The Broad. That pretty much ruled out asking anybody else for money, said Barry Munitz, a governor of the Broad Foundation. The museum, about to break ground on a Diller Scofidio & Renfro building, will have an initial $200 million endowment and has no plans to seek outside funding, according to Joanne Hyler, who will be its director.

But there’s another Broad museum, this one nearing completion at Michigan State University, in East Lansing. Mr. Broad (pronounced Brode), a Michigan State alumnus, and his wife, Edythe, gave $28 million to that cause — far less than the cost of the museum’s new Zaha Hadid building. And that means the museum’s director, Michael Rush, has to raise money before the museum opens this year. “We still have a few million to go,” he said by phone.

But who will donate to a museum named for one of the wealthiest couples in America? (Its official name is the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum.) As Lou Anna K. Simon, the president of Michigan State University, said at an event to publicize the museum, “Some people think Eli can just write another check.” Not only that, but the name on the door suggests that no mater how much a donor contributes, the credit will go to the Broads.

Luckily, Mr. Rush said, the university’s hundreds of thousands of alumni are known for their school spirit. It also helps that the museum is offering naming opportunities; one gallery will bear the name of Edward Minskoff, the New York real estate developer and a Michigan State graduate. Mr. Minskoff wrote in an e-mail that the Broad name, if anything, encouraged him to give. “Eli is one of the most important collectors in the world, and it will only serve to attract other prominent contributors,” he wrote.

Often, though, putting a wealthy donor’s name on the door discourages giving, according to Mr. Munitz and other experts. (He named the Menil Collection in Houston, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis as three museums facing that challenge.)

When Mr. Munitz was president of the J. Paul Getty Trust — endowed by the oil company founder — “it was hard to ask for money with a straight face,” he said. But the trust, he said, is not without need; it is wealthy enough “to do anything it wants to do, which is different from being able to do everything it wants to do.” These days, he said, it seeks donors for some purposes.

Fund-raising may be easier for an institution named for a less towering figure than J. Paul Getty or Eli Broad. The Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish museum in Los Angeles, was named for Jack Skirball and Audrey Skirball-Kenis, wealthy Californians, but its director, Mr. Munitz said, “has always made it clear that the institutionwouldn’t survive and prosper without other major donors.” One such donor, Lloyd Cotsen, the former president of the skin care products company Neutrogena, endowed what is now known as the Cotsen Auditorium at the Skirball Cultural Center. “There wasn’t the sense that other donors would be in the Skirballs’ shadow,” said Mr. Munitz, who is the president of Mr. Cotsen’s foundation.

In Arkansas, the Crystal Bridges Museum was built with a gift from Alice Walton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, and received $800 million in additional funds from the Walton Family Foundation. Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s director, said it had not been difficult to raise additional money. One reason, of course, is that the museum isn’t named Walton.

But even if it had been, Mr. Bacigalupi said, that might not have discouraged donors, because of excitement in the community about the project, which, he said, was fueled by the Walton association.

The museum has signed up 6,000 members, about twice as many as its top executives had expected, since it began its membership program last year. And many of those members gave far more than the $35 minimum — in some cases, thousands of dollars more. Asked if the donors were looking to curry favor with the Waltons — who control much of the economy of this part of Arkansas — Mr. Bacigalupi answered no. After all, being one of thousands of members is akin to being anonymous. Larger donors are not anonymous — the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation gave $10 million to defray the cost of bringing school groups to the museum (even covering lunch and transportation). But Mr. Walker made his money as a Wal-Mart executive, and the Walkers are part of what Mr. Bacigalupi described as a group of prominent families who pitch in to support each other’ projects. He said the museum was benefiting from a “tradition of generosity” in northwest Arkansas.

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By ANN LANDI

Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Taos, N.M.

The enigmatic Agnes Martin, who spent parts of her life in this small mountainous enclave and died here in 2004, gained international acclaim for her spare, luminous canvases, fields of washy color traversed by delicate hand-drawn lines, generally in the shape of a grid. These understated works can carry a big impact, producing a meditative response in viewers and inspiring reams of appreciative criticism. Like many of the Minimalist artists with whom she is often associated, Martin could extract infinite variations on a theme, producing both small drawings and huge paintings that use the grid as their underpinning.

Agnes Martin:

Before the Grid

The Harwood Museum of Art

Through June 17

Yet Martin—born in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock—did not arrive at her winning strategy until she was in her late 50s, and her earlier work is not well known. Indeed, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into full-blown abstraction. In honor of her centenary, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos has tracked down a generous selection of works the artist made in her 30s and 40s. In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, these include biomorphic paintings made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos in the mid-1950s. They are lyrical works in subdued colors, taking on motifs from nature, like "Mid-Winter" (1954) and "The Bluebird" (1954), or hinting at grander, curiously archaic subjects ("The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden," 1953). This last is an explosive semifigurative work, in which the doomed couple are broken into a frenzy of jagged shapes, but more typical are several untitled paintings that show hovering, vaguely geometric or oozy, lifelike forms (the "biomorphs" of biomorphism). The museum has also included three early grid paintings from 1959 and 1961 and a selection of later works on paper in the entry hall, a preamble to the Harwood's permanent gallery of seven large paintings from 1993-94.

 

March 14, 2012

By Adam Lindemann

I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things, as they did with Maurizio Cattelan’s recent Guggenheim retrospective.

 

The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was...

Read more at: adamlindemann.com