The New York Times, December 10, 1995
Arts & Leisure, p. 46.
Architecture View / Herbert Muschamp
Of Mondrian, Street Grids And Cities Transcendent
Abstraction, as a way of life, has put down deep roots in
New York City, where the skyscraper can be said to lift
the material toward the spiritual.
Uptown, downtown, crosstown, our town: long before reaching
the painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie," visitors to the
Museum of Modern Art's magnificent Mondrian show may find
themselves drawn into a New York state of mind. Mondrian's
painted grids, of course, fit almost too neatly into the
city with the 90-degree soul. And for an architecture
critic, the show casts a revealing light on the city
itself. It may be entirely coincidental that Mondrian's
grids recall the street plan of Manhattan. Even so, the
paintings and the city both stand at the intersection of
material reality and metaphysical thought.
At the Modern, wall plaques help viewers grasp the idea
that Mondrian's abstract forms are not simply a matter of
composition or design. For Mondrian, and for those
susceptible to the creative process he pursued with such
passion, the departure from representation holds a
spiritual dimension. Perhaps the show itself can help us
perceive the transcendent city outside from a similar point
of view. The engineers who designed New York's grid did
more than carve out identical plots of land from a bumpy
little island. They also defined a metaphysical space, a
test ground for the aspirations that the skyline came to
symbolize.
I have a wandering mind. I confess that while walking
through the show, the thought that haunted me was somewhat
off the wall: Martha Stewart has bought Gordon Bunshaft's
house. I couldn't get that picture out of my mind. Martha
Stewart, living in a glass International Style house in
East Hampton. Here is a writer (I swear by her book on hors
d'oeuvres) who stands for getting back in touch with the
physicality of life. She chops vegetables and even grows
them, raises chickens, bakes bread and does all this messy,
hands-on stuff.
Now she has come to roost in a house that is a classic
statement about the increasing abstraction of modern life.
If Martha Stewart can't escape the tug of abstraction -- if
in fact, she deliberately chooses to dwell within it --
what hope is there for the rest of us?
Actually, I think it's a tribute to Mondrian's art that the
show can put you in mind of something like Martha Stewart.
I say something, rather than someone, because Martha
Stewart, while a real person, is also an abstraction, a
brand name that stands for things like baking bread and
raising chickens. She makes a career of dispensing images
of these things to people who eagerly devour them because
the reality of rising yeast and clucking hens, not to
mention the traditional way of life associated with them,
has become increasingly elusive.
Stewart, in short, is a brilliant example of what Labor
Secretary Robert B. Reich has called a "symbolic analyst,"
the elite worker (including everyone from executives to
artists) in today's economy whose task is to "simplify
reality into abstract images that can be rearranged,
juggled, experimented with, communicated to other
specialists and then, eventually, transformed back into
reality." But reality, with Stewart, is itself an
abstraction; some of her readers choose to grow chickens,
yet most consume the printed and televised images of food,
hearth and family. That's why she ought to feel at home in
Gordon Bunshaft's house.
Symbolic analysts should feel right at home in Mondrian's
studio, or rather the reconstruction of it at the Modern
show. The walls of the studio are hung with scores of
abstract images, which the artist has patiently rearranged,
if not precisely juggled. The result of his experiments
transformed art. But from what reality did Mondrian
initially extract his images?
The modern city was an important source. That is one of the
thrilling revelations of the show. In 1915, just before he
leaped into abstraction, Mondrian created a group of
drawings and paintings based on the cityscape of Paris. The
artist was fascinated by half-demolished buildings whose
innards had been exposed by the stripping away of their
masonry facades. In one painting of 1915, squares of pink
and blue represent the painted walls of apartments and the
orthogonal interior structure that the facade has covered
up. Mondrian's mature work, in other words, traces an arc
that lifts from Paris and touches down in New York 30 years
later, when the city appears through the lens of abstract
form.
The arc parallels the innovations that revolutionized
architecture in the 1920's: the stripping away of the
masonry facade, the exposure of the building's interior by
glass walls, the reduction of the city center to an
abstract diagram.
The progressive abstraction of architecture and city
planning is one of the principal developments of the modern
movement; it is evident in projects like Mies van der
Rohe's Fredrichstrasse project of 1921 and in the
diagrammatic urban plans of Le Corbusier. These European
models transformed New York's architecture in the postwar
decades with buildings like the glass skyscrapers that rose
along Park Avenue and the high-rise complexes like the
Silver Towers on Bleecker Street. By the late 1960's, New
York was well on its way to becoming an abstract city, a
place that came into its own as the world capital of
symbolic analysis, a center for media, information and
global finance.
Abstraction had a place in New York long before the Seagram
Building was built in 1958. The Manhattan street grid is a
piece of engineering, not a work of art. Still, it is an
abstraction, a geometric pattern projected on the ground
without regard for the city's natural topography. To some
extent, the city that arose from that pattern seems to
reverse Mondrian: where he progressed from depicting the
physical cityscape to creating abstract form, New York has
grown from an abstract diagram to the densely built-up
metropolis we see today.
But the city's physicality is deceptive. As the
architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable once observed,
"There is no art as impermanent as architecture." Huxtable
was writing about the volatile real estate market and the
corrosive pressures it brings to bear on the city's
landmarks. Thanks to the preservation movement, which
Huxtable heroically championed, those pressures have been
partly held in check. Not everything solid is destined to
melt into air.
There are other factors, nobler than real estate values,
that contribute to the city's persistent impulse toward
immateriality. In "The Skyward Trend of Thought," the Dutch
architectural historian Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen describes
the metaphysical aspirations of the architects who designed
this century's early skyscrapers. Inspired by the soaring
heights made possible by engineering, architects like
Raymond Hood, Cass Gilbert and Hugh Ferris created designs
that would lift the skyscraper from the material to the
spiritual realm.
The architect's victory over gravity might be made to
represent the groping of earth toward heaven. The
neo-Gothic spires of Gilbert's Woolworth Building and
Hood's American Radiator Building, the dreamy cityscapes
rendered by Ferris: projects like these gave form to the
utopian idea that a commercial city need not exclude the
transcendent; it could pay spectacular homage to it.
Today, that idea may strike us as naive or even cynical.
The architectural historian Carol Willis is surely correct,
in her new book, "Form Follows Finance," to emphasize the
crassly material foundations from which the skyscraper city
arose. Didn't Cass Gilbert, Woolworth's architect, once
call the skyscraper "a machine for making money"? Yet I
think that Mondrian was not wrong in discerning that the
dynamism symbolized by that skyline has a transcendent
dimension all its own.
This is the dimension Mondrian evokes in "Broadway Boogie
Woogie." It is not the moralistic dimension of medieval
piety evoked by Cass Gilbert's neo-Gothic ornament. Rather,
it is the creative realm of the artistic imagination. The
painting does not literally represent the city. It remains
a work of abstraction. But both the painting and its title
inevitably evoke the city's streets; they recall the
network of void space that runs throughout the built-up
metropolis. That void is the space of creativity, the
matrix of movement, of change, of ideas yet unformed, of
the city yet to be built.
For me, the lesson of the Mondrian show is that abstraction
is not a period style, not a dated mode of painting or
designing. It is a contemporary way of being. The show
documents an artist's successful struggle to live
creatively in the present. The city is the record of such
moments.
[Photos] Mondrian's paintings, like "New York City 1,"
above, and skyscrapers like the Seagram Building seem to
spring from a common need for abstraction.
[End]
Arts & Leisure, p. 46.
Architecture View / Herbert Muschamp
Of Mondrian, Street Grids And Cities Transcendent
Abstraction, as a way of life, has put down deep roots in
New York City, where the skyscraper can be said to lift
the material toward the spiritual.
Uptown, downtown, crosstown, our town: long before reaching
the painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie," visitors to the
Museum of Modern Art's magnificent Mondrian show may find
themselves drawn into a New York state of mind. Mondrian's
painted grids, of course, fit almost too neatly into the
city with the 90-degree soul. And for an architecture
critic, the show casts a revealing light on the city
itself. It may be entirely coincidental that Mondrian's
grids recall the street plan of Manhattan. Even so, the
paintings and the city both stand at the intersection of
material reality and metaphysical thought.
At the Modern, wall plaques help viewers grasp the idea
that Mondrian's abstract forms are not simply a matter of
composition or design. For Mondrian, and for those
susceptible to the creative process he pursued with such
passion, the departure from representation holds a
spiritual dimension. Perhaps the show itself can help us
perceive the transcendent city outside from a similar point
of view. The engineers who designed New York's grid did
more than carve out identical plots of land from a bumpy
little island. They also defined a metaphysical space, a
test ground for the aspirations that the skyline came to
symbolize.
I have a wandering mind. I confess that while walking
through the show, the thought that haunted me was somewhat
off the wall: Martha Stewart has bought Gordon Bunshaft's
house. I couldn't get that picture out of my mind. Martha
Stewart, living in a glass International Style house in
East Hampton. Here is a writer (I swear by her book on hors
d'oeuvres) who stands for getting back in touch with the
physicality of life. She chops vegetables and even grows
them, raises chickens, bakes bread and does all this messy,
hands-on stuff.
Now she has come to roost in a house that is a classic
statement about the increasing abstraction of modern life.
If Martha Stewart can't escape the tug of abstraction -- if
in fact, she deliberately chooses to dwell within it --
what hope is there for the rest of us?
Actually, I think it's a tribute to Mondrian's art that the
show can put you in mind of something like Martha Stewart.
I say something, rather than someone, because Martha
Stewart, while a real person, is also an abstraction, a
brand name that stands for things like baking bread and
raising chickens. She makes a career of dispensing images
of these things to people who eagerly devour them because
the reality of rising yeast and clucking hens, not to
mention the traditional way of life associated with them,
has become increasingly elusive.
Stewart, in short, is a brilliant example of what Labor
Secretary Robert B. Reich has called a "symbolic analyst,"
the elite worker (including everyone from executives to
artists) in today's economy whose task is to "simplify
reality into abstract images that can be rearranged,
juggled, experimented with, communicated to other
specialists and then, eventually, transformed back into
reality." But reality, with Stewart, is itself an
abstraction; some of her readers choose to grow chickens,
yet most consume the printed and televised images of food,
hearth and family. That's why she ought to feel at home in
Gordon Bunshaft's house.
Symbolic analysts should feel right at home in Mondrian's
studio, or rather the reconstruction of it at the Modern
show. The walls of the studio are hung with scores of
abstract images, which the artist has patiently rearranged,
if not precisely juggled. The result of his experiments
transformed art. But from what reality did Mondrian
initially extract his images?
The modern city was an important source. That is one of the
thrilling revelations of the show. In 1915, just before he
leaped into abstraction, Mondrian created a group of
drawings and paintings based on the cityscape of Paris. The
artist was fascinated by half-demolished buildings whose
innards had been exposed by the stripping away of their
masonry facades. In one painting of 1915, squares of pink
and blue represent the painted walls of apartments and the
orthogonal interior structure that the facade has covered
up. Mondrian's mature work, in other words, traces an arc
that lifts from Paris and touches down in New York 30 years
later, when the city appears through the lens of abstract
form.
The arc parallels the innovations that revolutionized
architecture in the 1920's: the stripping away of the
masonry facade, the exposure of the building's interior by
glass walls, the reduction of the city center to an
abstract diagram.
The progressive abstraction of architecture and city
planning is one of the principal developments of the modern
movement; it is evident in projects like Mies van der
Rohe's Fredrichstrasse project of 1921 and in the
diagrammatic urban plans of Le Corbusier. These European
models transformed New York's architecture in the postwar
decades with buildings like the glass skyscrapers that rose
along Park Avenue and the high-rise complexes like the
Silver Towers on Bleecker Street. By the late 1960's, New
York was well on its way to becoming an abstract city, a
place that came into its own as the world capital of
symbolic analysis, a center for media, information and
global finance.
Abstraction had a place in New York long before the Seagram
Building was built in 1958. The Manhattan street grid is a
piece of engineering, not a work of art. Still, it is an
abstraction, a geometric pattern projected on the ground
without regard for the city's natural topography. To some
extent, the city that arose from that pattern seems to
reverse Mondrian: where he progressed from depicting the
physical cityscape to creating abstract form, New York has
grown from an abstract diagram to the densely built-up
metropolis we see today.
But the city's physicality is deceptive. As the
architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable once observed,
"There is no art as impermanent as architecture." Huxtable
was writing about the volatile real estate market and the
corrosive pressures it brings to bear on the city's
landmarks. Thanks to the preservation movement, which
Huxtable heroically championed, those pressures have been
partly held in check. Not everything solid is destined to
melt into air.
There are other factors, nobler than real estate values,
that contribute to the city's persistent impulse toward
immateriality. In "The Skyward Trend of Thought," the Dutch
architectural historian Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen describes
the metaphysical aspirations of the architects who designed
this century's early skyscrapers. Inspired by the soaring
heights made possible by engineering, architects like
Raymond Hood, Cass Gilbert and Hugh Ferris created designs
that would lift the skyscraper from the material to the
spiritual realm.
The architect's victory over gravity might be made to
represent the groping of earth toward heaven. The
neo-Gothic spires of Gilbert's Woolworth Building and
Hood's American Radiator Building, the dreamy cityscapes
rendered by Ferris: projects like these gave form to the
utopian idea that a commercial city need not exclude the
transcendent; it could pay spectacular homage to it.
Today, that idea may strike us as naive or even cynical.
The architectural historian Carol Willis is surely correct,
in her new book, "Form Follows Finance," to emphasize the
crassly material foundations from which the skyscraper city
arose. Didn't Cass Gilbert, Woolworth's architect, once
call the skyscraper "a machine for making money"? Yet I
think that Mondrian was not wrong in discerning that the
dynamism symbolized by that skyline has a transcendent
dimension all its own.
This is the dimension Mondrian evokes in "Broadway Boogie
Woogie." It is not the moralistic dimension of medieval
piety evoked by Cass Gilbert's neo-Gothic ornament. Rather,
it is the creative realm of the artistic imagination. The
painting does not literally represent the city. It remains
a work of abstraction. But both the painting and its title
inevitably evoke the city's streets; they recall the
network of void space that runs throughout the built-up
metropolis. That void is the space of creativity, the
matrix of movement, of change, of ideas yet unformed, of
the city yet to be built.
For me, the lesson of the Mondrian show is that abstraction
is not a period style, not a dated mode of painting or
designing. It is a contemporary way of being. The show
documents an artist's successful struggle to live
creatively in the present. The city is the record of such
moments.
[Photos] Mondrian's paintings, like "New York City 1,"
above, and skyscrapers like the Seagram Building seem to
spring from a common need for abstraction.
[End]