Anne Truitt at Matthew Marks Gallery

Columns. The first, minimal works by American artist Anne Truitt, gaining their distinction from the variation Truitt achieves through the essential repetition of this form, varied only in scale and color. It becomes, in effect, a form of aesthetic biology; the evolution into being of a formal species.

The second is taken at the Roman ruins of Fiesole, Italy. From classical post-and-beam, the post now springs upward into an arch. Note also the "post" in the background, a typical Renaissance observation tower.

 

Tour de France

 In honor of the recent Tour de France, which we watch as much for the 3-week diorama of fairy-tale French countryside as for the shifting wiles and superhuman stamina of the race itself.

First image is of two tables by Gae Aulenti; the second is a one-off (I presume) chandelier made of bicycle wheels in a hair salon in Florence.  

The Birds

 Oops, I cropped the birds. Here they are--two lovebirds.

 Second picture is Lynne in the Boboli Gardens one rainy Sunday when we seemed to have the wet streets and tenebrous cafes pretty much to ourselves.

 The clay-tiled dome floats on the city like a vast ceramic bubble, still after six centuries an overwhelming spectacle of magnitude and artistry. Alas, alas, claustrophobia keeps me from climbing up the mole's burrow between inner and outer shells of the dome to the top. 

 Funny how often one comes across buildings in this city just left undone--facades of ragged brick, or the equally raw band of masonry at the base of the dome. Money, I guess. Or patrons, in the slip-slide of Florentine power, suddenly hounded out of town. 

Two Birds With One Stone (Dome)

Another Duomo shot. I call this picture "two birds," but if you look hard enough, you may also see the Duomo in the distance.

Florence Train Station9

 A view from the corner of the train station toward the Duomo in the distance. 

 Certainly one of the themes of I Am Love is the great weight of past glory that presses down on the minds of present-day Italians and that still vibrates through their aesthetic genes.

 A friend observes that all we have now is the new, without the bracing mystique of the new (just look, for a taste of the latter, at the great Karsh portrait of painter Jean-Paul Riopelle in his Paris garret). Not so, however, in Italy, where the new, when not eclipsed by a staggering mountain of regulations, is still tuned to a mysteriously lunar key of elegance, originality and bravado echoing from that particular past. 

 There is a long, strong link between Brunelleschi's dome and the manifold perfections of the train station not a mile away; the same link connects the Renaissance courts of Mantua or Milan with the breezy panache of any Italian hailing a cab today.   

Florence Train Station8

 A hundred yards long, these red and white marble stripes on the floor of the main concourse are like a "yellow brick road," guiding footsteps toward one of the world's most enchanting cities. 

 Stripes abound across the ages of art and design--from the corrugated fluting of a classical column, to this facade of a medieval church to a contemporary column by the French artist Daniel Buren (see earlier entry). As pattern, it echoes the first crude repetitive furrows cut into the earth by ploughshare and beast; the principle of settlement and taming and recurrence. 

 I recall, many years ago, on a remote, windmill-dappled plateau in Greece, watching as peasant, mule and rudimentary plow scribed their lumpy, parallel ribbons over the earth the way Adam must have done. 

Florence Train Station7

 Two shots of those amber marble walls. Is this King Solomon's temple or a train station? Earlier, I mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright--quite capable of building anyone a temple, even himself. Also worth noting is the fingerprint here of the severely unadorning Austrian architect, Adolph Loos, whose barrenness could achieve extraordinary moods of opulence.

Florence Train Station6

 From the French word for window, fenetre, we get the word fenestration--the use of glass or of windows in a building. Nothing says moderne quicker than wall-wide, light-soaking expanses of glass. One only has to think of the skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe. 

 Here, a wide ribbon of glass flows forward from the concourse at the back, over the main ticket lobby, then down and over the porch at the front and down, finally, to the ground in one uninterrupted cascade of glass. 

 Inside, there is only luminous, window-gridded sky above, the light drifting down the luscious amber marble walls in waves of intangible honey.  

Florence Train Station5

 Everywhere, luxuriant travertine marble and bronze. The plate of prongs, itself a lovely minimalist sculpture, is meant to keep pigeons away from the window sill. God is in the details. Same goes for the movie I Am Love, where the camera seems as entranced by the beauty and details of incident and place as it is by the progress of the plot, reminding us that love itself is as much an incomparable artifact as it is a dramatic narrative.

Florence Train Station4

 The flip sign--a marvel of Italian design. Letters and numbers would flip with the fluttering swiftness of hummingbird wings or those old packs of cards that created moving pictures of a dog jumping or a couple making love. When it stopped: Florence to Milan, 10:55. Platform 12.  

 Waiting for a train in Trieste or Milan, I'd watch, quite bewitched, as the large black board flutter-spelled the times and platforms of arrivals and departures.

 It's dormant now, overtaken by digital signs. Like the displacement of books by e-books or (in our lifetime?) of breakfast, lunch and supper by that single atomic capsule we slip down our throat at bedtime, a tangible enchantment has been lost. 

Florence Train Station3

 To the left, the ornate steeple of Santa Maria Novella; to the right, the train station--a succinct lesson in two types of architecture; the older an architecture of divinity and ascension; the latter, a humanistic repudiation of all such ascension, with its flat roof and lateral pattern. An architecture, instead, of the low, planetary breadth of human society.

 Which doesn't make the latter less mystical. The Mesopotamians believed both in sky gods and earth gods (the latter largely forgotten by Christianity). The fable of the tower of Babel may in fact be understood as a warning against single-minded ascension up, up and away from the level spirits of earth. The first sky-scraper came to grief.

Florence Train Station2

 I happened to see this guy sitting up on the roof--a repairman, I assumed, though a bit mysterious, as he was just sitting there, watching me while I was watching him. After I had taken a couple of shots, he took out his cell phone, so I skedaddled. 

 Note the evenly-spaced horizontals in the stonework, recalling Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style, with its low profile and long, fluent latitudes graven in stone and brick, as well as the dramatic overhang floating above the sidewalk, unsupported by any vertical posts, emulating the dramatic cantilevers in Wright's houses, most famous of all, his Robie House in Chicago. 

 The great American architect teaches the Florentines a thing or two.

Florence Train Station

In honor of the current Italian movie, I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton, and a character of equal élan, the Italian moderne house in whose marbled splendor much of the movie unfolds, I'll give the next week or so over to one of my favorite buildings in the world (and another example of Italian moderne at its most refined), the supernal Florence train station. 

Carlo Severa at Accademia delle Arti del Disegno

 A diverse, retrospective range of work by Italian Neo-Constructivist, Carlo Severa, is on show at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. The Accadamia, as it happens, faces the same picturesque square as the San Marco monastery of the previous suite of entries.
 Severa has a particular instinct for paper, its colors, textures, absorptions as well as the dimensional effects of folding. Another cheer for paper. 

 The rippled effect of accordian-folded strands of paper laid edge to edge resembles the weave of an antique Canadian basket displayed in my mother's minute (but widely visited) accademia of pioneer arts and design. 

 Small wonder I gained a Shaker-like zeal for simple forms, knocking around these ancestral implements as a kid. One summer morning I set about mowing a field of alfalfa just like a Tolstoyan peasant, with a century-old scythe in hand. But I digress. 

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco9

In the end, this question: how do the spiritual principles of monasticism dovetail with the aesthetic principles of modern minimalism?

For Samuel Beckett language was a clutter, a fog, an excess to be ground down to a final minimum of what, perhaps, could be honestly said at all. I have that sense as well, listening to a Gregorian chant, the thread-bareness of honesty, of pure, acerbic essence.

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco8

Few things, certainly not a Cellini sculpture or a courtesan's wily bon mot, could be transplanted from the 15th or 16th century into the jazzy precincts of Milan Furniture Week and fit right in. But this chair could. Quite remarkable.

Made of three simple, recurring elements. That's all.

The contemporary chair, by Shiro Kuramata, springs from a very different tradition of asceticism than that of European monasticism--though it presents a very similar sensibility. Wabi, Shibui (defined by James Mitchener as acerbic good taste) both denote traditional Japanese principles of serene restraint originating in the same voluntary poverty that gave rise to western monasticism.

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco7

Symmetry is the dominant compositional gene both at San Marco and in all of Florence. To say it's an exclusive distinction of plain aesthetics is, of course, quite wrong, but it is an essential one in 20th century movements of plainness, or as a friend puts it, of ornament-crime.

I've always thought of Brancusi's Endless Column as a corollary, the uncrossed vertical of the Christian cross.

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco6

Artists speak of media, as though paint or wood or steel are vehicles, middlemen in the cycle of making art that are eventually subordinated, or overtaken by other, more important aesthetic qualities. What if the medium is the message, italicizing, laying bare the wooden-ness of wood, the old glow of hand-worn, foot-worn surfaces, the chalkiness of plaster, making their sensuality as essential to a work of art or meditation as the musky tone of an oboe is to an oboe concerto.

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco5

Plain and fancy.

It's a great object lesson to take college kids first to the church of San Marco, then to the monastery next door. Most find the baroque razzle dazzle of the church much more to their taste; the monastery not so much. A few, perhaps do.

Then we inform them that, taste aside, the architecture of the monastery is a much more distinguished example by one of the great Florentine architects of the 15th century. For many American kids this notion is entirely new, particularly in architecture, that poverty (of a voluntary kind) may be good; that asceticism is one road to the golden heights of artistic or literary refinement.

Lynne and I also point out that the origins of the college campus lie right here, in monasticism (cloister becomes the college quad; dormitories much the same), as does the symbiosis between a certain austerity of setting (my barren dorm room in college didn't even have a Fra Angelico fresco on the wall) and the diligent, secluded craft of learning.

They look at me as if I've lost my mind.

I love these corridors, the floor tiles, the serene plaster walls, the delicate ledge capping the wall; and what could be more elegant than the slice-of-bread-thin doorframes made of gray Tuscan stone, arched at the top and closed by a simple, hand-tooled wooden door that Sam Maloof or George Nakashima, had they been 15th-century Florentine tradesmen, might have made?

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco4

Two of many frescoes painted by Fra Angelico (and helpers) in San Marco, where he resided as a Dominican monk. Every cell in the dormitory has a painting of a Bible story or Dominican legend (or curious blend of the two). I counted when I was there this spring, but forget at the moment just how many there are; at least forty or fifty cells in all.

It's really a lark to teach in a museum, standing in front of an actual Rembrandt or Zadkine, distractions notwithstanding (and we have had some thrillers--sprinklers turning on, sirens going off, steel barricades crashing down). But better yet is when that art is still in situ, exactly in the spot for which it was created. San Marco, indeed all of Florence, is a teacher's dream.

The second painting is remarkably akin to Surrealist art painted 5 centuries later. It depicts the scourges and humiliations of Christ; so vile were the offenders that religious conventions at the time these paintings were made forbade any representation of them as actual people. Just weird fragments, cadavre parts, all humanity subtracted.

R.o.M.Minimum San Marco3

I recall Troy Thomas, my art professor at Penn State, extolling the harmonies of interval and proportion in a Renaissance arcade, as if such perfections were a visual elixir, a holy spirit disclosing the mystical geometry of our own humanity. Brunelleschi, we were led to believe, spent as much time on their infinitesimal refinements as Einstein spent on an algebraic formula.

Here, in the cloister, monks or nuns strolled, the rhythmic repetition of the columns and arches inducing a state of contemplation the way the sound of waves or a dripping tap may do. Rule of thumb for any minimalist--repetition good, it shears away the superfluous; discloses the essential. Think of Swiss typography. Think of milking cows (an analogy lost on my urban wife).

John Pawson observed that compositions that are based on repetition tend to exhibit the quality of simplicity. This rhythmic repetition instills a sense of order. No surprise that branches of monasticism are called just that, orders.

Confronting you at the top of the stairs leading to the dormitory at San Marco is a bewitching fresco by Fra Angelico--his most famous--of the Annunciation. It takes place, as you can see, in a tranquil arcade that is almost identical to the real arcade at the bottom of the stairs.

R.o.M.Minimum San Marco2

 I mentioned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Here he talks about the aims of his architecture: "this singular density and mood, this feeling of presence, well-being, harmony, beauty under whose spell I experience what I otherwise would not experience in precisely this way." 

 In short, enchantment. Zumthor's severe Therme Vals, a thermal spa in Switzerland, for which he was recently awarded the Priztker Prize, comes as close to a contemporary version of the singular density, well-being, harmony and beauty of monastic architecture as any that I can think of.

 Above, a corridor in San Marco. The rafters of the roof float above the dormitory cells like a giant wooden umbrella.

Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco

 Over the next week or so I will post pictures from San Marco Monastery in Florence. I go there as often as I can when we are in the city, and as early in the morning as I can. Often I am the only person there, caught up in a mood of serene elation as I walk along its spare, polished, perfectly proportioned corridors.

 Is there a link between the asceticism of San Marco and the exacting simplicity of a current designer like John Pawson? Clearly. Both Le Corbusier, in his time, and more recently Pawson himself point to the ruggedly plain medieval monastery of Le Thoronet in the south of France as a central inspiration for their own work. Modern ascètes from Borges to Loewy to Boulez to Zumthor can't help but come to mind in almost any European monastery,

 or strains of Messaien, drifting through the birdsong in the cloister.

Yves St. Laurent at the Petit Palais, Paris

 Black and white are colors that subtract more than they add; that clarify more than they embellish.

 The porcelain jars are by the Japanese potter Taizo Kuroda, a ceramicist of Brancusi-like spareness and refinement.

 The jackets are by Yves St. Laurent, part of his revolutionary 'Le Smoking" series of jackets for women, created over many years. Many are on view in a black, cavernous chamber in a not-to-be-missed retrospective of the designer's work at the Petit Palais in Paris. Black, in this case, not only rings in the sharper, leaner cut of the clothing, but adds a cue to its outré nature as demi-monde attire.

Kosuth at the Louvre

 Art and text are cousins a long way back. Back, as you can see, to Egyptian hieroglyphics, when text actually was the representation of the object or action described. 

 Another instance, pointed out by the French novelist Michel Butor in a talk here in Elmira, is one that goes back to Renaissance painting, to the rise of the art star and the importance of his signature in the corner of the painting. In a performative tour de force, Butor went from painting to painting at a local museum, riffing on the signatures of the artists and how essential to each picture each signatures was; if nothing else, essential to its worth. 

 In the oldest depths of the Louvre Museum, American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth has installed a single string of neon text that shines in the subterranean gloom like some murky procession of shamed halos filing through purgatory.

Spinning Wheel 3

 This is my favorite painting in Florence, by the great post-High Renaissance painter, Pontormo. It hangs in the church of Santa Felicita. Do you see the wheel, outlined by the upper curvature of the picture frame? Follow the curve of Christ's deposed body, around the circuit of faces. Note the lurid colors, the un-Biblical face and shirt of the man in the foreground as well as the slack effeminacy of the dead Christ--the falsetto notes of Mannerism.

 The painting, along with another Pontormo, is set in a minute, perfectly proportioned chapel designed by the greatest of all Florentine architects, Brunelleschi, just on your right as you enter the church. Best of all, you'll have it all to yourself.  

Spinning Wheel 2

The mosaic belongs to the splendid old arcade of the Palais Royal, where Cocteau complained of bells ringing and where Louis XVI played with his toy cannons as a boy.

Spinning Wheel

Spinning wheel, got to go round--a Laura Nyro lyric, I believe.

Each spring we stop at Renault's flagship showroom on the Champs Elysées and sit in the driver's seat of the latest concept car. Since boyhood I have loved the futuristic élan of concept cars, knowing of course how rarely, if ever, a Sistine Chapel roadster ever makes it onto the real road. 

Here is one rim.

And another spinning wheel. I attended a small Christian school, so we didn't throw the discus in the nude as they did, undoubtedly, at the outré and irreligious high school in town. I did, however, throw the discus quite well, winning Ontario-wide in my senior year. It seems even then I had a penchant for obscure accomplishment (like writing a design blog). 

 This is a particularly refined article of Etruscan black-figure pottery, so-called though the ground here, rather than the figure, is black. It dates to the Persian occupation of Etruria in the 5th century, when occupiers imposed the pronounced stamp of Greek aesthetics on local handiwork. Just as possible, this plate may have been made by a Greek master who had emigrated to central Italy, bringing his world-beating, god-figured, discus-hurling Hellenism with him.

 

Michael Kenna

Two more pictures by Michael Kenna. (See previous entry for more discussion.)

The bridge is the Pont des Arts in Paris, an iron cobweb spanning the Seine and offering early in the morning or just as the sun is going down a perfect observatory from which to watch the slow swim of the river and feel the narcotic languor of a city so unearthly in its loveliness that you spit to reassure yourself that you're real.