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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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 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.