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.