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.