Art Institute's 20th Century Masters: Better Kahn'ed than on the Piano?

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I have to admit to being somewhat taken aback this past year by the total lack of discussion or interest in the Art Institute of Chicago shutting down one-third of its Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing for six months of “adjustments” only four years after its opening. Nearly 100 masterworks were shipped to the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth for a blockbuster exhibition The Age of Picasso Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Musem.  Photograph: Andreas Praefcke, Wikipedia Commons

Ironically, to make move for the exhibition, the Kimbell's permanent collection has been moved out from the original world-renowned building designed by Louis Kahn to a new addition designed by Renzo Piano.  According to architecture critic Martin Filler, writing in the current issue of the New York Review of Books . . .

The switch involves unfortunate comparisons.  With their celebrated skylit concrete ceiling vaults and use of creamy travertine on the walls, Kahn's interiors virtually caress pictures shown within them, in an almost uncanny melding of sensitively proportioned volume and mysteriously modulated light.  Not surprisingly, the Art Institute's best twentieth-century pictures here look better than they ever have at home.

Filler damns the Piano addition with faint praise.  The title, No Harm to the Kimbell, pretty much says it all.  Although Filler raves about Piano's finely crafted, 2 percent titanium walls as “the most ravishing concrete I have seen in the U.S.” he concludes “the new Kimbell addition will soon fade into the middle rank of Piano's oeuvre, neither at the top . .  . nor the bottom.”  He doesn't mention where the Modern Wing falls in his rankings.
Filler's review is not available online, except to subscribers.  If you don't have it already, pick up the January 9th issue of the NYRB.  With a haunting new poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Garry Willis's acute dissection of the mis-analyses of Joe Scarborough, and the usual assortment of great pieces on myriad topics, it's well worth the price.

When the Modern Wing opened, it met with a largely ecstatic critical response.  There's much to admire in Piano's design, but I can't help thinking of it as something of a great white whale, ever-so-tastefully smothering the sting of the often ragingly provocative art of the early 20th century.  The scrupulously neutral harbors its own aggressions.

Read the whole story:

The Shock of the New: 1/3 of Modern Wing Shuts Down as Picasso and Matisse head out for six month Texas excursion.  Read here.

Sunday Reading: Eileen Gray's E.1027 house regained, The Reinvention of Rahm, a Conservative debunks the GOP, and the sound of real leadership, from FDR

Interesting reads this weekend:

Financial Times architecture critic Edward Heathcote has the story of Eileen Gray's 1925 E.1027 house, the modernist landmark that predated Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye by several years.  Uninvited, Le Corbu painted a series of murals on the lower murals, built a hostel on the hill above it, and finally washed up on the beach below after drowning in 1965.  Long abandoned, E.1027 is being lovingly restored by an organization called Friends of E.1027, and is scheduled to re-open next year.

Elsewhere, Shirley Anthrop has an interview with former CSO Music Director Bernard Haitink, who will return to Chicago this fall with performances of the Mahler 4th and Haydn's Creation.

Chris Buck © Business Week

The new Business Week includes Devin Leonard's The Reinvention of Rahm Emanuel, an update on the convoluted tale of The Saving of Group Zero, and a story on Spam's Long March in China that is, for a change, about not Internet skulduggery, but canned meat.

Over at the Sun-Times, conservative pundit David Frum cuts the floor out from under the GOP lunatic fringe with Obama has made a bad economy worse? Really? How?, which concludes . . .

Gov. Rick Perry on Friday urged us to believe that the economy is gripped by the worst slump since the Great Depression because Obama spoke disrespectfully of the owners of private jets. To which I can only say: Really? That’s the indictment?

In The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew in What Were They Thinking? dissects the Debt Ceiling Deal, while on its blog, Ronald Dworkin reminds us what real leadership is with a quote from a FDR campaign speech from 1936.

David Levine © New York Review of Books

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

As Dworkin notes, Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.

Special bonus, from Wikipedia, is this chart of the national debt as a percentage of GDP under every U.S. President since 1945.  Surprise, surprise, until Obama, the ratio fell under every Democratic president, Dwight Eisenhower and the first term of Richard Nixon.  It's increased under every Republican President since, big time.  Ronald Reagan (+9.3 and 11%), George H.W. Bush (+13.0%), and George W. Bush (7.1 and 20.7%) all grew the debt to GDP ratio a higher rate than Obama (9.0%).  It was Dick Cheney who famously declared "deficits don't matter."

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