North Carolina Museum of Art; No. 6

The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad. You've probably heard that Salvador Dali died this week. He's almost impossible to judge as a serious artist because they are at least two Salvador Dali's, the hysterically creative young genius of the 1930s and the aging public personality of recent decades. When I learned of Dali's death, my first thought was, I'm not going to mention it. He's had enough hype without one more voice in the chorus. I've had a growing contempt for the junk Dali has marketed for at least as long as I've been paying attention to contemporary art. The typical Dali work on the market today sells for a few hundred dollars in the case of the lithographs, prints produced either in enormous quantities or even with photo reproduction methods to several thousand dollars for works supposed to be originals but with no serious artistic originality. I'm only following more perceptive critics when I say that the great Salvador Dali died

in the Second World War, to be replaced by a shameless charlatan masquerading as the great surrealist for now almost half a century. On the other hand, Dali in the 30s was the real surreal. He gave the world images unseen by conscious minds. Dali shocked even his fellow artists, even other surrealists, with some of his scandalous images of not only the unseen, but of the then unspeakable. The fact that his limp watches have become a cliche of popular culture takes nothing from their effectiveness in the 30s. Dali showed us our dreams, probing the limits of obsession and fear. He was fascinated by Freud's symbolic world of the unconscious. Dali's masterpieces of the 30s were possible because he found an acutely realistic style and a procedure that enabled him to put things together that didn't go, but that meant something when he did it.

While I don't advise you to go to the auctions that come around to suburban hotels, where you can buy a genuine late atrocity by Salvador Dali or Juan Miro or Marc Chagall, I do think Dali's last half-century was good for something. It wasn't art, but it was good theater. Dali must have read Sautra's existentialist works when he was in Paris in the old days, because his later life was spent in becoming Salvador Dali, in playing the role of himself, and in deciding what he would be, he became it. As was once said about Victor Hugo, Dali was a madman who thought he was Dali. He gave us the stuff that dreams are made of. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. Joseph Covington takes up December and January in ordinary years.

Even in those months, there's a breath of spring in good years, though in bad years the cold encroaches upon February. Elizabeth Lawrence wrote those lines to open the first chapter of a Southern Garden in 1942. Miss Lawrence was writing eloquently about her garden in Raleigh, and those of us in this area can be glad that it was reprinted a few years ago by the University of North Carolina Press. Miss Lawrence took pleasure in the flowers of winter. We have them here, most people don't. In fact, the experience of walking through a winter garden in most northern latitudes is very different without Camillea's quince and pansies and bloom. A European garden depends less on the color of blossoms for its charm. Even in the spring and summer, when blue-smocked gardeners are scattered through all French public gardens, down on their knees, busily transplanting colorful annuals in the formal flower beds, and then those gardens' principal interest is in the geometry of their design. For 400 years, French landscapers have been planning double rows of deciduous trees that

grow into stately alleys of shade. Outside the alleys, of, say, plain trees, French gardens are typically open spaces filled with designs formed by immaculately clipped hedges. The hedges make diamonds and squares in quencunxes. Quencunxes are those garden beds with a design at each corner and one in the center. Little spaces within the head shapes are filled with flowers in the summer, but in the winter there are only the green lines against brown earth and the white stone pebbles that cover the paths. Such tailored spaces are meant for walking. They aren't good for jogging, the pebbles are hard to run on. You walk slowly in a formal French garden, watching other walkers, enjoying the artifice of nature molded to human activity. You know where you're going because you can see from one end of the garden to the other. It isn't the romance of the unsuspected of an English garden, it's the logic of a clearly ordered space that is the attraction.

When the leaves are off the plain trees in winter, the trunks and branches show bold silhouettes against the often cloudy sky. A redameticie walked in these gardens in Paris. Louis XIV had great gardens constructed at Versailles. They are still there, clipped and neat and ready for your winter walks. And when you come back, maybe the daffodils will be in bloom. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. A 10-year-old girl walks along a corridor in a public building. There are pictures on the walls of unusual scenes. She glances as she passes. The weights are around the corner as more unusual still. A gigantic nest of sticks has been constructed by some monstrous bird inside a room, spilling out through the door. What kind of creature made it? How did it get there? The child is no longer glancing at the pictures on the walls.

Her curiosity is completely absorbed by her discovery. She looks up into the face of a creature larger than herself, who emerges from the cocoon of sticks. The creature is a man of a special type. He's an artist. Patrick D'Arty built his swirling weaving structures of sticks inside that room, just as a stork would do, but he isn't working from instinct like a wild creature. He's working from the vision of an artist's eye. His eye meets his young watchers, and he pauses to say hello. D'Arty, unlike a stork, enjoys an audience while he works. The girl will leave the museum of art, taking with her an indelible image, etched onto her memory. Patrick D'Arty's art is unusual in its material, tall, thin maple saplings. He is gathered for the job. The small trunks are gray with a dark reddish tinge. The twigs are dull cranberry colored with silver highlights, giving color to the fascinating form he has woven.

I remember the first of his structures that I saw several years ago. I almost never remember the first time I see an artist's work. D'Arty's is unforgettable. The pieces he makes are often big and made to fill or to explore the architectural space they are created in. On a basic level, they're sculptures. They aren't really nests, of course, though the title of the current one on view in the North Carolina Museum of Art until March 26th is Shelters of Transition. Part of the value of such works is that it suggests associations with nature without telling you precisely what you're supposed to think. I'm all too aware of the difficulty most of us have coming to terms with contemporary art, but Patrick D'Arty's art is the rare thing that explores and suggests, but with some intrinsic sensual form that makes even those who love to hate modern art, take a second look. The forms are so beautiful and so intriguing that most of us are going to like them. I recommend you have a look.

For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. Most of us like living where we are nestled into the lower Piedmont. Our QOL, that's quality of life, has a lot for us to be pleased about. The process of our place here becoming what it is to be is very obviously continuing and accelerating. Let me pose a question that's in line with the thoughts I've had in other commentaries, and that is, what are the focal points of our communities, the physical visual points around which we gather for rights of passage, for joining into a spirit of community, and for celebrating Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, and surrounding points. There are churches, of course, but the very ubiquitousness of churches makes them focal points only for congregations. There's no great city cathedral where the bells peel to call all citizens together. Quasimodo would have a tough time raising an audience here.

There is the Fayetteville Street Mall in Raleigh. It looks like the heart of a community, but there isn't much life in it. The state government complex is worse, the dark side of the moon. There's Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, lots of life there, but little focus. Durham has its new arts council building and a baseball stadium, effective but scattered. We'll watch to see how that city arranges its new parts. I'm thinking about how the right kind of monuments can bring people together. Not monuments of the type of the bronze warrior that passers by, pass by too easily, but structures conceived to fit, to fill, to beautify, to break up a particular public space. I've heard about a place where that seems to be happening since the last five years. It's a university campus in California. The animator of public monuments at the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla campus, is Mary Beebe. She gave a public talk last Wednesday night in the North Carolina Museum of Art and inspired her audience, with not only the challenging and fascinating sculptures, the current term

is site-specific art for art made in response to a particular place, but also with the life that spontaneously converges around them. Bruce Norman's giant neon letters spelling out vices and virtues, Nikki de San Files, 14-foot sun god, a fiberglass bird decorated in a vaguely Aztec manner, and several works that stand in the landscape in such a way that they carry on a dialogue with nature. Students and faculty have taken these intrusions into their space, first with bewilderment, and then after a while with a great deal of acceptance, and now as popular symbols of their community, Mary Beebe calls the great bird the mascot of the campus. Students study by them, leave offerings, and even get married in front of them. I hope there will be a movement towards such works in our part of the world. If you're interested, let me suggest another lecture in the same series next Wednesday at 8 by another representative of a California University, Galen Krants, Professor of Architecture at Berkeley, whose topic is Culture in the American Park.

For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I'm just old enough to have been vaguely aware of what was going on in the decade of the 1960s. The 60s crept down on little cat feet. Eisenhower was president, Elvis was king. There was something frenzied about the acceleration of change in the 60s. The Beatles invaded America, the Marines invaded Vietnam. The decade went out with a roar, or was it a cry of anguish. It wasn't an easy time, but it was exciting. This year's UNC Fine Arts Festival, Flashback the 60s, will bring back the memories, or for most of the students, will look back and try to sort out what was happening in the arts, from movies to music to movements. Flashback the 60s starts today, and the many events continue to march 5th.

So let the games begin. The festival organizers are bringing in people who were making the arts what they were back then, figures as diverse as Eva Marie Saint and Clement Greenberg. I wonder if today's undergraduates know who Eva Marie Saint is, perhaps they caught her with Brando and revivals on the waterfront. As for Clement Greenberg, he was a force in the interpretation of art of the 60s, almost a crusader in his critical championing of a certain point of view of what then contemporary art should be and mean. Albert Hughes singled out Greenberg in his overview of the history of modern art, speaking of New York formalism of the 60s, as issued to the world by Clement Greenberg and his epigones. It'll be interesting to see if Greenberg is mellowed. The art of the 60s quickly found its niche in the museum world. Actually niche is hardly the right world, since 60s canvases tend to be measured by the square yard.

In the North Carolina Museum of Art, for example, the large contemporary collection space is dominated by quite a few running feet of the work of Morris Lewis, Kenneth Nolan, and Frank Stella, dating neatly between 1960 and 1970. An exhibition at UNC of regional artists will bring together works of the 60s with more recent pieces by some of the best of then and now. Maud Gatewood, Herb Jackson, Edith London, George Burline, Denis Saborowski, Joe Cox, Claude Hall, and 15 others. The performances, lectures, and exhibitions are for the most part free and open. Watch local newspapers for listings or call the Fine Arts Festival office in Chapel Hill at 962-55-05. Nostalgically yours, this is Joseph Covington. The sexiest buildings in the world these days are art museums.

Don't take my word for it. Just watch the art and architecture pages of time in Newsweek. Every art museum wants a new building, a new wing, or refurbishing of what they have. The Louvre wants all three. A quiet but great old place like the Walters in Baltimore built a modern wing in the 70s, but seems to be more in love with its newly renovated Italian palace wing. New vows cities such as Dallas and Atlanta have built art museums that require your attention more than the art that they are supposed to display. I haven't completely come to terms with Atlanta's high museum of art building by Richard Meyer. It is beautiful. The entrance presents a shining facade of white enamel, composed of geometric shapes and spaces that delight the eye and invite you to enter. The interior is dominated by an open central space, with ramps that double back upon themselves to carry you up to the four levels. I recently heard a discussion by art museum people at a professional conference about such central designs.

One astute director referred to the high, I am Pays Wing of the National Gallery and others as sons and daughters of New York's Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pays East Wing has been criticized as wasted space, more architectural art than art gallery. I've always dismissed that opinion because the wing is so beautiful and because the central space does not interfere with the galleries. I can't be as positive about the Guggenheim, which, like Atlanta's high museum, presents a perfect exterior but fails inside and its mission to allow the art to speak for itself. The problem with the high is more than Meyer's building over shadows, what the director of the Getty Museum has referred to, as Atlanta's modest collection. What's new in Atlanta is a big exhibition called Georgia Collects. I am surprised at what Georgia collects. The show is composed of 350 artworks from private and corporate collectors. If the high curators had sifted out the top 100 pieces or even 200, Georgia collects would be stunning.

As it is, the 350 pieces include stunners side by side with dogs. There is a 1936 Picasso of his lover Marie Thérèse that is as good as it is important and another study of Jacqueline in a more abstract style, both pictures of substance and style. But there is also a late Mary Cassade drawing that is so bad it barks. They show a great George Bellos in a mediocre Monet, a beautiful Rembrandt drawing and a minor van Gogh. I was impressed with contemporary pieces by Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Fairfield Porter and Alice Neal, 20th century small sculptures by David Smith and Jacques Lipschitz, a Courbet and a beer shot. But wading through the secondary and tertiary quality works took the luster off the shining examples. Georgia collects is on view at the High Museum through March 26th. I hope I don't sound invious of what Georgia can do. I doubt that North Carolina has as much first class art among our private collectors. But I do think that Georgia needs not only collections, but critics.

For a museum of art that is not in Georgia, this is Joseph Covington. How often do you hear people brought up on Hollywood movies lament they don't make them like they used to? It's true, thank heaven. I like Carrie Grant and Marilyn Monroe as much as anyone. Some would say I like them too much, but can you imagine a Carrie Grant and Marilyn Monroe film made now in 1989, disaster? They couldn't do dangerous liaisons. They also couldn't do what independent filmmakers are doing across the country. Films that explore our time and at the same time explore the art of making film. The film program at the North Carolina Museum of Art has screened hundreds of films ranging from Hitchcock to Truffaut to North Carolina filmmakers to some stuff that's so independent and avant-garde it's been picketed. So one of a kind film artists sometimes have a hard time finding their audience.

I think those of us involved in the exhibition of film have a duty to help these artists carve their niche. A new film program in the museum will present a monthly forum for films that are different. These are movies you won't see at the Sixplex. Calling it a forum is meant to emphasize these events as occasions for watching and talking about films. Each time someone who knows something will introduce the film and field questions from the audience. We start tonight at eight o'clock. The film is called Seven Women, Seven Sins. And the person who will speak about the film is the one who made it, where I should say one of the seven women who directed segments of the German-produced work. Maxi Cohen is a New York filmmaker who is getting some international attention. She and filmmakers from Germany, France, Belgium and Austria were chosen to explore the moral dilemma of what constitutes a deadly sin in our time. Each woman uses her own style. Betty Gordon made an old Hollywood-type film noir B-movie.

Valley Export of Austria gives us an avant-garde music video. Helkesander of Germany made a live-action cartoon. Maxi Cohen, our visiting filmmaker, uses documentary to examine anger. She won the award for Best Short Film at the Montreal Festival of Festivals and the award of Special Distinction at the Tokyo Video Festival. The LA Weekly wrote that Cohen skillfully uses her interviews with real people to keep shifting our perceptions of anger and culminates with a breathtaking example of the futility of rage. I have seen in various places an audience become absolutely enthralled in the work of a filmmaker after hearing the director talk about it. It's a rare opportunity, an exciting one, and I hope you will be part of it tonight. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I don't usually read the obituaries, but a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a coffee

shop in San Francisco finishing breakfast in the newspaper with 15 minutes to kill before going to a meeting. I continued reading past the arts and letters, past sports and weather to the obits. He was the box around the obituary of James Bond that caught my eye. Being a fan of both ornithology and einflaming stories, I began to read about old James Bond, the author of the Birds of Jamaica. Somehow my attention wandered to another spot on the page, and my curiosity turned a surprise. Richard Roud was dead. Richard Roud is a hero to some people. He was the first and only director of the New York Film Festival until last year when he was encouraged to make way for new leadership. I'll preside it over the introduction to American audiences of the best foreign films, as well as several unforgettable independent American films. A recent retrospective of his second decade at the NYFF included Fitzgeraldo, Day for Night, chariots of fire, Mean Streets, by by Brazil, the lost honor of Caterina Bloom, my brilliant career, Moonlighting, and the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie among many others.

The festival was important because it was in the United States. Most of what we see from Cannes involves movie stars on the beach. We hear little from Berliner Toronto, except in specialized film publications. The New York Festival attracted crowds of film buffs, critics, and American film distributors from Los Angeles to Raleigh. Richard Roud didn't choose all the works by himself, but his taste and guiding hand were felt. He had a bias for French movies, which was nothing but fortunate in the 60s and 70s when Truffaut, Guadarraine, and their colleagues were creating the new wave and going beyond it. Parentatically, Roud wrote a book on Henri Longois, Founder and Soul of the Cinematheque François, who was an inspiration to him. The book is called A Passion for Films, which could be Roud's own epitaph. The most memorable moments of each premier screening at the festival were often the statements and answers to audience questions by filmmakers invited to comment on their work. Many sessions are moderated by members of the selection committee, sometimes they were

moderated by Roud himself. I will remember the image of Roud at his last New York film festival in October of 1987, fielding questions to director Maurice Piaillard, translating them into flawless French, translating the director's responses, and transmitting in the process the image of a veteran viewer of the avant-garde in its battles with critics, institutions, and audiences. Those of us who share Richard Roud's passion for films are the poor for the loss of him. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I'd like to try to bring some logic to the recent stir over the desecration of the flag at the Art Institute of Chicago. From the young artist in Chicago installed his exhibition, a lot of visitors were shocked to see the flag of the United States displayed on the floor. As art, this type of activity is already unfamiliar to most folks in the street, the artist

expresses his idea by manipulating found objects, or by what we call now performance art, in which human actions carry the message. Anyway, this fellow in Chicago got to be big news. Art in our society is almost never big news, and we only hear about it in the media normally from all things considered in Charles Coralt. What passes for art news on ABC or whatever is $50 million auctions, deaths of celebrity artists like Warhol and Dolly, and controversy that usually has little to do with the substance of the art. The young artist in question has a scathing attitude toward our society and feels called to make the strongest statement within his means about our inequities and evils. So what else is new? When young artists or young people stop rebelling against the harsher side of reality, that will be news. Most people will disagree with the artist, but he's made his point, and perhaps made us think about what we are and ought to be. And if we decide he's full of it, and we really aren't so bad, shouldn't we thank the author of the protest for confirming our beliefs?

There was actually legislation pending over the flag business, which brings me to the idea of the importance of symbols. Here is an area where visual images have a power that used to go into great art. The colored light of medieval windows, the cross and rubens, altarpieces, the papers of state in Gilbert Stewart's portrait of Washington. We have a gut response to the flag that is quick and intense. It symbolizes the nation and it stands for us. I feel it on the 4th of July as much as any VFW member. I will not forget the emotion I experienced on the Washington Mall on July 4th, 1976. Yet I separate this valued emotion from the rational knowledge that the flag is not the country. However, cherished, it is only an image. I find it supremely ironic that we get so exercised about the misuse of a symbol and at the same time we live with the never-ending genuine treason of the sale of national security information to our global opponents. The emotion attached to the symbol would seem more powerful than the reason to respond

to that which is symbolized. I will leave it up to those more legislatively inclined to decide a flag desecration should be redefined in more inclusive terms or to protect that symbol with criminal penalties since it does shock the gut and the heart of us to see it. I do believe, though, that we are the stronger when we can reason between symbol and reality. And here comes the cliche, our society is the stronger for being stable enough to tolerate criticism even in obnoxious forms. This is Joseph Covington. Planning your summer vacation? I hope you'll budget an hour or two for a museum along the way. If you find yourself in California, I can't recommend a more delightful cultural interlude than San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor, despite the odd name the Palace of the Legion of Honor is an art museum.

Perhaps it will strike you as more palatable if I say that the geographical setting of the Palace is beautiful enough to be included in any tour of the overwhelming California coast. It lies between seal rocks, that's where you see California sea lions not seals, and the Golden Gate Bridge. The museum lies in fact within San Francisco's Lincoln Park, which is situated right on the Golden Gate, the great entrance from the Pacific into San Francisco Bay, and which is spanned at one point by the magnificent bridge that ranks with the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace among the world's most beautiful feats of iron and steel engineering. In February, I was buzzed by a swarm of hummingbirds flitting around the edge of the steep cliffs overlooking the Golden Gate. Here stands the Palace of the Legion of Honor. The name and purpose of the museum come from its dedication in 1924 to the memory of Californians who died in France in the First World War, and from the building's resemblance to the 18th century Parisian Palace of the French Order of the Legion of Honor. That sounds pretty good.

What's inside is an unusually specialized collection of primarily French art. There's a big collection of rodass sculptures, headed in the entrance courtyard by the Pensive Seated Bronze thinker, hardly a rare cast since you can see the thinker in collections from Paris to Baltimore, but always impressive. Inside, there's a small bronze of rodass the kiss. The power of rodass bronze sculptor overcomes the sweet sentimentality that spoils the image of the embracing lovers in the marble or plaster copies we see too often. The French painting collection is a true fine for Francophiles since it offers both works by the great masters and by the secondary artists, who while not rising to the rank of genius often have everything to do with shaping the artistic conventions of a nation like France. Among the heavyweights, a water lily painting by Monet and one of the more beautiful ones at that, a charmingly romantic idol by Vâteau, with four elegantly costumed 18th century ladies and gentlemen enjoying the pleasures of music, company, and probably games of love

in a garden, and small-ish canvases by David, the artist of the revolution in Napoleon, and by Manet. It's always a twitch for me to discover pictures by important, but less celebrated painters, such as Estache-Lessuerre, who will never be a household name because it's too hard to pronounce, and because his 17th century nymphs and goddesses aren't subjects we warm up to very quickly in our times. Actually Lessuerre wouldn't want you to warm up too much, since despite the fact that his picture in the palace is of a nude goddess of love, he created his figures with a cool and particular palette, the man had a way with green and purple. The palace collection isn't tiringly large, so you can revel in pleasures without leaving too exhausted for Fisherman's Wharf, or for the true Eficionato, for more of San Francisco's art museums. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington saying, O'Revoir. Palaces are packed into Rome.

Some streets are made of nothing else. Most of the time one is shut out by their deliberately forbidding facades, but there is nothing better on a cold winter day than to spend a morning in the warmth and luxury of one of these palaces. My favorites in Rome are Peruzzi's Palazzo Massimo, one of the state rooms exquisitely painted with scenes of the Nile, where the pyramids are set against a deep, starry indigo sky, and the Palazzo Pamphili in the Piazza Navona. Here the white-coated servants of the Brazilian Embassy, which it now is, lead one through room after room until you finally arrive at Boromini's Grand Salon. These words are from a little book published last year called An Architect in Italy. The author and very much the illustrator is Caroline Maudwitt, who based her descriptions of the buildings of Italy on her observations while there is a student at the British school in Rome. As an architect, she could be imagined to have some facility with the draftsman's art. Architecture, after all, must pass through an existence on paper in between the architect's

imagination and creation and stone in mortar. And Maudwitt is among the architects whose plans and sketches constitute fine art on paper. As she walked the streets and piazzas of Rome, she carried her box of watercolors with her, and filled the pages of her sketchbook with colorful reminders of the glories and wonders of ancient and Renaissance architecture. It is these pen and ink drawings with watercolor washes that fill most of the 112 pages of this small and insubstantial volume. It is both her images and her verbal descriptions, which make the little book a treasure. While she ranges as far north as Venice, Rome is the star city, for its palaces and gardens, its facades and courtyards. The drawings have the freshness and economy of quick sketches, enhanced by the elimination of trivial detail and the selection of details that are truly telling. Her forearm of Rome balances the warm pale ochre earth, with small details of gleaming white marble, larger masses of green foliage, and cascades of the pale purple wisteria that

blooms there at Easter. In front of the pantheon, there are tourists and cafe sitters that put the ancient stones firmly in contemporary life. As a writer Caroline Maudwitt has the ability to express in a very few words, what it is about a great building or just a fine average one that gives it its character as a building, as a space, and as a place to be. Landscape architecture is a part of the picture. Here is what she says about one combination of architecture and garden. The beauty of the three little oratories next to San Gregorio Magno is at least as much in there being pushed up out of the way in a quiet little grassy arena, as in the ingenuity of their architecture, it is a lovely place. Gaggles of nuns emerge now and then from the convent next door in their white and blue, their cypresses and holy andres, and above all this are the associations with St. Gregory the Great.

Here he gave bread to the poor and to the angels. On this site he founded the Benedictines, and from here he sent out a gustan to convert the English. An architect in Italy is published in New York by Clarkson Potter. For the North Carolina Museum of Art this is Joseph Covington. Human types can be compared in all manner of ways, romantic versus realistic, liberal and conservative, giving in self-centered. I think another of these dual polarities and an important one is between those who are serious and those who find humor in all situations. I'm not talking about people who laugh at Bob Newhart, even the comically disadvantaged among us can usually chuck a little good, harmless joke. I'm talking about those people who see the humor aside of earthquakes, assassinations and plagues. It must be a gift to be able to be so detached. Writers and filmmakers are supposed the artists who best display black humor.

I've always been amused by Jonathan Swift's suggestion that poor unwanted children should be eaten, although since I acquired a pair of my own off spring I have to admit I'm too close to infant husbandry to enjoy the satire anymore. On a sillier level remember the popular television series a few years ago about prisoners of war in Germany. It was a comedy that never seemed to bother anybody. No satire at all there. Then there is the extreme of the underground artist who works hard to be outrageous. The older I get the more I enjoy a good bit of outrageousness, though I cautioned those with delicate senses of humor and dedication to good taste that such art is decidedly not for a mass audience. Let's consider German filmmaker Rosa von Präunheim. His personal image is calculated to be slightly outrageous, his real name is Holger, not Rosa, and he is actually Latvian, but underground forces aren't much in vogue in Latvia currently. I saw von Präunheim at the New York Film Festival two years ago, talking about his latest

effort called Anita Dances of Vice. He appeared on stage wearing a bright green-checked suit that he announced he found on 14th Street. von Präunheim is no newcomer to underground film, having been shocking the bourgeoisie for over 20 years. A somewhat heavier black comedy than Anita Dances of Vice is the one we're showing in the North Carolina Museum of Art Film Forum tonight at 8, it's called A Virus Knows No Morals, and you guessed it, it's a farce about 8s. How you ask, can such a horrible subject be funny? Well, of course it isn't, but von Präunheim's savagely satirizes the situations, myths, fears, and realities of 8s. The film is serious as well as irreverent. The setting is a gay Berlin sauna. When a virus Knows No Morals was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, film comments that it had the general air of a Lana Turner melodrama choreographed by John Waters. Waters, of course, wears the undisputed crown among outrageous American filmmakers.

Joe Gomez of North Carolina State University will have the task of making some sense out of the farcical film when he leads the audience discussion after the museum's screening. Joe says it fits well with a course he's teaching called Subversive Cinema. It should indeed. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I'm a confirmed Francophile, but I have to admit that for most of the period between the dawn of the Iron Age and the building of Versailles, Italy was the region that had the most to boast about. Think of the scenes played out on that hill covered peninsula. The Truskin Diviner is mysteriously reading auspices and constructing fabulous tombs. The development of the Roman Republic fueled by the civic virtues of its citizens. The grandeur of an empire that conquered Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Romanesque churches.

The Renaissance energy of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Permanente. Not to mention folks like Titian and Caravaggio or Petrarch and Bocaccio. There's a great deal of talk now about the cultural hegemony of European civilization in the United States. We ought to know more about the other continents and their accomplishments, but with the possible exception of China, a pretty big piece of real estate, I don't think there is an area that advanced civilization so much for so long is Italy. If the North Carolina Museum of Art has to be stuck with one wing more richly endowed than the others with art, I'm not displeased that the European collection, with a Dutch Flemish, British, French, and Italian pieces, got the long end of the stick. This in a while something like our Italian collection, most of which we've had for twenty or thirty years, deserves some special attention. On Saturday we're having a few thousand close friends over for a little festival of Italy for all ages. We live in an age of museums that are fun places to be. Children can see a genuine mosaic floor from the Roman Empire and then go outside and help construct a mosaic of color tiles.

Some of them will even bring a bed sheet and will show them how to wear it like a Roman Toga. Our culture of Italy and great masterpieces are both part of the picture. It's true we're showing three coins in the fountain, but there will also be tours of the Italian and Roman collections and a sly talk on Roman Florence. You can catch a friendly game of bachiball or admire the classic lines of Italian-designed automobile. Punch and Judy, pasta-making, paper-making, wine-making, carnival masks, and the cathedral of St. Peter's and model form, folk dances and fake Mona Lisa's will all be part of Festa d'Italia on Saturday. Until then, Arrivederci for the North Carolina Museum of Art. This is Joseph Covington. If the National Gallery of Art had called its exhibition Treasures of Cambridge, I reckon

all the worshipers of English tradition and aristocracy would be flocking to see it. The actual title, Treasures from the Fitzwilliam Museum, hardly has the tourist standing in line. Something called Fitzwilliam can't compete very well with the museums in Washington that are full of airplanes and dinosaur bones. The subtitle, The Increase of Learning and Other Great Objects, is guaranteed to keep the crowds small. I suspect the curators of sabotaging the PR campaign with such fancy phraseology so they can enjoy the riches from Cambridge without having to elbow through busloads of convention years from Des Moines. Those visitors who are attracted, despite the lack of fanfare, even convention years from Des Moines, should find the experience enjoyable. There are treasures inside, more than 160 of them, from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculpture to medieval painted books, to master paintings of the Renaissance Baroque and modern epochs. It's a connoisseur's exhibition, with an eclectic choice of fine pieces offering pleasures both flamboyant and subtle.

Such a big variety of things can be overwhelming and confusing, and I hardly approve of the decision to provide every piece with a descriptive label. The labels are short and to the point, about explaining why the work is important. 160 labels is too much to read, of course, but they're there for the objects that catch your eye. If you go, be sure to train your eye on the coins of the ancient world. While they aren't masterpieces on the order of the paintings by Titian and Rubens, they are exquisite little sculptures in gold and silver. I also recommend the selection of drawings. Drawings are an acquired taste. They don't have the seductive color of paintings or the immediate impact of sculpture. I'm embarrassed to say I used not to think much of Rembrandt's sketches. They were too loose, too incomplete and quickly done. Really I realized Rembrandt was as eloquent with pen and ink as any master of meticulous detail, with a few quick strokes he cut to the heart of the matter at hand, with a sureness that now leaves me an awe. For aficionados of more polished drawings, there's a vato, as elegant as Rembrandt is powerful.

These treasures from that museum at Cambridge, which by the way bears the name of the ViCount who founded it 170 years ago, are on view at the National Gallery in Washington through June 18th. Kelly Ho, for the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I think the National Museum for Women in the Arts is a bad idea. I don't like the purpose. I think the collection is meaningless, and I don't even like the name of the institution. It's an art museum, painting, sculpture, and all the media that go into an art museum, so why not just National Museum for Women's Art, or National Museum of Art by Women. Four women in the Arts is misleading since it connotes the ideas of performing in literary arts and puts the emphasis on the women rather than the art.

Such a title could be appropriate if writers, performers, and administrators were equally represented, but they aren't. More importantly, the segregation of painting and sculpture by women strikes me as wrong headed. It trivializes the first rate work that women have done, and that deserves consideration as good art, not as women's art. Elizabeth Vigiela Bravo, 18th century France, deserves to be seen in the National Gallery of Art, and she is, along with the North Carolina Museum of Art. Georgia O'Keefe, and Helen Frankenthaler, deserve exhibition space in the National Museum of American Art, and they have it. Which would you prefer to be called one of the best women artists, or one of the best artists? The establishment in this decade of a museum for women's art suggests that these artists can't get recognition otherwise, and that isn't true. The enormous exhibition at the National Gallery of Georgia O'Keefe's work a couple of years ago proves otherwise. O'Keefe was a turning point for women in the history of art. Prior to the 20th century, there were few opportunities for women to be successful professional

painters. This says nothing about the talent of women, but rather that they had no way to learn the trade, or to market their work. The exceptions are mostly wives and daughters of artists, who learned from their husbands and fathers, and proved that a woman's skill could be considerable. In the 19th century, Mary Cassade and Bilt Morizzo gained fame alongside their male colleagues among the impressionists. They work hangs today in major museums around the world, but they would not be considered quite as innovative as Degas or Manet. With O'Keefe and then Louise Nevelson, and then Helen Frankenthaler and now Nancy Graves and Audrey Flack and plenty of other artists, women have earned a consideration at the highest levels, with no need to qualify the superlatives awarded to them. Putting the women I just mentioned in a collection with second and third-rate artists, just because they're all women, is a step backward. It would be different if they were feminine qualities evident, or any other connecting thread in the subjects, or the style of women artists. There isn't.

The argument will be made that artist historians have been biased against women, and that significant women artists have been neglected. This was true in the past, but the remedy is in studying these women and showing they work in meaningful context, side-by-side with their male colleagues. From whatever time, or place, or style, they were a part of. And this is being done more every day. The National Museum for Women in the Arts opened in a beautifully restored building in Washington in 1987. You can see some fine works there, but you'll have to see other museums to understand them. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. In the short film called Birds by Dutch filmmaker Franz Swarties, one sees the image of a woman

with a toy bird on an elastic band. The image develops an aura of sensuality as the woman makes the toy hop over her face and body, while in the background we hear birds twittering. This is obviously not a Clint Eastwood vehicle. Experimental film, whether in the Netherlands, the United States, or any other country, tends to show you things you won't ordinarily see in narrative film. The purpose isn't storytelling, it's exploration. I've been looking into the work of Dutch avant-garde filmmakers recently for a film forum at the North Carolina Museum of Art tonight at 8. Film curator Nelly Vorhaus will be here with a group of short Dutch films that she'll introduce to the audience. This will be the same program she's presenting at the Millenium in New York, the Cinematek and San Francisco, and the film forum in Los Angeles. The Raleigh audience will see ten films by seven directors. Generally these works offer explorations of color, light, movement, and space. Since these are the most cinematic qualities of film, the medium is perhaps as well suited

to the search for the ultimate images as any other in the world of art. Some of these images are abstract, pure color, light, and motion. More typically there are actors in specific situations, but even here it's the visual power of the images that gives the films their impact rather than any sort of plot. Holland gave the art world Pete Mondrian's compositions with colored rectangles and carried Redvelle's geometric furniture. The contribution of Dutch experimental filmmakers is less well-known, but no less interesting. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. There's a reindeer outside my office. He rode in on a pickup truck and he won't move. Next to him there's a porcupine and a gator.

The porcupine doesn't seem bothered by the gator, but the reindeer looks nervous. This monstrous menagerie is the work of chainsaw artist Clyde Jones. Clyde is not one of the art types who explore the esoteric possibilities of abstraction. Clyde makes critters. Critters that display an imaginative originality that is one of place for them on the grounds of the museum and in the hearts of Clyde's fans. Mr. Jones was born in Rocky River in 1935 and now resides in Bynum. He didn't learn his art in an academy and that makes him what curators call an outsider artist, outside the academically taught conventions of art. What Clyde does he thinks up in his own head. Dogs, possums, panthers and squirrels have all emerged from the logs and roots the sculptor has spied in the woods. Part of the effectiveness of the animals is that Clyde doesn't mess around with a lot of cutting pieces off and carving. This technique is more in putting pieces of wood together so that their natural shapes suggest torsos, legs, heads and tails.

And ears. All Clyde's critters have wonderful tails and ears. It's his trademark. That reindeer, I think that's what it is, has antlers formed by the natural branching of tree limbs. But Clyde Jones doesn't take the natural thing too far. The reindeer's seductive eyes are created with plastic flowers and bicycle reflectors. It works. That animal's big eyes and smile make him very friendly. Some of the others, a stegosaurus maybe, are more formidable with their bizarre snouts and horns. If you think children will like these sculptures, you're absolutely right, and you will too. They are part of an exhibition of outsider artists of North Carolina that opens inside the museum in July, but they're enumerous outdoor pieces that can be seen beginning now on the grounds of the museum. Clyde would like it if you paid his animals a visit. I would too. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. I had the experience recently of serving on the jury for the Sir Walter Raleigh Appearance Awards, which were announced in May.

These awards are given by the Raleigh Appearance Commission for developments of outstanding appearance, not just good design, but sensitivity to the topography and vegetation of the site, and of the well-being of the people who moved through and near it. The experience was encouraging. The jury spent most of a day looking at houses, office buildings, public edifices, sidewalks and landscapes in Raleigh. At the beginning of the process, there were at least a couple of us who were skeptical that we would find enough recent projects that we would want to give awards to. And while not everyone was impressed with all that we saw, they were, in fact, several sites that seemed to me to be better off with the development than without it. Generally, as far as I'm concerned, cutting down five acres of woods to build a shopping center is not an improvement and wouldn't be even if it was designed by IMP, it's hard to compete with an oak. But it isn't difficult to look inside a city and find areas that could look better. When a developer takes such an area and builds a visitor-friendly structure that deserves some attention.

The recently restored Tucker carriage house is a good example. The old carriage barn near St. Mary's College was aging into dilapidation, until it was rescued and retrofitted to serve the space for a non-profit dance organization. The high-rise residences next to it should be delighted by such an interesting and historic neighbor. Unless obviously destined for an award, might be more station in the heart of downtown Raleigh. It's a parking garage for cars and a central facility for public buses. Now when a bus station and parking garage cop an award for appearance, that's news. There are a few types of structures less intrinsically beautiful than monstrous concrete slabs, with open sides that give passers-by the view of rows of dented bumpers. More station is actually rather nice looking. Its brick facade is a warm improvement over the brutally functional concrete of most such structures, and its opening show careful attention to the repetition of pleasing lines and shapes that make the building the best looking garage I've ever seen, unless you want to count the Guggenheim Museum, which Peggy Guggenheim called her uncle's garage.

More station, behemotho it is, is also designed to be an inviting space to walk by and through, even more rarer than a pleasant facade, with such architectural regard for pedestrians and occupants and the encouragement of the city's appearance, commission and planning department, there's hope yet for the urban life of North Carolina cities and those of us who live in them. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington. It was on this day 122 years ago that Mrs. Wright gave birth to her little boy, Frank Lloyd. It was 100 years ago this year that as a young man Wright built his first dramatic private

house. He didn't have to argue with the owner about the modern design, it was his own home in Oak Park, Illinois. In another decade he would conceive what may be the finest idea for a house that North America has produced. Its prairie house design grew from the flat open spaces of the Midwest. The low height and horizontal lines of the Frederick Roby House and Chicago make the brick building seem to hug the Illinois Earth, even though the Roby House comes right to the edge of the sidewalk of a Chicago street. Wright's prairie house is dared to break apart the rectangular boxes that people had always lived in. The rooms have well-defined spaces and still give a sense of openness, partly because rows of high windows look out onto terraces and balconies that continue the lines of floors and roofs. The prairie house made landscaping easy, a tree at one end on the street side and tall shrubs at the other end embraced the building and joined it with its space. Almost three decades later Wright designed another house that ranks with the Roby but

responds to the more dramatic landscape of a Pennsylvania mountain setting. Wright concrete slabs still form the horizontal basis for each floor, but the height rises into the forest around the house. Most brilliantly, Wright extended cantilevered slabs directly over a mountain stream, giving the structure the name, falling water. Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius. We know that because he said so. He was eccentric and somewhat difficult, but that's the price of having the work of someone who creates something new. Their hersts and vanderbills could build palaces with as many hundred rooms as they wanted, but they couldn't reach a finer marriage of earth, walls, and life than the infinitely simpler brick and concrete houses of Wright. They were of their place and time, and among the relatively rare structures that meet my ultimate criterion for judging a building. It makes the space that occupies seem better than before it was built. It's worth a look around wherever you are to see 100 years after that house in Oak Park,

how many American buildings you can find that have the right stuff. For the North Carolina Museum of Art, this is Joseph Covington.