The American Scene; Art & Exhibition

I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say, but I don't know what to say. Good morning. My name is Joel Zanger for the American Scene. A subject this morning is art and the exhibition, and the subject is prompted by something that's happened only very recently. Matters of art and artists have become increasingly familiar on the American Scene, but the recent completion of New York of the Guggenheim Museum for

contemporary art has created a stir and focused attention on the problem of how the art shall be shown. This morning we have two guests who will discuss this problem. Our first guest is George Danforth, who is the director of the Department of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, our second Daniel Brenner. Daniel Brenner is a Associate Professor of the Department of Architecture. I wonder if we might start out Professor Brenner. This Guggenheim Museum that has brought this problem to the attention, at least of the American Museum going public, what is it that has caused such a stir? Usually it's the pictures that creates the fur. Why the museum? Well, anything connected with Frank Lloyd Wright has always been publicity -making. There have been lots of new museums completed in the last 10 or 20 years, and there hasn't been much of an uproar about them. The reason this has created Orrampus is that it's not a crummy building.

It's a very, very powerful, very strong architectural statement, almost a piece of sculpture. And Catherine Coofer instance in the Saturday Review titled her article on the museum, architecturally successful, but the paintings died. This is indicative of a whole group of criticism that has cropped up the question of whether if an architect gets too dominant in the way he designs a building, the material that goes in may very well be too subordinated. Now, George, you were just at the Guggenheim Museum a few days ago. Why don't you tell us something about the experience of being in it? Well, it was quite an experience. I was there on a Saturday and was very crowded. You expect this in the museum, nevertheless. Still, this is the crowd's effect. You're looking at the paintings by virtue of the design of the building. The paintings I don't know that all of them died, as Mrs. Coofer said, but certainly the work

of the artist took a hard blow in being exhibited in this building. It's so strange and form and so very powerful in form as to, as you have said, take your attention away from the consideration of the work of art itself. I was particularly disturbed by the problem posed in exhibiting the paintings on the wall, just the very simple problem of what angle should you hang the picture? I wonder, could you, in general, describe this shame? Yes. Well, why don't we have a slide here? Let's see our first slide. The exterior of it will give you some idea of the shape of the building. You can see in the top view that it is spiral in form with an approximate six -story height, as I recall. The lower picture is from the interior, looking from the main floor up towards the various levels. It doesn't show too well the problem I was about to mention in this one, but let's

stick on this a moment. Now, in this, this is taken from one of the upper levels. Let's hold this for a moment, because I think some degree you can show the disturbing thing to me at least of what angle to place the pictures. You see the vertical, the dark vertical members that you see in the background are actually perpendicular. They are structural members of the museum. Therefore, the floor and the ceiling line being at a spiral and consequently a slope is not perpendicular to those vertical members. Now, the spaces between the vertical members are relatively small. You can get some rather large pictures, but considering certain museum wall areas, those are rather small. So, they have the problem as to what line do they put the picture? Do they line it to the floor, which is sloping, or to the vertical members, which are perpendicular? And that is the choice they make. Yeah. Whichever you do. The time I was there, which was different than it was there, then it was a few days before, so I am told, is that they put all of the pictures with the bottom

line of the pictures, and most all of them are square rectangular, parallel to the floor. So, you had this very disturbing, strong pattern of movement between the pictures and the wall elements. You know what's a bit like the funhouse, where your normal relationship to spaces is thrown out of kilter and usually stagger out of the place, a little bit seasick or something. This is exactly my reaction. After I left it, looking at all of these and going along the spiral, I walked up and I walked down, contrary to what they recommended taking the elevator up and walking down. Oh, there's a pattern. You're supposed to start at the top and come down this way. They recommend it, but if you don't have to, you can walk up and you can walk down. But you are a little dizzy. You're a balanced sense of balance is thrown off by trying to adjust to what is normal to the human being, which is to stand vertical and to have some reference to the horizontal plane. It was quite disturbing in this sense. In other words, there is no horizontal plane in this building above the floor level. That is right. And then when you stand back to look at the picture, and some of them are very large and you have to get some distance from the pictures,

then you're in the line of the circulation of people walking up or coming down the spiral. Which means you have to move or they have to move. They don't do it, so you have to move. There are an awful lot of battles put to you in with contemplation looking at a piece of art in this museum. It's quite disturbing. Well, you know, the trouble is, it's a problem that occurs not only with a museum, or even with an architecture that always does. It's whether the person who is a so -called creator who is making an object of some kind can sort of restrain their itchy fingers or something so that they don't try to completely dominate wherever the object goes. Mr. Wright was a very strong personality. His houses might be criticized by some people on the same score. That they were so dominantly right that whoever lived in them suffered. The same thing could hold true of a dress design, for instance, whose dresses was such a

reflection of her own ideas that the person who wore them was completely submerged. But still, it seems to me the normal question is Mr. Wright, when commissioned to design an art museum, had it taken consideration of the problem of showing pictures. And yet, you suggested that in this from this respect at least he failed. Well, Dan, is this a bad museum, though it's a good building? Yeah, I think so. Very definitely. Now, let's look at this next slide. This is very interesting. This was done 50 years ago at the Art Institute. It was an exhibit by Frank Lloyd Wright, the first exhibit he ever did of his own Japanese prints. Now, I don't know how well this comes across, but he got fascinated by the picture wire to hold each print. He made a very complicated pattern of the picture wire, which sort of completely fights with the prints. He wasn't content to just put the prints up there and give them a quiet background so you could look at the prints. Now, Mr. Wright had to show how clever he could be with picture wire. Now, of course, this is on a much smaller level than what he did in the museum, but it's the same thing

to the exhibition. And you see by the doorway there, he's built in architecture to the exhibit upon which to place it looks like plants, but that construction to the right of the door, which goes from one room to another, again, is something which has nothing to do with the presentation of the prints. It's a challenge. You know that little construction. This was done by Frank Lloyd Wright. Look how clever I am. This seems to be the problem of Mr. Wright and other architects of this strength and strong ideocentric character, certainly in the Guggenheim Museum. His ego has come in way of the problem and solving the problem. The trouble here is, goes, this is rapidly becoming an indictment of Mr. Wright. No, let me change it. Let me change it because Catherine Kuh in this article, she was the only critic who did, took the occasion to bring in a museum that Miss Vandaro has designed in Houston, Texas. And even though Miss is completely at the other end of the scale from Wright as far as the way he does

a building, let's look at that Houston slide now, the first slide. And we'll see that from the outside of the slide of the Houston Museum that the building is recognizably a Miss building. It looks like some of the buildings in Chicago that were on the Illinois Tech campus. And it has the quality of a big hole with huge areas of glass and steel. Now, if we look inside the Houston Museum, we'll see that in this interior picture, there's very little resemblance to what we saw in Wright's Museum. That here is a huge space, a completely large open space. Everything really is very well related to the normal points of reference. But if we look at the last slide we have on Houston, now it's another interior shot. We find that the person installing the painting is confronted with a wall that's

40 feet high at the end. In other words, the scale is so immense that it poses problems. The pictures become dwarf. Here the problem is the people are really given unlimited flexibility. They have no flexibility in the Guggenheim. Here they have unlimited flexibility. Here they have to have real imagination and they have to have quite a bit of money so they can install devices which will work within this space. What about that basic problem, the problem of that immensely high ceiling? Isn't that fairly difficult to get around? Well, they had an exhibit in there recently where they actually sort of built a museum within a museum. They built additional floors right inside this big space with bridges and whatnot to create different scale. Now they could do it. See, it's like a stage. It's like a studio. In other words, you'd say this comes closer than to an ideal in that it is sufficiently flexible that if itself is unsatisfactory, it can be made. This seems to be a prerequisite of museum design to me. And the museum in

New York, as opposed to this, is as Dan has pointed out, is so rigid. So absolutely unflexible. You can only use it one way. There's absolutely no other space to handle freely. That is free of circulation. Because it's rigid or free of structure. Of exhibiting, it's rigid in terms of the traffic flow, the movement is through it. That's right. And the architecture highly imposes upon it. Now I think it must be agreed, it seems so to me at least, that in the museum in Houston, that the architecture is as easily distinguishable as being Mises, as Dan has said, but it has a certain calmness and composure about it. It becomes a dignified structure as a background to the display of arts. It tries in its own way, even though maybe the height is difficult for certain kinds of paintings, yet as a piece of architecture is at least a little more neutral, considerably more neutral, than are the strange forms and curves of rights architecture in particularly in the U .K. and I museum. You use the word neutrality in this interest in me because most of the museums I've gone to, and I suppose

the Art Institute is a fairly representative example, have always struck me as being neutral merely by the fact that I'm accustomed to the general layout of the American museum. They tend to look alike, more or less. This is neutrality simply through custom. Now, why not simply stay with our traditional museum patterns, the museum which is... Well, the museums you've been accustomed to seeing come right out of the history of the museum, which is a short one, because museums really didn't come into being in the sense of public museums until well after the French Revolution. When they merely took over the palaces of the nobility, and they became like the Louvre places where art had been shown for the nobility and continued to be shown for the public. This form was just taken over in the museums that were built afterwards. Actually, if you're sensitive to the architecture of those buildings, they make a very strong

statement too. You see the old traditional Renaissance architecture, you become accustomed to it, fades out of the picture. If one is sensitive to what is done architecturally, a building that's a copy of the past is very discordant, very disturbing, and also can make very powerful space statements and things like that which can louse up the things that are going inside. So, because one becomes accustomed to something that's bad... What would you say are the failures, for example, of a museum like the Art Institute? Many of the failures, even though they're not as obvious, let's say, as in the right museum, are similar. There are things that the architect, the difference is the stairhole. You know the big stairhole in the Art Institute? There's a gigantic space when you compare that with a home museum that's useless. You know, he'd like the lot of stairs winging up just the way right has the spiral, these stairs go up all over the place. It's good for nothing. There's a certain part about the space of it though.

Yeah, that's what we're talking about is finding it more sympathetic to the display of art objects, as in Mises, as opposed to the eccentric forms of rights. I think we have a slide if you'd like to get to that of one of the galleries at the Art Institute. This is an old before remodeling and is an old exhibit. Now, you know, when you talked about neutrality, this is a good example. When they first started showing paintings, they went jammed together, they discovered the whole wall. You couldn't even see the wall. So they were all competing with each other, you know, just all yelling at each other. This is somewhat better, but still it's a fairly old exhibit, and here the paintings are so jammed together, they still jump at each other. Now, look at the next slide we have here. And it's absolutely typical of current thinking in museums. This is the Art Institute. This is the Art Institute again. It's your recent exhibit, and you show the neutrality, if you want to call that, is achieved by giving infinitely more space around these things. Well, does this suggest

the possibility that within the physical framework of museums we already have? There's room for achieving this kind of neutrality you say is desirable. Is it necessary, in other words, to scrap on museums and build museums like Meast Build and Euston, this is? Well, I think this is an example of that, that you can do. You can do it within the existing structures. Yes, if you can do anything within an existing structure, you've got the money. It might cost twice as much as a new building, but you can do it. Well, I can see certainly that neutrality - flexibility, let's do it that way, or unobtrusiveness, that these are all desirable for showing pictures. But especially, you want flexibility because you don't know quite what you're going to show. But certainly, isn't there another school which painters who want a setting which is specifically related to the paintings that ought to be shown? Yes, Dan has a very good story on the Galgan show. No, no, this was to lose the track. To lose, yes, excuse me. It's interesting because it was a traveling show that

went to three cities. In Philadelphia, they took a whole series of paintings that Le Trek had painted in a bordello. And they thought that they would obviously create a lot of public interest, and they did not satisfy with that. They thought they had to recreate the furniture and the atmosphere of that type of institution in the museum. So they used curved plush sofas and huge, labored old plant stands, and what have you. To many people, they really seemed ridiculous, that whole attitude. A movie set for the... You know what it's like? I think food looks good. And I think a nice steak on a simple plate is fine. It seems sort of ridiculous to me, for instance, to have a plate, let's say that has a steak painted on it, and then put your own steak on top of the plate. Well, would you generalize in no case a setting should be adjusted to? Oh, I think it would be done very subtly without any stylistic or... If you are choosing rather extreme case here,

it can be done well. Sure. But not by using historical things that just a mirror image of the thing. I think even in those days the painting probably looked better in the studio than in the room, which was recreated. Oh, you still see it. This becomes a kind of sentimental thing in presenting an exhibit that they give into. First of all, publicity purposes. Here's another way of handling things in an architectural space. I think we still have one shot here that would show that. A slide or a book. Why don't you work down this problem as a matter of... Yes, this was a project that Mise Vandero did back in about 1942, Jews, in which he presented his idea of what he thought an ideal museum, so to speak, would be. This was never a completed building. No, this was a project. It came out in an architectural magazine in this country. They invited a number of architects

to do certain buildings for the town of 1940 or 50X. I forget which data was. It's all past now, whatever that may have been. But Mise showed, tried to show in this, and I think did very well. This is only one photograph of how a painting itself being so large. So a very huge in scale could become a wall element within itself. This painting directly ahead of us here as you're looking at it is of the Great Picasso Gernick, which is 12 feet high and 25 feet long. Large enough to very definitely become a wall element within a free space, a space which is freed by not having a bearing wall construction, but columns or a big span of some kind. So he used that, and he showed also how that being an architectural element, as well as a painting, could be used that way, and then juxtaposed that to sculpture, which today has shown in the picture just before this, that Dan showed of the new gallery. Redone gallery in the Art Institute, there was a piece of sculpture, sculpture being used in a different space. Is this relatively new, bringing together in the same gallery in the same room, sculpture and painting?

Not necessarily. The only reason to ask is the first picture you showed was remarkable by its absence of any sculptor at all. It seems to me what you could answer this better Dan, because you've worked with the museum a great deal, but it seems to me that what is developed today as a greater sensitivity to what sculpture can do within the space, which it is placed. What it can do to articulate that space, give it scale, or some other visual quality. You know, I think there's a sort of a misunderstanding among a layperson about what a painting or a sculpture is. I think a lot of them feel it's a decorative object to cover a space on a wall. You know, it's something you stick over the metal piece because it looks empty, or maybe you put a piece of sculpture on a piano to keep the piano from moving. I don't know why. You keep the show off and falling off the piano. But if a work of art has any meaning, real meaning, it's not as a piece of decoration. The artist is trying to make some statement about his relation to the world around him, and it has to be treated with a little respect. I think the way so many decorators, for instance,

say, let's build our room around a painting. So they get a painting on the wall and they say, now we'll take the green from that and we'll cover the sofa and green fabric. We'll take a red and we'll pick up the red with something else. It's a travesty of what an artist should be doing. He's just a decorator then. They might as well get wallpaper. And if you carry that approach and that understanding of the thing, you have to treat things in a museum with a real respect and understanding, and you can't use them as decoration. Well, let's see if you're going to articulate this and kind of concrete terms, respect. What does that mean practically when you're faced with a problem showing a particular painting? How do you treat a painting with respect? Well, it's an, I know it's a difficult question. We don't have the painting in itself. You don't attempt to use it as a basis for the way you paint the room around it. The color in the room should be a neutral background to the painting, for instance. There should not be any other painting too closely related to it because the two will obviously compete.

The painting should be used as a painting and not as something else. For instance, artists always make, even though they try to be valid in their statements, they make mistakes. There was a show here of Shagal many years ago. And he got fascinated with a construction. It was like an old tree trunk or something, it stuck up. And then he hung his paintings from the branches like Leaves. He thought it was a real tricky idea, you know. But I think it demeaned his paintings. You know, they become part of a window to display his paintings. Or another construction. Well, people who install art are frequently tempted to do that. There's an example at the Art Institute now. They dug up for a show from their collection. An old 19th century sculpture in white marble. It looks like the white rock lady with sculpted clouds and what have you. Then they stuck her in front of a wedge wood blue wall. So, you know, it would have a recall to

this wedge wood china that's blue and white. Well, you know, it's tricky. I just don't go for that sort of thing. Oh, yeah, I feel good. Yet, nevertheless, this is an attempt, apparently, on the part of the museum. Well, whoever is responsible for the white rock lady. This is an attempt to create a total atmosphere which will make for the public the viewing of pictures and what complete and satisfactory experience. Now, you say this can be done subtly. How has it done subtly? How has it done properly? This is a failure, fair enough. But how do you do it right? Well, by the way, you handle the space. By the way, you relate the paintings one to the other. Well, I can give an example. I worked on a show once that was about five centuries of French drawings. The colors we used, while there were no way historical, at some of the planes we put in the space, did sort of give a very hint of a suggestion of what one associates with space in French buildings. I happened to do the

same to Lucila Trek show in New York. And I tried to use a space there that would be somewhat similar to the space in the windmill, you know, the Moulin Rouge. You know, just by the space you can suggest somewhat the atmosphere in which he lived and worked without getting it all. You mean by not false association of detail or the spirituality? Well, what about the case where museums have permanent exhibits? Now, certainly the flexibility and neutrality of desirable in the case of contemporary collections, which change. Well, what about an Impressionist group? I mean, we have, well, again, back to the Art Institute. Yeah. We have a group of French Impressionists, and those paintings are going to stay on those walls. They should not. They will. They will. They probably won't. No museum keeps, maybe the Louvre keeps everything. But you alone, you alone three of your paintings from a gallery, and you have to do something in the gallery, unless you're just going to leave some

dirty mocks on the wall. But even at that, Jules, the problem that Dan has spoken of, of the sensitivity to the painting, and what it is and what it says are the work of art, on its own grounds and its own terms, stands. This is kind of universal. Whether that painting is going to be on the wall an hour or ten days or ten years, still put it on the wall with the same understanding of what it is as a painting, as a work of art. It should look as though it's built in. As soon as it's built into the museum, I think it's dead. You know, it's another corpse in the museum. Oh, this was your point. You mean, make it a part of the architecture? I wonder. Because it's permanent. Yeah, it can just be done. What about... Let's go into something like in the way of a mural, which is a part of the building, or a fresco. Well, I was thinking specifically of the meat's idea for the Garnaca as a wall. This is what you don't get much more permanent. Or at least you don't create the impression of permanence more highly than it is. But it's a wall that's always been moved out. Yeah, but that's... Sure, it can. It is a

wall though, but not a wall. But it looks like a wall. No, it should not look like a wall that holds up the building. It should look like a very thin plane, just a screen in a space. Nearly a petition, which is a painting. Of course, this is ideal if all our paintings... Or at least every museum possesses a number of paintings of that dimension. But what happens to small paintings? They have to be here. They can't be handled that way. That's true. I mean, they can be handled on a wall that's a free plane, but a number of them. We saw that in the... In the... Here's the wall. A wall just scaled to the scale of the painting. I wonder, could you say that your generalization is about the ideal museum would extend into the person who has paintings hanging in his own home? I think many of the attitudes about the way things should be done in a museum should carry through into a person's own. I think the people who typify that attitude are the Japanese. Very good example. You know, in the way they handle their ride. It's treated with great respect. It's almost enshrined. I'm placed in a shrine. But it's changed continually. And the whole

approach to this, even though it's specifically Japanese, and I don't recommend just taking the physical thing over, but the philosophy behind it is wonderful. Many of the people that I know who have good contemporary collections, let us say, generally speaking, their exceptions have the same attitude towards... They were speaking up to museums towards the showing of a piece in their home. They're examples. I think some of these people that we know of are working on it, realizing that it's too much of a clutter to can't see anything for the paintings. In other words, then, if we could summarize, you would say, that ideally, that best museum is one which is sufficiently flexible to create as many ideal situations as paintings it possesses. That's very well put. Most flexible and most neutral. Yes. And this goes again. I'd like to thank you both, Mr. Danforth, Mr. Brenner, this morning. And I'd like to thank you for listening.

Good morning for the American scene. This is Jules Anger.