Mark Lamster

I’ll skip commentary on the grim events at the Holocaust Museum in Washington in favor of more sanguine news in the Jewish museum world. Earlier this week plans were released for the new Jewish museum in Moscow, to be placed in Konstantin Melnikov’s landmark Balhmetvsky bus depot. The renovation is by the German firm Graft. The exterior will remain essentially untouched. Inside, a scrolling blobby insertion—”intervention,” to use the architectural term of art—will connect the two floors of the structure, and serve various programmatic needs. I use the term scrolling, but I’m not sure the architects had anything so literal in mind, which makes it a nice change of pace from the architectural parlante of other Jewish museums, to say nothing of Daniel Libeskind’s abstracted Hebrew letter forms in Berlin and elsewhere. How well or poorly such amoebic shapes will relate to Melnikov’s open space, or serve their functions, is another story. We’ll see.

My cousin Barbara Schaefer is having a show of recent work at Shop Art, on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. (Convenient!) Barbara is walking sunshine, and her pictures—big tactile abstractions, with caligraphic skeins of paint—channel her personality. I’ve always thought there was something Rubensian about them in their energy and handling of the painted surface. Also, they make me smile.

We spent this past weekend at the beautiful weekend home of the Woo family, a masterwork of modernist architecture sequestered high in the rolling Vermont hills. Kyu Sung Woo, the paterfamilias, designed it himself, and his limpid vision and great attention to detail show everywhere. (The project may be familiar; it was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.) The main house is comprised of a pair of light-filled, two-story bar structures, hinged at the middle. The volumes and geometries are asymetric but have a natural sense of harmony to them. Horizontal and vertical bands in a variety of materials (blond-wood floors, green clapboard siding panels, corrugated metal) give interiors and exteriors visual energy and direct the eye into the landscape. It’s all controlled and executed with immense care and polish. A few pictures:

Next week the MET will put on display Michelangelo’s “Torment of Saint Anthony,” reputedly the artist’s first painting. It’s a rare chance to see the picture, which was restored by the museum’s crack conservation department, before it heads off to its home at the Kimbell, in Ft. Worth. You have to love how flat-out bezonkers it is, understandable when you learn that it was (supposedly) painted when the artist was all of 12 to 13 years old. Contemporary sources tell us the boy-genius studied the wares at the local fish market to aid him in the realism of his monsters. The small boat at the bottom of the picture, sailing off apparently unaware of the drama above, is an especially nice touch.

Has Leigh Bowery, said to have died more than a decade ago, been hiding out on the Coney Island boardwalk sporting a mullet all along? Peter Arkle took the photo at left on Sunday. Lucien Freud’s classic portrait of Bowery on the right. You make the call. But wIth all due respect, when it comes to fleshy naked derrieres, I’ll stick with the master:

Continue reading Bowery on the Beach?

It has been a grim year for publishing, which accounts for the unusually restrained mood this past weekend at Book Expo America, the industry’s annual trade show. Attendance was down 17 percent compared to 2007, the last time it was held in NY. Among the absentees were big guns like Doubleday, Knopf, and FSG, the art-book house Phaidon, and indy fave McSweeney’s. “Whether it makes sense for us to be here is an ongoing question,” one publisher told me. I wonder about the future of the show. With so few booksellers left to sell to, it’s hard to see how the costs publishers lavish on their booths justify themselves. Which is why so many simply punted, opting only for basement meeting rooms and not major public displays. I didn’t hang around long: trudging the aisles is an enervating task even in the best of years. I did manage to see a few old colleagues, however, and to snag a few catalogs and advance reading copies. From what I saw, and it was an entirely random sampling, here are ten books (plus one) I’ll be reading this fall, in no particular order:

Continue reading BEA Report: 10 Fall Books (+1) for Your Library

The Magritte Museum opens next week on the Place Royale, in Brussels. For the past several months, as it was prepared for its unveiling, the building was cloaked by this brilliant trompe-l’oeil construction wall, very much in the spirit of the artist. (The house in the middle is Magritte’s home and studio, a few miles away on rue Esseghem.) I hope this painting will be on display inside, to double the pleasure:

It would seem there is a certain proclivity among Belgian-based artists for trompe l’oeil effects on their architecture. In the early seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens actually painted a series of faked sculptures around the courtyard of his house.

But that was just the beginning of his visual gamesmanship. On the garden facade of his studio, a building he designed himself, he painted a fake loggia, and then to heighten the apparent “realism” of this scene, painted a canvas that appeared to be hanging out to dry in front of it. (If you look carefully, you can see this composition on the far right of the second story in the blurry image above.)

Architectural camouflage, of course, is most often used in wartime, to ward off enemy aircraft. I can’t help but think of Jon Stewart’s running accusation that Dick Cheney had the Vice President’s residence obscured on Google Earth. It would be nice to develop some more inventive applications of these types of effects. Could they be used to test-drive projects in development? What if, one day, New York was dummied up to look like Paris? Or flipped around so the West Side was on the East Side? The mind boggles. Time for coffee.

It’s Memorial Day in America, so let’s talk for a moment about memorials. The other day I came across the image above, from an unveiling on a road outside of Detroit. Even acknowledging the centrality of the highway in American life, this seems a bit crass to me. (New Yorkers might think of the Ari Halberstam Memorial Access Ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, a tribute that makes a bit more sense, as Halberstam was murdered on the bridge.) The naming above was tied to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, MI.

This is the museum, a work of architecture parlante by Neumann Smith & Associates. Here’s a bit of the firm’s description of the building: “The gray and blue striping on the second story reminds visitors of the camp clothing Holocaust prisoners were forced to wear. The cables criss-crossing the exterior brick represent concentration camp fencing. Even the shaggy greenery around the perimeter is reminiscent of the meadow grass that flourished near the camps. All of this uncomfortable imagery is deliberate to convey the great destructive force of intolerance.”

Do we really need buildings like this to educate? We have films and artifacts to teach the specifics—I think a showing of Shoah is enough to permanently instill the horror of the camps on any visitor.

The absurdity of the Detroit memorial museum only reinforces the manifold virtues of Peter Eisenman’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin. This seems to me everything that a memorial should be; physically and emotionally powerful, but not trite. Eisenman is the most cerebral of architects, and his gridded, Cartesian thinking here is still evident. But it is as much from the gut and the heart as from the head, a combination of humors that suits. If only we could have something so deceptively simple and powerful for Ground Zero. It’s a vast improvement over what we’re getting, to say nothing of this.

Meanwhile, in about an hour, a parade of fire trucks and antique cars will file through the quaint Berkshire town where I find myself this holiday weekend. I expect a fine turnout, and can’t imagine a nicer way to honor local veterans.

I’m a terminal equivocator, a chronic and debilitating deliberator. In the latest episode of CBC’s WireTap, “The Deciders,” host Jonathan Goldstein walks me through one of those difficult decisions we all are faced with at some point: Should I go to the doctor? Hilarity ensues as we review the pros and cons of my plight. Stay tuned afterward for Jonathan’s interview with author Jonah Lehrer, who knows from deciding. It would seem I’m a maximizer not a satisfizer. Or something like that. Whatever the case, you can maximize your satisfaction by choosing to turn your internet dial to the CBC.

Lee Siegel has a wonderful piece in today’s WSJ on the history and decline of the muse in art. “Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago—eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines—but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers in their work up until recent times,” he writes. The roll of the muse was to imbue the artist with creative vision; that is, to serve as something more than pure “exemplar[s] of style”—which is how he sees today’s couture model. I suspect there are fashion designers who would disagree with this contention. My only quibble, and it’s not really one at all, is that there’s no mention of Rubens and his wife Helena Fourment, inarguably one of the great muses in art history. Rubens married her when she was just 16 and he 53, and they had 5 children together, including one conceived just a month before his death; he was nothing if not ardent. At their wedding, his brother celebrated his fine catch. “He now owns the living image of Helen of Flanders, who is far more beautiful than her of Troy….The beauty of her shape is surpassed by the charm of her nature, her spotless simplicity, her innocence, and her modesty.” Rubens painted her endlessly, both as herself and as any number of mythological figures; sometimes she appears numerous times in a single painting. In his most famous portrait of her (above), she appears as Venus in a fur wrap. Hot stuff.