ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENT

On my own, on a three-day vacation in Prague, I wandered the streets of the old city without a tour book, following pictographic tourist signs and the movement of the crowds. I was suitably impressed with the city’s castle, its bridges, and its impeccably maintained art nouveau facades. But what stopped me in my tracks was a large modern concrete apartment block just outside the Jewish quarter. It’s facade was made from triangulated concrete planes that tipped gently this way and that from the perpendicular, catching the light and holding the eye dramatically. This immense five-story building was charged with kinetic energy, alive with a hard, modern pulse.

Its architect, Otakar Novotný, is one of the best-known Czech Cubists. At the Czech Cubist Museum, a fifteen-minute walk away, there’s a charming permanent display of furniture, glassware, tableware, posters and painting, including works by architects Josef Gočár, Josef Chochol, and Novotný himself. These galleries are housed in a former office building by Gočár, that’s dressed in faceted panels of rich red sandstone.

The overall aesthetic of Czech Cubism is energetic and expressionistic, characterized by hard graphic lines, sloping planes, and attenuated lozenges. The furniture is kooky and eccentric, as if fabricated to decorate the set of a happy horror movie. It’s also bulky, with swollen profiles to accommodate the depth of the turning wood and glass planes. A tall cabinet with shimmering faceted glass doors can’t hold more than a few place settings, so compromised it its interior space.

Though only clumsily applied to smaller objects, Czech Cubist stylings suit buildings brilliantly, offering a rich technique to model large surfaces. I can’t think of another modern building that breaks its large planes as simply, boldly, and effectively as the Novotny apartment block. Architecture often stands on the sidelines of principle-driven artistic movements, hampered by cost, scale and utility. So it’s surprising that Czech Cubism finds its finest expression here, in buildings. It engages light, surface, and optics indelibly.

House in Neklanova, Prague, 1913-1914. By Josef Chochol.

August 22, 2017 by Nalina Moses

INTO THE GROUND

From the outside, the Darwin Martin House (DMH) in Buffalo might be the most lyrical of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes. It’s a lovely bundle of low-lying horizontals: brick walls, concrete railings, ribbon windows, and overhanging eaves, that seems to hover above the flat lawn. In its composition it feels more relaxed, and refined, than even more celebrated Wright works like the Robie House.

But the house’s interiors are something different. The rooms on the ground floor (entrance, living room, sitting room and dining room) are set in a dense, interlocking plan around two large freestanding brick fireplaces. There are no doors or archways to mark the boundaries between the rooms, only wood beams and shifting heights in the ceilings. These ceilings are set low, so low that someone six feet tall would have trouble moving from one to the next.

The walls are all finished with a gold-tinted plaster. And they are trimmed with wood bases at the bottom, wood frames at the corners, and wood coves at the top. What plaster surfaces that remain are encrusted with wood display niches, bookcases, radiator covers, and window seats. Overhead, the ceilings and beams are also trimmed in wood. All this heavy woodwork – in teak with a heavy grain, stained the color of tea – weighs the space down. And when one moves to the windows for relief one can’t see beyond their intricate stained glass panels and the deep eaves to the sky. So one’s view remains pinned low, to the horizon.

It was one of Wright’s commandments to build into the ground rather than on the ground. And one typically finds inside a Wright house, like Robie House, a protected, burrowed feeling. But at DMH one finds instead a sense of compression, as if one is being pressed into the ground. This is an uncommon Frank Lloyd Wright house. Rather than a dynamic, fluid interior, it offers one that’s tangled, and overbearing.

Photograph courtesy of Darwin Martin Complex.

November 04, 2014 by Nalina Moses

The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses