PLAY TIME

The Paul Rand exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is called Everything is Design, but it might better be called Everything is Delight. This great graphic designer, who’s best known for the brand identity he created for IBM in the 1940′s, did work that gives remarkable pleasure. All of it (corporate logos, advertising copy, book covers, cosmetics packaging, cigar wrappers) is characterized by candy colors, eye-popping geometries, and eccentric compositions that give a strong sense of play.

Make no mistake about it; this is high design. The familiar eight-bar IBM logo, when not orthogonal, is designed to sit at precisely 37 degrees from the horizontal. An instruction manual Rand wrote for the company (Use of the Logo/Abuse of the Logo) notes the text size, spacing and information fields on an employee’s business card with fascistic authority. While his graphics look like happy jumbles of words, pictures, photographs and glyphs, they’re composed rationally. Each element floating on a blank white or black background is located with ravishing precision.

Rand’s compositions erupt from the center of a page with child-like grace. There’s an ad for Frazer automobiles that features a super-sized hand playing with the vehicle as if it’s a toy. The designer creator the logo for Colorforms play sets, and illustrated several childrens books. At a time when branding is a business science, shaped by focus groups and market research, Rand’s work is an argument for exuberance.

Image courtesy of the Paul Rand Foundation.

May 03, 2015 by Nalina Moses

ROOF PARTY

When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I? I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going." That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture.

The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler. Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus. The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry. It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving. A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms. The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre.

Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside. So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed. The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries. Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow.

It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building. It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature. But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass. And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky. The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird. It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below.

Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

April 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses

BEAUTY AND BRUTALITY

The Prada Winter 2014 campaign, shot by Stephen Meisel, unfolds under an overcast sky, in a barren landscape, as a beautiful young couple loiter about an abandoned Brutalist house. Their clothes and accessories are “architectural,” rendered in black and white, accented in undiluted primary colors, and cut in crisp geometric lines. Against the bare concrete of the house the man and woman, in their luxurious duds, pop. The shots capture dramatically the contrast between hard and soft, bright and dull, flesh and stone. In the accompanying promotional film the couple play out an amour fou inside the house, which is furnished only with a bare mattress and folding chairs. It’s like a high design crack house.

But what building is this? It’s rough skin recalls a Paul Rudolph house in New England, but its curving concrete retaining wall recalls a Scarpa house in northern Italy. Credits for the campaign give us the name of the make-up artist and models but not of the house or its designers. Some of the campaign’s images are remarkable in that they do not even feature clothing, bags or shoes; they simply position the Prada logo against an enlarged detail of the architecture: a cornice, a stair, a wall. In these shots the texture of the aging concrete (crumbling, shadowed, damp) is richly sensual. It’s a roughened, sensibility that goes against the prevailing gloss of high fashion. But there’s nothing “architectural” about these images. They never reveal the entire building, or describe compellingly the place where it is. The movie is even less revealing, focused mostly on close-ups of the models and their clothing. This house isn’t a structure, really; it’s just a sign of Brutalist style.

March 30, 2015 by Nalina Moses

STORMY WEATHER

The movie Mr. Turner gives us the person of J.M.W. Turner, not the painter, and that’s unfortunate. Because, as depicted here by Timothy Spall, he’s a cantankerous middle-aged coot with a crab-like shuffle who communicates, when he cares to, in caveman growls. He neglects his adult daughters, sexually exploits his maid, bullies potential patrons, and insults fellow painters. Maybe the warts-and-all portrait is meant to show that beautiful things are often created by unbeautiful people. But, except for the tenderness he shows his father and his mistress, we see little more than the warts.

More confusingly, we don’t see the things that make Turner a great painter: vision, discipline and passion. I can’t believe that the doltish half-man in this film could have painted the way Turner did. In the movie we see Turner stabbing the canvas with brushes, scrubbing paint off it with rags, spitting into its surface, smoothing patches with his fingers, and blowing pigment across it from the palm of his hand. But we don’t ever see him paint. That is, we don’t ever see him look deeply into the world around him and then into to the one he’s making. Instead we see him hop out of bed each morning, march into his studio, and make paintings. (Compare this to Lust for Life, which shows us how uniquely Van Gogh sees the world, and how he puts that world into his work.)

The paintings used as props in the movie are poor reproductions; most don’t look like paintings at all. But they give glimpses of the power of Turner’s art. In a scene set at the Royal Academy we see a young, petulant Queen Victoria belittle Sunrise with Sea Monsters to Prince Albert as “an oily yellow stain." That painting, hung high on the gallery wall, hemmed in by dutifully observed landscapes and hokey pre-Raphaelite melodramas, jumps out at us. It’s a fiery, emotional utterance, an explosion of light, a composition perched audaciously between the abstract and the figural; it’s like a scream.

March 08, 2015 by Nalina Moses