Something Ventured, Something Lost—The Whitney's Next Move

The windows at the Whitney Museum of American Art on 75^th and Madison Avenue are spectacular. Glimpsed only rarely amid the largely uninterrupted surfaces of Marcel Breuer’s forty-five year old building, they sometimes strike me as more interesting than the art itself.

This is not the case at the current Lyonel Feininger exhibition, which tracks the American Bauhaus master’s work from his cartooning days at the Chicago Sunday Tribune to the Manhattan streetscapes he painted following his long European sojourn. Feininger is best known as the creator of the woodcut print that graced the cover of the Bauhaus’s founding manifesto. His choice of a Gothic cathedral communicated the school's desire to integrate "fine" and "applied" arts. To this end, each student was taught by both an artist and a master craftsman. By the time the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, a new generation of teachers, expert in both artistry and craftsmanship, had been trained.

Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral of Socialism, 1919

Among the new generation of Bauhaus masters in Dessau was Marcel Breuer, who was in charge of the furniture workshop. (Seeing Feininger’s work in Breuer’s galleries feels like a reunion of the two Bauhaus masters, each of whom eventually settled in New York.) The move to Dessau was accompanied by the construction of a new campus, designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and a shift to a more modern aesthetic. This is especially apparent in the Bauhaus publications, with their advertising-inspired typography and layouts, and in the designs and paintings of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus as a teacher in 1923, following a period in Berlin during which he encountered the brand of (politically watered-down) Constructivism imported from Soviet Russia by El Lissitzky. Moholy-Nagy’s Glass Architecture paintings, with their overlapping planes of color and interplay of transparency and opacity, owe a heavy debt to Lissitzky’s Proun paintings, which were well-known in the early 1920s. (Lest anyone doubt El's utopian bona fides, Proun is an acronym which translates as “Project for the Affirmation of the New”.)

El Lissitzky, Proun GK, 1922-23

Marcel Breuer’s windows at the Whitney resemble nothing so much as a Proun painting come to life. Even more than Lissitzky’s famed Proun Room of 1923, which projected the Proun into three-dimensions, Breuer’s windows exploit the architectural potential of these works and the utopian ideas they illustrated. Trapezoids set into the walls at angles, they seem to move simultaneously toward and away from you, acting as dynamic counterpoints to the artworks that surround them. When a window is covered with a white scrim, as is often the case (to mitigate the impact of sunlight on the art, one presumes), the effect is even more startling. The trapezoid glows like something out of James Turrell’s playbook. When blacked out to facilitate the exhibition of video works, the effect is very different, looking for all the world like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square made flesh. (Malevich’s work and teachings prompted Lissitzky’s Prouns.)

The Whitney will be leaving its Breuer building in 2015 for more spacious, Renzo Piano-designed digs in the meatpacking district. The groundbreaking ceremony took place in May. This will come as a relief to those—and there are many of them—who dislike the Whitney’s current home. In November 2010, the New York Times’s Christopher Gray called it “ornery and menacing,” saying “it may be New York’s most bellicose work of architecture.” It would be premature to say that I will miss Breuer’s building—even after the museum moves its collection, it is unlikely that they will unload it. The fact remains, however, that I enjoy it. The Whitney is a pleasant place to visit, despite—or maybe because of—its too-small size (far too small for the Whitney’s collection and ambitions).

At the groundbreaking ceremony, the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, described the new Whitney as “aspirational.” Like the tourists drawn to the neighborhood’s luxury retailers, perhaps? According to a video posted on the Whitney’s website featuring detailed renderings of Piano’s building as it will appear in 2015, the new Whitney, situated at the southern entrance to the High Line park, will invite the neighborhood in. This is a far cry from Breuer’s fortress-like building, located in an equally wealthy, though decidedly less “hip” enclave. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have always liked Breuer’s building—it feels placeless. While this is an often-heard criticism of postwar modernist architecture, I have to admit to rather enjoying it in this case. The Upper East Side can be a forbidding place, and the Whitney feels like an oasis. By contrast, the new Whitney will blend seamlessly with the shiny glass storefronts and towers that are coming to define the meatpacking district and adjacent Chelsea. To be sure, it will be a treat to see more of the Whitney’s collection, but something wonderful will be lost in the process.

Postscript:

Cory Arcangel convinced the Whitney to suspend its prohibition of photography for viewers of his current “Pro Tools” exhibition. I thought I would take advantage by photographing the windows for this blog entry. After taking the picture seen here, I was informed (rather abruptly) by a security guard that photography of the windows is prohibited. Confused, I approached another, less agitated guard, to inquire about this strange policy which would allow me to take pictures of the art, but not the windows. People try to take pictures of the windows all the time, he told me, and it is not permitted—he couldn't tell me why (for more on the fraught position of museum and art gallery security guards, see Security Check). Disappointed, and a little embarrassed, I slinked away, wondering whether Arcangel realized how partial his victory had been.









 Sign at the entrance to Cory Arcangel's exhibition