Why was Frank Lloyd Wright, who for twenty years or so had spoken with no uncertain contempt of modern painting, chosen as the architect of a building whose main function, supposedly, was to preserve and show off at their best the works of modern artists? The trustees of the Guggenheim Museum must have thought Wright was joking and did not mean what he said. This was a mistake: for so humorless and self-absorbed a genius as Wright, every word that crossed his lips had the finality of papal pronouncement. More probably it was just the old principle of star billing: for the big Spectacular you must get the biggest name even if the big star is miscast for the part. If the Spectacular turns into a fiasco, it will at least be a howling and sensational one. The new museum is spectacular and exciting in many ways, as one would expect from any large project by Wright, but in ways that make the individual works of art a subservient appendage to the architecture. Where another architect might have understood that the function of a museum is to disappear, as it were, before the works of art it houses, Wright insists on overpowering these works by his own presence. Anybody who doubts that Wright was serious in his ridicule of modern painting has only to take a trip to the new Guggenheim museum.
This trip begins with the exterior, but let us postpone that and begin with the first step inside the door, where in the first impression of the single total space from dome to floor we encounter the genius of Wright in its certainty and simplicity. The sudden rush of space is lovely and exhilarating. The spiral of the ramps, as one looks upward, is an arabesque that flows, without breaking it, into the rhythm of the whole dome. The bits of the paintings here and there visible from below behind the ramp are bright and invigorating splashes of color punctuating the white rotunda. One is not really looking, or trying to look, at the paintings yet. So far so good. Then one’s eye detaches the works of sculpture on the ground floor. Under the space of the dome they are at first glance reduced to the indifferent and incidental objects of décor in a hotel lobby. With a start one recognizes familiar works, among them some really first-rate Brancusis that have been acquired by the museum since James Johnson Sweeney took over. Now here is a very positive yardstick for measuring this new museum, because the old Guggenheim had a Brancusi show a few years back in which some of the same pieces were exhibited. The old Guggenheim was just a nice Fifth Avenue mansion, less pretentious than most, and happily not congealed into that frigid imitation of French chateau style that litters the length of the Avenue. The main thing is that it did have rooms, and within these rooms individual works of art could be isolated and looked at. Brancusi was far more imposing in the old Guggenheim than in the new: the individual sculptures were let be themselves, not absorbed into some structure supposedly grander and more significant. The powerful King of Kings, for example, awesome and mysterious as Easter Island, and yet with the intimate warmth of the wooden texture that was one of Brancusi’s special secrets among modern sculptors, dominated one of the rooms in the old Guggenheim, while in the new it is a piece of wood islanded forlornly in an immense lobby.
This absence of rooms, real rooms, in modern architecture is a strange denial of the human need to be isolated, alone, to shut a door. Is it the case that this architecture has accommodated itself too willingly to the spirit of the machine age, that it secretly thinks always in terms of factories and office buildings?
Once details have begun to detach themselves, you begin to be a little uncomfortable at some of the design in this impressive dome. The ribbing under the dome is both busy and tasteless, with meaningless triangles and horseshoe curves that obscure the simple flow of the basic line. It would have been easier and better for Wright to have followed conventional line here—the rest of the structure is original enough, God knows. But here too he must assert himself with something original, and precisely in the department where he has always been weakest: taste and décor.
Such failures of taste, however, would not matter if the pictures were truly served. So we take an elevator to the top, and now the Great Pictorama begins!
It is curious that Wright seems never to have heard, or thought about, the old folk observation that it is more tiring to descend a mountain than to climb one. Probably he was too engrossed in the brilliance of the idea of a continuous descending circular ramp that would lead past all the pictures; and it is a brilliant conception, abstractly; the only trouble was that it was never tested concretely, in relation to viewing paintings. To a certain extent Wright was always a genius of the abstract idea; and if he was in the grip of his own abstraction, he must assert it against life itself, including the personal life of the people who might use one of his buildings. He forbade people to have the decorations they might have liked in one of his houses. Never have I felt the suck of gravity quite so forcefully as on the ramp of the new Guggenheim, as it pulls you past one picture to the next. You have always to be conscious of planting your feet and holding your body at an unusual angle in order to stay put for a while before a painting. Never has terra firma been quite so welcome as when I reached the level bottom at last and was walking on the usual kind of floor. How is it that an architecture that claims to be functional could have dealt so thoughtlessly with the ordinary physiology and habits of the human body?
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Why should Wright have overlooked these matters? The explanation, I think, is in what he imagined would go on in this museum, and this is the key to the whole structure. He imagined a great crowd continuously and slowly flowing past the pictures, down and out the door into the garden or the street. A kind of conveyor belt of customers. The building is really the kind of thing proper for a World’s Fair; and it is no attempt at malicious witticism, but simply the more accurate designation, to call it a Pictorama rather than a museum. This great crowd really turned out during the first couple of weeks after the opening. They had come to see the building rather than the paintings; in fact, with a crowd like that, as at most vernissages, the paintings couldn’t very well be seen. But Wright has designed a building where people must perpetually come for the building and not the paintings.
The descending ramp would have been a splendid idea for a World’s Fair that was exhibiting miniature designs of city developments of the future or model factories or perhaps new styles of automobiles. You need not look at these things very long. If you are not a technician interested in the specific technical problem, you get the general idea immediately. But a great painting, or even a good one, is something else again. It was not painted so that you can get the general idea of it as you shuffle past with the crowd. You have to stay put before it until it comes to you. Better still if you can sit.
Ah but of course there is no place to sit before a picture at the Guggenheim! In a building that bows so low to functionalism that it has a lavatory on every level there is not a sofa or bench, except in a little comer of the main floor where people cannot see very much but can wait for the telephone or for rendezvous. There is no place where you can sit down and lose yourself in contemplation of a painting. Here again, evidently, Wright thought of the museum as a building for the masses, and amid those dense crowds that he must have imagined moving along like sheep before the paintings, there would of course be children with their mothers, and so there would have to be a John immediately handy in case junior was short-taken.
Anyway, there would be no place to put chairs even if the directors should be so minded to break the continuity of Wright’s conception. The edge of the near ramp would be too close, and the ramp on the other side too far. This stricture applies equally well if you are merely trying to see the paintings standing up. The best distance for seeing some of the paintings would be to be suspended in space one-third of the way out under the dome.
Some people I know have been much impressed by the view you get if you look across the rotunda at the paintings on the opposite wall. The effect, I admit, is very splashy. But it is also one of the most subtly dangerous effects of the building, especially if the museum is considered an institution to educate public taste. The effect of seeing paintings strung out along the wall at a distance of a hundred or more feet is to reduce the individual paintings to rather gay posters ornamental to the building. The pictures sink to a common indifferent level. A splashy but rather empty Mathieu, for example, will show up at this distance as equal to a quiet and monumental Mondrian. The museum actually has one of the best of Mondrian’s middle period, “Composition No. 7, 1913,” a perfectly magnificent picture. It could very well be lost in the shuffle, for the Guggenheim collection is a very uneven one, if you did not know and were not on the lookout for it. Imagine a New York boy of fourteen or fifteen who is seriously trying to educate himself in art through the museums of the city. If he has any stuff, he will of course eventually detach that painting from the gay spiral of the Pictorama. But it will take him longer, and there will be more false leads en route.
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In the present boom in the buying of American painting, a very fortunate thing for the painters, the majority of purchasers are still private persons. This means that these paintings will be hung in private apartments or homes, and will be lived with the year round, day in and day out, under varying conditions of weather and lighting. (As yet, not all collectors keep their paintings uniformly and artificially illuminated.) This is quite as it should be: the test of a painting is how well it stands up when you live with it. Modern painting is different in many ways from the painting of the past, but it is still painting, and every painting lives or dies as an individual work. A modern painting, if the painter is any good, is as intense a spiritual adventure as any painting of the past, perhaps more so in one way since the modern painter has less given him to start with. Perhaps no phrase in current chatter on aesthetics has been more bandied about and understood worse than “the dehumanization of art.” If this means a detachment from a certain traditional and specific form of Renaissance humanism, well and good; but if it means the denial of the spiritual and individual personality of the modern artist, then it is not only misleading but part of the tacit drift toward the faceless society of the future. No doubt, the modern artist often uses motifs from the Machine Age. Why should he not since he lives in the midst of it? But any structure that tends to assimilate the modern painter to the Machine Age and mass society does a disservice to painting itself.
Of course, it will be said that no museum can hope to duplicate the exquisite circumstances for enjoyment available to the private collector. To be sure. But with all the remarkable means open to modern architecture more can be done toward this end than has yet been attempted. And perhaps not so much need be done, after all. A few days before I visited the Guggenheim I had seen a very lovely show of Philip Guston at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Because I knew and had liked Guston’s painting in the past, I was met by that shock of displeasure on entering that often happens when we come expecting the old and the artist has moved on to something new; but I was determined to stick with these paintings and let them come to me, if they could. Now, nobody will claim that the Sidney Janis provides ideal conditions for viewing: it is more or less a little office and warehouse which happily seems to be doing a brisk business these days. But it did have two chairs, and ashtrays by them! I managed to get into one of the chairs, hogged it for a while, and let a few of the pictures work on me. It came easy after that Not much, just a simple chair, but it would be too humble a consideration for the great Pictorama that human beings like to sit and are likely to be more receptive doing so.
Perhaps the idea of a museum, any museum, belongs too definitely to an abstract and Alexandrian age so that the attempt to make a museum into a major architectural project is bound to be heavy and overweening. Perhaps a museum is more tolerable the more modest it is. Why not, then, have taken some old brownstone, remodeled it, punched holes in the walls and let in the light. The Guggenheim with its white walls and even white light is, I suppose, well lit, but according to a style which is on its way to becoming canonical nowadays. It is the light of an unblinking stare; and the paintings become lifeless and static within it. With natural light there would be gray days and bright days, the picture would change but live; and any painting that had any spizazz could ride these breakers of weather and be enriched thereby.
Why should we condone anything nowadays that tends, if even in the slightest, against the living and toward the lifeless, whether it slights the spiritual individuality of the artist or my own spiritual freedom as a gallery-goer? My course through a museum is always erratic: I may walk through the first rooms very rapidly, stop in the middle and slow down, then go back, and then forward. These zigzags of freedom are denied me at the Guggenheim. If, after I have got to the bottom, I want to go back to a single painting, I must take the elevator and descend halfway down the ramp. And what is going to happen when they want to give small one-man shows that in another building could be packed snugly and intimately into a few rooms? What would a new Brancusi show look like in this new Guggenheim?
And so we say farewell to the Pictorama, crossing over to the other side of Fifth Avenue, this time enjoying the humble functionalism of a park bench. I would not want to leave the impression that I think this building was not worth doing: everything bold is worthwhile, provided we learn from its mistakes. The trouble is that the accumulated hush-hush that has surrounded Wright for decades as an “authentic American genius” (which he certainly is), as well as the vested interests of architects without taste, will combine to drown the voices of the few who cry that the emperor is naked—or in this case is not nearly naked enough. In fact, I liked the exterior better than I had thought I would from its photographs. Some of the popular scoffing is not wholly accurate: it is not really so much like an overblown Bendix washer, or butter churner, or slightly distended accordion. Rather, in its full sweep from block to block it is an effective, if somewhat literal, parody of a ship, of about the heavy cruiser class I should say, with the rotunda as a superstructure from whose turrets guns might suddenly swivel. If it were set down beside a waterfront, and its interior remodeled for offices, it would make quite a good building for one of the maritime services.
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