Word: guggenheims
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Museums, it has been said, are the modern cathedrals. Richard Meier's Los Angeles Getty Musuem, Frank Gehry's Bilboa Guggenheim--these are the seats of present-day architectural spectacle and wonder. This year's winner of the Pritzker Prize (architecture's highest award) demonstrated his own ability to generate that sense of wonder. It was, indeed, a grand Piano performance...
...that vast span. For someone who had the impact on international art that he did, Pollock had a bafflingly short career. He didn't attain any degree of originality until after his 30th birthday. The arc of the career rises from 1943, when the collector and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to paint a mural for her Manhattan apartment, to the early '50s--no more than 10 years. The final four years of his life brought a string of pictorial failures and, at best, semi-successes: no talent could survive the alcoholic battering Pollock gave his. And then...
Such was Pollock's problem. The picture in which he broke free from it--and, it now seems, took American art into a larger freedom with him--was the 20-ft.-wide mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim. He painted it in one outpouring rush, in a day and a night. Mural isn't by any means an abstract painting. It retains the essence of subject matter shared by most "classical" murals, from Giotto to Matisse--the projection of human figures on a large plane surface. But the movement isn't suave. The figures are arabesques, coiling, jammed together, recognizable...
...alle Quattro Fontane, whose plan is a quatrefoil stretched to a near ellipse. Standing in it, Serra wondered, "What if I turn this form on itself?" But the closest architectural sibling of these new sculptures is the work of Serra's friend Frank Gehry, the designer of the spectacular Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, with its freely twisted and flowing curves sheathed in metal. To calculate the full-scale enlargements of the Torqued Ellipses from their sheet-lead models, Serra had recourse to CATIA, the same computer program Gehry used for Bilbao...
...addition to being named a Guggenheim fellow in painting, Phipps also won the Grolier poetry prize...