Word: planarity
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Mies, meanwhile, was taking the logic of the empty architectural box to its unnatural extreme in the U.S. His campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology is a grove of steel ectoskeletons, essentially giant one-room buildings. The Farnsworth House (1951), a planar H-beam box floating over a floodplain outside Chicago, was Mies' last modest building, and the most affectingly American one. (Alas, his project for an Indiana fast-food stand never got built.) Farnsworth looks like a house, just barely. After it came almost nothing but true Miesian "universal space": high-rises, modeled on his twin apartment slabs...
...gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miró's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture...
This conquest of the "planar dimension" has not, up till now, been properly explained by a museum show. Rowell has done the job with tonic intelligence, bringing together 114 sculptures done between 1912 and 1932 by 39 artists: French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Italian and American. She has traced sculpture's passage from closed mass to open form with a precision of focus and a variety of little-known works that no earlier effort has matched. This may be the most important show of modernist sculpture in the past ten years...
...Russia, where there was virtually no tradition of sculpture, the planar impulse took two directions. One-as its name, suprematism, indicates-tried to transcend the material world. The painter Kasimir Malevich and his students, like Ilya Chashnik, devised reliefs and models that in their crisscross of small rectangular shapes and larger blocks resemble models for imaginary buildings or cities. They were, in a very rarefied sense, social blueprints, though quite unworkable ones. Perhaps Russia was the only country in which artists could seriously imagine that abstract art might attain the moral compulsion of a holy picture. Chashnik's Large...
Such experiments look recondite in the '70s, and they must have looked quite peripheral when they were done. The audience for them was small compared with that for a radical poet like Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the link that planar sculp ture sought between art and technology was often frustrated by shortages of materials and know-how. Still, these works cast a long shadow. The most surprising aspect of the show is the quality of some of the lesser known artists whose work Curator Rowell has ferreted out. One was Katarzyna Kobro, a Russian woman who worked with Malevich...