Hands off.

Some buildings are important. And a building doesn't have to be good to be important. And 'good' is a fuzzy bit of subjectivity anyway. But there is no denying the importance of Philip Johnson's pink granite monolith on Madison Avenue, variously known as the AT&T Building, The Sony Building, and currently, 550 Madison Avenue.

It is an important building on many levels: 

• For breaking the International Style's stranglehold that choked skylines the world over, a movement Johnson himself chronicled and curated particularly in a MoMA exhibit as far back as 1932, those rectilinear glass boxes that elegantly reflected the austerity and practicality of a post-World War era. 

• For the sheer number of historical architectural movements and buildings it references. 

• And for the moment in time it captures on two fronts: The realization of Postmodernism as a bona fide theory on a grand public scale, and the culture of corporate power it, frankly, buries before the building is even finished.

Philip Johnson was witty, charming, irascible, mean-spirited, mercurial, celebrity-driven, the most sought-after architect in the 80s. His buildings are in Houston and Pittsburgh and Boston and DC and Minneapolis and Dallas and all over Manhattan and Europe for that matter. And they are statements, each and every one. He was also, apparently, immortal, working every day until his last at the age of 98. He molded the idea of 'starchitect,' that an architect's one great work necessarily made him (usually a him) a great architect. I wonder.

He was responsible for some truly great buildings. His PPG Place in Pittsburgh is a Neo-gothic monument to the company's plate glass roots and a siren call to Pitt's Cathedral of Learning a few miles away. His own Glass House in New Canaan, CT is positively Greek in its simplicity. And working with his mentor, Mies van Der Rohe, he produced the interiors for the now legendary Seagram Building on Park Avenue, particularly The Four Seasons Restaurant which put or at least kept the building on the map.

But his 101 California Street in San Fransisco looks dangerously serrated and top-heavy, his telescoping elliptical Lipstick Building in Manhattan promised far more than it delivered, its one trick underwhelms, and his AEGON Center in Louisville is a little too reminiscent of something Albert Speer may have designed for the Reich, a stylistic and philosophical flirtation Johnson notoriously indulged in the early 30s and that shadowed him the rest of his long life. 

That brings us to some middle ground here.

In the late 70s, the largest corporation in the world was AT&T. Some said their influence and control of communication in the US and internationally made them as powerful as a fourth branch of the US Government. 

Their original home at 195 Broadway was a 1908 wedding cake of a building that, still standing, boasts the largest number of exterior columns of any building in the world. 

In a gesture to cement their visibility, AT&T commissioned Philip Johnson to design a building that would set the company apart from every other company by setting it apart from every other company building. They decidedly did not want another glass box. They told this to Johnson, the man who had helped design the best of them, The Seagram, which remains, arguably, the purest and most successful corporate statement in the Modernist Movement. 

The Modernists hoped to develop an architectural vocabulary that would define the 20th Century in the way Classical and Gothic defined theirs. They took Louis Sullivan's credo 'form follows function' to its most fundamental ends. It was van Der Rohe who said, "Less is more." Using the new materials at their disposal, concrete, glass and steel, Mies van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, the architects most associated with defining and articulating Modernism, designed dozens of carefully proportioned, simple and simply beautiful glass boxes whose ornamentation relegated to the forms themselves and the richness of materials. The curtain-wall construction, copied ad nauseam throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s (and often by less inspired architects, think of the nearest office park near you) changed city skylines all over the world. 

The masters called theirs The International Style. And it was Philip Johnson who personally brought them to light in America through his position as MoMA's first curator of architecture in the 1930s. He made himself a king-maker. But Philip Johnson himself was not an architect until about the age of forty. The man who was known towards the end of his life as The Dean of Architects, the man whom every good contemporary architect, Daniel Liebeskind, Richard Meier, the late Zaha Hadid, called 'uncle,' the man quoted regularly among architects ("A room is only as good as it makes you feel."), the first winner ever of architecture's Oscar, The Pritzker Prize, studied philosophy as an undergrad at Harvard. He went back to school at 36, and ended up designing hundreds of projects and over 50 of the most recognizable buildings in the world. 

What kept Johnson young was his restless mind. Having reached the apex of Modernism with The Seagram Building, he quietly sniffed the air for the next emerging style. It has been said of him, he was responsible for no innovations himself. He just cleverly, presciently timed his association with a new style to make you think he invented it. And the next style in the air was Robert Venturi's 1960 treatise against the severity of the International Style. Venturi countered 'less is more' with 'less is a bore' and called for a post-Modern movement, a reaction to the Modern. Postmodern buildings might have ornamentation particularly through one or more classical references. These classical references are often fragmented, without function, and or wildly out of scale. The effect is often one of whimsy. And enough with the black or silver metal. Let's bring some bold color to the drawing boards. 

The movement makes its debut small, in homes, then shopping malls. And you're seeing them now in your mind's eye, from your youth if you're around my age, the Greek columns, the oversized crown molding, the oddly placed window. Vegas and later Atlantic City were fertile grounds for Postmodernism with their themed hotels and casino floors. College campuses used the form to find cohesion between their earliest buildings and their contemporary counterparts. And European cities find it a problem-solver for the same reasons. But it was Philip Johnson who put the movement in encyclopedias. 

Out of the twenty-five renowned architects AT&T asked to submit proposals, only Philip Johnson failed to do so. They chose him anyway. In 1978 he disappeared into his studio and on January 8, 1979, he emerged on the cover of Time Magazine no less holding his model.






This, would be no Seagram Building.

For the largest corporation in the world, a stone tablet, rising unbroken for 37 stories, controversial from the word go for its lack of setbacks, the selfish way it occupied the sky. For one of the most powerful corporations the world had ever known? Pink granite. Miles of it. At the bottom, the opposite of form follows function. A seven-story entry arch. Surrounded by a sort of breezy loggia.

But it was the topper that took the world's breath away in some kind of collective audible gasp. Entirely ornamental, it was a pediment in the Greek tradition, but pierced by a fragmented oculus, its Roman allusion. Almost immediately, people noted a resemblance to the chair back and highboy ornaments used by Thomas Chippendale in his iconic furnishings. Just as immediately, The AT&T Building was nicknamed The Chippendale Building. 

Because Postmodernism suggests wry little winks and nods to history, the designs can bear capriciousness. That top is more than capricious, it is a complete flight of fancy. And the building has more oddities at first glance, like the set of three oculi near the base at each side of the building. I see them and think, "Why?" But the building as a whole is actually a careful documentation of some of the great design throughout history. 

Built in thirds like a Greek column, the building has a clear base, the shaft in the tallest rise of the building, and the capital, here the fragmented pediment. The massing of windows in the shaft may seem arbitrary. But there are three columns of them. The two outside sets further divided into thirds (with a sliver column to the side of each). And the center set of windows is broken into nine small columns, three threes in fact, three being the Palladian ideal, the Vitruvian ideal, the liturgical ideal. 

But there is an almost subliminal ode to quality written into the face of most of the building: It is remarkably reminiscent of the English Rolls Royce radiator grill.

Because the windows are set back, the granite cladding on the steel beams--it's really just a conventional Modernist building 'tarted up in that season's drag,' one critic said--flows uninterrupted up and down the length of the building, adding to its verticality, but emerging at the base to look like actual columns, like the columns in the original AT&T Building six miles south. And while the pediment is the showstopper, the base is where Johnson exercises his vast knowledge of architectural history. 

In a bargain for additional height, Johnson promised the city public space. He put it at the bottom of the building. 

The bottom of the AT&T Building resembled an Hypostyle Hall, an Egyptian temple of a dark and quiet forest of tall columns lit from above (hence the three oculi and four tall openings above them on each side) representing the marsh at the beginning of time, primeval, the columns rising like the great papyrus, and here in Johnson's iteration, a room of contemplation, a retreat for the Mad Men and Women hustling up and down Madison Avenue. 

The entrance is monumental, and all built on a scale to house the enormous statue of many names and many homes. Sculpted in 1914, The Genius of Telegraphy was hoisted atop the old AT&T Building at 195 Broadway in 1916. By then, AT&T had spun off its telegraph division as Western Union and immediately the sculpture was renamed The Genius of Electricity. But at 24-feet, second in size after the Statue of Liberty and covered with 40,000 sheets of gilt, everyone called him Golden Boy. He appeared on phone books for decades. In the 1930s, he was renamed The Spirit of Communication and stood his aerie perch until Johnson gave him indoor ground floor digs in 1984.

  

The archway incorporates the height of the statue and the added height of a clerestory window, the huge center oculus that. moonlike and full, seems to hurl itself up the building to some lesser phase at the top. 

The base, too, thoroughly references Brunelleschi's early Renaissance masterpiece, the Pazzi Chapel in Florence, its entrance, an archway flanked by columns, its interior, multiple oculi, a vaulted ceiling, and the delicate opened columned walls of a cloister. That Johnson would recreate this solemn environment with exactitude, but on an enormous scale, to house the god of AT&T no less, was utterly ridiculous. But if you recall, that is indeed one of the four major tenets of the movement. 

In its tripartite structure, the bottom holds the classical elements of three major civilizations, Hypostyle, the Greek description of an ancient Egyptian room of columns, like the Palace of Athena and dominated by a Roman arch. That it hurtles through the centuries to recall the architect of the Renaissance, in every sense of that phrase, is a stroke of genius. But consider that it continues on through the fabric of time to tie this aesthetic journey into that of its home town and the other, earlier end of the 20th Century, and keep your head from exploding. Because it does all of the above and then reminds us of the base of the 1913 New York City Municipal Building and its Neoclassical A-listers McKim, Meade, and White who were taking the classical elements popular in the moment of time just before theirs and stretching them into one of the world's first skyscrapers while Johnson is taking a skyscraper and stretching long-forgotten classical elements back into it.

That, my friends, is important. It is carefully considered. It is the conversation every artist has with the ages out of respect and deference. As a jumping off place into the unknown.

That it never worked was most definitely a fault of the architect, but the deck was stacked against him. In 1982, halfway into the construction, two years before the doors opened, AT&T divested itself of nearly half of itself, spinning off the local exchange part of their business, Ma Bell, into the Baby Bells of 1982. It was that or be forced to do more to avoid Anti-Trust penalties. AT&T was indeed a monopoly, convincing us some monopolies like utilities were necessary to keep service uniform. It was a lie. Shrouded in mystery. As was the bottom of this building. Stone-like but really steel, and dark and darkly inscrutable like the machinations that happened behind the carefully packaged windows upstairs, it turned out not to be so comfortable a place to take a break. It made people nervous. 

Golden Boy was moved out early on. He never quite worked on the ground. His room, big as it was, turns out? Not quite big enough. He seemed stuffed in there. And the only good view of him was from across the street, where the unfortunate paning of glass made him look jailed, not imprisoned as much as in a holding cell awaiting arraignment, Indeed, he was moved on to three subsequent facilities like a Menendez brother. 

AT&T had to take a tenant almost immediately and Sony occupied half the building from the outset.  In 1996, Sony commissioned the very accomplished architect Charles Gwathmy to 'adjust' the troublesome base. Gwathmy sealed in the open spaces with windows and Sony shops, but he left the building recognizable.

Sony purchased the building in 2002 and ten years later, sold it for $1.1 billion to two property investment firms, Olayan and Chetsfield. In October of 2017, the new partners announced plans to have the Norwegian firm Snøhetta design millions of dollars of renovations. Like Gwathmy, the people over at Snøhetta are no slouches. They were given the commission to design the new Library. At ALEXANDRIA! And their NYC resume includes designs for the new layout of Times Square and the 9/11 Museum.

And here is where the firestorm erupted. 

Philip Johnson died in his Glass House in Connecticut in 2005. He's not around to advocate for himself. So his acolytes have taken to the streets, screaming witty epithets like, "Keep your hands off my Johnson!" 

The bulk of Snøhetta's renovations are centered around the base, which is where the public in NYC interface with a skyscraper. As obvious as that may sound, its importance cannot be overstated. Snøhetta proposes stripping away the granite from the bottom seven stories of the building, exposing its dirty little secret, its a Modern skyscraper underneath. They further propose to replace the granite cladding with a seven story 'curtain of glass,' ribbon-like to suggest a lightness, movement. We know, for sure, statistically, scientifically, people go in spaces they can see clearly from the sidewalk. Whatever food festival/vertical retail combination ends up in there will do well until tastes change as, of course, they will. 

But gone forever will be that rather startling array of references, gone will be that soaring interior that made you feel something. Even if it was creepy, so creepy they filmed a Batman in there, you felt something. And look carefully, gone will be the illusion of columns that run the length of the building into the sidewalk. They were an illusion, but they gave the building roots, sea legs, a presence on the street. As proposed? The building looks like it could pancake down on itself at any second. It won't. But I wonder we are trading one anxiety for another. And thrown to the gutter is Johnson's greatest premise, that a building in NYC has to have a good top and a good bottom, and they must refer to one another. I mean, better to change all the rest of the building and leave the bottom than have thirty granite stories floating un-moored to a glass shed.

I'm not the fan of Postmodernism I once was. I remember being tickled by it, and its historical elements piqued my interest enough to read up on them and understand the arc of architecture, how it is, I believe, the art form that most informs us of the culture that created it. But think of that moment in time, the 1980s and 90s when Postmodernism had its day. I find its playful references cynical now. It was a cynical time. A 'Me Generation' where selfishness needed cynicism to justify itself. I think Johnson's worst excesses were his cynical, selfish ones. 

And too many Postmodern designs were executed as overwrought and bulky, like this nonsense in Tokyo:

In the way its cousin could be, by the way, the earlier response to Modernism known as Art Deco. I love Art Deco for putting up a fight, salvaging ornamentation in its streamlined way, the way it does so elegantly and subtly at Rockefeller Center. But I hate it at places like the old General Electric Building blocks away where its array of marbles and finishes gives me claustrophobia and vertigo.

Both movements were a way out, though. Imagine living in Rome in 77AD and thinking if I see another arch I'm going to feed myself to the lions. Or living in Northern France in 1318 and seeing another pointed arched stained glass window going up. Philip Johnson showed us there was an end to the endless glass boxes of Modernism. The man who brought us Modernism delivered us from it. In this building. 

It deserves respect. 

The building that reaches back eight centuries.

I've noticed lately almost every time someone new to the city hits the corner of 48th and 8th, they look north, take out their phone, and take a picture. One forgets, living here, how startling some views are. Up the block?

It's a good building.

Worldwide Plaza is a 52-story tower rising far above its largely five-story neighbors in Hell's Kitchen. When it opened in 1989, it was, in fact, the tallest building west of 8th Avenue and the tallest one built west of 8th since the McGraw Hill green explosion of Art Deco style in 1931.

I simply call it the Number 2 Pencil Building. It's palette, shape and silhouette remind me of every standardized test I ever had to take. 

There was talk of building the tallest building in the world on that site, a block of a parking lot by the time the mean lean years of the mid-70s had rolled round. But a zoning law that gave developers tax incentives for including public spaces in their programs convinced the design team, particularly the chief architect, David Childs (Time Warner Center, One World Trade Center) of legendary Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, to split the building into three, in this, Mr. Childs' NYC debut. 

The first is the tower, One Worldwide Plaza, an office building whose large square footage per floor lured companies like Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Japanese investment bank Nomura, and the international advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather to what was then one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. 

The second building is a residential tower. It is separated from the office building by a breezy plaza where neighbors sit and relax under the gaze of a beautiful sculpture/fountain representing the four seasons. Underneath all of that, small movie theaters that, even better, have been converted into off-Broadway venues. 

At the 9th Avenue end of the block the project lands comfortably into its smaller surroundings with a series of townhome-like apartments and retail shops, all echoing the architectural fireworks in Tower One. 

To understand the building, its good to know a little history.

The first two Madison Square Gardens sat on the northeast corner of Madison Square Park. The first was unremarkable. The second was Stanford White's masterpiece, a Doge's Palace with a tower based on the Tower of Seville. It took a brave man to take on the design of that which would replace it, and that man was Cass Gilbert.

Gilbert, who designed the (old) Customs House, The Woolworth Building, and The US Supreme Courthouse, took as his inspiration for the new New York Life Insurance Building the Cathedral of Salisbury, home to the oldest clock in the world, the best of the four original copies of the Magna Carta, and, to this day, the tallest church spire in England. 

The John Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral that, ironically, hangs in NYC at The Frick.









Gilbert modified this early English Gothic form and gave us modernist lines with the grace of Gothic elongation. And instead of a spire, he gave us pyramid of 25,000 tiles covered in 24-karat gold.





















The third Madison Square Garden sat on the block between 8th and 9th, between 49th and 50th. When it came down in 1968, the neighborhood, never good to begin with, began it's decline Into one of the foulest in America. (From 1969 to 1986, almost impossible to think of today, an entire block in midtown Manhattan was a parking lot.)(You'll never know what I went through to find this picture.) 

David Childs to the rescue. 

Replacing a Madison Square Garden had been done. So like a good artist, he bows in deference and passes on the torch. He gives us the massing of Gilbert's quasi-Gothic/Modern office building and adds a 'Salisbury tower' of his own, affectionally referred to as 'David's Diamond.' It's copper elements add cool green to the sky, it's 'skylight' at the top flashes, dazzling, at night. 

At the base, a wonderful surprise awaits. An oval arcade of shops with glass skybridges takes you around the entire periphery of the building, its drum-like shape belying the squareness of everything above. Mr. Childs quite literally fits a square peg into a round hole, and rather seamlessly for his efforts. Above you rises the warm earth tones of creamy, ochre-y oranges, in brick and precast concrete, and rich-feeling brown granites and marbles.

It falls dead center into the Postmodern, the affinity for square windows, its accessories, like the  oversized sconces, classic, but reeking of the 80's. It exudes strength through its extreme massing, but its sense of play in shape and color make it festive, like a drum majorette, leading the city out of its misery and into a new Golden Age. 

Yeah. It's worth a picture.

There's no M in Row

The sky was particularly cinematic tonight, giving shape to some things one might never quite notice in the blaze of day. But I had noticed my neighbor before, just not dressed as it was tonight in the beguiling raiments of deflected light and haze. It's a good building. 

It's a good building and a good neighbor. It's been mine for over twenty years, across the street, across the corner. Catty-corner.

When it opened in 1928, the day before its namesake's 119th birthday, the Hotel Lincoln was the largest hotel in New York City. Its 27 stories were topped with an enormous mast bearing the hotel's name and nestled underneath in E-shaped hallways over 1300 rooms and a ballroom called the Blue Room where legendary acts like Artie Shaw and Count Basie would frequently entertain.

It was the ballroom that lured the customers, something the Kramer Family owners tried at their other successful property around the corner, the Hotel Edison, whose Green Room booked favorite Harry James. But it was also the location of the Lincoln that lent it a unique marketability, standing as a bulwark of sorts between the glamour of the Broadway theaters being built all around it at the time, and the meaner streets over here on my side of the block in Hell's Kitchen. 

Mr. Kramer died and in 1956, his widow Maria sold the property to a young upstart named William Zeckendorf, the man who became one of the most legendary developers in New York City history. He remodeled the place and renamed it the Hotel Manhattan, took the mast off the roof and added a 28 -foot-tall blazing white instantly iconic M that could be seen for miles.

Mr. Zeckendorf was no hotelier, though, nor was he much interested in a neighborhood that was in decline and in short order decay by the mid-60s. By the 70s, Mr. Zeckendorf was off to greener pastures and had the Manhattan closed and boarded up. And that very well might've been the end of my neighbor. 

But living inside the abandoned hotel were eight tenants who had rent stabilized leases that, by law, cannot be broken by the landlord. They stayed on for years, finally accepting buyouts for $3,000.00 which was a tidy sum in the late 70s.

In stepped the Milstein Family. Fearing anti-Semitism, but not wanting to have to deal with that big damn M up on the roof, they called their place The Milford Plaza. I'll be honest with you, it had the reputation of a dump. But in 1978, they produced a non-Union commercial to the tune of Lullaby of Broadway, paid the dancers once, and ran that commercial for the next ten years, making it the longest running commercial next to that Santa one on the electric Norelco razor they used to trot out every year. 

And people came.

Until they didn't.

The late 80's and 90s saw a spate of incredibly trendy hotels open up in the neighborhood.Many in brand spanking new buildings, but even hotels in repurposed spaces like the Paramount and the Royalton, were places to be if you were one of the beautiful people. The Milford was going down.

Ramada bought it for a while, It closed entirely. Again. For two years. Then, in 2010, developers Rockpoint Group and hotel operator Highgate Holdings purchased the hotel for $200 million and began a renovation of all 1331 rooms and lobby spaces for another $140 million. It is now called Row NYC. So guess what had to go? Yes, there is no M across the street anymore. Sigh.

Good news! It seems to have found niche. The rooms are bright and cheerful, the lobby says "This is cool!" and the price point is fair and often really good. (Just beware, room sizes very wildly from spacious to claustrophobic.)

But that's all inside. Outside is a grand affair. It rises block-like but yields to the sky with the hallmark feature of Manhattan buildings in the 1920s, the setbacks. Or the wedding cake effect, as these building were often described.

The center is set off by lighter stones that rise up the west-facing front giving the building a soaring look rather than its actual horizontal silhouette. 

But the top! The top is filled with medieval Italianate references like balconies and terraces and arcades. two -story Gothic windows. It looks rather like a lovely villa or a ducal palace floating atop a very jazzy 20s NYC supper club. Well done. Whimsy.

My only caveat: The bottom two stories once held beautiful large arched windows, that tied the bottom of the building to its top, essential in a land of skyscrapers. The new developers ripped all of that out and added a two-story glass box that envelopes the entire streetscape of the building. I'll have more to say on that with the next building I want to show you. I've seen it work elsewhere. It doesn't here.

So, the news is mostly good for a hotel that but for a few twists and turns in history, might easily have gone the way of the wreckers ball any number of times but somehow kept finding a way to survive another day. I think that's why like it. Plucky.

The Whitney with Jeff. Early Sunday Morning. Edward Hopper, 1930.

There are two strikingly opposed elements going on in this painting and I'm not sure I ever realized the second one until tonight.

This view no longer exists, save for its immortalization by Edward Hopper where you can see it hanging on Renzo Piano's new walls of The Whitney Museum of American Art in the smoldering hot neighborhood known as The Meatpacking District. It is Seventh Avenue at 15th Street, ironically a five-minute walk to where the painting now calls home. It is Sunday morning. It is 1930.

I've always been enamored by the crispness of Hopper's works, how he seems to suck every molecule of air out of his paintings so that we are left with something so dead it is alive. Or better put, utterly pregnant with possibility.

Here, the quiet closed shops on Seventh Avenue are topped with apartments. The only thing that suggests humans live behind the glass are the particular tastes of the window treatments. But the un-spinning barber pole, the cloudless sky, and morning's long shadows suggest more than a loneliness one might think at first. They suggest a stage where the first person to enter left will start the clocks and set in motion a series of events that might alter the flight path of a swallow in Capistrano or knock a nova towards a galactic spectacle millions of light years away.

What I never quite noticed in Hopper's works before is that this specificity, this crispness, this exactitude of a vacuum, is all illusory. He is an impressionist. I'd always assumed I knew what the shops were. But you cannot read the signs. I'd always admired the shadows of the detailed copper crown molding so easily found on the streets of New York City. But I'd assumed their detail, perhaps because I filled in the blanks with my own memory, or because the carefully crafted repetition of his impressions left me feeling the detail. I even wonder that I'd seen people in the windows in the past. They are not there.

But by giving us this template of a morning with which we are all so familiar, simply perhaps by the slant of light, and suggesting the things we know so well, Hopper fires up our imaginations, each of us different, with different stories to tell, the people waiting for their entrance, the hilarious, the terrifying, the stories of joy and pathos, the possibility behind each pane.

Hopper paints this masterpiece, deceptive as it is, and then turns to each of us and whispers, "Okay. Go!"

Echoes: Shakespeare and the new World Trade Center.

Shakespeare mostly wrote in meters. He also mostly wrote in dia-meters, or diametrics, phrases on either side of a diameter, often in opposition. He knew we humans, a debating species by nature, instinctively listen for them, hear them in those careful enough to deliver them with their intended weight.

This plays out most obviously perhaps, in the Beethoven Fifth of Shakespearean monologues, To be, or not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. 

Contrast 'to be' with 'or not to be.' Contrast 'whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune' with 'Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.' Contrast 'or by opposing' with 'end them.' Contrast 'to die' with 'to sleep.' And then contrast the way he goes on to define and differentiate kinds of sleep, a resting in peace, say, versus a tormented endless dream. 

I invite you to scour Shakespeare's texts. He uses this 'this or that' construct throughout the entire canon. And that is only part of his genius. Because he knew we would hear that. He knew that these diametrically opposed notions would reverberate in our heads, and that we would absorb an enormous density of thought as a result. For you teachers, remember: Like Beethoven's Fifth, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be heard, not read. But if you read them with this paradigm in mind, they are eminently more readable. They are also much easier to memorize, by the way. Shakespeare helped his actors as much as he helped his audience.

(Let me tangentially add here that Hamlet falls off the verse in this first line. If the line read, 'To be or not to be that is the quest,' that is the iambic pentameter Shakespeare establishes. By adding one more syllable, '-tion,' he tells us--and the actor playing Hamlet--something is wrong with our poor ponderous Prince. Indeed.)

This was on my mind today as I wandered through the plaza of the new World Trade Center. 

I walked up the gently sloping stairs of the new Liberty Park to survey the ground below. And all around me I saw contrasts. The stonework of the paths is laid out in parallel lines, an echo of the hallmark outer columns of the original Towers One and Two. But they lie horizontally, of course, a reminder of the fallen. They are punctuated by harsh angular gardens, reminding one of the harsh jagged twisted tons of steel that punctuated thousands of our loved ones. Flowering inside these beds however are blooms and grasses stirring softer senses, like pillows of comfort. Splendid stone and steel accents are interspersed among wooden benches that feel more inviting, more human. And all this angularity leads into the comforting round arms of Santiago Calatrava's St. Nicholas Church, currently under construction.

I looked out onto the hundreds of leafy green oak trees giving shade to hundreds of visitors, how they yielded only to the waterfalls, how the waterfalls remind one of the gravity of that day fifteen years ago, but softened one's harshest memories with their coolness, their gentle sounds. I looked up at the extraordinary crystalline towers rising overhead, how the architecture at their bases echoes those outer-wall columns of the original Towers One and Two as well, how they stand guard over the emptiness of sunken waterfalls, how "Reflecting Absences" is in itself a diametric.

I looked across at The Oculus, the transportation hub that is both spiky and white, piercing and virginal, a parabola of stillness that somehow evokes movement, the flapping wing of a peace dove at the center of an act of war. 

And I took in David Childs' new Tower One of the new World Trade Center. Each of its four sides rise up in defiance, drawing our eyes to the heights of humanity, to the heavens, while each of its four corners draw our eyes down to earth, in remembrance perhaps, in a nod to our humility, a call instead to humbleness, angular reminders of everything it means to be soft and tender in community.

Not everyone is in love with the new World Trade Center. And I have yet to form a full opinion, honestly, allowing it the time it will take to flower into its fruition. But if one looks carefully for everything I think was intended, I believe its echoes of 'What was once' bouncing off 'What has come' fusing into 'What will be' in our minds might, in our minds, be as satisfying as the shared sadness, devastation, and resolution we feel together when tragedy corrects itself and all is set right in Denmark.

September 10th. My annual reflection.

As the dawn rose on August 7th, 1974, a lithe figure stepped out into the space between Towers One and Two of the brand new World Trade Center. 

For the next forty-five minutes, he made eight passes between the towers on a cable barely visible from the ground carrying a 55-pound balancing pole of his own design and even lying down at one point on nothing it seemed to the delight of a mob of commuters 1,350 feet below.

Philippe Petite turned 25 the next week and for his birthday, New York City dropped the litany of charges leveled against him, consigning him to a mandated performance for children in Central Park, provided he use a net.

This extraordinary event in New York City history has been pushed into a smaller corner of our collective memories by the terrible events that would transpire on that site twenty-seven years later. And it was foolish perhaps. But as we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the worst day in my life, I'd like to recall this day, when a bit of derring-do captured our imaginations and cemented a vision of joy paving the way for many days of joy over many years to come at the original World Trade Center. 

Our memories of loss might better be sprinkled with any number of happy memories that give loss its center and its meaning, a testament to our extraordinarily human resilience when it comes time to cope.

MoMA with Jeff. Andy Warhol: Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962.

Nearly every artist represented in the collection at MoMA suffered the scorn of his or her contemporaries, let alone their colleagues and the already established art community and whatever norms had settled from the dust of the previous artistic revolution. But perhaps none more so than Andy Warhol. Warhol continues to be one of the most polarizing figures in the landscape of art history and criticism, an artist, in fact, who created a great schism at the very institution we are talking about in these posts after a 1962 exhibition at MoMA catapulted him to the apex or nadir, depending upon your perspective, of the discussion of what, exactly, is art.

Warhol was a first-generation American, the son of Lemko immigrants from present-day Slovakia. His father worked in the coal mines of southwest Pennsylvania and the growing family moved a few times in and around the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. As a young boy, Warhol was stricken with what is believed today to have been scarlet fever, leaving him weak, blotchy, bedridden months on end, outcast by peers, and ultimately, a rather neurotic hypochondriac. He found salvation in art and after toying with the idea of attending Pitt, then teaching, he settled instead on the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today's Carnegie Mellon) to become an artist in his own right.

What is often overlooked in the bright burning spotlight that was his life and career, the swirl that surrounded all of it, Warhol was a supremely gifted artist. An excellent draftsman and illustrator, his line could be brilliantly executed. Second, and more important for me, his use of color was beyond even that of the Fauvists. He pushed that envelope to new emotional heights and were I to ask you, I can almost guarantee you could summon up the red of his Campbell soup can in your mind's eye. It is not the red Campbell's uses, by the way, it is Warhol's slightly altered version and to maximum effect. 

Through his painting, his silk-screening, his films, his sculptural installations, his writing, Warhol did much to succeed in an effort attempted by many of his predecessors: Compose an all-encompassing artistic aesthetic that touched every part of the human experience.

Why so controversial, then? Well, first, I think because his silk-screening techniques allowed him to mass produce his work, something other artists and collectors likely feared as the market place shifted between what is good art and what is simply valuable because of its rarity. It was a good, well-timed, and much-needed thumb to the nose, if you ask me.

Secondly, with further-reaching implications, the mirror he held up to us was not entirely flattering. In an ever-increasing consumer culture, we are attracted to the popular, to the manipulated, to the ordinary dressed up in emperor's clothes. Why is a box of Brillo pads art? Because by re-contextualizing it, we examine what draws us to it in the first place. This is at least part of what is at the core of popular art, or Pop Art as it became to be known. That is why it is good art. 

But if we use the construct that good art reflects the human condition, whereas great art predicts the human condition, why might Warhol be great? 

Because he predicts the Kardashians, he predicts the internet, or mass communication at least, he predicts the downfall of celebrity, the loss of its cache, in an age when anyone can become famous simply for being famous, recognizable for nothing but exposure, and with fame accessible to absolutely everyone, the value of it bottoms out. He lived in a time when celebrity meant everything. He predicts our decade when it is utterly meaningless.

I also would like to mention for a moment his often forgotten good heart. He went on to mentor hundreds of artists and the world might never have known the genius of Jean-Michel Basquiat alone, for example, were it not for his eagle eye and generosity, spiritually and financially.

The painting I chose today, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, underscores some of these premises, and another emerging theory of mine, to boot.

Of the three women Warhol returned to repeatedly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I think two were in on the joke and one never thought any of it funny to begin with. Monroe and Taylor sought fame, but the fame they enjoyed (or didn't) was the crapshoot of genetics, their beauty was their slingshot. They understood that. And could be self-deprecating and remarkably humble and prescient as their stars rose. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' beauty was part of her equation, but it was the worst day of her life and one of the worst in the world that cemented her celebrity status.

Here we have Marilyn Monroe, painted days after her suicide. Alone is a sea of gold. And my emerging theory plays out before us: That great artists have an innate or deeply cultivated sense of their moment in history which sets them apart uniquely able to change the course of theirs and in their wake, ours as well.

This is more than a nod to the iconoclastic paintings of Orthodox Byzantium after the great schisms where the Kingdom of God was not representational but beyond the representational, where gold stood in for the perfection of the next world. Warhol's Byzantine Catholic upbringing is referenced here, as is the sweep of five centuries of subsequent artistic achievement. It is from this fully realized moment in time he paints. As such, we are invited to worship, as we had Marilyn in life, so much so that I can refer to her as we all do by her first name, a familiarity that is assumed we must remember. But she is set small, an insinuation she is not worthy of worship as much as she is of understanding, lost as she is among the vast universe of this canvas she inhabits barely. And she is 'painted Marilyn,' almost clown-like, Warhol's garish use of color a reminder that this was the painted face Marilyn applied as mask, a persona created perfectly for our mass consumption, successful in its execution, but resembling nearly nothing underneath. 

She got the joke until she didn't, the weight of the illusion snapped the tether connecting her to humanity, and the joke, sadly, intensely sadly, turned deadly in her case.

This painting is a cautionary note to the world, I think. And one maybe even lost on its creator. Warhol would go on to become a caricature of himself, lost to the allure of the popping flashbulbs of the paparazzi, wasting time in the night clubs of New York where his sense of authenticity and authentic human connection may have been bruised and broken, his art dimmed and diminished, his trust shattered as much as his body was by the bullets of a 'friend' who nearly assassinated him in 1968, an event from which this hypochondriac never fully recovered, physically, mentally, or spiritually. Fame is a powerful and addictive lie and a fatal one at that. Warhol understood that for us. Until he didn't.

MoMA with Jeff: Marc Chagall: I And The Village, 1911.

Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Lionza, a suburb of Vitebsk, then part of the Russian Empire and a small city of 60,000, half of whose population was Jewish like Chagall himself. Vitebsk was sometimes called the Toledo of Russia for its wooden charm and charming selection of sacred and secular buildings, its slightly cosmopolitan resemblance to its Spanish counterpart. Wood does not weather well a world war or two and nothing Chagall might recognize exists any longer, except for Chagall's talent and his relentless need to capture his memories in paint. 

And none of those painted memories would have been possible without Chagall's mother who bribed the local high school headmaster with 50 rubles to allow her son to finish his education in a world where the stigmatization of Jews had reached the beginning of its worst slippery slope in an already troubled history. By the turn of the century, Russian Jews had been consigned to the Pale, Jewish settlements in the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Chagall's Belarus. Chagall's father hauled herring for a living, back-breaking, demeaning, barely compensated work while his mother operated a small market out of the family living room. And yet Chagall recalls never going hungry, the luxury of buttered bread always in his belly. 

He discovered drawing from a friend who told him to borrow books and copy pictures. Chagall thought it was magic and told his parents he wanted to be an artist. 

When I was a boy, I told my parents I wanted guitar lessons. For years, once a week, my mother took me to Mr. Costello's music store and I had guitar lessons. It hadn't occurred to me the sacrifice of this endeavor until one windy night the five dollar bill due for my instruction flew out of my mother's hand and we spent frantic hours on a chilly autumn night roaming the streets looking for it, finally finding it miraculously among a pile of leaves in a doorway. What our parents do to nourish us, how their selflessness replaces hunger, how we might never know save for some whipped up molecules on a planet spinning in space. This is what comes to mind when I think of Mrs. Chagall risking her life and a fortune to boot so that her son could study among the Christian boys of Vitebsk.

Chagall hit the art world as Cubism was all the rage and the last word in Paris and its effect on his entire body of work is obvious. But like Matisse, he was a master of color. Perhaps even more so, at least enough for Picasso to proclaim, "Once Matisse is dead, only Chagall will understand what color really is." More symbolic than abstract, his canvases are fantastical, the things of which dreams are made, flirtations with surrealism, but more rooted in reality, rooted nearly always in sentiment, but not gooey syrup-y sentiment, rather the well deserved and hard-won sentiment of loss and remembrance of things past.

Chagall is thought of as a Modernist, but more so as the preeminent Jewish Modernist, and his life was fittingly composed of many exoduses far from the home he loved. He studied in Paris, returned through Germany to his fiancé at home, barely survived the terrors of the first World War, escaped the second through the dangers of Vichy France from where he had to be recused by the United States, very nearly a victim of The Holocaust. Certainly too many of his paintings were, deemed 'degenerate' by the Nazis and burned in bonfires of vanity. He eventually settled in the south of France where he died what seems like yesterday to me, in 1985, at the age of 97.

I pass his murals, The Source and The Triumph of Music at The Met, several times a week. I bring every group visiting the UN to his breathlessly blue stained Peaceglass window. A few years ago, I glimpsed up at his ceiling at the Palais Garner, the old Paris Opera, to see his quadrants of colors celebrating the luminaries of ballet and opera. 

And today, I chose this: I And The Village, 1911, from MoMAs collection.

This painting is a love-letter to his childhood, his boyhood home, and like love, it is hard to describe sequentially all that is happening. But let's try. The figures in the fore, a green man (add Fauvist to Chagall's lengthy resume) is connected by a barely perceptible line to the eye of a goat, reminding us the line between animal and man was as inextricable as it was tenuous to peasant life. Circles abound like planets, creating orbits and planes, one containing the tree of life exploding like stardust, another, a hillside where churches stand next to upside down houses, gravity giving way to memory, crosses coexisting with a Jewish peasant dressed in black and portentously carrying a scythe but in a living ballet with a lovely woman playing the ubiquitous Chagall fiddle. (The fiddler on the roof is not a Chagall convention, it is a Chagall invention.) It is nighttime, it is daytime, it is quiet, it is lively, it is as celestial as it is earthbound, and all of it bathed in the most magnificent jewel tones, like a tapestry for the downtrodden, like the backdrop for an opera in which the hero is the lowest born and most deserving. 

Chagall was in Paris when he painted this, and didn't know a word of French. Alone and lonesome he retreated to the recesses of his warmest memories, a place where his parents bathed him in love and where his bride-to-be waited in a window for his return, before some mysterious divide presented itself between Jew and Gentile, before the world fell apart, and we can watch all of it unfold one hundred years later, his mind spinning out of control on this canvas with the sweetest symbols of love and remembrance.