Pollock's Promise: Toward an Abstract Expressionist Architecture Author(s): Eric Lum Reviewed work(s): Source: Assemblage, No. 39 (Aug.

, 1999), pp. 62-93 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171260 . Accessed: 08/01/2012 00:46
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1. Jackson Pollock (left) and Peter Blake in front of model at the Betty Parsons Gallery, 1949

Eric

Lum

Pollock's
Toward
an

Promise:
Abstract

Architecture Expressionist

EricLumteachesdesignandthe History at of Modern Thoughtin Architecture of Technology. the IllinoisInstitute

In the wake of the prominence given to American art in the internationalart scene following the Second World War, American architecture began to look to modern art to realign itself as partof a high cultural practice. The functional utility of wartime building primarilycarriedthe technical propertiesof modernism into mainstreampractice.' Yet it was still unclear how architecture could be included in a theory or uniform style of art. The industrializationof the building process, along with the transformationof military-industrial plants to postwardomestic and commercial building production, became significant forces in the masscultural reception of a modernist architecturalstyle; but modern painting and sculpture, especially that produced by American artists,did not generate the same degree of interest as the early European avant-gardein combining the variousartsinto a cohesive and unifying practice. The development of postwarAmerican architecture as an artisticratherthan an industrialactivitytherefore became the central issue for architects, academics, and critics interested in resituatingthe professionwithin the fine artsrather than the technical sciences. In some ways, this debate between ars and techne paralleled the early conflict that opposed Henry van de Velde's supportof the organic Kunstwollenagainst Hermann Muthesius's promotion of
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Assemblage 39: 62-93 @ 1999 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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ture, in reverse,workedtowardthe conceptual purityfound in the two-dimensionalimage.

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"UnframedSpace"
At the age of twenty-sixand not yet graduatedfrom the Pratt Institute, Peter Blake became the nominal head of the Departmentof Architectureand IndustrialDesign at the Museum of Modern Art in the springof 1948. Though merely titularand designed to placate those trusteeswho disapproved of Philip Johnson'spast forayinto fascistpolitics,2Blake's newly acquired position within the New Yorkart and architectural establishmentgave him a measure of influence and recognition.

2..
-

-----

-----

2. Plan of Blake model. Painting legend: 1. Number 17A, 1948; 2. Gothic, 1944; 3. Number 24, 1949; 4. Number 1A, 1948; 5. Alchemy, 1947; 6. The Key, 1946; 7. Number 10, 1949; 8. Summertime: Number 9A, 1948.

Through the SwissphotographerHerbertMatter,Blake became acquaintedwith JacksonPollock in the summer of 1949, and laterthat year Pollock invited the young curatorto the installationfor his fall show at the Betty Parsons the mass-producedtype in artisticproduction. But the Ameri- design Gallery. For the show, entitled "Muralsin Modern Architeccan analogy differed in that building technology became centure,"Blake designed a half-inch scale model of an "IdealExtral to the industrializationof architecturalconstruction, hibition"space for Pollock'smonumental canvases,in which while painting and sculpture dominated the art scene. Archithe paintingswould be placed in a rectangularglass pavilion, tecture as an artformcould not yet reconcile its relationship modulating the entire volume into a series of localized spatial with its sister arts in the postwarsituation. events.3Blake'soriginal inspirationcame from Mies van der At the same time, postwarAmerican painterswere also inter- Rohe's Museum for a Small City project of 1942, which was Forumin 1943 and also cited in ested in architecture, though they were not driven to imitate published in Architectural architecturalideas per se, but rathercame to architectureas a Johnson's 1947 biographyof the architect.4Placed freestandresult of their own investigationsin workingthe physical and ing between thin T-shapedsupports,held up by mirrored walls on both ends, or simply supportedfrom the ceiling, the conceptual limits of the canvas. Thus, while architecture ensemble of muralswould form both architectureand exhibilooked to painting as an alternativeto the programmaticcorporate functionalism of American modernism during the late tion.' Elements from two other Mies projectsalso appearin the scheme. The etched glass light well in the center of the 1940s and early 1950s, painting began to find its conceptual limits borderingon the architectural.A symbiotic transforma- Barcelona Pavilion is replaced here by a panel whose sides are Pollocks covered with equal-sizedmurals,the back-to-back tion occurred: as painting, especially modernist mural paintThe semicircular Macassar condition. creating a "transparent" ing began to take on the scale, material density, and object nature of the vertical architecturalsurface, modern architecebony wall of the Tugendhat House dining area also makes an
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3. Reconstructed model, showing Alchemy reflected against mirroredwall

appearance,transformedinto a perforatedbrassscreen enveloping the volumetric skein of a proposedPollock sculpture. At Blake'srequest,Pollock made severalminiatureplasterdipped wire sculpturesfor the model, which were "akind of of his drip paintings."6 In this three-dimensionalinterpretation the Blake's scheme extended of way, originalconception Mies, whose photocollagesimplied a clear separationbetween the workof the architectand that of the artist.The mural, for Mies, acted as merely one element within the general schema of surfaces constructedby the architect;in Blake'smuseum project, the artist's workconstitutedand defined its environment.

Blake associated with the ruralwilderness of the East Hamptons in which this project was envisaged thus coincided with the neutralized tabula rasa setting affordedto the freestandingbuilding-objectsdesigned within the canons of the InternationalStyle. Second, the perforatedpegboardsurface that Blake used for the floor of the model served a dual purpose: On the one hand, it acted as a convenient modular ArthurDrexlergraspedits architectural in describing aspirations unit in which to situate the wall panels at right angles to one how "in its treatmentof paintingsas walls the design recallsan another, so the walls could be moved or turned to accommoentirelydifferentkind of pictorialart;that of the Renaissance date changing exhibitions (Number 10, 1949, shown in one fresco.The projectsuggestsa re-integration of paintingand arphotographas parallel to an exteriorpane appearsin another chitecturewhereinpaintingis the architecture,but this time as perpendicularto the wall and thus rotatedabout a pivot). without messageor content. Its sole purposeis to heighten our On the other hand, the incessant repetition of the grid strucexperience of space."'In this, DrexlerrecognizedBlake'sread- ture not only recalled the conceptual extensibility intimated dismissalof its veiled ing of the Pollock muralsin the curator's the Dom-ino frame, but also that potential centrifugal by the aleatorynatureof the work symbology,insteadtransforming pressureresiding in the plane of the modernist canvas.9By to pure background patternand heighteningthe brutephysical- means of the universalizinggrid, the juncture between plan ity and spatialpresence of the paintings.(Pollock'squip that and plane makes the elision from Le Corbusier to Piet Blakesawthe artistas a "meredecorator" bearsout this charge.) Mondrian a natural, if not inevitable, process. For Blake, Pollock'scanvasesheld the intimationsof an illusionistic visualdepth in the same manneras the humanist Through the tectonic facture of Pollock'spainted surfaces, fresco,within both the optical recessesof perspectival space and Blake heightened the architectonic presence of the murals. The abstractexpressionistmural was not subject to the limits acrossthe planarsurfaceof the overallcanvas.8 of the wall surface,nor detached from it; rather,it constituted Two elements of the model reinforce this reading of limitless- a new kind of wall surfaceby assertingits own independent ness. The firstconcerns the opaque Plexiglas roof hovering spatial identity.The use of mirrorsas supportsacted to visually over the base, supportedsolely by the mural panel walls. The extend the muralbeyond its physical boundaries,extending, exteriorwalls, presumablyof clear glass, were left out in the too, the notion of the allover canvas,so that the canvasgained model ostensibly to see the paintings better. But doing so also the appearanceof a contiguous and freestandingwall surface. permitted the haptic experiences implied in the model to A number of differentrelationships between wall and painting align with the visual recesses projected beyond the immediare displayedhere in an effortto diffusetheir differences:freeate boundaries of the glass box. The barrenemptiness that
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wall;full-heightwall/mural; standing(curved)wall; mirrored wall/mural outward so that the backand suphalf-height (facing wall/muralsupported port side face the main space);"floating" back-to-back murals attached to a single by full-heightwalls; wall; and finally,one largerwall on which is fixed a smaller painting - the only instance of a "traditional" mounting. Mural and sculptureslide pastwalls, or are wallsthemselves.The overalleffect is no longer of the gallerywall as neutralbackof vertical groundsupport,but rather,of a largervocabulary elements that define interiorand exterior,path and vision. In this installation, three types of spatial conditions are posited against one another:visual or painterlyspace, as presented through the nonperspectivaloptical depths of the painting; the reflective optical extensions composed by facing and the haptic, architecturalspatial dynamic fashmirrors;1o ioned by the physical interrelationshipamong the paintings (and furthermodulated by the sculpturalpieces). The implications of this construction become clearer if we place it against other spatial relationshipsbetween painting and support. In the pre-Renaissancefresco, the painting is set within and delimited by its architecturalenvironment; architecture creates and circumscribes the conditions for the mural. Its visual space is confined to the flat surface from which it is derived. With the development of a formulaic painterlyperspective in the Quattrocento, the painted work begins its optical assault upon the limits and conventions of its architectural support.This is not to discount examples from Roman interior still-life frescoes, among other attemptsat the visual destruction of the immediate confines of its supporting surface; rather,what is notable here is the competition for the spectator'sbody - the dynamic, haptic space of the architect against the frozen, singularviewpoint demanded by the painterly construction. The virtualstatic space created by the painting privileges the stationaryviewpoint demanded by the perspective construction, and it consequently attemptsto disinherit the spatial conditions of its immediate surroundings.

of easel painting,the canThrough the conceptual trajectory vas begins to leave architecturebehind, its spatialconstruction independent of its environment.It is in the large freestanding as shown in Marcel Duchamp's glassThe Bride artwork, StrippedBare by Her Bachelors,Even and approachedlater in sculpture by AlexanderCalder'slinear wire pieces, that the plane of modernistartacknowledgesand engages its surrounding space. In large-scaleabstractexpressionism,the flatnessof the canvasis no longer simply, transparently flat, workingas the illusorywindow to a fictional world,but instead becomes a materialobject, dividingand constructingspace. Mies reverses this condition in transforming the wall into a painterlysurface, the book-matched striationsof marbleveining to by employing introduce patternto the wall constructionand the reflective propertiesof glassto layeran additional,optical depth to his static volumes.1" While Blakecopied Mies forthe basic premisesof the Pollock museum project,the uniquenessof Blake'sscheme lies in the way it willinglycollapsesthe differencesbetween painterly space and architectural space. Mies's 1942 museum collages worktowarda similarspatialconflation,but the final result yields architecturein favorof the two-dimensional image, where paintingand materialpatternbecome equivalenton the surfaceof the page.12In contrast,the Pollockmuseum produces a dynamicoscillationbetweenthe two and the three dimenas its moving center. Both sional, with the viewing spectator pictorialand architectural spacesare physicallystaticand confluid. The murals servea dual function:they concepceptually tually extendthroughspace by the reflectionof the mirrored supportsand also worktheir own nonperspectival phenomenal space beyond and throughthe canvas.The Pollocksculptures in the museum then act as fulcrumpointsaroundwhich the viewercan reengagefromone localized space to another." Though the 1949 Parsonsshow was financially successful, the enticement of the model in the galleryfailed to generate
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4, 5. Views of Pollock exhibition, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1950

much in the way of sales for the largerworks.With one noteworthyexception: Blake had brought Marcel Breuer to the gallery in December (presumablyto show the architect his model as much as the work of the artist),and Breuer was suitably impressed enough to commission Pollock to paint a mural for the dining room of a house he had designed on Long Island.'4Breuer'sscheme for the Geller House, a binuclear plan with a butterfly-wingroof, separatedprivatesleeping functions from public living and dining spaces by way of a glassed entry hall - a physical division that not only exposed a simplistic functionalist determinism, but also underlined in architecturalterms the cultural shift towardthe domestic acceptance of modern art by the postwarleisure class, in its conception of the living/dining space as a separateexhibition canvas pavilion. Breuer installed the six-by-eight-foot-wide flush againstan existing full-height bookcase, dividing the living area from the dining space. In this manner, he realized the vision Blake had initiated through Pollock, of a wall surface that was simultaneously opaque and translucent, optically reflective and facturallydense. If Mies had played the invisible host to this process, as close as Pollock would come to a direct involvement with the architect was by participatingin a group show in the newly constructed interiorsfor the Chicago ArtsClub in October 1951. Far from the De Stijl tendencies of his earlier work, Mies had by this point adopted a relativelysomber and symmetrical classicism for the ArtsClub project, returningthe paintings in the exhibition to the space of a more conventional gallery interiorand restoringthe traditionalseparation between architect and artist.Mies did have a significant

effect upon Pollock's subsequent work, however, at least through the secondarylens of Blake'sparticularinterpretation: Pollock had retained the model at the end of the Parsons show and had brought it to his Long Island house, where, according to Steven Naifeh and GregoryWhite Smith, it "satconspicuously on a worktablein the corner of the studio, its miniature murals and mirroredwalls a continual reminder of the possibilities of scale."" Whether Pollock's concern with questions of scale was an inevitable part of the artist'sdevelopment, or whether Blake, along with Tony Smith, factored significantly in propelling Pollock's move towardthe "deathof easel painting," can only be conjectured. One argument in favorof Blake's influence, and through him, Mies's, lies once again with the model, which displayed only the largestof Pollock's worksin their double function as both painting and wall. While any simple causal explanation is dubious at best, Naifeh and Smith claim that Pollock spent considerable time examining the model in his studio, and it is clear that he was thinking of scale in painting some of his largestworksin the wake of the 1949 Parsons show: Number 31, 1950 (One), painted in the summer of 1950, stood eight feet ten inches high by seventeen feet six inches wide, while Number 30, 1950 (AutumnRhythm) measured nine feet high by almost eighteen feet across. In contrastto the 1949 show where the artworkwas presented in a scatteringof placement and scale, the murals for the fall 195( show at Betty Parsonscompletely dominated the gallery walls. Indeed, Pollock had the dimensions of the gallery explicitly in mind, and the murals almost precisely covered its walls, acting as a replacement, a substitutefor them, as the Blake model originally proposed.'6William Rubin aptly sum
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marized this condition in assertinghow Pollock'swork "forms a new categoryin which the intimacy and environment of the cabinet-size easel painting is preservedwhile the picture - drained of illusion - achieves the size of a mural painting independentlyof that genre'ssocial and esthetic implications. The 'window'which has the traditionaleasel conception, has become the 'wall."''" This conception of window become wall underlaythe conceptual frameworkfor Peter Blake'sfirstrealized architectural design, his 1952 beach house in Water Mill, Long Island. The sparewhite eighteen-foot-square structure,spun into rotaryorbit through the shearing of its exteriorwall panels and lifted off the ground by slender I-beam pilotis and a partiallyhidden basement half story,predatesthe betterknown workof John Hejduk, RichardMeier, and Gwathmey and Siegel by over a decade in its investigationof frontality and rotation,closure and openness, suspension and periphery - themes that would markthe ascension of American architecturalformalismbeginning in the mid-1960s. Though the sliding walls were finally presented as blank surfaces,Blake originallyintended to incorporatea variegatedskein of color by way of JacksonPollock's muralson the sliding panels. As situated, they could reenact that fluctuatinggestalt between the opaque, immediate plane and the perception of a transparent, limitless depth that emulated the distantvistasof outer Long Island. Through this marriageof mural and wall, painting could become fully integratedinto architecture;in its closed state, the house would be encompassed by a totalizing painted environment - an idealized conjecture not realized until MarkRothko's1971 Houston Chapel.

6. Peter Blake, Blake House, Water Mill, Long Island, 1952

The Muralistand the Modern Architect

Samuel Kootz, a prominent board member of the Museum of Modern Artand noted galleryowner, disliked Pollock's workand found the artistpersonallyeven less appealing for
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his drunken episodes and explosive behavior. Nonetheless, he understood the marketimplications of making connections between the work of prominent architects and that of American abstractartists,such as he had observed in Blake's model at the ParsonsGallery. Kootz had alreadyexplored this incipient relationshipas early as June 1946 in his show "Modern Painting for a Country Estate:ImportantPainting for Spacious Living,"suggesting this art to be an integral partof the domestic environment of the postwarleisure class."'The new cultural class became a new marketto be exploited for both a new domestic architectureand the progressiveart that accompanied it; modern architecture, afterall, required modern paintings for its walls. A year after the Parsonsshow, Kootz attempted to make use of this emerging relationshipwith his October 1950 show "The Muralistand the Modern Architect,"for which he initiated a series of collaborationsbetween artistsand architects designed to demonstratethe integral connection of the heroic scale of American abstractmural painting to the blank surfacesof the InternationalStyle. In the exhibition catalogue, Kootz stated how in order to "encouragethe use of modern artistsby architects and builders, we have secured the cooperation of a group of distinguished modern architects who planned projectsfor the artistsand made models showing the use of."'9 The collaborationsexhibited - between Adolph Gottlieb and Marcel Breuer on a dormitoryat Vassar; David Hare and FrederickKiesler on Kiesler'sEndless House project; Hans Hofmann and Jose Luis Sert on a civic center in Peru; Robert Motherwell and Walter Gropius'sArchitectural Collaborativeon a series of public schools in Attleboro, Massachusetts;and William Baziotes and Philip Johnson on a preliminaryscheme for the Wiley House in New Canaan20 - were intended to show how the blank expanses afforded through modern architecturewere naturalcanvases for large mural painting: "The modern painter is in constant search of a wall - some large expanse upon which he can employ his

7. PhilipJohnson, Wiley House, 1953, preliminaryscheme

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imagination and personal technique on a scale uninhibited by the average collector's limited space.""21 The allusion to limits referredas well to the collector's financial constraints,highlighting one of the variouscontradictions underlying the exhibition: while Kootz demonstrably aimed to "encourage the use of modern artistsby architects" by illustratinghow mural work could be incorporatedwithin modern architecture, and thus to increase the public awareness and acceptance of abstractionas the visual vocabularyof high culture; by the same token, the workas salable commodity could not exist outside of the gallery structurethat determined its financial worth. While Kootz tried to portray mural painting's function in the public sphere, its economic and cultural value could be determined only by returningto the space of the privatemarket. Similarly,architectureas realized construction could be exhibited only as a representation of the work in situ. Kootz attempted to reconcile these issues by presenting the work at two scales. At the level of the architecturalmodel, the province of the architect would be shown as the site for the artwork,displayed in miniature form. Conversely, the large size of the mural works(Hans Hofmann's mosaic, for example, was to be fifty by twenty-fourfeet) necessitated a corresponding reduction to the scale of Kootz'srelativelymodest gallery space. For Johnson'shouse project alone could the mural be shown at anywhere near its original scale, the organic outlines of Baziotes'sfloor-to-ceilingabstractionsubstituting for the tectonic opacity of Mies's onyx and travertine slabs.22The draftsman's and model maker'scraft entered the arena of the art world somewhat in the manner of a Trojan horse, carryingthe artworkwithin its shell; or rather,here, the innocuous, overlooked item is the shell, the architectural object. (Only much later would New Yorkgalleries such as Rizzoli and Max Protech come to vie for architecturaldocumentation as artwork- and correspondingly,the architect

present process and documentation as galleryart.) Because the architecturalmodels were not for sale (nor at this point would there have been an audience for such objects), Kootz relied upon the artiststo fulfill their marketfunction, by providing reductions of their intended full-scale work - the artists' own models or mockups - for sale in the show. While architecture reduced could no longer fulfill its "useful"function, the mural reduced revertedback to the scale and setting of the easel painting, and was thereforemore easily absorbed by the postwarart market. Perhaps more disturbing,however, the show inadvertently highlighted the formal disparitiesfaced between artistand architect. With perhapsthe exception of the Kiesler/Hare collaboration, there seemed to be little in the way of a common visual language to unite the two disciplines: one wedded to the rectilinear,ascetic doctrine of the International Style, the other just as determined to departfrom its graspby a willful explorationof variegatedform and color. Not surprisingly, this enforced marriageresulted in the artist'swork appearing as mere decorative embellishment, functioning as visual varietyto relieve the blank slate of high modernism's vertical surfaces.Moreover, there seemed to be an interminable gap between them, despite effortssuch as this to revive a unity of form and praxis.23 In distinction to Blake's earlier attempts at combining painting and architecture,the artists and architects in Kootz'swere interested more in incorporating aspects of the reciprocal disciplines in relation to their own than in workingin a truly collaborativeprocess. If the visual artswere to have a strongerrole within the building process, and thereby reinstill the role of public art in architecture, then they needed somehow to reengage with the contemporarydialogue in architecturaldesign; conversely, architecture needed to work towardan understandingof contemporarycurrentsin painting, if it hoped to develop any more than a cursoryincorporationof art beyond its use as decorative pattern.
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"How to Combine Architecture,Painting,

and Sculpture"

Inadvertently,ratherthan displayingthe new mid-centurysynthesis among the arts,the Kootz show emphasized the general divide between contemporarypainting and architecture,with painting seemingly oblivious to its surroundingsand architecture regardingmodern painting, for the most part,as ornamentaldistraction.At the same time, Philip Johnson recognized the imaginativepromise held out by the Blake/Pollock museum project.With these two diametricalexamples in mind, he organizeda symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in March 1951 to highlight the problems and prospectsinvolved in attemptsat a closer collaborationbetween the arts. Entitled "The Relation of Painting and Sculpture to Architecture,"the symposium outlined the desire to heal the rift between the disciplines, and if not returnto an artificialunity (which could not have been a desirablegoal, in any case, in light of the specific economies of the postwarart market),24 then somehow to reconcile the disparatetendencies of informepainting and organic sculpture with the austere formalismof InternationalStyle architecture. Johnson'sinterest in integratingthe artsstemmed from his reading of architectureas a formal discipline, markedby his proclamation of the new style of architecture in 1932. His own interest in abstractart came about during his tripsto European galleries in the late 1920s and early 1930s, while in the process of acquiring a significant personal collection of modern painting and sculpture. The nascent formal vocabulary that he had witnessed in abstractart and architecture held the promise of a common artisticlanguage (even if cubism, purism, constructivism,De Stijl, and so on each spoke a distinctly different individual dialect), a sort of visual Esperanto that united the work on a formal and cultural front - if anything, his single lifelong loyalty had been towardthis classical vision, the notion of architectureas an integral part of

the visual arts.In this sense, the need to organize this symposium pointed out how far apart,at least according to Johnson, the visual artsin America had drifted in the present and that some measure of reintegrationhad to occur. He began the symposium by reiteratinghis stand on architecture as fundamentallya fine art, arguing against the technocratic tendencies of mid-centuryAmerican architecture (againstPietro Belluschi explicitly and more generally Gropius'steam approach to design). Architecturewas not about simple functional utility, he contended, but only came into being through the superfluous, the surface embellishments that elevated it beyond mere building (recalling Nikolaus Pevsner'sclassic distinction between the bicycle shed and the cathedral). Painting and especially sculpture were two disciplines that traditionallyaided building in its quest towardthe status of architecture. In sculpture,Johnson outlined two general approachesto workingwith architecture:One was simply to juxtaposethe two, in the manner of the Egyptian Sphinx with the pyramids or, more recently, the statue by Georg Kolbe in the Barcelona Pavilion. The other method was what he termed the "integrated"school of design, pointing to classical Indian religious temples as an early example and to Antonio Gaudi and Kiesleras more recent instances. In the firstcase, architect and sculptorwould play separate,if, it was hoped, mutually compatible roles; in the second, the architect would take on the role of the sculptor.The formerwould have the advantage of specialization, with the concomitant danger of each discipline ignoring the other (Johnsonhere gave the example of RichardLippold'swiry sculpture failing to hold as an effective whereas central axis for TAC's GraduateCenter at Harvard); the latter might benefit from a single design vision, with the disadvantagethat it might also result in awkwardsculpture or ponderous architectureor both (later Breuer or Edward Durell Stone come to mind).

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Painting carried similar issues for Johnson:at its best, as he assertedwith the example of Theo van Doesberg's Caf6 L'Aubette,painting could transforma quotidian space into an exceptional work of architecture;at its worst, it could revert to mere backgroundsurface decoration;or, as in the case of Guernica in Sert's 1937 Spanish Pavilion, art and architecture could become wholly ignorant of one another. Johnson could point to his recent experience with Baziotes as typical of the difficulties in working contemporaryabstractpainting into an architecturalspace: The otherdayI wasaskedto collaborate witha painterwhomI admireverymuch. I thinkI own his bestpainting.It wasjustan abstract problem- the model of a house.The painterdidn'tunderstand the problemat all. He did a verygood painting,but you can'tjustsay,'Hereis a wall, now startin.' Is it my faultor the
painter's fault or both?25

chitectural model that incorporatedpainting and sculpture as the imaginative extensions of the basic art of building: The combination of painting, andarchitecture is desirable. sculpture, Why? of the individual First,fromthe viewpoint arts,becausethe conception of any one of these in isolation is a limitation. Interrelated,

as theyhavebeen in all the greatest periodsof art,theycontribute

to one another. Isolated they dry up, lose their associative values,

becomeinbred,spiritually dwarfed.

of the public,a failureto interrelate Second,fromthe viewpoint them is a deprivation, a limitationof the full emotionalstimulus theirorchestration - forthe whole of theseartsproperly provides combinedis greater thanthe sum of its parts. of architecture, the discouragement of Finally,fromthe viewpoint theircombination wouldbe a fatalimpoverishment, forpainting
and sculpture in architecture are an extension of its imaginative tor in painting and sculpture.26

factorjustas representation is an extensionof the imaginative facIn distinction to Clement Greenberg'sclaim that, as with abstractexpressionism,art approachesits highest expressionby reaching within its internallyspecific materialand formal parametersratherthan imitating the effects of other disciplines, Sweeney here arguedthat the artsneeded to workwith each other to create a common vocabulary,a unifying Kunstwollen that rejoined the disparatearts.Like Greenberg, however, Sweeney did believe in a single discipline as the flag bearer for the others.While the art critic saw music as the leading artformof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through its disciplinaryautonomy, the architect saw his own discipline as the eternal mother art,giving rise to its progeny in painting and sculpture. For Sweeney, architectureprovidedthe framework on which the expressiveartscould hang; without them, as he implied, the InternationalStyle became subject to a fatal self-imposeddenial of the subjective imagination shown by the other arts. But the limits Sweeney imposed on the role of painting and sculpture bluntly demonstratedthe distance between the sub-

For Johnson, Baziotes had simply not considered the problem of the materialpresence of the painting or its specific architectural relationshipto the rest of the house. The autonomous abstractpainting here implied more of a returnto the heroic scale of nineteenth-centuryneoclassical mural painting in a traditionalgallery setting than to a real and active engagement with the fluid dynamics of a modernistspace. The traditionalprofessionaland formal affinities between art and architecture, then, seemed to raise serious issues in the contemporarycontext. How was it possible to returnto a more synthetic process among the arts;indeed, was this tenable or even desirable at this point? While the art markethad its own rationale for such a collaboration, artisticand philosophical motivations were less forthcoming. In this sense, the symposium became a forum to reinvigorateold alliances, to renew old vows among disciplines that now had little, if any, formal or professionalrelations with one another. The Guggenheim museum directorJames Johnson Sweeney, who began the list of symposium speakers,tried to justifythe continuation of this affiliation by deferringto a neoclassical ar-

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ordinate position to which architectureassigned the visual artsand the aspirationsof postwarpainting, which, as exemplified by the Blake/Pollock project, had its own designs on both its relation to architectureand as architecture proper. The American painter Ben Shahn voiced some of these concerns in following Sweeney's comments: architecture had lost its expressivespirit in the modern era in its emphasis on scientific functionalism, he argued, so that it fell to art to claim a greaterdegree of individual expression.The architect, in his description, functioned as bureaucratictechnocrat, whereas the artistacted as vanguardinterpreter.Thus, according to Shahn, the social responsibilitiesof the modern artistconflicted with his limited tasksas assigned by the architect. The artistcould no longer be asked simply to provide ornamental distractionfor architecture. Rather,the work needed to stand on its own merits to hold true to his position as artist:"Ifthe artistis called on merely to keep his work subservient to the architecture,to create something ornamental but nothing more, he is in effect being asked to take leave of The fresco, himself for a period, to departfrom his role.""27 once seen as integralto the artist'soeuvre, now came to be viewed as confining as well as financially impractical in relation to the commodity nature of the modern easel canvas. Between architecture'sdesire to subordinatethe other arts and painting'sintent to release itself from the economic and physical boundariesimposed by the fresco, the two disciplines seemed to hold little in common at mid-century.Jose Luis Sert lamented this condition, in remarkinghow "the whole thing is that we are divorced.A lot of time has passed since architecture and painting were together, and we have lost the The particularpostwar habit of collaboratingin this matter."28 economies of the two professions - one dependent upon portabilityand easy convertibilityfor its exchange value and the other inherentlytied to the land values of a specific location - created a situation in which their economic and cul-

tural worth became directly relatedto their ability to produce distinctly separatecommodities. This separationasserteditself not only through the economies of each discipline, but also by way of an increasinglydistinct visual vocabulary. Sert argued that modern painterstreatedthe architectural commission as a blank surface devoid of site or architectural specificity, to be handled no differentlythan a raw canvas in creating the self-contained, individually expressivework of art that was independent of its immediate context. Conversely, architects ignorant of contemporaryissues and developments in modern art, chose artistswithout regardto the suitabilityof the particularcommission. What was needed, he asserted, was a "community of ideas"shared among the disciplines that would enable a common ground of understandingin developing a team approachfor the architecturalcollaboration. Towardthis goal, Sert outlined three possibilitiesfor combining painting and sculpturewith architecture.The ideal would be one in which there develops an "integralapproach" intimate sense of unity between art and architecture.While Sert was thinking here of Renaissanceor art nouveau work, suprematistand De Stijl collaborationswere significant modernist examples. The architect ideally would also become the sculptorand/or painter,subsuming the minor artsunder an architecturalfoundation and binding them in a common artistic goal. Though architecturestill had an ostensible claim to artisit had to acknowledge its debt to tic sovereignty,paradoxically, this position: "Withoutthem to achieve and sculpture painting [the architect]would produce buildings, but the buildings would not be architecture."29 Specifically, for Sert, it is architecture conceived of as sculpturalform that gives architecture its sense of "plasticvalues,"alluding to Le Corbusier'sreclamation of sculpturalform for modern architecture.30 The second, "applied"approachwould accept the building as given, and painting and sculpture as secondarydecorative elements subsequentlyadded merely to enhance the architec-

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By presenting this model, Sert also implicitly acknowledged Other than the convenience of the blankwall surfacesafforded the contemporaryimpracticalityof returningto any craftsby the InternationalStyle, little in the way of a common visual based unity among painting, sculpture,and architecture, aiming instead to promote a formal autonomy within a mutustyle linked the new paintingto the new architecture.There seemed to be no easy solution to the thornyissue of relatingthe ally sympatheticrelationship.In this manner, the notion of with its vague taint of socialist sympathies, "cooperation," intensely individual,introspective,spontaneous,and messyvicould be fortuitouslyreplaced by the idea of a mutual "indetalityof the abstractexpressionist palette to that of the rectilinear geometryand sparevocabularyexpressedby American pendence," in which personal ideals could be accommodated within an overall framework.It also solved the more modern architecture.The artistIrene Rice Pereirasuccinctly immediate and thornyproblem of posing the austere ethos of statedthe situationin observinghow Bauhaus design againstthe antiacademic, willfully autonounlikearchitecture, mostpaintingtodayhas no underlying strucwithinwhich to construct an object.Inasmuch as mous stance of American painting. In light of the indepenturalframework dent direction of abstractartand architecture,this approach structural and form-giving areessentialforconveying properties and it seem to me that in content, would seemed to hold the greatestpromise for contemporarywork. meaning representation the visualartshas become a pictorialexpression of a flatconcrete For an artistsuch as Mark Rothko, painting created its own expressiveness. neither of world, pure illusorypictorialitynor planarobjectMoreprecisely,contemporary the ob- form, but one that art,in mostcases,fragments questioned the epistemic limits of the muin actionand a ject and negatesspace.There is merelydynamism Rothko's worktraceda trajectorythat began to ral format. of structural dissolution form.32 explore painting as a self-sufficientarchitecture,but wound As an implicit acknowledgment of this foregone situation, the up negating both the idea of the autonomous singular work resolution to this separationwas its acceptance. Thus a third of artand painting as a substitutefor architecturalform.
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tural design. An approachof this sort would require the architect to dictate the style and tenor of the artwork. Here, the visual language of the artistis preordainedby the architectural As Sert acdesign, so that "theyspeak the same language.""3 this of enforced often led to unsatistype unity knowledged, of the painter to factoryresults,owing to the "unwillingness" cede to the architecturalidea. Where the architecturetreats painting as ornament, the artist'sworkand conviction become compromised, as in the case of Pollock's commission for the Geller House; conversely,where the artistworkssolely with the painting in mind, for example, with Picasso'sGuernica, its architecturalsetting becomes irrelevant.As for the abstractexpressionists,this condition seemed incorrigible,as the formal concerns of American painting became increasinglyseparate from those of a native architecturestill in the throes of attempting to clarifyits identity.

approachwould be to understandthat the American variation of the Gesamtkunstwerk meant the celebration of the independent tendencies of art and architecture.At the same time, the notion of a democratic modern culture that allowed differing viewpoints played well into the Cold War cultural politics of the 1950s. This last approachsaw how "architecture, painting, and sculpture may be simply related to one another, each workstanding alone.... The whole becomes greater than the parts.""33 Sert held up the Piazza della Signoria in Venice as one such historicallysanctioned instance of a sympathetic and autonomous relation between historicallydisparatestyles, while Johnson had previouslymentioned the Kolbe statue in the Barcelona Pavilion as a contemporary example of how modern architectureand sculpture could agreeablycohabitate.

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Painting versusArchitecture:MarkRothko's SeagramCycle

In place of the traditionalfresco, the mural served to satisfy the ambitions of the modern painter for large scale. Apart from its relative portability,not only could it separateitself from its traditionaldependence on architecture,but it could also act as self-sufficientform, to delineate real versuspictorial space. It is in this sense that Mark Rothko spoke at the MoMA symposium, describing how he intended his paintings to have a direct and immediate effect, ratherthan impose the illusion of an artificialdistance on the viewer: "I realize that historicallythe function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and very pompous. The reason why I paint large pictures, however - and I think it applies to some of the other paintersI know - is precisely because I want to be very intimate and very human.""34 More precisely,Rothkowas interestedin returningthe spectator to the engaged specificityof the act of viewing. He wanted to reinstillthe notion of presencein the postwarworkof art. This position is manifestif we compare Rothko'sstatements with WalterBenjamin'sdisciplinaryanalogybetween auratic ritualand scientific vision: "Magicianand surgeon compareto painterand cameraman.The paintermaintainsin his worka naturaldistance from reality,the cameramanpenetratesdeeply into its web. There is a tremendousdifferencebetween the picturesthey obtain. That of the painteris a total one, that of the cameramanconsistsof multiple fragmentswhich are asIn distinctionto Benjamin's sembled under a new law."35 declarationof a distancedillusionism as the provinceof the painter,Rothkoinsteadclaimed the position of the modern surgeon,the cameramanwho selectivelyentersand dissectsthe recessesof the visual frame.Nonobjectivitystandsin place of the form. By appropriating the unified, reified representational instrumentalpropertiesof the camera, Rothkocould absolve painting from its fate as mere technical mimesis and capture

what no lens could see. The workretainsan undoubtablepresence born of its specific identity,but it is not concerned with a the dimensions of totalizingvision of objective representation; the canvasare not intended to captureand retainvision at a workin the particularities of a distance, but to the contrary, of the visual field: near-sighted,haptic exploration Frommypoint of view,at this particular time, to painta smallpictureis to sortof place yourself outsideyourexperience,thatis, to view or witha reducing look upon an experienceas a stereopticon glass.However you can paintthe largerpicture,you are in it. It isn'tsomethingthatyou commandor control,but you arehaving a completelyintimateexperience,and perhapsit is impossible for and perhaps it is an very people todayto paintgrandiose pictures, pictures. good thingthatthey can'tpaintgrandiose I thinktheselargepictures,mine or thoseof some of my contemin human can go anywhere wherepeople are interested poraries, and intimateexperiences.36 To be "in"the picturein this mannerradicallyshiftsthe of the traditional viewer'sunderstanding perceptualrole of that not as an Kantian is, isolated, experience,but one painting; dependent upon the physicalrelationshipbetween viewerand viewed. Rothkowould claim of his worksthat "apaintingis not a pictureof an experience;it is an experience,"indicatinghis readingof paintingas an immediateactivityratherthan a secRothko'sconcern with the notion of ondhandrepresentation.37 his canvasesto embody and how intended reveals he intimacy enframethe viewer,to act as a projectionof the viewing body. Elaine Scarry'sdiscussion of the reciprocal act of projecting in the structuringof a material artifact,in the way in which the work simultaneously reflects and projects the physical exteriorand interior events of the body, sheds light on how Rothko'swork operates:"The interchange of inside and outside surfacesrequiresnot the literal reversalof bodily linings but the making of what is originally interior and privateinto something exteriorand sharable,and, conversely, the reabsorption of what is now exteriorand sharable into the intiThe sentient mate recesses of individual consciousness."38
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attributesof the work are revealed as mirrorand extension of the body:The verticalityof Rothko'scanvases mimics the upright stance of the viewing spectator,outlining and enlarging the body in its projective aspect towardpainting, while the horizontal divisions between color bands demarcate an optical (corporal)horizon line. Reciprocally, the carefully measured aformalityof the luminous fields returnsthe workto the consciousness of the interior self. By this dual trajectory between artifactand individual, his paintings also highlight the tension between the depthless voids promised by the canvas and the material immediacy of the painterlyobject. If Pollock's murals promised the path towardan architectural self-determination,then Rothko'sworksare resolutelypainterly in that they remain explicitly circumscribedby the frame ratherthan probing into the "limitlessdepths"that reside beyond the edges of the allover canvas. Facture and color mark the material immediacy and optical boundariesof a mural plane that lies inert to the contingencies of the exhibition space. It is perhapsthis lost opportunitythat Johnson sensed, both in his experience with Baziotes and in abstractexpressionism in general. For Johnson, this perceived relapse in modernist painting back to the easel formatwas not entirely unwelcome, to the extent that the painter'scraftno longer threatened to impinge upon the architect'spriority.Rothko, in turn, found the architect'sunderstandingof his workto be restrictedto conventional notions of easel and mural painting. He was more interestedin exploring an aspect of painting outside of these received categories;that is, in a kind of artform that neither made architecture,contained its effects, nor became affected by its physical impositions. Painting had to be an encompassing experience, one that accepted its architectural supportas a matterof course, but also one that rigorously assertedits independence from the surroundingwalls. On the one hand, Rothkohad no interestin the easel painting'ssubordinationto the localized exigencies of any

architecturalsupport.On the other, he also resistedthe traditionalrole of the mural'sculturalassociations(heroic valorization,monumentality,economic power, social legitimation), but more directly,he refusedto engage in the architectural implicationsof the mural'sinsistentobject (or in Michael Fried'sterms,"theatrical") properties.In distinction to Greenberg'sclaims of pure, undistilledplanarityfor abstract expressionism,Rothko'sworkrevels in the oscillation between the facturalimmediacy of the canvasand the optical implications of an undefined apictorialspace outside the province of architectural volume. Rothko'smuralsdo not attemptoptically to extend and dissolvethe physicalboundariesof their settings, as in the Roman or Renaissancetrompe l'oeil fresco;rather, they hold out the vague promiseof an undefined space that is subsequentlydenied by its obduratesurfaceplane. Despite the artist'sdifficulties with the architect, Johnson was involved with at least two of Rothko'sbest-knownpublic commissions: the Seagrammurals and the Houston Chapel. If Johnson found fault with Baziotes'seffortsat an architectural integrationof modern painting, then perhapshe found Rothko'sscale to be more suitable to the scale of public architecture. In the Seagrammurals,we see Rothko making what seems initially to be a genuine attempt to workthe question of combining abstractpainting with postwararchitecture, although by the time of the de Menil commission for the Houston Chapel a decade later, it would become clear that his paintingsdeliver a deliberate and obstinate renunciation of any architecturalsupport. At the original behest of Johnson and Phyllis Lambert, Rothko was awardeda contract in the summer of 1958 to produce approximately five to six hundred squarefeet of mural painting for a privateroom adjacent to the main dining room in the Four Seasons restaurant, which Johnson designed as partof the Seagramheadquarterson ParkAvenue.39 Unlike the carefully controlled conditions in which Rothko preferred

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8. Johnson, FourSeasons Restaurant, Seagram Building, plan, with private dining room at right, 1960

Lii

ELjY~s

j,

his paintings to be shown, his charge here was to work with a predeterminedspace (fifty-fivefeet long by twenty-sixfeet wide by fifteen feet high) that was less than conducive to the taskof viewing his murals. The available area of the long west wall, for instance, was elevated above the diners' heads, which removed the possibilityof the workencompassing the viewer'shaptic field. Nonetheless, the commission became a kind of challenge for Rothko to produce the synthesisbetween painting and architecturethat had been discussed at the MoMA symposium. James Breslin'saccount of the Seagrammuralshighlights Rothko'scontinual ambivalence about the project;aftertwo yearsof workthat produced approximately fortycanvases, seven of which were to be chosen for the room, the artistfinally turned down the commission upon seeing the dining room afterits opening. His vision of a profanespace that would be transformed by the totalizing embrace of the cycle of muralswas dashed by the realityof its opulent setting. Rothko was interestedneither in making backgroundornamentation for the distracteddiner, nor in makingtranscendentalart for a disinterestedand uninformed upper-classaudience. But it became patentlyclear that his workswere intended to serveas a decorativebackdropin the context of haute cuisine dining, as fashioned by Johnson'srestrainedluxuryvia Mies's furniture,a shimmering Lippold sculpture,and verdantinteriorlandscaping. Rothko'sconception of the muralsacting as the main theme of the room gave way to the dominatingvision of the architect, in which painting was an afterthoughtto architecture.

From the beginning of the project, Rothko attempted to invert this endemic condition, by defeating the architectural reality through sheer painterlyvision. Among the New York School painters,he was the one most concerned with expanding the mural format beyond the boundaries of the single canvas. His method of workingwith architecture came to imitate its effects in order to master it, by extending painting towardthe scale and tectonic opacity of the architectural plane. More than just expanding the physical boundaries of a single painting, or creating a thematic triptych,these paintings anticipated and thwartedtheir architecturalsetting by their instantiation of structureand repetition. Ratherthan imitate architecturalvolumes through the mimetic means traditionallyaffordedto painting, Rothko chose to focus upon the aspatial,form-intensiveaspects of his work, to remove it from any comparison with architecturalspace. With material parametersdistilled to their raw essentials, the basic visual structureof the Seagram murals was outlined by shape, color, and relationshipwith adjacent canvases.The artistdid not situate painting within architecture in the trajectoryfrom the occupiable volume of architecturalspace to a fictional perspectivalscene. Indeed, he deliberately and obstinatelyprevented such a possibilityfrom happening, by recourse to the object facture of the mural plane. Rothko promoted form over space in an attempt to shift painting from a discipline of secondhand illusionism to a practice that would directly challenge architectureas form: In our inheritance we havespace,a box in whichthingsaregoing on. In myworkthereis no box;I do not workwithspace.There is a formwithoutthe boxand possibly a moreconvincingkind of form.40 Rothko'smodel of mural painting within architecture, then, became a process of working and extending the physical and conceptual parametersof the architecturalobject, instead of mutely accepting its fate within a circumscribed frame. In

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this new role as painted object - that is, as a class of painting that resides within the boundaries of painting ratherthan sculpture - the mural work inherits two complementary responsibilities:as architectureand as painting. Ratherthan a superficial representationof architecturalelements, however, Rothko produced a conceptual reading of the dining room that returnsit to a subset of his painterlyenvironment, whereby painting subsumes architecture. Breslin views Rothko'smethod as explicitlydrawingupon architectural imagerypreciselyto back awayfrom it, to defuse and deny traditionalintimationsof space and form. Breslin claims that by rotatingonto their sides the predominately horizontalbands of color in the earlyto mid-1950scanvases, Rothkomade a majorconceptual shift in his painterlyvocabutheir meaning from lary for the Seagramproject,transforming into figurativesymbolsthat alluded transcendentalabstractions to verticalarchitecturalelements: "Whilestill predominately rectangular,this new imagery,suggestingwindows,doors,portals, was simple, classical, architectural.Rothkohad moved his work into a whole new dimension."41 At the same time, this architecturalfigurationrefusesentryinto a perspectival space its obstinate of the mottled hues, texture, by foregrounding and overallshape that define the object natureof the canvas. Breslin here arguesthat "Rothko's muralswere to harmonize with these architecturalfeatures,in orderto 'defeat'them."42 But the course from the nonfigurativeto quasi-figuration as Breslin charts it is ratherspeculative. While the idea of Rothko'sturn towardthe mimetic holds an obvious allure, it is a somewhat superficial response to his intentions, and it remains unclear whether the artisthimself ever intended such overt references to architecturalforms. Indeed, the opposite case could be made for the increasing movement awayfrom literalism in the evolution of his work. If it is plausible, as Breslin and others have claimed, that Rothko'svisits to Michelangelo's LaurentianLibraryduring the 1950s uncon-

sciously influenced the Seagramcommission to some dethen it is less about imitating an architecturalscheme gree,43 - that of the painted planes standing in for the blind windows set between pilasters - than about creating a totalizing work of art, one in which the mural planes can create an encompassing environment by reasonof their object nature. Anna Chave makes a strongcase with the technical counterargument that the rectangularspaces in Rothko'sclassic abstractpaintings from the 1950s are not meant to appearas doors - that is, openings onto a more or less distantlandscape - for the simple reasonthat they have been painted on top of the base color the artistused for the particularcomposition and thereforethey appearto hover over the canvasas discrete planes ratherthan reside as voids behind the canvas This is not to say that Rothko was disinterestedin "wall."44 figurationand symbolism;Chave claims that the rectangles in his abstractwork act as metaphoric icons in the Peircian sense, descendants of his figurativeperiod from the 1930s: "In suggestingthat Rothko'spaintingsare iconic, I am proposing to show that they are embedded with metaphor,that they function by means of similarityand by exhibiting the structureof 'a state of things regardedas if it were purely imaginary."'45 According to Chave, the rectanglesare thus symbolic metaphorsfor his earlierpaintings, not merely supplanting or standing in for the objects of a realistcomposition, but ratheracting semiotically in fundamentallythe same manner as the figurativeworks.In this manner, the abstractpaintings can be understoodas wrestlingwith some of the same philosophical and religious themes Rothko had examined at the beginning of his career. Further,we could say that this iconic statusextends beyond the immediate confines of the rectangularforms held within the frame, to the object dimensions of the painting itself. By giving the painted object the statusof an icon, Rothko returnshis work to that traditional relationshipbetween architectureand the privileged role accorded to the religious icon.
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Rothko'scomparisonof the Seagramcycle with the Sistine chapel, then, in addition to its aspirationstowarda heroic religiosity,also revealedthe artist'sattemptsto dominate architecture,to instantiatean environment through sheer One of the principle devices in this effortconcerns painting.46 the physical relationshipbetween the murals;Rothko'sfastidious effortsto control the hanging of his worksevidences the importance he attached to the physical parametersof their exhibition, as well as to the mural images themselves. Willem de Kooning observedthat Rothko'sSeagramcommission marked"the firsttime he was making one painting in relation to another painting."47 Like the Sistine Chapel, the Seagram muralswere to be viewed as a continuous frieze, with one wall to be seen over the diners' heads. Michael Compton notes that Rothko's referenceto the paintings as a coherentset of panels indicatesthatthe muralswere not meant to be seen or installedas autonomousindividualworks, but insteadmountedflush to one anotheras sectionsof a larger muralconception.48 In settingup this condition,the muralwork began to takeon architectural proportions, developingan environmentthroughform,shape,and color. Comptoncompares the Seagramseriesto Monet'sWaterLily muralsinstalledas a circulararenainside the Jeu de Paume.Yet the essentialdifference betweenMonet'sand Rothko's conception lies in the distance betweenthe traditional notion of the canvasas transparent scrim,veiling a more or less distantlandscape,of Monet'swork, and the immediateand obstinateblankpresenceof Rothko's it is the impressionist frieze that recedes panels. Interestingly, into the architecture, the effect of a decorative veneer producing that skimsthe verticalsurfaces,whereasthe Seagrampanelsactivelyresistsuch a readingby stoppingthe eye at the surface,by forcingan engagementwith the facturalplane. While Rothko'swork refuses entry into any spatial illusionism born of perspectivaldepth, the Seagrampanels bring into focus an understandingof space that involves the immediate

relationshipbetween painting and viewer. Ratherthan retreating into the fixed and imaginaryspatial construction controlled by an invisible grid and vanishing point that resides behind the picture plane of the traditionalrealist canvas, Rothko'smurals highlight the real and elastic spatial relationship between artworkand spectatorin front of the canvas. Breslin speaksabout this production of a "local"space taking phenomenal precedence over its generic architecturalspace: In his paintings of the 1950s,Rothko, focusingon the interaction betweenthe viewerand the painting(rather thanconceivingof the paintingas a self-contained wished the 'space'of the object), paintingto extendinto the 'realspace'occupiedby the human the figurein frontof the painting.His obsessionwith controlling hangingand lightingof his workderivedfromthis effortto generate, out of the physicalpresenceof the workand the physical presenceof the viewer,a spatialenvironment.49 In this sense, the physical limits of the architecture of the exhibition space are absolutely critical to the conceptual and haptic understandingof the murals;this local space engendered by the interaction between artand viewer becomes intrinsic to the mural work. The determination of architectural form and volume enter into the province of the artist,in the work of dividing generic volume into perceptible space. If, as Rothko claimed, his work was about object form over mimetic reproduction, involved experience over illusionism, actual spatialrelations over its secondhand representation,then he needed not merely to dominate the local space of painting, but to develop and control the tenor of the overall environment as well. To be "in"his paintings also meant, ultimately, to be in his space. The Seagram commission failed, for Rothko, because of his inability (along with the lack of interest on the part of the viewer) to transformits specific spatial relationsfrom that of an inward, isolated dining experience to that of an experience focused on its periphery,toward a personal intimacy between painting and vision developed out of planarform, imbedded color, and lived space.
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Though Philip Johnson had complained of William Baziotes's ostensible lack of cooperationon the house muralfor the Kootz exhibition, the architectwas not willing to cede any true collaborativeresponsibilityeither for that projector for the interiorof the Seagramdining room (though, to be sure, Johnson'sown role was tightly circumscribedin relationto Mies's overall direction). This lay at the crux of the problem for Rothko:the artist'sconception of muralpainting demanded at the very least an acknowledgmentof the work'smaterial presence and spatialprovisions;ideally, the muralwork had to form the basis for the surroundingarchitecture,rather than the converse, to serve as applied decoration,the modernist equivalent of architecturalornamentationinside the ascetic space of a predeterminedvolume. His course of action, then, became a reaction againstthe given, the painter'staskof illusionism inside the architecturalshell. In its failure, we can glimpse the artist'sattemptto recapturethe space of the viewer through the insertion of an alternativearchitecturalschema honed from the facturalweight of hue and dimension, the structureof formal rhythmand repetition,the space of a painterly light hovering in front of the picture plane.

pervasivesense of loss, a longing for earlier, more unified periods in art, and, concomitantly, a sense of how current work carrieswithin itself the possibilityfor their renewal. For many, the separationbetween the artswas an inevitable consequence of postwarculture. The French architectural critic Paul Damaz claimed that the beginnings of this separation could be tracedback to the Cartesiansplit between rational thought and intuitivefeeling in the seventeenth century.50 In this model, the development of a modernistarchitecture, drivenby engineering and utilitarianfunction, becomes increasinglydivorcedfrom the extraneousconcerns of the visual arts.Here Damaz quotes the poet Paul Valkry,who couches the situation in classical, tragicterms:"Paintingand sculpture are children who have been abandoned.Their mother, architecture, is dead. While she was alive, they had their place, their role, their restraints."s' This nod to Victor Hugo's assessment of the demise of architecture'srhetoricalrole in the face of the modern printedpressviewed the visual artsas, without the parentalconstraintsof architecture'sguidance, now free to run wild, lacking form or regulation.Damaz's slightly more optimistic metaphor,on the other hand, comparesmodern architecture to an adolescent body, abandoningthe artsin favor of the physical pleasuresof pure structure: It is a factthatmodern as it is commonly architecture, practiced, careslittleforthe otherarts.It is a youngandvigorous architecture. It resembles a youngathlete,proud of his newlydeveloped body, whoas yet hashadlittleconcernforhis mind.It hasdeveloped folandeverything thatwasnot absolutely to its organization necessary or efficiency wasset aside.Andthus,it hascome to passthatart- hasbeen ignored butindispensable superfluous by ourarchitects, who were hypnotized by the technical exploits of engineers.52 lowing the precepts of a narrowand wholly material'functionalism,'

Loss and Redemption

If Rothko had serious questions about the collaborativeefforts between architecture and painting, then it was no clearer for architects or critics how precisely to incorporatepostwarart into modern architecture.While many contemporarywriters tried to celebrate the common sensibilities relating abstract expressionism to the InternationalStyle, the wide range of their often conflicting arguments exposed the quagmire in attempting such a model. It seemed clear, however, that postwarvisual culture could not match the collaborativeharmony among building, painting, and sculpture set during the Middle Ages or even in the early twentieth century by the work of the avant-garde. The literatureof the period revealsa

Between its death in Parisat the beginning of the nineteenth century and its subsequent rebirthin America some decades later, architecturewould outline the same course that modern painting - at least according to the model constructed by Greenberg - would follow for the New Yorkart market
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the demiseof tradibeginningin the 1940s.In otherwords, in Europe,foreshadowed tionalmimeticrepresentation by wouldbe supplanted as cubismandsurrealism, by painting of an autonomous a visual field activity, comprised working In thisway,Damazcouldreclaim pureformalstructure. the commonality of the visualarts,no longerby invoking but rather by pointingto the modernist representation, of abstraction: andsculpture, now Kunstwollen "Painting findthemselves forthe firsttime in intimatecomabstract, munionwitharchitecture, an artwhichitselfis essentially in of Platonicgeometries Thus the appearance abstract.""53 withthe elementalformsof couldbe identified painting the simplicity of composition modernarchitecture, compared Eventhe abandonment of subto spareBauhaus aesthetics. in canvas could of the external world the abstract matter ject of the withthe formalcomposition be seen in the obsession medium of abthe new-found architectural object.Through andarchitecture could once againdisstraction, painting their covera commonvisualgroundin whichto understand culture. andprogressive artistic workas partof a larger

positions, and, in turn, asked to be compared to a spectrum of architecturalforms ranging from Oscar Niemeyer's curvilinear vaults to Mies's severe rectilinear asceticism.

Within this spectrum, abstractexpressionismstood out not only as the dominant postwarartform,but also because of its resistanceto any easy translationinto architecturalform. Here, Greenberg'sformalistreading of postwarpainting situated painting and architecturewithin the progressiveideals of an industrializedeconomy. In reviewing a 1951 exhibition at the FrankPerls Gallery that included contemporaryartists such as Ad Reinhardt,Clifford Still, MarkTobey, Matta, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Motherwell, Rothko, and Pollock, MargaretSorzano acknowledged that the De Stijl artists had more in common with modern architecture than did present-daypainters, in the way the early avant-gardewere able to incorporatepainting and architecture into a unified work of art.This argument suggested that the specialization of the abstractexpressionist'staskprecluded the contemporaryartistfrom any architecturalpossibilities. Nonetheless, unlike Damaz, who proclaimed a correspondence by reason that encompassed everybody seemedhardly of an overarching"abstraction" Butthis claimof a unifiedformalsensibility the material relaintimated from Pollock to Sorzano the of a coherent able to offer much less Mies, verifiable, stability critics movement even withinthe groupof contemporary tionship between large-scalepainting and its architecturalposomekindof alliancebetweenarchi- tential: "The abstractexpressionistcan, with complete truth who wishedto promote to his objectives, create a mural or a sculpture whose shapes, forinstance,asVictorPasmore, tectureandthe otherarts. combined colors, moods and images will be related to the architecture in the pastartist andarchitect sertedthat"whereas and objects of contemporarydesign. These paintings can in theirownparticular as specialists media;todaytheycan evoke two kinds of reality:empirical realityand mystical realfunctionin termsof the sameformallanguage," implying thatthe legacyof cubismandfuturism ity. Despite the evasive quality of these paintings, there is a laybehindthe speonce modernism cific formalelementsof postwar By necessarylink between the artistand material reality."55 (invoking, of born to an abstract of model arculturaldeterminist Giedion's empirical reality expressionism relating again,Siegfried itself of abstraction Yetthisshibboleth chitectural construction, Sorzano not only linked painting to architechistory).54 or no hold in as to its abstractness so became vague ture, but she also managed to deflect the populist reading of any held together this workas unbridled mysticism and instead steered the disthe labelof the "abstract" meaningwhatsoever; andJuanMir6'sbiomorphic cussion towardthe specific material conditions and object works as JeanArp's such diverse and Mondrian's qualities surroundingthe work of art. rigidcomloopysplatters, shapes,Pollock's
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William Brice expresseda similar sentiment in Arts6 Architecture;in exploring the relationshipbetween painting and architecture, he assertedthat "therehas been a repeated phenomenon in painting described as a tectonic mode and much of contemporarypainting with its emphasis upon material, scale and the two-dimensionalsurface falls into a catIn its rediscoveryof the egory not far removed from it."56 material realm through absolute flatness, painting could claim some measure of similitude to the tectonic objectivity of modern architecture. If a claim to congruence could be attached to the primacyof medium among both modernist buildings and paintings,however, then in partthis occurred because of the relativelack of correspondence in their interpretationof abstraction; painting heading towardan interiorized,highly specific (read marketable) measure of individual gesture and architectureaiming at the anonymity of the public sphere. To account for this disparity,the art critic Jules Langsnerargued that it was precisely the dichotomy between abstractexpressionismand modern architecturethat made them ideally suited to one another: This kindof painting,with all its Dionysiandelirium,belongs, Here oddlyenough,on the pristinewallsof modernarchitecture. is ornamentation, conceivedin an idiom of our times,to clothe these oftendispirited surfaces. The purealmostmechanically impersonalmodernbuildingand the highlypersonalized, spontaneouslyexecutedpaintingrequireeach otherin spiteof, or perhaps becauseof, theirpositionat oppositepoles of visualization.57 Despite artistslike Pollock and Rothko who strenuouslyobjected to the reading of their workas decoration, its reception as such accounted for the popularityof postwarmural commissions awardedin the arid volumes of countless office lobbies. If Langsnersaw the abstractexpressionistcanvasas a visual relief to modern architecture,then the downside to this state of equilibrium would be the mutual negation of their respective effects: painting acting as a surface remedy, masking the underlying formal povertyin postwarbuilding, and archi-

tecture neutralizingabstractexpressionism's heroic aspirations it the function of ornamentation. This situation by delegating workedagainstmuch of what the New YorkSchool was attemptingto accomplish in the large-scalemural:the separationof painting from its architecturalsupportand the development of its tectonic autonomy.The artiststhus had to maintain a fine line between the public context of the mural workand the assertionof its formal independence. In contrast,if modern architecturewere somehow to retrieve a tangible measure of meaning from the lessons of abstract expressionism,ratherthan retainingan improbablealliance between two increasinglydisparatevisual disciplines, then it needed to relinquish its traditionalrole as backdropfor the mural workand, instead,strivefor a sympatheticadoption of a radicallydifferentvisual language than that posed by the early The critical acclaim given to abstract European avant-garde. the expressionismbegged question of what the architectural analogyto this radicalvisual style could possiblybe. While architects such as Peter Blake and Tony Smith were among the firstto recognize the architecturalimplicationsof Pollock's painting, they also found its translationto be at once liberating and problematic:if architecturewas indeed an artform, what would an architectureof abstractexpressionismbe like?

An Architectureof AbstractExpressionism, Part 1: The Smithsons

As the diverse range of conflicting opinions revealed, the difficulties of reconciling the individual expressivenessof painting with the industrialmodularizationof postwararchitecture proved to be a central hurdle for any clearly defined strategy of integrationin American building. Ironically,European attempts were able to generate a more convincing response, by way of the nascent pop/brutalismof the Independent Group in London and the situationistattackon high culture and postwarcapitalism on the Continent. For their part,Alison
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and Peter Smithson explicitly acknowledged the influence of Pollock's canvas splatteringsin regardto their conception of a new urban landscape as an intricatelyconnected megastructuralnet of activityand trafficcirculation. Guy D6bord and Constant'ssituationistdirives, on the other hand, took inspirationfrom the aleatorytrajectoriesof the informecanvas, translatingthese movements into a prescriptionfor a radical urban architecture. While advanced American art largely did not exhibit in Europe in the immediate postwaryears,the New York School of paintersbegan to gain recognition across the Atlantic through publication in the critical and popular press beginning in the late 1940s. Pollock, most notably, gained internationalnotoriety through a 1949 Life magazine article in which he appeared as an incarnation of the American rebel breaking The Smithsons were from academic artisticconvention.58 also concerned with dismantling a hegemonic order - that of the canons of CIAM urbanism - by returningto those very elements that had been discardedby The Functional City (the theme of the 1933 CIAM conference); namely, those of quotidian life in the neighborhood community. As partof the circle that formed the core membership of the Independent Group, the Smithsons were exposed to an incipient pop culture sensibility in the work of such figures as the artistsRichard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and the photographerNigel Henderson. Far from its American incarnation as a glossy send-up of commodity culture, the British version of pop art retained a grittieredge that owed its allegiance to dada, surrealism,and French existentialistthought, revealing populist sympathies in its critical awarenesstoward the practices of everydaylife. For the English, the differences among pop art, art brut, and abstractexpressionismcould be resolved within an overall order of postwarrealism;that is, a visual order markedby a messy vitality,the cacophony of mass-producedcommodity culture, the spontaneityof the im-

mediate gesture in distinction to the formally planned construction (no matterthat the movements of the former were as preordainedand considered as those of the latter). Thus, in addition to pop art, the Smithsons could incorporate the practices of contemporaryabstractart both as a means of challenging the formal status quo inculcated by an increasingly institutionalized modernism and as an autonomous ordering device that could act as a viable alternativevisual structure.As they stated some years later, they looked to a contemporaryvisual model to use as a basis for a new building and urban design syntax:"Itwas necessary in the early '50s to look to the work of painter Pollock and sculptor Paolozzi for a complete image system, for an order with a structureand a certain tension, where every piece was correThrough spondingly new in a new system of relationship."59 such an "image system,"modern architecture could once again be retrievedfrom the myth of transparentfunctionalism, and an architecturaland urban design method thereby be developed based upon a "freer,more complex yet quite comprehensible idea of'order.'"'6 Such a statementcontradictsthe popularreadingof their first majorproject,the HunstantonSecondarySchool dating from 1950, as an example of extremeMiesian reductivismas sponsoredby the WelfareState,61and helps to place this workwithin the orbitof an artisticsensibilitydrivenby an afunctionalistsystem of order.In this light, New Brutalismwas less about the raw elementarismof materialand constructivetechnique than a call to recastthe elements of common constructioninto found reassemblesexistingelements objects, just as the bricoleur-artist into an artof the most nascent patterns. Similarly, Reyner Banham's insight that the Smithsons were deeply influenced (along with a generation of others) by ArchitecturalPrinciplesin the Age of HuRudolf Wittkower's manism led to a superficial homology between the formal symmetryof the Palladian villa and that shown in the
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The aesthetic syntaxto which the Smithsonswere referring While the specter of Ludwig Hilberseimer'santihumanist vi- could be seen at the London ICA exhibition"Opposing of 1952, which highlighted work sion is resurrectedin the Smithsons' reclamation of the build- Forces"held in January Sam Francis,and the French paintersHenri ing cell (and more specifically, the dwelling unit) as the basis by Pollock, Michaux and George Michaus, thus bracketingdisparate for a postwarurban strategy,it is not the urban planner's visual strategiesand styles - abstractexpressionismand artauconstruction of a relentless serialized repetitivenessin tre - within a general orderof the allovercanvas.63 that is invoked here. In Hilberseimer, Reading Groszstadtarchitektur Pollock's work within the context of art autre and situationist we glimpse the absolute erasureof the subject and the absence of auratic presence, significant meaning, or origin, in a strategiesenabled the Smithsonsto conflate the drip paintings The resultant with a radicalpolitics (which Pollock had no interestin relatwholly reproducible world without inflection.62 "allover"effect thus concerns the kind of patternedrepetition ing to his work)and a neo-Miesianarchitecture,to produce that ultimately negates any significance in the individual act. one encompassingorder.It was thus in 1955, with some amount of justification,that Banhamcould claim both the Whereas the Smithsons used the cell in terms of its generafor the service tive and inventive possibilities;that is, as the germ of a funda- Europeanand the Americanartisticavant-garde of the new movement: mental proof of concept that could then lay out the basis for [New Brutalism] "Non-architecturally describes the art of some of Dubuffet, JacksonPollock structures the aspects confines of its initial form. larger-scale beyond and of Appel, and the burlappaintingsof AlbertoBurri Though it was Hunstanton that established their reputation among foreign artists- and, say, MagdaCordell or Eduardo as the architects of the New Brutalism,it was their 1952 entry Paolozzi and Nigel Hendersonamong English artists."64
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Hunstanton school plan. But Hunstanton does not display that primacy of volume, mass, and axis around the center of the plan that the Renaissance palazzo demonstrates.Instead, the focus of the school plan dissipatesto its peripheralcourtyardwings, so that it is not so much a tripartitescheme as a binary one; or rather,the central foyer reads in the same order of importance as its companion volumes on either side, making for a three-celled division of elements, with central voids within each section. Add to this the separategymnasium and caretaker'sfacilities removed from the main body of the school, and what appearsis a willfully asymmetricalplan made up of individually self-contained elements. It is precisely this cellular schema that marksthe two recurrent themes in the Smithsons' architecturaland planning efforts: the invention of a generative cellular module and its development into a larger-scaleproject, a process that they asserted was akin to Paolozzi's or Pollock's thematic workingof the individual brush strokeinto a cohesive overall visual system.

for the Golden Lane housing competition that more clearly demonstratedtheir interest in incorporatingaspects of postwar art into architecturaldesign. Ostensiblya large-scale building system designed to remedy the housing deficiencies of war-tornCoventry,the Golden Lane project does so by wholly ignoring the particularsof the existing urbanfabric, instead, literallysitting atop the traditionalcity with a secondof streetsand blocks. In its relentless layer infrastructure fractal-likedispersionover the face of the old city (a strategy that would be repeated in Constant'sNew Babylon projects), it presentsa radical challenge to the neatly zoned functionalism of CIAM urbanism.But also, more significantlyhere, it situates its strategyaround an aesthetics of dispersal,in which the matrixof the allover canvas can be remappedonto the scale and constructivedimensions of the city, the painterly fiction of the "endless"canvas ironicallytranslatedinto an urban sprawlof postwarreconstruction.

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Paolozzi's particularworking of the allover canvas, a calligraphic patchworkof inked grids and rectilinear shapes, took Greenberg's reading of abstractexpressionism'stendency toward wallpaperdecoration at face value, by literally making "allover" ceiling and wallpaperworks,firstfor the architect Ronald Jenkinsand later for the office of Jane and Maxwell Like Pollock's compositions, Paolozzi's drawingsinFry.65 duced the possibilityof figurativereadings,but ratherthan the sort of mystical, archaic primitivismthat Michael Leja has described as underlying Pollock's contemporaryreception in America,66 Paolozzi's wallpaperpieces suggest a a of different sort:that of the basic components of primitivism and visual structures. The lines and shapes do figural objects not determine any specific scale or figure but instead play on the perceptual ambiguity between small and large, organic (curvilinear)and geometric (rectilinear)shape. Further,they are not reversible,fluctuating elements retreatinginto a depthless horizon; rather,they maintain their form within a stabilized background.Despite their aleatoryappearance, the wallpaperworkswere composed out of separatedrawing "modules,"which were then pasted together to form an ensemble of tightly woven elements. Diane Kirkpatrick has observed that "thiskind of design, in two dimensions, allowed him to cover areasof any scale and any orientation with a pattern that suggested everythingfrom vines to the lineaments of a human or insect community seen from above. There was no beginning and no end to such patterns."67 This open reading allowed the possibilityof its reception as both an abstract allover composition and as the representationof a large-scale aerial view, and the Smithsons employed it to their own ends at Golden Lane, for the Sheffield Universitycompetition in 1953, and for the Berlin-Haupstadtcompetition of 1958. More specifically, the Smithsons incorporatedthe armature of the allover composition into an urban strategythat defied the antiseptic zoning logic of CIAM, through a relentless autotelic system driven by the ostensible needs of specific build-

ing functions and modular construction. At Coventry the immediate need for postwarhousing stock demanded the speed and efficiency of modular construction made possible by the repetitivehousing cell; at Sheffield Universitythe architecture was determined as a linear concourse, with the form of the Unit6 d'Habitationincorporatedas the basic building module. In Berlin the allover aesthetic was transformedinto the layered skeins of organized circulation pathways:elevated levels freely arrangedin a net of pedestrianwalkwaysabove, with motorized trafficsafely following the efficient logic of the rectilinear grid below. The pedestrianpathwayswere at once dislodged from and inseparablydetermined by the hum of the trafficgrid, and consequently the palimpsest began to resemble in plan the vision of frenetic organizationthat Paolozzi had been interested in pursuing in the wallpaper drawings.In all three architecturalprojects, facilitated by a modular building system, lay the potential for their continual extensibility, a reminder of the promise of an endless world beyond the picture frame.

An Architectureof AbstractExpressionism, Part2: The Tony Smith Church Project

While the Smithsons were among the firstto recognize the architecturaland urban implications of abstractexpression in Europe, earlier, if somewhat more hesitant attemptshad alreadybeen made by the two architects in JacksonPollock's circle: Peter Blake and Tony Smith. We have seen how Blake'seffortsto design an architecture around Pollock's work in 1949 had neatly replaced Mies's veined travertine walls with Pollock's lavish profusion of strewn colors, thereby mediating the radical implications of a new visual language by returningits precedents to a canonical modernism. Similarly, in his project for a Catholic church in 1950-51, Smith looked to American architecturalprecedents in tryingto inarcorporatePollock's painterlylanguage into an avant-garde
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chitecture. Though the project was never developed beyond a schematic presentation stage, its significance lies in the degree to which Smith attempted to bring two disparatevisual systems towardsome degree of coherence and artisticunity. The controversial issues relatingto Smith'schurch project,as firstpresentedby E. A. Carmean and subsequentlydebatedby Lee Krasner and RosalindKrauss,principallyconcern the iconographicpatrimony(or lack thereof) surroundingPollock's black paintings,done from about 1951, and the extent to which the artistparticipatedin the ceiling muralsdepicted in refutationof the ChrisSmith'sarchitecturaldesign.68 Krauss's tian imageryof the black paintings,as well as their questionable relationshipto church windowsor ceiling murals,lends credence to the argumentthat Pollock'sactual involvementin the church design had alwaysbeen severelylimited, finally ending upon the project'slacklusterreceptionby a group of prominent Catholic patronsin the summer of 1952. Leaving aside the debatable particularsof Pollock's intended participation,what is known and is more pertinent here is Smith's interpretationof the allover canvas in an architectural setting, as recorded in the extant plan and section drawing. Just as the Smithsons employed a basic cell to develop an architecture, Smith incorporateda repetitive unit, a hexagonal module, as the basis for his church design. In its relentless use of a hexagonal geometry to generate the architecture, the scheme is significantly indebted to FrankLloyd Wright's vision of organic architecture - Smith workedat Taliesin East from 1938-39 - as demonstratednotably in its polygonal configuration in the Hanna House of 1936. Ratherthan strictlyadhere to Wrightian doctrine, however, Smith tempered his interpretationof Wright'sorganic principles with his formalisttraining under Laiszl6Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design in the mid-1930s. Additionally,his interest in generative geometric pattern systemswas influenced, along with a generation of artistsand architects, by D'Arcy

9. Tony Smith, model of church, 1951

Thompson's On Growthand Form,as Smith himself stated.69 The genealogy of the hexagonal unit also points to Buckminster Fuller's technologically sophisticated,if formally awkward,Dymaxion House of 1927, although Fuller's design was that of a self-contained single cell divided into separate areas, whereas Smith's conception rested upon the multiplication of the basic module. The hexagonal geometryof the church project is repeated in section, punctuated by mushroom columns at the center of each module that isolate them from the ground plane. Le Corbusieris invoked here in the use of pilotis to separate building from ground, but the formsare perhapsarchitecturally more reminiscent of Wright'sinverted columns in the Johnson Wax Building of 1936-39. The heart of the design, however, was in its undulating ceiling plane. In plan, the floor plane is a seemingly random collection of modules, any potential symmetriesdislodged by additionalperipheralmodules. The traditionalarrangementsof the Christian church appear to have been disruptedin favorof a distinctlyasymmetrical, dispersiveplan with biomorphic overtones.Yet, looking to the ceiling, a measure of symmetryand traditional clerical hierarchyreturnsby way of a central skylitdome, surroundedby six companion domes, on which a band of
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eighteen triangularpaintings (presumablyby Pollock, as indicated in Smith's rendering of squiggly lines around the skylight)were to be installed. The scheme thereby returnsto an ancient Roman form of the Christian church, with a central altarsurroundedby a side chapel, confessional, and baptistery.Similarly,additional ceiling paintings were planned for the hexagonal side chapel and entrance baptistery, thereby forming three distinct areas of focus within the overall ensemble. Notwithstandingthe charge that Pollock never workedwith a triangularformator ceiling murals, Smith used this opportunityto infuse the project with the sort of visual dichotomy that Jules Langsnerhad perceived in postwar culture; in this case, between the rigidityof a radical modular architectureand the aleatoryexpressivenessdemonstratedby Pollock's paintings. Smith's project not only presented this antimony, but also attempted to reworkother oppositions the archaic againstthe modern, the autonomous, self-contained characterof the single cell against the open-ended nature of the organism - into an architecturethat expressed the separationbetween the physical, biological plane of the materialworld and the religious plane of the Spirit. The triangulatedceiling patternbears an obvious relation to the honeycombed ceiling in Louis Kahn'sYale Art Gallery of 1951 (done in collaborationwith Buckminster Fuller), although the Smith project predatesthe latter by almost a year. An analysisreveals distinct differences between the two: the perimeter of the art gallery is clearly contained within a rectangular boundary,whereas the church intimates an extensible potential; the open gallery spaces are divisible by means of moveable walls modulated by the gridded matrix,while the main space of the church is permanently fixed around the central altarand emphasized through its honeycomb geometry;the underside of the gallery ceiling structureremains uniformly flat with a polyhedral interior in each triangle containing lighting and mechanical services, whereas the church's ceiling accentuates the individual hexagons by

splaying each triangle upwardfrom the center of the modules. The murals thus do not lie flat, but follow the tilted angle of the hexagonal roof structure;the central mural band thereby oscillates verticallyas it revolves around the skylit dome. By this simple means, the randomized patternof the individual Pollock canvases is given a largerorder, literally interweaving it into part of the church design. In turn, the allover structureof Pollock's paintings is mimicked in a way that the ceiling pattern in the Yale Art Gallery only hinted at; that is, in the Smith church its potential extensibilityis given free reign to expand. As with Blake, what seems to have struckSmith as an architect with Pollock's paintingswas not the potential towarda literal flatness,the facture of the work,or the scalarambiguities between easel and mural painting, but ratherthe tendency to evoke space beyond the canvas. Michael Leja has analyzed the historicalreception of the intimation of space and depth in Pollock'swork, relating it both to the oneiric, subjective dreamworldsas translatedthrough popular interpretationsof Jungian psychologyand to the darkvortices of spatialclaustrophobia recurringlyportrayedin the film noir cinema of the As both Leja and Carmean have observed,the 19461950s.70 47 paintings Galaxy, Shooting Star, Comet, Reflectionsof the Big Dipper, and Constellation all emphasize the celestial metaphorof the night sky,and it is Smith who underscores this point in encircling the allover canvas band around the central skylight,thereby neatly mediating between heaven and earth,the sacred and the profane, nature and culture. Furtherenhancing this closed/open concept are the clearstory windows, which Smith may have intended to be painted in the manner of the Plexiglas Number29, 1950.71 In its final incarnation for presentation in 1952, the church design shifted from an open plan concept to a fixed one, in which the central hexagonal room would be installed with six wall-size Pollock murals. While this scheme, like the others,

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never advanced beyond a preliminarystage, its realization may be glimpsed in the octagonal Rothko chapel in Houston completed two decades later:in this setting, the painterlyenvironment forms and dominates the visual field and haptic space of the viewer, transformingthe everydayinto a personal vision of the artist'sconstruction. Rothko'schapel, however, emphasizes the closed, insular nature of the constructed environment by its darktonal saturationand severe granite surfaces, whereas Smith's church "room"plays upon the opposition between the literal, closed flatness of the canvas plane and the depths suggested in the painterly,pictorial frame of Pollock's metaphorical spaces. In this manner, the architect was able to enrich the original open schema and expand on the metaphor of potential extensibility,by presenting a space that encapsulated both the autonomous and repetitive nature of the hexagonal cell; closure and openness, flatness and depth, contained within the spiritualheart of the church. A homology of scales is thus introduced, from the fundamental relationshipbetween the iconic identity of the individual brush strokeand the hexagonal cell, at one level, to, at another, the open extension implied by the allover canvas and freeform additive composition of the church, as mediated through its potential structures:the mural band, the hexagonal room cycle. If, in its failure, it could be argued that the Smith church (and again this is Smith's particulararchitecturaltranslation of an abstractexpressionistenvironment ratherthan Pollock's attempt at an architecture) was the most radicalof the native effortsto embody the postwarpainterlyvision, then it was perhaps because of its inheritance of American models Wright, Fuller, and the objective microscopy contributedby the biological sciences - and correspondingly,the marked absence of Le Corbusier and De Stijl in its design influence. Or was it precisely because of this absence that such a path could only lead to isolation and rejection?

The Double Postscript:

The context of this essayhas been situatedwithin a postwar logic that posed abstractpainting against modern architecture, a thesis and antithesiswith the possibilityof resolution in a higher order.At both extremes, as building on the one hand, and drawingon the other, architecturewound up mimicking in the most superficialmanner variousstylistic effects in the contemporaryvisual arts.Aspiringtowardthe freedom expressedby painting, postwararchitecturesought to align itself within the folds of a dominant cultural paradigm - a condition that continues to assertitself today. If we pose this particularsituation as a mapping of one discipline againstanother, then we approachthat condition Jean Baudrillardrecalls in Borges'stale of the cartographicmap that, in its exactness, precisely covers the territoryit was desocial critique of postsigned to represent.Here, Baudrillard's war (primarilyAmerican) capitalistculture discounts the possibilityof an original referent,instead substitutingthe endless reflection of simulacra.72 His thesis lays out the vision of a hyperrealistculture imitating itself: Disneyland versus America;World Trade Center 1 versusWorld Trade Center 2; Left versus Right, and so forth. In a society that privileges serial reproductionas the cultural analogue to postindustrial capital, Baudrillard's argumentpositions the possibilityof the simultaneous replicationof abstractmural painting and modern architecturein a world of interminable duplications. Yet this doubling is not an exact co-reproduction.Each copies the other as if its counterpartwere its authentic referent; painting towardthe materialtactilityof the architecturalsurface and architecturetowardpainting'sdomain in the realm of the pure Idea. Neither is this construction a mirrorimage: between the constructedrealityof the building and the finished painting lies that transitionin the architecturaldrawing, a third surfacethat absorbsaspects of the other two. It

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is a mimetic process that is uninterested in the synthesisof styles, but rather,wishes to regain a sense of the authentic work of the artistin a world seemingly intent on its erasure. In architecture,looking to the autonomy of the painted plane became a means of critically engaging the serial tendencies of the InternationalStyle; for painting, the facture of material and the physical dimensions of American mural painting were in reaction to the academic formalismof the School of Paris.Not exact copies, then, but perhaps mutually sympathetic twins viewing the other in search of its own origin. This process of duplication marks(and indeed defines) modernist culture, claims Hillel Schwartz, in a mimesis born of an obsession with surface effect. Schwartzreads Pollock's abstractionlike postwarmodern architecture:at a distance whereby all effects of perspectivalforeshorteningare removed in order to registeras pure frontalizedplane: - and nothing- to the glass-andSurfacewouldbe everything steel corporate skyscrapers designedafterthe warby Miesvander director of the Bauhaus, and to the explicitlyreflecRohe, former tive glassbuildingsinaugurated in 1962by EeroSaarinen.... Glassskyscrapers weremeantto be glimpsedfromafaror fromon to be invisible,denyingcommunity high, wheretheypretended of urbanstoneand chrome while mirror-mimicking fragments aroundthem.73 In the glass box we find a mimetic operation at workostensibly more faithful to its surroundingsubjects than any painting could be - only distorted,dispersed,and inverted - in short, becoming a surrealistrefractionthat Diana Agrestlikens to the paintings of Rene Magritte,simultaneously promising and denying any objective reality.74

removing depth, as Venturi began to do in architecture in the early 1960s, the duplicated object takes on a cartoonish, unreal quality;all meaning resides on the surface, as the materialaura of the original is substitutedfor an art that is dependent upon anoriginal, serially produced references. The rendering of a building thereby takes precedence over its finished presence, essentializing the understandingof architectural form as semiotic, as a process of reading signs against a neutral plane. Thus it is precisely this cult of the blank, reproducible surface that ties Rothko to Warhol, Mies to Venturi, across the divide from high culture to mass culture. Norman Brysonpoints out a similar surface compression in the wall frescoes of the villa at Boscoreale, whereby the mimetic illusionism of the xenia still life is set against the The illusion of depth is opaque density of the villa walls.75 juxtaposedagainstthe obstinate opacity of the vertical plane. We also find this situation in Mondrian'swork, as it occupies that virtual space between two and three dimensions. If we read De Stijl (or for that matter, abstractexpressionist)painting as a contemporaryform of xenia, strippedof figuration, we are left with an oscillating plane, affirmingand denying its own materiality.In the contemporaryinstance, however, the painting is no longer set within and in relation to an architectural volume, but rathermakes its own architecture the gallery space is defined by its presence. Here, architecture does not contain painting, but ratherthe painting contains and constructsthe architecture.

In the postwarperiod, it is architecturethat increasingly aims towardboth a real and conceptual flatness, towarda degreezero condition of optical and formal transparencythat cannot This same obsession with pure color and surface is found in the silent autonomy of the paintings of Yves Klein, Reinhardt, be actualized, leaving instead an object that appearsmerely and Rothko during the 1950s, Schwartzcontinues, and convacuous, empty. Meanwhile, abstractpainting, workingtoward absolute two-dimensionality,finds itself faced with the of work Warhol in references mass-cultural the by versely, reversephenomena of edge, depth, space, and tactility. The and Claus Oldenburg the following decade. By precisely

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Roman still life displaysreality only to defy it, whereas abstractionseeks escape in the fictional autonomy of pure form. Perhapsthis is also why, through drawing,architectshave found it so easy to occupy this terrain,from the time of Alberti onward, in reducing architectureto an essence of lines, planes, and symbols. This isomorphism is not simply between painting and architecture, but more directly, between the process of drawing and making buildings. Not that one is any more or less importantthan the other; rather,they are begun to be thought of as having no essential differences, expressingsympathetic aspects towarda common unity. Through drawing,architecture returnsto painting, and the circle is closed: drawing/ painting/architectureare once again indivisiblylinked in an epistemic chain. The Double, the Other, disappearsin the face of the Same. This is the path that Michel Foucault describes in The Order of Things, in tracing the movement from a structuredtaxonomy of order beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century to a realization of its human origins and limitations at the end of the eighteenth. In painting, the cycle that removes the mural from its ecclesiastical frame, that defines painting as a separatediscipline and cultural artifact from architecture, sees its returnin the early twentieth-cenThere tury avant-garde,in the form of the Gesamtkunstwerk. is a kind of madness linked to the confusion between terms, Foucault points out, in relating the storyof Don Quixote: unlike the world of the Renaissance that realizes a metaphysical order of undifferentiatedresemblances, the classical era of the seventeenth century is founded upon a structuredtaxonomic order in which all human understandingmay be set within a tabulargrid of meaning. Madness resides in the inability to understandthis gridded order, instead revertingto the muddled heterotopic universe of Don Quixote, where resemblance is found everywhere.This old order, which the

classical era attemptedto stripaway, returnsas poesis in the modern era: At the otherend of the culturalarea,but brought close by symmeexpected try,the poet is he who, beneaththe name,constantly rediscovers the buriedkinships betweenthings,their differences, resemblances. Beneaththe established scattered signs,and in spite of them, he hearsanother, whichrecallsthe deeper,discourse, in the universal time when wordsglittered resemblance of things; in the languageof the poet,the Sovereignty of the Same,so difficult to express, eclipses,the distinction existingbetweensigns.76 The taxonomic orderof Durand'sarchitectural system,seen here as the culmination and end of the classicalperiod, remains as a kind of romanticfiction within the core of the InternationalStyle. The deliberateerasurebetween painting and architecturein postwarart,then, ratherthan a mere confusion between terms, may insteadbe understoodas an attemptto recoverthe archaic sense of resemblancebetween wordsand things. MartinHeidegger'ssearch for originalmeaning as a method of understandingman (a uniquely contemporary pheas Foucault looks to as the site nomena, points out) poetry where the rootsof wordsare dispersedamong the world. In this manner, JacksonPollock'sarchitectural and aspirations John Hejduk'spainterlyvision workas sympathetic,symmetrical assaultsupon the tabularstructureof the functional grid in modernistculture. The madnessin their method lies the return to an older visual orderfounded upon resemblancerather than difference,where things appearthe same, where flatness recedes into depth, and plans compressinto planes.

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Notes
Earlier draftsof this paper were presented at the 1995 Dissertation Colloquium of the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, and at the 1998 Society of Architectural HistoriansAnnual Meeting in Los Angeles. I wish to thank Joan Ockman and Stanislaus von Moos for their comments and criticism. 1. See Gilbert Herbert,The Dream of the Factory-Made House (Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1984). 2. "In fact, though not officially, Philip was the director of the department, and I worked under him. The reason this arrangementwas unofficial (as he explained to me, with typical candor) was that 'some of the trustees can't forget my Nazi past and would resign if I became the official director of the department.' We maintained the fiction - I was head of the Department of Architecture and IndustrialDesign, and Philip was a sort of unofficial consultant. Nobody, needless to say, was fooled" (Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia: ModernArchitecture and the Company We Kept [New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1993], 108). The letterheads of the period list Johnson as executive director, with Blake as curator. 3. The Pollock exhibition, held from 21 November to 19 December 1949, contained thirty-fourpaintings of varyingsizes, numbered consecutively 1-5, 7-35. Blake's project was listed as "Muralsin Modern Architecture:A Theatrical Exercise Using JacksonPollock's Paintings and Sculpture. By Peter Blake." 4. "Museum: Mies van der Rohe, Architect," explanatorytext by Mies van der Rohe, ArchitecturalForum 78 (May 1943): 84-85.

5. An interesting sidelight concerns the reproductions of the paintings themselves, which are not scaled copies of Pollock's work. That is, there is no relation between the actual worksand their representation for the purposes of the model. According to Blake, this was owing to the limited resources available at the time for proper prints;they were simply cut out of existing magazine and catalogue reproductionsand fit to the scale of the model. While some are shown in their original proportions(for example, the 1949 Summertime),others are summarily cut out so that only a detailed portion of the original is shown; in one instance, a relativelysmall Pollock is rotated ninety degrees and blown up to mural size. In neither case was there any attempt to align the original scale of the paintings with the intended scale of the museum. Since the model took its place in the Pollock studio after the Parsons exhibit, it seems that the artistwas not particularlydisturbedby this transformationof his work. Rather, as Blake has it, the museum was intended as a "proofof concept," and not as a proper representationof the artist'sworks. But it does reveal Blake's willingness to manipulate scale and proportion in the service of the architecture and lends credence to Pollock's charge that the architect treated the murals as decoration. Author's interview with Peter Blake, 19 October 1996. 6. Blake, No Place Like Utopia, 112. These miniatures turned out to be the only worksof their kind, roughly akin to Calder's wire sculptures and in line with Greenberg's pronouncement about the tendency toward linearity in contemporary sculpture. 7. ArthurDrexler, "Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson

Pollock's Paintings,"Interiors(January 1950): 90-91. 8. "To look at some of his paintings, to me, was like sitting on a dune for hours on end and looking out to sea, at the endless horizon and the shifting waves and clouds and banks of fog" (Blake, No Place Like Utopia, 114). 9. Rosalind Krauss,"Grids,"in The Originality of the Avant-Gardeand Other ModernistMyths (Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1986), 8-22. 10. Blake recalls that the inspiration for the reflective aspects of the museum space came from an earlier visit to a building in London by Sir Charles Barry(possibly the Reform Club of 1841), which contained a room with mirroredwalls, somewhat in the manner of the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. Author's interview with Blake, 13 July 1999. 11. Much more, of course, has been said about the Barcelona Pavilion than can be repeated here. Among one of the more noteworthyessays, recalling the "theatrical" qualities of the building, is recounted by Jose Quetglas in "Fearof Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion,"in Architectureproduction,ed. Joan Ockman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 122-51. As a conceptual model, Blake'sscheme lacks the detailed specificity of a built work, comprised of floating planes and readymadematerials.The result is a studied elementarism, roughly akin to the plastic and metal constructions of Constant's New Babylon, though here any sense of a subversivederivehas been replaced by the measured bourgeois stroll and optical consumption of the museum goer'spromenade. 12. Neil Levine more fully recounts the historical and conceptual tra-

jectory of Mies's incorporation of collage techniques in "The Significance of Facts":Mies's Collages Up Close and Personal,"Assemblage 37 (December 1998): 70-101. 13. In a 1947 article, Gibson Dane prefiguresBlake'sreading of sculpture's function in architecture: "Sculpturecan serve as a catalystof the space-mass-volumerelations because it enriches and amplifies its spatial ambient as well as exerting its own independent existence. By its character,dynamic and lithe, or monumental and weighty, sculpture can, with its emphatic use of profile, texture, color, and movement, provide a three-dimensionalcounterpoint to the whole architectural ensemble." In Blake's case, Pollock's sculpture also acts as a foil to painting, workingthe play between three and two dimensions, volume against plane. See Gibson Dane, "Architectural Sculpture Today,"Magazine of Art (May 1947): 175. 14. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, JacksonPollock:An AmericanSaga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 600, 607. 15. Ibid., 613. 16. Ironically, the 1950 Parsons show was a commercial failure, with only one of the large-scale canvases selling, and at half the asking price. Pollock's works in subsequent shows were notably smaller in scale. 17. William Rubin, "JacksonPollock and the Modern Tradition," Artforum5, no. 6 (March 1967): 36. 18. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of ModernArt:Abstract Expressionism,Freedom,and the Cold War, trans.Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 122. 19. The Muralist and the Modern Architect, exhibition catalogue, 3-

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23 October 1950 (New York:Kootz Gallery, 1950). 20. This preliminarytwo-story scheme has close precedents with Johnson'sown 1949 estate at New Canaan, incorporatingthe glass house as a piano nobile, sitting atop a ground-storyrubble wall; the final Wiley design rotatesthe living room pavilion at a ninety-degreeangle to its base. 21. The Muralist and the Modern Architect, 19. Despite being the source of inspiration, Pollock is noticeably absent from the show. 22. The problem faced here, as with Pollock's mural for the Geller House, is that the mural is inherently one-sided and something needs to occupy the obverse. Blake somewhat deflected the issue by suggesting the transformationof Pollock's work into three-dimensional sculpture. 23. A review in the November 1950 issue of Interiorscommented on how "all five architectsgave their artists space in buildings for which they had alreadydrawnplans, and it is likely that in most cases the space was not planned for an artist.Both Philip Johnson, in an earlyproject for his own glass house, and Marcel Breuer, in the dormitorynow under constructionat Vassar,gave their paintersa freestandingcanvas in the form of a screening wall - the equivalent of a texturedsurface. Adolph Gottlieb's mural for Vassar,a covey of calligraphsfloating againsta dull-gray-brown ground, seems a graceful complement to Breuer's stricterarrangementof glass and stone, but the timid may wonder if William Baziotes'sgreatblack spook in a mauve twilight is perfect decoration for a defenseless glass house." 24. As Pollock and Kootz both demonstrated, art at a public scale fell

out of the province of the gallery system; moreover, the publicity gained through modern art'srelationship with contemporaryarchitecture could only be financially realized by returning it to the economy of the privatesector. 25. "A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture," Interiors(August 1951): 101. 26. Ibid., 102. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 105. 29. Ibid., 103. 30. Sweeneywould laterarguethat modernpainting,correctly applied, can also aid in enhancingthe sculpform:"If turalaspectsof architectural the architectfeels, as Le Corbusier did, that he 'can makehis composition with the a prioridesireto bring out, at a given moment, the greatsong of plasticrealism,'paintingcan be called in to his aid and an aesthetic fusion can be achievedproductive of a more complex orderwithoutany sacrifice of unity in expression." Sweeney here most likelyhas Le Corbusier's in own paintingand architecture mind. See JamesJohnsonSweeney, Visionand Image(New York:Simon and Schuster,1967), 160. 31. "A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture," 103. 32. Irene Rice Pereira,"Viewson Art A Conversation," and Architecture: in The VisualArtsToday,ed. Gyorgy Kepes (Middletown,Conn.: Wesleyan UniversityPress, 1960), 63. 33. Ibid. 34. "The Relation of Painting and Sculpture to Architecture," 19 March 1951, Archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, transcript,42.

35. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(1936), in Illuminations, trans. HarryZohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 233-34. 36. "The Relationof Paintingand 43. BarSculptureto Architecture," baraRose arguesthat this attempt visuallyto bracketthe viewing experience by painterlymeans was central to abstractexpressionism: "Thusto create an image so large it would take up the viewer'sentire field of vision and hence to occupy his entire consciousnessfor the moment he was looking at it, became a generalgoal for the artistsof Rothko'sgeneration, who wished to make of artan experience as total, as engagingand as real as life itself" (American Painting:The TwentiethCentury[New York: Rizzoli, 1980], 73). 37. Dorothy Seiberling, "Part2: The Varied Life of Four Pioneers," Life, 16 November 1959, 80. 38. Elaine Scarry,The Body in Pain (New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1985), 284. 39. The particularsof the Seagram commission are well documented in Thomas Kellein, Mark Rothko: Kaaba in New York,exhibition catalogue, 19 February-7 May 1989 (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1989). See also James E. Breslin'sbiography of the artistin Mark Rothko:A Biography(Chicago: Universityof Chicago, 1993), and Michael Compton's introductoryessay in Mark Rothko:The SeagramMural Project,exhibition catalogue, 28 May 1988-12 February1989 (Liverpool:Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1988), 8-17. 40. Charles Moritz, ed., CurrentBi(New York:H. ographyYearbook W. Winston, 1961), 399; also cited in Breslin, Mark Rothko,401. 41. Breslin, Mark Rothko, 383.

42. Ibid., 403. 43. See, for instance, Michael Compton's essay "MarkRothko: Subjects of the Artist,"in Mark Rothko,exhibition catalogue, 17 June-1 September 1987 (London: Tate Gallery, 1987), 60. 44. "Thereare reasonswhy Rothko's pictures should not suggest doorways, however, including the fact that their would-be doorframesare not in front of their would-be landscapes or open spaces but in back of them, having been laid down first. In addition, the color of the wouldbe doorframesdoes not simply surround the unknown space with a discrete rectanglebut usually continues into the space itself, filling the intersticesbetween the broad rectangularareas"(Anna Chave, MarkRothko:Subjectsin Abstraction [New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989], 74). 45. Ibid., 37. 46. Breslin, Mark Rothko,407. 47. Ibid., 378. 48. Compton, "MarkRothko,"62. 49. Breslin, Mark Rothko,402. 50. Paul Damaz, Art in European Architecture(New York:Reinhold, 1956), 9. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 39. 54. Victor Pasmore, "Connection between Painting, Sculpture and Architecture,"Zodiac 1 (1957): 66. 55. MargaretSorzano, "17 Modern American Painters:A Recent Exhibition at the FrankPerls Gallery,"Arts 6 Architecture (January1951): 26. 56. William Brice, "Concerning Painting and Architecture,"Arts 6 Architecture(August 1953): 20.

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57. Jules Langsner, "More about the School of New York," Arts 6 Architecture (May 1951): 20, 46. 58. "JacksonPollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"Life, 8 August 1949, 43. Peter Smithson mentions Pollock's appearance on the European scene around 1949; since Pollock's first European exhibition was not until 1952 in Paris, it is likely he was referringto this widely known article. See Peter Smithson, "The Idea of Architecture in the 50s,"Architect'sJournal 131 (21 January1960): 121-26. 59. Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring:Studies of Alison and Peter Smithson (London: Studio Vista, 1967), 34. 60. Smithson, "The Idea of Architecture in the 50s," 124. 61. See, for instance, Philip Johnson's judgment of the Hunstanton project as "good Mies van der Rohe," in "School at Hunstanton,"ArchitecturalReview (September 1954): 148. 62. See K. Michael Hays,Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject(Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1992). 63. Diane Kirkpatrick, "The Artists of the IG: Backgroundsand Continuities," in The IndependentGroup: Britain and the Aestheticsof Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), 209. 64. Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism,"ArchitecturalReview (December 1955): 356. 65. Kirkpatrick, "The Artistsof the IG," 211, n. 10. 66. Michael Leja, ReframingAbstract Expressionism(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). "The Artistsof the 67. Kirkpatrick, IG," 209.

68. See E. A. Carmean, "The Church Project: Pollock's Passion Themes," Art in America70 (Summer 1982): 110-22, and Rosalind Krauss,"ContraCarmean: The Abstract Pollock,"Art in America 70: 123-31. 69. See D'ArcyThompson, On Growth and Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942). This text appeared in core reading lists, ranging from the courses at the Chicago Bauhaus to the classes taught by Colin Rowe and BernardHoesli at Austin in the mid-1950s. 70. Leja, ReframingAbstractExpressionism, 308-23. 71. Carmean, "The Church Project," 114-16. 72. See Jean Baudrillard,Simulations (New York:Semiotext(e), 1983). 73. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy (New York:Zone Books, 1996), 205, 206. 74. Diana Agrest, "Architectureof of Architecture,"OpMirror/Mirror positions 26 (1984): 119-33. 75. See Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1990). 76. Michel Foucault, The Orderof Things (New York:Vintage, 1973), 49.

Figure Credits
1. Photographby Ben Schultz. 2. Drawing by Eric Lum. 3. Model by PatrickBodden; photograph by Jeff Heatley. Courtesy of the Pollock-KrasnerHouse and Study Center. 4-6. Photographsby Hans Namuth. 7. Photographby Ezra Stoller. 8. Mark Rothko:The Seagram Mural Project(Liverpool:Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1988). 9. Estate of Tony Smith, New York. Photograph by John Wronn.

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