Whenever I am in Des Moines, I try to spend an hour or so at the city's Art Center. The museum is architecturally significant consisting of three interconnected buildings, each designed by an important architect -- the original structure is a refined, a low-slung brick edifice with an elegant wood-walled entry designed by Eliel Saarinen (constructed 1945 - 1948);this opens into a monumental concrete gallery on two levels with a massive v-shaped roof supported between skylights with adjacent fountain (I.M. Pei, 1966 - 1968), and, finally, an ultra abstract construction by Richard Meier completed in 1985. The Meier annex looks fragile, like something pieced together from pre-fabricated frames of gleaming white metal -- it's taller than it is broad and, to borrow a mordant phrase from Tom Wolfe, looks like a glistening, hyper-contemporary insecticide factory. The bright interior of Meier's assemblage is successful notwithstanding the rather robotic appearance of the outside and the galleries are very well-lit with vertical spaces accessed by daunting stairways -- one of them is open between the steps and rather vertiginous. For my money, the massive Brutalist Pei structure is one of the most beautiful spaces, both inside and out, that I have encountered anywhere -- it's a bracing pleasure to enjoy the great, serene expanses of concrete with an enormous two-story window opening out onto a rose-garden; the place is cool, hushed, with an ecclesiastical atmosphere and there's never really anyone in this big space. I would guess that the acoustics in this suite of rooms are astounding and would like to see a string quartet or some other ensemble on that order performing in this place. Entry to the museum is free and, I must confess, that I like to stop at this place mostly for the purpose of dipping into the cool, resonant Pei chambers -- what marvelous ruins they will one day make!
On display in the summer of 2025 is a large retrospective of works, mostly oil on canvas, by the Dominican artist, Firelei Baez (born 1981). Baez' paintings are colorful and figurative. She works in two principal modes -- large paintings of female figures in colorful turbans ("do-rags" that are called tignon) with large, alert and staring eyes but faces otherwise unformed and without nostrils or mouth; Baez also paints surrealist figures (women's legs sprouting fantastic garlands of flowers for torso and head) on enormous canvases silkscreened with maps, historic images, and architectural drawings. In these large latter paintings, Baez contrasts the efflorescing female figures, exploding into elaborate, sculptural-looking bouquets of flowers, against rather staid schematics of bridge pylons, fastening hardware, sea-charts, and old engravings of the imagined inhabitants of the Caribbean, woodcuts of families of native folk happily picnicking on scraps of dismembered bodies (the Carib Indians were reputed to be cannibals.). The point seems to be to contrast the embodied resistance of the native people against the mechanisms of colonialism (bridges and factories) that once oppressed these people. The mouthless portrait figures with the elaborate turbans are close to kitsch -- they refer to a 1786 decree that all women on the island (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) be mandated to wear the tignon as a sign of their African or Creole blood. Many of Baez' works have long Brechtian titles that are impossible to remember and difficult to interpret. Several of her pieces seem to be part of the Center's permanent collection -- there is an alcove in the Pei building with three large and brilliantly colored canvases that show a figure with a woman's legs and hips dissolving into radiant, lightning-like rays of light (this is called, for some reason, "Adjusting the Moon: Waxing and Waning - the Right to Non-Imperative Clarities.") A great tilted facade with an open doorway leans across the Pei building's heroically-sized hall -- you can walk through the thing which is covered with a sort of pale blue floral print, something that you might imagine as comprising one of the signature tignons adorning the women in the show. Baez orchestrates these sorts of effects in an installation: "A drexycyen chronocommons: To win the war you fought it sideways" (2019) - the space is like the interior of a large tent made of billowy blue fabric, translucent and lit from behind in several places, with open alcoves in which there are stationed Baez's big portraits of women without lips or mouths turbaned or sprouting orchids from their brow. Lengthy and tendentious labels natter on and on about racism, colonialism, the history of the island of Santo Domingo -- but these hectoring texts don't really add anything to your appreciation of the work.
The Center's permanent collection contains a Goya portrait, a lifesize image of a Spanish bureaucrat, posed next to a small brown pug dog with wet bulbous eyes. One of the most famous images in the world is in the Meier annex -- this is Francis Bacon's eerie and disturbing "Screaming Pope". There's an Edward Hopper painting of a lone woman in an automat; she wears a white button of a hat over her compact creamy face. A painting by Philip Guston shows the brutish profile of the composer Morton Feldman (called "M. F." in the scrawl on the painting)-- Feldman has a huge ear as befitting a composer, smokes a cigarette, and his flesh is the color of meat that you might see hanging in a slaughterhouse. The museum owns a nice Basquiat and an interesting charismatic work of Art Brut by Dubuffet -- the Basquiat and the Dubuffet should be hung side-by-side since they echo and resonate with one another. In the lowest part of the Meier building, there's a huge and excellent work by Anselm Kiefer: the painting shows a tangle of converging railroad tracks aimed at a sinister collection of buildings in the midst of a seared and slashed landscape, everything burnt and half-melted with another tangle of metal ladder affording escape, or possibly the mere hope of the escape, from the fatal rails and the death-factory on the horizon. The vertical ladder mimics the horizontal railroad tracks and ties and two charred ballet slippers dangle from one of its rungs.
No comments:
Post a Comment