Sublet with Bellini

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reads his essay from the April issue of The New Criterion on the rehanging of The Frick Collection in the former home of the Whitney Museum.

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2021

Sublet with Bellini

On Frick Madison.

For as long as anyone can remember—until last month, that is—Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1480) has lived at a single New York address: One East Seventieth Street. In fact, just about continuously since Henry Clay Frick acquired the painting in 1915, the tempera-and-oil on panel has resided in one room, and one place in that room, known as the Living Hall. There, in the sanctum sanctorum of Frick’s former mansion on Fifth Avenue, it has kept communion with the other paintings, bronzes, porcelains, and furniture that Frick brought together in the final, fecund decade of his life.

For a few years, following the death of J. P. Morgan in 1913, Frick, the self-made Pittsburgh industrialist, became the world’s unrivaled collector of European art, able to acquire masterpieces such as St. Francis in the Desert against all others. Upon Frick’s own death in 1919, his New York mansion was transformed into the home of his collection. According to his wishes, yet against the odds, his domestic setting remained intact. By maintaining its private feel even as it has grown into a collecting institution, The Frick Collection has been able to speak to the acuity of its founder’s eye and the power of his purse. The assembly has also gone against every modern museum trend of pasteurized, homogenized, white-cube walls lined with supposedly blue-chip works.

The presentation of Frick’s genuine masterpieces and historical objects all together, and in such density, is what has made his collection the astonishing place it is: the Bellini flanked by the Titians; the Titians above the small mythological bronzes; the bronzes atop the French commodes; the Chinese figurines atop the French cabinets by the windows; the French writing table illuminated by the electrified Qing dynasty lamps; the scattering of chairs and couches that you could trip over; and, across the room, the two Holbein portraits, eternally glowering at one another, interceded only by El Greco’s Saint Jerome (ca. 1590–1600), who translates the scene from his place above the mantelpiece.

From the moment the Frick opened to the public, art-world nabobs have lodged their complaints with the museum commission of weights and measures about this unbalanced display of fine art and decorative objects. At times, they just about showed up with their crowbars to pry the collection loose from Frick’s opulent setting—which still does not lend its objects, or admit children under ten years of age, or permit photography of any kind. Until quite recently, under the administration of its late founder, Helen Clay Frick, the adjoining Frick Art Reference Library even required jackets for men and skirts for women.

Decrying the Frick’s “sculptural bric-a-brac,” in The New Yorker of December 28, 1935, Lewis Mumford huffed that “The paintings are lost in the background.” “Converting a private mansion into a public museum” was a mistake, he continued: “That may have satisfied the tastes of Renaissance princes, or even that of American millionaires during the first part of the present century, but it no longer meets today’s standard of presentation.”

It was not just Frick’s mixing of business and pleasure, of life and art, that so offended Mumford’s standard. Frick failed to follow the protocols of serious scholarship that mandate one should divide art by geography, chronology, and material. By placing beauty and excellence above other concerns—and by honoring these priorities for a century after his death—The Frick Collection has long gone against the diktats of taxonomic Germanic academicism that make such deviations verboten, making The Frick Collection such a delight.

It goes without saying that a century of curators would have liked nothing more than to rehang The Frick Collection to “today’s standard.” Now, just such an opportunity has befallen the Frick’s current curatorial staff. As I wrote in these pages in March 2020 (see “Bird-brained at the Frick”), the Frick building is now undergoing an expansion that is more of an ill-advised intervention, squaring off John Russell Pope’s round edges and obscuring the light and lines of his Art Reference Library.

For the next two years, during the demolition and construction of this project, the Bellini, along with roughly half of its collection mates, has taken up temporary residence a few blocks north and one block east. It is a moment for broken leases in New York, but also for sublets of opportunity. The Frick has arranged a pop-up in the one time Met Breuer, formerly known as the Whitney Museum of American Art, now simply 945 Madison Avenue—for the period of the residency, to be called Frick Madison. And as might be expected with such a move, Frick Madison clears out the furniture. It cleans up the spaces. It whittles down and reorganizes the collection by geography, chronology, and material, as it austerely rehangs the work in Breuer’s brutalist building.

And yet, Frick Madison succeeds precisely because it adheres to the best traditions of that Germanic art history. It does not try to replace or recreate the Frick mansion with a facsimile installation. Rather it offers us an opportunity to have a direct engagement with art at a time when much more than the doors of One East Seventieth remain shuttered. And this rehang is explicitly temporary, not some “new Frick,” or so we are led to believe.

At its best—and in the hands of the director Ian Wardropper and the curators Xavier F. Salomon and Aimee Ng, this is often at its best—Frick Madison grants us the privilege of seeing these masterpieces in what amounts to a building-wide private viewing room. That’s certainly how you come across Frick’s collection here in this achingly spare, intimately thought-out presentation. Take that Bellini: positioned now in an alcove of its own, illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s cockeyed trapezoidal windows, St. Francis in the Desert makes the most of its new light both natural and divine.

Bellini was a genius of framing. He could paint his figures as if they were sitting just inside a window display. He also knew what to leave out, or just beyond the painting’s edges. For all the details we see in St. Francis in the Desert—and we may never stop finding new details in this composition—it is the light, blazing onto the scene from beyond the left frame, that is most revelatory. While very much seen by the painting’s subjects, the source of the light is left unseen to us. We only sense it indirectly, through Francis’s stunned countenance and the shadow lines behind him. At Frick Madison, the light now entering from the ray-like window on the wall to the left of the painting, blinding when you first come across it in the otherwise dimmed gallery space, newly illuminates Bellini’s own startling dynamics by extending the lines of light and shadow both depicted and real.

For the first time, you can also take a seat by the Bellini. Be sure to leave enough time to do so. I may have spent an hour in front of this work, standing up, sitting down, trying to take in what is, ultimately, untakable. I wish I could have stayed longer. When this painting went up for sale over a century ago at Colnaghi, in London, Bernard Berenson described it as “the most beautiful Bellini in existence, the most profound and spiritual picture ever painted in the Renaissance.” The divine is in its details. “Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,” that mountain man Francis wrote in his Canticle of the Creatures, “especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day, and you give light through him.”

Bellini devotedly rendered each plant and every animal of this verdant Italian agricultural scene in a newly proximate light. Out of his hermitage, Francis steps forward in such amazement that he has left behind his sandals, still tossed under the reading desk of his rustic dwelling. He holds his hands outstretched to receive the stigmata of Christ’s wounds as he is punctured by a light only hinted at by the rays streaking down in the upper left corner of the composition. That same light seems to liquefy the stone behind him, which melts like ice into a spring, feeding the kingfisher below. A heron, a donkey, and a rabbit occupy the middle ground, while a shepherd tends to his flock in the valley next to a river pooling by a low wooden dam. In his excellent audio commentary, Salomon suggests the surrounding figures are oblivious to Francis’s spiritual vision, but I wonder. From the donkey to the lambs, all seem to be alerted to something beyond themselves. Even the shepherd, far in the distance, looks up and turns his head back to us. The light may be incomprehensible, but it is also impossible to ignore.

There are many such moments here of new encounters with old friends. Spread across three upper floors, the collection is divided by geography and type: northern European painting and sculpture on Floor Two; Italian and Spanish painting and sculpture along with Indian carpets, porcelain, bronzes, enamels, and clocks on Three; and French and British painting, sculpture, and decorative arts on Four. The order has been dictated by the size of the floor-plates and the heights of the ceilings, which increase as you go up, accommodating the larger French paintings at top, but scaled down for the northern miniatures below. Wall labels are also gratefully non-existent, and instead a handsome sixty-page printed gallery guide is available free of charge by the entrance.

Jean Barbet, Angel, 1475, Bronze, Frick Madison (The Frick Collection).

Sculpture introduces each floor. On Floor Two, Jean Barbet’s Angel (1475) points the way for new arrivals. In his commentary, Salomon describes the story for this immaculate work that survived the meltdown of the French Revolution, one that “dramatically underscores the importance of preserving remarkable works of art—one of the most important missions, if not the defining aim, of any museum.” Amen to that.

Just around the bend, Holbein’s portraits of those undoubting Thomases, More and Cromwell, confront each other as though at the back of an alley, unmediated and raw, squinting at each other now at eye level. Past the Rembrandts, the Frick’s eight Van Dycks are united in one room for the first time. Just ahead, the three Vermeers now face one another like high-definition screens onto Dutch life, encouraging ready comparison.

Paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, installed at the new Frick Madison. Photo: The Frick Collection.

There is some work here that is rarely seen, and even more that is often overlooked. Two of the Van Dycks do not usually appear in the Frick’s public galleries. The same goes for the Mughal carpets, which need special protection from light. The rooms dedicated solely to European and Asian porcelain may be most surprising, elevating these “background” objects as solitary works in conversation with one another and across continents. But even the Frick’s highlights seem startlingly fresh. Removed from their opulent walls, Fragonard’s Progress of Love series of 1771–72, the four canvases he painted for Madame du Barry, seem newly monumental, especially in the spare hanging that now divides them from the scenes he added two decades later.

The only oversight here may be the bust of Frick himself. Positioned rather uneasily by the lobby elevators, shouldn’t he get a painting of his own to admire? How about Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington, now off view? With only about half of the collection we usually see now available at Frick Madison, the omissions may be as interesting as the inclusions, calling out for a rehanging sometime during the run. But, mostly, Frick Madison calls us back to The Frick Collection, when it is collected together once again at One East Seventieth. After seeing this work in a new light, I look forward, even more, to seeing it in the old.

Gallery Chronicle (March 2021)

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2021

Gallery Chronicle

On “Albers and Morandi: Never Finished” at David Zwirner, “Victor Pesce: Still Life” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, “Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings” & “Wolf Kahn: The Last Decade 2010–2020” at Miles McEnery Gallery, “Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase” at Berry Campbell, “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World” at Kasmin Gallery, “Deborah Brown: Things As They Are” at Anna Zorina Gallery, “Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s” at Van Doren Waxter & “Sharon Butler: Morning in America” at Theodore:Art.

“Albers and Morandi: Never Finished” is one of those sublime, museum-quality exhibitions where sight alone is allowed to inform and delight.1 “Museum-quality” might do a disservice, in fact, as the qualities of our museums are increasingly drawn to the verbal, even the hectoring and didactic, over the pictorial. Now on view at David Zwirner, this exhibition is near perfect in its selection, presentation, and insight. The result is stunning, even dumbfounding, in how it shows painting in its own language, on its own terms, and, at its best, speaking across styles in visual conversation.

Although near exact contemporaries—Josef Albers was born in 1888; Giorgio Morandi in 1890—these two artists seemingly painted worlds apart. Albers was theory. Morandi was practice. The hard edges of Albers looked forward. The soft contours of Morandi looked back. Or so we were told. “Never Finished” finds their shared affinities. They shared, for one, the same absorptive palette. Rather than radiate out, pale blues, airy grays, buttery yellows, and earthy browns pull us in. The two artists also approached composition in complementary ways, exploring their own recurring motifs. Simplex munditiis is the phrase that comes to mind from the recesses of high school Latin—the Horatian line that might translate as “simple in its refinements.” Both Morandi and Albers distilled their paintings to their own bare minimums of essential information, each paying respect, one might even say “homage,” to their chosen forms.

Seen together, Morandi brings out the softness of Albers’s line, while Albers reveals the sharpness of Morandi’s shapes. Up close, Albers is all edge, but back away and his squares, despite their flat brushwork, take on a mysterious glow. From afar, Morandi’s still lifes seem extra still, but get closer and those squares, rectangles, and triangles come alive in their own mysterious ways.

Each artist finds a balance in his compositional energies. Albers looked for the tension between figure and frame. In all of his signature “Homage,” just what, precisely, is the “Square,” and what is the frame around it? Beyond the square forms on masonite, here, in certain works, the frames themselves thicken to become part of the overall compositions.

Albers’s designs seem to tunnel inward, often from light outer forms to darker voids. His innermost squares are both absences and presences, forms floating on top that also sink beneath. Morandi finds a similar tension between subject and object. Just what is the “natura” of his “morta”? Is it the canvas itself, so sensuously brushed, or the vessels depicted therein? Here, rather than forward-facing, Morandi’s frames are allowed to recede, with his canvases now floating in the void. As curated by the gallery’s David Leiber, this exhibition makes the most of its space and light. Each room uses paired works and lines of sight to tunnel from one to the next, through evolving moods and tones, in a painterly conversation that is, indeed, “never finished.”

Installation view of “Victor Pesce: Still Life,” Elizabeth Harris, New York. Photo: Elizabeth Harris.

Just up the block from Zwirner, last month at Elizabeth Harris, that small, serious gallery holding out among the megas of Chelsea, “Victor Pesce: Still Life” revealed the life in the stillness.2 With unmistakable homage to Morandi, and perhaps not a little to Albers, Pesce painted basic forms with complex intensity. Created in the last twelve years of his life—Pesce died in 2010 at the age of seventy-one—the works on view depicted blocks and bags, boxes and vases. Over time, a simplicity of means betrays a strangeness of meaning, as these still lifes dissolve into abstractions of oil and ideations of shape. Just what is that haunting green block of Bridge (2007)? Pesce looked for the bones of form. “In the language of painting,” as John Goodrich writes in his catalogue essay, “he found the means of making them rhythmically, vitally alive—known, as a painter might know them.”

Emily Mason, Ancient Incense, 1981, Oil on canvas. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York.

Spread across the gallery’s two Chelsea venues, Miles McEnery last month enlightened the dark days of winter with a luminous husband–wife double-header. “Wolf Kahn: The Last Decade 2010–2020” looked to the artist’s late pastel-like landscapes. “Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings” opened a window onto the sunny compositions the artist developed in her New York loft, in which she had worked since 1979.3 Taken together, the paired exhibitions honored two artists, married for sixty-two years and both recently deceased, who maintained a connection with Tenth Street and, in their enduring work, each other.

In her nearly square canvases, here dating from 1978 to 1988, Mason lit up her compositions with washes of color that appear like dapples of light. As though illuminated by the sunshine from a window, her oils operate more like photo emulsion, seemingly brightened by luminous rays passing over their surfaces. At their best, as in The Green In Go (1983), these passages open up her designs. Streaks of light pull us into her abstractions that might otherwise be too densely color-filled to unpack.

Wolf Kahn, Against a Red Slope (Large Version), 2018, Oil on canvas. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York.

Mason’s abstract dynamics revealed something about her husband’s landscapes a block away. Late in life, Kahn’s woodsy scenes became a thicket of blowing, branching brushstrokes. The feeling of vernal softness, of a verdure perfumed with yellows, oranges, and greens, went right to his surfaces. Yet Kahn left a hint of depth, a spot of color or light, to signal distance. In Redwoods (2019), a bit of sky viewed through the trees brings us into the scene. In Woodland Density (2019), a blue hill, as though cast in shadow, carves out deeper space. Such glimpses, whether of the horizon or a cabin or a woodland stream, offer just the right destination in the abstract wilderness.

Installation view of “Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase,” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. Photo: Berry Campbell Gallery.

Anyone who has ever mixed intensely chromatic paints will notice that the results are not brighter colors but duller murkiness. That’s Color Theory 101. In her alchemical experiments with pigments and polymers, Jill Nathanson looks for ways to prove color theory wrong. Through abstractions created of translucent layers of acrylic, polymers, and oil, which she pours onto panel, Nathanson tries to find the light of her colorful combinations. In “Light Phrase,” her latest exhibition at Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery, on view last month, Nathanson looked to enlarge and refine these fluid forms.4

Unlike the opaque layering of oil on canvas, Nathanson’s translucent media are far less forgiving in their combinations and permutations. Occasionally the experiments go awry. In Sparkshift (2020), shimmering pools of purples, blues, oranges, and reds risk puddling at one point into a brown. In other compositions, such as Through Another’s (2020), color-rich curves make some abrupt turns that feel overly manipulated. The best forms were those that, despite their complex creation, seemed simple, even natural, in occurrence. Take the upward swirl of Tan Transpose (2020) or the sparkling beach glass of Only a Friend (2020). Here were crystal visions filtered through green-, blue-, yellow-, and rose-colored glasses.

Jane Freilicher, Parts of a World, 1987, Oil on linen, Kasmin Gallery, New York.

“Parts of a World” is an apt title for an exhibition of Jane Freilicher’s still lifes. The artist could take on a world of parts and incorporate them into a painted whole. Last month Kasmin Gallery presented fifteen of these still lifes, painted over five decades beginning in the early 1950s.5 In her quotidian visions of fish and flowers, Freilicher often painted the views from her beach-scrub window in Water Mill, Long Island, and her greenhouse-like studio overlooking the rooftops of New York’s East Village. Near and far, inside and out are taken in with equal measure. A single color then connects the disparate parts. What results is a mood, a world of sense and sensation that left me smelling the goldenrod and forsythia and hungry for the oranges and oysters.

Deborah Brown, Melancholia, 2020, Oil on canvas, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York.

It’s been a year for keeping things in house. For the painter Deborah Brown, the household gods of kachina dolls, glass figurines, and pet dogs all become subject matter in her latest, plague-year body of work, on view last month at Anna Zorina Gallery.6 A painter of loose lines and sun-drenched colors, Brown never lost the sense for the light of her Pasadena youth, even when walking her dog Zeus in the industrial business zone of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Brown looks for the animism in everyday scenes. Twenty-five years ago, for a mosaic series in the Houston Street subway station, she reimagined the train platforms with sea life swimming among the straphangers. Now skewed perspectives of domestic scenes, starring the bric-à-brac we have all rediscovered, find the humor and warmth of a year of staying in.

Installation view of “Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s,” at Van Doren Waxter, New York. Photo: Van Doren Waxter.

The minimalist 1970s challenged the expressionist 1950s. For Jack Tworkov, at one time a burning young painter of the New York School, the answer was to cool his molten compositions into glass and stone. Now at Van Doren Waxter, “Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s” collects these prismatic, architectural constructions of black, white, and gray.7 A fine essayist and a chair of Yale’s art department in the 1960s, Tworkov always reflected on art and history and his role within it. This exhibition includes a catalogue essay by the curator Jason Andrew and a sample of Tworkov’s own writing that well represents his broad perspective. It should not have been unexpected that Tworkov, entering the 1970s, would seek a new path. “I am tired of the artist’s agonies,” he remarked in 1974. His answer was to look to systems—the movement of chess pieces or the rules of composition—to distill his abstractions. His wild mark-making became more like hatches, his surfaces like etched planes overlapping and folding in on themselves. The exhibition at Van Doren Waxter reveals the color and heart that still energized these cerebral constructions. A dot of red or dash of yellow electrifies these abstractions far more than some wild expressionist brush.

Installation view of “Sharon Butler: Morning in America,” at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn. Photo: Sharon Butler.

Sharon Butler may have identified the “new casualism” of the outer-borough aesthetic, that studied desultoriness of what we might call the Jefferson Street Touch, but her latest paintings evince a new formalist intent. I like all the buttoning up. In her latest exhibition at Theodore:Art, forms and patterns have matured in her compositions.8 The contingent line has developed into the assured mark. The white holes of Pink (Dec 19, 2018) (2020) play between figure and ground. The rectangles of May 29, 2018 (2020) balance like pickup sticks. Meanwhile her brush handling has replaced freshness with maturity. Surfaces have aged. These paintings have a history. It’s been a year for feeling the years.

1 “Albers and Morandi: Never Finished” opened at David Zwirner, New York, on January 7 and remains on view through April 3, 2021.

2 “Victor Pesce: Still Life” was on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, from January 7 through February 27, 2021.

3 “Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings” and “Wolf Kahn: The Last Decade 2010–2020” were on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, from January 7 through February 13, 2021.

4 “Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase” was on view at Berry Campbell, New York, from January 7 through February 6, 2021.

5 “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World” is on view at Kasmin Gallery, New York, from January 21 through March 13, 2021.

6 “Deborah Brown: Things As They Are” was on view at Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, from January 7 through February 13, 2021.

7 “Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s” opened at Van Doren Waxter, New York, on January 14 and remains on view through March 20, 2021.

8 “Sharon Butler: Morning in America” opened at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, on January 15 and remains on view through March 7, 2021.

Next Stop

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, discusses the history of Pennsylvania Station and the new Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan.

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2021

Next Stop

On New York’s new Moynihan Train Hall

The demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station proved to be the great architectural trauma of New York. It was arguably the worst destruction the city endured in the past hundred years before the attacks of 9/11; its effects altered the urban fabric just as much. At Penn, the promise of “progress” was, in fact, the terror that leveled that civic temple of 1910 and replaced its soaring classicism with the soul-crushing modernism of today’s station. In 1965, a sign on Seventh Avenue announced the “redeveloped” station with the cheery slogan, “on the way to you.” Just behind it, as commuters continued to board their trains, the station’s exterior colonnade and vaulted interior were bashed to bits and carted off as landfill to the New Jersey Meadowlands.

The tragedy signaled an ignominious end to New York’s classical era. The indignities it introduced have become a daily reminder of what was lost. That’s because, for the sake of expediency while developers disfigured what had to remain an active transportation center, the old station was leveled rather than excavated. To keep the trains running, on through if not on time, the tracks, the east–west submarine tunnels, and the platforms were all kept, even as they were covered over with an oppressively low new ceiling. Like a blister in the sun, the awful new Madison Square Garden rose above these ruins. (To add insult to injury, the sports complex was named after the original palace where Harry K. Thaw had murdered Stanford White.) Commuter and intercity rail passengers—up to 600,000 a day spread across Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the Long Island Rail Road—were crushed down into what remained of the increasingly urine-soaked passages beneath. The ingenious double-decker platforms of old Penn, originally created to distinguish the path of arriving and departing passengers, now just added to the underground mayhem.

Aerial view of the old Pennsylvania Station from the northeast, between 1910 and 1920. Photo: Library of Congress.

Interior view of the head house and train platforms in the original Pennsylvania Station.

From the Baths of Diocletian, one of the classical models for the original station, to a modern-day sewer, old Penn has haunted the city’s conscience just as its replacement has remained a blight on the urban landscape. “One entered the city like a god,” the architectural historian Vincent Scully famously observed. “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Over the years, even as much else in the city has improved, new Penn’s warren of dingy tunnels and onrushing crowds has remained astonishingly grim.

In my own underground transfers, I too have learned the many twists and turns it takes to walk from the Seventh Avenue subway to an Amtrak train. I pass through one sickly tile corridor after another, beneath the stained ceilings perfumed with stale pretzels, on up to Penn’s departure concourse, only to wait among a scrum of passengers jostling one another over the announcement of their departure track. The one solace of this subterranean passage is the glimpse of old Penn that occasionally flashes in the light like an artifact kicked up in the rubble. A old handrail here and a staircase there—a few remnants of the original station remarkably remain intact amid the latter-day squalor.

Some three decades ago, looking up from the back of Penn Station on Eighth Avenue, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the iconoclastic senator from New York who died in 2003, made a similar discovery on a much larger scale. What he saw was not exactly old Penn, where as a boy he had once shined shoes, but there to the west was a building with striking similarities to the original station. And indeed, occupying an equivalent two-block space, the General Post Office Building, now known as the James A. Farley Building, still rises as a shadow of old Penn. In fact, McKim, Mead & White designed the facility, which opened in 1914 and was expanded to its current size in 1935, to complement the station. The Olympian building ringed with Corinthian columns and pilasters at one time served the same central role for mail as Penn did for passengers. At the time that Moynihan gave it another look, changes in postal distribution were upending the rail-based facility, just as the car and airplane had done to old Penn.

Moynihan had a vision to reuse the old postal building as a new passenger station. Starting in the early 1990s, he began negotiating with a tangle of federal agencies to secure the permissions and funding to get the idea on track. Like much else at Penn, the arrival of this initiative, what is now called the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall, has been delayed. With New York still in partial lockdown, the hall’s January 1, 2021, opening came and went with little fanfare, even as the completion of the 255,000-square-foot transit hub has cost $1.6 billion and taken a generation to reveal.

Moynihan Train Hall with Madison Square Garden in the background. Photo: Lucas Blair Simpson © SOM.

That the Moynihan Train Hall offers improvements over Penn’s existing facilities is a low bar to clear. At its best, the new train hall indeed finds ways to echo the grandeur of the original station, just as the late senator had envisioned. As adapted by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the train hall hints at what was lost next door. In the original Penn, the station’s classical Seventh Avenue head house opened to the west onto a glass-enclosed train shed. Just as that station’s façade and waiting room took inspiration from the past, its crystal concourse looked ahead, revealing the splendor of the machine age. Exposed cross-braced steel piers kept massing to a minimum while terraces of glass maximized the light within. Around the open stairways, natural illumination filtered all the way down through the levels, even reaching the trains passing beneath.

In the reuse of its original structural steel, now selectively left exposed, the new train hall reveals the DNA it shared with the departed station while recalling some of the forms of that crystal-palace shed. The train hall’s new main concourse has been carved out of the post office’s former central work room. As originally designed by McKim, Mead & White, this large central sorting area, just behind the post office’s retail windows, was glazed with its own sunken skylight that spanned the entire space. Blacked out during World War II, this back-of-the-house open acre was modified and divided more than once, yet the roof retained its steel superstructure.

In the thirty years it took to develop the new train hall, many proposals were put forward for reglazing this space. Some called for new skylights at the building’s upper roofline. The final decision to keep the original trusses while cutting down the concourse to street grade has created a lofty new space that still reaches back to an important past. The core of the train hall makes the most of its original structural elements, opening up its massive trusses and cross-braced columns and walls that, in the original post office design, were left unseen. At its center, a new four-sided pendant clock, designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects in 20th-Century-Limited moderne, ties the space together with a nod to the analog Benrus clocks suspended inside the original station.

New skylights now fill in among the old trusses in barrel-vaulted form with some extra fizz. These custom-engineered glass baubles are the station’s nod to the future, but one wonders if simply restoring the original glazing would have had a similar illuminating effect while freeing up resources for other improvements. For while the train hall’s central concourse looks sharp in battleship gray, with nicely illuminated rivets, its integration with the trains running beneath—the whole purpose for its creation—seems to have been an afterthought.

Beyond its uplifting forms, it is still an astonishing fact that the function of a century-old train station should be better than anything created today. At the original Penn, glass tile brought illumination to all levels. Step on one of Moynihan’s slick new escalators down to the platform and you descend from light to near-total darkness. Here, the light is only skin deep. An earlier proposal calling for glass flooring, both inside and out, went nowhere. Now beyond signaling their newness, those fancy new skylights are all form and no function.

That’s not all the signaling here. Move beyond the historical features of the main concourse and this train hall most resembles a high-end mall. In attempting to create a new retail and commercial hub, the surfaces mistakenly look west, to the flailing emporium at Hudson Yards, rather than east, to the spirit of old Penn. A colleague of mine calls this slick consumer finish the “international duty-free style.” With a smart but tiny waiting area designed by the Rockwell Group tucked under a side of the concourse, one wonders where trains even ranked in the level of importance for this train hall. The answer may be near the bottom, just a half step above its original use as a post office, which continues but with little integration now with the rest of the complex. The recent leasing of much of the building to Facebook, with new retail and restaurants planned just beneath them, speaks more to the design’s underlying interests.

Unfortunately, as a hall for trains, the new Moynihan Train Hall more than once goes off track. The hall’s street-level avenue entrances, to the north and south of the grand post office stairwell, are the opposite of inviting. Positioned at the far western end of platforming trains, the new concourse also presents an added inconvenience for the majority of passengers coming to the station from the east. As I noticed the day I visited, the new concourse was deserted compared to those oppressive waiting areas across the street at Penn, which are still better positioned over the center of the trains. When I asked a Moynihan ticket-taker about this, he wondered why anyone would walk an extra block west just to have to walk back the other way on the platform. He also suggested that Amtrak was making a tally of those still boarding from Penn and those from Moynihan, and would eventually stop listing the trains in the old location, forcing passengers to use the new hall.

For the rail commuter, the addition of Moynihan merely adds an extra length of turns to get from the subway to the Amtrak train. A pleasant concourse at the extreme end of a rat maze merely compounds an unsavory overall experience. The poor integration of typography, wayfinding, and pathways with the rest of Penn Station remains a joke, now made cruel with this reminder of what there once was. It is all the more remarkable that som’s own new underground waiting area, the West End Concourse, with overworked signage by Pentagram, which opened in June 2017, shares no stylistic similarity with the austere Moynihan concourse directly above.

Beyond the trains, the last missing piece of the Moynihan Train Hall is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Until recently, the new rail center was supposed to be known as Moynihan Station. Then in 2017, the first signs went up calling it Penn Station West. It could be that cancel culture finally caught up with the trailblazing studies of this senator who wrote “The Moynihan Report,” the 1965 paper concerning the high out-of-wedlock birthrate of black Americans and its negative economic consequences. A simpler answer is that the New York governor only ever wants to credit a civic project to a Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo now plans to build a new station, in a new style, over the entire Penn complex, and he would prefer to retain the naming rights.

As the National Civic Art Society and others have argued, the real solution for Penn Station is Pennsylvania Station: the demolition of Madison Square Garden and the rebuilding of McKim, Mead & White’s lost masterpiece over the extant tracks. Daniel Patrick Moynihan felt that loss deeply and dedicated his final years to finding it. By looking to the past, his new train hall should now inspire others not to make the same mistakes of fifty years ago all over again.