The Manor Reborn

ART & ANTIQUES
April 2015

The Manor Reborn
by James Panero

The renovated Cooper Hewitt Museum harmonizes new, immersive exhibition spaces with the elegant, century-old infrastructure of New York's Carnegie Mansion

THE DECEMBER 12, 1902, inauguration of Andrew Carnegie’s New York mansion on Fifth Avenue, between 90th and 91st Streets, captivated the city and solidified Carnegie’s ambitions in brick, mortar, steel, wood, and stone. When the Carnegie family returned from their Scottish castle, Skibo, to see the home for the first time, a crowd gathered at the New York pier to greet the famous industrialist. “Why, I am fit as a brand new piston rod and solid as a rock!” he told waiting journalists. Across a city blanketed with snow, a team of horses carried the family through Central Park to what was then an underdeveloped neighborhood still far to the north of midtown high society. Arriving at the entrance, Carnegie turned to his five-year-old daughter Margaret, his only child, and gave her the key to their new home.

Since that first day, the keys of the Carnegie Mansion, on the heights of what came to be known as Carnegie Hill on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, have passed through several hands. In a ceremony following Louise’s death in 1946, Margaret handed over the same front-door key to the New York School of Social Work, part of Columbia University, which occupied the buildings for the next 20 years before moving onto the Columbia campus. Beginning in 1976, after losing the original support of the Cooper Union and being taken on by the Smithsonian, the Cooper Hewitt design museum has called the mansion home.

Following a three-year renovation—112 years to the day since the Carnegie family first set foot inside—the Cooper Hewitt has now handed over the keys for us to explore this museum in a mansion. In her diary entry for her first evening in residence, Louise Carnegie concluded she was “very pleased with the house.” With a revitalized museum, thoughtfully brought to life by 13 design teams working closely with museum staff through a $91 million capital campaign, we can all be very pleased.

Through the latest renovation, Carnegie’s original imprint has been brought back to the forefront of the mansion. At the same time, the Cooper Hewitt has been able to update its approach with the latest forward- thinking concepts in museum presentation, improved efficiencies, and a 60 percent increase in exhibition space (achieved largely by clearing out its underused third floor), all without enlarging the campus footprint.

The genius of the renovation has been not to fight old with new, but to find synergies between the two, tapping Carnegie’s own sense for design, education, and betterment through technology. For example, his was the first private residence in the United States to have a structural steel frame (supplied, of course, by his own state-of-the-art mills) and among the first to have an Otis passenger elevator along with central heating and air conditioning. Carnegie’s philanthropic vision, now manifested in the latest technologies of the revamped Cooper Hewitt, lives on through a principle he stenciled along the frieze of his library wall: “the highest form of worship is service to man.” Carnegie’s philanthropy was greatly inspired by Peter Cooper, the founder of the Coo- per Union, whose three Hewitt granddaughters created the initial design collection that formed the Cooper Hewitt. “I feel very proud,” Cara McCarty, the Cooper Hewitt’s curatorial director, explains. “We are repurposing a historic home, celebrating its design, not denying it or covering up the historic features. We’ve tried to work with it. And I think it makes our objects feel so much richer. Because it’s landmarked, there are a lot of limitations for what we can do with an intervention. We turned those limitations into an asset.”

By “knowing so well what we wanted to achieve,” McCarty says the museum avoided “the Bilbao syndrome” affecting many museums, in which spectacular expansions by celebrity architects take precedence over collections. The Cooper Hewitt’s sensitivity continues the approach of Lisa Taylor, its inaugural director, who maintained, “The use of an old building for a modern purpose is the essence of urban recycling, so...we have a museum that exemplifies in its facilities the very principles we are trying to communicate through our collections.” From its arrival in the Carnegie mansion, the Cooper Hewitt has respected the building’s original design, which helps explain why the museum now has so much to draw on for its latest revitalization.

The design of the mansion, by the architects Babb, Cook & Willard, reflected Carnegie’s desire to create a proper home for his family around art and nature that, given his extreme wealth, was still relatively modest in its exposed brick and Georgian style but full of personal details inside. The most sumptuous space, now newly restored, is the small second-floor family library, better known as the Teak Room, designed by the painter Lockwood de Forest. With intricately carved teak paneling from India decorating the ceiling frieze, corbels, door, and fireplace, the room is the most intact de Forest interior still in place. The room also shows the wide scope of Carnegie’s design interests, here drawing on the same Eastern influences that informed Olana, Frederic Church’s Persian-inspired country home in Hudson, N.Y.

“Tools: Extending Our Reach,” the inaugural exhibition in the new 6,000-square-foot third-floor Barbara and Morton Mandel Design Gallery, brings a cross-cultural 2001-like consideration to the instruments that make such design happen, with 175 objects ranging in date from a Paleolithic hand chopper to a live feed of the sun transmitted by an orbiting satellite. Especially impressive here is Controller of the Universe, a sculpture by Damián Ortega made of old hand tools suspended on string that appears to radiate from a central point that a viewer can walk through. There is also “Beautiful Users,” an exhibition on the ground floor that explores “user-centered design,” from thermostats to telephones to hand grips for kitchen implements to the latest in innovations for the handicapped to open-source 3D-printing “hacks” to connect Legos to Lincoln Logs. Next door, “Maira Kalman Selects” invites the beloved author, illustrator, and designer to “raid the icebox” of the permanent collection and tell a story with a selection mixed in with her own personal artifacts. Especially tempting here is a pair of trousers draped over a bench with a handwritten admonition: “Kindly refrain from touching the piano and Toscanini’s pants.” The “Process Lab,” in Carnegie’s sumptuous library, poses museumgoers with their own design challenges through hands-on interaction.

Among a host of new digital displays underwritten by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the “Immersion Room” stands out for using digital and projection technologies to help visualize wall- covering design in a new way. With access to hundreds of patterns digitized from the museum collection, and the ability to sketch their own designs on a digital table, museum goers can now see patterns projected full size and floor-to-ceiling on the room’s walls, rather than having to extrapolate from see- ing a single strip of paper.

Such interactive engagements elevate the making along with the made and use historical examples to challenge museum goers to think about contemporary design in a new way. The exercise is not all that different from the challenges faced by the Cooper Hewitt as the institution thought through its historic home.

The Armory Show with Mr. P and Mr. Pee

 

The editors at Art F City ask for my take on Armory Show 2015 in this dual review. With deep thoughts on Jeremy Bailey, Mona Hatoum, Andrew Ohanesian, Art Markit, Chris Wiley, Aiko Hachisuka, and Jon Rafman. 

The Whiff of a New Blacklist

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 12, 2015

The Whiff of a New Blacklist
by James Panero

Recent protests at the Met Opera and Carnegie Hall signal a new turn in the relationship between art and politics.

With his ties to Vladimir Putin , the government patron and old acquaintance ultimately behind his St. Petersburg-based Mariinsky Theatre, conductor Valery Gergiev has become, for some, a proxy figure representing the anti-Western turns of the Russian state, both in human rights and geopolitics. These tensions first took center stage in 2013. Following Mr. Putin’s suppression of gay rights, protesters lined up outside Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House with signs that read “Gergiev Choose: U.S. Dollars or Putin’s ‘Morals.’” Inside, just as Mr. Gergiev raised his hands to conduct, they shouted him down, yelling “Valery, your silence is killing Russian gays!” Performances were halted until security could remove the disrupters.

With the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea, Ukrainian sympathizers have joined the chorus of dissent. The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili publicly declined Mr. Gergiev’s invitation to perform in St. Petersburg while also indicting Western audiences for supporting his music. At the premiere of “Iolanta” at the Met two weeks ago, a Boston-based, pro-Ukrainian protester even leapt onto the stage at curtain call with a banner depicting Mr. Gergiev, the Russian headline soprano Anna Netrebko, and a Hitler-inspired image of Mr. Putin with the slogan “Active Contributors to Putin’s War Against Ukraine, Free Savchenko” (after the parliamentarian and former Ukrainian officer imprisoned by Russia in 2014).

Protesters shouting down concertgoers; musicians silenced by hecklers; agitators taking the stages of our performances. All this represents a new turn in the relationship between arts and politics. There’s even the whiff of a new blacklist. At the continuing picket line outside the Met, protesters are distributing fliers that accuse Mr. Gergiev and Ms. Netrebko of using “their artistic standing to support and promote war and aggression... We call upon the institutions to review their policies and to consider appropriateness of allowing vocal supporters of aggression to perform on their stages.”

Current events have now claimed a front seat on the culture, and it’s time to stop them at the gate. Let’s put aside the obvious security threats that political agitation can pose to audiences and performers: It was in a Moscow theater in 2002, we should remember, that Chechen militants left 130 people dead. In 1987, members of a radical group known as the Jewish Defense League pleaded guilty to a series of bombings that targeted Russian performers as they toured the U.S., including the firebombing of a stage door of Avery Fisher Hall and releasing tear gas into the audience at the Met, an attack that hospitalized 20 people.

A banner today may be a weapon tomorrow. Concert houses clearly need to do more to keep us safe, and the Met has since increased security for subsequent performances of “Iolanta,” which have proceeded without incident. But more than that, they must speak up more forcefully for the integrity of the arts and its performers outside of politics. As Russian-American relations continue to deteriorate, it may be tempting for those of us who are justifiably critical of Mr. Putin to join the protests. But by blacklisting artists over not professing the right beliefs, the only guaranteed victim is the art itself. Moreover, such censorship is bad policy toward the causes we might hope to advance.

Mr. Gergiev’s response to such interruptions has been to focus more intensely on his music. “I cannot comment. It’s a silly, silly new invention, silly, ugly, what else can I say here?” he said as he boarded a flight south to conduct in Florida. “People come to the concert hall, the opera house. They are searching for beauty, for a very exceptional journey with the artists. They want to hear great music played well, sung well, staged well. I think that’s all they expect.”

And that’s the point. During the Cold War, when both tensions and the stakes were even higher, culture was used as a bridge, not a wedge. Between 1958 and 1988, 50,000 Soviet citizens visited the U.S. through our initiatives of cultural exchange. While some Americans at the time feared this Soviet influence, Oleg Kalugin, then a KGB general, later said such exchanges were a “Trojan Horse” within the Soviet Union. As Soviet performers brought their Western stories back to Russia, “They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system. They kept infecting more and more people over the years.”

Today, no Russian figure promotes cross-cultural exchange more than Mr. Gergiev. Last month, he brought 300 members of his Mariinsky Theatre, which included over 75 musicians, 50 chorus members, and just as many dancers, to a residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and various appearances in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Palm Beach, Naples and Miami, Fla.; and Washington, interspersed with his own conducting for the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He had a role in bringing “Iolanta” and “Bluebeard’s Castle,” the new Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill, to the Met in partnership with the Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera. Tens of thousands of people will see him conduct during this latest American tour, which Mr. Gergiev notes marks his 25th anniversary performing in the U.S.

And the conductor is also responsible for promoting cultural exchange back in Russia. In June, he will helm the next Tchaikovsky Competition, the same international contest that Van Cliburn, an American pianist, famously won at the height of the Cold War in 1958. Today, “big countries like the U.S. and Russia are sending competitors,” says Mr. Gergiev, “but also smaller countries like Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia. Last time, an Armenian cellist took gold. Armenian. It’s not a huge country, as you know. It was a surprise.”

What unites all of these initiatives is great music. Two weeks ago, I was at Carnegie Hall as Mr. Gergiev led his Mariinsky Orchestra through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4. Despite vocal protests outside, it went off without interruption. In fact, after a gripping hourlong performance that sounded like an approaching subway train, he held the packed audience in silence for nearly a minute before the house erupted in applause. “Symphony No. 4 requires concentration. The audience was really good,” he told me. “This symphony, somehow, naturally, goes to some mysterious world, which cannot be interrupted.”

Exactly. Such music deserves to be heard for what it is. Most of us still understand this is possible only by putting differences aside in the communion of a concert hall.