Norman's Conquest

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2019

Norman’s Conquest

On the expansion of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

You might have expected the $100 million expansion of the Norton Museum of Art, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to go wrong. Just consider the backstory: An ambitious director (Hope Alswang) and an embarrassed trustee (Gil Maurer) come together to lament the state of their outmoded institution. They wonder aloud how their tired facility (a 1941 Art Deco pile encumbered with additions, now resembling a bankrupt shopping mall) could be “expanded and transformed in a dramatic way.” The trustee says to the director: If you could ask any architect to do this expanding and transforming, who would it be? The director gives the name of a starchitect at the center of the celestial firmament (Lord Norman Foster). The trustee responds: That starchitect happens to work in my building (they are meeting on the forty-third floor of New York’s Hearst Tower; Maurer is then the coo of the Hearst Corporation; Foster designed that building in 2006; and Foster + Partners maintains a New York office there). The trustee calls up the firm. An architect (Michael Wurzel, a partner at Foster + Partners) comes down. They begin to “muse about the possibilities.”

A story of museum musings that began on a winter day in New York in 2010 reached its conclusion on a winter day in Florida in 2019, when the Norton Museum of Art reopened to the public. You might have expected it to go wrong—and yet this expansion has gone surprisingly right. How it went right is a triumph for South Florida. It should serve as a lesson for museum planners everywhere. If today’s museums must grow, grow they must. The Norton checks all the boxes of a museum’s new-car mandates (new restaurant, new lounge, new shiny surfaces), yet it stays remarkably sensitive to art and to the history of the institution that has held the art in trust.

On approaching the Norton’s new entrance from the South Dixie Highway, as most everyone in car-centric West Palm now must do, the first growth you notice is not the museum but a tree. This is not just any tree. It is the tree. Known as “the banyan,” but in fact a ficus altissima, the six-story-tall tree is the focal point of the new west-wing façade. Photographs do not do justice to its outsize presence. Foster calls the tree his “protagonist.” Indeed, it drives much of the plot of the new design. Forty-three feet up, elevated on cloud-white blocks, an aluminum canopy extends forty-five feet over a new entrance plaza. The canopy is a sharp horizontal, made of reflective panels like an airplane wing. From afar, the form seems to cut across the middle of the sixty-five foot tree, a slashing antagonist in an architectural drama. Yet the protagonist wins out. The canopy pulls back at just the right places so that the hundred-twenty-foot-wide tree can continue to grow and spread above the new roofline.

Up close, outside the new museum entrance, the sculptural qualities of this massive tree are striking. The banyan is its own work of art, a dizzying abstraction above, a gothic mystery below, with multiple trunks that have grown out of the many “prop roots” sent down over decades by its own bending limbs. And rather than compete with the tree, up close the aluminum roofline works with it to extend the shade of the natural canopy, adding welcome relief from the Florida sun.

The banyan tree along the South Dixie Highway entrance to the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Nigel Young.

The symbolism of this thriving tree is well appreciated by Foster. His architectural deference to its living history reveals something about his own approach to imposing new designs on living institutions—as he did successfully with Hearst Tower, which rises out of a 1928 base, and most famously with his additions to the Reichstag and the Great Court of the British Museum, completed in 1999 and 2000.

“The protagonist of the project was planted just before Ralph and Elizabeth Norton planted their seed,” he said at the museum reopening. The flourishing tree represents a flourishing institution in its increasing complexities. Rather than cut it down, the new design frames its growth for us to see. It protects rather than rejects history. It allows an organism to thrive through deep roots and existing branches. The challenge now of caring for the banyan reflects the challenge of caring for the museum. Since the tree’s failure would cause Foster’s design to fail, they are both closely interconnected. This is a fact not lost on the museum’s attentive arborists.

The plaza cleverly features another large sculptural form: Typewriter Eraser, Scale X(1999), by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. This 2017 donation to the museum by one of its trustees, Ronnie Heyman, was sought out by Foster, and with good reason. With its upturned brush resembling the branches of a tree, the Oldenburg serves as a symbolic pendant to the banyan. While allowing for growth, Foster has had to do some judicious editing of the Norton’s existing structures. The Eraser happens to touch down next to a part of the building that had been one of those loquacious later additions. Edited down, while still providing upstairs gallery space, this wing now fits into Foster’s concise five-paragraph essay of architectural form.

Typewriter Eraser, Scale X(1999) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (foreground) and the banyan tree in front of the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Nigel Young.

A convincing seamlessness of old and new, living and man-made, has been achieved through an uncanny awareness of existing ties and a balance of existing structures. “It started with two people, Ralph and Elizabeth Norton, in 1941,” Foster said of the museum. All such projects should begin with an appreciation of an institution’s founders. Too few do. Here such respect for the couple who bequeathed their collection to the public trust, with its particular strengths in American and European modern painting and drawing, as well as Chinese art, ultimately informs the overall design.

Re-established as the center of the institution is the Norton’s original 1941 museum building, which, like the banyan, determines the shape and placement of the new entrance. Designed by Marion Sims Wyeth as an Art Deco pavilion surrounding a central courtyard, the building’s original symmetry and sight lines have been restored by cutting back the infelicitous additions from 1997 and 2003.

As Foster creates his new façade facing the banyan tree to the west, he preserves the original front façade to the east. He also restores the ground floor’s east–west axis after it was disrupted by the earlier expansions that turned the museum entrance to the south. Now someone standing outside the new building can see all the way through to the old front door and on to the shimmering Intracoastal Waterway beyond.

I only wish the acoustics of this new entry plaza were as appealing as its form. On the day I visited, the noise of the South Dixie Highway, combined with the screech of a nearby rail line, was deafening. It might be said that every contemporary building “learned from Las Vegas.” A structure must now not only shelter the individual on foot, but also flag down the passing motorist on the road—functions that are often in conflict. But what happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas. While Foster’s aluminum canopy protects the entrance from the sun, it also acts like a bandshell to concentrate street noise on the exposed plaza. While it might take away from the museum’s billboard qualities, additional screening between the highway and museum is in order.

Perhaps already understanding the need of an added buffer between outside and in, Foster brings the visitor into the new wing slightly off axis. A quick turn to the left after the ticket booth then brings you into a new Great Hall (as it is called) and back into alignment with the original museum. Every great building needs a “great hall”—a place to decompress from the outside and adjust to the expectations within. The Norton has dubbed this space its “living room.” In its tasteful modernist furniture and bleached tones, it might just double as a Knoll showroom. It is indeed a pleasant enough room to linger, if not to live in.

The Norton Museum of Art’s Great Hall. Photo: Foster + Partners.

At the same time, with its maximum square footage designed for maximum flexibility, the hall lacks intimacy. All that tasteful furniture is easily moveable so that this Great Hall can serve as a flex space for great donor cultivation. A white box with gray accents (someone said that Foster designs in “fifty shades of gray”), the Great Hall is also topped with an oculus that looks squinty. Round skylights call for round rooms, not rectilinear ones. I wish Foster had rolled the dice and gambled on an interior that was more daring than another white cube—one that might also reflect the octagonal shape of the original eastern entrance.

At least by adding this large new space, and fulfilling the museum’s new-car mandate, Foster could then restore and renew the many smaller adjoining galleries from the 1941 building. Of the museum’s 130,000 square feet, it is interesting to note that only about 10,000 of that are truly new. The preservation of older spaces allows for substantial “recycling,” as Foster says. The original 1941 hardwood floor, for example, has been brought back to life after being covered in decades of carpeting. The Art Deco entry also looks wonderfully preserved—although I wish outdoor access to the east were also restored so we could easily see the Norton’s two outdoor commissions by Paul Manship, which flank the original front door.

The preservation of historical space preserves “the memory of time,” Foster says. This is also how a museum overhauled by a world-famous architect can still come in at $100 million, while the price tag for a new wing at the Metropolitan Museum is slated to cost upwards of $600 million. The best spaces here are the ones that have been brought back to life from the original building, where gallery proportions and arrangements were designed to best complement the art on view. I was very glad to see highlights of the Nortons’ bequests of European art arrayed front and center in one of these galleries. Here Monet’s Gardens of the Villa Moreno, Bordighera (1884) and De Chirico’s Sailors’ Barracks (1914) are presented with works by Klee, Soutine, Picasso, Braque, and Brancusi—all donated by the Nortons—and supplemented with bequests by later donors. Other galleries display the Nortons’ gifts of paintings and drawings by the Ashcan painters and first-generation American modernists such as John Marin and Maurice Prendergast, along with Stuart Davis’s 1932 painting New York Mural, purchased through an acquisition fund established by Ralph Norton.

Taken together with the museum’s significant holdings in photography and Chinese art, you start to see that the Norton is not just a museum of art but a museum of significant art with an important core collection. Foster’s elegant and symbolic renovation brings that fact to the fore by allowing the museum to defer to this great art history.

There are already some signs, unfortunately, that the new museum may try to upstage its impressive historical collection with contemporary work. An ability to attract new donors and bigger crowds is the constant seduction of the contemporary Kunsthalle. The Norton could do better than its dopey wall-decal commissions by Pae White and Rob Wynne, for example, or Instagram-optimized art such as the promised gift of Sam Durant’s End White Supremacy (2008), which is better suited for woke selfies at Art Basel Miami Beach.

When everyone else wants art to shout, the Norton should seek art that sings in concert with its core collection and its harmonious building. As the Norton’s director Hope Alswang, who is retiring this month, rightly says of Foster + Partners: “They were not building a piece of sculpture. They were not building a monument. They were building a great art museum.”

It is indeed a great art museum, if you can keep it..

Finger Painting with a Broad Brush

THE NEW CRITERION, February 22, 2019

Finger Painting with a Broad Brush

On Dana Schutz’s “Imagine Me and You” at Petzel Gallery.

If you are looking for a controversial artist, you wouldn’t necessarily point the finger at Dana Schutz. Nevertheless, and rather surprisingly, controversy pointed at this painter and sculptor at the last Whitney Biennial. In an exhibition that was asking for trouble with far more “controversial” work, Open Casket, Schutz’s memorial portrait of Emmett Till, the black boy who was infamously murdered and mutilated in Mississippi in 1956, took top prize for consternation and column inches. A British agitator named Hannah Black published an open letter to the museum’s curators and staff, co-signed by some fifty other writers and artists, “with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.” Aspiring censors the world over came together to declare that “white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.” A Twitter mob even materialized to form a human chain to block the painting from public view.

Schutz took refuge in the studio. Nearly two years on, the Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based painter has reemerged with a pointed exhibition of new work at Petzel that is impressed with personal experience. “Pointing” and “pressing” are the operative works. In this show called “Imagine Me and You,” on view through February 23, the finger appears throughout as both the instrument of accusation and creation.

Dana Schutz, Painting in an Earthquake, 2019, Oil on canvas, Petzel Gallery.

Schutz is a facile artist. In the past her paint handling has often seemed confectionary, easily digestible and saccharine sweet. Her rich colors and cartoonish forms have been the icing on a cake that is only half-baked. The Whitney experience has now added heat to the oven.Painting in an Earthquake (2019), the show’s introductory painting, is but the first of its many self-portraits. With paint brushes in her left hand, a figure smears paint on a shattering brick wall with the fingers of the right.

The exhibition then leads on to a room not of more paintings, but of figural sculptures in bronze. As these grisaille forms contrast with the colorful oils, they also illustrate the sculptural qualities of Schultz’s heavily impastoed canvases, which are often paintings in sculptural relief. The sculptures also give further form to some of the figures that later appear on canvas, such as in Washing Monsters (2018).
 

Dana Schutz, Washing Monsters, 2018, Bronze, Petzel Gallery.

Schutz comes out of the Brooklyn school of casual figuration. Whether in two dimensions or three, in their faux naivete, some of her cartoonish figures can seem overly mannered. At the same time, the surface expression of these bronzed objects, created first in soft molding compound, conveys personal meaning through their pressed forms. Schutz’s fingerprints are all over these crude displays.

Dana Schutz, Washing Monsters, 2018, Oil on canvas, Petzel Gallery.

The personal nature of these expressive surfaces is then carried over to Schutz’s paintings in the next room. Touched (2018) is both a subject and object of self-portraiture. A female figure faces out with a carved frown as Schutz gouges out the breasts of thick paint with two fingers.

Dana Schutz, Touched, 2018, Oil on canvas, Petzel Gallery.

Fingers appear as symbols throughout this body of work. The naked shipwrecked female figure in The Visible World (2018) dips one digit in the forbidding water. Another points to a gull with a berry in its beak and a daubs of paint across its wings. In Presenter (2018) the fingers of a disembodied hand muzzle a female figure with underpants pulled down around the ankles. Meanwhile, in Mountain Group (2018), at ten feet wide the largest painting of the exhibition, an ensemble cast of finger-pointers on ladders obscures the mountain landscape that a female painter in the foreground, with canvas and brushes, is trying to depict.

Dana Schutz, Treadmill, 2018, Oil on canvas, Petzel Gallery.

Turn around and the last painting you see is Treadmill (2018), with a figure trying to keep up on a fast-moving paint-splattered ground. At a time when anyone may be called out for deviations from the party doctrine of race politics, this exhibition points the finger at a new censorious age.

Hunt & Peck

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2019

Hunt & Peck
On the choreographer Justin Peck at the City Ballet.

“New Peck” might as well become a permanent fixture on the Lincoln Center marquee. This month a new ballet by Justin Peck premieres on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater—once again, as a headliner for City Ballet’s annual program of “New Combinations.” This fourth collaboration with the songwriter Sufjan Stevens, set to full orchestra, is simply billed, initially, as New Peck I (Winter 2019).

The wunderkind of the New York City Ballet, Justin Peck has already choreographed more than thirty original works, a number that has outpaced his age (he is thirty-one). This he has done as both a soloist in the company and as only the second “resident choreographer” in City Ballet’s history, following Christopher Wheeldon, who held the title from 2001 to 2008.

Considering this balletic fecundity, it is all the more remarkable to note that Peck was a latecomer to ballet. He started in tap, in his native Southern California, and only moved to New York’s School of American Ballet in 2003. In 2006 he was made an apprentice at City Ballet and joined the corps in 2007. He created his first ballet in 2009, for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, and enrolled that year in City Ballet’s New York Choreographic Institute. By 2014, at City Ballet’s spring gala, he had already premiered his sixth ballet for the company, the forty-two-minute Everywhere We Go. Alastair Macaulay, then the chief dance critic for The New York Times, hailed it as “diffuse and brilliant,” and “young Mr. Peck . . . a virtuoso of the form.” In elevating him to resident choreographer later that year, Peter Martins, City Ballet’s storied former ballet master-in-chief, called the promotion “sort of inevitable.”

Sterling Hyltin, Amar Ramasar, and Tiler Peck in Justin Peck’s Paz de la Jolla.

There does indeed seem to be an inevitable buoyancy to Peck’s tidal rise. His ballets convey a California ease that is not so much sunny as sun-baked. Rather than fight the current, he channels musical flow. Paz de la Jolla, his 2013 ballet set to Bohuslav Martinů’s Sinfonietta la Jolla of 1950, begins in beachy bliss, with splendid Esther Williams–like swimsuit costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, supervised by Marc Happel, stirred into an eddying, swirling reef of abstract, fluid motion.

Peck is most accomplished in such ensemble work, which here transforms into an ocean. Arms and legs trace the patterns of rolling surf. On the day I saw it, Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar became engulfed in the waves, while a third dancer, Georgina Pazcoguin, swam out for the rescue. Peck builds energy out of human shapes. He taps the increasingly chiseled strength of young dancers to create acrobatic displays that coalesce and disperse in swirls of limbs.

Peck’s architectonic sense, his use of arms and legs to create lines of structure, has been on display from the start. Year of the Rabbit, his breakout work of 2012, begins with a solo dancer spinning out from the tick-tocking gears of a remarkably complex human timepiece. His sprightly Scherzo Fantastique of 2016, once again with costumes by Bartelme and Jung, here set against a Fauvist backdrop by the painter Jules de Balincourt, is all spring and no fall. Arms and fingers shoot up to become the woody branches and verdant canopy of the forest primeval.

No one should wish to cork up the outpouring of such young talent. Yet there is nevertheless a sense that Peck’s youthful froth might improve if bottled and laid down to age. Something is missing in all the spume that needs to come forward in maturity—a human feeling calling from the deep.

Peck’s ballets are Instagram-optimized—just as the millennial choreographer himself betrays little personal affect in front of the ever-present modern lens. If not designed for social media outright, his works are nevertheless socially mediated creations. His dancers look past rather than into each other. His dances are all surface and no depth. The interpersonal partnering of the pas de deux, the essential romance of man and woman, loses out to internetworked movement. Here is ballet not as consummate courtship but rather as information flow.

As seen in Jody Lee Lipes’s 2014 documentary Ballet 422, which tracks the creation of Paz de la Jolla in laborious detail, Peck is nothing if not humble about his abilities and deferential to the traditions of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, the idolized founding choreographers of the company. Peck is a workman, and often a fine craftsman, of balletic form. He is calm and likable. His interactions with the late Albert Evans, the City Ballet dancer and ballet master, are especially moving to see. He also seems self-effacing to a fault. Worried of “overstepping my boundaries,” in one scene he approaches the conductor to give the orchestra a pep talk:

Guys, hi, I’m the choreographer. I don’t know if I know all of you, but I’m Justin Peck. I just want to say that my whole process of choreographing is really really really based on the music. And everything I do is about exposing the details and the complexities and the textures of the orchestra. It’s really really important to play with a lot of energy and vigor, especially in this piece. I would really appreciate that so much. I’m really looking forward to this premiere and everything. So, merde.

Only elevated to the position of company soloist in 2013, Peck was still a member of the corps de ballet when he debuted Paz de la Jolla. For the premiere, he takes the subway and carries his suit in a dry-cleaning bag across Broadway. He watches its opening from the orchestra, then at intermission rushes backstage to dance in Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. For every 1 percent of inspiration, Peck undoubtedly gives 99 percent in perspiration.

Yet Peck’s intimate proximity to the craft of dance, and to the craftsmen of his company, has oddly created some estrangements in his works’ execution. One explanation may be his reliance on video for translating the developments of the studio onto the stage. Through the lens of Ballet 422, we see the many lenses that capture and compress his choreography. His creations begin on iPhone. Peck uses the propped-up camera of his smartphone to record his own movements as he translates music to dance. Developing his choreography in ensemble, he reviews the digital video of his dancers’ studio work as a criminologist might review a surveillance tape. And laptop video is ever present as he unites his choreography with the lighting, costumes, and orchestration of the dress rehearsal.

Digital video has undoubtedly enabled Peck to work remarkably fast—two months, we learn, to create Paz de la Jolla—while remaining an active dancer. But the digital screen can also turn felt movement into a succession of flickering moments. This is why his work translates well to film; he is the choreographer for 2018’s Red Sparrow and Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming reboot of West Side Story. In person, his dances resemble stop-motion animation—action without interaction. The lens flattens emotion. It can quickly dehumanize intimate expression and exchange.

Such a consideration might also apply to the other recent headline-makers of City Ballet. These days it seems that Justin Peck is the only good news still coming out of the company. It is all a remarkable changement of balletic fate. Over most of the past decade, it appeared as if City Ballet could do no wrong. Its leader, Peter Martins, was the tough-minded veteran Balanchine dancer who carried his company from its founding era into the modern one. He mentored talent, such as Peck’s own, and championed a youthful, all-American image in his company. His series of online publicity videos, for instance, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, featured his rising dancers as reality-television contestants. The videos seemed like textbook examples of how to use new media to reposition legacy cultural institutions.

Of course, it helps to have a warhorse such as Balanchine’s Nutcracker to pay the bills of your online publicity machine, as well as a top talent feeder under your control in the form of the School of American Ballet and a city full of balletomanes and ballet moms to fill the seats. And, of course, it all resulted in a carefully choreographed online performance, which has now seen its own curtain descend.

First to exit the stage was Martins himself. According to accusations that the company has denied, this dancer who debuted with City Ballet in 1967 as Apollo ended his career as Dionysus. He came to rule both the company and its school as an absolute monarch, imposing his hot-tempered will and his cool-tempered choreography with impunity. Whenever I saw him pacing the halls of the Koch Theater, he reminded me of a Roger Moore–era Bond villain about to open his shark-tank chute. In the hashtag era, if nothing else, his leadership style was poised to take a tumble. After a leave of absence, he retired.

Then the other toe shoe dropped. In September, Alexandra Waterbury, a graduate of the School of American Ballet, sued a number of City Ballet’s principal male dancers—as well as the School, the Company, and one of its patrons—for a conspiracy of sexual degradation. According to the complaint, last year Waterbury discovered that Chase Finlay, her boyfriend at the time and a principal dancer of the company, had taken intimate photos and videos of her against her knowledge. Finlay had not only recorded this material but, as the complaint continues, also shared and discussed it in explicit and degrading terms through text messages with other men in the company.

The details in the complaint are shocking, and also compromising if it is, in fact, determined that a “fraternity-like atmosphere” at City Ballet “condoned, encouraged, fostered, and permitted an environment” in which this could happen, as the complaint maintains. Regardless of its legal outcome, the scandal has already decimated the ranks of top male dancers at the company. Finlay resigned, while Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, two other principals who allegedly engaged in Finlay’s pornographic exchange, were forced out. The company, meanwhile, has so far denied any institutional wrongdoing.

Ballet, of course, has long had its sybaritic side. Against the sin of scandal, Justin Peck appears all the more saintly, even if the world of ballet is so small that Ramasar was Peck’s chosen dancer for his Tony-award-winning choreography in Carousel in 2018, and Ramasar and Finlay can each be seen in Ballet 422. What unfortunately unites their worlds to Peck’s is the smartphone flicker and the Instagram filter.

Contrary to new media, ballet’s enduring allure is its connection to the ancien régime. Descended from the dance of the French court, as The New Criterion’s Laura Jacobs explains in Celestial Bodies, her recent book on ballet, “strict protocols of etiquette—including a refined sense of movement and the ability to dance—governed all. To stay in the king’s good graces, the aristocracy itself had to practice grace.”

For both dancers and audience alike, the courtly grace of ballet can rekindle this lost world. Just so, nothing breaks this spell like an errant ringtone, a recording light, or a sexting scandal. If the Waterbury lawsuit has proven anything, it is that ballet must be reclaimed by its states of grace. The courtly rigor encoded in the forms of ballet has the power to deliver us from digital psychosis. It can turn girls and boys into ladies and gentlemen—if only we remember to turn off our cell phones and be moved by the truth of ballet’s movement. “If someone can find out who you are from the stage,” Albert Evans once said, “that’s everything.”