Spanish Lessons

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2023

Spanish lessons

On “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” & “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” at the Hispanic Museum & Library.

The Hispanic Society of America was founded over a century ago to reflect a gilded vision of Spain and the Iberian peoples. Since 1904, this institution on Broadway and 155th Street has faced much harsher realities. The small independent entity—one of scholarly and artistic significance—has struggled so far removed from the limelight of New York’s Museum Mile. To this day the Hispanic Society remains the greatest New York collection few have ever heard of. Now, after a six-year closure to address its aging infrastructure, the museum and library have partially reopened with a renewed vision for the future. Just how much this vision aligns with the foresight of its remarkable founder, Archer Milton Huntington, is a picture still coming into view.

Archer Huntington was the stepson, and most likely illegitimate offspring, of Collis Huntington, one of the Big Four founders of the western railroad. Even more remarkable was his mother, Arabella, a significant collector of European art and a social outcast whose marriage to Huntington scandalized New York society. Arabella’s sense of independence encouraged her only child in his intense cultural pursuits. In 1882, while embarking on a Grand Tour at age twelve, Archer purchased a copy of The Zincali, George Borrow’s 1841 “Account of the Gypsies of Spain,” in a Liverpool bookshop. The book was one of several famous stories that informed the century’s Romantic affinities for primitive Spain—joining Victor Hugo’s Hernani of 1830, Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain, both of 1845, and Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875.

View of the entrance to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

As Huntington continued on to London and Paris, he was already envisioning an art collection along the lines of Sir Richard Wallace’s, paired with a library akin to the National Gallery’s, dedicated to the cultures of Spain and the Spanish diaspora. In 1891, to understand better the history of Al-Andalus, he even hired a tutor to teach him Arabic, at a time when no American institution offered classes in the language. On tours through Spain in 1892, 1896, and 1898, he purchased trunks of Spanish photographs while studying the country’s art and culture (the society now has 175,000 such images). In 1902 he acquired the bibliographic collection of Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros, who was his mentor. Soon Huntington had the most important collection of Spanish books and manuscripts outside of Spain, a collection growing to two hundred thousand manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand printed books, including over fifteen thousand volumes from before 1700. He paired this collection with paintings by Spanish masters—Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán, El Greco—which he was determined to purchase only from the international market, so as not to deplete the country’s own cultural patrimony.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry” with Sorolla’s Visions of Spain (1913–19) above. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

In 1908 Huntington opened his collection to the public in a Beaux-Arts building on Audubon Terrace, so named for being at one time part of John James Audubon’s estate. The building was nearly contemporaneous with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian vision in Boston’s Back Bay and equally novel, though less flamboyant. As the capstone to the collection, in 1911 Huntington commissioned Joaquín Sorolla to paint a mural of multiple “panneaux” of various Spanish regions, which he installed in its own purpose-built octagon-shaped wing. This impressionistic cyclorama of traditional Spanish culture was called, appropriately, Vision of Spain (1913–19), reflecting Huntington’s own dreamy vision for his new institution.

After Huntington’s death in 1955, there were times when it seemed the lid to his jewel box was bolted shut. When it wasn’t being shouted down as “racista”—as happened to one of its directors in the 1990s while he was chased across Audubon Terrace—the Hispanic Society put little of its energies into its own forward-facing persona. Part of this was an extension of Huntington’s own self-effacing style. “To place one’s name on a donation be it a building or subscription is an artificial and flimsy door to fame,” he once said. “The human race is full of creators, but it is their acts . . . which are interesting.”

Instead, the society continued to focus on scholarship and filling out its permanent collection of books, art, artifacts, and sculpture, in particular from the Spanish New World and Spain’s onetime Pacific colonies. Today the collection has grown to include four-thousand-year-old ceramics from the Bell Beaker culture of the Tagus river estuary, Roman statuary from Seville, Islamic pottery and Alhambra silk, Hebrew manuscripts, a map by Giovanni Vespucci, and Renaissance and Baroque ironwork on up through the Symbolist paintings of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. Last year, as its main building remained shuttered, two temporary exhibitions revealed the great depth of this collection: “Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh,” an exhibition curated by Patrick Lenaghan with his Hispanic Society colleague Hélène Fontoira Marzin, on the history of Spanish polychrome sculpture; and a display at the Grolier Club of highlights from the society’s library, organized by the society’s former director Mitchell A. Codding and the curator John O’Neill. (See “Visions of Spain” in The New Criterion of January 2022.)

Joaquin Sorolla, Detail from Visions of Spain, 1913–19, Oil on canvas, Hispanic Society Museum, New York. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

By some stroke of historical luck, the venerable but heavy hinges of the Hispanic Society were never forced open against the will of its founder. One could easily imagine the society’s takeover by a larger institution, the breaking of its indenture of trust along the lines of the Barnes Foundation, or, at the very least, a relocation downtown. Many such options were considered at various times in its existence, which in part may account for the deferred maintenance on its Audubon Terrace infrastructure.

Under the leadership of Philippe de Montebello, who was elected chairman of the society’s board in 2015, the institution has instead decided to double down on its Audubon campus. This has first meant upgrading the building’s aging envelope, designed by Charles Pratt Huntington, and bringing its systems, in particular its climate control, up to modern standards. The museum has also developed a strategic plan with Selldorf Architects to renovate the campus with the executive architects Beyer Blinder Belle and the landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand. An adjoining building to the east, originally the headquarters of the Museum of the American Indian, is being incorporated into the Hispanic Society campus, allowing for ada access to the Main Court galleries while introducing a new conservation studio, a wheelchair entrance, and spaces for special exhibitions and education. This longer phase of the project is still tens of millions of dollars and several years away.

View from Audubon Terrace. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

Fortunately, even with the introduction of a new entrance in the east building, the society says the door of the Main Court will remain unlocked. Since the society is, and has always been, a free institution, Audubon Terrace is well suited to be an open campus with outdoor seating and concessions—and access to its other remaining cultural institution, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, just up the courtyard. “If you are a regular, and you have a ten-minute lunch break,” says Guillaume Kientz, the society’s new director, “and you want to see the Duchess of Alba, you can do that.” The terrace’s program of Spanish-themed statuary—depictions of Don Quixote and El Cid created by Huntington’s remarkable wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington—is also an integral part of the society’s cultural program and best observed from the Main Court landing.

This past summer, the Hispanic Society reopened its Main Court after its six-year restoration, the first phase of the renovation project. While the treasures of its collection are still on tour through the summer, the museum dedicated its main gallery to the centennials of two artists: Sorolla (1863–1923) and the Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), born in the year of Sorolla’s death.1 Through the fall, visitors to the terrace will continue to encounter Soto’s Penetrable (1990), a large cube of steel, aluminum, and plastic hoses on long-term loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—a work that trades Soto’s usual optical delicacy for crowd-pleasing interactivity. While Sorolla’s portraits of Spanish life and the genre scenes of his Vision of Spain have little to do with Soto’s kinetic abstractions, the assembly spoke to the breadth of the society’s mandate while also allowing us to open the lid, after a painfully long wait, of the institution.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable, 1990, Steel, aluminum & plastic hoses, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Photo: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum.

Yet those of us expecting a full return to form will have to sit tight. What are described as essential repairs to the roof have now covered over the skylights in the Main Court and Sorolla galleries. The darkened result, interspersed with retina-burning spotlights, is heartbreaking for those of us who recall these formerly dreamy spaces. This is especially true when trying to appreciate the Main Court’s intricate terracotta walls and its imagined sense of a sunlit medieval cloister. While the society maintains that plans are in place to install artificial laylight behind the skylight glass, the remediation could not come soon enough. A public-spirited philanthropist could do worse than to underwrite the improvement of gallery lighting. As the Old Masters were almost all painted under natural light, their happy viewing calls out for equivalent illumination.

Installation view of “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The inclusion of modern and contemporary work also suggests something of a change in the priorities of the institution. While it is true that Huntington for a time embraced the contemporary Spanish art of his day—collecting Sorolla, Ramon Casas, Joaquin Mir Trinxet, Santiago Rusiñol, and Ignacio Zuloaga—he came to distance his Hispanic Society from the art of his own time. “Modern art is not our intention to show in exhibitions,” he declared. “That is a dealer’s affair and not, in my opinion, one for museums.”

Starting September 15, the treasures of the society’s collection are finally returning to its walls, but the installation will no longer be a fixed display of highlights as we experienced in the past. Certainly, with a collection of three-quarters of a million objects, there is a lot to show here. Some shuffling around would be welcome and refreshing. Yet as with most every other museum—including the venerable Frick Collection—today there seems to be an urge to put historic collections in “dialogue” with contemporary art. These interventions are often forced and merely there to serve some political or commercial end—a “dealer’s affair,” in Huntington’s choice words.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The society’s summer display of contemporary jewelry by Luz Camino was one such letdown.2 Filled with loans from a Who’s Who of rich collectors, the exhibition was no doubt designed to stimulate the philanthropic glands of the society’s major donors. Even worse, the exhibition’s gaudy displays were all positioned directly in front of the panels of Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. The cases obscured their view and fully blocked their labels. Despite its wide embrace of Spain and Spanish culture, the Hispanic Society shouldn’t need to include Las Vegas in its purview.

Acentury ago, Archer Huntington set out not to record the Spanish world of the present but to preserve a vision of its past, one that was already fast disappearing. His interest may have been based on a Romantic fiction, but there was a time when we could embrace the power of fiction to triumph over everyday fact. “We can only be grateful to the boy who discovered Spain in a Liverpool bookshop,” says the Hispanic Society curator Patrick Lenaghan, “and, thus inspired, created this extraordinary museum and library.” Even today, we should be able to dream the impossible dream that is the Hispanic Society of America.

1.   “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” was on view at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, from May 25 through July 15, 2023.

2.   “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” opened at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, on May 25 and remains on view through September 3, 2023.

Up the Riverside

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2023

Up the riverside

On New York’s Riverside Drive & Park.

Walking up New York’s Riverside Drive can be like visiting a lost civilization, like seeing the streets of Ostia Antica or Old Jerusalem. The curve of the drive, a departure from the street grid on the far west side of Manhattan, traces the landscape as it follows the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. A procession of some two dozen monuments lines the road, memorializing the figures of history in a classical vocabulary. Apartment dwellings of nine to twelve stories in brick, terra-cotta, and stone recall the French, Dutch, and English Renaissance, with punctuations of the Gothic and the Châteauesque. Meanwhile a 370-acre park between the drive and the river offers several miles of recreation and waterfront trails while also accommodating a subterranean railroad and a vehicular parkway.

Riverside is the result of sixty years of urban development that ended abruptly less than a century ago. Yet it now seems as foreign to us as the product of another civilization. Its architectural language has since been largely abandoned. Its legacy of craftsmanship—its terra-cotta moldings and stone carvings and copper cornices—has mostly been lost. Thousands of residents still call it home and live among its relics—I count myself among them—but Riverside Drive could never be recreated today.

Despite its reputation as a “modern” skyscraper city, there are of course many old streets in New York, as well as other historic residential districts. Something of the innocent age of Henry James and Edith Wharton can be found in the townhouses of Greenwich Village. On the Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue and then Park Avenue led the parade of the city’s aristocracy uptown, while Central Park West faced them with some of the finest pre-war “hotel apartment” towers in the city.

The Schwab mansion and its surroundings on Riverside Drive, 1906–45. Photo: Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. 

Still, for its harmony of landscape, function, and design, Riverside is a special achievement. “Heaven on the Hudson” is what the author Stephanie Azzarone calls the neighborhood in her new book on the “Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park.”1 I would not disagree. “In this part of the city,” she begins,

there is so much that has always been the same and little that is new or modern. On the façades of buildings large and small, intricately carved details above doors and windows speak to character formed a century or more ago.

A full tour of Riverside would begin, as Azzarone’s does, at West Seventy-second Street, its southern border, and head north. At one time the drive extended from here all the way to Dyckman Street in Inwood, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Though a northbound section of the Henry Hudson Parkway now interrupts it, today you could still walk the drive some six miles to about 180th Street, to the ramps of the George Washington Bridge. Alternatively you can follow the park’s riverfront esplanade to the “Little Red Lighthouse,” the one confronted with the arrival of the “Great Gray Bridge” in Hildegarde Swift’s famous 1942 children’s book. Azzarone’s tour, complete with photography by Robert F. Rodriguez, ends at the start of the first Riverside Drive extension at West 129th Street, where the topography drops into Manhattan Valley and F. Stuart Williamson’s elegant elevated viaduct of 1898 connects the drive to the heights of 135th Street.

But first, take a detour south from Seventy-second Street to the new construction on Riverside Boulevard, a recent extension of the drive, and consider what we tend to build today. A row of postmodern high-rises leads to a cluster of glass-shard skyscrapers. These final fishbowl condominiums offer the latest in high-gloss finishes and amenities. Their modernist forms are impressive from afar and imperious up close. But of course they would not be built this way if they did not appeal to today’s apartment dwellers. Fully exposed to an elevated highway in front of them, their designs also reveal the two great shortcomings of contemporary development: the open floor-plan and the glass curtain-wall. Both tend to be coveted by the high-end condo buyer. It also happens that these features greatly reduce building costs, as fewer materials and on-site expertise are required to erect prefabricated glass components. As a developer once explained to me, their widespread appeal is the great lie of his trade.

North of Seventy-second Street it’s a different story. Rather than anticipate a future wiped clean of antique residue, Riverside Drive looked to the past to reflect the weight of history in the monumentality of its designs. Bookended by the 1902 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at Eighty-ninth Street and the General Grant National Memorial of 1897 at 122nd Street (see my “Monumental madness” in The New Criterion of April 2020), there are memorials dedicated to firemen, to women’s health, to Joan of Arc, and to a range of others that all add their own gravitas to the park and drive (see “Gallery chronicle,” January 2016). All are products of the “City Beautiful” movement of the turn of the last century. Stop by Warren & Wetmore’s Robert Ray Hamilton Fountain of 1906 at Seventy-sixth Street, designed for the watering of horses. Or walk to the John Merven Carrère Memorial of 1919 at Ninety-ninth Street, a small terrace dedicated to the architect of the main branch of the New York Public Library—Carrère died in an automobile accident just months before the library’s opening—designed by his partner Thomas Hastings.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, ca. 1910.

Along the way, look up to the blue glazed terra-cotta window treatments of the Peter Stuyvesant Apartments of 1919 at Ninety-eighth Street, a building developed by James T. Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Consider the curving façades of the Colosseum and the Paterno, apartment buildings by the architectural firm of Schwartz & Gross, both completed in 1910, at a bend in the drive at 116th Street. Then look back to 103rd Street to the stepped finial—at one time a glistening copper-clad stupa—of the Master Apartments, originally built for the followers of the guru artist Nicholas Roerich (see “Gallery chronicle,” November 2013). This art-deco tower, one of the last constructed during the drive’s building boom, circumvented the city’s height and fire regulations by foregoing individual apartment kitchens and calling itself a hotel.

In the years after the Civil War, history weighed heavily as New York took on new responsibilities as a global capital. For a century prior, scattered farmhouses, villages, and “country seats” for downtown residents had gone up near the heights above the river. The early landowning families here, the De Lanceys, Apthorps, and Livingstons, still lend their names to modern Manhattan. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven” while renting the second floor of the Brennan Farmhouse next to what is now West Eighty-fourth Street in 1844. Yet even as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid down the Manhattan street grid, development was slow on the Upper West Side, where the rocky terrain was difficult to clear. This was especially true between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, where the steep and irregular drop from the heights to the river made conforming to the new grid especially challenging for residential development.

In 1866 Andrew Haswell Green proposed an act in the state legislature for the development of a park in the drop-off between these two avenues. Fresh from their successes to the east, the Central Park commissioners set about acquiring the land above Seventy-second Street from the heights to the river—or at least up to the riverfront railroad tracks laid down in 1848 to bring freight to downtown Manhattan (a railyard was located just south of Seventy-second).

In 1873 the commissioners wisely turned to Frederick Law Olmsted to design the project. Eleventh eventually became West End Avenue, while the docklands at Twelfth were absorbed into the park’s jurisdiction in 1894. In between, Olmsted used the contours of the heights to determine the sinuous shape of a new drive to bisect the two, carving out plots for development to the east that could overlook a park sloping down towards the river. His design made the most of the heights’ commanding views of the Hudson and the shoreline beyond. In two sections where the drop-off was too steep to connect his drive to the grid’s side streets, Olmsted split off a narrow carriage road, in the process creating extra “island parks.”

Olmsted “considered the existing grades and contours, the existing plantings and views, and designed a winding drive,” writes the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It was all a

seemingly simple, but for its time, remarkable design concept, which combined into a single unified design a picturesque park taking advantage of the natural attributes of a dramatic site and an urban parkway providing a landscaped environment for a residential community.

Starting in 1880, as the drive and park first opened, some twenty detached mansions went up, but this initial boom of the New York “Four Hundred” proved to be a bust. New York’s aristocracy mostly went to the Upper East Side. By 1902 a majority of the lots still remained vacant. Instead, it was the arrival of the Ninth Avenue Elevated and then the irt subway (now the 1, 2, and 3 lines) in 1904 that brought up from the crush of downtown a new business class eager for the drive’s riverside views. Developers were there to appeal to them, first with speculative row houses and, soon thereafter, with a proliferation of large rental apartments in multi-unit dwellings.

Outside of the overcrowded tenement, the apartment or “French flat” was a new concept for the upper-class New Yorker at the turn of the twentieth century. Beaux-Arts design helped to convey their respectability, as ornate lobbies and building attendants could now offer aesthetics and services surpassing those of a detached single-family home, with less expense.

The limestone façade of 190 Riverside Drive, constructed in 1908, at West Ninety-First Street. Photo: James Panero.

Over the following decades the class appeal of Riverside ebbed and flowed. During the Great Depression many spacious apartments were broken up into much smaller tenements, some even to single-room occupancy (SRO) units. It didn’t help that the open railroad tracks at the far edge of the park blocked the waterfront with an odoriferous cargo destined for the city’s meatpacking district.

It might be said that among developers, Robert Moses is now loathed by the Left nearly as much as Donald Trump. Both unabashedly appealed to the upper-middle-class city, and both focused on the future of Riverside. Moses’s great legacy here was to cover the Riverside tracks in a public-works project that cost nearly five times as much as the Hoover Dam. His 1934 West Side Improvement Plan brought in four million cubic yards of landfill and extended the shoreline 250 feet, doubling its size and turning Riverside into a genuine park while adding a new vehicular parkway. (More recently, even after federal funds had been allocated, a similar effort to bury the highway south of Seventy-second Street was blocked by Congressman Gerald Nadler due to his hatred of Trump, who controlled nearby development rights.)

Riverside’s final salvation came in the co-op conversion plans of the 1970s and ’80s. Hamstrung by the city’s market-killing rent regulations, landlords found ways to unburden their indebted structures onto their tenants. The process created thousands of small homeowners newly invested in the future of the neighborhood. As Riverside adopted a conservancy funding model in 1986 along the same lines as Central Park, neighborhood volunteers spread out every weekend to replant and fix up and tend to the dirt hills then covering the park’s grounds. Their efforts are still a defining characteristic of Riverside today.

Over time,” Azzarone concludes,

there have been multiple Riverside Parks. In the nineteenth century, Olmsted’s version was devoted to the pure enjoyment of nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the City Beautiful’s park focused on monumental aesthetics. In the 1930s, Moses introduced the Riverside Park of recreation.

Any future for Riverside must still look to the past with reverence. Given present circumstances, such an impulse is the one most in need of renewal.

1.   Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park, by Stephanie Azzarone; Empire State Editions, 240 pages, $39.95.

In Claude Monet’s Postmodern Garden

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, February 2023

In Claude Monet’s Postmodern Garden

on diving into an “immersive” exhibition

There are few topics that rankle the art critic more than “immersive exhibitions.” They must be second only to “nonfungible tokens,” whatever those are. I speak of the immersive spectacles where images of famous artwork are flashed on the walls and floors of a large white room in which you sit. Certainly, this should be outside the remit of my union card, I might think.

Until now, if you were looking for some opinion on this-or-that out-of-copyright projection venue slash tourist trap, I would simply say not my job. Maybe go see the real thing. Then we can talk.

And yet, with art on the walls, real or imagined, judgment always comes calling. Suddenly we seem to be immersed in immersion. It can be a challenge just to keep your head above the digital waters. This season, passing their subway ads and all sorts of other lures, I counted some half-dozen eye-poppers. There is, of course, The Original Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit, created by Massimiliano Siccardi. Visit the website and you will be invited to “choose your city.” Twenty American destinations are in the offing.

The same outfit, I read, also promotes Immersive Nutcracker and Immersive King Tut. Or there is Immersive Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Love, Her Art (nine cities for that one). Or how about Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion, billed as “the first immersive exhibition at New York’s permanent digital art center” called the “Hall des Lumières.” Note that this exhibition should not be confused with Immersive Klimt Revolution, on view in four other cities.

So where to begin? New to these deepening waters, I decided to dip my toes into what was billed as the US premiere of Monet’s Garden: The Immersive Experience. (Kindly do not confuse with Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience, now touring eleven cities.) At Monet’s Garden, I was drawn in by the specter of an “unprecedented range of visual, phonic and olfactory stimuli” that promised a “complete and total immersion into the work and world of Claude Monet (1840-1926).” In particular, Monet’s Garden would be “enhanced by aromas of lavender wafting in the air and the romanticism of classical music to serenade visitors.” Take that, I thought, Museum of Modern Art. If you are going to offer a $47 “VIP FLEX ticket” to see a copy of Monet’s Water Lilies, when the real thing can be yours a few blocks uptown for just $25, at the very least it should smell good.

Monet’s Garden is the work of Immersive Art AG, a “Swiss creative lab,” in cooperation with Alegria Konzert GmbH. Seeing their schedule, it occurred to me that the ability to reproduce immersive shows across many continents simultaneously would make a museum curator shudder as they chase down the next Old Master loan. Maybe Walter Benjamin had it backwards all along. When it comes to the work of art in the age of immersive reproduction, like the taste of a McDonald’s hamburger that remains the same no matter where you go, ubiquity conveys an aura all its own.

The New York venue for Monet’s Garden was an event space at 30 Wall Street, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. The anonymous environs conveyed the feel of a WeWork in receivership. Immersive shows, like sample-sale outlets and holiday-village markets, must make reliable subtenants for distressed real estate interests. And in fact, the hollowed-out floors of “Monet’s Garden” have a rich history.

In 1823, I discovered, an impressive neoclassical pile was erected here as the Branch Bank of the United States. In the 1850s the building became the US government’s Assay Office, designed to melt and measure the nuggets from the California gold rush. In the 1920s that building was demolished. The site’s last life was as a Seamen’s Bank. All that remains is the long escalator that once brought you to the loan officers on the second floor.

It is here that Monet’s Garden begins. And upon arrival, at first glance it all strikes one as a ridiculous scam. “Welcome to my studio” reads the introductory wall text. Reproduction Monet canvases — “Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son Jean Monet” (1875), from the National Gallery of Art, and “The Lunch in the Garden” (1866), from the Pushkin Museum, both available (I note) in high resolution from Wikimedia Commons — are arranged on easels for our inspection. There are visitor instructions throughout: “Pose,” “Photograph,” “Scan the QR Code,” “Immerse yourself and become part of the painting.”

The walls are covered with synthetic ivy. There is astroturf across the floor. Erik Satie plays. Theatrical lights are everywhere. A bed of fake flowers leads on to an arched Japanese “bridge.” Yes, it is that bridge, but in this case one that merely crosses a video of water projected on the floor. “Please do not jump in the pond,” reads a sign. What pond? For the first-time viewer, it takes more than a moment to understand what this is all for. Meanwhile I observed my fellow visitors — immersive veterans, no doubt — take to it right away.

I doubt these immersive experiences would be so ubiquitous without social media. For here, I came to realize, was the selfie floor — a liminal space presented in advance of the immersive video room. I watched as two millennial visitors, both immaculately kitted out, sought the room’s premier selfie spots. They knew just where to stand for the lights as they passed their iPhones back and forth, taking off their masks, tossing their hair and pouting over their shoulders.

I ended up spending longer here than expected. There were several wall labels featuring a half-decent timeline of Monet’s life. Projections of Monet paintings morphed into swirling pixels, some of which you could control by standing in front of them. Instagram filters were made available for selfie-taking, although I could not get them to work on my phone. But mostly, sitting on a bench, smelling the lavender, taking in the Satie, observing the fake flowers under shifting gradations of LED lights, I began to find the uncanny experience transporting.

Here, in this postmodern garden, I found my peace.

Back down the escalator was the immersive viewing room. I was handed a cushion and took a seat. The video installation cycled for forty-five minutes. I found it held my attention for the duration. The narrative followed the history of Monet through a holo-deck slide show of his paintings. At times, the animators added some motion to the works. The story focused on Monet’s artful construction at Giverny, where he lived for forty-three years from 1883 to 1926, building his famous garden.

The exhibition makes a compelling sensory case that the garden was the original immersive Monet experience. The artist’s opus now in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie — his eight monumental panels known as Les Nymphéas arranged in two oval rooms — was the painterly result of this immersive vision. Monet described these panels as “the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon and without shore.”

A day after my visit I happened to run across Woman with a Parasol — the real Monet — at Washington’s National Gallery. Did I feel ashamed of my prior day’s digital dalliance? Surprisingly, I did not. Rather, for a moment I sensed we had been immersed in the same nymphean waters. We had shared an “experience” together.