DAVID GARIFF: Welcome
to the National Gallery.
My name's David Gariff.
I'm a Senior Lecturer here.
So today as you can see
by the title, modern sculpture
and other things.
I am going to circle back
to talk about some things that I
didn't talk about, perhaps,
in their proper place,
simply because I tried to stay
with this sort of march
up the floors.
And I didn't want to start all
of a sudden being
in the tower when we were down
on the mezzanine.
So I will be circling back
to talk about some things,
even though they don't pertain
specifically to sculpture.
And so we're going to be moving
around a bit today.
And I'm going to start
with a sculpture.
And this is the sculpture that
is in the atrium,
among a number
of other sculptures
that are there.
This one wasn't specifically
commissioned for the atrium,
the way the Calder and the Caro
and a few others were.
But it was placed there pretty
soon after the opening.
This is Capricorn on the left,
by Max Ernst.
He conceived of this in 1947.
He actually didn't cast it
until 1975.
What you're looking
at in the photograph
on the right
is Ernst with his second wife,
Dorothea Tanning.
They moved to Sedona, Arizona.
And that's the version
of the sculpture he first
created, which was essentially
created from cement and junk,
detritus, soup cans, cartons, et
cetera.
So it was filled with a lot
of different things.
Only later did he decide to then
cast that.
Dorothea Tanning actually tells
us a little bit about that.
She said in her journal,
"In the summer of 1947,
Max Ernst, exuberant
and inspired by the arrival
of water piped to our house--
up to then, we had hauled it
from a well five miles away--
began playing with cement
and scrap iron,
with assists from boxtops, egg
shells, car springs, milk
cartons, and other detritus.
The result-- Capricorn,
a monumental sculpture
of regal but benign deities
that consecrated our garden
and watched over
its inhabitants."
So there they are together.
Ernst is in the back
here, in case you missed him.
And this returns us to the topic
of surrealism.
Because again, this really comes
out of Ernst's surrealist
period.
It dates to the '40s,
but it relates directly
to his earlier interest
in hybridization,
forming things that look
strange,
taking the body of something
and putting the head
of something else on it,
having a very imaginative,
dream-like kind of connotation
to it.
Here, he also created this kind
of ceremonial walkway
to approach the sculpture.
And again, when you see this,
especially the slide
on the left,
I think one of the things
that you realize he was
certainly interested in--
and this was
true throughout
his whole career-- was
Egyptian art.
And so you have the sense
of maybe two pharaohs
along a ceremonial causeway that
takes you towards the sort
of the pyramid, so to speak.
So this is a magnificent work.
You have to spend time
with this, as you do with most
the works, because there are so
many little transformations,
and details, and things changing
into something else
that it's easy to miss
a lot of things.
It's easy to miss the humor.
The king is smaller
than the queen.
He's seated.
He's kind of almost sinking
into his seat.
She's standing.
He holds a scepter.
This is made out of milk cartons
originally.
And of course, it's
a very phallic scepter.
So there's all things
about the traditional surrealist
interest in sex,
and imagination, and dream,
myth, mythic characters.
So you can sort of go and begin
to unravel
many, many different levels
of meaning for this sculpture.
Things that also many artists
were interested in.
We've talked a little bit about,
for example, Jung,
Jungian analysis, and the idea
of iconic archetypes.
King and Queen, Henry Moore does
a series of sculptures that are
seated kings and queens.
So there's this idea.
In fact, Ernst created
a beautiful chess set.
He loved to play chess, much
like Marcel Duchamp.
And he fashioned all the pieces,
and so they relate as well, some
of the pieces,
to the king and queen here.
So as I said, we're going to be
circling back.
So let's circle back
to Giacometti.
We mentioned him only in passing
earlier, when we were talking
about surrealism and sculpture.
We weren't really talking
about sculpture.
This is a photograph
of Giacometti in his studio
on the left, from 1950 and again
on the right,
probably from around 1955.
We did mention, I did mention
fleetingly Giacometti
in reference to this work,
when we were upstairs
in the upper level,
talking about surrealism,
because this is a work
from 1935,
when he is part
of the surrealist circle.
It's called The Invisible
Object, Hands Holding The Void.
It's really one of his greatest
sculptures.
But it was the sculpture that
was already, by 1935, turning
him away from a lot
of surrealist ideas.
And his desire by this time
was that he wanted to return
to the human figure,
and to actually work
from the live model.
And of course, that would not
be allowed by Andre Breton.
So in 1935, Breton kicked
Giacometti out
of the surrealist circle.
And he did it
in a pretty rude way.
He invited Giacometti to--
and I think, if I'm not
mistaken,
I'd have to go back and look--
it was Giacometti's birthday.
And he said we were going
to have a party for you.
Show up here at this restaurant
at a certain time.
And when Giacometti showed up,
all of his friends
were on the dais,
and he was expelled.
So Andre Breton, The Pope,
expelled him.
And he had to leave,
and he was no longer a part
of surrealism.
Remember I mentioned to you
things like this, how he was
looking at all kinds,
in a typical surrealist fashion,
looking at all kinds
of disparate sources
in terms of, especially
here, gas masks
from the First World War.
So these are four
different types,
the American one, the French,
the British, and the German.
Each army had a slightly
different model.
And that clearly influenced
the figure's face here.
But this is 1935.
This is the '30s.
In many ways--
I mean, it's arguable--
but some people think
Giacometti's greatest sculptures
are actually the ones when he
was part of surrealism
in the '30s.
They're very aggressive.
They're very-- sometimes they
are a bit hostile.
A sculpture called A Woman
with Her Throat Cut.
They are sculptures that are
supposed to be on the floor.
They're aggressive.
They have points, and they're
very
aggressive in their iconography.
But he changes.
When he goes back to the model
after this surrealist period
is when he starts to produce
the works that maybe people are
most familiar with.
So here is The Chariot
from 1950, now, so we're later
in his career.
And this is when he returns
to modeling, working
from the human figure.
He is working often
from a model,
even though, of course, these
are very attenuated, obviously,
figures.
He's always an artist who was
interested in art history.
He was particularly
interested-- he's Swiss,
but he was
in the Italian-speaking part
of Switzerland,
and spent lots of time in Italy.
So he was
interested in Italian art,
Renaissance, et cetera,
but also going back to Etruscan
art.
And a lot of these figures
relate back to Etruscan art,
these tall, thin, attenuated
figures.
The use of the chariot, the idea
of wheels in sculpture,
of making something
appear or, in the case of David
Smith, something that will
actually be able to move using
wheels.
David Smith does it initially
because his things are so big,
he can't move them.
So he decides, well, what
the hell, I'll put it on wheels.
And then I can move it.
And then later he likes
that idea, and he starts
to incorporate it.
But the idea of vehicles,
wagons, chariots--
you see a lot of sculptors
dealing with this at this time.
Here's Kneeling Woman from 1956.
Most of these later works
are all from the '50s.
He is a traditionalist
in the sense
that he's modeling clay
and casting bronze.
He's not constructing.
He's not welding.
He's not using steel, I-beams,
et cetera, so he speaks
to the long tradition, which
many, many sculptors who were
his contemporaries in the '50s,
certainly,
were abandoning
that whole approach to sculpture
in favor
of constructed sculpture,
but not Giacometti.
This is Bust of Annette, Number
9 from 1964.
If you see, you can see back
here the background.
We have Giacometti
in the Abstract Expressionist
room, only because it's a space
issue.
Where exactly would we place
those?
For example, back here, he
is in the post-World War II
room, European art.
These are all Dubuffets.
But then some of the smaller
pieces we have in the Abstract
Expressionist room.
But we're not trying to say
he was
an abstract expressionist.
That was a more logistical kind
of decision.
Here again, you can see
the room.
This is one of his most famous
sculptures, The City Square
from 1948, '49.
If you really want to understand
sometimes what Giacometti was
doing,
how he was changing things,
all you need to do
is compare his figures
to somebody like Rodin.
So for example, I didn't bring
it in, because if I started
bringing in more slides,
I would talk longer.
But if you put this up
against The Burghers of Calais,
we've changed entirely.
The Burghers by Rodin, which you
can see at the Hirshhorn
in the Sculpture Garden,
is all heroic, monumental,
bigger than life, idealized.
It reflects Michelangelo, all
the great traditions,
the Greeks, the Romans.
Here, we have
these little, emaciated figures
walking through this plaza.
They're not communicating.
They're not interacting.
And this is why Giacometti is
often described as a kind
of existential sculptor.
He's coming of age
during the rise
of existentialism in France,
Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul
Sartre.
He knows these people.
He meets these people.
The greatest story is how he
meets Sartre.
It's in 1939.
Giacometti is
in a restaurant/bar in Paris.
He's by himself.
He's drinking.
And Sartre is at another table,
and they've never met.
But Sartre recognizes
that that's Giacometti.
And so he gets up
from the table, and goes over
to meet Giacometti.
And he introduces himself.
And then he says, could you pay
my bill, because I don't have
any money?
So Giacometti paid the bill.
And then they became
fast friends.
Some of the best essays
on Giacometti art,
catalog entries
from his exhibitions
during the '50s, '40s, '50s,
are written by Sartre.
He actually did set designs
for No Exit by Samuel Beckett,
for the play.
But that never materialized.
They were never used.
But he did set designs for that.
So these were his sort
of contemporaries.
And he does seem to speak
to that idea
of, in the post-war period,
this kind of isolation,
existentialism, questioning
of who we are,
where we've come from,
what's going to happen,
that kind of thing.
So everybody, or at least most
people,
tend to see these attenuated,
spindly, long figures as--
what's fascinating
is he's modeling.
So when you model,
it's an additive process.
You're building up something
in clay.
But the figures look
like they're disappearing.
It's a really interesting
juxtaposition, because modeling,
usually, you build up something.
It's additive.
It's not
subtractive like carving
marble--
so normally, something that's
bigger, getting bigger
and bigger.
In his case, he's modeling,
but the form looks like it's
getting thinner and thinner,
and kind of getting emaciated
and drawn out.
He has beautiful touch.
I mean, again, when you model,
you have to be somebody who
likes tactility.
Otherwise, you'll be Brancusi--
somebody who likes to get
your fingers in there.
And certainly Giacometti
is like that.
Did I give you the title
of this?
This is called The Forest
from 1950.
One of my favorite placements
that Harry did
was to place The Walking Man up
on the bridge.
So this is Giacometti's- Walking
Man Number Two from 1960.
And I'm showing you
two different times it was
photographed.
He's either walking
towards the Terrace Cafe
or he's walking away
from the Terrace Cafe.
So we've switched him.
Here, he's walking
towards the entrance
to the galleries.
Here, he's walking
towards the entrance
to the galleries, as well.
Here, he's coming
towards the cafe.
Here, this guy is walking
the opposite way.
This is one of the best kind
of interactive spaces
just to sit around and watch
people, kids, what they do
with the sculpture, and people,
et cetera.
It's really quite
a beautiful installation.
We're going to go back
outside for a minute to talk
about Henry Moore.
We've already alluded to him
when we were talking
about minimalism,
and how he was essentially--
most of the minimalists
like Tony Smith
and everybody kind of thought
what he was doing
was sort of dead and old
fashioned.
But nonetheless, he gets
a prominent location
at the National Gallery East
Building.
This was a commission
from the gallery for one
of the sculptures that would be
placed in front of the building,
although there's a long genesis
about different locations.
So this is where it is today.
It's titled Knife Edge Mirror
Two Piece from 1976, '78.
There was a long genesis
for this commission
as the building was being built,
and going up, and then
beyond the architecture,
starting to think about what
kind of sculptures
we might want to be associated
with the building.
So in 1973, Jay Carter Brown
wrote to Henry Moore.
And he was requesting
"A great Henry Moore
for the Pennsylvania facade."
Now, this is not
the Pennsylvania facade.
The Pennsylvania facade
is facing Pennsylvania Avenue.
It's where the Andy Goldsworthy
is today, if you are outside.
That's where they initially were
thinking.
And Pei had created a sculpture
pad for that area on that north
side.
And then he went on.
He was kind of trying to make
the case for Moore,
although Moore didn't need
a lot of convincing.
And then Carter Brown's letter
goes on to talk
about "The great symbolic way
joining the White House
with the Capitol and the Supreme
Court."
So he's saying, your sculpture
is going to be right facing
Pennsylvania Avenue, which
is this main artery connecting
all these great buildings.
Pei had already custom designed
the pedestal out there
on the north.
Moore accepted the commission
immediately.
There was no real debate.
But then he came here,
Moore did.
He visited and saw the building
in a semi sort
of complete state.
And now he did not like
that position.
He did not like the Pennsylvania
Avenue position.
That was north.
It got very poor light.
And so he said to Brown
and to Pei, I want a change
the plan here.
And he proposed putting it where
it is now, on this facade
here, where it would receive
direct sunlight.
And it would have a very
different kind of effect
than being on the north.
There was discussion about this,
but as obviously, it was decided
that that's what would happen.
Now, the first sculpture
that Moore was talking
about for the space
is not this sculpture.
It was a piece that's today
in North Carolina.
It was the Large Spindle Piece,
this piece.
That's what he was originally
going to use for the National
Gallery.
It was first cast in 1968.
But this version is cast in '74.
It's today at the North Carolina
Museum of Art in Raleigh.
And so when he arrives--
well, now Moore comes
to America.
And then Jay Carter Brown
goes to his studio in England.
And they start talking
about various aspects
of the commission.
And after Moore had seen
the building as it was going up,
of course, he made another--
not only that he wanted
to change the location.
This is a plasticine model.
So this is a model,
this whole thing, when they're
trying to figure out where
to put this thing,
and how it's going to look.
And what Moore now said was,
I don't want it to be in line
with the building.
I want it pushed out.
So I want that pad to pull
forward.
And at that point,
it was talking about a sort
of a pointed pad.
And of course, Moore's rationale
here was what everybody knew
about Henry Moore,
Jay Carter Brown, Pei, anybody
who had ever studied sculpture.
And that is he did not like
sculpture that was
subservient to architecture.
He did not want a sculpture that
was going to be
subservient to the building.
It had to break the plane
and come forward.
So this was the sculpture they
were considering.
So there was discussion
about that.
And eventually-- I'm not going
to go through all
the machinations--
Spindle Piece got thrown aside
in favor, now,
of a different piece, a version
of which Moore had already
installed in London
at Westminster near the Houses
of Parliament-- this piece.
This is Knife Edge Two Piece
from 1962--
'62, '65.
It's bronze.
It's at the Houses of Parliament
in Westminster, London.
So now there was a discussion
of changing Spindle, which
eventually was purchased
for North Carolina,
to this sculpture here.
But of course, Jay Carter Brown
didn't want a knock off.
He didn't want something that
was already somewhere else,
and we're just going to make it
bigger.
So he said to Moore,
OK, I like this sculpture.
I think it would work and all
of that.
They had another discussion.
But then he says in a letter
to Moore, he said that that's
a good choice, but "perhaps
modified sufficiently to make it
a unique piece."
He still wanted to be
a unique piece, not just
a bigger version.
And then he goes on to get sort
of poetic,
that his vision is
of a "golden form bathed
in the level rays of the sun.
What with the scale
and prominence of that location,
tied to an institution
of aesthetic purpose,
we may be onto something very
major."
So after that, it was decided
to have Moore tweak this,
enlarge it, but give it
a different kind of format.
And what Carter Brown was
particularly interested in
was "I want to see your touch
in the sculpture.
I want to make sure that you
have worked the surface."
And so that was something he was
sort of adamant about.
Here's the maquette
in his studio, in Moore's studio
on the left.
These are some print photos that
show Moore and Jay Carter Brown
talking about how it might look
and how it might be changed
here.
This is September 23, 1976,
these photos.
There are today three maquettes.
They're all different.
Two we have here at the gallery,
and one is at the Henry Moore
Foundation.
The one that's at the Henry
Moore Foundation is this one.
This is a plaster maquette that
shows the sections.
Because this was sand
cast in sections and then welded
together.
And this would have been
the maquette that would have
been used to enlarge
the sculpture using what were
these polystyrene forms
or molds for sand casting.
So this is at the Henry Moore
Foundation today.
These two we have here.
The one on the upper right
is plaster.
And it's pretty much a finished
maquette from, again,
these all date from '76, '77.
And then the one on the bottom
is actually a bronze,
but it's small.
And that's the sort of finished
bronze.
And here, what they were
concerned with also was patina--
what would the sort of finish
look like.
So here is Moore and Pei
and Brown when the work is being
delivered to be installed here.
This is, again, 1978.
Here it is.
The riggers hoisting it down
with this crane.
This is the pad, as you all know
now.
So he didn't win the fight
for pushing it way forward.
That ended up not happening.
Here's Henry Moore as the work's
being installed.
It was installed between May 10
and May 13, 1978.
This is a more recent
photograph.
The biggest problem
with maintaining the sculpture
is the patina.
And keeping the patina to what
Moore's original intentions
were.
The sculpture is obviously
exposed to the elements.
It gets all kinds of dirt
and crud.
People touch it.
We had it one time defaced.
Somebody took a key
and scratched something in it.
So there are lots of issues that
have to be dealt with.
So in August of 2014,
our conservators
did a major project, which was
to repatinate the sculpture.
So this was before.
And this was after.
And here's a little model that I
just showed you, that they're
looking at to make sure they can
get it somewhat.
So this took eight weeks
to do the repatination.
Some of you probably saw it
going on, because they did it,
obviously, outside and just
closed off the area.
But you could watch them
working.
There are a number of flaws
in the casting
of this sculpture,
in the fabrication
of the sculpture.
There were a lot of little dings
and things
that Moore was unhappy with,
Jay Carter Brown
was unhappy with.
But those things had to be
somewhat sort of minimized.
It did not get cast by Moore's
usual founder.
His usual foundry was
a German foundry.
But because they had
a tight deadline, he had it cast
by the Morris Singer Foundry,
which was an English foundry,
to save time.
So the deadline-- a lot
of things affected the outcome
of the sculpture.
But it has now become this sort
of iconic piece,
although it does, as we talked
about last time with minimalism,
it does have a little war going
on with the Tony Smith
The Snake is Out,
but I like that kind of tension.
Another sculptor represented--
and what's interesting here,
and I can't go through all
of this--
but when they were considering
Henry Moore for one
of the major sculptures
for the building, they were also
considering Dubuffet.
And Dubuffet had plans
for a large sculpture.
In fact, at one time
they were talking about having
Dubuffet do kind of one
of his famous sort
of installation-type things,
where you could walk in.
And today, these are very
famous.
They look like a kind of a fun
house for a kid.
But you can walk in it
and do all these things.
Eventually, Dubuffet falls
by the wayside.
But we now have a Dubuffet
that's on loan to us.
And it's this one here,
up on the terrace,
the mezzanine.
This is, to give you
the English title,
Behold the Man Sitting.
Here's the little guy sitting
here.
The rest of this
is supposed to be like trees
in a forest.
This begins, in this work,
he's conceived of initially
in '69.
This sculpture wasn't finished
until '84,
so it's part of a long process.
This work-- remember, we had
Dubuffet.
We talked about Dubuffet already
as Art Brut,
remember, all the stone
and stuff, and crushing up
things, and paste--
all of those
works that we already talked
about.
This is a completely different
Dubuffet now, later
in his career.
And he creates a series starting
in the '60s that runs
until the '70s.
And it's a weird series.
That goes by a French name
called Hourloupe.
H-O-U-R-L-O-U-P-E.
There's a lot of discussion
about the origins of this word,
what it means.
One story that I had always
learned, but now I don't think
it's true, is that these are
the Dubuffet works that show
red, white,
and blue sort of forms
interlocked.
And one story that you will
still read is that this came
to him one day when he was
on the telephone.
He had a pad on the wall,
and he had one of those pens
that had three
different points--
you know, a red point,
a blue point.
And he was kind of doodling.
That's not true.
What the term Hourloupe,
it actually came from a book
that he saw.
It was a kind of, not a comic
book, but a cheap publication
that used this term,
and had illustrations.
And the illustrations were all
of these little caricatured kind
of red, and white,
and blue sort of figures.
And it had the word "hourloupe,"
which in the book was jargon.
It was jargon.
The book was written in jargon.
And so this term was used
by the author
to talk about things that roar
or hoot or howl.
So it was kind of a chaos,
I guess.
And so that's really what was
the genesis of this kind
of chaotic puzzle-like forms
that spread out, and become
other things.
This is made from plastic resin.
Of course, today, much like
Henry Moore, every major city
in the world
has a Dubuffet somewhere--
outside,
huge, public sculptures,
but very different from where
Dubuffet started.
You'll recall when we were
talking about minimalism
and talking about the building,
I danced around this big form
here, which kind of blocks
the view of the building.
And now it's time to talk
about that, because this is
the great sculpture by Frank
Stella that's located
on that part of the campus.
It's got a great title, Prince
Frederick Von Hamburg, ein
Schauspiel, which means
"a play."
Oh, I forgot, Three Acts
after that.
It dates from 1998 to 2001.
It's stainless steel, aluminum,
painted fiberglass, and carbon
fiber all together.
Stella is often thought
of as a kind of precursor
to minimalism, what we call
those "pinstripe paintings" that
were very flat and geometric,
and dealt with a lot of ideas
that were attractive later
to the minimalists--
extreme reductionism, et cetera.
That's a phase in Stella.
And then eventually, he gets
tired of all that geometry,
and reduction, and economy.
And he starts doing pieces
that we have in the East
Building that you've seen,
probably-- the big wall pieces
that come off the wall.
And they're very explosive,
and colorful, and much more
Baroque.
And from those wall pieces,
it was logical that eventually,
he would get to this, where he
would just take the figures
off the wall,
and start doing them
as freestanding sculptures.
So there is this progression
in Stella, ultimately, to a work
like this.
This was not commissioned
for the Sculpture Garden.
At one point, it was thought
to put it in the Sculpture
Garden.
Then they realized it's too
big for the Sculpture Garden.
It would overtake and overshadow
everything else.
So what this is about is,
unlike the rigors of his earlier
geometry,
it's all about movement,
and curvilinear shapes,
and things morphing
into other things, and twisting,
and turning.
In fact, it seems like it's
an incredibly unstable
sculpture.
It has these various fiber wires
and things.
Again, it's
interesting against the geometry
of the building here, so that it
creates a very different effect.
This title, which I'm not going
to repeat, comes from a play,
an 18th century play
by a German playwright named
Heinrich von Kleist.
And it was a play about love
and war.
So it was a play that was all
about the turmoil of love
and war,
and kind of a certain chaos
of the time.
Couple of other views, when it
works against the Capitol
Building.
Now on the campus, that
is to say, outside the building,
we have a lot of sculptures.
And we've talked about some
of them already.
But certainly, Calder
is on the outside,
as well as on the inside
of the building.
But here's one that we recently
moved down to the transition
area between the East and West
Buildings and the concourse.
This is Obus, O-B-U-S from 1972.
I'm still looking into this,
and I didn't have time
to go even deeper,
but often Calder's titles are
plays on words.
He might change a word,
or have it be something
different.
So on one hand, this title,
Obus, O-B-U-S, perhaps it could
just be a play on the word
"opus".
An artist has opus, a work,
that kind of thing.
But I actually think it relates
to this.
And this is a type
of French military shell,
artillery shell during the First
World War.
And they were called an Obus.
So this projectile idea here,
I think it's actually probably
a reference.
He'd spent a lot of time
in France, and was certainly
familiar with things like this.
I think it might relate to that,
although it seems much more
playful, obviously, than it does
sinister.
We recently moved this.
It used to be outside the East
Building.
It wasn't so recent, I guess,
and now it's outside the West
Building on Seventh Street.
So this is Calder's work called
Tom's, T-O-M apostrophe S
from 1974,
and then The Red Horse, Cheval
Rouge on the right,
which is in the Sculpture Garden
from '74.
Of course, Calder
is instrumental in developing
two types of sculpture,
the mobile--
things that move,
although that name was given
to the sculptures
not by Calder but by Marcel
Duchamp.
He came up with that term,
"mobile," in the '30s.
And then the stabile.
Mobiles are mobile.
They move.
Stabiles are stable.
They stay in place.
So these are two what we would
call stabiles here.
They're abstract, of course.
They refer to a number
of things, of course.
Here are two horses.
And these are both lovely works,
because they have great rhythm.
He's constructing here.
So he's taking big sheets
of metal, cutting it.
Sometimes it's welded.
Other times it's used
with rivets, to just form
the plates together.
He's not interested, as he would
say repeatedly,
he wasn't
interested in public sculpture
or large-scale sculpture that
sort of had
a great political or social
statement to make.
So he said at one point,
"I want to make things that are
fun to look at,
that have no propaganda value
whatsoever."
So he's
interested
in the formal language of color,
shape, movement, and especially
drawing with his wire
sculptures.
So here's the great work, as you
all know, that was commissioned
for the gallery in '78,
the great mobile that's
untitled.
So the formal title is Untitled,
from 1976, because he did not
live to see this installed.
And the last thing he always did
after a sculpture was completed
was to give it a title.
That was the last thing.
But he didn't title this work.
So this was commissioned
for the opening
for the building,
and installed in '76, completed
in '76, installed.
This is the maquette that hangs
today in the Calder Tower.
So this is the small model
that he presented to I M Pei
and to Jay Carter Brown
to show what he was thinking
about for the atrium.
So you can see that today when
you go into the Sculpture Tower.
And of course, that's very
important, because this is
much like the Henry Moore,
this went through a lot
of change,
and discussion and things,
especially about its weight.
When it was first being
conceived of, the scale that he
was conceiving of it,
it's over 85 feet across.
It weighed in at two tons, 4,000
pounds.
And of course, that wasn't going
anywhere.
That wasn't going to be turning
in the wind
unless you had a hurricane.
So that defeated
the whole purpose of a mobile,
if it's not going to be mobile.
So at this point is when they
brought in somebody else.
It's this guy here.
And this was, of course, Paul
Matisse.
Paul Matisse was the grandson
of Henri Matisse.
His father was Pierre Matisse,
who had the gallery in New York.
But Paul Matisse hadn't been
involved in the art world
so much.
He was an engineer.
And he was
an aerodynamic engineer.
He'd worked on jet planes
and all of that.
So he was brought in to see
if there could be some way
that they could still have
the scale, and all the things
that they wanted, but see
if this thing could move,
and actually sort of rotate
around based
on the currents of the wind.
So it was through Matisse's
engineering that, as I said,
the weight dropped from two tons
to 920 pounds, which now allows
it to sort of be a mobile.
So here they are, everybody.
This is Pei, Calder, Jay Carter
Brown, Paul Mathias, Jay Carter
Brown, Calder.
And this
is the important photograph,
because here is where Matisse is
showing this panel.
And this is what he came up
with.
It was a new kind
of aerodynamic panel used
for wings of airplanes that was
aluminum sandwiched with a kind
of synthetic waffle
kind of material in the center.
So here you can see it's
a cross-section.
He's showing them what's
in the center of this panel.
So it wouldn't be steel now.
And once they started crunching
the numbers, as I said,
the weight dropped remarkably.
There were
other interesting things.
It was calculated, as you know,
if you stand up on the mezzanine
or the upper level,
one of those,
it comes precariously close
to this one corner.
In fact, you could reach up
and touch it at that point.
And that was, again,
a discussion.
Because in fact, Calder at one
point said, "I would kind of
like if it banged into things."
But that was not approved by Jay
Carter Brown.
So it's
one of the great, great works
of Calder.
It's kind of a summation
of his career.
About the title, of course,
he was at the last years
of his life here.
And he talked about titles.
And he said, "You don't name
a baby until it is born."
But unfortunately, he died
a year before this was hoisted
up into its location.
And that took place on November
18, 1977.
Here is when it's being
installed.
So it comes packaged, all
the various parts.
The building isn't even
finished, parts of it.
These are the riggers
on the outside, where it's going
to be secured from the roof.
So this was one
of the great commissions
for the gallery
that sort of defines today,
probably defines the atrium.
Most people know this sculpture.
But there were others.
The Ledge Piece-- Anthony Caro
was commissioned to do the piece
on the ledge that's above
the entrance to the library
and to the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts .
So this is the piece
on the right.
It's called The National Gallery
Ledge Piece.
That's his formal title
from 1978.
When he was working on this idea
for the ledge, he did a sketch,
much like Pei did a very quick
sketch about the building
itself.
And what he had at hand
was a donut box.
So one of his first sketches
is this donut box that he used,
and then he gave it to us.
So now we have it in our archive
here, showing what he was
thinking about.
Now compare it to Henry Moore.
Of course, we have
a major difference here,
obviously.
And now this is more in keeping
with what the state of sculpture
was in the '50s, '60s, certainly
the '70s,
and that is now turning
to welded steel,
to construction, not to casting
bronze, not to carving stone.
Those were considered
by many sculptors
to be sort of old traditions
that had sort of fallen
by the wayside, which means,
of course, if you're going to do
this now,
instead of knowing how
to manipulate clay
or to carve marble,
you have to know how to weld.
So most of these sculptors
learned how to weld.
And that becomes
an important part
of their technique.
Believe me,
there are good welders
and there are bad welders.
My father was a welder,
so I know.
And so when you look at--
I'm always looking at the way he
runs the bead.
Oh, gosh, that's beautiful,
things like that.
Most people don't care
about that, as long as it
doesn't fall apart.
So what he creates here
is this cyclone, almost,
of material that's all welded.
Here he is installing it.
This is Caro here
with his assistants
installing the piece
Caro actually studied
and started with Henry Moore.
He was Henry Moore's assistant,
and then he basically moved away
from the traditions that Moore
was practicing-- carving,
casting, modeling--
towards welded steel.
Moore never learned how to weld,
had no interest in welding.
But Caro certainly did.
So here he is making some tweaks
to it.
It's abstract.
It's from industrial materials.
It's welded.
It's large scale.
It, again, speaks
to the geometry of the building,
which is so severe, as we've
talked about.
But now you have
this cyclonic kind of metal,
metallic sort of forms that are
coming especially off the edge.
One of the reasons he gets
this commission is because he
was interested in edge
and ledge,
pushing sculpture
right to the end of something,
and then having it,
even though it's welded--
this isn't like rubber
or something--
it comes off the edge.
And we have one
of his small table pieces here.
This is Table Piece-- got to do
my Roman numerals here--
70.
Is L 50?
Yes, LXX, Table Piece
LXX from 1968.
I love this sculpture.
I especially like this part
here, because it makes it look
almost organic, like it's kind
of moving,
like it has
a kind of a inner life.
So Caro is, of course,
introduces us, at least
in this context, to welding.
But Caro is not the great--
well, he's a great, he's good.
But a great welder, and the guy
we always think about,
is, of course, American.
And it's David Smith.
David Smith is, of course,
an American legend.
He's an icon.
And here he is at his studio
and house in Bolton Landing
in upstate New York, 1958.
We can't do justice to David
Smith, because he's just
too important and too prolific,
even though he has a very short
life, because he dies in a car
crash.
He's born in Indiana, Decatur,
Indiana.
His mother was a schoolteacher.
His father was a telephone
engineer.
And in fact, one of the things
that used to happen a lot when
David Smith was small,
he seemed to have this interest
already in building
and constructing
and deconstructing things.
He used to always take
the telephones apart
in their house.
But he didn't know how to put
them back together again.
So he was already--
just like we had Tony Smith
taking his medicine boxes
and building things,
it was a similar kind of thing
with David Smith.
So he's born in Indiana,
but they moved to Ohio in 1921.
He goes to the Cleveland Art
School, which is today
the Cleveland Institute of Art.
He goes for a year
to Ohio University in Athens,
Ohio.
He drops out of school in '25,
and he works as a welder
in a Studebaker factory.
Remember the Studebaker?
An automobile factory, so this
is where he learns to weld.
And he can do all kinds of--
there's different kinds
of welding,
Heliarc and other things.
He can do it all.
And he learns this working
in the factory.
It also confronts him with all
this industrial material--
big pieces of metal and things
that he falls in love with.
He moves to New York,
takes classes at the Art
Students League.
He studies
with some interesting people,
starts to learn
about abstraction, Cubism,
all of that.
Early in his work,
he is sort of looking at found
objects.
But the most important event,
I guess, is when he meets John
Graham.
John Graham is a friend
of Gorky's.
I've talked about John Graham
in the past, Gorkys
and Dekoonings.
John Graham was a kind of-- and
Stuart Davis.
They were kind of all leftists.
But when he meets John Graham,
John Graham asks him if he's
seen the welded sculptures
by Julio Gonzales and Picasso.
And at that point, he really
didn't know about those.
So once he sees what Picasso
and Gonzales had been doing
creating sculpture now that was
welded, he determines
that that's the route he wants
to take.
By the way, Picasso didn't know
how to weld until Gonzales
taught him to weld.
So the guy who's the most
important in welding,
in that sense, is Gonzales, who
teaches Picasso.
And then both of those guys
influenced David Smith.
So he settles into a studio
in '34 that he titles Terminal
Iron Works.
It's basically a foundry studio
in Brooklyn,
and begins to produce until he
moves to Bolton Landing,
begins to produce this huge body
of work.
Of course, the great tragedy
is that he's killed in a car
accident in 1965
at the age of 59.
He was on his way
to Bennington College.
And he was in a car wreck.
Now, we have added
some sculptures for the opening
of the East Building
that come from the David Smith
estate.
Technically, we don't own them,
but they're on a long-term loan.
And one that I can't even find
the photograph of-- because we
don't necessarily photograph
these if we don't own them,
but I found another version--
is this one.
We have this in black.
It's like, would you like this
in black?
We have this in black.
And that's the one I showed you
against the Franz Kline painting
that I thought was such
a beautiful.
But this is the one that's
in the Whitney in blue.
It's called Blue Construction
from 1938.
It's sheet metal
and baked enamel,
with a baked enamel finish.
Notice the date-- '38.
This is when Smith is becoming
influenced by surrealism.
So Smith is looking
at Giacometti's work
from the '30s and others.
And what he's fascinated with,
and what he likes,
is the aggressiveness,
the spindly, pointy things,
things that look like they could
pierce you or hurt you, cut you,
something you don't necessarily
want to rub your hands over,
that kind of thing.
So this is a good example
of that '30s kind of sculpture.
But this is the '60s.
And this work is on loan to us
now.
It's placed in the atrium.
It's called Black White Forward
from 1961.
So again, this comes
from the David Smith Estate
or Foundation.
I'm not sure how long we'll have
these sculptures.
But it was for the opening
of the building.
Smith is very interested--
believe it or not, he always
thought of himself first
and foremost as a painter.
He did start as a painter.
And so when it came
to sculpture,
he started thinking
about painting sculpture.
And this is a big part
of his motivation.
He takes these.
He's welding, of course.
He's cutting
big industrial pipe,
and other things,
flanges, et cetera.
And this is on wheels, notice
here.
And then he was concerned
with how color might affect
our perception.
Sometimes, you look at a David
Smith work
from a particular point of view,
it looks totally flat.
You think you're looking
at a painting.
And then you walk around.
All of a sudden, all
these things are projecting
that you never even realized.
It's really quite remarkable.
So this work we have
at the moment.
But the works that we've always
had--
I'm not showing you all
of them-- this is Circle Number
One on the left from 1962.
We have three of these.
They were a series, of course.
And they are painted.
And then in the Sculpture
Garden, one of the sculptures--
well, we just moved one up onto
the roof terrace, which
I'll show you in a second--
this is the Cubi series, Cubi
XXVI.
It's Roman numerals again,
from 1965.
This might be his most famous
series.
It's stainless steel.
He does this series
in the late '60s.
He's working in Bolton Landing,
up in upstate New York,
where there's a big winter.
And he thinks all-- he always
believed his sculpture worked
best outside.
And where he particularly liked
it was when it was shown
in the wintertime.
So all these photographs
of David Smith
with his sculpture--
he put all these sculptures out
on his land, so he could sit
and look at all of his babies
out there.
And in the wintertime,
these works particularly
are magnificent, because they
reflect the light of the snow.
He's also doing something here
that you hadn't seen earlier.
And he's manipulating a grinder.
So an industrial grinder
has a big sort of a disk.
And you use two hands.
So again, these are new tools,
new techniques.
I have to know how to weld.
I have to know how to solder.
I have to know how to bolt.
I have to know how to use
a grinder--
all of these things.
Not everybody is cut out
for that.
He works in series.
And each series speaks
to a different goal.
So the Sentinel series is here
on the left.
This is Sentinel Number One
from 1956.
Sentinels are just what they
sound like.
They're sentinels.
They're lookouts.
So he's thinking
of a human figure.
He's almost always thinking
of a human figure.
By the way, he once said, I
don't make girl sculptures.
I just make boy sculptures.
So this is like a sentinel
looking out.
And where he would place these
in Bolton Landing
was on the tops of hills.
So they were scouts.
They were sentinels, sort
of looking out.
He opens up the space here.
I mean, he does
magnificent things with iron
and steel, the way he bends it,
the way he cuts it,
the way welds it.
So this is a whole series.
We have Sentinel Number One.
The other series that came out
of a trip to Italy is called
the Voltri series, V-O-L-T-R-I.
And that's this cart here.
Re member,we just talked about
Giacometti with The Chariot?
Well, when Smith was invited
to Italy for the Festival
of the Two Worlds at Spoleto,
he became very interested
in similar things-- chariots
and Roman, Greek art.
So this is Voltri Number Seven,
which is like a little chariot.
These are figures.
They're riding here
on the chariot.
And I'll come back to that
in a second,
because when he's in Voltri,
and when he goes to Spoleto,
this is one of the most famous
moments in 20th century
sculpture.
This is the amphitheater
at Spoleto during an exhibition.
This is the reason he was
invited to Italy,
was to participate
in an exhibition
during the Festival of the Two
Worlds
that was called "Sculpture
in the City, Festival of Two
Worlds."
So that was the exhibition.
And he was invited to contribute
one sculpture
for the exhibition.
It ran from June to September
of 1962.
And when he came to Italy,
they put him up in this welding
factory.
It had been used to weld
railroad cars and things,
and they said, you can have this
as your studio.
And it was filled with scrap
iron.
I mean, it was filled
with flanges, and wheels,
and I-bars, and everything.
It was like he was a kid
in a candy store.
He couldn't believe it.
And they just said, here,
you can use this space.
They didn't clean it out
or anything.
And so he went crazy.
First of all, he was in Italy
now.
He started looking
at great sculpture
from the past in Italy,
et cetera, et cetera.
So he has to turn out
one sculpture for this festival.
And the great legend, myth--
it's not a myth.
It's what he did.
He turned out 26 sculptures
in 30 days.
Then he said, I kind of
got carried away.
I know I was only supposed to do
one.
But the organizers
of the festival
were caught unaware.
They were, oh, my god, what are
we going to do with these?
And they said, OK, look--
we're going to give you
a separate show.
And you're going to take over
the amphitheater.
There's our sculpture, right
there, Voltri.
So they said, OK, you're not
going to show with the rest
of these people.
We're going to give you
the amphitheater.
And you can fill it up
with all 26 of your sculptures.
And that's what he did.
What this is, is if you recall--
those of you old enough and have
been coming here--
when the gallery first opened
in 1978, we had the Tower
Gallery.
And this is what the tower
looked like, in part.
But we did a show called
"American Art at Mid-Century,
the Subjects of the Artist"
from June '78 to January of '79.
And David Smith figured very
prominently in that.
And it was decided to devote
the tower to him,
and to recreate the effect
of this.
So they built all these risers
here.
We built all those
for his sculptures.
And it was a tribute back
to this great event here.
There were 13 David Smith
sculptures in that exhibition.
Again, in talking
about materials, techniques,
approaches, we've got so many
different people doing so many
different things.
They're welding.
they're carving.
They're casting.
They're modeling, constructing.
So now we have Isamu Noguchi
here, very famous photograph
here of Noguchi
by Arnold Newman.
And this was in his studio
on McDougal.
It wasn't a street.
It was an alley, McDougal Alley
in New York City.
This photograph is from 1947.
And this is the great Noguchi
we have in the atrium, The Great
Rock of Inner Seeking from 1974.
It's a big basalt sculpture.
Noguchi is great.
He's fascinating.
There were so many great things
happening in New York,
and these people are all kind
of intertwined.
He's good friends with Gorky,
and all kinds of things.
But he was born in Los Angeles.
He wasn't born in New York.
He was born in Los Angeles.
His mother was American.
His father was Japanese.
And actually, he was raised
in Japan for roughly
the first 13 years of his life.
He entered Columbia University,
but to study medicine, pre-med.
And he was taking sculpture
classes sort of in the evenings,
as just something to sort of
pass his time.
But then he decided, I don't
think I want to be a doctor.
I think I want to be a sculptor,
actually.
And so he started to study
sculpture.
In 1926, he saw an exhibition
by Brancusi in New York City.
And that changed his life.
When he saw Brancusi sculptures,
that changed him profoundly.
He got a Guggenheim fellowship,
and he went to Paris.
And he was there from '27
to '29.
And the first stop he made
was to Brancusi's studio.
And Brancusi took him
on as an assistant.
So he comes out of Brancusi's
studio.
He loved everything
about Brancusi and about what he
was doing, the abstraction,
the way he dealt with materials,
et cetera.
Comes back to New York.
His first retrospective was not
until the '60s, '68
at the Whitney
is his first retrospective.
The other thing he's most famous
for-- and if you haven't seen
these, you should look them up--
in the '40s, late '30s,
throughout the whole
of the '40s,
he worked with Martha Graham
on the sets
for her different ballets.
And the ones that are--
they're all incredible.
They're all very abstract.
They're all very Spartan.
But he did the sets
for Frontier, 1935, Herodiade
in 1944, Appalachian Spring
in 1944.
And one of the greatest
is Cave of the Heart from 1946.
Those are all Martha Graham
dances, ballets, that he did
the sets for.
He had a very close relationship
with her.
Now, he's Japanese, and has
a certain Eastern sensibility.
Now we come back to the guy
I introduced when we talked
about minimalism,
and we were talking about zen,
and about the influence
of the thought of one
particular individual, D. T.
Suzuki.
Here, is John Cage with Suzuki
here, and this is Suzuki here.
He died in 1966.
Suzuki had a huge impact.
I mentioned this.
I just alluded to it last time.
For example, he was very
influential on the Beat poets,
on Ginsburg, Kerouac.
They all talked to him.
He was influential on John Cage,
Merce Cunningham.
They all met with him,
and sort of talked zen with him.
He was influential on Noguchi,
certainly.
Cage was probably the man who
really was the conduit
that other artists followed,
because he actually took
the very first seminars
at Columbia
that Suzuki offered about zen.
And he loved everything
about what Suzuki was talking
about-- process-oriented art
and music, all the things
that Cage and Cunningham kind of
explored.
A lot of it comes from Suzuki.
In 1931, Noguchi made
a pilgrimage to zen temples
and gardens throughout Japan.
He went to all
of the famous temples
and gardens.
And he started to steep himself
in the philosophy of zen.
He came back from that trip,
and would have, from that point
forward, a lifelong engagement
with the principles
and philosophy of zen.
He was never a practicing
Buddhist.
He didn't go that far,
but he would bring so many zen
ideas into his sculptures.
For example, zen emphasizes
the physical importance
of the thing itself.
That rock itself is significant,
not what we necessarily do
to that rock.
The danger of falling in love
with the idea of perfection,
seeking perfection or symmetry,
when in fact, sometimes
the greatest thing is the flaw,
the one thing that's not
perfect in the particular piece
of material, et cetera.
It strengthened in him the idea
of dualities in art.
We've seen this already,
because that also was coming
from other sources--
good, bad, et cetera.
When he works on sculpture,
very often what you sense
about Noguchi is that he's not
so much--
let's say he's carving-- he's
not so much carving with an idea
as much as he's just trying
to find something
in there that's already there.
You know what I'm saying?
It's a different kind
of mentality.
Here is the sculpture arriving.
This was done for the opening
here.
So here are the guys bringing it
in.
That's the back-- well, really,
it does have a front and a back,
but not so much, really.
Talking about all
of this, Noguchi talking
about zen and that,
he said at one point,
"I don't think that art comes
from art.
A lot of artists apparently
think so.
I think it comes
from the awakening person."
So it's coming
from your own awakening
to something.
Now, this sculpture, The Great
Rock of Inner Seeking--
first of all, the title,
I think, reflects what I just
said--
that you're not so much carving
it as you're kind of looking
for something.
You're seeking something
inside it.
He was fascinated
with astronomy,
and with the moon,
and lunar themes.
So one of the reasons that he
seems to have liked basalt
as a material-- you don't find
basalt very often--
certainly marble, granite-- is
because it seemed to have
a kind of,
to his way of thinking,
it was like a moon rock.
And it had particular elements
to it.
It was an igneous rock.
It had iron.
It had what's called augite,
black augite.
It had color.
It weathered
in an interesting way.
So in other words, it was a rock
or stone, basalt, that could
surprise you.
You could find a color,
or a sparkle, or something
that you weren't planning for.
And he tends to work
with this big sort
of boulder-like configuration,
sort of a single,
almost a kind of totemic kind
of form.
So when you look at this kind
of work, you are certainly
sensitive to that kind of zen
spiritual importance
of the material itself, and not
so much being manipulated
by the artist, but being kind of
brought forward or elicited.
Now we come to them
we're one of the more
recent works, Andy Goldsworthy,
of course, who we commissioned
to do the great work now
that's in the atrium,
and goes off the atrium
into the little--
used to be a garden.
This is Andy Goldsworthy, who
was born in England, 1956.
And he's standing on the work
that we own now called Roof
from 2004 to 2005.
That's all slate.
And it's made from Buckingham
Virginia slate, which
is the slate that was used
in the Smithsonian Castle.
So he had that same quarry
reopen, to quarry all the slate
for this work.
He is an artist, of course, who
has been very celebrated
in the last 20 years or so.
He's very much concerned
with the environment,
with art that relates
to the environment, both rural
and urban.
He's an artist who is very
concerned
with ephemeral sculpture
or ephemeral effects,
working in nature to create
works that will not last.
So he does works in snow,
icicles, tree branches.
And these things over time
are going to disappear.
He photographs them.
There's a kind
of a photographic documentation,
but the works themselves will be
lost to us.
He wants to work
with natural materials.
So this is not a guy who welds
steel.
He wants to use, whenever
he's working somewhere on site--
in this case, he was working
in Washington--
he tries to use
indigenous native materials.
So the Virginia quarry where
the slate had come
for the Smithsonian,
for the castle, he went back
to use that quarry again
for Roof.
So here it is.
The best way to see this work
is to go up a level,
and then look down.
So you can see these oculi,
these opening, which are very
important holes.
They're very
important to-- domes
are important, but holes are
equally important.
His MFA show was essentially
an illusionistic hole
in the floor of the gallery.
And people actually thought
it was a hole, and they thought
they could fall into this thing.
But in fact, it wasn't.
So he's very interested.
And you'll notice
this blackness.
When he came here, we gave him
the run of the campus.
You can put the sculpture
wherever you want.
And so he went everywhere,
and looked, and monitored
the light.
He came over a course of a year.
What's the fall light like?
What's the spring light
like, et cetera.
He took this, decided he wanted
this garden.
This used to be--
actually, it was
a Japanese garden a long time
ago.
He wanted this space,
and that was fine.
This is north.
This is where Henry Moore didn't
want a sculpture.
This is the north.
That's Pennsylvania Avenue
out there.
So one of the things he was
concerned about was the light,
and in reference
to these openings.
Because no matter what time
of the year, or what time
of day, or where you are,
if it's raining or sunny or--
these never change.
They're always totally
black and opaque.
And this is what he wanted.
He wanted-- it almost looks
like a velvety opaqueness.
It never changes.
It never changes.
And he calculated that.
He sat in this space,
like for a year,
just looking at the sun, and all
of that.
Of course, it's a dome.
So his thought was, my gosh,
this is a city
filled with domes.
There is the dome of the West
Building.
There is the Capitol Dome.
There's even paintings of domes
in this building, which
is Panini's Interior
of the Pantheon from 1734.
The dome refers to "domus"
in Latin, to house.
The title of the work
is Roof, a roof over a house.
It has that connotation,
certainly.
But he grows up surrounded
in England, and in Ireland,
and in Scotland,
by things like this.
So this is in the Dingle
Peninsula here on Kerry island.
It's what are called clochans,
C-L-O-C-H-A-N.
They're a dry-stone hut that go
through the landscape of a good
chunk of Ireland.
They have these corbelled roofs,
exactly like our work does.
Corbelled roof means you start
at a level like this,
and you just keep moving bricks
in progressively.
So there's no mortar.
You're not cementing or fixing
things.
You just keep moving a layer
in as you go from the bottom
to the top.
We're not sure of the dates
on these structures
with any certainty.
Some people date them as late as
700, other people not so much.
This is a wall, obviously,
from Northwest England,
from Cumbria.
And it's a Cumbrian wall.
And of course, his assistance
for creating the work that we
have, he brought wallers
with him.
So he brought, I think there
were six, five or six wallers
to come with him,
who broke these pieces.
Because that's how
they build walls.
So you just take a piece
of slate.
And you don't even have to have
a hammer.
Usually, you take another piece
of slate, and you just break it.
And then you stack it.
So that's what these guys did.
That's what they do
for a living.
They build walls like that one.
The only piece that had any kind
of machine tooling,
shall we say,
is the very last piece he's
going to drop on the top
where that oculus is.
And he wanted to-- he ground.
He used the grinder to just
grind around that.
But we have a great photograph.
This guy may still be inside.
He's ready.
Here's [INAUDIBLE].
He's ready to drop
this top piece on.
So obviously, somebody is inside
photographing up here.
The thing, of course,
you see they're all wearing
gloves here-- it's not so much
because you don't want your oil
on this.
It's because this stuff is so
sharp.
You can cut yourself.
So here's just another view.
Another sculptor, again,
represented
throughout our collection,
is Louise Bourgeois.
We just did a show on her work,
I don't know, maybe two years
ago.
She is fascinating from a number
of points of view.
Here she is on the left
in her studio in New York
around 1946.
She had a studio
on East 18th street in New York,
and another studio photograph
a little bit later, probably
the '60s, on the right.
Of course Louise Bourgeois' work
is fascinating.
First of all, there's
no material she doesn't like.
So she has sculpture in almost
any kind of material
you can think of,
she's done a sculpture in it.
And she's learned to understand
the nature of materials
in that particular way.
Of course, she has the overlay
of being thought of as someone
whose imagery is so focused
on female, not just
female-- female and male
sexuality and sexual themes,
but also tied strongly
to her autobiography,
to childhood trauma and events
that so scarred her that she
never quite got over them.
And the way she did get over
them, or at least deal
with them,
was to turn those fears
and concerns into works of art
that would sort of exorcise some
of these demons.
So at one point she says, "I
became a sculptor because it
allowed me to express--
this is terribly, terribly
important--
what I was
embarrassed to express before."
So things that she didn't want
to deal with in a more
conventional way,
she felt she could do
as a sculptor.
And the biggest issue
was her relationship
with her father.
Her father was, I guess to use
an old word, a philanderer,
and had had affairs
with a number of women.
But the one that was the worst
was when she was young,
they had hired
an English governess
to be her tutor, her teacher.
And unbeknownst to her
until later, her father
had a 10-year affair
with this woman
while she was in the house,
teaching Louise Bourgeois.
This was a betrayal,
I don't know, that Bourgeois
never quite was able to deal
with.
And so she is thought
of sometimes as a feminist.
She hates that term.
She relates to it,
but also defers from it.
But in any case,
this relationship
with her father led to a work
in 1974.
It was called Destruction
of the Father.
And what it was was a table.
And there were all
these biomorphic, kind
of organic forms
that were in latex that were
on the table.
And then it came out of what she
called a childhood fantasy
of going to dinner,
the dinner table with her family
members.
And that these were all--
that her father was
on the table.
And they chopped them up,
and then they ate him.
So that was the meal-- taking
her father,
chopping him up into all
these organic, gooey forms,
and then consuming his body
parts.
She continued to rail
against her father.
He had an explosive temper.
He was domineering.
He tended to embarrass her
in public.
I mean, there's a whole litany
of things.
She has a very successful
career.
In 1993, she represents
the United States at the Venice
Biennale.
So her work became very highly
regarded.
These are works we have.
Winged Figure on the left
from '48 and Spring on the right
from '49.
The Winged Figure is a bronze,
but there's also
a wooden version.
But we have a cast bronze
version.
And Spring is painted balsa
wood.
Lots of influences, and you can
sense already that she is
influenced by totemic forms,
by sort of primitive forms,
the totem pole,
shaman-related things,
the rattle, and all these things
that are part of ritual, part
of what we sometimes call
primitive cultures.
There is, though, another,
concept at work here very often.
I talked about duality
with Noguchi.
A lot of artists
were confronting this idea
of totem.
And they had seemed to have all
read Freud's book, Totem
and Taboo from 1913.
This is very important to David
Smith, who did a whole series
of sculptures
called Tank Totems.
And what Freud writes about
is this idea that a totem,
on the one hand,
it's an object of desire.
We want to possess it.
But on the other hand,
it is an object of prohibition.
We're not allowed to possess it,
because it's taboo.
So it's both totem and taboo.
And this plays into any kind
of discussion
for many of these artists--
Smith, but especially
Bourgeois-- with sexuality,
this sort
of love/hate relationship
with sexuality, with the body,
her own body, sexuality, trauma,
anxiety.
These are the themes she sort
of deals with.
Her work is in everything--
wood, bronze, marble, steel,
rubber, fabric.
And most of it
deals with some kind
of childhood memory.
So she creates these things that
look almost like wands,
or scepters,
or things that can ward off
or deal with evil sometimes.
This is a very Brancusi-like
idea.
It's like the Bird in Space
opened up his wings.
So it has a similar kind of feel
to it.
This is Mortise on the left
from 1950, painted wood,
and Untitled on the right
from 1952.
You know a mortise and tenon
idea.
So you have something
like a brick, but it's cut out
in the center
so something else fits into it.
And you can stack these things.
In some ways, this is kind
of primitive minimalism.
She's just stacking forms.
But because it's a mortise
joining something else,
it's a relationship.
There's a relationship here
that she's very often referring
to in an abstract way.
It's a kind of a contingency
idea, again.
Something else
is dependent on something else.
Again, I don't want to get off
the track here, but maybe I was
overly dependent on my father.
I expect something that I didn't
get, who knows what.
But I'm just saying there's
that idea here.
She had her problems
with her mother, as well.
But they-- I mean, it was kind
of an--
they were equal opportunity
offenders.
Actually they weren't,
because she was closer
to her mother than her father.
And her mother-- you'll
read sometimes that her mother
was a weaver, tapestry.
That's not true.
But what her mother did
do was to-- she had a job.
She came from the great tapestry
region of France,
and she was raised
with tapestries.
And she had a job where she
would cut out and repair
tapestries.
So it wasn't so
much about weaving or sewing.
It was about cutting.
Louise Bourgeois actually does
a series of works that are
scissors, that are a reference
to her mother.
But was this is interesting.
Let me read you one
of her quotes about this.
She said, "My mother organized
the repair of ancient tapestries
that are called Arras,
a town where there were
a lot of Flemish tapestries.
She considered it to be
a conceptual work.
She did not consider it to be
weaving.
She thought of it as a collage,
putting together, repairing,
which meant finding pieces
from the same area that could
replace the damaged parts."
Now for Bourgeois, this was
about healing, obviously,
about taking something that's
damaged and somehow repairing
it, fixing it.
And so this is a very powerful
impulse in Bourgeois' art.
But the interesting thing
in addition is that her mother,
very often, was asked to take
tapestries that were French,
but they were going to be
shipped to America
for an American market.
And the tapestries might have
had a little putto figures
or nudes that had penises.
So her mother's job was to cut
out all the penises.
And then she had to fill in
with something, so she filled
in with flowers.
But she kept all the scraps
of penises.
So Louise, as a young girl,
had this collection of tapestry
penises.
And if Bourgeois' art is
about anything, it's about two
things--
penises and breasts.
So she already was collecting
penises at a very early age.
And that brings us to something
like this.
So on the left, this is a work
called Germinal 1967.
It's marble.
And this idea of breasts
and penises, but she very often
conflates them.
So they're not like this is all
about breasts
and this is all about penises.
She brings them together, very
often, in the same work.
And that's clearly, again,
autobiographical.
She's working around issues
related to both her mother
and to her father.
This is a white marble work.
It's small.
And she collapses.
Here, she does collapse
the breast and the penis sort
of together.
She said about things like this,
"Sometimes I'm totally concerned
with female shapes, clusters
of breasts like clouds.
But I often merge the imagery--
phallic breasts, male
and female, active and passive."
So the phallic breast,
to use that phrase, is something
she is pretty well known for.
But that also has
a long tradition in art history,
going back to Asian art
and to other traditions,
the phallic breast, the breast
that's pointed out
like an erect penis, things
like that.
So it's not like it's something
that doesn't have a track record
in art history.
That leads to the late work
on the right.
And this is in our Sculpture
Garden.
And this is Spider from 1996.
She lives to be,
I think, 98 years old.
So in the '90s, she turns
to portrayals of--
well, they're not always
gigantic, but this one is--
gigantic bronze spiders.
She becomes obsessed with
the spider motif, with
the iconography in the mid-'90s.
In the mid '90s,
she's in her 80s.
I think she dies in 2004.
She sees in the spider something
that's both fierce, potentially
fierce, but also fragile.
It could be a protector,
something that protects you.
But it also could be a predator.
She sees it in a very strongly
mixed psychological
and biographical way.
It's certainly a reference
in part to her mother
and to herself.
So she sees the spider,
very often, as representing,
for example, cleverness,
industriousness, protectiveness.
So we have one
of the giant spiders
in the Sculpture Garden
that's there.
I'm just going to mention Louise
Nevelson, because up until now,
we couldn't really say much
about her, because we didn't
really have anything
substantial, just some drawings.
But with the acquisition
of the Corcoran works, we now
have this work.
It's not on view at the moment.
This is Ancient Secrets
on the right, from 1964.
And this is a photograph
of Louise Nevelson, the way she
was most known, when she started
wearing these turbans and all
this heavy eye makeup.
She died in 1988.
She's a Ukrainian-born Jewish
emigre.
She was married briefly.
But then more famously, she
lived with a female assistant
for about 30 years.
She came to the States
with her family in 1905.
And what she's associated with
is basically what you see here,
except this one opens
and closes, sort of
like a screen.
Very often, they don't--
these large, wooden
constructions that she makes
from found objects.
So she goes out and finds
things.
She just goes
around the streets,
finds a piece of wood,
finds a doorknob, whatever.
And then she encases it
into the sort
of puzzle-like boxes.
And very importantly, she paints
them.
Usually, they're always
monochromatic--
all black, all white.
She speaks to a lot of things.
She's speaking
to monochromatic painting, Ad
Reinhardt and all these people.
But of course, unlike
the severity of those pictures--
because she comes of age
in the abstract expressionist
New York school--
but unlike all those things,
of course, her thing is chock
filled with meaning, or at least
with the intention of meaning
that we can find by the way
we attach significance
to these different kinds
of thrown-out objects.
So in her work,
there are aspects of Cubism,
because she creates a kind
of Cubist effect sometimes,
Dada, detritus, the found object
being OK, assemblage,
surrealism.
Some of the objects
make you think they're kind
of weird, and they have
some kind of dreamlike thing.
So she really speaks to all
of these traditions.
She is like Louise Bourgeois
in the sense
that she is definitely
co-opted by feminists
and feminist art history,
et cetera,
even though in Louise Bourgeois'
case, she accepted but also
sort of deferred.
Louise Bourgeois said at one
point, "Some of my works
are, or try to be, feminist,
and others are not feminist."
And then Louise Nevelson
was much sort of pointed.
She said, "I'm not a feminist.
I am an artist who happens to be
a woman."
So that was her take on things.
But Nevelson and Bourgeois
are very important, nonetheless,
to this idea
of feminine identity,
sexual identity, all
these things that were coming
of age at that time.
A more recent work, Janine
Antoni--
so now she's a younger heir
to some of these much more
well-known women artists.
This is the work we just
purchased,
called Lick and Lather
from 1993.
I like this work a lot.
And I like it because it's
a wonderful point of departure
for talking
about different conceptual
things.
What we have here are 14 busts
on pedestals.
Seven of them
are created in chocolate,
and seven are created in soap.
They are all portraits
of the artist.
So these are the chocolate ones.
These are the soap ones.
So right there, we have
a tradition of self-portraiture
that's been around
for centuries.
Why do we make self-portraits?
Why do we portray ourselves?
It's serial art.
There's more than one.
It's a sequence, and no one
is the same as the other
as you go through the 14.
But the chocolate makes you
think of bronze.
But of course, it's chocolate.
So the idea
of the great tradition of bronze
is alluded to here.
But of course, chocolate
is ephemeral.
The soap makes you think
of marble.
But of course, it's not marble.
It's made out of soap, equally
ephemeral.
It's the technique of how she
creates these, though, that's
also a big part of how they're
done.
Because in order to create
the chocolate busts,
she licks the chocolate.
Hence, the title Lick.
And in order to create the soap
ones, she bathes with it,
and uses it as a soap.
So the works are created
by licking the chocolate
and lathering or washing
with the soap.
Now again, if you start thinking
about this, it has all kinds
of interesting things.
Licking can be interpreted as
well as eating--
you're eating something.
And so in this case,
you're eating yourself.
You're sort of erasing yourself,
which is the same thing you're
doing if you're soaping.
You're wearing yourself out,
essentially.
So something that's supposed
to be permanent,
in a memorial, a monument,
as things have been in the past,
is no longer like that.
So it's a relation-- it is
this idea of self
identification.
How do we identify?
How do we determine our self,
our ego, that sort of idea.
These are intimate things,
eating and bathing.
And to turn those things
into an art process
is very interesting, to have
that intimacy associated
with that.
And because we all eat and we
all bathe--
we might not all weld,
but we all eat and we all
bathe--
there is a kind of empathy.
We're kind of in the tub
with her.
Or we're kind of having
a big chunk of chocolate.
So there's a lot going on here
that I find pretty
interesting about things
that she's questioning
and dealing with.
The fact that there are seven
heads, seven chocolate and seven
soap, for a total of 14--
by the way, this is the only
version anywhere that has all 14
together--
seven was the number
in the Greek canon of proportion
going back to Polyclitus,
the human figure was supposed
to be a seven-to-one ratio,
according to Polyclitus.
So she's sort of echoing back
to that.
So I do want to come back
to Matisse, because if you're
heading up to the towers
eventually,
we now have a new location
for the Matisse cut-outs.
And this is the entrance now.
And this is Matisse in 1952
working on his cut-outs
in the Hotel Regina, which he
used as his studio.
This was his assistant.
He would tell her where to put
these things.
He would cut him out,
and then he'd say--
she'd stick them up on the wall,
and then move them accordingly.
So we're not going to spend
a lot of time.
I just want to make sure you're
aware of the room,
and where its location is now,
and also that it closes at 2:00,
because these are
light sensitive.
So they cannot be open
to the public through the full
working hours of the gallery.
One of the massive works
is this one large Decoration
with Masks from 1953.
Of course, color was everything
to Matisse.
Once he becomes somewhat infirm
and whatnot, maybe he can't
manipulate the paint brush
the way he would like to,
et cetera, now he uses scissors.
And now he's cutting right
into color.
He's just cutting color.
And that's what's
remarkable about the way,
and then he has these things
arranged--
really quite lovely.
The room is beautiful now.
The lights have to be kept,
of course, at a dim level.
We have others that are not up.
So this is a room that could
rotate, in terms of putting up
some of the other cut-outs.
From the left to the right,
that's the Woman with an Amphora
and Pomegranates.
And then the next little work
is Venus, and then Oceania
of the Sky.
So these three going this way
are from '53, '52 and '46.
This wall has Oceania
of the Sea.
So this is sky, this is sea,
from '46, and Beasts of the Sea
from '50.
These two works are very
important.
And they came about after a trip
he took to Tahiti, in the South
Pacific, in 1930.
And he began to think
about the sea and the sky,
and these various forms that
relate to his trip.
Now we're climbing.
When you get to the cut-outs,
you're near the entrance
to the tower that is where we
have rotating exhibitions.
So we just closed Anne Truitt.
And now, I don't think there's
anything up there at the moment.
The door's closed.
But if you go to the other two
towers, now you're going to see
the Calders, and the Rothkos,
and Newman's.
So Tower 2, if I got my numbers
right, is devoted to Alexander
Calder.
And we now have the world's
largest display of works
by Calder, in part
because it was supplemented
by works from his estate,
the Calder Foundation.
So you will not see a larger
collection of Calders
anywhere in the world than what
we have here.
This is not to mention even
the ones that are
around the campus
that I've already shown you,
that are outside the building.
So here is the installation--
magnificent.
This is not Calder.
That's one of the few works that
sneaks in.
That's Joan Miro, who was very
close friends with Calder.
Everything and anything you want
to know about Calder, you could
find a work here that will tell
you about it,
from the tiny, little pieces
that were reflective of when he
put together The Circus that's
at the Whitney,
with these little guys
on trapezes and things,
to the large works, stabiles,
mobiles here.
And when you look way back--
this is an opening here--
you look back here, right
up there in the back,
is the maquette for the atrium
untitled mobile.
So it's hanging back there,
here.
These are wonderful sort
of animal figures.
Of course, one
of the great things
about the Calder works
are shadows.
So depending on the time of day,
and how they're casting shadows,
it's almost like you have double
the work.
Particularly interesting are
the wire sculptures.
This is his Aztec Josephine
Baker from 1930.
Josephine Baker was
a great performer, jazz artist,
dancer who took Paris by storm.
Her famous dance was the banana
dance, which is something
that Matisse was influenced by.
So this is a cut-out that's
not up at the moment.
This is Matisse's The Negress
from 1952.
And it's a reference
to Josephine Baker.
And this is a reference
to Josephine Baker by Calder.
It's a wire sculpture.
He's literally, with the wire,
drawing in space with wire.
It's magnificent, reflecting
back to works
by the Futurists,
the Constructivists in Russia,
all of that.
They're graceful.
They're really uncanny.
Sometimes when you track it,
you don't even realize
that the whole form is like one
wire.
He's just turning it,
and twisting it.
It's really quite interesting.
When we laid out this room,
of course, we spared no expense
when it comes to design.
So to lay out a room like this
is difficult from the design
and curatorial point of view.
It's hard to kind of visualize
how everything is going to go
together.
So we have models of every one
of these,
right down to the tiny ones.
And here they are, playing
with Calder.
So this is Harry Cooper, curator
of 20th century art.
This is Mark Leithauser,
the head of Design.
So we replicated every one,
right down to scale,
so they could move them around.
So we have the largest
collection of Calder anywhere.
And we have the largest
collections of Mark Rothko,
and the largest collections
of Barnett Newman anywhere.
In the case of Rothko,
we have over 1,100 works, 800
works on paper, 300 paintings.
Newman is pretty
close to the same.
So the other tower is devoted
to Mark Rothko
and to Barnett Newman.
Again, this isn't sculpture,
but I didn't want to leave it
out.
So the Rothko room at the top
and the Calder or the Newman
room-- it's the same room.
It just has a partition that
separates the two.
Here's Rothko from 1953
in both photographs.
Of course, everybody knows
Rothko in terms
of these wonderful,
sort of diaphanous curtains
of light,
and the sense of almost even
before Frankenthaler,
he was working his oils.
They weren't Magna,
but they were oil that he was
diluting so much that it looked
like he was staining
the surface.
So he was kind of ahead
of the curve in that regard.
Certainly, they're abstract.
They're all of that.
But in Rothko's case,
he wanted people to see
associative meanings.
At one point, he said, "It is
a widely accepted notion
among painters
that it does not matter what
one paints, as long as it
is well painted.
This is the essence
of academicism.
There is no such thing
as good painting about nothing."
So the minimalists might argue
with that.
But what Rothko would say
is, if you come to my painting,
and you feel it's tragic,
or you feel it's hopeful,
or you feel it's sublime,
or you feel it's this, that,
or the other thing, that's OK.
He has no problem with that.
In fact, that's what you want.
At one point,
he said very ostentatiously,
"People who stand in front
of my paintings and weep
understand them."
So there you go.
It is a kind of--
his paintings do seem to embody
these universal themes,
sometimes tragedy,
ecstasy, et cetera.
So this
is a magnificent installation.
In the case of both Newman
and Rothko--
but it would be true of Pollock
as well--
they work best
in an environmental space, where
you give the whole room over
to these artists.
It's especially true,
though, with Rothko,
because only when he fills
the room, and these colors start
to almost seem like they're
coming out of the wall,
and they're vibrating,
and having them
all
a big environmental installation
is very, very effective
for understanding and sort
of feeling what the paintings
are about.
Untitled on the left
from 1953, Orange and Tan
on the right from 1954--
so we hang what are called
the classic Rothko paintings
here.
Most of the ones that
we're hanging now are from
the '50s, but he starts this
as early as '49--
this sort of general format
of the sort
of lozenge-like horizontal
shapes.
If you want to see where he
starts, you need to go back
into the Abstract Expressionist
room and look at early Rothko.
We have a few hanging
near the paintings by Gorky
and Matta, because it's a very--
Rothko is very
much like understanding
Kandinsky or Mondrian.
You've got to track him to see
where and how he got to this.
He didn't just wake up one day,
and, OK, I'm going to do this.
There's a very logical
progression of how he arrives
at this kind of imagery.
In '54, Rothko said,
"Since my pictures are large,
colorful, and unframed,
and since museum walls are
usually immense and formidable,
there is the danger
that the pictures relate
themselves as decorative areas
to the walls.
This would be a distortion
of their meaning,
since the pictures are
intimate and intense,
and are the opposite of what
is decorative,
and have been painted
in the scale of normal living
rather than
an institutional scale.
I have, on occasion,
successfully dealt
with this problem
by tending to crowd the show,
rather than making it spare.
By saturating the room
with the feeling of the work,
the walls are defeated,
and the poignancy
of each single work
becomes more visible.
I also hang the largest pictures
so that they may first
be encountered
at close quarters--" he actually
wants you to start up close--
"so that the first experience
is to be within the picture.
This may well give the key
to the observer
of the ideal relationship
between himself
and the rest of the pictures.
I also hang the pictures low,
rather than high,
and particularly in the case
of the largest ones, often as
close to the floor
as is feasible,
for that is the way they are
painted.
And last, it may be worthwhile
trying to hang something
beyond a partial wall,
because some of the pictures
do very well
in a confined space."
The other thing he is very
adamant about is the light,
and the actual intensity
of the light.
And in this gallery, we now have
the light controlled
by a computer
so it never varies.
Depending on what's happening,
the light levels will adjust, so
that you're always seeing it
the way Rothko's stipulations
cited.
Barnett Newman here on the left,
and here he is in a photograph.
This is Newman with Jackson
Pollock and Tony Smith, 1951
during a show.
This was at Newman's exhibition
at the Betty Parsons Gallery.
Again, Newman we can't really
sort of do justice in five
minutes here.
He's steeped in philosophy.
He actually majored
in philosophy at City College.
He brings a very sort
of profound concept of what art
should be to his work.
He has many interests.
He was a candidate for the Mayor
of New York in 1933.
He was a substitute art
teacher--
all of this.
He frets about what his painting
is, and what painting should be.
And almost all of the paintings
that he created between 1930
and 1940, he destroyed.
And he was looking to start
fresh in the '40s.
And he was really seeking what
we might call a sort
of a mystical abstraction.
And where that really began
for him was with the painting
that's his breakthrough
painting, this one on the left.
It's called Onement, I, 1948.
It's today at MoMA.
And then we have this painting
called Yellow Painting
from 1949.
This is a painting that has
a huge-- it may look very
simple, but it took years
of thought, and thinking,
and contemplating before he came
to this.
It was the first time he used
the vertical stripe that he came
to call a "zip."
And what he did here, actually,
was to put a piece of masking
tape originally.
And then he came over it
with a palette knife,
and put the color
over the masking tape.
So there's actually a piece
of masking tape under there.
And he felt that this was almost
a kind of profound, kind
of a zen moment,
where it
both divided and united
the painting.
And that set him off, devoting
himself to this kind
of relationship
with these zips, which are
a big part of the work we have,
of course, The Stations
of the Cross from '58 to 1966.
Again, I'm not going to--
we don't have time
to go through every work
and everything.
But what we should understand
is that this was a set of works,
although he didn't conceive
of it.
It came to be a series only sort
of progressively.
But it was dealing
with this question
that a lot
of abstract expressionists
were dealing with at the time.
And that is simply, what
the hell are we going to paint?
Everything has been done.
Everything has been said.
And now especially, we're
in this world, after the Second
World War, and the Holocaust,
and everything.
Should we even be painting?
And what should we be saying
if we're going to paint?
And these were
these big questions.
And certainly, because
of his philosophical bent,
Newman was particularly
susceptible to that kind
of thought.
And then when he was 53 years
old-- this was in 1958--
he had a heart attack.
And that was a moment
of clarity, I guess.
And as soon as he recovered,
he prepared two canvases
of exactly the same size, six
and a half by five feet,
and began to work on them
at the same time.
And he talked about it.
He said,
"From the very beginning,
I felt that I would do
a series."
Well, two years later, he was
working on the fourth.
And so he'd done two almost
immediately.
And then he did three, and then
number four.
And by that time--
so this is a couple of years
after he started in '58,
he said, "I began to think
of them as the stations
of the cross."
And then he completed
a full cycle of 14 paintings.
13 are the stations,
and then one is like a coda,
like the epilogue called Be II,
Roman numeral II.
So he finished the series
in 1966.
And the first time they were
shown as a group
was at the Guggenheim in '66.
And guess who organized
that show?
Our good friend Lawrence
Alloway.
Remember him?
He was the curator.
He organized that exhibition.
And for the most part,
it was a flop.
Most people didn't know what
the heck this was about,
and what was going on.
Only slowly did they gain
some sort of interest.
And what, again, Newman said
that they were about,
finally when he titled them
Stations of the Cross,
they're not meant to be read
literally
as the Catholic stations
of the cross, which have very
specific moments,
and Christ carrying the cross.
Christ falls the first time,
this kind of stuff.
But for Newman it was
encapsulated in the phrase that
is about Jesus
on the cross, where Jesus says,
"Why have you forsaken me?"
Lama sabachthani.
And he felt this is what
these paintings were about.
And then he further states,
"This is the Passion,
this outcry of Jesus,
not the terrible walk up the Via
Dolorosa, but the question that
has no answer."
And then he goes on to say
that this is each of our own--
this is our agony.
Each of us has this agony
about why have we been forsaken,
especially at the time
in the post-war period.
So that's his interpretation.
Interestingly, he's not
Christian.
He's not Catholic.
He's Jewish.
But he's taking that as the sort
of point of departure.
These are the first two
Stations, 1958.
These are Magna.
Remember Magna?
So these are Magna on canvas.
Everything here you have
to contemplate everything--
where the signature is, how big
the signature is, whether
the zip has a kind of vibratory
feeling, or whether it's very
severe--
all these things.
And it only happens
through quiet contemplation.
It's really good that we have
a bench in there,
because you need to really sit
with these things.
I find the space incredibly
moving, and the paintings very,
very powerful.
But it's probably an acquired
taste.
But when I say that, what I mean
is you've got to try to meet
the guy halfway.
You've got to spend some time
there thinking about it.
You can't just walk in
and dismiss it, like, oh, god,
this is just-- what's going on.
You can't do that.
What's interesting about
the so-called stations, other
artists have dealt with this--
Matisse.
This is Matisse's Chapel
at Vence, The Chapel
of the Rosary.
On the back
wall are the Stations
of the Cross.
Matisse literally numbers them
so that you know where you're
supposed to go.
And each one is literally one
of the stations.
So the fact here is, if you're
a nun here, the Nuns of the Holy
Rosary, you don't have to walk.
You can stay right here,
and just go through each one.
Normally, stations of the cross
go around a church.
They're on the walls,
and you kind of move,
like a pilgrimage.
But in this case, they don't.
Of course, the Matisse
is gorgeous, because it's very
abstract.
And it's very much just a few
lines, like Christ falling here,
Christ before Pilate here.
Christ falls a second time here.
They're really quite exquisite.
Hey, we made it up to the tower,
to the terrace.
This has changed recently,
but this is now
the new Sculpture Terrace that
takes you between the towers
that are devoted to Calder
and Rothko and Newman.
Currently, we have this work
by Katharina Fritsch
that I'll mention in a second,
called Hahn/Cock.
There is this work by Kenneth
Snelson that's still up there.
These are the Scott Burton
settees that are sort
of like benches,
that you literally are supposed
to sit on.
But within the last few weeks,
this has changed.
So now, we've brought this David
Smith.
We've installed Robert Indiana's
Numbers.
This is still the Snelson.
So now these are the works that
are up there.
The Snelson is here.
The David Smith is there.
The Scott Burton you can't see
in this photograph.
And they're still totally
dominated by the blue rooster.
Just by way of title, the Robert
Indiana work is called ONE
through ZERO, the numbers,
from 1978 to 2003.
They're Cor-ten steel, the stuff
that Richard Serra used,
remember--
although if this falls over,
it won't kill you.
Well, it could probably damage
your toes.
Kenneth Snelson-- this is called
V-X from 1967, stainless steel
and wire.
The Scott Burtons are now--
this is when they were
downstairs in the atrium--
Rock Settee from 1988.
And then this is Cubi Number 11,
1963.
This used to be in the Sculpture
Garden.
What we used to have here,
when you first came,
was a George Ricky sculpture.
It kind of looked like a David
Smith.
It's stainless steel,
but it moved.
But what we didn't contemplate
was how strong the wind can be
up here, and it damaged
the sculpture.
The wind got so bad,
it kind
of twisted the sculpture.
So nothing's going to twist
this, trust me.
So here is Katharina Fritsch,
the Hahn/Cock from 2013.
It's fibreglass.
It's about 15 and a half feet
high.
This is on loan.
We don't own this.
This is owned by Glenstone
in Potomac, Maryland.
But it's on extended loan.
But this relates
to the great Plinth,
the Fourth Plinth project that
goes on in London in Trafalgar
Square.
Because this is the work
that won the competition,
and was installed in Trafalgar
Square in London
on July 25, 2013.
They have a competition.
It's in front of the National
Gallery in London, which looks
into Trafalgar Square.
They have plinths, three plinths
that have sculpture.
One plinth was supposed to have
a sculpture going way back
to the 19th century.
It never materialized, so it's
empty.
So they decided to turn that
into a contemporary art
competition, who would have
a work
on the so-called "Fourth
Plinth."
And it's a great competition.
And you can look up online all
the various winners.
Of course, Rachel Whiteread
won that competition in 2001.
And she put a work on the plinth
called Monument.
And what she did was
she made a clear resin cast
of the actual plinth,
and then she flipped it upside
down.
So she won the competition
in 2001.
Here is Trafalgar Square.
So this is the National
Galleries back here.
This is the plinth.
This is Trafalgar Square,
and this is the monument
to Admiral Nelson, Nelson's
Column, which celebrates
the victory of Nelson
at the Battle of Trafalgar
in 1805.
Now, the idea, in part,
that Fritsch had here,
she works out of-- she's German.
She works, lives today
in Dusseldorf.
And she works, obviously,
in the large scale.
But her idea here was to place
something here that would speak
to all these phallic memorials.
So here, it's looking right at--
that's what's on top of here.
So that's Admiral Nelson.
And of course, there are
all kinds of things going on
here.
First of all, it's a cock, which
is a rooster,
but "Hahn" in German is "cock,"
so she uses both titles.
She's German.
She's not French, and she's not
English.
She didn't even think,
she says originally, of the fact
that the cock is a French thing.
Considering
the French-English rivalries,
that's another thing that plays
off.
It's a rooster or a cock,
but it's looking
at these other phallic
monuments, and sort of tweaking
its nose at those things.
It's not made by a male artist.
It's created by a female artist,
who is asserting herself
into this space using
this particular form.
So all these things are sort
of part of the mystique, shall
we say.
Some of it's tongue in cheek.
Some of it's humorous.
Some of the things
she didn't even think about.
She'll admit, I never thought
about that.
But in any case, it's very, very
effective, very popular.
And now we're a city that has
some phallic monuments.
So you have to kind of strain
when you're up on the roof.
You can't really see
the Washington Monument.
But you can see the towers
of the Castle here.
And I think as we approach
3 o'clock I'll leave you
with these patriotic monuments.
Thank you very
much for the whole series.
[APPLAUSE]
