Ink & Image, 11th Edition

Ink & Image Spring 2018 Volume 11 ______________________________________________

Contributors Carola Reyes BenĂ­tez Megan Gatton Owen Klinkon Amy Lenkiewicz

Cover Artist Mark Wei

Editors-in-Chief Lane Bhutani Eduardo Sotomayor

Š Ink & Image at NYU, 2019 -1-

Table of Contents Letter from the Editors ..................................................................................... Page 3

Tropical Modernism: Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico Carola Reyes Benítez ......................................................................................................... Page 4

Marsden in Mexico: Finding American Modernism Megan Gatton ................................................................................................................... Page 21

Married to Myth: Local Tradition in the Book of Kells’ Virgin and Child Amy Lenkiewicz................................................................................................................. Page

Nature and Mechanization after the Second World War: Order and Proportion in the Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments Owen Klinkon ..................................................................................................................... Page

About Us ............................................................................................................................. Page -2-

Dear Reader, As the editors of Ink & Image, we are delighted to welcome you to the eleventh installation of the NYU Department of Art History’s journal of original undergraduate research.

Founded in 2009 by department alumni Malcolm St. Clair (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘09), Alexis Wang (Art History ‘09), and Professor Kenneth Silver (the inaugural faculty advisor), Ink & Image strives to present the

The importance of cross-cultural engagement

We would like to thank our faculty advisor Professor Carol Krinsky, - We would also like to thank Professor Dennis Geronimus, the Chair of the CAS Department of Art History -

Professor Kathryn Smith

DEDICATION TO TOM MCNULTY

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Tropical Modernism: Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico

By Carola Reyes Benítez

In 1944, with the return of thousands of Puerto Rican soldiers from the battlefronts of World War II, the island’s government introduced an ambitious plan to reorganize Puerto Rico’s infrastructure. Although deemed a nonincorporated territory of the United States in 1898, Puerto Rico was largely abandoned by the U.S.—particularly in terms of economic support—by the midtwentieth century. Due to its complex legal relationship with the mainland, the island’s economy remained stagnant and later plummeted as a result of the U.S.’s dominance over the local mercantile economy, specifically that of sugar cane. 1 The middle of the twentieth century was a confusing time for both the citizens and government of Puerto Rico, leading to the establishment of a Puerto Rican constitution in 1952, which declared the island a commonwealth. The gap between the rich and the poor began to expand, bringing problems of overcrowding and sanitation to the thousands of communities of self-built slums. The level of poverty brought an image of shame to the United States, prompting local government officials to create policies for the betterment of the poor. The following two governors, Rexford G. Tugwell and Luis Muñoz Marín, would spend the majority of their terms restructuring the island’s government and improving its infrastructure.2 Tasked with ameliorating the standard of living on the island, the newly established Puerto Rico Committee on Design and Public Works recruited young architects working in the United States to assist the effort. The goal of this committee was to stimulate orderly growth through the creation of new schools, hospitals, and government buildings built efficiently and effectively. The

1

For more on the economy of Puerto Rico, see: Susan M. Collins, Barry P Bosworth, and Miguel A. Soto-Class

eds.. The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth (New York, NY: Brookings Institution Press, 2006).

2

Enrique Vivoni-Farage, Klumb: Una Arquitectura De Impronta Social (Klumb: an Architecture of Social Concern)

(La Editorial: Univ. De Puerto Rico, 2006), 253.

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style was to be modern, as it was believed to symbolize an architectural paradigm of progress. 3 The Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra joined the committee, and, in 1948, he published his plans for the adaptation of modern architecture in the hot climate of Puerto Rico in his book, An Architecture of Social Concern in Regions of Mild Climate. That same year, a young draftsman from Frank Lloyd Wright’s atelier, Heinrich “Henry” Klumb, accepted an invitation to participate in the program. Of the many architects who moved to Puerto Rico in the immediate post-war period, Klumb was the only one to stay and establish his career on the island, designing both municipal and commercial buildings until his death in 1984. 4 Klumb’s influence in Puerto Rico was acknowledged as early as 1955, during the landmark exhibition, Latin American Architecture since 1945, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Curator and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote for the catalogue: “In Puerto Rico, where Latin America and the United States overlap, it is not inappropriate that Klumb, the only Frank Lloyd Wright disciple in all Latin America, should be working with real success to adapt the principles of the master of Taliesin to the natural conditions of the Caribbean.” 5 Klumb’s employment of Wright’s theories in a different environment, both tropical and Americanized, is what made him a pioneer in shifting the visual and architectural language of Puerto Rico. Throughout his career, Klumb never failed to acknowledge Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on his designs.

However, it is important to note that Klumb’s designs were not strictly dictated by Wright’s theories. In fact, Klumb was often annoyed by the constant comparison of his work to Wright’s, as he felt his designs were not at all copies of Wright’s work. 6 Rather than following the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Klumb developed what is now called “Tropical Modernity,” a variant of the International Style that took climate and function into consideration 7 Klumb’s designs were 3

Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara, Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia

(Texas: University of Texas Press, 1968), 124.

4

Ibid., 124.

5

Henry Russell, Latin American Architecture since 1945, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 57.

6

Beatriz Del Cueto, Personal Interview. 28 April 2018.

7

Ibid.

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original adaptations of his mentor’s ideas expanded through architectural tendencies similar to those of Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. Klumb’s work in Puerto Rico provided the opportunity to create hybrids of various movements in order to formulate a distinct style— distinguishable by his own name—that proved to be functional and durable.

Henry Klumb was born in Cologne, Germany in 1905, where he studied at the local Staatliche Bauschule. 8 Impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs in the Wasmuth Portfolio (1911), Klumb wrote a telegram to the American architect asking to work in his workshop.9 Wright responded with an invitation to Taliesin, advising Klumb that he should be “prepared to stay if satisfactory.”10 In 1927, Klumb moved to the United States along with his wife Else. 11 While at Taliesin, he was, as he put it, “always surrounded by beauty, exposed to the art of work and living.”12 Klumb learned and deeply admired the theories of Wright, especially those concerned with the relationship between the exterior and the interior of a building, the power of horizontals, and the use of nature as an architectural model.

Nonetheless, Wright’s infamous temperament proved challenging; after multiple disputes with his teacher, Klumb left Taliesin in 1933 with plans to return home.13 However, the burgeoning influence of the Nazi regime in Germany, as well as the growing turmoil in the rest of Europe, made returning to Germany undesirable. For this reason, Klumb spent a decade in the United States helping various architects (e.g. Louis Kahn, an architect who also partook in the projects lead by the Puerto Rico Committee on Design and Public Works) with their projects, mainly those involving public planning.14 In 1943, he moved to Los Angeles to help with the regional design of

8

Enrique Vivoni-Farage, “Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb,” Docomomo Journal, no 33 (Sept. 2005), 32.

9

Del Cueto, Personal Interview. 28 April 2018.

10

Vivoni-Farage, “Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb,” 33.

11

Ibid., 33.

12

Ibid., 33.

13

Ibid., 33.

14

Francisco Javier Rodríguez-Suárez, “Sobre Henry Klumb,” La Torre: Revista De La lUniversidad de Puerto Rico,

no. 51-52 (2009), 159.

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the city.15 When he embarked for Puerto Rico in 1944, he was prepared to tackle the concerns of the government after having spent a decade working for government projects. He was excited to create set of design requirements that complemented and aided local needs in order to encourage diversity and better the lives of the poor. 16 After this second voyage to an unknown land, Klumb received the nickname “Klumbumbus” due to his continuing curiosity about the new world and its hidden treasures.17 However, despite his worldliness, Klumb did not anticipate the rich landscape and uncharted territory that was Puerto Rico.

Before Henry Klumb’s arrival on the island, Puerto Rican architecture consisted of mainly Spanish Colonial influences with a mix of traditional American design, which resulted in—to quote Klumb—“the most horrifying results imaginable.” 18 If a widespread type of North American suburban house imitated a British colonial house of the mid-eighteenth century, the model house for Puerto Ricans could be found in the houses of the Spanish city of Seville. The capital of Puerto Rico, Old San Juan, and its colonial architecture served as a constant reminder of the visual culture established by the Spanish. This aesthetic began to change after the establishment of the Puerto Rico Committee on Design and Public Works and the arrival of Klumb.

Klumb took Puerto Rico’s warm, wet climate and rugged landscape as an intellectual challenge rather than a hindrance. His largest and most complex project was the redesign of the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Píedras and Mayagüez campuses. The university’s chancellor at the time—and the man responsible for the university’s academic advancements—was Jaíme Benítez. His vision for a new and modern university with a newly established liberal arts curriculum called for Klumb to redesign the campus. Moreover, the close relationship between the university and the government of Puerto Rico allowed for Klumb to be hired without hesitation.

15

Vivoni-Farage, “Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb,” 34.

16

Ibid., 34.

17

Rodríguez-Suárez, “Sobre Henry Klumb,” 158.

18

Luz Marie Rodríguez-López, Presencia de las migraciones europeas en la arquitectura latinoamericana del siglo

XX (Universidad Nacional Autónomia de México, Facultad de Arquitectura, 2009), 64.

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Klumb’s designs earned Benítez’s praise; the chancellor later called the new-and-improved school the “university of the open book,” expressing Klumb’s success at creating a desired and democratic space for any student or faculty member. 19 The Río Píedras campus in San Juan consisted of a collection of Spanish revival buildings erected between 1935 to 1939 by the University Building Division of the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration or PRRA. The neocolonial campus was built around the iconic clock tower of 1903 (the year the university was founded), which remains in situ as a symbol of the university.20 In 1945, Klumb began to redesign multiple buildings for the campus that incorporated new architectural forms without neglecting function. All of Klumb’s buildings were rotated on 30 and 60 angles in order to efficiently reap the benefits of the breeze. Many of the edifices are positioned geometrically from each other, making reference to Wright’s theories on organic architecture and the use of geometry in the layout of buildings. 21 In 1948, Klumb designed the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Píedras campus Museum of Anthropology, History, and Art, which housed great artifacts of Puerto Rican history, such as Francisco Oller’s masterpiece painting, El Velorio (1893). The rectangular, reinforced-concrete structure sits on an elevated plot of land and features a thin concrete staircase leading up to the museum’s entrance. The building’s façade consists of a horizontal plane with movable gates that are patterned in a gridded shape with small squares placed at each intersection, recalling Frank Lloyd Wright’s intricate surface effects, as seen in his metalwork for the Robie House in Chicago.

Yet, Klumb’s design is more delicate and pristine than Wright’s works (which tend to focus on solidity), perhaps reflecting the influence of Mies Van de Rohe, who used steel and glass to promote simplicity. The program of Klumb’s gates, while recalling the work of Wright and Mies, was Klumb’s own invention: his mélange of forms does not directly reference any known work by either architect. The museum can, to this day, be entered through the rightmost gate where various

19

Carranza and Luiz Lara, Modern Architecture in Latin America, 35.

20

“Campus Information,” Humanidades. UPRRP. http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/ingles/?page_id=299.

21

Vivoni-Farage, Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb, 35.

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exhibition rooms are placed around an interior garden. This interior garden is decorated with works of public sculpture made by Puerto Rican artists and is used as a resting point between many exhibition spaces. The year-round warm, wet climate is suppressed by overhanging roofs with shades surrounding the museum’s interior garden. This utilization of a dual space, an interior and an exterior, takes advantage of the pleasant climate, while at the same time shielding the people (and the artworks) from the heat and rain.

During the same year, Klumb designed the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Píedras campus library, Biblioteca José M. Lázaro (Figure 1). Constructed of white reinforced concrete, the library rests on a flat plot of land, near one of the main walkways of the university. The building’s rectangular right wing is faced with glass windows that recede from the entrance to the library, with an exterior “skin” or brise-soleil that protects the books inside from the sun and heat. The invention of the brise-soleil cannot be attributed to one particular architect, yet it is often associated with Le Corbusier’s work in India. Klumb designed several brise-soleils throughout his career, all corresponding specifically to the functional and aesthetic needs of the building. 22 Klumb makes the library’s “skin” more interesting to the eye by adding a rectangular gridded symmetrical design, which complements the building’s façade and continues the aesthetic of the gridded gates decorating the exterior of the university’s museum. Here, the gate pattern is multiplied, and larger squares are added above the front doors, indicating the entrance. Behind each gate is a curtain of glass. This framing of the entrance by these gates protects the interior from the strong sunlight.

Moreover, the entrance includes an overhanging roof to shade the library’s visitors.

Once inside the library, the students and faculty are greeted by an open lobby space and a gray-and-black terrazzo floor. At the center of the building is the information desk, behind which are the main doors to the library’s collection. Above this desk, a mezzanine overlooks the first floor of the library. This double-height space is reminiscent of Wright’s and Le Corbusier’s tendency toward this design principle, which aerates the space and enhances the sense of height.

The library’s double-height mezzanine uses the otherwise low-ceilinged space to draw the eye 22

Vivoni-Farage, Klumb: Una Arquitectura De Impronta Social, 83.

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upward. The interior of the library has been modified throughout the years, but it originally held many study spaces furnished with Eames chairs of various colors.

After his work in Río Píedras, Klumb turned his attention to the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayagüez campus in 1947.23 Also consisting of original Spanish Revival style buildings, the campus was redesigned, starting with the distinctive Agricultural Science building. This building stands next to one of the university’s main roads. It is an “L” shaped reinforced concrete rectangular box with a flat roof; the strict horizontality of the building resembles the work of Wright. This classroom building is partially raised on columns of reinforced concrete, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s invention of pilotis, allowing for those classrooms above to have a view of the campus and of the artificial pond placed on the back garden. The part of the building that is not raised contains two floors. Klumb added tall palm trees in the center of the building’s two sides, forming natural vertical elements that contrasted with the horizontality of the concrete edifice. The whole building is an example of modern architecture that does not rely on ornamentation but on interconnected interior and exterior spaces, flat planes, and the play of light and surrounding nature.24 Klumb concluded his work for the University of Puerto Rico in 1948, and soon after received a commission for what would become one of his best-known building, this one used for worship. The San Martín de Porres Church, built in 1950, is a simple white square reinforced concrete structure on a flat plot of land (Figure 2).25 The to the church is made clear by an overhanging roof above the opening. This overhanging roof continues to the left of the entrance and turns into a stone wall with plants hanging over it. Perpendicular to the planting is a small bell tower. Although the building has a square plan, it is turned so that the interior seems diamondshaped. The building is entered through the bottom tip of the diamond and the visitor is greeted by

23

Jerry Torres Santiago, Mayagüez y Klumb: La Historia Olvidada: Arquitectura Del Recinto Universitario De

Mayagüez. (Centro De Publicaciones Académicas (CePA), UPR-RU, 2015), 13.

24

Ibid., 13.

25

Vivoni-Farage, Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb, 36.

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the choir and stained-glass windows. The interior walls are angled to resemble columns. The space between each angled wall is left open, which allows for cross ventilation and lighting control. The church is oriented on a central axis, where diagonal piers along both sides focus the attention toward the distant end where the priest officiates. Above, a skylight allows even more natural light into the room. The east and west ends of the church have a baptistery and a private prayer room.

Behind the altar—which is at the same level as the seating for the congregation—is a pathway that leads to the rectory (equipped with a bedroom, bathroom, reunion hall, small prayer room, and kitchen). The whole building is lightweight, allowing natural sunlight and breeze to fill the religious space, inviting visitors to connect with God and nature in one room.

A church designed by Klumb a decade after San Martín de Porres, the Nuestra Señora del Carmen Church, also in Cataño, is comparatively architecturally complex. Built in 1960, the hexagonal church stands out in the town’s crowded central plaza. 26 A high wall denotes the narthex, and a curved wall with openings on its sides denotes the entrance, flanked by a bell tower.

The windowless façade is distinctive for the color and texture of its natural poured concrete. Light and air come in through screens of terra-cotta at the base of the building, which contain a simple horizontal gridded design. A strip of windows between the walls and the hexagonal flattened vault allows light to enter. The vault appears to float because it is supported only by short, thin pieces of brick; this effect comes from Le Corbusier’s wall and vault joint at Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. The altar is placed in the center and five hundred seats for the congregation are placed around it—an arrangement that became common after the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council of 1962-65. Flanking the principal room are a baptistery and small chapel.

During his prolific career in Puerto Rico, Klumb also found work in residential architecture. In 1964, he designed “Casa Tugwell” a home for the then ex-governor of Puerto Rico Rexford Tugwell, who had originally brought Klumb to Puerto Rico after his establishment of the design committee. The house is located in the El Yunque National Rainforest in Luquillo, Puerto Rico. The plot of land is rectangular and is near a river which filled the house with sounds of water.

26

José A. Fernández, Architecture in Puerto Rico. (Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1965), 162.

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The house is made of wood and glass, resembling other simple wooden houses natural to the area, and is cantilevered over a small hill. Inside the home includes the kitchen, small living room, and hallway. Inside, beyond the kitchen and small living room, a hallway leads to the bedroom, originally designed as a geodesic dome 27 but later replaced by a square room. Most of the space of this house is taken up by the balcony, which includes various lounging areas with hammocks as well as a small dining room table. The balcony is covered by a pitched roof, ideal for protecting the home from the recurring rains of the forest. 28 In 1947, Klumb purchased a breezy plot of land in the Sábana Llana sector of Río Píedras, originally called Cody Ranch. This ranch was packed with rich nature and full of pleasant breezes provided by the surrounding trees. The existing house was a traditional plantation-style home or “cabaña”— made of wood with a zinc roof. It was elevated from the ground, with a balcony encompassing the home. Klumb took the existing structure and made it his own (Figure 3). He eliminated almost all of the walls, and those he kept were made movable. This openness takes advantage of the cool weather provided by the abundant trees including Royal and McArthur palms, cannonball and mango trees, among others. The surrounding balcony has an X-shaped hand rails to protect anyone from falling over. Casa Klumb is also raised on pilotis and is a free structure with movable walls, ideas likely borrowed from Le Corbusier. Additionally, it contains a central hearth, as Wright always included in his designs, and a built-in dining room table. Below the main floor, is a basement used for storage and other functions. In front of the house, Klumb inserted a small lily-pad pond to complete the tranquil impression. The tropical climate mediated among the influences from LeCorbusier and Wright and those of Klumb himself. 29 Casa Klumb was also full of furniture, designed and hand crafted by his artisan wife, Else. For Klumb, his home was his temple. He was known to spend hours working on his own garden and studying the sun’s effects on various parts of the property. He would often invite his employees to his home to observe the

27

Ibid., 162.

28

Vivoni-Farage, Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb, 35.

29

Rodríguez-Suárez, “Sobre Henry Klumb,” 168.

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sun’s positioning and effect on his home. Beatriz del Cueto, a former employee, recalled one of Klumb’s proverbs: “Mastering the small, accomplishes the great.” 30 Surely, Klumb’s attention to detail earned him both his success and the respect of those who worked closely with him.

Climate, a defining consideration in Klumb’s designs, has since become a major obstacle in the preservation of his buildings. Most of his projects have withstood decades of tropical storms, but some – such as the Casa Klumb – have not been as lucky. The University of Puerto Rico projects remain in good condition, as do Klumb’s churches. Their geometric designs have also weathered the test of time and remain functional. Klumb consciously turned the modern architecture of Europe and the United States into a flexible style that could be adapted to any climate. His designs interacted with their environments, playing with the movement of light and the changing winds while providing an important symbol of Puerto Rico’s modernity. The replacement of neocolonial buildings with modern architecture reflects the changing attitudes of Puerto Ricans from a once Spanish colony to an American one.

In 1979, Klumb became a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA).31 As the first fellow from Puerto Rico, Klumb opened the door for many other architects in Puerto Rico to gain distinction. Klumb is regarded as a pioneer of modern architecture in Puerto Rico and is spoken of as a “maestro.” 32 Although he never formally learned Spanish, he made many friends and was regarded as a generous member of the community, always sharing his knowledge and experiences. An award was created in his name by the Puerto Rico Architects Association in 1981; Klumb was honored as the inaugural recipient. 33To this day, the award is given annually to the island’s most distinguished architect, the biggest honor a Puerto Rican architect can receive.

Del Cueto, Beatriz. “La Influencia del Arquitecto Klumb en mi Trayectoria Profesional.” (Acceptance speech upon receiving Henry Klumb Award, 2012.)

31 Del Cueto, Beatriz. Personal Interview. 28 April 2018 30

32

Ibid.

33

Ibid.

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Klumb’s career in Puerto Rico came to an end on November 20, 1984, when he died in a car accident in Río Píedras near the university to which he dedicated much of his professional life.

After his death, Casa Klumb was acquired by the University of Puerto Rico.34 The university’s fruitful epoch came to an end with the development of political problems, dissenting opinions, and huge economic debt. For this reason, Casa Klumb has been poorly maintained for many years. The same tropical nature Klumb grew to admire almost destroyed his legacy with the coming of Hurricane Maria and its destruction of Puerto Rico in September of 2017. The hurricane left Casa Klumb in further deterioration (Figure 4). The house now stands on its last legs, slowly decaying and fading away from the landscape of Río Píedras.

In one of my travels to Puerto Rico post-Maria, I visited Casa Klumb. I entered through a small hole in the cyclone fence surrounding the property. The land remains completely abandoned, and nature has taken charge of the once-curated landscaping. The house, surprisingly, still exists, yet it is very unstable; the back portion of the house (including the kitchen) has collapsed. I was surprised to find Klumb’s book and record libraries still in the home. The labels he placed on the shelves are still intact, indicating where he placed Beethoven and Bach. To be sure, the two major hurricanes scattered books and records all over the property. The absolute desertion of this once space of innovation was stunning.

It seems as though Puerto Rico has forgotten Klumb, despite his immense contributions to the landscape and lasting architectural influence. Casa Klumb and its memory remind Puerto Ricans of a time when the island was prosperous and seemingly looking toward participation in a modern world. Now, the house is on the World Monument’s Fund Watch List and is waiting to be brought back to its original glory. The University of Puerto Rico’s lack of funds has made muchneeded restoration projects—like that of Casa Klumb—impracticable. Economic and political turmoil make the revival of a structure like this one seem like a trivial expenditure. However, it is the responsibility of those who care about the history of architecture in Puerto Rico to reestablish Casa Klumb as a site that could be used for learning and inspiration. Perhaps the saving of Casa 34

Ibid.

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Klumb from total destruction can bring new life to the community of Río Píedras and encourage the revival of the tendencies of Tropical Modernism. Nature has shown Puerto Ricans how destructive and frightening it can be. Casa Klumb is one of many examples that show how the island’s alluring landscape can stimulate inspiration and innovation. During this time of adjustment after the disastrous hurricane, let us not forget to admire nature and its ability to make any space enjoyable, as Klumb believed.

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Figure 1: Biblioteca Lázaro. University of Puerto Rico, Río Píedras Campus, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Photo taken by the author, Carola Reyes Benítez (2019).

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Figure 2: Nuestra Señora del Carmen Church, Cataño, Puerto Rico.

Photo taken by the author, Carola Reyes Benítez (2019).

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Figure 3: Henry Klumb House. Río Píedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Photo Credit: World Monuments Fund.

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Figure 4: Casa Klumb post-Maria, Río Píedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Photo taken by the author, Carola Reyes Benítez (2019).

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Figure 5: Casa Klumb post-Maria, Rio PĂ­edras, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Photo taken by the author, Carola Reyes BenĂ­tez (2019).

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“Tropical Modernism: Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico” Bibliography Carranza, Luis E., and Fernando Luiz Lara. Modern Architecture in Latin America : Art,jTechnology, and Utopia, University of Texas Press, 1968.

Del Cueto, Beatriz. La Influencia del Arquitecto Klumb en mi Trayectoria Profesional. Acceptance speech upon receiving Henry Klumb award. 2012.

Del Cueto, Beatriz. Personal Interview. 28 April 2018.

Fernández, José A. Architecture in Puerto Rico. (Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1965) “Henry Klumb House.” World Monuments Fund, www.wmf.org/project/henry-klumb-house.

Hitchcock, Henry Russell. Latin American Architecture since 1945. New York: MoMA, 1955. https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2436_300190216.pdf.

Jiménez, Jósean Figueroa, and Edric Vivoni González.Henry Klumb: principios para unajarquitectura de integración.Colegio de Arquitectos y Arquitectos Paisajistas de PuertojRico, 2007.

López, Rodríguez and Luz Marie. Presencia de las migraciones europeas en la arquitecturajlatino americana del siglo XX.Universidad. Nacional Autónomia de México, Facultad de Arquitectura, 2009.

Rodriguez, Carlos. “The Economic Trajectory of Puerto Rico since WWII.” Centro 18, no. 2 (October 1, 2006): 224–33. (EBSCOhost) Santiago, Jerry Torres. Mayagüez y Klumb: La Historia Olvidada: Arquitectura Del Recinto Universitario De Mayagüez. Centro De Publicaciones Académicas (CePA), UPR-RU, 2015.

Suárez, Rodríguez and Francisco Javier. “Sobre Henry Klumb.” La Torre: Revista De La Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2009.

“Vivos Los Recuerdos Del Jardinero De La Casa Klumb.” Diálogo UPR, 10 Apr. 2014, dialogupr.com/vivos-los-recuerdos-del-jardinero-de-la-casa-klumb-4/.

Vivoni-Farage, Enrique, et al. Klumb: Una Arquitectura De Impronta Social = Klumb: an Architecture of Social Concern. La Editorial, Univ. De Puerto Rico, 2006.

Vivoni-Farage, Enrique. Modern Puerto Rico and Henry Klumb. Docomomo Journal, no 33, Sept. 2005, 28-37.

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Marsden in Mexico: Finding American Modernism

By Megan Gatton

Intense periods of travel marked by the transnational exchange of artistic ideas characterized Marsden Hartley’s journey to define American Modernism. The exhibition, Marsden Hartley's Maine, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Breuer in 2017 focused on Hartley’s relationship with his native state. In 2014, his German works were celebrated in Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings, 1913-1915, an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico exhibited Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism in 2008, which displayed his work in the American Southwest. Yet, regardless of the international prestige of Marsden Hartley’s paintings, no retrospective regarding his time in Mexico has ever been presented. Perhaps because his stay was relatively brief (or because Hartley himself expressed feelings of discontent during his time abroad), his trip to Mexico in 1932 has been largely overlooked by curators and academics. However, this trip proved vital to the trajectory of Hartley’s career: it exposed him to new artistic modes of representation, stimulated his spiritual rediscovery, and refocused his vision for American Modernism.

In this paper, I will present a chronological study of Marsden Hartley’s career, hoping to elucidate the impact that his trip to Mexico had on his artistic trajectory. The spiritual explorations he began early in his career were reignited in Mexico. During his time abroad, he continued to formulate his own visual vocabulary. The scholar Bruce Robertson viewed Hartley’s work in Mexico as “a conjunction between his two most important periods: Maine and Germany.” 1 However, this perspective depreciates the lasting impact Mexico had on Hartley’s oeuvre. I hope to challenge this by examining Hartley’s works from before his trip to Mexico, which express his

1

Bruce Robertson, Marsden Hartley (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of

American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 94.

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early explorations of mysticism (the search for a divine truth through art), in addition to the works he created while in Mexico and his later works.

Born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine to immigrants from England, Hartley received minimal formal art education until 1893, when he enrolled in the Cleveland School of Art in Ohio. As a student, he was given a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays by his teacher, Nina Waldeck, whom he credited as “provid[ing] the religious element in [his] experience by producing the first book [he] had ever read.”2 Indeed, in his autobiography, Hartley described his relationship with Emerson’s text by means of religious allegory, stating “I felt as if I had read a page of the Bible” and “reading it on all occasions, as a priest reads his Latin breviary on all occasions.” 3 The influence of this exposure to transcendentalism appears in both Hartley’s writing and artwork. Several of his early paintings evince an Emersonian ideal of the spiritual connectedness of humanity and nature, as well as the purity of undisturbed nature. In The Ice-Hole, Maine (19081909), Hartley depicts the majesty of nature by emphasizing the mountains and lake, which compoose the scene. The only evidence of humanity appears in hewn cubes of ice and small houses at the lake’s edge. They are subtle inclusions in a work in which a cool palette and regulated brushstrokes create an impression on stillness. This emphasis on the power of nature over the influence of man alludes to Hartley's interest Emerson’s ideologies.

In the summer of 1907, Hartley began working at Green Acre, a retreat in Eliot, Maine established by local philanthropist Sarah Farmer as “an institute where artists, theologians, and mystics could exchange spiritual and philosophical views in a pastoral setting.” 4 The daughter of transcendentalists, Farmer was interested in Eastern religions; six years prior to Hartley’s arrival, she had reformed Green Acre into an institute of the Bahá'í Faith, which advocates the equality of

2

Marsden Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT

Press, 1998), 181.

3

Ibid, 181.

4

Barbara Haskell, Marsden Hartley. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in Association with New York

University Press, 1980), 13.

- 23 -

all peoples and religions. Hartley’s summer at Green Acre allowed him to engage with the work of other contemporary artists, particularly that of Arthur Wesley Dow, who painted in the Oriental and Synthetist styles. Green Acre also connected Hartley with patrons, notably Mrs. Ole Bull, wife of a prominent musician, who hosted an exhibition of his work at her home.5 Continuing his initial engagement with transcendentalism, Hartley’s time at the “institute” allowed him to further his relationship with both nature and spirituality.

Hartley returned to New York in 1909, where his work caught the attention of photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz offered to host Hartley’s first solo exhibition at his eminent 291 Gallery. This exhibition established Hartley as a member of the American Modernist movement with a group of peers that included John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand.

With connections and funding from Stieglitz, Hartley traveled abroad for the first time in 1912.

He first landed in Paris—where he saw the work of Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—before embarking for Berlin.

While in Paris, Hartley began to read the work of the sixteenth-century German mystic, Jakob Bohme, whose ideas imbued his work with a newfound mysticism. Through his readings, Hartley acquired the visual language of mysticism, which relies on symbols such as circles, triangles, and stars. This can be seen in his Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony) (1912-1913), (Figure 1) which borrows visual motifs from the illustration, The True Principles of All Things from The Works of Jakob Bohme. Regarding his Musical Theme series, Hartley observed “a kind of cosmic dictation applied aesthetically to produce a harmony of shapes & colors.”6 In Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), each of the elements appears clearly defined, yet no one symbol overpowers the composition. The wide array of shapes—including stars, musical notes, a seated Buddha, and a hand—create a harmonious and otherworldly appearance.

In 1913, Hartley traveled to Berlin, where he spent time with his two friends, Arnold Ronnenbeck and Karl von Freyburg. During this period, Hartley’s works began to take on a

5

Haskell, Marsden Hartley, 14.

6

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 84.

- 24 -

heightened sense of sexuality. Hartley, a gay man, felt drawn to Karl von Freyburg (although his feelings were apparently not reciprocated). During this time, Hartley’s language of signs served as covert symbols of the gay experience; his paintings and writings from this period express his sense of loneliness and frustration at the lack of both love and sex in his life. After Germany declared war on the Allies in 1914, Hartley—who sympathized with the German people—began to paint portraits. His masterpiece, Portrait of a German Officer memorialized Karl von Freyburg, who died in combat on October 7, 1914. As evinced by the Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition, the works Hartley produced during this period are some of his most recognized and celebrated.

More than a year earlier, in the January of 1913, Hartley met the artist Wassily Kandinsky. 7 He read Kandinsky's Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), which instilled a distinctive spirituality in his work. Hartley’s Painting No. 1 (1913), which borrows formal elements from Kandinsky’s Composition No. 4, contains a new level of ethereality that distances the painting from Hartley's earlier more earthbound works. In this painting, Hartley employs a greater variety in the sizes of his brushstrokes than in his earlier works, which featured intense layering of pigment using tighter brushwork. The lighter hues and pigment application create a diaphanous effect, which alludes to the influence of Kandinsky and his spirituality.

However, by the spring of 1913, Hartley’s enthusiasm for Kandinsky waned. In August of that year, he wrote of Kandinsky’s paintings, “I wish I could feel a little warmth in them—I wish I felt that they were really ‘creations’ and not laboratory demonstration.” 8 Hartley found Kandinsky's overt logic and mysticism—his quest to find divine meaning—unpersuasive, noting “I have only the attitude of the mystical nature which feeds itself into this quality of things as they appear before me.”9 Patricia McDonnell, one of the eminent scholars of Marsden Hartley, has argued that his “subjectivism was plainly in the tradition of transcendentalism and Jamesian

7

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 84.

8

Patricia McDonnell. ""Dictated by Life": Spirituality in the Art of Marsden Hartley and Wassily Kandinsky, 1910-

1915." Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 1/2 (1989): 30.

9

Ibid., 31.

- 25 -

empiricism” that therefore differs from Kandinsky's spiritualism.10 Though Hartley initially adopted elements of Kandinsky’s spiritualism, his later attitude focused his interest in the mysticism embedded within natural landscapes.

The First World War forced Hartley to return to the United States from Germany. By 1918 he had moved to New Mexico, where he spent time in Taos and Santa Fe, two havens for the American Modernist movement. He remained in New Mexico for the next thirteen years. During this period, Hartley began to paint landscapes once again. He abandoned the vibrant hues and symbolism that he employed during his Parisian and German periods in favor of a muted palette and a higher level of naturalism. This demonstrates Hartley’s return to his focus on depicting the “quality of things as they appear.”

In 1931, Hartley received a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, which stipulated international travel. Suffering from poor health, Hartley chose Mexico due to its proximity and perceived similarity to New Mexico. Arriving in Mexico City in March 1932, Hartley devoted the beginning of his fellowship to studying Pre-Columbian art and artifacts at the Museo Nacional. In a letter to Edith Halpert, owner of the Downtown Gallery, he expressed enthusiasm for his new surroundings, writing, “the Aztec remains are astounding in beauty and nobility and the people are beautiful and lovable.”11 There he gained “a wondrous revelation of a past truly great culture” by learning about the ancient myths attached to the Mexican landscape. 12 He visited the remains of the ancient city of Teotihuacan, which preserves the two great pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and the Temple of Quetzalcóatl (the feathered serpentine god of the heavens). While visiting the site's ancient temples, Hartley was drawn to their geometric symmetry and mythical symbolism. For him, it was “an incarnation of the forces of nature and the concrete

10

Ibid., 33.

11

Garnett McCoy, and Marsden Hartley. "South of the Border with Marsden Hartley: Letters to Edith Halpert, 1931-

1933." Archives of American Art Journal 37, no. 1/2 (1997): 12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557819.

12

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 154.

- 26 -

embodiment in stone of a supreme cosmic being.”13 The visit encouraged Hartley’s understanding of landscapes as spaces of mythologies and primeval pasts.

Unable to speak Spanish, Hartley made few attempts to connect with the Mexican people, preferring instead to socialize with his fellow Americans, including photographer Paul Strand and poet Hart Crane.14 Hartley spent a great deal of time with Crane, who was also in Mexico on a Guggenheim grant; they often engaged in intimate discussions, featuring a wide variety of topics, including their homosexuality. Their close friendship ended tragically when Crane committed suicide on April 27th, 1932 by jumping off a ship headed back to the United States. Distraught, Hartley created one of the most distinctive works of his Mexican period: Eight Bells Folly, Memorial to Hart Crane. This painting depicts a seascape with a boat sailing in the night. It also contains symbols reminiscent of Hartley’s German period, particularly his Portrait of a German Officer, another painting commemorating a departed friend.

By September, Hartley moved to Cuernavaca, seeking to avoid the altitude sickness, dysentery, and other unpleasant conditions of his time in Mexico City. When describing Mexico, Hartley wrote “the light will wear you down, the air will fatigue, height will oppress, the sense of conflagration will intimidate you.”15 By this time, his initial enthusiasm for Mexico had disappeared. In one of his letters, he observed, “it is a hard country to become identified with and without identification, no country can be interesting or livable.”16 Hartley expressed disappointment with what he perceived as a lack of connection between Mexico’s mystic past and its Spanish present. In his autobiography, he argued that Mexico “was denied the privilege of

13

Jeanne Hokin. Pinnacles & Pyramids: The Art of Marsden Hartley. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

Press, 1993), 85.

14

This was a common trait among American artists who travelled to Mexico during this time. While they were able

to experience the environment of Mexico, this lack of interaction with the local population deprived them of valuable opportunities for cross-cultural engagement.

15

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 153.

16

Garnett McCoy, and Marsden Hartley. "South of the Border,” 13.

- 27 -

completing its mystical significance through its own people” due to Spanish imperialism. 17 Hartley spent most of his time in Mexico feeling disheartened by his inability to replicate his experiences in Europe and New Mexico.

During his time in Cuernavaca, Hartley cultivated his spirituality by reading extensively in the library of Mary and Eric Ostlund, wealthy and educated American expatriates.18 He studied the works of mystics Paracelsus, Richard Rolle, and Jakob Bohme. Influenced by their writings, Hartley produced a series of paintings he called Murals for an Arcane Library, which included explicit allusions to their mysticism. His work, The Transference of Richard Rolle (1932) contains a cloud, presumably symbolizing Rolle, floating above a distinctly Mexican landscape. 19 The letter “R” is featured prominently throughout the painting. In this work, Hartley combines the symbolic language he acquired in Europe with the vibrant and mystical Mexican landscape.

Another work included in Hartley’s Murals for an Arcane Library is his 1932 painting, Morgenrot, which again alludes to the work of Bohme. In this work, Hartley employs the symbolic language of mysticism to depict one of Bohme’s mystical illuminations. 20 The vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows refer to the Morgenrot, the red mornings Bohme experienced during his revelations.21 These hues also evince Hartley’s connection with the Mexican landscape, which he viewed as a “flame consuming the whole aspect of life.”22 In a letter to Edith Halpert, Hartley wrote that he had “returned to the ‘gaudy flame’ of earlier pictures.”23 The paintings in the Arcane Library display Hartley’s engagement with both the mysticism that typified his earlier works, and the dramatic Mexican landscape that surrounded him.

17

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 146.

18

Bruce Robertson. Marsden Hartley. (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of

American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 93.

19

Townsend Ludington, Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley, 56.

20

Ibid., 58.

21

Ibid, 58.

22

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 146.

23

Garnett McCoy, and Marsden Hartley. "South of the Border,” 16.

- 28 -

Several of Hartley’s masterpieces from his time in Mexico are depictions of mountains.

Those he painted appear imbued with more mysticism than those in his previous paintings. His work Yliaster (Paracelsus) (1932) alludes to the work of Paracelsus and offers a highly imaginative depiction of the landscape. In this painting, he represents the peak of the mountain Popocatépetl. The work’s title refers not only to Paracelsus by name, but also employs the word “yliaster” which was used by Paracelsus to describe the element which composes the universe.

This painting shows a break from the naturalism Harley pursued while in New Mexico. The ethereality present in his earlier works was replaced with a vibrant palette of primary colors depicting “solidly rendered symbols with profound and specific meanings.”24 While he depicted the New Mexican mountains with a naturalistic palette and modeling, the Mexican mountains are abstracted, containing vast expanses of uniform colors unseen in the natural world. Instead of depicting a reality that someone else might also observe, Hartley placed the Mexican mountains in a mythical and primeval space.

As mentioned above, the one mountain that particularly captured Hartley’s attention was Popocatépetl, the second highest peak in Mexico (located to the southeast of Mexico City).

Popocatépetl also inspired Hartley’s writing. In his poem personifying the mountain, he writes: ...if, after four hundred years He should decide to shake the monstered tropic to the very stem, and curl of every petulant tail with sulphuric revisitation?25 In these lines, Hartley emphasizes the continued power of the mountain, imbuing it with a mythical persona. He further described Popocatépetl as part of an “Entente Cordiale” with other volcanoes, including Vesuvius in Italy and Mount Pelée in Martinique. Hartley’s engagement with Popocatépetl reintroduced the motif of the mountain, which continued to shape his oeuvre.

24

Haskell, Marsden Hartley, 94.

25

Hartley, Marsden. The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley, 1904-1943, (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press,

1987) 89.

- 29 -

Tollan, Aztec Legend (1933), a masterpiece of Hartley’s Mexican period, offers a stunning depiction of a highly imaginative and symbolic landscape infused with elements of Mexican mythology (Figure 2). This painting is one of his “fantasias,” works depicting an imagined landscape based on Pre-Columbian mythology.26 In this work, an abstracted form of a white falcon flies above a Pre-Colombian ruin, presumably the temple of Quetzalcóatl. Before archaeological research identified the ancient city of “Tollan” at Tula, Hidalgo, many thought that the painting referred to the Teotihuacan site, which Hartley visited. 27 The painting contains symbolism reminiscent of Hartley’s German period. However, he placed these forms above a Pre-Columbian ruin, exemplifying the profound effect that the history and landscape of Mexico had on his evolving style. Hartley’s time in Mexico led to the creation of works with a newfound level of mysticism while indicating the influence of the realism of New England, the symbolism of Germany, and the naturalism of the American Southwest.

Hartley’s paintings from his time in Mexico also contained more decorative and stylized elements than his previous work did. His sources of inspiration for these choices can be seen in the sculptural fragments and architectural ruins of Pre-Columbian cultures, as well as in the work of contemporary Mexican muralists, including José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, whose work had gained popularity in the 1920s. Of these three, Hartley most admired Orozco, whom he saw as possessing a “true Mexican nature” and a “pure indianism.” 28 In his autobiography, Hartley described Orozco as a “natural mystic,” whose work contains “touches depths of [William] Blake and Dante in his simple planes.”29 Orozco’s influence can be seen in Hartley’s paintings of Mexico, which appear flatter and more expressive and feature a warmer and brighter palette than his earlier works.

26

James Oles, and Karen Cordero. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947

(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 155.

27

Ibid., 159.

28

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 151.

29

Ibid., 151.

- 30 -

After spending a little over a year in the country, on April 20, 1933, Harley left Mexico.

Despite the negative feelings he expressed about the country, Hartley’s time in Mexico resulted in paintings that were imbued with a rediscovered sense of mysticism and emphasized the abstracted figure of the mountain—a motif conspicuous in his later work. One of Hartley’s later works, Mount Katahdin, Autumn No. 2 (1939-40), created in Maine almost a decade after his departure from Mexico, bears a striking similarity to Carnelian Country, a depiction of the Mexican landscape Hartley created in 1932. Mount Katahdin contains the bold palette and shapes he acquired during his Mexico period.30 This work reveals the influence of Mexico on his artistic evolution, as it shows an increase in mystical energy from the paintings of Maine he created earlier in his career.

Hartley’s later works—even those which are not landscapes—demonstrate the vibrant and flattened modes of depiction that Hartley began to employ while in Mexico. His work from 19401941, (Lobster on Black Background), features the crustacean as a red form composed of primary shapes with little variation in hue. This representation is markedly different from the still lifes he created during the 1920s while he was in Europe. These earlier works contain a higher degree of naturalism in their modelling and palettes. Yet, nearly two decades later, Hartley chose to depict objects in the bright, strong manner he originally used to depict the Mexican mountains.

It is true that Hartley once wrote of Mexico: “it was a place that devitalized my energies— the one place I always shall think of as wrong for me.”31 Nonetheless, he also considered it to be, “the most profound mystical space [he had] ever been privileged to live in.” 32 Hartley found valuable ideas in the landscape of “novel, powerful, dramatic Mexico,” which revitalized his work and aided him in defining American Modernism.33 Influenced by the fantasy of the Mexican muralists, Hartley adopted new artistic modes of representation. Through reading in Mary and Eric

30

Hole, Heather. Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism. (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2007) 142.

31

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 145.

32

Garnett McCoy, and Marsden Hartley. "South of the Border,” 16.

33

Hartley, Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, 146.

- 31 -

Ostlund’s occult library and producing Murals for an Arcane Library, Hartley further expressed spirituality he began to cultivate in Germany.

In Mexico, Hartley refocused his vision for American Modernism by experimenting with methods of abstraction and pigmentation. He was also able to combine the mysticism and modes of representation he investigated while in the United States and Europe with the dramatic, mythological landscape of Mexico. Though the trip had a lasting effect on his career, it has been too often disregarded by scholars of both Hartley and American Modernism. Hartley’s time in Mexico evinces the value of transnational exchange with not only the United States and Europe, but also “non-Western” countries, whose rich visual culture and history had (and have) much to contribute.

- 32 -

Figure 1: Marsden Hartley, Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), 1912-1913. Oil on canvas (100 x 80.6 cm). Waltham, Massachusetts: The Rose Art Museum.

Photo Credit: The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University.

- 33 -

Figure 2: Marsden Hartley, Tollan, Aztec Legend, 1933. Oil on canvas (31 ½ x 39 ¼ in). Minneapolis, MN: Myron Kunin Collection of American Art. Photo Credit: Curtis Galleries, Inc.

“Marsden in Mexico: Finding American Modernism” Bibliography - 34 -

Hartley, Marsden. Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville and Poets. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972.

Hartley, Marsden. Somehow a Past: the Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. Edited by Susan Elizabeth Ryan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Hartley, Marsden. The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley, 1904-1943. Edited by Gail R. Scott. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987.

Haskell, Barbara. Marsden Hartley. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with New York University Press, 1980.

Hokin, Jeanne. Pinnacles & Pyramids: the Art of Marsden Hartley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

Hole, Heather, and Barbara Buhler Lynes. Marsden Hartley and the West: the Search for an American Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, and Ulrich Birkmaier. Marsden Hartley. New Haven: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2002.

Ludington, Townsend. Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Manthorne, Katherine E. Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 18391879. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

McCoy, Garnett, and Marsden Hartley. "South of the Border with Marsden Hartley: Letters to Edith Halpert, 1931-1933." Archives of American Art Journal 37, no. 1/2 (1997): 11-19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557819.

McDonnell, Patricia. ""Dictated by Life": Spirituality in the Art of Marsden Hartley and Wassily Kandinsky, 1910-1915." Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 1/2 (1989): 27-34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557587.

Oles, James, and Karen Cordero. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Robertson, Bruce. Marsden Hartley. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

Scott, Gail R. Marsden Hartley. New York: Abbeville, 1988.

Married to Myth: Local Tradition in the Book of Kells’ Virgin and Child - 35 -

By Amy Lenkiewicz

Embellished with the peltas, keys, steps, and trumpets of the pre-Christian British Isles, the Book of Kells is a treasure trove of Insular art, as woven with indigenous tradition as it is with interlace.

The manuscript’s miniatures, painted in a style steeped in regional practice, ought also to be contextualized within local culture. This paper will examine the way that regional influences, from vernacular poetry to geography, can provide a more nuanced view of the Virgin and Child fullpage illustration in the Book of Kells. It is imperative to begin by narrowing and defining what was “local” to the Gospel book and its illuminators. Though scholarly consensus settles the Book of Kells’ date around 800 CE, its provenance remains disputed. Northumbria, Pictland, Iona, and Kells, and combinations thereof, have all been proposed as its possible place of origin. 1 Daniel McCarthy’s recent study argues that the Gospel book was produced entirely at Kells c. 807-814, and that Kells was not founded as a “daughter house” of Iona, as is traditionally maintained.2 McCarthy points out that no early records actually document Kells as having been founded under the auspices of Iona. Kells did not record its personnel nor its ecclesiastical affairs for 150 years. The few existing accounts imply, through the inclusion of the word “ciuitas,” that Kells was a significant site even before the monastery was built. This, too, suggests that Kells had importance independent of Ionian association. McCarthy notices that the first annals even term Kells the “new” monastery of Colum Cille, despite the fact that its Ionian counterpart was still flourishing.

However, the paucity of early writing associating Kells and Iona cannot be taken to mean that the two were not connected, given the fact that, as McCarthy says, Kells kept so few records.

McCarthy’s observation that Kells was an important site before its monastery was built also does

1

The Library of Trinity College Dublin, “The Book of Kells.”

2

Daniel McCarthy, “THE ILLUSTRATION AND TEXT ON THE BOOK OF KELLS, FOLIO 114RV,” Studies in

Iconography 35 (2014): 28-30.

- 36 -

not preclude Ionian associations. It is possible that what made Kells an important site was its royal provenance: the land was owned by the Scottish Uí Néill kings, who probably awarded it to the abbots of Iona as the culmination of over half-a-century of collaboration.3 McCarthy does not address the practical challenges posed by producing such an intricate artwork entirely at the newly-founded monastery. Medieval historian Geraroid Mac Niocaill observes that the monastery at Kells did not have the funds and skilled scribes necessary to create the costly and intricate Book of Kells; its whose vellum alone required the slaughter of about 185 calves.4 Despite the fact that he frames them as such, McCarthy’s observations are not mutually exclusive with the conventional theory that, no matter at which location the Book of Kells was produced, its illuminators were part of a web of monastic communication that connected Iona to Kells and spanned the British Isles. Thus, when examining “local” cultures which may have complicated the imagery in the Virgin and Child, this paper will consider both Irish and Scottish tradition, despite recent scholarship favoring entirely Irish origins of the Book of Kells.

Folio 7v in the Book of Kells, the full-page Virgin and Child miniature, is the earliest extant Madonna and Child illustration in a Latin codex.5 It precedes the initial page of the breves causae, or summary, of the Gospel of Matthew. In the illustration, the Virgin Mary sits in profile on a highbacked throne with one animal-headed terminal at its back and ornament resembling gem-style inlay at its base.6 The upper half of Mary’s body is turned toward the viewer, while her crossed

3

Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Markus, IONA: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburg:

Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 16.

4

Roger Stalley, “Investigating the Book of Kells,” Irish Arts Review Yearbook 10, (1994): 94.

5

Martin Werner, “The Madonna and Child Miniature in the Book of Kells: Part 1,” The Art Bulletin 54, no. 1

(March 1972): 1.

6

Interesting to note is the visual similarity between the lion head terminating the one visible pole of the Virgin’s

high-backed throne and the “animal headposts” found in Viking ship burials. Both the Kells Virgin lion head and the Sutton Hoo Headpost are felines whose heads are decorated with different patterns on their frontal and lateral planes. Both animals have mouths open in the same semicircular shape, showing visible gums and squat, rounded teeth. Large, cartoonish eyes and the same proportions between head and post make the similarity striking. The - 37 -

legs and throne are parallel to the picture plane. She holds the Christ child, whose body is in profile.

He reaches for her chest with his left hand while holding her right. Despite being the size of a tot, the Christ child has the proportions of an adult and notably lacks a halo. In contrast, Mary has a gold and purple halo. Four angels fill the space around the Virgin and Child. Three carry staffs that terminate in decorated circular disks; the fourth carries a floriated rod that is likely a musical instrument or a liturgical sprinkler called an aspergillum. 7 The scene is framed by a border of animal and ribbon interlace broken by a box of six nearly-identical bearded men facing left towards folio 8r, Matthew’s breves causae. Typical of Hiberno-Saxon illustration, all forms are colored in flat monochrome with minimal shading and modeling, instead relying on outline to suggest form.

In the history of its scholarship, the Kells Virgin has not been brought into conversation with a poem likely written at the exact same time and place. This paper will structure its examination of the Virgin and Child miniature in the Book of Kells around the virtues for which the Ionian monk St. Blathmac praises Mary in his previously overlooked work, “A Poem on the Virgin Mary.” This contextualization will be organized around the four main Insular virtues for which Mary is celebrated: her royalty, her conception of Christ, her supportive family ‘tribe,’ and her wisdom. In addition, this paper will perform a sort of lectio divina, the contemporary monastic practice of prayerful ‘rumination-by-association’ along literary, historical, aural, visual, or liturgical lines, by drawing from Hiberno-Saxon legal studies and folklore.8 Listening for

Animal Headpost from the Oseberg ship burial is an object contemporary with the Book of Kells. Kells’ illuminators could have easily borrowed the visual trappings of Viking royalty to depict the Virgin and Child because the Ionian monastery was frequently brought raided by the Vikings. One such raid may have even caused the transportation of the Book of Kells from Iona to Ireland.

7

Carol A. Farr, “Bis per chorum hinc et inde: The ‘Virgin and Child with Angels’ in the Book of Kells,” in Text,

Image, and Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honor of Eamonn O’Carragain, ed. Alastair Minnes and Jane Roberts (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2007): 122.

8

Jennifer O’Reilly, “The Book of Kells, Folio 114r: a Mystery Revealed yet Concealed,” in The Age of Migrating

Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland, ed. John Higgitt and R. Michael Spearman, (Dover: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993): 110.

- 38 -

resonances between the Virgin and Child and its local context, we may be able to make out whisperings of this mysterious manuscript’s many secrets.

A contemporary of Saint Blathmac, the Benedictine abbot and theologian Walafrid Strabo (c. 808-849 CE) narrates a dramatized account of Blathmac’s life (c. 750-823 CE) in a 180-line metrical poem.9 According to the poem, Blathmac denied his royal Irish lineage in order to become a monk, and later an abbot, in Ireland. After becoming an abbot, he moved to Scotland’s Iona to seek martyrdom. He was killed during the Viking raids c. 823 CE because he refused to reveal the burial location of the relics of St. Columba, the founder of the Ionian monastery.10 The poem’s biographical truth is supported by the fact that Blathmac is genealogically identifiable through records of his father, Cú Brettan son of Congus of the Fir Roiss. 11 Because Saint Blathmac was active in both Irish and Scottish monastic communities, his work is especially useful for comparison with the Book of Kells, a potentially migratory object.

Written by an Ionian monk, St. Blathmac’s Old Irish “A Poem on the Virgin Mary” can be taken to represent what Ionian monastics found most important and praiseworthy about Mary.

James Carney of the National Library of Ireland labels the poem’s meter “a simple unpretentious deibide, obviously intended for a popular audience.” 12 Because the poem’s meter indicates that it was intended for popular consumption, and because it was written in the vernacular, we can extrapolate that its content was also tailored to please the lay literate and the nobles for whom it might have been performed. Most Old and Middle Irish poetry was written for oral recitation,

9

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Walafrid Strabo: Benedictine Abbot” last modified August 14, 2018,

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walafrid-Strabo.

10

Ambrose Mooney, “St. Blaithmaic of Iona, Martyr (Blaithmac, Blathmac, Blaithmale)” last modified December

29, 2011, http://celticsaints.org/2012/0119b.html.

11

Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, trans. James Carney (Dublin: Irish Texts

Society, 1964), xiv.

12

Blathmac, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, xv.

- 39 -

making it accessible to even the illiterate.13The virtues for which the poem praises Mary were likely popularly accepted among the elite, both clerical and not. “A Poem on the Virgin Mary” can thus function as a guide to the way that the Kells Virgin visualizes, problematizes, and complicates the characteristics for which Mary was popularly and officially praised. I will group my quotations from the eight-stanza poem by theme—Mary’s royalty, her conception of Christ, her supportive family ‘tribe,’ and her wisdom—instead of by their order as presented in the poem.

In the seventh and eighth stanzas, Saint Blathmac writes, “(7) A maiden of the seeds of the kings, a queen of the race of David; it was no low-class kin in addition to that: the maiden was of the tribe of Juda. / (8) The woman was a daughter of Israel, the maiden was of noble race. Mary is the name of the woman who conceived in Bethlehem at Juda.”14 Words like “race,” “kin,” “tribe,” and “daughter” emphasize a genealogy rooted in the royalty of “kings” and “queen[s],” giving Mary a family with “no low-class,” but “noble” roots. This regality finds form in the Kells Virgin’s garments. Mary’s separate cloak and maphorion, or hooded outer garment, mark her clothing’s northwest European aristocratic origin, fit for a “native Irish queen.” 15 Indeed, two shades of the royal color purple differentiate her garment layers, and what appears to be a lozenge-shaped kite brooch fastens them together on Mary’s left shoulder.

The silver-and-gold colored brooch on Mary’s shoulder is thematically picked up in the gem-style decoration at the base of her throne, which recreates a flat cloisonné surface of garnet and green enamel-work, evocative of earlier Anglo-Saxon brooches (Figure 2). The detail is parallel to the picture plane, suggesting the flat, small-scale luxury brooches associated with the heritage upon which Saint Blathmac insists: that of “kings,” “queens,” and “noble” life. However, by increasing the scale of the luxury art, the illuminator ensures that the decor is large enough to 13

Thomas Owen Clancy, “Gaelic Literature in Ireland and Scotland 900-1150,” in The Cambridge History of Early

Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 658.

14

Blathmac, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, 109, 111; Niamh Whitfield, “Brooch or Cross? The lozenge

on the Shoulder of the Virgin in the Book of Kells.” Archaeology Ireland 10, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 21-22 15

Niamh Whitfield, “Brooch or Cross? The lozenge on the Shoulder of the Virgin in the Book of Kells.”

Archaeology Ireland 10, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 21-22.

- 40 -

make a visual impact. The illustration overstates the limits of miniature cloisonné design, expanding a symbol of wealth and heritage literally into the basis of Mary’s power: the base of her throne. As legal scholar Dorothy Dilts Swartz notes, there was a positive correlation between treasure and upper-class women’s powers in early medieval Ireland. 16 While this may tell us how the Kells Virgin “regalizes” Mary on specifically HibernoSaxon terms, the reason why she is presented in the form of a queen—instead of as a humble mother, for example—remains unanswered. To elucidate this question, we turn to Irish mythology, and the figure of the puella senilis, or the countryside personified as the king’s goddess bride. 17 As Celtic scholar Proinsias Mac Cana writes, “In Irish tradition it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this idea of the land and its sovereignty conceived in the form of a woman.” 18 This is especially true for the early medieval context in which the Book of Kells was illuminated, a period of transition between a pagan and Christian majority. In pre-Christian Irish religion, tribal kings married the woman who best embodied the beauty of the land. Only in union with such a representation of the goddess could a king’s rule become sacralized and acceptable to his people, and only in union with the king could the goddess stay beautiful and live on to marry en serie.19 Insular people assimilated Mary as a queen figure, as strongly suggested in the Virgin and Child, not because the strongest woman with whom they were familiar was a human queen, but rather because the strongest woman with whom they were familiar was the goddess archetype from folklore.

If we consider that the illuminators and miniaturists of the Book of Kells may have drawn upon their cultural background to conceptualize Mary and Christ’s relationship, we may better 16

Dorothy Dilts Swartz, “The Legal Status of Women in Early and Medieval Ireland and Wales in Comparison with

Western European and Mediterranean Societies: Environmental and Social Correlations,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 13, (1993): 115.

17

Proinsias Mac Cana, “Women in Irish Mythology,” The Crane Bag 4, no 1. (1980): 7.

18

Ibid., 7.

19

Margaret MacCurtain, “Women: The Historical Image,” Books Ireland, no. 90 (Feb 1985): 10; Mac Cana,

“Women in Irish Mythology,” 9.

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understand the Book of Kells’ preference for a Virgin and Child model which emphasizes Mary’s holiness and Christ’s humanity.20 The illuminators’ familiarity with the folkloric model of a divine woman married to a human king may explain the presentation of Mary and Christ using the Theotokos, or Mary-as-God-bearer model, a close theological analog. Mary, of course, is not divine, but her role in giving birth to Christ’s divine component, declared in the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, is perhaps the closest that she comes to divinity. 21 In the Virgin and Child page, the haloed Mary’s holy role as the mother of God takes precedence as she supports a Christ whose humanity is emphasized through his lack of a halo. This Christ is the worldly, human king of Scripture who imposes God’s divine rule on earth (John 12:15; 1 Timothy 6:15), the correlative to the folkloric human king.

Though Helen Rosenau proposes a different, Egyptian model for the Virgin and Child page, she also sees the illustration as emphasizing Mary’s holiness, going so far as to suggest that Kells’ Mary is semi-divine. She posits that this is the reason why the Virgin and Child does not act as a model for later artwork in the trend towards Christian orthodoxy. Rosenau’s work harmonizes with mine in her conclusion that this especially-holy Mary appealed to the illuminators of the Book of Kells because they had a “tradition of feminine deity” centered around the fertility goddess. 22 The influence of the fertility goddess archetype is visible in the representation of Mary’s breasts. The breasts’ components are large, articulated, and fully-frontal, emphasizing their function as milk-producing and life-giving. The pattern of three dots populating the Virgin’s cloak reinforces this impression, not only evoking extremely fine far eastern textiles, but also bringing to mind breast milk.23 The breasts’ clear outline against Mary’s purple cloak recalls an 20

Mac Cana, “Women in Irish Mythology,” 9.

21

Stephen J. Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 2016), 205.

22

Rosenau, “The Prototype of the Virgin and Child in the Book of Kells,” 231.

23

Bernard Meehan, “Decoration and Decorum,” Irish Arts Review 29, no. 4 (Winter [December 2012- February

2013]): 118; J. Folda, “Crusader Artistic Interactions with the Mongol in the Thirteenth Century: Figural Imagery, Weapons, and the Cintamani Design,” in Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western - 42 -

exaggerated, monumental conception of female fertility which appears across Ireland, even in the animistic naming of geography. Twin hills in County Kerry were dubbed the “Paps of Anu” after a monumentalized fantasy of the breasts of one popular example of the fertility goddess type, Anu.24 While Mary may assimilate the goddess’ fecundity, she is not merely another Anu; Mary is distinguished from the fertility goddess tradition by her unique virginity. Kells’ Mary wears a halo that reminds viewers of her particularly holy status as God’s virgin on earth, differentiating her as a Christian interpretation of the explicitly sexualized fertility goddess who marries kings en serie. However, the fertility and sexuality of both Hiberno-Saxon women should be seen in terms of child-bearing rather than male enticement because the native gender construct lacked a conception of the female as erotic temptress.25 The conception of Christ is the second theme for which Saint Blathmac’s poem praises Mary. He writes, in stanzas three and four, “(3) ‘Hail to you! whatever may come, O blessed amongst women. Hail! You will receive in your womb a being called Jesus.’ / (4) A being who has been born before worlds, who has given life to the dead; there is not apparent–though it is clear that it is not falsehood—in the Vetus or the Nouum a being like him.”26 This passage focuses on Christ as one source of Mary’s praiseworthiness. While stanza three represents Gabriel’s speech at the Annunciation, stanza four focuses exclusively on the merits of Christ. In this latter stanza, the phrase “there is not apparent … a being like him” suggests Christ’s uniquely dual nature, positioned between divinity and humanity. The phrase “born before worlds” suggests that Christ

Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (University Park, Pennsylvania 2007), 344-398; Heather Pulliam, “Looking to Byzantium: Light, Color, and Cloth in the Book of Kells’ Virgin and Child Page,” in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. C. Hourihane (University Park, Pennsylvania 2011) 59-78, at 66-67.

24

Mac Cana, “Women in Irish Mythology,” 10.

25

Carol A. Farr, “Worthy Women on the Ruthwell Cross: Woman as Sign in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,” in

The Insular Tradition, ed. Catherine E, Karkov, Robert T. Farrell, and Michael Ryan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 51.

26

Blathmac, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, 109, 111.

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was present before the earth’s creation, and that he is coeternal with God. This fourth stanza thus imbeds a theological argument, affirming Christ’s coeternity and coequality with God, established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.27 The third stanza sets the poem at a time when Mary is not yet pregnant: “You will receive in your womb a being called Jesus,” Blathmac writes [emphasis mine]. Just one stanza later, the phrase, “who has given life to the dead,” jumps forward in time to describe the miracles Christ has yet to complete as if they have already been completed [again, emphasis mine]. The careful variance of tenses has the effect of hurtling the speaker back and forth in time, collapsing the life of Jesus in a similar way as the Virgin and Child page in the Book of Kells. One visual parallel in the Kells Virgin and Child appears in Christ’s portrayal as an adult who is still the size of a baby.

Existing as both adult and child at once in the Virgin, it is as if visualized before us is Christ’s move beyond the realm of time, existing at all ages, at all times, at once.

Christ’s apparent adulthood is not the only indication of collapsed time. The four angels gathered around Mary and Christ may simultaneously reference the birth and resurrection of Christ because eighth-century Irish commentary on Matthew describes their presence at both events.28 Angels gathered around Mary and Christ carry flabella, the fans used to keep flies off the eucharistic bread and wine in Eastern Christian masses. 29 By fanning Christ on Mary’s lap, the angels address his body as if it has already been transformed into eucharistic bread, implying that his death and sacrifice have already taken place, though he is shown alive. The image collapses the time between Christ’s childhood, shown through his bodily presence, and the devotional context in which the Book of Kells was used, shown through liturgical objects, creating the impression that Christ’s life and the Insular liturgy take place simultaneously.

27

J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic 2014), 224-226.

28

Suzanne Lewis, “SACRED CALLIGRAPHY: THE CHI RHO PAGE IN THE BOOK OF KELLS,” Traditio 36

(1980): 154.

29

Werner, “The Madonna and Child Miniature in the Book of Kells: Part 1,” 11.

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The Virgin and Child insists upon Christ’s coeternity, like St. Blathmac’s poem, by fitting the past (the living Christ) and present (his status as Eucharist) into one setting. Carol A. Farr locates this setting, arguing that the liturgical references cue the understanding that the Virgin and Child scene takes place within a church.30 Farr’s interpretation allows for the possibility that the Virgin and Child should not be taken as a literal portrait of the bodies of Mary and Christ, but rather as a symbolic portrait of the Eucharist (Christ) and the Temple (Mary). 31 Common belief held that the angels of the heavenly liturgy were present at every mass and were represented by the deacons.32 However, Farr speculates that the angels would have reminded viewers of the Gloria and Sanctus hymns animating and resounding through a church’s empty air. 33 Another set of figures, the six small men disrupting the interlace border around the Virgin and Child, may also direct viewers to consider Christ’s coeternal and coequal status. Aside from the color of their garments, these six men are nearly identical: their bodies are frontal, as the folds of their cloaks show, while their heads are in profile, turned to their left to face the first page of Matthew’s breves causae initial page. With the same facial hair and type of cloak, the six men in the Virgin and Child composition clearly compose a set or “type.” Similar groups of witnesses in the borders of the full-page miniatures of Kells (for example, in folio 202v.) have been identified as monks,34 those to whom Christ ministered,35 saints and martyrs,36 metaphors for spiritual

30

Carol A. Farr, “Bis per chorum hinc et inde: The ‘Virgin and Child with Angels’ in The Book of Kells,” in Text,

Image, and Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honor of Eamonn O’Carragain, ed. Alastair Minnes and Jane Roberts (Turnhout: Bepols Publishers, 2007), 124.

31

Ibid., 125.

32

O’Reilly, “The Book of Kells, Folio 114r: a Mystery Revealed yet Concealed,” 113.

33

Farr, “Bis per chorum hinc et inde,” 125.

34

C. Nordenfalk, “Another Look at the Book of Kells,” in Festschrift Wolfgang Braunfels, ed. F. Piel and J. Traeger

(Tubingen: 1977), 277.

35

F. Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin (London: Thames &

Hudson, 1974), 188-190.

36

Carol A. Farr, The Book of Kells: Its Function and Audience (Toronto: 1997) 68-69.

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insight,37 and personifications of sight.38 In the most recent of these interpretations, Kirk Ambrose argues that these figures enact the Insular belief that “knowing” was a type of “seeing.” These witnesses’ “seeing and knowing” parallels the “seeing and knowing” of the Book of Kells’ viewer.39 Bernard Meehan elaborates that this “paralleled seeing” between the witnesses and the viewer-as-witness is not generic, but functions as a set of directions specific to each page. These six profile-heads indicate that the Virgin and Child should be read in conjunction with the breves causae facing it.40 Despite Ambrose and Meehan’s work, no scholar has yet looked specifically at what part of folio 8r the witnesses turn to face. Scholars have so far missed the very specific and intentional way that the Virgin and Child miniature and its accompanying text connect.

While other sets of witnesses may be generic, in the case of the Virgin and Child set, the number six is probably shorthand for Christ’s twelve disciples, turned to witness the first page of the Gospel summary of Matthew. The witnesses here take on specific identities to accompany their specific function as witnesses to Christ’s miracles. However, if the men represent the twelve apostles bearing witness to the events of the Gospels, then why are they placed in the border of the Virgin depiction, instead of directly on the breves causae page? The six men turn to face a text that reads, “Nativitas XPI in Bethlem Judeae Magi munera offerunt et infantes interficiuntur Regressio.”41 While the breves causae page alternates between large and small text in a patterned way, the portion of the text that the six men face is especially striking, its background colored green and dark purple. The text of folio 8r. closest to the six men begins in a unique, spiral-style break in the otherwise linear border that encloses the initial page. The six men’s intense scrutiny

37

O’Reilly, “The Book of Kells, Folio 114r: a Mystery Revealed yet Concealed,” 109.

38

Kirk Ambrose, “THE SENSE OF SIGHT IN THE BOOK OF KELLS,” Notes in the History of Art 27, no. 1 (Fall

2007): 1-3.

39

Ibid., 3.

40

Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells (New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2012), 47.

41

“The birth of Christ in Bethlehem of Judæa; the wise men present gifts; the slaying of the children; the return.”

Edward Sullivan, The Book of Kells (London, Paris, New York: “The Studio” LTD, 1920): 9, https://archive.org/details/TheBookOfKells/page/n25.

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of this line seems to ask viewers to model themselves on Christ’s twelve witnesses by paying it close attention.

The textual spacing is irregular and words are broken up between lines depending on the way in which they fit into the space of the page. The full line reads, “infantes inter,” curtailing the “-ficiuntur” from “interficiuntur.” The full sentence translates to “the children are slain.” The truncated Latin reads, “infantes inter,” which could be read (albeit incorrectly) as “children between” or “between children.” For the makers and monastic viewers opening to the Virgin and Child page and Matthew’s breves causae, this image-text pairing may have resonated with the idea of the unhaloed Christ caught between divinity (as God’s child) and humanity (as born of Mary).

The “betweenness” may also refer to Christ caught between life and death, the liturgical fans referencing his future, sacrificial death on the cross and its reenactment in the Mass.

The third theme that Blathmac introduces in praise of Mary is her supportive family ‘tribe.’

He writes in stanzas five and six, “(5) The mother who has born the boy is without doubt evervirgin; when the place from which she comes is known numerous are her kinsfolk. / (6) Of the people who sacrificed the Lamb who were in the city of Zion, of the posterity of Noah and Shem: it is Jerusalem.”42 Of course, these themes of praise overlap, so language like “born the boy” and “ever-virgin” reintroduce other strands of praise I have previously examined (here, Mary’s conception of Christ). However, the genealogical language in these two stanzas introduces a new reason to honor the Virgin. “Kinsfolk,” “posterity,” “of the people,” and “city” all emphasize Mary’s network of supporters. This emphasis finds visual parallel in the Book of Kells miniature, in which the artist has given Mary, who most likely sits physically alone, or, as Farr suggested, surrounded only by song, an invisible family or retinue of supporters: the four angels surrounding her. Blood kinship provided a basis on which monastic women could challenge the right of bishops to control monasteries and advise kings, so Mary’s retinue of angels, and her kinship with Christ, may suggest the support she had for her prominence in Church worship. 43

42

Blathmac, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, 109, 111.

43

Farr, “Worthy Women on the Ruthwell Cross: Woman as Sign in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,” 51.

- 47 -

The angels are not the only possible reference to Mary’s royal lineage; they coexist with references to the house of Judah. When St. Blathmac writes that Mary “was of the tribe of Judah,” he alludes to the Physiologus, a Greek text of animal lore from the fourth century which proclaimed that Christ was “our Savior, the spiritual lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David.”44 The artists of the Virgin and Child page probably referred to this same Late Antique text when they chose to refer to the house of Judah by including a lion-headed terminal on the back of Mary’s throne. The lion-head’s location, backing the seat of sovereignty, defines Mary’s regality as an inherited right of kinship. The decision to amplify the Virgin’s strength using references to her kin may relate to the changing ways which native women accessed power in a steadily Christianizing social and legal landscape. In pre-Christian Insular culture, women were valued for their roles in agriculture and herding, politically desirable marriages, the production of children, warfare (including light chariot battles), and possibly even armor-making.45 However, by the sixth century at the latest, Insular women were excluded from battle because of ecclesiastical intervention. 46 Thus, as their sphere of action within society became more constricted, so did their pre-Christian “relatively liberal property and marriage rights.”47 The fourth and final virtue for which Saint Blathmac praises Mary, her wisdom, comes through most strongly in the first and second stanzas as he writes, “(1) Mary is the mother of the little boy who was born on Christmas night: she read the Prophets and the Law until she was experienced in service. / (2) The woman was not unstable, the holy maiden was sage; she conceived with steadfastness and glory the well of divine wisdom.”48 While the Virgin does not hold a scroll or codex, typical motifs associated with wisdom, she has a type of baldachin formed by the wings

44

Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells, 138.

45

Dilts Swartz, “The Legal Status of Women in Early and Medieval Ireland and Wales in Comparison with Western

European and Mediterranean Societies: Environmental and Social Correlations,” 113.

46

Ibid., 114.

47

Ibid., 113.

48

Blathmac, The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cu Brettan, 109, 111.

- 48 -

of the two angels above her that suggests her particular holiness, wisdom, and authority. 49 While Christ and the angels look at Mary, she gazes from under this baldachin directly at the viewer, her despondent gaze perhaps signaling her omniscience of events to come as a proof of her wisdom.

Perhaps this wisdom is also implied in the edge of the composition, where a “borderland” of complexly knotted animal and ribbon interlace is neatly organized. The interlace is set off from the holy family by a two-layered frame; between its straight lines, the wild tangle of beasts is tamed into neat order. Insular ornament has been interpreted as an apotropaic device, an aid to meditation, an analogue to the human effort to make sense of divinity, and an indicator of flesh, among other things.50 Here, I argue that the interlace takes on gendered connotations. Hiberno-Saxon folklore considered women to not only be intimately connected to the fertility and contours of the natural land, “but also [to be connected] with the untamed fruitfulness of the wilderness beyond the limits of organized society.”51 This popular association strongly suggests that the zoomorphic interlace would have been seen as feminine to its creators and early viewers. This association takes on particular significance for the Virgin and Child as an image of Mary, a woman. In an abstract way, “framing” and “taming” may be synonymous in the Virgin and Child. The “untamed fruitfulness” of the woven beasts may have been seen as “tamed,” or controlled, by the borders, or fences, in which the beasts are enclosed. Even more broadly, the way that the frames separate each type of interlace from contact with Mary and Christ’s sacred inner area creates sense of the organized and disorganized; no interlace exists un-bordered. Mary’s wisdom, then, may have been the wisdom of cultivating and utilizing the bounty of the natural world.

Mary’s wisdom lies in the new model of the ideal Christian woman: she represents the paradoxical and astounding Hiberno-Saxon syncretism of a fertility goddess with a paradigm of virginity, creating a model which, unlike the goddess archetype, is impossible to embody because of its conflicting focus on chastity and childbearing.

49

Werner, “The Madonna and Child Miniature in the Book of Kells: Part 1,” 8.

50

Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Ornament and Incarnation in Insular Art,” Gesta 55, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 157, 171.

51

Mac Cana, “Women in Irish Mythology,” 10.

- 49 -

In the Virgin and Child image in the Book of Kells, the Virgin’s royalty, fertility, spiritual community, and wisdom are all celebrated. From her regional dress, to her historically-referential cloisonné throne, to her politically engaged animal headposts, it is not surprising that this extremely localized imagination of Mary is also one syncretized with the puella senilis figure of the personified countryside. To express this vision of Mary as a fertility goddess, we see the illuminators turn to a Theotokos model with a potentially unorthodox assertion of Mary’s divinity.

Part of this syncretization process is the alignment of Christ with the figure of the human king, the counterpart to the archetypal native land goddess. In Christ’s halo-less representation, his presentation as a fully-grown man sized like a child, and the angels’ flabella fans wafting over him like the eucharist, we sense the typological and Eucharistic significance encoded in this full-page miniature.

The relationship between the six men crouched in the border of the Virgin scene and the folio to their left supports the Virgin and Child as a rumination on Christ’s dual nature. These six men, perhaps shorthand for the twelve apostles, gaze intently at the words “children between,” or “between children,” directing the manuscript’s viewers to a clue about the connection between the images of Mary and the summary of the Gospel of Matthew. This phrase suggests that Christ is unhaloed because he is both God and man, alive and sacrificed, body and eucharist.

The image of the Virgin Mary in the Book of Kells reflects a society in flux, merging its own heritage and folklore with Christianized conceptions of women. Despite Saint Blathmac’s worthy attempts to straightforwardly outline the praiseworthy qualities of the Virgin Mary, we see a fraught, complicated attempt to visualize these qualities in the Book of Kells image, which struggles to rectify the contradictory aspects of two vastly different societies as they collide. By comparing the text and the imagery, two expressions of the same subject from the same place and the same time, we can see that the images allow for much more experimentation, obliquely engaging the political, the social, the economic, and the historical in a single religious representation. While Saint Blathmac’s poem may sound certain about the grounds on which it claims its devotion to Mary, the Book of Kells image lets us see all of the cultural anxieties lurking behind this confidence.

- 50 -

- 51 -

Figure 1: Virgin and Child, Book of Kells (fol. 7v). Iron gall ink, red lead, orpiment, red ochre, and chalk on vellum. (Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, MS 58).

Photo Credit: The Library of Trinity College Dublin.

- 52 -

Figure 2: Disk Brooch, early 600s, gold with garnets, glass, and niello. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Stalley, Roger. “Investigating the Book of Kells.” Irish Arts Yearbook 10, (1994): 94-97.

Sullivan, Edward. The Book of Kells. London, Paris, and New York: “The Studio” LTD, 1920. https://archive.org/details/TheBookOfKells/page/n25.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Walafrid Strabo: Benedictine Abbot.” Last Modified August 14, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walafrid-Strabo.

Werner, Martin. “The Madonna and Child Miniature in the Book of Kells: Part I.” The Art Bulletin 54, no.

1 (1972): 1-23.

Werner, Martin. “The Madonna and Child Miniature in the Book of Kells, Part II.” The Art Bulletin 54, no.

2 (1972): 129-139.

Whitfield, Niamh. “Brooch or Cross? The lozenge on the Shoulder of the Virgin in the Book of Kells.”

Archaeology Ireland 10, no. 1 (1996): 20-23.

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Nature and Mechanization after the Second World War: Order and Proportion in the Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments

By Owen Klinkon

In 1951, as pre-war visions of architectural utopias were replaced with hasty reconstructions and soulless housing projects, two seminal works of collective housing were completed. The first was Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, a wide, twelve-story, 337-unit building that rose above the seaside city of Marseille (Figure 1). The second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago, a pair of 26-story towers with 248 units in total and sweeping views of Lake Michigan (Figure 2). Just as the pre-war works of the two master architects inspired diverse works and credos among students and admirers, the precedents set by these buildings inspired distinct later styles and methods. The Unité took an important step toward the sculptural regionalism of Le Corbusier’s late works and inspired, if coincidentally, the quasi-movement of Brutalism. Lake Shore Drive and Mies’s clean, minimalist forms inspired corporate architecture that spread across the United States and elevated Chicago’s skyline.

When we define these two buildings by the works that they inspired and by the labels associated with their followers, we form an image of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive as contradictory, if not nearly opposite examples of post-war housing projects: brutalist vs. minimalist, sculptural vs. functional, primitivist vs. corporate, heavy vs. light, concrete vs. steel.

Many of these labels are, however, inaccurate. Despite the vast distances between their designers both in location and form, as well as the distinct economic and environmental conditions associated with each project, the Unité and Lake Short Drive have in common a number of similar values and processes.

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Beyond the superficial differences in their appearances and materials, the buildings arrived at remarkably similar answers to post-war questions, including new construction processes, a redefinition of regionalism and local influence, a focus on the human form in scale and proportion, and a new sense of space and function for families and urban residents. These similar discoveries culminated in the development of similar, more sophisticated understandings of nature, and a reexamination of the machine as nature’s antagonist. Despite the many differences in their work throughout their careers, it seems that, in 1951, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, if just by chance, arrived at a moment of concurrence in their concepts and processes for collective housing and in their treatment of nature and the machine.

A cursory examination of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive might see the buildings as representing considerably different aesthetics. Le Corbusier’s construction sits broadly and heavily on thick sculptural pilotis, resembling a cliff-face of reinforced concrete with deep loggias that double as sun screens. Alternatively, Mies’s glass and steel prisms, with their precise edges and expensive materials seem to float above the ground on thin stilts. A more extensive examination of the context and history of these designs, however, reveals that the architects of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive had similar intentions.

Le Corbusier originally designed the Unité with a steel frame and only reverted to concrete because of post-war financial struggles in France. The Unité was likely the project that convinced the architect of reinforced concrete’s value for large-scale projects, as he exclaimed during the building’s opening ceremony: “Here it stands, the ‘Unité d’Habitation de Grandeur Conforme’ built …using robust modern techniques and revealing the modern splendor of bare concrete.”1 Mies’s first high-rise residence, the Promontory Apartments, constructed just two years before (and only seven miles down the coast from) Lake Shore Drive, was built with a concrete skeleton and brick infill. His Algonquin Apartments, built a year later, were made of concrete and brick as well, contradicting the popular misconception of his post-war work as exclusively steel-framed.

After constructing Lake Shore Drive, Mies relied on steel and glass, and his work eventually came 1

Jacques Sbriglio, Le Corbusier: The Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 2004), 175.

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to embody the American skyscraper of the l950s and ‘60s. Le Corbusier, in his later years, adopted beton brut as his primary construction material. Both designers developed forms and methods unique to their specific materials, for which their post-war work is largely remembered. In 1951, however, they were still experimenting with construction materials. It is therefore unsurprising that instead of producing material-specific expressions, the concrete of the Unité and the steel of Lake Shore Drive were employed by their architects for similar purposes.

The materials of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive drew attention to the rudiments of both buildings and celebrated their basic structural elements in a way that recalls the focus on utility and fabrication at the Deutscher Werkbund. Le Corbusier and Mies transcended the machine-age imagery of early modernism, however, and instead of symbolizing the earlier technological zeitgeist, their protruding concrete and steel frames emphasized the pure geometry of their respective buildings’ rectilinear structures. Both architects were already known for their clean facades and use of geometric forms, but the commissions for the Unité and Lake Shore Drive gave them both the chance to express structure on a larger scale. As Mies wrote in 1922, “Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts….The novel constructive principle of these buildings comes clearly into view if one employs glass for the no longer loadbearing exterior walls.”2 Finally given a chance to construct skyscrapers—and with the luck of residing in Chicago, where he could follow the precedent for steel towers already set by Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School—Mies designed for Lake Shore Drive what, at the time, must have appeared to be just the skeletons of the two buildings.

Le Corbusier, too, was known for essential rectilinear forms, although by that time without the intense rationalism of Mies. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the curved, sculptural elements of the Unité, which were relatively new for Le Corbusier, meant a departure from his orthogonal forms of the past. While his later work would go further in embracing curvilinear expression, the sculptural components of the Unité—the pilotis, the entrance overhang, the fire escape staircase, the roof elements—all emphasize the rectilinear grid of the building’s 2

Carsten Krohn, Mies van der Rohe: The Built Work (Basel: Birkhἂuser, 2014), 156.

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slab and do not detract from it. Instead of diminishing the geometric rationality of the building’s core, the sculptural shapes provided tension through their taut conflict with the Unité’s boxlike frame, and perhaps even reinforced the strong horizontal and vertical lines, further clarifying the building’s structure. Just as Mies expressed the basic geometry of Lake Shore Drive with its exposed steel frame, Le Corbusier found industrial, essential forms in his use of reinforced concrete.

The emphasis on materials in the Unité and Lake Shore Drive not only benefited the buildings’ aesthetic values and expression of structure but also led to new processes of mechanized construction that had been unavailable before the war. For Le Corbusier, this process meant actualizing a long history of unrealized ideas in prefabrication. He revised them over the years from his Dom-Ino structure to his Citröhan houses to his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, which he summarized in a lecture of 1929, stating: “We must simplify, mass produce, mechanize and standardize at all costs.”3 Le Corbusier described the construction of the Unité as a bottle-rack system in which prefabricated apartments would slide into the building’s frame. The twenty-three apartment types that he designed, ranging from studios to three-bedroom units, would fit together like jigsaw-puzzle piece in a quick, efficient assembly process. The construction of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive buildings relied on prefabrication as well, with four-window sections of the façade assembled on the roof and lowered to fit onto the steel frame. Both buildings responded to the post-war need for mechanized production, but Le Corbusier and Mies devised solutions that would not sacrifice their form or design.

Despite the intention to build on an assembly line, however, the construction processes for both buildings were hardly efficient. The bottle-rack frame of the Unité was far from mechanized perfection, as the apartment units sometimes fit with as much as ten centimeters of space between their walls and the frame.4 On multiple occasions, the swelling cost of the Unité’s construction

3

Sbriglio, Le Corbusier, 149.

4

David Jenkins, Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles: Le Corbusier (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), 23.

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resulted in threats to terminate the building process.5 Lake Shore Drive, too, was more complex to construct than originally assumed, and the process, although quicker, also went well over budget.

Nonetheless, the architects’ use of mechanized production, just like their emphasis on basic materials, did not result in buildings with a factory aesthetic. Instead, the industrial processes of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive created a deeper sense of form and geometry that engendered a new concept of nature in a mechanized world.

The Unité and Lake Shore Drive transcended the factory aesthetic and industrial ideals of Le Corbusier and Mies’ pre-war modernism not only in process and style but also in meaning. A misconception about the earlier work of the two architects might be that in the interest of universality, the pre-war modernism that they pioneered lacked regional or cultural perspectives.

In fact, much of the work of Le Corbusier and Mies in the 1920s and 1930s was site-specific and circumstantially considerate, and their bare abstractions were often simplifications of regional themes. A more accurate criticism might be that their earlier works lacked reference not to the natural environment but to the local architecture and man-made styles of earlier periods. Even when the buildings of these architects were environmentally and naturally contextual, they were often aesthetically dissimilar to preexisting structures. That contrast would be expected from works of an innovative design movement.

The Unité and Lake Shore Drive, however, differ from many of their designers’ past works in that they contain clear references to local architecture (even if those references were unintentional). Le Corbusier always admitted to classical influence in his work, but began referring more overtly to historical regional themes in the 1930s with his Maison de Mandrot and Petite Maison de Weekend. Their primitivism was jarringly different from the hovering volumes of his preceding Villa Savoye. Le Corbusier’s strict purism receded even further after the war, and references to the historical architecture of Marseille were visible in his design for the Unité. The building’s raw concrete, for example, was comparable in texture and color to the bleached stone facades of the city’s low-lying apartments, and the Unité’s thick, sculptural forms resembled the 5

Ibid., 26.

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heavy towers of the city’s neo-Romano-Byzantine Cathedral “La Major.” The cliff-like mass of the Unité’s façade recalls the massive stone fortifications along Marseille’s waterfront; so too does the cast-concrete ramp on the rooftop, with square drainage outlets echoing the battlements of Fort Saint-Jean (see: Figures 3 & 4).

Le Corbusier made little public note of his local inspirations, but any argument that this apparent regionalism was intentional would be even more difficult to make for Mies, who said, “I think the influence my work has on other people is based on its reasonableness…because it is quite objective, and I think if I find something objective I will use it.”6 The minimalist forms of Mies’s pre-war work were symbols of the perceived anonymity of the International Style. As a result, the presumption could fairly be made that Mies would have constructed his steel and glass towers of the l950s regardless of location. Nonetheless, Lake Shore Drive had undeniable propriety in Chicago, continuing the lineage of Louis Sullivan and the steel-framed towers of the Chicago School, and following the vertical emphasis of the Chicago Tribune Tower.

It is true that abundant complaints were lodged against Lake Shore Drive and its pertinence to the city, but the Unité was also criticized in its first years for disrupting the low-rise suburbs of Marseille.7 Even as the architects’ ideas about regional reference separated in later years, with Le Corbusier’s sculptural forms developing into virtual extensions of their sites’ landscapes and Mies’s dark glass-and-steel prisms becoming increasingly homogeneous, the provincial context that the Unité and Lake Shore Drive had in common was important. For the first time, at least on the scale of an apartment complex, both architects created structures that transcended their earlier styles and reflected local architecture in their designs, even if without conscious intention.

Just as the Unité and Lake Shore Drive addressed post-war considerations of local context, they also acknowledged a sense of human scale. The vast, repetitive facades and massive interior capacities of the buildings presented problems of proportion different from those of the architects’ smaller pre-war houses and buildings. The architecture following World War I, compared to the

6

Krohn, Mies van der Rohe, 8.

7

Jenkins, Unité d'Habitation, 52.

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more ornamental styles around the turn of the century, could be criticized for its lack of scale and its mathematical and industrial harmonies in place of human practicalities. Although grievances were aired about Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s new apartment buildings—from the claustrophobic hallways and tight spaces of the Unité to the dizzying repetition of Lake Shore Drive’s uniform facades—the architects nonetheless found new and thoughtful solutions to dealing with human scale. Le Corbusier employed his recent creation of the Modulor, which he labeled “a harmonic measure to the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and mechanics.” 8 The figure, five feet and nine inches tall, carved into the wall outside the entrance to the Unité and including fifteen measurements, supposedly determined the proportion of every element in the building.

Mies, too, despite criticism of his vacuous scale, found a sense of proportion in Lake Shore Drive that was absent from some of his earlier work. The buildings’ supports allowed the lobby to recede from the tower’s façade, giving the ground floor a far smaller footprint than the floors above. One approached the building from the vast lakefront, walking under the compressed ceilings of the plaza entrance before entering the simple and intimate lobby. The result was that the towers’ huge presence was gradually reduced to human scale. Criticism of the scale likely came less from its residents than from its neighbors who resented the towers’ presence in a suburban area; an article in Architectural Forum in 1952 asserted that “most of the criticism of the apartments…has come from people who do not live in them, a not unprecedented pattern in the short but acrimonious history of modern architecture.”9 Although Mies’s work after this proceeded from a more geometric than human foundation, and although residents of the Unité continued to complain about their cramped living spaces, the consideration that Mies and Le Corbusier gave to human scale in these two large housing complexes provided new ideas about man’s role in the natural and mechanized world.

8

Le Corbusier, Le Modulor (Boston: Birkhἂuser, 2000), 15.

9

“Mies van der Rohe’s Recent Buildings: 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago,” Architectural Forum (November l,

1952), 100.

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The proportions achieved in the Unité and Lake Shore Drive suggested each building’s functions and demonstrated their designers’ concepts of the modern family. Le Corbusier made the family unit a priority in his design and later described his ambition: “I have been studying the chap known as ‘Man’ and his wife and kids. I have been inspired by one single preoccupation: to introduce into the home the sense of the sacred; to make the home the temple of the family.” 10 At the Unité, this meant giving the building multiple levels of function: that of the individual family unit, that of the family within a community, and that of the community within a city. The familysized units were unorthodox in their plans; each was designed less as a collection of rooms and more as a series of rational, functional spaces. The mechanical functions—bathrooms and kitchen—were grouped around the building’s core, where there were stacked pipes along a single vertical and leaving window access to the living spaces. The result was a relatively open layout for the three-bedroom units, with the third bedroom as either a loft over the living room or a room separated by a sliding partition. Le Corbusier’s ideal family could connect in these open spaces.

They could also join the Unité’s community in the common spaces of the building. The apartment complex, as Le Corbusier saw it, was a city within a building; it contained two interior shopping streets with various stores, a restaurant, a cinema, and a hotel, along with a gymnasium, a wading pool, and a children’s nursery on the communal roof. A healthy social setting, to Le Corbusier, meant sharing public spaces with neighbors. He described this ideal life-style, stating: “If you want to raise your family in seclusion, in silence, and in natural surroundings, place yourselves among 2,000 people. Take each other’s hand, walk through one and the same door, and get in one of four lifts that each has the capacity to carry 20 people.” 11 Although this comprehensive communal design might seem to sequester the Unité’s residents, trapping them in a world they had no reason to leave, Le Corbusier believed that a city of Unités would generate an even larger community.

Floating on pilotis and consistent with his plans for housing in his earlier urban projects, he

10

Sbriglio, Le Corbusier, 6.

11

Ibid., 38.

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assumed that the Unité would free the ground for traffic and assembly, although critics found this an impractical urban solution.

Although his Lake Shore Drive apartments were also elevated, Mies gave less consideration to the communal functions of the building (both within the city and as its own habitat) than he gave to the individual unit. Like those of the Unité, the apartments at Lake Shore Drive were open in plan; each had a definite form rather than being a shapeless collection of particular rooms. “We use the principle of flexibility,” Mies said about function in his design. 12 “We cannot help but fix the bathrooms and kitchen in one place, but otherwise it is quite flexible; we can take the walls out or put more walls in.”13 Similar to the arrangement at the Unité, Lake Shore Drive condensed and consolidated its mechanical functions, leaving adjustable space for communal family use. The flexibility of his apartments in fact admirably represented Mies’s often misunderstood attitude toward function. Mies made his functions conform to their forms, which were produced by pure geometry and proportion. He explained his process by saying that “today [fitting function into form] is the only practical way to build, because the functions of most buildings are constantly changing, but economically the buildings cannot change.” 14 At Lake Shore Drive, Mies provided a progressive sense of function, just as Le Corbusier created multilevel communal functions at the Unité. Both architects’ plans emphasized free space and flexibility, which came from a collective housing design process in which units were treated as individual forms rather than aggregations of functional rooms. This emphasis on larger shapes, and the recognition of a higher order, exemplified a movement toward a new sense of organic forms and functions that the two architects had in common.

The Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive apartments both transcended the ‘factory style’ industrial images of the 1920s and set precedents for mechanized architecture. Each building found a meaning in basic structure that derived from prefabricated construction methods. Despite

12

Krohn, Mies van der Rohe, 156.

13

Ibid., 156.

14

“Mies van der Rohe’s Recent Buildings,” Architectural Forum, 98.

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these industrial processes—ones that often resulted in ambiguous forms with no frame of reference, the Unité and Lake Shore Drive expressed both a local context and a sense of human scale. These were new achievements for mechanized constructions of their scale. The industrial themes and processes of each building created (for both) a sense of proportion and function that defined a new understanding of ‘natural’ design. Both architects expressed a deeper meaning of nature that transcended superficial images of material and aesthetics. This new nature was instead defined by proportion and order. For Le Corbusier and Mies, the spiritual aspect of nature could best be achieved in these buildings by means of pure geometry and essential proportions. Le Corbusier described the emotion of his process by stating that “the regulating line is a satisfaction of a spiritual order which leads to the pursuit of ingenious and harmonious relations. It confers on the work the quality of rhythm.”15 Mies expressed a similar theory, explaining that “the building art is, in reality always the spatial execution of spiritual decisions.” 16 The spaces and forms of the Unité and Lake Shore Drive, in their human contexts that resulted from the structural emphasis of their industrial construction processes, were new, post-war symbols of nature. The most widelyknown pre-war images of Le Corbusier and Mies’s buildings emphasized strict lines and industrial minimalism, and the modernist forms considered most natural might have been houses by Alvar Aalto with their materials sourced straight from Finnish forests, or structures by Frank Lloyd Wright that were abstractions of landscape such as the jagged roof at Taliesin West that followed the rise and fall of nearby mountains.

After the war, however, with the need for mass housing, the geometric themes and processes that Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had previously employed became solutions for finding a sense of nature in large-scale living developments. Their reinterpretations of nature went deeper than natural imagery, and was even aided by mechanization, pioneered in

15

Sbriglio, Le Corbusier, 52.

16

David Roberts and Peter Murphy, “Truth in Building: Mies van der Rohe,” in Dialectic of Romanticism: A

Critique of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2006), 109.

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both the Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive apartments. This reinterpretation found spiritual understanding in pure geometry, essential structure, and harmonious proportions.

A greater social explanation can also be found for these buildings. The order and proportion of the Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive apartments reflected the order of the natural world. After the Second World War, when unfathomable chaos and confusion had been sown by mechanized destruction, the purity and stability of nature was perhaps the closest thing that humanity could find to the social structure that it had known before.

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Figure 1: Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1947-51. Western façade and cast-concrete staircase.

Photo Credit: Fred Romero from Paris, France. December 28, 2014. (Licensed under “CC BY 2.0” https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

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Figure 2: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, 1949-51. Lobby of the north tower and covered walkway connecting the buildings. Taken from 860 Lake Shore Drive.

Photo Credit: Marc Rochkind. March 26, 2017 (Licensed under “CC BY-SA 4.0� - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

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Figure 3: Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille, 1660 Photo Credit: Vlad Mandyev from Marseille, France. April 17, 2016.

(Licensed under: “CC BY-SA 4.0� - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

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Figure 4: Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, 1947-51, cast-concrete rooftop ramp Photo Credit: Duc Truong. May 23, 2015.

(Licensed under: “CC BY-NC-SA” - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

“Nature and Mechanization after the Second World War: Order and Proportion in the Unité d’Habitation and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments” - 71 -

Bibliography Blaser, Werner. Mies Van Der Rohe: Lake Shore Drive Apartments: High-Rise Building / Wohnhochnaus.

Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1999.

Jenkins, David. Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles: Le Corbusier. London: Phaidon Press, 1993.

Krohn, Carsten. Mies Van Der Rohe: The Built Work. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014.

Le Corbusier. Le Modulor. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 2000.

Le Corbusier. Unité d'Habitation, Marseille-Michelet. New York: Garland, 1991.

MacFarlane, Stephen. "Unité d'Habitation à Marseille." Plan, no. 4 (January 01, 1949): 23.

"Mies Van Der Rohe's Recent Buildings; 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago." Architectural Forum 97 (November 1, 1952): 94.

Pomaranc, Joan C. 860-880 Lake Shore Drive. Chicago: Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks.

Roberts, David, and Peter Murphy. "Truth in Building: Mies Van Der Rohe." Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism, 109. London: Continuum, 2006.

Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: The Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 2004.

"Unité d'Habitation à Marseille." Homme et l'Architecture, no. 11 (January 1, 1947).

About Us - 72 -

Contributors Carola Reyes Benítez ‘20 is an Art History major and Business Studies minor.

After taking a course on Modern Architecture, she delved into research concerning the architecture of her native Puerto Rico. Her rediscovery of the work of Henry Klumb led her to write “Tropical Modernism: Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico”, in which she explores the life and career of this masterful architect.

Megan Gatton ‘20 is a Classics and Art History major focusing on Archaeology and minoring in Anthropology. Her passion for American Modernism began during an internship at Questroyal Fine Art, where she is now the Gallery Coordinator. Her paper was originally presented at the Hunter Museum of American Art’s fifth annual Undergraduate Symposium in April 2018. She thanks her advisor, Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, for his continued insight and support.

Amy Lenkiewicz ’20 studies the strange and wonderful art of the Middle Ages. She positions her scholarship at the crux of art and literature; it positions her somewhere deep in the belly of Bobst library.

Owen Klinkon ‘20

About Us - 73 -

Cover Artist Mark Wei ‘21 is a Photography and Imaging major at Tisch School of the Arts focusing on fine art photography and printmaking. During his time at boarding school in New England, his goal was to pursue a business degree and become a marketing director like his mother. However, he stumbled upon photography junior year of high school and was introduced to the field by his photography teacher and mentor, Ed Hing. Then he went to Beijing and interned for the fashion photography house Super Studio (founded by influential fashion photographer Yin Chao). Following the internship, he decided to pursue photography as a career. He would like to thank his mother, Jenny Tsai, and his mentor, Ed Hing, for their continuous support through the rough patches in life.

Editors Lane Bhutani ‘19 is an aspiring palaeographer at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where her concentration is titled “Didacticism and Syncretism: The Iconography and Colloquialisms of the Italian Peninsula.” She received a minor in Italian Studies from the College of Arts and Sciences. She plans to continue her work with Italian codicology, palaeography, and art history at the graduate level.

Buona lettura!

Eduardo Sotomayor ’19 is an Art History major. His study interests span from seventeenth-century artistic exchanges between the Iberian Peninsula and the New World, articulations of postcolonial identity through photographic portraiture, and new media technologies in contemporary art. In addition to editing for Ink & Image, Eduardo is Co-President of the Department of Art History's student organization, NYU Fine Arts Society.

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