Yes, but is it ART?

If you've ever visited the National Gallery in Washington DC, you'll know it comprises two buildings: East and West. The East Building is a modern assemblage of huge triangles designed by I.M. Pei; fittingly, it houses the National Gallery's collection of modern and contemporary paintings. The West Building is a neoclassical design by John Russell Pope (the same architect who designed the Jefferson Memorial), and it shelters the Gallery's original collections, donated by Andrew Mellon and others, of such pre-20th Century giants as Vermeer, Rembrandt de Rijn, Monet, Van Gogh, and Leonardo da Vinci. (This is the only work by da Vinci in North America. It's a small painting of Ginevra de Benci, and every time I see it, I wonder if they called her "Ginny.")

You can pass between the buildings from west to east or vice versa in two ways. You can go outside and cross a plaza with simple fountains and a cluster of Pei's miniature glass pyramids--architectural sketches for his magnificent pyramids at the Louvre?--or you can go through an underground tunnel on a moving sidewalk.

The latter option brings me to this week's pictures. Last year, to celebrate the East Building's 50th anniversary, the National Gallery spent several months enlivening the walkway with a totally contemporary 40,000 LED light sculpture called "Multiverse" by Leo Villareal, an American artist who is one year older than my son, Tom. (The West Building, by the way, is my contemporary, established in 1937; FDR opened it to the public in 1941, when I was around 4 or 5 years old. Jimmy Carter opened the East Building to the public in 1978, when both Tom and Villareal were about 10 years old.)

The question has been whether Villareal's twinkling, flashing installation is REAL ART. Nobody ever questions whether all the acres of statuary in the West building are REAL ART, even though hardly anyone other than scholars ever goes to see them or enjoy what they do to the space. The Washington Post, that bastion of solidified taste and stuffy attitudes toward anything the critic can't understand or appreciate, ran a much-quoted article last November about "Multiverse" and Villareal. The reviewer sniffed, "Multiverse" is good, attractive fun, but it doesn't have the substance [italics mine] that would bring it even close to major art."

What is major art, anyway? Ellsworth Kelly's "Catalpa Leaf" is a simple pencil outline of a leaf on a piece of paper, yet it merits inclusion in Robert and Jane Meyerhoff's collection of "major art" now on display in the East Building. (see last week's post). I think major art is like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's description of pornography: "I'll know it when I see it."

"Multiverse" never fails to fill me with joy when I see it. I can no longer see the stars at night, thanks to living in a big, light-polluted city, where the only celestial bodies visible at night are the moon and a few bright planets. But "Multiverse" recreates in a small way the punched-in-the-gut feeling I used to get when I'd go out at night on the dock at Lake Sallie and see uncountable stars. And "Multiverse" doesn't call up just stars, either. The moving patterns, the waves, the shattered forms evoke raindrops falling on the lake or the window or the splash of the surf or the ripple of grass in the wind. That Villareal can create a work that evokes all of that keen sensual pleasure with a bunch of little LED bulbs and ingenious software programming is a major accomplishment. So if you ask me, "Is it art?" My answer is be a resounding "Hell, yes!"

Hanging Out In The National Gallery

There's hardly anyplace here that's more wonderful at certain times of day than the National Gallery, East Building.  I went there earlier this week to see the extraordinary Robert and Jane Meyerhoff collection on display now.  The entire 300-piece collection of American and European abstract expressionism and other modern art is a massive gift to the National Gallery of Art by Robert Meyerhoff, a Baltimore real estate developer, and his late wife, Jane.

Harry Cooper, the curator of this astonishing exhibition, which includes about half of the collection, has grouped the artworks according to 10 categories or themes, including "scrape," "drip," "line," and "gesture." It's like going to hear a musical program comprising concertos in, say, E flat major for different instruments and by different composers. You can't say you've experienced art by Jasper Johns or Frank Stella until you've seen it mounted together like this.

After 45 minutes, I found it, as usual, overwhelming and had to leave.  I can only take so much of this intense rearrangement of my senses at one time. The exit of the mezzanine gallery looked out on the glorious, peaceful scene above.