Louis Kahn's Salk Institute campus. Photo: Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Recent links of note:

“How the New Met Can Work”
Eric Gibson, The Wall Street Journal

With the departure of maligned director Thomas Campbell, The Metropolitan Museum of Art finds itself at an institutional crossroads. This week, Eric Gibson, Arts in Review Editor of The Wall Street Journal and frequent contributor to The New Criterion, envisions how The Met can deal with recent decisions regarding its top management structure going forward. With the appointment of Daniel H. Weiss to the President and CEO position and the announcement that the new (to be announced) director will report to Weiss, many have wondered “whether this new arrangement means that financial concerns will henceforth take precedence over the intellectual and aesthetic values that have made the Met the great museum it is.” Gibson’s proposed solution requires that Weiss, an art historian himself, publicly announce that he does not intend to interfere in curatorial decision-making—the jurisdiction of a director—in order to clearly and consistently maintain a separation between the financial and aesthetic missions of the institution. However, Gibson writes, Weiss’s unique position as an administrator and intellectual could bring to The Met “a more nuanced perspective to financial stewardship” that will hopefully center the institution’s focus onto art for its artistic merit rather than its popular (read: financial) appeal.

“A Mystic Monumentality”
Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books

In the middle of the twentieth century, Louis Kahn, modern master, reintroduced a sense of idealism and gravitas to American architecture. Determined to build structures that convey the weight and moral conviction of Beaux-Arts Classicism with abstract form and modernist materials, Kahn navigated his contemporary aesthetic landscape with invention and originality. Martin Filler’s review of two books on Kahn (You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser and Kahn at Penn: Transformative Teacher of Architecture by James F. Williamson) speaks to these aesthetic concerns, but largely engages with Kahn’s biography. The review depicts (as do the books, I’m sure) a man who aspires, like his works, to lofty heights—in his personal grandiosity, pedagogical methods, and purist understanding of the life of an artist. In pointing out the inherent contradiction between Kahn’s personal beliefs and an at times less than savory personal history, Filler does not seek to desecrate Kahn as a figure worthy of our admiration, but instead to paint the comprehensive picture of a deeply complex man.

From our pages:

“‘Mark Tobey: Threading Light’ at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection”
Mario Naves

On the American painter’s exhibition in Venice.

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