The Guggenheim is also the defining symbol of the legacy of its designer, the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Through his work and the force of his personality, Wright transformed the architect into artist—a feat he never could have accomplished without a long, complex and rich relationship with New York City.

Today, Wright is best known as a pop icon, a flamboyant individualist with a chaotic love life who routinely bullied clients and collaborators—all in the service of his powerful personality and homegrown American aesthetic. But there was more to him than that. Wright was the first true star of his field, and his vision and success liberated generations of architects in his wake, from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid to Santiago Calatrava, inviting them to move beyond utilitarian function packed in square boxes to explore sculptural forms with autonomy.

Less known is the role New York City played in his vast influence as an artist. Wright complained shrilly about the city, calling it a prison, a crime of crimes, a pig pile, an incongruous mantrap and more, but this was the bluster of someone who protested too much. New York forged Wright’s celebrity as an American genius, resurrected his career in the late 1920s, and ultimately set him up for the glory of his final decades and beyond.

Wright got his start far from New York. Born into a dysfunctional Wisconsin family in 1867, he weathered his parents’ divorce but dropped out of college. He became the righthand assistant of the architect Louis Sullivan, a pioneer in Chicago’s efforts to create a distinctive American architecture, and in the 1890s started his own practice in Chicago, and Oak Park, Illinois.

By 1909 Wright had revolutionized domestic architecture, opening up the interior spaces of houses and harmonizing them with the landscape. He spent much of the 1910s in Japan designing the Imperial Hotel. Upon his return to America in the early 1920s, he found his career in shambles and his personal life in disarray, and spent much of the decade trying to reestablish his practice and his personal equilibrium. His brilliant projects went mostly unbuilt, and the yellow press covered his messy divorce and daily exploits. In the early 1930s Wright began to reemerge to acclaim in the public eye. In the last two decades of his life, his built work proliferated, and he rocketed to international fame.

Wright lived almost 92 years, so he had a long time to establish this fame—and he is experiencing one of his periodic resurgences of popularity today. Wright’s houses are once again in vogue (after decades of going in and out of fashion) and two chairs from the early Prairie period recently sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s more, the architect is enjoying renewed status as a cult figure, revered by his followers for his independence and individualism—the inspiration, at least indirectly, for Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Wright’s latest generation of fans are rushing out to buy a recent biography that revisits the tragic and notorious fires at the architect’s compound at Taliesin, his home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. They gather enthusiastically on the Internet, posting snippets of Wright’s writings on Twitter. Some still refer to him reverently as “Mr. Wright.” He’s a cash cow for the eponymous foundation which, having just announced closing his unprofitable school, licenses his name on everything from tea cups to ties.

Wright’s detractors have a lot to talk about these days, too. Wright was the sort of old white male who makes easy target practice, a famously arrogant figure who often alienated the very clients he relied upon to bring his architecture to life. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reminded visitors of strands of racism and misogyny in his work. Wright and his last wife, Olgivanna, exerted domineering control over apprentices, even dictating who married whom.

But all the focus on Wright’s sensational biography—whether it elevates him to pop icon status or hoists him overboard as a monstrous egomaniac—avoids the serious question: beyond the hype, what is Wright’s legacy? That brings us back to New York.

Although Wright wanted to portray himself as unique and self-created, he was part of a long tradition of seekers that continues today, artists of every stripe, in all media, who recoil at the terrors of New York while seeking to know it, to celebrate it, and to use it to find out who they are. A series of prominent American writers saw New York as a “terrible town” (Washington Irving) with skyscrapers that erupted in a “frenzied dance” (Henry James). For Henry Adams, New York had an “air and movement of hysteria.” Hart Crane, the poet, wrote Alfred Stieglitz in 1923 that “the city is a place of ‘brokenness,’ of drama.”

Interwoven into these complaints was an acknowledgment that New York spurred creativity and transformed artists. Herman Melville badmouthed New York at length. But during his first stay there, from 1847 to 1851, the city’s vibrancy and burgeoning publishing industry turned him from an unknown into a great popular success. Not only was Melville’s career transformed but, according to his biographer, the “pulse” of his energy increased. Melville remained tethered to the city and its publishers for the rest of his life, and he died there.

Wright had a similar response to New York: repulsion and irresistible attraction. He first visited the city in 1909 anonymously but his most transformative experience there began in the mid 1920s when, fleeing his estranged wife, Miriam, he took refuge with his lover, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, and their infant in Hollis, Queens, in 1925. A year later he returned. This time he went to Greenwich Village, home of his sister Maginel, a successful illustrator.

Wright’s stay of several months occurred as he was struggling to rebuild his practice and his reputation. All his projects—from an innovative office building in Chicago to a spiral shaped “automobile objective” for motoring tourists in Maryland—had fallen away. He had high hopes for “San Marcos in the Desert,” a lavish resort in Arizona, but it had no secure funding. Building new projects in New York could be a way out of debt.

New York offered energy, culture, and connections. His visit to the city enabled him to reconnect with his client and close friend William Norman Guthrie, the iconoclastic rector of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie at East 10th Street and Second Avenue. Guthrie wanted to reform religion by making it inclusive and global. He invited New York literati to the church, and introduced his followers to rituals and practices such as services from Hindu swamis and Native American leaders, and, to raise cosmic consciousness, Eurythmic dancing by scantily clad young women. Guthrie’s work set the stage for the 1960s counterculture in the East Village.

Wright designed two visionary projects for Guthrie during the 1920s, an immense fantastical modern cathedral, attached to no particular site, and a pinwheeling skyscraper to be located on the church’s grounds. The feasibility of the cathedral and the skyscraper’s scale in the neighborhood mattered little to Wright. Their role was to confirm the architect’s creative imagination. The skyscraper in particular became a vehicle in Wright’s publicity campaign against European modernism from 1930 onward (he pushed the argument that he had originated what Europeans followed). The skyscraper’s model became a set piece in all his exhibitions, and visitors today can see it at the Museum of Modern Art.

At the same time Wright was designing the St. Mark’s projects, he began forging a network of connections that would propel him forward. A circle of young modernists—including the critic Lewis Mumford and the designer Paul Frankl, known for his “skyscraper furniture”—championed and honored Wright. Mumford defended Wright in his writings and would insist Wright be included in MoMA’s epochal International Style exhibition of 1932. Frankl extolled Wright in books and saw to it that the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen recognized the architect with an honorary membership.

The city’s more conservative, established practitioners welcomed him too, if somewhat belatedly. The buzz surrounding Wright led publishers to seek essays and books from him. Wright wrote a series of essays for Architectural Record that articulated the nature of modern materials and building practices. Princeton University published lectures he gave there, in which he expanded his theory of modern architecture. He also wrote for mass market publications like Liberty magazine. Intertwined with the publications were a series of exhibitions of Wright’s work that raised awareness of his architecture domestically and internationally.

By 1932, when Wright’s Autobiography debuted to critical acclaim, the Depression had devastated the careers of most architects, but Wright’s would only advance. He conceived of his masterwork, Fallingwater, in 1936, while he was developing a new type of middle-class American home that he called Usonian. He was one step away from the pinnacle of his career.

Wright wasn’t living in New York when he designed Fallingwater—he worked from Taliesin—but throughout this period he remained connected to the city and its institutions, including MoMA. By 1943, when he received the commission to design the Guggenheim Museum, Wright knew the city and its challenges intimately. The project would encounter problems with the city building department, protests from artists who thought the building might compete with their art, and pushback from obdurate museum directors whose agendas differed from Wright’s and that of the late founder, Solomon Guggenheim.

By the early 1950s Wright and Olgivanna spent so much time in New York that they remodeled and moved into a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Unlike his first visit to Manhattan, this time around Wright basked in glamor. He entertained Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller as clients, gadded about with Hollywood star Ann Baxter (who happened to be his granddaughter), and appeared on television for interviews with Mike Wallace and Hugh Downs. He even showed up on “What’s My Line,” a quiz show where blindfolded celebrities tried to guess the guest’s identity.

Could New York be the Gotham we prize without the Guggenheim? Could Wright have become the figure we know today without New York? No, to both questions. Wright might have always remained identified with the Prairies, but he needed New York to confirm his superstar identity. New York, in turn, needed Wright to announce the future of architecture—for better or worse—from the world capital of culture, and to set the stage for the visionary projects of the 21st century.

Without each other, these two institutions, the city and the man, would be altogether different.

The post How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Turned New York Into the Center of the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In front of me stood a Gallic man wearing arty camouflage cargo shorts, who silently widened his huge blue eyes when I asked why he hankered to look at a gold toilet. At my aft stood a Japanese woman, who agreeably modeled for me her comely polka dot Commes des Garçons skort. She shrugged when I inquired why she planned to sit on a gold crapper, then gently petted the dog.

No one prodded me on why I, an American, wanted to spend my morning waiting to gawk at a shitter made of gold, which Cattelan had conjured in an effort to represent my country. As the line stretched and looped through Wright’s rotunda, an air of baffled hilarity began to rise from the queuers. “This is grotesque,” someone said. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” someone else jeered.

When I first assumed my place in line I thought I had queued to Schadenfreudistically witness the boneheadedness of others—specifically, the idiocy of Cattelan and the P.T. Barnum-like nadir of the Guggenheim curators. Cattelan is an art-world mercenary who traffics in dumb art. Born in Padua, Italy in 1960 to a truck driver father and a domestic worker mother, Cattelan has made a lucrative career out of aesthetic inanity. For 1996’s Another Fucking Readymade, he stole the works slated to appear in a Paul de Revs exhibit, which he then passed off as his own products. The next year, he exhibited 200 taxidermied pigeons, complete with ersatz pigeon excrement, at the Venice Biennale. 2001’s L.O.V.E. consists of a huge marble hand with all of the fingers chopped off except for an extended middle digit, which flips off the Milan Stock Exchange. In 2011, Cattelan falsely announced that he planned to retire from art after one last big show at the Guggenheim, where he hung up all of his sculptures so high in its rotunda that you really couldn’t appreciate their details.

America just appeared to riff off these themes of disgust and self-absorption.

But the closer I got to the toilet, the weirder I started to feel.

I realized that I was waiting to try to take a poo on my country, which was also a way, I guessed, of taking a poo on myself. I’m not saying that this country hasn’t earned its fair share of angry flatulence, especially in this particular political moment. I’m just saying that I don’t usually go out of my way to get pooed on, or to poo on myself, or to poo on anybody, as a matter of fact.

I don’t actively seek out self- or other-poopage because that seems like it would be really humiliating. And yet, I was there to humiliate myself.

There is a strong and worthwhile tradition of humiliation in contemporary American art. In the mid-1980s, conceptual and performance artist Adrian Piper devised her Calling Card # 1, which read, in part: “Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark … I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.” Piper is a light-skinned African-American woman, and she would hand these cards out whenever she found herself confronted with hate speech delivered by associates who thought that she was white like them.

The photographer Diane Arbus, who took powerful, mostly black-and-white photographs of trans women, older cisgender women, differently abled people, and terrifying-looking children, also pinned her audience with accusations. Arbus possessed such a great gift for making certain viewers squirm that poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum wrote an essay titled “Diane Arbus and Humiliation.” Arbus humiliated certain constituencies by showing them that their privilege caused them to over- and under-react to candid images of vulnerable people.

But Kara Walker is perhaps the most distressing and confrontational of contemporary pro-mortification artists. Walker burst onto the art scene in 1994 with Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, a panorama of beautiful black-paper silhouettes depicting surreal, usually violent, and sexual interactions between black Americans and slave owners in the antebellum South. In 2014, Walker expanded her methods with A Subtlety, a commentary on capital, race, and the sugar industry in the form of a huge sculpture of a sphinx made out of radiant white sugar: This being had a “Mammy” head, naked breasts, a 10-foot vagina, and a lioness’s hindquarters, and Walker installed her in Brooklyn’s decommissioned Domino Sugar Factory. A Subtlety grew notorious, and many Anglo people flocked to see it, often taking grinning selfies of themselves next to Walker’s chimera. Walker would walk around the factory, taking her own photographs of the selfie-takers and documenting their enjoyment.

In these works, Walker lures white viewers with the promise of beauty, and then leaves them to writhe in confusion, disgust, pleasure, and self-loathing as possible descendants of an unjustifiable society and contemporary inhabitants of a deeply unequal one. Like Piper and Arbus, Walker’s disgracing of her audience raises consciousness of base social practices like racist voyeurism and objectification, and provides people with chances to change the way they behave—that is, when they’re not excitedly taking self-portraits of themselves so engaged: “I would be happy if visitors would stand in front of my work and feel a bit ashamed—ashamed because they have … simply believed in the project of modernism,” Walker once told an interviewer.

No such opportunity offered itself with Cattelan’s America, however. It is simply not that thoughtful. It’s just a stunt. At least that’s how it seemed to me as I stood in line with my dog and my husband and inched toward the throne.

As I finally stepped to the head of the line, I was greeted by a tall, comely white male guard, outfitted in the Guggenheim’s stark black uniform and brandishing a luxuriant beard.

“Wait a second,” he said, popping into the bathroom, presumably to clean it with wipes or to make sure it wasn’t smeared with feces.

“This is lame,” I said to my husband.

“You don’t have to do it,” he said gently.

I hiked up my dog onto my chest and started to worry that the toilet would smell. I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The problems I could see with my patronage did not just flow from the prospect of evacuating on my country and thus myself. I also considered the fact that as a Chicana, maybe I shouldn’t wait in line to see a solid gold toilet made by an Italian and housed in a billion-dollar Wunderkabinett—the history of Mexicans, gold, and elite collecting is incredibly depressing in the first place, and the toilet part just adds yet another slur to that history.

But as I looked down the long row of expectant faces, I also felt giddy and happy to be participating in this art world spectacle. The psychoanalyst and literary critic Julia Kristeva once came up with the word jouissance to describe the unlikely ecstasy of oppressed and humiliated people, but as I entered the white-walled and pristine water closet, I could tell that word didn’t quite fit, and not just because I stood there of my own free will.

I looked down at the dumb gold toilet. It was gorgeous and gleaming and unused and maybe made of quondam Aztec gold. Nobody had dared employ it for any purposes other than Instagram. I felt very clearly that I was being insulted, and that I had insulted myself, even as I chuckled and took pictures of myself, the dog, and the potty. Jouissance certainly didn’t cover my reaction—there was no ecstasy to be found in this latrine. Also, my embarrassment was so baked in with other ingredients—a non-hysterical quantity of cheer, curiosity—that I couldn’t slap a “humiliation” sticker on the toilet like the one Koestenbaum had stuck on Arbus’s photographs, nor describe it as a Piper-like “discomfort” or a Walkeresque “shame.”

Yxta’s golden toilet selfie.

 
The better word might be paraesthesia, from the Greek root terms for “alongside” (para) and “sensation” (thesia), which can be defined as “wrong feeling.” Paraesthesia carries with it bigoted and medical baggage, which make it an uneasy choice as a descriptor. Austro-German psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing used it to denote homosexuality in his 1886 work Psychoapathia Sexualis, and the term today brands certain neurological disorders.

Yet, retrofitted, paraesthesia remains an apt name for the emotional condition of the spectacle-participant who finds humiliation unexpectedly boomeranging at her, and who negotiates it with a nimble psychic dance that keeps putting her “good time” at the center of the experience. Paraesthesia fits because the mental state, or sensation, truly is “alongside”: You think you’re chasing one particular dragon, but you find yourself getting pushed onto another track where you must flee some other beastly feeling. And then you hop back on the preferred route again.

That’s what I did, anyway. America isn’t great art. If the Guggenheim wants to be a place of artistic transcendence, then it has failed with this installation. The toilet is nasty and crude and bad comedy. But you’re “doing it” as part of an art community in a contest of endurance, and participating in social media fame. I only stayed in the bathroom for two, maybe three minutes, and took all of my photos and stared at the golden bowl and cursed and cackled in a paraesthesiatical fury. Then I walked out and grinned at my man and the never-ending progress of people who all grinned back at me and wanted to be where I was.

It’s not the first time that I ever felt happy, filthy, and angry at the same moment. But it’s certainly the only time I’ve ever shuddered through all three emotions while at a museum.

The post The Journey to Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet “America” Is Gross, and It’s Great appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Would you kindly remove your thick, stubby hands from my beautiful state?

C’mon—don’t try to look all Midwestern and innocent. You know exactly what I’m talking about. For years Chicago has been grabbing signature California institutions and screwing them up.

I get a reminder of your mismanagement every night when I turn on the television to watch my local baseball team, the L.A. Dodgers. Of course, the Dodgers aren’t on—they aren’t even available on televisions in nearly 70 percent of the Los Angeles market. The reason? Mark Walter of Chicago.

Specifically, Walter’s firm Guggenheim Partners, a financial services company with headquarters in Chicago and New York, paid too much for the Dodgers—more than $2 billion a few years ago. And to cover that price, the Guggenheim-owned Dodgers greedily sold TV rights to Time Warner Cable for a sum so high that other cable providers, understandably, refused to pay to carry Dodger games. So the majority of Southern Californians who don’t get Time Warner have been unable to watch Dodger games for more than two years.

Walter, the Chicagoan at the head of this toxic deal, couldn’t even manage to get the games on the air for this, the final season in the career of esteemed announcer Vin Scully, thus separating L.A. from its favorite voice. And there’s this irony; since this deal also blocks internet transmission of games to anyone in Southern California, people in Chicago can watch Dodger games even while people in Los Angeles can’t.

Then, in the morning, when I go out to my driveway to find out who won the game Chicago wouldn’t let me see, I encounter another local voice badly damaged by you Chicagoans: my latest copy of the Los Angeles Times.

Since Tribune Company bought the Times in 2000, California’s biggest newspaper has suffered under waves of Chicago executives who made big promises while cutting the number of reporters and pages. What’s your secret, Chicago—how exactly do you produce so many corporate mediocrities? Full disclosure: I worked at the Times for the first eight years of this ongoing Chicago occupation, before quitting after meeting Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate billionaire who is simply the most profane and dishonest person I have ever encountered in a professional setting.

More bad media news: Chicago now also owns the San Diego Union-Tribune; the latest Tribune chairman, Michael Ferro has been boasting that he has some virtual reality machine that will magically transform local newspapers into profitable global concerns. Reportedly, it achieves perpetual motion too. (How did our engineers in Silicon Valley miss this?)

Northern California has also seen a disturbance in the force emanating from your town, Chicago. Two years ago, Chicago lured away the great California filmmaker George Lucas, promising lakefront land for a museum housing his art and Hollywood memorabilia. This choice was inexplicable on many levels, including the meteorological—as the author Nelson Algren put it, “Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”

Fortunately for us, Chicago’s leaders are flubbing the whole deal—the project has been held up—and San Francisco seems likely to lure back Lucas’ museum by offering prime land on Treasure Island. (So shed no tears for the billionaire filmmaker.)

Why do Chicago-California marriages go wrong? The short answer: clashing cultures. California burst on the scene quickly, with a premium on speed, while Chicago, in the words of novelist Neil Gaiman, “happened slowly, like a migraine.”

Also consider that the defining poem of Chicago, Carl Sandburg’s 1914 masterpiece about the “City of Big Shoulders,” actually boasts that your city is “wicked” and “crooked” and “brutal.” California, requiring finesse, can’t compare to your city of butchers in these regards. (Just look at how Boeing, which moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, has cut jobs in what’s left of California’s aerospace industry.)

Chicago’s inability to handle delicate work is perhaps most evident in the surprisingly difficult relationship between California and that Chicagoan in the White House. What should have been a natural alignment between a liberal president and a liberal state has been undermined by the deep-dish stubbornness of Obama.

The president and his Chicago education secretary Arne Duncan should have been natural partners for California Democrats eager to do more for schools after years of cuts. Instead, California and Chicago fought bitterly, often because of Duncan’s inflexible insistence on imposing the same uniform policies on a state with so many wildly different regions.

Obama also managed to alienate Silicon Valley, which supported his campaigns, by demanding that tech firms behave like appendages of his intelligence apparatus. And, for much of Obama’s presidency, his administration devoted more energy to deporting our undocumented friends and neighbors than to delivering on his promise of legalizing their status, so they can contribute even more to California’s success as an economy and society.

Forgive me for also mentioning how Obama infuriated millions of California commuters who voted for him—including yours truly—with his knack for blocking rush-hour traffic during his endless political fundraising trips here. It’s as if he didn’t understand that our big cities don’t have an “L” elevated train like you do in Chicago to get around Secret Service roadblocks. These visits were almost always more about him taking from California (campaign dollars and Hollywood-tech cachet) than about giving anything, even his attention, to us. Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Republican governors seeking to lure our companies to their states have had more public conversations with real Californians than Obama.

To be fair, in other contexts Chicago pig-headedness has obscured California’s own failings. No one really talks about our state budget problems anymore given the length and bitterness of the struggles over public finances in your city and state. Yes, we did elect an Austrian action star as governor, but he—unlike a couple of your recent governors—never went to prison. And our pension problems and a recent spike in crime don’t look nearly so daunting compared to the size of those problems in Illinois.

All of this begs the question: Why do you keep meddling in our state’s challenges when you have so many giant problems of your own?

Please, for our good and yours, butt out of California, and get back to doing the things you do best.

Like screwing up our connecting flights.

Sincerely,
Joe Mathews

The post Stay Out of California, Chicago! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For me, the temple that has channeled this divine connection is New York City’s Guggenheim. I was born on the same day it opened—Oct. 21, 1959. Over five-plus decades, I’ve marked the years by my cross-country pilgrimages from the West Coast. In those visits, I’ve seen the direction of my life echoed in the museum’s famous circular design, and my personal story reflected in the titles of abstract paintings—inspired by Chagall and my other favorite artists.

We have a history, the Guggenheim and I.

Homage to the Circle, 1959

On the Guggenheim’s opening day, traffic and crowds clog Fifth Avenue, everyone eager for a first inside look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s audacious creation.

Originally launched in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the collection had outgrown its previous space, a former automobile showroom on 54th Street. There, the avant-garde paintings that founder Solomon R. Guggenheim began amassing in the 1920s were hung on draperies low to the floor so people could observe them while seated and listening to classical music. From its early days, the Guggenheim provided a full-sensory experience that took people out of their ordinary lives. There was even burning incense.

Some critics pan the new museum’s shell-like structure, claiming its sloped walls make it impossible to display anything properly. One wag dismisses the radical building as “an indigestible hot-cross bun.” Another compares it to a washing machine.

Others declare the Guggenheim a masterpiece, a work of art in itself. Wright, who once called his design a “spiral of life,” died six months before the opening.

While the crowds and critics are making their way through the galleries, I’m born at 2:12 that afternoon on the opposite coast, in a boxy building in downtown Los Angeles that once housed St. Vincent’s Hospital. On my birth certificate, I’m simply called “Baby Girl.”

Square and Circular Forms, 1981

I’m 21, a recent college graduate who’s not too sure what to do with an English degree or where I’m headed in life. My parents take me on a trip to Manhattan, and the Guggenheim is on our list of obligatory tourist sites, like Carnegie Deli or the World Trade Center.

Round where other buildings are square, the museum looks completely out of place amidst the staid skyscrapers. To me, who feels more comfortable with books than classmates, it’s a monument to anyone who doesn’t easily fit in. I love it. Even more as we stroll down the museum’s winding ramp. There’s one—twisting—way forward; you have to trust where it’s going.

At one point, my mother notices me admiring a work by Joan Miró, the Spanish artist who suffered a nervous breakdown in his teens, while working as a clerk. His otherworldly creatures, floating like clouds on the canvas, look familiar. “You liked Miró when you were a child,” Mom explains, and I remember the little book of his paintings I had in second grade. Miró gave up his accounting career to pursue art. Sometimes, finding the right path can be a struggle. I eventually decide to become a writer.

I and the City, 1982-2005

In the years that follow, I return to the Guggenheim whenever I can. I discover mystical Chagalls and lyrical Delaunays. Works such as “Paris Through the Window,” with its curious two-faced man, upside-down train, and soaring parachutist. Or “Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part),” which makes me feel I’m peering through a stained glass window at something sacred. The museum shows me different ways of seeing. It offers portals to the supernatural. I commune with angels, flying horses, green fiddlers. They teach me that imaginary things can be more real than the parking lots, bland buildings, and other objects outside my office window.

“Paris Through the Window” by Marc Chagall, 1913

 
On other visits, it’s the more ordinary subjects that mean the most. I’m in my late 30s. My father has just died of cancer. I stop before Picasso’s “Woman Ironing”—from the artist’s blue period. How had I not noticed before these aching shoulders and sad eyes, this emaciated form? But she’s always been here. She’s no different. I’m the one who’s changed.

Later, I learn that the woman hides a secret. In 1989, infrared cameras revealed a painting beneath the painting, an upside-down portrait of a man with a moustache. Who was he, and why did Picasso paint over him? Even art historians are perplexed. It’s a mystery, and I’m discovering life is filled with them—like why people suffer, and why those we love leave us too soon.

Lovers on a White Background, 2006

I’m in my mid-40s and touring the Guggenheim with my husband and another couple. We do everything as couples in those years. Lately, though, my marriage has been spiraling downward. I leave the group to wander through the galleries, alone. Before long, I find myself standing before Kandinsky’s “Composition 8:” His black circle with its cosmic purple orb floats by itself amidst all the sharp edges and broken pieces.

I stare at the painting a long time. After more than 15 years, my husband and I have lost each other. The comfortable, secure life I’ve known is slowly coming apart. I, too, feel like I’m floating. I’m scared I might break into pieces.

Woman Before a Mirror, 2009

October 21, 2009. The Guggenheim and I turn 50. The museum is throwing a big party, and everyone’s invited.

I go with my new boyfriend. We hold hands and take the elevator to the top. The building looks beautiful, like a luminous planet, after undergoing an extensive renovation to repair cracks in its walls. I’ve got a few lines of my own I’d like to erase.

In honor of the occasion, the Guggenheim has staged a major Kandinsky retrospective. We make our way along the curved walls, pausing to study each work. This time, I’m drawn to the artist’s more exuberant compositions, like “Fugue” and “Various Parts.” Their free-flowing shapes dance across the canvases like confetti.

“Fugue” by Vasily Kandinsky, 1914

 
I have reason to celebrate. I’ve lost a lot of the things I loved since my previous visit—the husband, the house, the kind of friends you accumulate through a marriage. But I haven’t come undone. I’ve grieved and kept going, walking a long ramp one step at a time. Following unexpected curves took me places I might never have ventured on my own and put me in front of visions my own imagination couldn’t conjure up.

Work in Progress, unfinished

Today, as I approach my 57th birthday, I find myself holding a retrospective of my own. The boyfriend and I eventually parted ways. Five years ago, I met my future husband, and after a dizzying six-month romance, we got married in a simple courthouse ceremony.

We talk about taking a trip to New York from our home in Oregon. When we do, we’ll go to the Guggenheim. I’m drawn to its rings like an orbiting moon. I know it will feel timeless and changed. I know it will remind me of where I’ve been and reveal something new about the person I am now.

Divorce or death or simply the day-to-day grind can leave one depleted. But there are places, like the Guggenheim, to reassure us that’s not all there is. The world includes the fanciful, the “non-objective.” Trains can run upside down. Fiddlers can be green and horses can fly like angels. Buildings don’t have to be square.

Sometimes I think about the day in 2059 when the Guggenheim will mark its 100th year. The museum will look as glorious as it did when it opened, and the line of people clamoring to get in will be just as long. Perhaps, if I’m still around, I’ll be there too—an old woman with her many memories. I won’t even take the elevator. Someone will hold my frail hand, and I will slowly make my ascent, moving up the rings toward the museum’s glowing skylight.

The Guggenheim’s skylight

The post The Guggenheim and I Are Spirals in a World of Squares appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.