In 1966, the board of the wealthy Kimbell Art Foundation in Fort Worth. Texas, hired the American architect Louis I. Kahn to design a new museum to house its collection of works, ranging from antiquities to contemporary abstract paintings (51). The benefactors, trustees and architect went to extraordinary lengths to create a beautiful environment that would focus our attention on the artworks and proclaim the dignity of art; thus the museum implicitly argues that tremendously significant experiences are to be had within its galleries.
What are these experiences, cxactly? The Kimbell takes us to the brink of a crucial idea: that the great themes of existence can be addressed in elevating material spaces. It makes all the right preparatory moves: it creates the luminous space, it assembles prestigious objects. But then it stops short, and never encourages us to reform our lives under the guidance of art. It is often said that the great museums are the cathedrals of the modern world, but the comparison reveals the weakness of contemporary secular galleries, rather than flattering them. Cathedrals were created as compelling statements of a complete theory of life: of our deepest needs, our spiritual destiny and the guidance necessary to live the right life. This religious project may have lost its allure, but we should hold on to the scale and sincerity of its intent.
At one end of a gallery at the Kimbell Museum is a niche designed by Kahn out of travertine marble framed by supporting beams of polished beige concrete, in which Donatello's Virgin and Child has been placed and dramatically lit from three sides (52). We know we are being invited to recognize a moment of supreme importance - but what precisely is the moral here? The museum suggests that Donatello is the star of this gallery, which is dedicated to Italian Renaissance art. But the artist should only matter because he is supremely effective at evoking a quality
The architecture says that something truly wonderful is going on Iwre - hut whati
51. Louis I. Kahn. Kimbcll Art Museum. 1966-72
Currently used to refine our understanding of fifteenth-century gender politics.
52. Donatello. Virgin and Child (The Borromeo Madonna), c.1450
that is of general human importance, in this case tenderness. In a gallery system rearranged under the guidance of a therapeutic approach, we should appreciate maternal tenderness through Donatello's work, but not remain fetishistically arrested in front of the work itself. The Kimbell shouldn't, perhaps, even provide us with rooms dedicated to Italian art of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. It should have a gallery dedicated to focusing our minds on important aspects of our emotional functioning.
There could be a gallery named Tenderness to help us understand what this quality is and why it is so hard to preserve in the conditions of daily life. We would meet Donatello here, but his presence would be subsumed under a higher heading and enriched by items from other parts of the collection. There would be space for Henry Raeburn's portrait of the Allen brothers (53), currently marooned in the British room, because it matters less that this is a work by a Scottish painter of the European Enlightenment, as the caption tells us, than that it, like the Virgin and Child, has many important things to tell us about how to bolster the more delicate inclinations of our hearts.
To accompany visitors to this putative room, we shouldn't need lectures on Florentine altarpieces or Scottish society in the late eighteenth century; we would need lessons in how to make tenderness more active in our lives. The point of museums should not primarily be to teach us how to love art, but to inspire us to love what artists have loved through an appreciation of their work: a minor but critical difference.
We need to learn more about affection.
53. Henry Raeburn. The АИсн ttrntfxrs, early 1790s
Today's museums attempt to draw in visitors by making claims for the rarity of the objects in their collections. They suggest that what they possess is not only good, but also unusual and very scarce. In contrast, the true ideal of the museum should be to make what is good and important very normal and widely distributed. The energies of those who love art shouldn't be devoted to piling up treasures behind high walls, but instead should be to spread the values found in works of art more widely through the world. The mission of the true art lover should be to reduce the relative importance of museums, in the sense that the wisdom and insight currently collected there shouldn't be so jealously guarded and fetishized, but instead scattered generously and promiscuously across life. To guide us in this ambition, we might follow the example of the Dutch twentieth-century designer Gerrit Rietveld (54, 55). It is an irony of his career that many of his works are now found only in museums; for example, his legendary Red Blue Chair has pride of place in the design gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
You can't sit on it in the museum.
54. (ierril RictvcUI. Red Blue Chair, c. 1923
The values captured in art shouldn't remain in t/н' museum
they should go with us into tl>e playroom.
55. Gcrrit Riot veld. Bolder wagon. 1918 designed), 1968 made)
Rietveld, however, was suspicious of art museums and the snobbery he felt they attracted. His desire was for his furniture to break free from the high-art ghetto of the museum and to enter daily life. Like many designers of his era, he was interested in mass production because of a feeling that the one-off masterwork could not sufficiently change reality, and that only if everyday objects were permeated with the correct values would human conduct change in the direction he wished for it - he wanted us to be more playful, kinder to our children, less judgemental about class distinctions and more relaxed about sex. Moreover, he felt that the right sort of furniture was an important part of any plan to reform humanity in these directions.
It was this engagement with daily life that led Rietveld to take an interest in so-called humble objects such as brooms, waste paper baskets, umbrella stands, prams and buggies. He wisely sought to take the values he loved out of the museum and make them breathe in the playroom.
The museum once had an important role to play. It preserved objects that might otherwise have been lost, democratized their availability and established a reliable set of facts about works. But the museum is only a prelude to a life well lived. It is not its summation. It contains a series of hints of how we might live, but ultimately it stands in relation to art as school does to life - at a certain point we must go out into the world and learn to abandon our guides with the utmost respect and gratitude. The fulfilment of the mission of the museum is the closing of its own doors so that the playroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the park and the office can become temples to our values as much as the quiet, marble halls of galleries once were.
Can We Get Better at Love?
What is it L ike to Be a Good Lover?
Attention to Detail Patience Curiosity Resilience Sensuality Reason Perspective
Am I Allowed to be Turned On?