Frank Gehry’s Big Bang

A longtime friend and client called in February to say he had taken an apartment in Paris overlooking The Tuileries on the Left Bank of the Seine and could I come for a visit. Without hesitation I blocked five days in mid-April for the excursion.It had been 15 years since my last Paris sojourn, and I had no plans to return until this invitation came my way. His description of the apartment belied its sweeping views of Paris with bookends of the Arc de Triumph to the west and Notre Dame’s Twin Bell Towers to the east, with a full frontal view of Montmartre’s Sacre Coeur directly out my bedroom window. I found myself in the veritable epicenter of Paris.

Museum visits were at the top of my list and a short walk across the Pont Concorde led me to Musée de L’Orangerie, built in 1852 to overwinter orange trees at the edge of The Tuileries. In 1927 the building was renovated to contain eight monumental Monet “Water Lilies” murals of epic size in two oval galleries with natural light filtered through a ceiling of canvas. The building was closed for renovation and restoration on my visit in 2000, so this was my first opportunity to see the collection anew. Both the building and collection are dazzling and should be on any visitor’s short list.

Next it was to the nearby Musée d’Orsay, the converted Gare d’Orsay Beaux Arts railway station from 1900 that set new standards for architectural preservation, renovation and adaptive reuse when it opened in 1986. The current Henri Rousseau exhibition is a show-stopper and carries the artist’s work far beyond one’s appreciation of “The Sleeping Gypsy” and “The Dream,” two seminal works at MOMA.

An entire gallery is devoted to Van Gogh, with scores of landscapes and portraits and another version of “Starry Night” unknown to this viewer, just one of numerous galleries devoted to significant artists of French lineage. Next on the list was the Centre Georges Pompidou. It may well have been two visits ago in the 1990s when I last toured this two-square-block amalgamation of colorful architectural elements designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in 1977. I just caught the end of a retrospective of the work of Anselm Kiefer and was there for the opening of a retrospective of Paul Klee on the same floor, no less—completely dissimilar artists with their artistic careers laid bare for all to see, with Kiefer’s late work channeling Monet’s “Water Lilies” in scale, brush stroke and subject matter, and Klee’s many late-life infirmities rendering his work to poetic lines in space. Only in Paris.

I was reminded how sensible the permanent galleries are arranged at The Pompidou, which is chronological and all on one floor, with individual galleries dedicated to the Fauvists, the early 20th-century movements of Suprematism, Constructivism, and De Stijl, then early Modernism all the way to contemporary and present-day. Each gallery provides a snapshot of a specific period in time with seminal works by the key participants, whether it be painting, sculpture, drawing or photography.

But it was by chance that I happened upon a treasure on The Pompidou site tucked away all by itself and hardly noticed, the reconstructed Studio of Constantin Brancusi. Re-created in 1997 exactly as it was left at the time of Brancusi’s passing in 1957, it includes hundreds of works of sculpture and art, his tools, and many drawings for proposed projects. Even if one bypasses the daunting Pompidou, this jewel, like L’Orangerie, is worth a pilgrimage while in Paris.

Culture, like cuisine, is always on display in Paris, and my host had procured two tickets to the Paris Symphony to hear the 1913 Stravinsky masterpiece “Rite of Spring” at the new Jean Nouvel Concert Hall. Sited well out of town at “the Periphery,” the ring road around Paris, it was quite a hike but so very much worth the trip. The new hall is a monumental work and contains a theater-in-the-round arrangement with sweeping balconies cantilevered above and surrounding the stage. The sound is exquisite even for the untrained ear, as the reverberation time in the hall is about 4 seconds. The “Rite of Spring” is the perfect foil for such an acoustic adventure, as the piece contains scores of solo parts. One could virtually imagine the notes ricocheting through the sculptural space.

But the best was saved for last, and having heard the Stravinsky piece the night before I was primed for my trip to Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne, a large and infamous park with quite a history of its own. A formidable drive up the Avenue Champs Elysees and past the Arc de Triumph and into the park brought me to the building, which opened in 2014 to great international acclaim and commentary.

Upon arrival I was reminded anew how important it is to experience architecture at first hand, and not rely on photographs and documentaries to form an opinion, positive or otherwise. I have visited numerous Gehry buildings over the years, including some of his most notable works, but even with some background knowledge, I was not prepared for this adventure.

The building has been likened to a number of recognizable objects, an iceberg being the most common. Its skin of 3,600 glass panels of varying tones of translucency, and its overall shape, led to this analogy, but my take was completely different. I saw the building as a moment frozen in time after a vast explosion where the many disparate parts of the building were flung apart from a central core, not unlike the universe at the early nanoseconds of the Big Bang. The buildings arced, billowing, sail-like exoskeletal structures hovering in space, suspended in time. For the life of me I have no idea how this building was constructed. Like many Gehry buildings, it defies every convention of structural framing and communication through drawings, no matter how sophisticated the computer software.

It is a tour de force in the purist sense of the term. Even Mr. Gehry has commented that it is like nothing else in his oeuvre. Unique would be an understatement of epic proportion. Further enhancing the building’s dramatic effect is a temporary installation, which opened on May 11, which features pastel-colored film added to the 13 far-flung arcs, or sails as they are most often called.

The French artist Daniel Buren was commissioned by the Fondation to create his “Observatory of Light,” and it has transformed the building into a kaleidoscopic array of overlapping and juxtaposed checkerboards of color. I walked across the street and deep into the Bois de Boulogne to get the full effect. It was a mesmerizing display of color, shape and light, no doubt as envisioned by the artist, and quite a triumph for the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Of course there is art inside, but for the moment the building is the story. I was advised by gallerist Karolina Blasiak of Gallerie Schukin in Paris that an exhibition is planned for fall of this year in collaboration with St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum to bring a show of Russian avant-garde artists to the Fondation. Just imagine Malevich, Kandinsky et al. in residence. What could be more apropos?