and manuscripts was invariably a sketchbook, or a portfolio of Sennelier paper, with somewhere a bottle of ink, a pen, and a set of watercolors.
Reading my father describe his early life as an artist, particularly his famous discussion of giving it up, I was surprised to see him say categorically that he never used color. Or that color didn’t interest him. That his medium was all prints, all black and white.
Certainly, the woodcuts were his signature and what afforded a certain income, beyond his professor’s salary, that he admitted “meant a lot.” But when we traveled as a young family as we did summers as well as sabbatical years, to France and Italy and parts of New England, my father went beyond drafting mere sketches, in pencil or pen and ink, to filling these with color—dots and dashes of light, luminous pastel—pale washes of color reminiscent of the very Cezannes that in their ultimate perfection eventually closed the door for him, he said, to ever making art again.
I remember the reflex he had when we would stop somewhere for lunch, of taking out his sketchpad, and while my mother unpacked a picnic of salads in little waxed paper boxes from the local épicerie, with the requisite baguette and log of sweet butter, he would sit and make a study of whatever scenery we found ourselves in. Or, if that proved uninspiring, he would ask one of us to pose, and in my infinite ennui as a child more interested in playing with my stuffed animals than sitting perfectly still, I suffered there on some rock or bench as my father sketched and squinted and I must say—smiled—until we were both released by the communal call to eat.
He worked very fast; it was my sister Elizabeth who remembered this, who at age ten or eleven accompanied him around Rome in the afternoons to this or that architectural site for what my father called “analytical sight-seeing.” As the resulting architectural pen and ink effigies were not leisurely studies but rather attempts to interpret information drawn from books by Janson and Rudolf Wittkower, the Columbia art historian who became a close friend, and whose “Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism,” my father wrote in his 2013 intellectual autobiography, “had the greatest philosophical influence on me of anything I had read about art.”
In this exhibit there are other edifices, notably Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane, where the artist was interested in the convex and the concave. “The idea that it was something invisible that gave structure to the visual turned me around completely in my way of looking at art,” my father wrote later on, recalling these epiphanies, that for him had echoes in Oriental philosophy, for example, and that occurred on these repeated Roman excursions in the footsteps of the Baroque.
What I remember is that once he was home – whether the ramshackle villa in Roquebrune or the apartment in Rome – he disassembled his road sketches of fresh ink or swaths of color, leaving them to dry on some surface that would soon enough be reclaimed for more domestic use: the maid’s ironing, somebody’s homework, a meal or an evening glass of wine shared with my mother.
In an essay written to accompany an online exhibit of his woodcuts established several years ago by his alma mater, Wayne State University, my father wrote of his oeuvres: “I had no interest in just making art, I wanted them to enter life, and hang on other people’s walls. I wanted them to be a part of life.” And so they are, decades later, courtesy of CAFA and a dedicated consortium of colleagues, to be seen by people from all over the world, a thousand miles from where their life began.
The essay is reprinted with gracious permission from CAFA, Beijing, China. CAFA published a catalog on the occasion of its 2014 Arthur Danto symposium and exhibit.
2 Boundaries Crossed
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ
1 Times Square
There is a pedestrian island in front of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, in Times Square, between 45th and 46th streets. After recent design upgrades and the elimination of vehicle traffic, it is a far more welcoming place than it was in the late summer of 1988, when I arrived in Manhattan from Budapest to pursue a PhD in sociology. It so happened that my first accommodations in New York, provided by the City University’s Graduate School and University Center, were in a single-room-occupancy building a stone’s throw from the square, on West 44th Street. Some of my neighbors were former prostitutes. The neon signs in Times Square – still made of neon back then – would paint red spirals on my white walls at night.
The overpowering visual and cultural landscape of Times Square fascinated me. A whole universe of sinister and sublime surprises awaited me steps from my front door. The aforementioned pedestrian island, I soon learned, was not just any island. It was part of a site-specific artwork. A mysterious drone emanated from underneath the metal grille covering its triangular surface. The sound arose from somewhere deep below, like an invisible sonic tower, comingling with the cacophony of taxi honks, subway screeches, and all the human clamor of the “Crossroads of the World.” Once you caught on, it was impossible to tune out its mood and mind-altering presence.
The installation, titled Times Square, had been designed for that spot by an experimental composer and percussionist named Max Neuhaus (1939–2009). The sound sculpture, as the artist called it, had been running more or less continuously since 1977, under the care of the Dia Art Foundation. Together with a fellow student, I set about documenting it. We interviewed a homeless man who lived on top of the work, seemingly oblivious to its presence. We met a woman who came there often to meditate. We asked tourists what they thought about the sound as a form of public art. We filmed pedestrians from rooftops. When we were done, we presented our work at a visual-anthropology conference in Amsterdam, in a documentary film titled Sound from the Ground.1
It was armed with a videocassette copy of Sound from the Ground that I entered Arthur Danto’s office for the first time, in 1991. I had since transferred to Columbia University, where I was working on a dissertation about art galleries and the transformation of the visual-art world into a modern cultural industry. The only hitch was, few of my professors in the sociology department knew much about art or its institutions and markets. It made sense to walk over to Philosophy Hall to seek out the advice of Arthur C. Danto. He was, after all, the man who coined the term artworld. And he was part of that world. At the peak of his powers as a teacher, theoretician, and critic, Danto was an intellectual rock star. A frequent presence in Manhattan’s glittering art scene, he had achieved an aura of public fame that is rarely attached to academics. As a 27-year-old student at the time, it took some nerve to knock on his door.
Arthur had just published an essay about Neuhaus in The Nation, where he famously held the art-critic post formerly occupied by Clement Greenberg. In a characteristic switching of gears from “mere” criticism to something deeper and more profound, he described Neuhaus’s sound sculpture as “a portable tabernacle, a bubble of sacral space encapsulated in midtown life, which flows unheedingly around it, save for those attracted as a momentary congregation” (Danto 1991). I was confident that my documentary would claim his interest. Not only was it about an artist he cared about, but it directly probed the categorical distinction between art and the ordinary world – Arthur’s driving preoccupation in the field of aesthetics. What better example of his “transfiguration of the commonplace” could one find than an artistic intervention that elevated Times Square, in all its grime and decrepitude, to a sacramental shrine?
Times Square was precisely the kind of art Arthur relished thinking about. It was about boundaries: between the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the transcendent, the aesthetic and the everyday. Such boundaries were for him always both philosophical and political, and he demonstrated exceptional skill in pinpointing them and explaining why they were relevant. He was, in this sense, a virtuoso of scrutinizing boundaries. As a person, he was fond of stepping over them.
