Book Review
By  Sandy McKee and Hiroki Yoshihara

 

 

Architect for Art: Max Gordon is an homage to a brother, mentor, and friend. The essays from clients and photographs of his work and collaborations depict an intelligent, delightful man who captured the imagination and friendship of a generation of artists.

Max Gordon

Last century modem art took away the traditional frame from paintings and declared them independent from the existing world; they needed a new setting to separate the work from daily life.  As a replacement of the traditional frame they found the white wall, White space became the new sign to identify art.  Max Gordon was one of the originators of this idea for viewing modern art.

After learning about his impressive career, particularly if you are an architect, you may be immensely jealous of the position he was in - wonderful commissions, and he managed to skip the messy design/building process by creating joint ventures with a series of local architects. His positions at MoMa and the Whitechapel Art Gallery Foundation gave him power in the world of art, yet the reflections that the clients make regarding working with him talk more of the great admiration they have for his understanding of how to view and curate art.

Gallery designed by Gordon
for the Museo Reina Sofía,
with Richard Serra’s “Equal-
Parallel; Guernica Bengasi,”
1986

 In the book we are not given the insider information to know how he achieved this. There is very little of Max Gordon’s personal reflections or explanations that give insight into his design process. Max Gordon himself says in a brief introductory essay that “a museum should be a place of enlightenment and study, not a cultural supermarket” but his white box was not always the preferred space for viewing art.

European castles and Victorian homes housed art. The question of what made his spaces so appropriate is never fully answered. He understood the needs of art, but those needs still seem elusive. Are the needs of art high ceilings, even illumination, a simple background, or is there more that the architect must collaborate with the artist on to provide an appropriate space for art?

The drop-floor
leads down to the third floor.
Installed is a 2002 exhibition
of Edwina Leapman paintings.

Currently the design of museums is shifting to that “cultural supermarket,” partly because of a wider definition of art but also because of the business of viewing and selling art.  The white minimalist spaces were fresh and inspiring, but the spatial needs of art may have changed since 1990, we seem to have a different need for the museums and galleries that are being built today. We now have the “Bilbao” effect, museums built as tourist attractions and one wonders if the artists will speak as admiringly of these galleries and buildings. They still contain the white walls, albeit now wrapped in a sculptural skin.

The book includes Gordon’s work at the residential scale as well as public galleries and gives us the rare opportunity to see some of the residences of major collectors. He took great care that people could live in the spaces he designed  -  they were not galleries with some furniture thrown in. He mixed his carefully considered minimalist detailing and pure spaces with domestic life, which is does easily fit into a pure white box.

 

Views of the top
floor gallery, with an Eric Fischl

Ultimately Max Gordon worked with the basic tools of architecture, form and light, to create spaces that were deferential to the art. The Minimalist details that he developed are tricky and the energy and the obsession to hide the difficult bits is incredible. Hopefully the artists that he worked with realized that. Our guess is they did, but there is still a mystery as to how he made these spaces resonate so well with the artists he worked with. Hopefully this book will inspire more study of his work.

MAX GORDON: ARCHITECT FOR ART
Text by Nicholas Serota, David Gordon, Jonathan Marvel, Kenneth Frampton. Published by Marquand Books

 

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