Because I don’t want to end the week on a sour note about Shrub and Der
Grope, I’d like to point to Timothy Noah’s
challenge to Tom Wolfe, yesterday in Slate. Will Wolfe take it? I hope
so.
I’d wondered why Wolfe’s entertaining polemic in defense of Edward Durell Stone’s white
marble Gallery of Modern Art (aka the Huntington Hartford museum) — “The Building That Isn’t There” Part 1 and Part 2 — which prompted Noah’s challenge, had gone
pretty much unnoticed. (Even trusty Arts Journal didn’t to link to it.)
I personally agree with Noah that the museum is a monstrosity. Like him, I cringe whenever I
pass it on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. It seems so awkward, massive yet fragile
and standing on puny legs, I always think it’s about to topple over and that maybe it
should.
But there’s an infectious pleasure to Wolfe’s take on the building’s peculiar architecture and
on Stone’s defection from the International Style. Besides, who can resist Wolfe in one of his
killer harangues? You won’t find a swifter summary judgment about the orthodoxies of
Modernism and a whole lot of other “isms.”
