Chelsea is rich with blue-chip shows right now, jewel-box wonders fill Upper East Side townhouses, and Downtown Manhattan teems with emergent names. But if you are seeking truly heady and bizarre art experiences in New York at the moment, and if you have limited time, head to Midtown. On a brief stroll, without spending a dime, and without setting foot in a single museum or commercial gallery, you can savor (1) a formidable corporate curatorial effort, (2) a tantalizing marketing spectacular, and (3) a slow-burning delight that is hidden in a luxury emporium and on offer for just a couple weeks. All three of these displays are thrillingly, brutally of the moment. Let’s take a tour.
JPMorgan Chase’s new home at 270 Park, which was designed by Foster + Partners. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
1. JPMorgan Chase’s Headquarters at 270 Park Avenue
Start on Park Avenue, between East 47th and 48th Streets. Over the past four years, JPMorgan Chase’s beast of a new headquarters has been rising here, a sleek, impressive, and faintly evil addition to the skyline. Last week, the nation’s largest bank officially moved into the tower, which was designed by Foster + Partners. It cost more than $3 billion to make, has 2.5 million square feet across 60 floors, can hold 10,000 employees, and soars a breathtaking 1,388 feet, making it the sixth-tallest building in the city.
But we are here for the art at street level. The biggest-ticket attraction is a pair of absolutely enormous abstractions by the German grandmaster Gerhard Richter, who is 93 and the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Titled Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, they are “painted works made with interlocking, hard-angled aluminum shapes,” according to press materials. With their peculiarly angled planes of flat color, these hard-edged pieces could be chopped-and-screwed versions of Richter’s redoubtable, rectilinear “Color Charts.” They’re punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art. The unfathomable cost of these things is at least part of their pleasure. The bank did not reply to a question about what they paid, but to offer a point of comparison: back in 2007, Goldman Sachs forked over $5 million for a Julie Mehretu mural.
by Norman Foster on the mezzanine of the lobby at 270 Park Avenue. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
There’s also a charming Maya Lin installation that clads one side of the building’s base with stone and a Leo Villareal light show on the building’s crown at night, but the work that steals the show is by Norman Foster himself. Centrally positioned in the capacious lobby, it’s a 3-D–printed bronze flagpole that shoots air from its top, keeping its flag fluttering. This invention is designed to replicate wind conditions outside (very cool), though it’s apparently also configured to never let the flag go limp. The Stars and Stripes hangs on it now now, waving surreally. (It recalls, for me, Pope.L’s massive indoor American flag).
A flag with an endless supply of artificial wind, forever aloft: The metaphors write themselves. Take it as a symbol of an institution too big too fail, a troubled republic pretending that everything is normal, or a company that is proud to know which way the wind is blowing. Either way, it’s deranged, and I love it.
Is that augmented reality or an A.I. creation? Neither. It’s Louis Vuitton’s flagship store on East 57th Street, which is currently undergoing a major renovation. Photo by Andrew Russeth
2. Louis Vuitton’s Under-Renovation Flagship Store
Ten blocks north and one avenue west, another impressive feat awaits. Louis Vuitton’s flagship store at the corner of East 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is undergoing a multi-year renovation, but you will see few indications of construction, save for scaffolding above the sidewalk. The whole structure has been done up to resemble a stack of gargantuan LV trunks, and the verisimilitude astonishes. Even up close, the exterior suggests monogrammed leather. To amplify the illusion, the company’s in-house design team installed 840 large rivets, as well as gleaming clasps and handles that weigh up to 5,000 pounds. It shimmers in the sun, and glows at night, thanks to lights secreted along various edges of the trunks.
An artist acquaintance compared it, admiringly, to the basket-shaped building that was built in 1997 for the now-defunct basket-making Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, by NBBJ and Korda Nemeth Engineering, a classic of postmodern architecture. It also vaguely harkens to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects that involved wrapping architecture, turning them temporarily into artworks and obscuring their decorative elements. LV has instead forged a building that is pure decoration, a canny advertisement that demands to be photographed. It’s easy to imagine super-fans of the brand replicating the display on their own homes. Silent and impassive, it’s an irresistible monument to luxury.
Espace Louis Vuitton’s display of two works by Gustave Caillebotte on the fifth floor of Louis Vuitton’s temporary store on East 57th Street. Courtesy Espace Louis Vuitton
3. Gustave Caillebotte at Espace Louis Vuitton
For now, LV’s main shop is a temporary, but still quite impressive, space across the street, designed by the serial museum architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA (who, like Foster, has gotten into the sculpture game by stacking Louis Vuitton trunks into zigzagging columns that stand more than 50 feet tall). Up on the fifth floor, the luxury giant is, for the first time in New York, staging an exhibition under its Espace Louis Vuitton platform, which regularly does ambitious shows at dedicated venues in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka. This display consists of just two paintings, but what paintings! They are prime pieces by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) that, earlier this month, were hanging in a touring Caillebotte survey at the Art Institute of Chicago. They will be here until November 16, and an appointment is required to visit them.
Gustave Caillebotte, (1876) at the Espace Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
Both pictures focus on solitary men. The Impressionist was only 27 when he painted the earlier one, (1876), which is owned by the Getty, and it shows a besuited figure from behind. It’s the artist’s younger brother, René, who died a year later, only 26. He’s high up in an apartment that belonged to the wealthy family, hands in his pockets, gazing down onto a street in the 8th arrondissement that is cloaked in shadow. Dapper and still, he’s a man in control of his destiny, but there is a hint of melancholy, even discomfort, about him. He’s isolated, perhaps yearning for something. That woman walking below? An escape, via that horse-drawn carriage in the distance? He can’t bring himself to move.
Gustave Caillebotte, (1877–78) at the Escape Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
In contrast, the man in the second picture, (1877–78), is pure action. A black top hat is perched atop his head, and he is rowing a small boat down the Yerres River in northern France, where the Caillebottes had a summer home. He’s taken off his jacket and put it on the seat next to him so that he can really go at it. We are sitting across from him, almost uncomfortably close, and can see a pair of boaters that we are about to pass. Tall trees recede into the background. It looks relaxing out there on the water. Until last year, the work was still owned by Caillebotte’s heirs, but the Musée d’Orsay was able to pry it loose thanks to a donation of about $50.5 million from LVMH, Louis Vuitton’s owner. For the next two weeks, though, it belongs to New York.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
