Space and light in Texas
Martin Gayford visits the Menil Collection and finds a marvellous display of modern American art
Mention the word 'Texas to the average European and what words would spring into their minds? Perhaps 'six-shooter', 'Stetson', 'oiland 'cowboy; followed, if they keep up with current affairs, by 'Bush', `war' and 'obesity'. Not many, I suspect, would find the terms 'art' and 'culture' slipping smartly into their consciousness. But, having recently returned from an eight-day visit to the state, I am ready to tell the world that Texas is a paradise for lovers of the avantgarde, and Houston is what the French like to dub on their signposts a 'vile d'art'.
Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in the other automatic associations — as there normally is with such things. I spied the occasional person wearing spurs and walking in that fashion — keeping the legs very wide apart — suggestive of chronic saddle-soreness. It is also the case that there are more astoundingly overweight people at Houston airport than in any other human gathering I have ever attended (though only, curiously, at the airport and not in the rest of the city).
There are, however, much less publicised sides to Houston, and Texas, and it was those that I was there to inspect. By and large. the USA is the land of museums, and — in particular — the place to go if you want to look at modern art. But these institutions — richly endowed, and bulging with magnificent collections — mainly congregate on the east and west coasts. The rest of the country, sniffily described as 'fly-over country', is less well placed for art.
But Texas is getting almost as well-off for the stuff as it is for oil. In my week I saw only about half of the important institutions even though working hard at artviewing all the time. Mind you, Texas takes some getting around. Flying from one side of the state to the other is like flying from London to Madrid.
Houston, built in a swamp near the Gulf Coast, sprawls for 30 miles. To find its art requires a long drive from downtown. The best is to be found in a delightful university area, full of those clapboard houses with broad green lawns on to which newsboys throw papers in American films. There nestles the Menil Collection, one of the best medium-sized museums in the world.
It marks the connection between two themes in Houston life — oil and art — since its founders, Jean and Dominique de Menil, derived their fortune from an oilservices company, Schlumberger. They spent it with remarkable enlightenment and lavishness. The main building of the Menil Collection is by Renzo Piano, who collaborated with Richard Rogers on the Pompidou Centre. Considered as an art gallery, or indeed from any point of view, this is a vastly preferable structure to the Pompidou. Indeed, it is one of the most architecturally perfect art galleries ever conceived (figuring on a shortlist with Dulwich, Basel and the Kimball Museum at Fort Worth, also in Texas).
The Menil Collection is long, low and boarded, discreetly blending into its leafy surroundings. Inside, the mood of tranquillity, concentration and spaciousness is — if this isn't a contradiction in terms — gently overwhelming. This is largely a matter of light. Lighting plays a big part in the secret of displaying works of art; and natural light is generally better than the artificial variety (which is why basement galleries such as those in the Sainsbury wing at the National Gallery are a bad idea). Piano worked hard at the Menil Collection to create ideal lighting conditions, modulating and diffusing the subtropical Houston sun to the optimum intensity. The whole building is a sort of giant light box — as Dulwich and all good galleries are — in which everything looks gorgeous.
And the collection is superb: Byzantine icons, African carvings, a world-class array of surrealists, Picassos, abstractions. The abundance of modern American art is remarkable: Barnett Newmans, a room of them; Jasper Johns, another room; Warhol, a third room. But the lavishness of the collection does not stop there. So rich is the collection in the work of Cy Twombly — an exhibition of whose paintings comes to the Serpentine later this spring — that a separate building is devoted to them, also by Piano, across the road. This building, in a more sober, classical vein, is also a masterpiece of light control, the sun being filtered through a veil of cloth above the ceiling of the whole gallery.
A few minutes walk in one direction, and one comes across another building filled with the light sculptures of the minimalist Dan Flavin. Just down the street is an even more ambitious one-man show — the Rothko Chapel, also funded by the Menils. Here the abstract expressionist, Mark Rothko, attempted to create more than a sequence of paintings; he aimed to make, as he put it. 'a place'.
Rothko's canvases, so dark that initially they appear entirely monochrome, in combination with carefully controlled low-level lighting, impose a level of attention that verges on meditation. You have to look so hard and so long to see the faint markings, the almost subliminally dim gleams of radiance in the paintings — like the tiniest touches of moonlight in a cloudy night sky — that you are almost automatically put in a calmer frame of mind. You feel alert yet tranquil, as people report after yogic exercises. Whether this counts as a spiritual experience perhaps depends on mood, and time of day. I went twice. Once it was like entering a different dimension; the second time, just dull. But it is a uniquely determined effort at transforming modern art into a religion.
Rothko's work — though he was not a Texan — looks completely at home in Texas. And that is I think because the special qualities of Rothko — like those of his contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman — are derived from the scale of the American landscape and the clarity of American light. And two things Texas has in abundance — apart from oil —arc space and light. As the title of a western once had it, it's the Big Country, covered by a big sky.
Well, there is no space to describe the excellent Houston Museum of Fine Arts, let alone the museums of Dallas, or the Kimball at Fort Worth, Nor Marfa — the little cattle town in west Texas taken over by the minimalist Donald Judd and filled with vast displays of his own work (which will be on show at Tate Modern this spring) and that of his contemporaries. Suffice it to say that anyone with a taste for adventurous art could do much worse than go prospecting in the Lone Star State.
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