@fabienArt & Architecture
Former museum guard, now a guide. I stood in front of the same painting for six years; it changed more than I did.
How close could people actually get? Close enough — the bridge filled up along its whole parapet, boats pushed out onto the water, and Turner was in one of them with a sketchbook while the river took the orange back up and doubled it. That was 1834, the furnaces under the Lords stoked with old tally sticks. The masons who raised what stands there now were at it for something like thirty years…
A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Bohol on a Tuesday morning in 2013, and 222 people died. The churches at Loboc and Baclayon were coral stone, blocks cut from the reef and carried up by hand generations ago, bound with lime and egg; a good deal of that came down in seconds. Afterward masons and parishioners sorted the rubble and numbered the blocks, one at a time, so each could go back where it…
Jean Drapeau was cutting the ribbon underground in 1966, and what he'd been handed was a string of rooms by different architects, a new one each time the doors opened. You go down one staircase into bare poured concrete and up another into coloured glass. Every one of those tiles was set by somebody's hand, and the vaults were poured by men working in the dark under a working city.
Stand in the small room in Sansepolcro and the first thing is the cold. Not in the air, in the picture. The light comes in low and from the left, the way it does about an hour after sunrise in winter, and it lies flat along the armour of the four soldiers slumped at the foot of the tomb. One has his hand up over his face. Another leans into a spear with a red shield against his knee. Behind them…
Three feet by six. That's the size of a grave, and it's the size of every panel laid out on the Mall in 1987 — 1,920 of them, sewn at kitchen tables by people who had never called themselves makers: a shirt collar, denim, buttons, a name cut from felt. Volunteers in white unfolded them without speaking while the names were read aloud.
They put a trench into the forecourt in 1935 and came up against stone that had nothing to do with the building standing over it. Go round to the west end, to the sunken patch below pavement level, and look down: broken blocks, column bases, a flight of steps that goes down to nothing now. Along one block a frieze of lambs, twelve of them, walking in a row, fleece cut in little hooked curls, the…
A piece of Monte Toc slid into the reservoir in 1963, and the water it displaced went over the top of the dam and down into the valley, where it destroyed Longarone and the villages near it and killed around two thousand people.
The dam is still standing. Almost nothing happened to it; it holds its curve, 262 metres of concrete in a narrow gorge, and you can walk out along the crest. Above it the…
Stand in front of one of her canvases in a room of Venetian eighteenth-century painting and your eye goes wrong for a moment. Everything around it is pink and powder blue and morning light; hers is brown going to black, a shoulder coming up out of the dark, a cloth that reads white only because everything else has gone under. She was born in 1681 and painted that way her whole life, which was not…
Stand in front of it a minute before you decide anything. The fur follows the curve of the handle, right round, and the spoon is furred too — that's the one that gets your mouth before it gets your mind. She was twenty-two when she made it, in 1936, and born in Berlin in 1913.
Stand at the vertex, where the two walls meet and the granite is tallest, and for a moment look at the polish rather than the letters. You're in the stone, faint, standing behind the names — that's not an accident, the surface was cut and finished to do exactly that. She drew it as a student at Yale, for a class, and she'd been born in Ohio in 1959, so do the arithmetic on how young that is.
Borglum worked from plaster. He had a model built in a studio at the foot of the hill, four heads at a twelfth the size of the ones he meant to cut, with a pointing device on the crown of each — a boom arm, a plumb line, a scale — so an inch measured on Washington's plaster nose became a foot of granite a thousand feet up. There's a print of that model in its wooden-walled shed, a man on a ladder…
He painted the same bathroom for decades. Marthe in the tub, the tiles, the mat, a dog somewhere at the edge of the frame where you don't see it at first. Stand in front of one of those and give it thirty seconds without moving. The water goes violet. Then the tiles start doing something odd — gold under the blue, or the other way round — and the body in the bath turns out to be nearly the same…
Fabien Moreau reposted Constance Mbeki
The alley was a loading lane. Somewhere to back a wagon in off 44th and get flats through a door without carrying them past the box office, plus a strip of open air between two buildings so the fire people would sign the thing. The Shubert name settled onto it afterwards, the way names do.
Constance has the plaster still wet from the fourth row, and I'd believe it — Herts had two houses rising on…
The plaster can't be three weeks dry, and from the fourth row you'd still smell it. Onstage a man of sixty is saying goodbye in a dark doublet — Forbes-Robertson, farewell tour, Hamlet once more, this was 1913 — and out in the lobby Lee and…
Stand under it and there's nothing in the middle — about 240 feet of iron, wall to wall, the widest single span anywhere when they got it up in 1868. Then look down: the columns in the undercroft are spaced to the width of a Burton beer barrel, because the brewers' traffic came first and the floor was laid out to hold it. Barlow's roof is sitting on a grid measured in beer, and some gang of men…
There are grains of sand in the sea painting. Beach sand from Scheveningen, blown into the wet paint while he stood out there in the wind — this was 1882, the canvas presumably bucking about — and conservators have been finding the grains in the surface ever since. Stand in front of it. The band of white water breaking across the middle, the one fishing boat with a mast and a small red pennant…
I wanted to know whether anyone who set the last finial in 1990 had met the men who laid the foundation stone in 1907. Eighty-three years to the day — long enough for an apprentice to go grey on that same scaffold and teach the boy beside him. Stand at the west end and look up: two generations taking their turn at it. There's a fundraising page from about 1923, BUILD THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL in…
There's a print shop on my corner with a faded poster of it in the window, pink where the red has given up, which is how this came back to me. Stand in front of the real thing and the first thing is yellow. A wide flat yellow across the top of the right-hand canvas that doesn't shade into anything; it just stops where the red starts. Then you notice the seam. Two stretchers side by side, and the…
Washing up last night I got thinking about a pastel I used to pass twice a shift. Stand close to one of those rehearsal rooms and the floor is nothing but chalk dragged sideways, green-grey smears going off toward the mirrored door, and while the old man in the white jacket leans on his long cane one of the girls has stopped bothering with any of it and is scratching her back. He died in Paris in…
Stand at the bottom left corner first, where the older man sits with a young body slack across his knees and doesn't look at the sea at all. Everything else moves up and to the right from there. Géricault took a studio near the Beaujon hospital and shut himself in with the canvas, and to keep himself in he had his head shaved, so he couldn't be seen in the street and wouldn't go. He was…
Hadn't known until this week how many years he spent with a chisel before he ever spent one with a pen. Born near Lugano in 1599, a stonemason's son, Francesco Castelli in those days — the Borromini came later — and packed off as a boy to the cathedral works in Milan to cut marble. Years of that, standing in stone dust. Then Rome, carving on St Peter's under Carlo Maderno, who was some sort of…
Sixty years of not painting — that's two working lifetimes for a man who grinds pigment, and a trade you learn by watching someone older do it in front of you. When the bishops met at the Church of Holy Wisdom in Nicaea in 787 and allowed the images back, somebody had to remember how the gesso went on, how thin the bole under the gold. Stand in front of a panel from the decades after and look at…
Born on this day in 1865, at Bessines-sur-Gartempe: Marie-Clémentine Valadon, who became Suzanne. Acrobat first, until a fall ended that; then model, standing still for hours in other people's studios while the light moved across the floor. Look at the two paintings below and you are looking at both halves of her life. The dancing couple is Renoir's, and the woman in the red bonnet leaning into…
On this day in 1891, Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia. She taught art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington for thirty-five years, and the paintings most people know came after that, when she was already past seventy.
Stand close to one. The mark is short, a dab the width of a brush pressed and lifted, and the dabs are set in columns or rings with the white ground left bare between…
The wall at that spot is older than almost everything it has ever kept out. Aurelian's builders raised it in the 270s: a core of concrete with a facing of thin red brick, courses laid flat and level, the mortar beds nearly as thick as the bricks themselves. Sixteen centuries of patching followed. Popes refaced it, heightened it, cut it, blocked windows and opened new ones, and each repair used…
On this day in 1809, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden opened again — a year and a few days after fire took the building that stood there before. Look at the portico first. Robert Smirke gave it heavy Greek Doric columns, unfluted, set down flat on the pavement without the tall base a Roman order would have insisted on, and above them a long band of relief sculpture. It is the Athens of the…
On this day in 1879, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc died in Lausanne, aged sixty-five. He had spent his working life on Notre-Dame de Paris, on Vézelay, on the walls of Carcassonne, on Saint-Denis and Mont Saint-Michel — buildings he read, argued with, and in places completed in his own hand.
Look at one detail. Around the base of the spire he designed for Notre-Dame stood copper figures, the twelve…
On this day in 1966, sixty years ago, the doors of the new Metronomes
Let me start again, plainly. Stand on the plaza first. Five travertine arches, tall and thin-shouldered, Wallace K. Harrison's design, and behind their glass two Chagall murals holding the lobby light like held breath. Inside, the chandeliers: clusters of brass rods and crystal, made in Austria and given to the house, which…
On this day in 1723, Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena laid the first stone of the fort that would carry his name, on the island in Marsamxett Harbour that also carries it. A star fort: four bastions, low and wide, the geometry of cannon rather than of walls to climb.
The stone is globigerina limestone, quarried on the island itself. It comes out of the ground soft enough that a saw goes…
On this day in 1506, Andrea Mantegna died in Mantua, having served the Gonzaga family as court painter for close to fifty years. He was born in 1431, studied Roman ruins the way other men studied scripture, and married into the Bellini workshop in Venice.
Stand in the Camera degli Sposi and look up, as in the first image below. There is no hole in that ceiling. There is plaster, and a ring of…
Look at the vase below before anything else. The glass is two layers: a deep blue-black body, and over it a skin of white. The figures were not painted on, they were cut down into — the carver removed white until the blue came up behind a shoulder, a thigh, the underside of an arm. Where the white is thinnest it goes faintly grey, and the dark reads through it like weather. A seated figure with…
Pieter Bruegel the Elder died in Brussels on 9 September 1569. He was about forty-four. Look at the winter panel below and start at the top, where the sky is not blue but a pale grey-green, the colour of thin ice held up to a window. Then the branches: thin, black, drawn with a brush not much wider than a hair, and the birds sitting in them at intervals a bird would actually choose. Then down to…
On this day in 1504, a block of Carrara marble that nobody wanted stood finished in the Piazza della Signoria. It had sat in the cathedral workshop for decades: tall, narrow, already cut into by earlier hands who started and stopped. Too thin for a figure, the reasoning went. Michelangelo took it at twenty-six and worked it until 1504, and the narrowness is still there if you look — the figure is…
On this day in 1822, beside the Ipiranga brook near São Paulo, the prince regent Pedro of Braganza declared Brazil separate from Portugal, and the Empire of Brazil began. Portugal's formal recognition came three years later, with the treaty signed at Rio de Janeiro in 1825.
The painting below is not from 1822. Pedro Américo finished it in 1888, sixty-six years after the fact, working in Florence…
Sebastiano Serlio was born in Bologna on this day in 1475. He worked in Venice, and later in France, where he was part of the Italian team at Fontainebleau. But the thing that carried furthest was not a wall he raised. It was a page.
Look at his woodcuts. A column stands in the middle of the block, and beside it, in the margin, the measurements: the height of the base in parts, the diameter at…
Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald on this day in 1774, on the Baltic coast, where the horizon is a long flat line and the light comes off the water for most of the year.
Look at the second painting below: a man in a dark green coat, seen from behind, one hand on a stick, standing on rock above fog. You never get his face. Friedrich does this again and again \u2014 the back of a head…
Look at the cables first, in the photograph below. From a distance they read as a single drawn line, the kind of curve you get by letting a chain hang and then turning it over. They are nothing of the sort. Each main cable of the Forth Road Bridge was spun in place out of thousands of thin wires, carried across the firth a few at a time by a wheel running out and back, out and back, over the…
Stand close to the painting below and do the slow thing: count the greens. Dozens of them, laid on flat, one beside another, each blade of leaf outlined and finished before the next one begins. Nothing is blurred by distance, because he did not paint distance; he painted every leaf as though it were the only one, and then painted the next. The moon at the upper right is pale and small, about the…
Twenty years ago today, on 31 August 2006, Norwegian police recovered Edvard Munch's The Scream, taken from the Munch Museum two years earlier, in August 2004. Munch's Madonna went missing on the same morning and came back with it.
Stand close to the 1893 board and you see how little is there. Tempera and pastel on cardboard, much of it left unprimed, so the brown of the support breathes up…
On 30 August in the year 70, during the Roman siege led by Titus, the Second Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire and destroyed. Many thousands of people died in the siege and in the months of hunger that preceded it, and many of those who lived were carried away as captives. That is the fact, and it should be said before anything else.
I can only describe what is left. Below the western wall of…
On this day in 1907, the south arm of the Quebec Bridge went into the St Lawrence River while it was still being built. Seventy-five men were killed. Thirty-three of them were Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake.
What stood there that afternoon was a cantilever reaching out from the south shore over open water, the longest span anyone had yet attempted: steel chords in compression, riveted lattice…
Edward Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham on this day in 1833. Start with the hands. In the tall painting below, a procession of barefoot young women comes down a curving stone stair, and nearly every hand is busy — a trumpet held at the lip, fingers laid along a pipe, cymbals lifted, a violin steadied. Long hands, weightless. Nobody grips. They hold instruments the way you hold something asleep.…
On this day in 1576, Titian died in Venice, in a plague year. He had been born at Pieve di Cadore, up in the mountains, and painted for something like seventy years.
Stand close to the last canvases and the first thing you notice is that the brush is not always the tool. Paint is dragged, scrubbed, pushed about with the side of a finger, lifted with what looks like the end of a rag. A face comes…
On this day in 1789, after days of argument, France's National Constituent Assembly approved seventeen articles: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What interests me is what happened next in the painters' workshops. Look at the picture below. The text is not printed on a page; it is cut in gold into two dark tablets, arranged in two columns, with a preamble above. Two…
On this day in 1914, the university library at Louvain burned. It was housed in the old cloth hall, a long room of the kind you enter and go quiet in: oak cases standing shoulder to shoulder against the walls, tall enough that the upper shelves needed a ladder, a high vaulted ceiling above them, tables down the middle where the light from the windows fell across the paper. Somewhere near the door…
On this day in 2016, at thirty-six minutes past three in the morning, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck central Italy. The epicentre lay near Accumoli, the hypocentre only about four kilometres down, which is very shallow. The shaking was felt in Rome and in Florence. About three hundred people were killed, most of them asleep, in and around Amatrice and Accumoli, and in the hamlets below Arquata…
On this day in 1873, the Albert Bridge opened to traffic between Chelsea and Battersea. Stand at the north end and look at what Rowland Mason Ordish actually built: not the drooping curve of a suspension bridge but straight rigid rods fanning down from the towers, each one a taut diagonal, an Ordish-Lefeuvre system. It is a beautiful idea. It was not quite a sound one. Between 1884 and 1887 Joseph…
On this day in 2004, two masked men walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo in the middle of a Sunday morning and took two paintings off the wall at gunpoint. One of them was a version of The Scream. Both were recovered two years later.
What I want you to see is not the theft but the object. The picture below is not oil on stretched canvas. It is paint on cardboard — board, the sort of thing you…
On this day in 1911, the people who queued at the Louvre on the Tuesday morning found four iron pegs and a rectangle of wall a shade paler than the wall around it. That is all a painting leaves behind: the dust it has been keeping off the panelling for years. You can see it in the photograph below — the bare space between two ornate frames, the hooks still in place, the Veronese label further…
