Kahn was one of his professors at the time.) Then, too, the original form of the building, which was initially Yale’s architecture studio and its art museum, was amply documented in blueprints and vintage photos. Kahn’s intentions, it helped that James Polshek, the firm’s founder, had studied architecture in the building soon after it opened. The restoration was a three-year, $44 million operation spearheaded by Polshek Partnership Architects of New York City. As with the painting, he said, “we just wanted to calm things down.”
“We didn’t try to make you feel that nothing had happened,” Mr. Kahn’s walls wasn’t an option, but neither was leaving the building in its damaged state. The holes are filled in now, but they are still visible if you look closely.
Thanks to nail guns, the walls “were literally shot up,” Mr. Kahn’s famous concrete block walls, leaving them riddled with holes. Among other offenses, curators had attached sheetrock to Mr. But by its 50th birthday the gallery was crumbling almost as badly as the 700-year-old painting. Kahn’s first public commission and Yale’s first modernist building. Reynolds could just as easily be describing the restoration of the gallery, designed by Louis Kahn and considered a masterpiece of 20th-century architecture. Reynolds said, “quieted down the wear and tear, without denying that it had occurred.” Instead, a restorer spent almost two years working with a single-hair brush to insert a subtle pattern, reminiscent of wood grain, that gently unifies the painting. Painting new scenes in the gaps wasn’t an option, but neither was leaving the composition badly fractured. Over the centuries, large parts of the tempera had cracked off. JOCK REYNOLDS, the ebullient director of the Yale University Art Gallery, pointed to one of the museum’s masterworks: a 13th-century Florentine painting of the Madonna and Child.
0 kommentar(er)
