JOHN ZEAMAN

Design

Artists Respond to 9/11

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There is a hellish alchemy in the documentary displays at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.  The terrible events of 9/11 made art and history out of everything it touched, turning office workers into martyrs, emergency responders into tragic heroes, and utilitarian objects – steel beams, airplane parts, fire trucks – into mythic relics. In such a context, artistic statements seem almost superfluous.

Twisted beam from the Twin Towers at 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Perhaps that is why the museum has waited till now, two years into its existence, and 15 years after the attacks, to mount its first art exhibit.  The challenge for an artist here is to take this vividly documented public narrative and turn it into something intimate and personal.

So, the curators of “Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11,” have assembled 13 artists who were personally touched by or at least physically close to Ground Zero.  One lost a brother. Others lost friends.  Several watched the events unfold from their Lower Manhattan studios.  One was so close as to be literally buried by the tsunami of ash and debris that blew out the glass in his windows. Others were farther away, but still close enough to pick up the scraps and sheets of office paper that drifted down from the sky.

For all of these New York-based artists, the attacks were a local event, not just something seen on TV or read about in the papers. Most of the pieces were made in the immediate aftermath, when the shock was still fresh and when such an event really was “unthinkable.”

Artist Eric Fischl  next to his controversial sculpture, “Tumbling Woman.”

In fact, so raw were the wounds, that the initial public response to one of these works was that it was unlookable.  Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman,” displayed on the concourse of Rockefeller Plaza in 2002, prompted such public outcry that it was covered, then removed within a week. The life-size bronze depicts a nude woman, upside-down, at the moment of impact with the ground. She is far from tumbling. The work refers to “the jumpers” – those who fell or jumped to their deaths from the flaming towers. And, although the muscular, androgynous body makes her seem more allegorical than real, the subject was seen as too searing and confrontational for a public space.

It remains to be seen what people will say now that it’s displayed in a gallery, albeit a very public one.

Most of the works in this show shy away from the human figure. That of Christopher Saucedo, whose brother Gregory was a firefighter killed in the collapse of the North Tower, is an austere, abstract work of handmade paper.  Titled “World Trade Center as a Cloud,” it is a white form that, floating on a pure blue background, vaguely evokes the blockish skyscrapers.

Also from a first responder family is Colleen Mulrenan MacFarlane. Her father, a deputy fire chief who had been working at Ground Zero, came home after three days. Her video, titled “daughter, sept 13,” shows her hands scrubbing her father’s white shirt.  The purpose was for him to be able to return to the site, but the act seems ritualistic, as if the compulsive cleaning could wipe away the event and protect the shirt’s wearer.

This is probably the most personally felt art in the show. Most of the others are too remote from human emotion.  Twins Doug and Mike Starn are among those who made use of the floating-papers motif. They superimposed decaying leaves over the sheets of scorched office paper. The effect is elegant and elegiac, but hardly an impassioned statement.

Something is likewise lacking in the four-minute video of falling papers by the performance collective Blue Man Group.  The image, in which the sheets drift gracefully through a black void like a snowstorm at night, is, with its upbeat soundtrack, more lovely than sad.

It’s as if many of the artists could not bear to engage too closely with their intense subject.  Donna Levinstone’s tiny pastels of rose-colored clouds of ash and dust are seen from such a distance, like dim and fading sunsets, that the effect is ethereal and unreal.

Of the artists who were close to the falling buildings, several mixed ash into their paintings. Todd Stone’s watercolor, “Lifting,” evokes that moment when, it was reported, pigeons took flight just before the first plane hit.

Abstract expressionist Michael Mulhern, who was temporarily buried in his ninth-floor studio by the debris from the collapsing south tower, mixed the ash into two gray, brooding compositions. The paintings are nearly 8-foot square and are on paper affixed to canvas, so that the surface ripples, like waves on water.  Mulhern died in 2012.

Although the stories behind their creation are compelling, the art in this show is generally less so. Too many of these artists took a cerebral approach.  Putting ash in the paint is not a substitute for emotional expression.

Then, too, it’s hard for art that is subtle or abstract to compete with the often sensational documentary material here – the twisted I-beams, crushed firetrucks, and videos of the collapsing towers just outside the glass walls of the gallery.   Ironically, the 9/11 Memorial Museum may not be the best place to display art that deals with its subject.

 

 

The Haunting of Met Breuer

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There’s something strange in the neigh-bor-hood.

On Friday, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its new branch of modern and contemporary art in the former Whitney Museum.  It’s “The Met Breuer” (after the architect who designed it). Those who love the Metropolitan had reason to hope that it would inject some curatorial sanity into a building notorious for its aesthetic horror shows.  Instead, the ghosts that inhabit the Whitney seemed to have taken possession of the Metropolitan.

Who ya gonna call?

In the first place, the event is turning out to be more than just the unveiling of a new branch. It’s also the occasion for a bizarre fit of rebranding that affects the entire institution. The museum is simultaneously releasing a new, blocky logo, a two-tiered design that reads simply, “THE MET.”  Aside from the awkward familiarity of replacing the august formal name with a cute nickname, the logo design (which leaked out a few weeks ago) has been universally panned for looking cockeyed and crowded, causing Director Thomas Campbell to fire back that critics are “logo obsessed zombies.”

Ghostbusters!

Before and after logos for the Metropolitan Museum.

To fit in with the Met Breuer branding, the museum’s elegant Beaux-Arts main building is being designated – in the same red lettering  — “The Met Fifth Avenue” (which sounds a bit like a new department store), while its medieval citadel to the north shall henceforth be dubbed “The Met Cloisters.”

You can easily imagine the brainstorming sessions of publicists, advertising people and image-branders that came up with this.  The same meetings must be responsible for the frenzy of promotion that has gone into the launch of Met Breuer —  a manic program of press releases, previews, dance and jazz performances, commissioned music, art workshops, and family programs. There has never before been such a fuss at the Metropolitan – not for the visit of the Mona Lisa, not for the Temple of Dendur, not for a half dozen more important wings that it has unveiled over the past several decades.

The most hyped of the events are a series of 9-minute gallery talks on the idea of “the unfinished.” This is inspired by the inaugural exhibit, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” a 550-year survey of incomplete art. No fewer than 30 minor luminaries – actors, writers, curators, choreographers, filmmakers, and other creative types  — have been recruited to deliver their thoughts.  Why nine minutes? Well, that’s the length of time it takes to walk from The Met Fifth Avenue to The Met Breuer. And, just to make sure things are really neat and cute, someone has figured out that it’s also the length of time it takes to walk from the entrance of Fort Tryon Park to The Met Cloisters ( taking into account, I suppose, that the latter walk is all uphill).

It’s the same old Whitney, inside and out.

OK, so what does it look like?  Well, here, too, things get strange. Not for what’s there, but for what isn’t. Prepare to be underwhelmed. The new Met Breuer looks remarkably like the old Whitney, identical on the outside (except for some quaking aspen saplings planted in the front moat).  As for the inside, this too, is practically unchanged, unless you’re really into details like polished brass and wood grain. What used to be a book bar in the lobby has been made into a reception desk. Up on the fifth floor, you’ll find a coffee bar.

The lack of substantive changes isn’t so surprising given that the Metropolitan doesn’t own this place. It has an eight-year lease with the Whitney that is costing millions.  Was the Metropolitan desperate for space to exhibit modern and contemporary art? Not at all. It already has the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, completed in 1987, which has more space than the Whitney building.  But it’s somehow not enough, or the layout is wrong, or something, because there are long-term plans to tear it down and build a bigger and better one.

Meanwhile there’s the “Unfinished” exhibit.  This is a big, messy show, an act of curatorial free association with a little bit of propaganda thrown in.  But it’s got some great, and sometimes provocative, individual works. Get off the elevator on the third floor, a location where the Whitney used to put some nutty thing, like a pile of stuffed animals or a punched-in wall, and you’re confronted by something almost as shocking  —  Titian’s “The Flaying of Marsyas,”  a gruesome image of a satyr being skinned.

Scholars are still guessing at why it’s so blurry.  Was it a new late style? Had the artist gone soft in the head or cloudy in the eyes? Whatever.  The point, made here and elsewhere –in  19th century oil landscape sketches, in misty semi-abstractions by Turner, in the oft puzzling Cezanne paintings where passages were simply left blank – is that the modern sensibility finds merit in the unpolished and seemingly incomplete.

This, oh-hum, was the path to abstraction, a lesson the Museum of Modern Art has been dogmatically preaching for half a century. Except this show throws in a whole bunch of paintings that were left half done because the artist died, lost the commission or who knows why.  These curiosities are sometimes fun to look at. There’s a big Rubens battle scene in which a fighter has three arms because Rubens was still figuring out the pose. But they add nothing to an art historical progression toward less is more.

And there are some curatorial blunders, such as an unfinished portrait by Manet.  Manet fits right in to all this because his flat patches and shorthand strokes  made his paintings look “unfinished” to contemporary viewers, although, as we know, this style led to impressionism. A finished Manet might have made the point so much better.

It’s when you get to the contemporary works that you realize that the end of the modernist progression envisioned here isn’t Matisse or Jackson Pollock. It’s conceptual art, in which the idea – not the object – becomes all important.  Process is at the heart of a stunt called “Lick and Lather” by Janine Antoni. She made two identical busts, one of chocolate, one of soap. She licked the former and bathed with the latter. The soap one ended up much smaller, therefore proving…

The other, smaller exhibit consists of minimalist grids and other linear diagrams by Nasreen Mohamedi, an Indian artist who died in 1990.  This, like most minimalism, is intended to be formally elegant and profoundly simple, but is thin gruel for viewers hungry for something to look at.

Oh dear. What is happening to the Metropolitan? Many are applauding its leap into the art of our time. Never mind that this is something already well staked out by the Museum of Modern Art, the new Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the New Museum. The Metropolitan has always been beloved for its grandness, its high standards, its grasp of 5,000 years of art history. It’s the city’s number one tourist attraction. It doesn’t need to prove its relevance.

Nevertheless, it seems possessed by the need to be cutting edge. Did someone say possessed?

Who ya gonna call?

 

The New Whitney Building

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It used to be said that “a woman can’t be too rich or too thin.” In the museum world, the expression might be “you can’t have too many galleries or too big a lobby.” Today’s museums all want grander atriums, stylish restaurants, auditoriums, bigger gift shops, study centers and, of course, more exhibition space.

There are lots of reasons for this, but the best explanation is that the art world is awash in money. As the value of art soars into the stratosphere, the institutions feel they must grow more opulent, too.  Bricks and mortar are cheap compared to art, so museum fundraising often exceeds expectations.

The Whitney Museum of American Art had been trying to do the expansion thing for 30 years.  Again and again, it was knocked down by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.  Finally, it ran away from its home at 75th Street and Madison Avenue, abandoning its iconic building and privileged location to build anew in the trendy Meatpacking District.

The building that opens (Friday, May 1) is every Whitney fantasy come true. It’s grand in scale, with all the extras that museums want today. It nuzzles up to the High Line, that hulking railroad trestle turned elegant pedestrian promenade and major tourist artery.

Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the new building is in many ways the opposite of the old. The 1966 Marcel Breuer building had an uneasy relationship with its Madison Avenue setting.  Its “brutalist” architecture gave it the character of a bunker, as if it were defending its avant-garde values from a hostile neighborhood. Its granite facade was stubbornly opaque with only a few small, eccentrically placed windows.

The new building at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets embraces its cooler neighborhood with a transparent lobby of floor-to-ceiling glass and a pleasant outdoor plaza where potential visitors can hang out, perhaps deciding whether to pay the $22 admission.

The museum carries this transparency up into the galleries where picture windows provide panoramic views of the slate-blue Hudson River and Jersey City. Near one, curators have juxtaposed a George Bellows’ painting of a similar view.

The indoor-outdoor flow is also evident in the four upper floor terraces.  These display sculpture and installation art and are playfully connected to each other by outdoor stairways, sort of like a vertical extension of the High Line below, affording odd views of rooftops and water tanks in its mostly low-profile neighborhood.

The new museum is not just moderately bigger than the old one; it is more than twice its size.  It has galleries the size of warehouse floors with no pillars to break up the view. Architecturally, however, it is no match for the old.  Whatever you thought of the Breuer’s inverted ziggurat and aggressive thrust, it was a powerful aesthetic statement.  The new eight-story building,  a  jumble of unintegrated forms, could easily be a hospital or a university building,.

Inside, it has industrial chic echoes of the Meatpacking District, with factory-style stairwells and pine floors salvaged from old manufacturing plants.

The inaugural exhibit, “It’s Hard to See America,” is a reminder that the best thing about the Whitney is its permanent collection.  It retells the story of American Modernism, beginning with the gritty realism of the Ashcan School and the machine-age odes of the precisionists.  Here can be found old favorites such as Alexander Calder’s wire-sculpted “Circus,” Edward Hopper’s moody “Early Sunday Morning,” and one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s haunting animal-skull paintings.

Descending from the eighth floor gallery, you pass through Jackson Pollock’s drip pictures, Andy Warhol’s pop, Carl Andre’s minimalism, so-and-so’s post-minimalism and all the other isms. The art gets progressively more unruly until, by the fifth floor it’s poking through walls, flopping on the floor, blinking, flashing and vocalizing.  You’ve arrived in the world of contemporary art.

With the exception of the Metropolitan Museum, which has expanded tastefully to accommodate its encyclopedic collections, it’s hard to think of a museum that’s been improved by inflating its size. Leonardo da Vinci said that small studios discipline the artist’s mind, but big ones distract it, and there’s an analogous principle that applies to the scale of museums. Some, like the Museum of Modern Art have become colder and more corporate as they’ve swelled. In a truly disastrous expansion, the Whitney’s architect, Piano, managed to make the elegant library museum of J.P. Morgan feel like a dingy appendage to the swank atrium addition, an architectural case of the tail wagging the dog.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see the Whitney find a neighborhood that it likes. On the other hand, you have to wonder if being a little constrained might have been a healthy thing for a museum that has long been short on self control. You have to ask, does our culture really need bigger Whitney biennials?

 

 

Colorama

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As a kid growing up in the early 60s, I used to take a train to Connecticut to visit my father. The adventure would begin at Grand Central station, where, after saying goodbye to my mother, I’d be on my own. I’d buy my ticket, get some magazines and gum, then hang around the Main Concourse, feeling very adult.  I suppose I looked at the famous four-faced clock, though I didn’t know it was anything special.

What I mostly remember were the twinkling stars on the vaulted ceiling and the glowing Coloramas, those billboard-size advertisements for Kodak, which depicted impossibly perfect people in impossibly beautiful places. They changed every three weeks, so that, for every trip I made, there was a new one. Usually, they were geared to the seasons ­– hundreds of tulips in the spring, Alpine snows fields in the winter, fields of pumpkins in the fall and beach scenes in the summer.

Once called “the world’s largest photographs,” they had a 40-year-run from 1950 to 1990. Today, you can walk down to Times Square and see bigger, jazzier signs with animation and live-action, but they don’t have the magic of the old Coloramas.

They were literally gigantic slides, or transparencies, lit from behind, the way they are in a handheld viewer.  The Concourse was much darker then. Many of the windows were still blackened-out from World War II and others were grimy from decades of cigarette smoke.  The result was a panoramic image that was richer, sharper and more real than life itself.

And completely idealized.  I’ve just been to a small gallery in Grand Central to see a show of 36 original Coloramas – almost all from the 60s – and, now, all these many years later, I was a little embarrassed to see how corny and absurdly wholesome their subjects looked. Of course, that was what all advertising looked like in the “Mad Men” era.  And, the subjects were usually chosen by Kodak executives, not the photographers.

More importantly, these are only approximations of the real thing. The originals were 18 feet tall and 60 feet wide. These are only 2 feet high and 5 feet wide, and are prints, not illuminated transparencies. Deprived of their scale and inner light, all that is left is their weakest attribute – content.

Still, it’s fun to see them and to learn how they were done. Various large-format cameras were used, including the so-called banquet camera, which produced the wide-angle, panoramic image. At the Eastman Kodak labs in Rochester, the image was enlarged and transferred to strip of transparency film that was 19 inches wide and 20 feet long.  It took 41 of these panels to make the billboard-size image.  Later, 40-inch film was used, and the number of separate panels reduced to 20.

The fantasy of a vacation spot reached by a private plane seems to have enchanted the Kodak executives. In 1964, the plane is in a ski scene in the Swiss Alps and in 1066, it’s a seaplane tying up to the deck of a Lake Placid cottage.

The family ones seem to take their inspiration from Norman Rockwell, like that from 1964, in which a mother gives baths to small children while father snaps the picture with his Instamatic. Or the one of the mother pointing a home-movie camera at her daughter playing with her dollhouse.  In others, Dad reads a story to the children, two kids break a wishbone at Thanksgiving dinner, and the family (plus dog) take a drive in their big white convertible.  If you’re were a baby boomer, the Coloramas seemed to grow up with you. By 1966, it’s teen beach parties (note the girl’s flip hairdos and the two-piece, halter-top bathing suits). And by 1967, the scene is inside of a discotheque.

It’s an upbeat take on the decade – no Vietnam War, no civil rights struggle, no assassinations. But nobody expected anything less than a perfect world in the Colorama images. And every world looks perfect if you get far enough away from it, which is the case with the only picture not to feature a human being – or a camera. It’s the Earthrise as seen from the Lunar Orbiter in 1966, the first such picture ever taken of the Earth from the Moon’s perspective.

Design That Talks

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Never did a NYC MetroCard machine look like such a brilliant design. It had no attitude or cutting-edge aspirations. It stood solidly, with its big, colorful buttons, amidst the beeping, clicking high-tech confusion that is “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects” at the Museum of Modern Art.

Down at my feet, a little cardboard robot was looking for directions. Shrill laughter issued from an adjacent gallery where a child was tickling a giant version of Talking Carl, a boxy iPhone app.  Faces on the wall smiled with grotesquely enlarged mouths.

I wanted to hug the humble MetroCard machine.  Someone put money in it and it responded faithfully. Click, click, click and the thin gold-and-blue card dropped silently into the pickup slot. Here, at least, was a form of human-object communication that was straightforward and useful.

Perhaps I’m not tech-savvy enough.  Or lack the proper irony. But I rarely had the sense that the world needed most of the 200 or so things on display in “Talk to Me.” Superfluity is not usually a hallmark of good design.

So abandon all preconceptions, ye who enter here.

The idea behind this show is that contemporary design is no longer about what you see in MoMA’s Design Store, such as the Ray and Charles Eames chair with the potato chip seat or the Isamu Noguchi beehive table lamp.  Those are objects that solve their utilitarian tasks with elegance and originality.

Now, in the digital age, objects aren’t even necessarily objects, anymore.  Their existence can be purely electronic. But they have personalities, or at least simulate them and have become, as the catalog tells us, “very communicative.”

The exhibit loves cute animated creatures like Talking Carl and Tweenbot, the little cardboard robot. These are the pet rocks of the computer age, some virtual, some actual. The lanky rabbit called Mr. Smilt, for example, is a computerized stuffed animal. It is programmed to cry in response to a child’s cry, with the idea that the child will stop crying and instead comfort the animal.

Bug Plugs are power-saving electrical hubs in the form of plump, antennaed creatures that turn electronic devices on or off, depending on whether it detects a human presence in the room.

Once you endow objects with personalities, there will inevitably be malcontents. “TV Predator,” for example, is a picture frame that is jealous of the attention paid to nearby televisions and causes them to  malfunction.

This, like many other things in the show, seems less an example of design than a work of conceptual art or a practical joke (the two are often indistinguishable).

Another item for the joke-shop shelf is the “Communication Prosthesis,” a pair of red plastic lip-inserts that pry open the mouths of the shy or socially awkward.  It’s supposed to make them feel more outgoing, except that the teeth-exposing grimace it produces is about as charming as the face of Batman’s nemesis, The Joker.

Things get even more bizarre with “Call Me, Choke Me,” a collar that tightens around the neck of the wearer every time he or she gets a cell-phone call, a design for people who are into erotic asphyxiation.

Mixed in with the outlandish are a few solid inventions, such as EyeWriter, a collaboration from the Ebeling Group, the Not Impossible Foundation and Graffiti Research Lab. It was created for Tony “Tempt” Quan, an L.A.-based graffiti artist whose paralysis left only his eyes mobile. It uses eye-tracking glasses and a computer program to translate eye movements into lines on a screen.  In Quan’s case, the graffiti tags he designed were projected onto the tops of city buildings, allowing him to continue practicing his art.

But the more you look in this exhibit, the more oddball things jump out at you, such as the “Menstruation Machine,” a metal device shaped like a chastity belt that simulates the experience of menstruation – including blood and cramps.  It’s for curious men, presumably, but in truth, like many things here, it’s for an art school audience or exhibits like this one, where there’s a premium on creativity at its most perverse, and – unlike the MetroCard Machine —  no expectation that it will ever actually be used by anyone.

 

Romantic Gardens

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  From the album “River-Views, Bays & Sea Coasts” of William Gilpin

Unless you live in the country, you’re hardpressed to find a square foot of land that hasn’t been altered by humans.  Even the land considered “natural” – that which hasn’t been covered by buildings, asphalt, concrete, gravel or astroturf – is probably the result of human design.  In a typical suburb, the tree-lined streets, the lawns that surround the houses, the parks that provide refuge  – were all someone’s ideas.

Where did those ideas come from?  Answers can be found at  “Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design” at The Morgan Library & Museum. It finds the roots of our landscape aesthetics in the period between the mid-18th and the mid-19th centuries – the age of Goethe, Beethoven, Delacroix, Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau.

Shifting views of nature first found expression in landscape design for private estates in England, France and Germany. Later, those ideas traveled to America with the great public parks of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Before the Romantic Period, landscape design was driven by the French formal style, with its tightly organized paths and beds defined by geometric lines — nature disciplined to within an inch of its life.

The Garden at Versailles in a painting by Willaim Callow.

Cracks in the formal style appeared in the 16th century, when the high-keyed emotion of the baroque found its way into garden design. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s redesign of the  gardens at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli transformed an orderly waterfall into a spectacular cascade over rough-hewn boulders.

By the time painter Jean-Honore Fragonard visited a century later, these same gardens had fallen into decline.  But his watercolor of broken balustrades, billowy foliage and scraggly branches, highlights another feature of the Romantic aesthetic – its fondness for crumbling ruins overgrown by rampant vegetation.

Rushing water was also a hallmark of Chinese garden design, which reached Europe through reports and engravings of the gardens at the emperor’s summer palace.  British writers praised its pleasing irregularity and “artful confusion.”

The Twickenham gardens of English poet Alexander Pope were celebrated for a three-chambered grotto that featured artificial stalactites and sparkling mineral-studded walls.

Soon, three ideals of landscape aesthetics were vying for primacy: the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime.

Architect Capability Brown, an advocate for the pastoral ideal, reorganized rich men’s estates into pleasing compositions of curling paths, gently rolling meadows, irregular clumps of trees and placid lakes.

At the opposite end of the continuum was the passion for nature’s wild and primitive force, the aesthetic concept that philosopher Edmund Burke called “the sublime.”  A watercolor by J.M.W. Turner, “The Pass at St. Gotthard, near Faido,” captures nature’s wild side with a scene of violent, roiling rapids.

The “picturesque” was popularized by travel writer William Gilpin. He taught people to analyze nature like a painting, appreciating its planes, color and patterns of light and dark. Jane Austen satirized this fad in Northanger Abbey when her heroine muses on a walk: “It seemed as if a good view were no longer to taken from the top of a high hill, and that a clear blue sky was no longer a proof of a fine day.”

“Moonlit Landscape” by Caspar David Friedrich.

Beauty and sublimity merged in the almost mystical landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, whose protagonists gaze into vast panoramas. The aristocrat Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Puckler-Muskau brought some of this spiritual longing to the design of his 1,500-acre estate, a project that went on for 30 years and which he once attributed to his “parkomania.”

Puckler-Muskau influenced America’s great park designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, who also drew inspiration from the Hudson River painters, a school that celebrated the sublime in America’s great wild landscapes.  To get a sense of what an amazing creation Central Park was, be sure to look at the before-photographs of this dreary landscape contrasted with the proposed after views painted by Vaux.  It looks like an impossible fantasy, yet in them you can easily recognize  today’s Mall and boating lake.