New Forms Taschen 135

Breaking down the Barriers

As has already been suggested above in several specific cases, one change that has occurred in recent years is that art and architecture have drawn closer together. In a sense, this movement seems only natural. As John Ruskin said, "No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder." The twentieth century has been rich in movements com-bining painting, sculpture and architecture, from De Stijl and the Bauhaus to ambi-tious if misguided efforts to use all of the arts to the ends of propaganda in Germany, the Soviet Union or Italy from the late 1920s to the war years. Major in-ternational exhibitions such as the one held in Paris in 1937 were showcases for this kind of synthesis of the arts, with Albert Speer's monumental German pavilion or the morę interesting Spanish pavilion, designed by Josep Uuis Sert, containing work by the sculptors Julio Gonzalez or Alexander Calder, as well as Picasso's cele-brated "Guernica," which was painted for this occasion.’⁶ Nor was the effort to integrate the arts limited to Europę. In the United States, through initiatives such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), artists who were later to become well known as members of the New York School participated in public art projects. The Mexican artist Diego Rivera executed large murals, a first one for the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts in 1932, which was criticized as irreligious, and another morę famous still, his "Man at the Crossroads," for the Rockefeller Center in New York. The presence of a portrait of Lenin in this work led to its removal and eventual reconstitution at the Pałace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

It may be that the so-called International Style, which called for an architecture devoid of "ornament," and the frenzied pace of post-War construction led to earl-ier efforts to integrate the arts being abandoned. It should be said that art too, hav-ing shifted its center of gravity after the war from Paris to New York, lost its will to participate in anything other than its own aggrandizement. This was to be the time of "art for art's sake," when individual painters and sculptors would execute works that no longer required a patron or a government to support them. The art market in its contemporary version developed a thirst not for murals or paintings madę to be in a given place, but for readily movable pieces, at home in a living room or a museum.

Morę recently, recession and a certain sense that art had reached the limits of its alternative tendencies toward provocation and minimalism, have led numerous artists to strike out into three dimensions and to create works that certainly recall architecture. From the other perspective, that of the architects, the search for al-ternatives to orthodox Modernism and superficial Post-Modernism has led many to look toward art for inspiration. Then too, the rallying cali of many architects has been for their work, once again, as in the past, to be considered art in and of itself. A number of examples, drawn from Europę, the United States and Japan, showjust how art and architecture have been drawn together to the point where the distinc-tion between them often blurs.

A»t ano Arcmitectube 145