At The Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing

At The Noyes House:

Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing
At The Noyes House, presented by Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM, and Object & Thing, provides a unique opportunity to experience contemporary art and design in an iconic residential setting. Taking place within Eliot Noyes’s (1910-1977, Boston, USA) modernist family home in New Canaan, Connecticut, USA, the exhibition brings together just over eighty works from thirty-four international artists and designers, including Lucas Arruda, Lynda Benglis, Heidi Bucher, Sonia Gomes, Green River Project LLC, Mark Grotjahn, Kazunori Hamana, Sheila Hicks, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Antonio Obá, Gaetano Pesce, and Faye Toogood, among others.

September 15 - November 28, 2020

New Canaan, Connecticut, USA

Visit Blum & Poe's website here.

Visit Object & Thing's website here.
The Noyes House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Photo by Michael Biondo.

A House in the Woods

Once upon a time, a black beast lived in a little house in the woods. It kept its back arched against the sky, all the better for children to crawl on it – for the beast was friendly, and stood very still. In the wintertime, snow would settle on its limbs, and it would look just right, with the walls gathered around it, walls of stone and walls of glass.

It sounds like something from a fairy tale, but it’s all true. The Black Beast II in question was a sculpture by Alexander Calder – a very early permanent “stabile,” executed in thick plates of steel. And the little house in the woods was, and is, a Modernist masterpiece by Eliot Noyes. Designed in 1954, completed in 1955, and beautifully preserved today, this was the second home that he built for himself and his family in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Noyes’s somewhat happenstance decision to move here paved the way for an influx of other architects in his circle – the so-called “Harvard Five,” among them Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson, whose Glass House is only three and a half miles south. New Canaan became one of the main proving grounds for American Modernism, though not without local controversy. A poem that ran in the local paper took aim at Noyes and his allies, expressing the wish that they be confined in padded cells - “windowless, doorless, charmless, and escape proof” - rather than unleash their frightening architecture on the innocent town.

It’s hard to imagine this sort of reaction nowadays. The shock of the new has worn away, leaving a deeper, abiding sense of wonder. The Noyes house is eminently livable, warm and intimate, entirely in harmony with its natural surroundings. Yet it is also a brilliant study in formal juxtaposition. In one direction, the walls are glass and steel, allowing for views right through the building and out to the landscape. In the other direction, the walls are made of local fieldstone. This axial contrast of transparency and opacity, of “International Style” and vernacular, infuses the house with remarkable energy, making it an extraordinary setting for art.
Alma Allen, Not Yet Titled (2020); Hugo França, Rings (2007).
It’s in this spirit that an enterprising trio of organizations – the new-model fair Object & Thing, and the galleries Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM – are staging a gentle takeover of the house this fall. The building is 65 years old this year: retirement age. But as I write, it is taking on a new lease of life, as works of art and design once again fill the space.

Eliot Noyes and his wife Molly were not collectors, exactly, but they sure knew

how to orchestrate objects. Like their close friends Charles and Ray Eames out in California, they surrounded themselves with a creative mixture of fine art, folk craft, tapestries, African sculpture and Americana (notably including several carousel animals). As part of this collecting activity – described by Noyes as “a small, intermittent, economical operation but done with tremendous excitement by the whole family” – treated their living room table as a sort of exhibition-in-miniature, setting upon it small scale works by Calder, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and others. For anyone that associates Modernist display with white-walled galleries and strict disciplinary hierarchies, their characterful, ecumenical approach will come as a surprise.
Sonia Gomes, Untitled, from Pendentes series (2018)

Many of the artworks that the Noyes family brought here are now in other homes, or in museums; but this has led to the happy opportunity to repopulate it, in an equally ecumenical spirit. Where Black Beast II used to stand (Noyes bequeathed the sculpture to the collection at The Museum of Modern Art, where he had himself been a curator in the 1940s), a commanding work by Alma Allen now takes pride of place. Also in the courtyard, where there was once a set of slatted outdoor furniture, one can sit in a newly-made suite by Green River Project LLC; the corners of the enclosure are punctuated with large-scale pots by Kazunori Hamana. The living room table is again activated by a range of objects, including a not-so-miniature ceramic by Lynda Benglis and two face jugs by Jim McDowell, made in the southern African American tradition, and charged with contemporary relevance. Where another Calder – this one a mobile – used to hang, a fiber sculpture by Sonia Gomes clambers down from the ceiling in mid-air.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Untitled (2020); Green River Project LLC, Pine Outdoor Coffee Table, Pine-Board Deck Chairs, and Stone Vessel (2020); Kazunori Hamana, Untitled (2019).

Several of the participating artists have created works especially for the exhibition, including Mark Grotjahn - who broke with his usual format, creating a horizontal painting to hang right above the hearth – and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, whose aluminum ‘curtain’ reframes the view of the forest, rearticulating the porous boundary between outdoors and in. Sometimes you have to stop yourself and wonder. How long has that Sheila Hicks been hanging inside the door? What about that gorgeous boro textile on the bed, by Megumi Arai, or the subtle wood-fired ceramics of Frances Palmer? They’ve all only been here for a few days, as it turns out, but they feel right at home.

Curiously, something a little bit like this actually happened once before, when the house was brand new. In 1956 the Wadsworth Atheneum, in nearby Hartford, lent a houseful of American antiques to Noyes for the purposes of a Look magazine shoot. Eames chairs yielded their spots to ladderbacks. The family was photographed playing cards on a big hooked rug. The moral of the story, as far as Look was concerned, was that the “the battle between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ is over.”
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Gaetano Pesce, Black Drip Vase and Green Drip Vase (2019) with flowers by Mizutama Studio.
Whether that was quite true at the time is questionable. But all these decades later, we do seem to be liberated from that either-or mentality. And that owes at least something to Noyes. He was a path-breaking figure in many ways: as a curator in the 1940s, he established the design program at MoMA, shaping it into an outpost for progressive and democratic thinking; as an architect in the 1950s, he played pied piper, turning New Canaan into a Modernist mecca; as a consultant to industry in the 1960s, he popularized the notion of universal design, preaching to his clients (among them IBM and Mobil) the virtue of consistency in all things – architecture, graphics and products.

As visitors flock to his house this fall, taking photos on their iPhones, they might well reflect that companies like Apple are essentially following the Noyes playbook. And to the extent that we’re all able to appreciate a Modernist chair, an abstract painting and a carousel giraffe all at once, we are also following in Eliot Noyes’s footsteps. As an innovator, his influence was both wide and deep. We can see it everywhere. But it is here, at his home, that we can experience his vision in its purest, holistic and accommodating form. In 1958, Noyes commented that aesthetic objects can “best be enjoyed in a house designed to bring art and their daily lives into as close daily contact possible.” He created just such a place, and that sense of contact is still alive and well: a modern story, with a fairytale ending.

By Glenn Adamson, an independent writer and curator based in New York.
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Lucas Arruda, Untitled, (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2020, 7 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.
Lucas Arruda
(b. 1983, São Paulo, Brazil)

If any place has atmosphere, it’s the Noyes House. Memories pervade the space, as does the sheer intelligence of its designer. But it’s when you stand in front of the paintings of São Paulo based Lucas Arruda that you see just how deep and rich an atmosphere can be. His landscapes are more mental than actual, participating in a tradition of perceptual painting that goes back centuries in art history. In Arruda’s contribution to this lineage, the mediation of light, as it meets the gaze, becomes a criss-crossed terrain; abstraction and figuration, apparition and emptiness, dissolve into cohesion. His images would be haunting and powerful anywhere, in their sublimation of temporality, the suggestion that matter has been slowly deposited onto their surfaces. But they take on a particular resonance here at the Noyes House, in the quiet stillness of a place long lived in.
Heidi Bucher
(1926-1993, Switzerland)
Heidi Bucher’s Skinnings series is a study of the relationship and boundaries between architectural structures and the human body. Started in 1975, Skinnings depicts the architectural spaces Boucher inhabited as receptacles of memory and experience that were very much a living, breathing part of her life. By “casting” these spaces in latex and then “skinning” them by peeling off the latex membrane Boucher sought to capture the essence of a room, or an entire building such as her grandmother’s home or her studio in the Canary Islands. Along with documenting her personal history, Bucher was also interested in exploring feminism, domestication and collective memory as seen in her "skinning" of the Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland. Famously, in 1882 Anna O was sent there for hysteria, a now discredited diagonosis of neurosis that was given to 19th century women who experienced uncontrollable and excessive emotional behaviors. Anna O's treatment is regarded as marking the beginning of psychoanalyses and whose case first appeared in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's Studies on Hysteria in 1895. Bucher’s Skinnings explore notions of limitation and domesticity, using them almost like footprints that allowed her to preserve and recreate history.
Sergio Camargo, RELIEF no 285 - Paris, 1970, painted wood construction 59 1/8 x 40 3/4 in.

Artworks
Sergio Camargo
(1930-1990, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Sergio Camargo was born in Rio de Janeiro, and trained initially in Brazil, including with the expatriate Italian artist Lucio Fontana. He spent much of his life and career in Paris, however, and was there exposed both to philosophy (studying at the Sorbonne under Gaston Bachelard) and avant-garde practice. This positioned him ideally to synthesize the approaches and aesthetics of Constructivism, Minimalism, and early Cubism. He shared with many European artists of his generation – particularly the Italians who followed in Fontana’s footsteps, like Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni – a profound interest in materiality, viewing abstraction not as a means to transcend the everyday experience of objecthood, but rather to reframe it and make it more palpable, more immediate. This viewpoint is of course entirely compatible with that espoused by Eliot Noyes. The Camargo construction shown here, with its dialectical contrast between smooth and jutting forms, compares closely with the opposition of glass and stone walls in the house.
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Sonia Gomes, Untitled, from Pendentes series, 2018, stitching, bindings, fabric, and lace, 107 7/8 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.
Sonia Gomes
(b. 1948, Caetanópolis, Brazil)

There’s a good and telling story about Eliot Noyes’s relationship with the artist Alexander Calder. In addition to the famous Black Beast II, Noyes acquired two of his friend’s mobiles, an unnamed red one made by Calder for a specific location in the Noyes House and another called Snow Flurry. In a 1958 article in Art in America, he spoke of his family’s affection for the mobiles, albeit in a way that might make a conservator cringe: “We all walk right through one low-hanging Calder mobile, making it swing, and we bat or blow at one another as we walk by.” Eventually Noyes came to feel this wasn’t entirely safe for the red mobile, and moved it to a more out-of-the-way location near the dining table. But the affable Calder was uncharacteristically upset; he’d made the mobile specifically for that location, and he wanted people to bump into it. Now, on the same hook, hangs a work by the great Brazilian fiber artist Sonia Gomes. It is equally inviting, and like Calder’s mobiles, composed of everyday materials – snipped steel in his case, cut fabrics in hers – while also assembling itself into a composition that is so specific, so communicative, that it amounts to an expression in an entirely new language. Also like Calder’s work, Gomes’ sculpture is essentially abstract, with fleeting flashes of figuration. That body that is mostly unseen or absent, in her work, hails from a very different place and time – the fabric remnants indexing her own experience as a Black Brazilian. Occupying this spot in the Noyes House, it does much to suggest how much our moment in art history has in common with half a century ago, and also how much broader and richer the conversation has become.
Patricia Leite, Entre Nuvens [Between Clouds], 2020, Oil on wood, 63 x 70 7/8 in.

Artworks
Patricia Leite
(b. 1955, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)
Brazilian painter Patricia Leite derives her subjects from photographs collected during her travels. The motifs are recognizable – in this case, as the title Entre Neuvens (“Between Clouds,” in Portuguese) signals, a high mountain landscape with the sun hanging overhead in a blue sky. Yet this bare description only begins to capture the feeling of the work, which, if photographic, is so only in a metaphorical sense – seeming to capture that instantaneous moment when ephemeral light is registered and fixed into permanent form. In this sense, the seeming solidity of Leite’s forms feels provisional. It is as if her images could easily slide into some other configuration without losing their graphic and chromatic intensity. As it happens, Eliot Noyes was an avid photographer as well, rarely without his camera, particularly on his frequent international trips. It seems certain that he would have found much to appreciate in Leite’s painting, could he see it today hanging in his home – the expression of a kindred spirit, who looks out at the world, sees the wonder in it, and finds a way to show the rest of us.
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Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Untitled, 2020, kriska aluminium curtain with laser cut steel frame, dimensions variable.
Artworks
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
(b. 1977, Barcelona, Spain)
One of the most dramatic installations in At the Noyes House comes courtesy of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, a Spanish artist based in Brazil. It is a curtain of sorts, made of green aluminum chains, with an organically-shaped cutout. The work articulates the boundary between the architecture and the forest beyond, and also (less obviously) stages a cross-cultural conversation between Noyes and his near contemporary, the Italian-born, Brazil-based architect Lina Bo Bardi; the lines of the cutout are taken from her brutalist masterwork, the Sesc Pompeia, in São Paulo. The chains, made by Kriska, are also a cultural import: widely used in Spain, they are lightweight, often brightly colored and make a characteristic metallic sound when the chains touch. Oscillating between diaphanous screen and semi-solid object, Mangrané’s curtain conjures a liminal state in multiple senses at once: marking an actual boundary, as well as a cultural pass-through in which multiple strands of modernity meet, brushing against one another. This same theme of intersection is also present in the three sculptures made of twigs and stones that Magrané has at the Noyes House, slight in their means but profound in their implication.
Paulo Nazareth, Sem título, da série "Objetos para tampar o sol de seus olhos" [Untitled, from the series "Objects to cover the sun from your eyes], 2010, photo printing on cotton paper 23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in.

Artworks
Paulo Nazareth
(b. 1977, Governador Valadares, Brazil)
Eliot and Molly Noyes were dedicated believers in the simple, well-chosen gesture. When they positioned an artwork in their home, it always felt unforced, its placement seeming obvious in retrospect but marvelously suggestive. The same can be said for the work of Paulo Nazareth. His concerns are quite different – addressing issues of immigration, racism and colonialism in his native Brazil and beyond – but employ a similar economy of means. The notion of encounter is crucial to Nazareth’s work. He often cultivates relationships with people he simply meets on the road — often, individuals in precarious financial or legal circumstances – and develops his work in response. He plays with the romantic ideal of the wandering artist seeking universal truths, but brings an acute political urgency to his representations of the unrepresented.
Antonio Obá, Wade in the water II, 2020, oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 79 1/8 in.

Artworks
Antonio Obá
(b. 1983, Ceilândia, Brazil)
Go into the intimately-scaled bedroom of the Noyes House, and you will see, hanging just above the bed (splendidly arrayed with a Megumi Arai boro textile), a scene of riveting power: as if the wall had dissolved to allow a view into some other realm. The painting, by the Brazilian artist Antonio Obá, is entitled Wade in the water II – a phrase taken from a well-known African American spiritual. It is replete with other associations, too, from Winslow Homer’s haunting late painting The Gulf Stream to the recent killing of George Floyd (which occurred as Obá was creating the work). Obá has spoken eloquently of the central figure in the work: “He is not only an alleged survivor of a shipwreck, rather, an allegory between the micro and the macro, the psyche and the landscape. Harmony and power manifest in the waves that seem to be caused by the character who walks on water, like a stone thrown into the placid waters. Master of the seas, a black navigator, master of his journey, knowledgeable about the wave he generates and the waves that seem to follow him, he advances. He does not contemplate the landscape inert. He faces the viewer from a distance, aware that the only route is forward.”
Celso Renato, Untitled, n.d., acrylic on wood, 15 3/4 x 7 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.

Artworks
Celso Renato
(1919-1992, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
When the Brazilian self-taught artist Celso Renato died in 1992, he left behind a body of work that is marvelously sensitive in its touch and rigorous in its handling of abstract form. His practice rotated around simple geometries, which he invariably infused with nuance and emotion though his mark-making. The painting shown at the Noyes House, just eight interlocking motifs rendered in acrylic on a panel rough salvaged wood, is typical of his ability to create a beguiling object out of the simplest means. Some of the energy comes from the dialogue between the painting and its physical support; some of it comes from the slight, characterful divergences of his line; but mostly, it derives from the force of the artist’s personality. As the New York Times critic Roberta Smith has written, “Renato worked with an almost reverential consideration of what he was painting on, creating his own fusion of art, nature and the haphazardness of everyday life and adding something of his own to the history of postwar Latin American Modernism.”
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Rubem Valentim, Untitled, undated, wood, 28 x 8 1/4 in.
Rubem Valentim, Emblema Relevo, 1967, acrylic over plywood, 40 1/8 x 29 1/2 in.

Artworks
Rubem Valentim
(1922-1991, Salvador, Brazil)
The Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim (nearly an exact contemporary of Celso Renato, also featured in At the Noyes House) organized his works from iconic abstract signs: lines, circles, cubes and arrows. While legible as contributions to Neo-Concrete movement, they were also infused with spiritual meaning. He saw them as emblems reductions of Orixá, or deities, from the Afro-Brazilian religions Candomblé and Umbanda, brought to the Americas by enslaved Yoruba peoples from West and Central Africa. Valentim specifically acknowledges this forced migration in his totems – like the one shown here, which has the presence of an animate being - drawing on inspiration from both African sculpture and Afro-Brazilian art.
With special thanks to Glenn Adamson, Rafael de Cárdenas, Frederick Noyes and Mika Yoshitake.

Photography by Michael Biondo.

Video by Michael Biondo, produced on the occasion of At The Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing, September 15 - November 28, 2020.

All images courtesy of the artist and:

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brussels/New York

Object & Thing, New York

At The Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing

At The Noyes House:

Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing

September 15 - November 28, 2020

New Canaan, Connecticut, USA

A House in the Woods

Eliot Noyes and his wife Molly were not collectors, exactly, but they sure knew

By Glenn Adamson, an independent writer and curator based in New York.

Lucas Arruda

Heidi Bucher

Sergio Camargo

Sonia Gomes

Patricia Leite

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Paulo Nazareth

Antonio Obá

Celso Renato

Rubem Valentim