At the Luss House

Sitting there, on a brilliant April morning, with Gerald Luss — on a luxuriant and expansive sofa he himself had designed, surrounded by artworks, with a breathtaking span of nature before us, visible through enormous steel-framed glass windows, hearing him talk about this surpassingly beautiful house which he had built to live in way back in the 1950s — a thought came to me. This is when everything made sense.

In all my experience as a design historian, I had never had that reaction to anyone or anything. Certainly not to modernism, which for someone of my generation feels like the baseline against which subsequent creativity has defined itself. It is the immovable canon. But for Luss — who was born in 1926 — it is quite different. For him, modernism was the great challenge, a brand-new experiment. To speak with him about form, space, detail and materials is to experience anew the unprecedented thrill of total clarity. Inarguable rightness. Actual perfection, here on earth.

The house in Ossining also remains, of course, much as Luss envisioned it. The one major subsequent addition was built following his own plans for a possible extension. It also remains quietly radical in its implications about time, life and architecture: as Luss says, “with few exceptions most people historically have lived in and still live their lives within boxes, Ossining was the antithesis in that it was premised on the absence of unnecessary enclosures akin to what nature exhibits and endows.” Almost needless to say, it is also an ideal setting for art and design, notably including some of Luss’s own furniture — that gorgeous long sofa we sat on, and a coffee table, date to the period of the house’s original construction — and some of the immaculately designed clocks he has made over recent decades, an investigation of time as a world-wide common denominator, paralleling his interest in space as the most important concern for an architect.

I asked Luss what he thought about all these new works, placed into his seven-decade-old house, and he just smiled and said, “It’s never looked this good.” In that reaction, I had the sense of a man who has lived long and well. He’s seen a lot of history, while doing more than his share to shape and define it. He’s seen aesthetic directions come and go, some wildly at variance with his own sense of what’s right. I like to think that now, as we all try to extricate ourselves from a particularly turbulent time in history, we have come full circle. Via a wide-ranging postmodern transit, I hope that we’re able to appreciate the true value of creative minds like Gerald Luss, and what they have achieved. Looking around this idyllic place, an easel for the works of vibrant contemporaneity placed in it, a second thought occurs to me. Maybe everything does make sense today, after all.

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

For a few centuries, landscape had pride of place as one of the principal modes defining the identity of painting. With the rise of abstraction, that preeminence was permanently eroded – even if the genre’s ghost still haunted Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. So to engage in painting today is both to re-engage a distant history and, in age of the Anthropocene, a fundamentally new undertaking. To the extent that it was ever coherent to see nature as “wild,” fundamentally other from the human, that separateness is now itself past. Lucas Arruda’s work is paradigmatic of all these dynamics. In his oil paintings, as well as slide projections and light installations, the Brazilian artist reimagines landscape as a evanescent typology, hovering between apparition and emptiness.

“Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal.” This is the art historian Rosalind Krauss writing, in her 1979 essay “Grids” – an influential description of modernist painting as an autonomous idiom, premised on withdrawal from the world and interrogation of its own concerns. The grid, Krauss wrote, “is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature.” Four decades later, that description still holds – until it doesn’t. Witness Short Tom (Tuned) by Matt Connors. Though loosely structured on a grid, it fairly teems with exceptions to any discernible rule. Even where the vertical and horizontal lines are evident, they are wonky, willful, charting their own unique course. Together with the vibrant polychrome palette and pinwheeling arrangement of intuitive, playful forms, it all amounts to an exhilarating release from constrained modernist logic. The positioning of the work in the Gerald Luss house – itself an immaculately planned and executed, grid-like composition – only highlights its bracing freedom.

For Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, a Spanish artist based in Brazil, every threshold is an opportunity. As in a past presentation at the Eliot Noyes House in New Canaan, Connecticut, he has articulated the landscape of the Luss House with his sculpture – forms that seem to realize an underlying, latent potentiality. The work in question, Systemic Grid 124 (Window), responds to both the materiality and the syntax of Gerald Luss’s modernist masterpiece. It belongs to a larger series of Mangrané’s works, which are created by motifs that self-generate, departing from a very simple geometric drawing (a cell) that multiplies itself until patterns emerge, mimicking the process of organic reproduction. In this case, the modular permuting unit is a polygon of sheet glass, joined together into a quilt-like pattern and then mounted on a brutalist base. In addition to its immediate perceptual qualities, the work also alludes to the celebrated Brazilian designer and architect Lina Bo Bardi – specifically, her display of the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. While Bo Bardi’s elements had the function of supporting paintings on a glass surface allowing viewers to see the back of the canvases, in Systemic Grid 124 (Window) Steegmann Mangrané makes transparency and distortion the pivot around which the work revolves, transforming the artwork from something to look at to something to look through.