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The Dallas Arts District's latest landmark, the Nasher Sculpture Center, will be a rotating display of one of the world's greatest collections of modern sculpture. Ranging from the late 19th century to the present, the collection includes works by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder and Richard Serra. And the building itself is the work of a real artist among architects, Renzo Piano.
Dallas developer Raymond D. Nasher – think "NorthPark" – and his late wife, Patsy, collected sculptures over 40 years, with stunning results. Only part of the collection, which totals some 300 pieces, will be on display at any one time. The plan is to keep the collection in rotation, outdoors as well as in. The opening exhibition, though, gives a good sampling of trends in 20th-century sculpture.
Keep in mind that there's no "right" way to look at a sculpture. Walk all around it; see how it looks from different angles. Just don't touch: Oils on our fingers can damage even sturdy materials.
About the art
Abstraction
Precise representation is only one possible function for sculpture. Starting in the late 19th century, artists have explored various ways and degrees of distancing their works from what we call "reality."
Henri Matisse's 1903 The Serf is obviously a man, but armless and rough-finished. Naum Gabo's Constructed Head fragments a woman's head into interlocking pieces of stainless steel. Alberto Giacometti stretches human bodies into rough, spindly figures. Henry Moore's Vertebrae are recognizable as such, though stylized in polished bronze.
Geometry
Some modern sculptures don't even try to represent something else. Instead, they show us that mere geometries can be pleasurable. Art, to paraphrase poet Marianne Moore, doesn't have to mean; it can just be.
One sculpture you can't miss in the Nasher garden is Mark di Suvero's Eviva Amore. It's a huge construction of Cor-Ten steel – it's supposed to look rusty – a kind of three-dimensional I-beam cross tied together with steel circles. Only a little less imposing is Richard Serra's pair of big but gracefully curved Cor-Ten panels, called My Curves Are Not Mad. (Don't worry too much about modern-art titles; they may or may not mean something.)
Barbara Hepworth's Squares with Two Circles (Monolith), at the end of the west walkway, is exactly what it says it is: bronze panels with circular openings. It's strangely totemic – and quite beautiful.
Psychology
Inspired by Freud and other pioneering psychologists, a whole "school" of art sprang up in the 1920s to explore the sometimes disturbing world of dreams. A later example of surrealism at the Nasher Center is Max Ernst's The King Playing With the Queen, a Minotaur-like figure grasping an abstraction suggesting a chess piece. It raises unsettling questions about sex and power.
The headless bodies lined up in two rows in Magdalena Abakanowicz's Bronze Crowd are all the more disturbing from an artist who as a young girl lived through both German and Soviet invasions of her native Poland. The figures exude both dignity and vulnerability.
Whimsy
One of the lessons of 20th-century art is that art doesn't have to be serious. It can be playful, even downright irreverent. Even abstraction can be fun, as Alexander Calder proves with The Spider, a suspended mobile of black-painted steel panels and rods. Roy Lichtenstein's Double Glass is a kind of 3-D cartoon of two glasses, in bright colors. Even Picasso's Head of a Woman – the one outside in pebbly concrete – playfully reduces the head to front and side planes, with cartoonish eyes, eyebrows and hair. If it doesn't make you smile, you're taking life much too seriously.
About the architecture
Renzo Piano? Not Steinway Piano?
Yuk, yuk. Mr. Piano, based in Genoa, Italy, is one of today's most respected architects. In 1998 he won the Pritzker Prize, the architectural equivalent of a gold medal at the Olympics. His buildings tend to be understated but elegantly engineered, with imaginative use of natural light.
So why understated?
That's Mr. Piano's way. He doesn't do flamboyant shapes. He belongs to another 20th-century architectural trend, toward simplification and distillation. "Less is more," as Mies van der Rohe famously said. Without superfluous trim and flashy colors, we can admire proportions and materials – and that beautiful engineering.
In those respects, the Nasher building is as thoroughly modern as Millie. But it's also quite traditional in its cluster of five shallow-arched bays, symmetrical both side-to-side and front-to-back.
All this understatement, of course, also keeps the building from competing with the art.
A glass roof/ceiling?
There's lots of glass, and not just overhead. The three middle pavilions have glass walls on both front and back, so from the street you can see right through to the big gardens out back.
There's no light like natural light for seeing art. In Mr. Piano's design for the Menil Collection in Houston, one of the neatest buildings in this part of the world, he used big concrete fins to diffuse sunlight into the galleries. At the Nasher he shades the glass roof/ceiling with elegant aluminum honeycombs. The openings are angled due north, so no direct sunlight, which could damage some of the artworks, ever enters.
From the outside, you can see that the shallow-arched roofs/ceilings are supported in the middle by rows of thin stainless-steel rods. Even the connecting joints are beautifully engineered.
What's the stone?
Italian travertine. On the outside it has a naturally porous finish and a soft golden glow. Inside, it's polished to a smoother, creamier finish. Pavements in front and back are Verde Fontaine, a green granite quarried in South Africa.
How about the trees?
Side entrances (to the cafe on the east side, to the director's office on the west) are shaded by bamboo. If you believe in feng shui, that means good vibes. Lined up along the gardens' long east and west walls are magnolias, promising big, fragrant blooms in the spring and summer. Inside the walls, gnarly live oaks continue the lines of the building's dividing walls and lend their own sculptural interest.
The plantings, devised by landscape architect Peter Walker, are rounded out with cedar elms, Afghan pines, crape myrtles and weeping willows.
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