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  The other painting, In the Cabin, No. 2, is a somewhat more serious undertaking, as its oil-on-canvas medium suggests. Within the cabin itself, obliquely facing us, sits a cross-legged man in a wooden chair, apparently reading a map or a newspaper; he and the chair are done entirely in shades of brown. His eyes are distinctly drawn, and he has the faint outline of an ear, but his lower face is blurred into invisibility. Around him is a room composed of planes, angles, and occasional curves, all in relatively solid blocks of color conveying domestic objects like a bureau (green), a mirror (dark blue), a pitcher (white), an armchair (olive-green front, electric-blue back), and the adjoining corners of a beige ceiling, a brown floor, and blue- and green-tinted walls. Outside the open doorway, practically in the center of the picture, is an abstract landscape that merges from white into yellow in a diagonal slash, and against that yellow ground, a tiny red figure, almost certainly a woman, appears in silhouette. The whole image is at once precise and dreamy, with thin lines of shape-sketching paint lending an almost cartoonish overlay to the gracefully abstract planes of color. It is a delicately balanced painting as well as an elegantly modern one, and Lou thought enough of it to hang it on the wall of his and Esther’s sitting room, on the third floor of 5243 Chester.

  Elsewhere in the house he had, over the years, put up other examples of his work. A watercolor called Street in a Coastal Village, No. 4, depicting the houses, cows, and people of Isle Madame, Nova Scotia, hung on the dining-room wall. So did a squiggly-lined oil painting of a scene in Rockport, Massachusetts, titled The White Church—a work whose bright yet threatening lighting effects gave it some of the eeriness of a de Chirico. Also in the dining room (which, of all the rooms in the house, had the best wall space for paintings) was Danube Country, the 1930 watercolor Lou had shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, while on the wall of his and Esther’s bedroom hung a 1929 watercolor sketch of the Borghese Gardens in Rome. Not satisfied with the picture-hanging space the house offered, Lou even began to paint on the house itself: at one point he executed a series of Blake-like allegories, in oils, on the panels of the bedroom door.

  All this created a welcome diversion from the joblessness of the late 1930s. There were fits and starts of professional activity, but much of it was unpaid. In 1938 Kahn collaborated with two other architects, Oscar Stonorov and Rudolf Mock, in creating a design for the Wheaton College Art Center competition. The result was never built, but it was selected for an architectural exhibit that traveled to seventeen venues, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In response to a competition announced by the new Philadelphia Housing Authority, Lou joined with George Howe, Kenneth Day, and others to submit plans for the Glenwood Housing Project. This too resulted in no actual buildings, though a couple of additional Philadelphia-area housing studies were assigned to them over the next three years.

  In early 1939 Lou was briefly hired as a technical advisor to the Information Services Division of the U.S. Housing Authority, and in that capacity he did the illustrations for a series of booklets with titles like The Housing Shortage, Public Housing and the Negro, and Housing and Juvenile Delinquency. He also designed the exhibition panels for the Authority’s Rational City Plan, part of a show called Art in Our Time which was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in May. In October of that year Kahn was introduced by a Housing Authority colleague to a fellow Philadelphian named Edmund Norwood Bacon, with whom he soon went on to organize a citywide housing protest and other activities focused on improving the city’s dire conditions. Working out of his home office, Lou also got tiny jobs doing alterations and additions to the local branch of the Battery Workers Union and a Philadelphia dentist’s building. And in 1940 his old friend Jesse Oser, whom he had known since Central High, hired him to design a single-family home in nearby Elkins Park—the first such commission that Kahn had ever received, and one that he faithfully and inventively completed within two years.

  None of this, however, brought him anything like the success he was hoping for. He did not seem to be getting any closer at all to that million-dollar job he had jokingly mentioned to Esther. And meanwhile the need for such a job (or any job, for that matter) had become more pointed, for in the summer of 1939 Esther announced that she was pregnant. As if to underline both the tenderness and the anxiety of the occasion, Lou began painting a portrait of his pregnant wife, Esther in Pink, which turned out to be one of the most touchingly intimate pictures he had ever done.

  Over the nine years they had been married, Lou had made a number of charcoal sketches of Esther: Esther framed in a window, Esther wearing a Matisse-like slanting hat, Esther holding a cat on her lap, and one isolated bust of Esther, large-eyed and serious and rather beautiful, gazing out at us with lowered chin. He had also painted at least one color picture of his wife, a 1935 watercolor that had the quick brushstrokes and vigorous, semi-abstract quality of the watercolors he had done on his Grand Tour. And then there were the composite drawings and paintings he called Esther/Olivia, one of which—Esther/Olivia, No. 3, from 1932—hung prominently in the living room at 5243 Chester.

  For the sisters, too, had been drafted to pose for the artist. Olivia’s reddish hair and clear, intelligent gaze, both of which inform the 1932 Esther/Olivia, come through on their own in the pastel-and-charcoal Olivia, a relatively realistic sketch made sometime in the 1930s. The same model appears in a slightly more abstract oil painting, done in 1939, called Olivia with a Grape. In the latter (which Lou gave to Olivia), the partially shadowed planes of the woman’s face echo the joint at which the walls meet behind her, while the white hand delicately holding up a greenish grape against a red dress comes across as strangely detached and therefore pointedly symbolic. A different mood entirely characterizes the portraits of Regina, who in her late teens appears to have posed for Lou at least twice in the nude. Of these two charcoal-on-paper sketches (both of which ended up in Regina’s possession), one is darker, more sultry, yet somehow more childish; the other, in a lighter style, emphasizes the curl of her hair, the arch of her eye and lip, and the soft swell of her breasts. Both resemble, to no small degree, certain of Picasso’s female busts from his pre- and post-Cubist periods.

  No one in the family seemed surprised or unnerved that in the course of his inveterate sketching the young artist should require the modeling services of his two young sisters-in-law as well as those of his wife. That Lou had captured something in these two women which they felt to be true to themselves was clear from the fact that they kept these portraits for the rest of their lives. They seemed willing and even pleased to be used repeatedly as his models—a kind of affirmation, they may have felt, of their relative importance in the household. Being Esther’s younger sister had not, for either of them, been an easy role. Olivia, the tomboy and later the public-spirited intellectual, was convinced that her mother had always loved the other two more, while the pretty, fun-loving Regina, the baby of the family, felt that Esther was clearly their mother’s favorite. So the alliance with their talented brother-in-law must have been balm to their injured feelings. Even as they grew older and graduated from college—Olivia from Temple, Regina from Penn—Lou continued to get along splendidly with both girls. He was especially close to Regina, who shared his love of music, and for whom he designed a pair of beautiful copper candlesticks on the occasion of her wedding.

  By the end of the 1930s both sisters were married—Olivia to an economist named Milton Abelson, Regina to a dentist named Harold Fine (though she would later divorce him and marry a second husband, Morris Soopper, who ran a hardware store in Philadelphia). When they moved out, Olivia’s third-floor bedroom was given over to the Catholic lady lodger, but Regina’s second-floor room, which was always called “the baby’s room,” was left empty. Lou and Esther’s own baby, it was decided, would occupy a new bedroom on the third floor of the house. This would place the infant on the same floor as the potentially anxious parents as well as only one flight up from the competent, knowledgeable grand
mother.

  The parents, as parents will, took pleasure in furnishing and decorating the room for the unknown visitor they were expecting. As the March 1940 due date approached, Lou hung his Esther in Pink—the last portrait, incidentally, that he was ever to paint of his wife—on the wall of the baby’s bedroom. The painting, at once warm and cool, emotional and calm, was both an artistic expression and an amulet of sorts. Pregnant but not visibly so, her arms crossed on the table in front of her, her strong eyebrows, firm mouth, and prominent widow’s peak softened by the expression in her liquid dark eyes, the mother-to-be stood out palely against the dark-blue geometries of the room-space surrounding her in the picture. This benign, watchful presence was presumably meant to offer round-the-clock reassurance to the child who was shortly to arrive.

  IN SITU: KIMBELL ART MUSEUM

  Interior of Kimbell Art Museum

  (Photograph by Robert LaPrelle, courtesy of the Kimbell Art Museum)

  Like all art museums, the Kimbell is a place for looking and seeing. The relationship between the architecture and the art is intense and mutually reinforcing, and both are a delight to the eye. Great paintings look especially good on these walls—in part due to the light that is cast upon them, a perfect mixture of natural and artificial illumination, and in part because of the congenial textures and spaces that surround the works of art. Kahn’s building never seems to overpower the paintings: it sees itself as their setting, their background, while nonetheless taking an active role in their display.

  “The building does dictate the kind of art you can show,” says Eric Lee, the Kimbell’s current director. “You can’t exhibit terribly large paintings, so we haven’t acquired them. Also, strong paintings look better in this building, weaker paintings fall apart. So the building has helped dictate the quality of the collection.” The spell the Kimbell casts apparently works on visiting paintings, too. Gesturing toward a large Matisse on loan from the Chicago Art Institute—the beautiful Bathers by a River, which here hangs alone on the central vault’s travertine end wall—Lee repeats a comment made by his deputy director, George Shackelford, at the time this loan exhibition was installed: “He said this wall has waited its whole life for that painting, and that painting has waited its whole life to hang on that wall.”

  All this is true. The museum highlights and glorifies one sense above all, the sense of sight. And yet it also, curiously, emphasizes the limits of what can be seen. The building suggests that what your eyes tell you is truth of a kind, but not necessarily the whole truth, not an absolute and permanent truth. There are stories behind the stories, and scenes behind the scenes. The unseen, the unperceived, has its importance in this museum, as you only come to realize over time. Appearances can be deceptive—in a pleasurable way, granted, rather than a cruel one, but still in a way that misleads. And yet such deceptions are part of the building’s pursuit of truth, just as a novelist’s inventions serve the truths that can only be told in fiction. The Kimbell Art Museum is Kahn’s version of a Tolstoy novel: grand but contained, artful yet persuasively real, a blending of the physical world as we know it and something only the imagination can grasp.

  Take, for instance, the most distinctive feature of the interior, the arched ceilings that curve over the individual galleries, each shedding its measure of natural light from above. Being inside these long, high rooms makes you feel utterly at peace: a bit like the sensation you get in England’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, perhaps, except that here Sir John Soane’s elegant nineteenth-century materials and structures have been replaced by something distinctly modern. The concrete vault over your head is high enough to give you a sense of grandeur, not so high as to intimidate, with a gentle, unspectacular curve that holds the facing walls and all the paintings on them in its tender embrace. Each gallery’s ceiling seems composed of a single continuous piece of concrete, smooth and yet also faintly textured. The pearly gray surface appears to glow from within, especially as it reaches its peak, where the arch disappears under the winglike aluminum brackets—both spotlight holders and sunlight disseminators—that hang just beneath the ceiling. Somehow the harsh Texas sunlight which prevails outdoors has been converted into a cool, silver-tinted beam that bathes the concrete and the paintings and the people who stand in front of them, making everything seem as if it exactly belongs there.

  “It has that feeling I have with really special buildings, like the Pantheon,” observes Nancy Edwards, a curator of European art who has been at the Kimbell for over twenty years. “The perfectness of the space, forever here. The perfect proportion, how it fits your body. And the light, different at every time of day. It has this durability and ephemerality at the same time.” Elaborating on how this feeling is created by the particular curve and size of the arch, she points to “the ceiling height, but also the magic of the cycloid vault, because it’s such a pleasing shape. The way it floats on top, and the clerestory gives you the idea of something above you. Part of it is the trick of the way the light bounces on that silvery surface. It acts as a sort of sky. That whole idea of a vault and a heaven: I’m sure Kahn thought about those things, because it’s such an antique analogy.”

  Then Edwards pauses, as if thinking of some of the implications behind her words, especially terms like magic and trick. “Everything seems so simple, but when you look it’s a little bit more complex,” she goes on. “I was thinking: yes, but there’s the slit down the middle.”

  She is referring to the fact that the vault’s arch is not really a single continuous arch at all, but rather, two identically curved concrete shells that swoop upward toward each other and then fail to meet. That failure, that gap, is covered over by the aluminum reflector that diffuses the sunlight coming through the central slit and turns it into a silvery glow on the uppermost reaches of the finely textured concrete. The effect is glorious, but it is definitely an effect, a calculated invention to make you feel that light is being shed from an unseen source. And yet this is also the truth: the source is unseen, unless you manage to get to one of the few places in the building (the off-limits mezzanine library, for example) where you are close enough to the ceiling to spot the gap between the shells.

  Nancy Edwards’ sense that the concrete ceiling is floating over her head is shared by just about everyone who enters these rooms. But that too is a trick of sorts, an element of the “magic” created by Louis Kahn and his engineer August Komendant. As you look down the length of the vaulted gallery, it will seem as if the entire concrete structure is resting on quarter-inch glass: on the curved strip of clerestory window that surmounts the travertine arch at the end of the hall, and on the long, thin, horizontal window that runs along the top of the outermost gallery walls. But the ceiling only seems to rest on these slender bits of glass. In reality, it is supported not only by the metal post-tensioning cables buried invisibly within the four-inch-thick concrete shells, but also by four massive concrete columns standing in the corners of each vault. The seeming miracle is not a miracle, but a cunning feat of engineering.

  It was, in fact, a purely technical engineering requirement that gave the building one of its most subtle visual effects, the elegant shape of the end-windows. Because Komendant insisted that the concrete arch sustaining each pair of shells had to thicken as it approached the top, the glass arc beneath it had to be thinned correspondingly, and the result is perhaps the most alluring “light joint” (as he called it) that Kahn ever created. It cannot help but remind you of church architecture, once you notice it; it definitely contributes to your sense that you are standing in a heavenly vault, or at least a cathedral nave. Yet the diminishment in the window’s width is so gradual, so natural, that you may well sense the modulation before you see it. It, too, is at once visible and invisible.

  * * *

  Even from the outside, the Kimbell’s apparent straightforwardness is somewhat deceptive. The building presents itself from the front as a piece of Palladian symmetry, with forward-thrusting outer wings—each containing f
ive full vaults plus one hollow, vault-sized portico—flanking a center section of equal length that contains only four vaults. The extra space in front of the central part leaves room for a grand entrance, or would leave room for that, if this structure had actually been designed by Palladio. Instead, Kahn’s entrance is obscured by a courtyard full of trees, and when you get close enough to see the doorway, you discover it is a simple glass door camouflaged within the surrounding curtain wall. Nor are the outer clusters of vaults readily visible or countable from the front. You really only get a sense of their shape, number, and connection from a sidelong view (a view that may remind you, if you have seen them, of the sequentially joined arched pavilions of Riga’s Central Market).

  “I think the Kahn building is most beautiful at these angles, and best approached from these angles,” comments Eric Lee as he walks diagonally across the coarse, yellowing St. Augustine grass toward the southwest corner of the museum. When asked why he feels that way, he honestly admits, “I don’t know.” But he is certainly responding to something that is evident elsewhere in Kahn’s practice—the sense that oblique approaches are the truest ones, and that entrances should be a bit hard to find.