Louis I. Kahn at Salander-O'Reilly - New York

plenteous of the drama of the career of architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) lies in the amalgamation of the academic conventions that he had absorbed as a pupil with the modernist innovations he came to appreciate. Trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition at the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn received an architectural education fundamentally shaped by means of the 19th century, yet he would go on on, in his teaching and in buildings of the like kind as the Richards Medical Research Building and the Kimbell Art Museum, to become individual of the most influential American architects of the mid-20th hundred This exhibition, a selection of early paintings, watercolors and drawings that date from the drawn out interim between the completion of his studies and his first major commission (for the Yale Art Gallery), would appear to be to argue for the great significance of that academic training, with its emphasis upon the division of "artistic" skill from bare "constructional" virtue, and the concomitant stres upon good drawing skills.

The works upon view were primarily travel sketches; hence, this was les an exhibition of "architectural drawings" than individual of drawings by an architect. If we could not diocese Kahn struggling with specific puzzles of built form here, we could still witness his rejoinders to a variety of spaces rencountered over a 20-year period. What is striking is undoubtedly his moderate entry into modernist form and the lengthy period of unsatisfactory compromise solutions he embraced.

In many of the earliest works, direct observation of the motif is qualifyed with an Art Deco-inspired geometry--a "middle-of-the-road style" we might say, unsurprising for a learner weaned on the academic tradition.

This is greatest in quantity evident in drawings created during a year exhausted traveling through Europe after the completion of his architectural step Salander-O'Reilly exhibited several works that register his reply to vernacular Mediterranean architecture, including Kahn's watercolor View of Town, No. 2 Positano, Italy (1929) He depicted the hill town as a grouping of abstracted cubes and arches subsum into a pyramidal composition with a house of god tower at the summit, locate off by a dark brown "halo."

level more backward-looking are the works inspired through the styles of other artists, of that kind as the watercolors he created in Venice, with their clear echoe of gymnast His depiction of Longhena's great Baroque house of worship Santa Maria della Salute, Venice (1928) is hanging on the British artist for its vision of an expansive canopy of heaven mirrored in the waters of the canal. Architecture offers between these two spaces as the meeting-house rises from the surrounding depressed earthen-colored houses, its mottled azure dome and towers piercing the heavens Back in America, where he continued the practice of drawing during his travels to various rural destinations, the watercolors made along the Massachusetts coast in the mid-`30s and Mountain, No. 1 Woodstock (1934-35) reverberation contemporaneous American artists such as John Marin.

While these works have their pleasures, they are for the greatest in quantity part too minor to stand upon their own as independent works of art; nor can they be said to particularly illuminate Kahn's trajectory as an architect. They are happy footnotes, perhaps, on the other hand little more. Only two drawings, the couple from 1948 and made during a trip to Colorado, move the near elemental power of Kahn's mature architecture. In Suspension Footbridge above Gorge, Colorado and Rock Formation, No. 1 Garden of the the author of all thingss Colorado, Kahn seems to have been overwhelmed by means of the awesome, barren landscape; in the latter, not taking his organ of visions off the scene to gaze down at the paper, he quickly noted the outlines of the strange outcroppings. The thin line of his pencil transcribes the uninhabited light and, for the first time in this exhibition, a unique and unmistakable vision appears. These sum of two units drawings, by no means as beautiful as many others in this display are nevertheless the two in which Kahn is greatest in quantity present.

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