A Gallery Where Art Is Primary

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The New York Sun

The critic Hilton Kramer has said that, in the old days when the art scene was focused on SoHo, he would make for Dean and Deluca when shows really depressed him. He went there to look at produce: the fresh, colorful, shapely fruit and vegetables — not to mention their handsome organization — would restore his belief in beauty.

I have a bookshelf rule. If I find myself indulging a metrosexual, anal-retentive fetish for the bookcases, file systems, and faultlessly neat workstations at a gallery (so unlike my own at home) for more than 60 seconds, I know there is a problem with the art.

Of course, galleries know that everything that happens on their premises needs to be aesthetically considered. Very few totally hide their administrative side. Even the receptionists — rarely plump middle-aged males, you may have noticed — are part of the show. The point is that it might not be a point of honor for a gallery’s fine design to stick in the critic’s mind.

It is no surprise that the financial powerhouses Gagosian, PaceWildenstein, and Matthew Marks have cavernous halls that offer perfect flexibility and all the amenities for enjoying serious art. These places often show artists who work on the monumental scale determined by museums. To accommodate Richard Serra, whose international profile has expanded in tandem with the fortunes of Frank Gehry, with whom he seems to enjoy a symbiotic relationship, Gagosian needed its Herzog de Meuron clerestory-lit hangar space on 24th Street.

If I was to send someone who is an architecture lover first, and an art lover second, to see the best possible example of Chelsea gallery design — a culturally specific architectural genre — I think I’d pick James Cohan Gallery.

Founded in 1999, the gallery moved to its current space on 26th Street in 2002. Mr. Cohan has said that as a relative latecomer to Chelsea, he had a chance to look around and learn lessons from other galleries he admired.

Like me, he has a special fondness for the premises of Cheim & Read, the dealership founded by two former directors at Robert Miller, another design-conscious gallery. The Cheim & Read space was designed by the dean of gallery architects, Richard Gluckman. It bucks the industrial trend, aspiring to a more regal air: less the factory, more the pavilion. The design, stressing contained proportions, sumptuous light, and a gracious procession from one room to the next, hermetically removes the visitor from the rest of Manhattan. It is a kind of Taj Mahal of galleries.

Mr. Cohan was after something more grounded, though his space taps a similar sensation of discrete but interconnecting viewing spaces. Working with Tom Hut of Hut Sachs Studio, who designed his old space on 57th Street, he had the good fortune to start with a tabula rasa: four walls and a roof. The former auto-painting garage boasted skylights that are still a defining feature of the space. Mr. Hut worked on the Guggenheim in Bilbao, which gave him experience working on a big scale.

The Cohan facade is an essay in the semiotics of gallery design. To the left, a garage door — almost a cliché of the Chelsea gallery experience, a reminder of an industrial past and of a readiness to receive and dispatch big art. (It also offers a wall of light to the small project gallery behind.) But to the right, by contrast, a warm, tall door in walnut signifies that luxurious experiences await.

The entrance area, a transition to and from the street, is paved in concrete, which gives way to wood in the rest of the gallery. There is a delicate, almost Rennie Mackintosh touch to the framing of the doors on either side of the receptionist. From here, you can turn left to look to the garage-door gallery, or proceed to the main exhibition space, a cavernous hall forming the heart of the building, around 30 feet by 40 feet, gloriously top-lit by two skylights.

Again, like the façade, there’s an artful hedging of bets between the raw and the cooked, the factory and the palace. The whole composition of the ceiling, for example, is framed by a false ceiling coming out about 6 feet into the room, at around 15-1/2 feet. This way you have a sense of a contained room and of the complete building structure, another 4 or 5 feet above the cut-out ceiling. Venting and ducts are discreetly tucked away, while the original metal beams are exposed — along with some fake ones added to complete the picture. For conservation reasons, the skylights are blackened for the current show, in its last week, of exquisite work on paper by Yun-Fei Ji exploring the human cost of the Three Gorges Dam project in China’s Yangtze Valley.

An opening in the back corner subtly indicates that there’s more to be explored. Through it you enter a third tier of the gallery, with two spaces, at 24 feet by 20 feet, and 20 feet square, respectively, offering different viewing experiences. The rectangle has a closed ceiling, making it better for works on paper or video. The square is quasiprivate viewing space, with a pocket door, although it is usually open to anyone, and is used for group shows of gallery artists. It isn’t a very exclusive viewing room, and perhaps that’s in the nature of the gallerist, a Midwesterner.

Openness is reflected in the unique arrangement of the library, which makes for a carefully calculated transition from public to private in a form that resembles a cloister, with two stories of offices looking onto it through glass walls. The library boasts a lovely Arts and Crafts refectory table and benches by Robert “Mouseman” Thompson, named for his hidden carvings of the little critters. This adds a warmth and sense of tradition to a modernist gallery that usually displays cuttingedge art. Visitors and staff can mingle, study books, strike deals, or eat lunch. The stairs to the second-floor offices are tucked behind a bookcase. In one lovely touch, the bottom shelf is also the first stair — practical, for the most commonly consulted volume, but also crafty, stressing intimacy and groundedness.

Okay, I found the bookcase, but I promise: I only looked for 59 seconds.

New York Venues is an occasional series on where and how to experience the arts at their best.


The New York Sun

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