Today, Dan and I went to see the movie “My Architect,” which is about the architect Louis Kahn. The film was made by his (illigitimate) son Nathaniel, who knew his father very little during his life, and twenty-five years after LK died, was trying to understand just who he really was. Despite some quibbles I have with it, the film is overall excellent and very moving. I recommend it.
But that’s not why I’m writing this journal entry.
As part of this project, Nathaniel visited every building that Kahn created. This includes the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been to the Kimbell twice. When the movie first showed sweeping shots of the museum’s beautifully lit, timelessly elegant interior, it all came flooding back to me.
The Kimbell is a gem of a museum, not only because of its architecture and light, but also because it has a small but completely first-rate collection. To quote its Web site: “The Kimbell Art Museum’s holdings range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including masterpieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, Caravaggio, El Greco, La Tour, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Houdon, Goya, David, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.” One or two of just about everything that any museum would give its eyeteeth to have. All displayed in perfect light, in uncrowded harmony.
The first time I visited the Kimbell, Adam was just two years old. Dan had gone off to live in Texas for several months to help in the start-up of his firm‘s then-new Dallas office, returning home only on (most) weekends. But this particular week, I had a conference to go to in Dallas myself, so I took Adam and went to live with Dan at his apartment on Turtle Creek. On this particular day we didn’t have to work, so we went to the museum.
I remember carrying two-year-old Adam through the galleries, and stopping to look at the pictures and sculptures. At each one, Adam wanted me to tell him its story. Not who painted it and when, but who is that woman in the picture, and where is she, and why is she there, and why is that man looking at her in that funny way, and what’s going to happen, and…
And so we stopped at various pictures and sculptures, and at each one I invented a story for Adam that would be as long as it needed to be so that I could really look at the object and that would incorporate elements that might draw his attention too to some of the significant aspects of the object. And so we spent a pleasant afternoon at our own pace, my two-year-old son and I, going through the Kimbell Art Museum.
Today, twenty-one-year-old Adam is working on a capstone project at Brown University. It is a hypertext Web site in which a group of people meet and go through a museum. They stop and look at various objects. The reader can click on the highlighted objects if he wishes, and can then read a story associated with the object.
Now I have to ask you: Do you think this could possibly be a coincidence?
