[Editor's note: This article was published in October 2009.]
Architect John Portman is a perfect subject for an exhibition at the High Museum.
The Atlanta native has not only had a critical impact on this city, but he also forged a global legacy using the ideas that he tested and introduced here. Few architects anywhere can claim his success as a hybrid designer/developer or at revolutionizing an industry, as he did with his concept of the atrium hotel.
Portman, at a very active 85, maintains that it’s the forward momentum that interests him. Nevertheless, looking back at his eventful career can be edifying for the rest of us, and a way to honor a hometown boy who made good.
Sometimes the celebration in “John Portman: Art & Architecture” supersedes the edification. More about that later.
The exhibition, which occupies the whole Anne Cox Chambers building, spans Portman’s career. It encompasses models, photos, renderings and wall texts representing selected architectural projects, as well as examples of Portman-designed furniture, paintings and sculptures.
A model of downtown Atlanta’s Peachtree Center — the 17-block complex of marts, hotels, office buildings and retail that he designed and developed — dominates the first gallery. It should. This project, evolved over the course of 50 years, has been enormously important as an economic engine and a force for downtown redevelopment.
What’s more, these buildings, and his two Georgia homes, are the cradle of the design ideas that have altered downtown landscapes around the world and continue to inform his work.
The 1967 Hyatt Regency, for instance, introduced his game-changing concept of the hotel as spectacle and social space, achieved through his own feng-shui formula: light, greenery and water enfolded in dizzying spatial volumes.
Portman was also a pioneer when he took his show on the Silk Road in the early ’80s. It was a prescient move, and a successful one, to judge from the models and photos of gigantic mixed-use developments built or under construction in China, Korea and Singapore on the third floor.
This is clearly a match made in heaven. Asian nations have the money, physical space and ambition needed to realize the grandest of Portman’s dreams. In turn, his iconic silhouettes of ever-taller skyscrapers and razzle-dazzle interior spaces embody his Asian clients’ aspirations and, like the astronauts planting an American flag on the moon, announce their ascendancy. No wonder 80 percent of the firm’s business is there.
The exhibition is not a retrospective in the sense of providing analysis or historical context. It is more like a scrapbook of a lifetime in design, a valentine to its protagonist.
But even that doesn’t quite explain the emphasis on Portman’s painting and sculpture. True, Portman, who was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s total environments, uses his art and furniture in his projects and considers them integral to his design. His prolific production also reflects his boundless creative energy. A few examples would have made these points just fine.
Instead, paintings and sculptures occupy both wedge galleries and the back third of the third-floor gallery. This is problematic because they are not important as works of art. The paintings, dense swathes of color and pulsing rhythms, can be pleasing, but are otherwise unremarkable. The sculptures are derivative and often ungainly.
To devote so much gallery space to art that would likely not be in the museum but for the signature, gives them weight and validation they don’t merit. This is too bad for Portman, for the viewer and the museum.
The museum could have used that real estate to enlarge upon aspects of the architect’s career and further visitors’ understanding of his ideas. It could have highlighted less well-known Atlanta buildings, such as the lovely Charles A. Dana Fine Arts Building (1965) at Agnes Scott College. It could have shown how important his homes are as laboratories for and pure expressions of his design principles.
It’s too bad in a more fundamental sense. One of a museum’s basic responsibilities is to make value judgments about quality. Questionable curatorial decisions like this not only mislead visitors, but also undermine the museum’s credibility.
Catherine Fox blogs about art and architecture on www.ArtsCriticAtl.com
Gallery review
“John Portman: Art & Architecture.”
Through April 18. $18; $15, seniors and students with IDs; $11, children 6-17; free for members and children 5 and under. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art. 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444. www.high.org .
The bottom line: A valentine to an important native son, the exhibition, which surveys selected highlights from a long and fruitful career, is marred by undue emphasis on the architect’s painting and sculpture.
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