Headdress in the form of a female head, Ejagham, Asirikong association, Nigeria, late Nineteenth to early Twentieth Century, wood, hide, rattan, metal and pigment; 23 by 22 inches. Yale University Art Gallery.
:"My father was only 5 feet 6 inches, but he cast a long shadow in New Haven," Nathaniel Kahn says in the opening minutes of
My Architect
, his Academy Award-nominated documentary about his father, architect Louis I. Kahn.
Kahn was teaching at Yale in the early 1950s when he was asked to design a new building to house the university art gallery. It was an important commission, one originally intended for Eero Saarinen. Founded in 1832 by John Trumbull, the artist and Revolutionary War soldier who is interred in the museum, the institution is the oldest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, as well as one of the richest. Its 185,000-work trove — featuring 21,000 examples of American painting, sculpture and decorative arts alone — ranges from ancient Egyptian and Greek objects to Impressionist, Modern and contemporary masterpieces. Among them, Vincent van Gogh's "The Night Café" of 1888 is known around the world.
Yale is similarly renowned for its architecture. The 260 buildings that make up its 310-acre campus in downtown New Haven represent a progression of styles from the 1750s to the present. In 1933, Yale opened its first seven residential colleges, inspired by Gothic structures at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. Georgian, Colonial Revival and Gothic Revival design predominate on Yale's campus.
The gallery, Louis Kahn's first major work, opened in November 1953. Radical for its time, the Modernist structure presented a spare, opaque face to Chapel Street. Its sides and back were transparent but hardly unadorned. Kahn fitted rectangular glass plates of alternating sizes into a Mondrian-like grid of steel. He chose glass because he wanted the building's interiors — originally meant to house galleries, studios and classrooms — to be flooded with natural light.
"The Night Café” by Vincent van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas, 28 by 36 inches. Yale University Art Gallery.
A consummate artist but a hapless businessman, Kahn died nearly penniless in 1974, at age 73. His last building initiated in his lifetime, the Yale Center for British Art — housing the late Paul Mellon's collection, unsurpassed outside the United Kingdom — opened in 1977, across the street from the Yale University Art Gallery. Two blocks from the town's 1650 green, the buildings are an architectural treasure like no other. Bookends to Kahn's career, they provide an exquisite precis of an unmatched talent.
On December 10, Yale University Art Gallery's Kahn Building will reopen to the public after a three-year renovation costing $44 million. The project was directed by the New York City-based firm Polshek Partnership Architects. The firm's founding partner, James Polshek, studied with Kahn. The partner-in-charge of the project, Duncan R. Hazard, trained at Yale and was uniquely sensitive both to Kahn's intentions and to the building's place in the university's history.
