Robert Slutzky; Painter & Architectural Theorist
Hyfler/Rosner
Robert Slutzky, 75, Painter and Architectural Theorist, Dies
By Margalit Fox NY Times
Paintings:
http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/slutzky/slutzky.html
http://www.upenn.edu/ARG/archive/slutzky/slutzky.html
http://www.upenn.edu/ARG/archive/newfaces/images/7_web.jpg
http://www.cooper.edu/architecture/exhibitions/slutzky/slutzky01.html
Robert Slutzky, a painter, writer and educator whose
lifelong exploration of the connection between painting and
architecture influenced a generation of postwar architects,
died on Tuesday in Abington, Pa. He was 75 and lived in
Elkins Park, Pa.
The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, Mr. Slutzky's wife, Joan
Ockman, said.
For many years a professor of art and architecture at the
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New
York, Mr. Slutzky was at his death a professor of fine arts
at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a co-author of
"Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal," a pair of
influential essays on the relationship of architecture to
Modern art, part of the canon in architecture schools
worldwide. He also collaborated with well-known contemporary
architects, including John Hejduk, Richard Meier and Peter
Eisenman.
"It became very important for architecture students to
understand not only how space was made in architectural
form, but also how it was implied in painting," said Anthony
Vidler, dean of Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of
Architecture. "Slutzky was a natural person to teach art and
concepts of color and concepts of space to architects,
because he could read them in painting."
As a painter, Mr. Slutzky was intimately concerned with
color and form, and with the contrapuntal, almost musical,
relation between the two. His abstract compositions of
vividly colored squares, grids and lines arranged in perfect
geometric balance were a kind of two-dimensional
architecture, reflecting the influence of Mondrian and the
Bauhaus painter Josef Albers.
Reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Slutzky's work in The New
York Times in 1975, Hilton Kramer wrote: "Mr. Slutzky works
within the strict pictorial conventions of geometrical
abstraction, which, in his hands, is a medium of lyric
improvisation. Everything here depends on proportion and
placement, on the weight and intensity of color, and thus on
delicacy of feeling."
As a writer and teacher, Mr. Slutzky helped architects bring
these concerns to their work, training them to look at,
think about and organize space as a painter might.
"To understand modern architecture, you have to understand
modern painting," Mr. Eisenman explained in a telephone
interview on Thursday. "If you take Le Corbusier: Le
Corbusier would have been impossible without Braque, without
Juan Gris, etc."
Robert Slutzky was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 27, 1929. He
received a certificate in art from Cooper Union in 1951 and
afterward enrolled at Yale, where he was taught by Albers.
He earned a B.F.A. from Yale in 1952 and an M.F.A. there two
years later.
In his first teaching job, at the University of Texas, Mr.
Slutzky became deeply influenced by two colleagues: Hejduk
and Colin Rowe, an eminent architectural theorist. With Mr.
Rowe, Mr. Slutzky wrote "Transparency," which explored the
idea of architectural space as a painterly entity, as
complexly layered as a Cubist canvas. Written in the
mid-1950's and circulated for a decade in underground
copies, the essays were officially published in 1963 and
1971.
"Transparency" was a reaction against the International
Style, the glass boxes of Philip Johnson and others that
were sprouting everywhere on the postwar landscape. To Mr.
Slutzky and Mr. Rowe, these buildings represented the
triumph of the sterile over the evocative.
"They felt that modern architecture had lost the subtleties
that were present in Renaissance, Baroque and neo-Classical
architecture," Mr. Eisenman said. "That doesn't mean they
wanted to turn the clock back and become pasticheurs. They
wanted to show that the same ideas that were active in other
times were available in Modernism."
The essays in "Transparency" center on the ambiguity of the
title word. "Transparent" can denote something that is
literally see-through, like a window. But it can also denote
something that is not, like the layered planes of a Cubist
painting, discernible one behind another. Paint and canvas
are opaque; the painter conjures transparency out of pure
form.
The illusion of transparency defines architecture. Painters
have two dimensions at their disposal; architects have
three. Transparency mediates between them. It can give the
illusion of depth to a flat canvas; conversely, it can
flatten a building into an abstract arrangement of geometric
planes. Transparency helps the built landscape meet the eye.
Mr. Slutzky's first marriage ended in divorce. Besides his
wife, who directs the Buell Center for the Study of American
Architecture at Columbia University, Mr. Slutzky's survivors
include their daughter, Zoė, a student at Columbia; a
sister, Rhoda Seidel of West Hempstead, N.Y.; and a brother,
Harold, of Los Angeles.
His paintings are in the permanent collections of the
Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"Transparency" was published in book form by Birkhäuser
Verlag in 1997.