A chance encounter with Joan Miró (or I was only looking for a cup of coffee)

Rarely do I ever feel the need to write things from my personal perspective - preferring instead to act as a kind of editor of collective random experience and interesting things. I don't like to write much these days, especially not out here in the vast expanse of the Internet.

But this past weekend a friend and I traveled to the Cincinnati Museum of Art. By chance, and desirous of coffee after an afternoon of art-lulled stupor, we stopped by
the Terrace Cafe at the museum. Just outside the cafe is a large mural by Joan Miró. I was sitting in such a way that the outside courtyard was to my left behind a bank of windows, and likewise, the Miró was outside in the hallway behind a bank of windows to my right.

It was a gray, snowy, rainy day to my left. But to my right was something completely different.

Miró is all about the color, the vibrancy, the simple complexity of the material - and I like that. The stuff is primitive and sophisticatedly complex, just like some of my favorite people. Indeed, I have no claim to being a highfalutin intellectual as regards art. But I know what I like and I like Miró's stuff. I hang my head and feign contrition for not grasping the meaning that art has collectively for everyone else.

That said, I was intrigued by how the museum came upon this very large and very fancy mural. Why was it here? What's the story? My friend wondered, had been commissioned for the museum? That's a noble thought.

Luckily, in most art museums these days, they put those handy cards next to the art that explains things a bit. And indeed, upon closer inspection we learned that it was entitled "Mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel" and that it had once been installed, remarkably, in the Terrace Plaza Hotel. It, and an Alexander Calder mobile, had been given to the museum in 1965 after the hotel changed hands. What idiots, I thought, these new owners, to part company with Miró and Calder. I pessimistically assumed the hotel was long gone - torn down in a rush to pave it over. I took several photos of the mural and let my experience with it percolate a bit.

Thanks to the wonders of the modern age, I was able to take that percolating interest and get to work looking up a few things on the online ocean of knowledge. I learned more than a few things about my newly discovered mammoth treasure.

It turns out that the mystery hotel was completed in 1948 at 15 West Sixth Street in Cincinnati and that it was designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill under the design coordination of 24-yer-old Natalie de Blois (a woman!). It was one of the first major building projects in Cincinnati after World War II and one of the first modern buildings in downtown Cincinnati. It was a mixed-use building with little ornamentation - commercial space below, a hotel above. The 18th and top floor contained a round dining room and an outdoor garden.

It was for that round room that our Miró had been commissioned.



And the building was still there. We had even walked by it later that same day without knowing it. I'd passed by it dozens of times in the past. Now it seemed a commonplace building that, I was learning, had once had a soul.

The building itself represented an aesthetic of the modern, the new modern, the post-war modern that shaped New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and eventually every bank branch across the Unites States. It was the style that became ubiquitous and, in some cases, loathed by many. But what genius there was in this building! A building coldly constructed with a "form follows function" mentality had commissioned for it artwork by two of the greatest artists of its age to inject its modern lines and stark sleekness with curvature and color. It would be a building with a soul.

And that's what I find fascinating. The building itself is remarkable in a number of ways. But because it's style became commonplace, it's impact is lost on us these days. Now we see similar structures as lifeless monoliths with horizontal glass windows. They are places we pass by without taking note.

That as the buildings' plans were drawn, commissions were paid to bring a completely unnecessary, yet oddly necessary expression to it's structure, is remarkable. There is no function to this Miró other than to simply be. That fact, juxtaposed with the building's clear linear mater-of-fact utilitarian structure, is amazing.

In that chic restaurant, a place to dine and drink in this new modern building, was a stunning mural both curving and curvaceous - an embrace for its patrons.

The endeavor represents something seminal about American culture in the mid 20th century - post war, when the United States was the happening place to be. Our uncomfortable culture was torn between the useful and the beautiful. The unbounded positive nature of our architectural and artistic life was unmatched and our growing pains were never more felt. While aspects of our culture would yield to what would become the dull soullessness of suburbia, here was an urban expression of the future where form and function was infused with soul.

And now that soul hangs outside a restaurant appropriately named the Terrace Cafe, restored and glorious, in a building with many souls to keep it company. The Calder mobile hangs right above it. Both are refugees.

Unfortunately, I read that the building's future is in jeopardy. Maybe if they returned its soul it might survive?