Date: 07-04-1992
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999              
Subject:   Now  Renaissance          

Pieter Saenredam's Interior of the Buurkerk, painted in 1644, detains few visitors to the National Gallery. It is such a quiet and unassuming picture, so still and distant and alien, that it is easily passed by. But it rewards close inspection. This painting of a Protestant church in Utrecht exemplifies Saenredam's fanatical modesty, his apparent lack of interest in anything superfluous to architectural description. It contains a few, isolated groups of figures and the odd dog or two, but they are dwarfed by the spacious church in which they are located and which seems to be the painter's true theme.

Attention is concentrated on the stately repetition of column, arch and spandrel; on cool expanses of stone wall and floor; on a space whose meagre contents, partially inventoried by the sunlight that pours in through high Gothic windows, seems to speak metaphorically as well as materially of purity. The ecclesiasti-cal interior, translated into a painterly language that is eloquent of order - Saenredam's lucid focus on the play of horizontals and verticals may dimly prefigure the art of Mondrian - is subtly invested with spiritual significance.

Saenredam has been called ''the first portraitist of architecture'', which might be said to make him oddly topical. The relationship between art and architecture is, as curators like to say, a live issue right now. ''Like nothing else in Tennessee'', an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery which takes its title from a line by Wallace Stevens, is devoted to ''artists whose work incorporates architectural references, both as a utopian concept and an urban reality''. And on Canary Wharf, in the shadow of the largest new office building in Western Europe, you will find ''Discretion'', an exhibition of work by younger artists, divided between the Rotunda Gallery and vacant shop premises beneath the glass and metal dome of Cabot Place East. Its subject is not exactly art's use of architecture, but art's compatibility or otherwise with a certain kind of corporate architecture. The work in this show is said to investigate ''the differences involved in making work and showing it in an open-plan office or shop front'' and ''the paradoxes of working in an environment which is apparently both public and entirely private''.

Neither of these exhibitions is of more than limited interest, but however modest their effects they offer an opportunity to consider the differences between past and present interpretations of architecture in the visual arts - to measure the gap that separates Saenredam, ''the first portraitist of architecture'', from his modern successors. The history of art's visions of architecture could be said, very broadly, to run parallel with the history of man's progressive alienation from the buildings that surround him. This is the moral to be drawn from both ''Discretion'' and the Serpentine's exhibition, though more of them later.

The rise of Saenredam's reputation in the modern era - he was, for centuries, one of Rembrandt's many forgotten contemporaries - may well have been founded on a creative misinterpretation of his art. Saenredam only became truly esteemed during the time of De Chirico and the Surrealists, perhaps because his art was seen to predict the fascination for those artists of architectural spaces that were troubling and enigmatic. Saenredam's paintings of tiny human figures in vast church interiors may have appeared interestingly melancholic. Their emptiness, their profound stillness, appealed to the same sensibilities that found in De Chirico's vacant plazas such effective images of twentieth-century angst.

To see Saenredam thus is to misinterpret him, but in a fairly understandable way. It is to place him within a tradition of essentially disaffected, nostalgic architectural painting which he does not occupy, but which intervenes powerfully between him and us. That tradition begins not in the seventeenth but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and finds its most durable expression in works like Corot's paintings of Roman architectural relics and Turner's or Friedrich's paintings of Gothic ruins. Such images predict the dis-tinctly modern sense of official architecture, of the architecture of church and state, as something that we have lost touch with - as the physical evidence of systems of belief that no longer carry the weight of significance that they once did.

The Gothic ruin, preeminently, became a potent image of crumbling religious belief in an era of dimin-ishing faith: the figures that walk among its picturesquely decayed, overgrown architecture are the melan-cholic witnesses of man's spiritual decline.

This may begin to explain the modern misinterpretation of Saenredam, because what is most striking about his Interior of the Buurkerk is also what makes it most alien to post-Romantic eyes. It is a picture of a medieval building that is completely lacking in nostalgia. It envisages that building not as the sign of a world of faith that has been lost, but which endures. One of the clues to this may lie in the role of those figures wandering about in Saenredam's church. They are important to Saenredam's picture, because they contrib-ute, not to some presumed sense of melancholy, but to a sense of the benevolent, forbearing nature of church authority. This is a religious space that happily accommodates the forms of secular trespass which they embody: none of them is here for the explicit purpose of devotion; some have even brought their dogs with them.

It has been said that Saenredam's interest in architecture outweighed his devoutness, but this need not be true. His painting of light, the delicate luminosity that plays on the wall and floor of the church, seems inevitably freighted with religious meaning; so too does his painting of the church's structure. The significance of the building is invested, not primarily in the rituals performed there (Saenredam's picture is notable for the boldness of its exclusions, notably of the altar) but in the space itself and the way it makes divinity manifest in its very form. Saenredam has painted a place where perfect order and illumination coincide: a place that is, in effect, an earthly prefiguration of heaven.

Saenredam's painting is a useful benchmark when you look at more modern reincarnations of architec-ture in art, because it clarifies the nature of the change that has occurred. The modern sense of alienation, not just from churches but from most forms of public architecture, is mirrored throughout modern painting, much of which tends to focus on the disjunction of the modern city and the kinds of urban experiences it has to offer. This is manifest from Cubism to Pop, with their differing versions of the yowling chaos of the street, and beyond. There are interruptions to this stream of unsettling imagery - the Constructivists' attempts, notably, to make a form of sculpture that seemed as revolutionary and as charged with millennial hopes of a new social order as the high modernist architecture of the Twenties and Thirties - but they are mostly of brief duration.

The received idea of the modern city perpetuated by modern artists is that it is, essentially, a place of alienation. This may be bravely celebrated or it may be bemoaned, but it comes to assume the status of a given fact. Modern art's visions of architecture originate, in fact, in the nineteenth century, in the attitudes that were spawned by the effects of the industrial revolution - the modern metropolis's scale and spread, its indifference to an older sense of community, is what modern art reveals. This suggests links between some of the most disparate forms of twentieth-century art to have taken architecture as its subject matter. Links between, say, Edward Hopper's dispiriting views of office blocks and those who inhabit them, and the ambitious urban projects of Christo, whose projected wrapping of a New York skyscraper is really a reproof to the same architectural impersonality which Hopper had noted.

All of which leads, in a somewhat circuitous manner, back to those two current exhibitions of architec-tural art. Even if the work here is extremely uneven, it also seems typically modern in its discontent with ar-chitecture, in its sense of modern cities and buildings as places that house broken dreams.

The most engaging work at the Serpentine is Julian Opie's rather enigmatically titled The Average Countrydweller Walks More than the Earth's Circumference in a Lifetime. This assembles a group of per-son-high painted plywood towers in a configuration suggestive of gridlocked skyscrapers. Walking around it, you glimpse little slivers of bright colour through its interstices which give it something of the quality of a 3-D Mondrian. It is a thing of great abstract beauty, this miniaturised metropolis, but it is also a tantalus: a city that you can't walk into; a utopia (like the inaccessible garden in Alice in Wonderland) that cannot be entered. It is the image, perhaps, of an architectural perfection that can never come to pass.

The unenterable building of beauty is a mini-theme of the Serpentine show, made so by the presence, close to Opie's work, of Jurgen Albrecht's ingenious little wall-mounted cardboard and paper tunnels. Tiny doors and windows have been cunningly spaced along their lengths, so to stare into them is to peer down long empty corridors illuminated by subtle, soft lights. This could be described as a reincarnation of Saenredam's charged, luminous vistas - the long view into light is a potent metaphor of spiritual journey - but here it is blocked by the doll's house scale. Albrecht presents you with a model of the kind of architectural space that is no longer designed, whose reality has been subsumed into fantasy and nostalgia.

Dan Graham's glass and pine-tree construction on the Serpentine's lawn calls attention to the extent to which what we see, in the modern city, is not seen direct but caught in a play of image and mirror-image, object and reflection. Its theme seems to be the visual competition set up by the city between real objects and their reflections, caught in shop or office windows. The glass which Graham uses is semi-reflective, so you can see through it, but imperfectly, and the vaguely labyrinthine form of what he has made may be a clue to his intentions. It is a distillation of bafflement.

The most noteworthy works in ''Discretion'' also have a downbeat, dead-end feel to them. Caroline Russell has taken advantage of the emptiness of the shops beneath the Rotunda gallery and placed ab-surdist little mock-displays in their windows: a few tampons on a shelf, a jar of Sudocrem. Art isn't really called for here, she knows, only commerce, so she has invented a parody of its forms: a sullen little se-quence of monuments to the architecture of the mall, which takes a certain grim pleasure in the fact of eco-nomic recession. Meanwhile, Rachel Evans' sound-work provides a pastiche of shopping mall muzak, behind whose drone you can just hear a voice repeating, over and over, ''The future looks promising''. It would be interesting to know what the executives of Olympia & Yorke make of this exhibition.

In ''Discretion'', the architecture you occupy becomes a part of the work, in fact becomes the reason for the work, which wants you to look at it all the more clearly - to see the tawdriness of Cabot Place East, its horrible Legoland pseudo-grandeur, its stained corporate carpeting (though stained by whom? There is next to no-one here) and the absurd dome that caps it all, above which looms the barely tenanted mass of the tallest building in London. We are, indeed, a long way from the Interior of the Buurkerk.