I promise I didn't come to Korea just to see Western art. Really. There are great numbers of contemporary art galleries in Seoul – it is, after all, a city of 20 million. But if I wanted to see Western art today, right now, besides Picasso I could see exhibitions of work by Rouault, Paul Klee, Kaethe Kollwitz, and Mark Rothko.

Yesterday I wound up going to the Seoul Museum of Art and saw "The Great Century: Picasso." It's almost all portraits and self-portraits, the people in Picasso's life.

As always, when I see a large group of work by Picasso, or even a small group, I'm amazed at his skill, his range, his inventiveness. And I understand why people use that irritating word, "protean."

The Museum has carefully arranged sections for each of seven lovers and wives. What was with them? Why would anyone sign up to sit over and over again, be looked at hour after hour? The results are, alas for my politics, very rich, especially the many prints in a range of printmaking mediums.

The last painting is a staring self-portrait in grays. The head is hard to separate out from the swoopy background. As we left, my son said, "for an old, bald guy, he sure gave himself a lot of hair."

Later I turned into the Sun Gallery, in Insa-dong, and found metal jewelry and other objects, by Lisa Vershbow. Clean lines, fresh palette, it was all art to enjoy. A trained metalsmith, Ms. Vershbow is also married to a U.S. diplomat, and so has traveled extensively. Before coming to the U.S. embassy in Seoul, they had been in Moscow. Her work in the Sun Gallery, and on her website (lisavershbow.com) displays a kind of cheerful Constructionism.

More later.

On June 10^th, the Seattle Times ran a story in their Real Estate section about the Mount Vernon home of legendary Northwest architect Roland Terry. Terry, the paper said, would be moving to an assisted care facility and his longtime friend, Abdel Ageep, would be putting the property up for sale. I was rather surprised to read Sunday morning, in the same paper’s weekly obituary column, that Terry had actually passed away on Thursday, June 8^th.

Terry is known -- along with Paul Hayden Kirk, Ralph Anderson, Wendell Lovett, Victor Steinbrueck and Fred Bassetti -- as one of the major architects who worked in this region during the 1950s and 60s and defined the so-called “Northwest Modern” style. While this style is generally characterized by buildings with dramatic placement within and scenic orientation towards the surrounding landscape, the combined structural and decorative use of locally sourced wood and stone, the presence of outdoor rooms, and an emphasis – above all else -- upon the exposure of our sublime and varied natural light.

While this description easily fits Terry, it does not entirely do justice to the uniqueness of his legacy. In addition to being an architect who was sensitive to the natural surroundings and changing lifestyles of Americans in the post-war era, he was also an unusually cultivated interior designer who lent a kind of worldly sophistication to his all of projects.

While nearly all the residences, hotels, and restaurants he designed are gone or have been altered beyond recognition, his masterpiece – Canlis – remains, perched high above Lake Union on Aurora, elegantly updated by architect James Cutler in the mid-90s. On a visit there for dinner last fall, I was delighted to find myself floating above the city in what seemed like an ultra-refined combination of mountain cabin and spaceship. The textures of the wood beams and the rock facing on the pillars, fireplace, and wall surrounding the exposed kitchen give the place an almost classical Japanese rusticity, providing a striking contrast with the restaurant’s main feature – the clean lines of the sloping glass windows (this prevented reflection and glare) that face territorial views of the Cascades to the east and north.

I have fond memories of this establishment. During the 70s and early 80s, when tax laws allowed businessmen to deduct large bar tabs on their returns, my father would often entertain yarn salesmen from the East Coast here. Neckties were mandatory in those days, waiters wore tuxedos, and Asian women in brightly-colored kimonos prepared the signature ‘Canlis Salad’ -- a variation on the Caesar with bacon rather than anchovies and egg whites in the dressing. This may all sound a bit too 'World’s Fair,' but Canlis was almost certainly the first restaurant of its kind to offer Sashimi to adventurous or well-traveled Seattleites.

My favorite Roland Terry restaurant memory, however, is having lunch with my mother at the Red Carpet in the Frederick & Nelson downtown. It was one of many dining establishments Terry designed for restaurateur Walter Clark. This dark, cavernous place was the source of endless fascination to me. Terry used the conventions of brick, coarsely-cut wooden beams, red vinyl leatherettes, brass chandeliers, and a dramatic flaming broiler to create a classic restaurant experience. But, as always, the difference was in the details. Individual wine racks created from blunt pieces of wood lined the walls and the booths were decorated with glass-covered, museum-like displays of small, carved wooden figures imported, I suspect now, from the Subcontinent. You had to walk through a tall, ornate, and creaky iron gate to get to the bathroom. Most important of all, Terry assembled an enormous collection of menu covers from high-end restaurants all over the world and had them plastered across the wall behind the benches. To a little kid from Ballard content to dine on the restaurant’s hamburger patties stuffed with green peppers and blue cheese, their colorful, vividly rendered images provided compelling evidence of distant lands and exotic locales.

Roland Terry designed residences and summer homes for many important and influential Seattleites. One of his earliest and most famous was John H. and Anne Gould Hauberg’s home in Washington Park, which he designed in 1953-54. Although it may look rather common-place and unremarkable to passersby today, it was ground-breaking and innovative in its day -- one of the first Modernist-International style homes built in the Northwest. Set on a small, steep lot across the street from the Seattle Tennis Club with a spectacular view of Lake Washington, the design required a multi-leveled floor plan with wide open and well-integrated living spaces. I have never been inside, but have seen double-height window walls that take advantage of the lakefront views from the street. The open, two-story living room, with its floor to ceiling windows facing the backyard terrace and second story mezzanine level which looks down upon it, was unlike anything one might have expected in a Seattle residence at that time.

The Haubergs were among the region’s most important art collectors, and Terry collaborated, as he often did on his projects, with some of the area’s better-known artists on the discreetly Northwest-textured interior of their home. Inside this white box, the home was finished with hemlock that had been whitened in a technique Terry had learned from Morris Graves. Guy Anderson designed the outdoor terrace with stones collected from a mountain creek. The house remains, I am told, more or less intact.

Perhaps the most original residence Terry designed was his own retreat on Lopez Island. I have only seen photographs of the place, but it appears to reflect both the architect’s eclecticism and his deference to the majesty of his chosen site. Set upon a rocky cliff overlooking Puget Sound, its glass walls take in the breath-taking panoramic views which are framed by bent and ancient pines. Any description of the small, remote dwelling runs the risk of rendering it a sum of incongruous parts. Terry somehow brought together enormous driftwood log pillars, siding from old barns, a sod roof, and paneling salvaged from a demolished French chateau and wove them into a strangely unified whole.

Recently, the Hunt’s Point house that Terry designed for car dealer and Seafair founder Stan Sayers in 1963 sold for $17.5 million, although the new owners made it clear that they were interested only in the lot. On a boat trip across Lake Washington last summer, I attempted to find the structure from the water. After some looking, I could barely discern the modest-looking one-story residence from the water, set away from the shore and sheltered by trees. It sat, of course, beside massive and more newly-built mansions, each taking up most of the footprint of their respective lots. Unfortunately, architects who design residences for affluent patrons these days seem to serve the dictates of inflated egos rather than the physical attributes and natural beauty of their locations.

Remembering some of the other Terry-designed public spaces; the Sea-Tac Hilton Inn and Doubletree Inn near the airport, the old travertine-clad downtown Nordstrom flagship, the Bank of California Building, and the Seattle Center Opera House, it is evident that he had no easily identifiable signature style. He was always more concerned with the demands of the space and the variety of human contexts. He knew just as easily how to please traveling salesmen looking for a unique and luxurious dining experience, a Weyerhaeuser heir and art collector who required the perfect city home, or a curious boy headed downtown on a bus with his mother.

What’s more, Terry brought a tasteful sense of global culture to an often bland post-war Seattle, successfully integrating Modernism, Asian asceticism, and Continental grandeur with our own Northwest traditions. And in so doing, he has had a lasting influence on the region.

(Some of the historical details of this piece were drawn from Justin Henderson’s excellent Roland Terry: Master Northwest Architect, published by University of Washington Press)

George Balanchine's Jewels
Pacific Northwest Ballet

June 1, 2006

It would have been difficult to comprehend the significance of Peter Boal’s decision last year to conclude his first season as Artistic Director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet with George Balanchine’s three-part 1967 ballet Jewels, but seeing the company perform the piece on opening night last Thursday, it seemed the perfect culmination of a year in which Seattle audiences saw the company transformed into a much more expressive and artistically relevant version of its old, albeit solid, self.

In a season marked by programming that often stretched the parameters not only of the PNB but of ballet company repertoire itself, closing the season with a full-length Balanchine work may have seemed like hedging one’s bets. But Jewels is an unusual ballet; contained within its Baroque structure are qualities of movement that demand a range of emotion and drama seldom required in Balanchine’s non-narrative work. Watching each segment of the piece unfold, you could see the effect that performing a wide range of newly-acquired works -- from Jerome Robbins’ In the Night to Susan Marshall’s Kiss and Marco Goecke’s Mopey -- has had upon the company over the past year. What is more, the three-part piece provided the perfect showcase for the Ballet’s three major principal dancers; Louise Nadeau danced the lead role in Emeralds, Ariana Lallone in Rubies, and Patricia Barker – who announced her retirement at the end of next season -- in Diamonds.

Jewels was inspired by Balanchine’s visit to the private collection of Van Cleef and Arpels jewelers in New York. Did he find solace, during this tumultuous decade of social upheaval, in the permanence of precious gems? Perhaps. But more likely, he recognized something in their spectacular combination of brilliance and symmetry that he had always strived to create in his dances.

Emeralds, with its dream-like languor and restrained elegance, harkens back to an earlier, more classical ballet style. Spare but not minimalist, it is set to a swelling but less than dramatic arrangement of compositions by Fauré. Louise Nadeau, paired with Christophe Maraval, radiated feminine beauty throughout her performance, dancing what may someday be remembered as her most definitive role with the company. The tone of Emeralds is strangely muted, the overall feeling somewhat remote; the composition, which ends with three men remaining on stage with their arms raised upwards, appears deliberately unresolved. As the rest of the dancers slowly exit the stage, we are left to contemplate passing of an older, European ballet tradition.

Rubies, set to Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra embodies the composer’s jazziest and most exuberant avant-garde tendencies. Beneath the high-pitched brass refrains and tempo shifts we hear the stops and starts of lusty American melodies, and Balanchine’s movement, however abstract, has an almost dance-hall-like swagger. Ariana Lallone physically towered over the company, exuding her familiar charisma and exoticism, but this performance – like so many of her others this year – revealed a sparkling and almost carefree sense of humor. Jonathan Porretta danced his role in the dazzling, over-the-top manner we have come to expect from him, but for the first time his penchant for showmanship seemed a distraction. His solos, however arresting, made him appear out of sync with his partner, Kaori Nakamura, and the rest of the dancers on stage. Still, it was enjoyable to watch him execute his moves with such smiling, cocksure self-confidence.

The work is a joyful celebration of Balanchine and Stravinsky’s adopted country. America’s robust energy may have unleashed their artistic sensibilities, but one wonders if they also recognized something of their native land in the rhythms and improvisation of jazz.

Diamonds was awaited with considerable anticipation that night. Days earlier, Patricia Barker had announced that she would retire at the end of next season after 25 years with the company. While I was expecting these circumstances to create a significant and memorable performance, I was not prepared for the dramatic spectacle that would follow. Coming at the end of a season in which she did not figure as prominently as she had in years past, it was a triumphant return to center stage. Paired with the intense and emotional Stanko Milov, Barker gave what was likely the most expressive and unrestrained performance of career. Watching her, I was reminded of Yeats’ famous question, “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” The Pacific Northwest Ballet has had many great principal dancers over the years, yet Barker remains in a class by herself.

Set to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.3 in D Major, Diamonds – like all ballets set to the composer’s music -- concerns the fulfillment of romantic longing. With its brass flourishes manifest in Balanchine’s sweeping gestures, it also pays homage to the choreographer’s Russian beginnings.

In the past year, Peter Boal has taken a ballet company with a tradition of excellence and turned it into one that can now perform with more feeling and greater nuance. He has done this, as we know, by adding unorthodox new works to the repertoire and remounting long-established ones with excellent casts. With Jewels, however, he demonstrated that he can pair the 20^th Century’s greatest choreographer with the PNB’s biggest stars to create the season’s most satisfying evening of dance.

[This review is dedicated to the memory of Michael Fajans, whose recent death at age 58 was a real loss to the Seattle art community. Check out his mural at the new Federal Courthouse (visible from the outside, especially at night) to see one reason why.]

In times past, drawing was seen as the art of line and shape, painting that of tone and color. Hopelessly out of date as these distinctions now are, they are still a useful starting point in discussing the work of artist Juliana Heyne. The basic building block of her current show is the scribble, a painted mark that conventionally belongs more to the world of line and ink, than to that of paint and brush.

For Heyne, the scribble, with its wiry, contorted structure and random quality, is an ideal way to express tactility and texture. As it happens, the gritty textures of the natural world are a central preoccupation of her current work. Clouds of scribbles, along with loops, curlicues and waves, are used to depict exposed bedrock, expanses of grass and foliage, and the rippled surface of small ponds and streams. Though the materials used in the current exhibit include a variety of media, including pastel, charcoal, oil paint, oil stick, and monoprint, Heyne’s approach is basically similar throughout.

Heyne seeks out natural subject matter where her graphic language can be used to greatest effect, and perhaps as a result there are few, if any, smooth surfaces or simple passages in these works. The sky itself barely makes an appearance, and though the paintings are nominally realistic, basic building blocks of conventional realism like cast shadows and form-building tonality are mostly absent, replaced by a flat, overall light which gives even weight to details both near and far.

All three of the locations that Heyne depicts in the exhibit are places where the rock layers that underlie the living earth are stripped of their cover and lie exposed, by a process either manmade (Minnesota) or natural (Eastern Washington and Utah). It’s clearly the landforms and not the origins that interest Heyne, since her treatment makes no distinction between the colossal Minnesota strip mine ripped open by man and machines, and those areas exposed over the ages by wind and water. It’s only with effort that we can recognize the tracks across the moonscape of her Iron Range paintings as dirt roads, and no vehicles – or people – appear at any point.

I couldn’t help but think of medical illustrations as I looked over these images, especially some of the paintings of Southern Utah. Two of the pictures in particular – views looking down into twisting canyons with tiny scraps of grass and trees here and there – appear on first glance like cutaway drawings of the body seen in cross-section, complete with whitish cell walls, ruddy-colored muscle layers, narrow blood vessels, and wrinkled, folded skin. The eye is everywhere assaulted with outlined, convoluted shapes and surfaces filling the image from edge to edge, and it’s almost impossible to tell if the scene is a close-up (which it is not), or a panorama, which it turns out to be.

I happened to find one of these Utah views photographed from precisely the same location as that chosen by Heyne for her painting, and the comparison was instructive. Heyne, it turns out, has been very faithful to the actual outlines of the scene, but very loose and inventive within those general boundaries. Heyne chooses to break up the molded, multi-colored sandstone so favored by Georgia O’Keefe (who painted similar rock formations, elsewhere in the region) into a patchwork of shingles, ovals, wrinkles, and crevices, favoring complexity over unity, and thereby, very unlike O’Keefe, obscuring the larger forms. And whereas O’Keefe’s Southwest landscapes are classically arranged, their monumental shapes streamlined and perfected, those of Heyne are contorted and conflicted, as though still under construction, a work in progress, or an map of the emotions. Heyne’s drawing – very unlike that of the polished O’Keefe – can be slightly awkward, almost at times naïve, and her colors are raw and fleshy, with the occasional appearance of a early spring green, a welcome ingredient that provides some of the most luminous interludes in these rugged, earth-bound works.

With Heyne’s fascination with texture and her relative disinterest in structure and scale, it’s not surprising that some of her works have almost no pictorial space at all. The oil stick on paper work entitled “Coulee Spring #4” is nearly impossible to read as an actual place. Filling the entire image is a barren, Eastern Washington cliff, painted in muted, nearly monochromatic earth colors interrupted here and there by narrow horizontal green bands. The green strips are the only calm areas in the picture, the rest of which is dominated by a jumble of contorted rock textures, the sort of active, overall surface beloved of the abstract expressionists, whose decorative sensibility Heyne’s clearly shares, and whose energy – and flatness - she is happy to employ.

For me the most satisfying pictures in the exhibit are those where the graphic activity is subordinated to a dominant overall design. In the monoprint “Escalante #3”, for example, a dark chocolate-colored stream cuts towards us through a soft pink and yellow meadow, with fiery red shrubs and a custard hill beyond. The meadow texture teems with hooks and scrawls, but they are muted in overall tone, lively but not overwhelming.

Even more subdued are the large areas of rock surface in the signature image of the show, the lyrical “Coulee Spring #1”. Here, for nearly the only time, Heyne uses dramatic chiaroscuro rather than shape and texture to organize her image. A body of water lies at the base of a dark volcanic cliff, with a park-like setting in the foreground. The selective sunlight casts the entire rock face into a purple shadow except for a patch of yellow-green grass, the better to set off the brilliant foreground, most especially a glowing salmon-pink hillside, the single brightest patch of color in the show.

Like many artists, Juliana Heyne approaches her subject matter with more than one goal in mind, seeking both to depict and to express; to record her location, but also to transform it - using a very personal, idiosyncratic language. One feels in these pictures the push and pull of competing sensibilities, and the fact that some pictures are more successful than others comes with the territory. Georgia O’Keefe is an example of an artist who early arrived at an approach to her art that remained consistent throughout her career. Heyne, on the other hand, is an example of a seeker, someone for who the search for the right way to express her subject matter is a worthy end in itself.

Under wet rainy skies over the holiday weekend, a trio of hot film tickets brought out hundreds of filmgoers to see X-Men 3 fill the screen with live-action comic book heroes and muscle-bound beefcake, Tom Cruise find yet another Mission: Impossible 3, and Tom Hanks chase after the Da Vinci Code in what could be the bestselling airport bookstore novel ever turned into a film.

Meanwhile, past advance posters promoting forthcoming releases like Miami Vice at the Pacific Place Theater, Seattle audiences had opportunities to check out the 32nd Seattle International Film Festival (May 24 – June 18) opening weekend selection of films. Screened around the city — and soon in Bellevue at the Lincoln Square Cinemas — SIFF trumpets its largest year with more films and film programs (something like 400 in all), more films by Northwest filmmakers, more music films and film events, more short film programs, and more lesbian and gay titles offered compared to recent years.

The fest’s opening weekend may have beckoned many to see larger marquee draws like Robert Altman’s screen adaptation of Prairie Home Companion and the locally-produced gay comedy Boy Culture. Although both films were billed with gala post-screening parties, no less festive is Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge — The Sound of Istanbul, one of several highlights at this year’s fest. Crossing the Bridge chronicles German musician Alexander Hacke’s dip into the sound and soul of Turkey’s Janusian port city and culture capital. At the end of the music documentary, Hacke reveals that he “didn’t find what he came for” during a recent visit to Istanbul, but enthuses, “I love Turkish music!”

The bassist for Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten, an industrial noise band that emerged in the 1980s, journeys from Berlin to Istanbul to meet with the city’s musicians, emerging pop stars, and find the burgeoning underground music scene in a bustling commercial and club district. His visit to the city enables him to engage in the vibrant music world thriving in Istanbul — pegged to the city’s infectious rhythm propelled throughout the film. The film’s rich mosaic exposes a portrait of hip-hop, world savvy techno deejays, aging rock stars and young avant-garde rockers, and traditional musicians whose range spans from haunting Kurdish love songs to the deep percussive style of Roma folk music to nostalgic torchlight ballads from the Seventies. Crossing the Bridge, while only scratching the surface, ambitiously expresses a confident mix of Istanbul’s contemporary music with wide appeal.

For info on how to SIFF, visit www.seattlefilm.org.