Judd Tully – Richard Meier: Collage Maker

Richard
Meier
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Richard Meier: Collage Maker
by Judd Tully
Richard Meier, the storied Pritzker Architecture Prize winning architect, world famous for his Getty
Center masterpiece, part of a grand career since opening his practice in 1963, has a lesserknown
side to his abundant creativity.
Starting in 1959, during a pleasurable residency at the American Academy in Rome, and before he
worked for Marcel Breuer in New York, the 25 year old Meier began making collages out of the paperstrewn
detritus found along the ancient streets of Rome.
Quietly, even sporadically, Meier responded to the 20th Century medium invented by Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque and further explored by Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, developing
a crisply textured, memoir like shorthand of his own.
Some of the earlier works, uniformly scaled at eight by eight inches, reminded this observer of the
Nouveau Realist, torn poster aesthetic of Mimmo Rotella and the Ab-Ex mannered, black and white
photographs of Aaron Siskind.
Meier, out of necessity, gradually expanded his uniformly scaled white boards to 16 by 16 inches, an
ideal size for what became his mobile art studio, one that accompanied him on long flights, especially
during the dozen years of the Getty project.
“I was flying back and forth across the country”, recalled Meier during a recent interview at his booklined
Manhattan residence, “and you could read for awhile but you’d start to get groggy after six
hours. So I carried a box with me, containing glue and the various materials for the collages. The box
fit neatly between the seat’s arm rests so I could work on the plane. That’s sort of where it all began.
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When you sit, “ continued Meier, ”you can see the whole canvas as it were and also, the scale of the
material for the most part, works well. ”
Recalling that time between 1984-85 and 1997, Meier casually noted in his understated speaking
manner, ”I have 140 books of collages from that period.”
Asked to elaborate on his working method, whether executed on a plane or at his desk in his
apartment in the city or at his country house, Meier responded, “You know what? It’s sporadic, for
instance, I could maybe do five collages one day and then not do any for a week. I have the boards
pre-cut so they’re ready to go.”
It occurred to me to ask if Meier painted as well, considering that the Swiss born architect and designer
Le Corbusier, one of his heroes did throughout his career and it was also hard to miss the Le
Corbusier watercolor from 1934 (the year Meier was born) hanging nearby.
In fact, Meier briefly studied painting with the artist Stephen Greene at the New School, expressly at
the suggestion of his long-time friend Frank Stella, who had studied with Greene at Princeton.
Meier made paintings and maintained a studio for a time, but gave it up long ago, realizing “I can’t be
an architect and a painter. When you paint and don’t work for a while, the paint dries up.”
That realization formed his raison d’être for collage making, as Meier explained, “I wanted to do something
manageable and not have a studio. Making collages is easy, it’s just paper and glue.”
In the historic spirit of Kurt Schwitters, who masterfully expanded the collage medium from the
1920’s onwards, powered by a packed universe of found fragments ranging from second-class rail
tickets to tobacco labels, Meier maintains a small arsenal of found ephemera, mostly contained in
small envelopes for easy transport.
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“I have all these scraps around me,” said Meier. “I like tickets, I like small pieces of paper. I don’t use
magazines, so it’s mostly stuff you come in contact with. I recently got some ticket stubs from the
ferry to Shelter Island and I don’t know where or when they’ll appear, but they’ll come into play at
some point.
“I have things that are maybe ten years old,” continued Meier, “that eventually finds its place, so it’s
not necessarily stuff of the moment.”
Meier equates his collage making to playing the piano or pursuing an activity that has nothing whatever
to do with his architectural practice. “No, it’s completely different,“ insisted the architect, “but it’s
very much an integral part of my life style.”
It was time to take a closer look at the collages and Meier directed his visitor to a corner of the
apartment and several neat stacks of the 16 by 16 inch collages that easily stood two-feet high.
Time passed and the cinematic carousel of black-and-white and color images flitted by, triggering a
mélange of associations as a cut-out newspaper photo of Frank Sinatra exiting a sports car appeared
or a racy, anonymous image of a female nude played off the stark white expanse of the collage
board. (Earlier, Meier paraphrased Picasso, saying “art is not interesting unless it has sex in it.”)
World leaders, Wall Street moguls, entertainers, professional athletes and movie stars entered the
mix, each image aligned with another, seemingly but not necessarily a related one, perhaps a theatre
ticket stub to a Broadway show or a business card from Nick & Tony’s, a restaurant Meier dined at.
Similar in part to the architecture he is famous for, the collective impression from the collages are at
once coolly composed and infused with a geometrical rigor. Sufficient areas of white space punctuate,
for example, a grainy, newspaper photograph of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
and an ABC Kitchen business card.
Viewing the compositions and the visual waves of flotsam-jetsam feels at times like a cultural anthro-
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pology tour, recognizing the Starbucks label, the faces of Farrah Fawcett and Derek Jeter or the
triumphant, campaign grinning duo of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
There is also the occasional appearance of doodles and drawings, almost like an interloper’s graffiti
animating some of the collages or the striking appearance of a classic art reproduction, such as Velasquez’s
masterpiece “Las Meninas” from circa 1656 or a Picasso drawing of Dora Maar.
Later in the visit, Meier took a stab at explaining his multi-decade oeuvre of culled and pasted images.
“It’s not an attempt to be a diary but it has to do with our time. They’re of today and are a way of
keeping track of things that have some significance.”
Judd Tully
New York, May 2013
Richard Meier with Frank Stella
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Editors
Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer, Isabelle Bscher
Coordination
Mitchell Anderson, Alessandra Consonni, Jeannette Weiss
Documentary photographs courtesy Richard Meier
Design and Printing
Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
ISBN
3-905792-20-6
978-3-905792-20-1
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