Magical Manmade Monuments

Carl Jung, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henri Matisse. Each set out to build a building for themselves or a friend, but each ended up building an avatar of themselves. Are these humans speaking through their buildings, or are the buildings speaking to the humans?

Jung built Bollinger Tower as a statement on his innermost thoughts. Paper wasn’t real enough, he had to carve his learnings into stone. But after the women in his life died, he realized the tower resembled his own psyche, each section symbolizing a part of his brain. He felt he lived and breathed in its walls, and called the life he lived there his second personality. He wrote books on what the towers taught him.

O’Keeffe’s move to the desert was all about dispensing with the unnecessary—with empty relationships, with the city, with material abundance. The scarify of New Mexican terrain helped her inner eye see to the core of her subject matter. She painted what she saw. The result was a study in peeling back the layers, until there was so little separation between her and the landscape that she started filling her home with it—rattlesnake skeletons, skulls, plants she‘d scavenged. The house became part of the countryside, and so did she, painting and eating the nature around her. She said she probably swam in every brook from Abiquiu to Espanola.

And then there’s Matisse. Have you ever seen someone’s bedroom and thought, “Yeah, this makes sense”? Sickness necessitated that he simplify his artistic process in his cut-out period, scissors and construction paper becoming his main tools. And he designed the chapel that way, all from his bed. Simple movements, so practiced that he could draw them blindfolded. If simplicity in process has anything to do with getting out of your own way, the Rosary Chapel is the truest thing we have to a living Matisse.

Funny how sometimes you think you’re the creator, only to find the lifeless thing is creating a new vision in you.