Artist Ellsworth Kelly calls his flat blocks of color, hung in the rotunda at the Moakley courthouse, "wall sculptures."
(Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)
Courthouse's bold art draws a mixed verdict
Not all see worth in valuable works
Artist Ellsworth Kelly calls his flat blocks of color, hung in the rotunda at the Moakley courthouse, "wall sculptures."
(Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)
To the untutored eye, they are simply huge rectangular panels - reds, yellows, blues, greens - that have hung like oversized Post-it Notes on the walls of the cavernous federal courthouse since it opened a decade ago. Hundreds of people pass them daily; few seem to notice.
In fact, the fiberglass-and-aluminum panels are among the most valuable works of art in Boston by a living artist, commissioned at a cost of $800,000 in tax dollars, and probably worth millions today. The revelation usually leaves visitors to the John Joseph Moakley courthouse incredulous or bemused.
"This is a gorgeous building, and every time I come in here I think that they belong in a kindergarten," said Mala Rafik, a Boston civil litigation attorney, shifting her gaze from the courthouse's breathtaking curved glass wall to a pair of blue and orange panels. "They're just colored blocks."
Ellsworth Kelly, the noted American minimalist, created the 21 murals that hang in the glass-domed rotunda and at both ends of sweeping hallways. He called them "wall sculptures" after they were unveiled, even though the murals, done in his trademark monochromes, are flat.
Ray Cheng, a longtime cashier at the courthouse cafe, calls them baffling and clutched his chest in mock horror when he heard how much they cost.
"Oh, my God, if it were me, I'd sell it," he said.
Few cultural topics are more divisive than the merits of modern art. Consider the "Boston Panels," as Kelly's lushly colored artwork is called, Exhibit A in the case of Those Who Don't Get It v. Those Who Say, What's to Get?
A panel of prominent artists, architects, attorneys, and judges, including US Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, picked Kelly - an 84-year-old Upstate New York artist whose work is displayed all over the world - from a pool of applicants to create something to enliven the new brick-and-glass courthouse rising above Boston harbor.
Under the federal Art in Architecture Program, 0.5 percent of the $163 million in construction costs for the building that houses the US District Court and the headquarters of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit had to be set aside to buy art.
A decade later, Kelly's creation is almost certainly worth millions, given what his work fetched at a
US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, a passionate advocate for public art and architecture who served on the committee that picked Kelly, said the artist specifically designed the panels to brighten yawning spaces and create intriguing angles in an austere, 10-story, L-shaped building that craves color.
Woodlock likes the murals, he said, in part because you can stand practically anywhere in the hallways and see shards of Kelly's bold colors. The panels are rigorous and orderly but not fussy, he said, a suitable metaphor for a place where justice is dispensed.
"People say, 'What does it mean?' They're looking for a narrative. That isn't the way he thinks," Woodlock said recently.
Each of the nine horizontal rectangles displayed in stacks of three in the rotunda is 11 feet high and 13 1/2 feet wide, an enormous space that would swallow representational art, he added.
Bernstein, the Albany professor, said that abstract art "requires somewhat of a leap of faith." Kelly, she said, always envisioned his art as an integral element of the architecture, much like stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals. People shouldn't look at the panels as individual pieces but as a pattern, which is how they can be viewed from the harbor through the multi-paned glass curtain.
Kelly declined to comment, through his assistant in Spencertown, N.Y.
The selection of Kelly's artwork for the courthouse probably reflected another reality: It's increasingly difficult, in an era of identity politics, to find traditional representational art that won't offend one group or another.
Still, some people visiting the courthouse for criminal and civil cases in a recent week said representational art that offends would be better than contemporary art that befuddles.
John H. LaChance, a Framingham criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, would have preferred a statute of Lady Justice or busts of famous lawyers.
Robert A. George, a Boston criminal defense lawyer, has barely noticed the panels through the years. "I'm heading straight to
Whether one likes modern art or not, Kelly's panels add a dash of cheer. As one court officer standing near the courthouse entrance put it, "It's nice to have some paintings here, because there's so much sadness. There's a lot of people going to jail."
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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