I am interested in considering Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation building as portraiture in the context of the Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition for two reasons. First, one premise of the exhibition is that objects may be interpreted as portraiture. e.g. a Salcedo chair or a Serra sculpture. Therefore, we might productively extend our thinking to include the leading, and certainly the largest object in the exhibition, namely the building. The building, indeed the entire site, is much more than a container for the exhibition. Its engagement of works of art in a dialogue on the areas of convergence and overlap between art and architecture is a central programmatic goal of the Pulitzer Foundation. A second reason for thinking about the building as portraiture comes out of recent research by Jack Quinan on a number of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style houses. Quinan shows that Wright intentionally went about investing the designs with characteristics that he and others have argued add up to portraits of his clients. While the Pulitzer Foundation is clearly not a house, it has certain house-like qualities that derive both from the building and the program. The Ando building is more residential than institutional in its overall scale, and also in the variations of scale from one space to another. So the idea of the house is useful. The informality of the visitor experience and the quality of discovery suggest a program that originates in a vision of a private as opposed to a public space.

If the idea of the building as a portrait can be sustained in terms of a private vision for contemporary art, how is this vision encoded in the building? Clues to this question lie in the unique collaboration between Ando, the artists Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra, and Emily Pulitzer. First, the building’s modernist, stylistic attributes operate like accoutrements in portraiture. Amongst other things, they inform us about taste. Beyond issues of taste, these stylistic preferences in architecture are reinforced in the commissioned works by Serra and Kelly which resonate with the architecture. The form of Kelly’s Blue/Black is echoed in a myriad ways in the rectangular forms in the building, while the materiality of Serra’s Joe makes a productive contrast with the building. The significance of this integration of art and architecture is that it is concrete evidence of the personal vision that is the originating force behind the building. The career of Serra in particular has been significantly advanced by projects in St. Louis. But for Serra’s oeuvre, the Pulitzer Foundation contribution goes beyond the commissioning of the torqued spiral entitled Joe, landmark work though it is. I’m thinking of the siting of Joe in relation to the Maillol torso, mounted on a plinth and centered in a formal rectangular plane of black sedge grass. In this juxtaposition, the parameters of Serra’s historic move to get sculpture off the pedestal and into its own space on its own terms are deftly disclosed. We are offered the possibility of coming to terms with Serra’s imperative to propel sculpture forward, away from the Maillol idea, an object to be viewed, to physical engagement of the body as the basis of the sculptural experience, as with Joe. Here we have a model for considering Serra’s art in terms of a dialogue with, rather than alienation from, history. Beyond the realization of the programmatic needs of the client, and beyond the stylistic choice of Ando’s high modernist architecture, we can discern the essence of a personal vision, one that has evolved over decades and is recognizable. I stress recognition as one of the elements essential to a definition of portraiture. This essence is recognizable to those who inhabit the intersecting worlds of artists, collectors, curators and the public in general. The embodiment of vision constitutes one argument for the building as portrait of the patron.