Flowing Gallery

For Manhattanites who turned out at the opening of a brand-new gallery last week, the big show was not the paintings (a 100-year retrospective from Manet and Monet to Picasso and Pollock), but the gallery itself--a gleaming interior of sculptured white plaster, marble and aluminum in which walls seemed to flow, stairs to float. Ceilings billowed to house controlled artificial light, and even the floor, covered with a luxurious wool carpeting, at one point suddenly lapped over on itself to become a bench.

Collector's Spree. The new World House Galleries is the brain child of TV-Station Pioneer Herbert Mayer. 48, who three years ago sold the last of his TV stations* for $8,500,000, took off for a European vacation that soon turned into an art-collecting spree (including the purchase of 51 Rodin sculptures). With a new hobby on his hands, Collector Mayer decided to turn it into a business, set up a network of buying agents and talent scouts. His goal: to exhibit "the best contemporary art from as many nations as create it."

For his Manhattan showplace, Mayer six months ago leased a choice 6,900 square feet of ground and second-story space in Madison Avenue's Hotel Carlyle, at 77th Street facing Parke-Bernet's auction headquarters. To give his gallery a really new look, Mayer called in as architects M.I.T.-educated Armand Bartos, 46, and Vienna-born Frederick J. Kiesler, 64, famed for such pioneering structures as his 1920 houses cantilevered out from masts like suspension bridges and his 1952 egg-shaped "Endless House."

"At Home, 10 to 5." For pint-sized (4 ft. 10 in.) Experimentalist Kiesler, whose radical departures have landed him more commissions for models than buildings, the World House was the first opportunity in decades to see his continuous-flowing forms grow to lifesize. Inside the entrance, an aluminum-covered ceiling slopes upward toward a two-story interior patio with a white marble island surrounded by a jet-fed black glass pool. A glass-sided stairway leading to the second floor is supported at pinpoints on a white Alabama marble cantilever protruding from a structural steel pillar that swells and tapers below like one of Brancusi's Endless Columns, expands above to become a wedge-shaped hanging wall. On the second floor the concave walls, sculptured columns and baffles--including one wall that stops just short of the floor-- gently pull the gallerygoer from one painting to the next.

While visitors flowed through the new gallery. Architect Kiesler beamed: "Look, and you can see the principle everywhere, continuous flow and continuous tension. This is not a marketplace. It is not a forbidding museum. It is a place where the paintings and sculpture invite the visitors to come to see them--'At home from 10 to 5.' "

*Cleveland's Station WXEL and Portland, Ore.'s KPTV.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.