Indian Miniature Painting by M. S. Randhawa (review)

Book Reviews 135 creator? Is he a split personality or is there a necessary connection, through him, between building and canvas? Does one mode of expression take precedence over the other in quality, quantity or influence? These are some of the questions that arise with regard to Argentine artist-architect Clorindo Testa and his multifaceted work. Testa's compatriot and sometime literary collaborator, Jorge Glusberg, has set out to explain this unusual phenomenon to the public in a handsome and informative book. The key to understanding Testa, according to Glusberg, is Testa's commitment to the human scale and the belief that architecture must simultaneously serve and delight urban dwellers. Such an observation is useful because, although Testa as an architect has officially recognized no other master but Le Corbusier, he has not restricted the designs of his buildings to a single style. Noris there in the chronology of his works the discernible development of a monolithic, personal style. Some of his designs from the fifties clearly reveal his debt to Le Corbusier. The clean lines and regular geometry of the Santa Rosa Civic Center isan example. Other designs from the same period, like the headquarters of the Banco de Londres in Buenos Aires, are far more idiosyncratic. From the outside, this bank looks rather like a giant art-nouveau cheese grater: a principle of orderly distortion has bent the stiff edges of the international style into something almost sinuous and surprising, in part commentary on and antidote to the staid facades of a business district. The same diversity characterizes later decades. In the early seventies Testa designed a number of hospitals, in which practicality and economy justified a conservative distribution of planes. But during the same period Testa entered and won the competition for the Argentine National Library, possibly his most outstanding achievement. This structure, located within a park in a residential district, literally takes off from a platform of angles and modernist curves to branch out like a baobab tree atop two massive concrete trunks. The books are stored underground; the readers absorb the light that penetrates the blunt concrete battlements of the superstructure. It looks like no other library in the world. And then there are the private residences commissioned in the late sixties: they are as modest, nestlike, and secluded as the Banco de Londres is massive and hieratic, the hospitals flat and functional. At the same time that Testa the architect was involved in this work, Testa the artist pursued a parallel career. Glusberg divides Testa's artistic production into four periods. In the early fifties, part of which he spent in Europe, Testa painted figurative oils of people and places. By the early sixties he had changed to abstract canvases in severe whites, blacks and grays, later abandoning paintingperse in favor of paper and cardboard constructions, spray-painted with bright colors in a representational mode. This, his most 'architectonic' phase, underwent a major shift in the early seventies, when Testa began doing crude, seemingly spontaneous aerosol paintings of people in banal domestic and urban settings. These were executed on cardboard squares, which were then pasted on walls, presenting an offhand commentary on modern life. This dark vision intensified in the pen-and-ink drawings of Testa's 1977 allegory of death, 'The Plague in the City'. In 1981 came another shift-this time to a tongue-in-cheek synthesis of the salon and the public space: imaginary plans for pyramids and giant cubes by a supposed architect to the Pharaohs, and plans for the reconstruction of the Parthenon-the artist's ironic commentary, perhaps, on the architect's yearning for immortality-through-construction? It is difficult to summarize a career like Testa's, because it is so rich and because it is probably far from being over (he is barely sixty years old). Some questions remain unanswered, like Testa's place and influence in his generation. In general, however, Jorge Glusberg has brought a fluid style, a designer's eye, and a pleasant balance of erudition and personal involvement to bear on Clorindo Testa "pintor y arquitecto", and the results are of interest to anyone who is curious about the current state of art...