The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Soon after entering the exhibition on the architecture of Eero Saarinen at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts you are stopped by the eyes of a pair of cats mounted high up on the left-hand wall of the gallery. What is a pair of cats with burning green marbles for eyes doing up there? This is a show of architecture of the mid-20th century, a period not noted for buildings ornamented with animals or gargoyles.

The cats--they could be cougars, or perhaps lions--are the work of the sculptor Lilian Swann Saarinen, the architect’s first wife (he had two). They’re from a group of terracotta animal figures she created for the walls of his Crow Island School (1938-1942) in Winnetka, Illinois. Positioned high on the MIA gallery’s wall by an exhibition designer who understands how the eye takes in a room, they make you feel that it wouldn’t take much for them to spring to life, jump down, and seize you as prey.

The cats project from their panels in deep relief, the modeling of the figures so deep that they’re almost works in the round. Their positions in space are slightly impossible, the laws of gravity and perspective partially suspended, making the cats’ effort to keep a foothold on the wall seem kinetic.

The lower cat looks astonished to have been stumbled upon by us. It seems amazed, also, by its own animality--as though only just awakened to the knowledge of its wildness. The figure is tense with felinity’s absolute alertness. It has eyes that eat what they see.

Moving further into the Saarinen exhibition at the MIA (the show, it should be noted, is spread across two museums—the Walker actually has the larger component) you come to a model of the monumental Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Saarinen and his team won the competition for the commission in 1947-48 but Saarinen died in 1961 and didn’t live to see it built--it was constructed in 1963-65. The exhibition features a terrific short film of the day the final, keystone piece was maneuvered into place: hardhats, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, working without safety harnesses 600 feet off the ground; bystanders below, upturned heads in homburgs and fedoras, riveted on the action above.

The St. Louis arch is in the shape of what’s known as a catenary, the kind of curve that forms when you hold a piece of string or chain at each end and let it droop (the way the lines sag between telephone poles would be another example). The curve (turned upside-down, it becomes an arch) imagined first as the line taken by a drooped chain, was developed further by conceiving it as a length of drooped bicycle chain whose links get progressively smaller descending to the bottom of the curve. The curve of the Gateway Arch, in other words, thins in its tapering ascent to the top. This thinning contributes to its elegance, but this by itself would not have made the arch the soaring thing of beauty that it is. Looking at early models of the arch,  the sculptor Carl Milles, an old friend and colleague of Saarinen’s, was disconcerted by the clunkiness of the structure’s quadrilateral cross-section. He suggested, in a stroke of lyric simplicity, that the cross-section be triangular instead. Milles’ suggestion gave a slenderness to the arch that pulled the form taut, the inner face of the arch reading now not as a flat ribbon but as an arris--the edge of a racing curve.

Grace is a quality difficult to realize. Saarinen’s architecture, anxious to knock your socks off, could sometimes be gratuitous. Succumbing on occasion to the desperation of the artist to seduce, his buildings sometimes swerve in the direction of grandiloquence—opting for big sweeping gestures and a great theatrical swirling of capes, stand-ins for grace. . .  a sort of wishing out loud for it. An understated and authentic grace is harder to come by. Whenever I come across an object that has it, the sensation is always the same: it gives off a feeling of calm, of a suspension of discord, opposites reconciled, pressures and tensions in balance, anxieties released. This isn’t to describe the achievement of a state of flaccid stupor but one of a humming equilibrium of forces, a quality the maker somehow caused to inhere deep inside and not merely on the face of the object. Such objects as embody this grace are rarely perfect but they are radiant and their radiance doesn’t pale--they do not bore you with the passage of time. Every time your eye falls on one it gives you something, it feeds you.

I saw a piece like this recently at Xylos, the gallery of fine woodworking at 50th and Xerxes in south Minneapolis. It’s a three-part folding screen made of pale rift white ash by the designer and craftsman Richard Helgeson, with hand-blown glass insets by Sue Obata. The piece is so quiet it’s almost swallowed up by the flashier work that surrounds it, and it would be were it not for the soft-spoken conviction with which it stands there just being what it is. It may in fact be a brave last stand because ash, the species of tree it’s made from, is--like the chestnut and the elm before it--under attack. The culprit this time, munching its way north up the continent, is the emerald ash borer beetle; it could make this beautiful lumber extinct.

The function of a screen is to mask, but this screen, its details too subtle for me to grasp on first sight, is demure almost to a fault. I needed it pointed out to me, for example (you can see this if you look carefully at the photo), that the widths of the pieces that make up the muntins and panels of ash are proportioned in an arithmetical progression of five, six, seven, and eight inches.

Xylos has something for every taste and degree of attention deficit, all the way from the discretely nuanced to totally over the top. Standing a few feet away from Helgeson’s screen is a flamboyant lingerie cabinet by the extreme woodworker Mark Laub, who’s giving Louis Quatorze a run for his money. For some people, less is more. For others, even more isn’t enough.

Thanks to lenders to the Saarinen exhibition for permission to photograph in the MIA.