Foreword

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts opened ten years ago in a building designed by internationally renowned architect Tadao Ando. Since then the inspiration for each exhibition has started with the building, which is a testament to Ando’s philosophy about the human intellect and spirit and its relationship to architecture. Ando believes that buildings should ideally possess a function and a fiction:

You can look at any city and see that many of the buildings have no fiction. They are purely functional. They don’t give people anything to think or dream about. They exist without inspiring people. The difference between a building and architecture is fiction.¹

Curators at the Pulitzer respond to the multiple fictions and experiences of Ando’s architecture. Art selection and placement are determined by the art’s formal, material, or metaphorical relationship to the architecture. Lights are generally turned off because natural light “brings geometry of the space closer to nature, . . . is the soul of a space . . . like breath to a body.”² The Pulitzer’s watercourt allows light to come off the water and through the glass walls so at certain times of day one sees the movement of the water as a reflection inside the space. Ando’s architecture “brings life to what is inside it,”³ and it is the curator’s privilege to work within this living, constantly changing environment.

Francesca Herndon-Consagra, our senior curator, organized Dreamscapes, which evokes thoughts and feelings about dreaming and altered states of consciousness. Motivated by the dreamlike quality of the Pulitzer’s watercourt, she presents twenty-five works spanning six centuries from local and national collections. On the main floor are paintings and sculptures that postdate twentieth-century theories about dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires and states. Meanwhile, the lower gallery is devoted to black-and-white imagery that predates Freud. It includes superb impressions of prints of dreamers: Albrecht Dürer’s The Temptation of the Idler (c. 1497–98) and Max Klinger’s remarkable series A Glove (1881), which is an antecedent to surrealism. A visitor with an understanding of artistic legacies will enjoy seeing several lines of development regarding dream imagery (e.g., Max Klinger, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, and Paul Delvaux) and painting styles (e.g., Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, and Georg Baselitz). Yet Dreamscapes encourages experience over interpretation, which is like dreaming, and there are moments where together the art and architecture promote a willful suspension of disbelief: your body turns red upon entering a gallery; you pass a naked woman on the steps; you listen to the intimate retelling of a dream through a telephone receiver; and you might even feel as if you have walked into the mountains of the South Tyrol through a wall at the end of a long corridor.

The goal of this exhibition and catalogue is to stimulate thoughts and feelings about dreams, and to gain new insights about the union of art and the architecture.

Emily Rauh Pulitzer
Chairman

¹ Michael Auping, “September 18, 2000,” in Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2002), 66.

² Auping, “October 10, 1999,” in Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando, 49.

³ Auping, “September 18, 2000,” in Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando, 70.