I first began the serious pursuit of the craft of painting when I moved to New York City in 1978. I attended the Art Students’ League on 57th Street, and usually had morning classes. Often in the afternoons, I would stroll a few blocks south to the Museum of Modern Art and enjoyed the privilege of experiencing first hand the many excellencies of that collection. I believe my training in the craft was enviable.

At that time, the Museum of Modern Art looked like someone’s townhouse converted into a museum. It had a homey, comfortable feel. A few years after this period in my life, the building was completely renovated; and, in what I believe was one of the great failures of design, the museum took on the feel of a foyer to a great corporate structure. The collection remained the same, but the paintings changed; that is, I stood in a changed relation to them.

New York is a city of vaulted steel and glass. It is only appropriate that its institutions of culture should reflect this. My discomfort with the new “Modern” may be only a part of a general dis-ease that I feel toward late twentieth century—I wanted to say “late twentieth century America”, but the word “America” is too broad. I will say “late twentieth century corporate structure”, and leave here unstated my opinions regarding the relationship of the word “America” to this particular form of power. My interest here is the environment of this structure and its relation to paintings.

Lewis Mumford noted that the physical structures that dominated the cities of Middle Ages Europe belonged to the Church. These structures formed the ecology of many of the great paintings of the pre-modern era. He points out that with the rise of the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie, the structures of the State came to dominate the landscape of cities. The structures of business now tower high above any other, and most large businesses are corporations. Mumford further points out that the root of our word “civilization” is the Latin for city. Civilization is the culture of the city. The structure of the corporation rules the city, and this structure imposes definitions.

It is interesting to compare the architecture of the corporation to the architecture of the church. The most notable feature of the structure of the buildings which dominate our cityscapes is their modular nature—they are formed by the replication of units. We can imagine King Kong arriving and in a fit of caprice tearing out the corner suites of the third floor of an office tower and exchanging them with the 52nd without in any way changing the basic look of the building. He cannot do this with a cathedral.

We extend this modular structure to the people. King Kong could wipe out the people of the third floor, and after the bit with the planes and guns at the top of the building, the people of the 53rd floor can take over the third floor without any great change in function. Furthermore, we can imagine the ape smashing one of my paintings that happens to be on the third floor, but the story ends happily because the one on the 53rd easily adjusts to the third floor location.

So, the human becomes modular. We lose our particularity, and this also marks a second great difference between the cathedral and the high-rise office tower—the cathedral has a tremendous, and often bizarre, proliferation of detail, whereas the tower possesses a machined uniformity. The question remains, when humans adapt to the tower, do they become accustomed to this structure, or does there exist some innate peculiarity in each of us that chafes against it?

In the small, Wisconsin town where I grew up, the tallest building was, and remains, a church. Also, in my neighborhood where I now live in Milwaukee, the dominant structure is, again, a church. I can look to the north and see the downtown towers and know that they are much taller than any of the structures around me, but from my perspective they are small and inconsequential. Yet I know that those towers impose relationships that pervade every aspect of my life and work. Perhaps this is the source of my paintings’ unease, a conflict between the church and the tower—not in dogma, or between religion and business, but in structure and the human relations that the buildings objectify.