Cranbrook: Orpheus with the Peristyle

The architect Eliel Saarinen’s great peristyle at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, built to complement the sculptor Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain, created during the same epic moment in architectural history, provided Christine Goodale with a North American setting for the continuation of  work she achieved in the Greek Temple drawings. The classical majesty of this sandstone peristyle enframes the graceful, dreaming bronze figures of Milles’ masterpiece circular sculpture; the effect creates a tension between straight line and shapely curve. The peristyle’s geometry orders the space while the figures with their organic edges replace the color and thereby function as flowing movement.

The more alive parts of the figures become flowing edges that easily turn into water. In Christine Goodale’s drawings this becomes a system in which color flows into, onto and through the paper, with some parts tightly controlled and others more open and gesturely. The spaces get larger and larger until they take over the structure of the grid and then disappear altogether into single, horizontal lines or “landscapes.” Instead of using ink to print, she now uses it to draw and paint. Behind these drawings, the memory of travel to Greece affects the choice of color, with blue (Aegean Sea) and black (absence, memory) defining the images of Greek ruins. This exploration leads to drawings that tease out the lines of the sculptures against solid colors as well as permitting the intersection of lines that could be experienced in purely abstract relationships.