The polymath’s revenge

The architectural historians Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani worked to develop an exhibition on the 19th-century French architect and visionary Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc for roughly seven years, or only a touch longer than it takes to properly say the man’s name. The results, on view at the Bard Graduate Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan through May 24, are astonishing—and not just because the section on Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration and reimagination of Notre-Dame in Paris, in the wake of the cathedral’s 2019 fire and subsequent reconstruction, feels about as timely as a batch of drawings from the middle part of the 19th century possibly could.

Though it still qualifies as something of a sleeper hit, overshadowed in recent weeks by coverage of the New Museum and LACMA, “Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds” is easily the most accomplished architectural exhibition of the year in New York. And maybe of the last two or three. With show-stopping large-format architectural and landscape drawings distributed over three floors, it charts the aesthetic (and, in its upper reaches, the dismaying political) evolution of a subject the curators call “a protean figure in nineteenth-century artistic and intellectual circles,” with an influence “encompassing activities as an architect, a historian of the Middle Ages, an artist, and a designer in all realms of the decorative and liturgical arts.” Oh, and as “an author, administrator, and military strategist.” Who “dabbled in geology.”

Reports that he didn’t spend much time with his wife and two kids do not come as a surprise.