I recently visited Mies van der Rohes' iconic Farnsworth house just outside Chicago, in the aptly named middle American hamlet of Plano, Illinois. The building is a kind of secular shrine to Modernism and as my small tour group approached the building through the fragrant summer woods, a hush came upon us all...
So beautiful...so much glass...it seemed to float...
It's previous owner was a British Lord and art lover named Peter Palumbo. He had the house stuffed full of fine pieces of Modernist art from his collection, including a Brancusi and a Picasso. In 1996, the adjacent Fox River flooded to record levels and inundated the house. The water rose so high that the entire house was nearly lifted off its skinny stilts and pulled into the river. It only managed to avoid this when one of its large glass windows shattered under the water's pressure, allowing the river into the house and thereby stabilizing the external force of the water.
Once inside the house, the river proceeded to suck all of Lord Palumbo's expensive art collection out through the broken window and launched it on a meandering journey downriver through rural Illinois.
Eventually though, the water did subside. Frantic art rescue workers wearing rubber boots searched the countryside for the missing art. They managed to find just about everything, including the Brancusi covered in mud.
However, the Picasso was never found.
To the unknown individual, who walks along the riverbank one day and sees a fractured and distorted form in the mud or maybe rustling in a nearby bush:
Is that...could it be...?
