That love/hate relationship with the modern world gave Graves's work a creative tension that made it so compelling for so many people. It also made Graves a somewhat paradoxical figure in our culture. He thrived in the world of modern commerce, running a sizable and successful architecture and product design firm for many decades, and yet he also seemed to chafe under the crudeness of much of what the commercial world produced. He created many serious and sophisticated structures -- museums, college buildings, corporate headquarters -- and yet he also conveyed in them an almost childlike innocence through simple forms, strong colors, and symmetrical compositions. And he re-interpreted elements of past architecture in new and fresh ways -- moving progressively backward in time from early modernism at the beginning of his career to pre-classical antiquity in recent decades, and yet he also designed buildings that will look, as my small painting suggests, just as good as ruins as they do, inhabited, now.

It always seemed too glib to call Michael Graves a post-modernist, as if his importance lay simply in what he followed and came to oppose. Let's hope that, with his passing will come a fairer and more nuanced assessment of his significance, taking into account not only the full range of his creative output, but also the real depth of his tragic vision of modern life. Like all great designers, Michael Graves both embraced the times in which he lived and embarked on its reformation, not with the naïve futurism that typified so much of the modern architecture that preceded him, but with the sage pastoralism that has characterized many of the most stable periods of past civilizations. While that pervades his buildings and his products, it remains most prominent in his paintings.