This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “The Prophets”.

By John Dorfman

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In the fall of 1888, in Paris, a group of young friends banded together to form a brotherhood dedicated to new ideas and practices in art. Most of them had studied at the famous Académie Julian and were fed up with its conservative outlook. Like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before them, they rejected what they saw as the outdated notion of a painting as a portal onto an illusionistic space but found inspiration in the art of the past.

Unlike the PBR, this new brotherhood—of whom the Post-Impressionists Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton were the most prominent members—didn’t choose their own name. Their friend, the Symbolist poet Henri Cazalis, bestowed it on them. He called them “Les Nabis,” which means “the prophets” in both Hebrew and Arabic. Perhaps a reference to the exoticized “Orient” (or Near East) was intended; at the time not only academic Orientalist painters but mystically-inclined Symbolists were interested in the non-Christian Near East. Or maybe it was simply that some of the artists were Jewish, most had beards and all were intensely earnest about their mission. Their works, though of course diverse, shared the use of bright or flat colors, compressed or multiple spaces, domestic or everyday subject matter and a sense of symbolic significance that belies the apparent realism.

In any case, the name “Nabis” stuck. The group created a private language to go with it, according to which a studio was called an “ergasterium” and letters between the members were to be signed “E.T.P.M.V. et M.P.,” initials standing for a French phrase which means, “In the palm of your hand, my words and my thoughts.” Many of the artists gave each other playful, polyglot Nabi names—Vuillard was “le Nabi Zouave” (Zouave referring to a French North African army unit that wore exotic uniforms); Denis was “le Nabi der schönen Ikonen” (“the Nabi of the beautiful images”); and Bonnard was “le Nabi très japonard” (a made-up term referring to his enthusiasm for Japanese art), while Paul Ranson, at whose home the group first met, was “le Nabi plus japonard que le Nabi japonard.” Obviously, notwithstanding their vaunted earnestness, these artists had a sense of fun.

The allusion to Japan in the Nabis’ names referred to the fact that they took inspiration from the Japanese colored woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that had been flooding into Europe since the middle of the 19th century. This decorative form of Asian art, with its bold, bright colors and largely flat pictorial space, was widely influential; among its enthusiasts was Toulouse-Lautrec, who in turn was a major influence on the Nabis. Like him, the Nabis rejected the distinction between fine and decorative art, and many of them created posters, book designs and illustrations, murals and stage sets for the theater. The avant-garde theater was especially interesting to Vuillard and Bonnard; in 1896 they worked together, along with fellow Nabi Paul Sérusier and Toulouse-Lautrec himself, on the set design for the premier of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi—a performance that degenerated into a near-riot due to the obscene and confrontational nature of the actors’ lines—not the set designs.

Most of the Nabis’ theatrical work was in the service of less edgy, though still resolutely avant-garde, drama. Vuillard was involved with several theater companies, where he practiced the technique of distemper on canvas, which he later used for easel and panel paintings. In 1891, through their involvement with the theater he and Bonnard were introduced to La Revue Blanche, a wide-ranging cultural journal to which they contributed artwork over the next decade and a half. Vuillard especially became close friends with the journal’s publisher, Thadée Natanson, a son of a wealthy Polish-Jewish banking family. Through Natanson, Vuillard became intimately connected with a circle of patrons and dealers (not to mention muses) who enabled him to achieve financial security by the age of 30 and introduced him to a gracious domestic world that he would depict again and again over the course of his long career, up to his death in 1940.

The influence of the Natanson circle on Vuillard is the subject of a monographic exhibition of the artist at the Jewish Museum, “Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940,” which opens May 4. A Vuillard show in this country is a relatively rare occurrence— the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., mounted a large exhibition in 2003, but the last one in New York was 20 years ago. However, it seems as though a Nabis moment is underway right now, because in addition to the Jewish Museum exhibition, a show titled “Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard” is on view at the National Gallery through May 6 and then at the Indianapolis Museum of Art beginning June 8.

The Jewish Museum’s show, which has 52 paintings as well as drawings, ephemera and historical documents, has broader aims than simply to chronicle Vuillard’s association with his patrons. Assistant curator Stephen Brown, who organized the exhibition, says, “We were interested in this artist because of his sociability. The people he lived with and whose lives he reflected in his art are not just people who bought from him, they became the subject matter. This really suggested itself as a way of looking at his career as a whole.”

Seeing that career as a whole is a challenge, in that the received art-historical wisdom maintains that Vuillard’s style changed decisively with the turn of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, most of the Nabis changed their styles and priorities in some way after the brotherhood disbanded in 1899—Bonnard abandoned the city for the south of France, and Denis went on to become an influential theorist of Cubism as well as a religious painter. Vuillard’s work after 1900 has been described as a return to an “optical tradition”—presumably meaning a more conventionally illusionistic representation of space and surface—with the implication that it was a retrenchment into traditionalism.

But Brown is at pains to demonstrate the continuity in his work, and points out that even during the Nabi years, Vuillard and his fellow painters were paradoxically both radical and traditional. “The Nabis were the last avant garde who had an unconflictive relationship with the art of the past,” he says. “The change in Vuillard’s work is along the lines of being more naturalistic. He continued to use extreme compositions and colors on occasion, but ultimately he had a goal that goes back to the Nabi period, which has to do with using visual means to convey emotions and meanings. It’s a mélange of realism and Symbolist thinking.” This subtle approach has caused Vuillard to be tagged as a conservative, and in general, the Nabis have been overshadowed in modernist art history by noisier movements such as the Cubists, Fauves and Dadaists.

Vuillard’s focus on domestic life as his subject matter, especially (though not exclusively) after the Nabi period has contributed to this perception. While by no means limited in his internal horizons, Vuillard was quite bourgeois in his lifestyle, at least by adoption. As Brown writes in the exhibition catalogue, the artist’s close relationship with his agent and dealer Jos Hessel and Hessel’s wife Lucy (also Vuillard’s lover and long-term muse) “promised domestic comfort and the opportunity to move in a coterie of the leisure class whose lifestyle was susceptible to expression as art—an idea that appears to have been irresistible to Vuillard.” The French critic Claude Roger-Marx, an early biographer of Vuillard, wrote that it was “an inexplicable paradox that this industrious worker and grave man should have devoted a good part of his life to representing idleness, to the exclusion of passion, suffering or sadness.” But Vuillard was by no means representing idleness; he was carrying the Baudelairean role of “the painter of modern life” into a different sphere—no longer the street but the salon. By 1900, Brown writes, “Vuillard had found his theme—images of modern life that were no longer restricted to aspects of the dressmaker’s shop but now included the salons of friends, the visits of young ladies, the gardens of a villa.”

Another paradox of Vuillard was his apparent reclusiveness and actual sociability. True, he never married, lived with his mother until she died and didn’t get involved in politics or public debates. But friendship and personal relationships were essential not only to his life but to his art, and the two had always mixed. Fellow Nabi Ker-Xavier Roussel married Vuillard’s sister. Artistic associates like the Revue Blanche publishers led him to patrons who became the hub of his quiet though busy social life. “This sociability entailed a circuit of production, material and moral support, and subject matter,” writes Brown. “Vuillard, in effect, became one with his patrons.” In Vuillard’s post-1900 interiors, we see the same intricately patterned textiles that serve in the early paintings to create a spatial background and as an almost free-standing source of visual interest, now repurposed to convey the comfort, serenity and aesthetic satisfaction of a particular social milieu. And the many portraits in the Jewish Museum’s show are reminders of the inseparability in Vuillard’s mind of the artistic and the personal. Vuillard frequently captures his sitters surrounded by their possessions amid carefully depicted décor, playing up the intimate link between people and the things with which they define themselves. In his portrait of the oil-company executive and art patron Marcel Kapferer, Vuillard has in fact painted his own paintings—and one by Bonnard—hanging on the wall behind the sitter, closing the circle by linking his own self to his patron’s sense of self.

Given that the Nabis are not often given enough credit for being modern, it is noteworthy that the National Gallery’s exhibition highlights their experiments with photography, the modern medium par excellence. Kodak snapshots of family and friends made by Vuillard, Bonnard, Vallotton and Denis show that the artists approached photography basically as dilettantes, just having fun with the camera like anyone else, rather than deliberately taking photos as free-standing artworks or as raw materials for paintings. Many of the snapshots were technically sloppy, but looking at them with an artist’s eye, the Nabis eventually took inspiration from them with regard to subject and composition. Some famous paintings were clearly modeled on snapshots, especially in the cases of Denis and Vallotton.

While some of Vuillard’s photographs ended up being sources for paintings, their main interest lies in the way they frankly and spontaneously record private moments in the life he shared with his intimate circle. We see the Natansons reading together on the sofa in their salon, Lucy Hessel languidly lounging and gazing out a window, the artist’s mother, frail yet smiling, toward the end of her life and—best of all—Vuillard’s brother-in-law Roussel dancing naked in front of a plaster cast of a classical frieze. In this moment frozen in time, the social and artistic cameraderie of the Nabis seems perfectly crystallized.

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Renaissance Redux”.

By Jonathan Kandell

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It isn’t easy to find the Antico Setificio Fiorentino, a brick-walled silk-fabric workshop hidden behind a garden of geraniums, hydrangeas and palm trees a block from the Arno River, which bisects Florence. There is the soft clatter of wooden looms and spindles—one of them based on a design by Leonardo da Vinci and others dating back to the late 18th century, when the workshop began operating. And in the adjoining showroom, amid bolts of the finest silk, Sabine Pretsch, manager of the Antico Seticio, picks up a taffeta sample in iridescent red and gold and tells me, “Here are the colors of the Renaissance paintings.”

This is no idle metaphor, as I discover that afternoon on a walk across the Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno to the Uffizi Gallery. In room after room, I gaze at paintings of aristocrats whose noble garments have been reproduced in superb detail by the Antico Setificio looms—the white and silver silk dress of a Medici child in Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of Bia de’ Medici (1540); the orange and yellow silk damask of the billowing robe worn by Jacopo Pontormo’s Woman with Basket of Spindles (1514–17); and the gold and black embroidered dress in Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni de’ Medici (1545–46).

The visible Florence is the ravishing architecture and art of the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace and the Duomo, or, on a tackier level, the trinket vendors on either side of the Arno. But concealed from the crowds and visited mostly by discerning, wealthy clients and their decorators is the Florence of the master artisan workshops.

The Antico Setificio Fiorentino began its activity when the Medicis were still the leading Florentine family. Bartolozzi e Maioli, a famed restorer of Baroque wood objects, rose from the ashes of World War II to help reconstruct the interiors of churches battered by air raids. And Brandimarte, the leading silver workshop, was founded in the 1950s by a skilled artisan intent on raising the quality of the jewelry and decorative objects peddled to foreigners and locals.

The quality of the fabrics produced by the ancient looms of the Antico Setificio cannot be replicated by modern computerized equipment. The silk and cotton fibers—untreated by chemicals—would break on a contemporary high-speed loom. And no new machine is capable of satisfying the personalized demands of an Antico Setificio client. “We can change the colors, texture, weight of a single piece of cloth,” says Pretsch. “We can weave a fabric with the green of your favorite garden shrub, or with the color of your eyes.”

She reaches for samples of ermisimo, a pure silk weave first brought over to Italy during the Renaissance from the Persian city of Hormuz. While a computerized loom will typically use 3,000 chemically treated silk threads per standard 1.4-meter length of fabric, the Antico Setificio will weave together 8,000 to 16,000 threads of ermisimo per 1.2 meters of fabric. The result is a more resistant, lustrous cloth in which each silk strand seems to reflect light. “This is the luxury of weaving slowly,” says Pretsch.

While in Renaissance times the fabric was used mainly for clothing, nowadays it is turned into curtains—multicolored drapes that hang 15 feet or longer. The workshop also produces another ancient, exotic fabric, spinone, developed in Renaissance Italy and woven from silk and cotton or linen. It is used mostly for upholstering, wall covering and tapestries.

Pretsch, whose varied, peripatetic careers included journalism, social anthropology and architecture, arrived at the Antico Setificio 27 years ago and took up management at the behest of Pucci, the fashion designer family, who had owned the workshop since 1958. Two years ago, the Antico Setificio was acquired by the Stefano Ricci fashion house.

The dozen loom operators, all women, come from Florentine artisan families that have been employed at the workshop for many generations, with mothers often passing on their posts to their daughters—after five-year apprenticeships. Perhaps the most valuable individual at the Antico Setificio is Fabrizio Meucci, who repairs all the ancient looms, including the huge, cylindrical warping machine designed by Leonardo.

“We are producing the same fabrics that were made 500 years ago,” says Pretsch. “For clients, there is an attraction to owning something that cannot be bought in any store. They purchase the fabrics through architects and interior designers who in effect act as our representatives around the world, or they can come here directly.”

Besides the private residences of wealthy denizens of Milan, London, Paris and New York, the Antico Setificio fabrics decorate the Senate and the Quirinale presidential palace in Rome, the Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen and the Royal Castle in Stockholm.

Occasionally, the master artisan workshops of Florence pool their resources for a large-scale project. This was the case, most notably, when the Antico Setificio and Bartolozzi e Maioli joined in the spectacular restoration in the late 1990s of the Kremlin’s great halls of St. Alexander and St. Andrew, whose interiors were destroyed by Stalin for ideological reasons. While the Antico Setificio provided the upholstering, curtains and tapestries, Bartolozzi took charge of the wood restoration, including furniture, angels, coats-of-arms, cornices and intricate wood embroideries. The restored rooms, with a larger floor space than the Duomo, are used to host receptions for visiting heads of state.

“We also do a lot of work for churches, especially the restoration of Baroque statues, columns, ceilings,” says Fiorenza Bartolozzi, owner of the workshop started in 1938 by her father, Fiorenzo, and another master artisan, Giuseppe Maioli. Bartolozzi e Maioli, even more hidden away than the Antico Setificio, is at the end of an alleyway in a former stable that belonged to a Florentine noble family in the 1500s.

The premises could still pass for a Renaissance stage set. Polychrome and gilded wood angels, saints, chandeliers and sconces, all in various states of disrepair, are stacked haphazardly in the cavernous building. In one of the less cluttered corners, Franco Pascale, the 74-year-old master artisan, carves ever so carefully on an intricately ornate painting frame. For major projects, the workshop hires up to 30 skilled artisans on a freelance basis.

The heavily ecclesiastical nature of the Bartolozzi’s inventory owes its roots to the workshop’s first significant project—the restoration of the interior of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, which was founded 81 miles southeast of Rome in 529 by St. Benedict. Considered one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the history of the Church, it was totally destroyed in a 1944 Allied bombing raid. The interior restoration, which lasted from 1957 to 1969, included the 82 seats of the choir, the bas-reliefs, the high altar and the decorative wood of the sacristy. Most of the work was done solely on the basis of photographs.

Beginning in the 1970s, when many Catholic churches in Italy undertook architectural modernizations, they sold their unwanted, older pews, stands, cornices and statuary to Bartolozzi e Maioli, which stores them in a separate warehouse on the outskirts of Florence. “The inventory is so huge that we will never run out,” says Fiorenza Bartolozzi, who runs the workshop with her husband, Carlo Alliata, and their daughter, Gaia.

The same techniques used to restore ecclesiastical properties are applied to secular projects as well. Using glues, gessoes, dyes and lacquer finishes developed in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, Bartolozzi provided the Sultan of Brunei with a rocking chair finished in gold leaf and an exact replica of Marie Antoinette’s bed with a spectacular wood canopy. Closer to home, Bartolozzi decorated the boudoir of Marina Berlusconi, daughter of the billionaire former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, with carved, gilded bas-reliefs. “The Berlusconis are important clients,” says Bartolozzi.

But the biggest customers nowadays are the Russians. Following the Kremlin restoration, Bartolozzi has received major commissions from oligarchs. A prime example is the renovation of a library in a Moscow mansion involving the use of gesso layers on wood with a linen-gray-white finish and gold-leaf gilded edges to achieve an 18th-century French neoclassical style.

Extravagantly wealthy Russians have also become the major clients of Brandimarte, the silver workshop named after a character in the Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso. Last year, an oil oligarch bought for his mistress a silver bathtub, five and a half feet long and weighing 1,320 pounds, with 24-carat gold plating on its four dolphin-shaped brass spouts. “Now, another oligarch has ordered one as well,” says Stefano Guscelli, Brandimarte’s designer and co-owner with his sister, Giada. (The founding father adopted the single name Brandimarte for himself, and his children decline to reveal either his first name or family name, though presumably it was Guscelli). Also available are copies of 19th-century samovars, four feet tall and all in silver. The animal and human motifs were removed from a samovar for Turkmenistan’s President, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, because he is Muslim.

This is far removed from the era six decades ago when Brandimarte opened for business with simple chain-linked bracelets and necklaces and decorative vases. What hasn’t changed is the basic technique in the workshop, now located in an early 19th-century former warehouse a mile away from the showroom. In one room, an artisan traces a design with black ink on a silver urn and then pours pitch into the container. Once the pitch hardens, he hammers and chisels the design on the surface of the urn. Finally, the urn is reheated until the pitch can be melted and poured out. In an adjoining room, another artisan uses only a hammer to shape and design a vase. And nearby, an artisan practices a third technique, using an electric-powered turning machine to shape and design silver plates.

“While I love the traditional designs my father created, clients nowadays want silver for everyday use, not just to place in a corner of a living room,” says Stefano Guscelli. Therefore, Brandimarte’s current offerings include flower vases and urns, wine goblets and decanters, plates and flatware, and pots and pans—all in silver. But the tripling of silver prices over the last two years has shifted the market away from Western Europe and the United States. “Today, the Russians are the Renaissance princes,” says Guscelli.

On my way out, I pass a large flower vase with frenzied human figures chiseled in bas-relief on its silver surface. A closer inspection leaves no doubt that it is graphic depiction of an orgy. Guscelli shrugs, his palms raised upwards, and says, “I know, but the Russians love that sort of decoration.”

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Lifting the Veil”.

By Jonathan Lopez

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In 1864, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to a friend announcing a new objective for the arts: “Paint not the thing itself, but the effect that it produces.” Mallarmé’s dictum offers a tidy summation of what would eventually be called Symbolism, a multi-faceted movement that influenced literature, music, painting and other disciplines. “Dreams of Nature,” a major loan show on Symbolism in European landscape painting, is currently on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and will travel later this year to Edinburgh and Helsinki. The exhibition traces the interplay between landscape and spiritual concerns from Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School through Redon, Böcklin, Munch, and Kandinsky. In conversation with Art & Antiques, the Van Gogh Museum’s chief curator of exhibitions, Edwin Becker, discusses this sweeping survey, whose treatment of Symbolist landscape touches on topics ranging from the music of Arnold Schoenberg to the esoteric beliefs of Rosicrucianism and Theosophy.

A&A: What is Symbolism?

BECKER: The term Symbolism comes from the literary world, and one of the first places it appears is in a manifesto written in 1886 by the poet Jean Moréas. In Moréas’s text probably the most important word is suggérer—to suggest—which is a key concept for Symbolism. There was this sense that an artist’s work should hint at a deeper reality hidden behind ordinary appearances. It’s a Neoplatonic concept—that the world we see is an imperfect reflection of the truth that lies beyond it.

A&A: How does this relate to landscape painting?

BECKER: The artists in the show didn’t suddenly say, “I want to work in a Symbolist style.” But after about 1886, they were all investigating techniques for portraying landscape not as a record of a particular spot in nature but as a pretext for expressing feelings, perceptions, dreams or visions.

A&A: What were some of the techniques?

BECKER: These artists often used a soft-focus effect, distancing the viewer from reality. The Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, for instance, was fond of climbing in the mountains, and in Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau Rising above a Sea of Mist (1908) you are standing with him on a mountain peak looking down into the valley below—an idea with precedents in the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich—and the scene almost dissolves into an abstract pattern. Hodler puts an emphasis on simplicity, soberness, going for the essence and avoiding any kind of anecdote.

A&A: There may not be an explicit anecdote, but in works by other Symbolists there does seem to be a suggestion of a hidden story, as in the various scenes of Bruges by Fernand Khnopff and Henri Eugène Le Sidaner.

BECKER: Bruges was a medieval town with a mysterious atmosphere and was not quite so polished and cleaned up as it is nowadays, so the idea that the city contained decaying vestiges of an ancient past appealed to the Symbolist mentality. Also the book Bruges-la-Morte (1892) by Georges Rodenbach was very influential. In the book Rodenbach seeks traces of his deceased wife through the city, and this macabre mood comes through in the way the Symbolists depict Bruges—the emptiness, the stillness, the strange corners or angles.

A&A: There is a measure of stillness and quiet to the technique as well, especially in the large conté crayon drawing by Khnopff, Lac d’Amour, Bruges (1904).

BECKER: Khnopff works very minutely in that picture, as if he does not want the technique to be felt; it becomes immaterial compared to the effect or sentiment, and in that way it’s a very conceptual kind of art.

A&A: The theme of water—reflections in water, mist on water, cities and structures viewed across a body of water—seems to come up frequently in the show, from Whistler’s Nocturne: Grey and Silver to Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. One of the most striking works in the exhibition is Lake Keitele (1905) by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. It shows a cryptic, geometrical form on the surface of the lake, but I’m not really sure what it is—melting ice?

BECKER: I’ve asked Finnish people about this, and some say it could be melting ice; others say if you stand at the lake at a certain time of day, you’ll see bright reflections like this across the water. It’s almost a decorative pattern, an abstraction within the natural world, and it becomes a reflection of not only of nature but perhaps of your own feelings, or an allusion to the story of Narcissus.

A&A: Gallen-Kallela isn’t an artist I know much about.

BECKER: He’s an important artist, but most of his paintings are in Finland, and he was very rooted in the Finnish environment. Probably his most famous works are his illustrations of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. If you travel out into the countryside you can still see the scenes and motifs he painted.

A&A: The show also includes some very familiar artists whom I wouldn’t normally think of in the context of Symbolism. For instance, you include Monet.

BECKER: People might find that very strange. We know Monet as the great Impressionist, but in the 1890s he moved to these series of single motifs—Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, poplars. The idea of the series is more contemplative than capturing the immediate impression of nature. It incorporates developments considered over a long period of time, and the forms, for instance in the Haystacks, Snow Effect (1891), become strangely prominent—exaggerated, in a way—and suggestive of a deeper meaning.

A&A: What about the Pointillist seascape, Setting Sun, Sardine Fishing, Opus 221 (Adagio), by Signac—what’s Symbolist about that image? It seems very bright and cheerful, no mood of dark foreboding.

BECKER: The dark and macabre aspect of things is one side of Symbolism. Hodler exhibited at the Salon Rose + Croix in Paris; Mondrian was a member of the Theosophical Society, and other Symbolists dabbled in spiritualism and the occult. But Symbolism was also about finding new methods to provoke a feeling or mood in the onlooker. Signac often gave musical titles to his works—adagio, allegro—as if he were composing music with his dots and discovering the secret language of nature. Symbolism is often about the underlying rhythms of life—as is Van Gogh’s Sower (1888). Van Gogh painted it in the asylum, and it evokes a sense that one’s own troubles are insignificant compared to the eternal cycle of reaping and sowing. The sun forms a kind of halo around the figure, giving it a religious or mythical appearance.

A&A: There are other works in the show that touch on religious themes more explicitly, for instance Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (1888).

BECKER: Thanks to our partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland, we were able to borrow the Gauguin, which is really one of the great Symbolist masterpieces. The central action is Jacob wrestling the angel, the story that the congregation had heard in church earlier and that they now see as a supernatural vision before them. Where you would expect a green meadow, you have this unreal red, almost a circus or carnival red, giving the scene a feeling of a performance.

A&A: The idea of mythical or mystical landscape ultimately points toward abstraction, for instance in The Cossacks (1910–11) by Kandinsky.

BECKER: That work is on the edge of abstraction. You can still make out the Cossacks with their weapons, and the rainbows in the background are perhaps bridges to another world, such as Schoenberg reaches for in his music.

A&A: You have a set of headphones next to The Cossacks in the exhibition so that visitors can listen to Schoenberg. What’s the connection?

BECKER: Kandinsky first heard Schoenberg’s music in a concert in 1911, and afterwards he wrote to Schoenberg about the similarities in their work. They both wanted to lift the veil from reality by developing a new method of painting or composing—Schoenberg used the 12-tone musical scale and Kandinsky used color theory. After the concert, Kandinsky began using intense shades of yellow, saying they gave him the feeling of Schoenberg’s music. But there’s a deeper connection. Schoenberg’s music was called dissonant, but Schoenberg said that to him it was just a different kind of consonance—a new harmony that was there all along and just needed to be discovered. I think that’s what the painters were seeking, too.

“Dreams of Nature: Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky” remains at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam through June 17, then travels to the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh (July 14 – October 14, 2012) and the Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, in Helsinki (November 16, 2012 – February 17, 2013). The illustrated English-language catalogue (Fonds Mercator SA: € 29.95) features essays by Rodolphe Rapetti, Richard Thomson and others.

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “A Flowering in Florence”.

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 When James Bradburne, the dynamic director of Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, came to New York last fall to publicize the foundation’s upcoming exhibition “Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists,” he held his meetings at The House of the Redeemer.

“Where?” asked the seasoned New Yorkers who had appointments with him. Bradburne was referring to a 1916 Italian Renaissance-style palazzo, smack in the middle of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, that was home to Edith Shepard Fabbri before she willed it to the Episcopal Church as a retreat house. Born a Vanderbilt, she was married to Ernesto Fabbri, brother of the artist Egisto Fabbri, who anchored Florence’s American art colony. Egisto designed the House of the Redeemer’s interiors, complete with a 15th-century library imported from a ducal palace in Urbino—a fitting backdrop for Bradburne’s recounting of the early days of the art world’s great Italian-American love story.

It all started after the Civil War, when rich Americans, particularly from Boston and the East Coast, began traveling to Europe. It was the American age of the Grand Tour, and art capitals such as Paris, London, Munich, Dusseldorf, Venice and Florence were among the must-dos for the cultivated. Edith Wharton, Bernard Berenson, Gertrude Stein, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Vernon Lee all set sail. Artists were also making the crossing, enrolling in art schools and feasting on a smorgasbord of monuments, Renaissance paintings and the increasingly impressionistic painting styles of their European contemporaries. “My God, I’d rather go to Europe than go to heaven,” said William Merritt Chase.

Certain cities, such as Florence, proved difficult to leave. Henry James, who was omnipresent abroad during these years, called Florence the “little treasure-city.” East Coast intellectuals dubbed it the “Boston of Italy.” Thanks to Florence’s violet-tinged light, awesome art and architecture and poetic villas and gardens, American artists who couldn’t bear the thought of another bleak New England winter settled in, producing some of the finest American works of plein air landscape and portraiture.

“Americans in Florence” documents their progress, which would continue up to World War I. Early “pioneers” such as John La Farge, George Inness and William Morris Hunt were followed by Elihu Vedder, Frank Duveneck, Elizabeth Boott (who would marry Duveneck), Frederick Childe Hassam, Edmund Tarbell, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Integral to the artist’s circle was Egisto Fabbri, the American-born Italian painter who had a palace stuffed with Cézannes in town and an overgrown romantic estate, Villa di Babazzano, in the Tuscan hills. American and Italian artists flocked to both of them. Of course, the true star of this era is John Singer Sargent, an American who was actually born in Florence.

One of the treats of this show is a collection of recently discovered photographs of this art colony that were taken by the eldest Fabbri sibling, Ernestine, who was also a painter. Shown side by side with a Sargent or an Egisto Fabbri painting, photos make the era—with its settings, costumes and customs—spring to life.

Palazzo Strozzi is noted for its creative approach to its exhibition subjects, and this show not only examines how Italy influenced Americans but how this wave of Americans affected Italian painters. They certainly took notice of those beautiful American girls wandering the city’s piazzas in their frothy white dresses—as evidenced by canvases of Giovanni Boldini, Vittorio Corcos, Telemaco Signorini, and Michele Gordigiani. The final section of the exhibition looks at how American artists who worked in Florence influenced later American painting—many of them, including Frank Weston Benson, John White Alexander, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing (all represented in the exhibition) returned to the United States and taught.

Palazzo Strozzi also has a reputation for coaxing little-seen loans out of private and museum collections. Among those in this exhibition is the painting that opens the show, The Hotel Room (1904–06) by Sargent, with the idea that this may have been an American artist’s first view of Florence. “Americans in Florence” displays examples of every kind painting that was popular in this era—portraiture of the wealthy, famous and titled; city scenes starring iconic Florence bridges and squares; “interiors with figures,” usually depicting a beautiful young woman in a sitting room in a faded Florentine palazzo; gritty paintings showing the encroachment of the Industrial Age on the verdant countryside, Renaissance-revival works, and idyllic Impressionistic Tuscan landscapes—think gardens, villas and lots of picnicking.

The exhibition has also produced a companion booklet, Passport for Americans in Florence, that provides visitors’ information on many of the palazzi, villas, churches and gardens that figure in these paintings. So, after viewing Sargent’s gorgeous At Torre Galli: Ladies in a Garden (1910), a visitor can consult the Passport for the opening hours of the garden and chapel at the real Villa di Torregalli.

“Americans in Florence” runs through July 15. The foundation selected this year to stage the show because it’s the 500th anniversary of the death of the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, our country’s namesake. Matteo Renzi, Florence’s progressive young mayor, has declared 2012 the year of the Americas. In honor of the decree, a sister show, “American Dreamers: Reality and Imagination in Contemporary Art,” is also up at Palazzo Strozzi’s Center for Contemporary Culture through July 15.

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Urban Legend”.

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The Kunlun mountain range in Central Asia has a good claim to being the remotest spot on earth. Not as high as the Himalayas but harder to reach, they ring a windswept plain known as the Takla Makan Desert, where archaeologists recently found uncannily well-preserved mummies, over 2,000 years old, that bear no resemblance to the current inhabitants of the sparsely populated area. In a place like this, even today, when the whole globe seems picked over, one feels that something long-lost and strange could be hiding in plain sight.

For Tibetan Buddhists, the Kunlun region is the site of Shambhala, an octagon-shaped sacred city—legendary or actual, depending on your point of view—ruled by a semi-divine king peacefully presiding over a population of learned, extra-long-lived subjects who possess both magical powers and high technology, which they use to preserve mystical knowledge until the end of the present world cycle. According to Tibetan lore, Shambhala (the name is Sanskrit for “source of bliss”), while existing in the physical world, north of Tibet, cannot be reached or even perceived by anyone who is not spiritually prepared.

That stricture has never deterred explorers; the idea of an all-but-inaccessible, timeless citadel is simply too alluring. Over the centuries, Shambhala has not only drawn intrepid, if misguided, climbers to struggle through the ice and snow, it has also inspired imaginations both inside and outside Tibet. Tibetan Buddhist painters mapped it onto cosmic diagrams and portrayed the lineage of its rulers, while monks wrote detailed (if sometimes metaphoric) travel guides for seekers. Nineteenth-century Western occultists reimagined Shambhala in proto-sci-fi terms as a shadowy underground realm called “Agarttha.” In the 20th century, Shambhala entered worldwide popular consciousness in the guise of “Shangri-La,” thanks to James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon and the partially-lost (appropriately enough) 1937 film of the same title. And, as a highly unusual exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, demonstrates, the sacred city beckons contemporary artists, too.

The MFA’s show presents work by two of those artists—Gonkar Gyatso from Tibet, and Tadanori Yokoo from Japan—alongside a set of medieval Tibetan paintings of the kings of Shambhala and various antique Tibetan objects that give three-dimensional reality to iconographic elements in the paintings. As curator Jacki Elgar tells the story, the exhibition came into being due to a happy confluence of events: In the 1980s, Elgar, whose main job is conservator of Asian artworks at the MFA, wrote condition reports on Yokoo’s print series “Shambhala” when it was acquired by the museum. Her interest was piqued. “I’m a conservator, so usually I don’t get to work with living artists,” she recalls. “Yokoo was a little bit like, Who are you? But we went to tea and just started talking about Shambhala.” Then, in the early ’90s, Elgar was going through the museum’s storage spaces and made a hiding-in-plain-sight discovery of her own—a group of 23 Tibetan paintings from the 17th century, in distemper on cotton, that had been donated in 1906 and lain neglected ever since. She began work conserving them and remounting them in the way they were intended to be seen. Finally, in 2009, Gyatso’s Shambala in Modern Times was featured in the 53rd Venice Biennale, bringing about what Elgar calls an “a-ha moment,” and work on the current exhibition got underway.

The scroll paintings, which Elgar describes as the “backbone and impetus for the show,” were bought in Paris by an American collector, Denman Waldo Ross, from a woman who apparently got them from China. They were mounted in Japanese wooden panels, a setup that was false to the original intent of the artists. They intended the pictures to be displayed as hanging scrolls, known in Tibetan as thangkas. In the MFA’s workshop—which Elgar proudly points out is “the oldest Asian conservation studio outside Asia”—the paintings were removed from their mounts and “in taking them apart, we found clues as to which was which, and now we have them in the right order.” Using infrared reflectography, the MFA team identified preliminary sketches and shorthand notes on the paintings from the master painter to his apprentices.

The total number of Shambhala kings is 33 (including the original Buddha, who is counted as one), of which the MFA’s series has 23. According to Tibetan teaching, the present king of Shambhala, wherever he may be, is called Aniruddha; his reign began in 1927 and will end in 2027. In the MFA’s painting, he is shown on a throne holding an iron elephant goad and a noose. A ferocious, red-eyed lion glares at him, perhaps symbolizing the challenges facing such an administrator during a time when the Kalachakra (or “wheel of time,” the sacred teaching safeguarded in Shambhala) is largely ignored or forgotten by the outside world. After Aniruddha, there will be five more kings, the last of whom, Rudra Chakrin, will emerge from Shambhala and engage the enemies of Buddhism on the field of battle. Accordingly, he is depicted in fighting form rather than seated, with a shield and a spear and surrounded by chariots. After the war—which some Tibetan sources predict will occur in the year 2424—a golden age will ensue in which the Kalachakra knowledge will spread virtue throughout the world.

The graphic works of Yokoo and Gyatso are very different from these traditional representations, and also from each other. Yokoo, born in Japan in 1936, started out as a graphic designer and did bold commercial work influenced by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast of Push Pin Studios. He got heavily involved in yoga and meditation in the 1970s and says he had a dream visitation from the king of Shambhala. He takes the myth seriously, but his “Shambhala” series is playful and psychedelic, dealing in a set of symbols devised by the artist rather than reworking or adapting traditional Tibetan iconography.

Yokoo’s Prithvi Devaloka (Earth-Heaven), with its rainbow-emitting pyramid against a black background, closely resembles the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; Elgar notes that Yokoo actually got there first, having used this image for a book cover design in Japan in 1972, a year before the album came out. Other works by Yokoo in the exhibition mix Hindu and even ancient Egyptian images with Buddhist themes and advertisements from India, against backgrounds of electric, hallucinatory colors that suggest a dream state or other forms of visionary consciousness. According to Elgar, Yokoo at first believed he had to seek Shambhala through yoga practice but no longer feels the need to do so, since Shambhala is now “an integral part of his being.” In that sense, he may be very close to the intent of the Kalachakra, which stresses the importance of finding enlightenment through everyday things and eternity in the fleeting moment.

Gyatso, born in 1961, is a member of the generation of Tibetans that grew up under Chinese rule. His work has a lot to do with Tibetan identity and with making the idea of Shmabhala relevant to the contemporary world. In the MFA show are a pair of photographs depicting the artist in two guises: as a traditional thangka painter (modeled on a famous 1937 photograph taken in Lhasa of the then-Dalai Lama’s chief painter) and as a Communist hack artist doing a portrait of Chairman Mao. In his Shambhala in Modern Times (2009), a silkscreen with gold and silver leaf on paper that was at the Venice Biennale, an outline of a traditional Buddha head radiates a burst of tiny colorful objects outward, spraying to the edges of the frame. On closer inspection, the tiny objects are seen to be images, logos and bits of text from global popular culture and commerce. The Buddha’s head contains a grid filled in with glyphs, invented by the artist, that merge Tibetan letters with Chinese characters.

“Shambhala for me is urban life,” Gyatso has written, “the way that the city acts as a sponge, mixing everything up and then releasing that energy out into the world.” For Yokoo, Shambhala is in your head. For Gyatso, it’s the global metropolis. For Elgar, it’s a myth that “gives you a hope that there are people in the world who are holders of civility and sanity, that whatever happens, it will get better.” We may have to wait till 2424 to know for certain.

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Stepping into Space”.

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Paintings can be heavy with meaning—think of the imposing biblical, mythological or historical themes of many a Renaissance or Academic tableau. Sometimes, they’re just heavy—consider the sheer bulk of a football-field-sized Barnett Newman canvas or a mixed-media Thornton Dial assemblage bulging with everything from welded-metal machine parts to baby dolls under thick crusts of paint. By contrast, the abstract and minimalist painters who splashed, scraped or smudged washes or traces of color on their canvases called attention to a dichotomy between the solid physicality of their materials and the apparently ethereal nature of what they had conjured up with them. Think of Robert Ryman’s white paintings, Agnes Martin’s subtle grids or Cy Twombly’s scatterings of scribbles on vast white or light-gray fields.
Similarly, the now-you-sense-it, now-you-don’t heft of the American artist Suzan Frecon’s paintings plays an incessant game of hide-and-seek with another essential aspect of these otherwise very solid abstract works, whose irrefutable mass and presence bring to mind those long-ago discussions—held during the heyday of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, shaped canvases and minimalist sculpture—about a painting’s status as an object with a sculptural character. The other vital aspect of Frecon’s paintings, with their uncluttered compositions of simple shapes set against richly colored grounds, is the mysteriously heightened, aura-like sensation that they convey to the viewer.

In part, that sensation is purely optical, as a viewer’s eye recognizes the rhythm of a perceptual tug of war between Frecon’s half-moon, curved or pointed shapes in what appear to be her paintings’ foregrounds and the broader expanses of color that make up her backgrounds. Or are her “backgrounds” actually precisely defined shapes in the foregrounds, set against colors that appear to be backgrounds? Another sensation Frecon’s canvases evoke is one that has long characterized some of the most moving works of abstract art of any style or era—that is a sense of transcendent, even spiritual uplift that comes with a viewer’s total absorption in one of her straightforward but beguiling images.

“I like that you can feel as though you’re stepping right into the space of the painting with a canvas this large,” Frecon observes during an interview at her New York studio, where a nine-foot-tall picture in progress hangs on a wall, catching sunlight from south-facing windows. The room is one of two modest workspaces Frecon maintains in a nondescript building in what is left of the garment district in midtown Manhattan. She explains that she has come a long way to become the maker of such large-scale, enigmatic images whose many small and medium-size companions share their rich colors, dynamic-static sense of pictorial space and visual allure.

Born in 1941 in Mexico, Pa., a small community in the southeastern part of the state, Frecon earned an undergraduate degree in fine art from Penn State, where she also focused on art education and French because, as she explains, her parents did not want her “to end up unable to survive, in an artist’s garret.” Still, she recalls, “From the start, I did not want to compromise by going into art education or commercial art; I wanted to be a serious painter.” To realize that goal, she figured, her study of art would have to take her far beyond her routine classroom viewings of slides of works by Renaissance and modern masters, and of such 1950s contemporaries as Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. So, setting off for an undergraduate semester abroad, with a base in Strasbourg, Frecon gained a point of entry to the museums and cathedral towns of Western Europe, where she eagerly sought out the masterpieces she had read about in books. Later, she was a student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for three years.

Of her first-ever encounter, in Venice, with a Cimabue oil painting of the crucifixion, she says, “When I saw the real thing, it overwhelmed me, and I understood right away why it was so important.” She responded to the play of light on its surface, the structure of its composition and its physical presence. Later on, Frecon says, in such paintings she also later recognized affinities with the work of such modern artists as her contemporary David Novros, a maker of irregularly shaped, monochromatic canvases that communicate powerfully through pure color and form.

“I was thrashing around the figure in my painting,” Frecon recalls, “but after I returned to the United States in 1967 and, later, moved to New York, I threw it out.” At the time, minimalism was on the rise. It was championed by such pioneering artist-theoreticians as the critic and sculptor Donald Judd. This new, non-movement movement, Judd wrote in one of his most influential essays, “Specific Objects” (1965), recognized that the “flat and rectangular surface” of conventional painting was “too handy to give up,” and that “[s]ome things” could “be done only on a flat surface.” But, Judd noted, the minimalists enthusiastically embraced the fact that “[t]hree dimensions are real space.” He added, “That gets rid of the problem of illusionism,” and spelled “riddance,” as he put it, to “one of the salient and objectionable relics of European art.” Judd wrote: “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”

Frecon, like some of the artists of her generation whose work she admires—Robert Mangold, a maker of monochromatic, shaped canvases, and the late Fred Sandback, who created sculptural forms using little more than stretched lengths of colored yarn—assimilated some of minimalism’s sensibility and concerns but also mapped out her own aesthetic path. She explains that she has long been as interested in what she calls the “empty space” of a composition as she has been in its “full space.” Ideally, she says, in her work, “I want them to work together.” The space a painting represents as well as the actual space it occupies have long seemed to be key aspects of Frecon’s works. John Davis, the veteran New York dealer who now runs a gallery in Hudson, New York, presented one of Frecon’s first solo shows in the early 1980s, when his gallery was located in Akron, Ohio. “With one huge, 20-foot-long painting and several small ones in my little gallery, Suzan created an environment you couldn’t help becoming immersed in,” Davis recalls. “At that time, she was painting gradations of a strange blue, each section meticulously applied to the canvas. Emotionally, the experience was very moving.”

Frecon speaks about the “structure” of a painting, referring to its shape as an object and to the function that shape fulfills in enclosing or framing an image. She notes that the proportions of her own canvases, even her smallest ones, “are precisely worked out so that they generate a certain relationship” between the elements of a composition. For some time now, she has used the millennia-old mathematical proportion, the Golden Mean, to produce visually satisfying measurements for her canvases. Meanwhile, Frecon labors over each new image she creates, paying close attention to the expressive character of her palette (she never uses black), producing preparatory sketches and even mixing her own oil paints herself. She uses a variety of vividly colored pigments, including iron oxides and ultramarine. “I worked for years to get those shapes just right,” she says, pointing to a small painting in her studio of two dark, blood-red, chubby crescent forms that appear to be riding piggy-back, set against a rich indigo background. Frecon notes that the two shapes are equal in area.

“I look for my structure to hold my art,” she says. “I build a painting—the ground, the format, the size, the relationship between the forms within it that are generated by the outside form. Color is a concept, which I usually think of first.” Speaking generally, Frecon notes that “painting has so much craft and virtuosity” associated with it. With that remark, though, she could be referring more specifically to her own scrupulously hands-on approach, which has resulted in the hard-to-photograph, luminous qualities of her oil-on-canvas works. Light reflects off their surfaces, with their varied sheens, even as it seems to emanate from deep within them. Frecon’s slow, deliberate art-making processes have produced paintings whose solidity belies their evanescent air. Look closely at them, and become lost in the depths of their saturated colors. Look again, and be transported as those same planes of color seem to gently lift away from their moorings.

Frecon’s watercolors, on Indian rag paper, are materially less complex, but with their asymmetrical compositions featuring long, lazy rectangular shapes or circles with their tops or bottoms lopped off and voluptuous, arch-forming curves, they exude some of her paintings’ harmoniously off-kilter vibe. That kind of energy, she says, “is what art gives you; it’s the art in a painting.” It’s the same compelling, unnamable quality Frecon has found in the diagram-like paintings of the early abstractionist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a Swedish mystic and artist, as well as in abstract Tantric painting, a centuries-old tradition in India. However, she has never tried to imitate such art forms. “I look at everything abstractly,” Frecon says, adding that “the story” any artwork refers to, meaning any obvious or suggested narrative content, “gets on my nerves.”

In The Life of Forms (934), a classic treatise about the material and other characteristics of works of art, the French art historian Henri Focillon asked, “These forms that live in space and in matter, do they not live first in the spirit? Or rather, is it not really and even uniquely in the spirit that they live, their external activity being nothing more than the trace of an internal process?” Frecon’s paintings are good examples of the kind of restless, soulful energy that might be seeking to express itself in tangible, visible form. Or maybe they are creations more in the spirit of one of Bram van Velde’s famously confounding pronouncements. Van Velde, a Dutch-born painter associated with Europe’s post-World War II abstract-art tendency known as “art informel,” observed: “What I paint is beyond painting.” Another of his cryptic bons mots: “I paint the impossibility of painting.”

Somewhere in such modernist koans may reside clues to a deeper intellectual appreciation of work like Frecon’s, but as the San Antonio-based dealer Lawrence Markey notes, alluding to her craftsmanship, discipline and avoiding-the-limelight ethos, “What struck me immediately about Suzan’s art was its authenticity. Here was a painter who was steadfastly pursuing art.” (Markey showed Frecon’s work routinely starting in the early 1990s, when his gallery was based in New York. Today, she is represented by David Zwirner in New York.) Given that so much art product today comes from artists who simply send their designs out to be fabricated for them, “the focus and authenticity of Frecon’s practice,” Markey says, inevitably touches those viewers “who take the time to stop and look” at her paintings.

As Frecon herself stated in an interview in the catalogue of an exhibition of her work that was shown at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland in 2008, “I think the nature of oil painting is slow, and I like that slowness, because the larger result of visual art…[is that it] takes you some place you haven’t been before.” She added, “This is what I want in my paintings—this indefinable, suspended feeling.” Perhaps recognizing that the art she had created over nearly five decades was as hard to pin down as those who had long examined it had suggested it was, she recalled that it was Cézanne who had written, more than a century earlier, “Talking about art is almost useless.”

Echoing that thought in her New York studio on an early-spring afternoon, she offers a succinct assessment of her solid-ethereal, singular art. “The reality,” Frecon says decisively, “is the painting itself.”

Gustav Bauernfeind, A Street Scene, Damascus

By Juliet Highet

This article originally appeared in the April issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “The Bridge-Builder”.

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To many in the West, the Orientalist art of the 19th and early 20th centuries is either colonialist kitsch or a charming time capsule of Academic painting. But to Shafik Gabr, an Egyptian tycoon and one of the world’s biggest collectors in the field, Orientalism is a potential bridge-builder between the Middle East and the West, something of real cultural importance, particularly now, with the struggle for democracy in the Arab world reaching the crisis point. Orientalist artworks are also, as we are now realizing, valuable historical documents.

“The Middle East has always been a crossroads between these worlds,” Gabr says, referring to East and West. “We owe the Orientalists a great debt, because although much of what they painted lives on today in our streets and villages, we constantly need to be reminded of the richness and value of our culture. For many years we Arabs did not reconcile ourselves to Orientalism. Now, from those paintings we’re getting to know about our own traditions and are owning them.” Buyers of Orientalist art, many of them Middle Eastern, are aware that it is much more than a repository of pictorial memories, precious as those are. As the region invests in museums, art institutions and art education, Orientalism is increasingly perceived as a valuable part of the region’s heritage.

Gabr disagrees strongly with contemporary critics who see Orientalist art as a symptom or even a cause of colonialism and detect a predatory gaze that misunderstood and demeaned their subjects. “I see Orientalists as early globalists who brought the Arab world to the West and really contributed to mutual understanding,” Gabr says. “Far from colonizing their subjects, these artists actively bridged the Oriental and Occidental worlds.”

He points out that curiosity about the “other” is a two-way street and illustrates the point by citing two paintings in his collection. In Gustav Bauernfeind’s A Street Scene, Damascus, the artist depicted himself trying to sketch but drawing bothersome attention from passersby—even the camel in the foreground is intrigued. In Gyula Tornai’s The Connoisseurs, a group of Arab men are mystified by an Orientalist painting in front of them. The irony today is that it is Middle Eastern art buyers who are particularly knowledgeable about the genre.

Gabr is chairman and managing director of the ARTOC Group for Investment & Development, and his personal fortune was recently estimated at $2.2 billion. He uses his wealth for philanthropic purposes, as well as to expand his Orientalist collection, most of which is hung at his villa in the Mokattam Hills above Cairo. He bought his first Orientalist painting, Ludwig Deutsch’s Egyptian Priest Entering a Temple, in 1993 but was originally drawn to the genre three years before that, while in Europe. “I am a very meticulous person, so I studied it and visited museums and auction houses, window-shopping,” he says. “When I felt I knew something, I bought that Deutsch.” It is no coincidence that his first purchase has a Pharaonic theme. “I am very proud to be Egyptian, and greatly value my country’s contribution to world culture. So I guess it makes sense that I would enjoy art that expresses this heritage.”

His collection—which will be published in May as Masterpieces of Orientalist Art by A.C.R. Edition, Paris—focuses specifically on artists who actually visited the Middle East. “I have shied away from armchair painters, who stayed in the comfort of their own homes, working just from imagination,” he says. Part of the ongoing critique of Orientalism is that certain painters produced works based on fantasy, and that is true of some of the artists, whose works range from the erotically voyeuristic (the notorious “harem” sub-genre) to the downright erroneous. The Gabr collection, however, is long on historic, topographical and ethnic realism. “I only have a few harem scenes,” he says. “I always choose paintings I can relate to, and each must tell a story.”

His harem paintings all evoke sympathetically the tender interaction of leisurely, bored, women behind closed doors. Gustave-Clarence Boulanger’s The Courtyard of the Palace of Dar Khdaouedj El Amia, Algiers captures this intimate connection between the languid, luxuriously dressed women lounging around a pool while little girl dances dreamily, trailing her doll. America’s greatest Orientalist, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, visited Algeria at least three times, and his Preparations for the Wedding delicately captures the ambience of calm before the storm, the bejeweled bride-to-be gazes out at the viewer. This painting also exemplifies a shift toward Impressionism in later Orientalist painters, such as Edouard Verschaffelt, who moved to Algeria, married a local woman and made sympathetic and realistic portraits in an Impressionist style akin to Renoir.

At the other end of the stylistic scale is the Academic master Jean-Léon Gérôme, a meticulous realist. His exquisite Blue Mosque, based on the Rustem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul, depicts variously attired worshippers against a background of shimmering blue Iznik tiles and perfectly rendered Arabic calligraphy. This attention to detail and photographic accuracy is characteristic of the ethnographic approach of the great Orientalist masters, including Deutsch. At a time when black people were not empathetically painted, Deutsch’s series of palace guards are gloriously dignified. The commanding grandeur of The Palace Guard shows Deutsch at the height of his evaluative powers and set Gabr back $1.6 million.

However, while Gabr has deep holdings in Gérôme and Deutsch, he does not limit himself to big names. “I have sometimes bought paintings by unknowns very inexpensively just because they are beautiful and complement my collection,” he says. “Building a collection is like completing a superb puzzle piece by piece.”

“The buying power for Orientalism lies with the Middle East,” says Alexandra McMorrow, director of 19th-century European art at Christie’s London. “There are large amounts of money available particularly from the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia.” Gabr says, “My competition today is formidable—I am in the same market as Gulf sheikhs, the government of Qatar, which is building a museum, as well as buyers from Texas.” Other very active investors include royal families from Morocco to Jordan, the Dahesh Museum in New York and the burgeoning regional museum structure headed up by Abu Dhabi.

Asked whether he buys as an investment, Gabr, a canny entrepreneur as well as connoisseur, replies, “When I started, I never thought of that, but as my collection started to grow, I began to be careful, aware that ridiculous prices can be asked—and obtained. Of course today I do look at it as an investment, but that’s not my purpose in collecting at all. In fact, some deep-pocketed representatives of governments have approached me, but I have no interest in selling. Each painting is like my own child.”

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When Billy Wright, a retired chemical engineer, died in 1994, no one in his family realized there was buried treasure in his house—in the form of 345 comic books from the 1930s and ’40s. In 2006, after the death of Wright’s widow, Ruby, a nephew was cleaning out her basement in Martinsville, Va., and came upon the stash, which his uncle, a meticulous man, had kept in astonishingly good condition.

It soon became apparent that the Wright collection contained most of the high spots of the so-called Golden Age of comic books, including the first appearances of Batman (Detective Comics #27, May 1939, $522,812 in the Heritage sale), Superman (Action Comics #1, June 1938, $298,750) and the Green Lantern (All-American Comics #16, July 1940, $203,150, a record price). A Houston-area relative of Wright’s showed the trove to experts at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, and when the house sold the cream of the collection, 222 comic books, at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion in New York in late February, the total take beat the record for any comics collection by some 50 percent. The Gary Dahlberg Collection, which Heritage started selling incrementally last year, has brought around $2.5 million to date and is almost completely sold. In 2002 the actor Nicolas Cage sold his collection through Heritage, as well, realizing $1.9 million.

Wright was no deep-pocketed collector like Cage; he bought all the books new, as a boy, paying the requisite dime for each. “What’s amazing is how early it starts,” says Barry Sandoval, director of operations for comics at Heritage. “We’ve had great collections that started in 1940 or ’41, but that’s where his ends, for the most part.” Plus, Wright had a good eye. “Even when we’ve gotten great Golden Age collections before,” says Sandoval, “you’ll have the key books that everyone goes gaga over today, and also stuff that people don’t care about that much. Here we were going, ‘Where’s the lamer stuff?’ It was as if Wright had a 2012 price guide when he was buying off the stands back then.”

Dan Flavin, blue trees in wind, 1957

This articles orginally appeared in the April issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Light Years, but Mostly Beyond”.

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Depending on whom you ask, there are two well-known Dan Flavins—one is the American minimalist sculptor who gained art-stardom with his light installations during the last quarter of the 20th century, the other is a Louisiana politician who served as a member of the state House of Representatives from 1996–2005. While admiring the works installed in the opening room of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition “Dan Flavin: Drawings” (through July 1) viewers might wonder whether the Bayou State politician secretly took up sketching as a hobby. The Morgan, and the exhibition’s curator, Isabelle Dervaux, have done their part to thwart any such confusion by installing two light sculptures for museum-goers to behold in all their incandescent glory; untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1a (1978) leans in the corner of the first room, and untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3 (1977) turns the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery on the museum’s first floor pink, yellow, green, and blue. The vast majority of the exhibition, however, is made up of over 100 sketches that span the career of Dan Flavin, the artist. Some are elaborate works in their own right, others are simple character sketches of passersby, while others are diagrams of his light works. On view also are pieces from his private collection of drawings—a multifarious grouping of wispy Hudson River School renderings, Japanese ukiyo-e works and modernist examples by his buddies and contemporaries. Paving the way to a deeper understanding of the artist’s tastes, techniques and talents, the show doesn’t stop at merely revealing a different side of Flavin; it seeks to tell a fuller version of his story.

Flavin, who was born in New York in 1933 and briefly studied for the priesthood in Brooklyn, was trained as a meteorological technician while serving in the Air Force. The exhibition begins after his dispatch in the late ’50s, with drawings in a broad, gestural and almost rambunctious style inspired by Abstract Expressionism. Here a group of watercolors featuring handwritten passages from the Bible and James Joyce’s cycle of poems Chamber Music provides a view into his education and scholarly sense for detail. A timely 1961 watercolor titled to those who suffer in the Congo, which was inspired by the crisis that led to Congolese independence, reveals a socially conscious side of the artist. “These early drawings,” says Dervaux, “show him searching himself, while also looking at other artists who inspired him—Mondrian, Cézanne, Brancusi.”

Between 1961 and 1963, Flavin began to develop his first continuous series of light-related constructions, which he called icons. The name was inspired by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s reference to his abstract art as “the icon of my time.” Flavin fabricated his icons out of painted wooden squares with at least one lamp attached. Though only eight were made, far more sketches of icons were plotted out on paper by the artist—some on 3 x 5 inch notebook pages and others as larger-scale pencil or pastel diagrams. Flavin noted that his icons “differ from a Byzantine Christ held in majesty; they are dumb—anonymous and inglorious…they are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring limited light.” Yet in his personal notes he described icon V (Coran Broadway Flesh), a piece for which he made multiple sketches, as “a perfectly resolved piece—symmetrical square of one color which is totally lighted.” The icons’ portion of the exhibition shows off the artist’s meticulous organization of his work, with notes, numbers and labels accompanying everything and setting the stage for his more elaborate fluorescent light sculptures. The series provides a window into the artist’s mind on the precipice of discovery.

A turn of the corner leads into the many drawings that accompanied Flavin’s light sculptures. Again there are sketches on 3 x 5 in. notebook paper with copious technical notes, but there are also sheets of graph paper labeled “final finished diagrams” that are fleshed out with ink and colored pencil. Here, too, the viewer is offered a deep look into Flavin’s conceptualization, with multiple sketches of the same projects, some made after a sculpture’s completion. It seems that as he began to delve deeper into these installations—the most notable artistic output of his career—he also began to explore different drawing styles. Taking a break from his raucous, Ab-Ex inspired style, a sublime drawing, the diagonal of May 25, 1963, is simply a pristine white line floating on a black page. Similarly, landscapes rendered in pastels, charcoal or pencil are merely a whisper of horizon line or splashy water. Multiple drawings of sailboats, such as sails (1985) and sails (1986) are sudden bursts of movement that seem to just hang in an unseen ocean. There are also caricature-like portraits of friends such as Claes Oldenburg and Donald Judd, as well as of strangers, spangled across the sheets of his many six-ring notebooks (viewers can find them in glass cases), usually captured in ballpoint pen and with as few lines as possible. Of the , Flavin observed, “figures spring and grope through pressed lines and tonal smears.”

Though at times the show portrays Flavin as a serious draftsman and an introspective thinker, his lighter side (no pun intended) is also on display throughout. In a glass case is the text of an unsent 1971 telegram to Richard Koshalek, then curator of the Walker Art Center, where Flavin was planning a show, reading, “RAISE THE DAMNED CEILING RICHARD, OR ELSE YOU ARE CRAMPING MY STYLE. LOVE, FLAV.” Another endearing Flavinism is the constant dedications to other artists and friends in his titles. There are sketches in memory of “Sandy” Calder, Pablo Picasso and Flavin’s father, as well as dedications to Barnett Newman and dealer Ivan Karp.

Flavin’s collection of drawings by other artists also reveals a great deal about his own artistic inclinations. He often sought to collect unfinished drawings or studies, such as the hasty sketches rendered by Mondrian on the wrapper of a pack of cigarettes. After his move to Cold Spring, N.Y., in the Hudson River Valley, in 1965, he became attracted to sketches by Hudson River Schoolers, including John Frederick Kensett’s Catskill Mt. (1849) and Aaron Draper Shattuck’s The Narrows, Lake George (1858). Drawings by contemporaries such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd he most likely acquired through exchange. Also on view are some of Flavin’s works by Japanese artists including Hiroshige, Hokusai and Kuniyoshi. Dervaux says these drawings especially resonated with Flavin because they “expressed so much with just a few lines.” A quality that Flavin is famous for.

Herb Ritts, Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage, 1990

This article originally appeared in the April issue of Art & Antiques Magazine as “Ready for His Close-Up”.

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You can argue whether Herb Ritts’ Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Naomi, Tatjana, Hollywood (1989) belongs in a leading American museum, but there’s little point to the exercise—the black-and-white photograph that captures a quintet of nude supermodels has already graced the walls of two. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston showcased the picture in the notorious and successful 1996 exhibition Herb Ritts: Work, and the image appears at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, which opens there this month. The Getty is the second major U.S. museum to devote a solo show to Ritts, a Los Angeles native who shot album covers for Madonna, celebrity portraits for Vanity Fair, fashion layouts, music videos, commercials, and sensitive depictions of tribal Africans before he died in 2002 at the age of 50. But it makes explicit an idea that was implicit in the Boston show, and implicit in Ritts’ short but spectacular career: The line that separates fine-art photography and commercial art photography is not just irrelevant, it’s an illusion.

Ritts’ nudes, fashion photographs and celebrity portraits receive attention in the exhibit at the Getty, but curator Paul Martineau acknowledges that some images suit more than one category. Stephanie… technically fits all three, but Martineau placed it among the nudes. It’s one of Ritts’s most famous photographs, occupying the first through fourth places in his top 10 best sellers at auction. He took it in 1989, before the peak of the supermodel era, and it gathers many of the women who dominated it: Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz. The picture is a good representative of Ritts’ work in that it looks almost effortlessly beautiful and doesn’t hint at the toil and finesse required to produce it.

Martineau notes that Ritts included in the composition of Stephanie… a subtle reference to one of his photographic forbears: The twined limbs of Tatjana and Naomi recall the pose of a 1936 Edward Weston nude of Charis Wilson. “This is one of the great things that Herb was able to do,” says Martineau. “He had an amazing visual memory, and he was able to incorporate influences of people he respected into his work without making it seem like he was copying. To be able to do that and create a style that is distinctly one’s own is extraordinary.”

The starkest statement in the Getty Ritts show comes in a section that Martineau packed with images of athletes and dancers and dubbed “Art and Commerce.” “I talk about the history of the bias against commercial photography,” he says, “and the people who came before him who address that, and how Ritts didn’t make a distinction between the two things—he approached all his work with the same level of intelligence and creativity. I pose a question and ask people if they can tell the difference between the photographs that were created for his personal projects or for commercial commissioned work.”

While Martineau asks the question in the context of the “Art and Commerce” display, he says it can apply to the entire show. Stephanie… is a case in point. Ritts had been assigned to shoot four models for a May 1989 Rolling Stone swimwear story. One of them—it’s unclear who—mentioned that Christy Turlington was in L.A. that day, and maybe they should call her and ask if she could join them. Turlington said yes, and Ritts arranged the five and fired away. So, not only did he possess the ability to make the world’s leading supermodels comfortable enough to strip naked, cram themselves into the narrow patio hallway of his Hollywood home, relax, and hug each other like sisters rather than the rivals they were—they liked him enough to tell him that another rival happened to be in town and suggest that he include her in the frame, too.

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style is only the latest example of how the fine art photography–commercial art photography divide is fading. Fashion photography, a category of images that is inherently commercial, is gaining respect from curators, dealers and collectors. At a Christie’s Paris sale in November 2010, an oversize print of Richard Avedon’s 1955 classic Dovima with Elephants became the first fashion photograph to break the million-dollar mark at auction, and last year, the Gagosian gallery—the global behemoth whose stable includes contemporary superstars Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Takashi Murakami, to name a few—began representing the Avedon estate. (It had previously been with the venerable Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, a photography specialist.) Last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston hosted a show based on three books by the late fashion photographer Helmut Newton: White Women, Sleepless Nights, and Big Nudes. British photographer Cecil Beaton, who captured the fashions and faces of the early to mid-20th century, was honored with an exhibit at The Museum of the City of New-York that closed in February. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum intends to mount a Horst P. Horst show after 2013.

Rising interest in fashion photography has brought fresh attention to artists who otherwise might have remained obscure. The death of Harper’s Bazaar stalwart Lillian Bassman at age 94 on February 13 might not have made as many headlines if the hundred-odd 1950s-era black and white negatives that she ruefully tucked into garbage bags and hid in her Manhattan home had lain undiscovered. Fashion photography historian Martin Harrison visited her in the early 1990s and located the stash, an act that snowballed into a late-in-life career revival for Bassman. She accepted commissions from the New York Times and German Vogue and embarked on what she called “reinterpretations” of her vintage photographs, working closely with a darkroom technician to release a total of 100 of her pictures in editions of 25.

The discovery also led her to Peter Fetterman, a Santa Monica, Calif., gallery owner who offers Cartier-Bresson, Horst, and Hoyningen-Huene and who fell under the spell of the Bassmans shown in Harrison’s 1991 book, Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945. “I saw her images and was totally seduced by her—her as a person and her work,” says Fetterman. He was readying a new Bassman show that emphasized lingerie when he received word of her passing. While he says he might change the name of the show, he does not expect to alter its content.

Like Bassman, Ritts was heavily involved with the production of his limited editions, which number more than 500 and were typically issued in series of 25 plus three artist’s proofs. Though half his lifetime output is in color, anyone who attends the Getty exhibit, views the catalogue of the MFA show, or visits the galleries that offer him will encounter only black-and-white images. Ritts was an ardent photography collector who cared deeply about the quality of prints of his work, and chose to stick to black and white out of dissatisfaction with the available color processing techniques. After he died, his foundation decided it would not issue posthumous editions and thereby ensured that his color images would never appear for sale.

Ritts began his professional career in the late 1970s. Like many of his predecessors, he was self-taught, but for him, the divide between commercial art and fine art simply didn’t exist. His ability to stride forward, indifferent to a debate that had simmered for decades, owes much to when, where, and how he grew up. Ritts was the son of a prosperous and privileged Los Angeles family who lived next door to actor Steve McQueen at the height of his fame. Ritts somehow achieved the near-miraculous feat of living at the epicenter of the film industry and working with its hottest stars without turning catty or cynical.

“In all my years with him, I never heard him even once whisper something that could be considered negative or cross. He was a complete optimist,” says Mark McKenna, who joined Ritts as a photographic assistant in 1989, stayed with Ritts until the AIDS-weakened artist succumbed to complications of pneumonia, and now leads the Herb Ritts Foundation. “No matter what he was doing, he liked to find this glint of beauty in everything he saw.”

His relentless embrace of beauty provides fodder for his critics, who relished picking apart the MFA show. After dismissing Herb Ritts: Work as “a collection of beautiful faces and perfect figures flaunting themselves,” and Ritts’ oeuvre as “all fun, all style and little substance, slick and seductive,” in her October 1996 Boston Globe review, Christine Temin couldn’t resist returning two months later, once the show was a confirmed blockbuster, to pen a disapproving article titled The Malling of the MFA.

MFA director Malcolm Rogers, for his part, has no regrets. “Wherever I go, people come up to me at parties and thank me for two things,” he says. “One is opening the Huntington Avenue entrance of the museum [which had been closed due to budget cuts], and the other is the Herb Ritts exhibition. They were both very festive, welcoming things to do in totally different ways—open the doors, and open people’s perceptions to a world of photography that previously perhaps hadn’t been featured in museums, but which was delightful.” The final attendance number exceeded 250,000.

Martineau shouldn’t face anything like the opprobrium that Rogers did, and not just because he’s shrewdly paired the Getty’s Ritts exhibit with Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity, a historic centuries-spanning survey of celebrity portraiture that draws on the museum’s archives and starts and ends on the same days as Herb Ritts: L.A. Style. Things really have changed in the last decade and a half. In 2011, Edwynn Houk Gallery became the New York representative of the Ritts estate and marked the acquisition with a retrospective of the photographer’s work. College age admirers of the MFA exhibition were prosperous young collectors by the time of the Houk show and helped make it one of the gallery’s top 10 best-sellers by volume.

Houk avers that prior to 2011, he might not have admitted Ritts to his stable. “For a long time, there’s been prejudice against work done on commission. It extended to reportage, fashion, and portraits. Over time, it has broken down,” he says, adding, “There’s been obviously more respect for people who have done creative work for the printed page. Collectors and museums respond more nowadays.”

He credits contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, who relies on photography, for speeding the erosion of the barrier. The first photograph to break the million-dollar threshold at auction was Richard Prince’s 1989 image Untitled (Cowboy), which fetched $1.2 million at Christie’s New York in November 2005. Since then, Prince, Andreas Gursky, and Sherman have all set fresh benchmarks for photographs at auction. Gursky’s Rhein II sold for $4.3 million last November at Christie’s New York, snatching “most expensive photograph at auction” honors from Sherman’s Untitled #96 from 1981, which had earned $3.9 million at the same venue six months earlier. Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) now ranks 11th on the all-time most expensive photographs at auction list, just ahead of Avedon’s Dovima. “It’s ironic, really,” says Houk, “that there was this great historical body of fashion photography that was not universally accepted until contemporary artists started changing the perception of what photographers were.”

Though celebrity portraits comprise only part of Ritts’s work, the media often reduces him to that particular aspect. In its initial Internet breaking news piece on the Herb Ritts Foundation’s 2007 gift of $2.5 million to the MFA for a photography gallery that would bear Ritts’s name, the Boston Globe staffer still called him a “celebrity photographer.” Moreover, Ritts is hardly the first prominent photographer to shoot A-List Hollywood stars for Vanity Fair. No less a photographic god than Edward Steichen accepted commissions from Condé Nast. His iconic 1924 portrait of the actress Gloria Swanson veiled in black lace appears in the Getty’s Portraits of Renown exhibit. Steichen is also credited with doing the first significant fashion shoot in 1911, when the French magazine Art et Décoration asked him to showcase dresses by the designer Paul Poiret. (Sadly, neither negatives nor high-quality prints survive.) Incidentally, Steichen holds fourth place on the ‘most expensive’ list, earned when his 1904 image, The Pond-Moonlight sold for $2.9 million at Sotheby’s New York in February 2006, making it the record-holder at that time.

David Fahey, of the Fahey/Klein gallery in Los Angeles (which, in addition to Ritts, handles photographs by Avedon, Horst, Irving Penn, George Hoyningen-Huene, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Man Ray, Bruce Weber, and Helmut Newton), had the unique pleasure of meeting Ritts as a photograph collector in the late 1970s before hanging his black-and-whites on the gallery walls in the mid-1980s. “Ritts was a master of capturing people in their pop culture moment,” Fahey says. “He didn’t just take pictures of Madonna, he took the picture of Madonna. If you think of Madonna, you think of that True Blue cover.”

There will always be some who insist on dismissing Ritts as fluff. But as time passes, it becomes clearer that Ritts had a talent that few can match: His best images please the eye without sliding out of the mind. “The proof is in the fact that there are so many pictures that Herb did that are impossible to forget,” says Martineau. “You see Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage and you will never forget that picture. It’s so fantastic.”