La Bella Principessa

Last night I watched the PBS special La Bella Princepessa on a drawing some experts believe to be a Leonardo da Vinci. A beautifully executed portrait, the pen-and-chalk drawing on vellum, features lovely rosy and golden tones. One of the highlight’s of the TV program was watching a contemporary artist recreate it using authentic materials. She began with a vellum calf-hide, which she cut to size before sketching in the figure. It was trial and error to get the colored chalk to adhere to the vellum and she eventually resorted to using her fingertips to rub it on. Interestingly, there is a partial fingerprint on the drawing, Leonardo left prints on other works, which not only supports the likelihood of finding one here, but also provides an example of the real McCoy for comparison. In the end, the print from the drawing wasn’t extensive enough and the results were inconclusive.

The drawing’s story is the kind that galvanizes the art world. Purchased for a relative pittance ($21,850) in 1998 by New York dealer, Kate Ganz (who held on to the painting for ten years) it was eventually bought by Canadian collector, Peter Silverman who suspected it might be a Leonardo and sent an image of it to eminent Leonardo scholar, Martin Kemp.

Kemp noted "uncanny vitality" in the work and says, "I experienced a kind of frisson, a feeling that this is not normal." The vellum had been carbon-dated c. 1440-c. 1650, which was within the range of Leonardo’s dates. Intrigued, Kemp embarked on his own investigation using high-resolution multispectral scans. Studying the drawing in extraordinary detail, the evidence began to mount up. Kemp discovered many areas that seemed to confirm that it was a Leonardo, most notably that the artist of the drawing was (very unusually) left-handed like the master himself. Other aspects include: the precise lines and adept modulation of colors and the enigmatic expression that is reminiscent of Leonardo’s other muses: Mona, Anne, Genevra. Lastly, the sitter’s headdress belongs to the Milanese court of the 1490s where Leonardo was.

Because there are stitch marks on the edge of the portrait and vellum was used for books, Kemp theorized that the portrait came from a book that may have commemorated a royal marriage. (This might also explain why hidden within the pages of a book it remained unknown for so long.) Armed with this clue, further research led him to theorize the sitter was Bianca Sforza (Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (c. 1455–c. 1508) painted a strikingly similar portrait, right down to the hair net, that's positively identified as Bianca), the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, who married Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1496. Her husband was not only commander of the Milanese troops, but most tantalizing, a patron of Leonardo's. Sadly Bianca, who was probably only 14, died just a few months after her wedding.

All this is very compelling, but there are experts who are not convinced that the portrait is by Leonardo and it was excluded from the blockbuster show now on view at the National Gallery in London. I have to say that while I think it is a gorgeous drawing by a consummate artist, it doesn’t look like a Leonardo to me. Now, I am no Leonardo expert, but his women are distinctly odd looking (it would be interesting to have a forensic facial reconstruction artist translate their features into “living” people to get a sense of odd they really are) and tend to look alike, probably because he used the same model. There are a couple of exceptions: The Lady with an Ermine (who kind of resembles Bianca) and his Portrait of an Unknown Woman aka La Belle Ferroniere. But even these have a stylized, almost archaic quality to their features. Not so the drawing, which not only looks like a real person, but possesses an ideal of female beauty that seems distinctly different from Leonardo’s. While there were contemporary artists who did paint beauties that look like actual people—Botticelli springs to mind—Bianca looks too pretty for Leonardo and too fleshed out, if you will, for the period. She’s more like a pre-Raphaelite glammed-up take on the Renaissance (though I’m not suggesting the drawing is from that era). Or I'll put it this way, if you asked Gustav Klimt to paint a by-the-book Renaissance portrait of a young girl, I think you'd end up with something like this.

It’s possible she was done by some other Renaissance artist or else is the product of an incredibly skilled forger. The multi-pronged expertise required to pull this off would be incredible, but with a potential $100 million payout it’s not completely inconceivable. While the evidence that points to Leonardo is manifold, for me it’s how something looks, it’s the ultimate test and all the facts in the world can’t take away from this. Just sayin’.

53rd Street Gem

The eminent architect W. G. Clark has called the American Folk Art Museum building the most beautiful in New York. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects it was completed in 2001.

Sheathed in bronze, the eight-level sliver of a building more than holds its own against the black glass behemoth to its right. On this block of megaliths, the human scale of the AMFA building offers a welcome visual respite. Its clifflike surface, which is pockmarked and mottled and looks both ancient and modern, presents a dynamic pattern of intersecting planes. A clever use of recessing creates a strong line bisecting the façade that culminates in a dramatic slanted V at the top, which expresses upward and downward movement simultaneously. All this dynamism adds lightness to a material that has a pronounced brooding intensity. Strips of glass on either side provide interior light without compromising the sculptural integrity of the façade.

Built by an overly ambitious board at a reputed cost of $32 million, the 30,000-square-foot building, beautiful though it may be, spelled trouble for the museum from the beginning. After years of struggle the institution finally threw in the towel, recently unloading the building to its next-door neighbor, MoMA, and retreating to its former home at 2 Lincoln Square where it pays $1 a year in rent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Talk about a comeuppance.

Rumors abound that the AMFA building will be razed. Adding fuel to the fire is its location: right smack in the middle of MoMA and an empty lot where a proposed Jean Nouvel high-rise, offering condos as well as galleries for MoMA, is slated to go. But MoMA claims that it intends to use the AMFA building as gallery space. One hopes in its Yoshio Taniguchi-induced fog that it does. Designed specifically to exhibit art and a seminal example of Contemporary architecture to boot, it would make a most fitting location for MoMA’s architecture and design collections and a delightful palate cleanser amid a sea of glass.

Philip Johnson's Glass House

(This article first appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of Artillery magazine.)

Philip Johnson’s Glass House, completed in 1949, is one of my all-time favorite buildings. Never mind that Johnson borrowed heavily from Mies van der Rohe, or that he also designed a number of notable eyesores in New York City: the false-fronted 1001 Fifth Avenue, the Chippendale-crowned, post modern AT&T headquarters (now Sony Plaza) and the pink marble “Lipstick” building—infamous these days as the onetime home to Bernie Madoff’s offices. On the plus side, Johnson also designed the sublime Rockefeller guesthouse and the almost perfect, original MoMA addition and sculpture garden; projects that are more in keeping with the aesthetics of his New Canaan, Connecticut masterpiece.

A sublime structure in a sublime setting, the Glass House is both rich and modest. Built for one, it’s the chicest monastic cell you will ever come across. The design is simplicity itself, composed of a rectangle bisected by a central cylinder that encloses the bathroom and provides housing for the all-important hearth. Aside from glass, brick is the predominant material; used to form the cylinder and to compose the striking herringbone floor, it’s also visible through the windows at the Glass House’s pendant structure, the Brick House. There’s a freestanding galley kitchen that when not in use, is hidden under hinged, wooden panels. Concealed behind a built-in cabinet is the acetic bedroom with the bed, and off to one side, a desk, where Johnson wasn’t ever able to work because he found the view so distracting. (He would eventually build a separate more enclosed structure for his study.) His favorite perch was at the dining room table facing north, from which vantage point, he could admire what he called his “very expensive wallpaper.” The Barcelona chairs, ottomans and récamier, elegant, restrained, sculptural, suit the setting perfectly.

A sizeable Elie Nadelman sculpture, Two Circus Women anchors the south end of the house, helping to define the space. The only other piece of art in the house is a large painting attributed to Poussin that’s mounted on a handsome Johnson-designed stand, a necessity given the glazed walls, but a design solution that turns the painting into an object as opposed to flat, wall decoration. Johnson bought the 17^th century work at the urging of his mentor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of MoMA. It’s an unexpected choice, but it works well in the space, its earthy palette echoes the dark bricks and landscape just outside the glass walls. At certain times of the year when nature’s colors synch with it, the flow between the two must be seamless. The painting depicts the burial of Athenian statesman, Phocian, sentenced to death for treachery and buried in disgrace outside the city walls. As my guide pointed out, the subject may have had particular resonance for Johnson, whose youthful flirtation with Nazism left him feeling ostracized. I kept thinking of its elegiac theme as I wandered through the grounds of what is in essence a memorial park, with 14 (mostly Johnson-designed) folly-like structures that call to mind 19^th century mausoleums dotting the 47-acre estate.

Johnson viewed the Glass House as one wing of a larger edifice that included the Brick House as its opposing wing diagonally across the “courtyard” of open lawn. The “doorway” was where the paths from the parking area begin; the gravel lining them, which crunches when you step on it, the “doorbell.” Near the entrance, a large, rather blah Donald Judd circle is balanced by the swimming pool on the far side of the courtyard. The pool, round with a rectangular plinth for sunning/diving cutting across it at one end, is a Suprematist painting made three-dimensional.

Though it mirrors the Glass House in length and shape, the Brick House is its polar opposite. Complete exposure is replaced by almost total concealment. The Brick House contained amenities impossible in the Glass House, including the mechanical components of both buildings, storage and privacy. Johnson referred to the Brick House bedroom as the “sex room” (he enjoyed being titillating) and it certainly has the aura of a seraglio. The familiar arch and column motif seen repeated in many of Johnson’s designs, lends a middle-eastern flavor to the room. Fabric panels ensure that the outside world is sealed off. Despite the fact that they’re Fortuny and the room itself is appointed simply, there’s something undeniably Liberace about it. Originally, the Glass House was Johnson’s weekend retreat with the Brick House at the ready when he desired more privacy or if the weather was too hot or cold, eventually Johnson lived there full-time, and fittingly would die there in 2005.

Behind the Glass House the land falls away to a pond, which boasts a “floating” pavilion that Johnson designed in 1962. It’s primarily an ornamental feature adding interest to the view, but Johnson also used it as a picnic venue. Inspired by the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain, the pavilion references its famous arches and columns that seem to go on and on, using Johnson’s attenuating spin. A Mannerist folly, the structure is much smaller than it appears and is placed slightly away from the shore, so that you must step across a couple of feet of water to get to it. Johnson enjoyed the concept of “safe danger” and orchestrated encounters with it in other areas of the property, most notably the rail-less footbridge that crosses a creek. Above the pond is the Cubist tower Johnson constructed in honor of his best friend, Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the New York City Ballet.

In 1965 Johnson completed the underground painting gallery modeled on the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae. His partner, David Whitney, was a curator and serious collector and given the constraints of the Glass House it became necessary to build a structure that could contain their growing collection of large, statement paintings, Warhol, Salle, Schnabel, Rauschenberg and Stella. Johnson devised a nifty series of three circular tracks with movable panels, allowing 42 paintings to be moved around easily for display. While the building worked for two-dimensional artwork, it functioned less well for three-dimensional pieces and so in 1970 Johnson built the Greek village-inspired, sculpture gallery. He devised a mechanical glass roof intended to open up like a gull-winged car to create the illusion of being outside. The roof proved problematic not only because the mechanics failed, but on sunny days its tubular supports cast prominent shadows that are distracting and compromise one’s experience of the sculptures.

Johnson referred to the small building built in 1980 that houses his library and study as an “event” on the landscape. Like something in a Precisionist painting, its vernacular is vaguely industrial, vaguely agricultural. In either case, the design connotes work. And it was here that Johnson could sequester himself to read, think and produce, surrounded by his books and the tools of his trade. The building was originally white stucco, but after Johnson built his final structure, Da Monsta, nearby, which he painted a dramatic red and black, he decided (using the advice of color consultants) to change the Library/Study to a more simpatico and, to my eye, safer bronze that Johnson referred to as an “emotion,” not color.

Four years later, Johnson built the Ghost House behind the Library/Study on the foundation of an old barn. Constructed of chain-link fencing and featuring a broken façade, the structure was influenced by Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. Though the “house” is but a folly, Johnson has succeeded in finally uniting inside and outside. Vines are allowed to grow up within the Ghost House before they are periodically cleared out, creating dramatically different effects depending on the season.

Johnson’s final structure built in 1995 was his most experimental. Based on a Frank Stella design for a Dresden museum, it’s both sculpture and structure, a tour de force made of modified gunnite shot onto a pliable wire mesh superstructure creating dramatic angled walls and graceful curves. For Johnson, it was almost a living thing and he coyly christened it: “Da Monsta.” He considered it his apogee, though in fact he’d reached that 46 years earlier. While I like aspects of Da Monsta, most notably its shape, I’m not wild about its fun house apertures. I kept wondering what Da Monsta would have been like if Johnson had taken Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-de-Haut as a reference point and painted it white to conform to the then white library/study rather than introducing a new color and painting the earlier building to conform to it

Johnson loved nature and the Glass House allowed him to live in it sheltered within a transparent box. He liked to refer to himself as a landscape architect and his treatment of the land is masterful. Composed of gently sloping meadows and woods, it looks natural but has been planted and pruned to Johnson’s exacting standards, creating handsome woodland vistas and interesting juxtapositions of plants. Like a director tinkering with a stage set, Johnson was hands-on, sometimes supervising distant landscaping projects using a bullhorn.

Insecure, prone to depression and sometimes difficult, Johnson was also wealthy in his own right, bien élevé and could “talk the talk.” Though the money may have trammeled his creativity, his polish guaranteed his position as society darling despite the fact he produced a number of mediocre, even ugly buildings. In this respect, he’s always reminded me of Ayn Rand’s Peter Keating. But at least Johnson admitted he was an emulator and gave credit to the architects he referenced.

Johnson’s work didn’t so much evolve as vacillate from one extreme to another. Above all, he seemed to be a pushover for whimsy, which did his work no favors, dating it rather quickly. Yet, when he was able to reign in that inclination, his work soared. The retrained elegance of the Glass House is so timeless it could have been built just yesterday. It must have bedeviled Johnson to have attained such perfection so early in his career never to reach such heights again. But he remained passionate about architecture, freely indulging it at his New Canaan “hameau du roi.” In the process, he created an iconic monument to his vision. One must admire his willingness to experiment and his incredible zeal for what was both avocation and vocation.

Sisters of Mercy

A couple of years ago at a friend’s house, I spied a sepia photograph of a bride on her wall. From the 1920s, it was very elegant; the bride wore a stylish dress and elaborate veil and was holding a large bouquet of flowers. It looked like an ordinary, if rather grand, professional wedding portrait and so I was taken aback when my friend told me it was a photograph of her great-aunt dressed for her final vows to become a nun. Now I had heard of the whole Bride of Christ notion, but I didn’t realize such extraordinary lengths were gone to with wedding portraits and tulle and such (the distinctly bridal First Communion get-ups I used to see in my New York neighborhood, notwithstanding). If I thought about it at all, I would have envisioned a simple white dress and veil.

I was convinced that if this family had such a portrait, others must exist and thought what an amazing collection it would make if one could assemble them. The exhibition and book possibilities made my mouth water. All these women…what were they thinking as they sat in their finery contemplating their futures? It seems incredibly poignant and I’m sure the photographs would reveal a rich mine of human emotion. Of course, trying to locate any photos has proved to be a challenge. Searches on the Internet have come up empty and I haven't even bothered with the Catholic Church knowing they wouldn’t be inclined to provide any assistance.

In recent years it seems the church has toned the fuss accompanying the ceremonies down considerably. But you can see how making such a to-do had been a brilliant move on its part, playing on every girl’s fascination with weddings. That a wedding (and most important, a dress) was still in the cards made becoming a nun so much more appealing and the bitter pill of entering a convent so much easier to swallow for everyone involved. It also helped secure the involvement of wealthy girls whom the church was known to target, since they’d have to sign over their inheritance. Members of this group and their families, in particular, were accustomed to marking life’s milestones with extravagant displays. The dress and ceremony would satisfy this requirement and the photograph would provide a lasting memento of the daughter who, in many cases, the family would never see again.

I still have hopes of finding a treasure trove of these portraits in the archives of some old photography studio. I would love to shine a light on them again for all to see.

Pick Up Sticks

Jonathan Brilliant’s an artist after my own heart, elevating ordinary, everyday humble objects into the realm of the sublime. His Stick Stack Show is currently on view at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, Virginia where Brilliant is 2011 Artist in Residence. The show is an offshoot of the Have Sticks Will Travel World Tour that began in 2009 eventually expanding into a series of site-specific installations recreated over an 18-month period in 13 different galleries. The current iteration in Richmond took two weeks for the artist to install.

Composed of items (stirrers, cup sleeves and lids, etc.) readily available at what Brilliant refers to as “his natural environment,” namely the corner coffee shop, he transforms them into wondrous sculptures. I particularly loved the monumental, The Richmond Piece, an undulating wall of 70,000 interwoven wooden coffee stirrers held together by tension and compression alone. It has a pleasing organic quality thanks to the material and amorphous shape. Well lit, it casts dramatic, twiggy shadows that extend the piece well beyond its physical borders, creating a negative image that splashes against the wall and floor.

I also loved Brilliant’s works on paper, which are elegant and retrained. The stir stick impressions are fresh and serendipitous and the lithograph, The GR Haze and laser cut, 18 Rabbit were just plain beautiful.

Brilliant may be making a comment on the caffeinated culture we live in, but I like to think he’s just working with the materials at hand. Certainly, the labor-intense, almost OCD nature of the work suggests a practice that is caffeine fueled, or at the very least Brilliant is tipping his hat to the jag and jolt that’s found within a cup o’ joe.

White as Wool...

I love it when you stumble upon an artwork by someone you’ve never heard of before that just blows your socks off. A couple of weeks ago this happened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts when I came across Tristin Lowe’s incredible life-sized whale sculpture, Mocha Dick. 52 feet long and constructed of creamy industrial felt, the sculpture features an inflated interior frame, which imparts a lifelike tautness to the form, suggesting skin covering flesh and bone. A venerable beast, this whale is battle-scared from a life spent roaming unfriendly seas and features clusters of finely detailed, appliqué barnacles across its surface and two soulful eyes that gaze out from within puckered lids. It's a work of real power that conveys both awe and empathy for the animal.

I liked the yin and yang dialogue between the exceedingly realistic details and the medium, which is pure artifice with its exposed stitches and zippers crisscrossing the wooly surface. The piece took six-months to create in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and involved a team of technicians and apprentices overseen by Lowe.

Exhibited alongside the sculpture are a whale oil lamp, a Robert Salmon painting of whaling ships in a harbor and a Rockwell Kent of a sailor on a ship’s rigging, I gather they are present to anchor the piece within the whaling narrative, but they seemed anemic—completely de trop, in fact—against the backdrop of such a show stopper.

At first I thought Mocha Dick was the artist’s play on Moby Dick, but I read in the exhibition dialectic that Mocha Dick was a real albino sperm whale that inhabited the waters off Mocha Island in the South Pacific. Mocha Dick was legendary, reputedly having attacked 20 whaling vessels. He was described in Knickerbocker magazine in 1839 as “white as wool . . . as white as a snow drift . . . white as the surf around him.” The account appeared in the magazine again in 1846, five years before Moby-Dick was published and while it's widely accepted that Melville was inspired by the events surrounding the sinking of the ship, Essex by a whale, given the similarity in Mocha Dick's name and the fact he was also albino, it’s clear he played a part in Melville’s inspiration.

Lowe acknowledges a longtime fascination with both Moby-Dick and maritime history, but he says the work's also about something more: “This project was like the story of Moby-Dick—embarking on a journey, transfixed by the call of the sea. It is not about Ahab’s quest for revenge, and not even about the whale itself, but more about Ishmael’s search for the unattainable.” 



Park Avenue Haversham

For a number of years my mother was president of the Chapin-Brearley Exchange, the wonderful now-defunct consignment shop that benefited the scholarship funds of those two New York City girls’ schools. The Exchange originated as a swap meet of sorts for school uniforms, morphing over the years to include party dresses and sporting equipage, and eventually women’s, men’s and boys’ clothing. Drawing from a pool of crème de la crème New York closets, including, after her daughter, Caroline, started going to Brearley, Jackie O’s, the Exchange was a treasure-trove of incredible finds. 

Years before Patricia Field was dressing Sarah Jessica Parker in vintage, my sister and I, on our limited allowances, were combing the Exchange’s racks for bits of finery with which to adorn ourselves. You never knew what you’d find there and it was the source of many divine articles of clothing that are still in my closet 35 years later: a beautiful gold silk 1940’s kimono jacket that looked like it could have been worn by Katharine Hepburn, a pair of sealskin Lapland boots with turned up toes and an ivory bangle carved from (I’m sorry to say) an elephant tusk, to name just three. What I liked best were the things that seemed to have been picked up on a whim during someone’s far-flung travels, only to be jettisoned later on when they returned to their homes...and reality.

The Exchange set the stage for one of the most unusual New York stories I know. The year must have been 1969 because my sister was still at home (she graduated from Brearley in 1970). My mother had received a call from the lawyer of an alumna—I forget from which school—who’d recently died and had left all her personal effects to the Exchange. There was such a quantity of belongings, and I suspect, in addition to space constraints, my mother feared the potential feeding frenzy that might occur among the Exchange volunteers when confronted with such booty, she had everything brought to our house for sorting and pricing. 

This is how our living room came to be transformed temporarily into Ali Baba’s cave. There were boxes and boxes of unopened Caron perfume, silk scarves, Indian saris, beaded evening bags and cashmere twin sets, most of them never worn and in their original wrapping. In addition to these items, there were several exotic robes, including a magnificent Chinese brocade tunic. It was a special piece and my mother arranged for a curator from the Metropolitan Museum to examine it. He was bowled over by the beauty of the thing, noting that the number of digits (eight I think?) in the claws of the dragons featured in the design signified the rank of emperor. (The robe was donated to the museum on behalf of the estate.)

Though this was all very exciting to a 12-year old girl, the really interesting part occurred before the things arrived at our house. My mother had met the woman’s lawyer at her apartment on Fifth Avenue to see what was what. After they finished, the lawyer explained to my mother that his client had another apartment that might contain additional items. 

The second one, which she’d used as her office, was a few blocks away on Park Avenue. Upon entering the apartment, it appeared to consist of only one study-like room with desks for her and her secretary. But the lawyer opened a jib door in the wall to reveal the rest of the apartment, which had been closed off for over forty years. 

It clearly had once been a very elegant space, but was now completely derelict. My mother described how the paint was hanging in sheets off the walls and sun-bleached draperies in tatters. The windows were filthy and everything was covered in a film of dust including the breakfast dishes still on the table. In the bedroom closet, beaded flapper gowns, probably Chanel and Lanvin, hung in shreds, and in the bathroom and kitchen was evidence of long ago quotidian life suddenly interrupted. To say my mother was floored, is not an exaggeration. On an ordinary day in the middle of New York, she’d run up against a real-life, 20^th century Mrs. Haversham.

As it turned out, the woman’s husband had had a heart attack while they were having breakfast sometime in the 1920s. Devastated, she’d walked away, shutting the door on apartment and her life there, only to return once it had been altered into her office space. All these years later I am still astounded by the person who would make such an extravagant gesture in terms of grief and wealth, holding onto that valuable piece of real estate for all those years. 

I wonder if it worked. Wouldn’t being in the same city/neighborhood/building, have been only less painful by a matter of degrees than in the apartment itself. Of course, I have no way of knowing the particulars. She may well have left New York for a period of time and returned after the pain was somewhat less. But all that aside, the story stands as an amazing tale in the annals of New York (and beyond) and it always makes me wonder at all the other stories that might be out there.