Supreme Fiction

'Brother, Who Art Thou?'

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 29, 2008

Brother, Who Art Thou?
By JAMES PANERO

A review of 'APPLES AND ORANGES: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found,' by Marie Brenner. (Illustrated. 268 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.)

If Marie Brenner and her brother, Carl, can learn to love each other, there might be hope for our divided America after all. She’s a hot-shot writer at large for Vanity Fair, an investigative journalist known for taking down corporations; her exposé of the tobacco industry became the 1999 movie “The Insider.” He is an apple farmer in Washington State with the N.R.A. sticker on his truck who complains about his sister’s “A.C.L.U. friends in New York.” Illness turns out to be this family’s cure. Carl is discovered to have cancer, and Marie flies to apple country to try to save him.

In less capable hands, a memoir of such reconciliation might become a tired on-the-road travelogue or, worse, a bedside tear-jerker. But in “Apples and Oranges,” Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate.

“Our relationship is like tangled fishing line. We are defined by each other and against each other, a red state and a blue state, yin and yang.” The history of sibling warfare between these Brenners goes back to childhood. When she was 3, Carl pushed Marie out a window, sending her to the hospital. In high school, Carl filled his room with “manuals of alleged Communists published by the John Birch Society” while Marie played Joan Baez records. One day Marie came home to find the records smashed. “She’s a subversive,” Carl told her. “I have it right here on my list.”

“Is anything in life an accident?” Marie asks. They both came from the same secular Jewish household, heirs to a chain of Texas discount stores called Solo Serve. So how could she become a liberal journalist in New York while her brother turned out to be a Bush-loving, Wagner-listening, evangelical “right-wing nut” growing apples on the other coast?

Marie Brenner brings the same journalistic arsenal to this question that she would normally reserve for an investigation of Big Tobacco. When her brother gets sick, research becomes her coping mechanism. “I am treating my brother as if he is a source,” she writes, “someone I have been assigned to interview.”

Brenner looks for answers in the relatively new science of sibling psychology. Questionable terrain, perhaps. “I want to investigate if sibling problems are passed down in families like blue eyes and brown hair,” she writes. She uncovers letters that reveal a rift between her father, Milton, and his sister Anita. “Did my father’s rage at his sister impact my relationship with Carl?” Anita went to Mexico to become an associate of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco; she posed for Edward Weston and knew Trotsky. Milton stayed in San Antonio to build up the company founded by their father, Isidor.

When Isidor left their mother for a much younger woman, Anita backed her father. Milton did not. “Don’t you see that you are laying the fuse for a tremendous bomb,” Anita asked Milton in 1932, “the results of which no one can foresee, and which will involve all of us?”

Marie hopes that understanding her father’s family can help her make sense of her own. “The term ‘coherent story’ keeps popping into my mind,” she writes. “Family therapists call this the genogram, the laying on of family theory.”

How do we end up the way we do? Marie is the compulsive rationalist looking for the missing piece in her brother’s story, the key to the mystery. Her faith, like Anita’s, is in enlightened salvation. “I was stitching facts out of what I learned, trying to come up with a grid to lock together all of the following events,” she writes. “Where was the pattern? How did it link?”

Like his father, Carl is ever the skeptic. “It doesn’t connect,” Carl responds. As soon as Marie develops a leitmotif, Carl undermines it. We are led to believe that Carl was in the Marines, where “officers are trained to run through smoke and fires.” Ah, we say, maybe that caused Carl’s adenocarcinoma. But this cannot be the case. “After all that tough-guy posturing in college,” Brenner writes, Carl “never got to the Marines.”

In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. “Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,” she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb “through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’” Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.

'Art's Willing Executioner'

THE NEW YORK SUN
June 4, 2008

'Art's Willing Executioner'
by James Panero

A review of 'Let's See' by Peter Schjeldahl

Art critics are like thoroughbred horses: They risk breaking down after a short period on the track. It came as a surprise, then, when the New Yorker appointed Peter Schjeldahl as its critic in residence 10 years ago: By 1998, Mr. Schjeldahl had already been around the course more than once. Born in Fargo, N.D., in 1942, he had been writing for the Village Voice since 1980, and before that for ARTnews, Seven Days, and the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Back in the late 1960s, the New Yorker's hiring of the Abstract Expressionist critic Harold Rosenberg came as a temporary reprieve from the slaughterhouse. For Mr. Schjeldahl, one wondered if the job would be a similarly green pasture in which to natter on into oblivion.

But Mr. Schjeldahl found his second wind at the New Yorker. He has regularly filed tuneful columns of readable stories with tight structure and interesting twists of phrase informed by his years as both a journalist and a poet. (By the 1960s, Mr. Schjeldahl was already a published poet in the New York School; he abandoned poetry around 1980 to pursue criticism.) Mr. Schjeldahl's latest volume of selected writing, 75 essays from a decade at the New Yorker running through 2007, has now been published as "Let's See" (Thames & Hudson, 256 pages, $29.95).

Those 10 years make for an interesting case study of art, one framed by the unprecedented rise in the market value of postwar and contemporary work — now a global infatuation — and an art-world giddiness that seems untouched, or is perhaps even encouraged, by crises in the economy and the war on terror. The art critic of today must function as a gossip columnist, a stock analyst, and a lifestyle guru. Mr. Schjeldahl plays these roles with brio: At the New Yorker, he has kept up with the art of his times all too well.

At its best, Mr. Schjeldahl's craft produces one-liners that are pleasing and illustrative: "[Gauguin] had the kind of petty run-ins with local authorities that dog arrogant misfits in resort towns everywhere." "One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine." Lucian Freud "is less a painter than 'the Painter,' performing the rites of his medium in the sacristy of his studio." "All Picasso's pictures are dirty." Such zingers are ready for Bartlett's.

But the anthology left me wondering how Mr. Schjeldahl's achievements, many but minor, stack up against his shortcomings as a responsible critic. It is not so much that Mr. Schjeldahl has bad taste. As a libertarian sensualist, he is rather preconditioned not to have taste at all, or at least to have sublimated his taste for the purposes of having his readers "engage with art of every kind," no matter how terrible or reprehensible the art might be. In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl belittles taste here as only a "sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's." It is interesting to note, however, that in disregarding taste, he heads right for the tasteless — leading me to suspect that Mr. Schjeldahl knows what good taste is all along but chooses to ignore it.

At times, this tastelessness can be unnerving but relatively harmless. Mr. Schjeldahl's ceaseless promotion of the histrionic contemporary artist John Currin, for instance, would put a publicist to shame. He calls Mr. Currin "as important an emerging painter as today's art world provides," whose "virtuosity has overshadowed that of everybody else in the field." He also manages to name-drop Mr. Currin into essays where you would least expect it, including a review of El Greco, and one of Victorian fairy paintings.

Over the past decade, about the last thing the overheated art market needed was more praise for artists like Mr. Currin. But Mr. Schjeldahl sent his coals to Newcastle — or rather, to the Gagosian Gallery — at the expense of endlessly more deserving and underappreciated artists.

Too often in the decade covered here, Mr. Schjeldahl followed the money rather than good conscience. Faced with market forces, he bids "goodbye to critics functioning as scouts, umpires, scorers, clubhouse cronies, and occasional coaches." Rather than regret the loss of critical authority, he welcomes collectors to the driver's seat. "Preposterous amounts of money seem to concentrate the mind," he says. Yet considering the overvaluing of artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and yes, John Currin, the facts just don't bear this out. I doubt Mr. Schjeldahl even believes it.

Far more damning than Mr. Schjeldahl's abdication of critical judgment, however, is his embrace of art used for violent ends. Mr. Schjeldahl came out of the Generation of 1968 with a weakness for violence, which often translates into an affection for fascist and Nazi imagery. He rightly bristles at politicized art, but I find his willingness to aestheticize politics just as disturbing. (There is a difference between the two: Walter Benjamin famously wrote that communism pursued the former strategy, while fascism adored the latter.)

"Art love does not accord with good politics, good morals," Mr. Schjeldahl said in a 2004 interview. "Hitler had rather good taste, certainly in architecture and design. I think the Nazi flag was one of the greatest design coups in history."

Such enthusiasm, a targeted irresponsibility, gets repeated more than once in the current collection. Mr. Schjeldahl describes "October 18, 1977" by Gerhard Richter, another son of the'60s, as "a suite of fifteen somber paintings [belonging] to a tiny category: great political art." Yet Richter's hagiographic icons (not all that well painted, by the way) simply mythologized murderous German thugs.

In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl reserves his highest praise for Der Führer himself, whom he describes as "masterly once he found his métier." Hitler, Mr. Schjeldahl informs us in a review of Nazi art, "embraced cleanly abstracted and geometric styles, which later informed his own design work (notably the stunning Nazi flag) and his shrewd patronage of the gifted youngsters Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer." I have deliberated over what is the most odious part of this remark, and I have settled on the use of the word "youngsters" to describe Riefenstahl and Speer. For Mr. Schjeldahl, it's as if Nazi propaganda was little more than after-school high jinks committed by the Little Rascals.

Mr. Schjeldahl's disagreement with the curator Deborah Rothschild in this same review is telling. He begins with a quote from Ms. Rothschild: "The union of malevolence and beauty can occur; we must remain vigilant against its seductive power." That sounds pretty reasonable, but Mr. Schjeldahl offers a quick retort: "I disagree. We must remain vigilant against malevolence, and we should resign ourselves to the truth that beauty is fundamentally amoral."

Why a critic should feel obligated to accept and even champion beauty in the service of wickedness is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Schjeldahl embodies the critic as an accomplice. At his best, he is gleefully sly. At his worst, he is art's willing executioner.

'The Art of the Art Biography'

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN
Spring 2008

'Sketches of Painterly Lives: The Art of the Art Biography'
by JAMES PANERO

Recently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my calendar for a decade. Not to worry, the agent said: Academics do research; writers write biographies.

Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of the Italian Renaissance, would have most likely agreed. His Lives of the Artists of 1550 was notoriously loose with the facts. Never one for scholarly remove, he also heralded his fellow Florentines at the expense of Venice: We would have to wait until the second edition to read of Titian. But Vasari was both a painter and a writer. With his unique temperament he applied the biographer’s craft of the classical age to the artists of the Renaissance: from Cimabue in the 13th century through the artists of the Quattrocento to Il Divino, the divine Michelangelo of the 16th century. “I have striven not only to say what these craftsmen have done,” Vasari writes in Lives, “but also . . . to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better, and to note with no small diligence the methods, the feeling, the manners, the characteristics, and the fantasies of the painters and sculptors.” Lives is more than a parade of the facts. It is an artistic statement and a luxuriant as fine as any Italian fresco. Think of John Richardson’s gossipy defense of Picasso, only applied to the Florentine Renaissance.

Vasari called biography “that which truly teaches men to live and makes them wise, and which, besides the pleasure that comes from seeing past events as present, is the true end of that art.” By following his own advice, Vasari wrote the narrative of an age and the benchmark of the genre.

The Journal of Eugene Delacroix is one work of literature that brought Vasari to the modern era. Walter Pach, the great, early American writer of modernism, translated from the French in my 1946 edition of this fascinating memoir. Delacroix was anything but a hopeless, breathless romantic. His journal carries forward the biographer’s art and, like Lives, comes off as great conversation. Here Delacroix deliberates on everything from the importance of serious painting to his next meeting with Chopin. In an entry from 1847, Delacroix dashes off the following calculations:

All the great problems of art were solved in the sixteenth century. . . . The perfection of drawing, of grace, and of composition, in Raphael . . . Of color, and of chiaroscuro, in Correggio, in Titian, in Paul Veronese . . . Rubens arrives, having already forgotten the traditions of grace and of simplicity. Through his genius he creates an ideal once more.

Here he is on Monday, October 23, 1849: “I read the terrifying list of the riches, of the monuments of all kinds which disappeared from the churches during the Revolution. It would be curious to write something on this subject in order to edify people as to the most evident result of revolutions.” And here he is on Sunday, March 11, 1849: “Beethoven’s compositions are in general too long.” This is a story of art we can relate to, one with voice and a soul.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, modern-day biographers might toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink. Or we get a clutch of color reproductions. But without direct contact with the work, in the safety of trivial observation, the art biography now lacks heart.

Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for De Kooning in 2005, built up their story of the artist around a tyrannical mother and a hardscrabble upbringing in Rotterdam.

Stevens and Swan are two of the best magazine critics around, but in their book they strangely make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling their document of facts, a chronicle of de Kooning’s dalliances and alcoholism written in excessive detail, the writers also abdicate to others their responsibilities as critics. How the authors feel about de Kooning is left an open question. Here is a book where I wondered what ever happened to Vasari’s exhortation “to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better.”

Henri Matisse was the 20th century’s great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. “What I want is an art of balance, purity, an art that won’t disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings.”

In her two volume biography of Matisse, Hilary Spurling offers an impassioned defense of Matisse that would make Vasari proud. She writes in Matisse the Master, her second volume: “The longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse’s work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang.”

Spurling can herself fall victim to an overabundance of detail. But thanks to her we now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to critical failures, by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice. And by recognizing the connections between Matisse’s paint treatment and the textiles manufactured in his hometown of Le Cateau—observations that became the subject of a marvelous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005—Spurling teaches us how to see Matisse in a new way.

Finally, one recent book demonstrates that you don’t have to write at length to get art biography just right. In just over 200 pages of Marc Chagall, recently published by Schocken, the writer Jonathan Wilson has crafted an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist’s life. It is a book that looks out from the artist’s work.

“The man in the air in my paintings . . . is me,” Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. “It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I’m not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own.” In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist’s life, that’s where Wilson finds Chagall.

Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that “sophisticated art aficionados weren’t supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark.” Chagall deserves more, and Wilson proves it. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the “twilight of a Jewish world.” Two hundred pages later, by engaging the style of Chagall’s work, Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skis above Vitebsk, where he belongs.

Russell Kirk, no stranger to writing about art, believed that biography could “apprehend the spirit of an age better through the lives of its great personages than through chronicles of events.” An art biography that takes flight, Marc Chagall brings Vasari, and Kirk, up to the present day. Now where’s my agent when I need him?

'An Old Master in Ruins'

NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Features
An Old Master in Ruins
Why is an El Greco worth less than a Koons? Gallerist Larry Salander called it a moral travesty, and decided, catastrophically, to do something about it.

By James Panero
Published Mar 24, 2008

The art dealer Larry Salander is ready to erupt. He puffs up, expanding his chest like a bellows. He presses his mouth shut. He squeezes his tongue against his palate and engorges his cheeks, his upper lip already damp with perspiration and a few molecules of lunch. Finally, with nostrils flared, he explodes.

“Our society now values a Warhol for three times as much money as a great Rembrandt,” he thunders, referring to the latest auction reports. “That tells me that we’re fucked. It’s as if people would rather fuck than make love.”

He says the last sentence slowly, emphasizing each word.

“That’s the difference between the Warhol and the Rembrandt,” Salander continues. “Being with Rembrandt is like making love. And being with Warhol is like fucking.”

Salander and I are just finishing a lunch of pasta fresca in the eat-in kitchen of his Upper East Side home. Now on the market for $25 million, the townhouse—almost a palace— is decorated with paint imported from Venice and fifteenth-century Sienese tiles. It reflects Salander’s eclectic taste, with African sculpture and American tonalist landscapes mixed in among the Canalettos. In the next room, Salander has inlaid a marble floor with the phases of the moon.

An aesthete with no formal art education (nor even a college degree), Salander built his art empire, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, on native artistic empathy and an intensity of will. “He is a very unusual combination of street vitality and aesthetic refinement,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic and a close friend of Salander’s who wrote catalogue essays for the gallery. “He’s a street kid who’s read Ruskin. I don’t know anybody else who so naturally recognizes the brutality of the world but lives in such a fine way.”

Artists, actors, critics, and buyers responded to his gravitational pull. When I visited Salander in Venice during the opening of the Biennale last June, he was a character in need of a Balzac, a prophet and a gambler who seemed to walk across the water of the Venetian lagoon. He spoke about Titian and Tintoretto as if they were close friends and skipped the contemporary art of the Biennale altogether. As we returned from the island of Burano, where we’d had dinner with his friend Robert De Niro, Salander said to me, “Art is the human attempt to make one plus one equal more than two.”

But Salander made a critical miscalculation. Over the last few years, he had been trying to apply his passion and alchemy to correcting what he saw to be a dangerous inversion of the art market. To Salander, many contemporary art collectors are philistines. But if he could use his gallery to create a new market for old-master and Renaissance art, perhaps he could shift the paradigms of the international art trade.

It was an intriguing idea, but it left him in ruin. On the opening evening of a show he hoped would electrify the market, angry investors closed down his multimillion-dollar gallery. A restraining order prevented Salander from entering the gallery or selling art anywhere in the world. He now faces a criminal investigation and lawsuits from investors who say they were abused, collectors who say they didn’t get what they paid for, and artists who say they never got paid. He could be upwards of $100 million in debt. As our lunch filled the afternoon, Salander spoke for the first time about his plan to rescue the art world from bad taste, and how it ultimately destroyed him.

Three years ago, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, located at the time at 79th Street and Madison Avenue, seemed to be an indestructible institution. Raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Long Beach, Long Island, Salander built his dealership from a small antiques shop in Wilton, Connecticut, into one of New York’s premiere art houses specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Becoming partners first with the more established dealer William O’Reilly and then with a passive investor named Myron Kunin, Salander mounted hundreds of museum-quality shows that seemed to rise above market concerns.

“Larry always has some mystery,” says Ann Freedman, the director of Knoedler and Company, New York’s oldest commercial art gallery, on 70th Street off Madison Avenue. “Success for him was to find the undiscovered painting, to prove this was a masterwork against all odds, to put on a show that nobody else would have dared to try to do. He just wanted to be special.”

Salander learned how to read the market. He developed a reputation for recognizing undervalued art, and took a prescient interest in the nineteenth-century pre-Impressionists and in early American modernists such as Ralph Albert Blakelock, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden Hartley, and Louis Eilshemius.

At the same time, living artists who eschewed the latest art-world trends found a kindred spirit in Salander, who showed the figurative painters Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Paul Georges, and Lennart Anderson. One day, Robert De Niro Sr., the accomplished New York School painter and father of the actor, knocked on Salander’s door and asked him to exhibit his paintings. Salander represented the artist for the rest of his life and subsequently managed the estate.

As a house for serious nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, the gallery had settled into a proven, commercially successful formula. But over the last decade, as the art market underwent a seismic shift, Salander noticed a particular gulf opening up between the markets for postwar and contemporary art, and most art created before Impressionism. New art suddenly started going for far more than older, established masterpieces. Many of the newly rich collectors preferred to spend their hedge-fund wealth on more recent, name-brand artists. A Jasper Johns was soon worth twice as much as the Metropolitan’s Duccio, the Madonna and Child purchased by the museum for as much as $45 million in 2004. An oversize sculpture of costume jewelry by the art star Jeff Koons was valued higher than a Tintoretto, an El Greco, or a clutch of Courbets.

To Salander, this development was a moral travesty. It was also a business opportunity. As he obsessed over these market dynamics, Salander eventually came to believe that the very survival of great art was at stake. By 2005, he had determined to be the first dealer to do something about it. He would risk his gallery’s established reputation as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century house by investing heavily in old-master and Renaissance art. He would make some money and, if his plan worked, save the contemporary market from itself.

Salander started out slowly, first by expanding his small, backroom dealership of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting and sculpture. But he was amazed at the availability of older art, and started to acquire it with vigor. “I ended up finding I could buy these things that I loved so much,” he says. “These great sculptures. Donatellos. And Luca della Robbias. And the idea I could have this stuff!”

It soon became apparent that the gallery would need to expand. In early 2005, Salander noticed a vacant 25,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance palazzo on 71st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. The rent was over $150,000 a month— almost three times the rent of his 79th Street venue for a space five times the size. Taking on the palazzo would entail an enormous amount of risk—especially since he had yet even to prove the existence of the market he hoped to dominate. But Salander was undaunted. “I said, I gotta either retire now or I gotta do this.”

The new branch of the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries opened in September 2005, with a grandeur meant to attract buyers from the contemporary-art world who might be willing to speculate on old-master and Renaissance art as an investment.

“I thought it was the most extraordinary place,” says Wieseltier. “A gallery that was consecrated to classicism and newness at the same time. It represented an aesthetic sophistication that refused to be dominated by the market, and therefore it was an act of cultural resistance. The purity of its intention was undeniable, and apparently catastrophic.”

The catastrophe came almost immediately. Salander began to have a cash problem. As the gallery acquisitions and payroll expanded to fill the needs of his new five-story fortress, Salander was forced to close down his 79th Street space. This dismayed many of Salander’s contemporary artists and longtime employees, who started to worry about the gallery’s standing.

But Salander stuck with his plan. He continued his regular schedule of nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions, now in the velvet-lined rooms of the palazzo, while amassing an enormous inventory of older work, including many overtly Christian sculptures—Ecce Homos, Mater Dolorosas, Virgins With Child—and dozens of wooden statues of Jesus Christ.

He saw his project as spiritual, even messianic. “We’re a soulless society,” he says, returning to a theme that surfaced many times in our conversation. “When I’m talking about the soul to people, they look at me like I’m nuts. But there has been a longtime manipulation of people who want to make money to dumb down the American society and rob us of the curiosity of our souls.” (Salander’s now writing a book on the subject called Soul Wars.)

Those who orbited Salander agree that his motivation was not primarily financial. “He’s passionate about the great painters,” says Liam Neeson, who purchased two paintings from Salander-O’Reilly and received two of Salander’s own works from the gallerist as a gift. (Salander is a regularly exhibited artist, and has a painting of the Crucifixion in the Smithsonian.) “He doesn’t see art as a used Tampax moving across a bare wall.”

As for the dealer in Salander, he couldn’t imagine how the market wouldn’t come around and follow his lead up Calvary. “I don’t think you need an M.B.A. from Wharton to understand this,” Salander tells me. “You have the greatest art in the world. A Donatello for sale. A Donatello? I couldn’t believe it. Parmigianino? The guy died when he was 37 years old. There aren’t a lot of pictures by this guy. And it’s less expensive. When Francis Bacon is $75 million, Parmigianino looks pretty cheap at $10–12 million.”

A Parmigianino may be comparatively inexpensive in today’s art market, but at $10 million or $12 million, it is far from cheap. Salander needed money to buy his art, and more money to hold on to it while he developed new buyers. He says he had a seven-year plan. “It wasn’t going to be producing money until towards the end of this thing,” he says, “because I was more interested in building the market for the big hit at the end.” So Salander took out a $19 million mortgage on his home and used the revenue to buy more art.

Then, in 2006, looking to end his money problems, Salander made a fateful decision, enlisting as a silent business partner a family friend named Donald Schupak. (Their daughters were friends from Dalton.) Schupak in turn brought in a Las Vegas casino owner named Jack Binion. Son of alleged crime boss Benny Binion, Jack had pioneered the World Series of Poker at his family’s Horseshoe casino and had developed interests in riverboat gambling.

As Salander describes it, Schupak lined up $10 million in financing from Binion and nearly another $5 million from additional sources. In mid-April 2006, Salander, Schupak, and the other partners formed Renaissance Art Investors, Inc. As part of the deal, Salander says he sold half-shares of $30 million of the gallery’s old-master and Renaissance art for an approximate $15 million payout from RAI. Still, the infusion of cash would not be enough to cover his mounting debts. He was sinking deeper into trouble.

Art galleries are largely unregulated businesses, and artists rarely file commercial documents to secure their loans to dealers, so until their day in court it’s impossible to know whether— or if so, just how severely—Salander defrauded his clients. Since the 71st Street gallery opened in 2005, dozens of artists, estates, collectors, and investors have come forward with serious allegations: that Salander withheld money he owed them; that he sold work he did not own; that he sold work whose provenance was misrepresented; and that he amassed over $100 million in debt from these schemes to float his old-master plans.

“The first clue I had that something was wrong,” says Lance Esplund, the chief art critic for the New York Sun, “was when I was trying to get paid for a catalogue essay I had written in 2006. The accountant kept dodging me.” At the start of 2007, a sea of artists, estates, and creditors began to make claims against Salander and his gallery for unpaid goods and services, and for mishandling artists’ work. Earl Davis, the son of the artist Stuart Davis, sued Salander for selling nearly 50 of his father’s paintings without remuneration, or even his consent. (De Niro would later claim that Salander had tried to unload paintings by his father to a gallery in Rome.)

The tennis star John McEnroe sued Salander for not delivering payment on an investment. Paul Rosenberg & Company, Salander’s former landlord at 79th Street, sued Salander-O’Reilly for up to $1.6 million in back rent and other debts.

It’s not that Salander did not have assets at that time—he admits he was continuing to buy up valuable work—he just did not have the cash (or perhaps the inclination) to pay everyone as money came in. Or as Joe Saracheck, the court-approved restructuring officer overseeing the bankrupted gallery, explains it, “The art business is much like the diamond business, but unlike diamonds, you cannot just liquidate art.”

By last summer, the lawsuits were showing up in the trade press, which in turn encouraged more creditors to come forward. In the month of August alone, Salander’s longtime partner Myron Kunin claimed in court that his “trust and confidence has been betrayed” by Salander for defaulting on the $7 million purchase of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Arthur Carter, the former New York Observer publisher who had exhibited his sculptures with Salander, filed suit for $1.2 million against the gallery for loans gone bad. The dealer Stanley Moss was awarded a $1 million judgment against Salander for outstanding payments on purchases. Roy Lennox, a managing director at the hedge-fund company Caxton Associates, sued Salander for $4.6 million and an additional $10 million in punitive damages, accusing him, among other things, of attempting to settle debts by passing off art with dubious attribution. Salander’s colleagues at the gallery quickly made for the exits.

To announce his move into the old-master and Renaissance market and quell concerns that his gallery was imploding, Salander began preparations in early 2007 for “Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture,” a blockbuster of an exhibition featuring works by Michelangelo and Titian that he planned to open on the evening of October 16. Over Labor Day, he brought in a single piece exceptional enough to anchor the show.

A London dealer named Clovis Whitfield arrived at the gallery that weekend with consignments from his own collection, including a rediscovered painting called Apollo the Lute Player. When the painting had been sold by Sotheby’s in 2001, it was attributed to an artist in Caravaggio’s circle and went for far below $1 million. But Whitfield had since discovered documentation that he believed proved the painting was by Caravaggio himself. Though the attribution was controversial, Salander intended to sell Apollo for $100 million.

The Caravaggio, he was certain, would reverse the gallery’sfortunes. “There was always the sense that he was going to make that one big sale that would make him liquid, and he’d pull it off,” says Roland Augustine, director of the Luhring Augustine gallery. The $100 million price tag was not arbitrary, either. A diamond-encrusted skull by the artist Damien Hirst had allegedly sold for the same amount in London. Salander’s Caravaggio would directly challenge Hirst’s backers and set up a showdown between the contemporary and old-master markets.

Yet just as the exhibition began to take shape, Salander’s partnership with Donald Schupak was falling apart. With the lawsuits now appearing regularly in the press, Schupak did everything he could to prevent the show from opening. Starting that summer, Schupak had become a regular presence in the gallery, often with his son Andrew. (Gallery workers nicknamed the pair Dr. Evil and Mini-Me.) According to one former Salander employee, Schupak “made it clear that he needed total control over everything. It wasn’t about the money anymore. He screamed into the phone a few times that he was literally going to get us and have his way.”

A few days before the October opening, Schupak and his lawyer filed a series of motions in New York Supreme Court designed to constrain Salander’s control of the gallery. Schupak installed a private security firm outside the gallery to videotape activity and search those exiting the building. He convinced a judge to padlock the gallery temporarily. Salander fought back, but the confrontation took its toll.

At 3 p.m. on the day of the opening of “Masterpieces of Art,” a rattled Whitfield showed up at the gallery. Tearful, he announced to Salander that he was pulling his paintings. As reporters and invited guests began to collect outside, Whitfield tossed his Caravaggio and other loans onto a truck and fled. At the same time, with the help of private security, Andrew Schupak began rolling out works from Salander’s storage that he claimed belonged to RAI. Salander left the gallery later that afternoon with his wife, Julie, daughter Ivana, and son Jonah, who lunged at a Bloomberg News photographer before walking home. The gallery, suddenly, was finished.

"Masterpieces of Art” never officially opened. Absent Schupak’s legal maneuvers, it might have, although it is doubtful the gallery could have stayed afloat for long. Upon Salander’s exit, the door was locked by court order. The district attorney’s office executed search warrants on the gallery and Salander’s townhouse and launched a criminal investigation, seizing computers, servers, and 90 boxes of documents. In November, Larry and Julie Salander filed for Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy from their second home, upstate, protecting them from the avalanche of suits filed against the gallery over the previous two years.

“The scenarios range from ‘He got in over his head’ to the other extreme, where he perpetrated a massive fraud,” says Robert J. Feinstein, who represents a committee of unsecured creditors against Salander. Roy Lennox has been more direct, accusing Salander in court of operating “an illegal Ponzi scheme.” But Salander denies any fundamental wrongdoing and shows little regret: “Why should that place be closed down by people who were late being paid and didn’t need the money anyway?”

In any case, when the bankruptcy is over and his assets are sold, Salander believes he will be left a rich man. (“The art,” he says, “is worth much more money than I owe.”) But there will still remain one fascinating question: Could Salander’s spectacular gamble ever have paid off?

“The old-master market operates in total ignorance of the twentieth-century market,” says the dealer Richard Feigen, who runs a successful backroom business in older art. “To attract the hedge-fund buyers is very speculative. They hear about Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons since they use their ears and not their eyes. How do you turn them on to the old masters?” And Leon Wieseltier admits that Salander “sometimes seemed like he was out to amass the most unpopular art he could.”

But it is possible to imagine the market changing—especially if the old masters began to take on the glamour of contemporary art. “If press and public could be persuaded,” says Whitfield, “if Martin Scorsese could have taken an interest, if Geffen and Wynn could have noticed, it could well have worked. Maybe there was a little bit of grandiosity in the thinking, but we know this piece of alchemy can be done.”

As for Salander, he’s certain his plan would have worked. “The timing was perfect,” he says. “There are now stories of hedging your bets against this bubble by buying old-master pictures.” This is no doubt true; Jeff Koons himself has been on an old-masters buying spree, spending $6.3 million for a sixteenth-century limewood carving just last month.

The prospect of Koons—Koons!—cornering the old-masters market is perhaps too much for Salander to bear, but it confirms he was onto something. “It’s an incredible thing when you have a vision,” he says as we clear the plates from lunch. “I don’t have the academic background. I don’t have any credentials. I love art as much as it can be loved. I understand what the morality of it is.”

'Tales of the Spirit'

ART & ANTIQUES
February 2008

'Tales of the Spirit'
by JAMES PANERO

For the study of art there may be nothing more important, and more impressive, than the catalogue raisonné. Literally a “reasoned” catalogue, the catalogue raisonné is a publication by a preeminent scholar or scholars that attempts to identify and describe all work produced by a given artist. Always printed in a small quantity, and with a price that reflects the expense of its production, such a book is rarely marketed to the general public, although it can be a beautiful object of art in itself.

The catalogue raisonné of the American painter George Inness (1825–94), recently published by Rutgers University Press and listed at $400, is no exception. Slipcased, weighing more than 16 pounds, with 1,274 pages divided among two volumes and nearly 150 color plates, it is a monument of scholarship on the iconoclastic painter of the Hudson River School, whose career spanned 50 years, from 1844 to his death. The publication of this catalogue is also a testament to the spell this artist can cast more than a century after his death. Behind the book is the story of the scholar who pursued the project for 15 years and the patron who made it possible.

This part of the story begins in the late 1980s, when New York financier Frank Martucci entered a Madison Avenue gallery and saw his first George Inness painting. He told me the painting encouraged him “to see beyond the canvas. There was a bigger world out there. Inness went beyond painting the everyday occurrences in life and expressed spirituality on canvas. He was an optimist, a non-conformist, a social egalitarian and an avid abolitionist.”

Martucci’s discovery had lasting repercussions for a self-effacing scholar named Michael Quick. In 1985 and ’86, Quick had organized a traveling retrospective of Inness’s works that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seen in Cleveland, Minneapolis and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where he was curator of American art) and ended at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Fresh from the success of that show, as Quick related it to me, he ran into Martucci, who “expressed an interest in supporting scholarship and asked me to name a project that I thought was the most important. And I told him that an up-to-date, improved catalogue raisonné that combined all the information of other scholars would be most useful.” Though Martucci admits that, at first, he didn’t know what a catalogue raisonné was, this did not stop him from underwriting Quick’s labors for the time it took to produce the book. In fact, Martucci would make several commitments to Inness. In addition to building a personal collection of eight Inness landscapes, he funded the construction of an Inness wing at the Montclair Art Museum in Inness’s New Jersey hometown. And then there was the catalogue.
Like his fellow American landscape painters Asher B. Durand and John F. Kensett, Inness began his training in an engraver’s shop in New York. He studied the 17th-century landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Mein-dert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael. Multiple visits to Europe brought him in contact with the Barbizon School in France and the pre-Raphaelites in England.

Upon his arrival to the United States, Inness took his first spiritual turn under the advisement of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a patron. As Quick writes in the catalogue, Beecher “advocated a more intimate, emotional relationship toward God, which he indicated could be found through ecstatic experiences in nature.” Inness’s spiritual development continued into the 1860s. Through the largely forgotten American painter William Page, Inness discovered Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Christian mystic and occult philosopher who also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and many other artists and writers of the period. Through Swedenborg and Page, Inness developed a “fresh concept of nature as a place of divine harmony and peace,” writes Quick, “together with a technique that was designed to create paintings full of this same harmony and balance.”

Inness’s vision progressed from strict fidelity to the observable world to mysterious images infused with rich atmosphere, which he built up through glazes of translucent pigment. In his famous early painting of Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley, from 1855, now in the National Gallery of Art, “Inness’s representation of Scranton is accurate, even down to the tree stumps in the middle ground,” writes Quick. For “Autumn Oaks” (c. 1876–77), a well known painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inness incorporated “a complicated process of painting the colors at nearly full intensity, glazing them back, and then adding intense highlights [so that] the color is both deep and intense, and the modeling is full and atmospheric.” As he reached the end of his career in the 1880s and 1890s, the layers deepened, and Inness produced his most haunting works, for example “Early Autumn, Montclair” (1891), now in the Delaware Art Museum, which Quick calls “one of Inness’s great late paintings.”

Martucci’s patronage allowed Quick to examine, personally, all of these paintings and then some. “It was two week-long trips twice a month for three years,” he recalls. “With just a few exceptions, I saw every painting in the book. That was one of the principles, that I actually examine each work. This was critical to the book’s success.” It also sets this book apart from the 1965 catalogue by LeRoy Ireland, which was based largely on black-and-white photographs of the paintings.
During this rigorous period of examination, Quick gained a new understanding of the artist. “It was a precondition for authenticity and also gave me insight into his work,” he notes. “I was able to arrive at some very new conclusions that could not have been discovered by any other means.”

After funding the indexing of old exhibition catalogues, magazines and microfilm, which accompanies each entry, Martucci underwrote the catalogue’s printing. This was carried out, after a delay of nearly a year, in Hong Kong, once the catalogue’s designers were able to color-correct and personally oversee the print run.

How does Martucci view the 15-year journey? “It was a lot of fun,” he says. “The purpose was quite provocative and certainly important. The outcome has exceeded my expectations, very much so. The amount of research that went into this becomes self-evident when one looks at the book. Every single picture has an extensive provenance with a commentary, a total exhibition history and summaries before each period. To me it’s quite unbelievable.”

“Today, people are interested in contemporary art,” Quick says. “Inness’s art is of a different kind. It’s not showy. It’s more subtle; that may be out of sync with today’s public.” But, he concludes, “reproductions have power.”

At the time of his death, George Inness was one of America’s best-known painters. Just over a century later, his spiritual landscapes contrast with the rather more jaded landscapes of contemporary art. A catalogue raisonné will never alter the fortunes of an artist overnight. But like a vision emerging from one of Inness’s mists, such a catalogue can provide the spark of recognition that makes the rediscovery of a great artist possible.

'Comeback Kid'

ART & ANTIQUES
December 2007

Comeback Kid

The return of Thornton Willis reflects the enduring legacy of abstract painting.

by James Panero

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” However in the past few years, a painter by the name of Thornton Willis, born in 1936, has re-emerged from near-obscurity. Almost 40 years after his New York debut, and after a brief shot at fame in the 1970s as a post-Minimalist, Willis is now creating some of the boldest work of his life, with critically acclaimed back-to-back New York solo shows, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea and Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. In an era defined by market trends, Willis is that uncompromising artist who still manages to rise above public taste.

“I was always an abstract painter,” he recently told me. “I’ve always done what feels right.” Willis is one of my favorite artists to visit in the studio. I spoke with him in his unadorned SoHo loft, among canvases propped against the walls, in the same neighborhood where he has lived and painted since the late 1960s. Here Willis is an original artist-resident, someone who has painted his way through the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial wasteland to multi-million-dollar residential enclave.

“I hardly think when I paint; I’m feeling,” says Willis. Seeing abstract art for the first time in the 1950s, he continues, “was like a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. A boom! Something fundamental to the human condition. I didn’t know what painting was before that. Seeing that work was the epiphany that brought me to painting. I’ve been chasing that ever since.”

Willis’s chase began in Pensacola, Florida. His family roots go back to rural Virginia and Georgia. His father was a Church of Christ minister, an evangelical who established congregations throughout the South. When his mother fell ill, Willis went to live with his grandparents. He was 7. “I always liked to draw. When I was 4 years old, my dad used to sit me on his lap and read the Sunday comics to me. They were in color. I was fascinated with the boxes, the color.”

Willis began in architecture school at Auburn University in Alabama. There he caught two traveling exhibitions: One featured the students of Hans Hofmann, the legendary painter and teacher of the Abstract Expressionists, and the other was a show of New York School painters brought by the American Federation of Arts. “Seeing those paintings spoke to me. It hit me on the head,” Willis recalls. He decided to become a painter, transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi to pursue abstract painting under the G.I. Bill. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study with Melville Price, an abstract artist from the 10th Street years who died in 1970 at the age of 49. In a recent interview with myartspace.com, Willis said, “From Mel I learned that the idea was to ‘live the work.’ To ‘be in’ the painting and to see the work as an extension of one’s self.” The life of the artist does not always fit into one’s assumptions about art history. By the time Willis arrived at abstract painting, Pop Art and Minimalism were in their heyday. “I see myself as having rejected those two possibilities,” he says. “Minimalism was reductive. I could not work that way. I need to act out on a painting. I need to work through accident.”

Willis moved to New York in 1967, a time when painters were starting to challenge the confines of Minimal art and experiment again with improvisation. “It was when Brice Marden and Richard Serra and Bob Ryman and Sean Scully began,” he recalls. “Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark and Lynda Benglis were finding new ways of making art: Serra tossing lead into the corners; or Saret working with chicken wire. It was sometimes referred to as the ‘fold and pleat’ movement. My work was taking the same cues.”

In the 1970s and early ’80s, through experiments with lines and voids, Willis developed a signature style that brought him international attention. He called it “the wedge.” Predicated on the relationship between figure and ground, a tension that Willis built up in his edging and color choice, these haunting images could resemble a curtain or a mountain peak, a threshold or a monolith. Wedges such as “Bisby” (1977) found an eager market. Collectors and dealers ranging from Larry Gagosian to Charles Saatchi to Sidney Janis to Jackie Onassis (who called Willis “Maestro”) scrambled to the studio and galleries to buy them.

At the time, Serra advised, “Just keep doing the same thing, Thornton. Just keep doing the same thing,” Willis recalls. But at the height of his fame, Willis felt he had exhausted his motif. He abandoned the wedge. He gave up figure-ground paintings. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, he in fact gave up painting entirely.

When Willis returned to painting in the late 1980s, his market had moved on. But Willis brought with him a new focus on Cubism and new interests. “I was reading about quantum physics, how everything is absolutely saturated with matter. With the figure-ground paintings there was the idea of negative-positive space. But in quantum physics I realized that everything is filled. There is no such thing as negative space. This influenced my own thinking about painted space. My paintings became areas of energy bouncing off each other. Cubism seemed to have that in it already.” Triangles and facets filled his canvases. Work such as “Gray Harmony” (1993) featured regimented designs of quiet beauty. Then came 9/11, and that changed everything. “The first plane went right over our house. I said, ‘That plane was really low.’ I listened. Kept listening. Then I heard something go ‘snap’ and I went to the fire escape. All day, refugees were streaming up the street. People crying. People covered in soot and ash. I went out onto the street and watched the towers come down.”

In shock, Willis did not work for six weeks. Then one morning he got on the other side of it. “I just started to draw,” he says. In three hours, he created his first painting after the attacks: In “Cubist Painting for Vered” (2001), a work dedicated to his wife, Willis did away with measured construction. “I realized the world was taking a major change, with more uncertainty.” Drips ran down the front; the painting wept.

A new urgency now fills his compositions, a tension between the structures of Cubism and the gestures of Abstract Expressionism. He says he struggles with these recent paintings. Edgy, bending and sticking out into our space, they are animated by a career in abstraction. The art critic for The New Republic, Jed Perl, has called them “wonderfully persuasive” and suggestive of “an emotional terrain at once rambunctious and saturnine ... Although Willis was always a powerful painter, he seems to me to be a far more inviting artist now.”

The life of Thornton Willis is a testament to the fact that an artist at any age, in any style, can produce remarkable work. He has been chasing abstraction for 40 years, and now, once again, the art world is starting to chase him.

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'

THE NEW YORK SUN

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'
BY JAMES PANERO
November 7, 2007

Isn't it ironic that postwar art has traded one Freud for another. The very influence that Sigmund once exerted in the 1950s, his grandson Lucian, now in his mid-80s, might claim today. John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, Tracy Emin: All are among the younger artists who look to Lucian's analysis of the body just as many Abstract Expressionists once drew on Sigmund's dissection of the mind.

In his new monograph on the artist, "Lucian Freud" (Rizzoli, 488 pages, $135), billed by the publisher as the most comprehensive survey of Lucian to date, William Feaver writes, "There's an easy assumption that, metaphorically speaking if not by actual bequest, Lu the Painter inherited the couch of his renowned grandfather." An easy assumption, yes, but an overworked one. Mr. Feaver, a British art critic and painter who has organized several Freud exhibitions, fortunately knows better than to spend much time on the Sigmund-Lucian comparison. Instead, his book hints at more interesting terrain. Although it is not an argument made explicitly in the book (a somewhat tongue-tied, soft appreciation), Mr. Feaver offers up nearly 400 reproductions, four interviews with the artist, and an introductory essay that suggests a different conclusion: The secret of Lucian's success may not be his Sigmundness. It may instead be his Englishness.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1922, Lucian escaped with his family to England in 1933. He did not look back. He never dilated on the Jewish identity that first sent him abroad — "Being Jewish?" Mr. Freud remarked to Leigh Bowery, the corpulent performance artist who became one of his favorite subjects, "I never think about it, yet it's a part of me" — he gave up on Germany — "Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been" — and, finally, he wanted little to do with Sigmund: "I think [psychoanalysis is] unsuited to the lifespan," he told Mr. Feaver, somewhat elliptically. "I feel very guarded about it but I'm fairly ignorant about it."

What replaced all this was an adopted national canon. Sure, boiling things down to national style may be reductive, but Mr. Freud clearly set about performing that reduction himself. The process began in boarding school, where Lucian worked to rid himself of Teutonic mannerisms. "When I came to England first I could only do German Gothic handwriting," says Mr. Freud. Mr. Feaver continues: "The spikiness lapsed and he developed a rounded, laboured, but not inelegant script of his own, each word treated as a novelty, written as though drawn."

The same transition can be seen through his early artwork. Despite little formal training, Lucian displayed an immense talent for draftsmanship. Although less well known than his paintings, his etchings remain a high point of his oeuvre (a subject that will be examined in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art starting in December). Ink drawings, such as "Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit" (1943), likewise became crystalline interpretations of the visible world.

Yet his paintings through the 1940s still shout "Weimar." The bug-eyed portraits of the period, though accomplished, betray an expressionist manner. Mr. Feaver writes how this led to the "assumption (he took it as an accusation) that he was a Germanic sort of artist, carrying on willy-nilly in prewar, pre-Hitler, 'Neue Sachlichkeit' style."

Well, up to a point, he was. In the mid-1950s, however, the manner matured. Suddenly we see the signature style, the splotchy red-yellow-green brushwork that he would apply, for the rest of his career, to his analysis of human flesh.

The 19th-century British painter Benjamin Haydon once remarked:

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things . . . yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed.

The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

If Mr. Freud was not born with English sensibility, he developed one in paint. And he found ready success in the "honesty" of these fleshy facts. It comes as no surprise that one of Mr. Feaver's interviews with Mr. Freud concerns Lucian's appreciation of John Constable. This interest began when Mr. Freud was "living in Dedham, in the Constable country. I'd seen the little painting of the tree trunk, close-up, in the V&A, and I thought what a good idea." Mr. Freud continues: "I mean, this is so English isn't it?"

But of course, beyond the interest in fact, Mr. Freud's most famous paintings are English for more tabloid reasons, too. Oscar Wilde once said, "The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral." As is underscored by Mr. Feaver's book, Mr. Freud's shortcoming is that he can abandon English fact for mere English sensationalism.

In 1964, Mr. Freud was dismissed from a teaching job for assigning his students to paint naked self-portraits that would be "something really shameless, you know." Thereafter, the subject in his own work became evermore shameless and grotesque. Enter Leigh Bowery and "Big Sue," Mr. Freud's obese painter's models. Enter taboo. For one painting he positioned his half-naked, pre-pubescent daughter Isobel on the floor beside a houseplant ("Large Interior, Paddington," 1968-69). He also featured a man, the photographer David Dawson, breastfeeding a baby as Francis Wyndham reads Flaubert's letters ("Large Interior, Notting Hill," 1998).

The slow rise of British art, which tracked the demise of the New York School and the dying influence of the French avant-garde, has privileged Mr. Freud as the embodiment of English style. Unfortunately, he inhabits the best and worst attributes of what England can offer up in paint. His champions point to John Constable. But Mr. Freud is rather more Dorian Gray.

'Art's New Financial Landscape'

ART AND ANTIQUES
November, 2007

Critic’s Notebook: Art’s New Financial Landscape
by James Panero

A frequent response to the sticker shock of postwar and contemporary art is to claim that the market is inflated, that we are experiencing a bubble. But does this term, usually reserved for stock and real estate prices, apply? The art market exhibits few if any of the traditional indicators of speculation or other instabilities in pricing. Unlike real estate, most art is purchased with cash in hand. There are no sub-prime mortgages propping up the purchasing of art, no unstable supports to come crashing down in periods of price correction. One explanation of the rise of art prices might be found in the rapid growth of global wealth, and this liquidity shows no sign of drying up. Art may simply be a luxury good with limited supply and growing demand.

But market skeptics are really saying something more. Underlying their concerns is the sense that art is suffering from a bubble in taste. It is difficult not to feel that disproportionate amounts of money are being lavished on certain artists, but does this necessarily mean that the market is overdue for some kind of aesthetic correction? Perhaps the art world has simply become more tasteless and will stay that way.

It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but even as art prices have risen across the board, they have not risen in equal measure to one another. Postwar and contemporary art has come to occupy a place in the market that never existed for it in the past, while prices for French, Italian, and other European art from the 16th through mid-19th centuries have experienced little uplift. Everywhere we can see the evidence of this sea change, from the very introduction of contemporary art auctions to the rise of the international contemporary art fair to the so-called deaccessioning of museum collections to fund contemporary acquisitions. Of course, older does not always equal better, but as the dealer Richard L. Feigen recently wondered in The Art Newspaper, should a Damien Hirst sculpture really carry a price tag comparable to that of the Halifax Titian, one of the world’s last Titian portraits in private hands (and still on the market)?

Maybe contemporary collectors just don’t realize how far their money will go in the arts of earlier periods. Lawrence Salander of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries has bet the bank that he can educate them. This fall and winter, in cooperation with the London dealer Clovis Whitfield, Salander is mounting an ambitious exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, including works by El Greco, Parmigianino, and Pontormo, with price tags that are a fraction of what you’ll pay for a Warhol. To top it off, Salander will feature the first work identified as a Caravaggio for public sale in the United States in several decades. (In 2001, Sotheby’s sold the work as "Circle of Caravaggio" and still disputes the claim.) The price point of this work, titled "Apollo the Lute Player," will be determined by the high water marks recently set by Hirst, say sources close to the gallery. Should Hirst be in the same league as a Caravaggio, even a disputed one?
 
A correction in price, predicated on a correction in taste, assumes that the collectors of art still care about the standards of the past. In the end, in areas where art price cannot be traditionally explained, and where there seems to be no end in sight to the sticker shock, one begins to think that there are other factors at work. Art has always been a valuable commodity, but only in the last decade or two has it come to be perceived as an investment-grade asset, with rates of return in certain cases equaling or exceeding those of more standard financial markets. Now, while art continues to function as a luxury good, a sign of social status and even as a source of personal delight and aesthetic fulfillment, the top buyers are leading us into a new world that transcends aesthetic concerns. What comes after modernism? The answer is not postmodernism. It may be closer to moneyism.

While postwar art has been swept up in this new phenomenon, at the forefront of the movement are contemporary artists who know how to fashion work for the buying public. Remember Jeff Koons, the 1980s art star and original Wall Street dandy who has been doing career maintenance ever since his market tanked in the last recession? He’s back in the headlines. A work called "Blue Diamond," a 7-foot-wide sculpture of monumental jewelry that Koons designed in polished steel in 2005 and 2006, is going up for auction at Christie’s in November with an estimated price of $12 million. If it sells, the sculpture will far surpass Koons’ previous auction record set in 1991, when his "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" sold for $5.6 million.

This is taxi fare when compared to the new Koons on the block, Damien Hirst. While the medium of his art may be dead animals, formaldehyde, diamonds and skulls, the subject of his work is the art market itself, and his work’s suitability as an asset. The artist’s admirers regard his financial success as part of a sophisticated commentary on the art market, but I think it is the other way around. Hirst’s commentary on the market is really a means of achieving financial success. This summer, as we all now know, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull sculpture, "For the Love of God," was reportedly sold to an anonymous group of investors, according to Hirst spokesmen, for the asking price of $100 million, topping off $260 million in sales for his White Cube Gallery show. Notice that word choice of "investors" rather than "collectors."Truly, it is the investors who are deciding the future of postwar and contemporary art. Consider the hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen. In a rare interview in 2006, this media-shy recluse lamented to The Wall Street Journal, "It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over, and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself." It should be safe to assume that a hedge fund manager with a winning market track record lasting a quarter of a century is not in the business of losing money. Through his collection of art, variously reported to be worth between $300 million and $700 million and amassed over little more than five years, Cohen may have discovered work that gives him pleasure, but he has also found a way to diversity his portfolio. In 2004, Cohen purchased Hirst’s pickled shark, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1991), from Charles Saatchi, Hirst’s Maecenas, for what was then considered an outrageous price, $8 million (see more on Hirst’s shark in News, page 34 of this issue). But he still does not want to take it home. Instead, Cohen has convinced the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to display his purchase on loan for a set period of three years. Cohen’s investment benefits from the museum’s formidable aura, while the museum looks to hook a future patron.
 
When our nation’s finest museums are reduced to banks for an investor’s appreciating assets, the art world is suddenly far beyond the purview of critics. To really know what the future of art will bring, you’ll have to ask the investors.

Picasso from the waist down

THE NEW YORK SUN
October 31, 2007

'Sketching A Portrait Of Picasso'
BY JAMES PANERO

John Richardson's multitivolume "Life of Picasso" has become an institution. Mr. Richardson, who has even set up his own foundation — the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research — has been researching the life for 25 years, and his work has certainly resulted in our more exhaustive study of the artist. "Volume I: 1881–1906" was published in 1991; "1907–1916: The Painter of Modern Life" came out in 1996. The new, third volume of his study, "The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932" (Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages, $40) surveys the midpoint of the career of Picasso, who was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Though this period is not Picasso's most engaging one (we can rank it after the Blue Period, after Cubism, before "Guernica"), Mr. Richardson still knows how to deliver his subject matter. In his hands, Picasso remains the priapic visionary who translated the sexuality of Andalusia to canvas, the mystical shaman who fought evil with evil, the sadistic lover who admired the Marquis de Sade, and the superstitious clown who refused to give old clothes to the gardener for fear that "some of his genius might rub off on the wearer."

Picasso, as Mr. Richardson explains, came from sybaritic stock: He was a "Peeping Tom like so many Andalusians," Mr. Richardson writes, who "suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male." For an Andalusian faced with a virtuous fiancée, Mr. Richardson continues, "regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response." Mr. Richardson's explanations would not exactly hold up in divorce court, indeed they can be downright silly, but his passion can come as some relief to the cooler and detached voice of much contemporary biography.

Yet for all that virility, the Picasso we find at the start of this new volume seems oddly emasculated. While his Cubist collaborator George Braque and the poet and friend Guillaume Apollinaire fought at the front, Picasso escaped to the safety of Rome. He settled into the world of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, accompanied by the composers Erik Satie, the choreographer Leonide Massine, and the dramatist Jean Cocteau, whom Mr. Richardson belittles as a "pampered, high-society homosexual … trying to gatecrash the avant-garde."

Picasso soon translated his accomplishments on canvas into tableaux vivants onstage. For his first production, "Parade," he designed innovative Cubist costumes. He also drew inspiration from the Farnese Hercules in Naples, inaugurating a classical period in his own painting. Finally he fell for a petite Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova, who became his first wife and who lifted Picasso out of his bohemian milieu.

Picasso painted the first portraits of Olga in the reverential style of the beaux arts. For this future minotaur, who would one day plunge "his monstrous, taurine penis," as Mr. Richardson delicately puts it, into a lover's "tumescent folds," his visions of the early 1920s were rather staid. Olga's transformation into a vagina dentata was still half a decade away.

Picasso never had much of a personality outside of the studio or the bedroom, and the glamorous society that surrounded him during this period clearly sucked up the artistic air. Picasso could paint remarkable work — there is "The Dance" of 1925 — but such achievements were rare, and Picasso can seem, in Richardson's telling, almost somnambulant. Picasso's friends, including Braque, were likewise left wondering what had become of the great artist: "Picasso's all too evident absorption into Diaghilev's effete world," Richardson reports, "left Braque worried about the state of his old friend's integrity."

This all changed, Richardson writes, on a "propitious" evening in January 1927 — propitious for the biographer, certainly, and propitious for anyone who prefers Picasso from the waist down. While cruising for love along the boulevards of Paris, the 45-year-old artist came upon Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was 17, "an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body — big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus." Ever the willing accomplice, Mr. Richardson is never at a loss for words when it comes to Picasso's bed games. After a brief attempt at domestic normalcy, "For the rest of Picasso's life sex would permeate his work almost as cubism did … As he once joked, he had an eye at the end of his penis." Mr. Richardson excels at writing from this point of view.

Picasso's mistress for nine years, Marie provided a counterbalance to "skinny Olga." She encouraged an avalanche of work and inspired Picasso "to unleash his sexuality and harness it to his imagery," which was often wickedly brutal. Picasso felt free to paint the most memorable work of the period, including "The Dream," now in the possession of the Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn (who in 2006 put his elbow through it), and the whimsical "Bather with a Beach Ball," now at the Museum of Modern Art: "In this glorious work," Richardson writes, "Picasso has pumped Marie-Thérèse so full of pneumatic bliss that she looks ready to burst." For Picasso this was as sweet as it got.

In his book "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy," Peter Gay takes stock of Picasso's achievement: "Of course, obviously, for any painter major or minor — or any poet or playwright — sexuality and aggression are indispensable raw material. What distinguishes Picasso was the animation, at times the brutality, with which he fixed love and hate on canvas and paper."

At issue, however, is how literally we should interpret Picasso's translation of emotion to paint. The poet and critic Roland Penrose once warned, "It would be too mechanical to read [Picasso's] portraits as a direct paraphrase of his troubles with one mistress or another; he was too imaginative for that." Richardson has build a great biography out of great gossip, but by looking for genius between the bedsheets, his ribald "Life" never quite credits the artist's imagination with the autonomy it deserves.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

'Mystical Mediator'

ART & ANTIQUES
critic's notebook

'Mystical Mediator'
Re-examining the legacy of Robert De Niro Sr.
By James Panero

September 2007

Modern art has tended to be divided into one of two categories. Visit Venice during this year's Biennale, for example, and you mostly encounter art of the dominant style-work based in tone, volume, depth, illusion, narrative and theater. This is art with a story to tell, art as a window, art that is loud, art with a point. The points may be radical, but the means are traditional, in that everything from academic painting to contemporary political art shares the common trait of using one medium to depict another. In the history of taste, this "public" style of extraverted, didactic art has always won out. But modernism has long nurtured a minority position. Mystical and idealist, often occult and certainly introverted, this secondary style is most easily recognized by its embrace of color.

On view in Venice through September 10, at the San Marco Casa D'Aste, the work of Robert De Niro Sr. serves as a counterpoint to the official art of the Biennale. This artist, who died in 1993, gracefully internalized art's color-based legacy.

Although little-known outside the world of art, De Niro Sr. remains just as famous as his celebrated actor-director son in the eyes of serious painters. Drawing on the sonorities of Bernard and Gauguin, the luxuriance of Bonnard, the anxieties of van Gogh, the moods of Munch and the textures of Matisse, De Niro
was spellbound by color's potential. A child prodigy, born in 1922 in Syracuse, New York to an Italian father and an Irish mother, De Niro at first studied with Josef Albers but then abandoned Albers' rigid color theories and went in for the push-pull compositional dynamics of Hans Hofmann, the celebrated painter and teacher of the New York School. Hofmann became De Niro's champion and godfather to the painter's only son.

De Niro's art, like the work of his colorist predecessors, finds its roots most directly in Symbolism, synesthesia and the metaphysical philosophies of the late 19th century (De Niro took an interest in the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy). Here the unity of painting predominates. The interlocking flatness and
harmonies of shape and color take precedence over subject matter. The painting itself is subject matter. In De Niro's case, the Passion of Christ, a recurring theme in his work, becomes passion itself. Writing in 1981 about Bonnard, De Niro echoed a similar sentiment: "His works are not about happiness. They are
happiness."

De Niro's indebtedness to Bonnard comes through most clearly in one of his early paintings-appropriately, a centerpiece of the Venice show. "Venice at Night is a Negress in Love" (1943-44) features a Bonnard bather awash in Gauguin-like colors, the palette more intense and atonal than anything the earlier artists
could have imagined.

Clement Greenberg made note of De Niro's early color combinations, not altogether approvingly: "Where De Niro usually goes wrong is in his hot, violent color, which, although he had digested the favorable influence of Matisse, often over asserts itself and distorts the drawing."

I disagree. This work is a masterpiece. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s and through the 1970s and 1980s, De Niro cooled his colors into a glassy sea. His signature flourish came in the form of broad, brushy outlines that defined his figures. At their best these gestures foregrounded his murky depths with graceful sweeps. The success or failure of his paintings often hinged on how well these final applications tied his compositions together.

De Niro Jr. has a deep affinity for his father's work. At a press conference in Lisbon, he broke down in tears discussing it. In Venice, as I walked through the exhibition with him, and joined him at a press conference for the opening, he said, "I am so proud of my father. But as a kid I didn't want to go to the shows. I now consider my father the best painter of the century."

Artist and son share the hunched shoulders, the taciturn expression, the brooding intensity, the inward pressure. The father was a dandy, maintaining the personality of the bohemian artist. In New York he crossed paths with the greatest painters of his generation. But unlike the Abstract Expressionists, De
Niro was more a mystical mediator than an innovator. As financial success passed him by, he would hit up rich friends like de Kooning for cash.

The marriage between De Niro and Virginia Admiral, another esteemed painter (they met through Hofmann), did not last longer than a few years, yet the two remained close. In the late 1970s, as Admiral worked to convert SoHo lofts into artist studios, De Niro took up residence in one of her buildings on West Broadway.
Here he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

This beautiful, top-floor space, with skylights illuminating every corner, remains as De Niro left it: tubes of seeping oils haunt the palette board, books on art, theology and philosophy line the shelves, posters from the history of art cover the walls, clothes fill the closets. In one corner, an umbrella hangs on the handlebars of a bicycle. In another, the door of a built-in birdcage swings ajar (De Niro favored parrots). When I asked De Niro Jr. if he ever wanted to become a painter, he said he "never had an interest. My kids don't want to be actors. But I preserved the studio for the children." The studio remains in the private possession of the family, but fortunately, Salander-O'Reilly published a monograph in 2004 on De Niro's work
that is filled with images of this magical place.

In 1857, the poet Charles Baudelaire, drawing on the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the poet Heinrich Heine, laid the groundwork for colorist innovation in his sonnet "Correspondences," from part of Les Fleurs du mal. Here is how Richard Wilbur translated the second stanza of this famous poem, which became a manifesto for painters like De Niro: "Like dwindling echoes gathered far away/ Into a deep and thronging
unison/ Huge as the night or as the light of day,/ All scents and sounds and colors meet as one."

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away, the art of Robert De Niro Sr. remains a place where scents and sounds and colors meet as one. What a joy to see it in the city of Titian, where color was born.

'Tintoretto's Thunderbolt'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MASTERPIECE
'Tintoretto's Thunderbolt'

His 'Crucifixion' of 1565 just may be the Italian Renaissance's single best work of religious art

By JAMES PANERO
September 22, 2007

The Venetian painter Tintoretto (c. 1518-1594) never commanded the sculptural vocabulary of Leonardo or Michelangelo. He did not luxuriate in the warmth of Giorgione or Titian. He displayed neither the draftsmanship (disegno) of Florentine art nor the affection for coloring (colorito) that was the legacy of his native city.

But through a synthesis of each tradition, "il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano," as one Venetian writer identified it, Tintoretto may just have painted the single best work of religious art in the Italian Renaissance. His "Crucifixion" of 1565 comes as both a concluding statement to the art of the high Renaissance and also something wildly new.

To see it, you have to visit Venice. Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" continues to fill the back wall of the boardroom (albergo) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he left it. Tintoretto dedicated his artistic and spiritual life to this confraternity, a charitable organization of Christian laymen dedicated to the plague-healer St. Roch. Surrounded by over 50 other religious images that Tintoretto painted for the Scuola Grande for the cost of materials, the "Crucifixion" forms the centerpiece of one of the largest intact cycles of religious work by a single artist in history.

Unlike Michelangelo, who initially fled Rome rather than finish the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Tintoretto never hesitated to apply his vision to paint. He persevered even as he was rejected by the Venetian establishment -- a situation that may explain the manic, expressive urgency of his compositions.

Consider how he first made his way into the Scuola. Since Tintoretto was the son of a silk dyer (tintore), the profession of a quarter of the Scuola's membership, his acceptance by the confraternity might have been a given. But in 1564, when he entered the artistic competition to supply the first ceiling painting to the newly completed albergo, the odds were not on his side. A young man with an evangelical zeal, Tintoretto had already been rejected for membership. In the conservative Scuola, resentment ran high against his brash personality and unorthodox paint handling -- "the thunderbolt of his brush," as one 17th-century painter called it. One member of the Scuola even pledged to contribute 15 ducats if Tintoretto was not chosen for the commission.

Meanwhile Titian, the ruling monarch of Venetian painting, who supposedly once expelled Tintoretto from his workshop after recognizing the young student's great talent, backed his protégé Veronese as heir apparent to the colorito legacy. (Their three-way rivalry will be examined in a show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in spring 2009.)

Giorgio Vasari, the great Florentine chronicler of Renaissance art, recounts how "the little dyer" overcame the odds. (They had their differences, but Vasari still saw fit to call Tintoretto "swift, resolute, fantastic and extravagant, and the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced.") Rather than submit a drawing of his ceiling plan, Tintoretto secretly measured the open space and "sketched a great canvas and painted it with his usual rapidity, without any one knowing about it, and then placed it where it was to stand."

When the confraternity protested, Tintoretto made an offer: "If they would not pay him for the work and for his labor, he would make them a present of it." It was a clever move. Since no donation to St. Roch may be turned away, through this gift "he so contrived that the work is still in the same place." (It didn't hurt that the painting's subject was the Scuola's patron saint.)

Within a year, Tintoretto overcame the Scuola's lingering resentment; he was accepted for membership and allowed to attempt his great "Crucifixion."

The layout of the room posed several challenges. Three different architects worked on the Scuola's design. When it was finished by Scarpagnino in 1549, the building's small, elevated windows provided only minimal interior light. The albergo was also wider than it was long, so that any painting covering the back wall would have to be viewed from close proximity and below.

Tintoretto conceived of a revolutionary program. Rather than keep his design locked in strict perspective, which would have been distorted by the room's oblique points of view (think of the front row of a movie theater), Tintoretto folded his narrative around the central figure of Christ on the cross. He then depicted Christ bending down -- to address the good thief, the figures in mourning at the foot of the cross, and our gaze from below. The fixity of the cross provides an anchor within an undulating sea of dark details that seems to extend beyond the picture plane out into our own space. With blank faces, the mundane figures surrounding Christ stir up the awful scene. A crowd of onlookers, carpenters, soldiers and even a dog make up "a centrifugal energy that charges the entire picture," as the art historian David Rosand wrote in his survey of 16th-century Venetian painting.

The ominous tones, curved landscape and artistic urgency that underlie Tintoretto's color choice, composition and paint handling make this work a point of departure. Rather than look back to the neo-Platonic ideals of classical sculpture -- brilliantly embodied at the start of the 16th century in the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel -- Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" anticipates the fallen angels of our modern era.

Like a thunderbolt from the brush, Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" can stop you in your tracks. The Victorian writer and artist John Ruskin certainly thought so. "I have been quite overwhelmed today by a man I have never dreamed of -- Tintoret," he wrote to his father on his first visit to Venice. "I always thought of him a good and clever and forcible painter, but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers. . . . And then to see his touch of quiet thought in his awful crucifixion -- there is an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves. If that isn't a master's stroke, I don't know what is."

From 1565 to 1588, Tintoretto expanded his swirling cycle of religious art in the Scuola out and down from the cross of the "Crucifixion": to canvases on the facing wall of the albergo ("Ecce Homo," "Christ Before Pilate" and "The Way to Calvary"); to a monumental series of images from the New and Old Testaments covering the walls and ceiling of the Scuola's central upper room (sala superiore); to episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary on the walls of the ground floor (sala terrena).

Tintoretto's work at the Scuola, executed over more than 20 years, became a perfect union of form, content, application and artistic intention. In Tintoretto's lifelong dedication to the Scuola, "the act of painting thus becomes a gesture of piety," writes the academic Rosand.

Earlier this year, the Prado Museum in Madrid hosted the first major survey since 1937 of Tintoretto's work. The museum also published an excellent catalog, in English, on the artist. No museum exhibition will ever do justice to Tintoretto, since his largest work never travels, but the Prado show came close, shedding light even on San Rocco: "the most personal and intensely felt of his works, conveying a powerful sense of the artist's own deeply held faith," writes Frederick Ilchman, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts and an essayist for the catalog.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which remains active as a confraternity, long ago opened its doors to the public. It now also maintains an excellent Web site, www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it, which includes interactive pictures of the rooms.

But there's no substitute for the real thing. The artist El Greco once called Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" the greatest painting in the world. Next time you are in Venice, make a visit to the Scuola your own act of piety, and experience a work of art that reaches across the centuries to our own time and place.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

'A(nother) Very Political Show'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A(nother) Very Political Show
By JAMES PANERO
June 26, 2007; Page D5

It isn't every day that you find yourself sitting beside Robert De Niro in a water taxi as he tries to lose two boatloads of paparazzi pursuing him in a slow-speed chase down the Grand Canal. Or that Bobby D asks you to explain Matthew Barney, the shock-jock artist now on display at Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection whom the New York Times once called "the most important American artist of his generation." ("Installation art and Vaseline," I say, which he repeats with a down-turned smile.)

Then again, it isn't every day that you're there for the start of the 112-year-old International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, when the Renaissance city fills to the brim with contemporary art. Leading up to the official opening, which took place June 10, the art world descends on Venice for its biggest, most spectacular and certainly oddest schmoozefest -- and departs just as the gates open to the general public.

The Arsenale, which houses the Biennale show's less established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom.
The Biennale mainly takes place in the docklands past San Marco and in a park nearby, the Giardini. Here the exhibition space is divided up among nations that maintain permanent pavilions and an international group show, this year organized by Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and formerly a curator at MoMA.

Seventy-six nations are participating this year, spread out not only in the pavilions across the Giardini but also in palazzos and other buildings throughout Venice. For the preview days, which began on June 6, hotels in Venice booked up months in advance. "Collateral" art events filled the city. Mr. De Niro was in town with the gallery owner Larry Salander to meet with journalists and present an exhibition of work by the actor's father, the accomplished and under-recognized New York School painter Robert De Niro Sr.

The De Niro show is now taking place at the San Marco Casa d'Aste in the center of town -- timed to the opening of the Biennale, but unconnected to the official exhibition. Neither Mr. Salander nor Mr. De Niro even made plans to see the central shows of the Biennale. For many, it's been a long time since the Biennale hosted must-see art.

The Biennale will remain open through Nov. 21. But visit Venice past the preview time and you miss half the point. Indeed, while the Biennale as an art fête may never be more important, the Biennale now faces stiff competition as a pre-eminent international art show from more nimble gallery-driven art fairs -- Frieze in London, the Armory Show in New York, Basel Miami, and Basel in Switzerland, which took place a week after the Biennale preview. Even Dubai now hosts its own contemporary art fair.

The Biennale has not been a "selling" fair since 1968. And with so much world-wide attention now focused on the marketplace, the exhibition has felt the pressure. Enter Bob Storr, the Biennale's first American-born curator.

At the preview press conference in Venice, Mr. Storr spoke only in English as he introduced this year's group show, an exhibition he calls "Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind: Art in the Present Tense." The title is meant to bridge the gap, as he sees it, between "conceptual" and "perceptual" art. "It is not a political show," Mr. Storr promised, but a "sober show at a time that lots of people are intoxicated by cash. The cash will go away some day. I hope the works in this show will not."

In fact, Mr. Storr has put together a very political show. Meant as a catch-all, "Think With the Senses" is instead an international survey with an all-too-narrow, tidy scope. Rare is the art here without a conceptual if not overtly political component. The Arsenale, a former naval factory building that houses his show's less-established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom, steps away from multimillion-dollar yachts parked outside.

One of the first rooms here is dedicated to the theme of crashing airplanes (by the artists Charles Gaines and Léon Ferrari). There is a work that explores the "politics of flowers" (by Yto Barrada). There are machine guns (by Nedko Solakov). There is a meditation on the Pinochet coup (by Melik Ohanian). There is a video of a child playing soccer with a human skull (Paolo Canevari's "Bouncing Skull"). There are portraits of tenured radicals like Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm (by Rainer Ganahl).

The other half of Mr. Storr's group show, which as usual is displayed in the Padiglione Italia of the Giardini, may contain more established artists, but the message is often the same. Here in a video, Mr. Ganahl repeats the words "I am not a terrorist" in different languages (at the Biennale, terrorists are the grievance group of the moment). Elsewhere, Raymond Pettibon has graffitied up a room with a diatribe against American politics. "America loves (adores) Israel," "Hillary Clinton, Hillary Kristol, Hillary Kramer: Post-op or same person" and "Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz" are scrawled besides images of the Star of Da