Summer lights

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2024

Summer Lights

On “Klimt Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” at Acquavella Galleries & “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” at Bookstein Projects, New York.

A distinguishing feature of modern art has been its pursuit of light. Of course, all of visual art is concerned with light. What modernism did was dispense with the controlled light of the salon in search of bolder and brighter sensations. Modern painters looked to reflect not merely a sense of sight but also the feeling of radiance. So they explored direct light and, in particular, summer light, chasing the sun into the countryside with their trunks of painting equipment in tow.

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was one of those painters whose compositional innovations were charged by the summer sun. A recent survey at Neue Galerie titled “Klimt Landscapes” looked not only to the verdant visions he captured in the Austrian towns alongside the Attersee between 1900 and 1916, but also to the lush creative landscape that unfurled around him in photography, jewelry, and fashion.1

Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, Oil & gold on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Today Klimt is most renowned for his “golden style.” His bejeweled portraits reached their apotheosis in such works at Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901), also known as Judith I, and The Kiss (1908–09), both in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. His Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the “lady in gold” restituted from Vienna to the subject’s Jewish heirs, now forms the heart of Neue’s permanent collection. In these works, Klimt, the son of a gold engraver, combined the decadence of precious metal with a sense for mosaic-like composition, taking inspiration from the shadowless Byzantine iconography in Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale.

Yet Klimt was more than an iconographer. He looked to move beyond these studied, labor-intensive portraits even as he relied on them to provide income for his large domestic payroll (he fathered at least six children with three mistresses while supporting multiple members of his extended family, including his widowed sister-in-law, Emilie “Midi” Flöge, a fashion designer and his muse). Klimt found relief in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria, north of Salzburg. Each summer, after 1900, he traveled there from Vienna to paint along the lake towns of the Attersee.

Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1909, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Organized by Janis Staggs, Neue’s director of curatorial and manager of publications, “Klimt Landscapes” took a welcome, wide-angle view of these creative sojourns. The exhibition brought together such masterpieces as The Park (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Kammer Castle on the Attersee I (Castle in the Lake) (1908, National Gallery Prague), and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914, Neue Galerie). The survey assembled works dating back to Klimt’s academic training and continuing on through his many experiments with optics, providing along the way several examples of jewelry by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser together with many photographic portraits of Klimt’s own projections of summer leisure.

Trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts of the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, known today as the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Klimt proved to be a precocious academic talent. The exhibition began with his figure studies of 1880 and his Two Girls with Oleander (ca. 1890–92, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), an astonishing vision of glowing Pre-Raphaelite women plucking flowers beside an egg-and-dart frieze.

Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, ca. 1890–92, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

Seeing Klimt’s command of painterly illusion makes his modernist compression, developed just a few years later, all the more remarkable. A founding member of the Vienna Secession in 1897, he joined fellow academic painters to look beyond the style of the salon. Yet for all of its innovative surface application, Klimt’s subsequent golden style owed much to academic structure. Beneath the ornament, his shimmering portraits were essentially salon paintings. Part academic, part modern, these works were dismissed by the devotees of either camp. Klimt remained largely absent, for example, from the French-focused timeline of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As such distinctions have diminished over time, however, the hybrid nature of these works has only made them more compelling. Today his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I has become known as “Austria’s Mona Lisa” and attracts commensurate crowds and Hollywood fanfare, serving as the focus of the 2015 biographical drama Woman in Gold.

The relief provided by the Attersee owed in part to the fact that Klimt had received little academic training in landscape painting, which was considered a lower genre than history painting and portraiture. This lack of schooling left Klimt free to experiment with the Stimmungsimpressionismus, or “atmospheric impressions,” that he felt during his Sommerfrische, “summer holidays.” Unlike his studied portraits, Klimt painted his landscapes without preparatory sketches. The unidealized composition of this “vacation work” helps underscore the leisure of their creation. Klimt viewed his landscape painting as a segment of his daily therapy. A letter from August 1902 outlines his summer workout routine:

Early in the morning, about 6 . . . I get up—if the weather’s good I go to the nearby wood—I’m painting a small beech wood there (if the sun’s shining) . . . that takes me to 8, then comes breakfast, then a swim in the lake, carefully of course—then I paint a little, perhaps a view of the lake by sunlight, or if the weather’s dull a landscape from my window—sometimes I drop this morning painting and study my Japanese books . . . Then comes midday, after lunch I sleep a little or read, and before or after tea another swim . . . After tea I’m painting again . . . . Every now and then I fit a bit of rowing into the day’s program in order to limber up.

A proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Klimt saw himself as a piece of that “total work of art.” In the summer he dressed the part by dispensing with the cummerbund and donning a blue, caftan-style painter’s smock. (Early Christmas shoppers, take note: Neue’s gift shop features an “exact replica” of this full length indigo linen smock with “hand-embroidered white epaulets and front pocket.”) Klimt appears in repeated photographs around the Attersee in this getup, walking on docks and strolling on trails, even as the figures around him didn’t always get the caftan memo, appearing in more standard summer outfits.

Beech Forest in Autumn, 1898. Photo: Hugo Henneberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

One revelation of this survey was the extent to which photography influenced and shaped Klimt’s own artistic landscape. “It would be difficult to overestimate the sizable impact of photography on Klimt’s development as a landscape painter,” writes Staggs in the exhibition’s catalogue. The Austrian Camera Club of Amateur Photographers, later known as the Vienna Camera Club, was established in 1887. Klimt surrounded himself with photographers such as Moriz Nähr, Heinrich Böhler, and Emma Bacher-Teschner, and he regularly posed as their subject. Klimt developed his own unusual, square landscape format largely under the influence of their often-square images. He also used telescopes and photographic aids to help compose his paintings, flattening his landscapes and even drawing on the patterns of photographic emulsion. Just compare Hugo Henneberg’s photograph Birch Forest in Autumn (1898, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) with Klimt’s Beech Forest I of circa 1902 (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden), or Heinrich Kuehn’s Meadow with Trees (1897, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna) with Klimt’s Pear Tree (Pear Trees) (1903, Harvard Art Museums). Klimt painted his landscapes in the style of this early photography.

Gustav Klimt, Beech Forest I, 1902, Oil on canvas, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

The remarkable set of Autochrome Lumière color photographs that Friedrich G. “Fritz” Walker took of Emilie Flöge and Klimt, in the garden of Villa Paulick in September of 1913, then brought the exhibition full circle. Early photography, in particular color photography, was especially light-intensive and relied on the same summer sun as did Klimt. Here in colorful costumes he and Flöge appear as both subjects and objects—flattened into their own lush landscapes in these photographic “drawings with light.” From “lady in gold,” we end with artists in green.

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.2

Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles), ca. 1985, Watercolor on paper, Collection of Matt and Maria Bult.

Painted with a sugary impasto, this masterly work can seem fresh and ready to melt in the summer sun. Thiebaud was the American Giorgio Morandi for his uncanny ability to transform paint into the subjects he depicted. In part this is due to the halation effects along his edges, as shadows are broken into lines and fields of blue and red that become delicate frosting for his forms, as seen in such works as Strawberry Cone (1969) and Two Tulip Sundaes (2010) and even such portraits as Betty Jean (ca. 1965). Thiebaud was particularly attuned to the textures of his media. His thirst-quenching Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles) (ca. 1985) would only work as a watercolor on paper. His Cheese Display (1969) feels milky-smooth, while his Beach Gathering (2000–15) appears encrusted with sand. Due to this innate sense for intimism, I find his portraits and still lifes work better than his landscapes. Thiebaud was at his best when subject and painting could melt into one.

The paintings in “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” on view last month at Bookstein Projects, spanned a remarkable eighty years.3 A suite of bold new work, of celestial bodies pared down to brushstroke, color, and form, all painted in Resika’s ninety-fifth year, was connected to Moonlight, a small landscape executed in 1943–44, when the artist was just sixteen years old. Beyond the official show, the gallery’s office also featured an extra work from the artist’s collection: Panorama of the Hudson (The Mermaid and the Factory) (1948), a wild composition of bridges, train tracks, and the ghost-like rollercoaster of the long-departed Palisades Amusement Park—painted at a time when the teenage artist could catch a ferry there just across town from his Central
Harlem studio.

Paul Resika, Moonlight, 1943–44, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects, New York.

The brightness and compositions may have varied, but everywhere a minimum of line defined depth in what were otherwise blind, blinding, and turbulent sights. Illuminated across time, the full assembly revealed a consistency of vision and a connected sense for the bare essentials. Revisiting the illusion of light in paint, Resika in his latest work has doubled down on the experimental quality of what can be done with a minimum of means. In several canvases, a simple dash, placed just right, becomes a horizon line reflecting the luminous spheres above. These orbs, all of slightly different values, meanwhile appear to fill the canvases with various shades of glowing color. “Marcel Breuer told me never to paint a green picture,” Resika explained to me when I ran into him at the gallery. So he did just that. This painter, who has been bucking convention for eighty years, remains a guiding light for the daring possibilities of oil on canvas.

Paul Resika, End of the Day #12, Oil on canvas, 2023, Bookstein Projects, New York.

1. “Klimt Landscapes” was on view at Neue Galerie, New York, from February 15 through May 6, 2024. 

2. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” opened at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on April 26 and remains on view through June 14, 2024. 

3. “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” was on view at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 31, 2024. 

Brown in Town

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2024

Brown in Town

On the Winter Show, Master Drawings New York, “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club” & “Masters Week.”

In late January, The Winter Antiques Show returned to the Park Avenue Armory. Correction: make that “The Winter Show.”1 Five years ago, as this venerable exposition fell under new management on its sixty-fifth anniversary year, the word “antiques” was struck from its title. Like that brown furniture in your grandmother’s attic now scented with camphor and racism, the past has lost its market value to the present. Against the mystery cult of the new, who dares to appear antique?

And so, much of The Winter Show in recent years has felt like Terminal D Duty Free. Aisles of bangles, baubles, and beads make the presentation an ahistorical muddle. Maybe this is the point. How better to get “younger collectors interested in material culture at large,” in the words of expo leadership, at the Young Collectors Night DJ party? Fortunately, it has not all been out with the old and in with the new for what remains arguably America’s most important antiques fair. Now seventy years old, The Winter Show’s ten-day assembly of dealers should be seen as an heirloom event—one dedicated to benefiting the East Side House Settlement, now in the South Bronx, as it has since the fair’s founding in the 1950s.

John Vanderlyn Jr., Santa Claus, 1845, Oil on canvas, Jeffrey Tillou Antiques, New York.

Beyond the gewgaws, this year’s Winter Show presented a welcome homage to its own past. Mixed in among the booths of some seventy dealers, an exhibition titled “Focus: Americana,” curated by Alexandra Kirtley of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, brought together pieces from several of the show’s historical exhibitors, some of whom still participate, and others who left long ago. Taken together, this fascinating assembly spoke to the importance of The Winter Show in raising the profile of American antiques over its seven-decade run and made the case for their value today.

Highlights here were many, including a tall case clock by Major Timothy Chandler, circa 1810, along with a fire screen “with framed theorem still life,” circa 1830, both on view from David A. Schorsch–Eileen M. Smiles Fine Americana. Olde Hope offered up a pine overmantel panel with a vernacular painting of a white house from New York or New England circa 1820–40. Levy Galleries brought a Hepplewhite mirror with an original floral finial and an eglomise-gilded panel of a farm landscape, made in New York circa 1795. Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented a portrait of Santa Claus “painted in 1845 by John Vanderlyn for the cabin on the river steamer Santa Claus—owned by Ezra Fitch,” according to a label on its verso. Allan Katz Americana brought a whirligig of a New York Seventy-ninth Infantry Regiment Highlander in tartan parade attire, the only known such carving in existence, from circa 1860–80. Meanwhile Kelly Kinzle Antiques presented “Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775,” a decorated powder horn attributed to the Simsbury Carver. Also from Kinzle was a miniature wall clock of mahogany and painted glass signed by David Brown, circa 1820, and a harvest face-jug by Charles Decker—an expressionist example of Tennessee’s Keystone Potter circa 1875. Altogether, the presentation of “Focus: Americana” revealed the wonder and strangeness of American craft, with pieces that rose to the level of fine art while retaining their folk traditions.

Simsbury Carver, Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775, 1775, Horn, Killy Kinzle Antiques, New Oxford, Pennsylvania.

With fewer collectors deeply invested in historical periods and styles, the hope today is that buyers will at least view such antiques as stand-alone works that can be mixed into more contemporary, Instagrammable settings. As with “Focus: Americana,” it was reassuring to see two current dealers dedicated to colonial, British, and American antiques flanking the show’s entrance. On one side, Cove Landing presented a George I “Mulberry Wood’’ bureau cabinet, circa 1725, with a mottled veneer that would put an abstract expressionist to shame. Meanwhile, across the entry hallway, Levy Galleries displayed a Chippendale tall case clock, circa 1770, next to a Federal eagle-inlaid tall case clock, circa 1800. Inside the booth, a Federal table attributed to the workshop of Thomas Seymour, circa 1805–12, spoke to the increasing interest in furniture designed for “lady’s work.”

Hirschl & Adler Galleries brought its own worktable “in the Sheraton Taste,” circa 1810, attributed to Thomas Seymour, with a similarly suspended fabric workbag for yarn and linen. This piece was paired with a burled-elm pier table with tole columns, circa 1815–19, along with paintings and watercolors by Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper. Nearby, Daniel Crouch Rare Books displayed John Mitchell’s fascinating Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, published in 1755, along with other cartographic curios, including the Adrian Naftalin collection of maps of the—checks notes—Jewish Holy Land.

Pierre Bonnard, L’Escalier, ca. 1932, Oil & gouache on paper, Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York.

Rounding out these attractions was a pair of George III reverse-glass cabinets featuring Grand Tour vignettes, circa 1780, attributed to Ince and Mayhew, from Hyde Park Antiques; a sixteenth-century bowl with a painting of John the Baptist by Pontormo at Robert Simon Fine Art; a stag hunt by John Wootton and other sporting scenes at Red Fox Fine Art; fifteenth-century books at Les Enluminures; a circa 1932 oil-and-gouache of a pet dog by Pierre Bonnard at Jill Newhouse Gallery; and artifacts by Northwest Coast Indians at Tambaran Gallery. Such a collection of historical objects is almost enough to make you forget our present circumstances.

The Winter Show serves as a pendant to New York’s annual auctions for historical art and antiques, which take place the following week. Squeezed between the two is Master Drawings New York, an initiative that brings national and international galleries to the Upper East Side, where they partner with local venues for wall space.2 Now in its eighteenth season, this year Master Drawings New York came under the leadership of Christopher Bishop, a New York gallerist with an eye for misattributed work. Employing a similar sense of connoisseurship to this undervalued gathering of galleries and collectors, Bishop introduced a new level of organization and scholarship to the endeavor that presented a welcome abundance of work in seemingly every available corner of the neighborhood—with only a few days to see it all.

Lorenzo Balidessera Tiepolo, A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand, ca. 1755, Black & red chalk, Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., New York.

Clustered in galleries around the Metropolitan Museum and continuing down to Sixty-fourth Street, twenty-six exhibitors mounted these special exhibitions of works on paper from the fifteenth century to the present. Highlights this year included, at Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., a portrait of the young Henry William Mathew by John Flaxman, dynamic studies by Il Guercino, drawings by Boucher and Corot, and an unpublished drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo. Abbott and Holder brought over forty-eight British works on paper from its London-based showroom, including a capriccio landscape by Robert Adam, a visionary bedroom sketch by William Blake, and a delicate J. M. W. Turner watercolor once owned by John Ruskin—along with a handsome printed catalogue. Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings presented orientalist portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Leopold Carl Müller alongside an exhibition of portraits and seascapes by the Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla. Meanwhile David Nolan Gallery, in collaboration with Donald Ellis, presented “Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900,” an exhibition of seventy-five sketches by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota artists from the nineteenth century.

The book trade remains a welcome gateway to the cultures of the past, with much of it accessible to a range of readers and collectors. Judging by the crowds at recent New York book fairs, the hard copy has become only more attractive in our digital world for its tactile pleasures and literary delights, while providing the ultimate backup to our evanescent bits and bytes. As collecting institutions have become radicalized by identity politics (see “A library by the book,” my essay in The New Criterion of December 2022), personal libraries are more essential than ever before.

Cover, spine & back cover of The Whole Book of Psalmes, 1643. Photo: Nicole Neenan / Grolier Club.

Last September, the upstart Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair set up shop for the first time inside St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. The show was a welcome competitor to the more established (and woker) International Antiquarian Book Fair, put on every April by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. An extra pleasure of its ecclesiastical venue was hearing Paolo Bordignon, St. Bart’s organist and choirmaster, perform on the fair’s opening night.

This season, just up the street, the Grolier Club, America’s oldest society of bibliophiles, founded in 1884, continued its run of significant public programs with two must-see exhibitions on view at once. “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” installed in the second floor gallery, was a page-turner.3 With more than ninety books from the Grolier member Jeffrey Johnson’s collection of early detective novels, the exhibition featured standouts ranging from the first American edition of Memoirs of Vidocq (1834), to the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892), to Agatha Christie’s first novel (1920). Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anna Katherine Green were among the list of accomplices in a thrilling show that was criminal to miss. Especially appreciated was Johnson’s own testimony, provided in wall labels, of his discoveries as a collector.

A gallery view of “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” at the Grolier Club, New York. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.

Meanwhile, on view through April in the club’s main exhibition hall, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020,” reveals the Grolier’s advancement of bookbinding as both collecting interest and craft.4 Thanks to the creation of the society’s own bindery in the late nineteenth century, for example, club members no longer had to send their rare books off to France for treatment. Drawing on the society’s holdings, the exhibition pairs the club’s own work with a hundred examples of rare bindings, starting with a circa 1473 brass-and-pigskin volume of The Jewish Wars by Josephus and Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, through a jeweled miniature Whole Booke of Psalmes (1673), on up to a gilded freehand design by Ulrich Widmann from 2019. Most rewarding are those bindings that speak to the contents within, for example, Ernest Lefébure’s Embroidery and Lace of 1888, with boards covered in green ribbed silk embroidered in delicate floral patterns.

To cap off the antiques season, in late January Sotheby’s filled out its multiple floors on York Avenue with its “Masters Week” sales.5 These days, works by, or of, non-whites and non-men are the hot commodities. Institutional buyers must pursue “diversity” or risk dei ire. That explains the run-up in prices for the saccharine paintings of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who has been achieving records at auction for her work as a female Old Master (Old Mistress?). At the same time, institutions must be seen delivering up their permanent collections to the deaccessioning of the vanities. In the latest Sotheby’s sales, the Metropolitan Museum offered paintings from its “permanent” collection by George Romney, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, and Johann Liss. With proceeds meant to “benefit the acquisition fund,” we might assume those returns will not be used to purchase more Romneys, Reynoldses, and Gainsboroughs.

Gustav Bauernfeind, The Western Wall, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

Nevertheless, it may be good to get such art into the hands of collectors who will value it, and it is a pleasure to see these works as they go up for sale. In the February 1 auction titled “Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I,” The Western Wall (ca. 1890), a painting by Gustav Bauernfeind, bore detailed witness to the historical importance of that holy site. Equally interesting was a charming Swabian School altarpiece of Saint Ursula, circa 1480–90, which at one time passed through the hands of the Monuments Men, who restituted the work from the clutches of Hermann Göring. In “Master Paintings Part II,” a Veronese oil of the creation of Eve, circa 1570–80, sold off by the Art Institute of Chicago after nearly a century in its collection, could have been yours for the price of New York’s worst studio apartment. In the February 2 sale of “Old Master and British Works on Paper,” a sketchbook drawing of a bridge near Epsom by John Constable, circa 1806, was estimated at $5–8,000 but ended up selling for much more. Meanwhile, the sale of “Master Sculpture & Works of Art” remained particularly undervalued, with fourteenth-century ecclesiastical French sculpture going for four digits.

In fact, it is worth noting that the highest jump of Masters Week was the sale of six gym shoes once worn by Michael Jordan. As that suite of sneakers sold for eight million dollars, no Old Master can hope to be like Mike.

1.   The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 19 through January 28, 2024.

2.   Master Drawings New York was on view from January 27 through February 3, 2024.

3.   “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” was on view at the Grolier Club, New York, from November 30, 2023, through February 10, 2024.

4.   “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020” opened at the Grolier Club, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through April 13, 2024.

5.   “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 26 through February 3, 2024.

Giorgione in the House

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2024

Giorgione in the house

On “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, New York.

The arrival of a single painting in the United States is not often cause for a special exhibition. When the visitor, however, is a work by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (ca. 1477–1510), you make an exception. Only about ten paintings are attributed today to the enigmatic Venetian, and The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–09), now on loan in New York for the first time from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is among his greatest achievements. So the appearance of this canvas at the Frick Collection’s temporary home of Frick Madison is cause for a very special exhibition indeed. That this painting has been reunited—for the first time in some four hundred years—with its pendant composition, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), the masterpiece from the Frick’s own collection that in the sixteenth century occupied the same Venetian palazzo as the Giorgione, is also cause for jubilation. This reunion is the occasion for a revelatory one-room show, “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.”1

The loan is the result of a pursuit that bordered on obsession for Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. The exhibition is also a tribute to the Frick’s outgoing director, Ian Wardropper, who has set his retirement for next year, and his high-minded use of the collection’s temporary digs on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum, onetime outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, and future headquarters of Sotheby’s auction house. On March 3, the Frick will vacate these galleries that have functioned like private viewing rooms for its collection and move back to its mansion at One East Seventieth Street.

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The installation of the Frick’s permanent collection on Madison Avenue—and in particular the presentation of St. Francis—was the inspiration for Salomon’s dream of reuniting the Bellini with the Giorgione. To underscore the worthiness of the unprecedented loan, in the accompanying catalogue published by D Giles Limited, Salomon collects everything we could possibly imagine about the creation, meaning, and provenance of The Three Philosophers and its relationship with St. Francis in the Desert.

Three years ago, I wrote about the effect of seeing St. Francis in the Desert in the light of Frick Madison (see “Sublet with Bellini” in The New Criterion of April 2021). A raking illumination fills the scene from beyond the left frame—unseen by us, but fully apparent to Francis, who exposes the symbolic wounds of the stigmata on his hands and feet. Flora and fauna fill this vision of his rocky hermitage as the rays seemingly melt its icelike outcropping into a stream, watering a kingfisher below. Kenneth Clark noted how “no other great painting, perhaps, contains such a quantity of natural details observed and rendered with incredible patience: for no other painter has been able to give to such an accumulation the unity which is only achieved by love.”

Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508–09, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KMH-Museumsverband.

At Frick Madison, positioned in its own alcove, the painting has been lit by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows in a way that accentuates the work’s own luminous dynamics. Light and shadow, depiction and reality glow together. The Three Philosophers has now been hung on this alcove’s opposite wall, which had been left empty before the arrival of the Giorgione. Again we are presented with figures in a rocky landscape, this time three men in colorful robes, with two standing and one seated. The similarities in these compositions of roughly equal size are striking, especially as the two paintings can now be observed together. The hills in the distance share uncanny form, as do the designs of the distant towns with their arched construction. The stepped stones in the foregrounds seem like mirror formations. Even the tiny pebbles appear to have been quarried from the same source.

The two paintings interact the more you move around them and take them in. Are we looking at the same scene depicting two different periods of time? Or are these two sides of the same outcropping, with the stone floor of Frick Madison now running between them? While the direct lighting of St. Francis leaves little doubt of its divine origin, the illumination of the Giorgione is more elusive. A sun low on the horizon seems to be setting, but the figures appear to be lit with an unexplained glow. Those “three philosophers” may be seen carrying scientific instruments and tablets relating to the sun and moon, but the lighting of the composition is non-Euclidian and otherworldly. It is almost as if the radiance of the Bellini is now bouncing off of the Giorgione in mystical, lunar-like reflection.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1475–80, Oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

As is often the case with Giorgione, the more we look into this young painter’s work, the less we understand it. Anyone who has tracked down Giorgione’s small painting The Tempest (ca. 1508) in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia can likewise attest to the mystery of that strange and tender scene of a nursing mother, an idle man, and ruined architecture beneath a stormy sky. Who are they? Where are we? What are we seeing? The questions strike like a thunderclap emanating from the clouds above. Here is something more than just visual storytelling with known characters and stock symbols. Rather it is something absorptive, mysterious, and new.

The same goes for The Three Philosophers. The composition has warmed observers with its brilliance but also baffled scholars about its meaning since just about the time of its own creation. In 1525 a Venetian collector by the name of Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552) was making a survey of art in the Veneto when he recorded a definitive account of these paintings together in what he titled his Pittori e pitture in diversi luoghi (Painters and paintings in different places). This manuscript was later published as his Notizia d’opere di disegno (Information on works of design).

In his account of the paintings “in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini,” written in the Venetian dialect, Michiel lists ten works. One of them is “three philosophers,” he writes, a “canvas in oil of the three philosophers in the landscape, two standing and one seated who is contemplating the sun’s rays, with that stone finished so marvelously . . . begun by Giorgio from Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano Veneziano.” Another is a “Panel of St. Francis in the Desert,” which Marcantonio Michiel identifies as an oil by “Zuan Bellini, begun by him for Messer Zuan Michiel, and it has a landscape nearby wonderfully finished and refined.”

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

Marcantonio Michiel’s account is significant for several reasons: for coining the titles of the two works (3 phylosophi and S. Francesco nel diserto); for its clear descriptions of the paintings (dui ritti et uno sentado che contempla gli raggii solari cum quel saxo finto cusi mirabilmente and un paese propinquo finito et ricercato mirabilmente); for information about their authorship and provenance (Fu cominciata da Zorzo da Castel Franco, et finita da Sebastiano Venitiano and Fu opera de Zuan bellino, cominciata da lui a Ms. Zuan michiel); and for describing them together in one private collection (In casa de Ms. Tadio Contarino).

Recorded some forty-five years after the creation of St. Francis, seventeen years after Three Philosophers, fifteen years after Giorgione’s death, and nine years after the death of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516), Michiel’s survey is also revelatory for what it leaves out: the identity of those three philosophers, as well as the particular moment depicted in Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. Both have been sources of discussion and conjecture ever since. For St. Francis, most scholars now agree that the image depicts the saint’s stigmatization, not in the “desert” but rather at his Apennine retreat at La Verna. Still, two standard references are missing: the seraph delivering Christ’s wounds, and Brother Leo. An alternative interpretation is that we are rather presented with Francis composing his Canticle of the Creatures, that prayer to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.”

The Giorgione poses an even greater conundrum. “Apart from Giorgione’s Tempest,” writes Salomon in his exhibition catalogue, “very few Venetian Renaissance works have received as much attention and been as widely interpreted as The Three Philosophers.” The identification of those “three philosophers,” which was left unstated by Marcantonio Michiel even within two decades of its execution, has resulted in centuries of conjecture. Assuming the painting in fact depicts “three philosophers” from antiquity, the proposed combinations as collected by Salomon have included the following: Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Regiomontanus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy; Ptolemy, Al-Battani, and Copernicus; Aristotle, Averroes, and a humanist; and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Alternatively, the figures might represent the Three Magi; or Marcus Aurelius studying with two philosophers on the Caelian Hill; or Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians; or Evander and Pallas showing Aeneas the Capitoline Hill; or a meeting between Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in Constantinople; or Saint Luke, King David, and Saint Jerome; or King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, and the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre as they plan the Temple in Jerusalem; or perhaps even the painters Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giorgione. For Xavier Salomon, the most convincing identification, as proposed by the scholar Karin Zeleny, is that of Pythagoras with his two teachers, Thales of Miletus and Pherecydes of Syros, “the first three philosophers of the Western tradition shown while at the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma.” I am more partial to the poetic approach proposed by the art historian Tom Nichols in his book Giorgione’s Ambiguity, in which he suggests that our interpretation is meant to remain free-floating and open-ended. Deliberate ambiguities, he writes, are Giorgione’s “visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation.”

“Uncertain about authorship, patronage, dating, and the significance of both paintings,” writes Salomon, “when it comes to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we know much less than we think we do.” What is certain is that these paintings occupied the same Venetian home soon after their creation, even if the specific location of Taddeo Contarini’s residence in the neighborhood of Cannaregio has been up for debate. Marcantonio Michiel writes that Bellini painted his St. Francis for Zuan Michiel, and the painting was then acquired by Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540) soon thereafter. It is possible that Giorgione’s Three Philosophers was a direct commission by this powerful and supposedly unscrupulous Venetian merchant—one even intended to complement the Bellini. While he may or may not have painted it for Contarini’s collection specifically, Giorgione most likely studied with Bellini, and so St. Francis might still have been front and center in his mind.

The last time these paintings were seen in one place was between 1556 and 1636. Like a flash of light of some divine rapture, their being brought together in this spectacular exhibition makes their connections manifest once again.

1.   “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” opened at Frick Madison, New York, on November 9, 2023, and remains on view through February 4, 2024.