Until the late singer George Michael bought John Lennon’s upright piano for $2.1 million in 2000, the Clark Art Institute’s richly adorned Alma-Tadema Steinway was the most expensive music box on the planet. Four years earlier, the museum had purchased the grand piano, its weight supported by two mythological griffins and inlaid with pewter, ivory, abalone and mother-of-pearl, for $1.2 million.
Publicly displayed, the Victorian Age piano, a pleasant hallucination of details, was exclusively designed for the wealthy New York banker Henry Marquand (1819–1902). The ornamentation of the Steinway required three years of labor and was the centerpiece of Marquand’s Greco-Pompeian music room, a facet of his opulent mansion cornering Madison Avenue and 68th Street in New York City, N.Y.
Alas, the brick and limestone mansion stood for less than 30 years before it was razed for an apartment building, its contents auctioned off to all points of the compass.
Through the persistent sleuthing of Clark staff members Kathleen Morris and Alexis Goodin, however, 12 furnishings and art works of the music room have been briefly reunited.
The room’s design was pivotally unique insofar as it was the only time that the Dutch painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) was commissioned to design a home’s interior. He’s best known for his highly detailed classical Greek and Roman paintings, often featuring bright marble architectural details seemingly real enough to touch.
“It’s kind of an extraordinary story,” Morris, the institute’s director of collections, said during a press reception. “It’s a unique moment in Alma-Tadema’s career, and it’s actually an unusual moment in the decoration of mansions of this type.”
Marquand, a co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was intent upon living in a structure large enough to house his vast collection paintings and sculpture. He hired a close friend, Richard Hunt, to design the $1 million, five-story chateau that required three years to build. The architect had earlier designed the Met’s exterior. Marquand’s mansion, readied for occupancy in 1884, featured an entranceway with a glass ceiling 40 feet above the floor, a greenhouse framed in cast iron and each room themed in a different architectural style. A smoking room had Moorish accents, $150,000 was spent on the Japanese-styled living room and another $400,000 on a Chinese room. This was in a time when carpenters took home some $860 annually, and laborers would be content with half that amount.
It was the era that Mark Twain dubbed “the gilded age,” noting that the wretched excess of the ostentatious wealthy was superficial, similar to the casting process wherein gold is thinly layered over a less precious metal.
Nevertheless, Marquand’s home, with accents by the glassmaker Louis Tiffany, was a showplace and, for a time, former president Grover Cleveland rented an annex. Architectural magazines highlighted the chateau’s many surprises, and their photographs aided Morris and Goodin in their adventure, the reunion of many of the music room’s original furnishings. Their sleuthing, however, was omnidirectional. They also detailed the history of the British company that created the furnishings of the room, as well as the noted pianists who’d stroked the keys of the Steinway grand. These details are contained in the companion hardbound “Orchestrating Elegance” (CAI; 220 pages; $35).
Marquand scored a coup in commissioning Alma-Tadema’s designs. The Dutchman was among the most famed of the Victorian artists and also one of the wealthiest. In his mid-30s, he arrived in England, making it his home. He won numerous awards for his academic depictions of early Greek and Roman life, and was later knighted by the Queen, one of only eight painters from the continent to be so honored.
He was extremely familiar with the excavations of Pompeii, the Italian city almost perfectly entombed in 13 to 20 feet of ash following the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. He had countless photographs of the ruins of these past Mediterranean civilizations to rely upon for accuracy.
“He was known for being a very careful researcher,” Goodin, the Clark’s curatorial research assistant, said. “He had a wonderful archive and resource library to work from as he thought about possible scenes from the past to illustrate.”
Alma-Tadema employed the London firm of Johnstone, Norman & Co., purveyors to such royalty as the Prince of Wales, to construct his furniture designs. The music room was rhapsodic in fine details. A large cabinet of ebony for storing sheet music was topped off with a miniature Grecian building.
If you were bored by a musical recital, you could gaze at the ceiling where a three-panel illustration of classical figures painted by Sir Frederic Leighton might enthrall you.
This opulence disintegrated upon Marquand’s death. There was no interest in the chateau and it was demolished in 1913, its contents sold to museums and private collectors.
For decades the Alma-Tadema piano sat in the lobby of a New York theater, collecting discarded candy wrappers and cigarette butts.
Long after his death, Alma-Tadema’ s paintings plummeted dramatically in value before resurgence restored them again to stratospheric prices.
The exhibit provides you with a glimpse of a long forgotten age and the accouterments of a wealthy man who set no limits on expenditures for his chateau.
View it before many of these antiques are again dispersed to the Four Winds.
A revelation of a different sort is the exhibit of 35 prints and two paintings by Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973).
“One of the things that interests me about artists in general, and Picasso in particular, is how there’s a myth to the artist,” Jay Clarke said during the press preview. She’s the Clark’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “There’s clearly a myth to Picasso about (his) amazing genius.”
Clarke is also the co-author, with Picasso expert Marilyn McCully of a companion catalogue “Picasso/Encounters” (CAI; 136 pages; $25)
Although the artist would paint in solitude, for his voluminous work in prints he entrusted the expertise of craftsmen to produce his images coherently. He also required attentive nurturing from his lovers and wives, who served unfailingly as muses until his ardor cooled.
He frequently said “there were two types of women, goddesses and doormats.”
“He had very tumultuous relationships with women — a lot of muses in his life,” Clarke said. “Not only did they exist as artistic inspiration, but they were very much a part of allowing him to have a family, a household.”
At the exhibit’s entrance you view a “Self–Portrait” oil from 1901, the inaugural year of Picasso’s “blue period,” a time when the color dominated his canvasses.
This is a gaunt, hungry artist who, a few years later will join Georges Braque in heralding the new art of Cubism, a movement which brought notice to both artists.
In the blue period, however, Picasso dwelt upon images of the downtrodden and outcast. A print of “The Frugal Repast” showing a thin, melancholy couple seated at a table sparse of food, marks the beginning of Picasso’s prolific career in print.
His works could be puzzling in complexity. Among well-known prints is “Minatauromachia,” a nightmarish scene of a mythical Minotaur wounding a female matador while a younger woman holds a candle, anathema to a creature that abhors light. One interpretation is that the unconscious bullfighter is his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, who refused him a divorce. The woman holding a candle resembles his lover, Marie — Therese Walter, who was then pregnant. The image of the beast suggests that Picasso may have seen himself as a monster in the field of romance. The image is something of a primer for “Guernica,” his huge canvas of 1937.
Some of Picasso’s prints could be eerily confusing or achieve high art, such as a dry point studies of Khokhlova’s or Walter’s faces. There are also portraits of his children, his second wife, other Minotaur scenes and the motifs of the circus and bullring to which he often returned.
The exhibit’s last wall holds a blow-up photograph of Francoise Gilot, the only woman who left Picasso, rather than to remain and be later discarded by the artist. He told her she would become obscure and was “headed straight for the desert” when she left him.
A well-known artist in her own right and the author of two best-selling books, her 96th birthday is this November.
Added to all this culture is an exhibit of works by the late Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), considered to be one of the most significant artists of the post war era. Her career spanned more than six decades and two exhibits highlight her work in Abstract Expressionism and experimental woodcut designs.
“Orchestrating Elegance” continues through Sept. 4; “Picasso/Encounters” through Aug. 27; Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings through Oct. 9 and woodcuts through Sept. 24. The institute is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is adults, $20; students with an ID and under age 18, free admission.