THE ART COLLECTION

The Bellagio Show

Page One of Three

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March 15, 2001, Thursday, BC cycle

LAS VEGAS: Steve Martin? Fine art? Las Vegas?

As Martin might say, "Well, excuuuuuuuse me!

The comedian, actor, author, banjo-player, singer - who'll add Academy Awards host to his resume on March 25 - is going to show the public yet another facet when he displays his collection of modern and contemporary art April 7 at the Bellagio hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

Why a Las Vegas casino?

"The real reason," Martin says in a catalog to be sold at his first-ever show, is "it sounds like fun."

Martin's show of 28 pieces will include works by Georges Seurat, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Edward Hopper and others. Two works, by David Park and Neil Jenney, that Martin previously donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will also be shown.

"The juxtaposition of great art in Las Vegas seems almost like an oxymoron," acknowledged Alan Feldman, spokesman for MGM-Mirage Resorts, which owns Bellagio.

The upscale resort and The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino are among those trying to change Sin City's neon-lit, velvet painting, home-of-boxing image by promoting museum-quality art galleries.

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March 15, 2001, Thursday, Final Edition; Life section; p. 2D

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March 15, 2001 at 11:05:28 PST

Martin's collection includes 28 modern and contemporary paintings and drawings, and include artwork from Georges Seurat and Pablo Picasso. Also included in the collection are paintings by actors Martin Mull and Eric Fischl. The display will include two paintings from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, previously donated to the museum by Martin.

The Martin exhibit will run from April 7 to Sept. 3. It will replace the 26-painting exhibit from the Phillips Collection of Washington, D.C., on display at the Bellagio since Sept. 1. The collection's last day at the Bellagio is March 25.

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March 16, 2001, Friday, Late edition

Section E; Part 2; Page 32; Column 3; Leisure/Weekend Desk

INSIDE ART

Carol Vogel

When MGM Grand bought Mirage Resorts for $4.4 billion last year, it transformed the Mirage's Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas from a showcase for works that Stephen A. Wynn, the casino's previous chairman, had bought for himself and for the gallery into a philanthropic kunsthalle, a museum without its own collection.

The gallery recently showed 26 works from the Phillips Collection in Washington. The net profit from the exhibition went back to Phillips. (The gallery's general admission is $12.) Now the gallery is preparing to show 28 paintings and drawings belonging to the actor and comedian Steve Martin. This will be the first time that he has shown his collection, which includes works by masters like Seurat, Picasso, Hopper and David Hockney.

The exhibition, from April 7 to Sept. 3, will have an audio tour narrated by Mr. Martin from a script by Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker. Net profits from the show will go to the Steve Martin Charitable Foundation, a Los Angeles-based organization benefiting the arts.

"Alex Yemenidjiam, the chairman of MGM Studios, approached Steve Martin," said Kathleen Clewell, director of the gallery. "He's been a supporter of the arts for a long time and has collected art for over 30 years."

Among the stars of Mr. Martin's collection are two Hoppers: "Captain Upton's House" (1927) and "Hotel Window" (1955). Also on view will be Picasso's "Seated Woman" (1938), depicting his mistress Dora Maar, and Lichtenstein's "Ohhh . . . Alright," a 1964 cartoon image of a woman holding a telephone, responding to the voice on the other end.

Although Mr. Martin declined to say why he had suddenly decided to show his collection, he wrote in an essay for the catalog: "I would like to tell you that I'm showing these pictures because I feel a need to share them with the public, that I can no longer hoard them away, that I can't continue for one more second to keep all their radiance to myself. I wish I could say that . . . wouldn't it be swell? But I will tell you the real reason I have agreed to show these pictures in Las Vegas: it sounds like fun."

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March 29, 2001, Thursday, Final edition

Daily Datebook; Pg. D12; The In Crowd

Leah Garchik

FREE ENTERPRISE: EBay is auctioning a package of two tickets to the April 6 opening of the Bellagio exhibition of paintings owned by Steve Martin, two nights at the Las Vegas hotel, two tickets to Cirque du Soleil's "O," an exhibition catalog autographed by Martin and a photo-op with Martin.

The last two are ironic offerings from a comedian who's made a career of decrying the self-importance of celebrities, but the Bellagio stresses that proceeds go to the Steve Martin Charitable Foundation, which gives money to the arts. As of yesterday morning there were 82 bids, and the price was up to $4,800.

And actor John Malkovich is partner in the Big Sleep hotel chain, the first branch of which opened recently in a converted 1960s office building in Cardiff, Wales. The hotel is described by its creators as a "travel lodge with sex appeal," which, according to a report in the Independent, includes AstroTurf-covered seats in the bar, Ikea trash baskets and Formica furniture.

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Leah Garchik's Personals

Friday, April 3, 1998

Martin Mull would wince at a news release about his new show of dreamlike figurative paintings at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco that says he's ``best known as an actor.'' Mull, who lives in Los Angeles, has bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts and has taught painting on the college level. ``Of all the things I could see myself doing,'' he said this week, ``painting is the only thing that is a lifetime commitment.''

 Most painters are forced to support themselves with other jobs, ``teaching, cab driving, frying shrimp at HoJo's,'' says Mull. ``As long as I have to do that, too, I couldn't ask for a better job than playing in show business two or three times a week. It's the best cab-driving job that I can think of.''

 Although he's proud that his New York dealer signed him on without knowing anything of his show business career, Mull admits there are advantages to Hollywood connections. ``My compatriots are some of the few people I know who are depression-proof. They can buy art and tend to do so.'' Well-known art collector Steve Martin, for example, owns 31 Mull paintings. ``He's my own private Lorenzo Medici.''

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April 1, 2001

Art Section

Steve Martin

I WOULD like, for the next few paragraphs, to talk about myself. I know what you're thinking: how can a Hollywood actor, who must be continually preoccupied with caring for others, take time out to talk about himself? Because in doing so perhaps I can explain why, after decades of never discussing or showing my art collection, I have decided to exhibit it now, and in Las Vegas.

 Being a celebrity can cause an accidental cheapening of the things one holds dear. A slip of the tongue in an interview and it's easy for me to feel I've sold out some private part of my life in exchange for publicity. I kept silent about my art collection in an effort to keep something personal for myself. My collection was for me, friends and other interested people. I didn't want these works to be perceived as vehicles for publicity, or to be treated as commercial objects used to promote an "image." I wanted the time and privacy to be dumb about art, to be sentimental, to be moved by it, to misunderstand it, to love it, without putting a public face on my thoughts.

 I have collected art for more than 30 years. Recently, it occurred to me it was time to exhibit these few pictures. I can only guess why. Perhaps my protectiveness about art has been replaced by a privacy of another kind and I've found something more important to jealously guard. Perhaps age has allowed me to see things in a simpler way. Maybe I've just relaxed.

 I would like to tell you that I'm showing these pictures because I feel a need to share them with the public, that I can no longer hoard them away, that I can't continue for one more second to keep all their radiance to myself. I wish I could say that _ wouldn't I be swell? But I will tell you the real reason I have agreed to show these pictures in Las Vegas: it sounds like fun.

 I am fortunate that such an avaricious hobby can offer such sublimity. During the course of my art-collecting life, I have bought crassly and I have bought nobly. I have mused about art and art collecting endlessly. I have overthought, under- thought, acted both rashly and judiciously. I've blown it, goofed up, sold off and traded. Within seconds, I've grown to dislike a painting I had struggled months to acquire. I have stared dumbly at pictures for thousands of man-hours; I have been humbled in the face of pure genius.

 Some paintings I own have grown on me and continue to give off their magic even after years of living with them. This interaction with art has seriously altered my life. After all my gallery visits, catalog thumbing, auction activity and clumsy negotiation, this selfish little pursuit has given me two disproportionate gifts. One is proximity to and communication with a beautiful object. The other is friends. Smart, funny, serious and open-minded friends.

 Some people seem to be born with taste. Oscar Wilde. Noël Coward. Such individuals seem to have a natal instinct for objects, art, words and, dare I say, fabrics. The singer Andy Williams has it, minus the fabrics part. One day in the 60's, with no background in art appreciation, Andy was driving down the street in Chicago and peripherally saw a painting in a gallery window. He drove a few blocks, turned around and went into the gallery and made some inquiries. Never having heard of the artist, Andy bought the painting. It turned out to be a splendid example of the most desirable type of painting by Hans Hofmann, the Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher.

 But what about folks like me: born in Waco, Tex., raised in Orange County, Calif., never exposed to anything artistic _ except comedy _ before my 18th birthday? You may be able to slot your own story into the previous sentence. I'm not sure I ever acquired taste, but what I have acquired is a feeling for art. This feeling is not absolute; it is relative. It came to me not as a blast of intuition but through the viewing of hundreds of paintings, and sorting them into a vague and fluid hierarchy.

 Cy Twombly is a brilliant artist whose career began in the 1950's. His work, for the beginning art lover, can be extremely bewildering. Squiggles and numbers are spread across white or gray canvases, giving the effect of a child's destruction of a piece of drawing paper. After I saw a dozen Twomblys, several emerged as best, several fell into the middle and a few I didn't know what to do with.

 THEN, slowly, the poetry of his work began to show itself. Then the violence. There was sometimes movement in the composition, sometimes a flat stillness. The penciled numbers on the canvases took on the glow of a crazy mental doodle that seemed to represent the endless background noise of the mind. The structure of the paintings and drawings revealed something monumental, without there being one monumental thing in them. I began to appreciate how different Twombly's work was from anyone else's. How he dared to take nothing and turn it into something, how he spoke with no one's voice but his own.

 But none of these qualities makes a great artist; what makes Twombly great is that he mysteriously, inexplicably, made art that museums, scholars and collectors generally recognize as profound, and yet, though his work generates thousands of essay and book pages, no one is really able to say exactly why. Such experiences have confirmed my belief that one's most deeply entrenched taste is the acquired taste, whether it's for art, avocados or comedians.

 In college, I had a friend named Phil Carey who was an artist and introduced me to the artist's way of thinking, and the magic names that I would someday be collecting. The art world had recently been set on end by Warhol and Lichtenstein. The Color Field painters, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, still had notoriety. Jasper Johns's intelligent pictures appealed to the brain as well as the eye. Pollock and de Kooning were giants, and Rothko stirred the somber and melancholy soul.

 These names had cachet and power. (I believe the reason I never merchandised my image when I became a popular stand- up comedian was a dim memory from these idealistic college days; these artists wouldn't have done it, and it just wasn't going to be part of my career. Of course, now I would look back with weird pride at a Steve Martin lunch box, especially after I found out that the Beatles had done it.)

 In 1970, though I had dabbled in antique- store paintings, I officially became a collector when I purchased an Ed Ruscha print of the famous Hollywood sign. It had a certain irony that I liked, and Ed was close with, and had collaborated with, Mason Williams, who was the head writer of the Smothers Brothers comedy hour on which I was a beginning writer. I bought books on all kinds of art and browsed the antique stores along La Cienega Boulevard.

 As I blundered my way around the art world, I came in contact with a dealer named Terry Delapp, who introduced me to 19th-century American painting, and I immediately fell in love with it. Easily graspable, the landscapes and genre paintings of the period were quite collectable, and I enjoyed the negotiating as much as the pictures themselves. Terry and I bought and traded through slightly sloshed eyeballs as we stayed up late and mooed over the glory of the paintings while slipping oysters Rockefeller down our throats. We amused ourselves by imagining the world's worst painting collection. Our lone entry was a picture we spotted in a local auction catalog: "Queen Victoria Viewing the Seals," and it was a painting of just that.

 During the next five years, I picked up information from Terry that has served me my entire collecting life. I watched as pictures were bought and sold, as deals were made, as paintings were examined and researched. I learned how to key out (tighten) sagging canvases, and I watched as dingy yellowed skies became eggshell blue as they were cleaned. I saw how an ultraviolet light, when waved over pictures like a magic wand, would reveal previously invisible overpaint, restoration, added signatures (curiously, the fake signature would appear to float over the canvas) and other ills that had befallen them through the years. Later, a varnish was invented that was opaque to ultraviolet light, making it less effective, teaching me that crime was in a technological war with crime prevention. But the good guys were at work, too: I was able to purchase through a classified ad in the back of an art magazine a homemade sample card of the many new varnishes, with a description of how they fluoresced under ultraviolet.

 At 24, after my stint writing for network television was over, and with my collecting instinct firmly in place, I traveled the United States performing my comedy act at nightclubs, colleges and folk clubs. The comedy boom had yet to happen and there were no comedy clubs to play. I worked at night, but during the day I haunted museums and college libraries. I learned from Terry the value of having one's own art library; in addition to its store of knowledge about art and artists, the use of the attributions and illustrations found in art books is one of the surest ways to separate the fake paintings from the real ones.

 I remember spotting a rare and valuable book in a Midwestern college _ it was Mable Dodge Luhan's early volume on Southwestern painting, "Taos and Its Artists" _ and wondering if I could smuggle it past the low-tech librarian. But my better judgment prevailed and I left it in place. This daytime study, along with my constant phone chats with Terry and Victoria Dailey, another art dealer and valuable friend, made me a walking catalog of 19th-century American painting, right down to the artists' birth and death dates. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there. And I did quick visual checks in the local antique stores, hoping to find a stray Winslow Homer that somehow had lost its way.

 When I studied the history of philosophy in college, I was continually pulled forward by the next philosophical movement. After Descartes, it seemed that Hume had all the answers, then Kant, then Wittgenstein. I kept looking ahead to and being swept up by my next investigation in philosophy. This seduction happened in my art collecting, too. After the Luminists and the Hudson River school, I was looking at the American Impressionists, then the modernists, and then, helped along by the Paris-New York show at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1977, the Abstract Expressionists and further, until I came to the bewildering end and started to look backward in time, and across the Atlantic toward Europe.

 MY collecting has been guided by various philosophies, too. One was to collect by image: a Luminist picture was a Luminist picture whether it was by Kensett (a master) or Fortunato Arriola (an unknown but fine artist who, incidentally, died young, drowned at sea during a ship fire). Another was by name value: the big artists only, the ones who cut through to the history books and were the recipients of voluminous ink. Yet another was by movement: if you had a Pollock and a de Kooning, didn't you need the other Abstract Expressionists, even though you might not like all of them?

 Then, I came upon a remarkable philosophy: I would only buy paintings that dealers would die for. I had come to realize that the odd little picture that you dearly love but no one else does was essentially unsellable when and if the time came (Terry called them "cellar dwellers"). I have heard pictures disparaged too many times for the strangest reasons, "not enough teepees" being among my favorites. In other words, if you're buying a Salvador Dali it had better be surreal and not be his one straightforward portraits of a 1938 Dodge.

 This philosophy of collecting sounds crass, but it isn't. There exists a remarkable consensus among dealers and the art world in general about which paintings are desirable. There is just no argument about a painting that falls short (especially if you're selling), and there is no argument about a painting that is unequivocally first rate. Quality seems to be simply "known," though practically impossible _ and unnecessary _ to quantify. I found that dealers, whose living depends on their ability to evaluate works of art, often display an uncanny perception for pictures, and I tried to see pictures from their particular angle.

 I used this approach to collecting for some time, and it worked well. I ended up with a tightly hewn and strict collection of some pretty decent pictures, but eventually I tired. I realized that adherence to a particular methodology of collecting was not really what I was interested in or could afford. What I finally said to myself was this: I would like some nice paintings to hang on my walls, and I proceeded accordingly. It is curious to realize that it took a lifetime of collecting to reach such a simple conclusion.

 So this is what I have, an extremely personal group of pictures. And less than a reflection of one consistent vision or philosophy, this collection is, frankly, a history of what was affordable and available at the time. There are great pictures mixed in with good pictures, mixed in with oddballs, but I endorse and have found something worthwhile in every one of them. The collector and actor Vincent Price once told me a story about his wife Coral Brown. They were giving an art tour in their home, when, with a particular frown, a woman looked at a Diebenkorn they owned and snarled: "You have so many beautiful things. Why would you own that? What is that called?" And Coral Brown replied, "It's called `We Like It.' Now get out."

 [Editor's note following article] Steve Martin, the comedian and writer, is exhibiting works from his art collection for the first time, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, starting on Saturday. The 28 pictures, representing most of his holdings, range from Georges Seurat to David Hockney to Robert Crumb. This article is adapted from Mr. Martin's catalog for the exhibition.

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Saturday, April 7, 2001

Christopher Knight, Times Art Critic

LAS VEGAS--In the anecdotal catalog essay that accompanies "The Private Collection of Steve Martin," an exhibition of 17 paintings and nine works on paper opening today at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, the comedian writes about his seemingly peculiar decision to hold his public debut as a collector in a casino venue: "[The] thought furthest from the mind when one lands at McCarran airport and stands amid the video poker machines, is art. All of us art-types chuckled inside a bit when a museum opened in a Las Vegas hotel."

Well, not exactly. The observation is a common mistake, also regularly made in the pages of the New York Times. In 1998, Bellagio founder Steve Wynn did not open a museum in his new and lavish resort hotel, where "The Private Collection of Steve Martin" now hangs. What he opened was a gallery, a frankly commercial enterprise.

An engraved brass plaque, discreetly located near the door, advised: "All works of art are for sale. Please inquire." Like any gallerist, Wynn bought and sold art through the gallery. And when he sold the Bellagio hotel to MGM, the art collection was also sold.

To be sure, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art was the only commercial gallery I know that charged patrons an admission fee (income was donated to charity). The Bellagio's new owners continue that practice, although the gallery is now nonprofit and no longer a commercial venue. Still, it functions today partly as it did before--as a high-end marketing tool for the casino, no different from the outstanding restaurants and deluxe designer clothing stores that distinguish the resort from others on the Strip.

The common confusion over the difference between a public museum and a private commercial enterprise italicizes the confusion of values around art today. I raise it here, however, not from any Victorian concern over "virgin" art being "sullied" by commercial "taint." (I like galleries and I like museums--and lately I've been liking galleries more than museums.) But it seems appropriate to this particular exhibition, in which an established public figure who is a longtime private collector chooses this distinctive setting to come out of the closet (as it were) as an art freak.

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Steve Martin has collected paintings, drawings, prints and photographs for 30 years. The comedian is serious about art, and he's knowledgeable, too. What began as a collection of American paintings has broadened some, but only six works chosen for the show are by European artists.

Indeed, each of the Bellagio Gallery's two rooms is centered on a magnificent Edward Hopper. One is a building in a landscape, the other a woman seated in a rather desolate hotel lobby. Both feel like portraits, and both bristle with the quiet tension between casual distance and intense voyeurism that is Hopper's distinctive trait.

"Captain Upton's House" (1927) is a hard New England lighthouse seen from below. With its priapic tower, the clapboard building appears to rise up in great, raw, planar slabs of white from gruff seaside cliffs--literally, a house built of light, a near-mythic construction whose civic job of protecting passing ships from coastal ruin conceals a private inner life barely glimpsed through prominent filigreed windows.

In "Hotel Window" (1955), a primly dressed matron, her awkward shelf of breasts characteristically (for Hopper) rendered so as to immediately draw your eye and induce discomfort, sits staring through a gigantic pane of glass that looks out over nothingness. Hopper is the one making a public window here, and the psychologically jampacked view he gives of a woman caught in the act of seeing reflects us back upon ourselves.

The only artist with more work here than Hopper is Eric Fischl, whose own Hopper-esque moralism pushes banal Americanisms into symbolic overdrive. Easily the strongest of Fischl's three pictures--which include a recent portrait of Martin at the beach, exposed yet anonymous--is 1982's wild exercise in suburban Surrealism, "Barbecue." Dad's leering over at the grill, Mom and Sis are splashing naked in the pool, and Junior, posed behind a green bowl filled with silvery dead fish smack in the middle foreground of the pict__e, has his head thrown back to blow fire from his mouth into the gray-green sky.

You know the feeling.

Martin's collection is exclusively figurative, including a fine chromatic abstraction (circa 1916) by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose spiraling planes of fractured color describe a Cubist head; a classic, True Romance comic heroine by Roy Lichtenstein; and, Bay Area painter David Park's blunt reworking of Picasso's prehistoric dryads, "Two Women" (1957). The actual Picasso--"Seated Woman" (1938)--is a veritable buzz saw of diamond shapes and colorful herringbone patterns, painted in the turbulent aftermath of his "weeping women" pictures.

There are a few weak works, including a gummy Lucien Freud nude and a Francis Bacon portrait study, as well as two interiors by little-known American John Koch (1910-1978). "Lovers," in which a nude man reclines on a bed to watch his lover undress, is curious for the incongruous blur of white light reflecting off an innocuous landscape picture hanging over the headboard. This moment of idle distraction amid keen anticipation rings true. But Koch's academic style wilts into tedious concern for "the well-made picture," which tends to pale when juxtaposed with, say, Lichtenstein's stylishly acute, well-made picture rendered in a bracing new idiom.

Freud's and Bacon's clumsy brands of flashy Expressionism are redeemed by Willem de Kooning's spiky 1952 drawing of two ferocious women. In fact, all the drawings are first-rate, from David Hockney's large colored-pencil rendering of a remote Andy Warhol to Vija Celmins' meticulous desert surface juxtaposed with Saturn, and John Graham's geometrically precise study of a cross-eyed woman.

The real knockouts, though, are an extraordinarily beautiful pair of sooty figure drawings by French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat. Each shows a man or woman in the act of reading, the blackness of the conte crayon subtly handled so that the figures appear to be mysteriously illuminated from the white glow of their book or newspaper. Like the Seurat painting in the old Bellagio Gallery, these poignant drawings ought to be in the collection of the Getty.

One photograph is on view. The 1979 "Film Still" by Cindy Sherman shows the artist as a B-movie heroine, dressed in sexy undergarments and contemplating the bathroom sink. The ingenue's singular identity, merging with the social and cultural image of the silver screen, transforms into a question mark. The inner life of the artist becomes a Hollywood projection.

Is this also true of Steve Martin, movie artist and collector of non-movie art? Plainly it's something he's thought a good bit about (Hopper and Hockney inform two of his best movies, "Pennies From Heaven" and "L.A. Story"). "The Private Collection of Steve Martin" is an exercise in looking behind the public persona of a celebrity. What you find there is as much a question mark as anyone else's life. Martin, like every good collector, simply uses art to help himself sort it out.