New York letter
Overnight celebrities
Gerrit Henry
New York The evening of Monday, 22nd March saw a rather unusual event taking place in Manhattan. The setting was a small, elegant nightclub-restaurant called The Ballroom, located in New York's art capital, SoHo (which stands for 'south of Houston Street'). The event was a crowded cocktail party ; the occasion was the unveiling of a fourteen-by-eight foot mural by the photorealist painter, Marion Pinto. The subject of the painting? The Ballroom, basically, but with some extra attractions.
Many small nightclubs, or cabarets, have sprung up around Manhattan over the past three years or so—intimate atmosphere and live entertainment seem to be right for the mood of the day. All these clubs are interesting in one sense or another, but The Ballroom is special. Its food is of a finer quality than that served at most other cabarets. Its decor—white on white with lots of potted plants—is soothing and charming, and the entertainment is always of a high quality. Beyond that, The Ballroom is the only nightclub in SoHo, once a commercial warehouse district and now known for its concentration of art galleries and artists. So, when Gregory Dawson, one of the club's owners, came up with the idea of commissioning a mural to hang over the semicircular stage some six months ago, he felt the painting should be not just a 'portrait' of the restaurant, but also of the people who made SoHo, and The Ballroom, possible—the painters, sculptors, art dealers, gallery owners, and critics who inhabit SoHo's live-in studio lofts and street-level galleries.
Marion Pinto, a resident of the area for some six years, agreed, and they set about choosing nineteen subjects who might best represent 'the spirit of SoHo'. Among those chosen were such internationally recognised painters as Alex Katz, Lowell Nesbitt, Larry Rivers, and Robert Indiana; also chosen were the SoHo Weekly News critic, John Perreault; the art-dealers Max Hutchinson, Paula Cooper, and Ivan Karp, all early settlers of the district; and, as a bow to the artistic greatness of the recent past, the abstract expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb, who, before his death two years ago, frequently dined at The Ballroom with his wife.
Ms Pinto invited her subjects to come to the restaurant in groups of two or three— allowing them to work out among themselves who wanted to be seated at which table with whom—and photographed them. Using a technique common to painters of the photo-realist school, Pinto then projected the figures onto photosensitive canvas, and 'painted them in' with acrylic pigments. The final result—nineteen art world celebrities sitting at tables or standing at the butcher-block bar, talking, conferring, laughing, gazing around at The Ballroom's sunny, elegant environs—is a contemporary homage to the 'high society' paintings of the early Renoir, of Degas and Lautrec, but executed in a style that is distinctly American in its photographic precision and accuracy of representation.
At the unveiling, all was pleasant pandemonium. Attending the party were painters Katz, Rivers and Indiana, the neon sculptor Rudi Stern and the wood sculptor Georges Radovanovitch, all pictured, all looking forward to seeing themselves in paint. Also present were the critics Perreault, Gregory Battcock and Grace Glueck : the first, featured in the painting, off duty and enjoying himself, the other two scurrying about gathering comments from the guests for their respective publications, the Solio Weekly News and the New York Times. Among other guests were Marion Pinto and friends, the geometric abstractionist Debo rah Remington, the Village Voice's art editor Alexandra Anderson, and the art collector Robert Scull, one of the prime movers in the pop art scene of the 'sixties who is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with his exwife Ethel over who owns what in the fabulous collection. Flashbulbs popped, reporters scribbled, and the spotlights held by members of a local TV crew cast a harsh glare over the proceedings. Then, without notice, came the ceremony. Greg Dawson's voice came over the house microphone: 'The Ballroom is proud to present—"The Ballroom"!' A white curtain slid aside and the mural, striking in its life-size realism, was revealed. Guests stood for a moment, staring up at their reflections on the wall.
A great deal of publicity and media attention—sometimes bordering on the overkill sort known on these shores as 'hype'— attended the unveiling of The Ballroom's new mural. This was annoying, but, considering the uniqueness of the circumstances, forgivable. The Ballroom and Marion Pinto had joined forces in an unusual undertaking—the restaurant had engaged a painter to execute a work of art honouring its existence, in much the way the Medicis engaged artists to decorate their palaces. This conjunction between art and commerce has for many years been forbidden, or at least sneered at, in the New York art world—since the growth of Manhattan as the world's art capital in the 'fifties, the gallery, the private collection, or the museum have been thought to be the only places for the display of art works. More recently, banks and business have begun commissioning works of art from fine artists, but, to many in the art world, commission of any sort is still held to be a dubious or even corrupt practice. For a restaurant to have commissioned a work of the artistic dimensions and ambitions of 'The Ballroom' is an act of courage, matched by the artist's courage in accepting and fulfilling the assignment. Not that either restaurant or artist are suffering from the exposure—The Ballroom is currently doing excellent business (due at least in part to all the publicity), and Marion Pinto has become something of an overnight celebrity herself.
But the whole thing has not been easy for restaurant or artist. Ms Pinto is, I suspect, discovering that the fine artist who dares to break ground in 'the real world' rather than the art world becomes something of a black sheep within the latter. And, one of The Ballroom's co-owners, at the end of the unveiling party, after it was announced that the party was over, was heard to say, 'We're opening for dinner now—we're returning this place to humanity'. Whatever the difficulties in managing the event commercially and aesthetically, however, The Ballroom's mural is a big step towards bringing the fine arts of today out of the museums and into public view. And, intriguingly, this is 'public view' of a private sort—what could be nicer than eating in with a painting while dining out?
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