Daniella Luxembourg on René Magirtte's Phantom Landscapes
Luxembourg + Co., a tony gallery that's been putting on museum-like shows in New York and London since 2011, has outdone itself in their 57th Street space in Manhattan. The Luxembourg part is a powerful mother-daughter team—Daniella and her daughter Alma—and this time, they're introducing us to the idea of Magritte as a landscape painter.
'René Magritte: The Phantom Landscape' (through July 12) asks us to put aside pipes, bowler hats, green apples, and clouds when we think of the Belgian Surrealist painter, and to consider Magritte as a landscape artist of a different kind—one for which landscape and psychology and fantasy and emotion all play in the same sandbox. (When I tell George Condo about the show, he says: 'Nice angle on Magritte. Nobody ever zooms in on that.')
René Magritte with his wife, Georgette Berger, circa 1937.
Daniella Luxembourg, one of the most innovative and far-sighted dealers-slash-art advisors working, is also a top-notch collector. When in New York, she lives in Pierre Matisse's house on the Upper East Side (she bought it in 2001), and a couple of weeks ago she sold 15 of her important works installed there—works by the likes of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, and other post-war masters—at Sotheby's in New York. Bare walls, not a problem: She's already brought in paintings by Domenico Gnoli, another Fontana, and two kinetic sculptures from the '50s by Jean Tinguely, all from her vast private collection, to replace them.
Born in Lódz, a city in central Poland known for its great number of palaces and villas and its National Film School (Roman Polanski went there), Luxembourg is a tastemaker who challenges convention. After moving to Israel when she was only a few months old, she grew up in Haifa, studied the history of art (with a focus on early medieval Jewish art), and started at Sotheby's in Tel Aviv in 1984, when she was in her early 30s. Then, in 1989, she left the auction house to found the Jewish Museum of Vienna. She looks at art as an intellectual but presents it so everybody can see it in ways we perhaps hadn't thought of before.
In 'The Phantom Landscape,' 14 well-curated works, most of them little known, tell a three-part story, divided into three rooms. The first, 'Frames of Reference,' looks at views outdoors through some kind of a frame. The second room, 'The Sky is the Limit,' is all sky. And the third room, 'A Human Landscape,' features work that uses the human body and the world around it, or 'the morphing of human bodies and natural elements into one another.' In the airy, sixth-floor space, Luxembourg walked me through the show a few weeks ago.
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