I t was an odd painting, no question about it. Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s “Christ as Triumphant Redeemer,” dating from the mid-1540s, had unusual looks and a twisted backstory, both intriguing to Catherine and Nathan Bruckner when they spotted the work in the winter of 2019 at a Sotheby’s Old Master preview in New York. The painting, which had turned up two years earlier at auction in Munich, had been triumphantly redeemed by a Dutch dealer, who’d guessed that the heavily overpainted panel might be hiding something. After buying it and funding its restoration, he was proved right.
To the Bruckners, something about Christ’s newly revealed pose—shoulder defiantly back, elbow out, wrist flexed, hand on ribcage—and the almost kitschy, rainbow-colored backdrop struck them as very John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” They nicknamed the painting “Disco Jesus.” And on the night of January 30, they placed a winning bid on it. Where to hang it was to be the next question.
The couple, who are partners in the Manhattan-based interior design firm Casalta, had just spent two years transforming a loft downtown into a home for themselves, with three bedrooms, an old-world kitchen and a central enfilade of public rooms facing west along Fifth Avenue. Despite a slightly chaotic arrival, the Disco Jesus soon settled in among their vintage photographs by Berenice Abbott and Harry Callahan and a second-century A.D. Roman bust. Some furniture slowly entered the picture, including a bentwood armchair with petal-shaped arms, by the Brazilian company Móveis Cimo, and a Baroque-era bench with the flat profile and scrolling edges of a party invitation. (More inviting for the eye than the body, perhaps—it’s shunned by the couple’s two young children.)
As a teenager in her native Vienna, Catherine often spent weekend afternoons with friends at the Leopold Museum or the MAK, developing an appreciation for the angsty, attenuated lines of Egon Schiele, which trailed her through her studies at Central Saint Martins college in London. She and Nathan met in the city through a post-graduate decorative arts program. He’d grown up in Brussels, where his father, entrepreneur Yaron “Ronny” Bruckner, amassed a fortune in consumer products and real estate, investing some of it in a wide-ranging art collection. The family homes in Brussels and on the Italian Riviera were designed by Axel Vervoordt, the Antwerp-based master dealer who shared the elder Bruckner’s open-throttle approach to collecting.
Some fathers take their sons along on visits to their tailor or their personal trainer. Yaron Bruckner introduced his son to his art dealers and his auction specialists, with whom Nathan maintains relationships to this day. Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art, remembers meeting him as a quiet, thoughtful presence by his father’s side.
“Yaron was always interested in the full scope of collecting, from antiquities to Old Masters to Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Billault says. “It looks very obvious in 2025. But there was a very different game being played in 1986. He was one of those Renaissance guys who was just excited by art that depicts a culture, a moment, an emotion.” Nathan, Billault adds, seems to have absorbed these instincts.
From the day they moved in, the young Bruckners have made their apartment a proving ground for their ideas about living well with art and objects. They’ve edited and reedited its contents in search of a balance between the classical European references they grew up with and their current surroundings, on a retail-clogged stretch of lower Fifth Avenue. “We have to treat the past as an advantage but not feel trapped by it somehow,” says Catherine, running her hand along the edge of a polished stone coffee table in the living room. “For me, it really comes down to using pieces from different periods of time, so a room gains depth. I would add that almost half the things we got for the apartment were eventually edited out. Same with the art.”
What remains tells a story not just of time but of material culture and personal taste, starting with the kitchen’s contemporary steel dining table and shelves lined with glass—18th-century American to 1930s Venetian—and walls tiled in a mismatched collage of Delft whites, suggesting artisanal production and everyday wear and tear. It’s highly particular, but still part of the current conversation, like the great aunt who shows up at the family picnic wearing Loewe shades.
On the living room’s stone table, butter cookies are piled on a silver plate and an early Basquiat painting, a gift from Nathan’s father, hangs on a wall where the Disco Jesus has recently been. In the mid-1980s, Yaron Bruckner began buying Basquiat from dealers Enrico Navarra in Paris and Larry Gagosian in New York, amassing a large number of paintings and works on paper. Nathan remembers a birthday sleepover in Brussels when one of his friends was so scared of a painting that she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with it. “Our daughter, when she sees this, she’s scared too,” he admits sheepishly.
The couple’s collection, seeded by the Basquiat and a few other gifts—notably a compact, theatrical Botticelli portrait of a maiden—has grown to include some less than expected choices, from a 1966 Lucio Fontana metal piece to a puckered and stitched burlap painting in cyan blue by Tsuyoshi Maekawa. Even in this company, the Disco Jesus stands out. David Pollack, who handled its sale as head of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings department in New York, sees a congruence between the painting and Basquiat’s treatment of the male body, foregrounding exaggerated gesture and the nude form.
“Obviously this is the Christ figure, which we see all the time in Old Masters,” Pollack says of the van Hemessen work. “But to have this electric light in the background, his arm in this very flamboyant pose—he’s muscular. He’s bloody. It’s weird. We’ve never seen anything like it.” Since the painting’s offering in 2019, Pollack observes, the market for Old Masters has continued to embrace tough, offbeat images—works that are patently old but appear new. “These narratives are playing out even further today, because you’re seeing more buyers of contemporary art dipping their toes into the Old Master market at the highest end,” Pollack says. “I think those folks would understand this picture better than most traditional Old Master buyers. Visually it’s a risky—and risqué—image, right? I think Nathan and Catherine were taking a chance, quite frankly.”
Casalta, a product of their respective creative backgrounds, already betrays influences of the couple’s passion for collecting. (The studio’s name comes from the avenue in Brussels where Nathan grew up.) A distilled homewares collection that Catherine has taken the lead on was born out of her admiration for the goblets, forks and candlesticks that pop up in Netherlandish still life paintings. Nathan is a shrewd researcher and auction buyer: at 17, he was already bidding by phone on Cycladic sculpture for his father, stretching the cord of a landline up to the top bunk of his New York University dorm room.
In the past few years, Casalta has learned to work in forward and reverse, finding a picture for a room or making a room for a picture. At Overstory, a bar the young firm designed for the 64th floor of 70 Pine Street, in downtown Manhattan, glowing alabaster sconces, a polished brass bar and puzzle-like herringbone floors lend the tiny room the potency of Adolf Loos’ American Bar in Vienna without a shred of art in sight.
For Billault, Casalta’s work comes across “a bit like Vervoordt 2.0. You have that inspiration, but what’s interesting is what they do with it,” he says. “There is something humble and deeply elegant there. It’s not the idea to have the largest, the biggest, the most. It’s just to find balance between keeping space for those masterpieces, but at the same time offering a really new way of looking at them.”
The couple’s drive to study their source material up close has led them around some pretty bizarre corners—like the afternoon they spent at a travel agency in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, pacing off the width of its door openings and snapping photos of its moldings and radiator covers. The space had been carved out of the lobby of a 1929 building designed by iconoclastic French architect Auguste Perret, a pioneer of concrete and mentor to Le Corbusier who had once lived in the building’s penthouse. Though the apartment had been preserved, the Bruckners’ repeated tries to gain access had failed; settling for the travel agency, they extrapolated its detailing and made an homage to Perret on Fifth Avenue.
As fate would have it, this past January Simon Porte Jacquemus held his Autumn/Winter 2025 runway show in the phantom Perret apartment. Suddenly, videos of the space began flooding Instagram.
“I recorded them all, because it’s like—oh, finally we see that wall!” Nathan jokes. “Whenever I see it online, it’s like, wow, we kind of nailed it.”
Lately they’ve been working on a project in the Hamptons with architects Olson Kundig and finishing up the homewares collection, which launches this summer. A measured pace suits their highly personal approach, Nathan says. “We don’t yet have a big body of work, but in 10 years, I think what would be great is if, when looking back, it’s not all in a ‘Casalta formula.’”
As if to fend off that prospect, in the summer of 2024 the Bruckners bought an Upper East Side townhouse designed in 1941 by the Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, a frothy cocktail of built-ins, glass-block walls, sculpted plaster fireplaces and a floorplan that wouldn’t have been out of place on an ocean liner. How to respond to all this? Time will tell.
