T
his February's Master Paintings & Sculpture from Four Millennia Part II live auction features an exciting array of works that span centuries, genres, and geographies. The sale includes property from several distinguished private collections, including those of Dr. Hinrich Bischoff, Anne W. Lowenthal, Ambassador J. William Middendorf II, Stanley A. Moss, and others, as well as paintings recently deaccessioned by the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, and sold to benefit the John and Johanna Bass Art Acquisition Fund. Featuring elegant view paintings, evocative still lifes, important portraits, and recent rediscoveries, the auction also includes a selection of paintings and sculpture offered without reserve.
By Keith Christiansen
In his New York Times obituary, Stanley Moss was remembered as, “a lyrical American poet who for seven decades evoked a troubled world of sorrows and sensual pleasures ruled by a silent God seemingly indifferent to the fate of humanity." I don’t think Stanley would have objected to that description. Poetry was his passion, his means of expression. But his love of art and his activity as a dealer—the means of financing his poetry and the running of the Sheep Meadow Press—was no less passionate. According to his own account, the two were intertwined. In a 2005 interview with Dilan Foley for the blog The Last Bohemians, Stanley recalled his beginnings as a dealer. “I went to Europe. A girlfriend of mine had painted two paintings of me and I sold them, which paid for the trip. I came back, working my way over on a boat. I thought, what job would I like to have most? I thought, I’d like to work at [the publishing house] New Directions. New Directions owner, James Laughlin, gave me a job as an editor and glorified office boy. It was 1949 and I was 24.” He then went on to say, “When I started selling art, I had no money or training. I have a gift for finding Old Masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains... How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much."
When I met Stanley, almost three decades later, he was established as both a poet and a dealer, known for handling paintings that had belonged to Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi. Together with his wife Vittoria and with the advice of the great Italian critic Roberto Longhi, Contini had transformed himself from a stamp expert to one of the foremost dealers of Renaissance art. It was through his most acquisitive client, Samuel H. Kress, that 236 works of art ranging from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century entered the National Gallery of Art; still others were donated to the Italian State in 1969 and are exhibited in special galleries in the Galleria degli Uffizi. During the time that he taught English in Barcelona and Rome in the 1960s, Stanley had befriended the heirs of Contini-Bonacossi and the remnants of this prestigious collection passed into his possession—including the Bellini and Workshop Woman at her Toilette Holding a Mirror (lot 26) and the striking Tintoretto ceiling of the Allegory of Music (lot 24)that are in this sale. So also was the picture that occasioned my first visit. Now in the Musée du Louvre: a modest-sized, bust-length portrait of the celebrated condottiero Sigismondo Malatesta by Piero della Francesca. Stanley was then living on the Upper West Side, in one of the towers of the San Remo, with a commanding view over Central Park. Only months before, I had moved to New York to assume the position of assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Stanley, ever assiduous in expanding his circle of friends and potential clients, invited me to come see the picture. I can still remember sitting on a windowsill in the living room so as to profit from the natural light playing across the surface of this marvelous painting. I knew that its attribution was not universally accepted, but it had the endorsement of Roberto Longhi, whose 1927 monograph established the critical basis for our modern appreciation of the artist, and it had recently been cleaned. I found it completely compelling. So, I was to learn, did Michel Laclotte, the head of the department of paintings at the Louvre, which acquired the picture the following year.
I cannot remember when Stanley moved into the beautiful house in Riverdale with its handsome porch overlooking the Hudson, but it was there that, over the years, I visited him to see the latest acquisitions and enjoy his signature Bouillabaisse. He cut an impressive figure, further enhanced by the large labrador retriever that forced himself on visitors; his strong featured face projected a seriousness that was reflected in the pictures that hung on the walls. There were paintings by El Greco and Goya (Stanley was a hispanophile) but also works by lesser known artists—his “discoveries.” Take, as an example, the exquisitely painted and hauntingly moving painting of the Crucifixion by the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Pieter de Kempeneer, known during his activity in Spain as Pedro de Campaña. Little known outside of scholarly circles, Campaña is nonetheless an artist of wonderful talent and originality. Like the Piero portrait, the Crucifixion was acquired by the Louvre in 1986.
Stanley’s combined passions for poetry and painting—a pairing that would have seemed natural to humanist writers in the Renaissance—lay behind his project to make accessible to an English-speaking audience the achievement of the greatest critic of Italian painting of the twentieth century, Roberto Longhi. Longhi’s style of writing is unique in its ability to convey in words the visual terms of an artist. But its inventive language and complex syntax pose significant challenges even for native speakers. Sometime in the early 1990s, Stanley asked me which of Longhi’s essays I would choose for a translation. The result was Three Studies, which appeared in 1995. Pleased with the result, he decided to take on an even more ambitious task: the translation of Longhi’s landmark monograph on Piero della Francesca. Stanley managed to locate a talented translator, David Tabbat, who was able to confront the eloquent but idiosyncratic descriptions that made Longhi’s monograph such a literary landmark. These were not projects conceived to turn a profit. Quite the contrary.
It must have been about fourteen years later that I received a phone call from Stanley proposing a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum. At an auction in London in 1995 he had purchased a fascinating still life depicting a bird pecking at a bowl of grapes set on a wood shelf. The sale catalogue called the picture North Italian School and dated it to the seventeenth century. However, its appearance was distinctly more primitive than might be expected from a work of that date and Stanley clearly thought it was something worth acquiring. Following its purchase, he got in touch with the great Italian connoisseur, Federico Zeri, who wrote to him suggesting that the picture, the composition of which has much in common with examples of fifteenth-century inlaid wood panels, intarsia, was the unique survival by the first European artist specifically lauded by contemporaries as a painter of still lifes: Antonio da Crevalcore (active between 1443 and 1525). When I was first shown the picture, I found the idea intriguing and took the step of confirming the attribution with both Zeri and the leading scholar of Bolognese painting, Daniele Benati, who then published it. I’m confident that Stanley liked the way the composition was intentionally conceived so as to emulate a painting of the fourth century B.C. recorded by one of our primary sources on ancient art, Pliny the Elder. Painted by Zeuxis, the favorite painter of Alexander the Great, as part of a competition, the picture famously depicted grapes so realistically that birds came to peck at them. Crevalcore includes a bird in his picture and also introduces further trompe l’oeil details so as to position himself as the successor of the ancient master. This overlapping of cultures, suggesting a collapse of time as well as an assertion of ambition, gives the picture a particular resonance that seems to me a fitting tribute to Stanley’s utterly original, contradictory, and persistently inquiring mind as well as his conjoined passions, evident as well in the paintings in Master Paintings & Works of Art Part I and Master Paintings & Sculpture From Four Millennia Part II.
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