“Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway”
“It’s About Looking!” The installation of the Last Supper at the Park Avenue Armory
One of the highlights of the art season in NYC was visionary filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s 45 minute immersive multimedia installation at the Park Avenue Armory that just concluded on January 6. Based on Leonardo da Vinci’s 1498 Last Supper, Greenaway created a theatrical illusion to provoke new ways of seeing Leonardo’s masterpiece with evocative soundtrack by composer Marco Robino.
Last year I had the opportunity to see the actual Last Supper at a rare private visit of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. An unexpectedly emotional experience. I’m also a fan of Peter Greenaway’s ever since his very first feature film in 1982, The Draughtsman’s Contract, and am aware of his long-term project launched in 2006 called 10 Classic Paintings Revisited, in which through a fusion of film, digital wizardry and installation, he plans to explore and interpret masterpieces by Michelangelo, Picasso, Rembrandt, Veronese, Raphael, Velasquez, Monet, Seurat, and even Jackson Pollock. Many are works in progress, and of the few that have been executed this is the first one presented to North American audiences. It was also my first chance to discover Mr. Greenaway’s approach and see his insight into one of the most celebrated works of art in a highly contemporary context.
“Greenaway’s pioneering use of digital media and new technologies creates a dynamic encounter of old and new forms of visual communication and explores the concept of visual literacy for audiences today,” stated Kristy Edmunds, Consulting Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory.
In the exhibition catalogue Peter Greenaway stated: “We have had two thousand years of Western painting and only 115 years of cinema. Both are supposedly in the business of delivering ideas by making pictures, by making images… Supposing we try to hold a dialogue between the two? To mingle and share and cross-refer their vocabularies, so to speak.”
The Armory’s soaring 55,0000-square-foot Drill Hall offered an unparalleled environment to experience this tour de force. The installation included a meticulously detailed “clone” of the fresco set within a life-size recreation — its proportions exact to within a fraction of an inch – of the nearly 4,000-square-foot apse and cupola of the Refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie. The enclosure, exact footprint of the Refectory, had at its center a three-dimensional version of the table from the painting, solid white as were the plates, cups, decanters, and food, but illuminated from within thus acquiring a dramatic and spiritual quality.
Peter Greenaway used technology, light and sound to bring to life the Last Supper’s historic context, the architecture, its composition and perspective, underscoring details and relationships, enhancing colors to reverse the clock on the decay of its surface. It made us contemplate, it made us look.
Departing from the “Refectory,” visitors encountered another multimedia exploration based on Paolo Veronese’s monumental late-Renaissance painting, The Wedding at Cana.
The Wedding at Cana at the Park Avenue Armory, NY
A shorter version of the digital extravaganza of light and sound presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale and projected onto, and around, a full-scale replica of The Wedding at Cana that covers the great rear wall of the Benedictine refectory on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, exactly where the original hung from 1563, when Veronese finished it, until 1797 when Napoleon had it taken down, cut up and sent to the Louvre where it remains.
Like the original, the replica measures nearly 24 feet by 33 feet; it captures textural details and brush strokes, and appears to include even the seams of Napoleon’s segmentation.
The Wedding at Cana at San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
The Wedding at Cana in situ is an experience that has not been available for over two hundred years, and Greenaway’s vision in Venice was a very different experience from the de-contextualized Armory version – I’m told by those who have seen both. I found it a bit analytical, didactic and lacking mystery – but even this abridged version made me think about the artist’s choices, his message, his style and superb sense of color, and his influence.
The show inaugurated the first full season of programming by the Park Avenue Armory since it began reinventing itself as an unconventional arts center three years ago.
To be continued . . .
