Steve Martin Adds ‘Curator’ to His Wild and Crazy Résumé
LOS ANGELES — Steve Martin looked as if he were playing a fast-paced board game. Standing inside a gallery at the Hammer Museum here with its director and two curators, the tall actor was hunched over a small tabletop model of that very room.
The
four took turns placing and replacing tiny pictures on the tiny museum
walls. There was a lot of pointing and gesturing — though not quite the
wild gesticulation of Mr. Martin’s most memorable characters. The goal
was to hash out a preliminary arrangement of artworks before hanging the
actual paintings.
“That’s
a beautiful, moody iceberg picture,” Mr. Martin said, as an image no
bigger than a business card — this one showing a soaring, snowy mountain
peak — fell off a miniature wall.
Mr.
Martin reached over to pick up the small reproduction and handed it to
the museum’s director, Ann Philbin, who held the tape dispenser. “We’ve
got to use stronger tape when we hang the paintings,” he said, with
perfect comedic timing.
Yes,
this multifaceted actor, comedian, New Yorker writer, novelist,
semiprofessional magician and Grammy-winning banjo player, who has long
been a serious collector of modern American painting, is adding a new
role to his repertoire: art curator.
Working closely with two seasoned curators, Cynthia Burlingham from the Hammer Museum and Andrew Hunter from the Art Gallery of Ontario, he has organized a tightly focused, masterpiece-driven show, “The Idea of North,”
to introduce the 20th-century Canadian painter Lawren Harris
(1885-1970) to American museumgoers. It opens on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles
before traveling to Boston and Toronto.
“He’s
Canada’s greatest artist and nobody in America knows who he is, with a
few exceptions,” said Mr. Martin, 70, who sees the show as a chance to
use “my celebrity face” to try to draw attention to the painter he sees
as a counterpart to Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley.
Mr.
Martin expressed disappointment that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had
passed on the show. “I really wanted to have a venue in New York, but
I’m very happy the show is going to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” he
said.
Born
in Ontario in 1885 into a manufacturing fortune, Harris helped to
establish in 1920 the Group of Seven, painters who celebrated the vast,
rugged Canadian terrain at a time when everything French was de rigueur.
He soon developed a distinctive style, using flat expanses of color,
spiky geometries like triangles and pyramids and a self-mirroring of
forms to create highly stylized images of nature. Many of his favorite
subjects, whether rays of sun skimming the surface of Lake Superior,
dramatic Rockies peaks or hulking Arctic icebergs, are rendered in such
strong, simplified volumes that they end up looking like architecture.
Mr.
Martin, who owns three paintings by Harris, spent much of the last two
years working on the exhibition while also collaborating with Edie
Brickell on a musical, “Bright Star,” headed for the Kennedy Center in
Washington in December. The two also have a new album, “So Familiar,”
coming out at the end of October.
“I
always feel like all these things are linked,” he said, sitting in a
small Hammer Museum study center, his eggplant-purple jacket and tie the
color of some of Harris’s mountains.
“You
might say it’s extreme to curate an art show and then do an hour banjo
show, but it’s not that far off-center to me. And you apply the same
principles to both — the first being, you do the best you can.
He
carved out the time while enjoying family life — he and his wife, Anne
Stringfield, have a young daughter. “For one, I don’t have a job,” he
deadpanned.
But
when talking about Harris’s paintings, Mr. Martin stayed away from
quick one-liners, often pausing to find the right words and details to
capture his experiences. He said he was first drawn to the work “maybe
20 years ago” in Canada, where he has done both comedy writing and
filming. “I would stop at these amazing bookstores — big bookstores in
little towns — and pick up books on Harris or the Group of Seven.”
“I
would call them powerful, emotional landscapes,” he said, sounding more
relaxed in the role of a fan than when talking about himself. “You can
marvel at a 19th-century American landscape painting because you can’t
believe you can see every leaf on every tree. But here there are no
leaves and no trees, or nothing that looks like a living tree, and the
response is much more emotional, I think.”
Ms.
Philbin, the Hammer’s director, had a similar reaction when she spotted
a small painting during a dinner party at Mr. Martin’s home three years
ago. “It was a view of trees with a lake behind it, an ordinary
subject, but it had a very animated presence, very stylized, almost
cartoonish, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way,” she said. “It
was fantastic, so I asked who did it. Steve said Lawren Harris, and I
said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
It
took a few more months — and a visit to Montreal, where she saw more of
the painter’s work — before Ms. Philbin came up with the idea of asking
Mr. Martin to organize a show. (His most recent undertaking for the
museum was paying tribute at a 2012 gala there to the photographer Cindy
Sherman, whom he once dated.)
“My
initial reaction was, ‘Of course not,’ ” Mr. Martin recalled. But the
idea grew on him. “It didn’t feel like dilettantism to me. I’ve loved
the work for so long. And a loving curator is an asset to an artist,
probably.”
Over
the next two years, he made several trips to Canadian museums to visit
prized paintings by Harris and make a personal pitch for the loans,
focusing on the artist’s prime period of the ’20s and ’30s. He went to
great lengths, Ms. Philbin said, “to see every single painting in the
show in person.”
One stop was the University of Toronto, to see “Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains,”
a striking 1930 oil on canvas of a pyramid-shaped mountain draped in
snow. Mr. Martin called it “an incredible, solitary, Hopperesque
painting.” He said that Harris often reminded him of Edward Hopper, who
is at the core of his own collection, but he admitted that the
connection was personal, “not art historical — their pictures don’t even
look alike.” Rather, the painters seemed to share an obsession with
isolation. “For Hopper, isolation meant desolation,” he said, adding
that the cosmopolitan Harris found meaning and beauty in it. “He was
trying to be alone.” Another
stop was the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He brought
along the comedian Martin Short, as they were flying to Calgary to do a
benefit show, “Steve Martin and Martin Short in a Very Stupid
Conversation.”
“Marty’s
Canadian, so he loves the work,” Mr. Martin said, then suggested a test
of sorts to determine if someone walking the streets of, say, New York
or Los Angeles, grew up in Canada: “You say: Hi, Lawren Harris. And see
if their eyes twitch.”
Mr. Hunter of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who organized the artist’s 2000 retrospective at the Americas Society in New York,
said that within Canada, Harris’s images had traveled far beyond art
museums to appear on calendars and postage stamps. “If you’re of my
generation — I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s at a time of a great
nationalism — you learned about Lawren Harris in school, seeing his
images not just in art books, but books of Canadian history and
geography,” he said.
“They were so tied to an idea of Canada that we didn’t see them as paintings — they were icons,” he added.
Ms.
Burlingham, the Hammer curator, said that Mr. Hunter did the most work
arranging loans; she took the lead on the catalog, and Mr. Martin had
the vision that drove the show.
Or,
as Mr. Martin put it, “Andrew knows Lawren Harris the best, Cindy has a
deep knowledge of museums and has developed an eye for the work, and I
am the goofy celebrity — the excited one.”
Self-deprecating
comments aside, he said that organizing a show “didn’t feel over my
head.” For starters, he has an art collection at home that bridges over a
century, from Georges Seurat to Mark Grotjahn,
and he likes to rearrange it from time to time. “If something’s hung
for years in the same spot, you tend not to see it any more,” he said.
Mr.
Martin noted, though, that his art buying had dwindled over the last
few years. “I’m not really an active collector anymore,” he said, adding
that he had been “priced out” of many of the American painters he
likes.
Harris’s
prices are also steep — one painting set a $3.5 million auction record
for the artist’s work, in 2009, but Mr. Martin said he had bought his
earlier. None of them are in the Hammer show — “that would have been
wrong,” he said.
But
Ms. Philbin said she believed that his celebrity did help their efforts
to borrow works. “We were afraid of not getting some of the loans,” she
said, noting that the museum was competing with Canada’s
150th-anniversary events, planned for 2017.
“I do think the fact that Steve Martin was calling helped to open the door,” she said.
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