Steve Martin’s True Heaven

In the anecdotal catalog essay that accompanies “The Private Collection of Steve Martin,” an exhibition of 17 paintings and nine works on paper opening today at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, the comedian writes about his seemingly peculiar decision to hold his public debut as a collector in a casino venue: “[The] thought furthest from the mind when one lands at McCarran airport and stands amid the video poker machines, is art. All of us art-types chuckled inside a bit when a museum opened in a Las Vegas hotel.”

Well, not exactly. The observation is a common mistake, also regularly made in the pages of the New York Times. In 1998, Bellagio founder Steve Wynn did not open a museum in his new and lavish resort hotel, where “The Private Collection of Steve Martin” now hangs. What he opened was a gallery, a frankly commercial enterprise.

An engraved brass plaque, discreetly located near the door, advised: “All works of art are for sale. Please inquire.” Like any gallerist, Wynn bought and sold art through the gallery. And when he sold the Bellagio hotel to MGM, the art collection was also sold.

To be sure, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art was the only commercial gallery I know that charged patrons an admission fee (income was donated to charity). The Bellagio’s new owners continue that practice, although the gallery is now nonprofit and no longer a commercial venue. Still, it functions today partly as it did before--as a high-end marketing tool for the casino, no different from the outstanding restaurants and deluxe designer clothing stores that distinguish the resort from others on the Strip.

The common confusion over the difference between a public museum and a private commercial enterprise italicizes the confusion of values around art today. I raise it here, however, not from any Victorian concern over “virgin” art being “sullied” by commercial “taint.” (I like galleries and I like museums--and lately I’ve been liking galleries more than museums.) But it seems appropriate to this particular exhibition, in which an established public figure who is a longtime private collector chooses this distinctive setting to come out of the closet (as it were) as an art freak.

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Steve Martin has collected paintings, drawings, prints and photographs for 30 years. The comedian is serious about art, and he’s knowledgeable, too. What began as a collection of American paintings has broadened some, but only six works chosen for the show are by European artists.

Indeed, each of the Bellagio Gallery’s two rooms is centered on a magnificent Edward Hopper. One is a building in a landscape, the other a woman seated in a rather desolate hotel lobby. Both feel like portraits, and both bristle with the quiet tension between casual distance and intense voyeurism that is Hopper’s distinctive trait.

“Captain Upton’s House” (1927) is a hard New England lighthouse seen from below. With its priapic tower, the clapboard building appears to rise up in great, raw, planar slabs of white from gruff seaside cliffs--literally, a house built of light, a near-mythic construction whose civic job of protecting passing ships from coastal ruin conceals a private inner life barely glimpsed through prominent filigreed windows.

In “Hotel Window” (1955), a primly dressed matron, her awkward shelf of breasts characteristically (for Hopper) rendered so as to immediately draw your eye and induce discomfort, sits staring through a gigantic pane of glass that looks out over nothingness. Hopper is the one making a public window here, and the psychologically jampacked view he gives of a woman caught in the act of seeing reflects us back upon ourselves.

The only artist with more work here than Hopper is Eric Fischl, whose own Hopper-esque moralism pushes banal Americanisms into symbolic overdrive. Easily the strongest of Fischl’s three pictures--which include a recent portrait of Martin at the beach, exposed yet anonymous--is 1982’s wild exercise in suburban Surrealism, “Barbecue.” Dad’s leering over at the grill, Mom and Sis are splashing naked in the pool, and Junior, posed behind a green bowl filled with silvery dead fish smack in the middle foreground of the picture, has his head thrown back to blow fire from his mouth into the gray-green sky.

You know the feeling.

Martin’s collection is exclusively figurative, including a fine chromatic abstraction (circa 1916) by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose spiraling planes of fractured color describe a Cubist head; a classic, True Romance comic heroine by Roy Lichtenstein; and, Bay Area painter David Park’s blunt reworking of Picasso’s prehistoric dryads, “Two Women” (1957). The actual Picasso--”Seated Woman” (1938)--is a veritable buzz saw of diamond shapes and colorful herringbone patterns, painted in the turbulent aftermath of his “weeping women” pictures.

There are a few weak works, including a gummy Lucien Freud nude and a Francis Bacon portrait study, as well as two interiors by little-known American John Koch (1910-1978). “Lovers,” in which a nude man reclines on a bed to watch his lover undress, is curious for the incongruous blur of white light reflecting off an innocuous landscape picture hanging over the headboard. This moment of idle distraction amid keen anticipation rings true. But Koch’s academic style wilts into tedious concern for “the well-made picture,” which tends to pale when juxtaposed with, say, Lichtenstein’s stylishly acute, well-made picture rendered in a bracing new idiom.

Freud’s and Bacon’s clumsy brands of flashy Expressionism are redeemed by Willem de Kooning’s spiky 1952 drawing of two ferocious women. In fact, all the drawings are first-rate, from David Hockney’s large colored-pencil rendering of a remote Andy Warhol to Vija Celmins’ meticulous desert surface juxtaposed with Saturn, and John Graham’s geometrically precise study of a cross-eyed woman.

The real knockouts, though, are an extraordinarily beautiful pair of sooty figure drawings by French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat. Each shows a man or woman in the act of reading, the blackness of the conte crayon subtly handled so that the figures appear to be mysteriously illuminated from the white glow of their book or newspaper. Like the Seurat painting in the old Bellagio Gallery, these poignant drawings ought to be in the collection of the Getty.

One photograph is on view. The 1979 “Film Still” by Cindy Sherman shows the artist as a B-movie heroine, dressed in sexy undergarments and contemplating the bathroom sink. The ingenue’s singular identity, merging with the social and cultural image of the silver screen, transforms into a question mark. The inner life of the artist becomes a Hollywood projection.

Is this also true of Steve Martin, movie artist and collector of non-movie art? Plainly it’s something he’s thought a good bit about (Hopper and Hockney inform two of his best movies, “Pennies From Heaven” and “L.A. Story”). “The Private Collection of Steve Martin” is an exercise in looking behind the public persona of a celebrity. What you find there is as much a question mark as anyone else’s life. Martin, like every good collector, simply uses art to help himself sort it out.

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* “The Private Collection of Steve Martin,” Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South, Las Vegas, (702) 693-7722 or (888) 488-7111, through Sept. 3. Open daily.