George Deem

The Triumph of Art

Date:	1990
Medium:	Oil on canvas
Size inches:	54 x 96
Size cm:	137.2 x 243.9
Signature:	Signed and dated center left
Location:	Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, New York

The Triumph of Art

At the Palace of Hampton Court near London are nine large canvases painted between 1486 and 1493 by the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna for the Gonzaga Family of Mantua. The paintings, known as the Triumphs of Caesar, were purchased in 1629-30 by King Charles I of England and taken to Hampton Court. In the Triumphs of Caesar Mantegna (1431-1506) imaginatively re-created the parade given in antiquity to a victorious Roman general upon his return to Rome. Prominent in the procession is the display of captured people and objects, including paintings and sculptures.
My painting for Paul Weiss Rifkind, The Triumph of Art, is derived from Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar. At the lower left is a still life of flowers by Paul Cezanne. Above, behind a flaming torch, is A Maidservant Pouring Milk, a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. To the right is Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning. Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is partly obscured by the Hopper painting; only Mona Lisa's hands are visible. To the right again, behind the Hopper painting and partly obscured by it, is Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, an 1871 painting by Thomas Eakins.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum building moves the site of the parade from Rome to New York.
To the right of the Guggenheim is Jim Dine's Bathrobe, a painting in the Collection of Paul Weiss Rifkind, and La Danse, a painting by Matisse. High in the sky, and on the other side of the wall, is a Frank Stella painting, also in the Collection of Paul Weiss Rifkind.
Below the Matisse and the Stella paintings a young man carries a female figure by the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. On the cart is a Roman head of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. (George Deem, note, March 29, 1991)