Even many experts would not have been able to distinguish the wall mural in front of them from the real one, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” that “most beautiful and marvelous work,” as Vasari described it, doomed to crumble almost from the minute its tempera dried.
But a quick walk around this painting would have revealed a few anachronisms. On the back side the painting’s cracked, ancient-seeming plaster was mounted not on quattrocento brick but on Alucore, the kind of aluminum sheeting used for floors in jetliners. In front a ruler-straight seam was running through the head of St. James, a problem that a man high in the basket of a hydraulic cherry picker was trying to correct with a small paintbrush. That he and many of the workers with him spoke Italian — “Bene! Bene!” one called out from below — lent a little verisimilitude. But the view around them was not of a church from Milan’s gilded age. It was a view bequeathed by another gilded age, the 19th century one that gave rise to the Park Avenue Armory, in whose vast drill hall all this art-historical re-enacting was taking place. In other words, the traveling Peter Greenaway painting-cinema-lecture-installation-whatever-it-might-be extravaganza had finally come to town. Beginning Friday and continuing through Jan. 6 Mr. Greenaway, the provocative British filmmaker, along with an international crew of theatrical producers, video experts and art makers will present, for the first time in America, the kind of splashy multimedia art exhibition he has shown to huge, appreciative audiences — and not a few irritated art scholars — around the world for three years now. The show inaugurates the first full season of programming by the Park Avenue Armory since it began reinventing itself as an unconventional arts center three years ago.
Mr. Greenaway’s exhibition, born of his desire to revive a visual literacy he believes modern eyes have lost when looking at paintings, enlists props, lights, advanced digital projectors, towering screens, recorded music, voice-overs, precise copies of paintings (though sometimes the real ones) and practically every other theatrical aid besides smoke machines and interpretive dancers in the cause of trying to bring masterpieces of Western art to life.
The exhibitions began in 2006 as an experiment, with projections onto the canvas of the real “Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s masterpiece at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Mr. Greenaway, 68, lives and is revered enough to have received permission to experiment with such a Dutch national treasure. (He was yelled at nonetheless by some viewers when the show opened. “To them, I suppose I was trying to put a fifth leg on a four-legged cat,” he recalled in an interview.) The idea took off, and since then has involved the real “Last Supper,” onto which Mr. Greenway superimposed projections for one night in 2008; an exhibition with a replica of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” last year in Venice; and two more “Last Supper” shows, in Milan and Melbourne, using the replica of the “Last Supper” that was recently shipped from Spain to New York in six panels.
A week ago inside the armory drill hall workers from Change Performing Arts, a Milanese theatrical production company, began building a life-size re-creation — its proportions exact to within millimeters — of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where “The Last Supper” was completed by Leonardo in 1498 after several years of work.
The copy of the painting for the Greenaway show was made 510 years later in far less time, about five weeks, by a company called Factum Arte, based in Madrid and London, a pioneer in the use of high-resolution photography and three-dimensional scanning to recreate paintings and sculpture so precisely that it is now working, at the request of scholars and conservators, on projects involving paintings by Caravaggio and several tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The “Last Supper” replica — which the company prefers to call a clone, though it was made with borrowed photographic data less precise than the company generally uses — was “painted” by an inkjet printer that slowly covered panels of plaster, much like the kind Leonardo worked on, with paint that mimics the original but is designed to last much longer. (Leonardo used an experimental tempera mixture on dry plaster that proved disastrously fragile.) By Thanksgiving the only major element of the production inside the drill hall that had not yet arrived was Mr. Greenaway himself. There were last-minute visa problems, caused partly by an overstuffed passport. But by Saturday morning he had made it and, dressed in what seems to be an unvarying uniform — dark pinstriped suit, dark shirt and dark knotted scarf — he was in constant motion in a swirl of consulting producers and workers, looking a little like the harried director Guido Anselmi in “8 ½” by Fellini, one of Mr. Greenaway’s heroes.
“It looks bigger than I thought it would, but that’s a pleasant surprise,” he said, craning his neck to take in the replica of the refectory, which looked like a kind of Renaissance spacecraft under repair beneath the hangarlike armory roof, with lots of room to spare (even with the addition of a huge second structure evoking an Italian piazza, where another part of the half-hour production projects images of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” recreating the 2009 exhibition in Venice).
Over a cup of untouched tomato soup several hours later Mr. Greenaway talked about how his interest in creating these shows grew not only out of his own early training as a painter and his desire to use film for primarily painterly purposes. He has often described “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” from 1989, probably his best-known movie and one that shocked audiences at the time, as being much more about color than about its ostensible themes of sex, death and cannibalism.
The motivation grew even more out of his waning interest in cinema, whose death he has been proclaiming loudly for more than a decade, even as he continued to make movies. In his view the motion picture, around for little more than a century, has exhausted its possibilities as an evolving art form and lost its hold on the imaginations of a Web-connected populace. What began to obsess him was the idea of seeing what advanced 21st-century movie technology (“The tools of cinema are now wasted on cinema,” he said) could do if harnessed to a few thousand years of its two-dimensional forefather, Western painting.
“On a basic level, if it itches, you have to scratch it,” he said. “So if I complain that cinema is bad, then I’ve got to try to put something back in its place.”
Of the paintings he has volunteered for this mission so far, and those on his wish list — among them, “Guernica” by Picasso; a major Jackson Pollock drip painting at the Museum of Modern Art; the Sistine ceiling as perhaps a grand final act — he said: “We don’t turn them into films. They’re not animated works of art. They’re not cartoons. But we can change the color, and we can change the contrast, and we can change the chiaroscuro, and by inference we can make these paintings cinematic in a curious way.” A few days later, pacing pensively during a run-through of the production — a raised table evoking the “Last Supper” dinner table glowed ominously red and then blindingly white; Mr. Greenaway’s own basso profundo boomed forth like the voice of God. Projections of painting details wheeled vertiginously around a few onlookers — he said he was a little worried that the whole thing was dragging a bit, like a slow episode of “Masterpiece Classic.”
“It’s also my responsibility here to introduce notions of legitimate entertainment,” he said.
But Adam Lowe, the founder of Factum Arte and the creator of the “Last Supper” replica, stood by smiling, saying that he cared only about the theoretical approval of one viewer: a restless artist himself, who ultimately loved experimenting more than painting. “And if he were here today,” he said, “I think Leonardo would be the happiest man in the world.”
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