TOKYO - -Adios, Santiago! Ciao, Tintoretto!
It's a fresh page for art history books, as former contenders for the globe's biggest oil-on-canvas murals - artists such as Columbia's Santiago Martinez Delgado (1906-1954) or Italy's Tintoretto, (1518-1594) - were recently bested by a painting in Japan.
When an Abercrombie & Fitch store opened in Tokyo's Ginza neighborhood late last month, it contained what the Ohio-based retailer boasts is the world's largest oil-on-canvas mural.
Painted by a New Yorker, Mark Beard, the mural is a manly fantasia (a mantasia?) of athleticism and attitude. In it, some 300 young men are depicted in various states of dress, and undress, as they swim, climb rocks, cycle, ski, lift weights, and hunt rabbits, all the while looking impossibly sultry. A triptych consisting of two side pieces framing a wide, central panel, it is more than 180 feet tall, and nearly 9,000 square feet in area. Such dimensions easily, well, muscle aside Santiago Delgado's 1953 commission by Nelson Rockefeller for the Bank of New York lobby in Bogota, or Tintoretto's "Paradise," completed in 1577 for the Doges Palace in Venice.
Tokyo is the fifth painting - after New York, Los Angeles, London, and Milan - that Beard has been commissioned to create by Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch. The Ginza mural, however, is easily twice as large as anything Beard has done before.
"The folks at Abercrombie are my Medicis," he said, a few weeks ago in Tokyo, as he stood, palette in hand, on a high scaffolding. "I am very lucky I have a rich client who can afford to hire me to do something so elaborate. Let's face it, this is a time-consuming and expensive way to decorate a clothing store."
A new construction, Abercrombie & Fitch Ginza is a tall, slender building erected on a corner lot. From the exterior, each story appears to have floor-to ceiling windows covered by dark wooden louvers. Inside, however, these "windows" are hidden behind interior walls and display cases. The result is a dark, club-like environment, with 114 speakers (and 83 subwoofers) blasting groovy music, and lighting that's exquisitely flattering to both merchandise and customer. Beard's painting is, quite literally, central to the store's ambience, as it is designed to entice shoppers to the store's upper floors.
He began work on it nearly two years ago at his midtown Manhattan studio. For months, he drew detailed sketches and formed clay sculptures of young men sent over by Abercrombie & Fitch ("They are very specific about the looks they like," Beard noted.) Then, he created elaborate maquettes showing how the figures would be arranged about a glass-treaded staircase that rises within the mural.
Once plans were approved, he painted more than 100 canvases, each 10 by 12 feet. When dry, they were removed from their wooden stretchers, rolled in tubes, and sent to Tokyo.
Affixed to the stairwell's walls, their edges "scalloped" together by a crew of wallpaper hangers imported from London, all merge into one enormous painting. If this sounds like an exacting process, it wasn't. Beard estimates that nearly 20 percent of what he painted back in New York ended up on the cutting room floor, requiring him to spend nearly a month in Tokyo, retouching.
As he daubed a swirl of snowflakes around the mural's "skiing in the Adirondacks" section, Beard spoke of painters he's studied carefully and cadged techniques from: Antoine Watteau, Diego Velazquez and Thomas Eakins are high on his list. He even claims to be influenced by the "Tomb of the Divers," a 5th century BC funerary mural and the lone example of non-vase figural painting from Ancient Greece, now displayed in a museum in Paestum, Italy. Beard's "bravura" style of brushwork - everything is meticulously planned to appear improvised - is similar to that of his main hero, John Singer Sargent.
This technique is labor-intensive, to say the least, with alternating coats of paint and glaze slowly built up so each of these layers can show through simultaneously.
The majority of men depicted in his Tokyo mural are Caucasian, and Beard likes to exaggerate their skin's pallor, with blushes of pink around pectorals, elbows, and knees.
"Since the time of Peter Paul Reubens, this has traditionally been a way to express eroticism in paint," he explained. "Sarah Bernhardt used to powder her skin, but rouge the tip of her nose and the tops of her ears. It is an old style, that I happen to like."
Beard, 53, grew up in Salt Lake City; both his father and great-grandfather were painters. After studying art at the University of Utah, he studied drawing under Yves Brayer at the Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He moved to New York in 1980, where he took courses in fresco-painting at the New School. A chance meeting with Mario Amaya, an art critic and former director of the New York Cultural Center, led to an opportunity to paint the composer, Virgil Thomson. Other commissions soon followed, as did work in theatrical design. For many seasons, Beard worked with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre.
"The Abercrombie & Fitch commissions are an especially ingenious use of his talent, as Mark paints in a style of the 1920s and '30s we were once quite familiar with - look at the lobbies in Rockefeller Center - where humble humanity is shown in a heroic scale," said Ashton Hawkins, a lawyer and longtime board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. "Yet, Mark makes it palatable to the modern sensibility, because there's a sly element of camp to it. His mural is awe-inspiring, but should also be viewed with a grain of salt."
Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, puts Beard's work into an even broader historical context, by citing "kalos kagathos," a term that in Ancient Greece equated goodness with beauty. "Yes, it's slightly tongue-in-cheek, but Mark, in his own way, is playing off an idealization of perfect manhood that dates back to Herodotus. It's not about going to the gym to get pumped up. Rather, 'kalos kagathos' refers to a purity and nobility of thought, suggesting that a healthy body is the reflection of a healthy soul."
The Adirondack snowstorm complete, Beard moved on to a swimming hole scene. He gazed for a moment at a young man, standing at the pond's edge and painted in the process of shucking off his wet bathing suit, nearly revealing too much.
"To a certain extent, of course, we are selling sex," Beard acknowledged. "But I like to say it is 'polite nudity.' You will see more revealed at the Louvre than you'll find here."
This said, Beard sighed.
"Really, though, this mural depicts something altogether different, and in its own way, much more shocking than sex," he said. "What I paint - the evanescence of perfect youth - is very fragile, and slightly sad. It only lasts a moment, you see, and is gone before you realize."