Gian Berto Vanni in his SoHo studio
By Jennie Green
When I visited the 77-year-old painter, Gian Berto Vanni and his wife, Frani Gay, at their home/studio on the top floor of a steep, five-story SoHo walk-up on lower Broadway, I hardly imagined that I would wander home three hours later feeling intoxicated by my renewed faith in the power of human imagination.
Imagine, to begin with, having the vision, the faith, and the confidence to design a house and then build it into a piece of earth with your own hands, or to walk away from a comfortable life as an award-winning Paris illustrator into the penniless uncertainty of existence as a New York painter with a young wife and infant son.
Gian Berto (Chichito to his wife and close friends) is a compact fireball of a man who told many compelling stories on the afternoon of my visit, including a most extraordinary one about a sailing trip without a boat.
“I had a spear with me so I could catch fish,” the Italian-born artist said in his quick, lyrically accented English. “Frani and I had our wetsuits, which is how we traveled from island to island. It was one of our greatest adventures.”
“You went from island to island without a boat?”
“Yes.” Then, after a brief pause: “We were the boats.”
“So you swam …”
“Right!” exclaimed Vanni. “We were in Greece, a place I know very well, and we swam from island to island. We caught fish and camped out on various beaches. Once, when we arrived on an island, some people who lived there asked us: ‘Where is your boat?’ And we told them: ‘We are the boats.’ And of course they didn’t believe us. So they got in a skiff and paddled out to where they thought we might have moored our boat. By the time they returned, they had resigned themselves to the fact that we were telling the truth. They roasted a goat in our honor, and we ate and drank with them all night. It was a big celebration, a fantastic party.”
Gian Berlo Vanni is a person who has so much faith in the visions that fuel his imagination, risks are as easy for him to take as breaths. In fact, he doesn’t even appear to think in terms of risk, but rather in terms of ideas, action, and experience. His art is not merely an expression, it is an extension of his ongoing dialogue with the coincidences and paradoxes of the world in which he lives. That few if any distinctions exist between the life and the work of Gian Berto Vanni speaks for his status as a creator – not just a creative person – in the truest sense of the word.
Because there was never a time in Vanni’s life when he didn’t make art, or doubted his creative power, or felt blocked, or tormented, or questioned the validity of his work, or felt compelled to pursue any other more practical endeavor.
The only child of a doting father who was a prominent physician, Vanni was born in Rome, Italy, in 1927. He started painting not long thereafter, and has never stopped. An early distaste for mathematics ruled out any chance that he would follow in his father’s professional footsteps, and the son’s interest in architecture wasn’t keen enough to counter his intuitive sense that a career in the field would involve too many practical concerns. So at 18, Gian Berto undertook to become a painter – a vocation hardly novel in a family that counted 27 painters before him – the first one being Lippo Vanni in the public palace in Siena, in 1320.
From the diary of Gian Berto Vanni, summer 2005, camping and sailing among the islands of the Aegean Sea: "Now we are back in Kythira, sitting on our terrace overlooking the Cretan Sea. The new day is beginning, and in a while I shall go catch some fish for dinner, then come back to paint my golden icons, cook dinner, see those friends that come to stay with us, and count how many full moons we shall see before coming home, to New York, in September."
He enrolled in the school of Art and Architecture at the University of Rome and followed the standard curriculum of landscape, still life, and nude. He is more than glad to have received that formal training, but even as a young man understood himself well enough to know that a career in portrait and still-life painting wasn’t going to be for him. So he had to make a choice: “At the end of World War II, a young man with an artistic interest had to face a hard challenge,” he wrote in a small, beautiful book entitled Gian Berto Vanni: Fifty Years of Painting that he published himself. “It was my case. The monopoly that the Fascist party had imposed on the culture considered Modernism as evil … My first steps in breaking with tradition dealt with the simplification of planes. But I realized soon enough that much more was needed. I then decided to move to Paris to broaden my understanding of what happened to art in the past fifty years. The result was devastating … in a positive sense.”
After six months in Paris, Vanni won a scholarship to study painting in Holland, where he was allowed to go to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum to copy Van Gogh. He experimented with such other media as clay and painting on tree bark. But the turning point of his Holland experience was an artistic awakening – the recognition of two fundamental aspects of nature that would inform his work over the next 50 years. One was the abstraction of the wind on the grass; the other, the paradoxical depth of the ultra-fine horizon line between vast swaths of water or land, and the sky.
Vanni’s teacher, Vortemberge Gildevart, a painter of the De Stijl movement of Piet Mondrian, and others paved the way for his promising student to win a Fulbright grant to Yale University. There, Vanni worked with famed Josef Albers, who believed that “a formal coherence should be carried throughout a work.” But for Vanni, this suggestion provoked a contradictory thought: that the coexistence of multiple styles could exist within a single canvas or composition. And this coexistence ultimately eventually became his leitmotif.
After Yale, Vanni returned to Paris, where he started to develop the ideas he had cultivated in Holland and the United States, add-ing to the process intense experimentation with color, which he often used to define shape. “The chromatic evidence of the fields was sometimes following, sometimes contradicting their placement in a rational, Euclidean space,” he writes. “The fragments were sometimes used as boundaries, limits created at the edge by the pressure coming from the energy of the opposing colors, as the ripple marks of advancing and receding in opposite territory; sometimes I let them float in space, as remains of destroyed land, or seeds of a new organism ready to grow and expand, until meeting another boundary, another space.”
In the midst of all that creative work, Gian Berto Vanni became a family man. He and American-born Frani Gay Atkinson spotted each other at a horse show in Rome in 1946—while Vanni was at Yale—and were married five years later in Richland, Washington, where Frani’s father was working in an atomic plant. The couple spent the decade that was the 1950s moving freely between Paris, Rome, and New York – enjoying a most traditional marriage within the context of a most unconventional lifestyle – as if they themselves were the central contradiction within a Vanni painting. Frani did not have artistic aspirations (“I can’t even draw a circle,” she told me in their Broadway loft) but was content to facilitate her husband’s ambitions by fetching supplies, keeping the studio organized, caring for their son, Ruggero, who was born in Paris in 1958, and managing family finances that since 1950 had been generated exclusively through Van-ni’s painting.
There was, however, a stint in Paris during the mid-1950s when married life called for more money, so Vanni tried his hand at commercial drawing. His whimsical, semi-abstract children’s-book illustrations (which were unheard of at that time) won him awards, notoriety, and lucrative offers from other publishers.
But the studio beckoned. So in 1958 the Vanni’s moved to New York, where Gian Berto returned to painting full-time. The trouble was that it was as difficult then as it is now to survive as a fine artist in New York City, and the penniless young couple now had an infant son. “It was a terrifying time,” says Gian Berto. “Very difficult. Eventually I did start to get involved with a gallery, but it turned out to be a fraud, which left a bad taste in my mouth about galleries in general.”
Still, when Vanni returned to Europe he prepared a show for Rome’s Schneider Gallery (his first Schneider show had been in 1955) that was hugely successful. So there were more shows, first with Schneider, then with other galleries, and this went on long enough for summering in Greece to become a Vanni family tradition. Gian Berto could afford to buy a small plot of land on the island of Kythira, where he single-handedly (without electricity for tools but with two bricklayers to help mix the cement) built an asymmetrical, ecological dwelling and studio that popped out of the earth and his own imagination.
“It must have been the beginning of 1964. I was in my studio, and my side vision made me aware of a painting that I did not remember. I turned around to give it a closer look, and I realized that it was a group of three canvases of different sizes, gathered together against the wall. One was partially hiding the other; but the small visible portion was asking to enter the picture, match its credibility against the other one to upset the existing balance by introducing its rhythms, its definition of space. Thus I became interested in a conscious way in discontinuities, contradictions of styles, quotations from my personal museum of memories, hints to the sediments from the contrasting cultures that hide and coexist in our subconscious.”
And so began two decades of work at the easel, punctuated with travel throughout the Middle East and Far East that inspired experimentation with silkscreen, etchings, film animation, still photography, and other media.
In 1973, Vanni returned to his original passion for painting on canvas with pigments and brushes. In 1977 he had an anthology show at the Galleria Nuovo Carpine in Rome, and in 1979 the Centre Culturel Français offered him a show in their Rome gallery as recognition of his long-standing connections with Paris. But Rome – that spot on the map to which he habitually returned – had lost its sheen. All his commissions were somehow tied to one political party or another, and if that wasn’t unpleasant enough, he had come to realize, by contrast, that he missed New York – “… its constant movement between action and ideas, primitive landscapes and contemporary urban realities.”
In 1979, Vanni’s then 21-year-old son Ruggero, a promising abstract painter, was accepted at Cooper Union, and that became the catalyst to revisit New York “temporarily.” But when Vanni ran into a former colleague who taught at Cooper Union, and who asked Vanni if he would take on the teaching of an adjunct course or two, the latter replied quickly: “I’ve never taught painting before; why would I start now?” But the other man persisted until Vanni agreed to give it a shot. And now, ever since, his annual September return to the rent-controlled lower Broadway loft, after beautiful summers spent sailing the Turkish coast and at their Kythira home, is dictated at least in part by an expectant crop of young painters who are waiting to learn about color and form.
But returning to New York also means retreating back into the studio to produce another cycle of work – and planning the next big adventure for the long winter break between semesters:
“My travels around the world continued,” Vanni writes. “I went to southern India and to the deserts of Rajasthan; the palaces of Mysore, the shrines of Bali, the royal tombs of Luxor; new elements joined the old ones in the crucible of my thoughts – and in my attempt to open the mysteries of forms rather than being satisfied with their content I follow the opposite path: to see rather than to look at things and give the images the time to become visions, letting them interact on my personal stage.”
In New York, Vanni has over the years also settled into a kind of ultimate freedom: the ability to sell his work without the assistance (or intervention) of the gallery system. “I’ve never really been comfortable with the whole concept of a middle-man when it comes to selling art,” said Vanni, who holds two open studios a year – one in December, the other in May – at which he generally sells enough of his paintings to finance the travels that have become intrinsic to inspiring and informing those paintings. “But I’m lucky,” he says. “I have a wonderful list of creative people who love art and are interested in my work. And I can keep my prices (from $1,200 to $15,000 at the open studio this past May) low enough so that people who like the work can actually afford to buy it. And when you take the gallery out of the equation, that’s who’s buying the work anyway, people who really like it, not people who are looking for an investment, and there’s something deeply satisfying about that.”
At the end of the day (or even at the beginning of the day) this writer is not a person who can speak with any authority about visual art, especially of the abstract variety. I don’t have access to the kind of history or vocabulary that would enable me to articulate my impressions. But here lies the brilliance of Vanni’s work: You don’t need any special expertise to let his abstracted landscapes indulge you on both visceral and intellectual levels. Because they are – just about all of them – simple yet extraordinarily complex reflections of what it is to be organically alive on Planet Earth. No gimmicks. No exhibitionism or self-referential hooks. Abstract, certainly, but disciplined through years of practice and layer upon layer of thought about the natural paradoxes and inconsistencies that exist within everything from molecular biology to geopolitics to human relationships – and shining always with a kind of tempered electricity.
Like the artist himself. At 77, Vanni remains such a powerful engine of creative energy that a substantial portion of his life seems to unfold on the periphery of linear time, in a raw, pure space behind and slightly to the left of some vast imaginative canvas to which most of the rest of our eyes are drawn. It never even occurred to me to ask Gian Berto if he contemplates retirement; clearly, his work is so seamlessly woven throughout the fabric of his life that it would be like asking the man if he ponders suicide.
The Vannis are not rich. Or famous. And yet: “We’re lucky that we’ve been able to live exactly as we wanted to live,” says Frani with a wide smile that deepens the creases around her mouth – perhaps the bargain price she’s had to pay for all those summers under the hot Grecian sun.
I shove my legal pad back inside my pack and brace myself to descend the five flights of steps that I know will spit me back out into the world of current events, public transportation, and dinner. Before I leave, though, I linger before a massive oil painting in the front room in which gauzy swaths of gold and silver crowd but ultimately fail to obscure a more reticent field of purplish blue, which itself houses a vibrant, cell-like nugget of primary yellows and reds. At which point I turn to this painter and say: “So the bottom line with you is that everything is possible. If you can imagine it, it can be?”
“Yes!” says Vanni, and with an intense smile and a trickle of laughter that seeps out from between his full red lips, he suddenly reminds me of a cheerful wizard whose magic has just been laid bare. He hesitates a moment before veering off down a slightly different path: “You know, Frani and I are grandparents now. Ruggero has a son, four years old, and next year the little boy will start Kindergarten at a bilingual public school in Chinatown where he will become fluent in Mandarin. Can you imagine that? So this is the next big adventure, and we’re all going to have our work cut out for us, keeping up with him.”
