In ancient and old buildings of stone—be they classical, Romanesque, medieval, Renaissance, baroque, even rococo and certainly neo-classical—it’s often easiest to see how a structure “speaks” when it’s denuded of furnishings and decoration, when tone and tenor become clear. Is the voice elegant? Eloquent? Does it pose a question, or posit a solution, or both? Does it, in short, talk pretty?

The idea of a human-made environment as boon and buttress for thought—a safe haven for contemplation sensorial, spiritual or philosophical—is as ancient as the Greco-Roman atrium, which found translation over the centuries in the Islamic pleasure garden and Medieval Catholic cloister.

During a visit to the just re-opened Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers in the Champagne region of France, a few hours drive from Paris, I was especially mindful how stones, and the spaces and volumes they make, inspire, their balance and harmony encouraging breakthroughs in other arenas—in this case those that start with a pop and then get bubbly. Because buzz notwithstanding, this abbey was home for over forty-five years to Dom Pierre Pérignon (c. 1638-1715), the monk who is the father of Champagne.

While it’s clear he did not invent champers, Pérignon, the abbey’s cellar master from 1670 until his death, was indisputably Champagne’s greatest and earliest pioneer. He improved quality and set standards for production that would be refined progressively in the 19th century—the celebratory result summed up in an apocryphal Pérignon quote from a late 19th-century print advertisement: “Come quickly, I’m drinking the stars!”

In the ensuing three centuries, most Pérignon particulars have been lost. Still, it’s known that when he came to the province weak red wine was its norm. It’s also known he created clear white wines from black grapes (Pinot Noir) by clever, innovative manipulation of their pressing, and that he was the first wine maker to understand the idea of terroir (that grapes grown in different sections of a district, or even a sub-section of a district, yield different attributes and tastes). It’s known he evolved into a wine whisperer who learned how to bottle Champagne at just the correct moment to preserve its bubbles, and that he employed thicker glass to discourage explosions caused by the wine’s second fizzy fermentation, single explosions often then starting disastrous chain reactions.

What remains a mystery is what inspired the gentle, humble Benedictine to launch an oenophilic revolution? Or what, in other words, enabled Pérignon to conceive of an improved sparkling wine, when sparkling wine was very much a novelty?

And having done so, what then emboldened him to embark upon a journey that would occupy him for well over four decades, its resolution predicated on the reconciling of Champagne’s many disparate elements, both technical and taste?

No documentary evidence exists, unfortunately. But just as there came to be balance in Champagne, so was there first architectural harmony in the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers.

Situated next to vineyards on a postcard-pretty hillside outside of Epernay, the abbey and its grounds just received a makeover costing several million euros and taking several years, the work initiated, planned and paid for by the property’s owner, Moët & Chandon. (Dom Pérignon is the house of Moët & Chandon’s tête de cuvee, or top of the line.)

Like the monk’s favored drink, the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers is a mix. Fully rebuilt in 1692, it incorporates earlier architectural elements, such as Romanesque columns (with grape-vine motifs, no less), with some later decorative detail, namely window frames with small 19th-century mouth-blown panes.

The park, gardens, cloister and renowned Sainte-Hélène portal were fully restored, and the monastery’s former library was renovated; it’s now a tranquil tasting and event space. Connected to the abbey is Hautvillers’ church, where Dom Pérignon’s tomb occupies a place of honor.

It’s a mosaic of and in balance. Like the vintage beverage that bears his name.

(All photos credited to Stephane Cardinale.)

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The high stakes, big money, haute design world of international fine and decorative art fairs is no different. Turf is staked out, jealously guarded and defended, and reputations and buzz of the fair and its dealers are key in attracting coveted high-flying collectors and building bridges for new byers and markets. As dealers across the categorical gamut—contemporary art to ancient sculpture—have seen increasingly over the last ten years, more and more of their revenue and new clientele is generated at fairs. That makes these jet-set Happenings important like never before.

Which is why this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris was such a Napoleonic big deal. The fair, which ended last Sunday after a ten-day run in the glass-domed Grand Palais just off the Champs Elysées, marked its 26th edition.

Founded in 1956 and launched in its present form in 1962—with 78 dealers, steered to the Grand Palais by none other than André Malraux, the celebrated intellectual, novelist and theorist who was also France’s first Minister for Cultural Affairs—the Biennale set the pace for international fairs for well over the following three decades. On display were not only boldfaced pieces, the majority of which were French 18th century, but boldfaced people. There were luminaries of screen, stage and screen; leading artists; kings of countries and bourses. Tout le monde, café society, and the curators from the West’s most important museums, all drawn to the Biennale, which grew to become an encyclopedic fair offering vetted antiques and fine art from the ancient to the contemporary. At the fair’s heart were of course its unique objects, but it was as much the platform of Paris that arguably made it peerless.

A shock, then, that over the last decade the crown for Best Fine and Decorative Arts Fair in the World has been worn—with increasingly confidence and security—by another fair, the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, an annual encyclopedic fair held in the dreary month of March in Maastricht. How a Dutch fair dating to the mid 1970s, which began as a small venue specializing in Old Master paintings and continues to be held in a small town in southeastern Holland, managed to become the world’s preeminent art and antiques fair, is a fascinating story of long-range planning and determination. How the Biennale stumbled is an equally interesting story, and continues to be the subject of conjecture (much of it conjuring 18th-century Versailles in its complexity and penchant for intrigue).

Regardless, this was the Biennale bounced back, and it did so by doubling down. The number of exhibitors surged from a relatively anemic 87 dealers in 2010 to a robust 122 this year. The Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA), the antique dealers union that organizers the fair, also undertook a 13-city promotional tour leading up to the fair, with whistle stops in standards such as New York, Milan and Berlin, but also in Hong Kong, Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai and Istanbul.

Broadening the numbers, in terms of exhibitors as well as well-heeled collectors, was vital. But Christian Deydier, the noted Asian-art dealer who is also president of the 400-member SNA, cleverly chose to emphasize not what makes the fair international, but what makes it most uniquely and distinctly French. Because while other fairs might have more exhibitors and greater range, the Biennale remains unsurpassed in sheer uncontestable glamour. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAMwvBjSS80&feature=youtu.be Toward that end, Deydier secured Karl Lagerfeld as the fair’s scenographer, and Lagerfeld, acting in coordination with museum exhibition designer Rene Bouchara, delivered a turn-of-the-20th-century fantasy that conjured the Belle Epoque, the era in which French taste and influence over the arts was unchallenged, and which was, not coincidentally, a reminder of when and why the Grand Palais was built (for the Universal Exhibition of 1900).

Nor were holds barred to achieve the stunning effect: booths had uniform facades, white-framed light gray storefronts with enormous mullioned windows punctuated by faux street lanterns, stand-to-stand carpet with an abstract pattern evoking cobblestones, and, in the center under the great glass dome, an enormous striped balloon that the brothers Montgolfier would have envied. Deydier, an accomplished chef, also engineered a roster of Michel-starred top toques to cook at the fair’s gastronomic restaurant, with three-star chef Michel Guerard overseeing the fair’s opening night charity dinner gala benefiting the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris- Hôpitaux de France, whose longstanding patroness is Bernadette Chirac, former first lady of France.

And in poured le beau monde, French, European and international. Included were the likes of Bernard Arnault, Henry Kravis, Francois-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayak, Pierre Bergé, Eugenie Niarchos, Charlotte Casiraghi, Yue Sai Kan, Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani, Philippine de Rothschild, Prince and Princess Michael of Bourbon Parma, not to mention Mr. Mick Jagger and Ms. Danielle Steel. (To catch a bit of the fair’s buzz, watch the slide show, Impressions from the Opening, first video above.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1VwXVOGnA&feature=youtu.be The sound, fury and river of champers were not for nothing. The artworks on view were dazzling, often literally if one sauntered into the stands of the great jewelry houses, numerous as never before and including first-time exhibitor Hong Kong-based Wallace Chan. All the Paris-based big guns were firing in force—from new players such as Dior and Chanel, to Cartier, Chaumet, Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels (which complemented a comprehensive exhibition currently on at Paris’ Museum of Decorative Arts).

Many of the houses featured pieces made exclusively for the Biennale, pieces that, so complex in intricacy and construction, took almost two years to complete. The unofficial spokesmodel for several of the houses, the late Elizabeth Taylor, made a ghostly through line at the fair, her photograph and examples of her famous collection (much auctioned at Christie’s earlier this year for enormous sums) on view at Bulgari, not far from the stand of New York and L.A.-based contemporary art dealer L&M Arts, which showed Andy Warhol’s yellow “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)”, perhaps the fair’s single most expensive piece with a rumored asking price of $40 million.

Central to the Biennale has always been a premier selection of FFF (fine French furniture). While there were slightly fewer specialists than in years past, the great Parisian antiquarians more than made up for this in quality. The big daddies were in attendance: Didier Aaron, Aveline, Francois Léage and Steinitz. But in terms of consistency paired with connoisseurship paired with complete unity, the prize went to Maison Kraemer. In 2010, this venerable, multi-generational company of antique dealers amused and awed visitors with a recreation of the Oval Office employing 18th-century French furniture exclusively (the illusion was down to to-scale photographs of the grounds mounted in the windows).

This year, Kraemer staged the first-ever monographic exhibition devoted to cabinet maker Jean-Henri Riesener, Marie-Antoinette’s preferred furniture source. Indeed, among the approximately 20 pieces was a coiffeuse, a lady’s dressing table with a complete kit (small, delicate, hand-painted porcelain containers for powders, rouge, etc.) that is identical to two at Versailles that belonged to the doomed queen. (There was also a small writing desk that was once part of the royal collection at Versailles, its delivery documented on December 31, 1779 by Riesener himself.)

The second slide show above shows off three of the pieces, starting with a commode owned by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse d’Artois, followed by an 18th-century backgammon table, and finally the small writing desk from various views. As Laurent Kraemer says with typical understatement, “Uniquely, furniture in 18th-century France was a major art.”

The same could be argued for 20th-century French furniture, especially that made between the world wars, much of which was made in the great 18th-century ébeniste tradition combining exemplary materials and craftsmanship to yield uniquely artful pieces. Examples of work by Jean-Michel Frank, Armand-Albert Rateau, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and Eileen Gray have for the last decade been darlings of collections, auction houses and galleries, and terrific examples were on stand at Galerie Vallois, along with a pair of matching cabinets in shagreen, ivory and mother-of-pearl by Clement Rousseau, who should be better known than he is.

Right Bank-dealer Alain Marcelpoil, a specialist in Art Deco furniture who wrote the book on Lyon-based furniture-maker André Sornay, showed a stand-full of Sornay’s work, among them a partner’s desk from 1929 that emerged from a console (when the leaves came out and clicked into place, concealed desk lights illuminated, as pictured above). First time exhibitor Galerie Mathivet showed pieces by André Groult as well as Rateau—evoking the dressing room of his great patron, couturier Jeanne Lanvin (one of her original dresses was even on display, all part of the ambiance.

In terms of post-war and contemporary, Yves Gastou showed a plexiglass backgammon/game table from 1970 by Jean-Claude Farhi. It made me think of Kraemer’s 18th-century Riesener, which in turn prepared my mind for Gastou’s surrealist table, “Expansion Valise,” from 1970 by César. And while it’s actually a desk, the fantastic bronze donkey by Francois-Xavier Lalanne at JGM Galerie (priced at $1 million) could in a pinch serve as a bar.

Why quibble when you might tipple?

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Colossal mistake.

Because Frankfurt is a far-too-little lauded and explored cultural trove that is as navigable as it is compactly foot-friendly. A city of 60 museums, Frankfurt also has been investing in the maintenance, modernization and expansion of its museums at a rate unparalleled in Germany (let alone the rest of Europe, where “culture cuts” have become a too-familiar phrase).

Much of this recent activity can be found in the 12 museums that line the banks of the river Main, the watery thoroughfare that bifurcates the city. They form a cultural cluster known as the Museumsufer, or Museum Embankment, with the majority of the museums—ten—on the south bank.

Launched in 1978 and more fully realized in the ‘80s, this cultural concentration composed of purpose-built neo-classical buildings—such as the Städel, Frankfurt’s renowned fine arts museum; 19th-century villas once belonging to the city’s political or financial aristocracy; new construction from modern starchitects such as Richard Meier; and combos thereof—recently reached a new apogee.

Located along the Schaumainkai, a tree-lined boulevard with views across the Main to the city’s skyline (Frankfurt has earned the local appellation “Mainhattan” because of the number of skyscrapers, unique in Germany), the museums also often neighbor one another, and none—even the most diametrically opposed—are further than a pleasant promenade.

Which is exactly how best to address the Museum Embankment: on foot, and ideally over several days, with time allotted for civilized lunches at the museums’ cafes and restaurants or in the trendy eateries nearby (many of which happen to sit on or near one of the city’s coolest, not-international-brand-driven shopping streets nearby).

And so, meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen…

1. Start the morning at Museum Giersch. The museum further west on the embankment, it’s housed in a neoclassical villa from 1910, opened in 2000, specializes in art of the region (encompassing the Main and Rhine rivers and surroundings), and serves as platform for a changing series of exhibitions.

2. The Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt’s sculpture museum is next. On view through September 23 is “Jeff Koons,” a solo exhibition devoted to the American artists whom The Economist recently called America’s most famous living artist (and whose auction sale of “Hanging Heart” in 2007 for $23.6 million momentarily made him the world’s most expensive living artist as well). Besides the debut of several long-awaited (and anticipated) works, among them two goddesses—Balloon Venus from the artist’s new “Antiquity” series and inspired by the Venus of Willendorf fertility figure from c. 2300 B.C., and Metallic Venus, glossy and turquoise and replete with a planter filled with live petunias—what makes the show a showstopper is the integration of the 44 pieces alongside Liebieghaus’s permanent collection. Spanning five thousand years of sculpture, it gives contrast and context to Koons’ work, sometimes complement too (below is a video of the exhibition).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drbPDArE6qw&feature=youtu.be

Regardless of what’s on temporary exhibition, the top floor attic rooms should not be missed. Modeled on Renaissance studioli, intimate, private spaces for study, contemplation and the display of art, these rooms combine the fine and decorative arts, showing sculpture alongside the 19th-century villa’s original furnishings.

3. Founded in 1815 by merchant and banker Johann Friedrich Städel, the Städel Museum (officially the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie) is among Germany’s oldest assemblages of art opened to the public, and has one of the most important fine art collections in Europe. Among its 2,700 paintings, encompassing over 700 years of Western art, are headliners such as the Lucca Madonna by Jan van Eyck, The Geographer by Vermeer (pictured), Goethe in the Roman Campagna by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (Goethe, a native Frankfurter and a favorite son of the city), Portrait of a Young Woman by Botticelli and The Blinding of Samson by Rembrandt, to name but a few. Additionally there are some 600 sculptures, 500 drawings and prints, and 100,000 photographs. There’s also a neighboring and affiliated fine arts academy, the Städelschule, which dates from 1817 and has had such noted professors as German expressionist master Max Beckmann (who is duly and copiously represented on the museum’s walls as well).

The current building dates from 1878, and a small, striking addition, designed by Austrian architect Gustav Peichl, was built in 1990 to exhibit 20th-century work and special exhibitions. But the biggest addition in the building’s history is also its most recent. Last February saw the debut of almost 10,000 square feet of subterranean gallery space designed by the noted local architecture firm Schneider+Schumacher. Carved from beneath the museum’s garden, the massive addition has natural light courtesy of 195 skylights (pictured), and is devoted entirely to contemporary art collection, with all the Richters and Tillmans, Kiefers and Kippenbergers, Beuys and girls one could hope for. The entire construction of the new wing was painstakingly documented in photographs by noted American artist Laura Padgett, a longtime resident of Frankfurt, in her book Space over Time. For re-fueling, the airy café, connected to the excellent book and museum shop, is worth far more than an espresso, and the restaurant Holbein’s, juxtaposing contemporary design and cuisine with the building’s traditional architecture, merits more than a lite bite.

4. The Museum for Communication comes next. House, suitably, in a modern building of glass, it is a metaphor for clarity and transparency in communication. The central question, How Does Communication Work, is answered by the permanent collection, which includes an exhibition illustrating the journey from Mesopotamian writing tables to the invention of the postal service, and is further extended by exhibits focusing on “Telegraphy,” “Telephone,” “Radio,” “Television,” and “New Media.”

5. A short walk down Schaumainkai is the German Architecture Museum, or Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM). The museum holds one of the largest collections of architectural models in the world, as its permanent exhibition “From primordial hut to skyscraper” makes clear in 3-dimension. Only with such deep reserves would its current temporary exhibition, “Architectural Model, Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia,” through September and filling the entire museum, be possible.

Equally interesting is the museum building itself. Housed in a neo-classical residential villa from 1912, the interior was completely razed and reconceived by Cologne-based architect Mathias Ungers in the early 1980s. In effect, by constructing an internal four-pillar structure that rises from the pillars supporting the basement’s auditorium through the building’s attic, Ungers created a “building within a building,” a thoroughly modern conceit that nonetheless references one of the oldest motifs in architecture: the canopy. Needless to say, such a program attracts architects and architecture buffs the globe over.

6. Following is where cameras roll: the German Film Museum, Deutches Filmmuseum, which reopened last year following a major four-year renovation. Besides exhibitions chronicling the history of film and a comprehensive range of educational films, the museum also boasts one of the best cinemas in which to watch movies new or old. Located at the major and very pretty intersection of Schaumainkai and Schweizer Strasse, just over the picturesque Untermainbrücke, it’s also opposite the stylish Lohninger restaurant: updated traditional fare, such as a superb schnitzel with perhaps a less-than-expected pairing, in a grand pre-War space or, weather permitting, on a Paris-worthy sidewalk patio.

7. Just down the street, in three turn-of-the-century villas, the World Culture Museum, Weltkulturen Museum, houses a trove of 67,000 artifacts from Oceania, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas, complemented by an image archive with roughly 120,000 historical and contemporary ethnographical photographs and films, and a library with 50,000 books and journals. A major addition is currently on the drawing board.

8. Arguably Frankfurt’s most esoteric museum, Bibelhaus, or Bible House, is next, its purpose to elucidate and sensorily explore connections between the the Bible and contemporary life. Hence there’s a reproduction boat and nomad’s tent from 2000 years ago, as well as myrrh, frankincense and anointing oil visitors can actually smell. A bit of culture mixed with more than a dollop of kitsch, the collection is sincerely presented.

9. As befits an important design destination, the Museum of Applied Arts, or Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), makes a statement. Situated in a large park-like setting, it’s composed of the Villa Metzler—a villa completed in 1800 that forms the nucleus of the museum and which, following its renovation in 2008, has a series of main floor salons that can be rented for seminars and special events alongside period rooms on the second and third floors (sporting acres of hand-blocked scenic wallpaper made from 19th-century wood blocks; pictured)—and a main, modern building design by Richard Meier in 1985 in his signature white. The largest component of the permanent collection is unsurprisingly European applied art.

Occupying the museum’s entire upper level, it affords a chronological tour and insight into the development of applied art from the 12th century to the beginning of the 20th. Additionally, there’s a collection of 20th-century chairs, many prototypes and limited edition, that demonstrate the evolution of modernism and materials over the last century. Also, on permanent loan are 243 objects designed by Dieter Rams from the Braun Collection—coffee makers to alarm clocks and clothing irons, all fetish-worthy. Currently, the Meier portion of the museum is getting a face lift, but it’s minimally invasive: the museum shutters for the month of December, then reopens with a big bash at New Year’s. The museum also has a new director, Matthias Wagner, who assumed his post this spring, and who plans to feature design and fashion more prominently (a trend increasingly well established and demonstrated by exhibitions over the several years at the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

10. Last in the line is the Ikonen-Museum, or Icon Museum, one of only a handful of museums in the world focusing on religious icons found in Christian Orthodoxy. The collection spans five hundred years, form the 15th through 20th centuries. Located on Brückenstrasse, it’s also close to a number of locally owned fashion, furniture and design shops, as well as bistros such as the Chambre d’Amis.

Seven bridges span the river along the Museum Embankment, and on the other side of the Main are two additional museums. Founded in 1988, the Jewish Museum is housed in two large neo-classical villas, one having belonged to Mayer Carl von Rothschild of the famed Rothschild banking dynasty (which originated in Frankfurt). The first Jewish museum in Germany, it covers the history and culture of Jewish communities in Frankfurt from the 12th to 20th centuries. It opened on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. A major renovation and extension of the site directly behind the former Rothschild villa is not only planned but imminent.

The second museum, the Historiches Museum (History Museum), composed of buildings from five centuries, is the midst of major renovation and expansion. Its first phase is complete, and opened last month, but the new annex, the final phase of work, is scheduled for a 2014 completion.

Occupy Frankfurt? Certainly for several days on the Museum Embankment alone. And now, about those banks …

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise, Barbican Centre in London has staged an exhibition celebrating the franchise’s design milestones. Read more here.

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Meet Aphrodite as she is presented in Aphrodite and the Gods of Love. The first U.S. exhibition devoted exclusively to the Love Goddess and her amorous realm, it’s currently (through July 9) in Malibu, not on a scallop shell rising from the foam of the Pacific but at the Getty Villa, the 64-acre ocean-view complex and 48,000 square feet of galleries placed in a building inspired by the Villa dei Papyri, an ancient Roman villa from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum destroyed by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79, which interestingly belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—topically too as Caesar and his imperial descendants claimed direct lineage to Aphrodite through her son, the Trojan hero Aeneas. Nor is the modern mise-en-scène of Malibu any less appropriate. Do Julia Roberts and a bevy of Hollywood handmaidens and Adonises dear to the Goddess not live close by, right up the coast?

As with any major mythological figure and movie star, Aphrodite is complicated, far more than a story on E! can readily convey. It’s in the service of illumination and elucidation that the Getty exhibition shines. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with the Getty, the exhibition debuted last fall in Boston. At the Getty, the exhibition is spread over four galleries, each conveying a different aspect of Aphrodite, with each respective aspect illustrated by pieces from the two museums’ renowned collections of ancient Greek, Roman and Near Eastern artifacts as well as by important—at times unprecedented—loans from Italian cultural institutions and museums, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (pictured) from Rome’s Palazzo Massimo a particular showstopper for its sheer virtuosity and surprising balls.

Aphrodite begins with a literal unveiling. Standing room center at the beginning of the exhibition is the Goddess as most commonly imagined: nude, beautiful and subtly, seductively beckoning. This is Aphrodite of Knidos (“Colonna” type), the first image above, a 1st-2nd century-A.D. Roman copy of the 4th-century-B.C. Greek original by Praxiteles, one of that golden era’s most famous sculptors who with the original created the first monumental female nude in Greek art—and hence in Western art.

Also in the room, perfume vessels, storage jars and mirrors show how Aphrodite served as model and inspiration for women in boudoir and baths while demonstrating the various ways in which she as The Nude was depicted in antiquity, establishing a line that would be picked up again during the early and high Renaissance by such artists as Sandro Botticelli and The Birth of Venus, one of the most recognizable images in the world; Lucas Cranach the Elder (the representation of the myth of Venus is the most famous ongoing theme in Cranach’s repertoire, a stellar example being his Venus from 1532); the voluptuous Venuses of Titian (prime example, Venus Anadyomene, which in form and theme evokes Praxiteles’ sculpture) and Rubens (Venus at the Mirror); and made modern by the likes of Manet (the nude in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe might be an amalgam of Manet’s wife and favorite model, but she’s pure Aphrodite in conceit), who differed in approach from 19th-century Academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (whose less revolutionary Birth of Venus hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, same as Manet’s Déjeuner), and into the 20th century, with its Modern, Post-War and contemporary categories, where many of nudes still stretch languorously back to Aphrodite. (Shown in order of mention and to suitable musical accompaniment in the slideshow below.)

The three following rooms serve to flesh the Goddess out (as it were), to introduce her complexity, even contradiction. David Saunders, assistant curator of antiquities at the Getty and the exhibition’s curator, states but one entertaining example: “Although patroness of brides, she was hardly faithful to her husband, the god Hephaestus, as Hermaphrodite [son of Aphrodite and Hermes] and Priapus [son of Aphrodite and Dionysus, and represented in the exhibition by a Roman statue of the Imperial period from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] make clear.”

Her relationship with Eros (Cupid to the Romans) is similarly contradictory. Some sources refer to him as her son, others a companion who, although depicted as a child might be far more ancient than the Goddess herself. As Christine Kondoleon, senior curator of Greek and Roman art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who conceived and organized the exhibition wrote in its catalog: “One Hellenistic epigram humorously sums up the problem: ‘Eros is such an exhausting child that nobody wants to be his father.’ As to his other, it was not until the seventh century B.C. that the poet Sappho first called Eros the son of Aphrodite. Of the major early sources for the Olympian gods, only Hesiod writes about Eros, and then only as an attendant at Aphrodite’s birth, where he is joined by Himeros, the personification of desire and longing.” What is consistent about Eros is that he often serves to represent the capricious, potentially annihilating power of passion, as shown by the exhibition’s Statuette of Eros wearing the lionskin of Herakles (pictured), a 1st-century B.C. Greek terracotta figure that shows a mischievous boy with little-kid fat rolls, but wearing a lion skin, an attribute of Hercules and meant to convey his superhuman power.

Not even Aphrodite’s origins are definitive. It’s known she was not native to early Greek religion, but where did she come from? Cyprus, the Near East? Her genesis is as complex and multilayered as the Goddess she grew into, a deity whose purview seem to have extended to powers over the sea (she could calm the waves for smooth sailing, apparently); and, as Venus, seems to have had martial powers as well, as the exhibition’s imposing Capua Venus, which originally held a shield and whose left foot rests on a warrior’s helmet, illustrates.

Perhaps sometimes it’s not only best but sweeter not to know, or not to know too exactly. Isn’t mystery a key component of charm, after all?

Following its run at the Getty, Aphrodite and the Gods of Love will show itself at the San Antonio Museum of Art, from September 15 to February 17, 2013.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RmegyzF_Js&list=HL1338877940&feature=mh_lolz

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Hack bodypainted Gotye a second time, subsequent to the video. The image is incorporated in a work that will be auctioned this Friday, May 25, at the Art Melbourne fair, and exhibited in Hack’s stand beforehand. Recently writer Nic Forrest sat down with Hack for a Q&A that more than connects the dots.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY

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Which is why The Spring Show NYC’s angle seems not just fresh and fun, but an enjoyably educative experience as well. Opening tomorrow in Manhattan at the Park Avenue Armory and running through Sunday, the fair acts as platform for 50-something dealers specializing in 20th-century decorative arts, English, Continental and American 18th and 19th furniture, tribal and Native American art, Asian art, paintings, sculpture and prints, maps and posters, even “garden ornament.” Hoopla, wir leben! (as the German collectors and connoisseurs might say.)

But what really makes the fair’s press release pop is how it’s framed. As the release says, “Astute organizers of art and antique fairs pursue a dual mission. On the one hand, they must appeal to museum professions and seasoned buyers, and on the other, they want to welcome neophytes. No art and antiques fair anywhere in the world fulfills those two goals with more aplomb than the Spring Show NYC.”

How so?

Back to the release: “Spring Show NYC dealers were asked to select two highlights: one for a hypothetical museum curator, and another for the novice collector.” Might this be perceived as a gimmick? Sure. What escapes it from actually being a gimmick? The quality of dealers and the seriousness with which they addressed the request.

Following are examples of picks, which are shown in order in the slideshow below: Dalva Brothers goes full throttle with an entire stand comprised of antiques with a royal French provenance, such as this late 17th-century baroque sleigh made for the heir to the French throne. Keeping to the museum curator-novice collector rubric, the über-erudite Carlton Hobbs proposes a mid 18th-century Anglo-Indian writing box made for Warren Hastings, first governor general of India, and a brass mounted 1930’s library cabinet by Alfred Porteneuve (nephew of Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann). Craig Van Den Brulle gives props to a Riemann cast-stainless-steel chair (also pictured above, priced at $120,000), and a etched bronze coffee table with inlayed agate stones by Jean Claude Dresse. Snappy dresser Jason Jacques highlights a vase in “budding style” by famed Danish ceramic designer Axel Salto, and a collection of collotypes on handmade Japon paper from the portfolio Das Werk Gustav Klimts, printed between 1908 and 1914. Lawrence Steigrad Fine Art selects Chacun Pour Soi by Philippe Rousseau, originally shown in the Paris Salon of 1865, and MacVicar Anderson’s Thames panorama Somerset House, St. Paul’s and Waterloo Bridge, London. Thomas Colville Fine Art picks La Psyché, a circa 1871 work by Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, and Evening Among the Ruins by early American Modernist A.B. Davies. And Douglas Dawson underscores an early 19th-century gilt-bronze casting of the Thai monk Phra Malai, and an enormous terra cotta African pipe from the 1920s, once owned by the queen of the Cameroon and positively smokin’.

After that, need anything more be said?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2_AnMmN2MY&feature=youtu.be

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