Review: VASEMANIA

She Has The Last Laugh Now

BY ANN E. BERMAN

New York -- A fair amount of sniggering greeted the 1993 opening of the Bard Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture. Founded by Susan Weber Soros, the wife of wealthy financier George Soros, the new institution, also known as the Bard Graduate Center (BGC), was widely seen as a plaything for a rich woman, and its subject matter -- furniture, porcelain and the like -- was dismissed as genteelly inconsequential.

No one is sniggering now. In just over a decade, BGC has become a well-respected graduate school and exhibition venue that demands and gets -- serious attention for a perennially under-appreciated segment of the art world. In two Beaux Arts townhouses on New York's Upper West Side, international scholars and local culture-hounds bond over the decorative arts of the past two millennia. Retirees and young mothers line up for lectures on Etruscan jewelry and Palladio's villas. Exhibitions of Neoclassical vases and Aesthetic Movement furniture attract thousands of viewers. And each year, graduates stream into the workplace, where as curators, auction-house experts, dealers and professors they are nudging the decorative arts center stage.

Their champion started life in Queens, where her father ran a shoe- accessories business. Her mother, an amateur painter, imprinted her daughter early with a love of art, and Mrs. Soros went on to study American painting, receiving a degree in art history from Barnard in 1977. In 1981, still searching for her professional niche, she enrolled in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum School of Design's graduate program in the decorative arts on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "The first week I was there," she remembers, "I knew I had found what I wanted to do. The decorative arts are as important as painting and sculpture, and they shouldn't have to be their neglected stepchildren. They deserve to be interpreted, conserved and appreciated."

But the job would have to wait: In 1983 she married George Soros, the Hungarian-born money manager and billionaire, 25 years her senior. Mrs. Soros detoured away from the art world to run The Open Society Fund, her husband's cultural foundation. Then, in 1990, she heard the Cooper-Hewitt program was looking for a new director and decided to apply.

She didn't get it, and the art world had a field day. The wife of one of the country's richest men had been denied a prize that money couldn't buy. When shortly thereafter Mrs. Soros founded BGC, observers cackled that, thwarted, she had flounced out and, with $25 million of her husband's money ($20 million for an endowment, $5 million for the first year's operating budget), founded a rival school just for spite.

Mrs. Soros doesn't waste much time on her version of events:
"Cooper-Hewitt interviewed me for a year and a half," she says, her gaze level. "During that time I compiled a 15-page plan documenting my vision for a graduate program in the decorative arts. When they finally decided that my plan was too grandiose, I had already spent so much effort on it that I teamed up with Bard College (in Annandale-on- Hudson, N.Y.) and used it to found a new center for the decorative arts." Asked to compare the two rival institutions, which now sit on opposite sides of Central Park, she says only that Cooper-Hewitt does not offer a Ph.D. and notes correctly "that we have a much broader curriculum."

In fact, BGC has whizzed past Cooper-Hewitt and a handful of other contenders to become the country's leading graduate school of the decorative arts. "BGC courses cover a more encyclopedic range of material than any other school, and they are taught by the most distinguished faculty in the field," says William Rieder, curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, who calls Mrs. Soros's ability to set all of this in motion "a remarkable feat." Mr. Rieder is also a fan of BGC's extensive public programming. In particular, its three annual shows get kudos from Mr. Rieder for "their extraordinary success in promoting the decorative arts in this country." Organized by BGC curators, students and outside experts, and installed at 18 West 86th Street, they are open to the public at just $3 a pop.

Not everybody could make exhibitions like "Hungarian Ceramics From the Zsolnay Manufactory," the work of British designer Thomas Jeckyll, or "Five Centuries of Collecting by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire" worth the detour off the Museum Mile, but the BGC team can, and consistently does. Elegant, focused installations and accessible wall copy make it easy to understand and enjoy slivers of the past you never thought about, or even knew existed. It's the antithesis of the blockbuster style of exhibition making, possible only in an institution that doesn't need to recycle the obvious to pay the bills, and it makes a wonderful change. "We show culturally significant work that isn't well known," says Mrs. Soros. "God knows the world doesn't need another Faberge exhibition."

Instead, BGC is offering "The Castellani and Italian Archaeological Jewelry" (on view through Feb. 6, 2005) -- 250 pieces made by three generations of an Italian family of jewelers between 1814 and 1927. The Castellani revived ancient techniques that produced intricate, patterned surfaces and, using Etruscan, Roman and Greek pieces as models, created jewelry in deep, gleaming gold, set with enamel, glass and precious stones. Tastemakers and purveyors to 19th-century royalty, they once ruled the jewelry world yet are now almost entirely> forgotten.

It's hard to understand why. Their work is timeless, in the style of Bulgari or Ilias Lalaounis (now we know where they got a lot of their ideas), able to dazzle with shape, pattern and craftsmanship -- instead of flashy rocks. Check out a branch thickly clustered with golden oak leaves and acorns that curves into a diadem, and the "swan earrings" -- golden discs enriched with enough concentric patterns for a rose window, supporting hanging tassels, blue enamel finials, and white enamel swans. The show provides just enough context -- photos, paintings, ancient objects -- to tell the story, and doesn't show one more piece than is necessary. You'll be sorry to see it end.

Eleven years after she brought it into being, Mrs. Soros, age 49 and now separated from her husband, is still firmly in control of BGC. She is its director, chief fund-raiser (support from corporations, foundations and collectors now keeps the doors open), a member of its faculty and a frequent curator (she co-curated "Castellani"). Such ubiquity brings to mind another talented multitasker and raises an interesting question: If Susan Soros is the Martha Stewart of the Bard Graduate Center, can it someday exist without her? Mrs. Soros naturally has mixed feelings about the matter: "I don't want this place to be the "Cult of Susan," she says with a sigh. "I want it to survive me." Just not anytime soon. "I'm not going anywhere," she adds. "They will have to carry me out of here."

For further information, please call 212-501-3074 or e-mail kruse@bgc.bard.edu.

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