Carlo Bilotti; art collector with a new museum in Rome
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Elisabeth Rosenthal
Rome's Latest Gem Was One Collector's Big Dream
The Museo Carlo Bilotti is Rome's newest cultural gem, with
extraordinary art housed in a fastidiously restored
16th-century marble palazzo smack in the middle of Villa
Borghese.
But wait. Carlo Bilotti? A Medici? A Borghese? Guess again:
Mr. Bilotti, who died last week at 72, was a loquacious
retired Italian-American perfume executive from Palm Beach,
Fla. Little known outside art-world circles, he had spent a
lifetime loving and collecting modern and contemporary art,
becoming a friend of the likes of Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí
and Giorgio de Chirico in the process.
Now his own name is becoming well known. Armed with his
stunning collection, a big dream and (not unimportant) an
ego to match, three years ago Mr. Bilotti approached Walter
Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, with the idea of creating an
eponymous museum to house some of his art holdings. Mr.
Veltroni immediately accepted the proposal, offering to
renovate any of the decaying buildings in Rome's most famous
park for the project.
So began a unique public-private partnership that has
produced a museum at lightning speed and (Rome hopes) a
model that other donors will follow.
Within six months, Mr. Bilotti had selected a dilapidated
16th-century palace that was originally built as a home for
a noble family, but after being hit by cannon fire in the
1840s had been used as a storehouse for oranges, a religious
institute and as city offices.
This summer, that building reopened as the Museo Carlo
Bilotti, featuring a permanent collection of 22 canvases by
de Chirico. The first temporary exhibition consisted of
three "meditation chapels" Mr. Bilotti had commissioned from
the contemporary artists Damien Hirst, David Salle and Jenny
Saville. The current offering is a show of late de Kooning
works that came from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg,
Russia.
"I know the Museum of Modern Art would have taken these 22
wonderful de Chiricos and given me a room - or I suppose I
could have given my collection to a museum here in Florida,"
Mr. Bilotti said in a phone interview a few weeks before his
death. (He was a board member at several Florida museums.)
"But, let's face it, Boca Raton isn't Rome. And in a way, I
felt that Rome was the perfect home for these paintings." De
Chirico, a Surrealist painter, spent most of his life in the
city and died there in 1978.
The Italian curator Gianni Mercurio, who organizes the
museum's shows, said Americans might not appreciate how
difficult it was to pull all this off. "Oh, I know there are
people who will say, 'With 20 de Chiricos he got his name on
a museum,' " Mr. Mercurio said. "But this is very, very
unusual, especially for Italy, where there are so many
bureaucratic problems that even Italian collectors end up
selling work in the U.S. or giving to overseas museums."
He credited Mr. Bilotti's "strong personality" and Mr.
Veltroni's love of contemporary art with making the museum
happen.
Mr. Veltroni is a popular mayor who has in recent years
resuscitated a city known for traditional thinking and
architectural decay. In 2005 he raised eyebrows by proposing
to rename Rome's main train station after Pope John Paul II
shortly after the pontiff's death. (The Vatican demurred.)
This year he helped pave the way for the first Roma Film
Festival.
Mr. Bilotti said, "I had this wild idea, and Veltroni said,
'O.K., why not?' "
Mr. Veltroni ordered 70 city employees out of the building,
previously called the Aranciera (Orange Storehouse) of Villa
Borghese, and hired the architect Francesco Stefanori to
oversee a renovation. The architect restored some of the
building's original architectural details, including an old
tile fountain at its core. The city allowed Mr. Bilotti to
pick ancient Roman sculptures from Rome's other museums to
adorn some of the display spaces.
"This was the first time the City of Rome was involved with
a private donor, but this was a very important for us," said
Alberta Campitelli, an art historian who works for the city
and is the museum's director. "We don't have a lot of money
to buy paintings and masterpieces. Rome is important for
ancient art, of course, but we need to be more modern."
Mr. Bilotti was born into a wealthy family in the southern
province of Calabria, but he said he always considered Rome
to be his spiritual home in Italy. Trained as a lawyer, he
moved to New York "for fun" in the 1960s and stayed in the
United States for the rest of his life, marrying an American
whose family had created the Old Spice fragrance.
On a first pass, it is tempting to conclude that a bit too
much ego is on display at the Museo Carlo Bilotti. In
addition to the 22 impressive de Chirico paintings that
occupy much of the first floor, an entire room is devoted to
the Bilotti family.
Yet some of it is art: a 3-D portrait by the artist Larry
Rivers in which Mr. Bilotti stands before a Roy
Lichtenstein, and a melancholy double portrait by Warhol of
Mr. Bilotti's wife, Tina, and his daughter, Lisa, who died
of cancer in 1989 at 20. (The Bilottis subsequently adopted
two children.)
Beyond that, though, there is a wall of photographs, deli
style, showing the Bilottis at play with artists, from Dalí
to Warhol to Lichtenstein. A video shows Mr. Bilotti
interviewing and schmoozing with the artists whose work he
collected.
In the end, it is hard not to be charmed by Mr. Bilotti, who
comes across as an ebullient personality who took an abiding
joy in art - a kind of Steve Irwin for the contemporary art
world. He could have had a television show.
In one priceless video segment, you see him visiting the
studio of Damien Hirst, the artist known for, among other
things, suspending dead sharks in formaldehyde, who was then
struggling to create panels for one of the three meditation
chapels Mr. Bilotti commissioned. Mr. Hirst offers his
benefactor a choice of two sets, each consisting of four
huge deeply hued canvases framed with backwards excerpts
from the Gospels and decorated with dead butterflies,
crucifixes, pills and razor blades.
"You put in my gold pen; I think it's fantastic!" Mr.
Bilotti exclaims with delight upon seeing the gold Cartier
affixed to one of the canvases.
"Anything you want," says Mr. Hirst, who offers to put pens
on the other panels as well.
Throughout his life, Mr. Bilotti was less a collector than a
Medici-like patron. He reveled in commissioning work and
nurturing the artists through the creative process.
For the third meditation chapel, Mr. Bilotti challenged his
friend Mr. Salle to use the Sistine Chapel as a backdrop. "I
think it is one of the world's most misunderstood works.
People say it's an homage to Christianity, but if you look,
you see much more: an orgy, or whatever," said Mr. Bilotti,
who was educated at Jesuit schools.
So over a calm faux-fresco religious background on
wall-length canvases, Mr. Salle superimposed images of
current events: newspaper clippings about the Iraq war and
images of Serbian death squads, nuclear blasts and the
devastation left by Hurricane Katrina.
Having founded his dream museum, the ever-restless Mr.
Bilotti had moved on to another project in the months before
his death: he had entreated Mayor Veltroni to find him a
"desecrated temple" so he could have it restored by a
contemporary artist.