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Is it the back of a woman’s dress? I wonder, standing before a cherry-red painting by Domenico Gnoli at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
It’s not until I step several feet away from the canvas, an over-five-foot square, that I realize the work depicts a tie knot, ultra-cropped and punched in until it’s almost abstracted. Up close, I’m captivated by the rhythmic, perfectly rendered lines of the ribbed fabric. Under the late Italian artist’s hand, this mundane object evokes a sculpture, akin to paintings by Park Seo-Bo, in which repeated pencil lines are carved into a still-wet surface, producing three-dimensional texture.
That meticulous trompe-l’oeil effect is just one of countless tricks that Gnoli had up his sleeve, as evidenced in the survey at Lévy Gorvy Dayan—the largest American exhibition of Gnoli’s œuvre since 1969. Over the short course of his life (Gnoli was just 36 when he died from cancer in 1970), the Roman-born artist achieved great success as an illustrator of children’s books and magazines including Sports Illustrated and Life; a costume and set designer; and ultimately as a painter of a singular, totally timeless style, variously conjuring Surrealism, Pop art, and Arte Povera. With “The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli,” Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents 17 exemplary paintings, as well as rarely seen drawings, etchings, notebooks, letters, and ephemera, from the height of Gnoli’s career, between 1965 and 1969. Given there are only 160 to 170 mature paintings of Gnoli’s in existence, most of which are held in private collectsions, it was no easy feat to put these works together.
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“Gnoli’s collectsors are usually very reluctant to let his works go, even as loans,” Amalia Dayan, who jointly runs the gallery with Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, tells Vogue. Many of his pieces either remain in their original owners’ hands or have been passed down through their families. “There is the cult of Gnoli,” Dayan goes on. “Once you delve in, and you understand his complex universe, it becomes an obsession.” Her own obsession formed over a decade ago, when she presented Gnoli shows in 2012 and 2018 with her former gallery, Luxembourg & Dayan (now Luxembourg + Co.).
Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s new exhibition required close collaboration with Gnoli’s estate, which includes the Domenico Gnoli Archives, Majorca—led by the artist’s widow, Yannick Vu, and her current husband, Ben Jakober, who was a fellow artist and Gnoli’s close friend—and the Archivio Domenico Gnoli, Rome, led by the artist’s sister, Mimì Gnoli, and Livia Polidoro-Gnoli Archive.
Reflecting on the significance of the show, Vu, a French-Vietnamese artist and the daughter of eminent Vietnamese painter Vu Cao Dam, tells Vogue how “vital” New York had been for Gnoli. “It’s where he started his real career during the late 1950s and ended it,” she says, referring to his 1969 solo presentation at Sidney Janis Gallery as a “consecration” for him. Despite coming from a family with a rich cultural history (his mother was a ceramicist; his father an esteemed museum curator and art historian; his grandfather, who shared his name, was a famous poet and friend of the French writer and politician François-René de Chateaubriand), Gnoli believed that New York and France were “the only places where one could develop as an artist,” says Vu.
Indeed, upon moving to New York, Gnoli met someone who would change his life: Diana Vreeland. The former Met Costume Institute consultant and Vogue editor-in-chief became a great friend and collectsor of his work. “She was the most generous, extraordinary person,” says Vu. In the summer of 1969, Vreeland visited Vu’s and Gnoli’s house in Majorca, where she saw the paintings that he was making for the Janis show (several are on view in the Lévy Gorvy Dayan exhibition). She would later publish photographs from the Janis opening in the “People Are Talking About…” section of Vogue’s January 15, 1970 issue.
While in New York, Gnoli married model Luisa Gilardenghi, who introduced him to Richard Avedon, Bob Silvers, and more of the city’s creatives and intellectuals. After their bitter divorce, however, Gnoli moved to Paris in 1962 on the recommendation of his friend Jakober.
Gnoli and Vu met in France and were wed in 1965, going on to spend much of their time in Majorca, where a few of their friends had homes. The Spanish island is where Gnoli produced many of his most magnificent paintings. “Domenico found the freedom to really express himself there,” says Vu. (Today, Jakober and Vu split their time between Marrakech and Majorca, where they run a museum and archive of their collectsion, Museum Sa Bassa Blanca, which includes a gallery dedicated to Gnoli.) It’s also where he developed his signature technique of mixing sand from local beaches with vinyl glue and pigments to give his canvases a rustic, fresco-like texture. The grainy technique is particularly visible in Il grand letto azzurro (1965), featured in the Lévy Gorvy Dayan show, where close inspection of the teal bedspread reveals a tan floral pattern made up of non-pigmented sand.
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“He was always looking for his own path,” says Dayan. “What makes Gnoli’s work so singular is this isolation of the detail. That then touches on abstraction and minimalism because it’s so reduced and precise.”
Another signature: depicting everyday items, especially clothing details (think zippers and buttons, collars, or the back of a shoe), with gravitas. “My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence,” the artist once said. And indeed, viewing a Gnoli painting is a meditative experience, where new details emerge both the longer you stare and the further you step away from the canvas.
Throughout the Lévy Gorvy Dayan exhibition are Gnoli’s quotidian observations, beginning with Striped Trousers (1969) and Curly Red Hair (1969). While the former is one of many tightly cropped sartorial images that brings Issy Wood’s greyscale paintings to mind, the latter is a dead ringer for Anna Weyant’s portraits of young women with undulating locks.
“I’m drawn to his restraint—everything feels clear and deliberate—and his simplified, sculpted forms with subtle distortions,” Weyant tells Vogue of Gnoli, whom she counts among her favorite painters. “He had a brilliant way of turning mundane and familiar objects and scenes into magnetic and psychologically charged images.” She also enjoys the humor in his work, which especially comes to the fore in an upstairs room devoted to Gnoli’s drawings. (In one sketch of a bosom, emotive visages cover each breast.)
On the gallery’s first floor is a room with examples of Gnoli’s more conceptual work: a trompe-l’oeil view of the back of a painting, a yellow armchair, a brick-wall corner, and one of Dayan’s favorite, an apple. “It touches on the history of still life, Surrealism, femininity, and womanhood without having a figure of a woman. It’s got sexuality, it’s morbid—it has it all,” says the gallerist.
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Also adding to his works’ resonance was Gnoli’s manipulation of “presence and absence.” One upstairs room at the gallery features six of Gnoli’s bed paintings, most of which contain no figures. “It’s very special because the whole cycle of life happens in the bed: you are born in bed, you die in the bed, and you make love in the bed,” says Dayan. She calls the experience of the room “spiritual,” an adjective Vu also uses to describe her late husband’s aura. According to Dayan, Gnoli’s beds were a key inspiration for Maurizio Cattelan’s All (2007), composed of nine marble sculptures that resemble dead bodies covered by sheets.
The final space in the show considers Gnoli’s preoccupation with clothing, in part a product of his costume-design background and exposure to his first wife’s fashionable friends. From a crisp white collar to the maroon Purple Bust (1969), his color palette enhances the monastic quality of these paintings, which nearly double as fabric studies. “He was a very elegant person with a magnetic personality, and he liked to dress well,” Vu says. Rather than paint from life, Gnoli painted from his “fabulous visual memory”: “He had incredible eyes and could see things that other people didn’t.”
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In 2021-22, Milan’s Fondazione Prada mounted a seminal retrospective of more than 100 paintings and an equal number of drawings by Gnoli (Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli are among the artist’s top collectsors). Dayan hopes her show will continue expanding Gnoli’s legacy, which she believes deserves a proper museum show in America. Thanks to Dayan’s spellbinding show, Gnoli’s cult is certainly about to gain a bevy of New Yorkers.
“The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli” is on view through May 23.