"If music be the food of love, play on," commands Orsino in opening Twelfth Night. It could be the motto for The Pursuit of Pleasure, the latest offering from the Guggenheim Hermitage, the Venetian-lodged outpost of New York's Guggenheim Foundation.
The show was organized with an eye to our town's chief product, indulgence, by Susan Davidson, curator at New York's Guggenheim; Arkady Ippolitov, curator of Italian prints at St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum; and Karl Schütz, director of the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. It's the fifth exhibition at the Guggenheim Hermitage and the second in which the three museums, which have collection-lending agreements, have collaborated.
For a society, and a city, in which music tends to fill any aural vacuum, it might come as a surprise that people in benighted ages without recorded sound often found music essential accompaniment to their pleasures. This is a given in the first of the show's four sections, "Music and Dance," which carries the viewer from Titian's pudgy infant clutching a tambourine, "The Small Tambourine Player" (c. 1550) to Picasso's latter-day cubist "Mandolin and Guitar" (1924), in which the two instruments are like ripe fruit in a still life.
But music penetrates the exhibition's other three sections, as well. It figures in "Flirtation and Romance" as the nourishment Shakespeare identified, whether from the recumbent shepherd piping a flute in Rubens' dreamy "Landscape with Rainbow" (c. 1632-5) or the woman bowing the cello in Johannes Baeck's "Parable of the Prodigal Son" (1637). She appears to be tuning, as is the lute player in Theodoor Rombouts' "Card Playing" (17th century), from the "Gaming and Sport" section. This troubadour seems to be narrating the peculiar scene to his left, in which two women, aided by male advisers, are fleecing a third male player. Even the title figure of Bernardo Strozzi's "Lute Player" (1640-4) twists a tune peg. "Celebration and Cafe Society" offers only a singer in the background of Max Beckmann's acid, harshly toned view of "Paris Society" (1931), although you can just about hear the La Marseillaise amid the chaotic swirls and strokes of blue and red in Picasso's "The Fourteenth of July" (1901).
But it is the quality of work that makes this show music to the eyes. It suffers slightly from the fact that several works have been shown in previous Guggenheim Hermitage exhibitions, a failing of the previous show, A Century of Painting: From Renoir to Rothko, which bequeaths some works to its successor. The compensations, however, are considerable. These include appealing works by masters such as Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec and Velázquez, whose "Luncheon" (c. 1617-8) is a keenly observed moment among three working men clustered around a table.
Even works by lesser-known artists are striking. Alfred Maurer's "In a Cafe" (1905) is a vertiginous and brilliantly arranged view of the title establishment, the foreground filled with the lively hats of five female patrons. Eduard von Grützner's "Visit to Monks" (c. 1900) is slightly sentimental, but it's a richly composed scene, the not-so-ascetic monastics sharing the produce of their vineyards with some medieval visitors.
The Pursuit of Pleasure could be the show that firmly establishes the Guggenheim's presence in Las Vegas. The theme is not going to pull anyone away from a craps table or lap dance, but it suits the city well. The nonchronological arrangement lets visitors draw visual and social comparisons across the centuries. The work is mostly first-rate, including sculptures by Degas and Rodin that were not installed for a preview last week, and the exhibition is imaginatively conceived and installed.
The exhibit will be up through January 16; call 414-2440 or visit www.guggenheimlasvegas.org.