Piano can be yours for $2.5 million
Canadian visual artist creates a $2.5-million ‘art case’ piano, Peter Hum writes.
About five years ago, the president of the esteemed piano company Steinway & Sons approached a Canadian visual artist with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
While Paul Wyse is best known as a portrait artist, Steinway asked him to create what’s known as an “art case” piano for the company, meaning a unique instrument that’s as much a vision of beauty as it is a music-maker. Designers such as fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld and BMW’s Albrecht Goertz, among others, had previously created limited-edition art case pianos for Steinway. But Wyse was requested to make something even more rare — a one-off masterpiece incorporating all the painted components and customized pieces he could imagine.
Given carte blanche by Steinway, Wyse knew just what he wanted to make. “It was an immediate nobrainer,” he says.
Unveiled in New York last month, Wyse’s piano was titled Steinway’s Pictures at an Exhibition Model D concert grand, which a deeppocketed collector or concert hall can now buy for US$2.5 million.
At its core, the instrument is a white, nearly nine-foot-long piano, with both sides of its massive lid hand-painted and a series of stunningly detailed paintings along the sweeping perimeter of its case. The piano’s legs, bench and music desk are ornate pieces unto themselves. Every aspect of the piano’s fantastic appearance relates concretely to the 1874 suite of piano works called Pictures at an Exhibition by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
“I’ve known that piece my whole life,” Wyse says. “I’ve heard it since I was a kid.”
Indeed, at the New York event, Wyse himself played Pictures at an Exhibition on his piano of the same name — which is not surprising given that the 47-year-old has been a concert pianist and an associate professor of music as well as a celebrated visual artist. As a pianist, he is one of more than 1,600 designated Steinway Artists, along with the likes of Vladimir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarrett, Billy Joel and Diana Krall, and Steinway likes to refer to Wyse as “the first master artist in history to design, paint, and play a Steinway art case piano.”
Wyse’s creation is “just layers upon layers of cool stuff,” says Anthony Gilroy, Steinway’s senior director of marketing. “It’s a great combination of the arts — visual arts and musical arts — and that’s what Pictures at an Exhibition was all about.”
Wyse, who was born in Portland, Maine, but who has lived in Canada since he finished his postgraduate piano studies in Montreal, only took up painting and drawing as a hobby when he was in his 20s. “I wasn’t particularly good at it,” says Wyse, who now resides in Osgoode, Ont., a rural community just south of the nation’s capital.
But over the years, he took lessons and classes, and he gravitated toward the old European paintings and portraits he admired at museums he visited while he was a pianist on tour. He developed his talents sufficiently to be called upon to paint the official portraits of former prime minister Paul Martin and former House of Commons speaker Peter Milliken, among many others. Now, his main source of income is from painting, not playing piano.
Wyse also produced two portraits of his musical mentor Leon Fleisher, a famed classical pianist and conductor, that are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Those works led Steinway to commission Wyse to paint Billy Joel’s portrait, and that painting ’s success led to the art case piano commission.
Wyse says his Steinway represents visual art “turned into music and then turned back into art again.”
Mussorgsky’s suite was inspired by the composer’s tour of an exhibition in St. Petersburg, Russia, of works by his late friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. In turn, Wyse’s piano refers imaginatively to the works by Hartmann and Mussorgsky, and to the legacy of Mussorgsky’s art into the present day.
The frame of the piano refers to the Promenade movements of the suite, showing a wealth of paintings, each connected somehow to Pictures at an Exhibition, viewed by contemporary gallery-goers. Among the paintings are portraits of French composer Maurice Ravel, who orchestrated Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922, and of Mussorgsky himself, who occupies a place of honour at the mid-point of the piano’s tailpiece.
To allow Wyse to accomplish much of the painting, the piano frame was elevated in Wyse’s studio so that it was closer to eye level. Painting the frame took the longest chunk of time during the three years or so of painting that followed two years of planning, Wyse says, due to the successive layers of paint and even gold leaf required to achieve the vibrancy of its colours.
The underside of the piano’s lid grandly shows the Great Gate of Kiev, which was designed by Hartmann but never built, and which was also the final movement of Mussorgsky’s suite. Wyse calls the lid “the climax of the piano,” paralleling the climax of Mussorgsky’s suite. Much of the lid was painted while it was unattached to the piano, but Wyse also did some of the work while lying inside the empty piano case itself when the lid was attached.
“It is very awkward. It is very Sistine Chapel,” Wyse says.
The piano’s three legs are dreamy creations that relied on the craftsmanship of furniture maker Karen McBride, of Woodkilton Studio near Ottawa, to make Wyse’s design practicable. Wyse wanted the piano’s legs to depict the hut of Baba Yaga, a witchlike character in Slavic folklore who lives in a hut on top of hens’ legs. Wyse wanted to pay homage to Hartmann’s drawing of a clock that was based on the witch’s hut, and to the penultimate movement of Mussorgsky’s suite.
McBride, who also attended the New York debut of the piano, said it took more than a year of fulltime work to refine and build the legs, complete with hen’s feet cast in bronze attached to fake birch stumps, that met Wyse’s artistic vision and could support nearly 1,000 pounds of piano.
Wyse says he was “certainly paid handsomely” to create the piano but won’t divulge more. “I almost feel like it’s not of monetary value,” he says. “I had the chance to do it, and that they let me do it is the chance of a lifetime.”
Steinway’s Gilroy says that before long, the piano will be “travelling the world until such time as it’s bought,” and will likely head to China in June.
Wyse will be glad to have the piano out in the world and viewed by music enthusiasts. But given the piano’s theme, he also hopes there might be a Russian chapter or footnote in its future story.
“Part of me thinks, wouldn’t it be nice to have it connected to its history somehow,” he says. “I hope it will be played by a Russian pianist. I hope it will be played.”