Peter Marino’s Pioneering Art Foundation in Southampton

The architect and designer Peter Marino is famous. He’s famous for his black leather biker attire, complete with a motorcycle cap. He’s famous for designing sumptuous houses and apartments for his extremely wealthy clients. And he’s famous for his elegant, beautifully conceived, art-filled buildings and interiors for luxury companies like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Bulgari, and recently, his wildly glamorous renovation of Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue flagship for the company’s new owner, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault.

Marino is also famous for his dedication to the arts. He is the Chairman of the Venetian Heritage foundation; the French Ministry of Culture named him a Chevalier and later an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has curated exhibitions of his extensive collections, from his Renaissance and Baroque bronzes to his Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. But one of the architect’s most impressive, although not yet as well known, endeavors in the arts is his creation of the Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, New York.

After the former public library was abandoned by the town, and became increasingly derelict, Marino bought the 1895 Queen Anne Revival building in 2018, and began restoring the brick exterior and designing new life into the interior. He created impressive galleries—fully restoring one, including its tiled fireplace, and lining another in an exquisite green Venetian plaster, to house his far-reaching collections, which range from the aforementioned bronzes to edgy contemporary art.

 

 

On my first visit to the foundation, which opened in 2021, the Green Gallery had a painting by the Baroque artist Luca Giordano hanging above a bronze bench by Claude Lalanne, and near a painting by Cy Twombly. On the second floor—at the top of a staircase clad in the British artist Richard Woods’ riff on the building’s exterior’s half-timbering—a large white space houses mid-20th century and contemporary art, and smaller spaces are used for photography exhibitions. “I really, really believe in adaptive re-use,” Marino says, although his particular brand of adaptive re-use is especially luxurious.

Marino is well aware that his professional success has allowed him both to collect art and to create a place where the public can visit his collections. He also delights in discussing various works: The foundation hosts talks, like Brunch with Bob, which are moderated by the writer Bob Colacello and Isabelle Marino, Peter’s daughter (the two are co-associate directors), speaking with artists whose works are on display at the foundation; Marino often participates as well. There is also the Peter Marino Book Club, which features discussions about art-related books. And, of course, the summer lineup of exhibitions will offer plenty to talk about.

 

 

The best-known artist in the roster is the 85-year-old German native Georg Baselitz, whose work Marino has collected since the 1980s, and whose exhibition includes 45 paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Marino explains that during the pandemic, Baselitz asked him to design a sword for his induction into the Académie des Beaux-Arts. “I made a sword with four eyes that swivel around your hand,” Marino recalls. And he decided to mount the exhibition at the same time as Baselitz’s show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; Naked Masters pairs the artist’s contemporary nudes with the museum’s Old Masters counterparts. “It was one of the most beautiful, thoughtful shows I’ve seen in years,” Marino says. “I have 33 of his drawings, and around 20 paintings,” many of which are in the exhibition.

The works, which range from colorful to stark black and white, are on display in the Green Gallery, the high-ceilinged Cathedral Gallery, and the Black Gallery, and some are leaning against the walls, as they were in the artist’s studio when Marino first visited—an unorthodox but effective strategy, given the large scale of the paintings. Baselitz was a boy during the Nazi regime, but Marino says his art “is about humanity, not politics.”

The art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who showed a large Baselitz exhibition at one of his Paris galleries earlier this year, says that Marino “has one of the greatest private collections of Baselitz,” whom he calls “one of the most important painters of our time,” and calls the architect “a dream collector,” for his interest in the artists as well as their work.

 

 

Another artist whose work was on display this summer is Erwin Wurm. In his exhibition, colorful, abstract paintings are paired with his ironic sculptures, like that of a giant gherkin (from his Icons collection) that is, in his words, “penetrating” a side table by Charles Eames; two sculptures of an Adolf Loos house from his “Fat and Melting Houses” series, which sit on two of Marino’s bronze boxes; or a sculpture of a large, boot-like form stepping on an overturned chair, which Wurm says is “about disruption.” And Marino’s collection includes a portrait of Marino as a skeleton with a leather jacket and motorcycle cap. The piece also features cleaning supplies, because Marino likes to clean and tidy up, the artist says. The two men met at Ropac’s gallery in Paris, and together made proposals for Louis Vuitton. “He’s very supportive,” Wurm says of Marino. For the recently completed Vuitton store in Vienna, for which Marino designed an ultra-modern interior in an 1859 building, seven works by Wurm were commissioned for one wall, near Marino’s sculptural, winding staircase. David Maupin, a co-founder of the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, which represents Wurm in the U.S. and Asia, says Wurm “is one of the few artists who works conceptually. [Wurm and Marino] both have a lot of humor, and they both fearlessly explore materials.”

 

 

On July 15, an exhibition by the Israeli artist Michal Rovner opened at the foundation. Rovner’s multimedia and video work caught Marino’s eye at the 2003 Biennale, where the artist was representing Israel, with a series of petri dishes that displayed videos that would “give the viewer the experience of culture,” she says. Marino was fascinated by this work, as well as by her films of jackals, using night vision goggles. “I think she’s one of 12 major artists today,” he says. And the foundation’s website states that her work “shifts between the poetic and the political to explore questions of “nature, identity, dislocation, and the fragility of human existence.”

Marino started collecting Rovner’s work that year, and commissioned her to create a video installation on the façade of a building he designed for Chanel in Hong Kong that opened in 2008. For the new Chanel boutique in Beverly Hills, Rovner created white paper flowers “blowing in the wind” for the store’s white vestibule. Her works in the exhibition at the foundation include one about the human condition of displacement; a table with the petri dish videos; “Fields of Fire,” about oil fields in Kazakhstan; a triptych of cypress trees, and a projection of the trees on black stone, which she describes as “like an archeological find.”

Marino notes that Rovner “paints with video,” while Rovner calls him “an extraordinary person,” adding that she loves the way he designed the gardens at his house in Southampton. “He feels everything, he sees everything, and has such generosity.” (Marino also has a house in Aspen that he designed, and which contains art from his collection.)

 

 

The second-floor photography gallery will present works by the famed French photographer Eugène Atget, and is also showing “Three Lindens,” a group of photographs by Priscilla Rattazzi of three linden trees that have stood for over 200 years on the site of her former home (which was renovated by Marino) in East Hampton. Rattazzi, who now lives in Palm Beach, photographed them in all kinds of weather, including several hurricanes, and she marveled at the trees’ strength. As she left the house for the last time, she wrote in her book of the same name (which is published by The Peter Marino Collection), “As I pulled out of the driveway, I hoped I would be as resilient as they are.” Rattazzi has become an amateur scholar of lindens, learning about the trees’ formidable resilience, and she recently came across a website that sells health and beauty products made from linden flowers, which have healing properties. This Saturday, July 29, the foundation will host an author talk and book signing of Three Lindens with the photographer.

For Rattazzi, who was once known for her fashion and celebrity photographs, one of her recent projects has a political bent—her photographs of Hoodooland, a series of surreal rock formations in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah; she began this work to protest then-president Donald Trump’s announcement that he was authorizing a major reduction of the size of the park, which took effect in 2018, leaving the unprotected areas vulnerable to dangers like oil drilling.

This enticing array of exhibitions is the rule, not the exception, at the foundation. Marino has said how excited he is to be able to share his art collections with the public, which makes sense, since he loves art, artists, and talking about art. His flair for presenting his varied collections in an eclectic, personal, and non-academic manner will be appreciated by those who visit, and those who keep coming back for more.

 

This story and more appears in PALMER On the Road, available now.