Word: wynn
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Gradually, Wynn's collection is moving toward the mass it needs to define its own shape and establish its own gravitational field. It isn't there yet, and all talk of a "private museum" is beside the point, but you have the sense of a collector with real moxie. This isn't the Getty of Las Vegas, and it isn't meant to be, but Wynn has already nailed a few things that the Getty, with its comparably huge buying budget, ought not to have missed. He has also taken on some sound advisers, led by Edmund Pillsbury, for many...
...haste, repent at leisure, is one of the usual mottoes of collecting. But despite the breakneck speed at which Wynn has so far put his collection together, there are some works in it that any museum would envy. They include a late Cezanne, a portrait of his housekeeper painted around 1900, her brown dress as massively articulated as the side of a mountain; and one of the best Joan Miros in existence, Dialogue of the Insects, 1924-25, its precise forms buzzing and chirruping with strange lepidopteral life in a bare dream landscape...
...painting that turned Wynn away from the 19th century into the 20th--and, as he puts it, "got me off my training wheels"--was a portrait by Picasso of his long-suffering mistress Dora Maar, done in 1942. This riveting image is one of a woman in disequilibrium, not as fiercely torn apart as she is in the Weeping Women of those years, but out of kilter all the same, with staring eyes, figure-eight nostrils flared as though in suppressed fright, and strange asymmetries of form around the nose and brow. Compared with it, Impressionism began to look somewhat...
Absent a real museum, or the civic will to build and endow one, perhaps the only way to habituate fine art to Las Vegas--and vice versa--is to do what Wynn has done in the Bellagio: build a sort of treasure box in the core of the hotel, to which limited numbers of the public will be admitted at $10 a head, hotel guests and high rollers preferred, so that the art itself becomes a spectacle with overtones of privilege and thus matches up with the imagery of the rest of the city. It recalls Marianne Moore's famous...
...fully realize how much water matters in Vegas until you see the works of Kublai Wynn, the Bellagio especially. Never was a city built and embellished in such opposition to its own environment. The Mormons tried settling this parched valley, nothing but dust, rocks and Gila monsters, in the 1850s; they failed. In 1905 it was set up as a dry-gulch railroad town handling transshipments of fruits and vegetables from California to the Midwest. Labor strikes all but destroyed the railroad, and with it Las Vegas, in the 1920s. And then, in the '30s, three things made the place...