Salon for the spirit
Friends and close clients of Art Cabinet owner Doerte Neudert invited to share in the European tradition of art, ideas & fun
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
Doerte Neudert, as you may suspect, is from Europe - not just the soils of Europe, but also the ideals and traditions that survived a half-century of war - that pushed up through the rubble like a field fo flowers cultivated by thinkers and

MICHAEL GALVIN/The Independent Doerte Neudert in her home gallery. Left: works by painter Charlotte Culot and Nantucket sculptor Billy Sherry. At right, "Harp" by Fuller Potter.

artists.

Just off the slate patio and garden

astride her Dukes Road home, Neudert has recently installed a renovated shed with skylights that nourish with natural light a garden of paintings and sculpture. The pieces have a contemporary and European slant. This is to be the home base for Neudert's upcoming salon - which she is anticipating as if it were a birthday party for every one of her invited guests.

"I offer champagne, everything. It is for me an inner must, an inner duty to share what I get from America, from Nantucket, from my clients," Neudert said. "I want at least to show my gratutide by giving them a space to feel comfortable ... to offer them what I think is the best - what is pure, what is truth, what is nutrition for their soul. Like a little, tiny view of how life could be."

MICHAEL GALVIN//The Independent Neudert with her John von Wicht, whose work may soon be acquired by major Manhattan museums, according to the Art Cabinet owner.

Salons began in 17th century Europe (specifically France and Italy) to be an intimate venue for sharing ideas and performances. Using the home as a safe harbor for experimentation and free speech, salons began as a kind of cottage industry for art and intellectualism and became a staple of high society by the 18th century. Today, they survive on the romantic understanding that art often makes its most intimate acquaintances outside of the museum or concert hall.

Neudert intends the salon to be a gift - a gift of her culture, of everything she holds dear. Her daughter, Christina, has even flown in from Munich (where she is studying for her Ph.D. in psychology) to present a lecture on the spiritual and psychological need for art entitled "Art and Humanity."

The daughter of a German soldier who fought for the Nazis, Neudert ran from the evils of 20th century German nationalism and into the world of freedom and ideas. She married an art professor in Munich, bore him three children and then, 25 years later, realized she did not know who she was. After a divorce, Neudert traveled the world for five years, at the end of which time she concluded that she was stronger than she had ever credited herself for being and also that she could be a lightening rod for beauty.

"That painting is like adrenaline for me; it's like two bottles of champagne. It gets me high," Neudert said of a massive, vertical piece called "Harp," by Jackson Pollock contemporary Fuller Potter.

Potter shares the space with John von Wicht. MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are debating whether to purchase one of his pieces, according to Neduert.

"That makes me feel good, because I'm on the museum-level, my gallery, in a way," she said.

Also newly installed in the space are works by the likes of John von Wicht, Diether Kunerth, Victor Kraus and Charlotte Culot, the artist who allowed Neudert to succeed in the United States. Over two decades ago, when Neudert arrived here, she represented only Culot; she scrimped, saved and borrowed to give Culot a New York show, and since then, success has followed success for Neudert, who now counts Jack Welch among her loyal client roster, which, she said, is over 2,500 buyers long.

Now in her 13th season on Nantucket, Neudert has added two contemporary, German artists (Petra Amerell and Peter Weber) and also this space on Dukes Road. (Her main location at 2 Union St. remains open.)

One of her more current, new successes is island sculptor Billy Sherry, who once hauled pieces of the dismantled water tower back to his house to meld. Over the winter, Neuderte and Sherry made a lucrative trip to the Armory art fair; one of his pieces (sold) stands in a corner where Christina and also Wilfredo Chiesa (another of Neudert's artists and an art professor at UMASS Boston) will give their lectures (Chisea's on "The Pleasure of the Eye") and where John Dowland will give a concert of the Renaissance for voice and guitar.

Alternately, inside Neudert's home (which is a prescient mix of European antiques and mid-century modern furniture), Blue Lion Music will perform sets of jazz, beginning at 8 p.m.

Neudert's greatest hope for the night is to "crack the door to Paradise" for someone at the salon.

"Because if you find a pianting that is touching you, you get something you can't buy," Neudert said. "If you don't have a bridge anymore, you need someone to open the door inside of you again. And then you can enter a dialogue with the painting and become creative, which, as Einstein says, is the best kind of intelligence. Because it is the ability to become happy again and feel who you

are." I
When: Saturday, Aug. 4, 6 - 9 p.m.
Where: 18 Dukes Road
Cost: Free and open to the public

For more on Art Cabinet or on the show, call 325- 7202; go to www.artcabinet.com; or e-mail artcabinet@nantucket.net.