Hollow Body Perfection

The guitar is, apparently, fine art. Not a utensil for making art, but art itself, and labeled as such by two of the city’s preeminent cultural institutions. With shows at the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, we are apparently to accept this Sergoviaover-Springsteen thing, this Djangoover-Yngwie dynamic, to allow Woody Guthrie’s fascist-killing machine as still life with frou-frou basket. The truth is, I’d rather take a guitar out to a dive bar to satiate my guitar fetish rather than spend the afternoon ogling it in hallowed halls. But with all those curvy instruments beckoning, to the museums I went.

At the Met, the exhibit Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen From Italy to New York—unfortunately named for a video game—opens with a handful of 16th- to 18th-century lutes and violins, which ups the cultural ante by providing a legitimacy the guitar never asked for. But when a 1928 Gibson (back when the headstock read "The Gibson") is eventually arrived upon, the kettle is on.

From there, a roomful of John D’Angelico models beckons. The D’Angelicos are deco sirens, sultry like the Chrysler Building—so New York that the prize model is called the "New Yorker." A 1940 white plastic model that once belonged to Al Nevens of the Three Suns humanizes the collection, and a solid plank of an electric mandolin (made for Vaudevillian Pat Valley circa 1950) grounds it. How sexy were these hollow bodies? Did electricity kill that?

The John Monteleone designs, on the other hand, are showy, whorish and overdressed at the same time. Their colors are too bold, their F-holes more raunchy than revealing. Beyond them in the back room are harp guitars, mandoliras and Django’s Selmer. Here are models by Mozzani and Maccaferri, Turturro and Fabricatore. It doesn’t matter if you know the makers; it feels good just saying their names.

On display at MoMA is Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914, a striking collection of 65 works. Moving clockwise through the room, the visitor again encounters a few violins threatening to class up the joint, but before long, populism wins over and the common guitar claims center stage.

What might be most telling in the exhibit is a large photograph of the artist’s studio taken in 1912: Seven guitar sketches on paper are pinned to the wall above his bed, along with one of the sculptures that serve as centerpiece for the show. Sheets of paper in a cluttered room, not fine art but obsessive art, the basic elements—circle, parallel lines, hourglass—fetishistic in their repetition. Sometimes the guitars in the paintings are so tactile, so bodily, that they dissolve into the ears and hair of the people portrayed, perhaps becoming the music they listen to. The guitars are nice and carnal, even if the halls they’re housed in are hallowed. Picasso himself didn’t play an instrument and, as noted in Anne Umland’s catalog essay, "is said to have had no patience with
most types of music." He did, however, find enormous appeal in café
society life, with flamenco music and the populist spirit the guitar
represented then, as it does today.

But
enough of these museum pieces. I need more. So I continue south: I walk
the vestiges of 48th Street, once a marketplace of fellow strummers and
now a Sam Ash shopping mall. The one holdout from the independent
dealer days is Rudy Pensa, proprietor of Rudy’s Music, which has the
feel (and often the price point) of a jewelry store. As I walk in, a
customer is hanging out at the corner, talking shop, as is the pastime
at guitar stores.

"It’s
like a work of fine art, in ukulele form," he says. "It’s flame
mahogany." I wonder to myself how much a person might pay for a uke.

There
are a few axes on the wall within a reasonable range, at least for a
serious guitarist. Some nicely retro Reverend models hover around the
$1,000 mark. A beautiful 1978 Gibson L5-S, burgundy Les Paul body, solid
but with an arched top, doesn’t feel under-priced at $5,000. But the
truth is I was just wasting time so as not to appear too eager. I had
already fallen in love with something so stylish, so sleek that it
managed to subvert its own gaudiness. One could question the combination
of white and gold. One could ridicule the fake F-hole painted onto its
face. But this would be like criticizing a bombshell’s fashion sense.

"I wouldn’t be caught dead in that dress."

"Yes, but you are not Elke Sommer."

Maybe
the reference to the ’60s sex symbol seems dated, but I can’t think of
any contemporary Hollywood star that feels as right. I can’t help but
stare.

Made by
German luthier Jens Ritter, the Princess Isabella guitar is a limited
run of 50. More will be made to order, but having one tailored seems
obscene. God’s play. It’s already perfection.

The
Isabella’s ash body is light as air and just an inch thick with a
finish so pure it’s like a glazed cloud. Its curves are both exaggerated
and sublime. Its price tag? $10,000. I thank the clerk and head back
out to the street.

Continuing
further south, I make my way to Carmine Street Guitars in the West
Village. The small shop is a great home for oddities and curios, often
made by proprietor Rick Kelly, known for repurposing found wood into
one-of-a-kind guitars. His Bowery Pine "Kellecaster" series, for
example, is crafted from the rafters of a 150-yearold building,
liberated when the building was torn down. With photos of Bo Diddley and
Robert Quine on the wall peeking out between instruments in disrepair,
unplayable and not for sale, and strung things that look more like oars
than anything else, it’s everything you could want from a guitar shop.
Kelly’s creations—one made with wine corks, another carved into the
shape of a rifle—hang alongside collectible beauties and a few starter
models. Planks of well-weathered wood lean against the wall.

When
I arrive, a woman is in the shop with an oddity she’d just purchased, a
Gibson SG four-string tenor guitar, which Kelly determines to have a
neck that was filed down to scale and a fake Gibson logo affixed to the
headstock. That bit of forgery, however, doesn’t diminish the interest
being shared by the few people in the store. It’s a social shop, like a
barber or a tobacconist, where people go to swap stories and boast of
conquests.

From
there, I continue down to Soho, and to the new Rudy’s location. In
truth, there are shops that are more inviting, but owner Rudy Pensa has
the collection worth coveting. Small wonder that a half-dozen D’Angelico
from Pensa’s personal collection are actually included in the Met
exhibit.

The 62-year-old businessman and self-proclaimed amateur guitarist came to New York from his native Argentina 35 years ago. Around the same time
he played a D’Angelico for the first time and fell in love. He started
collecting them and soon opened his shop on 48th Street. I ask him why,
among instruments, the guitar is such an object of lust.

"The
guitar is a super-cool instrument," he says, his accent still strong
after so long in New York. "It’s not an instrument you need someone else
to play with. The guitar is very intimate. People like to dress the
guitar like a beautiful thing.

"I
think of the guitar as very sexy. It has something… I don’t know. It
attracts me, young people, men and women. It’s something you embrace and
feel the vibration. I think it’s easy to fall in love."

He’s
right, of course. The holding, the caressing, feeling it respond under
your touch. He tells me about his nylon string, a comparatively plain
instrument but the only one he plays. He doesn’t, however, say anything
about having a wife. I consider asking him about the Ritter, but somehow
feel as if I’m hitting on his daughter and back off.

She’s out of my league, anyway.