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Nancy Levinson|Essays

November 5, 2010

Greenaway at the Armory

For the past several years the polymathic Peter Greenaway — film director, librettist, curator, VJ — has been transforming some of the masterpieces of Western art into multimedia experiences mixing light, sound and digital technology. This season one of his “Classic Paintings Revisited” will be staged for the first time in the United States, when Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision comes to the Park Avenue Armory in December in New York.

Leonardo’s Last Supper was first staged, for one night only in 2008, on the fragile surface of the actual late 15th-century mural at the Santa Marie delle Grazie in Milan. Others in the ambitious series include The Night Watch, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2006, and The Wedding at Cana, at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

See here, for a recent Greenaway lecture at Berkeley, including a video of the performance in Milan.