January 2002
For dinner our first night in Reykjavik, Kristjan recommends Humarhusid’s, which translates to “Lobster House.” We all opt for the house specialty: Sautéed lobster tails in champagne sauce, a bottle of Petaluma chardonnay from Australia followed by rich molten chocolate ganache.
The bill is $280—modest, given our feast, partly because there is no tax or service charge; tipping is neither expected nor welcome.
Reykjavik guidebooks call this city “expensive” because Iceland imports everything (except sheep and lamb) then taxes it to the hilt to support their model society of subsidized education and health care. But it is only costly if you are tourists of the bottom-feeder kind, in which case you pay three times the usual price for beer and Big Macs. Top-shelf travelers quaff lobster tails in champagne sauce and fine wine at slightly more than half what a much less-spectacular meal would cost in London or Paris.
Our accommodations also reflect this pricing phenomenon. I chose Hotel Holt because it houses Iceland’s largest private art collection. My suite, with contemporary conveniences and amenities (two TVs, cable, trouser press) is priced less than a smaller room at the Lowndes in Belgravia, London—and their final bill is not inflated with several kinds of contrived taxes one finds in most big cities; in fact, no tax at all.
The Holt’s oak-panelled brandy and whiskey bar is furnished with supple Italian leather sofas and club chairs and brass lamps with orange shades and oozes coziness.
Surreral-Squared
Their art, hanging everywhere, is extraordinary. I view it mouth agape, if salivating for vintage Armagnac.
“It’s beyond surreal,” I say to Van Stein.
“You mean Surreal-squared,” says the artist.
“Does that exist as a real category?”
Van Stein’s eyes are as wide as mine. “It does now.”
At some point during my art collecting, after I’d evolved through London’s Royal Academy realism and impressionism but mostly traditionalism, I became aware of Outsider Art, known in Europe as Art Brut.
As its name suggests, Outsider Art is produced by artists who are outsiders; that is, those without formal training: The un-neutered self-taught.
The Outsider movement encompasses naïve, childish pictures of animals and trains painted with raw fruit and vegetable pigments by illiterate southern men of color.
But it also includes a category known as Visionary Art i.e., art produced by the mentally insane—often as a form of therapy.
Schizophrenic Art, as it is also known, was pioneered at an asylum near Zurich called Gugging in the early 1900s after psychiatrists discovered that allowing mental patients to draw or paint had a therapeutic effect upon their psyches and eased their symptoms.
As word got out within the psychiatric community, art therapy programs began to flourish in psych wards throughout Europe and the United States.
Why do I mention this?
Because what passes for mainstream art in Iceland is exactly like the dreamy, bizarre Visionary Art that emanates from psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland, Britain and the United States.
No finer place to reflect on this than Hotel Holt’s brandy bar, sipping 25 year-old Armagnac.
Is it a landscape or a portrait?
A large canvas on a back wall shows a dusky sky, some ocean, beach, part of a house—and the head of an elderly woman with grim expression in the lower right-hand corner.
More alarming, perhaps, is a smaller canvas in the dining room: A nine year-old boy in the lower left-hand corner is looking away from the viewer with an apprehensive expression, transfixed on a greenish backwash in which one can discern the features of an old man sporting Albert Einstein’s hairdo.
Is he looking at the ghost of a dead ancestor? Or hallucinating his own future?
Floating heads, frightened eyes, faces without features, features without faces—enough to make Salvador Dali dizzy.
Surreal-squared.
And the natives may not even know it.