DONALD SULTAN: The Artist's Cabin

By Robert Long

Should Donald Sultan feel like picking up and flying to Romania tomorrow morning, he won't have to worry about a place to stay. The Art-Otel Budapest has seen to that.

The hotel was the only one of a projected chain of "art hotels" to be completed before the dramatic falloff in hotel revenue after Sept. 11 put an end to its owner's plans.

"He had collected one or two of my works and asked me to help design the interior of a hotel in Chicago," Mr. Sultan said on a recent hot afternoon in his cozy, cool Sag Harbor house. "Someone else was doing Budapest. But that person dropped out, and I agreed to do it, with the understanding that I would also do Chicago."

The Chicago project never happened. But 600 Sultan works - prints, paintings, and drawings - were installed in the Budapest hotel's private rooms and public spaces, and there they hang today.

Though there's no Sultan Suite as such, "I have a room there," the artist said. "I haven't been back in quite a while but it's a great place to have."

Mr. Sultan has a loft and studio in New York and an apartment in Paris as well as the Sag Harbor house, which is a very short walk from the village. He works only in New York after a period of many years when, he said, he "felt like a turtle," carrying his studio equipment with him from place to place.

"When I came into the art world there was no money in it," he said. "The only reason I decided to become a full-time artist was because I saw that you could make a living by teaching in a university."

His father, a tire dealer, had wanted to be a painter, and had reproductions of Matisse, Pollock, and de Kooning in his studio.

"Those artists were major influences when I was young," Mr. Sultan, who grew up in North Carolina, said. "My mother was always involved in theater, and I got involved, too. I thought I'd become an actor or a director. I began learning set design. But eventually I realized that I'd have more artistic freedom as a painter than in a collaborative enterprise like the theater. I wasn't good at taking direction. And in movies you spend all your time trying to raise money."

The switch from theater to painting came while he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"There was a nice studio setup there. I had no idea what to paint, so I put up a canvas and started applying the color brown and did it again and again until I had a very thick, all-brown painting."

An art teacher happened by. "He said, 'There's another person, the head of the painting department at Duke, who's making minimalist paintings like that.' I said, 'Oh, is that what I'm doing?' " He laughed. "So I became friendly with him, and did all these one-color paintings, for years."

He decided on a graduate school once he'd seen an exhibit of "huge and great" canvases by students at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the chance to spend plenty of time in the museum itself was attractive.

"When I got there I began to realize the extent of that collection," he said. The museum's Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman paintings were particularly important to him. "I'd never seen paintings like that before. And I remember when the critic Lawrence Alloway was giving a talk on Mark Rothko and the first thing he said was, 'When Rothko died the world lost a great rococo painter.' I love that. I've never heard it articulated further, but it is perfect. People like that can really affect the way you think about things."

Mr. Sultan moved to New York at virtually the very instant that the art world began to change in a revolutionary way. It was 1975 and he found work building lofts for other artists.

Although no one realized it at the time, "the transformation of all those loft spaces into living spaces was the biggest single architectural style of the last half of the 20th century, besides the International style," he said. "It's all over the world now."

"Building lofts put me in touch with a whole community of younger artists and people in the theater. It was fantastic. There weren't all that many people in the art world then. You'd go to an opening and everyone would be there - Warhol, Stella, Oldenburg, and all the dealers. There were about seven or eight galleries in SoHo."

He had his first show in 1978, at the Mary Boone gallery. Ms. Boone was already considered an important dealer, but the art world hadn't quite turned into the star-making machine it did just a few years later, when investing in art became the thing to do, and the stock market began a steep climb.

"Then the '80s came," Mr. Sultan said. "and art was treated like stock. A huge amount of money was poured into art, creating a lot of hostility toward artists that I think was unjustified. At the same time it created an explosive interest in art worldwide. People all over the country whose kids wanted to be artists thought, 'Well, that's not such a bad idea,' because they saw pictures in magazines of young artists driving nice cars."

"So then it became the thing to do, and you had art schools pumping out young artists with degrees, and suddenly there are thousands of them, plus young entrepreneurs in the gallery business. Then Sotheby's started holding auctions of emerging artists and pumping prices way up."

Mr. Sultan and many of his contemporaries benefited from that era of inflated prices, but they had to deal with its aftermath, too, which came in both critical and financial form.

"There was a backlash. It gets pretty rocky when you see your prices go down at auction. If your dealers were supportive, if they weren't just in it for the money, then you could weather it. But that's the way of the market, and it's always been that way. I can remember when you couldn't give away a Warhol. It happens to everybody. People go on to the next thing. It's difficult. But if you're in it for the long haul, you just go on with what you do."

The art world has grown enormously since Mr. Sultan came on the scene, and that hasn't been good for young artists trying to establish a career, he said.

"It's a very serious problem to be in that mosh pit. They never get anyone to look at them really hard. A group gets one good hard look and that's it. It used to be that having a piece in the Venice Biennale was a big deal. Now it's just a big party and there are 100 million people there. No one remembers anything they've seen."

Mr. Sultan's work is in major museum and private collections all over the world, and his gallery in New York of over a decade, Knoedler, is as blue-chip as they come.

Many of his drawings and prints include simple images - oranges, lemons, freesias - that have been mysteriously transformed in the execution, sometimes by the inclusion of unexpected media, such as black flocking for the centers of daisies.

His best known pieces, though, are not only evidence of his fine-art skills but are also reminders of his interest in theater design and his experience as a carpenter.

There are cleanly painted, high-colored images of flowers on linoleum squares mounted on huge wooden armatures covered with rubber, tar, and Spackle. They have a dramatic presence, jutting out from the gallery wall several inches so that you can see their layered construction.

"Those pieces bring to bear almost everything that formed me. I learned from color field and Abstract Expressionism to paint big, on the floor, and then to upend the room - rip up the architecture and put it on the wall, using building materials.

As it turned out, Mr. Sultan never had to teach to support himself, which may be a loss for a generation of young artists, for he is not only knowledgeable and articulate but has a contagious enthusiasm.

"When you see real art it has an unmistakable quality," he said. "It's electric; the spiritual and intellectual aspect of a person is transferred to an inanimate object and then it's given back to the viewer."

"A work of art astonishes you in a way you can't explain. The artist imparts a vision. That's what distinguishes art from craft. Craft is not meant to have that electric charge; it is utilitarian. Art is unique and cannot be reproduced. It pushes the boundaries of thought and taste and it makes people uncomfortable. It has no real purpose and yet it's fascinating and that is why people want to make it and to preserve it."

Fame, he said, doesn't diminish the challenges faced by a painter or sculptor.

"This is what I always tell young artists. If you want to be a good, serious artist, you have to imagine that you're in a cabin all by yourself and no one's ever going to see what you make. What would you make, knowing you're going to have to live with it for the rest of your life?"

"Even if you're a big success, and a lot of people come to see your shows, your fortunes will shift, people will drift away. But you're still there. You're still in that cabin."