Installation view of Robert Füerer’s “Women of Art: Button by Button” at Bountiful Davis Art Center, featuring button mosaic reinterpretations of iconic paintings from art history including, from left, Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer,” Monet’s “Woman with Parasol,” da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine,” and Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” Image by Geoff Wichert.

It has happened again. In the immediate aftermath of my breakthrough in understanding an artist whose labors in two separate artistic gardens had puzzled me for years (see here), another artist has brought forth a similarly converse second body of art. Robert Füerer is a seasoned world traveler, a fragment of whose lifetime self-portrait appeared here upon his recent return. Once again, the subject matter couldn’t be more different from his previous outing; not just different, mind you, but mutually self-exclusive. And the technical approaches couldn’t be less alike if he’d switched from painting in oils to collaging with tailor’s buttons … which, as it happens, is precisely what he’s done.

The eight non-paintings making up Women of Art: Button by Button, in the Front Gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center, literally re-present not only some of the most popular paintings in art, but pivotal moments in its history as well. For instance, it’s generally agreed that one of the primary purposes of Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece of 1484-86, “The Birth of Venus,” was to personify the Renaissance rebirth of the Classical Age and its consummate literary form: Mythology. So it’s appropriate that Füerer begins his own rebirth of art with “Birth of Buttons.” By layering hundreds of pierced discs drawn from the history of apparel, made of materials that run the gamut from the mere practical to the elaborately ornamental, sometimes as many as five deep to produce details and lively effects, he’s made copies of instantly recognizable artworks that enable him to control just how they evoke our memories of the originals.

Robert Füerer, “Lady with a Buttoned Ermine,” a button mosaic recreation of Leonardo’s famous portrait, transforming classical oil painting into textured, playful collage.

While Botticelli was crowning the two primary media of their day—buon fresco and egg tempera—Leonardo was transforming the characteristics of oil into the perfect medium to represent flesh. His “Lady With an Ermine,” which he finished around 1491, was one of a series of women’s portraits that climaxed with “Mona Lisa,” which was not finished until Füerer came along to button it up.

From “Lady With a Buttoned Ermine,” Füerer vaults to Modernism, in 1871, with the painting known colloquially as “Whistler’s Mother.” That it’s the tiniest painting here doesn’t stop the artist from claiming she is actually sewing on a button while posing on her familiar rocker, but it does make for a remarkable effect when her famous image suddenly flashes forth, visible for an instant, from the tiny cluster of buttons.

The hits came fast in those years: Claude Monet’s 1875 “Madame Monet and her Son,” also known as “The Stroll,” now becomes “Button Parasol,” while Paul Gauguin’s once-scandalous “Woman With a Flower” of 1891 becomes “Tahitian Woman with a Flower” today.

Two opposing, yet still modern approaches to figure painting appeared at the same time in 1907. Gustav Klimt keeps his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer straight while embedding her in a background he based on the Byzantine ornaments of Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale. In what may be the most readily legible reproduction here, Füerer captures the original’s hallucinatory optics with buttons instead of mosaic tiles. Then, in what may be more difficult to see because of its roots in the invention of Cubism, Picasso’s “Young Ladies of Avignon” challenges readings of “Buttoned Demoiselles.”

Robert Füerer, “Frida and Monkey,” a button mosaic reinterpretation of Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, layered within a brightly painted, folk-art-style wooden frame.

Frida Kahlo populated her garden home with monkeys, which she painted to show their intelligence and sympathetic characters. She may have kept them to compensate for her inability to bear children, while her self-portraits with monkeys, like this one from 1938, were frequently commissioned by her friends.

Füerer recalls using buttons as tiles in portrait mosaics beginning in 2008, with one he called “Mosaic Mona.” It’s not hard to guess the subject, nor is it surprising that the idea came to him while contemplating his grandmother’s button collection. Progress followed over the next 16 years, leading to the present eight images done in 2024. One particularly sweet touch involves the frames; while not necessarily authentic to a specific period, each seems to invoke the academic or decorative quality of traditional art. While the resemblance between the button versions and the originals may at first seem questionable, comparing them soon proves otherwise. Details like Monet’s wife’s shadow coming down the hill between her and her son—who might easily be overlooked—may not have been noticed in the original, but become permanent parts of the memory of the painting afterwards.

And perhaps the most meaningful, even useful lesson here has to do with pareidolia, a cerebral-optical effect that has recently migrated from an obscure fringe of scientific lore to become as central to understanding how reality works as knowing that objects in space are not really weightless. It seems our brains work like independent scientists, constantly seeking out patterns of information in the sensory noise in which we operate. Don’t be surprised, as your eyes graze over the plethora of buttons, to suddenly catch a pair of eyes or a complete face looking back from the edge of your vision, only to disappear when looked for directly. There’s a lesson here about not believing all the things we think we see. And in what could very easily, and not unreasonably, be taken for a stunt or an elaborate joke—the humor is certainly here— Robert Füerer has found a playful way to activate the museum pieces of art history and restore some of their relevance in yet another pivotal hour.

Robert Füerer, “Buttoned Demoiselles,” a button mosaic translation of Picasso’s groundbreaking cubist painting, reimagining angular forms through layered buttons.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.