In New York, 286 Saint Fabiolas = One Epiphany

NEW YORK -- In the far reaches of uptown Manhattan, beyond Harlem, there's a suite of wood-paneled galleries hosting work the like of which they've never seen before: 286 portraits of the same female saint, crafted by artists ranging from skilled hacks to ungifted amateurs, all showing their subject in the same pose, in the same clothes and in general as much alike as they could make her.

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Over and over and over again.

Your jaw drops, your eyes pop and you can't suppress a chuckle. Here, in a museum as venerable as any, you're up against what's not supposed to be in a museum: The unculled, the unprecious, the unlovely, the unvaried. It's so much business-as- un usual, it can only be contemporary art.

And it is. All those look-alike portraits make up "Francis Alys: Fabiola," an installation mounted by the Dia Art Foundation, one of New York's leading supporters of the avant-garde. The antique galleries it has borrowed belong to the 103-year-old Hispanic Society. It's known mostly for its holdings in Goya, El Greco and Velázquez.

Alys is a 48-year-old Belgian long based in Mexico City. He is a major player in contemporary art, with work that varies more widely than most. It ranges from a video that shows him kicking a huge block of ice through his adopted city (we watch it melt to the size of an ice cube) to a 12-hour documentary of the city's main square (it shows locals crowding into the shadow of a huge flagpole, and moving with it as the sunny day wears on) to paintings to snapshots to delicate, hand-drawn animations with an almost sentimental side.

Fabiola is a Catholic saint who died in Rome in 399. Born into a wealthy family, she was the subject of a scandal in the early Christian church -- she dared divorce an abusive husband -- but later renounced all worldly goods and became a chum of Saint Jerome. Fabiola was mostly ignored until 1854, when a sentimental novel about her life became a bestseller. She got another boost in 1885, when a French artist named Jean-Jacques Henner painted what became her iconic image. Henner's painting hasn't survived. But over the past 120 years, thousands and thousands of copies of it have been made by professionals, part-timers and faith-filled outsider artists.

"Francis Alys: Fabiola" simply presents the horde of Fabiola pictures Alys has been able to accumulate, at flea markets and wherever else they have turned up, in the 15 or so years since he started his collection.

Lots of important artists have built major art collections. How many have set out to build a determinedly minor one, made up of insignificant copies of an unimportant lost original? Alys's collection is in a class of its own, with holdings more interesting than many.

Given the mania it launched, Henner's original Fabiola was surprisingly staid: A head-and-shoulders profile of a woman looking left, shown wearing a red wimple against a plain dark background.

Most derivations keep that basic format intact: At most, Fabiola's head may veer from profile, or it may look right instead of left. But otherwise, the copies can play fast and loose.

There's a Fabiola meticulously inlaid in precious woods. There are Fabiolas carved or cast in low relief, and others almost in 3-D. Fabiola is rendered in sophisticated needleworks that come surprisingly close to what the original painting might have looked like (they seem as if they were all made from the same stitch-a-Fabiola kit). Other sewn panels are crude home-drawn affairs that barely capture her outline. There's a surprisingly proficient Fabiola done entirely in grains, beans and seeds -- a kind of farm-house pixelation -- and another done by backing glass with colored foils.

Most Fabiolas clearly reveal when they were made. In 1920s pictures, the dour saint has a hint of the flapper about her; by the '40s she's a bit Lauren Bacall. She can be rendered with the thick impasto of impressionism, the slick surface of Victorian sentiment, or even, in a rare modernist moment, in a portrait floated on an almost cubist cityscape.