True Artistry Born of Craftsmanship

By CORINNA DA
FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

New York

Guitar maker John Monteleone stands under an enormous photograph of himself that covers a whole wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as shoals of visitors stream by without recognizing him. Most are busy fiddling with the iPod app specially created for the exhibition "Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York," perhaps listening to guitarist Mark Knopfler praise him as a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci.

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Archtop History, Inc./Vincent J. Ricardel

John Monteleone with his 'Four Seasons' guitars.

But Mr. Monteleone is oblivious to his surroundings. That's because the modest, soft-spoken 63-year-old with a grizzled beard is warming to one of his favorite subjects: wood. "I have become quite fond of the Alpine spruces," he says. "German spruce, Austrian, Swiss or Italian—each one is like wine. You get this sense of terroir."

Mr. Monteleone says he can tell how a piece of wood will sound long before he picks up the first chisel. Holding his arms as if cradling a lyre against his body, he demonstrates how he taps the wood, listening for clues. "Is the sound high or low, is it bell-like, is it pure? Does it have overtones? How long does the sound hang in the air? If you rub it, can you hear the crispness of the treble? If you have a real lively piece, you can tell."

There is an element of terroir in Mr. Monteleone's craft, too. He is part of an unbroken line of luthiers that goes back all the way to Stradivari, one of whose guitars is here on display. Students of the northern Italian masters of violin-making took the art south to Naples, where they applied it to the indigenous guitar and mandolin. From there, it made its way to America, where a craze for mandolin ensembles in the late 1800s fueled an influx of Neapolitan luthiers. And New York proved a fertile soil for the extraordinary flowering of guitar-making exemplified by the three "Guitar Heroes" of the Met's 93-object exhibition: John D'Angelico, James D'Aquisto and Mr. Monteleone himself.

D'Angelico came of age as a craftsman in the Little Italy of the 1920s, as the market for mandolins began to dry up. He turned to the construction of archtop guitars, which have the curved top, raised bridge and f-shaped sound holes of a violin. In those preamplification days, the archtop guitar's powerful sound and unique twang was highly prized by jazz guitarists. One of his most iconic models is "The New Yorker," a guitar inspired by the hotel of that name, which echoes the building's Art Deco structure on the headstock.

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Archtop History, Inc./Vincent J. Ricardel

Mr. Monteleone sanding a 'Grand Artist' model in his workshop.

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Archtop History, Inc./Vincent J. Ricardel

John D'Angelico's 'Mel Bay New Yorker' archtop.

D'Aquisto was D'Angelico's apprentice, who began by sweeping the wood shavings off the workshop floor and gradually learned his master's secrets. His guitars are instantly recognizable for their extraordinary aesthetic simplicity. He dispensed with any plastic or metal elements in order to let the beauty of the wood shine through.

"They were all really innovative in different ways," says curator Jayson Kerr Dobney. "D'Angelico made the jump from mandolin to guitar. D'Aquisto had that mind-blowing radical aesthetic vision. And Monteleone was all about completely reinventing the instrument."

For a period of time in the '70s, Mr. Monteleone found the most work making mandolins for the folk-music revival that had started out in the West Village. When he did shift his focus to guitars, he gave them a stylized scroll—quoting that of a mandolin—which remains a signature feature of his instruments. But his greatest contribution to the redesign of the guitar is seen in the position and shape of the sound holes. One of his instruments has a lever that allows the guitarist to open and partially close the sound holes at will. Other times he moved the holes to the side of the sound box for what he calls a "me guitar," in which the sound is projected up into the player's ears rather than out into the room.

One of the most striking instruments on show is the now-legendary "Deco Vox" (2007). As Mr. Monteleone recalls, "The client's wife asked one day and said, 'John, could you make a guitar like the Chrysler Building?' And I think I said, 'No, I can't.' But I thought about it and started to pick off certain ideas that would work on a guitar. It was about the form, the expression, the movement. And I wanted to get the colors of a sunset sky against the top of the Chrysler Building."

His most personal project is one that came out of his obsession with materials. The "Four Seasons" (2002-06) is a quartet of guitars embellished with rubies, diamonds, turquoise and delicate watercolor paintings—on the inside, visible only through those voyeuristic side sound holes—that evoke the different seasons. Opening up those sound holes, says Mr. Monteleone, "I began to see the interior walls as a canvas."

It's a long way from the Stradivari guitar, which Mr. Monteleone calls "conservative, but striking in its simple beauty." But, he says, "make no mistake. Amati and Stradivari—they sold them as art, too."

Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about music for the Journal.