Hotel life as a work of art

Art hotels with famous paintings on the walls are fun, but they are not quite the same as hotels which inspire their own masterpieces, writes Jonathan Jones

CY TWOMBLY'S painting, Bacchus, is a fleshy cascade of red painted spirals – or are they half-formed letters? – on a canvas nearly five metres wide. It is a homage to the ancient Greek and Roman god of wine, a claret-coloured banner of ecstasy that is a modern equivalent of the frescoed walls and ceilings of baroque art. Where can you put a painting like this? A museum? A palace? The answer is a hotel. Bacchushangs in the lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, lit by a standard lamp made from a sawfish snout, near red velvet-covered sofas and chairs with dangling tassels that look like they have come straight out of a Velázquez portrait of a pope. The hotel's design is the brainchild of the romantic painter and film-maker, Julian Schnabel, who has given it a look somewhere between a palazzo imagined by Edgar Allan Poe and an expensive bordello. Art is everywhere, including in the bedrooms. One luxury suite has its own Damien Hirst spin painting.

The sense of decadence as you look from the bright lights of the big city to your own Hirst on the wall must be ravishing. To paraphrase the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese's New York film, The King of Comedy, better to be Saatchi for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.

The Gramercy Park is one of a new breed of hotels that give guests the ultimate fantasy of living with art, waking up in a room that is like an installation and having breakfast in what amounts to a private museum. Schnabel’s rich take on this idea is a collaboration with hotelier Ian Schrager, who also created London’s St Martin’s Lane Hotel with designer Philippe Starck. The Schrager and Starck hotel aesthetic was famous for its minimal restraint, but his new collaboration with Schnabel is over-the-top, high-art splurge. Art, Schrager claims, is the next big thing in hotels. As many people heading off on holiday this month will find out (perhaps almost by accident, so common is the art hotel becoming), the Gramercy Park is by no means alone.

AT THEAtelier sul Mare – meaning "studio by the sea" – near Cefalu in Sicily, you can stay in rooms transformed into elaborate installations by artists (one room glows deep red, another has a monster with a gaping mouth carved into one of its walls) at a fraction of the cost of a night in Schrager and Schnabel's hotel.

At Berlin’s five-star Marienbad Hotel, meanwhile, a new scheme invites artists to decorate rooms in return for a free stay (the hotel’s neon sign is by Glasgow artist Douglas Gordon). In fact, the Marienbad has a lot of competition in Berlin. The German capital’s vigorous art scene makes it a natural choice for hotels which perhaps also strive to resist the homogenisation of the once- bohemian centre of Berlin. Art hotels reassure those disappointed by the capital’s clean-up that the atmosphere of Berlin in the heady days after the wall came down can still be found. Thus, you can also live with art at the Arte Luise Kunsthotel and at no less than three Berlin branches of the Art’otel chain.

Or you can stick with the classics. At La Colombe d'Or, Saint Paul de Vence, in the south of France, a mobile by the American master of surreal abstraction Angus Calder distinguishes the hotel swimming pool and there is a mural by Fernand Léger in the restaurant. La Colombe d'Or is a Provençal landmark. In his novel, Super-Cannes, JG Ballard imagines Jacques Chirac spraining his thumb opening an oyster in its restaurant. In the 1950s it was frequented by Picasso and Matisse and other modernist titans, which is how it ended up with its exquisite art collection.

Having art in your bedroom is a singularly intimate way of getting to know it, and collectors have always been drawn to this private relationship with art. In 15th-century Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici kept Uccello's three big paintings narrating The Battle of San Romanoin his bedroom. Well, it was a big bedroom. Not even the most luxurious art hotel can match that. In the 19th century, John Ruskin had Turner's painting, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming Onin his bedroom until it upset him too much and he had to sell it. In offering their guests the intimacy of sleeping with or even inside an artwork the new generation of art hotels are giving us all the chance – at prices ranging from moderate to expensive, but always much less than actually buying art – to live like a collector.

THIS SEEMS LIKEfantastic fun to me. Yet a hotel decorated with art is not necessarily the same thing as one with authentic artistic associations.

Manhattan is where the modern art hotel truly began. Essentially, what happened was that artists took root – like disreputable but fascinating weeds – in hotels there. Living in hotels is a New York bohemian habit going back to Dorothy Parker. In the 1950s and 1960s the cheap dive of last resort for a gallery of artists, writers and musicians was the Chelsea Hotel.

This hotel is decorated today with an art collection given by guests in lieu of rent. There are two songs – one by Leonard Cohen, the other by Lou Reed and John Cale – about the Chelsea and, of course, Andy Warhol's film, Chelsea Girls. All portray it as a place of decadence and depravity. It is where Dylan Thomas was staying when he died and where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen in Room 100.

The real bohemian art heritage of New York is in the Chelsea, and at the Carlton Arms, where graffiti artists began to decorate rooms in the 1980s. This is still a budget hotel even though it now has a room by Banksy. When I stayed there in the 1990s the bold murals didn't change the bareness of the rooms. What I remember is not the painted walls but the sound of Hey Judedrifting up an air shaft – just a tinny radio playing somewhere, but an unfading memory. That's the thing about hotels – it is often the faded or seedy ones that are evocative. Certainly they are more likely to have inspired artists than would a hotel immaculately decorated with famous works of art.

The Hotel Grand et des Palmes in Palermo is not exactly faded – many of its rooms have been restored – but this palatial residence has a history so brooding it thickens the air. Wagner lived there when he was composing Parsifaland Renoir came to the hotel to paint his portrait. The surrealist writer, Raymond Roussel, died of a drug overdose in one of its rooms in 1933. When you walk through its frescoed and marble-laden public areas you sense these ghosts and get the message:that great art is more likely to emerge from crumbling palazzi than glittering lobbies.

The perfect art hotel should, therefore, be somewhere between the museum-quality decor of a Gramercy Park and the raw history of a Chelsea. The pearl, by that criterion, has to be the Colombe d’Or. Great artists truly did hang out there and they truly did leave masterpieces behind. You can appreciate both the art of French modernism and the lifestyle of its creators, and all in an apparently unspoiled pastoral setting. Trust Matisse and Picasso to get it just right.

– Guardianservice