T qatar issue 32

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The 83-year-old artist Agnes Denes in her New

York City studio, with her 1984 painting ‘‘Teardrop

Monument to Being Earthbound’’ on the wall.

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Features48 Life Among the Leopards

In India, where big cats often pose a threat, a traditional farming community is enjoying their presence. As safarigoers discover Jawai for themselves, will its precarious harmony become a thing of the past? By Hari Kunzru Photographs by Richard Mosse

56 Rock Legend Set amid the starkly beautiful landscape of Joshua Tree National Park, a futuristic desert oasis by the architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg is perhaps the most unrecognized of America’s great houses. By Nancy Hass Photographs by Anthony Cotsifas Produced by Michael Reynolds

64 Works in Progress Female artists in their 80s and 90s — including an international land sculptor and a painter who anticipated Minimalism — are finally receiving their due. By Phoebe Hoban Photographs by Stefan Ruiz

72 Inside the House A new film sheds light on the nerve-racking days and sleepless nights leading up to Raf Simons’s first couture collection for Dior. By Jo-Ann Furniss

CultureJuly-August, 2015

ON THE COVER: Photograph by Anthony Cotslfas.

Copyright ©2015 The New York Times

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Arena37 Home and Work

The French sculptor Marie Christophe channels the pastoral romance of her 18th-century manor into delicate wire objets.

76 Document Leanne Shapton’s paintings

of Japanese fabrics.

Clockwise from above: Marie Christophe

sculpting a new creation; Chanel's haute couture

top; Raf Simons’s first couture collection for

Dior in 2012.

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Lookout10 Sign of the Times

In the age of smartphones, memories are instantly documented, downloaded and disseminated — but at what cost?

12 This and That Alex Garland’s sci-fi faves; feasting on food scraps; Lord Huron’s strange new album; pretty, punky pins; Prada opens a museum; hotels with over-the-top amenities; and more.

20 On Beauty Achieving the dewy, luminous skin found on today’s runways is tougher than it looks.

22 Watch Report Shining a light on all-black timepieces.

23 Market Report A torrent of blinged-out shower slides.

Quality29 In Fashion

With the proliferation of fast fashion and online retail, haute couture remains luxuriously old-school.

34 The Thing A limited-edition Tiffany watch that honors its namesake.

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Lookout Qatar18 This and That Qatar Wadha Al Hajri, Qatar’s participant in

the global fashion scene, has revealed her Autumn/Winter 2015-16 collection; local brand Al Motahajiba launches a high-end luxury collection called Signature; Graff and its fascination with timekeeping; the Qatar Turkey 2015 Year of Culture facilitates a visual dialogue between selected photographers from each country.

24 On Auctions David Bennett, the chairman of

Sotheby’s international jewelry division has earned the title “100 carat man” for the unique feat of selling seven diamonds weighing over 100 carats.

27 Legacy Bottega Veneta goes back to its roots of

pure craftsmanship to revive its legacy.

Quality Qatar35 Another Thing Ralph & Russo's handmade “fan shoe” is

inspired by Grenada's Alhambra.

BEADED BEAUTYThe Monumental Sculptors exhibition by Jean-Michel Othoniel, at Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong, in 2014.

Page 47

Publisher & Editor In ChiefYousuf Jassem Al DarwishChief ExecutiveSandeep SehgalExecutive Vice PresidentAlpana Roy

EDITORIALManaging EditorSindhu NairDeputy EditorsEzdihar Ibrahim Ali

Fashion EditorDebrina AliyahSenior CorrespondentsAyswarya Murthy

ART

Senior Art DirectorVenkat ReddyDeputy Art DirectorHanan Abu SaiamAssistant Art DirectorAyush IndrajithSenior Graphic Designer Maheshwar ReddyPhotographyRob Altamirano

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T, THE STYLE MAGAZINE

OF THE NEW YORK TIMESEditor in Chief Deborah NeedlemanCreative DirectorPatrick LiDeputy Editor Whitney VargasFashion Director Joe McKennaManaging Editor Minju ParkPhotography DirectorNadia Vellam

THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEWS SERVICESGeneral ManagerMichael Greenspon Vice President, Licensing and SyndicationAlice TingVice President, Executive Editor The New York Times News Service & Syndicate Nancy Lee

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Arena Qatar39 On Sculpture French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel is

modernizing the gardens of the Château de Versailles with his monumental and joyful glass fountain sculptures.

43 On Art Photographer Aparna Jayakumar has made

Doha her new home and hopes the city will serve as a springboard to explore the region and document the lives of its people.


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12 T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

WHAT IF MARCEL PROUST had kept an Instagram account? What if he’d used a smartphone to snap a photo of every evocative morsel he’d ever eaten? Would he still have written ‘‘In Search of Lost Time,’’ his multivolume account of the vanished social universe of his youth, unlocked by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea?

These questions occurred to me a couple of months ago when I picked up my son, 13, and two of his friends after a long day of downhill skiing at a resort near our home in western Montana. They stowed their gear in the trunk and piled in. As I pulled out of the crowded parking lot, eyes on the slick road, I asked them about their day. No answer. I glanced to my right, at my son, then in the rearview, and saw that all three of my rosy-cheeked young passengers were absorbed in the same task. They worked with their heads down, thumbs and fingers flying, occasionally passing their cameras to one another. ‘‘Whoa!’’ I heard. ‘‘Awesome!’’ ‘‘That jump was sick!’’ I tried again to start a conversation about the day’s most memorable moments but my son was so busy with his highlights reel that I realized this was his day’s most memorable moment: the reviewing and editing of the video footage from his helmet-mounted GoPro camera; the conversion of blurry

raw experience into a finished, archived artifact. When I try to recall my childhood (which, as a memoirist

and fiction writer, I’m often inclined to do), I don’t have recourse to an exhaustive catalog of images and documents. My parents never shot home movies and they took family photos only rarely, on ceremonial occasions when everyone was compelled to smile tautly and mask what was really going on inside them. As a consequence, revisiting my youth can feel rather like a homicide investigation. Working from clues and the accounts of witnesses, including the highly unreliable one who lives behind my eyeballs, I wait for scenarios to form and patterns to emerge. If they seem plausible I delve into them further, especially if the images align with the murky emotions they conjure up. I tend not to question the resulting mental scenes despite being well aware that photographs and secondhand stories have been shown to create false memories. Clear or hazy, bright or dim, my recollections are private, mine alone, and written in synaptic smoke, not subject to verification by instant replay.

What makes memories precious, even certain ‘‘bad’’ ones, is forgetting, of course. Remember forgetting? I’m

Sign of the Times

Remembrance of Things LostAs we increasingly outsource our memories to devices,

we may be forgetting the pleasures of imperfect recall.

BY WALTER KIRN

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FREEZE FRAME A composite photograph of tourists in Times Square capturing the scenery.

13July - August 2015

not so sure my son will. There’s also a chance that people might miss it someday. ‘‘Black Mirror,’’ the dystopian British TV series (now available for posterity on Netflix), devoted one of its early episodes, ‘‘The Entire History of You,’’ to the nightmare possibilities of total digital recall. The premise is that the hip and affluent have adopted a new gizmo: a tiny ‘‘seed,’’ surgically implanted in their necks, that records (and can also replay on a TV screen or in its owners’ brains) footage of everything they see and hear. Oddly, no one seems to mind being filmed continually by others, even during sex; indeed, the appeal of the implant seems partly based on its users’ desire to reenact the thrilling erotic encounters of their pasts, occasionally while making love to another partner in the present. The inevitable crisis occurs when a tipsy, jealous husband scrutinizes footage from a party that indicates his wife and the male host may be infatuated with each other. The husband grills her on the subject, learns that she and the host are carrying on, and forces her to replay for him a scene of their having sex; later, his wife having left him, he cuts out his own seed with a razor blade rather than retain the painful memories.

The fallacy behind this script is that there would be a market for a device that enables complete and perfect recall. Not even my GoPro-toting son wants that. His instinctive goal is to record exceptional experiences that he expects he may want to savor again someday, saving himself the Proustian trouble. He inherently understands that memory consists of constructing, and later reconstructing, narratives, not just storing and retrieving data. Memory is an imaginative act; first we imagine what we’ll want to keep and then we fashion stories from what we’ve kept. Memories don’t just happen, they are built.

The problem for my son — and for everyone who relies on microchips to preserve the present for future examination — is that we have no idea who we’ll be when the time comes to reflect on who we were. Despite our tendency in the computer age to think of ourselves as soft machines, the human mind is not a hard drive, a neutral repository of information. The melancholy passage of the years tends to change our values as we age, and the awesome backflips of 13 don’t hold the magic they once did; not when compared to the image of a loved one who has since gone absent, say. If I’d had a smartphone with a video camera back in my early adolescence, I doubt that I would have trained it on the things that matter to me now, like the sight of my mother reading in her blue armchair, underlining passages from Proust.

A graver problem with offloading our memories is that we may be degrading our capacity to make them the old-fashioned way. I’ve long suspected that this might be true; in fact, I may be an extremist on the matter. One reason that I’ve never kept a journal is that the attention that goes into keeping one is, I feel, more profitably spent on engaging with the moment. I’d rather live in the instant than ’gram the instant. Support for my instinct came the other day when I read about a study conducted at University

College London on the alleged contribution of technology to early dementia. The research suggested that regions of the brain crucial to forming memories — in this case of the features and locations of landmarks in physical space — may tend to wither prematurely with the use of automated navigation aids. The part of the hippocampus that remembers things simply doesn’t turn on when a device performs the task instead.

A remembrance never formed is worse, far worse, than a remembrance lost.

At 52, increasingly forgetful, I sometimes rack my brain for past experiences that I’m positive are in there somewhere and draw a blank. It’s frustrating, but the blank still marks a spot — a spot where a memory used to be and might, if I eat the right cake, reappear. What makes memory magical is its imperfections and its unpredictability; try as we might, we never quite control it. It draws our attention to the margins of stories that once seemed to be the main events. Someday, when my son reviews his footage, what will come back to him may not be his ski stunts but other aspects of that winter day: the voices of his friends, the shadows on the mountain, the face of his father beside him in the car. ‘‘2

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If I’d had a smartphone with a video camera back in

my early adolescence, I doubt that I would have

trained it on the things that matter to me now, like the

sight of my mother reading in her blue armchair.

MIND OVER MATTER A 2011 installation of printouts of photos that had been uploaded to Flickr over a 24-hour period.


Behind Lord Huron’s beautifully bizarre new album there’s a writer who doesn’t exist, two gonzo auteurs and a whole lot of soul.

The Luxury of Leftovers

Pretty in Punk

The Los Angeles–based indie band Lord Huron creates rich landscapes that stretch far beyond sound. Ben Schneider, the lead singer, originally conceived of their new album, ‘‘Strange Trails,’’ as a feature-length film, but aborted the idea when he discovered ‘‘that it’s really hard to get a movie made.’’ Instead, he’ll supplement ‘‘Strange Trails’’ with a series of short films — indebted to directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Akira Kurosawa — in which he’ll play a host of fictional alter egos, while acting out the album’s many adventures. The multimedia approach has worked for Lord Huron before: The band’s breakout debut, 2012’s ‘‘Lonesome Dreams,’’ was inspired by George Ranger Johnson, a prolific but underappreciated adventure novelist whom Schneider completely made up. (The singer went so far as to launch a website for Johnson, whose books, which share titles with the record’s songs, are conveniently listed as ‘‘out of print.’’) For Schneider, an art-school grad who generally deflects the trappings of rock stardom, playing make-believe offers a chance to shed his shy-guy persona. ‘‘I’m not interested in being famous,’’ he says. ‘‘But I want what I make to be famous.’’ strangetrails.com — JEFF OLOIZIA

Waste is becoming a dirty word in the world of high-end food. During Expo Milano 2015, the Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura oversaw — with

help from Mario Batali, Alain Ducasse and René Redzepi — the Ambrosian Refectory, a pop-up dining hall in a disused theater, where meals were

made using surplus from the estimated 400 tons of food that arrived at the culinary fair every day. Batali and Ducasse also recently worked at New York’s wastED, a temporary restaurant at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, which involved a cast of rotating chefs addressing food waste in their menus.

In England, Thomasina Miers of the popular Mexican chain Wahaca is championing the Pig Idea, which proposes to change European law to allow for the leftover food of restaurants and catering companies to be used as pig

and chicken feed. Expo Milano 2015 runs May 1-Oct. 31, expo2015.org; bluehillfarm.com; thepigidea.org — ROCKY CASALE

Clockwise from top right: Valley Cruise, QR30, valleycruisepress.com.

Prize Pins, QR55, prizepins.com. Pintrill x Careaux, QR110, pintrill.com. Mansi Shah,

QR55, mansishah.com. Diagonal Press, QR73, diagonalpress.com. Explorer’s Press,

QR18, explorerspress.com.

Above: Lord Huron’s enigmatic frontman Ben Schneider on the new album cover. Right: bandmates (from left) Mark Barry, Miguel Briseno, Schneider and Tom Renaud.

LISTEN UP

FEELING FOR

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

Rocker embellishments with a softer side.

This and ThatA Cultural Compendium

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SHORT LIST

NOW BOOKING

A Cure for the Cacophony

‘‘FUTURE DAYS,’’ 1973‘‘The krautrock

legends Can make music that sounds like both the future

and the past, but not the present.’’

‘‘METAL HURLANT’’ ‘‘This comics anthology has featured a range of

esoteric artists, including Moebius, whose ability

as a draftsman stands up to Albrecht Dürer’s.’’

J. G. BALLARD’S BOOKS‘‘An iconoclast novelist

who was best known for ‘Empire of the Sun,’ but who was also a prolific

author of sci-fi with hallucinatory intensity.’’

‘‘STALKER,’’ 1979‘‘A haunting piece of

Russian cinema, this is unbelievably beautiful

and obscurely frightening — like watching the final moments of mankind.’’

‘‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,’’ 1968

‘‘Possibly the most complete work of science

fiction in any medium, this film contains almost

magical intelligence.’’

The British novelist Alex Garland makes his directorial debut with ‘‘Ex Machina,’’ a sci-fi parable that he also wrote about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Here, the screenwriter

of ‘‘28 Days Later,’’ ‘‘Never Let Me Go’’ and ‘‘Dredd’’ on his five favorite genre offerings.

Life in the big city can get overwhelming, which is why Beijing’s five-star Rosewood hotel, situated among the bustling bars and hustling bankers

of the Chaoyang District, opened Sense in April, for guests who wanted to sleep where they spa. In addition to 11 treatment rooms, there are five suites

overlooking the skyline — all decorated with limestone, dark wood and a serene palette of muted beige and gray — so that guests can opt to enjoy the extensive menu of treatments in the privacy of their own palatial accommodations. From

QR3,170 a night, rosewoodhotels.com — DANIEL SCHEFFLER

The glass-domed swimming pool at the Rosewood hotel in Beijing.Top left: a sketch

of the Whitney bag by Renzo Piano.

Right: the new Whitney museum. C

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Blueprint for a BagOn May 1, the Whitney Museum of American Art in

Manhattan reopened at a new downtown space designed by Renzo Piano. To commemorate the unveiling, the

architect and Max Mara have created a limited-edition bag that mirrors the steel ribbing and graphic lines of the

building’s bluish-gray facade. From QR4,190, maxmara.com.

Lookout This and That


THE SCENE

From left: Karl Zahn’s Cora, QR46,600; mobiles from his

Landscape series, from QR7,650; Bounce

shade and lamp, QR12,380.

Burpee NightsIn the City That Never Sleeps, circuit training has overthrown circuit

parties as the preferred path to endorphin-fueled transcendence. The 19th-century cathedral that once housed the notorious N.Y.C. nightclub

the Limelight is now home to a David Barton Gym, complete with a turntable overlooking the nave. The success of SoulCycle — owed in part to

its dark rooms and pounding music — has spawned offshoots, like NoHo’s Mile High Run Club, a cheekily named studio devoted to cardio. And Equinox

gyms around the country mark their namesake biannually with a party ‘‘designed to jumpstart your high-performance lifestyle,’’ while the

location in Brooklyn Heights recently hosted a Deep House Yoga night with shots of pressed lemon, cayenne and turmeric. davidbartongym.com;

soul-cycle.com; milehighrunclub.com; equinox.com — ZEKE TURNER

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

Every morning since President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the artist Rob Pruitt has made a small portrait of the commander in chief.

The idea was born of his optimism following Obama’s win: ‘‘It seemed odd to not have any place to put that energy.’’ More than 2,000 of these images were on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. ‘‘The Obama Paintings,’’ mocadetroit.org — DAN HYMAN

Obamarama

From top: installation of ‘‘The Obama Paintings’’; Rob Pruitt; a detail of one of his drawings.

The furniture designer Karl Zahn is known for his animal-shaped wooden toys and delicate mobiles, but for his recent

collaboration with the Brooklyn-based lighting company Roll & Hill he has created two new fixtures: Bounce, a folded disc,

suspended from the ceiling, which casts a soft glow projected from a lamp

positioned underneath, and Cora, a pendant with eight LEDs and a bronze finish. The pieces debuted at the Milan

Furniture Fair and reflect Zahn’s interest in earthy, elemental materials such as walnut

and brass. karlzahn.com — TOM DELAVAN

Nice Lights

BY DESIGN

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Lookout This and That

Disco skating rink in Miami BeachMore than two decades after relaunching the Delano, Ian Schrager has returned with the new Miami Beach Edition and its Studio 54-inspired nightclub, which houses a 2,000-square-foot ice-skating rink with floor-to-ceiling windows facing Collins Avenue. editionhotels.com

An edible golf course on St. KittsOpened in December with wooden guest houses set on 400 acres, Belle Mont Farm is introducing the world’s first pick-as-you-play golf course, designed by the Welsh golfer Ian Woosnam and dotted with tropical fruit trees. Signs indicate what’s ripe for snacking; caddies, clued in to each season’s harvest, provide directions to the best bounty. bellemontfarm.com

Kickboxing classes in PhuketTo complement its sleek

villas overlooking the Andaman Sea — as well as

the 30 elevated suites with private infinity pools

coming later this year — Thailand’s Sri Panwa

Phuket has a bamboo-lined kickboxing ring, with a

three-day course taught by a local Muay Thai champion.

sripanwa.com

New-release films in LondonSome hotels screen classic movies,

but the Ham Yard — which also boasts a bowling alley — has gone a

step further by teaming up with the Curzon Cinemas chain to show

releases while they’re still in theaters. The 190-seat, retro-mod

space also hosts public events, from music and comedy nights to

Edinburgh Fringe previews. firmdalehotels.com — CHRISTINE AJUDUA

Rooms With Something Special

NOW BOOKING

Miuccia’s Museum OpensThe Fondazione Prada — the art branch of the legendary fashion house — opened the doors to its first permanent exhibition space in Milan earlier in April. .

Housed in a converted 1910s distillery reimagined by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, the

10-building complex currently features the work of the American artist Robert

Gober, the cheeky Surrealist best known for manipulating everyday objects: warped bathroom sinks without faucets or drains, disembodied wax-colored legs with real hair. A selection of Gober’s new and old works occupies the top three

floors of the ‘‘Haunted House,’’ now clad in 24-karat gold leaf.

fondazioneprada.org — JEFF OLOIZIA

From top: the gold-leaf facade

of the ‘‘Haunted House’’ at the

Fondazione Prada in Milan; the

designer and patron Miuccia Prada;

the artist Robert Gober’s ‘‘Untitled,’’

2009-2010.

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This and ThatLookout Qatar

Almotahajiba, the makers of the “most-loved” abayas in the country opened a flagship store for its luxury abaya brand

Almotahajiba Signature in Porto Arabia Towers at The Pearl-Qatar.Designed to cater to the modern Arab woman, Signature aims to be a leader in the traditional luxury womenswear market, offering

an exclusive range of handmade abayas, jalabiyas, sheilas, leather goods and accessories that combine exquisite designs with high-quality materials. “Signature embodies what is most

noble and accomplished in the artisan world, blending tradition, sophistication and bespoke luxury to deliver an unmatched level of elegance and personalization in Arab womenswear,” says Aly

Delawar, the CEO of Al Siddiqi Holding, the company behind Almotahajiba. According to Tomasz Miszczuk, senior designer at

Al Siddiqi, this venture has been the most prestigious for the house. “From the design of the showroom,"

says Miszczuk. "to the touch and feel, and finally the packaging of the product, every detail is executed with love." — SINDHU NAIR

Wadha Al Hajri, Qatar’s Phoebe Philo, the only designer whose designs have been exhibited outside the country, and who is known

for her straight, even austere, cuts in stern blacks and serene whites has revealed her new collection.

“I refer to it as my muse collection, because it is inspired by the beauty, femininity and strong personality of one of my favorite

artists,” says Al Hajri of the starting point for her Autumn/Winter 2015-16 collection. The designer has returned to her signature black

and white, to create a minimalist collection cut from luxurious velvet, silk gazar, organza, crepe and neoprene. For fall, Al Hajri

also focused on more fitted shapes with a hint of masculine tailoring. Her signature hand-embroidered geometric patterns and latticework cut-outs are part of the designer’s ongoing exploration

of unique surface embellishments and techniques. — SINDHU NAIR

More Than Just Abayas

Masculine Monochromes from Wadha

TRADITIONAL MOTIFSWadha Al Hajri's new collection

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Signature collection.


Scaling New Territories of Timekeeping

Sara Al Obaidly is delighted to have been chosen as one of the first women photographers to be sent to Turkey to capture its landscapes

and to gain a deep insight into the country as part of the Qatar Turkey 2015 Year of Culture organized by Qatar Museums. The

Qatar Turkey exchange program continues to build on a legacy of connecting people through cultural activities. “In terms of my visual interpretation of Turkish people, what became apparent throughout the journey was the nation's love and adoration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revered founder of Turkey, named

Atatürk, translated as ‘Father of Turks’. His portrait hangs in every city, town and village we came across,” says Al Obaidly. “He

remains the national hero, and from my journey it seems as though he certainly will be for generations to come.” Al Obaidly was accompanied by Saleh Al Marri on the Turkish expedition.

Accustomed to working alone with a clear vision in mind of what she is looking to achieve, the concept of working in a group was definitely a step outside of the familiar for Al Obaidly. “However,

being exposed to the same location as my fellow photographer only motivated me to think outside the box, pushing me with each frame I took,” says Al Obaidly. “With this in mind, I gained immeasurable

insight into myself as an artist and as a creator.” A journey of self-realization and confidence building, Al Obaidly learned what it is that draws her to a location or a subject. “Approaching a stranger

for a portrait or asking to stop the car on a busy road to jump out and take a shot, as a reaction to a gut feeling that the particular

location just couldn’t pass me by,” she says of her enriching journey. In September 2015 an exhibition in Qatar will showcase the works of

Qatari and Turkish photographers. — SINDHU NAIR

The Turkish Window

It has been a little over seven years since the British jewelry house Graff’s foray into the world of watchmaking. Judging from this year’s response at Baselworld, the storied jeweler has hit all the right notes. Naturally, diamonds and jewels feature heavily in the watch pieces; the women’s Halo collection launched this year, is a gem fiesta, incorporating sparkling stones meant to catch attention. But it is the house’s serious commitment to research and development in its watch-making manufactures that puts Graff in the big leagues. To date, Graff has to its name a stable of watches that feature high complications and movements, two of them

world firsts, including a sports watch with a 300-meter depth rating, and the thinnest flying tourbillon that is fully set with diamonds. “We try to push the

boundaries, even though we are relatively young in this industry. But our commitment gives us the legitimacy,” says Hugues Jucker, the international sales director. The decision in 2008 to seriously pursue this new territory came from a

desire to enter the men’s market, as Graff has long catered mostly to women. Still, in the Middle East, women are Graff's most important watch buyers, and the

company has a bestseller in its Butterfly watch. The house offers dress watches, technical watches, sports watches and a bespoke line. They all carry a signature

triangle crown at the noon mark. “We pass the 3-meter test. Anyone within this range will be able to spot the crown,” Jucker explains.

Graff is available at Ali bin Ali Jewellery. — DEBRINA ALIYAH

TO WATCH OUT FORGraff's Halo secret ring watch; Master Graff's structural skeletal Tourbillon.

PICTURE BOOKClockwise from right: Sara Al Obaidly

at work; the landscape and the people of Turkey through her lens.


Lookout

SOME OF LIFE’S greatest pleasures teeter on the near side of wretchedness: Brontë novels, floral scents with fecal base notes, Beethoven’s ‘‘Moonlight’’ Sonata, Monica Vitti’s face in profile. Dewy skin — plumped with moisture, luminous with blood flow — is desirable because it is so almost awful. Enough dampness and you look like someone just back from Baden-Baden; too much and you’re in amphetamine-addiction territory.

On Beauty

Not NothingAchieving dewiness — skin that glistens with moisture or glows with its own good health — is more complicated than it looks.

BY ALICE GREGORY

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Dewy skin — as seen in the recent runway presentations of Balmain, Donna Karan, Marni, Proenza Schouler and Alexander Wang — is pearlescent but not shiny, moist but not wet. There’s something old-fashioned-seeming about it — reminiscent of a pre-Max Factor era when the adjectives used to describe a woman’s beauty were adopted from the home and garden: milky, downy, rosy, lily-white. Unlike bold lips or

PURE RADIANCE A model at Giambattista Valli’s fall 2015 show, where the makeup artist Val Garland applied cream blush on top of a sheer foundation to luminescent effect.


NATURAL LIGHT From top: for spring at Alexander Wang, Diane

Kendal spritzed rosewater on the skin to prep, followed by moisturizer and

a cream foundation; another model from Alexander Wang for spring.

Products, from left: La Mer Intensive Revitalizing Mask,

QR580, lamer.com; Chantecaille Water Flower Fluid, QR260, chantecaille.com;

Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv Ultimate Diamond cream, QR1,275, esteelauder

.com; Joanna Vargas Skincare Rejuvenating Serum, QR365, spacenk

.com; SK-II Facial Treatment Mask, QR60, sk-ii.com; Dior Hydra Life Sorbet cream, QR220, dior.com; Chanel Hydra

Beauty serum, QR400, chanel.com.

smoky eyes, this is not an equal-opportunity beauty trend: Highlighters and a tinted moisturizer can really only assist a quite lucky person with an already near-perfect complexion.

As Gladys Denny Shultz wrote in her 1968 advice book, ‘‘The Successful Teen-Age Girl,’’ ‘‘dewy skin freshness’’ is ‘‘a mark of youth.’’ More girlish than womanly, it recalls adolescence, albeit according to a revisionist historian: no wrinkles, sure, but also no zits. If dewy skin has a patron saint, it’s the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, whose face seems somehow to look, even under the flash of red-carpet cameras, as though she’s positively glowing.

These days, when people talk about beauty coming from within, they’re seldom referring to the figurative light emitted from a benevolent soul. By ‘‘within’’ they mean physically inside of the body: the organic roughage in one’s gut, the Pilates-toned core. As health becomes increasingly synonymous with wealth, what counts as desirable is beginning to look less like makeup and more like a very expensive spa treatment.

Some of today’s most faddish beauty products are intended to create this sort of well-hydrated visage. Scads of female-oriented websites have issued the seemingly obligatory ‘‘Coconut Oil Is Amazing!’’ post in the past 12 months. And you’d be hard pressed to find a makeup artist who didn’t push Lait-Crème Concentré, a supple but inexpensive moisturizer from the French brand Embryolisse. Last October, when Emily Weiss, founder of the hit beauty website Into the Gloss, introduced Glossier, her new cosmetics line, she wrote a celebratory piece describing the inspiration behind the ‘‘set of core essentials.’’ The facial mist, balm, moisturizer and skin tint that made up the brand’s first foray into manufacturing and e-commerce were meant to achieve ‘‘glowy, dewy skin,’’ Weiss explained — makeup, in other words, that isn’t trying to hide anything.

Vaseline-shiny eyelids, uncolored lips without a single flake, a nacreous Cupid’s bow — these are the dewy dream’s most recurring motifs. For Donna Karan’s spring 2015 show, the makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury ‘‘pressed’’ moisturizer onto the models’ cheekbones for a ‘‘plastic, shiny effect.’’ For at-home grooming, she recommends mixing foundation with a little bit of illuminator. ‘‘You can’t have a beautiful painting without a beautiful canvas,’’ she says. ‘‘Skincare is essential.’’ Tom Pecheux agrees. He remembers Olivier

Vaseline-shiny eyelids, uncolored lips without a single flake, a nacreous Cupid’s bow — these are

the dewy dream’s most recurring motifs.

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Rousteing, the creative director of Balmain, telling him that he wanted his models to make other women jealous: ‘‘That type of natural glow on the face where you actually don’t see the makeup? It’s a very difficult thing to do.’’ If all this sounds daunting, you could also try following the advice of the late writer and editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, with her trademark combination of draconian self-sacrifice and gleefully baroque ritual, suggested that readers spray their face with bottled water. ‘‘Spritzing does moisten skin like the Irish mists and London fogs,’’ she wrote in her 1982 book ‘‘Having It All,’’ ‘‘but water evaporates quickly and can’t keep you dewy unless you keep at it.’’


Lookout

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JeanRichard 1681, QR25,122, Tourneau Time

Machine.

Watch Report

Black OutEverything on these timepieces —

from the dial and the numbers to the straps — has gone dark.

A bright idea, indeed.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEONARD GRECO


Clockwise from top left: Jimmy Choo,

QR2,165. Sacai, QR1,215. Loeffler Randall, QR820.

Rochas, QR4,190. Giuseppe Zanotti

Design, QR2,585. Stuart Weitzman, QR1,365.

Raoul, QR1,075. Fausto Puglisi, about QR10,905.

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Market Report

Bedazzled Sandals

The humble shower slide has ascended to high fashion,

with crystal beading, golden grommets and a metallic sheen.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA MCCLURE


Lookout Qatar

On Auctions

The 100-Carat ManDavid Bennett, the chairman of Sotheby’s international jewelry division,

has earned this title for his unique feat of selling seven diamonds weighing over 100 carats.

BY SINDHU NAIR

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THIS MAY, IN GENEVA, an auction titled Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels by Sotheby’s achieved a total of $160,914,902 — the highest ever total for any jewelry auction. Other highlights included a new world auction record for a ruby and the sale of an extremely rare 8.72-carat pink diamond, said to have been linked to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, niece of Napoleon I, at $15.9 million. David Bennett, the worldwide chairman of Sotheby’s international jewelry division directed that record-breaking auction.

“The sales are evidence that the market for exceptional jewels is going from strength to strength,” Bennett says. “The galleries are brimming with collectors during our exhibitions, and this has translated into lively bidding throughout the sale with global demand for the finest diamonds, gemstones and signed pieces of the very

highest order.” Not only are jewelry sales garnering interest, but new forms of auctioning are gaining popularity, too. In April, Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels sale in New York was one of the first auctions to be held through its new platform partnership with eBay, the online auction site. Of the 294 lots sold, four priced at more than $1 million were bought by online bidders, either via eBay or Sotheby’s online bidding platform, BidNow.

An authority in the field of gemstones and jewelry, Bennett is known as the “100-carat man”, having sold seven 100-carat exceptional diamonds. He has led many record-breaking auctions, including the Graff Pink, a rare 24.78 carat ‘fancy intense pink’ diamond that was sold in November 2010 for $46.2 million — the highest price ever paid for a gemstone or jewel at the time of the sale. He has presided over the sales of the collections of opera singer

CELEBRITY GEMSWith three decades of aucton history in the field of jewels and precious stones, Bennett can easily pick up new trends and interests in the market.


Maria Callas and the film star Ava Gardner and was instrumental in the sale of the collection of Gina Lollobrigida. His career highlights also includes a mishap during one of his initial auctions in Geneva when he had to project his voice across the large sales room for an entire hour when the loudspeaker system broke down. It was a process, as he recalls “rather tiring”. During a career spanning more than 35 years at Sotheby’s, Bennett has witnessed the growth of the auction market for jewelry and precious stones. Since his first auction in London in 1978, which he says “was executed with very little training”, Bennett has seen a “dramatic” change in the auction market. “Back then, it was virtually unknown for there to be a phone bid and there were very few private participants in the sale,” he says. “Just in terms of sales volume, in 1978, all of our sales in Switzerland totaled $39,120,539 while our Geneva sale in May 2015 alone was $158, 228,800,” Bennett says, “Our 2014 annual turnover worldwide in jewelry was $602 million.”

Bennett adds that the most significant change in the auction market has been the entry of private buyers into what was previously a market dominated by dealers. The turning point for the auction world was the Sotheby’s 1987 sale of the Duchess of Windsor's jewels. “The sale was the first auction to receive a truly international promotion, and it sparked off massive press attention all over the world,” Bennett says. “This resulted in unprecedented crowd queueing to get into our New York galleries for a pre-sale exhibition and a sale that

was attended by 1,200 people in Geneva, with bidders from 24 countries. The sale brought $50 million, far in excess of the pre-sale estimate of $7 million.”

After this international focus on the auction business, things went on to change drastically in the auction world and the waves of change hit even the Middle East region. “The dramatic changes in the oil industry in the 70s led directly to a significant increase in participation by clients from the Middle East in the jewelry auction business during the years that followed,” says Bennett.

“In the 90s, many large or record-breaking diamonds were sold at

auctions to buyers in the region and in the last 15 years the number of buyers based in the region has risen by 25 percent,” says Bennett.

The first 100-carat D-color, internally flawless diamond offered at auction was sold by Sotheby’s in Geneva in

November 1990 to a Middle East buyer for $12,760,000, and established the world record price for a diamond at auction. “This piece was renamed as Mouawad Splendor by its new owner, Robert Mouawad," he says.

More recently, Asians have entered the competition in the international auction market, he reveals. “Between 2006 and 2014, Asian buyers have more than

doubled in worldwide jewelry sales — from 17 percent in 2006 to 37 percent in 2014. Collectors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia, predominantly ethnic Chinese, constitute a significant proportion of buyers at auction in Hong Kong and have now extended their reach beyond to our salesrooms in Geneva and New York. The number of buyers from Greater China at Sotheby’s jewelry auctions worldwide has more than doubled in the past five years, and they are successfully acquiring some of the top pieces.”

Presiding over such landmark sales for over three decades, Bennett's experience garners bidders’ interest. “One gauges interest by understanding and appreciating very carefully their tastes,” he says. “For example, while

GOING ONCE Clockwise from top: The Sunrise Ruby; below: during the auction of the same Sunrise Ruby in Sotheby's Sale Room; a Cartier Ivresse diamond necklace.

Bennett believes that people choose gemstones, perhaps unconsciously, due to

the complex relationships between the ‘inner planets’ in their astrological chart.


On Auctions

there truly is an international market for jewelry, the sales in Geneva, New York and Hong Kong each have their own different characteristics.”

As he gained in experience, so did he develop a sense of adventure. “When I moved from London to Geneva in 1989, I decided to take some risks — for example, offering the first 100-carat D-color internally flawless diamond at the auction, which had the effect of increasing the profile of the sale,” says Bennett. “In our experience, if we offer something fine and very rare, we can create a core sale which attracts interest and attention.”

In addition to the sale of the legendary jewels of the Duchess of Windsor, some of the iconic collections Bennett has worked on includes the princely collections of Thurn und Taxis as well as the collections of H.H. Begum Sultan Mohamed Shah Aga Khan.

While auctioning is a process of marketing or selling, nothing is left to chance with longstanding expertise of specialists working in the jewelry field. “Sotheby’s regularly undertakes due diligence procedures prior to accepting works of art for sale,” he explains. “When we are offered a work, the expert carries out methodical research, which can include physical examination of the work in question, appropriate testing, checking relevant literature, exhibition history.” It also helps that jewelry is one area in

which the materials are subject to scientific analysis, for example through gemological institutes or laboratories.

While Bennett has been involved in many historical auctioning processes, some are closer to his heart. “One of the historical pieces that stand out the most for me was the legendary Beau Sancy, a truly magical stone and one of the most important historic diamonds ever to come to auction. The diamond had been owned successively by four ruling houses of Europe,” recounts Bennett. This diamond was sourced for the Royal Family of France and was worn by Marie de Medici in her crown at her

coronation as Queen Consort of Henri IV in 1610. After her death it was acquired by the House of Orange and went to England during the reign of William and Mary. Lastly, it was owned by the Hohenzollerns of Prussia. “Thus, the celebrated diamond had been the privileged witness of 400 years of European history, and its supreme historical importance was reflected in a remarkable result when it sold for $9,699,618 against an estimate of $2-4 million,” says Bennett.

While this auction had an enormous historical value, the sale of the jewels of the Duchess of Windsor in 1987 also left an impression on Bennett, “The jewels themselves were of extraordinary importance with their impeccable royal

provenance, but also because the Duke and Duchess were icons of style throughout their entire marriage, and chose and commissioned unique avant-garde designs, some of which — for example the ‘Great Cats’ by Cartier — rank among the most important and influential jewels of the 20th century,” says Bennett.

Another distinguished sale was in 2012 with the personal collection of Suzanne Belperron, who according to Bennett is the most talented and influential female jeweler of the 20th century.

This collection included some of Belperron’s most celebrated designs and very intimate items, which illustrated her style and creative virtuosity. Bennett believes that people choose gemstones, perhaps unconsciously, due to the complex relationships among the planets in their astrological chart.

While owning jewelry is a very personal decision, he feels that the most desirable are those pieces with a noble and prestigious provenance which evoke the lifestyle of the personalities who once owned them. “A notable recent example is a rare 9.75-carat vivid blue diamond pendant from the collection of Paul Mellon, which sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $32.6 million,” he says.

Bennett cannot share much about his experiences with Middle Eastern clients because of Sotheby's confidentiality policies.

“However, I can tell you that before I joined Sotheby’s, the company held the famous sale of the collection of King Farouk of Egypt in 1954 following his abdication,” he reveals. “King Farouk had an extraordinary collecting activity across a wide range of categories. The revolutionary government turned to Sotheby’s to monetize the palace collection.”

During his time at Sotheby’s, Bennett has traveled regularly to the Middle East as the region has many clients, both buyers and sellers. “Clients from Saudi Arabia, in particular, were prominent in the 90s,” he adds. One of the most recent trends that Bennett has discerned is the return of an interest in natural pearls.

Some stories confirm this belief, including those of old Qatari businessmen like Hussain Al Fardan, who is collecting pearls for his own private poearl museum. And that is a story worth waiting for.

PRECIOUS ONES Top: Cartier natural pearl necklace,sold during Sotheby's Geneva sale indicates the new interest for pearls; left: The Historic Pink Diamond sold at Geneva.

Lookout Qatar

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BENNETT’S TIPS FOR COLLECTING JEWELRY

For those new to the market or restricted by price, here are my top four tips on collecting jewelry:

• Focus on the highest quality

pieces — not necessarily the biggest stones.

• Trust your taste: if you like something and feel a connection with it, there’s a good chance someone else will too, if you come to sell it.

• Ask for certificates to accompany the jewel, which attests its quality and origin.

• Remember that important or historical provenance can greatly increase the value of a piece of fine jewelry.


WHEN BOTTEGA VENETA reopened its doors in Villaggio Mall last fall, it was an understated classy affair done very much in tune with the house’s proclivity for quiet luxury. The excitement revolved around one Napa tote that glimmered through a technical construction of overlapping layers of leather, resulting in irregular streaks of color and texture. The one-of-a-kind Monalisa Glimmer bag was the result of the house’s signature intrecciato technique, with innovations in color and texture, and aptly rung in the reintroduction of the brand to the Qatari market.

By allowing the products, which reference craftsmanship, to take center stage within the universe of Bottega Veneta, the company's creative director Tomas Maier, has completely transformed a once-declining business into an institution that is now synonymous with Italian leather expertise. The turnover is so thorough that not many actually remember the flashy and logo-driven aesthetics of a pre-Maier Bottega Veneta. When Maier was tasked to inject new life into the house in 2001, his vision was to restore its legacy of skilled craftsmanship and understated design. After all, Bottega Veneta, which simply means “Venetian Store” in Italian, was founded on the quality production of leather goods by Vincenza, Italy's craftsmen. In a

methodical meets Zen kind of way, Maier went about stripping away the stereotypical glitz and glamor associated with luxury fashion and realigned Bottega Veneta to its origins. “I am proud to say this vision has been realized. In fact, I would say that we have even raised the level of craftsmanship,” he says.

Maier’s vision lives in the 18th century Villa Schroeder-Da Porto, restored and reconstructed as the house’s new atelier, which began operations two years ago. Located some 18 kilometers from Vicenza in Montebello Vicentino, the villa is surrounded by a 55,000-square meter park and is now home to more than 300 craftsmen and staff. But this is no ordinary trophy asset or showhorse that has been erected to claim legitimacy to the trend in reviving la egacy in craftsmanship. Maier understands the soul driving the art lies in the people who create the products for the house, all of whom were consulted and involved in the establishment of this new atelier. “These days, hand-craftsmanship is one of the greatest luxuries,” he says. Through joint committees, surveys and site visits, the staff had a say in creating the new workspace that they now occupy. A shuttle bus service, ample parking space, traveling allowances, an in-house company restaurant, and recreational services make up a perks list that sounds like it better suits a Silicon Valley tech

BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

Bottega Veneta goes back to its roots of pure craftsmanship, celebrating raw material, reviving its legacy and

strengthening the link between the craft and its locality.

The Hand that CreatesLegacy

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giant than a traditional atelier. The structure itself is an extension of Maier’s philosophy on

sustainability and the creation of products that last a lifetime. Construction materials and resources are extracted within a limited range of the original villa, energy comes from 1,200 square meters of solar panels and water from aquifers is used for acclimatization. More than three-quarters of the existing building structures were restored, and the surrounding historical park was studied to recover the pre-existing nature, including the surrounding plants. Largely based on a university campus model, the area boasts expansive outdoor and open areas intended for multi-purpose use, and areas to encourage collaboration and relations between staff. The atelier is now the first in the fashion sector to have obtained a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification at the platinum level from the Green Building Council, in recognition of its environmental sustainability.

However, the house’s commitment to this project runs deeper than a sense of corporate responsibility; it is a recognition of the link between craft and locality. “Craftsmanship at its highest

“It is just as important for a culture to preserve its craft traditions, as it is to

preserve great works of arts or historic architecture,” says Maier.

BESPOKE MOMENTS Clockwise from left: The intrecciato technique of tightly woven cross-hatched design; craftsmen at work experimenting and improvising on materials and techniques; the restored and reconstructed Villa Schroeder-Da Porto is the house’s new atelier, the first fashion house to have obtained LEED certification.

level is deeply rooted in its place. The artisans who produce our leather goods in Italy bring to their work generations of local tradition and a shared sensibility that can’t be replicated elsewhere,” Maier explains.

Bottega Veneta’s expertise has always been the intrecciato technique of tightly woven cross-hatched design, using the light and pliable glove leather of the Veneto region, making it a pioneer of supple handbags in the 1960s while others were still producing rigid and boxy designs. The technique has, over the years, been further developed through Maier’s work with the craftsmen and has become the foremost signature of the house’s work. “The intrecciato is evidence of the human hand,” Maier says. The designer’s first bag ever

for the house, the Cabat, was made using a specially developed two-sided intrecciato weave that resulted in a seamless tote.

At the atelier, the continuous process of innovation paints a bright future for the traditional craft, just as Maier had first achieved through the making of

the Cabat. The birth of unique colors, like of the Napa Glimmer tote, comes from experimentation and research, including testing rooms that score the durability of the leathers.

“It’s what keeps the job so interesting. We are always developing innovative materials that the artisans will experiment with using traditional techniques, or an adaptation, as needed,” Maier explains. The atelier is now also home to La Scuola dei Maestri Pellettieri di Bottega Veneta, a craftsman school established by the brand a decade ago, to revive an experience similar to traditional long-term apprenticeships. “We are nothing without our

artisans, and any longevity we would expect is dependent on our ability to train new generations in these age-old techniques,” Maier says. Beyond the formal training that could possibly lead to a career within the house’s atelier, the school also recently collaborated with University IUAV of Venice to offer a three-month course in advanced handbag design and product development — an invaluable immersion into the knowledge and artisanal know-how particular to the Veneto region. “It is just as important for a culture to preserve its craft traditions, as it is to preserve great works of arts or historic architecture,” he adds.

Maier’s nearly 15-year tenure has extended the house’s craftsmanship reach into fragrances, jewelry, watches, ready-to-wear and furniture. As you would wear one of Bottega Veneta’s minimally-designed, but luscious leather-fabricated dresses, you could also work on a custom-made desk that is surfaced with intrecciato weaves. The intermediary element between them all is less about the prestige of a brand name, and more of what Maier constitutes foremost as luxury: understated, personal, rooted in rare materials and superb craftsmanship.

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LegacyLookout Qatar

Maison Margiela Artisanal coat.

In Fashion

The Enigma of Haute Couture

These clothes couldn’t look any more modern — dramatic silhouettes, dark colors,

floral appliqués — yet they are created in the most traditional manner. Is custom-

made fashion a treasure or a relic?

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTON PERLAKISTYLED BY TRACEY NICHOLSON

TEXT BY ALEXANDER FURY

Quality In Fashion

Dior Haute Couture coat, dress and boots.


Chanel Haute Couture top.


Quality In Fashion

HAUTE COUTURE IS the great anachronism of 21st-century fashion. While the rest of the

industry speeds up, live streams and sells online, couture plods along slowly, methodically, stuck in its ways. Indeed, speed — or the lack thereof — is its defining characteristic. It is about clothes that take days to assemble, months to embroider, all adding up to thousands of hours of concentrated labor. In essence, it’s old-fashioned. That’s not just part of its charm: It is its very reason for existence.

The name literally translates as high sewing or needlework, and the craft was established by Charles Frederick Worth to cater to the court of Empress Eugénie in the 19th century. To support it, a specialized industry of embroiderers, milliners, glove and button makers and plumassiers (working with feathers, as that evocative French appellation suggests) developed in Paris.

Buying these handcrafted clothes today ties you back to that tradition. It’s like purchasing a custom-made piece of history — new money, old clothes — as dresses are made in the same manner as they were in the Second Empire. To maintain that 19th-century hub of industry, the house of Chanel financially supports much of it. The different artisans are held under an umbrella company, owned

by the house, named Paraffection — ‘‘for the love of.’’ For love rather than for money.

Often, when I’m at the fashion shows in Paris, I wonder what the point of it all is. You feel this especially when something particularly hideous passes by and you ask yourself who would ever want to dress like that. Couture is different. You wonder who could dress like that given the cost, which, as the man-hours suggest, is steep. Yet it makes virtually no money: the profit

on clothes is said to be around 1 percent or less. During its golden era, following Christian Dior’s New Look of

1947, couture catered to around 20,000 clients worldwide. Today, an optimistic estimate of that number is in the low thousands.

Who are these customers? ‘‘You think old people,” Donatella Versace says. ‘‘Ladies who stay at home all day and drink tea. It’s

not at all like this.’’ According to Versace, her new customers come from India, Russia and Brazil. Dior and Chanel send their collections to New York and the Far East for clients to view; this February, for the first time, Chanel also showcased the collection to select clients

in London. Dubai is next. Then, perhaps, Korea, says Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel. ‘‘In every collection we have one, two, three new customers,’’ he states. ‘‘But our objective is not to get more customers. It is more about the perfect service.’’

There’s plenty of shadowy conjecture here. Few people are willing to talk figures when it comes to couture, other than to relay the awe-inspiring hours of labor required — Valentino even publishes them in the house’s show program. No costs are quoted, although there are few figures flying around: Melania Trump’s 2005 Christian Dior wedding gown, for instance, cost between $100,000 and $200,000.

What do you get for that money? Well, as Pavlovsky explains, you get perfection. The clothing is constructed to a client’s individual measurements — devotees say that they fit like nothing else. ‘‘The insides of things in the Chanel collection are so beautiful,’’ says Amanda Harlech, a creative consultant to Karl Lagerfeld and a couture client herself. ‘‘There are hidden dresses, all embroidered, extraordinary feather embroidery . . . instead of it being stitches, it’s actually feathers.’’ Harlech suggests that the ‘‘impossibility’’ of couture is part of its superiority.

That impossibility is, perhaps, the reason couture exists: simply because it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t have a place in the 21st century, when ready-to-wear has superficially co-opted its dazzling techniques and its sumptuous materials. But, in fact, couture exists because it represents true luxury. It’s about the luxury of someone else caring, about people devoting days to creating something that makes you not only look, but feel, better. As Harlech explains that the simplest Chanel suit takes two people two weeks to make, entirely by hand, I remember the adage that time is the ultimate luxury. That’s why haute couture thrives in the new landscape of fast fashion. It represents the value of having the time to stop and smell the roses, or sew them onto a Chanel wedding gown, as 15 women did, this past December. That took a month.

Haute couture is old-fashioned.

That’s not just part of its charm: It

is its very reason for existence.

Giambattista Valli Haute Couture top.


Giorgio Armani Privé dress.

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The ThingIn honor of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who in 1837 founded

the famed jewelry house that bears his name, Tiffany & Co. has created the new CT60 calendar

watch, which carries his initials. The number references the phrase he coined, ‘‘a New York

minute,’’ which he believed contained 60 seconds of possibility. Based on a design made famous by

President Roosevelt when he wore it to the Yalta Conference, this model is pure, sleek elegance. Gold

numerals made from shimmering metallic powder are set into an 18-karat rose-gold case and attached to a black alligator strap lined in calfskin. The sapphire crystal back reveals the mechanics, decorated with Art Deco motifs borrowed from the 1939 steel store doors. In a numbered edition of 60, this is part of a

collection of four new timepieces, the company’s first in more than 20 years. It pays homage to the

opportunities embedded in time. Tiffany & Co. CT60 calendar watch, QR69,180. — BROOKE BOBB

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOANNA MCCLURE


Another Thing Fashion house Ralph & Russo dedicated to the most luxurious fashion, presented the fan shoe, part of a new range designed to complement its couture. Its

creative director, Tamara Ralph, conceived this entirely handmade collection while designing a ball

gown. Its inspiration stems from the intricate Arabesque detailing of the Alhambra palaces. Shaped

into geometric cutouts yet fabulously feminine, the design reflects the palaces’ pointed arches. It

accentuates the ankles and curves along the calves to visually elongate the legs.

The shoe is available in black satin, either plain (£1,100/QR6,210) or studded with Hematite

crystals (£1,600/QR9,035); The python range (£1,600/QR9,035), seen here in pink and gold, also comes in

black, burgundy and pastel yellow. The collection is available at Ralph & Russo, Harrods

or via ralphandrusso.com.

Quality Qatar

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WORKING IN IRON WIRE the diameter of a clothes hanger, Southwest France-based sculptor Marie Christophe — whose clients include Hermès, Dior, Roger Vivier and the interior designer Jean-Louis Deniot — fashions animals, light fixtures, fanciful birdcages and other seemingly gossamer objets. Some pieces are beaded, like an elephant with crystal-strewn butterfly wings for ears that is destined for a show at Creel and Gow on New York’s Upper East Side in September. Others are flat, like line drawings come to life. ‘‘Her work is like she is: light, airy and extremely poetic,’’ says Roger Vivier’s creative director Bruno Frisoni, who’s commissioned numerous store decorations from Christophe — and in whose honor she created a pair of ladies’ legs, the soles

of their heels reading ‘‘Roger Vivier’’ in loopy wire cursive.The playful sophistication of Christophe’s work is reflected in

the eclectic 18th-century residence she shares with her husband, the interior designer Emmanuel Fenasse, in Gers, an agricultural region west of Toulouse otherwise known for its foie gras. An idyllic lane winds up to the two-story, pale-stucco manor, its faded robin’s-egg-blue shutters the stuff of South of France postcards. Nearly 30 acres of gently rolling pastureland is punctuated by a small stone structure that once served as an aviary. Next to the main house is a massive linden tree under which the couple and their two sons, Joseph, 13, and Raoul, 7, take their meals when it’s warm, about half the year. There are copious old roses, lilac bushes,

Home and Work

A Delicate BalanceIn rural France, Marie Christophe, a sculptor of whimsical objects, finds a home for her urbane sensibilities.

BY ALEXANDRA MARSHALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY THIBAULT MONTAMAT

STEEL BUTTERFLY Clockwise from left: Marie Christophe in a hallway of her home in Gers, France; a bike made from her signature sculpted wire; preparatory watercolors.

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a large patch of wildflowers that lures clusters of butterflies, and a row of cherry trees that, on a recent fine April day, had just burst into bloom.

The room Christophe has chosen as her atelier looks out onto much of this pastoral perfection, enhanced by an

imposing, centuries-old cedar. Inside, a long, narrow table hints at the billiards room

it once was. Slower to reveal themselves are Christophe’s exquisite

sculptures, so delicate that even the larger pieces tend

to adorn rather than dominate a fully furnished room. A table lamp

casts an encompassing light while barely seeming to be there; a stylized

skeleton dangling from an Artemide task light is decorative without being the least bit distracting.

French country houses, with their wood beams and terra-cotta tile floors,

often inspire city mice to try their hand at rustic shabby chic, but Christophe and Fenasse, who transplanted themselves here from Paris a year ago, are having none of it. Though there is some roughed-up toile de jouy in a small sitting room off the kitchen, most of the antiques throughout the house are midcentury or later, thanks to Fenasse’s parents, who were Knoll distributors in his birthplace of Algeria.

Christophe jokes that one visitor has dubbed their renovation très bobo, the derisive French term for bohemian hipster, and it’s true that I recognize many of the codes: 1950s brass flower sconces picked up at the Porte de Vanves and Saint-Ouen flea markets, graphic metallic Cole & Son wallpaper in a guest room and a sleek downstairs bathroom with the same ceramic light switches you’d find in, say, Soho House. Thanks to the structure’s placement on the edge of a meadow, light is also a recurring element, whether throwing stars off a disco ball onto the

blush-pink walls of the living room or streaming through French doors into the family’s wide,

contemporary kitchen, its simple wood cabinets and stacks of colorful ceramics giving it a whiff of Scandinavia.Working in wire followed naturally from Christophe’s

progression through art school, where she first studied drawing and then sculpture before blending the two disciplines in scribble-

like wire objects that grew more complex over time. Discovered by Jean-Louis Dumas, the erstwhile artistic director and chairman of Hermès, at a group art exhibition in Paris in 1996, she was soon after commissioned to construct life-size horses for the company’s Beverly Hills outpost, a seal of approval whose impact is still felt.

These days, Christophe returns to Paris frequently, bunking in a studio the couple own near the Rue Montorgueil. After all, it would be unjust for the dozens and dozens of Roger Vivier and Bruno Frisoni shoes that line her canary-yellow closet to lie fallow. ‘‘I have regular meetings for work, and I have priorities that are a little less professional but still important, like lunch or dinner with Bruno and a little bit of shopping at Le Bon Marché!’’ she explains, adding that it hasn’t always been easy to get friends down for visits. More difficult to understand is why they’d ever want to leave.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY Clockwise from right: Christophe’s son Raoul in his sea-foam green

bedroom, with one of the artist’s Bottle lamps; a Bee sconce for

Dior; the Swans chandelier from 2010; a pair of legs dangling in the atelier.

LIGHT TOUCH Fashioning a new work by hand.

THINK PINK A Christophe chandelier adorns a sitting room done in faded toile de jouy.

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Arena Home and Work


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IT’S BEEN MORE THAN 300 YEARS since the last permanent artwork was commissioned in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, originally designed by legendary royal landscaper, André le Nôtre. Amid the succession of terraces, pools, parterres and perspectives that comprise the French formal gardens, lies the poetic, fairy tale-like Water Theatre grove, a location which was once the venue for parties, performances and concerts during the reign of King Louis XIV. Closed to visitors since 1990 after a devastating storm, May saw its grand reopening after a major makeover by the respected landscape architect Louis Benech and the contemporary glass artist Jean-Michel Othoniel following their winning entry in an international competition, with construction work beginning in May

2013. Breathing new life into the 1.5-hectare, fountain-filled wooded grove, the pair delved into its celebrated past and infused a contemporary feel into a location where the spirit of the Sun King still remains.

Louis XIV was a king who was well ahead of his time, perpetually calling on the skills of the greatest craftsmen and artists to create the monumental work that is Versailles — a hotbed for creativity and creation — in proclamation of his glory. Othoniel was adamant about paying homage to the past while celebrating the present, saying, “What’s important is to show how it is possible for an artist today to create a link with the past. I’m an artist who takes inspiration from the past and brings a new form to it.” A work of epic proportions,

On Sculpture

Glass Ballet The French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel is modernizing the gardens of the Palace of

Versailles with his monumental and joyful glass fountain sculptures.

BY NINA STARR

THE ARTISTIC VIGILJean-Michel Othoniel (center) with his artisans at work at the

glass factory.


Arena Qatar On Sculpture

Othoniel’s three massive gilded fountain sculptures for the grove’s ponds — his most extensive and challenging artwork to date — are made of 1,751 bowling ball-size blown-glass orbs (where each orb weighs between four to eight kilograms and took five days of work to complete), 22,000 sheets of gold leaf and custom-made piping and nozzles, and required 14 months of production. Titled “Les Belles Danses” (The Beautiful Dances), the sculptures feature loops and arabesques composed of these blue and gold glass spheres, evoking the body in movement, amplified by water jets. They were directly inspired by the ballets hosted by Louis XIV, the calligraphic floor pattern notations in the book L’Art de Décrire la Danse (The Art of Describing Dance) written by Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1701 to help the king remember court dance steps and Le Nôtre’s famous embroidery parterres replicating those found on the king’s garments.

In a way Othoniel’s sculptures show the Sun King dancing on water. “The figure of King Louis XIV is really the subject of the whole garden, depicting his power and evoking his divine dimension,” says Othoniel. “In my work, I often evoke the body, a symbolic absent body. My imperative is to speak of Louis XIV in a contemporary manner. The formal relation between dance and gardens as written about in earlier scriptures, are an obvious source of inspiration. There is the evocation of a joyous, leaping dance, a triple-meter dance with convolutions and ricochets. I redrew these elements to stage the king’s body. It seemed natural to place my sculptures on water, as Louis Benech’s pools are a contemporary evocation of the theater in the ancient grove.”

Depending on the hue of the sky, “Les Belles Danses” transforms from the dramatic, like a monster emerging from the sea, to the meditative, like a pagoda on water. The sculptures are the result of the expertise of a team of 70, including glassmakers, metalworkers, engineers and gilders, just as Versailles was built as a collaboration between the greatest architects and artists, in a dialogue among numerous creative disciplines. Having previously worked on projects with architects Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel and Kengo Kuma, Othoniel discloses, “I love that as an artist, you can get in touch with other artists and do projects together.”

“For the unveiling of the Water Theatre grove, we worked with the French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who created a special

ballet for the opening and I designed the costumes,” says Othoniel. “I also work with writers to illustrate their books. It’s important for an artist today to connect with other artists in different fields.”

No stranger to installing his works outdoors, whether giant necklaces suspended in the gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, the Villa Medici in Rome or the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Othoniel’s works form an intimate bond with nature, becoming one with the colors, shapes, scents and seasons. Nonetheless, he also enjoys exhibiting in galleries and museums. “I love both and I try to connect with different people and cultures, like with my installations in Korea, Japan, Singapore and the U.S.,” he says. “It’s not just about the French talking to the French. My work is very personal and unique, but it should talk to the public. That’s the goal today for an artist: to be local and global. This is the big change that has happened in less than 10 years in the art world: globalization. You have to be really unique and also spread your ideas to different cultures.”

There is an inherent duality to Othoniel’s pieces. While concerned about the durability of materials used in a piece that is meant to last for years, he also aims to convey a sense of fragility and delicacy. “What appears to be very light is actually very heavy; what looks simple is actually very complex,” says Othoniel. “So you have this sort of double feeling about it, which I love. I want people to be energized and joyous when they look at my work. It’s very important to bring hope to the world because I feel it is being abandoned with wars, globalization and climate change. My goal is also to bring beauty. Othoniel speaks about his Asian experience and how beauty is linked to meditation and the sacred. “This has really helped me to see my work in another way, to see that beauty can bring you to another level and towards the idea of the sacred — not religious — but of how you can escape the world through beauty and I really love that,” he says.

The first time I met Othoniel was at the Art Basel in Miami in December 2014, when architect Peter Marino had opened his retrospective “One Way: Peter Marino” with a mural commissioned from him to adorn the entrance to the Bass Museum. Now in his airy Parisian studio, in the trendy Marais area, complete with a rooftop

DANCING ON THE GROUND Clockwise from right: 'Kokoro' in

Tokyo; 'The Beautiful Dances' fountain sculptures for the Water Theater Grove

in the Garden of the Palace of Versailles; "Contrepoint" exhibition in

2004 at Musée du Louvre, Paris.


introducing glass into his work the following year. He had discovered obsidian (a jet-black volcanic glass) and began working with CIRVA, a glass research centre in Marseille. “What I like about glass is that it’s a very basic material,” he says. “It’s something everybody has had an experience with, almost like an emotion. It’s not sophisticated, unlike crystal or

precious stones; it’s something you have a direct relation to.”

From 1996, Othoniel’s works started being installed in landscapes and in 2000 he completed his first public-sector commission, transforming the entrance of the Paris metro station Palais Royal —Musée du Louvre, into the bauble-decorated “Kiosque des Noctambules”. In 2003, he exhibited blown-glass forms at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and, the following year, he created his first freestanding necklaces for the Louvre. The retrospective ‘My Way’ was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2011, then at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Macau Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2013, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo commissioned the permanent installation, “Kin no Kokoro”, for the Mohri Garden.

Today, Othoniel works with glassblowers Salviati in Murano and Matteo Gonet in Basel that use the Venetian technique, and glass has become his signature, as he crafts oversized hand-blown spheres and strings

them together like pearls to form necklaces, knots or flowers. “The necklace connects you directly to your own body,” explains Othoniel. “You have the desire to wear it, but can’t. I love to play with attraction and repulsion. There’s also the idea of the sacred because of the beads that are used. The knot plays with the idea of movement. The flower is about finding beauty. It’s not flamboyant; it’s the idea of how a small, discreet thing from nature can talk to you, how a sense of wonder can come from reality. It’s important to tell people that you can find beauty in reality.” That is one of the messages that Othoniel wants to convey through his work. Some may call Othoniel’s work decorative but that’s a label he fights against. this is

terrace that overlooks the Picasso Museum, and also offers glimpses of the top of the Centre Pompidou, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur and the Bastille. Othoniel sketches here alone every morning, despite the dependence on computer technology in the creation of his sculptures, Before his team of 10 arrives in the afternoon and they work together. Adept at rallying people together, he succeeded in penetrating the elite circle of glassblowers in Venice. “It took me 10 years to convince them to work for me,” says Othoniel. “It’s part of my work to build synergies around me. I see myself in the role of an orchestra conductor. I want to be part of the construction and see how the artisans blow glass. The sensuality of the manufacturing process is important to me.”

Born in 1964 in Saint-Étienne, Othoniel graduated in sculpture in 1988. “I was very lucky, although I’m not from an artistic family,” Othoniel says. “In the 70s, there were no art schools really in France and it was not very democratic: it was if your father was a painter, then you became a painter. But I had the chance to be in a city that had a fantastic contemporary art museum. It was one of the first in France. They invited artists to create installations and performances. Tony Cragg and Joseph Beuys came and I had the chance to meet Cragg when he was 20 and I was seven. For me, as a young child, it was really a window of hope; it was a way to escape the reality of Saint-Étienne, which was a poor city.”

It was through the museum that Othoniel discovered his passion for art and decided then that he wanted to be a part of this world. He also realized that it was not easy, but he had a will to work hard. “ I had the chance to start when art was not linked to money. You were an artist not because you wanted to be rich and famous but because it was important to you to be an artist. I was fortunate to meet a lot of artists who became my friends, to enter important galleries, to have connections with good museums and to have collectors who are genuine art lovers and have a very emotional relationship to art. Luck is important in the art world.” Othoniel began his career in the early 90s with sculptures made of wax or sulphur, which he presented at the Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, before

A TRIBUTE IN TEARS Clockwise from left: “Bottle of Tears” in which each tear-filled container houses a floating object from Othoniel's personal artistic world — needles, hooks, suns, stars; “Le Bateau de Larmes” or “Boat of Tears”, was made from a boat recovered by Othoniel on a Miami beach that was built by Cuban boat people who fled poverty and dictatorship; 'Kokoro' in Tokyo


probably because the use of vibrant hues in sculpture is uncommon, as sculptors have difficulty with color and tend to favor browns, blacks, grays and whites through the use of stone and metal. But Othoniel establishes precise limits around his choice of color, only working with shades that have strong meanings in different cultures — like pink for the body, red for blood and blue for the sea — without overstepping limits that would label his work as ornamental. He describes how his art has evolved over the past 30 years: “In the beginning, I was just in my own world. Now for the past 15 years, I’ve learned to talk to the public and to bring them with me into my vision of the world.”

“The Versailles project arrived at the right time,” he says. “I’m at a stage where I have found my own language and can communicate through my art. I’m not doing this project for myself, but for others.”

“In the beginning, I was just in my own world. Now for

the past 15 years, I’ve learnt to talk to the public and to

bring them with me into my vision of the world.”

A'ROUND' THE WORLD Clockwise from top: “Monumental Sculptures” exhibition in 2014 at Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong; “My Way” exhibition in 2012 at Brooklyn Museum New York; and at Hara Museum Tokyo; Kiosque des Noctambules, giving commutors a breathing space; “Coureonne de la Nuit," Strasbourg.

Arena Qatar On Sculpture


On Art

A Ticket to Other LivesGregarious and passionate, the photographer Aparna Jayakumar has

made Doha her new home and hopes the city will serve as a springboard to explore the region and document the lives of its people.

BY AYSWARYA MURTHY PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY APARNA JAYAKUMAR

APARNA JAYAKUMAR’S creative subjects proclaim her penchant for humanism, though that doesn't necessarily come from her training in psychology, she says. Rather, she attributes this interest to her years as a student in some of Mumbai’s more well-known left-leaning colleges. “Having studied under the likes of Palagummi Sainath, it’s only natural that a level of socio-consciousness and awareness set in quite early,” she says. And Jayakumar’s growing love for the camera helped her focus these energies and gave her a unique perspective on the lives of those she photographed, while living vicariously through

the spectrum of society. She found herself in a solitary bubble that encased her in a moment, a time and place. “My camera is my access to the world, my ticket to meet different kinds of people, from taxi drivers to movie stars,” says Jayakumar. “So many people just let you into their lives when you say you want to take their pictures. For me it’s important to inhabit different kinds of worlds and photography gives me that opportunity.” Ever since she started shooting with her first camera, a Nikon FM10 that was a gift from her mother when she turned 19, the people of Mumbai became her constant muse. “As a city girl

THE SOLITARY PHOTOGRAPHER"My camera is my access to the world, my ticket to meet different kinds of people. So many people just let you into their lives when you say you want to take their picture."

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On Art

MUMBAI MUSE “Goodbye Padmini” maps

the story of Mumbai through the legacy of Premier

Padmini taxis.

Arena Qatar


"As a city girl growing up in such a crowded city, I am not used to empty spaces and

don’t know what to do with them."

THE DECISIVE MOMENT Selected works from Jayakumar's various projects:.

Clockwise from top: “Nowhere Land” at a Bollywood film set intended to recreate an Angolan hamlet;

“Goodbye Padmini”; Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor in the publicity still for the film “Mausam”.


growing up in such a crowded city, I am not used to empty spaces and don’t know what to do with them,” she laughs.

Meanwhile, Jayakumar’s media and film training was rushing her along another route, rather inescapable in Mumbai — Bollywood. “Through the course of working in advertising film production and commissioned shoots, I ended up in film set photography, a kind of halfway house for me,” says Jayakumar. It was her job to shadow the cinematographer, and shoot stills that one couldn't just grab from the video — capturing the right moments both on and off screen, shooting the cast while they were in costume and in the vein of the film, to stumble upon that defining moment. For instance, Jayakumar says, the

poster for the Academy award-nominated “Salaam Bombay” was shot by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala on the set, a candid still of the kids goofing around during the shoot, which eventually became the face of the film. The first film set she worked on was “Little Zizou” by Taraporevala, Jayakumar’s idea of a Renaissance woman, who was turning director with this comedy about two quirky and embattled Parsi families. An accomplished photographer herself, having held exhibitions across three continents, Taraporevala brought her camera along and took her own pictures during the first few days of the shoot, considering Jayakumar was so inexperienced. “After the first week, when she saw the pictures I had been clicking, she stopped bringing her camera,” says Jayakumar, who, despite several years of experience behind the camera at that point, remembers this as her big moment of validation as a photographer. Several assignments followed, including blockbuster flicks such as the A-list “Kaminey”. “When I saw my stills splashed across giant billboards in the city, it truly started to feel like this was my life now,” she says.

Jayakumar’s long liminal phase as she remained unconvinced of a viable career in photography is unsurprising. Even as she was honing her skills, high-resolution camera phones, Photoshop and “young kids with their DSLRs” were starting to take over. “Where does a professional photographer stand in all this? I am still trying to answer that question. I was once asked to submit a budget proposal for a project and since it was a public service campaign, I slashed my fee and quoted a figure that covered purely the cost. They got back to me saying someone’s nephew had a great camera and was willing to do it for free,” she shrugs. “Some people just want decent pictures that are sharp and colorful. They are not really

that discerning about the eye and the maturity that comes from experience.”

Jayakumar almost prides herself on her embarrassingly poor post-production skills. But then, she is old-school like that: What you shoot is what you have, she says. “If it’s a commercial shoot, I would outsource some of the less basic touchup work. I don’t believe in manipulating an image; I don’t even crop my pictures very much,” she says. A photographer’s job is not just to click pretty pictures but to capture that “decisive moment” as Cartier Bresson believed — an image which defines everything about the situation and tells the whole story in one frame. “Of course, photography has moved on from that, but part of me still believes in it. Because for me, his pictures are timeless and still have the power to move me.”

But it is also an exciting time for photographers. “You can look back at the century and embrace styles and techniques that appeal to you the most,” Jayakumar says. “People still work with cyanotype, daguerreotype and wet plate collodian, using the earliest techniques and films. That’s the beauty of photography; it doesn’t matter, as long as you are making something that is meaningful and resonates with the audience.”

Jayakumar talks about one of her most inspiring works, “Goodbye Padmini”. “I have often been asked if “Goodbye Padmini” was inspired by Raghubir Singh’s Ambassador series. I am a huge admirer of his, of course, but this was just a happy coincidence, and nowhere close to what he has done,” says Jayakumar about the project that mapped the story of Mumbai through the iconic taxi. The Premier Padmini, as it is called in Mumbai, was originally manufactured in India between 1964 and 2000 by the Italian company Fiat.

“The charm of the Padmini taxi is unique, with its disco lights, brightly colored seat covers, over-the-top taxi art, icons of various gods, or Bollywood stars (or both side-by-side). There is much old-world romance associated with the black-and-yellow taxi — any local will have nostalgic stories to tell about riding around town in a Padmini,” she explains in her picture log. The first taxis arrived in Bombay in 1911. One hundred years later, the government issued a notice stating that taxis over 25 years old had to be removed from the streets.

“The project started out as a commission for an Italian publisher who wanted to capture the color and kitsch, but I was drawn to the human story, of migrants losing their livelihood with the disappearing taxis,” says Jayakumar. Through the disappearing taxis, she tells the story of Mumbai — a city in flux, rapidly changing, ever-ready to throw out the old and embrace the new, a city that embraces and glorifies the disparity between the rich and the poor, something that is omnipresent throughout India, but glaringly accentuated in Mumbai.

Jayakumar finds Doha relaxing; Mumbai’s pace was starting to burn her out. It’s also a whole new whole that awaits her and her lens. “I love Islamic architecture and art and the people are so beautiful; I am yet to explore all this with my camera. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Iran are a photographer’s dream.”

In Doha, after moving out of the “sterile” West Bay, Jayakumar is starting to appreciate the city’s aesthetics. Already the projects in her head are demanding to be born. But she is still learning about Qatar, getting accustomed to its people and their stories. It’s a game of patience, after all, of watching and waiting for that one moment.

THE BENGALI BABU Jayakumar captures the essense of the typical “Babumoshai”, a middle-aged, middle-income, office-going Bengali man "who dresses like it’s still the '50s, likes to eat rice and fish curry, always with a mishti (sweet) to finish the meal, is ready to engage in long-winded discussions about history and politics, while smoking numerous cigarettes."

On ArtArena Qatar

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July – August 2015

nEW HORIZONSIndia’s Big Cat Country 48

The Most Iconic House You’ve Never Heard Of 56

Unsung Women Artists Come of Age 64

The Magic of Dior’s Couture Ateliers 72

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BY HARI KUNZRU PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MOSSE

JUST BEFORE DAWN, on the whitewashed steps leading up to the Shiva temple on Perwa Hill, we find four leopards. A mother and three cubs, they loll about, rubbing against each other like oversize domestic cats. The guide is shining a powerful flashlight, and when it catches their eyes, the glint is a startling yellow-green. Languorously stretching, occasionally changing position, they seem unconcerned by the humans watching them from a jeep at the foot of the hill. As the sun nears the horizon, the sky turns pale and the contours of the hill appear, an ancient granite dome whorled and pocked by erosion, full of caves and fissures. Dawn breaks, bathing the rock in a peachy glow, and the cats slink out of sight.

Up at the top, an elderly priest begins to move around the sanctuary, a bearded figure wrapped in a shawl against the morning

LIFE AMONG THE

LEOPARDSIn the ancient hills of Jawai in

northwest India, locals and big cats have peacefully coexisted

for centuries like nowhere else in the world. As safarigoers arrive to

experience the unique environment, can the harmony last?


ANCIENT WAYS An elderly priest

descending to Perwa village from a temple

devoted to Lord Shiva on Perwa Hill where he lives, one of the

many holy slopes in the region that is also

home to leopards.


cold. I watch through binoculars as he begins the long, slow descent of the steps, perhaps two hundred of them, steadying himself with a stick. According to local legend, as a young man the priest committed a murder and sought sanctuary here, whereupon he was filled with the wild glory of God. Seeing his devotion, his pursuers relented, and he has spent his life in this remote place, serving Lord Shiva. On an outcrop directly above the steps, about halfway down the steep hillside, the oldest of the cubs has reappeared and is watching the frail old man pass below. Almost full-grown, it is a formidable creature, with muscular forelegs and a powerful jaw. It looks poised to pounce. Yet as the priest picks his way down, it makes no move, and he reaches the bottom safely, puttering off to run his morning errands in the village.

Jawai, in the Pali district of Western Rajasthan, is a remarkable place. In a country that has been changed almost beyond recognition by two decades of explosive economic growth, electrification here is patchy, the crops of mustard and wheat painstakingly harvested by hand. In 1946, Maharajah Umaid Singh of Jodhpur broke ground on a dam on the river Jawai, the most significant incursion of modernity into the landscape. The land around the dam is known informally by the river’s name. The rich river-bottom soil, which for millennia has supported clans of Rajput farmers, is broken by dramatic solitary hills, stark uninhabited granite peaks, almost all of which are marked by a shrine or temple. Some, like the

one at Perwa Hill, are lived in by the priests who tend them. Many are passed down from father to son. Through this country wander semi-nomadic herders of the Rabari tribe following ancient routes that take them south into Gujarat and east into Madhya Pradesh. And in the hills live dozens of leopards, predators who by day watch the humans go about their business, and by night come down to hunt, stalking the streets of their villages and killing their livestock.

Around the world, from the savannas of Kenya to Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, when big cats pose a threat to poor communities, the same sad story prevails: Cats kill valuable animals. Occasionally they kill people, often children, who are small enough to be carried away. And then people kill the cats. In the first three months of this year, leopard attacks across India left at least nine dead and 38 wounded. Yet in Jawai no one has been taken by a leopard for over 150 years. In 2013, a young naturalist called Adam Bannister came to Jawai to work for Anjali and Jaisal Singh, a New Delhi-based couple who wanted to set up a high-end safari operation. Bannister, a sandy-haired South African who had worked with leopards in South Africa and jaguars in Brazil, walked and drove around the region, talking to local people to find out the patterns of leopard movement. He quickly realized that Jawai was unique. Perhaps nowhere else in the world do

HIGH AND LOW Perwa village, frequented by leopards who feed on

domestic cattle and other livestock. Above: on

a hill known as Dev Giri, a temple to the vengeful

goddess Kalka Devi, where the big cats like to roam.


humans and big cats live in such proximity with so little friction. The result of Bannister’s research and the Singhs’ experience

(their company, Sujan, runs successful tiger and elephant safaris elsewhere in India and in Kenya) is a luxurious tented camp designed to have a low environmental impact. Its 11 tents, located in a field bought from a local farmer, can house 22 people at full capacity, and staff are recruited, as much as possible, from the community. The permanent structures — a garage for jeeps, staff accommodation and offices — are hidden behind a high bamboo fence, giving guests like me the illusion that they are living a little closer to nature than is in fact the case. Every day, just before dawn and again at dusk, Bannister and his team treat the tourists — often serial safarigoers, equipped with expensive long lenses and wardrobes of khaki clothing — to a bouncy and sometimes hair-raising jeep ride through the countryside, past antelope, porcupine, crocodiles and all manner of bird-life, to look for leopards.

I first visited the camp last October, looking for a place to unwind after a family wedding in Delhi. On that visit, Bannister took me to watch a mother and her cubs prowl about outside a cave partway up a hill called Nag Bawasi, which lies right on the outskirts of the nearby Sena (‘‘Army’’) village, founded, according to tradition, by demobbed Rajput soldiers. The mother, Bannister explained, had earlier that day killed a goat on the Sena cricket pitch and dragged the carcass up the hill to eat. By the time we came upon them in Bannister’s jeep, the leopard family was satiated, relaxed. As dawn broke, the sounds of the village waking up brought home how startlingly close they were to human habitation. Barking dogs, a transistor radio, the coughing of a generator. Though the elevation creates a natural boundary between the two worlds — the cats above and the humans below — there was no illusion that

we were in an uninhabited place, some game reserve or national park. The morning light revealed sleepy men and women walking along paths, each one carrying a container of water, a can or a steel lota, on their way to defecate among the scrub and the drifts of plastic waste.

In parts of Africa where leopards’ prey is more scarce, their territories can be huge, on the order of several hundred square miles for an adult male. Females will have territories

within that of a dominant male, staying close to places where they can raise their young. If a cub is female, a mother will cede territory to her. If it’s male, it will usually be pushed out, forced to roam more widely. In Jawai, where territories consist of a network of hills connected by corridors of farmland, leopards needn’t travel far for food and do not feel threatened by the humans around them. It is generally in places where humans have made attempts to kill or expel leopards, such as in Uttarakhand, that attacks are more common. Over a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs at the camp, Bannister explains his own theory, that the big cats that become ‘‘man eaters’’ are old or weak, too slow to catch other game or too toothless to fight. In Jawai, strong young males are always coming into conflict with their elders, who may well be taken care of before they become a problem. Though leopards can live for 20 years here, Bannister has never sighted one older than 10.

When he’s not out driving or chatting to the guests, Bannister holes up in a little office next to the camp’s kitchen garden and updates the database he keeps of every leopard sighting, creating entries not unlike Facebook profiles for individual cats. In 2014, he sighted one female leopard — he named her Naina — 75 times. In a month when he tracked her with particular attention, he discovered that she had killed at least three goats, three dogs, two buffalo calves and a young cow, all from a single village. For a poor

the time of Holi, the festival celebrated across India in a riotous carnival of water jets and colored dye, a time in which differences are resolved by water fights and the senses of hardworking people are pleasantly deranged by opium and the cannabis preparation bhang. On the night of Holika Dahan, the eve of the festival, villagers light bonfires to reenact the destruction of the evil demoness. Climb a hill and you can see them all across the district, beacons in the darkness.

On top of Nag Bawasi, rowdy Sena boys chant and sing, their fire (made of truck tires) sending flames up into the sky. Down in the village, others compete to pull a 20-foot pole out of the flames, carrying it around like a giant torch. Sparks fly, and I have to duck out of the way of the Bacchanalian procession. Tonight, with all the smoke and noise, there are no leopards in sight, but the religious significance that attaches to the hill and to the other high places in Jawai is part of the reason that they form a sanctuary for the

community, this is a significant economic loss. Yet across Jawai, the leopards seem to be viewed as a blessing. People stand on their roofs to watch them. They take pleasure in their presence.

SPRING IN JAWAI is a time to watch flights of waterbirds land on the lake and eat raw chickpeas out of the pod. The vivid green wheat fields look enhanced, postproduced, as if Shah Rukh Khan might suddenly burst out and sing a sentimental movie song. It is

SACRED SPACE A ceremonial trishul, a Hindu symbol, in one of the many hillside temples in Jawai.

In the hills live dozens of leopards, predators

who by day watch the humans go about

their business, and by night come down to stalk the

streets of their villages.


cats. People do not like to kill living things near a temple, and locals do not have reason to climb these hills, except to worship.

The next morning I watch Bannister chase village children around with a mineral water bottle full of dubious colored liquid. The kids give as good as they get, drenching him and squealing with laughter. Someone sprays my shirt pink, someone else dumps blue and green powder on my head and a raffish village elder offers me a shot of syrupy lime-green moonshine, which, lightweight that I am, I really can’t face so early in the day. Others have no such qualms. Around me there are bloodshot eyes, woozy grins. A musical ensemble consisting of a couple of large double-headed dhol drums and a tal pan sets up a clattering rhythm, and men dance the gair, clacking long sticks together as they circle a shrine. Through this chaos, Bannister genially shepherds a small group of tourists, including an elderly English couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. He is a man performing a balancing act, fiercely committed to the leopards yet aware that the very presence of tourists is a sign that faster times are coming to this place, in the form of Internet access and cellphones and members of a younger generation who

know what things cost and are not sentimental about the old ways.

One of the guides at the camp is Varun Kutty, a dapper young man who grew up far from here in the Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh. He has made it his business to understand the local culture, much as Bannister has made it his

business to get to know the wildlife. On the evening of Holi, after I send my paint-spattered clothes to the camp laundry, he arranges for me to visit a manor house in Falna, to meet Thakur Abhimanyu Singh, the village’s leader. Here, the thakurs are the apex of the human system, just as the leopards are the apex of the wild one. Though Jawai is by no means a timeless place, it is overwhelmingly Hindu and the caste system retains real power. Modern forms of authority like the Indian Forest Service operate here, and modern politics too, but in practice, feudal lords like the thakur are the ones who settle disputes and receive fealty, much as their forefathers did hundreds of years ago.

We arrive as a huge gair dance is circling through the courtyard. The thakur, a friendly, mustachioed man with the placid good manners of one accustomed to being obeyed, sits cross-legged on a platform near the main gate, heavy rings on his fingers and a pair

The elevation creates a natural boundary between the two worlds — the cats above and the humans below

— but there was no illusion that we were in an uninhabited place,

some game reserve or national park.


DAWN AND DUSK On Dev Giri, the leopard whom the Jawai-based naturalist Adam Bannister has named Naina. Opposite: the area around Jawai Lake, for millennia the home of Rajput farmers.


AT ONE A semi-nomadic herdsman from the peaceful Rabari tribe, carrying a scythe, used to cut branches for his herd.


of mobile phones on the sheet in front of him. Stick-carrying men file in and greet him before heading into the dance. Women congregate in a corner, forming a densely packed crowd. In between namastes, the thakur points out various local worthies who are part of the line — a bank manager, a railway official. Some dancers have immense panache, clacking sticks with the man in front and the man behind in swoops and stylized sword-fighting moves. Others lollop along like drunks doing the conga at a wedding. In front of us, a line of old men are watching the proceedings. They are, to my eye, almost identically dressed, in clean white cotton. Most have mustaches and all wear pagaris, turbans of various colors and designs that allow the thakur to name the caste of each one: ‘‘This man in pink is an ironsmith, this man is a farmer. This pink is for a mali, a gardener, the red spots are Meghwal, the ones with the dark red are Rabari, the ones with many colors, those are Rajput men….’’

It is something to be a Rajput man. The thakur is a Rajput. The princely dynasties in Jodhpur and Udaipur are Rajputs. The cardinal Rajput virtue is bravery, not forgiveness or humility. Ordinary Rajputs are arable farmers. As Bannister puts it, ‘‘If

leopards ate wheat or mustard, you can bet they wouldn’t last long.’’ The herders whose livestock are threatened are Rabari, not Rajput. The Rabari are semi-settled nomads, with a different view of the world. Women conduct business affairs (and hold a lot of the family wealth in the portable form of jewelry) while the men roam with the animals. Whether it is pressure from their land-owning Rajput neighbors or some aspect of their culture (perhaps stemming from their veneration of Mata Devi, the mother goddess) that leads them to accept the leopards, they are the ones who are called on to exercise forbearance. Fatalism has its limits. They raise high barriers of thorns round their animal pens at night.

How long can Jawai’s fragile entente between humans and leopards persist? For the moment, the tourist footprint is very light. Jawai camp is small, exclusive and maintains good relations with the community. But more cars and jeeps are arriving, bringing people to look at the wondrous cats. Bannister believes that, unless some kind of regulation is put in place, the leopards could migrate east into the high Aravalli Mountains. Creating a national park and displacing the farmers and herders would destroy the lifeworld of Jawai’s people and remove the leopards’ main source of food. Such a park would have to be stocked with wild game to make up for the vanished livestock.

On my last day at Jawai, I visit a temple not far from Sena village, on a hill called Dev Giri. On the way up, at its base, are monuments to two jeeva samadhis, yogis who had themselves buried alive, leaving behind their material bodies and the cycle of death and rebirth. On the peak is a temple to a dark goddess, Kalka Devi, a vengeful aspect of the Mother Goddess who is worshiped here in a natural cave that reaches way back into the hill. Outside, rotting scraps of clothing hang on a tree, votive offerings from the parents of sick children. Inside, a flight of steps leads up to a stone bearing a relief image of the goddess alongside her vehicle, a black dog. High on the rock above her head, black bees swarm over a huge lobelike hive. I walk up toward her. She has staring eyes. She carries a severed head and is garlanded in skulls. After a few paces, I look down. Beside my bare feet are a set of oily paw prints, the tracks of the leopard who walked here before me.

For the moment the tourist footprint is very light, but unless some kind of regulation

is put in place, the leopards could migrate east into the high Aravalli Mountains.


ROCK

BY NANCY HASSPHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTHONY COTSIFAS

PRODUCED BY MICHAEL REYNOLDS

Deep in the desolate heart of Joshua Tree hides a house as otherworldly as the landscape itself.


BLENDING IN As seen from behind, the

concrete ‘‘wings’’ of the Kendrick Bangs

Kellogg-designed organic modern house,

embedded in a five-story mound of

rounded boulders on the edge of Joshua

Tree National Park in the California desert.

LEGEND


DESIGN WITHIN REACH In the dining area, built around an

existing boulder, a string of Carrara

marble lights and a pair of steel tables

that spiral into arcs.


INTO THE WILD Left: a view of Joshua Tree National Park from the main deck. Below: the kitchen, with custom-carved marble countertops, steel cabinets and a sculptural rock ventilation stack.

‘It’s like the Sistine Chapel,’ says Kellogg, referring to a point at the center of the room where two glass-topped tables nearly touch — Adam reaching for the hand of God.

The five-page note came by mail, unbidden, in March 1986, handwritten on plain paper in a pleasant scrawl:

‘‘Dear Mr. Kellogg,My wife and I recently

purchased a very interesting, though unconventional, building site in the California desert. . . .’’

Sent by a pair of artists, Jay and Bev Doolittle, the letter was the beginning of a relationship that would result in perhaps the most unsung great residence in America by one of architecture’s least-known major talents. While it was John Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, who gained international fame for his works in the California modern organic style during its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, now 80 and still practicing, has championed the style and pushed it beyond what even Lautner, who died in 1994, might have imagined. The house Kellogg built for the Doolittles on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, an hour from Palm Springs, is arguably his apotheosis: a nearly 5,000-square-foot marvel of engineering in which every inch, inside and out, including the

furnishings, is hand-hewn from natural materials using soaring, twisting, curvilinear forms that are at once trippy and ambitious and — perhaps surprisingly — serene.

The house appears suddenly, atop a sprawling five-story-high pile of rounded boulders, perched like an alien spaceship or a giant armadillo. Seen up close at the end of a winding path beyond the spiky Brutalist fence welded by John Vugrin, the craftsman who labored for two decades on the house’s interiors, the structure seems both part of the ancient landscape and otherworldly. Technically wall-less, it is formed of 26 enormous cantilevered concrete columns sunk seven feet into the bedrock. Each column, which Kellogg bathed in molasses to achieve a natural texture, fans out like an airplane wing at the top, overlapping the next to form a roof line. Between the columns, virtually invisible from many vantage points, is thick tempered glass that lets wide stripes of light fall into the house during the day; at night, from the dining table or the curved leather built-in sofa in front of the copper-hooded fireplace, the stars are visible in the vast desert sky.

‘‘The idea was that the house would be


FROM THE GROUND UP A view of the underside

of the house from the footpath below. Opposite:

stone stairs leading from the downstairs guest

bedroom to the main living area, flanked by a concrete

pedestal with hand-cut opaque glass panels.

The structure supports a loftlike master bedroom.



settled in the landscape, like it was crouching on the rocks, maybe like an animal asleep,’’ says Kellogg, 6-foot-1 and still gruffly vigorous with bushy brows, a shock of Einstein hair tumbling over the collar of his army jacket and cargo shorts that may never have been washed. He has driven, reluctantly, from his longtime home in San Diego County, to give a tour, though he clearly is not one for the self-referential

The house appears suddenly, wedged into a sprawling five-story-high pile of rounded boulders, perched like an alien spaceship or a giant armadillo.

speeches architects are given to. ‘‘I’m a burger kind of guy,’’ he tells me right off, in a voice close to a roar, ‘‘a taco guy, you know?’’

He is also a dreamer of epic, unconventional proportion. Unlike Lautner, he never was a Taliesin Fellow, but Wright was his major inspiration nonetheless. On a college trip with other architecture students in 1955, Kellogg spoke to Wright after a public lecture, and

became an instant acolyte. His first house — designed at age 23, without a license — was a wild riff on Wright’s concepts for family friends who years before had had Wright draw up plans for a house on another site, which was never built. Starting in the late 1960s, Kellogg designed and engineered more than a dozen startling residences, including the Surfer House in La Jolla and the Onion House in Kona, Hawaii, as well as a massive funnel-shaped stone and glass chapel in Karuizawa, Japan, that has for nearly 30 years been one of the country’s most popular wedding sites.

Kellogg arguably might have become as famous as Lautner had he turned down the commission for which he is best known: creating the look of the Chart House restaurants; such commercial projects have never been architectural careermakers. The upscale chain was co-founded by Buzzy Bent, a former navy man who had fallen for organic style doing boyhood chores for Frederick Liebhardt, a well-known San Diego-based architect who came out of Taliesin. A Southern California institution, the restaurants were less famous for their steak and lobster than for Kellogg’s soaring, shocking designs, each radically individual.

The High Desert House was born, as most great buildings are, from aesthetic fearlessness, which the Doolittles had in excess, Kellogg says. Formerly in advertising in Los Angeles, they had become successful with limited-print editions of Bev’s hyper-realistic layered scenes of Western life and American Indians. Looking for an architect for the 10-acre plot in Joshua Tree, they had happened upon a Julius Shulman photo of Kellogg’s Yen House in an architecture magazine. They knew instantly Kellogg was the one to build them a house that wouldn’t intrude on the landscape but embrace it.

It took more than three months for him simply to decide how to place the house; the Doolittles didn’t want to disturb the natural setting with demolition. There was a 3D topographic model showing every rock, based on aerial photos taken by a plane they hired to survey the site. After that, though, Kellogg and the Doolittles made decisions spontaneously, he says, responding to inspiration and changing conditions. In many cases, the boulders themselves were incorporated into the structure. Not far from a spur of the San Andreas fault (‘‘The Marijuana Trench?’’ Kellogg wonders, trying to recall the name. ‘‘Or the Mariana Trench? I don’t know.’’), the structure is earthquake-proof, he insists.

The house takes full advantage of its outrageous setting — inside, you feel as though you are on the bridge of a luxurious spaceship gazing safely at the lunar landscape beyond the glass — but the interiors compete with the view for attention. There are five loosely defined levels, with discrete rooms parsed by the huge arched concrete structural pillars, but because A

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of the endless curves, the spaces flow into each other almost seamlessly. There is virtually no free-standing furniture, save some dining chairs made, like everything else, by Vugrin, who worked alone for years at the site after the exteriors were finished (in 2002, the Doolittles finally were able to move in; Vugrin’s work continued until 2014). His main motif can be found throughout the house: glass-topped table bases in carved marble or wood that resemble the spines or rib cages of prehistoric creatures. Some are miraculously cantilevered from the concrete columns, and the two long ones that Bev Doolittle used as drawing desks are attached to enormous steel arcs that soar to the ceiling, bisecting the loftlike room. Above them is strung a series of Sputnik-like lamps, also Vugrin creations. ‘‘It’s like the Sistine Chapel,’’ says Kellogg, referring to a point at the center of the room where the two glass tops nearly touch — Adam reaching for the hand of God.

Every surface is crafted, inlaid or textured

with natural materials, from mahogany to steel and glass tile; nothing machine-made or manufactured, save the guts of the plumbing fixtures (Vugrin, as adept with metal as with wood and stone, welded his own spouts and handles that integrate into a free-standing vanity that resembles sculpture). The arc of kitchen cabinets is patinated metal; directly above, supported by an illuminated mushroom-shaped support structure, is a circular master bedroom. Its half-height curved bookshelves allow a panoramic view of the desert, and an adjoining bathroom has a fountain — made from one of the boulders that juts into the house — that circulates a cascade of water into a trough near a hand-mosaiced tub.

Kellogg built the house to last forever, he says, though in 2014 the Doolittles sold their masterpiece, having lived there for 12 years — less than the time it took to build. Getting older, they moved to Utah, to a home with fewer stairs that’s easier to maintain. The new owners are

Matthew Jacobson, a Los Angeles-based Facebook executive and his wife, Kristopher Dukes, an interior designer. They live in a 1980s Ray Kappe home in Manhattan Beach and bought the High Desert house to preserve it as a work of art, scooping up a Marmol Radziner prototype prefab in nearby Desert Hot Springs as well with the same intent.

The Dukes, who have only found time to stay at the High Desert a handful of nights since they purchased it, say they will keep it as the Doolittles and Kellogg intended. Even the small, rounded, pale rock that incongruously overhangs the minimalist metal roof line of the two-car garage built into the hill at the bottom of the footpath will stay. The two-lobed watermelon-size boulder has been there as long as the hill itself, a stubborn mark of imperfection in Kellogg’s graceful, harmonious scheme.

‘‘Hell, that rock looks like someone’s ass,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s a statement. There’s nothing more organic than that.’’

SHAPE SHIFT The main deck, which curves along the front of the house, at

dusk. Opposite: the sunken living room, with a built-in distressed leather

sofa, a brass cabinet and a custom glass and Rosa

Verona marble coffee table topped with pottery

made by local artisans.


WORKS IN PROGRESSBY PHOEBE HOBAN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEFAN RUIZ

A VERY SMALL SAMPLING OF THE FEMALE ARTISTS

NOW IN THEIR 80S AND 90S WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

ABOUT DECADES AGO.

Carmen Herrera


much-anticipated inaugural show in its new building at the foot of the High Line. There, a painting of hers — the diptych ‘‘Blanco y Verde,’’ 1959 — hung for the first time alongside works by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns, publicly granting her a status in the canon that — according to curators at several major institutions — should have been hers for years. She became a centenarian in May of this year. A documentary about her life, ‘‘The 100 Years Show,’’ made its festival premiere in April.

Herrera was born and studied architecture in Havana, Cuba. In 1948, she moved with her husband to Paris, where she exhibited several times at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and developed her abstract geometric style. But upon returning in 1954 to New York — then at the height of Abstract Expressionism — she was plunged into obscurity. Although she was friends with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and knew the Ab-Ex artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, her pared-down, purist style — which in many ways anticipated Minimalism — shared little with

their larger-than-life gesturalism. Herrera continued to produce work, but her paintings remained stashed in her studio until she was granted a small show at El Museo del Barrio in 1998. During a gallery group show in 2004, Herrera sold her first painting, at the age of 89. Among the collectors who immediately bought her art were Cuban-born Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. The young Cuban-American artist Teresita Fernández calls Herrera ‘‘crucially important, both for the focus and singularity of the work and because she inadvertently represents the invisible legacy of the 500 years that Latino artists have been working in America.’’ She is also now represented in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. ‘‘It’s about time!’’ she says over a nip of Scotch in the New York loft that doubles as her studio. ‘‘There’s a saying that you wait for the bus and it will come. I waited almost a hundred years!’’Carmen Herrera’s first museum retrospective will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall of 2016.©

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Whitney Museum of American Art’s

Carmen Herrera, 100, a regal Giacometti-thin woman with bone-white hair, could be the poster child for late-in-life recognition. Her work was included in the

PARED DOWN "Untitled", 2007, a work in

acrylic on wood by the Cuban artist, who

anticipated Minimalism but was largely ignored

until her late 80s.


and ‘‘A Forest for Australia,’’ 1998, 6,000 native saplings planted in the form of five spiraling steps in Melbourne.

Most recently, Denes was commissioned to create ‘‘The Living Pyramid’’ for the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City — her first land-art creation in New York since ‘‘Wheatfield.’’ The 30-foot-tall structure sown with the seeds of several grasses should have started to sprout by mid-May, just in time for the Frieze Art Fair. ‘‘I was hoping for a lot of wild flowers,’’ she says wryly, ‘‘but they don’t grow that quickly.’’‘‘The Living Pyramid’’ is on view at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, through Aug. 30.

more easily swallowed.’’ Now 83, and the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Denes is known for works that merge her interests in philosophy, mathematics and science, including intricate diagrams and ‘‘map projections’’ of the planet Earth onto an egg, a hot dog and — a form that has inspired her for decades — a pyramid. But she is most celebrated for ‘‘Wheatfield — A Confrontation,’’ 1982, which transformed a barren plot near the former Twin Towers into golden fields of grain. A kind of global gardener, she has made equally ambitious earthworks including ‘‘Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule,’’ 1996, an 11,000-conifer forest in Finland,

ON POINT "Pyramids of Conscience" (detail),

2005, acrylic forms filled with polluted

water (left) and pure water,

by Denes, known for her international

earthworks and playfully cerebral

"map projections".

order to make complex ideas©

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Agnes Denes is aware that the theoretical underpinnings of her work are esoteric, but she has always tried to sugarcoat the pill. ‘‘My work was never really understood,’’ she says. ‘‘It was shown because it was exceptional and beautiful to look at, which is a trick of mine in


Agnes Denes


Dorothea Rockburne

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College, where she was a student of the mathematician Max Dehn, famous for his work in the field of topology. But it wasn’t until the mid-’60s that Rockburne realized precisely what she wanted to express in her art. According to the artist, she was in the middle of a dance performance with the Judson Dance Theater when she had the epiphany that would lead to her unique take on geometric abstraction. ‘‘I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio,’’ she recalls. ‘‘I was visually solving equations.’’

Since then, Rockburne has consistently created paintings and installations that express mathematical concepts, although she hasn’t always wanted to share her work. A solo exhibition in New

MYSTIC SENSE "Geometry of Stardust: Similarly

Attracted", 2009-2010, a painting on watercolor paper

by Rockburne, who has become increasingly

interested in the cosmos.

York in 1958 was both a critical and commercial success, but she herself deemed it ‘‘not good enough’’ and retreated to her studio for almost 10 years. During that decade, Rockburne worked as both a waitress and as the studio manager of her friend Robert Rauschenberg in order to support her young daughter, Christine.

In 1970, with a backlog of unseen work, she joined New York’s legendary Bykert Gallery, which also represented Brice Marden and Chuck Close. She has since had a retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., in 2011 and a solo show of drawings at MoMA in 2013. Still, she feels something is missing. ‘‘I would very much like a retrospective in New York City at a major museum,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s time.’’

school Black Mountain

Dorothea Rockburne, 82, has never veered from her singular vision. Her lifelong love affair with mathematics and painting was cemented in the 1950s at North Carolina’s experimental liberal arts


geometries with Abstract Expressionism. In 1969, Farmanfarmaian created the first of her mirror reliefs, which are again in the vanguard thanks to the resurgent interest in non-Western schools of Modernism.

Born in Qazvin, Iran, the daughter of an Iranian diplomat, Farmanfarmaian briefly studied at Cornell University and Parsons School of Design. She created the famous purple flower logo for Bonwit Teller even before working for the New York department store, and later befriended fellow store employee Andy Warhol. She also produced illustrations for Glamour, commissioned by the artist Alexander Liberman, then editorial director at Condé Nast. She was mentored by the painter Milton Avery and socialized with Joan Mitchell and Alexander Calder. And yet, she insists today, she was invited to places like the Eighth Street Club, a storied salon where the Abstract Expressionists held court, only because she was a ‘‘pretty object.’’ She didn’t take her own work seriously at the time. ‘‘I was just doing it because I liked it,’’ she says. ‘‘I did not think: I am a good artist.’’

In 1957, she wed the Qajar prince Abol Bashar Farmanfarmaian, moving back to Tehran, where she began the consummate collection of

indigenous Turkoman jewelry and pottery and folk-art ‘‘coffee-house’’ paintings that have continued to influence her work. In 1979, her career took a dramatic detour when she and her husband traveled to New York for a holiday visit, the start of what would become a 26-year exile precipitated by the Islamic Revolution. The loss of her studio and the confiscation or destruction of much of her early work — along with her beloved collection — was a setback not only for the artist but for the scholars who lost her early oeuvre. Yet Farmanfarmaian continued to make art. In 2004, by now widowed, she returned to Iran, slowly but deliberately rekindling her career. In 2011, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a champion of her work, edited her first monograph. Of ‘‘Lightening for Neda,’’ her largest installation to date, she told Obrist that she wanted the work’s reflective surface to have a liquefying effect. ‘‘Your own picture, your own face, your own clothing,’’ she said. ‘‘If you move, it is a part of the art.’’‘‘Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014’’ was on view at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this spring..

PATTERN PLAY "First Family — Square", 2010,

a geometric work of mirror and plastic on

acrylic and wood, by the Iranian artist,

who was exiled from her home country

for 26 years because of the 1979 revolution.

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works elegantly conflate Persian

If Iranian culture has sometimes been left out of the history of Modernism, its traditional techniques have proved pivotal to Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 91, whose decorative


Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian


INSIDE THE HOUSE

HANDS ON Raf Simons and his longtime colleague Pieter Mulier inspecting a fall 2012 couture ball dress in Dior’s signature full-skirted silhouette at the atelier flou; opposite page: Simons during the Christian Dior 2015-2016 fall/winter haute couture collection fashion show on July 6, 2015 in Paris.


RAF SIMONS ISN’T good at hiding his feelings. The Belgian designer who took over as creative director at Dior three years ago, after running the minimalist house Jil Sander, may seem intense and

watch-spring tight, but his emotions — fear, obsession, ecstasy — are instantly readable in his steel-blue eyes and at the corners of his mouth. At one point in ‘‘Dior and I,’’ the documentary by Frédéric Tcheng released this month that traces Simons’s first eight weeks at the house and the breakneck creation of his first couture collection for fall 2012, he is so carried away by joy when a fabric-maker is able, at the last minute, to perfect a challenging print based on the paintings of Sterling Ruby that he holds back tears as he mouths the word, ‘‘Sublime.’’

It is the paradox of Simons’s personality and talent — despite his reserve and shyness, he is also collaborative and emotional — that is at the heart of the film. That duality underpins as well the relationship he has developed with Florence Chehet, 47, and Monique Bailly, 62, the pair of premières who, respectively, run the atelier flou, where Dior’s confectionary dresses are created, and the atelier tailleur, which creates the meticulous suiting and fitted pieces. With their mostly middle-aged workers, called ‘‘les petites mains’’ (the little hands), many of whom have been sewing couture since they were teenagers, the premières, one jolly, the other fretful, are the unsung heroines of the film — and arguably the couture business itself — laboring in crowded workrooms atop Dior’s historic Avenue Montaigne mansion.

The uninitiated may assume that clients rarely have contact with the white-coated, unglamorous people who actually hand-make the clothes, but through much of the process, Chehet and Bailly are directly involved, sometimes flying to such places as Doha, Dallas or St. Petersburg to do multiple adjustments on garments that

can easily cost $200,000 or more. Of all the French design houses that started out with couture, only Chanel continues to maintain its atelier in addition to ready-to-wear operations.

‘‘It is really an in-house, collaborative thing,’’ Simons said recently, as he sat behind the large midcentury desk that dominates his office in an annex to the mansion, a work by Los Angeles-based Ruby on the wall. He is eating a bowl of fruit and cereal heartily, surely a sign that now, three years after the film was shot (his most recent ready-to-wear show, a minimalist jungle of

INSIDE THE HOUSERaf Simons talks about a new film

detailing the bumpy road to his first

couture collection for Dior — and the

intimate relationship with the women

of his atelier. BY JO-ANN FURNISS

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‘Ready-to-wear is often very abstract. You do not have personal human contact with the people making the clothes,’ Simons says.

‘Here, it is really an in-house, collaborative thing . . . and very family, very fast.’

FORM FITTING Clockwise from right:

pastel feathers individually sewn onto

fabric in horizontal panels; Simons and

his première Florence Chehet pinning the

bodice of a dress muslin; models waiting

backstage before the fall 2012 show’s finale,

for which they wore custom veils by the

milliner Stephen Jones; Simons’s finale gown

with contrasting embroidery on

the front and back.


legacy of Galliano’s highly theatrical oeuvre.

Despite their differences, however, both men were unafraid to make extraordinary demands of the ateliers, as did Monsieur Dior, whose memoirs are read in voice-over during the film, linking the new designer directly to the founder. It’s not unusual for a single couture dress to take 700 hours of work; Galliano’s aesthetic was more elaborate, but Simons’s approach required a different sort of discipline. His first collection riffed on the

house’s legendary New Look, but he insisted that the dressmakers sculpt the trademark poufy silhouettes into a more modern shape, which, at moments in the film, proves challenging. He produced more pants in his first collection than the house had ever seen, and continues to. ‘‘When we worked with John Galliano, we knew nothing was impossible,’’ said Chehet, who started her career as a seamstress for Hubert de Givenchy more than 30 years ago. Looking back on that first collection with Simons, she said, ‘‘We felt we were necessary, that they needed us.’’

A subtle but significant moment in the film comes midway through the season preparation, when the premières present the ateliers with the sketches that Simons has approved, ready to be cut and sewn under breathtaking deadline. Instead of assigning each seamstress an item, the workers are allowed to choose which design they wish to execute.

‘‘It’s very beautiful; everybody becomes emotionally invested in what they do,’’ said Pieter Mulier, Simons’s right-hand man, reflecting recently on how that process, which he’s seen several times since the film was shot, still moves him. ‘‘A couture garment is like a child that each person takes care of day and night for two months, and the last day when they give the garment away to the showroom, it’s very sad.’’

tough, twisted animal prints, was warmly embraced by critics), he is in a more peaceful place. ‘‘I always compare it to the sense you get from American quilting, where the women of a family get together and work on something for months, years even.’’

Simons’s years in ready-to-wear did not prepare him for the face-to-face closeness of the couture atelier, he says. As someone who is not easily comfortable with strangers — his awkwardness is palpable in the film as he meets the staff for the first time — he seems as surprised as anyone by the intimacy that has developed since he took over. ‘‘In ready-to-wear, you work with many external suppliers, it is more abstract. About 95 percent of these people, I do not know who they are.’’ In the Dior ateliers, he says, it was ‘‘very easy and very family, very fast.’’

THE PRESSURE ON SIMONS to create a couture collection from scratch without any experience in the ateliers and with the shadow of Monsieur Dior hanging over him gives the film its racing pulse, but through it all, the premières are largely unflappable.

Little wonder, as they spent years working with the temperamental, flamboyant John Galliano, whose name is not mentioned in the film and who click-clacked about his shows for 15 years in flamenco heels or outfitted as a haute couture pirate, complete with skintight britches, bandanna and bad-guy mustache. (He was fired in 2011 by owner LVMH in the wake of drunken anti-Semitic comments made in a Paris bar and recently took over at Maison Margiela.) Simons, in his customary white shirt and navy cashmere crew-neck sweater, stands as a quiet rebuke to all that, and his collections have grown more confident season by season, leaving behind the A

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Document

Japanese FabricA 19th-century sample book, or shimacho, of kimono textiles.

Part of a series of paintings from books, by Leanne Shapton for T magazine.

Documents

T qatar issue 32