Peggy Guggenheim!

 Venice, 1966

Yes... I was talking about Peggy Guggenheim in my previous post Can you guess who she is? and so many of you guessed right (the comments are now published on that post) but the first to give the right answer was John Lyle. I am sure many of you are familiar with his name, if not I encourage you to go HERE to see his website, full of extraordinary pieces.
Back to Peggy, she was one of the most influential collectors of modern art in the twentieth century...Hard to believe but she considered herself as the poor Guggenheim, since the death of her father aboard the Titanic created some financial troubles for her mother, so even if she was quite wealthy her lifestyle was not comparable to those of her uncles.  She became friend, or lover, or wife of many outstanding artists, among them Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Laurence Vail, Samuel Beckett and she started collecting works from unknown artists of her time, soon to become icons in the art world.
During my last visit to Venice I went once again to  Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, her long searched dream home, an unfinished palace on the Grand Canal. The name comes from the eight carved marble  lion heads decorating the facade.  The palazzo construction began in 1748 for the Venier family (three of the city's doges were Venier); the building remained incompiuto, unfinished, for uncertain reasons, several speculations no precise answer. When Peggy saw it the palazzo still had only one finished floor and she decided to keep it that way.

In the beautiful garden of the palazzo Peggy installed a marble Byzantine throne. The enigmatic shapes of sculptures by Brancusi, Giacometti and others created a great contrast with it and are still there, with latest new additions.

"Standing Woman" (1947) by Alberto Giacometti

Maurizio Nannucci (2003)

A sculpture by Anish Kapoor (2007)

Inside the building we can appreciate a vast collection of modern and contemporary art, her furniture are gone but luckily we can still see photographs and explanations of how the palazzo looked when she lived there. Below is a picture of Peggy  in her bedroom, which had a view of the Grand Canal, notice on the wall behind the bed,  shimmering like the Venetian water, the silver sculpture with  fish and butterfly, made by Calder  in 1946 in new York, but absolutely at home here in Venice.

Now the piece rests on a wall of her previous bedroom, surrounded by other art, in front there is a window with a display of her glass collection reflecting the lights on the water. The bedroom when she lived there had turquoise walls, curtains made out of Indian saris and a marabou bedcover of the same color. Venetian mirrors and a huge collection of her earrings were adorning the walls.

 

The Library

This room could very well be featured on today's Interior design magazines, timeless style. She wanted white vinyl on the sofas, easy to wash every morning since her many dogs felt at home in the best seats. Over the sofas she placed black and white striped fur rugs which she said the dogs adored to lick...

The dining room

Princess Pignatelli once said to her that if she would throw in the Grand Canal all those ugly pictures she would have the most beautiful house in Venice, of course Peggy knew she had an exquisite collection and her house was the best display for it.
In August 1978, Peggy turned eighty and her birthday was celebrated appropriately.  Descending from  her personal gondola, to go to the party held for her at the Gritti Hotel she was greeted by a banner with her name and a phrase "To the Ultima Dogaressa" referring to the power of the ancient dogi of Venice. So famous was her collection that Venice's international Biennale once gave her a pavilion all to herself.  Peggy said: "It was wonderful, I was listed with Germany and France. I felt like a whole country all by myself."
Later in life she found a way that would permanently preserve her palazzo and her collection. In 1976 she donated her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (started by her uncle in New York) stating that the collection must remain in its location in Venice, thus creating the Venetian branch Guggenheim-Venice.

She passed away on 23 December 1979 and her ashes were buried in the garden between her marble throne and the graves of her beloved dogs. The marble headstone is engraved with the simple inscription:

"Here lies Peggy Guggenheim, 1898-1979"

Photography by Albarosa Simonetti (images of Peggy Guggenheim were photographed from the walls)

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What a project! The Erickson building, Vancouver.

The Erickson building Vancouver

I had the pleasure a few days ago to preview a luxury apartment at the Erickson building in Vancouver, a project recently completed by Patricia Gray, an award winning Interior Designer and a dear friend.
We spent there quite a few hours over two days to have everything in place for a professional photographer to do a reportage on the apartment and it was an amazing experience since I was also able to take several pictures while he was shooting. The place is a dream to photograph. I am happy to say that Patricia has chosen one of my images for her latest post that you can read clicking on The Erickson Vancouver.

Thanks Patricia for the opportunity, it was great!

Photography by Albarosa Simonetti ©

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Can you guess who she is?

Hints:

A rebel, enigmatic as a sphinx, an art addict, she had many lovers, some famous some infamous, a few husbands, many dogs, a life full of pain but also full of excitement and passion (she lived in Italy for thirty years and she is buried there, near her beloved dogs).

She is the girl on the left and she made a mark on the XX century.

Who is she?

The comments will not be published until the identity will be revealed on a following post.
The first person with the right answer...will not win anything... only a mention!

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I love Opera, do you?

If you love Opera, Symphony, Ballet, you must love Teatro alla Scala and now there is
a new Hotel to love, called Milano Scala.

The project by Cibic&Partners is located in the Brera area, in the center of Milan, a few steps from the world famous theatre. An existing building, from the end of XIX century, was renovated creating 62 rooms, each different from the other but all with the common theme of Opera lirica. You can have meals at the restaurant "La Traviata" and choose the bedroom suite "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" or the Suite "Carmen", the Suite "La Boheme" or another favorite subject, all bedrooms will have some blown up images related to La Scala performances.

I can spot Maria Callas below, on a swing.

 

Not much privacy here though...

I love the use of the "Rosso Scala" color as an accent and for the luxurious drapes, the same color used for the velvet chairs in the theatre.

The grand Lobby with glass ceiling and ethereal ceiling lights by Moooi.

 

It is a gorgeous Hotel but it is important to note that this is also a Green Hotel, because the project was carefully studied to permit eco-sustainability, great insulation, they even excavated underground to be able to heat and to cool the building with a sophisticated technique using ground water. The rooms of course are lit by LED lighting, the bathroom accessories are all biodegradable, faucets and toilets have water saving devices and even the paper used in the hotel and for advertising is certified by the Forest Steward Council.  For mobility they offer hybrid courtesy cars and since Milan has a very efficient service of bike-sharing, called BikeMI, you are assured that even if in a luxury hotel your footprint is kept low.  

Finally a beautiful terrace to enjoy a break, drink a Rabarbaro Zucca and  look at the

360 degrees view of Milan, weather permitting, of course.

 

Now tell us...do you love Opera, symphony, ballet?

What is your favorite piece or your favorite composer, dancer or singer?

Images source
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The joy of autumn

After a few months of sunshine, roses in full bloom and blue sky, rain is coming, leaves are falling, fireplaces are lit and...Art Galleries  are putting up their best faces. Autumn is the best time of the year to get interested (again) in art.

A few days ago I went to Bau-Xi gallery in Vancouver, for an interesting lecture and the opening of a new exhibition of a dear friend, Jamie Evrard, a very talented painter and a warm, fun, smart lady (I should say girl, because she is full of enthusiasm, curiosity and joie de vivre like a teenager or better yet like a child).

She talked at length, and we all wished she talked longer, about the house in Tuscany where she spends a few months a year enjoying the tranquillity of the countryside and painting still life all day between long walks and long meals at neighbors houses.

but let's hear what Jamie said:

Pentimento, the title of my show, is an artistic term meaning “the reappearance in a painting of an underlying image that had been painted over (usually when the later painting becomes transparent with age)” .
This talk, too, has something to do with the idea of Pentimento or seeing layers underneath the surface, as I have put it together by reading over my Italian diaries of the last 16 years, discovering forgotten events and feelings, selecting, deleting, and deleting again, trying to discover the trajectory, if there is one, of my last 16 years in Tuscany. I have tried to distill from hundreds of pages of diaries a selection of snippets which have made up my life in Italy: its pleasures, doubts, joys, lonelinesses, friendships, misunderstandings, tastes, laughs and sorrows.

 and here is when she talked about the first encounter with that charming house:

We walked down a grassy carpet along the wall, turned right under a huge fig tree and continued down some ancient rocky steps with mossy grass growing between them.
Opening the ancient heavy double doors with the key we had been sent we went in. The first thing I saw was a bowl, all white, containing three pears and an apple sitting on a trunk covered with an old rug. Not a perfect apple, but one that looked as though it had rusted, and the smallest perfect golden pears. What about my first fascination being with this bowl of fruit and not the house itself. Perhaps the white bowl was a metaphor for the whitewashed empty rooms of the house, a beautiful simple container to set off whatever one would put inside it; a place for imagining. In any case, my instantly falling in love with a simple bowl of fruit was certainly a preview of what was to become my work of the next many years: painting still life in Italy. (...)

A six hundred year old parish house has become in many ways the touchstone of my art making, for it is there in that quieter place that I have time to really stop and consider both my art and my life.
(...)  Standing here painting by the window of a darkish room, trying to convey what I see in watercolour suddenly seemed like a crazy thing to do. It would be hard for most people to understand why anyone would travel halfway around the world to a place where bed sheets need to be washed by hand in the tub in order to paint the shadows on an eggplant. Well, I’ve made my choice, and that’s what I’ve done.

In the Fall of 1999 Jamie wrote in her diary:

What an orgy of colour in the landscape. Probably any normal person would have seen green forests and fields and noticed that the afternoon was cloudy.  To us, everything seemed tinged with purple. Weeds are going to seed--Queen Ann's lace has purple spent flowers, many plants have purple stalks, the green of the forests calls for its compliment. Grapes of deepest blue with vines which are only now beginning to turn gold. Looking down into the valley in the dusky light even the far off mountains are purple.

Only a painter can write such a vivid description of nature's beauty.

Many of my friends were at the opening and among them Interior designer and blogger Patricia Gray and writer and blogger G.S. Sirotnik (with a very appropriate scarf...)

 

Florence Roberge, a painter, who often travels to Tuscany with Jamie to find inspiration for her art.

As you can see autumn has arrived with an explosion of colors.

Photography by Albarosa Simonetti
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A Brillante project

Let's start from the beginning...

 

In this first picture you may notice a blah room with an awful track light and by-fold doors,

 the furnishings look very basic and the fruits very fake.

 

This room actually  could well be a budget hotel room but instead it was an apartment staged at the cost of $ 5,000, freshly painted in the most depressing brownish green and furnished... well... you see it by yourself.

Would you like to see how it changed?

This is the same angle as above, after I moved in and started to decorate it.   The very first thing I did was to  paint the walls in a beautiful Smoky green, by Benjamin Moore.

 

Benjamin Moore Smoky Green CC-700

It is a bit of a funny color because even though it is officially called green it actually "reads" blue when you put it against white, has only green and grey undertones so the name could be deceiving and most of the time, depending on the light of the day, it can become a gorgeous robin's egg blue tone.  As cooler colors expand visually the space I thought it was a great choice for a small apartment and I assure you it is also a very relaxing color.

The bed  was then hidden by two great bookcases, deep enough that I can have books on both sides, designed by Neils Bendstedt for Inform Interiors, Vancouver. As you can see I have created a sort of corridor from the kitchen area to the bedroom even if in fact there is no bedroom, since it is in an open space apartment with a lovely patio which I will show you in another post.

 

At the end of the so called corridor a focal point created by an antique oil painting and an antique secretaire gives the impression of more depth.

Some objects I love to display on the secretaire.

This is Martino, my loyal keeper of hats and Geronimo's leashes. Needless to say I had to be very careful with every inch to have enough space for walking, moving furniture, entertain. Luckily it is my profession and we do this for clients all the time, using the space as best as we can. The flow is great.

Let's rewind for a moment.

From the bed to the living area before, cold and uninviting as it can be.

Fast forward.

I love the energy of the orange and the pillows are made of a luxurious damask silk, instead of that useless screen I hang hazelnut silk drapes.

I never liked headboards and rarely had one so I hung a big oil painting instead, at the perfect height to be able to read in bed without touching it. I also have small oil paintings on each side of the bed, made by my mother after some of our trips, the one here has Hawaiian  Plumeria as a subject.

The bathroom as it was before, isn't a weird way of using a wall?

 

Don't you think art looks better on the wall instead of towels? and the two silky turquoise curtains make me smile every morning. The small table with an aqua glass top is one of three from a previous house.

Another wall in the bathroom with my photography displayed.

 I love pure linen towels, they dry easily and it is a wonderful feeling using them.

My bathroom is full of framed photographs but as long as I keep an eye on the matte for signs of dampness I know they are safe.

This project as you can see is still in progress, I will add a ceiling light over the bed, I have my eyes on something on 1stdibs, I need new window treatments, change the fireplace front and oh! so many things so little time.
In Italy they say the shoemaker does not have shoes, is there anything similar in English?
Next time I will show you where I work and socialize, in the meantime I would love your comments:

What do you think of the transformation? Comments please!

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Photography by Albarosa Simonetti

Continue Reading... Label: Brillante Interiors, Interior design, Projects