Occasionally the art world becomes very bizarre. Picture yourself as a middle aged Italian sewage worker hired to drive a bulldozer to uncover old sewer pipes close to the Apian Way, Rome’s oldest highway. It’s late January 2023, cold and rainy. You take a break, jump down to pour coffee from your thermos when you see a face glaring at you from the pit below. A face, with strong frown lines in the forehead and bare shoulders, with something furry tied around them.
You call your boss who calls the archaeologists. They’re not particularly pleased with you because although you discovered a sculpture from 250 CE, you also damaged it. They say you’ve beaten up Hercules.
Yes there he is, Hercules, life sized, with his trademark lion skin cape around his neck and trademark big club. He looks stern and hard.
A few days later the archaeologist tell you Hercules is a metaphor for the portrayal of the Emperor Decius who reigned in Rome 249-251 CE. He was not a friendly guy. He fought the Visigoths in Bulgaria and died there, but not before he organized the first mass execution of Christians.
Today the archaeologists are restoring the sculpture and it will go on display.
My second art world story
It involves a trend in the artworld, a public private partnership between an artist’s foundation and a major luxury perfume brand. There’s money to be made. And you can smell like something you have only dreamt of….
Jean Mathieu Matisse, great grandson of Henri Matisse, founded Maison Matisse. The French have a different legal system as regards ownership of family art. The famous parfumier Guerlain created a scent with Maison Matisse in the name of the artist Matisse. They placed it in a custom painted handblown glass bottle that will set you back $14K in a limited edition of fourteen.
The artworld has long partnered with luxury brands, especially in France. The Matisse scent had a precursor in an Yves Klein scent, called L’Heure Bleue, originally created 110 years ago. The Yves Klein foundation teamed up with Guerlain to create a cobalt blue art deco bottle inspired by the color International Klein Blue patented by the artist in 1960. The extract is the warmest, richest, and most highly concentrated version. Limited to thirty examples, you’ll find a one-and-a-half liter bottle on Guerlain.com for a price of $17,000 USD.
What does Matisse smell like?
Henri’s great grandson says – like “joie de vivre.” They named the perfume Jasmin Bonheur, thought to smell lively, modern, and dynamic, like Matisse’s canvases. Jean Mathieu Matisse said, “Henri Matisse has become synonymous with happiness. With his simplified brushstrokes he wanted to bring joyful emotions to life for everyone. The creation therefore evokes the same energy, daring, and warmth.”
The bottle has two visual inspirations, Matisse’s painting “La Musique,” 1935, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY. It pictures two women, a large green plant, and a guitar; the second inspiration is an antique blown glass bottle, created in 1853 for the wedding of Napoleon III to Empress Eugenie. The glass artist at that time created a relief of tiny bees up the bottle as the emblem of the French Empire. A perfume was created for Eugenie.
So, if you have $14K you can smell like joie de vivre. Heaven knows you don’t want to smell like Napoleon III.