Sunday, June 19, 2011

Juxtapositions

Art dealer/designer Hester Diamond gave an interview to the London arts magazine Apollo and opened her Manhattan apartment for the June issue. She and her husband had built their own collection of modern paintings in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Harold Diamond died in 1982. Hester Diamond subsequently took the collection around a different corner, gradually selling off 20th-century works to finance acquisition of Renaissance and Baroque. Most strikingly, she chose to set the Old Master paintings against bright, linear 21st-century furniture.


Marcel Wanders sofas. Venus Disarming Cupid by Paolo Veronese (1550-55).


Barber Osgerby table. Angelica and Medoro by Cornelis van Haarlem (1616).


The Plague at Pergamea and Sicilian Games by Dosso Dossi (1520-25). Marble relief of Dido (center) by Giovanni Maria Mosca (c. 1520).


Chaise longue by Patricia Urquiola. The Vestal Virgin Tuccia by Moretto da Brescia (c. 1545-48).


Left to right, Gianlorenzo Bernini's marble Autumn (c. 1616-18), Bill Viola's video Ablutions (2005), Xu Zhen's Spread Forest (2010).