Farah Nayeri

Yet a portrait painted by the Renaissance master has just cropped up on the international art market. With an asking price of $30 million, it is set to be the lone work at the booth of Trinity Fine Art, a London-based gallery, at this year’s Frieze Masters fair from Thursday to Sunday.

The portrait, “Michele Marullo Tarchaniota” (circa 1497), shows a dark-haired man dressed in black who casts a sideways glance at the viewer. Marullo was a soldier and poet of Greek origin who was close to the Medici dynasty of bankers and arts patrons — and was celebrated and admired in late 15th-century Florence. He drowned while crossing a river after visiting a fellow scholar.

No one knows for sure how his portrait came about: whether Botticelli painted it during Marullo’s lifetime or whether it was posthumously commissioned by his widow, Alessandra Scala. Yet it is distinctive enough to have been included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2011-12 exhibition “The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini.”

“We wanted it because it is, quite simply, a marvelous picture — despite the fact that it has not come down to us in the ideal kind of condition one would hope,” Keith Christiansen, chairman of the European paintings department at the Met, wrote in an email.

“Botticelli gives us a truly psychological portrait of one of the most fascinating humanists of the 15th century.”

The portrait also provides “a different sense” of the work of Botticelli, who is more commonly known as a painter of female figures or of “mystic, Dante-esque visions,” Christiansen added.

Painted with egg tempera on a wooden panel, the Marullo portrait was transferred to canvas in 1864, according to the Met catalog, and made smaller: About 2.75 inches were trimmed from either side of it, leaving a slightly slimmer version of Botticelli’s original composition.

A few weeks before the Frieze Masters opening, Trinity Fine Art organized a viewing of the painting in a London storage facility. Ultraviolet light revealed that parts of the subject’s hair and clothing had undergone restoration.

The list of the portrait’s prior owners is a who’s who of European royalty. It was once the property of Auguste de Beauharnais, whose father was the stepson of Napoleon. The portrait later entered the collections of the son-in-law of Czar Nicholas I of Russia.

About a century ago, it was bought by prominent Catalan politician and arts patron Francesc Cambó i Batlle. The family has owned the portrait ever since. It was recently on long-term loan to the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Italian gallerist Carlo Orsi, owner of Trinity Fine Art, said he was approached by a member of the family a year or so ago and asked about the possibility of selling the work. There were 14 heirs, he was told, and it was impossible to slice up the painting into equal parts.

Orsi works with prominent family collections in Italy. He recently showed a bronze bust of Pope Urban VIII by Bernini at the Florence International Biennial Antiques Fair. Previously, he sold Pontormo’s “Portrait of a Gentleman With a Book” to businessman and collector Francesco Federico Cerruti, who died in 2015 and bequeathed his collection to the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy.

The Botticelli was an offer Orsi could not refuse. “I thought to myself, ‘When will I ever be handling another Botticelli?’ ” he said. “This kind of opportunity comes up only once in your life.”

The gallerist said he initially considered showing the painting alongside other works at his booth at the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He soon realized that it would draw all the attention and prevent him from finding buyers for any of the other objects he had for sale.

That was when he decided on Frieze Masters, a fair with a strong focus on modern art, where the Botticelli was sure to stand out. And he decided to dedicate an entire booth to the portrait.

Orsi said the market for old masters had received a shot in the arm from the sale in November 2017 of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for $450.3 million at Christie’s in New York — despite the ensuing debate around its authenticity.

“The Leonardo sale helped a great deal because even people who were not interested said to themselves: ‘Old masters can fetch enormous prices,’ ” he said. “This is definitely helpful to Botticelli. If you’re a buyer who pays tens of millions for a Jackson Pollock or a Jeff Koons, and you see an icon of Italian art for $30 million, you’re going to buy it.”

While Orsi said he had received expressions of interest in the Botticelli portrait, there’s no telling whether the Frieze Masters stand will lead to an actual purchase — especially because of an added complication.

While the work has a temporary export license from the Spanish government, it does not have a permanent one, Orsi said. If someone decides to buy it, Spain has the right of first refusal. The buyer will have to wait months to see whether Spain can raise money to acquire the painting.

What if it does not sell? Orsi said it would still work out to be a good promotional opportunity for his gallery.

“People will know that I am a gallerist they can trust,” he explained, “someone who can have a Botticelli, a Bernini or a Pontormo.”

This article originally appeared in

If You Have $30 Million, You Could Have a Botticelli

LONDON — Sandro Botticelli, who died five centuries ago, is best known for his “Spring” and “Birth of Venus” paintings, which help draw more than 2 million visitors a year to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. His works are not generally expected to be found outside the world’s major museums.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” could join the lineup if it is completed in time, said the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, at a news conference in Paris. Frémaux said he had seen most of it, and it was “magnificent.”

The festival opens on May 14 with Jim Jarmusch’s zombie movie “The Dead Don’t Die” and ends on May 25. There are 19 movies in the race so far, though Frémaux said there were likely to be additions.

“You will see women directors, first films, Americans, zombies, genetic manipulations,” Frémaux said, adding that the titles in the competition would also feature “painters, singers, cops, parasites, violent mafiosos.”

Screening out of the official competition is “Rocketman,” a biopic directed by Dexter Fletcher, whose world premiere will bring superstar singer-songwriter Elton John to the Cannes red carpet.

Another out-of-competition title is the documentary “Maradona,” focusing on Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona and directed by Asif Kapadia, whose Amy Winehouse documentary drew critical acclaim.

Last year, the Cannes Film Festival missed out on Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” because it was a Netflix production. “Roma,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, went on to win the top Venice prize as well as three Academy Awards.

The reason for the exclusion was that Cannes requires all competition titles to be released in French movie theaters. The rule is part of a system of subsidies and regulations with which France protects its homegrown film industry and preserves its nationwide network of cinemas.

Frémaux said the rule remained in place, though he and the festival management had had regular conversations with Netflix, including one earlier this week. He said Netflix had no movies ready that would have been potentially eligible for the competition.

The president of the festival, Pierre Lescure, told reporters at the Paris news conference that the French film industry would soon show more flexibility and that the mandated delay between a movie’s theatrical release and its release by a streaming service, currently three years, could be changed. Depending on a movie’s style and budget, that window could be narrowed, he explained.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/movies/cannes-lineup-almodovar-jarmusch-tarantino-loach.html" id="0a31d8c5-d655-3156-aca8-fdba7a86a5ef">The New York Times</a>.

The Cannes Film Festival on Thursday revealed a set of movies in contention for this year’s Palme d’Or. American director Terrence Malick — who won in 2011 for “The Tree of Life” — is back with “A Hidden Life,” set during World War II. Pedro Almodóvar of Spain and Ken Loach of Britain are also in the running.

Almodóvar and Malick Will Compete at Cannes. Tarantino? He's a Maybe.

Thyssen-Bornemisza, 55, a collector of Roman coins and antiquities, opened the Kallos Gallery in London’s upscale Mayfair district in 2014 and specializes in Greek but also Roman, Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities. Having been offered a small stand in the Showcase sidebar section of TEFAF Maastricht last year, Kallos is this year making its debut as a full-fledged exhibitor and will be showing items including a marble portrait head of Roman Emperor Hadrian and an Egyptian alabaster canopic jar that once contained the organs of a high-ranking priest, removed during mummification.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q: What is it like to show at Maastricht?

A: It’s the gold standard — the best fair in the world. Typically, most dealers make over 50 percent of their annual turnover in their 10 days at Maastricht. Everybody hoards their best pieces for Maastricht, and that’s what we’ve done.

Q: How did the family collection come about?

A: The collection started because my great-grandfather, who was a successful entrepreneur and not from a noble family, absolutely adored [(French sculptor Auguste) Rodin’s work and commissioned six pieces. He then went on to build up the old master collection. My grandfather continued the collection and took it up to about the 18th century. His famous directive to my father was: “You can collect up to the 18th century, but the 19th century is suspect, and the 20th century is rubbish.”

My father, who clearly had very different tastes, was undeterred by this advice and started collecting German Expressionist paintings, which were at the time considered not great art.

He then bought Cézanne, Matisse, van Gogh and the famous Gauguin “Mata Mua.” He loved cubist paintings, loved Picasso, loved Braque. And in the ‘70s, he fell in love with American 19th-century landscapes.

At the time, there were only a handful of private collectors. The market wasn’t anything like what it became by the ‘80s.

Q: What was it like growing up in the middle of all these masterpieces?

A: When a painting arrived in (the Swiss family villa in) Lugano, my father was like a little boy at Christmas, unwrapping a painting and deciding where it would hang. His favorite paintings were actually in his bedroom: He had a late van Gogh, a Cézanne, a Degas. You can’t grow up in that environment and be indifferent to such beauty.

My father never explained why he liked a particular painting, with one exception, which was a modern painting of a triangle. I asked him once, and he said, “There’s a great tension within this piece.” I left it at that.

Q: Why didn’t you collect paintings, too?

A: As my elder brother, a keen tennis player, once said, “Just because you’re a keen tennis player doesn’t mean you want to step onto the court with Roger Federer.”

Q: Were you eager to mark yourself off from your father and grandfather?

A: Yes, that’s right. I believe that you should collect what you love in life.

I always had a great passion for ancient history, for Rome. Since I was a little boy, I collected coins. I happened to be in a hotel in Geneva once when there was a big Roman coin auction. I remember going to the viewing and seeing the most extraordinary examples of Roman coinage, and I got hooked. There was an open window in the market, where I was able to go in and buy the best pieces.

I have hundreds and hundreds of coins. I do it the old-fashioned way: I write out cards with the descriptions and weights. The more coins you look at, the better you get. The difference between something that’s good and something that’s exceptional, you can only learn over time.

Q: Why open an antiquities gallery?

A: As I was buying at auction about 10 years ago, there were some Greek pieces coming up that were exceptional. Antiquities is a strange area, because you’ve got maybe a dozen big collectors in the market. There was nobody trying to build up the world’s greatest collection of Greek antiquities.

I bought these pieces and thought it would be great to open a gallery at the top end of the market for Greek antiquities.

I was driven by my passion as a collector. I didn’t open this gallery as a business venture.

Q: But galleries are shutting down right, left and center?

A: You’re absolutely right. If you have a gallery in New York, London or Geneva, it’s a very expensive proposition. Rents are sky high.

A lot of antiquities dealers don’t have gallery premises and still make a good living. But they’re people who have established their reputations over decades and have particular skills: They’re great bronze experts, or vase experts. If you’re new to the game and trying to build up a brand, having a gallery is important.

Q: Where do you want to go with your own collection?

A: I believe that private collectors should open their collections to the public and to the academic community. Otherwise, it becomes a selfish exercise.

I have two pieces on loan to the Ashmolean Museum (in Oxford) at the moment.

Obviously my intention in the long term would be to open a small museum somewhere, perhaps in London. That would be my endgame.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/arts/lorne-thyssen-bornemisza-kallos-tefaf.html" id="6b5c98fb-cf1a-3a70-a8ec-3e53133d481f">The New York Times</a>.

For Thyssen-Bornemisza, Collecting Is in His Blood

LONDON — Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza comes from one of Europe’s most famous art-collecting families: A museum in Madrid bears his family name. That institution, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza opened in 1992, when Spain bought the family’s collection of works by masters including Dürer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Monet and van Gogh. The collection, said to have been rivaled in Europe by only that of the queen of England, was established by a dynasty of industrialists who made a fortune in shipbui...

In 1516, she was lugged out of Italy on the back of a mule by Leonardo da Vinci and ended up in France, where she became royal property. She lived for a time at the Palace of Versailles, then moved permanently to the Louvre Museum. That stay was interrupted in 1911, when a thief snatched her off the walls and kept her for two years in his Paris apartment before he was caught trying to sell her in Florence, Italy.

Now, the Mona Lisa is on the move again. And while it’s only a temporary relocation — from one wing of the Louvre to another — it’s causing commotion here.

The Salle des États, where the painting has hung since 2005, is being renovated. So, since July 17 the portrait has been installed in another gallery.

The difference is that there’s only one way in — up three escalators and through a single doorway — and 30,000 visitors a day to accommodate. The museum has spread the word that it is “exceptionally busy,” and that only prebooked tickets guarantee entry.

The phenomenon now known as overtourism is frustrating everybody: visitors, host institutions and host countries, said Marina Novelli, a professor of tourism at the University of Brighton in England. “We live in a world that is overcrowded, and travel is equally overcrowded.”

The Louvre is starting to introduce stiffer traffic-control measures. Last week, the museum’s deputy managing director, Vincent Pomarède, announced that from October or November, all visitors will need to reserve a timed slot for their visit. The measure was originally planned for early next year.

Novelli said she would be more radical still in protecting the world’s top sites. If “the way to deal with it is closing access to a particular attraction,” she said, “so be it.”

Try telling that to Alia Al Jabr. The 19-year-old engineering student from Kuwait looked dazzled by her first encounter with the Mona Lisa. “We love art, we love seeing art!” she said, as her younger sister and brother nodded approvingly. But what about the rushed conditions? “I don’t mind, because I took a beautiful picture. I actually took a video,” she said.

What if she didn’t get a photo? “I would be sad,” she said. “It’s like a memory. We have to take a picture to remember our first time here.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts/design/mona-lisa-louvre.html" id="1a34dea9-5f94-3338-aad4-82aa5d7c4d58">The New York Times</a>.

PARIS — The Mona Lisa gets around.

Want to See the Mona Lisa? Get in Line

“Sun &amp; Sea (Marina)” — presented by artists Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite — took the Golden Lion for best national participation at the Biennale, beating 89 other national pavilions.

This was the second successive time the prize has gone to a performance piece: In 2017, the winner was the German pavilion, for Anne Imhof’s haunting “Faust.”

Saturday’s other big prize, the Golden Lion for best participant in the Biennale’s central exhibition, was won by American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. He showed a stirring 50-minute film, “The White Album,” in which he juxtaposes manifestations of white supremacy with portraits of white people he cares for and is close to. Jafa also showed a set of monumental sculptures of truck tires in chains.

“If I could have picked a list, I would’ve picked the same list,” said Catherine Wood, a senior curator specializing in performance at the Tate in London.

Wood said the Lithuanian pavilion had “this very clever way of framing people’s everyday activities and leisure” — lying on towels, playing board games, applying suntan lotion, chatting, reading — with a “quite powerful activist dimension” of warnings against ecological disaster and species extinction.

“It’s pedestrian movement meeting this overarching framework of a story that was joyful and melancholic at the same time,” she said.

The Lithuanian pavilion’s curator, Lucia Pietroiusti — who is curator of general ecology and live programs at the Serpentine Galleries in London — encouraged museums to start thinking outside the box.

“The exhibition format is begging for a certain kind of opening up of possibilities,” she said. “We specialize so much, create these niches of specialism. Then we encounter these huge catastrophic situations like climate change or species extinction, and we need to find more ways to connect.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/arts/venice-biennale-winner.html" id="833c36d9-d2c9-3376-ab2b-27c535877efa">The New York Times</a>.

VENICE — An opera performance on an artificial beach, in which swimsuited performers break from sunbathing to sing warnings of ecological disaster, won Lithuania the top prize Saturday at the Venice Art Biennale, the world’s oldest and most high-profile international exhibition of contemporary art.

Venice Biennale's Top Prize Goes to Lithuania

The Lithuanian pavilion’s curator, Lucia Pietroiusti — who is curator of general ecology and live programs at the Serpentine Galleries in London — said the piece had started out as a slightly longer theater performance in Lithuanian. She encouraged museums to start thinking outside the box.

The fusion of theater, music, literature and visual arts in “Sun &amp; Sea” was “exactly the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that resonates in the present time,” she added.

The Biennale was established in 1895 as an exhibition of new art from around the world. As ever more artists took part, the idea came up to have countries build pavilions.

Belgium’s was the first to open, in 1907. This year, there were 90 national pavilions. They are usually government-funded. But in recent years, pavilions have had to find alternative backers. Part of the money for the Lithuanian pavilion, for instance, came from crowdfunding, its curator said. Other national pavilions rely on private donors.

This year’s central exhibition was curated by Ralph Rugoff, the American-born director of the Hayward Gallery in London, and was titled “May You Live in Interesting Times.”

In a departure from previous Biennales, Rugoff showed the same 79 artists or artist partnerships in the exhibition’s twin venues, the Giardini, a public park, and the Arsenale, a former shipbuilding complex. Jafa showed his film in the Giardini and his sculptures in the Arsenale.

The Biennale can be daunting for those who are not art cognoscenti or participants in the art world. There’s a lot of art to see, and some of it can be forbidding. Performance art’s growing appeal may be down to the fact that “it’s actually very accessible,” said RoseLee Goldberg, founding director of Performa, a multidisciplinary arts center in New York.

“Everyone feels entitled to comment and feels comfortable commenting,” she said. “You don’t feel intimidated — that there’s a need to have a background in art history to respond to something.”

The Silver Lion for promising young participant in the central exhibition went to Haris Epaminonda, who was born in Cyprus and lives and works in Berlin.

The five-member jury — led by Stephanie Rosenthal, director of the Gropius Bau contemporary-art museum in Berlin — also gave a special mention to two artists: Teresa Margolles, whose work focuses on Mexican women victimized by drug-related violence; and Otobong Nkanga.

A special mention went to the Belgian pavilion for “Mondo Cane,” a comic, mannequin-based installation by artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys.

Earlier, a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement was awarded to American artist Jimmie Durham.

The Venice Biennale runs through Nov. 24.

Pinault, 82, is the founder of the company that eventually became the Kering luxury-goods group. His family holding company also controls the auction house Christie’s, among several other assets. He already has two exhibition venues in Venice. Now he’s transforming the Bourse — a circular exchange building where wheat, sugar and other commodities were once traded — into the latest and most conspicuous vitrine for his collection.

It will be Paris’ second billionaire-funded art space after the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which was inaugurated in 2014 by Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of the rival luxury-goods group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. (The two tycoons recently made headlines when Arnault’s family pledged 200 million euros, or about $224 million, and Pinault’s committed 100 million euros toward the rebuilding of Notre Dame de Paris after the fire at the cathedral.)

In a country where museums are basically offshoots of central government and where private sponsorship of culture was long considered self-interested and suspect, the opening of the two art spaces signals a cultural shift. As France’s museums face austerity-driven cutbacks and struggle to satisfy a public thirst for contemporary art, private money is becoming increasingly important.

In a recent interview after he toured the Bourse construction site, Pinault boldly positioned his future space among Paris’s leading cultural landmarks. “Near here, there’s a great museum, the Louvre, which I’m not going to try to imitate: That would be pretentious,” he said. “And not far away, there’s the Pompidou Center, a great museum of the 20th century.”

“What I would like is for the Bourse de Commerce to be a place to show the art of today,” he added.

Pinault said that the Bourse “could be an interesting complement to existing institutions,” because French museums had slow decision-making processes that made it hard for them to buy contemporary art: Prices can quickly inflate while curators and administrators debate acquisitions. “Only a madman like me can decide to buy them fast,” he said.

From afar, the iron-domed Bourse — set in the onetime market quarter of Les Halles — looks like just another 19th-century Paris edifice. But inside, the listed building (inaugurated in 1889, the same year as the Eiffel Tower) is unexpectedly monumental, with a vast rotunda and a high cupola that recall the Pantheon in Rome.

The Pritzker Prize-winning architect hired to lead the transformation, Tadao Ando of Japan, said in an interview that he wished to preserve that Pantheon-like feel because he was a long-standing admirer of the nearly 2,000-year-old Roman monument, with its high dome and central opening that let in the sun and the rain and made the visitor feel one with nature.

Rather than carve up the rotunda into multiple spaces, Ando has placed a 30-foot-high concrete cylinder inside it to be the Bourse’s main exhibition gallery. Immediately above the cylinder will be a promenade from which visitors will be able to gaze at the dome and at the 19th-century wraparound wall painting beneath, produced by five artists and representing trade between the continents.

The museum’s half-dozen other galleries will be located next to the rotunda and on the first and second floors of the Bourse building. A basement auditorium is also being installed.

Pierre-Antoine Gatier, a state-appointed architect in chief who oversees works on national monuments, said that Ando was “respectful” of the existing building and that the Japanese architect did not wish his contemporary intervention to be “visible from the outside.”

Ando said he felt “a sense of anxiety” as an architect because of the building’s proximity to other great museums. “Paris is a center of world culture, so when you’re in the heart of Paris, you have to live up to the task,” he said. “This is no ordinary architecture project. It’s much more than that.”

The opening of the Bourse de Commerce will be the culmination of a 20-year saga that began when Pinault announced he was opening a museum on an island in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, on the site of a former Renault car factory. He hired Ando to design it, but, blaming local government delays and a lack of surrounding infrastructure, he gave up just as construction was about to start. (Ando said that decision had been “very disappointing.”)

Pinault turned to Venice, where he took over the 18th-century Palazzo Grassi, and, later, the city’s former customs building, which was subtly transformed by Ando. The Venice venues have hosted a series of exhibitions rooted in Pinault’s collection: group shows; solo shows of artists such as Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen; and, in 2017, a sprawling, dual-site Damien Hirst exhibition, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.”

Arnault — who is often portrayed as Pinault’s archrival, particularly when the two were battling over control of the Gucci fashion house — hired another Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Frank Gehry, to design the Fondation Louis Vuitton in western Paris. That steel-and-glass structure draws more than 1 million visitors a year with exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, including displays of the Fondation’s own collection.

By the time the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened in 2014, Pinault was actively looking for a space in Paris. In 2016, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, offered him a 50-year lease on the Bourse de Commerce for a lump sum of 15 million euros, plus yearly fees.

Asked if displaying his own collection in a museum in central Paris indicated an oversize ego, Pinault said that he had an ego “just like everybody else” but that he never forgot his “humble origins” as a timber merchant from Brittany, northwestern France. He recalled that when he was a child, his grandmother told him to keep his ego in check, otherwise it would “grow like a man’s beard.”

The Bourse will stage around 10 shows a year, involving works from Pinault’s collection as well as loans, according to Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the billionaire’s culturaladviser and a former French culture minister. In late 2020, the Bourse and the Pompidou will team up for a dual-venue exhibition of a male artist whom Pinault described as world-famous but declined to name.

Referring to that plan, Aillagon said, “Public institutions no longer have this absolute mistrust of private ones.”

Pinault dismissed comparisons with the Fondation Louis Vuitton, saying that that building was mainly a venue for large loan exhibitions. As for Arnault himself, Pinault said that he was not a “rival,” but a “business competitor, which is not the same thing.”

“There’s no competition between us when it comes to art,” he added. “No knives drawn!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/arts/design/bourse-de-commerce-paris-francois-pinault.html" id="a7859214-312a-3b79-aa4b-e684935d909c">The New York Times</a>.

PARIS — Early next year, after a nearly $170 million redevelopment, Paris’ 130-year-old Bourse de Commerce will reopen as a contemporary art museum. Unlike the world-famous state-funded museums nearby against which it hopes to measure up — namely, the Louvre and the Pompidou Center — this one will be financed by one man: French billionaire François Pinault, whose collection consists of about 5,000 works by artists such as Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly and Cindy Sherman.

Paris Is Getting a New Museum. Here's a Sneak Peek.

Now, the Italian tenor — described by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times as “perhaps the most dependably exciting singer in opera” — is getting ready to return to the Royal Opera stage in May as Cavaradossi in a revival of Puccini’s “Tosca.” It’s an opera he knows well. At 13, he played the shepherd boy in a 1990 Rome Opera production of it that starred Luciano Pavarotti. By then, young Vittorio already had a few years of singing under his belt, having been a soloist in the Sistine Chapel Choir.

Grigolo, 42, has tried other genres, too. In his 20s, he briefly gave up opera for “popera,” recording a CD, “In the Hands of Love,” that reached No. 6 on the British pop album charts.

The tenor is known in opera circles for throwing himself into his roles. He’s also a daredevil offstage, with a passion for sports cars and motorcycles. The following conversation, translated from Italian, has been edited and condensed.

Q: How old were you when you realized you wanted to be a singer?

A: I was 4 or 5. I heard my uncle sing “O Sole Mio” in a holiday village in Puglia and was stunned by the powerful, booming sound coming out of his chest. My heart was pounding. I said to my mother: “Uncle has supernatural powers. It’s as if he was a superhero. I want to be a superhero like him.”

Soon afterward, I started singing with my dad, who sang opera arias at home, in the bathroom or in the car.

Q: What was it like being in the Sistine Chapel Choir as a little boy?

A: It was an incredible gift to train in such beautiful surroundings, with statues everywhere and beautiful ceilings. It was particularly special to sing in private concerts, private Masses attended by the pope, moments of special prayer. It was like being a singer in a painting. I was conscious of the grandeur of the place.

Q: How important was Pavarotti in your life and career?

A: For a little boy like me, hearing him sing live and singing with him was incredibly moving. He would always give me advice and encouragement. He would say: “Vittorio, I can teach you all the tenor parts you like, but I can’t teach you charisma. You have it — that extra ingredient in the magic potion that will allow you to touch people.”

Q: A decade or two ago, singers such as the Three Tenors — Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras — were household names. Why are there no opera celebrities on that scale today?

A: Opera doesn’t have the same platform that it used to have. In the past, radio and television broadcast it a lot more.

I’m convinced that things are changing now, with opera broadcasts in movie theaters. They give people an introduction to opera. The tickets are cheaper, it’s easier, and if people like what they see, they can buy a ticket to experience opera itself.

It’s also important for singers to perform outside of opera houses. I was one of the first to sing “La Traviata” in a train station in Zurich and “L’Elisir d’Amore” at Malpensa Airport in Milan. These might seem like crazy projects, but they make people realize that opera and classical music are part of our history, and that they have to be part of our life.

Q: Why did you give up your crossover career?

A: I realized that it wasn’t going to be my future, because I would’ve ended up being forgotten by the opera world. So I had to go back into opera.

Now that I’ve sung in all the major opera houses and been recognized all over the world, I can allow myself to step out and communicate again in a more popular musical language, meaning with a pop song rather than an opera aria.

Q: You won’t abandon opera?

A: Of course not! How can I abandon opera at the age of 40? I only just got where I am, and I have another 20 years of opera in me. I’ll certainly be singing until I’m at least 60 or 70.

You have to preserve the voice. There are opera singers who sing for three years and are finished. So you have to know how to choose the right repertoire. Otherwise, it’s not you who will be deciding to abandon opera, it’s opera that might abandon you.

Q: Explain your passion for fast cars and motorcycles.

A: I’ve been motorcycle racing since I was a boy. To me, the sound of the motorcycle engine is like an orchestra. I love to hear it when I’m wearing my motorcycle helmet: that rumbling noise that makes me quiver and gives me as much emotion as a great voice singing at the top of their lungs.

Q: You have a taste for risk and danger?

A: I like to push things to the limit. As far as dying goes, you can die walking out the front door, slipping on a banana peel.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/vittorio-grigolo-royal-opera-house-tosca.html" id="e17a8be2-5dd0-3c02-a666-81fbf4666cd4">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — Vittorio Grigolo got his first major operatic break in June 2010, when the Royal Opera House cast him at the last minute in Massenet’s “Manon.” Critics and audiences were ecstatic.

For a Daredevil Tenor, Opera Is a Lifelong Thrill

Colonialism and its aftermath are a frequent talking point at La Colonie, and they are a long-standing preoccupation of Attia, as his new exhibition “The Museum of Emotion,” running through May 6 at the Hayward Gallery in London, attests. The subject has become particularly timely with President Emmanuel Macron of France’s recent pledge to give back some of the 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa that are in France’s national collections, mostly in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Through his installations, Attia (who won the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious art award, in 2016) critiques Western museums’ approach to African heritage — their tendency to undervalue, misread and misrepresent its treasures, and to view it, still, through colonial eyes. In a room at the Hayward, for example, he shows an old-fashioned vitrine full of stuffed birds, and, mixed in with them, three bird-shaped African ritual masks. This, the artist is saying, is how African artifacts were long shown in Western natural history museums: alongside animal and plant specimens.

“What strikes me, and anyone else with origins that link them to these objects, is that when you visit Quai Branly, or the British Museum, or the Metropolitan Museum, you see objects that have been decontextualized,” he said in an interview at La Colonie.

“It’s as if you amputated a human being, showed his arm, and said: ‘Here is the human being,'” he added.

Elsewhere in the Hayward exhibition is a small shelf holding two objects: an Edvard Munch art book with “The Scream” on the cover and an African mask that bears an uncanny resemblance to the howling face.

The director of the Hayward Gallery, Ralph Rugoff, who curated the show, said that through this installation and other works, the artist was conveying a “sense of questioning of traditional museum values, where artifacts from the former colonies still can’t be taken seriously as great works of art somehow on the same level as the Western masters.”

Rather than dwelling on the need to give the objects back, Rugoff added, “It’s more like, ‘Let’s get rid of the concepts that make us take, and also reject, some of these artifacts, to put them in a hierarchy.'”

Attia, 48, grew up in the Paris suburb of Garges-lès-Gonesse, one of seven children of an Algerian construction worker father and an Algerian mother who was prevented from learning to read and write by the uncle who raised her.

The exhibition opens with a video, taken with a drone, of a suburban housing project — or “open-air jailhouse,” as the artist put it — like the one where he grew up alongside many other descendants of France’s former colonial subjects.

From his childhood through his teens, Kader spent months at a time in Algeria. Barely two decades had passed since the country’s liberation from French rule in 1962, so “there were still very strong traces of the war of independence,” he said. “You were basically living in a history book.”

Everywhere, he said, the architectural leftovers of colonialism were repurposed. A modernist church, for example, was turned into a mosque. “These colonized people felt like they were taking back what belonged to them,” he said. “That’s when I developed a profound interest in the notion of reappropriation, and later, of repair.”

By the 1990s, Attia, then in his 20s, had earned degrees in applied arts and philosophy. He then spent nearly three years in the Republic of Congo doing alternative civilian service (a substitute for France’s compulsory military service). Part of a team preparing for the opening of the country’s first national museum, in the capital, Brazzaville, he came across objects that would be on show: masks, talismans, jewelry, shields. He became aware of the spiritual dimension of these objects, he said, of the belief that they had sacred or magical powers.

When he returned to France and went looking for African artifacts in museums, he found them displayed in a building that was the precursor to the Quai Branly. Important treasures that had been blessed by healers and sorcerers and used in rituals were, he said, “orphans here, because the bodies and communities that celebrated them were no longer around.”

At the same time, he started exploring his own French-Algerian and Muslim identity. In the early 2000s, he photographed transgender Algerian prostitutes who had fled civil war and persecution; images from that series are at the Hayward.

A few years later, he produced a series of works inspired by the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca in whose direction Muslims turn when they pray. One of the paintings, “Black Cube II,” a work from 2005 that was exhibited in the British Museum’s “Hajj” show in 2012, shows the Kaaba as a quivering, dripping object.

Attia then started highlighting instances where North and sub-Saharan African culture had influenced Western culture without being fully acknowledged. In 2009, he produced “Untitled (Ghardaïa),” a scale model made of cooked couscous of the ancient Algerian city of Ghardaïa, whose geometric architecture influenced the architect Le Corbusier — a little-known fact. (“Untitled (Ghardaïa)” is owned by the Tate galleries in Britain.)

That same year, he denounced a multivenue exhibition in Paris, “Picasso and the Masters,” for leaving out the African masks that had so profoundly influenced the Spanish artist.

La Colonie, near the Gare du Nord in the French capital, is a forum where issues related to colonialism can be debated not only by intellectuals and academics, but also by ordinary citizens. (The space pays for itself by turning into a bar on weekends.)

Attia, who lives and works in Berlin and Paris, is no stranger to the debate about restitution. He organized a symposium on the subject at La Colonie in September, with speakers including Felwine Sarr, one of the two academics appointed by Macron to make recommendations on the subject. The report’s co-author, Bénédicte Savoy, said in an interview that Attia had “the ability, through a few gestures or objects, to give form to the philosophical questions of our time.”

Attia is working on a film with one of the descendants of a king whose throne was looted by French colonial forces and is now being given back by Macron to the state of Benin.

The fact that Macron was returning 26 treasures (including the throne) to Benin was a “strong gesture," Attia said.

“You need strong gestures to change the world,” he added.

But a previous wave of support for restitution in the 1970s was never followed up, he warned, and he called on artists and intellectuals “to fight to defend the question of restitution.”

“Artists have to embrace this issue so that it’s not just a matter for museums and researchers and politicians,” he said. “Art can stand up to politics.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/arts/design/kader-attia-hayward-gallery.html" id="3d38477d-2ce8-3119-af73-21484c2fe2ee">The New York Times</a>.

We Need to Talk About Colonialism, French-Algerian Artist Says

PARIS — Late one Sunday afternoon in February, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia welcomed several dozen visitors to a talk in the skylighted foyer of La Colonie, a cultural center and cafe that he opened in 2016 in a former textile factory in Paris. Guests sitting on old sofas and folding chairs listened as Attia moderated a debate between two French philosophers on the politics of race in postcolonial times.

<h1>CANNES, France — “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” the Quentin Tarantino movie that had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, revolves around the August 1969 murder of the actress Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie.</h1>

Glamorously coiffed and outfitted throughout the film, the Australia-born actress does get screen time. She goes into a movie theater by herself one day to watch one of her own films, putting up her bare feet as she takes in the scenes. She spends time in Hollywood with her husband, director Roman Polanski, and dances riotously at an outdoor party, as male guests eye her with desire. Yet she doesn’t have many lines in the movie, which runs 2 hours and 40 minutes.

At a news conference for the film on Wednesday, I asked Tarantino why Robbie, an Oscar-nominated actress who starred in “I, Tonya,” didn’t get more dialogue. It must have been a deliberate choice on his part, I added.

“Well, I just reject your hypotheses,” Tarantino replied, and said no more.

Robbie, who was seated beside him and was also asked to comment, smiled at the director’s response, and said: “I think the moments that I got on screen gave an opportunity to honor Sharon and the lightness.”

“The tragedy, ultimately, was the loss of innocence, and to really show those wonderful sides of her, I think, could be adequately done without speaking,” she noted. “I did feel like I got a lot of time to explore the character, even without dialogue specifically, which is an interesting thing.”

“Rarely do I get an opportunity to spend so much time on my own as a character, going through a day-to-day existence,” she said. The actress added that she “actually really appreciated the exercise and felt that I could deliver what I wanted to on screen.”

The movie, which was well received by critics in Cannes, opens July 26 in the United States.

This article originally appeared in <a id="74ea346c-a442-447a-8522-4560c8700fb9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/movies/quentin-tarantino-margot-robbie.html">The New York Times</a>.

Tarantino passes on question about screen treatment of Margot Robbie

At a news conference for the film on Wednesday, I asked Tarantino why Robbie, an Oscar-nominated actress who starred in “I, Tonya,” didn’t get more dialogue. It must have been a deliberate choice on his part, I added.

An all-star cast including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny and Selena Gomez assembled on the red carpet before the movie’s world premiere, surrounding Jarmusch, who wore his signature dark sunglasses.

The movie is about a horde of flesh-eating zombies — corpses that rise from their graves and haunt a humdrum town called Centerville, a “real nice place” with a population of 738. The zombies gravitate toward the things they enjoyed when they were still alive: coffee, chardonnay, candy, toys, cable TV and power tools. The zombies’ sudden emergence is apparently linked to polar fracking, which has caused the Earth to be pulled off its axis.

“‘The Dead Don’t Die’ fancies itself a cutting-edge macabre comedy, but the truth is that it’s behind the curve of pop culture,” wrote Variety reviewer Owen Gleiberman. “That’s why it’s a disappointing trifle.”

But some attendees of the Cannes premiere were much more upbeat.

“Audiences that expected a normal zombie movie will be kind of upset by the pacing of this movie, but people who know Jarmusch’s work will be very happy,” said Luiz Oliveira, a film critic from the Brazilian news portal Metrópoles, when leaving the screening. He described himself as a fan of the director. “It’s like you’re hanging out with Jarmusch characters in a zombie apocalypse,” he added.

Audrey Shaw, a 21-year-old University of Florida film student, said she “really liked it. It was very campy, very on the nose, but it made a lot of points.”

“It was definitely talking about climate change, and ignorance of Americans, and how we look past the problem,” she added, “and just involve ourselves in our everyday lives, and don’t look at what’s happening.”

CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival opened Tuesday with 21 movies contending for the top trophy, the Palme d’Or. A gala premiere of “The Dead Don’t Die,” by American director Jim Jarmusch, kicked off the 12-day extravaganza.

Farah Nayeri

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