Joan Rivers' decorating dilemma
Dennis Lewis
today, beginning with the conflict between Joan Rivers' formal
surroundings and her collection of Southern primitive paintings.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/garden/09disasters.html>
"I live very formally," says Joan Rivers when the subject of
decorating disasters comes up. "My apartment is very 18th-century
French and English formal. I have finger bowls at dinner. Marie
Antoinette and I could have been friends."
This is why Ms. Rivers' passion, the paintings of the folk artist
Clementine Hunter, has created what she sees as a disaster.
Brightly colored (or as Ms. Rivers describes them, a mixture of
African art and Grandma Moses on acid), they depict slavery-era scenes
of cotton picking, slave burials and weddings, and do not work at all
with the gilded columns and ornate objets (for instance, a huge
crystal bowl once owned by Czar Nicholas II) of Ms. Rivers' Fifth
Avenue duplex. Worse, Ms. Rivers cannot stop buying them.
How did Ms. Rivers get hooked on Souther primitive? "I was playing
Natchitoches, way down in the South -- this goes back to the '80s --
and somebody asked, do you want to meet this primitive artist named
Clementine Hunter. She was 101 then, an old, old, old lady who painted
these insane primitives, almost three dimensional. I think the first
painting was slaves carrying cotton. I brought it home and Vincent
Price, who was a great art collector, said, 'Are you crazy?'"
The cost?
"I gave her $35 and a meat pie."
Ms. Rivers now owns six Clementine Hunters, for which she estimates
she's spent $12,000. That's not a lot of money for a woman whose
jewelry, often sold on QVC, has, according to her spokeswoman, grossed
half a billion dollars since its inception.
The problem is, there is nowhere for the paintings to go. When Ms.
Rivers puts them up in her very modern jewelry-business office, the
president of the company just as quickly takes them down. Her own
apartment is, of course, out of the question. "My decorator threw a
fit and just said, 'Where? Where? Where?'" Ms. Rivers said. "'Next to
the Coromandel screen? I don't think so.'" ...
Ted Dork
would!!
Phoenix
says...
Really neat article. Thanks for bringing it here.
bel