Jeff Koons harshly treated by his then wife Ilona Staller (Cicciolina) - June 1994. Ilona: “I am in Trieste, but I don’t feel safe. Minister Biondi needs to help me. My husband is going to kill me. He keeps threatening me.” Staller is on the run with her child....
I lost my father when I was ten, and I was the oldest of four siblings. I had to quit school and start working at age fourteen. On 13 May you turn eighty, so it’s been sixty-six years since then. How do you feel about living such a long life and about this birthday?...
"After 31 years as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York I decided it was time to teach my long experience and the life of the work of art." Philippe de Montebello is in great shape, sitting comfortably in one of the salons of the New York University...
Peter, you met David McDermott in New York in 1980. He went to Syracuse University like you, six years ahead, and this encounter changed both your lives. How did it happen? He went after me. He courted me. It was like the fairy tale "Puss in Boots". He asked me what I...
Inès, the Marquise of the Boutique. I go to see Inès de La Fressange in 1991, in the new flat that she and her husband Luigi d’Urso (who tragically died of a heart attack in 2006) have bought and renovated on the top floor of a very Parisian building. Madame Verdurin,...
Jeffrey Deitch, you are a curator, an art critic, an art dealer, and you have been the Director of MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and done many other things. How would you describe yourself? I am one of the very few people who have played every single...
Zachary E. “Zac” Posen is walking around his new atelier in the Upper East Side of New York, next block to the St. Regis Hotel or the newly opened, very chic, Polo Bar (where, by the way, he will have dinner later with some business friends and his boyfriend,...
You are one of the most famous Italian artists alive today. Why do you choose not to have a studio in one place? Art doesn't come as much from inspiration as it does from the obsessions and fears that we all face every day. I have never been able to escape from the...
Massimiliano Gioni is Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York; Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan. The interview took place in the Italian restaurant Emporio, next to the Bowery in the Lower East Side of...
It is with great sadness in our hearts that we republish our interview with Amos Oz, who has died on 28th December 2018. Writers and his readers mourn his loss and will miss his voice so much. In his book "A Tale of Love and Darkness", which has been translated from...
Lorcan O'Neill arrives at my house wet and frozen by snow that just keeps on falling. The New York he has just landed in from Mexico looks like a fairy-tale landscape. There is an art fair going on, The Armory Show, where he has a stand, in the middle of which hangs a...
Wim Wenders inaugurated a photo exhibition called “Images of Planet Earth” in the Scuderie del Quirinale (Quirinal Stables) in Rome, 2006. The great director is walking through the enormous spaces of the Quirinale, putting the final touches on the exhibition and...
The following interview with Zaha Hadid RA took place in the Royal Academicians’ Room in the Keeper’s House at the Royal Academy of Arts in London’s Mayfair. The invited audience have been generously welcomed by Charles Saumarez Smith, the Secretary and Chief...
This interview with Frédéric Mitterrand was made in 2009, when for almost a year he had been the director of Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. Your predecessors as Director of Villa Medici include the great painters Poussin, Ingres, Balthus, and many great...
To reach the Dolce & Gabbana headquarters, one goes down a ramp with little steps that are just barely there. The space - neither a garage nor a loft - is modern with large glass doors, walls painted white, and a few Baroque details here and there – an object or...
Jay Levenson is Director of the International Program at MoMA. What is the mission of the International Program? The department was started in 1952 to circulate exhibitions from the Museum internationally. The idea was to share the collection and make American artists...
Very Valentino. In Piazza Mignanelli - a stone’s throw from the Spanish steps - one sees an old palazzo and a large staircase where models are being photographed. Valentino is very busy. It is June 2004 and there’s a buzz in the air. Valentino has given interviews to...
Massimo Ferragamo, how did you become the “American Ferragamo?” The best things in life happen by chance. Back when I was a humble student, I had a conversation with the chairman of Saks Fifth Avenue who was visiting Florence. He suggested I do the executive training...
I have just finished a long interview with Urs Fischer in his huge studio in Brooklyn, not far from the bridge that I am now crossing. Today the sky is very blue, as it sometimes is in New York in winter. This amazing view of the city, its bridges and skyscrapers,...
Mariano Rubinacci’s large shop and tailor's workshop is headquartered in the heart of Naples in the sixteenth century Palazzo Cellamare. "My son Luca marks the third generation. My father started in 1930 almost by chance. He was from a good upper-class Neapolitan...
The job of the artist is to actually make time stand still. Tracey Emin is in her London studio. She says: “I bought this building in 2010. I live two minutes from here in a really old house that was built in 1729. This once used to be an artists' area, now it is more...
“We just sold a Turner for £30.3 million.” George Wachter is Chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America and Co-Chairman of Old Master Paintings Worldwide, with over forty years of experience in his field. He joined Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings department in 1973...
LIVING POETICALLY The art of living life as a muse. Loulou de la Falaise, with her international pedigree, epitomised the archetype of the Parisian lady. I loved her elegance, her imaginativeness, her brilliant creativity and her incorrigible non-conformity. She also...
My secret? I love my life. Gianfranco Ferré welcomes me into his office in Via Spiga in Milan. He’s relaxed and smiling as if he’s just returned from a long holiday. He’s wearing a shirt with bizarre black and white stripes, and a tie that with its strange mixed...
Glamour? It’s about learning to cover up. Pierre Cardin arrives in a dark green Jaguar driven by a chauffeur dressed in an impeccable blue uniform. The fashion designer gets out wearing a blue jacket with gold buttons, a shirt with large checks and a white collar,...
My Passion for Real Food. Sally, you are soon going to celebrate thirty years of your restaurant Clarke’s in London's Kensington Church Street. Have many things changed since you started? From the age of twelve and a half I had the real idea that you could run a...
Robilant + Voena are agents and dealers in fine art. Edmondo, why did you come to live in London in the early seventies and then never go back to Italy to work? The choice was never really mine. My parents didn't give me the option, but decided that I should be...
From Napalm to Beautiful Women. Richard Avedon is a small man. His face is sunken in and he hides behind his white mane of hair and large tortoise-shell glasses. He is dressed in black velvet and has shiney shoes. He’s in the middle of the Sala delle Cariatidi in the...
"I’ve seduced the world with casual elegance." Calvin Klein gets out of a Mercedes and goes into an Italian restaurant downtown. He is dressed in dark grey and is wearing a crew-necked pullover without a shirt underneath. He is very thin and lanky. When he speaks, he...
A life spent in photography. What does that mean? It’s a great life because photography is a way to express oneself with a wonderful language, a universal language that doesn’t need to be translated or interpreted. That everyone can understand. It’s a language that is...
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Money Must Stay in the Family
The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.
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