alain elkann interviews

ART AND DESIGN

Colin Bailey

Colin Bailey

Colin B. Bailey is the Director of The Morgan Library & Museum. He was Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, before that Deputy Director and Chief Curator at The Frick Collection, and he is a specialist of 18th-19th century French art, especially...

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François Halard

François Halard

“I’ve gone from top models to beautiful homes.” In the early 1980s, photographer François Halard worked for Decoration International in Paris. Then Alex Lieberman, the art director at Condé Nast, called on him and he moved to New York. In May 2011 I asked him: How did...

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Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson

"I made portraits of Lady Gaga from classical paintings in the Louvre’s collection. Her interior sense became her exterior expression." I arrive in the Watermill Center. Bob Wilson is expecting me in his industrial reconverted building where he lives, where he has his...

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Julia Peyton-Jones

Julia Peyton-Jones

"If you don’t like the system then you invent your own." Julia Peyton-Jones is Director of London's Serpentine Galleries, located in the elegant landscapes and architecture of the Royal Park, Kensington Gardens. The Serpentine Galleries now comprise two separate small...

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Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada, photographer and filmmaker: “My look at a changing Morocco” You are famous as a photographer as well as for other things. What else do you do? I am also a sculptor and filmmaker. I showed a film at the Venice Biennial, at the Arsenale, which was chosen by...

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Dante Ferretti

Dante Ferretti

“Fellini taught me how to dream.” Dante Ferretti is a three-time Oscar winning Italian art director and production designer. His work with directors from Fellini and Pasolini to Gilliam and Scorsese has earned him an array of industry awards and nominations. Ferretti...

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Amanda Harlech

Amanda Harlech

Amanda, Lady Harlech is one of the fashion industry's leading authorities on style, enjoying a successful career as a consultant and muse to Karl Lagerfeld. For years you’ve worked closely with Karl Lagerfeld, the famous designer behind the Chanel and Fendi...

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Gavin Brown

Gavin Brown

An incomparable adventure. I meet the gallerist Gavin Brown in a little road in Trastevere in Rome. I ask him: What brings you here? About 13 years ago I found myself visiting friends at the American Academy here in Rome. We walked into Trastevere and it was my first...

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Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel

Painter and director Julian Schnabel, wearing a white robe and velvet slippers fit for a Venetian gondolier, opens the door of his extravagant New York home in downtown Manhattan during October 2000. This is where the most important scenes from his first film...

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Charles March

Charles March

Reviving Goodwood. Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara, is the master of Goodwood, a traditional English agricultural and sporting estate of some 12,000 acres that stretches from the top of the Sussex Downs to the outskirts of Chichester. At 3,400 acres...

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Cicciolina

Cicciolina

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....

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Luciano Benetton

Luciano Benetton

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?...

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Philippe de Montebello

Philippe de Montebello

"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...

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Peter McGough

Peter McGough

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...

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Inès de La Fressange

Inès de La Fressange

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,...

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Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch

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...

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Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan

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...

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Massimiliano Gioni

Massimiliano Gioni

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...

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Amos Oz

Amos Oz

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...

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Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders

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...

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Zaha Hadid at the Royal Academy of Arts

Zaha Hadid at the Royal Academy of Arts

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...

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Frédéric Mitterrand

Frédéric Mitterrand

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...

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Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana

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...

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// FEATURED

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.

// PUBLICATIONS

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