Patrick Kinmonth

AN INDEFINABLE PERSONALITY. Patrick Kinmonth is an Anglo-Irish opera director and designer, film maker, writer, painter, interior designer, art editor, creative director and exhibition curator. He is widely known for his many stage, costume, interior and architectural designs and recognised internationally for the breadth and depth of his creative interests. His many collaborations have yielded landmark opera, ballet and dance productions, books and exhibitions. Kinmonth’s earlier role as arts editor at British Vogue included creative direction for fashion and portraiture shoots. He is perhaps “one of the most indefinable personalities of contemporary art”.

You can listen to the podcast of this interview here.

Patrick Kinmonth, we cannot define you, but let’s start from the beginning. Your father was an Irish doctor, your mother was English, and you were a brilliant student at Oxford University where you primarily studied English language and literature and also attended the Ruskin School of Drawings and Fine Arts?  

Yes. The conundrum for me really has been that I felt as a child that I was an artist, before I even knew consciously what an artist was. I realised that that was my condition.  

How did you realise it?  

I realised that what I saw mattered to me very, very much, and I wondered why, when my brothers and sisters didn’t seem to notice things in the same way. Then artistic people like an aunt or a cousin or someone a little older than myself would confirm the idea that to be as I was, to feel as I was feeling, was actually something remarkable that I was going to be able to make central in my life. To those people I am permanently grateful.  

After your outstanding career at Mansfield College in Oxford University, which included an involvement with theatre, you went to Venice, another magical place for aesthetics?  

Yes, a place where every single place you look there is beauty and there is almost nothing that disappoints visually. Fez and Meknes, cities in Morocco, also had the same effect on me when I went there first 35 or 40 years ago: that not a single person, not a thing that was being worn, not a play of light on a wall, nothing was not beautiful. Fez is still a miracle. So there are other places, but Venice was and remains the most aesthetically satisfying city in the world for me.

Madama Butterfly, Oper Köln, Patrick Kinmonth Direction, Sets and Costumes, 2008

Patrick Kinmonth, you met and became friends with special people in the world of art in Venice and were very close to the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim? 

Very would be an exaggeration. I was close to her, spent a lot of time with her and was her neighbour. I lived in Ca’Dario, one of the most beautiful houses in the world, when I went back to Venice. It is a famous house for being haunted by a curse that if you own it you will die. It’s for sale at the moment and I would love to buy it, but I am sensible of the tradition of dying that’s associated with that house.  

You survived because you didn’t own it!  

Yes, but I was just around the corner from Peggy and in those days she was quite a lot on her own because, sadly, she had lost her daughter and she didn’t have a partner at the time. She enjoyed showing me her extraordinary collection and we talked about art; and also, I just talked. She could be quite silent sometimes, and I filled the gap. My friends call me “Radio Patrick”, because if you turn me on at about 5 o’clock in the morning I will talk until you leave the room. I think that was useful for Peggy.  

You went on to win a talent competition and became a creative director for fashion and furniture for British Vogue?  

I came second, not first. The person who came first was a remarkable individual called Stephen Pickles, who had been at Oxford at the same time as me. But coming second, I was still offered a job at the magazine at Condé Nast, which I took up. Eventually Arts Editor was my official title. In those days there wasn’t an Artistic Director as such. The fashion editors, and I, were the ones who actually performed the function of being the artistic director of the magazine, which later became a distinct career for people.  

You worked at Vogue for many years with important and famous photographers such as André Kertész, David Bailey, Mario Testino, Ronald Traeger and Bruce Weber? 

It was natural for me, and actually a relief for me, to collaborate and work with all these incredible artists. I felt in the end their work was not necessarily improved, but was honed in appropriateness for exactly what the editor-in-chief and myself wanted the image to be on the page. It was a very interesting role and it allowed me to step back from my own artistic journey and devote my energies and my eye to these other people, which I really adore doing. I felt I could grow as an artist by seeing the world and working with these other people who I really could help a lot with composition, with ideas, with depth. I could help them tell the story they needed to tell with their camera, and I would also help them aesthetically. “Wouldn’t it be better if that blue thing was not in the background?” or, “That chair is disrupting the picture,” or in other words constantly giving an aesthetic opinion.  

You did also become a painter and met some of the most famous painters of the age in London, such as David Hockney, who recently passed away aged 88, and Francis Bacon, who died in 1992? 

I was one of the last people in London to see Francis Bacon before he went. It was a Wednesday morning when I saw him, and by Saturday in Madrid he was dead. I miss him a lot. I haven’t had time to be an immensely close friend to all the people I’ve met, but I had a certain kind of confidence, and confidence is a vital element in the life of an artist. I was very sure that what I had to say was right. I had tremendous conviction. I could walk into a room and André Kertész would be there, somebody so reflective and extraordinary as a photographer, and I would be able to say, “I think it would be a great deal better if we moved the camera to the left.” The same with Lartigue. Lartigue was a total legend, but I was in my early 20s and I would say, “Henri, no, let’s go over here, it’s much better.” I had this impertinence at my fingertips, but I was convincing, and they were interested in somebody who actually engaged with what they were doing. Anybody genuine could see that I was only trying to help them, and of course they didn’t have to do what I said. I was completely prepared for them to say no, and in fact it was very exciting when they said no, because I learned something.  

Were you also able to do this with David Bailey, who has a very strong personality?  

David Bailey did not do what I said very often and enjoyed telling me that he wasn’t going to do what I said, and I totally respected that. That was his position and I rather revelled in it. It would be accompanied by a monologue of him saying how stuck up we all were at Vogue, and what a nightmare the Editor was, and why couldn’t he just be left alone to get on and do what he wanted to do. More or less he would say, “What are you doing here?” but he enjoyed doing that. It was the name of the game. Bailey was a photographer whose process required him to be absolutely in charge and on top of it. He was dominant as an artist and a photographer and so that particular kind of relationship was really interesting.  

You had a lifelong relationship with other renowned photographers such as Tony Snowdon, and with Mario Testino you curated an important show about Diana, Princess of Wales in Kensington Palace? 

Yes, I did, but probably the most important show I did with him looking back was his first retrospective show, at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2002, called Mario Testino: Portraits. I curated it, and I also designed the architectural space. That was the beginning of a really enjoyable part of my work, which is curating and designing exhibitions for others, most notably probably Valentino, for whom I made the 2007 exhibition at Ara Pacis in Rome for his 45th celebration of his career. That was amazing because I was dealing with Richard Meier’s building for the Ara Pacis, which was very controversial, and it became a football with the mayor of Rome at the time who disliked it. Richard Meier made this building for this extraordinary sacred monument the Altar of Peace from the ancient world which was beautiful and controversial in equal measure. Mussolini had taken a great interest in its excavation. The building was hated visually by most people because it was a very modern response to the commission. Suddenly, Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, who had this brilliance, saw the moment and said: “What about if we put our exhibition inside the building of the Ara Pacis?” This was an exceptional idea and everybody agreed to it because they thought, if we can show how extraordinary this building is and at the same time honour Valentino, who is so respected in the city, it would be a double win. I was allowed to build a huge structure inside the building and outside it and do an intervention artistically and architecturally with the whole thing and show Valentino’s work. It was an amazing opportunity.

Patrick Kinmonth, you also worked in partnership with the Italian art director and curator Antonio Monfreda, with whom you did many exhibitions at the Metropolitan in New York, or for Fendi?  

Yes, we worked a lot together. He made it possible for me to work in the way that we did within Italy, because he lived in Rome and I lived in London, and he enabled the most phenomenal amount of connections and possibilities for us. He has a fabulous eye and a marvellous aesthetic sense and we became a very powerful team together for these projects. I’m very grateful to him for those collaborations.  

Since 1993, you had another very important partner, Robert Carsen. with whom you developed another side of your career in theatre, working in opera all over the world. You did Wagner’s tetralogy in Cologne and Shanghai, and then La Traviata at the Fenice in Venice in 2004, and with this Traviata you went to Tokyo and Beijing? 

Robert was aware of me as a painter, and right at the beginning of my career a great friend, Jasper Conran, had been invited by the Royal Ballet to make the costumes for a new piece called Tombeaux. It became clear to Robert that there was a possibility of me working as a set designer, because Jasper asked me to make the stage image for this ballet by David Bintley, and David Bintley wholeheartedly embraced the idea of me doing the sets. After that, I met Robert socially and he asked me if I would be interested to do some sets in the opera. I said, “Yes I absolutely would, but I’d like to do the costumes as well.” He looked at me with the look of ‘okay, so give him an inch and he’ll take a yard!’’ But I did really want to be responsible for how the figures looked in front of the sets and what the colours were and what the clothes were and everything, and so from that moment on I did both sets and costumes in the 20 and 30 productions that I made with him.

Do some of them continue to live? 

Yes. The Traviata in Venice in 2004 was created for the theatre’s reopening after its disastrous 1996 fire, and we did the very last performance of it last year, so it lasted for 20 years. Other productions with longevity included our Ring Cycle and our Janáček productions which allowed me to work with simplicity, with the elements of air, fire earth and water. I thought of working directly with water on stage for Katia Kabanova, and proposed a kind of vision of Acqua Alta. In that opera at its climax, the heroine Katia drowns in the river, and I felt it would be beautiful and appropriate to have the water there the whole time. It’s her fate, her doom, visually there the whole time on the stage: water, water, water, water. It’s just a matter of when the thread of her life will break and, like Ophelia, she will fall in and inevitably drown.  

Pierre Audi, the English-Lebanese theatre director and artistic director was another encounter of yours?  

Pierre was at Oxford with me, so I knew him right from the very beginning of my maturity. I lived with my aunt in London, one of the ones who had noticed my artistic abilities early on, in her beautiful house in Notting Hill Gate with my cousins and my uncle for a decade. I was very lucky to be there. When I wanted to leave, I hadn’t yet got the resources to buy my own apartment, and Pierre said, “Come and stay with me, because I’m only in London half the time.” He was based in Paris. I started living there, and living in a flat opposite me was Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales. She was a nanny, and I got to know this shy interesting person who had that atmosphere of caring for children, which was at the beginning of her own career and obviously existed into the time when she had children of her own. She was just so amazing with them.  

At a certain moment something changed, because you yourself made Madame Butterfly, Samson and Delilah, and Don Giovanni amongst other operas as both director and designer? 

Yes, and I went on to do nine or ten productions which I directed and designed. Things happen in one’s life that are inexplicable, which just have to be assigned to luck. This production of Madame Butterfly flowed out of me, inspired by the quite extraordinary singers that I worked with. This first experience of directing was a completely natural discovery, where beautiful ideas emerged in rehearsal. I don’t think I achieved a production as good as that very first one again for years. Something happened that was like a key turning in a lock, where I realised, ‘yes! this particular story, for whatever reason, I can make really exciting in the theatre’ , and it proved to be the case.  

You play the piano very well. Do you have a special relationship with music? 

As a child, I had the most beautiful natural soprano voice. It was a genuine gift, and a gift can be given and a gift can be taken away. My family showed absolutely no interest in it, and I had to have a chaperone to go and perform, so various local ladies would drive me to where I needed to go to perform, which probably gave me a very strong sense of independence: “If you want to do something, Patrick, just get on with it”. When I reached puberty, my beautiful voice disappeared. It just switched off and was completely and utterly over. I can’t sing, I don’t sing. I have no range. There’s no evidence of any of this former gift. It’s gone. It was salutary, the idea that you’re given something absolutely amazing and you can’t tell why. So the moral is get on with it, because who knows when you won’t be able to do whatever it is you are doing right now. You might just wake up one day and be blind, or wake up one day and be someone else, or wake up and be dead. Just get on with it whilst you can and don’t hold yourself back.  

Is it correct that you met David Hockney in Los Angeles and became close to him? 

I met him first in London because I had met another painter, Patrick Procktor, who was at the time more famous and more successful than David Hockney, which is an extraordinary idea. I think Patrick actually paid for David’s ticket to go to LA for the first time. He and various other painters have asked to paint me, spontaneously, and I would say yes thinking I’m going to have a chance to speak to this or that amazing artist. Amongst these people was Patrick, and also Craigie Aitchison who was a life-changing figure for me because his conversations about art and how to be an artist and what an artist is helped me formulate and navigate the world of art in the way that I have done. Eventually Hockney and I did have a crisis because I wrote critically of his paintings which investigate Picasso’s achievement. Now I see them in a completely different light, but at the time I thought ‘why is David, who draws so exquisitely, who has his own vision and who doesn’t need to be looking at anyone else, why is the studio full of pictures in the manner of Picasso?  Why is the work of David Hockney carrying on a tradition that is completely comprehended in art history, particularly in the work of Picasso, which is albeit infinitely interesting?’ The further we get away from the work of Picasso, the more we can see that he went on innovating, discovering, and making, right to the end of his life, as did David. 

When he died, some people compared Hockney to Picasso? 

Yes, they said that not since Picasso has an artist worked in such a varied way, because Hockney used photography, he used technology, he was absolutely open to every single innovation, he started drawing on the iPad, et cetera, et cetera. He did what he wanted to do and, and was magnificent and prolific. Most of us who love his work still look with some melancholy at the early ink drawings which are of an extraordinary, exquisite perception and quality. I don’t think he found that on the iPad personally and I wish he had gone on drawing with a tiny, tiny, black pen because there somehow he reached a place where no one else has gone. David draws a line which travels and which is not always anatomically accurate, but which traces precisely the feeling of David as he drew the person. And that is less like Picasso and much more like Matisse.

Káťa Kabanova, Patrick Kinmonth Sets and Costume, Direction Robert Carsen

Patrick Kinmonth: Neva, 1994, Private Collection

Valentino: 45 Years of Style, Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome, 2007. Photo by Beatrice Pediconi

Venetian Damask, fabric printed on one hundred percent linen for Chelsea Textiles,
London

Patrick KInmonth, has your life changed again recently?  

I do much less work in the opera, because I feel in many ways I have made my statement in opera, although there is talk of going to direct and design Tosca in Tokyo, a very tempting project. I’ve shifted my focus in the performing arts to ballet, and I’m preparing a new ballet now with the choreographer Cathy Marston about the life of the French novelist George Sand for the Paris Opera Ballet, with my sets and costumes. And then I’m doing a new Sleeping Beauty in Nice with Pontus Lidberg, and there are plans for other ballets in the future. So that goes on, but my main occupation at the moment is architectural, as I have started working more and more with building: making buildings, making domestic architecture and their settings: landscape and gardens.

How has this thread grown? 

I was asked by Angela Missoni to make a flagship store for Missoni in Rodeo Drive in L.A., which I did in association with Antonio Monfreda. For various reasons, the building now is the store of Yves Saint Laurent in L.A.. So I was making buildings, and sometimes they’re modern, and sometimes they are romantic restorations of ancient buildings, which really interests me and I’ve started working with those things and because I can’t find the fabrics and things I would ideally want, I’ve started making fabrics, so that when I make an interior I can also make the fabrics, the textiles and the wallpapers and the colours in the rooms exactly as I feel the rooms should be. This is an extension of stage design coming into architecture and my clients daily life. I haven’t stopped imagining, and I still find that every day brings the most amazing inspirations and possibilities.  

Are you now very involved in textiles? 

I’ve spent a long time researching the development of digital printing, because this is the new frontier in textiles and there’s a lot to know and learn and I have tried to do so. In the process I’ve also learned what effects are created only by more traditional techniques. Screen printing does one thing, woodblock printing does another thing, jacquard weaving does another. I’ve started to really understand and be very curious about the history of textiles and how they function, and it brings me back to Venice, because I discovered Fortuny when I first went there and his house had not yet been turned into a museum. It was closed up and half-open, and it was left as he left it. His brush marks, where he cleaned his brushes, were on the wall by the sink. There were maquettes for all sorts of things, including Wagner’s trilogy, just piled up in a heap in the back, and the whole place was in disorder and magnificent. When I went to Vogue, that was the first story I proposed, and that is where I met Tessa Traeger, who is the photographer that I wished to do the photographs with. We married eventually, and have been together for more than 40 years. When I first started doing the textiles, it was to the idea of Venice and Fortuny that I returned. I have a collaboration which is now quite long-standing with Chelsea Textiles in London, who backed me and did a collection of these printed fabrics which are inspired by Fortuny and the city.  

Having worked all over the world, is London, England, the centre of your life?  

My father was Irish, and I have an Irish passport. My mother was very English, and so I was an outsider in England because of my Irishness and an outsider in Ireland because of Englishness. This made me feel always that I didn’t belong totally to either country, but both countries are enormously important to me. I love England despite all its travails, and I think it’s wrestling with its identity and its place in the world and having a very difficult time. But in that, it is not alone. It’s also a personal struggle that I think every individual is going through now. How do you live? Where do you live? How do influence where you are? What can you give to the world to make this world a better place and not descend into this brutal disharmony that we see around us? My only answer is: I can only do what I can do which is to try and work with beauty, which gives joy. Because joy is the point. Joy is the goal. Joy brings happiness even for an hour or two in the opera house or even for a moment in the ballet when something happens that takes you beyond your own expectations. That is what I can try and offer. But everybody brings their thing. The person who bakes the bread perfectly gives pleasure to every person who makes a piece of toast.  

You speak German, Italian, French and many other languages. Displaced between Ireland and England, nevertheless is your home in the English language?  

Yes. Totally. The Irish use language in a very beautiful way, typically. It’s no mystery that so many writers have been Irish, but they have very often left Ireland in order to achieve exactly what it is that they are trying to do. But in Ireland, in an everyday way, the language of somebody you meet in a bar or somebody you talk to on the road remains very fascinatingly subtle and musical. There’s a tremendous poetry in the way the Irish use language, which is a matter of pride. Vocabulary, trying to express oneself clearly, but in the same way very meaningfully, is part of the culture. In England, there’s almost a fear of the highest quality in language which has entered the culture. Our poets are adored and continue to be so and there are marvellous poets writing now, but the language of every day I find less subtle and less beautiful than it was 30 years ago. 

Are you nostalgic?  

Not at all, because nostalgia, for me, implies a certain sadness, that something has been lost. I don’t feel like that at all. I feel that we need to notice what’s going on around us in order to adjust our own motivations. Staying true to the possibilities of language in poetry and in speech and in the use of the language is the equivalent of constantly being aware of the quality of what it is you’re trying to do and say and feel and make. That encourages one to defend a position that one feels is important.  

What is driving you is beauty, and also joy?  

Yes! Yes! There is a famous Japanese book by Marie Kondo about how to tidy your life, where to put your things and how to fold your socks and make order. She uses the words “sparking joy” to describe that. You have to decide in your life what brings joy. If you look at that pair of socks, do they depress you? Do they do nothing to you? If that is the case, get rid of them. Give them to the charity shop. But if they spark joy then keep them, treasure them, respect them, and put them in a place where they can do their job of bringing joy into your life. It struck a real chord with me, the idea that bringing joy is really the point of being an artist.  

Thank you very much Patrick Kinmonth.

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