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#Post#: 128--------------------------------------------------
The Treasure Behind the Wall
DIR By: Satanica
Date: January 25, 2019, 11:13 am
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HTML https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/fashion/the-treasure-behind-the-wall.html
--- Quote ---
>
>
[img]
HTML https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/21/fashion/21painting/21painting-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp[/img]
> Alex Bolen, the chief executive of Oscar de la Renta, planned
to have his new store in Paris open around this week, just in
time for the couture shows. He planned to have a presence in the
city even if he didn’t have a show. He had it all figured out.
>
> Then, last summer, in the middle of renovations, Mr. Bolen got
a call from his architect, Nathalie Ryan.
>
> “‘We made a discovery,’” he remembered her saying. On the
other end of the phone, Mr. Bolen cringed. The last time he
received a call like that about a store, their plans to move a
wall had to be scrapped because of fears the building would
collapse. He asked what, exactly, the discovery was.
>
> “You have to come and see,” she told him.
>
> So, gritting his teeth, he got on a plane from New York. Ms.
Ryan took him to the second floor of what would be the shop,
where workers were busily clearing out detritus, and gestured
toward the end of the space. Mr. Bolen, she said, blinked. Then
he said: “No, it’s not possible.”
>
> Something had been hidden behind a wall, and it wasn’t
asbestos. It was a 10-by-20-foot oil painting of an elaborately
coifed and dressed 17th-century marquis and assorted courtiers
entering the city of Jerusalem.
>
> “It’s very rare and exceptional, for many reasons,” said
Benoît Janson, of the restoration specialists Nouvelle Tendance,
who is overseeing work on the canvas. Namely, “its historical
and aesthetic quality and size.”
> [....]
> In the arms race for the most unique! most authentic! store
currently underway, when only-in-person experience is what
differentiates retail from e-tail, a cultural treasure
surrounded by a puzzle straight out of a Dan Brown novel may be
the ultimate accessory.
> [....]
> In 2017, Mr. Bolen was offered the former Reed Krakoff store
on Rue de Marignan, a diagonal side street off the luxury
thoroughfare Avenue Montaigne, which terminates on one end at
L’Avenue, the high-fashion canteen.
>
> Mr. Bolen liked the location, and the building, which had been
built in the 19th century and remained largely in the hands of
one family, many of whom still lived in the upstairs apartments.
Still, he wanted a larger site, and when the office space that
spanned the second floor became available, he grabbed it.
>
> “It was pretty charmless,” he said. A former insurance
brokerage, it had a dropped ceiling with fluorescent lighting,
particleboard walls and industrial carpeting in its rabbit
warren of offices. “We knew we’d have to take everything out,”
Mr. Bolen said.
>
> The idea was to link the two floors with a grand staircase.
The ground floor and part of the second would serve as the
boutique, and a room at the end would be used as a showroom and
event space, with other space for offices and storage.
>
> The interior, designed by Jeang Kim and Will Kim of Oro
Studio, would feel less like a big white box than a home for
“young people who had just moved into their grandmother’s grand
apartment,” according to Ms. Kim (who is also the sister of
Oscar de la Renta’s co-creative director Laura Kim; she is not
related to Mr. Kim).
>
> Not long after the demolition began, a discovery was made. A
workman, tearing down the dropped ceiling in the last room on
the second floor, said there was something “strange.”
>
> That would be a paneled ceiling that had been underneath the
visible one, composed of 29 inset squares, eight of them painted
with different heraldic seals, and a central diamond. Dating
from the mid-19th-century, they were well preserved since they
had been recessed within the coffers of the ceiling.
>
> Still, while that was an interesting reveal, it was not
unprecedented in a building of that age. It was when workers
began removing the particleboard along the side and a chunk of
the wall came off too that things got interesting.
>
> “Oh my God, it was — wow,” said Ms. Ryan, who was the in-house
architect for Dior for many years and opened her own company,
Kirei Studio, in 2010.
>
> Behind the wall a single painting, dark with age, ran from end
to end. “Sometimes when you work on castles, you find something,
but usually it’s a hidden fireplace, or in Italy, maybe a
fresco,” Ms. Ryan said. “But in an apartment? In a store?” She
had never seen anything like it.
> [....]
> Demolition was halted to figure out what the painting was and
how it came to be in what was about to be a shop. Seeing the
aristocrats on horseback and the mosque in the picture, Mr.
Bolen said, visions of Crusaders and Knights Templar began to
dance in his head. “I think maybe I have seen too many movies,”
he said.
>
> In the game of six degrees of separation, this was a good one:
Mr. Bolen’s mother-in-law, Annette de la Renta, had cousins (via
her mother, Jane Engelhard) who had married into the de La
Rochefoucauld family, storied members of the French aristocracy.
One of those family members happened to live across the street
from the new de la Renta boutique.
>
> So when the painting was found, and it became clear Mr. Bolen
would have to talk to the building’s owners, whom he had never
met (the lease had been negotiated through a broker), his
relative was able to make the introductions. Another de La
Rochefoucauld, who happened to work at the Louvre, got a
recommendation for an art historian: Stephane Pinta of the
Cabinet Turquin, an expert in old-master paintings.
>
> Mr. Pinta determined that the painting was an oil on canvas
created in 1674 by Arnould de Vuez, a painter who worked with
Charles Le Brun, the first painter to Louis XIV and designer of
interiors of the Château de Versailles. After working with Le
Brun, de Vuez, who was known for getting involved in duels of
honor, was forced to flee France and ended up in Constantinople.
>
> Mr. Pinta traced the painting to a plate that was reproduced
in the 1900 book “Odyssey of an Ambassador: The Travels of the
Marquis de Nointel, 1670-1680” by Albert Vandal, which told the
story of the travels of Charles-Marie-François Olier, Marquis de
Nointel et d’Angervilliers, Louis XIV’s ambassador to the
Ottoman Court. On Page 129, there is a rotogravure of an artwork
depicting the Marquis de Nointel arriving in Jerusalem with
great pomp and circumstance — the painting on the wall.
>
> But how it ended up glued to that wall, no one knew, nor why
it was covered up. There was speculation that maybe it happened
during World War II, given the setting. It could be “a
fog-of-war issue,” Mr. Bolen said.
>
> What everyone did know was that it would be dangerous to move
because of how the painting had been attached to wall: backed by
gauze and glued on. And, Mr. Bolen said, his wife, Eliza, told
him, “If you move that painting, you will have 100 years of bad
luck.” He thought she was probably right.
>
> Instead, Mr. Bolen reached an agreement with the building’s
owners: He would restore the painting if they agreed to let it
remain in the store while the store was a tenant (the initial
lease is for 10 years). Mr. Janson got to work in late November.
>
> For the last two months, a team of three to five people have
laboriously swabbed away some of the varnish to allow the colors
to come through. They hope to be finished by May, Mr. Janson
said, though Mr. Bolen believes it will be sooner than that.
Slowly, details that confirmed the painting’s provenance have
begun to emerge: the mosque, the Western Wall, the elaborate
brocades of the visiting Frenchmen.
> [....]
> “We’re not going to put a wall of dresses in front,” Ms. Ryan
said. Security will be increased, and the 10 floor-to-ceiling
windows on the second floor equipped with treated glass. The
plan is to open in late spring.
>
> In the meantime, Mr. Bolen has not given up the search. “I
need to get a heraldic expert in to look at the ceiling,” he
said, sifting through photographs and pointing at some of the
shields. “That one has three stars, a royal crown — and fish?”
>
> He looked at another one. “What do those three stars mean?” he
wondered. “I don’t know. But that’s worth finding out.” He
looked excited.
>
> Shoppers with a yen for a conspiracy theory or a taste of
history may be, too.
>
--- End Quote ---
More photos at the link.
#Post#: 145--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Treasure Behind the Wall
DIR By: Alf
Date: January 25, 2019, 12:58 pm
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Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
--Al
#Post#: 177--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Treasure Behind the Wall
DIR By: KatO9Tails
Date: January 25, 2019, 2:56 pm
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that is so Paris and France! Here's another link for people like
me that refuse to pay NY Times & have bounced into their site a
few times:
HTML https://hyperallergic.com/481559/a-massive-17th-century-painting-was-hiding-in-the-walls-of-an-oscar-de-la-renta-boutique/
#Post#: 178--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Treasure Behind the Wall
DIR By: Satanica
Date: January 25, 2019, 2:57 pm
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It really is and not something we would have on our minds over
here in the "New World".
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