Category: Art

A MAN FOR ALL JEWELS

He liked to call himself “a craftsman of jewellery”. That was how Fulco Santostefano della Cerda. Duca di Verdura played down his trade when interviewed about his creations. With a flamboyant name and an aristocratic pedigree, he didn’t have to labor to build a mythical aura around himself. Growing up among the fauna carved in stone in the gardens of his mother’s estate, Villa Niscemi in Palermo, his imagination captured the capricious shapes of animals and plants that were going to become the inspiration of his work.

He was the offspring of a very peculiar aristocracy in the throes of disintegration. His relative Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had already documented with grit and melancholy the beginning of its downfall. Fulco was born in 1898. When the end of that process was taking place. With irony he described his home town as a “capital of operetta”. It was in this “gossipy” and provincial environment that good fortune began to smile at him. When he me.

Linda and Cole Porter on one of their visits to. Sicily, he was still an immature and. Feverish youth of 20. After organizing the “Ballo 1799” in Palermo in honor of. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, former guests at Palazzo Verdura, his name began to ring in the international party circuit. Six years later he was sitting next to. Coco Chanel at a dinner party in Venice. She fell under the spell of his exuberant personality and there and then without hesitation she offered him a job in her atelier. Paris in the 30s, was a place of fantasy and exploration, of opium dens and high fashion, where elites mingled with the underworld. Fulco didn’t hesitate and for the first time his imagination matched his surroundings. Amber, diamonds. rubies, emeralds and semi-precious stones were transformed in his hands into mythological creatures, shapes from nature or bizarre objects.

His friend Nicolas “Niki” de Gunzburg, another specimen of wandering aristocrat, lured him to. California where many European émigrés were creating artistic colonies. The Hollywood of the period went into rapture about his creations. Greta Garbo commissioned from him a cornucopia overflowing with pearls and amethysts. Frank Sinatra an enameled box and Katherine Hepburn sported his creations in “The Philadelphia Story”. Cole Porter after having received Fulco’s gift of a golden box, went on to name him in the lyrics of his song “Let’s face it”. (“Liz Whitney has on her bin of manure a clip designed by the Duke of Verdura”).

As years went by. Sicily was more and more in his mind. His American bi-coastal success was no longer stimulating. He was losing the glamour that constituted the essence of his work. But the Sicily he carried in his. Heart was just a faint echo of a world long past. He decided to move to London where he would dedicate his final years to writing his memoirs. He never had time for that. As he was leaving his home one morning, he was run over by a car. His ashes were taken to the cemetery of Sant’Orsola in Palermo. He finally returned home.

CALL ME WINNARETTA

Winaretta was the twentieth child of an extravagant American, Isaac Singer, the sewing machine tycoon and a handsome French woman, Isabella Eugenie Boyer. Isaac’s larger than life personality had amassed an exceptional fortune and he procreated with the same zeal. After having sired nineteen children with two former wives and one lover, he espoused Isabella, who was thirty years younger than him and gave him six more children. One of them was Winaretta.

This young girl was unusually determined and had developed from an early age a strong set of convictions. Her passion for music and painting burgeoned in her adolescence and never left her. With the financial wind blowing her sails, she navigated the sophisticated elites of Parisian life and married a presumably wealthy prince, Louis de Scey-Monbeliard. Two years later, after his continuous demands for money and suspicious of his fabrications, she sued for divorce. A white marriage followed another. This time to a much older gentleman, prince Edmond de Polignac, composer, holder of one of the most aristocratic French titles, and an avowed homosexual. Was there any calculation on Winaretta’s part? After all, the new prince was 59 years of age when the bride just had turned 28. Was she attempting to disguise her sexual preferences? All Paris knew of the leanings of Polignac so society could be excused if it speculated about her innocence or her alibi. Either way, the couple came to share her passion for music, the bond upon which their feelings solidified.

The new princess de Polignac helped the career of composers and interpreters. She engaged intensely with Ravel, Fauré, Hahn and Stravinsky. In her memoirs, she recalled that moment when “it was decided that I was not to study music but to learn painting at an atelier in the Rue de Bruxelles, conducted by a Monsieur Félix Barrias”. In spite of negating her formal musical training, her fierce and determined personality  propelled her to become the most discerning musical hostess in Paris.

Posterity had been kind and respectful to her, a special individual, patron of the arts, splendidly generous. Yet some questions remained as to who she really was. Her conceit and haughtiness was not making good bedfellows with her apparent generosity. When asked why she had not invited Chanel at the first hearing of Stravinsky’s “les Noces”, she replied tartly: “I don’t entertain my trades people”.

In her eagerness to please and be acknowledged, as a young woman she wrote to Virginia Woolf after meeting her at a party: “Dear Mrs. Woolf, when will you allow me to call you Virginia, and when will you call me Winnaretta?”. In later years Woolf wrote about her: “to look at her you’d never think she ravished half the virgins of Paris”. Needless to say, there was never a chance that Virginia Woolf would call her Winnaretta.