March | 2012 | Jonathan Griffin

March 28, 2012

Physica Sacra

While doing research for my forthcoming book Itinera Alpina (a collaboration with Ben Branagan – watch this space) I came across an image that stopped me in my tracks. It was an 18th-century engraving, showing a massive veiny liver apparently floating over a bucolic pastoral landscape, bordered by an elaborate Rococo frame. I found it reproduced in a book (in German) about 18th-century Zurich. Neither Ben nor I had any idea how or why such an image would come into being, or what it meant, but we were captivated by its weirdness, and it became an inspirational touchstone as we put together our book. Read the rest of this entry »

March 20, 2012

Nathan Hylden

Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

The facetious joke – or is it a wry compliment? – about white monochrome paintings is that they hardly differentiate themselves from the walls they hang on. Despite choosing as his pictorial subject rectangles of blank white wall, Nathan Hylden worked hard to make the paintings in his exhibition ‘So There’s That’ as unblank and as unneutral as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

March 13, 2012

Stewart and Lynda Resnick

Photograph: Amanda Friedman

A chapter in Lynda Resnick’s book Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business is titled ‘The One True Copy of Jackie Kennedy’s Real Fake Pearls’. Resnick tells the story of how, in 1996, Sotheby’s auctioned the estate of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, including her iconic three-strand pearl necklace. It didn’t matter that the pearls were imitation, and that the young Jacqueline Bouvier had picked them up at Bergdorf Goodman for around $35. They were listed by Sotheby’s at $200–$300. Resnick was determined to have them, and persuaded her husband Stewart to bid all the way to the jaw-dropping closing price of $211,000. The couple were the subject of ridicule in the national press. Read the rest of this entry »