A Victorian exhibition
The fashion designer is collaborating with Sotheby’s by displaying a collection of Old Master paintings at her boutique, which will then be auctioned
With their lofty prices and hushed atmospheres, luxury fashion boutiques can feel more like museums than ordinary high-street shops. Victoria Beckham is about to further blur the lines between art and commerce, by installing a selection of precious Old Master paintings in her London flagship store.
Beckham’s Dover Street store will host a temporary exhibition of Old Master paintings in collaboration with Sotheby’s — a first for the auction house, which has never before displayed artwork in a retail space.
The project, part of Mayfair Art Weekend, will see 16 portraits by titans of the genre, such as Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Lucas Cranach, take pride of place amid the handbags and dresses from Beckham’s pre-autumn collections. “David and I have loved collecting contemporary art for quite some time, but Old Masters is really something new for me, and something I don’t know an enormous amount about. I’m really enjoying learning about it,” Beckham says.
“It’s been quite incredible. I love how these paintings tell a story.”
At the mention of her husband, the story that really hangs heavy in the air has less to do with paintings and a little more to do with the rumours that she and David are on the brink of divorce after 19 years of marriage.
The Beckhams have since dismissed the chatter as “nonsense”, and they put on a delightfully united show of togetherness at David’s own fashion event: the London Fashion Week Men’s catwalk show and luncheon for Kent &Curwen.
Beckham, declining to comment on the rumours, says she appreciated the chance to be the frontrow spouse for a change.
“It’s very enjoyable to not have the pressure, to just be able to go and look at great clothes without the stress [of my own show]. It’s lovely.”
And while some may presume this awardwinning designer has no business getting involved in the art world, Beckham is, in fact, no stranger to cultural collaboration.
In 2015, she commissioned Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed to reproduce Work No. 2497: Half the Air in a Given Space, a room filled with 37,000 white balloons, in her polished-concrete store. Later that year she gave artist Eddie Peake free rein over her shopfront and staircase wall, which he lavished with a vivid, cobalt-blue word painting called Courgettes.
“When I first opened my store, I always said I wanted to use the space to showcase other people’s work that I find inspiring, but never did I believe that I would be showcasing work like this,” Beckham says. “This really is a dream come true.”
While the Old Masters appellation applies to paintings made between the 13th and 19th centuries, Beckham’s taste is usually more contemporary. As Beckham stated, she and her husband are avid collectors of works by living artists. “Art is something we’re enjoying learning about together, and every piece means something personal to us,” she says.
Beckham gave her husband a neon heart by Tracey Emin in 2014, and credited a painting by Julian Schnabel, whose work she began collecting after first encountering it at Sir Elton John’s house, as the inspiration behind her preautumn 2014 collection.
Their collection now has an estimated value of tens of millions of pounds, and is understood to include works by Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sam Taylor-Johnson.
After five days in the store, the masterpieces will return to Sotheby’s in time to be auctioned off on July 4.
While a store filled with pounds 1,500 dresses and celebrity clients already comes equipped with robust security, 500-yearold paintings require a different level of protection. Beckham has enhanced security and installed special lighting to make the most of the art — all while showing the clothes in the best possible light as well.
Has spending time with the Old Masters’ dark, precisely rendered canvases tempted her to place a bid? “I’d like the Rubens,” she says, referring to the painter’s portrait of a brooding Venetian nobleman, valued between 3 million pounds and (Dh14.61 million) 4 million pounds, a smile entering her voice. “But he seems to be very expensive.”