Victoria Beckham The role art has played in my marriage
Victoria Beckham tells Emily Cronin about the role art plays in her life and her new exhibition
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.
From today, 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-fall 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, the heritage menswear brand in which David is a partner.
Beckham, declining to comment on the rumours, says she appreciated the chance to be the front-row 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 award-winning designer has no business getting involved in the art world, Beckham is, in fact, no stranger to cultural collaboration either.
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 Victoria 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, so it would be really hard to pick a favourite,” she says.
Victoria gave David 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 pre-fall 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, the photographer and filmmaker whose 2004 video portrait, David, of David Beckham sleeping, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Beckham proposed this latest art project after enjoying a trip to The Frick Gallery in New York, and working closely with Sotheby’s specialists to select paintings from their forthcoming Old Masters evening sale for display, Beckham ultimately decided to focus on portraits.
“It’s really interesting when you look at what they’re wearing and their jewellery, and how that works in a retail space like mine… I love the richness of the colours and how luxurious the pieces feel. They’re beautiful and they’re going to look stunning in such a contemporary space.”
After five days in the store, the masterpieces will return to Sotheby’s in time to be auctioned off on July 4.
“We’re excited to collaborate with Victoria because she’s someone with such a strong aesthetic sense,” says Chloe Stead, deputy director specialist of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s.
“It’s been a delight working with her. The selection she made came together rather naturally – it’s a very representative group of portraits that we hope people will
‘Every piece means something personal to us. It would be hard to pick a favourite’
be happy to see recontextualised slightly.
“Old Masters don’t always need to be displayed on castle walls – they can be seen in more modern environments, too.”
While a store filled with £1,500 dresses and celebrity clients already comes equipped with robust security, 500-year-old 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 £3million and £4million, a smile entering her voice. “But he seems to be very expensive.”