“I shut my eyes in order to see.” — Paul Gauguin
The most coveted invitations today aren’t to gallery openings or auction previews – they’re to sleep inside the collection itself. Which raises an obvious question: Who actually wants to be asleep in an art hotel? Unless you’re Gauguin reborn then closing your eyes might not be your best move.
The man who shut his eyes to see ended up decorating Parisian drawing rooms. Art and money have always been in cahoots with one another – the rich making sure that those less well endowed understand just how rich they are. Art Hotels in a sense follow this tradition.
This is the Grand Tour reimagined for an age when proving you’ve got taste matters more than proving you’ve got money. Though let’s be honest far better to have both. The question is whether dropping several hundred euros (or thousands) buys you kudos if not the art. Or is it jaw-dropping and very expensive set-dressing for your Instagram? I’m in two minds about it. In principle I love the idea of Art Hotels.
But more and more the billionaires seem to be competing with one another rather than flinging open their doors to the public. If hotels become galleries then the wider world finds it difficult to get an admission ticket. Anyone could access a church. But hotels.. that’s harder. Sometimes a lot harder.
Venice: A Billionaire Playground (But You Can Still Crash the Party)
Let’s start with the bad news: Venice increasingly serves only the top one per cent. A frightening number of rooms start at $2,000 per night. Beauty and privilege cordoned off without a shot fired.
I spent two winter months in Venice once, long ago. Where forty years ago the city felt approachable, today it resembles The Hunger Games with better gondolas. The roll call of names fighting for a piece of the action blares out the truth. The Cheng family from Hong Kong (worth $22.5 billion) opened Rosewood Venice. Taiwan’s Nelson Chang owns Palazzo Venart. And, of course, Bernard Arnault tried to snap up Hotel Bauer for $294 million.
As for the Venetians themselves? There were 120,000 when I was there in the 1980s. Now the figure is down to a paltry 50,000. The locals are being quietly erased so billionaires can play at being Doges.
Speaking of Doges I have a tenuous connection with them too. Through my more blue blooded ( once upon a time) husband. My husband’s mother’s family, the Huguenot Prioleaus, were direct descendants of the Priuli family. In the mists of time and Venice’s fog they produced three Doges – men who once controlled the trade routes of the Mediterranean and commissioned Titian and Veronese.
Fat lot of good that does us now. Sadly, ancestral prestige does not get you any entrance ticket or privileged access. We’re squarely amongst the lowly travellers scrambling for room at an inn that’s already overcrowded and priced beyond reason.
So here’s how we blag our way into the best of Venice without risking arterial collapse when the bill arrives.
The St. Regis: Worth the Price of a Coffee
Requirement 1: Decent acting skills and smarter clothes than usual.
Outside, Julian Opie’s steel runners march along the Grand Canal . Opie has spent decades reducing human identity to generic outlines, stripping away everything that makes a person distinctive. There’s something apt about these identity-less figures stationed outside a hotel where everyone is dripping wealth. Our personal theory? Guests who tried to make a dash for it after seeing the bill. Management caught them and turned them to steel – a cautionary tale for the rest of us.
Head for Points, the travel site that provides tips for ambitious globetrotters, suggests a smarter approach. Walk in dressed for the occasion: enjoy the art, order afternoon tea or settle for a drink. That way you skip the mortgage-sized room charge and leave before anyone checks your net worth.
You’ll be in good company. Everyone at the St. Regis is performing in their own way: the billionaires and multi-millionaires swanning through the lobby; the staff in their choreographed hospitality and, most subversively, the art itself. The dissident as luxury possession.
Ai Weiwei’s chandelier dominates the Gran Salone: irridescent glass branches tumbling overhead in the traditional style of Murano glassblowing.But there’s a trap. Look closer and you’ll spot handcuffs dangling from the foliage, porcelain crabs scuttling over flowers, a hand extending its middle finger skyward.
That gesture belongs to his “Study of Perspective” series – photographs taken between 1995 and 2011 showing Weiwei’s raised finger before Tiananmen Square, the White House, the Eiffel Tower and various other locations that reflect state power. The handcuffs reference his 81-day detention without charge by Chinese authorities in 2011.
It’s stealth revolution camouflaged as décor, a fingers-up to the oligarchs who rule the world including, one assumes, some of those checking in downstairs.
Miss this hotel completely? Impossible. The Arts Bar alone is worth the trip: twelve cocktails served in custom Murano glass, each designed around a famous artist or personality. It’s flamboyant, it’s delicious and provides an endless source of conversation.
Just avoid doing a clanger like my sister did at Claridge’s, hurtling across the floor to the bar on the way to a long-awaited engagement. She was late, very late, and collided spectacularly with a waiter carrying four glasses of champagne and a bottle. Miraculously the friendship stayed intact.
Trattoria All’Angelo
So what does a woman or man who wishes nonetheless to lay their fair or dark head on a pillow inside a fashionable art hotel actually do? With a little bit of ingenuity, it’s still possible. Just make sure you don’t fall for the dubious line that arty means very basic. Whatever the proprietor claims, it does not involve propping up a rat or flea-infested dungeon room.
Within Venice my money is on the Trattoria All’Angelo. For billionaires it may be a climb down. But for the rest of us it is the quintessential art hotel. Its success lies in becoming a hotel organically. No one in New York or Dubai or Hong Kong sat over a spreadsheet drawing up columns of add-ons. Instead it began almost as a matter of accident and on a very local scale.
Post-war, Renato Carrain’s grandfather opened a modest café that morphed into the meeting place of local anti-fascist artists known as the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti or, the New Arts Front. Founded in 1946, under wafts of smoke and over cheap wine they changed the look of Italian art.
The group was explicitly anti-fascist at a time when that still meant something dangerous. Neither the artists nor the café owner were flush with cash. But each valued the presence of the other. In exchange for food and drinks the café got great artwork to keep.
The fun part of the story is that this artists’ collective weren’t amateur dabblers. Their number ultimately came to include Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Pizzinato. Aesthetics overcame politics. As a result the café’s reputation began to be associated with not just the Veneto art scene but the European art scene. A place to go should you stay in Venice.
One major coup of the open-minded owner was to secure the loyalty of Peggy Guggenheim who arrived in 1948 She would arrive by gondola with her Lhasa Apsos – she kept fourteen at one point, each named after a Venetian landmark – twice weekly, developing her museum ideas over dinner. If she showed up late and they’d seated someone else at her table, the family would ask the diners to move, bribing them with free meals. Inconvenient maybe; but true to the restaurant’s sense of priorities.
The café’s most spectacular coup came in 1964. Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Biennale. Almost to a man and women the Europeans were furious. They alleged bribery and cheating. It was cultural war.
It also signalled a changing of the guard, a shift towards the power of the American dollar. The shift in power from Paris to New York was in play.. Italian critics accused Rauschenberg of assassinating the spirit of art. “Treason in Venice,” shouted one newspaper’s headline. One French critic declared it “the end of art” – dramatic, but he wasn’t wrong that a seismic shift had occurred.
While other café owners and restaurants were packed full of rattled Europeans lamenting the ‘arriviste’ and pop artist, Trattoria All’Angelo welcomed the scorned Americans for an impromptu party. With an impeccable sense of timing the café had seen the future. A legend and a relationship had been secured.
To this day the café survives intact – and so does the bar. The art connection is also as strong as ever. The grandson of the original owner, Renato Carrain, showcases emerging artists on a revolving basis. Best of all, in a world of blandness and brands, it still feels like someone’s home that happens to have extraordinary art, rather than a gallery renting rooms.
Or just have lunch. The restaurant serves locals alongside visitors, maintaining some connection to its café roots. Book a table, enjoy Venetian cooking surrounded by actual masterpieces, and congratulate yourself on experiencing art without requiring venture capital funding.
La Colombe d’Or: Where Baldwin Wrote – and You Can Still Eat
If All’Angelo proves organic evolution, La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence had a somewhat similar development. And similar longevity. Book lunch on that legendary terrace, eat where Picasso and Matisse once dined, and soak in the atmosphere that drew everyone from Sartre to Simone Signoret.
Its first incarnation was in the 1920s when it was known as Chez Robinson – named, improbably after the Swiss Family Robinson. Maybe a reference to the terrace’s clear position overlooking the valley. A place to lose yourself. The locals loved it using the terrace as a place to dance.
Then came the second world war which changed the lives of so many. Artists and intellectuals descended on the South choosing the Provencal auberge as their personal canteen. Their number included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger providing Paul Roux, the owner, with a unique collection. Some gifts came immediately; some later. But nobody forgot.
To this day their gifts. are distributed around the inn with a nonchalance that is literally unparalleled – making the Columbe D’Or unique. Sketches by Picasso and his “ Flower Vase” are scattered in the dining room. So too a Braque. Both jostle for space with works by Miró, Chagall, Matisse, and Delaunay.
In due course other works appeared.
Post war the Colombe d’Or was no longer just a refuge for struggling artists – it had become an institution that conferred legitimacy. To have your work on these walls meant you’d arrived. Fernand Léger created his dove mosaic for the terrace not because he needed a bed for the night, but because association with the Colombe d’Or now burnished an artist’s reputation. César Baldaccini’s oversized thumb sculpture guards the entrance like a calling card. Alexander Calder’s mobile dangles over the swimming pool – and Calder, by then internationally celebrated, made a point of giving Madame Roux a painting for her birthday every year for decades.
