All About Xavier

Today’s post comes from Wendy Hughes Chuck who, like many of us, has discovered a new ‘COVID celebrity’. Wendy writes:

Cocktails with a Curator

“Good evening and welcome to this episode of Cocktails with a Curator. I’m Xavier Salomon, the Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection.” Many NGV guides, like me, will have been delighted by this weekly YouTube talk and invitation to cocktails by the erudite and charming art historian, Xavier Salomon. 

Since the Covid-19 shutdown, every Friday at 5pm New York time (or 7am on Saturday, Melbourne time) Xavier greets his listeners via YouTube from his New York apartment. He then raises a glass and sips a cocktail chosen for its connection to a specific work of art in The Frick Collection. The cocktail recipe, and a Mocktail version for non-drinkers, is posted online in advance so viewers can prepare to enjoy a virtual clinking of glasses.

Xavier then proceeds to describe in detail one of the works at The Frick. His English is flawless, but with more than a tinge of an Italian accent. His presentation style is personable; his deep knowledge and appreciation of the works of art and their provenance show through.  The series is now in its 10^th week. This week’s choice is James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland (1871-4) with a spray of Japanese almond blossom in the background which has been matched with a Sake Highball cocktail. A couple of weeks ago Jean Barbet’s Angel, a rare bronze from 15^th century France, was matched with an Angel Face cocktail while François Boucher’s A lady on her Daybed from the 18^th century was matched with a French 75.

Here are the ingredients for the Angel Face cocktail Xavier chose to accompany Jean Barbet’s sculpture of an angel:

Black Lives Matter

Last week, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and in memory of George Floyd and many others, there was no presentation. Xavier pronounced himself to be “lost for words”. Instead viewers were invited to join him for eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence. Many viewers posted their comments in support of this which you can read after watching the YouTube video. There was only one negative comment that I noticed.   

Travels with a Curator

On Wednesdays, New York time, Xavier delivers a second series, Travels with a Curator, which, if anything, is even more delightful than the Cocktails series. Each week he visits a historical building, often a church, which has a link to one of the works in The Frick Collection. For example, a few weeks ago, he described the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato near Florence, the original home of a sculpture of St John Baptizing by Francesco da Sangallo (c.1535-38), designed to stand atop a holy water stoup in the church. The sculpture now sits in The Frick Collection.  Other places he has visited include Westminster Abbey, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Mount of Quarantine in Jericho, the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw and the Ca d’Oro in Venice.

Who is Xavier Salomon?

So who is this young, erudite and cosmopolitan curator who is entrancing art lovers with a twice weekly treat on YouTube? The Internet reveals that Xavier Salomon was born in Rome and brought up between Italy and England. He has a Danish father and an English mother. He is well travelled and multilingual and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London, culminating in a PhD thesis on The Religious Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621). The cardinal was a nephew of Pope Clement VIII and a patron of the arts. Xavier’s main areas of expertise are art and patronage in seventeenth century Rome and the Veneto painter Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). But he is a new renaissance man who can talk knowledgeably about any of the works in The Frick Collection.

Xavier curated a Veronese exhibition at The Frick in 2006, Veronese’s ‘Allegories: Virtue, Love and Exploration in Renaissance Venice‘ and in 2014 he curated the first monographic exhibition of Veronese in England, at the National Gallery in London.

He has worked as a curator in London at the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery and, in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before joining The Frick in 2014 at the young age of 34. His somewhat unwieldy title is ‘The Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator’. Sharp was a leading Manhattan hotelier and real estate developer who died in 1992 and endowed the Chief Curator chair at The Frick.

In 2018 Xavier was awarded an honour by the Italian Government when he was named a Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia (a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy) for his contribution to the artistic heritage of Italy.

The Frick Collection

The Frick Collection, where Xavier holds sway, is located in Henry Clay Frick’s former residence on Fifth Avenue, New York at 1 East 70^th Street. The mansion houses the private collection of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), an industrialist from Pittsburgh. It opened as a museum in 1935 and is known for its distinguished old master paintings and its outstanding examples of European sculpture and decorative arts. It receives about 300,000 visitors a year.

If you have not yet seen ‘Cocktails with a Curator’, go to: https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/cocktails_curator

And to view ‘Travels with a Curator‘, go to: https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/travels_curator

The Frick Collection website is at: https://www.frick.org/

Veronese at the NGV

A glance at the NGV website reveals 20 works by Veronese in our own collection, mostly engravings or pen and ink drawings and one oil, ‘Nobleman between Active and Contemplative Life‘ (c.1575). A closer look indicates that these works are categorised as “studio of”, “attributed to” and “possibly after” with some produced after Veronese’s death in 1588. 

Thank you very much to Wendy for telling us about an unlikely but fascinating COVID ‘pin-up boy’.