Tiffany’s Art of Commerce

When the redone Tiffany & Co. flagship store opens on the corner of Fifth Avenue, there won’t just be showstopping diamonds on display. Gallery-worthy art by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Sarah Sze, Julian Schnabel and others will also be exhibited, many now in Tiffany’s permanent collection.

BY STEPHEN WALLIS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAGI SAKAI

April 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiffany-new-york-city-store-reopen-basquiat-prince-schnabel-holzer-d5ef7eb2

When Tiffany & Co. reopens its New York City flagship on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street this spring, following three years of work, visitors will hardly recognize the street-level sales floor famously featured in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Or any other floor, for that matter. Where dark-green marble and teak columns once surrounded a bank of art deco elevators, a showstopping painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat now hangs. It’s the same one, Equals Pi, that featured prominently in Tiffany’s 2021 ad campaign starring married musicians Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who crooned “MoonRiver,” the theme song of the 1961 movie. The canvas was chosen especially for the robin’s-egg-blue background that nearly matches Tiffany’s own trademarked blue. It’s an intentionally placed lure—inviting in those tourists who come to re-create Audrey Hepburn’s dreamy window-shopping scene.

In the new-look Tiffany, splashy art abounds: A concave, faceted stainless-steel Anish Kapoor wall sculpture in the third-floor wedding and engagement area seems tailor-made for celebratory ring-shopping selfies. Step off the elevators on the sixth floor, which is devoted to home and accessories, and there is one of Julian Schnabel’s signature broken-crockery paintings, from his Victory series; it depicts flowering rosebushes inspired by those that grow on his property in Montauk, New York. Schnabel has also created a limited-edition series of plates, which make their debut as part of an installation he conceived using a seven-foot-long tiled table surrounded by hand- painted bronze chairs with velvet cushions, all made by him, displayed next to one of his famed Blind Girl paintings, which is on loan to Tiffany.

The project is a rare commercial collaboration for Schnabel, who says his connection with the company, as with so many people, goes back to Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But the biggest factor in his decision to participate was the man who reached out, Peter Marino, the New York–based architect and art collector.

For decades, Marino has been a go-to architect for LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, masterminding sumptuous, often art-filled boutiques for LVMH’s brands, such as Louis Vuitton, Dior, Bulgari, Hublot and Fendi, including several near Tiffany on 57th Street. (And in Paris, the new Dior flagship, which includes a gallery and a restaurant.) Soon after finalizing its $15.8 billion acquisition of Tiffany in January 2021, LVMH brought in Marino to take over renovations of the Fifth Avenue flagship, which had been planned under Tiffany’s previous management team and were already underway. He set out to reimagine virtually every aspect of the flagship’s interior.

LVMH’s goal for the 186-year-old American jewelry and luxury goods company is to marry Tiffany’s legacy of venerable design with cool, contemporary style. Nowhere are those efforts more important than inside the iconic Fifth Avenue store, now dubbed the Landmark (despite it not holding landmark status). Not only the crown jewel of Tiffany’s 337 boutiques worldwide, it is also central to the firm’s history and identity.“

We see the building as a cultural hub,” says the company’s president and CEO, Anthony Ledru. “Without it, Tiffany is not the same brand.” While declining to cite specific numbers, Ledru says the renovation represents “by a lot” the largest investment LVMH has made on a single store, overall and specifically for art.

That investment speaks to LVMH’s business ambitions for the brand, which has been something of a star performer since joining the group’s portfolio. “We doubled the business on high jewelry the first year, and we doubled again the second year, which is quite exceptional,” says Ledru. The next step, he says, is updating existing Tiffany stores or creating new ones. “This year, there’s really a big acceleration at the global level—in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Paris, in Milan, in London,” he says. “The Landmark is the first big one.”

The granite, marble and limestone art deco facade of Cross & Cross’s seven-story 1940 building has been preserved, and its familiar bronze Atlas clock—refurbished and reinstalled—still flexes its muscles above the Fifth Avenue marquee. On top, a new, eye-catching three-story glass extension, designed by architect Shohei Shigematsu of the firm OMA, glows like a beacon.

Inside, “it’s a total new building,” says Marino, who recounts getting a call about the project from Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the morning after the deal closed. The aim, Marino says, was to create a fresh look and identity for Tiffany, which, as he puts it, “had drifted towards a very middle ground of taste, totally nondescript.”

A major component of the strategy is art, both specially commissioned works and existing ones acquired for the project. Many areas of the building now display works by blue-chip names like Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, James Turrell, Rashid Johnson and Sarah Sze, in addition to Schnabel, Kapoor, Basquiat and others. While art is a standard component in the LVMH-Marino luxury retail playbook, here it was taken to another level.

“What you’ll see in the store is quite unique in terms of the number of artworks and the pedigree of the artists,” says Alexandre Arnault, executive vice president for product and communication at Tiffany and Bernard Arnault’s second-oldest son. Arnault fils consulted closely with Marino and his father—one of the world’s leading art collectors—on acquisitions and commissions.

Even before the renovations, few stores could match the Tiffany flagship’s draw as a nexus of culture and commerce, occupying a prominent position on one of the world’s most famous shopping corridors. Still, visitors today expect visually stimulating and shareable displays or in-store amenities that go beyond shopping.

The sixth-floor cafe, originally introduced in 2017, has been redesigned, featuring jewelry-themed ceramic wall sculptures by Molly Hatch, and will be called the Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud. Galleries on the eighth and ninth floors will host long-term rotating exhibitions. “We really wanted to give the feeling of this being more than just a store and a full experience,” says Alexandre Arnault.

Many of the artworks in the store have a connection with Tiffany, whether visually, in their use of Tiffany-like blues, or with their content. And several of the works that will be on display, including pieces by Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Sarah Sze and Schnabel, are part of Tiffany’s permanent collection. Basquiat’s Equals Pi is on loan from the LVMH collection, and there will be a group of works on loan from Marino.

On the ground floor, a commission by Not Vital that is encircled by the central jewelry counter features 15 abstract portraits—geometric totems, essentially—of famous women who have worn Tiffany, from Shirley Temple to Babe Paley to Jackie Kennedy. Modeled in silver, the figures reflect the spectacular skylight overhead devised by Paris architect Hugh Dutton with “new technology, glass beams,” Marino says, “and it literally resembles a cut diamond, with thousands of facets.”

On the third floor, Marino enlisted artist Rashid Johnson to create a commission for the Rose Salon, so called for its blush-pink fabric walls. The more than 12-foot-tall piece is part of his Falling Man series, featuring upside-down figures, typically composed of mirrored or ceramic tiles, their blocky bodies evoking the pixelated characters of early video games. For this iteration, Johnson painted the figure using wax over tiles custom-colored in Tiffany Blue.

“These works are meant to be kind of existential investigations, meaning the idea of man falling through space, finding himself,” explains Johnson. Working with Tiffany Blue fit into his ongoing experimentations with expanding his color palette. “Using that color within this context really speaks to the place,” he says.

Asked if any artists took issue with the idea of incorporating Tiffany Blue into their commissions, Marino retorts, “You mean, did Michelangelo mind painting Jesus Christ when he was commissioned for the Sistine Chapel? I don’t think so.”

Schnabel, who calls Tiffany Blue “endearing,” used it as the base color for his stoneware plates, which have 22-karat-gold edges and feature the names of artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians, selected and handwritten by Schnabel. “I thought, OK, who would I like to have dinner with? Who do I care about?” he explains. “These are all names that touch a chord somehow in me.”

It’s a highly personal cast of creatives, some dead, some living, from 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi to 20th-century poet W.H. Auden to contemporary artists Luigi Ontani and Laurie Anderson, both friends of Schnabel’s. Others include musician Benjamin Clementine and movie director heroes such as Luis Buñuel and Héctor Babenco.

A total of 12 names are spread across two sets of six sets of plates, each consisting of a dinner plate, a bread plate and a dessert plate (only five editions of the two sets will be available, priced at $7,000). Schnabel likes to imagine dinner-party guests trading plates to mix and match. “Why not have Lou Reed, W.H. Auden and Luigi Ontani together? It’s a way of rewriting history.”

Tiffany has a history of working with artists, dating to 1902, when Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of founder Charles Lewis Tiffany, was tabbed to be the company’s first art director. Decades later, in the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns teamed up on window displays for the firm and Andy Warhol created a line of Tiffany greeting cards. (Some collaborations can be risky and have mixed results for long-established brands like Tiffany, as with its recent team-up with Nike on Tiffany Blue “swoosh” sneakers, which were widely criticized by coolhunters online, even as they quickly sold out.)

The new leadership clearly sees value in partnerships with artists and plans to introduce more in the coming year. “It’s an opportunity for us to speak about our products in a different way,” says Alexandre Arnault, “and a way for us also to gather creative minds that can bring a completely outside view.”

Arnault was integral to the company’s collaborations with artist Daniel Arsham, whose limited-edition travel cases for LVMH-owned luggage brand Rimowa were conceived when Arnault was CEO there, and since has produced editioned objects and jewelry designs for Tiffany. Arsham’s 12-foot-tall sculpture Bronze Eroded Venus of Arles is positioned on the store’s third floor, encircled by the graceful staircase Marino designed with Elsa Peretti–inspired curves and transparent balustrades ornamented with rock crystal, as it spirals up to the eighth floor.

“I really turned the gas up on every single floor,” says Marino. “Each is its own planet with its own palette and its own product.”

The architect replaced dull wall-to-wall carpeting with floors of pale oak parquet and custom-woven area rugs. Dark paneling was swapped out for walls of white marble and shimmering mirror, fabric and expanses of artisanal lacquer. Sculptural display cases were tailored for each area, including dedicated spaces for the brand’s special collections by Tiffany’s legendary designers Jean Schlumberger, Peretti and Paloma Picasso. The furniture includes custom Marino designs, custom artisan designs and significant vintage pieces, reminders by association of Tiffany’s heritage as an exemplar of American design.

On the third floor, Marino created wavy, pearlescent walls and covered the ceiling in platinum leaf, a refined nod to the silver foil that famously lined the Factory studio of Andy Warhol, his first client. Bordering the floor’s main display areas are private selling rooms, each featuring the work of a different artist. Vik Muniz lined one space in a wallpaper of trompe l’oeil pink peonies he created with collaged bits of painted paper and then photo- graphed. Damien Hirst clad another room with a wallpaper based on his exuberant pointillist-style Cherry Blossom paintings, an installation Marino says is “going to be a heart-stopper.”

Many of the artists who created works for the Fifth Avenue building have long relationships with Marino, few longer than Nancy Lorenz, who has been doing collaborations with him for nearly three decades. Lorenz conceived expansive installations for multiple spaces, including two series of handmade wall panels, her largest-ever commission.

For the sixth floor—where home is a renewed focus for Tiffany with the appointment of its own artistic director, Lauren Santo Domingo—Lorenz composed elegant panels of blue-gray lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl. On the seventh floor, which will feature what Tiffany claims will be the most impressive collection of its high jewelry anywhere in the world, she created atmospheric wraparound panels in lacquer, mother-of-pearl and water-gilt white-gold leaf—contemporary riffs on traditional Japanese cloud screens.

Marino has even conceived of a sort of shrine to Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the so-called Audrey Room on the fifth floor. Declining to reveal details, the architect describes it as a space where “anybody can take a selfie and be part of ‘Moon River.’ ”