“I’m game. I’m always ready for something new!” declares the ever-ebullient collector Frank Cohen. His latest venture is to fill every floor of Fortnum & Mason, London’s swankiest department store, with more than 60 of the choicest home-grown pickings from his extensive art collection.
There’s an Edward Burra in the boardroom and a couple of Leon Kossoffs behind the ground floor cash desk. William Roberts’s large canvas of snooker players hangs in the basement wine bar and a pair of Howard Hodgkins grace the Duke Street staircase. In another stairwell, Paula Rego’s sinister School for Little Witches has a faceoff with a wall display of decidedly upmarket bath hats, while Nicholas Monro’s larger than life-size Dude Cowboy, from the 1970s, strikes a camp pose in menswear.
“There’s something tremendously exciting about the thought of customers shopping for their favourite tea and stumbling upon a major work of Modern British art”, says Ewan Venters, Fortnum’s chief executive officer. Venters met Cohen at a dinner for the wedding anniversary of their mutual friend, the writer Howard Jacobson. Thanks to the quality of the work and some nifty curating by the former Tate Britain curator Robert Upstone, the collection looks surprisingly at ease amongst the hampers, cashmere socks and perfume bottles. “It’s the best of British,” states their proud owner, who started out working on Manchester market stalls and then went on to establish a chain of (art free) DIY stores across the north of England.
But the posh Piccadilly surroundings did not induce genteel behaviour amongst some of the younger—and young-at-heart—artistic contingent during yesterday’s (13 September) unveiling of this grand display, which remains in situ until 15 October. Militant smoker Maggi Hambling couldn't resist having a quick forbidden puff, as she posed imperiously on before her painting of a wonderfully louche Mirror Bar (1979-80) of her own imagining. Then Jake Chapman, whose bronze sculptures reside just outside the first floor Parlour restaurant and in the crypt, revealed that the last time he was at Fortnum’s was when he was egging its windows on an anti-austerity march. The memory obviously proved too strong as he then proceeded to surprise passing shoppers by pretending to relieve himself into the window display featuring a neon piece by Tracey Emin—perhaps also paying homage to the Chapman Brother’s recent spat with La Emin over their re-make of her famous (and now destroyed) tent which they provocatively entitled The Same, Only Better. So much for the healing force of art…