Wes Anderson’s Phoenician Project, Art Collection

“Never buy good photos,” said ZSA-ZSA Korda, the lead character of Wes Anderson’s new film. Phoenician Projectnow available in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. “Buy a masterpiece.” This is a great advice for any aspiring art collector. But what money is used? Korda offers less wisdom in this regard.

That’s because Korda, played by Benicio del Toro, finds himself in the kimchi: he’s trying to execute a dark plan (the nominal Phoenician project) that can open a waterway somewhere near the Mediterranean, but he doesn’t need the funds to do so. (There’s also the fact that assassins and international governments keep coming after this jet-setting high roller: he’s survived being shot out of the air six times when the film begins and finds his plane downed again by its ending.) He spends much of the movie trying to wrangle his business associates into filling the financial gap, enlisting his aggressive daughter, a nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), as his collaborator.

However, Corda had a hard time making some quick cash – if he had just sold some paintings in his 16th-century palace, home to nine sons, and had arranged a collection of artworks so much that most of the photos weren’t even hung from the walls. The house itself was modeled in the home of British Armenian businessman Caluste Gulbenkian, an English Armenian businessman who bought thousands of works of art and was accused of trying to evade taxes in England before his death in 1955.

There is a glorious Floris Gerritsz. Van Schooten’s life was 17th-century life, roasted on plates (breakfast!), and René Magritte in 1942, where the house plants seem to have bird leaves. There is also a 1889 portrait of Pierre-Auguste Renoir with the artist’s nephew, long locks, etc. Liesl slept below, barely knowing the existence of this Impressionist painting.

Korda has accumulated such a collection, and he seems to care little about it, never mentioning it, which shows that the art he purchased is a temporary distraction to his dirty business and his broken family relationship. It functions like window dressings to him, merely the background of evil transactions taking place. His attitude tilted back on how the Russian oligarchs treated their precious Picasso and Ruscos before the Ukrainian war, hindering their ability to continue collecting.

Anderson is a director known for imagining gorgeous symmetrical suits, who themselves feel like an art installation, so why he was taken to the Milan museum to design a café for Fondazione Prada, a museum in Milan that has a long relationship with him. Artwork comes in Phoenician Project Like props French dispatch. But here’s the capture: some of them are real.

Renoir is real and even once owned by actress Greta Garbo, whose real estate was sold at Sotheby’s in 1990 for $7 million. According to Getty Images’ credit line, the library has images of Renoir in its library, with works from a large collection of Nahmad family holdings.

“You can tell the difference,” Anderson wrote in his production notes. It seems that most of his characters ignore it. Magritte is also real, and so is Van Schooten. Magritte used to belong to Heiner Pietzsch, and he appeared in Artnews List of 200 collectors before their death in 2021; now, it is in the collection of the Berlin State Museum. Van Schooten is owned by the German Museum hamburger Kunsthalle.

However, other works, including the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, are replicas. It is difficult for the audience to distinguish which works are real, and this part is the point: Korda cannot tell the difference between good and bad works of art, good intentions and counterfeits, even when he ventured in his Air Air Air Air, he was tired of books about the customers of the High Renaissance and Connorvasis. He did not know the value of something truly valuable, just as he did not know the value of Liesl, and if he passed away he tried to designate it as the heir to his property.

Then there is a chance picture of Corda showing him, some leaning against the wall instead of hanging. “Wess believes his collection is not finished, but is not changed,” Adam Stockhausen, the film’s production designer, told him. Elle Decoration. “ZSA-ZSA has a wide variety of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, but they always come and go.” They are just props in Korda’s own universe.

Phoenician Project In some ways it is a copycat of collectors who buy art through this mentality. Here is Korda again: “Never buy good photos. Buy masterpieces.” Anderson may put on the appendix: Buy great works, but cherish them appropriately.