Covid-19 – Thirty Seven East

Not at Your Home: Olivier Cassegrain’s Obstacle Race

May 19, 2020May 20, 2020 by JC Agid Leave a comment

Not at Your Home: Olivier Cassegrain’s Obstacle Race

A jockey smoking a pipe on a galloping horse. In a single blue stroke of pencil, Marion Naufal’s watercolor sums up the challenges of a race, a style, a brand—Longchamp—and of the family Cassegrain whose history has been attached to America right from the start.

Comfortably seated on his New York terrace, the grandson of the Longchamp’s founder, Olivier Cassegrain, is meticulously watching over the American destiny of the family business.

While retail sales in Texas are slowly picking up again, the original Madison Avenue boutique is still closed along with all the other luxury brands in Manhattan. In Soho, the Maison Longchamp remains as empty as the Hudson Yards Vessel where, until a few weeks ago, tourists, business travelers and New Yorkers flocked. “The stairs of the Vessel are with those of the Soho boutique the most famous in New York,” says Cassegrain. They are both the work of the same English architect. “I would be quite happy to see more people on these stairs soon,” adds the Vice-President of Longchamp United States with a smile, “at least a little more on those in SoHo than on those of Hudson Yards.” Filling these stairs is just an additional challenge for the man who loves nothing more than overcoming obstacles with a cigar on his lips.

Not at Your Home: The Artistic Mankind of Betsabeé Romero

May 11, 2020May 12, 2020 by JC Agid Leave a comment

Not at Your Home: The Artistic Mankind of Betsabeé Romero

“Art needs to express itself to safeguard humanity.” These are the words of Betsabeé Romero, a Mexican fixture, sculptor, and a generous, greedy painter who is exhibited around the world. She is a poet and activist too. This humanity—a damaged, confused and self-reflecting humanity—was not prepared to face the brutal consequences of the Covid19 pandemic.

Betsabeé Romero is now listening to the suddenly silent streets of Mexico City, North America’s largest city.

From her little street house in the Villa de Cortés district, the artist is on the lookout for the sadness that invades the world faster than the disease. The absence of funerals. the hidden violence against the women and children in her country. And of course, her own personal fight fight for female artists.

Confined, she writes, draws, and reads, mostly philosophy at the moment. She is thinking about art installations to illustrate the staggered mourning that many people will experience. Incidentally, she has been invited to create and speak on this topic at the Frieze in London this Fall, as well as in Sydney and Rome.

Not At Your Home: The Art of the Virus with Olivia Tournay Flatto

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020 by JC Agid 1 Comment

The Art of the Virus with Olivia Tournay Flatto

A moving body, notes in harmony, an emotion, a knowledge, a narrow door toward a new idea, an engine inherent to life, to the mere concept of human beings’ survival, science and art maintain an intimate relationship, two mirrors reflecting each other and focusing on the hope of creation.

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) actually just metamorphosed Covid19 into a musical existence, similar to the work of a composer, an exceptional melody that could help science to better understand the mechanics and weaknesses of this devastating virus.

Art in the service of science, science in the service of art. Olivia Tournay Flatto is no stranger to the crossover between these two fields.

A scientist herself and President of the Pershing Square Foundation, she has developed a fund to support young researchers with bold and new ideas in the fight against cancer. Passionate about ballet, she is a member of the Board of the Friends of the Paris Opera and President in New York of the American Friends of the Paris Opera & Ballet (AFPOB), created 35 years ago in response to Rudolf Nureyev’s request to support a tour in the United States of the ballet company, which he directed.

The halls of the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille are now closed until further notice; laboratories are mostly concentrating their research on a Covid19 vaccine. Yet science and art—brain and heart—remain more than ever the essence of our lives.

Not at Your Home: Marc Levy Beyond the Walls

April 28, 2020May 11, 2020 by JC Agid 2 Comments

Marc Levy Beyond the Walls

There is a small bookstore on the corner of 10th Street in the West Village. In this little shop so reminiscent of the past, old and new books squeeze together on the shelves and give off that special scent of cracked ancient floors and living pages. Just a block away, if you look up, you can see through an open window that belongs to the most widely read French novelist and storyteller in the world.

A conversation with Marc Levy usually takes place over a good lunch on the terrace of Sant Ambroeus café. But Sant Ambroeus is closed now, as is the Three Lives & Company bookshop.

We could have also dined on a dish he would have cooked. But Marc Levy is currently a recluse in his haunt, sitting at his desk, among his books, computer screens and ancient typewriters. Surrounded by his characters, he gathers the letters of the alphabet and creates stories, like the one he just published in Des Mots Par La Fenêtre.

Not At Your Home: Let the Flower Bloom with Agnès de Villarson

April 23, 2020May 13, 2020 by JC Agid Leave a comment

Not at Your Home: Let the Flower Bloom with Floral Artist Agnès de Villarson

When spring blooms in Manhattan, tulips flourish at every Park Avenue intersection. Not far towards the West, the pink and white festival of century-old cherry trees attracts tourists and New Yorkers alike in Central Park. Nature always triumphs when Spring offers at its dawn its annual spectacle. For the floral artist Agnès de Villarson, it is the promise of a busy season of New York galas, weddings and boards of directors, all with flower compositions on the tables.

A French version of this interview has been published in Le Petit Journal (click here).