October 20, 2019Richard Blow collaborated with Bruno Lastrucci to create works using the ancient inlay technique pietre dure (portrait courtesy of Leo Bastreghi). Top: Untitled (Collage with woman in profile), ca. 1955. Images of artworks are from Collection Lastrucci, courtesy of Wright
Most vintage modern dealers court publicity. Not Adam Edelsberg. If Edelsberg is press shy, however, he is also market savvy, with a practiced eye for spotting great design that has gone unnoticed and a nose for sniffing out tucked-away troves. This maker of markets is to his business what Greta Garbo was to Old Hollywood — an elusive legend. He runs his globe-spanning operations out of a smartly renovated former motorcycle-repair shop just outside Providence, Rhode Island, in the tattered industrial town of Pawtucket — about as far away from the glam precincts of his clients as you can get.
Edelsberg’s latest obsession involves an obscure artist named Richard Blow, who, in the mid-20th century, conceived captivating, enigmatic modernist art works in pietre dure, an ancient inlay technique employing ultrathin slices of highly polished precious and semiprecious stones, shells and fossilized wood that are tightly fitted together to create rich pictorial images.
Untitled (Surrealist landscape), ca. 1960
Edelsberg first saw a work by Blow some 20 years ago and was so enchanted that he began quietly and obsessively hunting for others. What he’s collected, along with a recently discovered stash, is on view now through October 24 in the exhibition “From Medici to Montici: Richard Blow and the Modern Pietre Dure,” at 507 West 27th Street, in New York’s Chelsea. The show will also include original paintings by Blow belonging to his creative collaborator and protégé, Bruno Lastrucci, a master of pietre dure. On the morning of October 24, the inlay pieces will go on the block in an auction at Wright20. Other pietre dure works by Blow acquired by Edelsberg are currently available on his 1stdibs storefront.
“Amassing this collection has been a passion project,” says Edelsberg. “It’s the least transactional and most curatorial thing I’ve ever done because I am by trade a dealer.”
Over the years, even as Edelsberg came upon other pieces by Blow, facts about the artist’s life eluded him. The works themselves, which are quite small, rarely measuring as much as 10 inches in height or width, are mysterious. Although they bear a tiny intarsia M crafted out of Murano glass, Blow’s signature appears only occasionally, on the back, and dates and titles are just as rare.
Blow called his pietre dure project Monitci after Santa Margherita a Montici, the town where he lived. Works bear a tiny intarsia M (for Montici) crafted out of Murano glass, but Blow’s signature appears only occasionally, on the back, and dates and titles are just as rare. Photo courtesy of Leo Bastreghi
Then, a year ago last spring, Edelsberg received a call from Susan Mathews, who identified herself as the daughter of a couple who had managed a dairy on a farm owned by Richard Blow in Clinton Corners, New York. She had discovered him on 1stdibs and wondered if he might be interested in acquiring the works the artist had given to the family. With that conversation, the transatlantic tale of the artist’s adventurous life and generous spirit unfolded.
Top: Untitled (Pistol with knife), ca. 1968. Bottom: Untitled (Two pistols), ca. 1968
Perhaps the most astounding detail of Mathews’s story was that several years before, while vacationing in Tuscany, she had chanced upon the Lastrucci workshop in Florence unaware of its connection with Blow. Bruno Lastrucci had grown up at the villa owned by Blow, the Piazza Calda, in Santa Margherita a Montici, just south of Florence, and had become his closest collaborator in the pietre dure project. This project Blow called Montici — hence the mysterious M — after the town where he had lived.
Soon after receiving the call, Edelsberg was on a plane to meet and speak, through a translator, with the 76-year-old Lastrucci. Seeing the artworks and ephemera the artisan had saved from his association with Blow, the dealer was finally able to piece together how — and why — the pietre dure pieces came to be. In the fascinating and gorgeously produced catalogue published to accompany the auction of Blow’s works — which includes an essay by renowned scholar Glenn Adamson — Edelsberg documents this merging of ancient craft and modern art, all the more extraordinary for the brevity of its existence.
Richard Allmand Blow was born in 1904 in LaSalle, Illinois, otherwise known as Zinc City. His mother, who had trained as an artist in Paris, came from a family that owned one of the largest zinc manufacturing companies in the world; his dashing father, after a career as an intrepid naval officer, had become a Midwestern captain of industry. After attending Princeton, Blow, like so many young Americans in the 1920s with artistic aspirations, set off for Paris to become “a modern.”
Bruno Lastrucci, pictured in the workshop in 1960 at age 14, became a protégé of Blow, eventually a creative collaborator and a master of pietre dure. Portrait courtesy of Leo Bastreghi
He appears to have immersed himself in that city’s heady brew of creative ferment and stylistic expression, but little is known about whom in that artistic vanguard Blow socialized with or what he did other than marry Eleanor Pettinos, a spirited New York debutante with literary aspirations, in 1927.
The newlyweds decamped to Piazza Calda, a then-decrepit villa Blow had only recently bought, and set about restoring it. During the renovation, he returned briefly to Paris to study with the accomplished Cubist painter and critic André Lhote, who taught a host of outsize 20th-century talents to see anew — among them, Tamara de Lempicka, Dora Maar, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Louise Bourgeois.
Top: Untitled (Capricorn), ca. 1960. Middle: Untitled (Lion), ca. 1960. Bottom: Untitled (Whale), 1961
Judging from his paintings that survive from the interwar period, Blow also fell under the aesthetic spell of the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, whose art he later collected. One of his metaphysical works, The Painter (1938), depicting an artist seen from behind painting a fanciful tower-like folly perched on a perfect dome-shaped hill, was included in a one-man exhibition at the Maynard Walker Gallery, in New York, before being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Five years later, the Museum of Modern Art included a painting by Blow in the exhibition “Romantic Painting in America.” Richard Allmand Blow, it turns out, was not just an artist of means but one of distinction.
The early years at Piazza Calda were eventful. There was the birth of a son and an amicable divorce. In the mid-1930s, Blow married again, to Marya Mannes, another spirited New York heiress, who was a Vogue features editor and sculptor. The birth of another son soon followed.
Then, in 1939, the Fascists confiscated Piazza Calda, and Blow and his new family fled to the States. No sooner had they arrived than America was at war, and Blow, an amateur pilot, was captaining long-haul cargo missions for the navy. By the time the Axis was defeated, he had acquired the farm upstate, which he dubbed Hardstone (the English translation of pietra dura).
The Florentine connection to pietre dure can be traced back to 1588, when Ferdinando de Medici, a son of Cosimo the Great, founded a workshop dedicated to the craft for the production of pictures, furniture adornments and objets d’art. Florence was a city celebrated for its sumptuous wares, and none was considered more luxurious than pietre dure.
Untitled (Five buildings), 1957
Over the next four centuries, Florentines skilled in the technique demonstrated their artistry with works reflective of the latest currents in art and design. By the early 20th century, however, their descendants, while still expert practitioners, no longer possessed that artistic invention. Instead, they employed the same exacting and laborious methods in churning out uninspired revivalist trinkets for well-heeled tourists and the export trade. They were barely making a living.
Blow’s second marriage did not survive the war, but Piazza Calda did, and he returned as soon as he could. Despite the devastation Italy had suffered, a new creative spirit was stirring. With his wealth, knowledge of business and creative vision, Blow saw an opportunity to be part of this cultural resurgence by reviving the antique craft he so revered.
The exhibition will also include original paintings by Blow belonging to Lastrucci.
He must have gotten to work immediately because in 1948, he had a show of his Montici creations at the prestigious Knoedler gallery, in New York. The works were various in style, drawing on the imagery of Cubism, Surrealism and the Pittura Metafisica. Hands and butterflies were frequent motifs, imagery that also figures in the graphic work of two of the giants of postwar Italian design, Giò Ponti and Piero Fornasetti. The fanciful naivete seen on occasion in the work of those Milanese masters is also apparent in some Montici creations. Which is only to say that they are as Italian in spirit as they are reflective of the Paris avant-garde. And all their rich associations were very much on trend with what forward-looking American tastemakers at the time desired for their homes.
At first, Blow gave his preliminary drawings and paintings to local pietre dure workshops to realize. But soon, he invited one master craftsman, Fernando Nenci, to his studio at Piazza Calda to collaborate more closely. Bruno Lastrucci, the eight-year-old son of Piazza Calda’s caretakers, became Nenci’s apprentice.
Untitled (Surrealist landscape), 1961
By the time Lastrucci was a teenager, he’d become the lead craftsman in the studio and was working directly with Blow. Italian artists were also invited to contribute designs to the project, notably Massimo Campigli, Eva Carocci and Costantino Nivola. Blow’s objective was not to make the artisans secondary but to inspire them to innovate on their own by exposing them to the latest creative currents.
Piazza Calda, located just south of Florence, was in disrepair when Blow bought it, but he restored the property and opened his workshop there. Photo courtesy of Leo Bastreghi
His enterprise quickly gained success. In 1949, Montici jewelry boxes with pietre dure tops were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual Christmas exhibition. Three years later, black-and-white images of Montici pieces were included in the museum survey show “The Modern Movement in Italy.”
Even more significant in promoting Montici in the United States was the inclusion of a large selection of pietre dure in the traveling exhibition “Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today.” The show opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1950, then moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago; the DeYoung Museum, in San Francisco; and nine other institutions across the country. Several of the museums acquired Montici works. Other exhibitions and gallery shows followed over the ensuing decade. Blow opened a store in Manhattan called Piazza Montici, offering pietre dure pictures, as well as furniture and gifts. Bespoke decorative panels for interior design projects were commissioned, and Cartier ordered a collection of jewelry pieces that Blow crafted in partnership with the Florentine silversmith Brandimarte.
Then, in 1954, just as the business was taking off, Blow was in a car accident in which he suffered a serious brain injury. He could not travel back to Italy for three years, and the workshop at Piazza Calda closed. Pieces continued to be made but were outsourced to other workshops. Even when he did return, it took several more years for him to fully recover.
Left: Untitled (Catfish), 1960. Right: Untitled (Butterflies and mermaid), ca. 1955
By the 1960s, tastes were changing. The surge of interest in this rarefied art in the early postwar years was never matched. In 1973, Blow sold the Piazza Calda but provided the Lastruccis with a farmhouse on the property. In the spirit of his padrone, Bruno Lastrucci continued to innovate in his work. For a time, he even signed his pieces B&B, for Blow and Bruno. Today, his son Iacopo carries on the tradition. In 1983, at age 79, Blow died of cancer. His ashes were sent back to Montici to be buried in the garden at Piazza Calda; Bruno Lastrucci made the tombstone.
Edelsberg’s cache exposes a new generation of collectors and connoisseurs to rare vintage works in which the antique and the modern meld, works that arose out of the kind of inspired collaboration for which the aesthetic-minded Medici and the artistic talents of Florence were once renowned — an alliance committed to the cultivation of beauty, skill and experimentation. They are unique expressions of a time, a place and a highly unusual man. Is it any wonder Adam Edelsberg was obsessed?
