ARTS
“RUINS HAVE BEEN A THEME IN MUCH OF MY OEUVRE, AND I HAVE QUITE OFTEN DISTRESSED MY WORKS ON PURPOSE.’’
Colette Lumiere Artist Reborn
BY CLAUDINE STEINBERG
A
lmost half a century ago, the Tunisia-born artist Colette landed in New York City — from outer space, she claimed, to anonymously paint the streets with mysterious signs and symbols that she received from her far away cosmic home. She made a quiet feminist statement by sleeping nude on an outdoor Carl
Andre sculpture and abandoned herself to her dreams in store windows and museum vitrines. Every aspect of her life was transformed into art: her clothes, the characters she embodies and, most famously, her living space. colettetheartist.mystrikingly.com Maison Lumiere Out of the blue one day in August 2007, the doorbell at Maison Lumiere on Pearl Street
rang with utter urgency: the five-story house from 1831, along with its two slightly older neighbors, had suddenly been deemed unsafe, and Colette was told — “Gestapo style,” she recalls — to leave immediately. A crack in the facade running from the basement to the roof had been widening almost imperceptibly for decades, but more importantly, the three remaining dwarfs at the feet of the Financial District’s glass towers had just been bought by developers with tall ambitions — not even the landmark-worthy birthplace of Herman Melville on what was once known as Great Queen Street would be spared. For Colette, the instant eviction — police officers escorted her outside— did not just mean the loss of a home but the destruction of the already legendary art environment that she had inhabited and continuously transformed for almost three decades: it had evolved from a “minimal baroque,” furniture-free incarnation without furniture and walls covered in white parachute fabric to a Rococo cave created from frilled, ivory-colored silk satin: a sensuous “soft space” gently illuminated by lightboxes that were integrated into the fabric. “ There’s a Mermaid in the Closet ” Three months after having been thrown out, Colette was granted “quick entry”— the bureaucratic term for salvaging essentials within a single hour. “Things flew out of my
