The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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just staring down capitalism,” Cunning-

ham said. Critics have complained that

“Fearless Girl” promotes a kind of “cor-

porate feminism,” but Cunningham sees

the art work as “aspirational.” “I view

her as a symbol of people who don’t see

limits,” she said.

“The cultural context totally changed

as that controversy was happening,” Siff

said.

“I think that’s also a part of why my

job got so much press. I was named pres-

ident during the MeToo movement,”

Cunningham said.

She took Siff on a tour (highlights:

the jumbo Fabergé urn that Nicholas II

gave in appreciation for a bond issue, on

which he defaulted, owing to being ex-

ecuted; Jimmy Page’s guitar; a stained-

glass ceiling made by an ex-Tiffany em-

ployee, after Tiffany’s quote was too high).

They ended in Siebert Hall, a confer-

ence room named for Muriel Siebert,

the first woman to join the exchange, in

1967. Cunningham said, “The first nine
      guys she asked to sponsor her said no.”
      She pointed at Siebert’s rainbow-striped
      fur coat, inside a display case: “She didn’t
      try to blend in.”
      Siff noted that Cunningham’s outfit
      matched her own onscreen wardrobe as
      Wendy Rhoades. “The leathers, the zip-
      per up the back,” she said. “Wendy re-
      ally zips herself in.”
      “I don’t want to be too gendered about
      it, but she can be a shark. She can be as
      manipulative and conniving as some of
      the more toxic male archetypes,” she went

on. But, as a therapist, “she has great wells

of empathy, and emotional X-ray vision.”

As for working in finance, Siff said,

“Slinging around huge amounts of

money” on a screen—“that would make

me break out in hives.”

—Rachel Syme

1

LATE NUDEDEPT.

SENSORIALSUPPER

I

n 1944, the collector Robert Sterling

Clark heard that the Art Institute

of Chicago was looking to acquire

“Seated Bather,” a late nude by Renoir.

In a letter, Clark derided the picture

as “a great big mushy gelatinous fat

woman with a sad face strawberry tint,

has no bones only fat.” Clark loved

Renoir, but mostly his early paintings.

As an heir to the Singer sewing-ma-

chine fortune, he was able to buy many

of them. He eventually assembled one

of the world’s greatest private collec-

tions, which later formed the core of

the Clark Art Institute, in Williams-

town, Massachusetts.

Last month, the institute’s curators

travelled to the Explorers Club, in Man-

hattan, in order to give a sneak peek at

some upcoming exhibitions to a few se-

lect “lovers of the Clark.” Among the

offerings was the institute’s first-ever

1 O T I o t

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show of Renoir’s nudes, including the

gelatinous one that had so offended the

Clark’s founder.

After the presentation, the Clark lov-

ers (mainly well-heeled donors) min-

gled on a terrace. At a podium, a man

in black washed guests’ hands with rose-

water in a basin filled with magnolia

petals. “It’s a Biblical thing: you lay your

hands on the flowers and then you pour

over the water,” Olivier Meslay, the

Clark’s director, said. “We’re trying to

mix the idea of tradition and something

more unexpected.”

The Explorers Club building was

once the home of Clark’s brother Ste-

phen (he founded the Baseball Hall of

Fame), and the institute now maintains

offices there. “Many of the pieces of

stained glass”—the building has a hun-

dred and fourteen leaded windows—

“were sent over from Europe by Ster-

ling Clark,” Michael Conforti, a for-

mer director of the institute, explained.

“His brother probably didn’t know

what they were!”

The exhibition is titled “Renoir: The

Body, the Senses,” and Elena Siyanko,

the Clark’s director of advancement ini-

tiatives, explained the genesis of the

dinner portion of the evening. “I met

this parfumier, Julian Bedel, who con-

cocted the scents for this evening,” she

said. “And with him, scent is all kind of

about sex. So I thought, Let’s do a sen-

sorial supper. It’s, like, full skin, sex.”

Bedel, a shorn Patagonian, created a

rose-heavy scent for the room, using

only plants that Renoir painted. “It’s a

depiction of how that landscape would

smell,” he said.

A woman drifted through the crowd

wearing a diadem of green hellebores

on her head. She was Emma McCor-

mick-Goodhart, an Anglo-American

artist, who had, with Siyanko, arranged

the party. “In scheming the dinner, I

tried to conceptually inhabit the nude

from without, across media—to treat

vegetal and floral flesh as nudes, to ex-

tend the notion of what constitutes a

nude at all,” she said.

In the dinner room, tables were

paved with a layer of figs, moss, mush-

rooms, ranunculi, and onions, the work

of the florist Bella Meyer, a grand-

daughter of Marc Chagall. “The plants

offer themselves completely,” Meyer

said. (Real mushrooms had apparently

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“Did we remember to put out the fire?”

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