Female Nudes Crafted From Financial Times Lure Bank Barons By Trista Kelley
June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Dorrit Moussaieff, Iceland's first lady, struggled to find the perfect gift when her friend turned 60. What does one give Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of Blackstone Group LP?
When Moussaieff met London artist Natasha Archdale, she found just the thing. Archdale creates nude female figures from coral-hued fragments of the Financial Times newspaper. Moussaieff commissioned a portrait of Schwarzman's wife, Christine.
``It's in his Park Avenue apartment, between a Rembrandt and a Picasso,'' Moussaieff said in an interview. ``I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.'' She declined to say what the picture cost.
Archdale, who said she has commissions for the next two years, commands as much as 15,000 pounds ($30,000) for the portraits. Her choice of medium is alluring to people in the financial industry, and in the pictures she often matches the newspaper's content to her subjects.
``Lots of people think I had this clever agenda of mixing the female nude with the Financial Times because the correlation is good: sex and money and business, and art at the moment is so prolific,'' Archdale said, sitting in front of five of her pieces at a friend's house in London's Notting Hill. ``But it wasn't that well thought out.''
Archdale declined to list her clients. Blackstone spokesman Peter Rose said in an e-mail that Schwarzman ``prefers not to talk about what he may or may not own.''
`Worked for Me'
A graduate of Bedales School and Cambridge Arts College, Archdale, 31, said she has been drawing the female form since childhood. When she broke her spine in a car accident nine years ago, she discovered a talent for collage.
Bored and bed-ridden for six weeks, Archdale created self- portraits with the Financial Times simply because it was the only material available.
``I just started drawing myself in front of a mirror,'' she said. ``I didn't have paints around me or equipment, but I did have the Financial Times newspaper. It was next to my bed, and it's pink, and it just worked for me.''
Archdale, who previously worked as a model, first exhibited in May 2007 at The Gallery in London, which has hosted works by Rankin and Banksy. She sold all 17 pieces at the event, and since has completed about 12 more.
She now spends about a month on each piece in her Notting Hill apartment-turned-studio, where hundreds of copies of the Financial Times pile up on the floor.
`All the Bits'
The newspaper ``is the bible in our industry so it seemed appropriate,'' said David Yarrow, another Archdale client.
Yarrow, the founding partner and chief executive officer of Clareville Capital Partners LLP, hangs the portrait of an unknown model at his beach house in Devon, southwest England. Yarrow paid 1,000 pounds for the piece.
``I sometimes get quoted with regard to hedge-fund nonsense and she found all the bits in the FT with my name in it and used it to go in the picture,'' Yarrow said. ``It's been much admired. I would never sell it.''
Portrait painting has evolved from stuffy, serious works, said Lyndsey Leiper, a consultant at the London-based Royal Society of Portrait Painters. The charity has arranged portraits on behalf of Oxford University, Queen Elizabeth II and London Mayor Boris Johnson.
``We're starting to see a lot of younger artists and they really are bringing in new, edgier work'' said Leiper, who doesn't know of Archdale's portraits. ``People like to see how other people perceive them. Do you want the artist to make you look mysterious or intriguing?''
Spending on Portraits
Highlighting the move toward less conventional portraits, Leiper said, is the Johnson piece, which portrays the mayor seated in a deck chair holding a coffee cup, an image she described as ``angelic.'' The portrait cost 10,000 pounds and was painted by Felicity Gill. John Wonnacott, known for paintings that mimic the style of wide-lens photography, created a series of works featuring Britain's Royal Family and can charge more than 100,000 pounds a painting.
Archdale's most famous influence, Lucian Freud, became the world's most expensive living artist at auction last month. His 1995 nude, ``Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,'' sold for $33.6 million with fees at Christie's International in New York.
The growing trend for personal portraiture has been fueled by outreach efforts and word of mouth, Leiper said. The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, formed in 1891, last year organized 50 portraits that brought in 400,000 pounds, an increase of 63 percent over 2006.
Leiper said she and her colleagues are contacting more potential clients directly amid fears the economic uncertainty will crimp spending on portraits. The threat doesn't worry Archdale, who says she gets daily requests for her work.
``I never thought I would be able to do it for a living,'' Archdale said. ``I still can't quite believe it.''
(Trista Kelley writes for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are her own.)