The term “hotel art” doesn’t typically inspire visions of creative brilliance, instead calling to mind a framed seashell print at a beachside bungalow, sketches of the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty, or oil paintings of horses in snow at grand ski resorts out West.
But over the years some hotels, through wealth or by happenstance, have displayed real art—art that should be hanging in a museum, or at the very least a blue-chip gallery. In its heyday, the Ancien Hôtel Baudy in Giverny was host first to Monet, then Pissarro, Renoir, and more Impressionist biggies, with many artists’ work ending up on its walls. A few decades later on the opposite side of France, the owners of La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence struck up a friendship with Matisse and Léger, and eventually Picasso was gifting a painting and Calder was installing a mobile by the pool. As it turns out, even the Cubists couldn’t resist bartering their work for free food and drink in the Côte d’Azur.
These days, it may be harder to snag a Picasso for your vacation spot. But on the Amalfi Coast, Le Sirenuse is keeping the tradition of contemporary patronage alive with an incredible collection of site-specific artworks made by a wild variety of artists handpicked for commissions.
Co-owners Antonio and Carla Sersale years ago decided to bring in new stuff to complement the old, building on the legacy of Antonio’s father, Le Sirenuse cofounder Franco Sersale, who had previously helped transform the former family compound into an opulent escapist fantasy. The duo managed to impress with one of their first commissions, from the British artist Martin Creed, who hung one of his neon phrases—“Don’t worry”—in the vaulted ceiling of the hotel’s main bar lounge, surrounded by arched windows with cliffside views. (Looking out at the Bay of Positano, it’s hard to imagine anyone does!) Now, works by Stanley Whitney, Alex Israel, and Rita Ackermann live upstairs.
But the latest commission might be the boldest and most ambitious yet. Sersale asked the white-hot art star Nicolas Party to design a work that can’t live on a wall, but rather dwells at the bottom of the swimming pool: Pool, a classic Party composition, now makes for the town’s best watering hole. Does it rival the pool designed by David Hockney at the Hollywood Roosevelt or the one Ed Ruscha did at his brother’s house in Studio City? Yes.
When first approached by Silka Rittson-Thomas, the London-based art adviser who helps curate the hotel’s commissions, Party had never been to Le Sirenuse, but that didn’t matter: “I said yes right away.”
He started sketching initial plans, intending it to be an homage to the great mosaic works in Naples history and those found in the ruins of nearby Pompeii. And while he was aware of the Ruscha and Hockney pools, it was Hockney’s famous large-scale depictions of pools in California and France he was channeling.
“I was very stressed about the first meeting—when you show the first drawings, it’s very scary,” Party said of his presentation to Sersale. “But Antonio saw one and he was like, ‘Ah, that’s it, that’s fantastic, okay this is good, okay let’s do it’—going on for like five minutes. And what he saw is fairly close to what it is now.”
The result: a color-saturated, hyperreal homage to the clash of blue sky, cerulean sea, and jutting peaks that confronts anyone who walks out on the hotel’s balcony. Party said he realized the key was to create something that looked as though it had always been there. “When you do a painting, it’s conceived out of context, it’s in the studio, in a white cube,” he said, “and when you do a pool in a hotel, you’re aware that no one will see it out of the context.”
“I wanted something that looked like a pool,” he continued. “The hotel is kind of perfect. You don’t want to mess around with it too much.”