Francesco Vezzoli has been making provocative and genre-breaking art—encompassing film and video, embroidery, sculpture, and photography; and often playing with notions of celebrity, glamour, and spectacle—for more than three decades. His new book, Francesco Vezzoli: Diva (Skira), plays with iconic figures from pop culture, religion, and the golden ages of both Italian cinema and Hollywood, with Vezzoli embellishing portraits of Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, Bianca Jagger, Veruschka, and many others with embroidered tears, glittered eyebrows, and bloody noses.
We chatted with the artist—who called in from his bedroom in Milan after taking in a William Forsythe ballet at La Scala (“I mean, spiritual delight,” he raved)—to learn more about both his new book and his ever-surprising work and career.
Vogue: Your new book has an introductory essay by Shai Batel that places you in an artistic lineage that includes Duchamp and Richard Prince. Do you agree with that, or would you place yourself elsewhere?
Francesco Vezzoli: I must admit that when I was very young, I did buy a lot of those early Richard Prince books—I was a big fan. But I would never place myself in the company of such geniuses, because it’s always dangerous—you may disappoint! I will say that whatever the impression my work may generate, it did come from an urgency. When I started having actresses within my video art pieces and when I started embroidering tears on their faces, for me it was a strong necessity of seeing a certain sensibility that I had not seen present before. I felt I had to do them because the history of art, especially the Italian history of art, had no representation of the kind of sensibility or importance that this kind of iconography played with.
Really, it was a double path: One path was that my type of sensibility, whether you call it gay, queer, or whatever, was not represented. But I also felt that emotions had been kind of canceled back then—in the ’80s and the ’90s—for probably too long. And I’m a big fan of melodrama.
At the risk of being obvious: Why tears? Why are they crying? We have other things as well: some people’s faces are bleeding from the nose, others are bruised. But tears are a major motif here. Is it to do with this melodrama, or is there something else?
On the surface, yes, it is the representation of emotions. But I’m also doing in each one of those divas’ eyes a little Lucio Fontana cut or slash, and out of that slash there is an outcome of emotions that, from the glamorous surface, would not be expected. That is my idea—some sort of gesture that reveals the truth behind the screen. Whether that truth is about your sexual orientation or your emotion can be analyzed and interpreted, but certainly it is about the truth behind the screen. It’s always about adding a layer of truth. Obviously the tears are not always the truth, but it’s like saying, “Be careful what you wish for—not all your dreams, when they become reality, bring all the things you expected from them.”
It’s very banal, but that’s what inspired me. At the time, I was reading a lot of biographies of movie stars and movie directors, and I did lots of gender studies at Central Saint Martins in the early ’90s, and so there was this need of taking that heritage and adding that little bit extra of glitter and emotion to the official image.
I’ll confess that I’ve always thought of you as so very Italian—I didn’t know you went to Saint Martins!
To be completely honest—I don’t usually say it—the transition from the Italian provinces to Central Saint Martin in London was super stimulating, but rough. London itself was super exciting, but the city was easier to navigate than the school. I was approaching an entirely different educational system, and so doing these needleworks allowed me to stay by myself for long stretches of time.
I think the first one was a portrait of Jeff Stryker without tears, but then I was doing needleworks of the prostitutes’ cards that you would find in phone booths—back in the days before Grindr, before Tinder, before any social media—for any kind of encounter. I was appropriating a visual vocabulary that was supposedly inherently female, but I was using it for some kind of pseudosexual discourse. And that translated, inevitably, into a biographical and more emotional one.
But what was the initial attraction of going to Saint Martins—or to London?
I just wanted to escape my provincial city, where I’m doing a big exhibition when your article comes out, so I should not speak too badly about my hometown.
Which is where?
It’s the north, between Milan and Venice. It’s called Breschia. It’s a lovely city full of great museums, great architecture—and a quality of life that, after spending my entire life around the world, I kind of miss. But I wanted to escape that kind of universe; I wanted to go to the London clubs, I wanted to see a Leigh Bowery performance, I wanted to see a Michael Clark ballet. I wanted all that stuff, that extra bit—and I did find it, and I did find myself. I just came back from London, and whatever happens, that is the place that has my most personal memories from my big first change of life. You can t erase that. I miss that clubbing scene—I was a club kid, but it wasn t just going to gay clubs. It was about being part of this culture that had its own codes, which were disembodied from, well, financial codes. You didn’t have to be rich to be a club kid. From that, we translated into a luxury-oriented culture, but back in the day, the door policy did not depend on the expense of the items you were wearing.
I have a dumb question about your book: Why is it—in these movie stills and these homages to the fashion photographs of Francesco Scavullo or portraits of Marisa Berenson—that they’re all from a long-ago era? They go back to Cary Grant, or even earlier, to Marlene Dietrich, and onward to the ’80s. Is it because these earlier eras are one step removed from us, and therefore they more easily telegraph notions of glamour in a kind preserved state—one that you can then puncture and play with?
Totally, yes. Also, I was in London exactly when the concept of glamour was changing. Up until the ’80s, the idea of glamour was connected to a set of standard values for the Western world, whether it was Paris or London or New York. But in the ’90s, the codes start changing, and so all that iconography seemed even more frozen in a past of untouchable beauty, and I needed that kind of a surface to slash. If I had slashed one of those beautiful covers that Corinne Day shot of Kate Moss—well, those images didn’t need a slash. I never thought of it.
Your book also has an interview that you did with Sophia Loren, and there’s this amazing quote of hers that you ask her about. She once said, “If you haven t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful,” which is just amazing. But how did this chat with her come about?
You have to put the blame always on Condé Nast [laughing]. It was for a cover I did for Italian Vanity Fair, which was embroidered by me, and she agreed to do an interview. I think she is a great actress because she’s had a fucking dramatic life. I mean, she was born into real poverty, and she had to really struggle to become who she has become, and I thought that that sentence, while being very poetic, was a way of saying, unless you have been confronted by some real rough things, you are not able to succeed at either acting or at telling the truth.
I also want to throw back one of your own quotes to you now—it’s from a video interview you did, though honestly I don’t know if it’s recent, or just recent-ish.
Just say that I’m ageless, so it may have been 20 or two years ago.
Of course. But you said, “I’m a sweet vampire,” and I couldn’t understand the context.
Yeah. That goes back to a period where I was doing a lot of videos with movie stars, and very often people would say to me, “How did you convince Sharon Stone, Helen Mirren, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett—”
And Courtney Love, Dianne Wiest, Lady Gaga, Michelle Williams—
Yeah, exactly. And I would say: I always went to these heroes of mine with a very precise project that was somehow built on them. There was nothing gratuitous about it. So, yes, I was a vampire—today, I would say I was an honest vampire, because I never wanted to intrude into their private life. I wanted them for what they represented, because my job was to bring celebrity culture into the artistic discourse—not just through images, like many artists had done before, but through the real physical performance of these unreachable icons.
Many people thought that there was some manipulatory aspect to all of this because I was just a kid. At one point, I had dinner with a major, major artist in America, and he said to me, “Oh—but everybody knows your parents are very powerful in Hollywood.” And I just started laughing. I said, “My father is a lawyer in Brescia, and he couldn’t meet Sophia Loren even if he wanted to.” I was not coming from that. So I did have to be a bit of a vampire and ask these people to give me a fair slice of their celebrity blood, but then I poured it immediately into the ink that draws my needle.
This new Diva book also contains a conversation between you and Hans Ulrich Obrist, which touches on many fascinating things, but of course you know what I’m going to ask you about: the lunch that you had with your old friend Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for the New York Times (and, before that, Vogue), and Zaha Hadid, and… Donald Trump. I have a sense this is a very long story, but can you give us a sense of what this lunch was like? It seems there was a notion that Zaha Hadid could perhaps do a building for Donald Trump?
Maybe Herbert was dreaming of, how do you say, redeeming Mr. Trump through the strength of Zaha. I’m not going to go into politics, because I think anyone can go into politics. Zaha was one of the most penetrative people you could ever deal with: You could not escape her gaze, or the strength of her point of view. I mean, Zaha made her way into the world of male power through great vision, excellence, great strength. And I think that Mr. Trump felt that this woman, coming from a completely different background than his, had that kind of power. But he literally was just not listening to a single word that Zaha—the greatest living female architect that the world had seen until then, and probably until now—would say. I was shocked. Anything that she said was just bouncing off him.
What are you working on now?
I’m planning to do a big exhibition in Alba, the city of truffles in the north, near Turin, on Roberto Longhi, who was a great, great writer and the most important postwar art historian in Italy. He rediscovered Caravaggio—Caravaggio was forgotten until the Second World War, and there’s never been a show about him. And then there will be the most important show on de Chirico and the metaphysical painters at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and it’ll open for the Olympics. I have some pieces in there, and I’ll be designing the final part of the exhibition, so I will be both curator and artist within the same discourse, and I’m very happy about that. There’s also something important I’m doing with Dasha Zhukova—we are presenting a special project in Miami.
What kind of special project? Can you say?
Yeah. Vogue ran an article recently about her real estate projects—she’s building buildings all around America, and she involves artists to make artworks for them. This is the first step: we took a very, very famous piece of design, and we added something that turns the meaning of the piece upside-down, and she will put it in her buildings and we will present it at Design Miami.
But the earlier project at the Palazzo Reale—if I’m not mistaken, de Chirico is a hero of yours, yes?
Yeah. I’m super happy that this is going to be the biggest show ever on metaphysical painters. It’s going to go to the most important public museum you have in Milan, and then it’s going to go to the National Gallery in Rome. It’s super exciting—I always have what we would call the “syndrome of the actress without a screenplay on her table,” but luckily enough, until 2027, I’ve got two great new movies to make.
