Walton Ford is at it again, spellbinding us with the stories he tells through his bravura oversized watercolors, but this time he’s going about it in a very different way. Yes, like in his past, animals are present: Two ferocious-looking cheetahs star in each one of the four paintings here, but the cheetahs are there because they’re the pets of Luisa Casati, the eccentric and wealthy Milan-born marchesa who lived in the Palazzo Non Finito (now Palazzo de Leoni) in Venice before Peggy Guggenheim moved in. More importantly, it’s the first time he’s telling one of his fantastical tales through a woman. It’s also the first time his story is as much about the person as the animals.
Dodie Kazanjian: So tell me Walton, how did the two of you meet?
Walton Ford: I recently did an installation in Venice during the last Biennale and ended up living in Venice for about a month. It was wonderful, obviously, and I went to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, as one does, and they had the Jean Cocteau show, which I loved, but I became aware of the fact that before Peggy Guggenheim bought that Palazzo, the Palazzo de Leoni, the Marchesa Luisa Casati lived there. It used to be called the Palazzo Non Finito because it was never finished. It was meant to be many stories high, and they only got to the first floor. I guess they ran out of money in the 18th century, and it became a ruin and a problem for Venice. They didn t know what to do about it. So the Marchesa bought it and moved in.
DK: How did you find out about her?
WF: By seeing a wall text at the Guggenheim Foundation. Then, I had a show at the Morgan Library, and simultaneously they had a show about the Ballet Russes. And Marchesa Casati used to commission Léon Bakst, who designed costumes and sets for the Ballet Russe, to design costumes for her because she would throw these magnificent, hugely expensive masked balls in Venice that were the social event of the season. We re talking around 1913, right before the First World War, and they had a book in the Morgan Library bookshop about the Marchesa Casati because she was in one or two images in the show about the Ballet Russes—and because she was a patron of the arts and she would spend millions of dollars of pre-First World War money on her parties. She was wild in the way she entertained. Anyway, I saw this book about her called Infinite Variety. When I started flipping through it and saw a picture of her with her pet cheetah...
DK: It was readymade for you!
WF: Yeah. The idea of wealthy, somewhat debauched, but also a super-gifted artistic personality before the First World War owning cheetahs in Venice. There s a lot of visual opportunity there for someone like me.
DK: So it was the person who led you to the animal this time.
WF: Yes. She appeared to be unhappily married when she was quite young. She was always a striking figure, tall and slender, and she was a very great horse woman. Apparently Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet, saw her and thought, this woman is my muse. It was love at first sight for him, and they started this affair, which lasted the rest of their lives. He wrote poems about her and they fed off each other, and she eventually saw herself as a shape-shifting work of art, so she would commission people to make her clothes, to make her jewelry, to create a persona. She would walk around with a giant python around her neck, half naked under a fur coat, walking her cheetahs with foot servants dressed as Nubians holding torches. She would walk through the streets of Venice like this, unannounced, and make this appearance. She became a thing to see when you went to Venice at the turn of the last century—like you d see the Titians and the Rialto, and then you would see the Marchesa. If you were lucky, you d see her in her gondola with her cheetahs or you d see her walking, wearing only a fur coat.
DK: She was waiting for you to paint her.
WF: But she always used this fearsome presence. She scared people. And when you think that she was born into a world where she was forced to wear corsets, her clothes went right up to her chin and all the way down to her hands, and they were very restrictive. And she was a mother, and the wife of a marquis. But she wasn t happy with these roles, and she freed herself from all of that and became this wild, wildly costumed and extravagant bohemian artist. There s a very famous photograph of her by Man Ray. It s a face you ve seen many times where there s three blurry eyes and this staring woman s face.
DK: I know the picture but I didn’t know it was of your Marchesa!
WF: She s one of those overlooked but super-pivotal figures. We know that Virginia Wolf and the Bloomsbury women threw off their corsets and started wearing eccentric clothing they designed. But this is a very extreme version. It s not just to say, I want to get out of my corset, but it s that I want to shapeshift and really shock people with nudity, extreme makeup, costume—spectacle. So she created a spectacle of herself. And I focused on her cheetahs. The irony is that the Marchesa Casati was a wild animal that could not be tamed, but she kept wild animals and tried to tame them—she leashed them. There s a paradox there that comes with a narcissistic artistic personality, but the thing about her is maybe she saw the paradox and the irony in it. Maybe she didn t care. Maybe she tried her best to take good care of these cheetahs, but the fact is their life would not have been a good one for a cheetah. In my mind, that s just a bad idea from start to finish. Yet she did it as many, self-indulgent people do today, as we know from Tiger King, Eric s Goode s show.
But she was an artist and she was a completely untamed spirit, and she used her cheetahs like they were costumes or bodyguards, spectacle-producing fashion accessories. I m sure she loved them. It’s remarkable to think you re born to be a docile wife and mother and you end up as a fearsome figure with a python around your neck. What a transformation. What a courageous and unhinged and amazing story she has.
DK: Was it hard for you to focus on the life of a woman, something you’ve never done before?
WF: Yeah. I felt like I was taking a big chance because, okay, I m a 65-year-old white guy, and I m going to make pictures of a semi-nude beautiful woman. But I kept in mind that there s a difference between a nude, which is just an object, not actually a human being, and a naked person, a portrait of a real human being who has agency but happens to be partially undressed. This was the way she presented herself to the world when she was painted. She was lovers with Romaine Brooks, who was a very great English portrait painter. Romaine Brooks was a lesbian, very out of the closet about it. She wore men s clothing and she had girlfriends, and she did it without trying to pretend. It wasn t like she had some lavender marriage. Romaine Brooks was really out out, and she was one of Luisa Casati s lovers, and Luisa Casati insisted that she be painted nude by Romaine Brooks. That was the way she wanted to present herself. And the portrait gets at this ferocity she wanted to project.
DK: How does this compare to what you ve done in the past?
WF: This is way more deliberately cinematic. There s a lot more dramatic, almost over the top lighting effects. This was a decision because of her excessive, maximalist approach to life. The show is called Tutto, which means everything. It s from a poem that was written by Gabriele D’Annunzio when he was involved with her, and it translates basically as “everything was desired and everything was attempted.” And that s how she lived. She ended up broke in the 1950s, completely destitute on the streets of London. People would see her looking in trash cans. Yet she still was doing a sort of Sunset Boulevard magnificence. She would still put herself together and put the makeup on and make an appearance, but in moth-eaten costumes. She was this relic, this remarkable presence that people would still be like, oh my God, I saw her on the streets of London.
DK: But what was different about this show from all your others?
WF: What s different is I decided to throw away any fear of bad taste or excess. These are maximalist paintings. I didn t care if somebody thought they were over the top or they were corny or it looked like Disney or it looked like illustration. It is influenced by all of that. Even NC Wyeth. I don t care. Because she wouldn t have cared.
DK: But in the past, you would have cared.
WF: Yeah. Artists are like rats that make their own maze that they then have to escape from. (laughs) We set rules and then we break the rules that we set for ourselves. So I was working within a range of restraint. The restraint was the natural history art that got me started. This endless way of linking me with Audubon. These paintings couldn t be further from anything that even remotely could have been inspired by Audubon, except there s an animal, which is just not enough of a reason to link me with some other artist.
DK: What do you think these link you to?
WF: More pop culture, cinema, Frank Frazetta, really dubious stuff. The idea of even Léon Bakst and the Ballet Russes. When I did my first show with Gagosian, it was in LA in Beverly Hills. It was influenced by cinema, very strongly—lighting effects, the MGM lion, King Kong. This has been going on for a while, this move away from gun-room art, natural history imagery that got me started, into a more general cultural realm.
DK: You finished a fifth painting just before your show opened, and it’s the most frightening.
WF: I realized I needed to do one that got a little more at the darker qualities of the narrative. The first four show the magnificence of the views across the lagoon. But these alleys are where you spend most of your time when you re walking around Venice. The claustrophobia—alleys that might be almost 900 years old that have never seen the sun since they were built. It s an amazing thing.
DK: In this last picture, you painted the Marchesa standing, wearing a red robe, over nothing, with a snake around her neck.
WF: Many people said, I saw her with her leopards and her boa constrictor, and I was like, no, it s cheetahs and an Indian python.
DK: What took you so long to focus on a woman as the artist heroine
WF: I ve only recently come to realize that you often are embarrassed about the thing that s most true about you. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be in the kitchen with the women, and I drew pictures for them and made jokes and entertained them, but my father and the men in my family would make fun of me and say, what s going on with this kid? He should get outside and play football. I bought into that for a while. But now, in the third act of my life, I felt like I had the right to paint her.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Walton Ford, “Tutto” is on at the Gagosian Gallery in New York from March 6–April 19, 2025.