On a recent Monday morning, Genny Cortinovis is searching for just the right light as art preparators and mount-makers position four glass objects in a wall case at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
“Let’s swap them,” says Cortinovis. She’s talking about the “Maretta Mizimah II,” a reedy green vase by the American artist Toots Zynsky and “The Diver” vase, designed by Sweden’s Edward Hald. “The shadows and light are weird. The Hald holds up better on the bottom.”
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
Jake Bloomer, a senior preparator, moves them into place.
“Will you spin it to the right?” she asks, stepping back to assess the result. “One more time?”
Cortinovis is searching for the Zynsky’s best angle.
“There’s less movement, but I like this,” she says. “It doesn’t have a bad side, really.”
The loan of a vase by the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto to the Bard Graduate Center in New York left a blank space in the wall case in one of the decorative arts galleries, presenting Cortinovis with an opportunity to rotate in a collection of glass objects, including the Orrefors vase by Hald that was acquired in 1937 and hadn’t been on view in decades.
Cortinovis, the museum’s assistant curator of decorative arts and design, oversaw the installation of the exhibition “Blow-Up: Graphic Abstraction in 1960s Design” and co-curated “St. Louis Modern.”
Yet, installations are just one aspect of her job, one that requires a lot of time reading and researching and visiting with collectors.
This summer she will attend Art Basel in Switzerland and travel to Paris to research a pair of “problematic sconces” whose provenance has been called “not quite right” by some scholars. SLAM bought the sconces from a dealer in 1917, but they originally belonged to Sir John Murray Scott and presumably Lord and Lady Wallace of the famed Wallace Collection in London, says Cortinovis. But several scholars who saw the sconces in the 1960s commented that Baroness Liliane de Rothschild owned a similar pair and that hers had come from Marie Antoinette’s pièce des bains at Versailles. That pair was offered at Christie’s “Collection Marie-Antoinette” sale last November and the royal provenance was once again suggested, but no hard evidence was offered to support the attribution.
While she’s in France, Cortinovis plans to look in the royal inventories housed in the National Archives, outside Paris, and speak to specialists at the Château de Versailles and the Louvre about the sconces. David Conradsen, SLAM’s Grace L. Brumbaugh and Richard E. Brumbaugh curator of decorative arts and design, will search the Wallace Collection archives. Together, they hope to uncover more of the sconces’ intriguing history.
“It’s my mystery for the summer,” she says. “I love to sleuth.”
Cortinovis, a native St. Louisan, is the daughter of an interior designer mother and a “mad collector” father, as she describes him. “This is in my genes,” she says.
Despite the painstaking detail that she exhibits at work, she approaches the design of her own home—a painted lady in Lafayette Square—with a more “laissez-faire” attitude, she says with a laugh.
