My Life as an Art Dealer: “A Highly Combustible Commission”
By Harissa Beaumont
This could have been the last entry in my diary, but luckily I am still here.
There are times in this job when I wonder if I am an art dealer or an unlicensed explosives handler. This week was one of those times.
It started with a call from an eccentric collector,let’s call him Collector D. He has a reputation for wanting pieces that are not just unique but technically dangerous. His collection includes a sculpture made entirely of melted-down Colt 45s , a taxidermy piece that once leaked something suspicious, and now, his latest obsession: a portrait made entirely from different coloured gunpowder.
“I want something with energy,” he told me over lunch, while slicing into a steak that was aggressively rare. “Something alive.”
“Well,” I said, stirring my third coffee, “You might not be if this portrait goes wrong.”
He grinned. “Exactly. Get Harland Moorhead to make it.”
The artist in question is known for using volatile materials,previous works include a drawing made with rocket fuel and an installation that had to be extinguished mid-opening. “Safety is key,” D reassured me. “It mustn’t just explode randomly.” This was not entirely comforting.
A phone call was all it took. Harland loved the idea and said he actually had a cupboard full of gunpowder that he wasn’t sure how to use – so this commission was ideal.
Once the portrait was complete, the next challenge was where to store it. Gunpowder is not something you can just prop up against a wall. No smoking was allowed anywhere near it, and, as an added precaution, the piece had to be kept behind explosion-proof glass.
Fiona, my gallery assistant, looked at the crate when it arrived and then at me. “If this goes wrong,” she said, “do we technically die in the name of art?”
“Possibly,” I admitted. “But let’s try not to.”
The portrait was spectacular,smoky textures, deep charcoals, and fiery reds. D loved it. The only slight issue? He wanted to hang it in his drawing room, over the fireplace.
“Just a couple of small concerns,” I said carefully. “Will there be fires? And… er… candles?”
“Always,” he said proudly. “I love atmosphere.”
There was a long pause as I considered whether it was my professional duty to explain that his new portrait could, under the right (or rather wrong) conditions, ignite and destroy his entire Georgian townhouse along with much of London.
”We don’t want to cause a second fire of London, so maybe-“
”Don’t we? Imagine the publicity!”
“Make sure it’s always behind the explosion proof glass,” I said. “And, maybe no flambé desserts near it.”
The piece was finally installed, behind its protective casing, with a small but noticeable No Smoking sign discreetly placed nearby. D is thrilled. I, however, will not fully relax until at least a month has passed and I have definitive proof that it has not combusted during the cigar and indoor fireworks dinner party that D was having in its honour.
Until next week,
Harissa
The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the Hearing Trumpet Meeting
Date: 4th March 2025
Time: 7:00 PM , 11:05 PM
Location: The Yellow Salon, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair
Attendees:
• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)
• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)
• Lord E. Northcote
• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)
• Hugo Van Steyn
• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)
• Max Duclos (Collector)
• Conrad Smithe (Probationary member; status under review)
• Pascal (Afghan hound, wearing a small silk scarf in “muted ochre”)
Book Discussed:
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
1. Welcome and Context
Molyneux opened with a remark on Carrington’s “polymorphic surrealism,” noting that the book’s anarchic humour and geriatric heroine offer “a reminder that the avant-garde need not be young to be dangerous.” The evening’s staging included an arrangement of Carrington-inspired objects: a gilt teapot shaped like a fox, a small egg-shaped reliquary filled with pomegranate seeds, and a taxidermy raven (on loan, not for sale).
2. Discussion Summary
• Dr. Lorrimer praised the novel’s subversion of patriarchal tropes through “feminist absurdity,” pointing out that Carrington “lets old women lead revolutions without apologising for it.” She compared it to the writings of Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini, sparking a brief sidebar on Surrealist domestic spaces.
• India Trelawney focused on costume: “The knitted balaclavas, the strange cloaks,they’re not just eccentricities, they’re political garments.” She drew a parallel to a recent Comme des Garçons collection, producing a lookbook from her Pimlico Wilde tote bag.
• Lord Northcote confessed to “not quite trusting” the narrative’s leaps into alchemy and lunar colonisation but admired its “camaraderie among the disobedient.” He likened the reading experience to “being on a train whose timetable one has accidentally burned, leaving one bereft of any arrival information.”
• Hugo Van Steyn was uncharacteristically playful, calling the novel “utterly unserious and therefore, in its way, profoundly serious.” He drew comparisons with Jean Dubuffet’s notion of “art brut as spiritual insurgency.”
• Max Duclos dismissed much of it as “Surrealist whimsy” and claimed Carrington’s visual art “does the work better.” Trelawney retorted that “Max prefers his magic on canvas where it can’t answer back.”
• Conrad Smithe questioned whether the satire risked obscuring the emotional core. D’Abernon countered that “emotion is what the satire is made of,” and a brief silence followed, broken only by Pascal sighing audibly.
3. Artworks on View
• Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) reproduction with Molyneux’s annotations on Carrington’s symbolic lexicon
• A 1970s Surrealist deck of cards, believed to be a collaborative prototype between Carrington and Alejandro Jodorowsky (disputed)
• Two small ink drawings from the estate of Ithell Colquhoun, placed discreetly by the drinks table
• Contemporary ceramic sculpture Lunar Soup Tureen by Saskia Hoekstra, created for the occasion
4. Refreshments
• Pre-discussion cocktail: “The Trumpet Call” , gin, elderflower, sage, and a whisper of absinthe
• Canapés: blue cheese gougères, smoked almond pâté on oat biscuits, beetroot hummus in endive leaves
• Main wine: Château Simone Palette Blanc 2018
• Dessert: poached quince with rosemary cream, served in mismatched teacups
5. Other Business
• Next Book suggestion: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir, proposed by Northcote, seconded by Lorrimer. Approved with the condition of a supplementary reading of the first chapter of The Second Sex.
• Decision taken to proceed with the Bibliophiles of Belgravia joint evening next month, venue to be neutral territory.
• Molyneux raised the possibility of an off-season “Ephemeral Pamphlets” weekend retreat in Rye; members expressed cautious enthusiasm.
6. Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 11:05 PM after a spirited post-discussion toast “to lunacy, longevity, and the liberty of old women.” Members lingered, inspecting the card deck under low light.
Respectfully submitted,
Fiona d’Abernon
Acting Secretary
Mayfair Book Groupette
Me and My Porsche
Digital pigment print
Edition of 5
In Me and My Porsche, Sandy Warre-Hole delivers a pop-cultural mise-en-scène that is both gleefully superficial and quietly savage, an image that at once embraces and eviscerates the digital iconography of contemporary aspiration. This portrait , deceptively flat and cartoonish at first glance , is a masterclass in synthetic artifice, where Warre-Hole’s signature linework and saturated palette coalesce into an image as seductive as it is subversive.
The central figure, unidentified, perhaps the artist herself, stands assertively in front of a classic Porsche 911, the epitome of postwar European affluence. Yet Warre-Hole’s rendering eschews realism in favour of stylised geometry, placing her firmly in the lineage of Roy Lichtenstein’s benday-dotted drama and Patrick Nagel’s icy cool femmes , but filtered through the hyper-clean gloss of vector illustration and the linguistic shorthand of emoji culture.
The setting is stark: a strip of flat asphalt, a green lawn rendered in crude fill-tool green, a blank blue sky. The composition is brutally horizontal , an echo, perhaps, of David Hockney’s West Coast suburban idylls , yet stripped of their sensual nuance and reduced to pure sign. Like much of Warre-Hole’s oeuvre, Me and My Porsche is less a scene than a simulation of one, hovering somewhere between memory, fantasy, and advertorial cliché.
But this is no mere aesthetic pastiche. Beneath the high-gloss façade lies an acerbic critique of the performative self. Warre-Hole’s subject stands with hip jutted and lips parted in the performative posture of lifestyle branding , an Instagram moment, mid-capture. And yet, there is something unsettling in her frozen grin, her mannequin-like symmetry. She appears not quite real, not quite human. A vector woman for a vector world.
This is Sandy Warre-Hole at her most conceptually charged: crafting a work that reads simultaneously as self-portrait, satire, and sociological artifact. In Me and My Porsche, the automobile , that long-fetishized Freudian stand-in for power, sex, and success , is not merely a backdrop but a co-protagonist. It looms behind her like an idol or a lover, its headlights blank and unseeing. The Porsche is not driven; it is posed. Not parked, but curated. It is an object of both desire and detachment.
Art historically, the work dialogues richly with themes of self-representation, from Dürer’s grandiose self-portraiture to Cindy Sherman’s mutating identity theatre. But unlike Sherman, Warre-Hole doesn’t disguise herself in layers of illusion , she presents a self already shaped by capitalist illusion. In the age of filters, Warre-Hole suggests, identity is not performed but manufactured.
In Me and My Porsche, we are given not just a portrait of a woman, but a portrait of a culture , aestheticized, perennially self-aware, and, like her artworks, expensive.
