David Cruz
It's an exquisite coincidence that Arturo Pani's friends and family called him “el raro,” or the rare. His mother gave her queer son the nickname because rather than use a pejorative, she preferred a kinder adjective—an apt metaphor for his extraordinary style. The Mexico-City based interior designer began his career in the 1930s during an era when modernism became the dominant design vernacular, influenced by expats fleeing fascist Europe. Pani differentiated himself with a French-infused glamour that was muscular and flamboyant with sturdy curves, but never spare.
David Cruz discovered Pani in Los Angeles when he and Blackman first opened their shop. Pani, like other Mexican designers who catered to the affluent, was part of a cross-pollination that took place between California and Mexico, especially during the middle of the twentieth century. The pieces he discovered were eccentric and bold—a centipede table or a pair of lamps with bronze-spiked orbs.
Years later, Cruz learned that Pani designed the swank interiors of the art deco landmark Hotel del Prado in Mexico City, where Cruz often met friends for drinks in a salon with a Diego Rivera mural entitled Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park. In typical Rivera style, the mural was a cutting commentary on bourgeois society. He also included a self-portrait as a child standing with his wife, Frida Kahlo, towering over him. The hotel didn't survive the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, but the mural did and is now a centerpiece of the Museo Mural Diego Rivera.
Pani's father, a diplomat who took his family to Belgium, Milan, and France, was a Rivera patron and encouraged the painter to leave Paris and travel to Italy, where he studied Renaissance frescoes. Like Rivera, Pani and his older brother Mario studied in Paris. The brothers went to the École des Beaux-Arts, and when he returned to Mexico City in 1935, Arturo and Mario, an architect responsible for some of Mexico City's most iconic buildings, embarked on the first of many collaborations. They designed the Hotel Reforma, where Arturo created an industrial luxuriousness in the public spaces, which became emblematic of Mexican modernism.
Pani continued to work in hospitality, designing interiors and furniture for restaurants and luxury hotels, like the Hotel Bamer, with its circular bar and ample armchairs. Throughout his long career, he used rich materials like parchment, velvet, solid gilded brass, onyx, and mirros. He often took traditional European styles and gave them his Mexican flair, interpretations that enabled him to gracefully adapt to trends: 1940s Regency, 1950s modernism, and the Swinging 1960s and 1970s, when his Acapulco home epitomized what became known as “Acapulco style,” was captured in an iconic image by society photographer Slim Aarons.
Stacie Stukin, excerpted from Beauty & Mischief
Adam Blackman and David Cruz officially embarked on their venture, Blackman Cruz, in 1993; in the three decades since, they have created—and helped create—countless worlds, purveying objects of beauty and curiosity (dare we say magic?) culled from around the world. Operating from Los Angeles, the pair first showed their wares in a West Hollywood showroom on La Cienega and, in 2007, moved into their current home on Highland Avenue—an expansive space that was formerly the infamous gay nightclub Probe, known not least for basically playing itself in American Gigolo.
If discussing patina and provenance over a once booze-soaked bar seems incongruous, one might argue that such incongruity is characteristic of both Los Angeles and Blackman Cruz. At the center of the “dream factory,” worlds collide—and collision is perhaps what Blackman and Cruz do best. The pair’s “odd couple partnership,” as the New York Times put it, is the force behind an aesthetic sense that is delightfully difficult to pigeonhole. As the title of their recently released book Beauty & Mischief: The Design Alchemy of Blackman Cruz suggests, Blackman Cruz’s eye together encompasses the serious, sexy, and silly, and the myriad permutations therein. You might find, as one does in this auction, a stunning 1902 Carlo Bugatti chair (itself a treatise on material alchemy) next to an antique drum-playing rabbit automaton (restored to working order by an aerospace engineer), or a painstakingly beaded papoose from Borneo alongside an iconic mid-century modern sofa by Poul Kjærjolm, or a softly glowing snake lamp by Frank Gehry. Or impossibly elegant Gazelle lounges by Dan Johnson, or...Or. Or. Or.
Significantly and much to their credit, Blackman and Cruz have not shied away from certain elements of the archetypal curiosity shop. “We’re merchants,” their website declares. “We sell life enhancers.” In leaning into the longstanding lineage of rarity-purveyors, they show that they recognize the preciousness of curiosity itself—and the adjacent elements of surprise and fantasy. They let themselves be led by the search, and the excitement of the find is gleefully passed to their audience. That said, there are certain figures who serve as touchstones for the pair, designers whose sensibilities mesh well with Blackman Cruz’s vision: Bugatti is among them, as well as Pepe Mendoza and Arturo Pani, both from Mexico City and featured amply in the collection offered here. And then there is the Blackman Cruz Workshop, founded in 1998 by Blackman, Cruz, and creative director Lika Moore, offering limited edition lighting and furniture; among the works selected here are two metalworked lamps by Moore and the uncannily “dripping” Leary marble table.
Design is typically a studied thing, where precision takes precedence. Blackman Cruz breathes a little refreshing chaos into the discipline, finding a comfortable perch amidst a multiplicity of exciting tensions: ancient and contemporary, scientific and spiritual, restrained and resplendent. In our era of ubiquitous quantification and optimization, Blackman Cruz extends an invitation to not be afraid of what draws us in—even if it can’t be named or measured. In other words, to revel in the possibilities of enchantment.
Auction Results Arturo Pani
