Word: tailor
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Sapone's skillful needle has earned him paintings by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Massimo Campigli, Alberto Magnelli and Hans Hartung, as well as sculptures by Diego Giacometti and a collage by Clave. The exchange began by accident 14 years ago, soon after the mustachioed little tailor, an expatriate Italian from the mountain village of Bellona near Naples, and his wife Slava opened shop on the Riviera. One day the Florentine ceramist and painter Manfredo Borsi ordered a suit. "If you prefer," Borsi imperiously suggested, "I will pay you with one of my paintings." Sapone did not really prefer...
...sewing machine and a pair of pinking shears are the only clues that identify Michele Sapone's ground-floor flat on Nice's Rue de Châteauneuf as a tailor shop. Casual visitors are much more likely to mistake it for an art gallery: about 450 paintings and drawings -many by Europe's best-known contemporary artists - crowd the walls of the waiting room, the workshop, the corridors and even the fitting room. As tailor to more than 100 leading French and Italian artists, Sapone, 56, accepts payment for his clothes in works of art. Says...
Audacious Initiatives. One artist led to another. Poet-Painter André Verdet ordered a sport coat of grey velvet curtain material. Picasso took one look at Verdet's coat and was off to see the tailor. The two men hit it off instantly, and after Sapone had cooked Picasso some Neapolitan spaghetti, the artist gave him three lithographs and an order to "sew something...
Other Sapone contributions to Picasso's wardrobe include a white silk suit, which the artist wears to bull fights, and a brown velvet smock with a collar so high and broad that the tailor told Picasso: "Your head emerges from the collar like a flower from a pot." In return, Picasso has given him about 50 paintings and sketches - including a powerful War and Peace pastel contrasting dancing nymphs with a hideous fire-belching monster. According to a Riviera dealer, the work, which Picasso gave in payment for a pair of trousers, would now fetch...
Strutting Peacocks. Sapone's flourishing trade belies the image of the painter as a rather threadbare chap. The younger and more impecunious may seem indifferent toward clothes, but the more prosperous often prove to be strutting peacocks. Before Sculptor Jean Arp died in 1966, recalls the tailor, "he would walk through a party in Paris, twiddle with his lapels and say to people, 'Sapone, eh oui, un Sapone!' " The definition of un Sapone varies widely...