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The trouble with Christian - Whatever Happened to - Christian Leigh - Biography
ArtForum, March, 2003 by Alexi Worth
For a six-year run beginning in 1987, CHRISTIAN LEIGH was one of the most visible--and ambitious--independent curators in the international art world. Then he vanished. ALEXI WORTH looks back on an enigmatic impresario of many guises whose disappearance remains as mysterious as Leigh himself.
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In the mid-'90s, around the time that Christian Leigh went underground, or vanished, or worse (the more lurid versions of the story pictured him at the bottom of a Venetian canal), a curious fax began circulating through New York galleries. At the time, Leigh was a familiar figure in the art world--the most flamboyant of the independent curators who had risen to prominence with the bull market of the '80s. But the fax had nothing to do with curating or with Leigh's widely publicized disappearance. It was a copy of a profile from People magazine, dated September 5, 1983, and titled "Kristian Leigh Had a Dream: I Was a Teenage Dress Designer." The accompanying photo showed a swollen, melancholy-eyed kid--a kind of cross between Fatty Arbuckle and Peter Lorre--flanked by a pair of sultry female models. The writers of the piece were evidently charmed by their eighteen-year-old subject--and by his tea dresses, his wool suit and his evening gowns trimmed with marabou feathers and rhinestone-embroidered lace:
With price tags ranging up to $20,000, Leigh's flashy creations are worn, he says, by private clients like Jane Fonda, Farrah Fawcett, Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep, who wore one of Leigh's dresses to the 1982 Oscars.
Bankrolled by his mother, Barbara, who once owned a series of stores that sold discounted designer clothing, Leigh employs 25 helpers in his Manhattan salon....
Leigh cur his first dress at age thirteen, when his mother told a valued client she had just taken on an in-house Parisian designer named 'Pierre.' Et voila, five days later, the fictitious Frenchman, Kristian, came through.
For anyone who knew Leigh from his second act in the art world, the piece was both amusing and spooky. Everything was there already--the obsession with Hollywood, the flamboyance, the name-dropping, and above all, in the vignette about the "fictitious Frenchman," Leigh's predilection for self-creation. Few friends ever knew much for certain about Leigh's past, but most remember sketchy, glamorous details. He had grown up in a mansion in Newport, he said, near the von Bulows. His mother collected Jasper Johns and was close to Barbra Streisand. He had graduated from high school at fifteen, then dropped out of Princeton. There was a stint in England, where he'd been a stylist for Boy George.
The stories were suspiciously colorful, and the ingredients varied. Some people heard Parsons rather than Princeton, Duran Duran rather than Boy George. But they rarely bothered to challenge Leigh: An air of fabrication was part of his charm. When I told his onetime friends, in the course of interviews for this article, that neither Princeton nor Parsons had any record of Leigh, and that Leigh probably wasn't his real name anyway, few were surprised. They did wonder, though, why he never talked about the fashion career, and wondered if he'd ever really had one.
The truth, as with so many Christian Leigh stories, is elusive. Meryl Streep did attend the 1982. Oscars. At least one photo from the time (republished for a recent Oscar special in People) shows her in a long purple dress attributed to the "then-popular Kristian Leigh." A source close to the actress, however, says she has "never heard of this person." The business itself--Kristian Leigh Ltd.--did exist. For a few years in the early '80s, it attracted a flurry of press notices. The earliest was an adoring 1982 piece by John Duka in the New York Times. The last, from the February 10, 1984, issue of Women's Wear Daily, suggests some reasons for Leigh's reticence. It tells a brief, tawdry story, involving unpaid debts to suppliers, the arrest of Leigh's mother for writing a bad check, and a deserted office on East Twenty-eighth Street. The headline reads KRISTIAN LEIGH SHOWROOM CLOSED; DESIGNER'S WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.
IMPRESARIO
Five years later, in the summer of 1989, a mega-exhibition of American art opened in Salzburg. "The Silent Baroque" is remembered above all for its absurdly extravagant opening festivities. A multitude of New York artists and critics were flown to Austria, put up in deluxe hotels, and treated to banquets on the grounds of Schloss Schonbrunn, outside Vienna. Attendees remember it as a fever dream of opulence, with night after night of Fellini-esque parties catered by livened footmen. For some, the junket represented the grand finale of '80s excess, the last and most lavish party of the waning decade. But "The Silent Baroque" is remembered for other things as well. It put Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac on the map, brought the neo-geo artists to Europe, and highlighted the ascendancy of its young maximalist curator--the corpulent, brilliant Christian Leigh.
