In the Frame: Michael Diaz-Griffith

What are you working on currently?

Michael Diaz-Griffith: ‘As a follow-up to my first book, The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors, I’ve just begun a guide to connoisseurship and collecting today. The collecting manuals from the antiques boom of the 1980s through the early 2000s are excellent but need an update, and I’m excited to shift my focus from inspiring interest in antiques and historic art to empowering young collectors to become tomorrow’s connoisseurs.

‘That word, “connoisseur,” fell out of fashion for a spell, and there was maybe a sense that it represented a snobby or remote approach to collecting, but the quest to understand our material world is just the opposite: it is a humble, endlessly enriching way to move through our cultural environment and connect with others and ultimately ourselves.’

What ritual or routine keeps you going?

MDG: ‘Looking at art, reading about art, writing about art and talking about art — mostly with my husband. Any other ritual or routine is in service to this way of living, which ultimately supports our own ability to make things.’

Is there a work of art, museum or historic home that made you see things differently?

MDG: ‘The Looshaus in Vienna, designed by Adolf Loos and completed in 1912. This building helped me see how an understanding of historic precedent and a respect for context could work together with new technology and a sense of abstraction, rather than against them, to produce a work that was both vital in its moment and that endures.’

Which artist or designer from history do you wish you knew more about?

MDG: ‘Hildegard of Bingen.’

What are you reading currently?

MDG: ‘One of those older collecting guides that I mentioned — Collector’s Progress by Stanley W. Fisher — a deliciously picaresque romp through the mid-century English antiques world. Partially consumed or waiting to be read on my nightstand are Ancestral Voices by James Lees-Milne, The Silver Book by Olivia Laing, a volume of Jorie Graham’s poetry and The Hour of the Predator by Giuliano da Empoli, which diagnoses the political condition of our age — namely, the rise of strongman rulers. As all students of art history know, it is impossible to understand the material culture of the past or present without understanding how power works.’

What artists or designers are you excited about right now?

MDG: ‘Duyi Han (b. 1994), a multidisciplinary artist and designer who seems to be from the future, and, perhaps, he is. His practice treats the history of visual culture as active material, combining and recombining aesthetic languages, including those belonging to historic art and design. Very happily I was able to commission an outfit modelled after the ones he makes for himself — the kind of thing that can happen when you support an artist early in their career.

‘Another Chinese artist, the filmmaker Bi Gan (b. 1989), just produced one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen: Resurrection. If you see it too you will understand why I classify him, in no uncertain terms, as an artist.’

In your eyes, what makes a house a home?

MDG: ‘Objects that are extensions of ourselves in an almost talismanic way. They can be works of art, design, collected or inherited things, books or anything else, as long as they reflect our sensibilities, memories, tastes, enthusiasms. To my mind, home is a place that shelters daydreaming, vulnerable moments and the messy side of life. That helps us constantly relocate ourselves in space, time and with our loved ones, even as our world becomes increasingly chaotic and filled with distractions. Meaningful objects support that program, reminding us of where we’ve been, where we want to go, who we are and who we want to be.’

Your favourite view, anywhere in the world?

MDG: ‘I love looking down from a height on my home. It throws life immediately into perspective. For a long time, I could do this from the peak of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Today I do it every time my flight lands at LaGuardia Airport, and the island of Manhattan, in its strangely intimate immensity, glimmers into view. How comforting to know that this great capital of culture is both available to me and that I have a bolthole there for hiding in plain sight!’

Most memorable art or design show you’ve seen in the past year?

MDG: ‘Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Genius at New York’s Neue Galerie, which runs through May 2026. An exponent of the Wiener Werkstätte, Peche is an all-time favourite designer of mine who is only now receiving his due. Like Loos and Duyi Han, his work investigated and rethought the ornamental, synthesising it into the vocabulary of modernity instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’

Please share your top picks from Christie’s right now?

‘Jacques-André Portail is known for portraying elegant youths absorbed in solitary pursuits, but this chalk drawing, A Young Artist Sharpening His Chalk, feels unusually tender — and possibly self-reflexive. Is the figure a favoured student of the artist? Does Portail see something of himself in the young man as he sharpens his chalk?’

‘Set this pair of Louis XV ormolu-mounted Chinese celadon porcelain ewers atop a mantel in a vast empty room, and no additional decoration would be needed. They are masterpieces of form.’

‘Nicolas Lancret’s The Four Seasons could be the seed from which an important new collection grows.‘

‘This early George III mahogany secretaire cabinet-on-stand represents the tradition of English furniture at its finest. I noted above that the ormolu-mounted ewers could stand on their own in any room, but I take that back: they should be displayed here! Together, they would form a miniature exhibition on rococo taste in England and France, on carving and casting alike, and if you look closely, your eye will begin to register a host of formal parallels, each one to be savoured like an Everlasting Gobstopper of connoisseurship.’