NEW YORK — Most artists take you to a gallery to show you their work. Juliet Hartford, notorious A&P heiress and one of the stars of the documentary “Born Rich,” which airs tonight on HBO, takes you into people’s houses.
“Oh, the maid will just let us in,” Hartford says confidently as she walks up to Cristina and Karim Tabet’s house on East 65th Street and rings the doorbell. After explaining to the maid that she just wants to visit her portraits, she trounces up several flights of stairs, points out a few pieces of artwork she hasn’t painted along the way and arrives at a trio of portraits of the Tabet children. There’s one in orange, another in green and another in purple with the same image, repeated over and over, evoking an Andy Warhol portrait bought at Sears. They’re striking and fun, but Hartford doesn’t tend to analyze her work and how it maneuvers the divide between photography and painting.
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“Oh please. I can’t, I can’t discuss this,” she says over breakfast earlier at The Carlyle Hotel, where she spent much of her youth. “It’s too much for me. I don’t think that way. I do a lot of different things, and I just happened to do portraits for a few friends of mine, and it was fun and I earned money. That’s all. I didn’t really think of it in depth. It’s nice that they hang it in their apartments and you know, whatever. It’s been a nice opportunity for me to make money and it’s been fun, you know? And I’d like to have a show.”
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Hartford’s portrait techniques are somewhat unusual. She says she doesn’t like to use oil paints because they make her break out and aren’t “good for my skin” and she doesn’t like the smell of turpentine. So she’ll use items like Magic Marker, orange Day-Glo spray paint, SOS pads and Windex.
The mixed media results have been, well, mixed. “For the portrait I did of Alex Miller I used a yellow highlighter, one of those things you use in college on textbooks,” she adds. “I used removable glue because if I didn’t put [the photos up] correctly I could remove it. The funny thing is that removable glue evaporates and eventually there’ll be no glue. And not only does removable glue evaporate, yellow highlighter pen evaporates.
“Alex said she was trying to keep it out of the sunlight because it was fading,” Hartford goes on. “And I’m thinking, of course, because the yellow highlighter pen is evaporating. I keep telling her I want to get back into the portrait so I can put in more removable glue and more highlighter pen.”
Though she’d like to keep it a surprise, the show that Hartford is planning includes more Andy Warhol-like work but with an autobiographical slant: a huge canvas painting of the A&P logo; another of the Le Rosay school insignia in Gstaad, Switzerland, where she attended high school, and a painted version of a childhood photo.
Ever the provocateur, Hartford also made a T-shirt with the A&P logo and wore it around town (and in German Vogue) but says it was “too exhausting” to make more. Instead, she made a Hilton logo T-shirt for Paris, a Getty oil one for Pia and a Hanson logo one for Robert. “I’ve always been creative and visual and artistic. But I don’t understand the math and business world. I really don’t.”
Still, art isn’t where she wants to focus her life’s energies. She has her modeling and thinks an acting career might be in the works. “Somebody offered me a movie with Harrison Ford,” Hartford says. “They’re sending the script over, like, next week, but maybe they were lying.”
Her acting experience stems from a school production at Le Rosay of “Le Petit Prince.” “I was the snake. I have a great picture of myself. I was in a black bodysuit on the floor. They had a Lamborghini on the stage. I guess they used the Lamborghini to be the spaceship. Wasn’t he from a spaceship? It’d be typical Rosay to use a Lamborghini.”
Above all, however, Hartford just hopes to carve out for herself a “simple life.”
“Just to be anonymous, live the rest of my life in peace and have a beige pug,” she enthuses.