Does Jocelyn Wildenstein Belong to the History of Art or Celebrity?
Published on The Art Journal, July 2026.
The terms that tag The Lion Queen, the posthumous documentary about socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, form a list as beguiling as the subject herself: Art, Biography, Documentary, Drama, Fashion, Journalism, LGBTQIA+, Mystery, Nature, New York, Romance, Thriller and Women. The film’s central appeal is the same one that defined Wildenstein’s life. She was endlessly photographed, discussed, and turned into image; another woman immortalised in the still form of the paparazzi flash photo (clad in tight leather and animal prints, a great tan and a Getty Images watermark). She is also outlived by her nicknames: Catwoman, The Bride of Wildenstein, and the titular Lion Queen, whose glossy New York Magazine cover story the film takes its name from.
Jocelyn’s striking features garnered both public ridicule and cult appreciation. Her face continues to be an object of endless fascination and, for some, unforgivable repulsion. Her lips and cheeks were full and protruding, brows raised and eyes elongated like those of the felines she supposedly replicated to please her hunter husband, art dealer Alec Wildenstein, whom she met while shooting jungle cats in Africa. For art journalist-cum-crime writer Rachel Corbett – who wrote a page-turning investigative piece on the Wildenstein family for The New York Times Magazine and was featured on-screen in the documentary – the legend is almost too symbolic to be true. “I don’t think she was trying to turn herself into a cat to look good in his eyes,” she admits over the phone from New York, where Wildenstein herself spent much of her life.
A year after their fateful meeting, in 1978, Alec and Jocelyn eloped to Las Vegas without the approval of his father, the powerful collector Daniel Wildenstein. Whether welcome or not, Jocelyn found herself a part of the most important circle of art dealers in the world. Her last name was now almost as recognisable as the masterpieces the family inventory holds: Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Velázquez among them. Though kept at an arm’s length by the Wildenstein family, she regularly represented the business in front of the press. “There was a sense that she was knowledgeable about art and did understand what she was looking at,” Rachel says.
While navigating the social codes of high society and artworld exclusivity, Wildenstein simultaneously became fodder for the tabloids. She partied each Tuesday at the Bowery Bar’s Beige night, dressed to the nines alongside the likes of David LaChapelle and Amanda Lepore, and was increasingly tormented as her looks evolved. “Alec and Jocelyn got their first surgery together, and she, like a lot of people, just got hooked,” Rachel tells me. “Clearly, she had some body dysmorphia going on, and plastic surgery wasn’t so good then,” she adds. Just as the media attention that Jocelyn attracted followed her into celebrity marriage, it followed her too into the seemingly untouchable, high-culture artworld that surrounded it. Her existence in these two distinct spheres is ostensibly contradictory: one’s economy is based on privacy and exclusivity, and another’s existence requires a stable current of gossip and drama, fabricated or not.
Alongside expensive art, Wildenstein had a nose for the complex dynamics of the powerful family she had entered, as well as for her own role within it. In 1998, she revealed some of her husband’s dynamics to Vanity Fair. “When you are fifty-seven, and you’re still the son, the same as when you were seventeen, when you run a business so big like this, but you still have your father behind you all the time as the shadow, you’re never your own master.” But when her own nineteen-year marriage ended in a bitter, tabloid-ready scandal (a young Russian model, a half-naked husband, a gun), Jocelyn took the Wildenstein family to court to fight for a historic multi-billion-dollar divorce settlement. “That she was prepared to take them on proved, in itself, how courageous she was,” Rachel says. “The family would have loved nothing more than for this woman to disappear forever, but she refused to be cowed.”
Perhaps Jocelyn does not belong as much to the history of art as she does the history of celebrity only because the former will not accept her into it. Regardless, she embodied the same forces of excess, artifice, image and performance that underpinned the Wildensteins’ artworld: a possession of too much – cash, attention, self-awareness, self-importance – as well as an attainment of purity and perfection, be that in a face or a Botticelli. Jocelyn had an addiction to a version of beauty that, though not appealing to all, continues to inspire many with its glamour and campness, and the confidence to wear it until the end. Looking back, we could see her as a woman engaged in a lifelong practice of silicone self-creation and “an extravagant, destructive creativity,” as anthropologist Grant McCracken writes. Hers was a performance practice, intentional or not, of transformation away from the human and towards the wild animal. For cultural theorist Meredith Jones, the combination of Wildenstein’s “disparate” and excessive features formed “a grotesquery that means their host can only be deemed, at best, perversely beautiful.”
It’s tempting to draw out and examine Wildenstein’s case as a Cronenbergian surgery-sex-selling parallel (these ultimate sources of physical and psychological gratification) and to theorise her condition endlessly. It is impossible, however, to know the true reason she underwent the surgeries that she will forever remain renowned for, since Wildenstein died on New Year’s Eve two years ago, at the age of eighty-four. Rachel tells me that her relationship to these procedures was at once blatant and “very mysterious. There’s no question that she had loads, but she changed the story all the time.” While various interviews record her admitting to a touch of Botox here and there, she also insisted that she hadn’t been touched by the blade of a scalpel. This caution and elusiveness were at once self-protective and strategic. As Rachel explains, “Jocelyn was aware of the massive interest in her,” and of course, in how she looked. “It makes me sad to see myself on the screen,” she told an interviewer in 2018 with heartbreaking honesty. “We have pictures of ourselves in our head that are different from what we project.”
After a lifetime of being trivialised by the media and reduced to a tabloid caricature, Wildenstein spent her final years re-engaging with the press on her own terms, giving interviews to a new generation of fashion and culture publications. Rather than sensationalising her appearance, they approached her with an attentive interest in her glamour, extravagance, and the life she had led. These conversations allowed her to reflect with candour and humour (and, of course, a touch of her signature elusiveness) on her family, her much-contested appearance, her lifelong love of art and wildlife, and the myths that had accumulated around her over the years. Few women so relentlessly reviled by the tabloids have been afforded such an opportunity. It is in her documentary, filmed prior to her death and completed afterwards, that Jocelyn sits down before the lens and speaks directly to the camera, a complete person, marking the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning with the complexities embodied by her life and the overlapping worlds she inhabited.