The scene had some of the enchantment of a spell-casting ritual: In a shoe-box-size gallery with hot pink walls in Lower Manhattan, a crowd had gathered as a woman was methodically opening an obelisk-shaped box. Those who hadn’t managed to squeeze inside the room were spilling out onto the street into the evening humidity. They watched in hushed fixation as the woman pulled from the box a tall glass flacon containing what looked like a saffron-colored potion.
One that, you could say, promised to conjure Elizabeth Taylor.
The potion was a recreation of an obscure perfume once worn by Ms. Taylor. It was concocted by Marissa Zappas, 38, an accomplished perfumer and the woman who unboxed the fragrance last Thursday evening at an opening event for “Her Scent of Mystery,” a new exhibition at the Olfactory Art Keller gallery in Chinatown.
The show, on through Sept. 20, takes its name from “Scent of Mystery,” a 1960 film briefly featuring Ms. Taylor, who makes an uncredited cameo in its final shot.
Mercilessly panned — Bosley Crowther said in The New York Times that “we are compelled to conclude that this business of using smells with pictures is a fetching but ineffectual stunt” — the movie famously incorporated a then-futuristic technology called Smell-O-Vision, which involved a clanking metal box with a bronchiole-like network of pipes being installed in a theater. As “Scent of Mystery” played, the machinery would hiss odors in accordance with its scenes. When the villain smoked a pipe, for instance, gusts of tobacco-scented air hit the audience.
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