Gallery walls

There's something terribly bleak about pile upon pile of the ephemera of past lives – dead people's stuff – and so much of it, that with each step I feel increasingly forlorn, if not downright depressed. It's not that I'm creeped out by the modern equivalent of grave goods still awaiting decent burial or burning, it's more that the amount of crap (and there's no other word for it) that has been produced, is still being produced, and will continue to be produced. This is not to say that none of it is without value be it to poor families, young marrieds looking to impress the subdivision, pickers, the recyclers of 60s and 70s worst moments, the taste-bereft or the aesthetically unrestrained.

If I were still suffering from visual and moral dyspepsia after yesterday's tour of a flea antiques market I might take a jaundiced view and say that, occasionally, I feel restraint is long gone from interior design and with it also are gone the underpinnings of history, utility and balance. I might wish my view were not so jaundiced and there certainly are times when my negativity is denied but I am sure of one thing and it is that balance is not understood or, at least, not often apparent, or even appreciated in today's interior design as seen in magazines and books. It is very hard nowadays to get a balanced idea of how a room works – there's a wealth of visual information in the form of vignettes, partial views and close-ups but actually to see how a room functions in relation the people who use it is a rare treat.

So, you might ask, what has got me on this path. In a word, Pinterest. Don't get me wrong – I don't dislike Pinterest, but my ability as a twenty-first-century man living at this week's apex of technological advancement to use a lot of time looking at pretty pictures (dogs or rooms, it doesn't matter) is truly worrying. I cannot blame Pinterest for that. These photographs below and their ilk, from a Google search, have led me to rethink the placement of five drawings (they hang in a row) on our living room wall – remove them altogether or leave one.

It's not just the incoherence, absence of balance, or the seeming unconsidered nature of the relationship to the wall and the room itself that bothers me: it is that they are not contained (in my old-fashioned way, I prefer disparate images to be contained, grid-like, within an implied border and despite asymmetry have balance) and appear to disperse from more than one centre. Also, it looks as if someone spent a lot of time trawling flea-markets – in itself not a bad thing, unless you're me, that is.

I realize, also, these present day asymmetrical arrangements of images and objects, so-called gallery walls, are not just reactions to static, yawn-inducingly-traditional groupings, such as in the photograph below, but a definite but not extreme attempt in their beginnings to enliven a modern way of living in traditional interiors. Now these gallery walls are a fad and as to whether that is a bad thing the jury is still out.  What I do know is that asymmetry is hard to achieve without an eye educated about balance.

There are precedents of course, not few and far between: two literally gallery walls (Uffizi and Royal Academy) and they share a common purpose – display, both artistic and social - with the following two (Van Day Truex and William Pahlman).  I'm not sure if Pahlmann's is an in-store display or a residence but either way that display of artwork above the cabinet must have seemed wonderfully modern at the time. Pahlmann's work is a little hard to assess at this remove but that is a discussion for another day.

John Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772

William Powell Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881

Van Day Truex, 1944

William Pahlmann, 1950s

Behind this discussion (rant?) about placement of pictures on walls are thoughts I've been having about walls just being allowed to be themselves and not just supports for art or artifacts. Not revolutionary, this idea of having walls bare except for an applied finish, but it occupies me and I would like to discuss it in the near future.

Shivered and groused

Of all the faces, famous and not, that I saw at the 59th Annual Winter Antiques Show preview (one of a series of events organized by the Decorative Arts Trust) last Saturday morning at the Park Avenue Armory, the only one that spoke, as it were, was a marble third-century Roman portrait head. Perhaps it was the the disembodied humanity of it silhouetted against black but of all the wonders to be seen that day at the antiques show and during the weekend at the Metropolitan Museum, the apartments and houses on and around Park Avenue, it is this head, or its semblance of humanity across the ages, that occupies me still. 

After lunch in the sombre Tiffany-designed Veterans Room we went our freezing way to the Metropolitan Museum where our group's guide, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts curator Wolfram Koeppe, alarms constantly sounding, showed us highlights of the exhibition Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens. The exhibition is now ended and I am glad I saw it, for it was one of the most superb exhibitions I have ever been to: ceiling-scraping cabinets, desks, chests, gaming and dressing tables were beautifully and generously displayed in all their decorative, secretive and mechanical glory. One of the most charming exhibits was the automaton of Queen Marie Antoinette playing a dulcimer, apparently an object that was put away quite shortly after she received it. 

Saturday evening was spent very happily with Daniel and his partner in their entirely personal and beautiful apartment for drinks and thereafter for dinner at La Boite en Bois. Good food, good booze, good company and good music. Their place is not a long walk from our usual hotel but it was that evening I finally realized how much a Southerner I've become and how I have grown to hate cold weather, especially when shirt, woolen sweater and a woolen overcoat, a scarf, and a tweed cap are not enough to keep me merry and bright. I groused and shivered, shivered and groused all the way back to the hotel. 

Looking just now through images on my phone I saw how little I photographed at the antiques show – this Anatolian bronze recumbent stag bowl, second millennium BC, the portrait head above, and a William Morris (not Morris and Co., the dealer pointed out) "Hammersmith" carpet. The rest? Gorgeous, fabulous, stunning, superlative, important – believe me, these adjectives all apply but, simply put, I'm just glad I saw the best at my leisure and under one roof. 

With diffidence, I have to say that I never understood Americana and Folk Art but in the space of a few hours at the Armory I came to appreciate it – a little. I wouldn't collect it even now for aesthetic and financial rather than anti-American reasons for I feel it just wouldn't fit, even if we has space for anything else and we could afford it. There was a time when Americana did fit in, but the 1976 Ethan Allen "Don't give up the ship" painted aluminum eagle is long gone, as is the carved pair of swans (beaks touching with the cutest of heart shaped spaces between above an incised motto "Friendship") from Mable's on Madison Avenue. Mable was the first person, not French, I'd ever heard refer to herself as "moi." I was charmed. 

Call me superficial, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree – anything for a quiet life – but, having lived through the rage for marbleizing, graining, distressing, Bi-Centennial reproductions of American furniture and the effects of Mrs Henry Parrish's "decorating shot heard around the world" when, via Bloomindale's, "Made in India" Wedding Ring, Bear's Paw, and Saw-Tooth Block quilts came to land on any surface not yet chintzed, faux-finished or distressed, I could say I live in hope I never see a second-coming of Neo-Colonial Revival decorating or that faux-finishes will ever again bring rapture to every keeping room in suburbia. 

So, in a roundabout way the subject of marbleizing and graining brings me to this apartment and the thought that if there's a surface rarely considered in a modern room, it is the ceiling. Not so in this Park Avenue apartment where nearly every architectural surface, including the ceilings and doors had been marbleized using a bravura technique by the owner herself many years ago. Where was not painted was upholstered, occasionally in gaufrage velvet, layered with medieval tapestries, romanesque and medieval paintings and mural fragments, in front of which stood baroque, renaissance, medieval cabinets, tables, chests, fragments of pietra dura, bronze sculptures and a coffee table surfaced with a fragment of mosaic from Caligula's floor. A marvelous place, reminiscent of Renzo Mongiardino's complexity of design and the whole enlightened with scholarship and taste.

This last photograph, a vignette that in many ways sums up the whole place despite the ceiling being plain, shows an exquisite baroque cabinet allegedly (if I heard rightly) was deaccessioned from Buckingham Palace.

Roman head and Anatolian bowl fragment from here.

Picture of The Berlin Secretary Cabinet (David Roentgen, 1743-1807) from here.

William Morris "Hammersmith" carpet from here. 

Then the angel sang his melody

Somewhere between the Medieval Climactic Anomaly and the Little Age Age a nineteen-year-old and not-yet-sainted English king had the notion to found a chapel at Cambridge as a pendant to that of Eton College near Windsor –– a chapel, one of the quieter glories of English Perpendicular architecture, roofed with the largest fan vault in the world, which I had lectured about but never visited. 

Sometime after the beginning of the Age of Global Warming, the Celt and I stepped out of the family car into horizontal rain that, in essence, is winter on the fens of East Anglia during the dark days before the equinox. Loathsome weather but, somehow, masochistically nostalgic.  

We were there for the Celt's brother's fiftieth birthday party – a surprise for the brother, a family reunion for the Celt, and a chance for me finally to visit the College roial of Oure Lady and Seynt Nicholas or as it is more generally known, King's College, whence each year is broadcast the Celt's favorite radio programme of the season – A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.     

"They are buildings of extremely simple exteriors and plans, but with plenty of masterfully executed decoration. The contrast is especially poignant at Cambridge. To design this long, tall, narrow box of a college chapel no spatial genius was needed. There is no differentiation at all between the nave and the choir. The decoration is repetitive, the same window tracery is used twenty-four times, and so is the panel motif for the fan-vaulting. They were rationalists, the men who designed and enjoyed these buildings, proud constructors, of a boldness not inferior to that of the Catalans. Yet they succeeded – and here we are faced with the same problem as in the contemporary German churches – in combining this practical, matter-of-fact spirit with a sense of mystery and an almost oriental effusion of ornament. Standing at the west end of the nave one can hardly think of the supreme economy with which this effect of exuberance has been attained. The fan-vault in particular helps, wherever it is used, to create an atmosphere of heavy luxuriance. Yet it is an eminently rational vault, a technician's invention, one is inclined to surmise. It originated from the vault designs of chapter-houses and their development into the palm-like spread of bunches of ribs towards a heavily-bossed ridge ...

"To translate the fan-vault from the small scale of a cloister into the terms of the height and width of a nave was, it seems, not risked before the later fifteenth-century. A little later, during the years of the sixteenth, the King's Mason, John Wastell, adopted the fan-vault for King's College Chapel."

Pevsner's beautiful, if dry, prose describes the building perfectly – but what he does not impart, rationalist that he is, is any sense of the atmosphere of the place – not that there was room to do that in a wartime paperback of around 250 pages.

Atmosphere, surely, derives from historical and romantic associations, but for me that day any atmosphere, romantic or not, was driven away by my wondering how long I could endure the cold inside the building and trying, as I shivered, to absorb what I could see of the roof – that great geometrical sacred grove, as it seemed to me, eighty feet above my head.

I sat, that afternoon, near the altar above which hangs Rubens' Adoration of the Magi, wrapped in overcoat and scarf, cap in hand (I'm old-fashioned enough to uncover my head in church even as a tourist), listening to the strange and genteel officialese used by people setting things up for the coming festival, and as the day turned from dark to darker there came a moment when the sun shone and the colors of the glass at my back flickered on the walls opposite – colors that only resolved into something recognizable once captured in a photograph.

A quiet glory indeed.

Quotation from An Outline of European Architecture, Nikolaus Pevsner, A Pelican Book, Penguin Books Ltd., first published 1943. Fifth edition, revised and enlarged, 1957.

The title of the post is from here: the Second Reading.

A Pinterest of a book

I don't consider myself to be a "fan." I don't seem to have the ability to be passionate, to the nth degree, about much, if anything. I appreciate beauty and talent where I find it, but I rarely find it consistently – it's unusual for me, that is, to be so taken with a designer, or an artist, that everything they do delights me.

Thus, when I say that I am not a fan of Miles Redd, I don't want you to misunderstand me – I'm not not, I should say. I'm not anti-Miles Redd for some of his work I like and some of it I don't care for. Some of it is fun, bold, sassy, a clever pastiche, and some of it is trite, cute, derivative, and occasionally ridiculous. More style than substance in fact.

I am a fan of books, of course, especially books about decorating, so I was delighted to be lent a copy of Miles Redd's The Big Book of Chic. Well, it's certainly big and really makes a statement on the coffee table. But I must confess, leafing through what I can only describe as this tome, I came away unsatisfied. Rarely, I felt, have so many trees been slaughtered for so little purpose.

It's as if Mr. Redd had printed out his Pinterest page. Printed it out on lovely rustly cartridge paper, bound it in wonderful thick wrapped board, and finished it off with a glossy dust jacket courtesy of Assouline. But a Pinterest it remains – droll quotations, notwithstanding.

One half expects to turn the page and find two cute Labrador puppies in a basket, or a four-poster bed in a meadow of flowers (picturelesspinterest.tumblr.com). Well, maybe Salukis would be more chic than Labradors, but you gets the idea.


I am a fan of books, as I say above, and the design of them (perhaps because my first degree was in graphic design) is of interest and concern. An agglomeration of photographs with a small amount of text is, in itself, no bad thing for not all interior design books need essays of pith and moment to accompany imagery – visuals that, sometimes, very clearly belie the text. Yet a book that is all imagery beyond a few words as an introductory chapter is somehow unsatisfactory – we are used to explanations and feel, and are, cheated if they are not there. Mr. Redd's book is more than that but when one is faced, for example, with images repeated as vignettes or with an identical image, but black and white, pairing the one on the opposite page the result cannot help but be unsubstantial and unsatisfying. I'd love see more of Mr. Redd's work and understand more about his design proces and philosophy, but sadly this book delivers neither.

An evening in Rome, an anniversary, fascist architecture, Simon Boccanegra, and a discount

"This place has been around for a few generations, and the marble-lined walls and tiled floors haven’t changed a bit. And the homey old-fashioned setting is one of the things I love best.  Settimio used to be in the back, but is no longer. His wife is though, working in the tiny kitchen, made of Cararra marble, making fresh pasta every day.

"When you go by Settimio it will look closed. They keep the doors shut, and often locked. They’ll let you in, maybe, if they like the look of you."

And closed it looked that wet and cold evening in Rome, a week or so before Christmas – we'd walked from the hotel near the Piazza del Popolo, through the Christmas market in the Piazza Navona, thronged with merrymakers – all seemingly clad alike in lustrous black padded coats – on over greasy cobbles, avoiding umbrellas and restaurant touts, weaving in out of parked cars and scooters – when we arrived at the trattoria recommended by Elizabeth Minchilli.

Determined as we were (when in Rome, etc) to avoid the tourist traps, we set out to have an authentic Roman experience. I know the word authentic is fraught with deceptions, but, notwithstanding, authentic was what we set out to find – and authentic is quite likely what we got.

The door was opened for us by a smiling woman who, surely knowing we were neither regulars nor, judging by our accents, Italians, called for the owner who thrust his head out of the door and let us in – I guess he liked the look of us – explaining as he did so that there was but one set menu. We settled in our chairs in a golden glow of Roman authenticity, marveling to each other that when we spoke Italian he appeared to understand us! So, was the food anything to write home about? Of course, especially if one were writing to nonna assuring her that her tesoro was eating well. Each course, simple both in nature and in presentation, was downright tasty, and much appreciated by two stranieri americani who, by the time they got up to leave, felt they'd had a genuine Roman experience – even to the politely expressed puzzlement from the owner when I asked for cheese after we'd finished our coffee. When it arrived it was not the hideously expensive, preciously presented gobbets dabbed about in quince paste or balsamic treacle of what is known as a "artisanal cheese plate" hereabouts – just a large wedge of excellent cheese on a plain white plate.

In Rome for a week–long, immersion Italian course (no English spoken, with each of us at different levels) after a trying half-year, we played at being locals – each morning setting out in overcoats with umbrellas, bags and books in hand, skirting the Piazza del Popolo; walking alongside the Ara Pacis in its Richard Meier-designed travertine envelope matching the stone of the nearby Fascist-era buildings bracketing the Mausoleum of Augustus; diverging from the Apple-Map-recommended route to walk across Piazza Navona where, one evening, we listened to Baroque music in Borromini's Sant'Agnese in Agone; stopping each morning to look at Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and then wending our way through the narrow streets – one teeming with young priests rushing towards us like a murder of crows; on towards Piazza dell'Orologio and past what became our favorite lunch place after school (Casa Bottega, a bar where we were given a discount because we were "cute" and where, later in the day, the best Manhattans were served) and up the five flights of stairs to class.

One morning, as we crossed Piazza Augusto Imperatore, looking again at the carved inscriptions from Mussolini's time, the Celt remarked that he quite liked the Fascist architecture we were seeing every day. I agreed, but pointed out that it is hard to disassociate architecture from those who commission it – something we discussed all the way to school – not that we came to any satisfactory conclusions.

The visual connection between Mussolini's early Modernism, the massive stripped remnants of ancient Rome, and Meier's Ara Pacis, is obvious. Eighty-plus years has softened the glaring newness of Fascist architecture in Rome, and perhaps its associations with Mussolini have also been softened – for who cares any longer? A few more years will erode the suspicion that the Museo Ara Pacis, as it now looks, is nothing but a chunk of the Getty Center translocated to Rome. Associations, positive and negative, all erode.

Finishing at two, as we did each afternoon, gave us time for a late pranzo, some exploring, a nap, homework, or an exhibition – one such a wonderful show, at the Scuderie del Quirinale, of Vermeer and his Golden Age contemporaries.

Vermeer's "The Allegory of the Catholic Faith" – unexpectedly Baroque – made me think that Rome with its multiplicity of saints and their miracles, for a pagan such as myself, is nothing more than an allegory for the survival of the old gods and goddesses.  Not my favorite of Vermeer's, this painting of a simpering rich gal who, hand on heart, heel firmly pressed on a terrestrial globe, gazes upwards like a silent-movie strumpet masquerading as a Baroque virgin. There is another interpretation, obviously, but one not necessarily less prejudiced.

Verdi's Simon Boccanegra opened the new season at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, with Riccardo di Muti on the podium and with wonderful sets – variations on a theme of Genoese walls and arch – by the husband and wife team Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo. One of the most moving operas I've ever seen. In fact, I almost shed a tear at the finale... almost.

Three years ago on Christmas Eve the head waiter in the hotel restaurant befriended us – he and his wife had lived in England for a few years – and on each visit we catch up with life, love, happiness, and Italian politics. I'd forgotten that I'd happened to mention that two weeks earlier had been our anniversary – forgotten, that is, until he brought a congratulatory wedge of tiramisu to end our final breakfast at the hotel. We've never had tiramisu for breakfast before, and let me tell you, it sure ain't a bad way to begin the day!

I am back to blogging after what I can only call a convalescence: long, slow and introspective. Being mauled by a black dog took the wind out of my sails for quite a while. I appreciate those of you who were kind enough to notice, and bear with, the hiatus.

Decisions

Strafed by flies circling the only sunny spot on the restaurant terrace, ruminating on both bread and life, and glamoured by the play of light on the tabletop, I listened as I sipped my bourbon to the Celt and my old professor discuss the worth of voting in Georgia. And as I sipped, it occurred to me that theirs was but a continuation of a conversation I been overhearing across our acquaintance for weeks now.

A few weeks ago I sat at dinner with people who, mostly, could have been my children's age and, as if personally involved, were talking about celebrity derring-do. Now, I recognize this kind of conversation is nothing more than oiling the wheels of social interaction, but there are times – many, actually – when I cannot take part because I have little if any idea of whom this or that person is. Despite the merriment – and it was a merry evening – my mind wandered as I looked around me at the Chippendale chairs and the chandelier, prismatic and tinkling above our heads... thinking, as one does, how much I might resemble a tipsy eighteenth-century squire surrounded by kith and kin in his newly-bought dining room. I thought too of a style of furniture that in its heyday (a day not yet gone by in Atlanta) had, with regional inflections, spanned the Continent, Great Britain and its burgeoning empire. As I sat there, an occasion from nearly twenty years ago and, to me, very eighteenth-century in feel, came to mind: we'd been taken to lunch by a business acquaintance at his wife's grandparents house, and the grandfather during the meal went to his Chippendale sideboard, quietly took out a chamber pot, pissed into it, put it back in its place, and reseated himself at the head of the table. Bewildering, bothering or bewitching, I couldn't decide – but sure as hell I have remembered it.

I was brought back to table from my eighteenth-century reverie of squiredom, fox-hunting and common land enclosures, by a tale of a local decorator – a friend of the speaker – who'd shocked him and his partner by announcing that they should "vote with their wallets" rather than on social issues. My question, after listening for a little while longer, and perhaps a little too forcefully interjected, was why he and his partner would consider that person a friend if she was supporting a candidate who clearly would deny them the civil rights they considered to be theirs.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, home again from the two parties we'd attended, we drank a nightcap with two men bewildered by the number of their friends who would, as they saw it, vote their rights away for the sake of a tax break and were trying to persuade them to follow suit. During that conversation I remembered a pamphlet* published some thirty years ago that queried why we seek for the good wishes of those whom we allow to oppress us. As I recollect it, it was a piece of polemic, uncompromising in nature, and it has influenced me ever since – despite the accommodations and compromises that sometimes, over the years, whether unthinkingly or not, I have made and continue to make.

One way or another, it will be a different world on Wednesday morning. But either way, there will still be much to be fought for.

* With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression. Andrew Hodges and David Hutter

Il faut meubler l'interieur de soi-même

I don't care to know the hour
'Cause it's passing anyway
I don't have to see tomorrow 
'Cause I saw it yesterday 
Though I'm living and I'm singing
And although my hands still play
Soon enough it will be over
Cause tomorrow is today

Reading, as I was this morning, Derek Hill's eulogy of Roderick Cameron (my copy of Remembering Rory is dedicated to Natasha and Stephen) I came across a phrase "il faut meubler l'interieur de soi-même" that fit exactly with what I had been thinking recently – not that I think in French, of course, but am trying to do so in Italian and non è facile let me tell you.

I had been thinking was how impersonal our flat had become – neutral ground for the interaction of two very dissimilar personalities that have gently rubbed each other smooth over the last thirty-odd years – and smooth seemed to be the best thing I could say about the living room – an equivalent, in decorating terms, of an Aesthetic heroine, pale, wan and terribly, terribly tasteful.

"Someone ought to be able to enjoy these" said the neighbor, handing me a bunch of zinnias as I opened the door to him. "We're going away for a few days and wondered if you'd like them." And enjoy them we did, for the few days they lasted. I took a picture of the zinnias – their colors a lodestar in the grey morning light in the grey room and, idling away a second or two before my coffee was ready, took another of their reflection in the tabletop. Just like that, the lens having focussed on the layer of dust, I had myself an image somewhat emblematic of my mood of the past few months - seeing, with all the attendant obscurities, through a glass darkly.

This grey morning, ceilinged as I am – embower'd going too far, perhaps – in morning glories and enchanted by chuckling hummingbirds, I feel it's time to write again and perhaps, equally importantly, it being as much a milestone as beginning to write, to redecorate the living room.

I know ikat is faddish and everyone has it, and it really sucks to admit this, but we have two ikat-look brocade pillows in both of our newly–favorite colors, Schiaparelli pink and orange – zinnia colors if ever there were any – on the newish sofa. Much as with the zinnias, the new pillows light up the doldrums the living room and have suggested a solution to a problem we've been discussing seemingly forever – new curtains. A decision, finally, was made and the fabric  ordered and is on its way to the workroom and will return to hang at the windows as curtains of a glowing fuchsia linen - emblematic, if curtains can be said to be, of new paths, if only neural ones.

Il faut meubler l'interieur de soi-même, indeed.



Those of you who recognize the quotation beginning this post as being from Billy Joel's Tomorrow is Today will understand where I have been over the summer and if you do not, it doesn't matter. I shall return, amongst other things, to my Circles within Circles theme over the coming weeks.