CURLICUED

A small exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Fragile Beasts, collects prints with motifs in the spirit of the grotesque. This style has highly specific origins; it was born when ceiling frescoes from the Domus Aurea were uncovered in Rome in the sixteenth century. These elegant, ancient panels are decorated with sepia-colored angels, wrestlers, garlands, centaurs, leopards, and flowering trees, all depicted in profile against a light-filled sky. Grotesque is a baroque style, characterized by curving, curlicued forms that incorporate, very literally, the figures of plants and animals, including humans, so that they seem to be morphing into each other. Grotesque forms have a bizarre half-object half-thing quality; they spring strangely to life, with a tenuous, slithering identity.

The exhibit itself, of small prints displayed behind glass, didn’t hold me. But as I moved through adjoining galleries, with displays of Tiffany glass and Victorian birdcages, and through the museum itself, the old Carnegie Mansion, lined in carved wood panels and lit with decorative iron chandeliers, I felt as if I were submerged in the grotesque. The rich, thick ornament in the objects and the architecture feels animate, as if the place is a living thing. This whirling, stirring quality might not be unique to the grotesque, but characteristic of all premodern art. Before God was in the details, life was in the ornament.

Print, Plate from a Series of Designs for Ewers and Vessels, 1548; Cornelis Floris II (Flemish, ca. 1513-1575); Published by Hieronymus Cock (Netherlandish, ca. 1510-1570); Engravings on paper; Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane; 1946-3-3. Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt.

October 08, 2016 by Nalina Moses

The last time I was in Paris I stopped at Tati to pick up an Eiffel Tower charm to bring back, ironically, as a souvenir. I came back instead with a delicate filigree ornament of an open hand, of which I knew nothing except that it was “eastern” and that it carried some sort of blessing. I wore it on those days when I felt the need to be protected with forces greater than normal, and felt protected.

It wasn’t until I read Dare Me by Megan Abbott, a crime story set in the emotionally-charged world of high school cheerleading, that I learned that it was a hamsa. The amulet is resonant in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. Depending on one’s beliefs, the flat palm depicted is that of Fatima daughter of Mohammed, Miriam sister of Moses, of Mary mother of God. The charm has been secularized and popularized in friendship bracelets exchanged by teenage girls. It’s often paired with a small, round glass bead that represents the evil eye, which the hamsa can ward off. In Dare Me a hamsa friendship bracelet becomes a crucial plot point when it’s gifted by a cheerleader to her coach and then spotted by that girl’s best friend, who acts out. The design of most hamsas – sort of symmetrical but not really, sort of naturalistic but not really, sometimes up and sometimes down – lends itself to inspired graphic design. My own charm is smaller than a penny and astonishingly thin, with equal parts gold and open space so that it feels like a scrap of lace. It’s hard to find an expression of this icon that isn’t lovely. Even the clumsiest ones convey its essential goodness.

November 28, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Though St. Petersburg is extravagantly picturesque, offering the pedestrian winding canals, candy-colored buildings, and fancy-capped churches each way she turns, I’ll remember the city for the decoration of its interiors, particularly the stonework in its churches.

Inside Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the island fortress, there are monolithic tombs for Alexander II and Empress Maria carved from deep green jasper and mottled pink rhodonite whose otherworldly hues and markings befit a tsar and his wife. The chunks of stone are very literally magnetic, drawing one forward. The inside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of St. Kazan is crowded with religious paintings, gilded trim, brass chandeliers, wreaths of lit candles, bearded priests, and praying babushkas. And the walls and floors are lined with stones the likes of which I have never seen before. The floor is a mosaic of different dark, tumultuously-patterned varieties, the tiles of each worn to different depth because of its unique hardnesses. There are pilasters flanking the altar carved from lapis lazuli and malachite, their blue and green the strongest, purist colors I’ve ever seen. It’s suddenly obvious why the stones are precious, and why they’re employed here in the service of the divine. There’s something in the way strongly colored and patterned stones are used so liberally in (many are mined in the Urals) that’s particularly revealing. The stone isn’t subservient to the architecture or ornament; it remains a substance with marvelous properties.

July 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room. The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point. This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other. On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky.

On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor. To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next. They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals. There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present – every surface dissolves into ornament. And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.) The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations. It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight. The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia.

July 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses