IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Like an Hermes scarf, a Picasso print, or a Rolls Royce, the Tiffany lamp is today so much of a signifier – of wealth, of culture, of connoisseurship – that we lose track of any very extraordinary physical qualities it might possess, the thing’s real beauty. A closer look at the Tiffany lamps on permanent display at the New York Historical Society allows one to ponder just this.

The gallery, by the accomplished British architect Eva Jiřičná, isolates the lamps on pedestals in tall glass tubes so that they glow like fireflies, floating in clusters in the dark, still second floor gallery. They are offered up like jewels, against mute black floors, walls and ceilings. This drama does not serve them well. They are, in the austere surroundings, just too much. They offer too much color, too much light, and the shapes too many things woven in their shades: leaves, vines, fruit, flower, birds, clouds butterflies. Their most distinctive features, the intricate stained glass piecework of their tops, gets lost. They are, here, over-the-top, kitsch.

Why weren’t the lamps woven into a display about late nineteenth-century interiors or industry, or about one New York family’s history? Isolating them like this, as precious objects behind glass, undoes their sensuality and their utility. What quality of light did they give off in a cluttered bourgeois sitting room? How did they light patterned wallpapers or tablecloths? What shadows did they cast over someone sitting nearby, or walking by? These are household objects. Why can’t we see them, and cherish them, as such?

Pond Lily Table Lamp, Tiffany Studios, 1900-1906. Collection of New York Historical Society.

February 08, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FREE SPEECH

At an open reading I was part of long ago, after about a dozen amateurs (including myself) shared bits of self-conscious prose, a woman with dishevelled hair and a very big handbag shuffled to the mike, unfolded a piece of paper, and read a poem dedicated to her dead stepmother, which began:

She combed my hair every morning

She took me to school on time

She packed me sandwiches with jam

After she was done she looked up, smiled, and said, “She was the only person who really cared about me.”

The Pencil is a Key, the recent exhibit at the Drawing Center in SoHo, reminded me of that moment. There’s an immense rage of drawings here, by artists from different cultures and ages, with different degrees of talent and training, who all completed these works while they were incarcerated. But each artist drew with the same urgency – the same fundamental need to communicate. And in the end the skill with which they’ve drawn (linework, perspective, composition) matters less than the fact that they’ve drawn at all.

There are accomplished, professional renderings are, including works by political prisoners Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. All the works are rich in feeling: sadness, pity, confusion, rage and grace. But the most affecting are those by untutored artists, perhaps because the content comes across so plainly. I was stunned by Angola prisoner Herman Wallace’s drawings. During more than forty years in prison he drew, over and over again, with relentless clarity, his cell in solitary confinement (bed, door, toilet) and the dream house he hoped to move to (two floors, bay windows, a one-car garage). Completed with pencil and ball point pen on scrap paper, these sketches were mailed to relatives and friends.

It’s facile to compare art to language, and drawing to speech. But this exhibit makes a strong case that drawing is, like speech, a human need.

Herman Wallace, 2002-07.

January 23, 2020 by Nalina Moses

MORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD

Boscobel, the handsome nineteenth-century house-museum in Hudson County, New York, gives poignant testimony to the new American spirit. Built between 1804-1808 by farmers States and Elizabeth Dykeman, it was inspired by Boscobel Castle in Shropshire, England, where Charles II hid in a tree and then a priest hole after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester.

It’s instructive to compare Boscobel to the Neuer Pavilion, the delightful summer home Schinkel built for Friedrich Wilhelm III inside the gardens of Charlottenburg in 1824. Both homes are built with two stories in a nine-square plan, with the rooms settled around a central staircase. And both are rendered in a restrained neoclassical fashion, built from flat surfaces embellished with raised motifs and flat patterns.

The Pavilion, though originally a royal residence, is compressed and – because crafted by Schinkel – exquisitely proportioned and detailed. Its exterior columns and pilasters appear etched into its taut white stone skin. Boscobel, originally a working farmhouse, is about four times as large. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, with eccentricities in its plan. The columns, pilasters and festoons on its facade are cheerfully overscaled, like theatrical makeup. (Our guide suggested, kindly, that these motifs were designed to be seen from boats passing on the river below.)

But if Boscobel is brasher and noisier than the Pavilion, it’s also looser and freer. Large windows invite the eye to wander off into the landscape. There’s room to move about inside, to pass others on the stair, to hide in the corners, to linger for hours inside one of its rooms. Its architecture seems governed by pragmatics rather than proportion, and its ornament by personal preference rather than rules. And that might speak perfectly about America, then and now.

Photograph courtesy of Boscobel. House and Gardens.

January 19, 2020 by Nalina Moses

SLEIGHT OF HAND

Modern American product designer Russell Wright proclaimed, “The hand of man should not be visible.” Wright’s house-studio in Hudson County, Dragon Rock, set high into the rock face of an abandoned quarry, conforms to this dictum. The structure can’t be seen or understood completely from any angle on the ground, and gives no clear image of itself. It’s a deft act of camouflage, one that even an accomplished architect might not be able to execute.

If Wright’s iconic midcentury dinnerware feel charmingly dated today, this house doesn’t. It has the rough, eccentric personal presence of those by Bruce Geoff and Bart Prince. It’s less an object of its time than a figment of its creator. It’s no surprise that Wright got his start in theater design; the house feels like a loose assemblage of moments rather than a cohesive structure. There’s a narrow passage that squeezes one from the studio into the main house, a twisting spill of rock stairs leading down to the dining room, and a low, skewed two-seat banquette in the center of the living room. Even on a sunny summer day the great room, framed with exposed wood beams and a tree trunk, felt shadowed and forlorn, as if the visitor were trapped inside its creator’s dark dreams.

Wright shared many ideas (building into the earth, the open plan, motifs derived from nature) with his extraordinary architectural counterpart, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the master architect’s contemporary houses, scaled similarly, offer experiences that are physically and psychically expansive. They can overwhelm but they can also, often, dazzle. The rhythm of the ornament, the spatial complexity, the sly spatial transitions, can transport. One never feels, as at Dragon Rock, that the finishes are rough, the proportions pinched, or the connections between materials unconsidered. Russell Wright’s home is best understood as a personal experiment. To consider it as architecture is unfair; that discipline requires a firmer, more coherent hand.

Photograph of Dragon Rock by Rob Penner.

September 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses