HOUSEHOLD GODS: D'AULAIRES' BOOK OF GREEK MYTHS

Lisa Zeiger

“The world will treat your children as you have treated them.”--Alice Neel

To reopen, at sixty, the pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a children’s book I first read at six, is to uncover my real childhood, the one lived in the house of books, rather than the contemporary house I lived in, often in terror, in the hills of Los Angeles in the 1960s.

My father was Jewish, my mother, Unitarian. I suppose I had a vaguely Christian orientation, imposed by the right-wing, faux-WASP, fancy private school I attended, but I knew the faith preached there was one of hypocrite punishers. It was not until my forties that I was able to shed that trauma, and be baptized into the Episcopal Church.

But to this day, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, published in 1955 and still in print, is my true catechism. I have never read Homer, or Pindar, or Aeschylus, but from the d’Aulaires--a married couple, who met in 1929 in Munich while studying with the painter Hans Hoffman, and later knew Robert Graves, traveling the Greek islands, sketching and writing-- I know the names and deeds of every Olympian, every one of their offspring, every mortal, every monarch, every hero, every beast, and every monster.

The foibles, powers and beauties of the Greeks still make more sense to me than the protagonists and punishments of the Bible. Certainly, at six, they sheltered me from and explained to me the irrational rage of father, school, and spoilt peers. The displeasure of the gods was always emotionally intelligible, whereas I have never understood God’s rejection of Cain’s offering of his harvest, while exalting Abel’s burnt cattle. An Episcopal priest blithely explained it to me this way: “Perhaps God wanted a ham sandwich that day.” But if God is all-knowing, he knew his favoritism would incite fratricide. I have always sided with Cain, the murderous sower; just as I honor Hagar, the slave who bears Abraham a son, Ishmael--the outcasts--more than I do Sarah, Abraham’s barren wife, who chastises Hagar in jealousy, before, at ninety, giving birth to Abraham’s second son, Isaac. At six, I did not yet know I was illegitimate, but I sensed in myself the scapegoat, the proof of something not quite warded off.

Genealogy of the Gods.

The magnificent illustrations of the d’Aulaires were my initiation into the wonderful counterpoint of word and image that is possible, and which ought to be mandatory in our lives. (Alice in Wonderland was another such experience, and, indeed, another literary shelter, but it was d’Aulaires’ that first gave me an inkling of the divine connection between logos and eikon.)

At six, I was unnaturally curious about the gods’ methods of seducing mortals. When I remember the Greek myths, the first I think of is one from the middle of the collection; of the beautiful Danae, immured by her father, King Acrisius, in a sealed room with only an opening in the roof, because an oracle had foretold that his daughter’s son would kill him. “There no suitor could see her beauty and she would remain unwed and childless.” Wily  Zeus, however, visits Danae in the form of a shower of gold pieces. Danae gives birth to Perseus; upon discovering the infant and realizing he is the son of Zeus, Acrisius does not kill him, but locks Danae and Perseus in a chest which he casts out to sea. “If they drowned, Poseidon would be to blame.”

Zeus visits Danae as a shower of gold.

It is Perseus who will ultimately decapitate the Medusa, one of the three hideous Gorgon sisters who turn all who set eyes on them to stone. In Athena’s protectively mirrored shield, he sees that “long yellow fangs hung from their grinning mouths, on their heads grew writhing snakes instead of hair, and their necks were covered with scales of bronze.” From Medusa’s head springs Pegasus, a beautiful white winged horse.

               Perseus and Andromeda.

With winged sandals and a cloak of invisibility, Perseus escapes the surviving Gorgons and flies over the coast of Ethiopia, where he sees, “far below, a beautiful maiden chained to a rock by the sea. She was so pale that at first he thought she was a marble statue, but then he saw tears trickling from her eyes.” Andromeda is the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia, whose vain boast that she was lovelier than Poseidon’s daughters, the Nereids, so inflames the god that he sends a sea monster to ravage the kingdom of Ethiopia. King Cepheus appeases Poseidon with the sacrifice of his only daughter, Andromeda,to the monster, whom she awaits in fright and whom Perseus slays.

This tale of  beauty, secrecy, imprisonment by a father, and discovery by a god was a myth I prematurely recognized and would unconsciously live by, and, on charmed occasion, live out.  The association of beauty with gold pieces reminds me of a favorite passage from Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, the narrator’s description of another forbidden heroine, Charlotte Stant, as metaphorically envisaged by her lover and brother-in-law, the Prince:

He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower, which gave her a likeness also to some long loose silk purse, well filled with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together.

A second myth I love is the story of Io, a maiden seduced, then changed by Zeus into a beautiful white cow to deceive his jealous wife Hera, who cannily asks Zeus for the cow as a gift, one he cannot refuse. “Hera tied poor Io to a tree and sent her servant Argus to keep watch over her. Argus had a hundred bright eyes placed all over his body...He was Hera’s faithful servant and the best of watchmen, for he never closed more than half of his eyes in sleep at a time.”

To rescue Io, Zeus sends the god Hermes, disguised as a shepherd, to entertain Argus first with his lyre, then with a tale so dull the watchman’s eyes all close and he dies of boredom. Io runs home to her father, the river-god Inachos. “He did not recognize his daughter, and Io could not tell him what had happened, all she could say was, “Mooo!” But when she lifted up her little hoof and scratched her name, “I-O,” in the sand, her father at once understood what had happened, for he knew the ways of Zeus.” Zeus defends himself against Inachos’ revenge by throwing a thunderbolt, parching forever the river-bed Inachos in Arcadia.

Hera, Argus , and Io.

Hera, in turn, furious that Argus is dead and Io the cow, free, sends a vicious gad-fly to sting her. “To be sure that her faithful servant Argus would never be forgotten, she took his hundred bright eyes and put them on the tail of the peacock, her favorite bird. The eyes could no longer see, but they looked gorgeous, and that went to the peacock’s little head, and made it the vainest of all animals.”

The gadfly chases Io “all the way to the land of Egypt,” where she is worshiped by the Egyptians and becomes an Egyptian goddess. Hera permits Zeus to change Io back into human shape if he promises never to look at her again. “Io lived long as the goddess-queen of Egypt, and the son she bore to Zeus became king after her. Her descendants returned to Greece as great kings and beautiful queens. Poor Io’s sufferings had not been in vain.”

Both these myths are starred with the themes of beauty, jealousy, rescue of a captive (usually through her transformation) and just deserts. I see also the recurrent Oedipal scenario of youth held in captivity by age, spurred by the elder’s fear of being murdered by his offspring, or betrayed by a younger spouse. Demeter’s daughter Persephone is confined to the underworld for half of each year by her husband, Hades; Aphrodite skips out on her old husband, Hephaestus, with the dashing war-god, Ares. Everywhere youth is the prey of parents and gods.

In my late twenties, a psychoanalyst told me that beauty was for me an “overdetermined” category. Primal and primary, perhaps; yet I  learned from Athena, my favorite goddess, that wisdom, too, has power. When I read the myth of Paris, Prince of Troy, who must decide which goddess, Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite, should win the golden apple of Discord, Paris gives it to Aphrodite. Aphrodite has promised him Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman on earth, overwhelming the youth-- himself extraordinarily beautiful--so that he spurns the worldly power offered by Hera and the supreme wisdom pledged by Athena. I told my mother, “I would choose wisdom, because with wisdom you can learn how to have both beauty and power.”

Athena born from the head of Zeus.

Athena springs full-grown from the head of her father, Zeus, as the goddess of wisdom, victory, and, oddly, handicrafts, At thirty I would begin to study this last discipline, as a thread of art history. I identified also with Athena’s precocious maturity, at least in intellectual matters. I loved the gods partly because they were adult, rather than fairytale children led astray. When I was thirty-four, my lover’s mother told me Grimm’s fairy tale, die Sterntaler (star-currency), the story of the little match girl who gives away all her clothes, until, naked in a storm, she is showered with gold coins from Heaven. I silently wept, hiding my face while doing the dishes. When I mentioned the little girl’s similarity to Danae, the mother replied, “Das war aber was anders.” “But that was something different.”

Reading D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths was an imaginative escape that promised an eventual, actual escape from childhood and its tyrannies, the reason, perhaps, that I return to it now as I do not return to Alice in Wonderland, the story of a child. We remain, to one extent or another, sealed in childhood our whole lives long, receiving gold through a hole in the roof, only to be thrown into a sea-chest and swept away: to survive, sometimes to subdue; at last, to love, the mysteriously patterned commotions of our fate.

Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur in his labyrinth.

Over the door of the d’Aulaires’ house in Vermont, still lived in by their son, Nils, are inscribed the words, “This is the House that Books built.” The d’Aulaires built for me a house of many mansions, a house with deep porticos, celestial views, looming towers, and hidden doorways. I am still tracing its unending labyrinth.

CHARLES BURLEIGH'S SHADOWS OF MODERNISM

Lisa Zeiger

Most histories of 20th century design, as epitomized by the Bauhaus and its progeny, exalt the brightly lit subject of function, while eliding mention of Modernism’s mystical and even Symbolist shadow, an origin opposite to the official Modernist Genesis story of design and a new visual style driven by the imperatives of industrial production.

A few great scholars of architecture, decorative art, and design, notably Joseph Rykwert and David Brett, trace with erudition and subtlety the Modernist obsession with function and progress back to roots consumed with form, symbol, and mystery.  In David Brett’s slim, seminal book, Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship, he locates Mackintosh’s early inspiration in the European Symbolists, imbibed through the person of Jean Delville (1867-1953), the Belgian Symbolist artist  who taught Mackintosh and his future wife Margaret MacDonald at the Glasgow School of Art in the early part of the first decade of the 20th century.

Joseph Rykwert’s illuminating 1968 essay, “The Dark Side of the Bauhaus,” reminds us that in its beginnings the Bauhaus owed as much to the artist and Zoroastrian devotee,  Johannes Itten, who wore a monk’s habit while teaching color theory, and to Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus’ greatest artist, deeply interested in Theosophy and  the writings of Rudolf Steiner--who revived European interest in Goethe’s color theory-- as to the steely rationalism of Walter Gropius and, later, Moholy-Nagy. Itten’s practice and belief, according to Rykwert, was that “the whole personality must be involved in the work; the designer’s and the artist’s activity must involve the mind, the body, the senses and the memory, and the unconscious urges. Of Itten, Rykwert concludes his essay with these words, “It may be that [Itten] represents the Bauhaus at its darkest. But then, I think it was also the Bauhaus at its richest.” The Weimar Bauhaus of 1919 was a school bifurcated between the firmament of reason and the deep waters of something close to religious belief.

Exactly such  depths, such shadows, both literal and metaphorical, attend the Modernist clarity and clean lines of interior designer Charles Burleigh’s design of a small Greenwich Village apartment. Rectilinear planes intersect or divide the space, yet their solidity is always in question, always floating. It is an almost Minimalist interior--Mies van der Rohe’s sternly beautiful leather daybed is there-- and yet there are dark corners one does not readily associate with the cult of plainness. Diaphanous cream sheer curtains both admit and mute the sunlight, fomenting an almost hypnotic feeling in this otherwise shipshape space. Colors stream in through art works: a red abstract painting, the lime green of sofa and  vase, a silvery coverlet in the bedroom.

In Greenwich Village, Burleigh may have created a compact machine for living, but how much more intensely has he made a space--within the great city-- for contemplation.

CASA EMILIA

 

“O taste and see that the Lord is good”, said the framed print on Emilia’s green kitchen wall, the words of the psalm encircling images of fruits and vegetables.

These are words that welcome, an invitation. To me, they have come to encompass more than Emilia’s excellent cooking; they signify also the opportunity I have found as a lodger in her house: the opportunity to write without impediment, to enjoy, in right measure, the human and creature comforts that create a physical and emotional context for writing. To Emilia and for her house I am grateful.

Writing boils down--always--however long the writer’s money, to a room, sometimes just a table and chair. To earn one’s seat as a writer, one first must sit, easier said than done.

Goethe's deathbed and desk.

Happy is the writer who can say to herself, “I have everything I need.” These needs are, in reality, quite slender: materially speaking, unlike other arts, writing comes cheap.

Perhaps I am partial, but in New York City every writer is incalculably rich in experience and place. There may be tumult outside the door, or even surrounding one’s seat, but if one just straps in, pen and mind in hand, writing will happen. My first experience of really concerted writing came at the kitchen table of a women’s shelter in East Harlem. There, in the place of dispossession, I discovered the power of writing to summon and crystallize memory rather than simply propagate information and interpretation.

George Sand's writing room at Nohant.

To be a writer involves, not comfort, but the meaningful loss of it, the falling away of all that is not writing. Henry James wrote, “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” a pronouncement I read to include our individual histories.

I hold that life’s losses, of emotional and material attachments, and even of other talents, transform writing from avocation to necessity. Pleasures lost--provided one has tasted them completely--are the ingredients of language. The writer learns to translate rather than possess, to cook rather than consume.

Even if she has lost nothing, let alone everything, the writer must sit amidst luxury as an ascetic, abandoning possessions, transforming into words the people and things she desired or, indeed, still loves. I am not speaking of renunciation, but of suspending instinct and its imperatives, distilling from experience, good and bad, its good. Through writing, one finds what the poet Rumi called, “the pearl... in sorrow’s hand”.

Ernest Hemingway in Spain.

Pleasure may upend the writer; but for a writer the memory of it is mandatory, the more remote the memory, the easier. The paradox and mystery of every writer’s life is the necessity of misadventure and the brinksmanship required for its final translation into words, into, one hopes, what Henry James called literature.

Distractions to the writer are fatal, their tentacles uprooting the hardiest talent, unless, later, they are put to use, comprising a thesaurus of people, places, things, loves, one delves into again and again, finding the right word--even just the right punctuation mark--to render their juice for the reader.

“Take, eat, this is my work.” One wants only at last to be able to say these words when an essay or memoir or novel reaches the finish line of the slow, always interrupted race of its writing.

George Bernard Shaw's rotating writing house.

A New Year

“Love comes in at the eye,” wrote Yeats.

On December 12th, I had the great pleasure of spending an evening with interior designer Stephen Bastone, his gray Russian Chihuahua, Silvio, and designer Kyle Marshall.

Our setting was Stephen’s apartment in the exalted, remote East Fifties of Manhattan, a place where the rich don’t buy: they have. Stephen, himself rich in prodigiously detailed, dedicated knowledge of the decorative arts, has: an apartment intensely lived rather than decorated, filled with the incomparable 19th century furniture, finishes, and art he abides with, not deciduously, but for life, in every sense.

Stephen’s exquisite taste hasn’t made him etiolated, easily ruffled, or removed. Bronx-born, his accent extant, he is a hardy succulent amidst orchids, enthusiastic, generous, ever ardent for experience in all its grandeur and grime. Stephen’s life blends A Rebours, the fin de siecle novel of des Esseintes, hermit aesthete, with Satyricon, the Classical tale of Encolpius, luscious, learned vagabond.

There was a heated discussion between Stephen and myself about Marlboro Reds  and the more esoteric Marlboro brand I smoke and advocate, Blend 27. Blend 27 comes encased in an elegant copper pack, and unlike Marlboro Lights, does not produce a pull redolent of bus exhaust. It is a touch milder than Reds, yet richer, resonant, smooth, as Stephen remarked with pleased surprise.

We talked of our lives and our work, which, for the three of us, are one and the same. Writing and design are vocations that suction ideas from living. Whether we live large, or live hard, we strive always to create, to foment beauty in the particular forms to which we are called: material or literary, at desk or drafting table, or, for that matter, auction house.

The things we see and hear--rich and strange--course, first, through our minds and hands, then, into our books and rooms.

Happy 2017!

ON THE INSIDE

At a moment when American liberty and justice for all seems eerily suspended,, activist-curator Tatiana von Furstenberg has gathered 220 drawings by incarcerated LGBTQ artists into a startlingly beautiful and moving exhibition, ON THE INSIDE, at the Abrons Center until December 18th. It is impossible to wrest these drawings from the terrible context in which they were made, and yet many transcend their social and political significance, becoming simply works of art, worthy of a long look, and thoughtful interpretation.

Representation of many kinds, from writing to drawing, would seem to me to be grounded in three things: observation, skill, and longing.

In an essay on writing to appear on New Year’s Eve 2017, on bookandroom.com, I have written, “The [writer’s needs] are, in reality, quite slender: materially speaking, unlike other arts, writing comes cheap.” After seeing, ON THE INSIDE, I’ve had to revise this opinion, realizing that visual artists, too, may achieve great things with the most minimal ways and means, and in the most constrained of circumstances. At the same time, the price paid by bodies, minds and souls to bring these works into being is as high as any could be: the loss of liberty and autonomy, the coercion from the individual of identity and dignity.

Ruben T., Spread Your Wings

ON THE INSIDE reminds us of the primacy, authority and originality of the individual hand and eye. Its currently incarcerated artists work with “basic materials the prisoners have access to behind bars: mostly letter-sized paper, dull pencils, ball-point pen ink tubes (the hard shell is deemed too dangerous), and unlikely innovations such as using an asthma inhaler with Kool-aid to create an air brushed painting.” I saw a faint tri-fold in the paper of many of these now framed works, necessary for mailing the drawing to a recipient on the outside.

I wondered who these artists are, their lives, their loves. Individual crimes and convictions were not part of the curators’ labels or my consciousness while I was looking at the drawings, but I came away from ON THE INSIDE with the near-certainty that, if not all inmates are political prisoners, they are all, to varying degrees, prisoners of politics. For-profit prisons, a 21st century reincarnation of slavery; linens, food and security services generating big business interests; the criminalization of nonviolent, often victimless offenses imposed with wild disproportion upon citizens of color; laws in 34 states barring voting by ex-felons, a population which includes about 20 million people in the U.S. overall.

There is a rich lineage in literary history of imprisoned writers: Voltaire, Cervantes, Defoe, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Genet, Himes, Goines, Mandela, Malcolm X. The writer’s solitary work is often envisioned as taking place in privation akin to that of a cell; whereas the artist’s studio is imagined as a place of light, color, and conviviality.We think of Montmartre and Arles, not the Bastille, Reading Gaol, or Rikers. Prison might be seen as perversely ideal for writing, provided the prisoner is permitted to have paper and pencil, but it does not lend itself to the materials and practices of visual art. Visual artists who produced work while imprisoned are few; only Egon Schiele comes to mind. The Austrian artist painted several watercolors during his 24-day imprisonment in April 1912 for seduction of an underage girl, abduction, and exhibition of pornographic material to minors.

Melvin C., Martin Luther King

Using the materials and-- models-- at hand, the artists of ON THE INSIDE deal almost exclusively with one subject, the human face and human body. (Bodies in prison are plentiful.) If there is drawing from live models here, there is also clearly, in the case of celebrity portraits, the use of photographs from magazines as inspiration. There is the loving verisimilitude of Melvin C’s portrait of Martin Luther King; the elegant graphic power of Jeffrey B’s Obama and Friends.

I mentioned longing as an element of art-making. The several hundred images in this show emanate desire beautifully and plangently, transmitting to us the tragedy of prison, which so clearly is the woe of separation from one’s own life, one’s own loves.

At the same time as we see separation, we are aware in these works of the strange, imposed proximity in prison of others, a forced intimacy among inmates which, at its best, creates fellowship, and bedfellows. There was erected in the middle of the gallery a sort of cabin, filled with graphic sex images, with a sign at the entrance warning that children under thirteen could enter only if accompanied by a parent. I did not find the images within much more salacious than the writhing, almost always erotic figures in the main exhibition. There was a lovely labia, drawn with tenderness softly in pencil; another, of a man masturbating on a toilet. Indeed, I would say softness suffuses even the most hardcore of these subjects. There is the dull pencil, endlessly tracing with feathery strokes the lineaments of desire. Eros appears to be a constant companion in confinement.

Stevie S., Acceptance

Possibly my favorite drawing in the show is Stevie S’s Acceptance, two sinuous figures in an embrace evoking altered states, against the background of a cinderblock bathroom. Their bodies are lavishly tattooed with past loves and losses, now forgotten in the unearthly, transitory miracle of fulfilled desire, as quick as it is ecstatic.  “Familiar acts are beautiful through love,” is written in cursive in the drawing’s right-hand lower corner, a truth about passion that is often painful to remember.

Bruce B., Sparrow

Other images are about aloneness in captivity and the emergence from it. Bruce B’s Sparrow shows a fiercely beautiful woman kneeling in profile, downcast, her arms tattooed with Native American-inspired patterns, her face with ciphers resembling war paint, a picture of a regal figure in sorrow. Tiffany W draws a similarly defiant yet melancholy caged woman, Shawn Dee, her wings folded at her sides as she glowers out at us from behind bars. In Spread Your Wings, by Ruben T, a woman with windblown hair is lifted and liberated by a vast pair of wings.

The works I’ve described above, with their stylized depiction of people whose  physical beauties are exalted to the point of exaggeration, reminded me of the sure, swooping lines of Antonio Lopez’s fashion drawings from the 1970s and ‘80s, so wonderfully exhibited at the Museo del Barrio last June. I also heard murmurs about Tom of Finland throughout the gallery.

Tony B., Prison Is Worse for Some

Two quite different images also caught my eye, pictures which seemed to encompass the themes touched upon above, of isolation and connection, abjection and celebration. Prison Is Worse for Some by Tony B is the only image in full color in the exhibition. Against a green wall stands a frail figure, face frozen in apprehension, next to a steel sink and toilet with socks drying on a pipe above, towels and a steel mirror hanging on the wall, a cyan blue steel railing in the background. It is a view of the secret domestic life of prison, the washing up and making do.

Kris H., Gift of Life

In Gift of Life by Kris H, the Holy Family is surrounded by angels and shepherds, drawn with flourishes that seem, on a formal level, to connect them, or rather to reveal the mystical connections of the scene. The flowing clothing of the figures shimmers. The intensity of this inaugural Christian scene reminded me of the charged, sensuous treatments of the subject by British 1930s engraver and typographer Eric Gill.

The Abrons gallery itself, composed of yellowish cinderblock, made a fitting setting for ON THE INSIDE. Sentences, proclamations, and fragments of autobiography by various prisoners were printed on the walls in black, providing a subtext for the drawings, and reminding us of the kinship between writing and drawing. Within the drawings themselves, too, words are often woven in, in a calligraphic cri de coeur, the hand and heart needing to inscribe and explain, even when the image says it all.

There is, in these drawings, sometimes, an ecstasy that soars, assuaging and transforming the pain of absence.

THE HOUSE OF SELF-UNDOING

Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.--Yukio Mishima

I rented the studio on Hansaring because it corresponded to a fantasy I had of a small, impossibly tall place, like the interior of a tower, its floor plan the size of a postage stamp, its ceiling fourteen feet high.

The flat had glass doors opening onto a balcony with a wrought iron railing, overlooking a slightly unkempt art nouveau Hof, or courtyard. The balcony might have been beautiful, but for the collection of Schrott, rusting iron salvage, piled upon it. The primary tenant of the flat must have found these heavy fragments artistic; I simply ignored them. I had a way of mentally and visually eliding anything I didn’t want to see, and that held true for more than metal.

One thing I refused to see was that I was never so—not happy—but let us say, absorbed, as when I was unhappy in love, miserable over some man who didn’t love me. To paraphrase John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, my torture was my delight.

John Fowles' The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Nevertheless, I awoke each morning in this room—or came to, depending on how much I drank at the bar downstairs the night before—with the sense that I had sprung a trap, the trap of America, of my own origin. Simply to be living abroad, ‘in Europe’ was liberation. Never mind that the places, which had included London and Glasgow as well as now, Cologne, were gloomier than the one, New York, I had escaped. It gave me a sense of defiance to be living in places I had once only read about, never mind that reality did not always live up to fiction.

In Cologne I had been a guest in a number of rarefied houses, two of which abide in my mind as examples of great depth in decoration. Both belonged to men I was involved with, one much younger than I, the other fifteen years older, which at the time seemed an instance of great age. Today I am almost a decade older than the latter was at the time, and I wonder, with some regret, at how I misprised that man. As we age, we are dispossessed, evicted from the most arrogant and powerful group on earth, the young and beautiful. I was thirty-five, already on my way out, hell-bent on jailbait and the glamour of extreme good looks I chased, and feared, was escaping me.

But I have mentioned great depth in decoration, and that is what I wish to document here, eliding, perhaps the turbulent emotional content of these affairs. The memory both of passion and disregard fails, but the rooms, the atmospheres created by these two men linger in my mind. Furthermore, there is a strange twist to the story of my own life in the room at Hansaring, which is the denouement of this narrative.

My first lover, the older man--whom I’ll call Friedrich--was an architect who, disenchanted with the bureaucracy attending the design of buildings, had turned to collecting and selling superlative furniture of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, and he surrounded himself, both in an apartment in the center of Cologne and a country house in a hamlet not far away with these rare artifacts. I remember on his bed in Cologne a black woolen blanket which he had purchased in Morocco from a woman who had spent a year weaving it, not dyeing it black but fabricating it from the wool of a black sheep. “In Morocco the poor man is as beloved as the rich man,” said Friedrich, who, however, had not been above driving a hard bargain with the lady.

Friedrich exalted the work of all artisans, not only that of sophisticated European designers of the early twentieth century. We shared a love of the anonymous beautiful object, found at a flea market, which evinced the same genius of hand or eye as one masterminded by an artist or designer. His collection of German, Austrian and Dutch Modernist furniture, ceramics and textiles was the most refined and rigorous I have ever encountered, inside a museum or out. If, in some sense, twentieth century Modernist design takes the chair as its focus, Friedrich possessed a Vitra-like selection, which included, of course, Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair and chairs by Erich Dieckmann. Friedrich told me he could not buy a book if the cover were ugly. I differ from him in this respect.

Gerrit Rietveld 1888 - 1964, “Red Billet” Armchair, Utrecht 1924. Image courtesy Galerie Ulrich Fiedler.

Gerrit Rietveld 1888 - 1964, “Beugel” Chair, Utrecht 1927. Image courtesy Galerie Ulrich Fiedler.

The young man, whom I’ll call Luzian, told me, similarly, that he could not inhabit a place, not even temporarily, if it was aesthetically displeasing to him. I disagreed; I felt sometimes one must sacrifice the look of things to some higher purpose. Had I not, in Cologne, inhabited a series of ugly rented rooms just so I could stay in the same city as my beloved? “Ich bin anspruchsvoll,” Luzian said, speaking the words slowly as he spoke all words. I did not at first understand “anspruchsvoll” but I took it to mean demanding, which he was, persnickety, in retrospect, a flaw I could not see. 

My image of Luzian: Pharoah Akhenaten, Egyptian Museum Cairo, photo Hajor. 

Luzian lived with his mother in a mellow brick house from the turn of the 20th century, lodged in a charmed setting on the southern banks of the Rhein, in an ancient suburb of Cologne. I had not expected this boy to live in relative upper middle class comfort, nor for his mother to be something of an intellectual. Luzian had a dusky aura of the streets; I visualized his mother working in a shop, a dimestore. Therefore I was surprised when, as we approached his street in his car, to see that the street was private, barricaded except to those who had a key.

The first time I saw his house we were alone there, mostly in the kitchen, which had earthy grey plaster walls like those in my flat in Glasgow. The furniture and gas stove were old, immaculate. Up a narrow flight of white-painted wooden stairs were his and his siblings' bedrooms, two girls and two boys. In one room was a white chest of four drawers, each drawer stenciled in blue with the name of a child. To me this manifested love and order, a family unlike the one I came from, of two parents and a quartet of children, instead of a triangle of sometimes single mother, father, daughter. Yet this family and this house had been abandoned by the father at one stage; later Luzian would tell me that after the father’s departure his mother left everything intact to the point of stagnation. The house was “stuck”. But I, stuck in the inferiority complex of my origins, could not be convinced of a flaw in this apparently perfect family; even the divorce seemed an acceptably official event. My own parents had never married but stayed together for thirty depressed years. 

I see here that in fact I cannot remember many details of the decoration wrought by either of my lovers, though that is what I promised the reader. I know only that Friedrich’s and Luzian’s interiors and the seemingly orderly lives and relationships they represented were perfect of their kind, intimidating. This was a projection on my part, a fantasized antidote to the damage and defects which were my inheritance.

At Hansaring, in an effort to lift the curse of my elders, I decided, not for the first time in my thirty-something life, to seek psychoanalytic help. But where, in Germany, were the psychoanalysts? Had they not, driven out by the Nazis, all migrated to where I came from, namely Los Angeles and New York? I had read a book by a renowned therapist, Konrad Stettbacher, entitled Wenn Leiden einen sinn haben soll—if suffering has a meaning—and he wrote simply that the meaning of suffering is in its relief, an explanation andprospect which sounded good to me.

Freud’s Sofa, Freud Museum, London. photo Robert Huffstutter.

I opened the Gelbe Seiten, the Yellow Pages, under Psychoanalytikern: and found but two names, whom I’ll call Herr and Frau Doktor Langeweise, a married couple, obviously. Twenty years on, I have searched the Internet for psychoanalysts in Cologne and now there are dozens; how could there have only been this pair at the time? The Langeweises are still around, but no longer in the center of Cologne; they moved to the suburbs.

Freud’s chair (reproduction in Freud Museum, Vienna), a gift from his daughter, Mathilde. Photo, Mar del Sur.

I noticed something else about these names: their address was Hansaring, like mine. I dialed their number and was instructed by an answering machine to send a letter of inquiry to their address. 

In my mailbox I received a neat typed letter offering me a consultation with the Frau Doktor. When I set out to see her at the appointed time, I was amazed to find that the stone steps to her house were in fact a part of the building I lived in. The grand façade of the building—of her house--was directly on the Ring, whereas I reached my studio through the Hinterhof, or rear courtyard, by an interior flight of stairs. 

Inside the massive front door I stood alone in a vestibule. At the top of a long staircase sheathed in Oriental carpet stood a woman with salt and pepper hair pulled back in a clip. She wore maroon velvet slippers embroidered with medallions. As I ascended, there were painted on the wall to the side figures that might have hailed from Pompeii, gods or an aristocratic family. I thought of the final scene of Fellini's Satyricon; I thought of Freud. Sure enough, in Frau Doktor Langeweise’s consulting room were the sort of ancient figurines I knew from period photographs of Berggasse 19, and a long chaise covered in kilim rugs. Not only did we share an address, I saw now that we shared the wall of her consulting room. The chamber where I had shed so many tears and read so many texts was but a membrane of masonry away from this putative place of healing.

I commenced a psychoanalysis with Dr. Langeweise in the language in which it was invented, and felt I had arrived at a new origin, one I could borrow to my benefit. I confessed my infatuation, not only with Luzian but with his family. I wanted new ancestors, like the ones on Dr. Langeweise’s stairs, like the ones in the house on the Rhein.  Once, after an especially stormy session of sobbing, Dr. Langeweise gave me a small clay female head from her desk. “Do you know who Hera is?” she asked. “Of course,” I said. I had been raised on the Greek myths rather than the Bible. “Hera is the protector of women,” she said, “and in Greece the women place these heads at her temple to receive her help.”

Goddess (Hera), Boetia, 6th c. B.C., Museum Aschaffenburg, photograph by Maulaff.

“But I live under a curse,” I said in German. “Fluechte duerfen aufgehoben werden,” she replied in a deep voice: “Curses can be lifted.”

Hansaring 88, Koeln, built 1890; photo by Z.  Holzmann (showing two adjoining houses.)

Mine wasn’t. I merely outlived it, or outran it. I never married the golden German I craved, nor had his four children, nor lived with them in a mellow brick nineteenth century house. But I am happy now with my portion, amused that I can barely remember the one who so tormented me with his lack of love; I remember, with love and some regret, the one I saddened for the same reason. A loves B who loves C, an ancient infernal circle I no longer participate in. The house at Hansaring was not my first or last house of self-undoing, but it was certainly one of the most dramatic.

LOVE LETTERS Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective

What is painting? Well, it is literature. What is literature then? Well, it is painting. --Marcel Broodthaers, 1963

I dream of a new alphabet. --Marcel Broodthaers, 1974

Every week I make a ritual trip to Three Lives bookstore on West 10th Street, where I always buy one book, sometimes signed by the author; not to read, but to own. I am shoring up a small hoard of printed matter whose visual presence and physical heft, neatly shelved, sustains me while I work. The typefaces of these books, for me, are scintillating shapes brimming with personality. I wonder at the odd genius of their makers, for whom they are so often named: Didot, Cochin, Bembo, Garamond and of course, the incomparable Gill, pedophile though he was.

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976). Moules sauce blanche (Mussels with white sauce). 1967. Painted pot, mussel shells, paint, and tinted resin, 14 3/4 in. (37.5 cm) diam.; 19 1/8 in. (48.5 cm) high. Private collection, New York. © 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

Two months ago I saw the “immersive”--as they say--Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924-76) retrospective at MoMA. I apologize to readers for not reviewing this wonderful revelation of an artist obscure to most Americans while it was still on exhibition. But MoMA’s vast, exquisite catalogue accompanying that show has been my delectation ever since, so I will share a bit about its contents here. 

A large, lavishly illustrated book is, if anything, the best topos for Broodthaers’ singular works, which consist abundantly of printed or painted words. The 350-page catalogue, edited by Christophe Cherix and Manuel J. Borja-Villel, contains essays by such notables as philosopher-critic Benjamin Buchloh, Jean-Francois Chevrier and Thierry de Duve, among others. My favorite contributions are two essays by Cathleen Chaffee, who catches perfectly Broodthaers’ scintillating balancing act of text and image. 

Marcel Broodthaers was a poet turned artist who abided, throughout his creative life, in what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy, that place where signifier and signified engulf us in the pleasures of texts. Broodthaers’ compact art career spanned only twelve years, until his death in 1976, but it is an exceptionally dense, complex, yet ordered and unified one. The four distinct periods of his subsequent work--literary exhibitions (1963-1967), an invented museum (1968-1972), paintings (1972-19) and “Decors” (1974-76)--are all suffused by the written, printed, cinematic or painted word. 

In 1963, at the age of forty, Broodthaers publicly turned to visual art because he was a commercial failure as a poet. He inaugurated this leap of irony and faith by encrusting the unsold editions of his last poetry book--entitled Pense-Bete (aid to memory)-- into a sculpture of white plaster, a first act and work as a visual artist which reified and enthroned his heretofore unnoticed writing. During this early period Broodthaers made objects, usually incorporating wordplay, from cast-off materials such as egg or mussel shells, coal or frites (fries).

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976). Pense-Bête (Memory aid). 1964. Books, paper, plaster, and plastic balls on wood base, without base: 11 13/16 × 33 1/4 × 16 15/16 in. (30 × 84.5 × 43 cm). Collection Flemish Community, long-term loan S.M.A.K. © 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

Then, in 1968, his avowed career took a curious turn. Broodthaers declared he was no longer an artist and appointed himself director of his own museum, which he called the Musee d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles). He began to explore the ancillary activities which surround and support a museum-- documentation, publicity and finance--creating a cascade of announcements, publications, films, slide projections and objects. For the next four years he displayed these works, as always, heavily embedded with words, in twelve temporary presentations of the Musee, which he called “sections”, in seven European cities.

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976). Musée d’Art Moderne à vendre–pour cause de faillite (Museum of Modern Art for sale–due to bankruptcy). 1970–71. Artist’s book, letterpress dust jacket wrapped around catalogue of Kӧlner Kunstmarkt ’71 (Cologne: Kӧlner Kunstmarkt, 1971), with artist’s inscriptions, overall (folded, with catalog): 17 11/16 x 12 5/8 x 5/16 in. (45 x 32 x 0.8 cm). Publisher: Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne. Edition: 19. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Partial gift of the Daled Collection and partial purchase through the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Agnes Gund, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, 2011. © 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

In 1972, ever quixotic, Broodthaers announced that his tenure as Director of the Musee had ended, and that, once again, he was an artist. He began a new form of painting in which he physically painted nothing himself, but instead printed words onto canvas. These are among the most beautiful works in his repertoire. In a splendid catalogue essay, Kim Conaty pinpoints the source of their haunting presence: 

“With Peintures litteraires, writers and artists [ranging from Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll to Edgar Allan Poe and James Joyce] are the subjects of paintings that are themselves composed only of printed text. Broodthaers’ choice of letterpress--the standard technique used to print books until the second half of the twentieth century--conflates the act of writing with that of painting. Furthermore, his aesthetic decisions regarding the works’ final appearance--which included choice of typeface, text color, and the density of printing--derive as much from the world of book production as from that of art.”

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976). La Conquête de l’espace, Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires (The conquest of space, atlas for the use of artists and the military). 1975. Artist’s book, offset lithograph, thirty-eight pages, with slipcase, closed: 1 5/8 x 1 1/8 x 3/8 in. (4.2 x 2.9 x 1 cm). Publisher: Lebeer Hossmann, Brussels. Edition: 50. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Partial gift of the Daled Collection and partial purchase through the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Agnes Gund, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, 2011. © 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

From 1974 until his death in 1976, Broodthaers organized large-scale displays which he called Decors, exhibiting examples of his past work along with new works and borrowed objects. He surrounded these works with elegant atavisms redolent of 19th century Great Exhibitions: potted palms, carpets, mahogany vitrines, flying in the face of the modern white box as locus for display of art. In French, the word decor also suggests a film set, and Broodthaers shot a number of films in his exhibitions.

Installation view of Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 14–May 15, 2016. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Martin Seck

A final, personal comment provoked by this beautiful book: I doubt many people, even art and book lovers, share my thin skin when it comes to typefaces. An ugly one passes as unimportant; a beautiful one never receives the admiration it deserves. Typography, I suppose, is considered a minor art, and yet it is the one which unites and exalts the great arts of writing and drawing. Marcel Broodthaers--the retrospective, the catalogue, and, of course, the artist himself--is, for the lover of letters, a galaxy of pure pleasure.

LAYERS OF LIFE: Mary Fife Laning (1900-1991)

Have you ever thought about the leavings of life bequeathed by people who lived in your home before you, and of the layers which will be superimposed by the inhabitants who come after? It is rare, in the 21st century, to find many urban houses--and I include apartments in this category--which bear the continuous veneer of a single family. In New York, especially, where we live cheek by jowl with all sorts of strangers and familiars, our “inheritance” may comprise traces--legacies--of a person we never met, unrelated to us except by the accident of edifice. 

Today we are fond of using--overusing--the word “layering” to describe both architecture and interior design. In architecture, layering has become a term of art, denoting delicate yet stable structural elements that stack or overlap, an alternative to monolithic curtain walls and classical masonry alike. In interior design, layering refers both to textiles and to the incremental changes, sometimes clashes in style that characterize the decorator’s attempt to create rooms in which pieces from different eras talk to each other in harmonious tones, not cacophony. 

Photograph by Stephen Barker

In April 1990, I was fascinated by four photographs of an interior taken by my friend, artist Stephen Barker. Steve’s fellow artist, Billy Doig, had just moved into some rooms in a house in Brooklyn Heights, imprinted with the creative life of the former owner, artist, Mary Fife Laning (1900-1991). 

Photograph by Stephen Barker

Mary Fife, born in Dayton Ohio, studied as a young woman at the Art Students League in New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller, whose circle she became a part of, along with Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop and her future husband, Edward Laning. She exhibited widely in the 1930s and ‘40s, atmuseums and galleries which included the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Photograph by Stephen Barker

But the record of Fife Laning’s life is an ellipsis. I sought clarification in a book chronicling the lives and work of her colleagues, The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street by Ellen Wiley Todd. Todd writes in great detail about four urban realist painters--Isabel Bishop, Raphael Soyer, Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller--with several passages on Edward Laning, but makes no mention of Mary. The omission is strange, since the book is about American women in the interwar period redefining the work force and the working class, and how artists--including one female artist, Isabel Bishop-- shaped their image, as much in the service of social progress as of individual expression.

From Susan Teller Gallery, Mary Fife, Women and Children Crossing the Street, about 1925, etching, 7 x 4 inches     

From gallerist Susan Teller, who has an etching and a lithograph by Fife Laning, shown here, I learned that the artist had owned the house in Brooklyn Heights, and likely gone to a nursing home in 1990, the year before her death. Fife Laning’s life and oeuvre would make a wonderful doctoral dissertation for a scholar so inclined. Some of her images, incidentally, depict interracial passion, a subject taboo at the time she created them. 

From Susan Teller Gallery, Mary Fife, Forbidden Love, 1935, lithograph

The Fife Laning paintings in Brooklyn Heights were beautiful, surrounded by rich impedimenta, including a slender, towering human skeleton. They formed an ensemble which Billy Doig refrained at first from altering, although he would add a few strata of his own, the ones, like lamps, necessary for living.

Stephen’s pictures, published here, capture this intermittent moment when the lives and things of two inhabitants criss-crossed. 

For more about photographer Stephen Barker:

http://www.blurb.com/b/7135934-early-on

thearchivistswig.com

stephenbarker.com

For more about the Susan Teller Gallery:

susantellergallery.com/

Harlem, mon amour

It is Memorial Day weekend 2016, and I have consecrated three days to writing in my room, happily sequestered in the apartment, emerging at dawn to grab a cinnamon roll warmed by microwave from the immaculate Broadway Finest Deli at 149th and Broadway; staying in the cave during the welcome but blazing hours of 87 degree sunshine; then coming out at the magical hour of 6pm, to sit, smoke, and watch the street on the bench on the traffic island just in front of Broadway Finest. The sun is in abeyance but not yet down as I run into some thirty people, whom I know as neighbors, friends or acquaintances. All are beautiful in their extreme individuality (I won’t employ the overused word “diversity”, although it applies). For a moment, I reimagine this bustling, sunstroked stretch of Broadway as a beach, one with a boardwalk broad enough for multitudes.

The particular trio of streets I know best--148th & Broadway through 150th--is an enclave of longtime African-American residents, the intergenerational backbone of a community which includes many artists, photographers, writers and musicians. This small stretch of historic Hamilton Heights is also held down by a Dominican populace, their extended families an armature against gentrification. Through this sturdy demographic runs a skein of white people with a modicum or more of tenure--mostly single, some young, others middle-aged--arrivistes like me, who landed here, not to harvest brownstones, but to live humbly in shared accommodation. Straitened veterans of divorce, dispossession and other misadventures, our tenancy is conditioned on blending in; behaving ourselves rather than putting on airs. We are here to reclaim our own lives, not the habitats of others.

Carl Karni-Bain*

The pleasant small cafes and bars springing up, manned by white hipsters, are harmless in themselves. But they augur, always, a creeping corporate culture which sees in charming homesteads a chance to profit. Already there is on 148th and Broadway a glossy new residential building erected by Columbia University.  These apparitions, independent and corporate alike, cater to the recent huge influx of Columbia students driving up rents.

Today I read with dismay a New York Times article** about the uprooting by real estate forces of black lives in Harlem, by Michael Henry Adams, historian of Harlem’s great artists and houses. I first encountered Adams’ writing in the late 1990s, when I was Decorative Arts Editor of  the former nest magazine, for which he wrote a piece about Harlem interiors. At that time in my life I was aware only of the aesthetics of housing, not its politics.

Adams quotes Valerie Jo Bradley, a founder of the preservationist group, Save Harlem Now!: “Everywhere I travel in the U.S. and even in Brixton, in London, a place as culturally vibrant as Harlem, wherever people of color live, we and the landmarks that embody our presence, unprotected, piece by piece, are being replaced.”

Carl Karni-Bain*

Adams himself remarks, “To us, our Harlem is being remade, upgraded and transformed, just for them, for wealthier white people...There is something about black neighborhoods, or at least poor black neighborhoods, that seem to make them irresistible to gentrification.”

Exactly. It is the very charisma of “culturally vibrant” neighborhoods which is so alluring to wealthy urban adventurers in the first place, who then proceed to neuter their new ‘hood with branches of Starbucks and Whole Foods. (The latter’s brand, 365, is an exorbitant, flavorless monopoly, not one whit healthier than the stuff at C-Town.)

Dare I say it--and it will inflame everyone, rich or poor, black or white: low-income neighborhoods are simply more fun, certainly more friendly.  I lived for twenty-odd years in a brownstone apartment on West 84th between Riverside and West End, and rarely had truck with my chilly neighbors, busy Having it All. Not to be outdone, I was a snotty self-absorbed Bohemian, whose social life was determinedly “downtown”. Human contact was always elsewhere.

Carl Karni-Bain*

Harlem, in contrast, is a place where familiarity breeds esteem. Surprising affinities are uncovered, not least because many of us who are here are not yet removed from need, and this includes the emotional need for other people, not just money or status. A friend who had been in a shelter once told me never to fear living in one: “You’ll meet your best friends in a shelter.” When you don’t have it all, there is more incentive to share, and, perhaps, even, to organize.

Today I set out to write about the promenade of people on Broadway, not gentrification. But for those of us whose foothold here is fragile, the shifting sand of Harlem is always on our minds. As we savor the still simple pleasures of our neighborhood this Memorial Day--sitting on a bench watching the street, meeting friends by the bodega, holding a cookout in Riverside Park--we fear we abide in Harlem on borrowed time.

*A NOTE ON THE PAINTINGS OF CARL KARNI-BAIN

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only within the falling of the dusk.” --Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Carl Karni-Bain’s paintings present us with an alluring mirror of mythology we gaze into  through spectral layers of oil crayon and paint. His painterly nebulae are like the mists of time, veiling figures, mostly female, who seem both remote from us and near.

The first painting by Carl I saw was of a woman with an owl on her shoulder, and immediately I thought of Athena--Minerva to the Romans-- my favorite goddess, whose emblem and familiar, the owl, symbolizes her wisdom.

Carl’s images, seen in the context of the evanescent Harlem in which he lives and creates, remind us of Hegel’s dictum, quoted above:  that wisdom appears only retrospectively, when it’s too late to use it to change anything. But in the case of the encroaching gentrification of Harlem, I have faith that the wings of Minerva’s owl will spread and cover us before dusk falls.

For more on Carl, see: 

https://www.facebook.com/Carl-Karni-Bain-BAI-109947492370422/

**http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-black-harlem.html

Elegy for My Apartment

The longest relationship I have had was not with man, woman, or even cat, much as I might wish for this last liaison to have been permanent. No, it was with a studio apartment, in a brownstone on 84th Street off Riverside Drive.

There I lived from 1978 when I was 21 until our final breakup in 2005, aged 48, after twenty-seven years spent arranging and rearranging assorted contents in a space measuring 21 feet by 15. There were numerous long pauses in my residency here; I often sought to escape, not so much Manhattan as from the seeming impossibility of finding a larger apartment here, and so, from time to time, I took off for Hollywood, Echo Park, London, Glasgow and Cologne, each time subletting this precious, rent-stabilized space to my neighbors upstairs or to grimy itinerant students, while I lived in adopted, impractical, impermanent splendor elsewhere.

I thought of this apartment, this room, not so much as an apartment as a fate, a solitary one at that. Downstairs lived a lady I thought of as old, a kind of independent lay religious, who seemed not to age as I did. She had no visitors. I had many; none stayed.

But whatever this apartment symbolized to me—I think of the old English ballad, “One is one is all alone and evermore shall be so”—decorate it I did, ever optimistic, time after time, just as I took on one lover after another, an enchainement in more ways than one: series, chain, repetition.

As funds increased and fluctuated throughout my life and peripatetic careers, there were improbably ambitious and esoteric schemes implanted in this tiny space, but it is the first, most modest, yet emotionally charged redecoration I wish to document here, for it was attended and orchestrated by Daniel Sachs, a great friend I knew from Berkeley, California since the age of seventeen, now, with his partner, architect Kevin Lindores, one of New York’s premier decorators; together they won the 2011 Palladio Award for Traditional Architecture.

I said back then, and I say it still, nobody has better taste than Daniel. At that time, he studied sculpture at the Cooper Union under the austere aegis of the German Conceptual artist, Hans Haacke. Daniel was able to take a break from Haacke’s stern anti-material regime by making a chair, of cobalt blue-painted tubular steel and wood, with gray velvet seat and back cushions, for a disapproving architecture professor. Daniel might have become an artist rather than designer if art education at the time had favored making; a natural-born maker Daniel was and is, and, it must be said, a consummate shopper.

Daniel, drawn by Stephen Barker

The year was 1980. We were students, Daniel at Cooper, I at Barnard, and we were poor, pinched for time by our studies, for money by our parents. Still, we decorated. I recall an Easter vacation in which I was supposed to be finishing my senior thesis, entitled “Human Furniture: Collectors and their Objects in the Novels of Henry James.” Instead, we shopped, painted and arranged, not The Spoils of Poynton, but the spoils of several Manhattan establishments, notably Fiorucci, Design Research/Marimekko (I had bought $30.00 sheets—in dark blue and white checks with scalloped edges--in 1979 from the former; a white Formica work table for $75.00 at the latter), Henri Bendel’s house wares department (from which I bought a brown and blue striped blanket by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac) and Lord & Taylor, where my mother permitted me to use her charge account; there I bought two large finely woven Chinese baskets with lids and a white-on-white embroidered Indian bedspread. (My bed itself came from the street.) There were items I acquired from a wonderful junk store then on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, a small chair, with rounded wooden organic arms and leather seat I still own, albeit stashed in a basement in Cologne; and a white craqueleur lamp, now lost, which received a variety of shades over its tenure.

I would have been content with simply painting over the pale pink walls, relic of an earlier scheme, but Daniel became enmeshed in stripping decades of plaster, paper and paint off the walls, devoting precious time to preparation, to sanding and spackling. I was alarmed at how much time this took; I was feeling guilty about my thesis, because somehow I could and would not work on this thirty page tome-to-be until the apartment was completely beautified. Writing at that juncture in my life was an exercise in pulling teeth, my own, slowly.

We purchased two gallons of paint from then S. Wolf’s Sons on Ninth Avenue and 52nd Street, in a shade of honeysuckle yellow called ‘Belladonna’. I think the brand was Benjamin Moore, but in any case, Daniel knew that Wolf’s was the place to go. He knew all the places to go and I trusted his pronouncements with adoration. For all I know, not possessing cab fare, we marched these cans the thirty blocks uptown, I in a pair of sea-green snakeskin heels from Charles Jourdan and a red shirtdress from Henri Bendel, although that was a summer outfit. Perhaps, if it was still cold I wore a brown and white herringbone tweed coat, single breasted, by Calvin Klein, along with vanilla colored boots stained with salt. To quote Joan Didion in her essay, “Goodbye to All That,” “Was anybody ever so young?” I remember the fashion and furniture items I culled so carefully then from the current fashionable emporia, paring them out of allowance and part-time earnings, with a kind of reverence. They read to me like a 1970s catalogue of style on slender means.

I possessed a few works of art: a large poster, in magenta and cobalt blue, I had acquired while on a language course in Munich, of Fassbinder’s film of the Nabokov novel Despair, entitled “Eine Reise ins Licht,” A Journey into the Light. A great friend of Daniel’s and mine, the photographer Stephen Barker, gave me a number of Hockneyesque line drawings of ourselves and other friends which adorned the yellow walls. The photographer David Armstrong gave me several black and white photographs of Daniel and other young people from the East Village, somberly glittering indicia of a glamorous gutter life beyond the anti-stylish Upper West Side, so inhospitable to me and my ilk. I also had a Chinese portrait, in red and green, of a sage on silk, borrowed from a Columbia University friend, Madeleine Hurd, who in fact lent me a number of antiques in an endowment which lasted several years, until, rightly, she reclaimed what we called “the sacred trust.” These included a marvelous carved swan daybed, a green enameled card table, and a kilim carpet, green with lozenges of orange and black, which was my (temporary) pride and joy.

An excerpted page from the Nest magazine article, Hello To All That, which featured my apartment and text, with photographs by Adam Bartos and David Armstrong.

My studio had the appearance of a square, which was its beauty, along with a high ceiling; more awkward was the fact that it had only two windows, in the back, northeast corner, overlooking and overshadowed by the back windows of a larger building so that there was little of the natural light I craved. Then there was the kitchen, a mere alcove stuffed with front facing stove, sink and fridge. But the floor was parquet; the bathroom beautifully tiled, with an ancient porcelain pedestal sink and a leaded glass window.

I abandoned 84th Street, permanently and willingly, a decade ago, fearing if I stayed I would grow old alone, like the lady downstairs.

Now I dream constantly of that difficult space, having outlived decisively my dread of “One is one,” only too willing, now, to be alone, if I could but find the space and solitude to be so. My life and quarters are more crowded, and writing is no longer according to Flaubert’s scheme of a sentence per day.

Two dicta cover my case: above all, “Never give up your first apartment.” And, as St. Theresa and Truman Capote famously said, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I sometimes mourn my so often unloved apartment, glad I was liberated from it, incredulous that I am no longer there. I am suffused, every day, with its memory.

Glenn Gissler: Roxbury Revenant

The name Litchfield County, Connecticut does not readily summon images of Bohemia, yet, in the 1940s, it was home to sculptor Alexander Calder and Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage.  A hidden history attends this innocently woodsy, Colonial portion of Connecticut, a narrative interior designer Glenn Gissler unearthed after he bought an 1840 Greek Revival farmhouse in Roxbury, Litchfield: “There’s a photo of the two Surrealists with Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and Frederick Kiesler at the Tanguy-Sage home in Woodbury, c. 1942. Their house had chic wood and upholstered art moderne furniture, and a billiards table, along with their own art and that of their close contemporaries.”   Glenn found the first house Tanguy and Sage lived in for a short time, and another house they lived in for many years; the studio building bears an historic plaque.

Glenn’s own plot is a farmhouse on a bunch of acres. Of  Roxbury’s and Woodbury’s environs, Glenn notes, “Nearby is a Masonic lodge, a Greek temple on top of a large rock outcropping. My house is a Greek Revival farmhouse with simple temple front references.” Glenn is taking a long look back at such layers of style in architecture and furnishings, shaping his own house with what he calls “classicism with humility”, a faintly rustic incarnation of the Greek Revival.  Explains Glenn, “I’m looking to revive the Greek in my own Greek Revival farmhouse, which implies restoration. I will be doing some restorative things, some recreated, some imaginary to the house and property. I am trying to consider the Classical basis of that period of American and design history through my own property to make a home that lives for today while looking backward in time.”

Acquiring the property in early 2014, Glenn was a veteran of moving house, but he had always done so within New York City, from funky pillar to elegant post: variously, a Classic Six, a Chelsea loft and now a divine Brooklyn Heights duplex. But the house is, for Glenn, more dream than dwelling, a far less limited space than is afforded by apartments in which to test the depth of his own decorative education and expertise.

On the exterior Glenn is working to allow the land to re-express itself, more like farmland than forest. What in 1840 began as a farmhouse was expanded over time by a small landowner with aspirations to the gentry, “so there’s a certain dignity implied”, remarks Glenn.

The interior of the house, still at the threshold of its full decorative glory, expresses what I have always seen as Glenn’s gift for a rich plainness just this side of Shaker. Glenn often begins with floorcoverings; in this house he has used jute, a material heavier, more rugged than sisal, braided like expensive queen’s matting, in stripes.

The furnishing of the house is a study in the origins and development of Classical forms which mutate yet remain steadfast throughout all the places and times in which they have been interpreted. Glenn owned a pair of Robsjohn-Gibbings Klismos chairs, which, given their glamour, he hesitated to use in Roxbury. Yet Gibbings had actually derived their dimensions and bony contours from measurements he had taken from Grecian black pottery; the chairs are near-replicas of the first appearance of Classical style. Unlike Regency furniture which is very stylized, Gibbings’ furniture is literal. Glenn, quoting Gibbings, says, ” In almost every representation of Greek life the furniture is present,” adding a pronouncement of his own: “You can’t stop learning. Classicism is a whole other avenue.”.

The living room coffee tables are Gibbings for Widdicomb--"mass market, yet streamlined, with lovely proportions”-- and in the bedroom are Widdicomb night tables, a Liberty Thebes stool and a collection of terracotta vessels by Christopher Dresser, all examples, from various periods, of progressive movements in design which nevertheless turned to the Classical as taproot of beautiful form.

Glenn has not escaped Connecticut’s “obsession with the Colonial,” carefully selecting at auction pieces of William and Mary furniture he finds architectural. But his overall sensibility remains modern:  “I am interested in furniture that recognizes history yet supports a modern lifestyle. We no longer have the manners to support uncomfortable furniture.”

As a collector of contemporary sculpture and drawings--among his favorite works are an “energy drawing” by Gordon Matta-Clark, and a rustic 19th century wall mounted shelf that predates and recalls Donald Judd--Glenn’s farmhouse has not escaped conceptual intervention and installation. “I have a work by the American artist David Dupuis, a red shape in steps and on each step there’s a rock element which get smaller with the ascent.” On the property Glenn has discovered chunks of crystalline white quartz, placing one on each of his stair steps, an homage to Dupuis. He plans to create a stone circle outdoors, a sort of folly. Stairs--those architectural markers of a true house--are a recurrent sculptural theme. A 19th century model of stairs is echoed by an American stepped bookcase, both in Glenn’s library.

The foyer is as formal as a farmhouse will permit, with 1820s English hall chairs paired with a pair of convex mirrors. Glenn has commissioned a hooked rug in Renaissance falling rocks pattern, an illusionistic depiction, once again, of steps.

Finally, the front door, which Glenn insists guests use, is adorned with an eighteenth century door knocker given to him by Tom Luciano, founder of Historical Materialism. It marks a portal presaging a home at least as surreal and interesting as that of Tanguy and Sage, a very American crucible of taste, history and invention.

Edwin Lutyens' British Ambassador's Residence, Washington D.C.

Elsewhere I have written, echoing the thesis of Nikolaus Pevsner in The Englishness of English Art, that the greatest English artists are robustly idiosyncratic individuals, rather than members or even leaders of movements.

The English architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) epitomizes this idea, an avatar of the resolute individuality and more than occasional eccentricity of English artists and architects. As Elizabeth Wilhide writes in her 2014 book, Sir Edwin Lutyens: Designing in the English Tradition, “It is Lutyens’ reconciliation of extremes, the defining characteristic of his design approach, which marks [his] accomplishment as particularly English.” Wilhide describes the poles of Lutyens’ aesthetic as “austere yet rich, grand yet domestic…” Lutyens loved paradox, the craft and coziness of the vernacular, the colder beauty of the Classical.

Well into the twentieth century Lutyens worked outside the Modernist idiom, instead creating houses synthesized from English vernacular buildings--looking especially to Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912 ) as an influence in this regard---and from Classicism of the highest order, reinterpreting the Mannerist forms of Christopher Wren. Lutyens chose to design in these two opposing strands of English tradition, and in doing so, broke the mold of all “isms”, presiding over the twentieth century as England’s greatest architect of the time. The result was houses such as Munstead Wood, for the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll and the marvelously stony Castle Drogo and powerful monuments such as the London Cenotaph.

If India has a magnificent complex of buildings designed by Lutyens, namely the Viceroy’s Palace in New Delhi, so America’s capital has her own jewel in the crown--or rather the Republic--namely the only Lutyens building in the country, the British Ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C. Built between 1928 and 1930, the Great Crash of 1929 intervened, constricting the budget for the house. The frieze and pilasters are of plaster rather than the marble specified by Lutyens; the black floor tiles are slate; the columns scagliola.  

Although Lutyens is best known as an architect of private houses, he also designed national monuments, memorials and official buildings, constructing over 550 houses and other buildings in his lifetime. The British Ambassador’s residence is a fascinating hybrid, setting for grand diplomatic functions, yet, like all of Lutyens’ houses, a most enveloping private sphere, exquisitely fitted out with furnishings in American Colonial style, as well as Chinese antiques, that soften its grandeur.

“Lutyens succeeded in creating a stage set for both pleasure and serious consultation,” writes Frances Stead Sellers in the Washington Post. She quotes former British ambassador Sir David Manning: “Diplomacy can involve an element of theatre...the great thing about the Residence is that it’s infinitely adaptable.”

The theatrical aspect of the house is expressed by the dramatic circular stairway with sinuous wrought iron banister, a Lutyens signature. Towering columns at the entrance announce that this is a place of importance, yet within are human-scaled spaces which with perfect dignity enclose the conversations, many historic, some simply convivial, which have taken place over the last 85 years and which continue to animate the rooms of this national treasure, made in America, quintessentially English.  

Done and Undone: New Years Eve 2016

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday; it is secular yet fueled with spirit and symbolism that border on the religious, its excesses, at best, a Bacchanal. It celebrates what a popular book calls, in its title, “The Power of Now”. At New Year’s, we rejoice in the very instant of transition, the minute of moving forward--some of us at full tilt.

In my writing, I draw many particular turns of phrase from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. From the Penitential Order, Rite I of the Episcopal Church, I now wish to tease out the words, “the things we have done and those we have left undone.”

Sixteen years ago, on the eve of the millennium, I wrote an essay for the former magazine Nest: a Quarterly of Interiors. In it I also cited a passage from the BCP, a eucharistic prayer for the dead. In an Eternal Return, here I am again, no wiser but definitely saner, still trying to reconcile my mistrust of religious orthodoxy with my love for the language which proclaims it.

This phrase of the Mass is uttered in the context of confession and pardon, sin and redemption. But in anticipating New Year’s Eve, and thinking back over the past year, I can apply it in a happier sense. Done and undone refer to what we have achieved and what we have, perhaps, left unfinished but in 2016 will return to; or to what, in our dreams, we aspire to and may--this year!--grasp like the brass ring.

Done and undone also connote interiors, rooms as high art, decorated by a designer privileged to use every means possible to realize an artistic vision. Other rooms are done so apparently simply as to seem undesigned. They are, above all, lived in, yet not without artistic intent. Gradually their inhabitants assemble, with the designer’s eye if not her resources, the elements which compose a place of interest.

In the interior shown here, an apartment on East 11th Street, several arrangements create an uncommon aura. We feel this place, empty of people, is waiting for them to arrive, waiting for the moment when they drink wine in the glasses seen here in serried ranks. This room is all anticipation.

The generous, boxy armchair is sheathed in fragments of kilim rugs; the two collages above it, by the aptly-named artist Matt Smoak, are actually composed of hundreds of cigarette butts which have not lost their aroma. Books and busts, a bronze lamp and a crustacean claw: these deciduous things make up the aspirations of this interior, thoughtfully, beautifully undone.

Done and undone: speaking personally about the past year, the words refer to my writing. Ghostwriting, website texts, magazine articles, above all the launch, on December 23rd, of BOOK AND ROOM: these things were done. But 2015 was also my year of writing dangerously, working on a TMI memoir which remains unfinished. Recently I began again slowly to weave its pieces together. That undone book is my redemption and brass ring, still way over my head.

2016 should be the year in which we think consciously about what we do and undo. Done or undone, our home is the incubator of our work, our relationships and our hopes. In it, let us ring in the New Year, with excess or its opposite, celebrating the eternal hourglass, turned once more.

Singh City: Christmas 2015

Petra Singh, born in Augsburg, Germany, now resident in Harlem, New York City, is a peripatetic homemaker supreme.

The word homemaker is maligned in our time, smacking of sugary 1950s constraints on women’s lives. But when we regard homemaker as the compound word that it is, stripped of connotation, we realize it is regal: both Home and Making are preoccupations of the modern mind, which searches restlessly for creative expression in leisure time, Bohemian escape from corporate culture, flight to the abode as autonomous sphere in a rule-bound world. When I consider “homemaker” in the positive sense of a high aesthetic in everyday life, I remember the 19th century neurologist Dr. Charcot, Freud’s teacher, whose private passion, shared with his wife and daughters in Paris, was for decoration, for their house as locus of dreams made material. In a three-story Harlem townhouse, Petra Singh has manifested her own dreams, her yearning to create what Mario Praz, writing of his Roman apartment, entitled The House of Life.

I first met Petra twenty years ago in Brussels, where she and her late husband, the art collector Ranbir Singh, were homesteading a house of my dreams, a Jugendstil mansion replete with serpentine boiserie and Delft tiles. Every time Petra entered the house’s Carrera marble-clad vestibule, she reflected, with elation, “How happy am I!” It was almost a ruin at the time I saw it; they would restore it to all its fin de siecle glory.

After long wanderings, from Brussels to San Francisco then to Manhattan’s Chelsea, Petra has alighted in Hamilton Heights, Harlem’s precinct not only of stately brownstones, but of Dutch-inspired and Aesthetic Movement gabled houses of mellow red brick. Petra inhabits her brownstone as a captain inhabits a ship, secure in the staterooms yet afloat in foreign waters. There is no need to go on deck.

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A bevy of young women, Petra’s daughters Yasho and and Celeste and their friends, bring victuals, Champagne, music and much laughter into Petra’s generous domain, a grand bourgeois Arts & Crafts inflected interior. In her small traditional New York kitchen Petra sometimes prepares fragrant Indian dishes she learned from Ranbir; other feasts consist of ham glazed in maple syrup and chili (a la Jacques Pepin) accompanied by warm German potato and cucumber salad, dressed in oil and lemon juice rather than mayonnaise.

In the past year, inspired by her friend, the Canadian violinist and music critic, Jacqueline Vanasse, and by her daughter Yasho’s boyfriend, Christopher Beroes-Haigis, a cellist, Petra launched her “Soirees”--evenings of ravishing classical music--piano, cello and violin--performed by young, world-class musicians from China, Japan and Europe. Christopher, still a senior at Bard College, is a frequent performer at the Soirees. His teachers and mentors include the composer Joan Tower and the cellist Andrey Tchekmazov. Petra’s patronage includes serving on the board of the Omega Ensemble, an organization granting stipends to promising young classical musicians.

The sounds of the Soirees are not those of chamber music. Within the space of Petra’s paneled living room, one feels transported to a grand symphony hall, in which the music sometimes reaches a sublime frenzy not usually associated with the classical. When I heard a Chinese violinist play, I thought of H. P. Lovecraft’s occult story, The Music of Erich Zann, in which an aged, mute violinist plays strange melodies of an otherworldly nature.

Since 1987, Petra has also presided over Equator Studios, a company producing artists’ carpets, fabricated in limited editions in Nepal, commissioning well-known contemporary artists to create the designs. She is currently in the process of renewing production of Equator’s original editions, while also commissioning a new generation of artists to make designs for the carpets. In 2016, a large number of the carpets will be included in a major exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Petra has also joined forces with Cornelia Lauf, director of Rome’s curatorial organization Golden Ruler, to curate a series of artists’ carpets.

The Singh house, capacious yet cozy, contains many small shrines, reflecting the Indian-German heritage of Petra’s daughters. Indian and Tibetan artifacts vie with German decorations that sometimes exhibit remarkably similar motifs, as in the portable Tibetan altar decorated with red and white floriated ornament, paired with a German metal table ornament with identical enameled flowers. Petra herself is ecumenical in her devotions: Madonnas and Buddhas, photographs of Pope Francis and Mother Meera are illuminated by crystal candelabra with tall German candles, burning day and night, which Petra brings from her trips to Europe. Expressed by these votives is the meaning and value--both spiritual and material--Petra imparts to her home.

Early 20th century and mid-century furniture--a scarlet upholstered armchair by Wiener Werkstatte designer Josef Hoffmann, wire chairs by Warren Platner--seem at home in the living and dining rooms, each, in Harlem turn-of- the-century tradition, equipped with a fireplace surrounded by a carved mahogany mantelpiece. Petra rotates the display of her sizeable collection of contemporary art, most recently launching an exhibition of artist Mark Dagley’s paintings on her walls.

Upstairs, Petra’s bedroom invites repose and meditation, stirred by a retablo of her own artwork and a varied array of precious objects: Hermes handbags, diamante jewelry from the 1920s, a marble Shiva, spectral African masks and intricate 19th century German family keepsakes.. Sophistication abides with spirit, style with the solemn beauty of relics.

Throughout the house, lush plants surround the inanimates. .I am sometimes reminded of the mysterious New Orleans house inhabited by Charlotte Rampling’s character, Margaret, in the 1987 noir movie Angel Heart, dense with talismans, charms and amulets, dimmed by the twining shadows of plants. I sometimes forget how very gothic Petra’s interior is, discovering it anew when I venture upstairs.   

Petra’s narrow kitchen and brown velvet couch are places I, and many others come to continually to sate our appetites--for her excellent cuisine, conversation,  and kindness--for all the ineffable qualities that exalt her home. Like an inadvertent follower of Charcot, she has single-handedly reinvented the house as cosmos of predominantly female imagination and life, womb and shelter for the cultivation of art and of life’s most momentous events: friendship and love.

Harlem on My Mind

Within my apartment building, which has always reminded me of an immense grey battleship, is a honeycomb of inhabitants, each with their own decorative world.

I first met my neighbors Judy and Julio while I sat smoking one morning on the ledge outside the front door. From their kitchen window they saw me, and in a neighborly gesture as charming as it was unexpected, passed me a cup of cafe con leche, deliciously perfumed with nutmeg, through their winter curtains, printed with poinsettias. We forged a cafe con leche tradition, and I began to consider their window my own private cafe, and became curious about the interior beyond their curtains.  

I was not disappointed. Judy, who mixes her paints herself, has created a place of intense, variegated color: Pompeiian red, saffron yellow and sea green. I thought of spices as much as of pigments. Her interior reminded me of an observation I wish to make--hoping it isn’t politically incorrect--that the houses of people of Hispanic descent are often marked by a very formal, almost rigid arrangement of furniture and ornaments which is, in turn, tempered by the use of lively, sometimes wild color. Think of the magnificent photographs Robert Polidori shot--before the political thaw-- of Cuban rooms of vivid, rather peeling grandeur

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Broadway above 145th Street includes a Dominican community that becomes ever denser as one approaches Washington Heights. At Broadway and 155th Street is the wonderful museum of the Hispanic Society, a monument of early 20th century decoration sheathed in sculpted terracotta tiles,  mercifully untouched by renovation. It stands as an exemplar of the harmony of deep color and meticulously deliberate arrangement I find in Latin style.

In cultivating one’s own style in decoration, it is important to be a locavore, a seeker who unearths in his or her immediate environs unsuspected enclaves of beauty. I am sure there are many Judys and Julios in my improbably immense building, which I will gradually find and reveal in the pages of BOOK AND ROOM.

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