Editor's Letter |
Editor's letter, January 2009
January 8, 2010 | Several years ago I visited the Reverend Peter Gomes, Harvard University's chaplain and professor of Christian morals, to interview him about the way he had furnished Sparks House, the residence Harvard provides for its preacher. I was struck by the exuberance of his rooms, their voluptuous colors—golds, reds, and greens—their antiques—Yankee, French, Scottish, English—the dramatic spiral stairwell lined with wallpaper inspired by that in Gunston Hall in Virginia, the pieces of Canton and Rose Medallion that remind Reverend Gomes of the old Yankee houses in Plymouth where he did chores as a teenager. These rooms feel alive, held together by the nimble mind of this African American minister who is as hard to classify as his sense of decor. Although I know that material things are morally neutral, I was still bound to ask the Reverend Gomes how such elaborate furnishings fit with his calling. As I consider the Winter Antiques Show and its exceptional charity, the East Side House Settlement in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, I am reminded of Gomes's answer: "I do believe that God is the author of beauty," he told me. "It is not beauty that distracts us from God. It is beauty that affirms the presence of God." He has much more to say on the subject, which is why I am pleased that Gomes will be the keynote speaker on January 22 at the Winter Antiques Show, where I am confident that his remarks will illuminate the whole of the antiques season in New York—from ceramics at the National Academy Museum to Americana at the Metropolitan Pavilion to the Pier shows—with a sense of the mission of things of beauty.
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Editor's Letter |
Editor's letter, December 2009
December 11, 2009 | There is a great deal of fretting these days about the future of collecting and the dearth of young collectors. Were there ever many young collectors? Probably not. It takes the perspective of age (as well as the accumulation of capital) to do what the best antiques collectors do: value a folk art painting or a tall-case clock for the image it gives us of the past, the picture of what we were, against which we can measure what we have become. That, for the most part, is not a young person's game. So I didn't worry recently that there were not throngs of well-heeled thirtysomethings strolling the aisles at the splendid San Francisco Fall Antiques Show. Their time should come, if all goes well.
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Editor's Letter |
Editor's letter, October 2009
October 23, 2009 | A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization's historic houses—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, where Henry Davis Sleeper invented romantic clutter and reinvented interior design during the almost thirty years he worked on it from 1907 to 1934. Of the latter we will have much to say in a future issue. The Gropius House is pertinent here because it reminds me that the Bauhaus, subject of Christopher Long's wonderfully clarifying article in this issue, was a school, not a tyrannical aesthetic imposed by a group of Weimar era killjoys. However alienating the international style eventually became, the Bauhaus as represented by the house Gropius designed for his wife and daughter, is a warm and pleasant reminder of the school's best ideals: beauty joined to function in a timeless design.
There was one thing about the visit that puzzled me, however. Among the furnishings designed by Marcel Breuer is a badly pitted lacquered plywood and chrome-plated tubular steel side table. This is not the kind of furniture that was meant to be restored, and Gropius's daughter Ati Gropius Johansen has argued that it should be replaced by a good new version. Historic New England is not so sure, but I think she is right. With modernism crispness is all, or nearly all. This is not the furniture that Thomas Messel values in Meredith Etherington-Smith's article, where the craftsmanship cannot be duplicated and the passing years only add to the beauty of a piece. Neither is it the luxurious silver furniture of Versailles described in this issue by Florian Knothe, created to burnish the aura of the Sun King. Breuer's designs were meant to be mass-produced for the masses and, to my mind, the patina of age seems beside the point and does not become them.
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Editor's Letter |
Editor's letter, September 2009
September 25, 2009 | One of the things I admire about Electra Havemeyer Webb was her instinctive sense that the cultural designations of high-, low-, and middlebrow were silly. I do not mean to suggest that Webb was a prophet of late twentieth-century multiculturalism or that she could have argued for the relative merits of a beautifully carved duck decoy vis à vis a fine Degas. She couldn't, and she wouldn't have seen the point. For her, the decoy and the painting were both objects of astonishment and delight, but she knew that while the latter was justly praised, the former was likely to be overlooked. Thus the long journey to establish her multibuilding Shelburne Museum with its irreverent assemblage of the overlooked—decoys, hatboxes, tools, rowdy circus ephemera, ceramics, glass canes, and everything else that struck her as important and in need of rescue, including some really big items such as a lighthouse and a side-paddle-wheel steamer.
Several months ago I was discussing Electra Webb and the resilience of the Shelburne with my friend Tom Armstrong, former director of the Whitney Museum. That talk resulted in a plan to take eight artists up to the museum to see what they each made of the collections. We did just that with the, to me, astonishing and delightful results you can read about in Eleanor Gustafson's article, "The present learns from the past."
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Editor's Letter |
Editor's letter, August 2009
August 10, 2009 | We have grouped a promiscuous array of things in this issue under the broad umbrella of "folk art": schoolgirl drawings, trench art, manufactured advertising signs, as well as objects more conventionally agreed upon as "folky," such as carved walking sticks and weather vanes.
While it is common to worry about the vagueness of the term folk art, I am inclined to enjoy its dodgy ambiguity. Folk artists operate outside the rules of the academy and, most important, apart from the market forces that drive fine art. The way in which they work behind the back of "great" art gives their work the freedom that draws us in and grants us a certain liberty too. I know how I am supposed to think and feel about the sublimity of nature in a Hudson River school landscape; I don't have that certainty when I run across the large carved dog's head in Allan and Penny Katz's living room. Sometimes it's a thrill to be on your own just as that carver undoubtedly was.
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Gemellion, Artist unknown, Limoges, France, 13th century Champlevé Enamel on Copper, 8 7/8” diameter Collection of The Walters’ Art
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