Inspired

Alexander Rodchenko

Prototype 576 table light, 1971 

Made by Arteluce, 1971

Based on an idea of Germano Celant. Lights in the style of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, particularly after works by Alexander Rodchenko. Having acquired consent from the artist's widow, lights 576 and 577 were realised in very limited editions in the early 1970s.

One has to take several different shots of a subject,  from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again - Alexander Rodchenko

Now playing: Arthur-Vincent Lourié - Synthesis for piano op. 16

November is a long way away II

100 YEARS: The imagination of Robert Crowder, Vralati, and Shoji Kuroda

  

The three faces of an artist that lived for a century

A special exhibition to mark Robert Crowder's centenary

November 13, 2011 - January 8, 2012

9:30 am—6:00 pm (Monday—Saturday. Sunday by appointment)

Shumei Hall Gallery

Pasadena, California

1960s folding screens which typify Crowder's work

Crowder (1921-2010) was an American-born painter who learned the technique of Nihonga while living in pre-war Japan. He took the artist name of Shoji Kuroda after having studied under the master painter Mochizuki Shunko (1893-1979). With the outbreak of World War II, Crowder was interned as an enemy alien and subsequently deported from Japan in 1943.

His profound affection for the country, however, remained intact, and to this day he shows not a trace of bitterness or regret. He would have stayed forever, he says, had it not been for the circumstances. As it was, he returned to the United States, and the beautiful things that had captivated him in Asia — ikebana flower arrangement and painted byobu, as well as fabrics purchased from the mountain “aborigines” on his visits to Taiwan from Japan — formed the basis for establishing a studio of handpainted murals and folding screens used in decorating the Hollywood homes of the rich and famous. - April, 2007 issue Cultural News

Imperial City  by Robert Crowder & Company

The last incarnation of Mame's Beekman Place apartment

Now playing:  Ryuichi Sakamoto - Solitude 

If it's not coffee and if it's not tea, what can it be?

Mocha set 

Designed by Josef Hoffmann, circa 1925 

  Yellow overglazed porcelain

 Made by Porzellanfabrik Augarten, Vienna

Now playing: Ultravox - Vienna

Cafe society

 The Angus McBean photograph that was flashed on the screen of the Academy Cinema to  promote the adjoining Pavilion Cafe

 

The Lost Pavilion

The Pavilion Restaurant in Oxford Street designed by Angus McBean in 1951.
As it appeared in the May, 1988 issue of The World of Interiors.

Now playing: Jean Michel Jarre - Touch To Remember

Decorative art

Otto Alberth Hirth (1899-1969)

Screen

Watercolour on canvas, 1930-1940

Now playing: Carl Maria von Weber - Adagio Patetico in C#

Memento

18th century ivory oval box with cover

The slightly raised domed cover with urn finial and with gold wire inlaid monogram cartouches E H C, the box of slightly rounded form raised on six short feet, finely and delicately carved all over in openwork with geometric patterned panels, with original silk brocade partly covered cardboard box, with writing in ink to the interior of the cover partly reading " ...The Work that Beresford brought from Jamaica for .. his Daughter, This Box for Eliza Maria, My godchild and name sake"

11½in. (29.3cm.) wide




Now playing:  Cesaria Evora - Negue

Je n'aime pas à résister à la tentation.

I am not over-fond of resisting temptation.

from Vathek by William Beckford

William Beckford

by Sir Joshua Reynolds
oil on canvas, 1782
National Portrait Gallery



William Thomas Beckford  (1760-1844)

 Beckford was the only legitimate son of Alderman William Beckford, twice lord mayor of London and Member of Parliament. His mother, Maria (nee Hamilton), was descended from the royal House of Stuart. Being the only child of a late marriage, he was given every encouragement. At the age of five he received piano lessons from the nine-year-old Mozart. He also received instruction from Sir William Chambers and Alexander Cozens in architecture and drawing. Upon his father's death in 1770, he inherited a vast fortune built on the  Jamaican sugar trade. Making him, as his distant cousin Lord Byron later put it, England's richest son.

 While touring England in 1779, he developed what he called a strange wayward passion for William Courtenay, the eleven-year-old son and heir of Viscount Courtenay. Beckford also became involved with Louisa Beckford, the unhappily married wife of one of his cousins. In 1780, the restless Beckford embarked on a European tour that his family hoped would ease his inner turmoil and dispel any rumors surrounding his friendship with Courtenay.

In 1781, inspired by a Christmas party held in Courtenay's honour at Fonthill, Beckford wrote Vathek - the story  of an impious voluptuary who builds a tower. A tower so high that he not only can survey all the kingdoms of the  the world, but he can also challenge god in his heaven. Beckford claimed to have written the initial French-language draft of Vathek in one sitting over the course of three days and two nights. He had based his characters on historical figures and provided a wealth of detail. He intended to add to this story four episodic tales.  While composing them, he arranged for the Reverend Samuel Henley, an oriental enthusiast and former professor, to translate the entire work into English and to add footnotes explaining the allusions.

Unfortunately, completion of the episodes was to be interrupted. In the autumn of 1784 scandal broke . Beckford was charged with sexual misconduct with young Courtenay. Reports of the scandal spread quickly, and, though his guilt was never proved, he, with his wife (he married Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783) and baby daughter, was forced into exile. In May 1786, in Switzerland, his wife died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their second daughter. Beckford also learned that Vathek was to be published anonymously, with the preface claiming that  the work was directly translated from the Arabic. Subsequently, Beckford published a French edition in order to claim authorship (the uncompleted episodic tales were to remain unpublished until 1912).

In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron wrote, 

Unhappy Vathek, thou wert smitten with unhallowed thirst

Of nameless crime, and thy sad day must close

To scorn, and Solitude unsought - the worst of woes.

Beckford spent his time in exile traveling throughout Europe, eventually returning to England in 1796. Ostracised, he spent the remainder of his life collecting books, paintings, and rare works of art and building his extravagant Gothic pile, Fonthill Abbey. Beckford supervised the planning and building of what was to become the most extraordinary house in England. In 1807 the house's great central tower collapsed and was rebuilt. Beckford grew notorious as both the creator of the increasingly popular Vathek and as the reclusive owner of Fonthill, where he lived until financial difficulties forced him to sell in 1822. The tower again later collapsed, destroying part of the building.



The design of the interiors and the furnishings at Lansdown Tower,  the house Beckford later built in Bath,  gave tangible evidence to his creative genius. And quite possibly, if not laid ,  solidified the foundations of the English eclectic style.

One of a pair of silver-gilt waiters made by William Burwash for William Beckford

Coffer-shaped display cabinet
William Beckford and Henry Edmund Goodridge
probably made by English and Son, Bath
1831-41

Oak cabinet on stand made for the Scarlet Drawing Room 

Lansdown Tower, Bath

1831 - 1841

Oak cabinet

Most likely designed by Beckford and his architect Henry Edmund Goodridge

A superb example of the furniture Beckford commissioned during his final years.

Cabinet made in Paris around 1825

Richly encrusted with hardstones and mounted in gilt bronze

The panels were made at the noted Gobelins workshops in Paris, late 17th Century.

Roman chair, circa 1800 

Originally part of a suite of furniture at Fonthill Abbey

Sold at the Fonthill sale 1823

Siena marble console table    

Commissioned by William Beckford for the vestibule at Landsdown Tower, Bath. 
Most probably designed by the architect of the Tower, Henry Edmund Goodridge, in collaboration with Beckford.

Now playing:  Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade 

Polished and painted

Regency satinwood side chair with painted decoration and caned seat.

The swept front stretcher and back splats are particularly fine details.

Now playing: Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satellite

By special appointment to the Imperial Crown

House of Fabergé nephrite tray with silver and gilt enameled handles set with diamonds

  House of Fabergé nephrite tray design, Hermitage Museum


House of Fabergé

Now playing: Alexander Borodin - Symphony No. 2, III. Andante

Caught in time

 The London Photograph Fair

20th February,  2011

Useful in conveying links to the past. 

There is comfort to be found in continuity.

Now playing: Adele - Don't You Remember

Purpose built

Designed by Lord Snowdon for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969.

Some 4,500 odd were produced for the event with invited guests being given first refusal of purchase.

Now playing - The Smiths - This Charming Man

à la française

Drawing Room Interior

Leopold Pascal (1900-1958)

French Hepplewhite mahogany show frame sofa of small proportions

 

Cotton and viscose brocade for sofa done with a fan edging.

Pair of French Hepplewhite mahogany elbow chairs, circa 1800, to be used directly opposite sofa.

 An uncut and cut velvet with a strie background for elbow chairs - done with a nail trim.

Pair of 18th Century French walnut armchairs for use next to sofa.

Nail and tape trim rather than double piping.

Linen and viscose textured moire
for chair faces (backs to be done in brocade) and curtains (lined in rose).

Lady's court dress and matching petticoat of pink striped and brocade silk.

French, circa 1760

Come to the edge, he said. 

They said: We are afraid. 

Come to the edge, he said. 

They came. 

He pushed them and they flew. - 

Guillaume Apollinaire

 

 

Now playing: Barbara - L'aigle Noir

Spilling the 't'

Clément Massier, Golfe-Juan
Earthenware tea set glazed in running dark-red and green, circa 1900

Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. 

Now playing:  Bryan Ferry - Alphaville

Spirits!

 

Tumbler

 

Sherbet glass

 

Knickerbocker pattern

Designed in 1933 by former Tiffany executive Arthur Douglas Nash for the Libbey Glass Company.

The golden age of Libbey-Nash.

Now playing: Arcanta - Goldensong

Narry a whisper

Madame Schlumberger photographed by Eric Boman

Bob Colacello's The Wow of São has seemingly sparked little or no interest in cyberspace. Not one of the ravinshing details created by decorator Gabhan O'Keeffe has been swooned over or glommed onto. Surely the readers of the two or three remaining interiors magazines are the same audience as that of Vanity Fair? Perhaps Madame Schlumberger's rooms were simply too grand, too foreign, and too quixotic...

....nothing shocked Paris—a city where taste is everything—more than her over-the-top new apartment, on Avenue Charles Floquet in the Seventh Arrondissement. Conceived as a neo-Baroque fantasyland by the London decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe, it set São’s contemporary art and 18th-century furniture in a series of rooms that combined France with Portugal, Scotland with Persia, and Egypt with Hollywood. The pièce de résistance was the Andalusian-style terrace, with the Eiffel Tower rising directly above it. Dinner-party debates over whether O’Keeffe’s creation was “innovative” or “abominable” got so out of hand that at one soirée a pair of socialites had to be pulled apart before they came to blows. “It’s simply hideous,” said one visitor, “but totally fabulous!”

 She had more than taste. She had audacity. - Pierre Bergé

Eric Boman for Vanity Fair, October 2010

 The grand salon  photographed by Jean-Louis Garnell for Nest

Mme Schlumberger was living proof that there is more to being a Medici than simply money and influence.





Now playing:  Frank Sinatra - The Lady is a Tramp

This

Broken by Paola Navone for Richard Ginori

Clever and modern, yet charming.

Now playing: Annie Lennox - Walking On Broken Glass

South of the border

Oval serving dish with a hand chased finish by L. Maciel

Tri-footed bowl with a flared serpentine rim

Serving tray by Sanborns

Down Mexico way, there is treasure to be found in silver. Even 20th century pieces have an old world feel and glamour to them.



Now playing: María Luisa Landín - Somos Diferentes