I was not aware of Carlo Bugatti when I saw (a version of) this desk (top) at the Art+Design Show at the Armory this past Thursday. The name was vaguely familiar–race cars wasn't it?* or motorcycles? But not furniture. Certainly not this slightly disturbing crenellated fantasy in walnut, copper, vellum, and mother of pearl. Why disturbing? because it was almost animalistic. And I couldn't place it– definitely Arts and Crafts-ish, sort of Eastlakean, but as though interpreted by an alien. Japanese? Indian Raj? Moorish? Arab? Yes!
Bugatti was born in Milan in 1856. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and began making furniture in the 1880s. The earlier furniture's rectilinear asymmetry and exotic materials--encrusted and embellished--recalled the Orientalism of the time; the later sinuous forms were influenced by Art Nouveau. But the aggressively hybrid vision was truly, singularly his. Gaudi is the only other designer of the time I can think of who was as profoundly bizarre.
Bugatti gained international attention at the Exposition of Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902 with his "Snail Room." The tantalizing but maddeningly indistinct photo directly above is all I could find of the exhibit. His "Cobra chairs" (above the Snail image, right), created for the Turin exhibit, are entirely covered in vellum-- as was much of his later furniture. At some point his furniture also graced the Waldorf Astoria’s Turkish Salon, where, it is said, coffee was served by an actual Turk complete with a boy attendant...
Extravagant, daring, bewildering, excessive and fascinating, Bugatti's work was renowned for meticulous craftsmanship and eccentricity but was never truly popular. Perhaps because, as the Cleveland Museum of Art notes, it was extremely "challenging."
His design star was occluded by the time he died, in relative obscurity, in 1940.
*His son Ettore went on to found the automobile company.
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Bugatti's designs are like ceremonial furnishings for some alien royal court. Something about the spikey "tribal" regalia draping many of Bugatti's pieces reminds me of Frank Frazetta.
Corposant-- the ball of fire which is sometimes seen playing around the masts of ships in a storm, from Italian corpo santo-- holy body. St. Elmo's Fire.
Dying Sayings --... Archimedes to the Roman soldier: "Wait til I've finished my problem." ... Voltaire : "Do let me die in peace." ...
Tartarus-- infernal regions of classical mythology, used as the equivalent of Hades but Homer places Tartarus as far beneath Hades as Hades is beneath the Earth
Dr. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer described his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as "a treasury of literary bric-a-brac." I think of it as a rollicking pageant of erudition, flinging out tidbits of wisdom and rightly forgotten obscuranta alike, from "the Aeolian mode" and "baton sinister" to "whipping boy" and "zingari." I found my pitifully dog-eared copy of the 1981 edition at the library sale on Shelter Island and pedant and avid pursuer of trivia that I am, I use it as bedtime reading. And it's great fun.
A bit of background: Brewer graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1836 and was ordained two years later. Ultimately a failed academic, he proceeded to fill his days compiling dictionaries and surveys, and regimenting a popular children's education series with astonishing speed. He wrote or edited such weighty tomes as An Entire New System of Book-keeping (1853), A Guide to Roman History (1853), Sound and Its Phenomena (1854) and Dr. Brewer's Guide to Science to which is added Poisons and Accidents, their antidotes and remedies (1859) among many, many others.
"What a fussy old gentleman Dr. Brewer is," complained an editorial colleague, although Brewer was just 54 at the time. "He is so insufferably inquisitive and such a gossip!" Dr. Brewer's grandson, in a late memoir, depicted him as far more genial and entertaining, but loony never the less: "The walls of his room were papered in a plain white paper upon which he used to write in pencil stray memoranda and the names of an particularly interesting visitors...."
Grammarian, Classicist, scientific dabbler–Brewer belonged to an era of moral uplift and self-betterment. And it was in that grand spirit of inquiry that Brewer catalogued folkways, classical references, linguistic anomalies, Latin phrases, and popular trifles and issued his Dictionary, in 1870, for his countrymen's, and posterity's, edification. Although his publishers remarked tartly that they were "doubtful whether the book would pay the expense of printing" the Dictionary recently enjoyed a 17th edition just last year...
image from Amphigorey Also, Edward Gorey.
I just read a book I'd gotten months ago and promptly forgot about, "Color: a natural history of the palette" by Victoria Finlay. The author, a British journalist living in Hong Kong, sets out to explore the origins--historical, cultural, physical-- of pigments and dyes. The book, organized loosely by color swatch, is sometimes weighted down with her travelogues of traipsing off to China for fabled greens or meandering through Afghanistan in search of ultramarine mines. But what, early on, had annoyed me to the point of putting the book on the shelf: the chatty, lady's magazine lightness proved to be less of an obstacle as the book wore on. I tend to like bits and pieces, historical oddities and unraveled edges and it certainly provides just that.
In the book, color, something we think of in benign almost frivolous terms (pink or blue faceplate on your cellphone), takes on gritty physicality, volatility, even toxicity. Metals, stones, berries, bark, insects, shells are ground, smoked, burnt and acidified. Through distilling and decanting, arcane alchemical processes produce miraculous results.
The often harsh paradoxes of the material form of color are amazing. Velvety rich blacks rendered from oak gall, soot, and charred bone, brilliant reds from beetles, pristine white from a red dust. Fugitive and unstable, there's an almost spiteful nature to unfixed color-- saintly whites turn black, brilliant reds fade to sickly pink, and puritan blacks that turn a disturbing orange. The almost allegorical danger inherent in many of these colors is fascinating as well: lead white, used extensively in cosmetics and paint and prized for its transcendent luminosity, caused "plumbism" and slowly destroyed one's liver, kidneys and mind. Arsenic used to fashion Scheele's Green, which accented Napoleon's wallpaper on St. Helena, may have contributed to his death...---
Here's where one can learn a bit about wonderful things like gamboge and orpiment:
• Museum of Fine Art Boston: conservation and art materials encyclopedia
• Also, a paint-making site.
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images: I'm obsessed with paint color chips-- the typology aspects, the naming, the...prettiness. At top are some Benjamin Moores, below Farrow & Ball (a company I've written about before, in one of my favorite posts from a simpler time); a weaving color/pattern sample book made in 1763 by John Kelly of Norwich, England, from the Victoria & Albert Museum; powdered colors for painting on velvet, 1814, also from the V&A. The three bottles are labelled 'Ackermann's brilliant carmine', 'W H Edwards's lilac purple', and 'W H Edwards's sunflower yellow'.; three of five bottles of dye powder I found when a dye works was being dismantled on Spring and Thompson Streets about 10 years ago. They are from 1951-54 and are labelled things like "Benzo Fast Yellow" from appealing, monolithically-named companies like General Dyestuff Corporation and National Aniline Division of the Allied Chemical and Dye Company.
I've been thinking about "disgust." Largely thats because it's something I feel rather frequently, especially in New York-- in summer. But I try not to dwell on my particular triggers. Instead I wanted to know more about the nature of disgust-- a visceral sensation, and a particularly loaded state of being. Its something that is felt bodily and mentally, and (dangerously) it can take on moral overtones. Luckily, I found the perfect primer on the subject, The Anatomy of Disgust by Michael Ian Miller (from which I took the title of this post; some of the "neighbors"being contempt, outrage, revulsion, indignation). He literally parses the term and shows why it is a surprisingly important albeit contentious concept. He says that while the content of the disgusting and the threshold of disgust varies across different societies, the concept of Culture,
"strikes us as inconceivable without disgust playing some role in its construction... To feel disgust is human and humanizing. [Those who are insensitive to disgust] belong to somewhat different categories: protohuman like children, subhuman like the mad, or suprahuman like saints."
Miller posits that disgust, rather than being anti-social, "has powerful communalizing capacities" and can help to build moral social community (grossly, 'us' versus 'them'). Intriguingly, though disgust can appear to come from a stance of superiority, it necessarily brings with it a fear and insecurity -- of contagion, of threat to order. Because of the strong feelings it elicits (mental threat and physical revulsion) it can provoke outsized reactions/retaliations that are in themselves "disgusting."
Miller also argues that a less volatile cousin of disgust, contempt, is a useful, even necessary, aspect in a democratic society-- as long as its reciprocal. (I really like this guy.) The notion is that the "lower classes" gained some kind of societal stance, some sense of 'power' when they were able to experience (and subtly express) a certain contempt toward the 'nobility' or their supposed superiors...
Addendum: etymology of "disgust": The word enters into English, from French, in the early 17th century--as Miller points out, Shakespeare had no such word. Its literal derivation means "distaste"–with regard to ingestion. He points out, though, that at the time the word appears, concern with taste–with regard to refinement and discernment-- is increasingly prevalent. Discernment and the ability to recognize and reject vulgarity is intertwined with the "civilizing process" and the contemporary rise of propriety and privacy. Then that brings about the exquisite proliferation of issues of embarrassment, guilt, and a whole psychological theater of darkness...
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The two images at top are from Freaks, Geeks & Strange Girls: Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway, neither of which I find disgusting in the least. But they do bring up this point: what happens when what at one time was considered freakish or disgusting or marginal becomes unremarkable? What happens when what is "normal" shifts–when the boundary that delineates "us" from "them" moves?
Once one gets over the initial shock of Iceland: that is--the outlandish cost of food ($15 for a bagel sandwich, $3+ for what was essentially a plastic Dixie cup of coffee) and alcohol (difficult to get drunk on $10 bottled beers) and shopping for clothes or "souvenirs" (I resorted to telling myself I was shopping at an outpost of Barney's), then its smooth sailing...
The landscape has a quasi-mythic, Tolkienian quality. An "edge of the earth" sort of mysticism that kept making me think "Stairway to Heaven" should be playing as the soundtrack. (For those of you who do not like Led Zeppelin, don't worry, it was my imaginary soundtrack)
You begin to realize how it is that these Norse countries have elves and sprites and wood nymphs in all their folk lore. Its not just that they have quite the penchant for quaint fairy tales--the landscape really shapes that sensibility. Low clouds, mist, waterfalls cascading seemingly out of nowhere, the serrated mountains. Oh and rainbows too. All that was missing were the Unicorns.
Everything is much bigger, figuratively, than you are. As opposed to New York, say, where the landscape is absent or accessible in small defined areas: a park, an angled view up to the sky ("is it going to rain?"), a fleeting glimpse of the river on a crosstown street. Without consciously realizing it I've been drawn to outsized landscapes as offering a kind of escape. Thunderstorms always thrilled me for the same reason: they were so much larger than (my) life. They hinted at larger, more universal things. They threw the small day-to-day boundaries of small day-to-day lives into highlight, and went beyond.
images: 1-4 & 6: Reykjavik. I was charmed by the corrugated metal houses!; 5: rocks on Vik beach with me reflected in each one; 7 & 9: Jokulsarlon glacial lake; 8: Skogafoss (I think!); 10: greenery ; 11: Vik beach; 12: ice cave, Solheimajokull glacier
[The first of a few posts I'll have on the trip to Iceland.]This country has the most astonishing landscape I've ever seen. The overpowering sublimity of the best spots of the American South West is perhaps similar, but in Iceland the human intervention in the landscape is so small and reserved that the experience is vastly different. The place has a vaguely mystical, other-worldly aura. My senses were changed somehow, at least while I was there.
The colors of everyday life hummed in what appeared to be quite a narrow scale–at first. But once you're attuned to Iceland's particular range, the depth and intensity are stunning: rich matte black, lunar greys, mossy green-greys, slate grey-blues, silvery sage green, icy blue-white, crisp bright sky blues, eerily luminous aqua, lush intense greens... The streetscape is dotted with houses painted in a few saturated colors, including one lipstick-dense magenta red that I never thought I'd see on a building (unfortunately I don't have a photo of that).
The light is different. It's suffused through low clouds, or mist for much of the time– then the sun breaks through and under the suddenly cloudless skies the greens and blues crackle. I can't begin to imagine what stars would look like over that landscape. (to be continued)
since you asked:
My favorite bar/cafe, the Prikid, on the main shopping street Laugevegar (sp?)
I was not aware of Carlo Bugatti when I saw (a version of) this desk (top) at the Art+Design Show at the Armory this past Thursday. The name was vaguely familiar–race cars wasn't it?* or motorcycles? But not furniture. Certainly not this slightly disturbing crenellated fantasy in walnut, copper, vellum, and mother of pearl. Why disturbing? because it was almost animalistic. And I couldn't place it– definitely Arts and Crafts-ish, sort of Eastlakean, but as though interpreted by an alien. Japanese? Indian Raj? Moorish? Arab? Yes!
