Objective Issue 1

Perspective of Objective Objective - meaning, “the purpose of a thing,” rather than “without opinion.”

This inaugural issue of the journal of the Master’s Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, offered jointly by Parsons School of Design and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, is meant to represent the breadth of our program, our interest in objects, the contexts which produced them, and the methodologies through which they can be understood.

The “decorative” or “applied” arts, the bits and pieces that make up the history of design, might seem oddly specific, but really, they are tools to be used, a primary source of incredible value for every historian and curious individual. Whether purposefully preserved treasures or the detritus of households and industry, objects are the physical presence of human ideas, and may travel through time and space to share the message of their users and makers. Careful study of objects can reveal secrets and surprises, confirm long suspected truths or bring entirely new questions to light.

The history of design is broad, and the work of students and alumni in our program reflects this. Topics in this first issue of Objective range from a Gilded Age Tiffany & Co. silver service to Socialist Realist design in the Soviet Union; from the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn to depictions of wheelchairs in early film. Through seemingly disparate subjects, common themes emerge. Issues of gender and power woven into a Napoleonic lace bedcovering reemerge stitched into twentieth-century Chilean arpilleras. The recent addition of “curatorial studies” to the program’s title emphasizes more focused attention to organizing and presenting these objects and themes in ways that are beneficial, legible and interesting to others.

“Curate” is currently a verb du jour, denoting the selection of items on cocktail menus and playlists, even lifestyle choices. And while we may find our objects all over—in museums, on stage, and, yes, even in cocktail bars—for us, curatorship implies a serious commitment to understanding objects and how to care for them. Our research is guided by principles of proper scholarship and inspired by the collections and expertise of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Under the mentorship of the faculty at Parsons School of Design, we refine and gain authority in our individual areas of interest. Most of the articles, excerpts and reviews exhibited here started in seminar classes–some became theses–and all represent what emerging scholars of the History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA Program have to offer our field.

Objects are objective. Though reflections of human ideas, they cannot speak for themselves. And so, we do our best to interpret their silence. Consider this our OBJECTIVE.

Contents

Drawing for the Avant Garde Font Katie Gross..............................................................................................8 A Taste of Luxury: Coffee Cups from the Mackay Silver Service

by Tiffany & Co.,1878 Elizabeth H. Scheuer................................................................................14 Honeybees, Fritillaria, & Empress Josephine’s Alençon Lace Bed Johanna A. Pacyga..................................................................................22 Uses of Precious Red Coral in Renaissance Italy, c.1400 - 1600 Anna Rasche..........................................................................................30 Enwheeled: Wheelchair and User in Early Film Penny Wolfson........................................................................................48 Of the Future. For the Future: The Translation of the New Soviet Man from Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism Rebecca Gross.......................................................................................62 Perspectiva corporum regularium Julia Pelkofsky.........................................................................................78 Introduction to a Thesis on the Music Box Roi Baron...............................................................................................84

Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet, by Jacqueline Adams.

Carolina Arévalo...................................................................................100 Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Andrew McClellan & “Aimed at Universality and Belonging to the Nation: the Enlightenment and the British Museum” in Enlightenment, by Kim Sloan.

Catherine Gale.....................................................................................106 Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish,

by Jane Munro.

Rita Ostrova.........................................................................................112 Scenic Design: You Can’t Take It With You Matthew Kennedy.................................................................................116 The Collector’s Cabinet, Morbid Anatomy Museum.

Samantha Wiley...................................................................................124 Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, Metropolitan Museum of Art Mae Colburn........................................................................................128 Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye, Museum of Modern Art. P.J. Carlino...........................................................................................132

Reviews Ways of Curating, by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Asad Raza.

Catherine Powell.....................................................................................96

Ten Questions With: Gregory Herringshaw, Assistant Curator in Charge of the Wallcoverings Department, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum...138

Anna Rasche Editor in Chief

Carolina ArĂŠvalo Designer

Rebecca L. Gross

Catherine Powell

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2014

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016 Catherine is a Curatorial Fellow for the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department at the Cooper Hewitt. Her interests lie in issues of design, production, and artistic identity in the tapestry workshops of the French and Northern Renaissance.

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016

Julia Pelkofsky

Roi Baron

Rebecca is a design historian based in Sydney, Australia. She is a freelance researcher and writer, and a volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, expected 2015

Laura Handlin

P.J. Carlino

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2004

Managing Editor

Marilyn Cohen PhD, Faculty Advisor

Designer

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2012 P.J. is currently a Ph.D. candidate in American and New England Studies at Boston University, investigating the history of design, manufacturing and consumer culture, and is a teaching fellow in courses relating to the history of American popular culture.

Mae Colburn Copy Editor

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2015 Mae Colburn is a second year student at Parsons/Cooper Hewitt. Her focus is in textiles with an emphasis on contemporary tapestry.

Catherine Gale MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016

Katie Gross MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016 Katie is a part-time first year student who in 2012 earned her BFA in Illustration from Parsons. She is active in her practice as a printmaker and hopes to continue focusing her studies in contemporary graphic design.

Copy Editor

Laura Handlin is an independent editor and researcher, and a former adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design.

Matthew J. Kennedy Ma in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2013

Elizabeth Scheuer Copy Editor

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2013 Elizabeth is an adjunct instructor in the History of Decorative Arts & Interior Design at SUNY Purchase, and is an associate member of the Appraisers Association of America.

Matthew currently handles image licensing for Cooper Hewitt’s publishing projects, and is also a freelance design writer. He actively pursues research focused on the intersection of design, theater and popular culture.

Samantha Wiley

Rita Ostrova

Penny Wolfson

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2012

Johanna A. Pacyga MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2010 Johanna is a doctoral student in anthropological archaeology at the University of Chicago, where she focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century francophone world. An early instantiation of this paper was presented at the Eighteenth Annual Symposium on the Decorative Arts and Design at the Cooper Hewitt.

Copy Editor

MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, expected 2016

MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, 2014 Penny Wolfson is a prize-winning essayist and book author, and is currently writing a memoir told through objects. She also runs the ebooks section of the Cooper Hewitt's publications division, and will present a talk based on this article at Columbia University's Narrative Medicine program this spring.

Objective

Drawing for the Avant Garde Font Katie Gross

Four panels of a uniquely calculated san serif alphabet are carefully laid out on aging tracing paper depicting upper case, lower case and symbol letterform sets of the font Avant Garde. The angular black letterforms are hand painted in ink on the eleven by seventeen inch sepia tinted tracing paper. Painted thickly with ink, the layers of deep black have given a bubbled sheen to the letterforms, leaving behind streaks of a coarse paintbrush. Remnants of pulled graphite ruler lines are faint, yet still confine the black shapes to designated linear spaces. In the center of the circular letterforms there appears to be an impression of a brown dot where a compass could have been Thomas Carnase, Drawings for the Avant Garde Font, 1967, pen and black ink, brush and white gouache over graphite on tracing paper. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

8

used in an effort to create a perfect circle. Circular pencil remnants can be seen on the lowercase alphabet panel, especially within both renditions of the letter ‘e’. White gouache painted with quick brush strokes hides mistakes around the chunky black letterforms, forcing the eye to move around the solid shapes and adding a hand-made quality to the very calculated pulled graphite lines. Leftover rubber glue wash on the back of the four panels adds a tint of sepia to the smooth paper creating even more contrast between forms, and allows the gauche to appear bright white on the oncetranslucent tracing paper.

A sans serif font composed of angular letterforms reminiscent of early twentieth-century typography is a basic way to describe Avant Garde.

However, this font was and is so much more than a simple replication of its predecessors, Futura or Helvetica; 9

a new typeface of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is emblematic of the tumultuous history between the designer Tom Carnase and the larger New York firm for which he worked.

Though attributed and donated to the Cooper Hewitt by Carnase, the font itself was commissioned by Ralph Ginzburg and conceived by Herb Lubalin for the magazine Avant Garde.

The somewhat scandalous history of the font is an undercurrent to its immense popularity during the late twentieth century and early twentyfirst century. Yet many contemporary users do not understand the unique stamp Avant Garde left on the design industry compared to other types of the time such as Baby Teeth by Milton Glaser or ITC Ronda by Herb Lubalin. Avant Garde started a return to ‘good’ design during a time period exemplified by the popular and decorative Art Nouveau style.Though eventually overused, the Avant Garde font is notable for its contemporary social and political history and for its call to return to functional design during the late twentieth century.

As mentioned previously, the Cooper Hewitt credits the four drawings for the font Avant Garde to Tom Carnase, but this font in the contemporary design world is attributed to the renowned designer Herb Lubalin. A key player in forms of modern typography, Lubalin created his own design firm with his associate Aaron Burns in 1970 called Lubalin,

Burns & Co.1 The main focus of the company was to provide contemporary design services and create typefaces exclusively for New York advertising agencies. Lubalin, Burns & Co. like to say they were “the first typo-graphics agency” in the world, licensing and producing exclusive contemporary fonts, which no one else really had ever done.2 Though Herb Lubalin was on the corporate track, he still worked with his good friend Ralph Ginzburg and Ginzburg’s wife Shoshanna on their risqué, personally published magazines that were Playboy-esque, but also addressed current issues in politics and contemporary art. The first and most extreme magazine of the Ginzburgs was Eros, published in 1962. It showcased nude photos of Marilyn Monroe as well as short stories

by Ray Bradbury and a poem by Allen Ginsberg.3 Eros was written and directed by Ginzburg, but art directed

by Lubalin, who proudly designed the logo. Eros only lasted for four issues before it was shut down by the United States Government for sending immoral content through the U.S. Postal Service.4 Yet Ginzburg, even after the long trial which resulted—and went to the Supreme Court—was not finished with the magazine business. Instead, he decided to start another magazine with his wife and Lubalin, this one focusing more on politics, art and social issues. As usual, Lubalin art directed the magazine, and Ginzburg

1

TwoPoints.net, I Love Avant Garde (Hong Kong: Victionary, 2010), 3.

Ibid.

3 “Crimes Against Typography,” last modified August 4, 2004, http://www.aiga. org/crimes-against- typography/ 4 Ibid.

2

10

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commissioned Lubalin and his firm for the logo of the magazine to be called Avant Garde. Lubalin struggled to create the identity and was having trouble coming up with the idea for the logo until Shoshanna Ginzburg set him on the straight and narrow by stating, ‘‘I asked him to picture a very modern, clean European airport (or the TWA terminal, with signs in stark black and white). Then I told him to imagine a jet taking off to the future.”5 Lubalin adapted the gothic fonts Helvetica and Futura, but then took them apart, condensed them and forced the angular shapes to come together to create the Avant Garde logo. Lubalin turned his sketch over to the type designer at the firm, Tom Carnase, who rendered the final logo to perfection. Lubalin then requested that Carnase compose lettering for headlines to match the original logo for the magazine spreads. Carnase realized that by then he had designed enough letters to create a whole alphabet, and began finalizing the letterforms that would eventually become the typeface Avant Garde.6 12

Though the magazine Avant Garde lived a short life between 1968 and 1971, it managed to address everything from the Vietnam War to nudes by Picasso. It was meant for the designer elite. Most subscribers were fellow New York designers working in large firms and looking for new ideas from Herb Lubalin, one of the top designers of the time. The decline of the magazine only fueled the desire of all the art directors and design enthusiasts who subscribed to the magazine over its three years to own the font Avant Garde. Lubalin decided to create a sub company of his firm called International Typography Corporation, which licensed the use of fonts—specifically his fonts—including Avant Garde.7 He actually offered the font’s rights to Ginzburg, but due to heavy legal fees from Eros, Ginzburg could not afford the rights and was forced to decline the offer. While Carnase still retains ownership of all the original drawings for the light, medium and demi bold Avant Garde layouts, Lubalin did not share with him any of the profits from licensing

the font. As Carnase said, “I resented it highly, this was no way to treat a partner.”8 Though mad about the money, Carnase was more furious about the misuse of the font. During the 1970s the font was suddenly everywhere, becoming iconic of the period. In fact, Avant Garde did not stop in the 1970s but remains alive today.

Steven Heller finally and “officially” killed the Avant Garde font on August 4, 2004 when he published ‘Crimes Against Typography’ on the AIGA blog. A lecture about the font’s history

by Heller concludes with a rant against the growing overuse and abuse of the font by young budding designers. The market became flooded with this easily recognizable angular font suggestive of a higher understanding of typography given its nostalgic connotations of the 1970s. However, the font thinks too highly of itself given the fact that fonts

before Avant Garde such as Gill Sans, Futura and even Helvetica, were doing the same thing and doing it much better. Carnase’s fears of the over use of Avant Garde were justified; the typeface he worked so hard to produce was misused, becoming nothing but a one-trick pony due to Lubalin’s licensing. Perhaps, one day it will return to the innovative, slightly sexy state of its 1968 hay day. But for now, Heller puts it best: Eventually, after excessive overuse and rampant abuse, its quirkiness became simply irksome — something like the paisley typefaces — no longer fashionable, but not entirely obsolete either. Today, Avant Garde is having something of a revival on the pages of some magazines. For some it may even be an alternative to the more elegant contemporary graphics.

As for me, I’m happy to say I kicked the habit.9

5

Ibid.

TwoPoints.net, I Love Avant Garde, 4.

7 Ibid, 3.

8 “Crimes Against Typography,” last modified August 4, 2004, http://www.aiga. org/crimes-against-typography/ 9 Ibid.

6

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A Taste of Luxury: Coffee Cups from the Mackay Silver Service by Tiffany & Co., 1878 Elizabeth H. Scheuer

These two after-dinner coffee cups from the Mackay Silver Service are silver-gilt and champlevé enamel.

They have a barrel form, with four-part shaped feet, and handles decorated with foliate chasing. The enamel decoration is geometric floral and oriental motifs, primarily in dark red, black, blue, and white. The gilt ground is additionally chased with leafy decoration. On each cup is a shield, on an enclosed background of light blue, with the crest or arms of the Hungerford family. Below the shield is a monogram composed of the intertwined letters MLM, for Marie Louise (Hungerford) Mackay.

The shield is a background of black outlined in gold, on which appear two horizontal gold bars, above which are three small gold circles. Below the shield is a gold-rimmed black ribbonshaped banner with the words “Et dieu mon appui” (And God My Support).

Above the shield is a crest that includes motifs of a thistle and a shamrock to symbolize Mrs. Mackay’s Scottish and Irish origins. The cups are generally in excellent condition, with minor loss of enamel consistent with use over the years (Figs. 1-2).

These two enameled cups, and the massive silver service of which they

Opposite page: Fig. 1. Tiffany & Co., Two Coffee Cups from the Mackay Service, 1877-78, silvergilt and champlevé enamel.

Fig. 2. Tiffany & Co., side view of Two Coffee Cups from the Mackay Service, 1877-78, silver-gilt and champlevé enamel.

Image courtesy M.S. Rau Antiques, New Orleans.

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15

are a part, are emblematic of the opulence and excess of the Gilded Age. Created for John and Marie Louise Mackay by Tiffany & Co., the silver reflected the rags-to-riches ambition of the Mackays as well as the ever-increasing extravagance of silver tableware. Exhibited at the Paris International Exposition of 1878, they garnered both criticism and critical praise, but helped win Tiffany & Co. the Grand Prix, a special gold medal for Edward C. Moore, and the medal of the Legion of Honor for Charles Louis Tiffany.

When nine-year-old John Mackay arrived in America in1840 as a poor immigrant from Ireland, he could not have imagined that he would one day be one of the richest men in the country. Mackay travelled to California in 1851 to follow the gold rush. He learned much in eight years of labor, but it was not until he moved to Nevada in 1859 that fortune truly found him. Early employment as a mining contractor led to partial ownership of the legendary Comstock Lode, and the discovery of the “Big Bonanza” in 1873.1 In 1867 Mackay married Marie Louise Hungerford Bryant, a young widow of Irish, Scottish and French origin who was supporting herself and her daughter as a seamstress in Virginia City, Nevada.

By the early 1870s, after Mackay had become a rich man, Mrs. Mackay moved first to San Francisco, then to 1

New York where she hoped to join society life. Rejected by the elite social leaders there, she moved to Paris, where she lived among high society, entertaining luminaries such as former President Ulysses S. Grant, for many years before establishing a residence in London.2 According to family legend, Marie Louise Mackay visited Virginia City for the last time in 1874 before moving to Paris. During her visit she accompanied her husband fifteen hundred feet down an elevator to see the famous Big Bonanza. While down in the mine, her husband gave her a twisted piece of silver, and she had the idea of making “some fine and memorable thing of it.”3 Mackay promised her enough silver for a dinner service made by the finest silversmith in the country, and later sent half a ton of pure silver to Tiffany & Co.’s Prince Street manufactory. It was reported that it took Tiffany’s two years to complete the service, with two hundred men working on the project, for a total of more than a million manhours.4 Company records suggest that Tiffany’s probably employed at least 100 craftsmen in the early 1870s; they averaged around 300 men, women and boy workers in the 1880’s, and had over 400 by 1910.5 One may infer from these numbers that Tiffany’s might have had to hire extra people to complete this commission, or at least that virtually the entire work

Carpenter, Charles H., Jr. with Mary Grace Carpenter. Tiffany Silver. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1978, 57.

2 Ibid.

3 Berlin, Ellin. Silver Platter. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1957, 210.

4 Carpenter, 58.

5 Venable, 74.

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force was deployed in working on the Mackay silver. Edward C. Moore, one of the main Tiffany’s designers, was responsible for the design, for which he obtained U.S. Patent No. 10524 on March 12, 1878.6 The Mackay service numbered approximately 1,250 pieces, of which 918 were flatware.7 The remainder consisted of a vast selection of hollowware and table accessories such as napkin clips, service trays, and so forth. The service included many different patterns, all in ornate forms of floral, foliate, and Near Eastern decoration. Certain pieces have designs reminiscent of Japanese ceramics and textiles, but Tiffany’s called the overall design Indian in its records.8 Every piece in the service, in perfect proportion to its size, has Marie Louise Mackay’s monogram MLM, and the Hungerford family motto and crest, which was designed for her.9 The coffee cups were part of an after-dinner service, and together with small spoons and butterfly-shaped napkin clips, were the only pieces decorated with champlevé enameling rather than elaborate repoussé or chasing.10 According to Florence Howe Hall, author of Social Customs, the

etiquette of the late nineteenth century required that, “After dinner coffee should always be café noir, or strong black coffee. It should be poured out in the kitchen or butler’s pantry and handed round on a silver in tiny cups, with tiny gold or silver spoons and lump sugar, but no cream or milk.”11 The Mackay silver service was delivered in 1878 directly to Paris, where Marie Louise Mackay was living. It arrived in nine mahogany and walnut trunks, each bearing a silver plaque listing the contents.12 An accompanying leather silver-trimmed album contained photographs of all the pieces included in the enormous silver service. Tiffany’s exhibited some of the service at the Paris International Exposition that year, as part of its exhibition wares, which were divided into six different classes of goods.13 The Illustrated Catalogue of the Paris International Exhibition noted that exhibitions were “superior shops on a grand scale, but they include much that cannot be seen in any shop …unique works of art which but for such exhibitions would be hidden from the outer world in palaces and grand mansions.”14 Tiffany’s itself was modest about its display: “Messrs.

6

USPTO Website. (Notably, the application was only filed on February 11 of that year; this represents an unusually short turnaround on a patent application, and Tiffany’s must have had some influence in the Patent Office to get the patent granted in time for production that spring.)

7 Carpenter, 61.

8 Ibid, 62, 64.

9 Ibid, 62.

10 Ibid, 65.

11 Ibid, 95.

12 Ibid, 61.

13 Official Catalogue of the United States Exhibitors, Paris Universal Exposition MDCCC LXXVIIII. London: Printed at the Chiswick Press, 1878, 173, 174, 177, 182, 185.

14 The Illustrated Catalogue of the Paris International Exhibition, 1878. London: Virtue & Co., Limited, 1878, 15.

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Tiffany & CO’s display of silverware at the International Exhibition is made up of articles taken from their regular manufactures for the current season’s business, together with part of a service just completed to fulfill an order, and several pieces of their make kindly loaned by the owners.”15 By showing the Mackay silver, Tiffany’s could fill their cases at the exhibition without having to create additional new pieces with no guaranteed purchasers. This, together with the fact that the silver was to be shipped to Paris in any case, represented considerable convenience and costs savings to the company.16 Tiffany’s, which also received rave reviews for its newly made objects of Japanese-inspired mixed-metals, received a grand prize for artwork in silver against such European firms as Elkington’s, Odiot, and Christofle.17 It is impossible to know what role the Mackay pieces played in this honor, but the connection and the international recognition can only have redounded to the benefit of both Tiffany’s and the Mackays.

A contemporary report praised the Mackay service: “This gorgeous set… comprises several hundred pieces, including nearly every article that ever is or has been made of silver— punch bowl, soup tureen, dishes, trays, tea things, spoons, forks, etc.,

in bewildering variety and number.

All the work was done by hand, and the rich floriated designs are all in full relief.... This splendid service alone would form a very full exhibit.”18 Back in New York, however, the New York Daily Tribune, though acknowledging the work that went into the service, considered it ostentatious (maybe even vulgar), referring to it as “a monument of the wealth of the owner. To put as much silver into it as possible, to put as much work on the silver as possible to impress the beholder at the same time with the enormous costliness of the service and the skill of its makers—is apparently the object, and is beyond question the effect, of this large accumulation of coin and cunning.”19 The Mackay Silver Service, a dinner and dessert service for 24, was the first, largest and most ornate of six private custom-designed flatware patterns produced by Tiffany & Co. in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.20 John and Marie Louise Mackay, in owning a private custom design from Tiffany’s, belonged to an elite group including J. Pierpont Morgan, “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt and his sons, William Randolph Hearst, and Mary Frances Hopkins (widow of Mark Hopkins).21 This was precisely the company in which the Mackays wished to be found. Custom patterns were so elite

15 Loring, John. Tiffany Style: 170 Years of Design. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008, 24.

16 Venable, Charles L. Silver in America 1840-1940: A Century of Splendor. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1994, 107.

17 Venable, 112.

18 Carpenter, 59.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid, 99.

18

Fig. 3 Scientific American, The Manufacture of Silverware, May 12, 1877, print.

19

because they required specially made dies, which were time-consuming and costly to produce. Dies were often kept in safes or vaults to protect from theft or copying, and could represent half the assets of a company, including land and structures. In 1901 Tiffany’s had about 10,000 dies, indexed and accessible.22 There was strong competition for skilled die-cutters, and during the period of the Mackay service production Tiffany’s employed Florent Antoine Heller, one of the best known.23 It is likely that he worked on the dies for the Mackay service.

Views of the Tiffany manufactory from the 1870s and 1880s show some of the processes involved in silver pieces (Fig. 3). A description of the design room of the Prince Street manufactory in 1887 conveys a vivid sense of the space, which would have included an extensive library of pattern books, trade catalogues, books of rarities, and so forth: Our first impression as we enter is that we have strayed into the Museum of Natural History. All around are wellpreserved counterfeits of birds and smaller animals, as also gourds, ears of corn, grasses, &c., all of which have already served, or still serve, as studies. Running back the entire length of the long, light room are drawing-boards, at which sit busy designers, while about them hang plaster casts, models and electrotypes of designs which have graced work previously done.24 At the middle of the nineteenth century, an average American silver service would have contained table forks, tablespoons, teaspoons, and 20

a few serving pieces; knives might not have matched the other pieces.

A few dessert pieces might match or be of a separate service.25 By the post-Civil War period, however, that had all changed. In 1868 it was said that there was “more solid silver plate owned in the United States than in any other country of the world….

There are few families among us so poor as not to have a few ounces of silver plate, and forlorn indeed must be the bride who does not receive upon her wedding-day some article made of this beautiful metal.”26 In the last third of the nineteenth century, dining implements had become steadily more numerous and variegated, and the Mackay Service epitomized the increased extravagance in both style and number. Several factors combined to permit the development of such opulence and the general rise in silver consumption. In the post-Civil War years as per capita income increased steadily,27 the opening of silver mines in the American West resulted in the steady decline of silver bullion prices.28 Ownership of silver was a longstanding symbol of high social status,29and lower classes eagerly purchased the newly affordable goods in imitation of the wealthy.

In addition, improved methods of growing, processing, and transporting foods resulted in an expansion of the American diet. With the introduction of foods such as sardines, anchovies, celery, salads, and ice cream wealthy diners required—of course—a wide range of individualized eating implements. Lastly, dining style

changed from “a la Française” to “a la Russe.” In the former, many dishes were put on the table together, for guests to serve themselves according to their choice or which platters they could reach. In the latter dining style, first introduced in Paris in the 1830s by the Russian ambassador but arriving in the United States some time later, each course was served separately. The sequence might include soup, fish, an entrée (precursor to main course), meat, game, dessert, and other dishes. Fresh flatware was provided for each course. This new system of formal dining promoted the creation of flatware specific to each food type as well as multiples of common eating implements.30 The manufacturers were quick to take advantage of these changes, and ensuing competition resulted in the production of a bewildering array of choices for silver flatware.

The Mackay Silver Service, represents a confluence of factors prevailing in the Gilded Age. John Mackay made his fortune in silver, a burgeoning commodity in America in the years after the Civil War; Marie Louise Mackay was determined to enter the highest levels of society, and could command all the tools necessary to that pursuit. Dining habits had changed to promote an explosive expansion of accessories necessary for the well-outfitted home; Tiffany’s was eager for the private custom work, and had the skilled workmen to design and execute the commission. The completion of the commission in time for the 1878 Paris International Exposition was an extra bonus for both Tiffany’s and the Mackays. Although the twentieth century saw a simplification of dining habits, it is impossible not to admire these two beautiful coffee cups, and the entire Mackay service, as emblematic of the highest products of a bygone age.

21

Ward, Barbara McLean and Gerald W.R. Ward, Eds. Silver in American Life. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1979, 300.

22 Venable, 78.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ward, 37.

26 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 37, No. 220 (September 1868): 434 (“Silver and Silver Plate”).

27 Venable, 123.

28 Ward, 37.

29 Venable, 123.

30 Ward, 37-38.

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Honeybees, Fritillaria, & Empress Josephine’s Alençon Lace Bed Johanna A. Pacyga

In 1808, Empress Josephine of France commissioned a luxurious set of linen lace bed hangings from the Clérambault lace manufactory.1 The commission, referred to as the Alençon lace bed, testifies to the return of luxury materials and fine decorative arts during the Empire period. This rejuvenation of French crafts was instigated by imperial court etiquette and policy supporting domestic industry in the wake of economic depression caused by the Revolution. In this context, Empress Josephine’s propagation of postrevolutionary Neoclassicism was central to the visual-political success of the Napoleonic court. As a principal tastemaker at the apex of postrevolutionary and imperial society, she both determined and popularized Clérambault, Valance Fragment from Malmaison, c. 1796-1810, point d’Alençon lace. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

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the hallmarks of Empire style through her own choices of fashion and décor, providing the Napoleonic regime with an aura of legitimacy and pedigree. As the emperor’s consort, Josephine was integral to the creation and implementation of imperial iconography, playing a key role in the establishment of Napoleonic legitimacy on an international scale.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (CHSDM) object 1962-50-69 is a fragment of Alençon lace, identified as having been part of Josephine’s lace bed. Although a late example, this fragment is a fine specimen of the handmade needlepoint method characteristic of Alençon (as opposed to bobbin-made laces from other centers). Alençon is a traditional lace center in Normandy, and was the location of the prestigious Clérambault manufactory where the bed was produced.2 23

The set of hangings was purportedly delivered to the imperial household around 1811.3 Subsequently, it is unclear as to how, when, or why the bed furnishings were parceled and dispersed. It is likely that after the fall of the Empire in 1815 the hangings were dismantled for use as commemorative objects. According to F.B. Palliser, lace historian, fragments of the set had been sold at the “ancient fabric of Mercier at Lonnay” many years before Palliser's 1864 visit to Alençon, at which point the firm had one small piece remaining.4 It is likely that the 1840 return of Napoleon’s remains to Paris—orchestrated with much pomp and celebration under the reign of Louis-Philippe— provided an advantageous sociopolitical climate in which to market fragments as Napoleonic souvenirs.

The CHSDM fragment, from the 1

collection of Richard C. Greenleaf, was most likely purchased between 1940 and 1962, at which point Greenleaf donated his collection to the Cooper Union Museum (now in the CHSDM collection).5 Greenleaf appears to have been unaware of the fragment’s origins: in his catalog entry the object is described as a “portion of a flounce,” with no mention of Napoleonic connection despite the blatant iconographic reference.6 Other fragments of the Alençon bed appear in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

An opulent commission, the design is overt in its use of Napoleonic symbolism, mainly in the form of the imperial bee. However, the overall design is replete with naturalistic iconography associated with the Empire, including the imperial

Fragment of valance: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Textiles Department, Object 1962-50-69, donated by Richard Greenleaf.

2 Félix Boulard, La Dentelle d’Alençon: ses origines, ses développements techniques et industriels, artistiques et historiques (Alençon: Imprimerie Alençonnaise, 1924), 228.

3 Originally dated at “before 1810,” my research implies a date range of 1809-1811 for the final manufacture of the lace hangings, placing the commission most likely sometime in 1808.

4 Fanny Bury Palliser, History of Lace, (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1865), 178-179.

It is unclear as to why the fragments were sold by the Mercier firm, rather than by the Clérambault firm that originally produced the lace; however, Palliser’s book is illustrated by a photograph of a fragment clearly belonging to the Alençon lace bed as produced by the Clérambault firm, owned by Charles-Pierre and his wife, Louise Ratier, both well established, high-profile merchant names in the industry.

G. Despierres, who wrote the first comprehensive history of Alençon lace in 1886, complied a directory of lace families, and she specifically noted the bedding commission under Louise Ratier’s name.

Gerasime Despierres, Histoire du point d’Alençon, depuis son origine jusq’au nos jours (Paris: Librairie Renouard, H. Laurens, Successeur, 1886).

5 Richard Cranch Greenleaf, “Lace from the Collection of Richard C. Greenleaf,” three-ring binder album of 57 photographic prints mounted on blank leaves of paper, with annotations and captions by Greenleaf (1940).

This was a personal record belonging to Greenleaf with photographs and both handwritten and typed descriptions of the items. Object 1962-50-69 is not included and it is certainly distinctive enough that it would have been, therefore it is surmised that the fragment was not yet in the collection in 1940.

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fritillaria blossom (belonging to the lily family). Alongside the familiar Romaninspired motifs of Empire (i.e. the eagle, Winged Victory), naturalistically rendered flowers, butterflies, and honeybees were integral to Empire design.7 The CHSDM object measures 52 by 49 centimeters, and is sprinkled with an all-over pattern of the Napoleonic honeybee. The selvage is visible along the upper edge, signifying that the valence remains at its intended height; presumably this edge would have been sewn to a stronger fabric for hanging purposes. Below the field of honeybees, a garland of fritillarias winds along the bottom third of the valance, followed by a scalloped border of stylized floral garland motifs with leaves and berries.8 These were the only decorative elements included in the commission, aside from Josephine’s personal insignia at each corner of the curtains and possibly a central depiction of the arms of the Empire (not present in the CHSDM object).9 The empress’ insignia consisted of a crowned “J” in the form of a cornucopia, framed by a circlet of laurel leaves.

The main body of the fragment is constructed of typical Alençon

buttonhole net ground—the réseau.

This foundational stitch is the identifying characteristic of point d’Alençon. As a ‘true’ needle lace (à l’aiguille), “it is built up stitch by stitch on an outline structure of thick threads tacked along the lines of a design drawn out on a parchment [or vellum] pattern.”10 Needle laces are composed of variations on the buttonhole stitch, which is modified with the addition of extra twists, loops and knots around the basic detached stitches.11 In the case of Alençon lace, the resulting body consists of tiny hexagons forming the net ground, which is quite fine and creates a sheer backdrop for pictorial depictions. The makers of Alençon lace were highly acclaimed for their skillful working of figures: historian G.M. Tracy referred to Alençon lace as, “la précieuse, la royale.”12 Figures are modeled by the manipulation of the buttonhole stitch in the réseau, rempli, and fond. Shading is achieved via the use of stitches either more or less tightly spaced than the réseau. These stitches are referred to as the rempli; specialist lace makers called remplisseuses were responsible for figure-work. There are various types of fillings, including: gaze serré or ordinaire, gaze claire, gaze quadrillée, point à trou,

6

Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, “The Greenleaf collection: Textile Arts from the 16th to the Early 19th century,” (New York: Cooper Union Museum, 1964), 16.

7 Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, ed., Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style, 1800-1815 (New York: Abrams, 2007), 246-298.

8 Cooper Union Museum, “The Greenleaf collection,”16.

9 Palliser originated the inclusion of a central coat of arms; however, all sources agree on the inclusion of Josephine’s monogram. Palliser, History of Lace, 178.

10 Santina M. Levey, Lace: A History (Leeds, England: Victoria & Albert Museum/ W. S. Mancy and Son, Limited, 1983), 1-2.

11 Ibid., 2.

12 G. M. Tracy, Dentelles et Dentelières de France (Paris: Didier, 1946), 40.

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and point mignon. Some of these have picot, or little barbs that stick out into the space of the hexagonal net, others employ extra looping of the thread to create thicker lines, and of course, the closeness of the stitches also has a great effect. Skillful manipulation of these variations on the stitch allowed the remplisseuse to create the painterly figures for which Alençon laces are famed.13 In his booklet on laces of the Orne, the Abbé Leboulanger declares Alençon lace superior to those from other regions because: [It is] …exclusively worked with a needle; with this tiny tool, the lace maker is able to reproduce with a precision which nothing equals, the most varied designs and pictures, the most lively sceneries. In the hand of the skillful worker the needle acts in the way of a pencil.14 Ancien régime fashion, anchored in the baroque and rococo, had demanded elaborate ornament, resulting in complex laces encrusted with figural scenes. After the Revolution, reigning Neoclassicism called for clean lines and simplicity in ornament. Empire style—in direct opposition to the ancien régime—codified this simplicity into opulent sobriety.15 In Empire laces one sees a growing emphasis on the transparent quality of the net and the

depiction of orderly and sparse figures.

Wide fields of net sprinkled with dots and bordered by a scalloped edge, often with tiny bouquet motifs, are the norm.16 Here, Napoleonic honeybees take the place of dots. They are portrayed in aerial view, wings slightly spread, and staggered in ten rows of fifteen columns, coming to a total of seventyfour individual figures on the Cooper Hewitt object. This number is truly remarkable, given that this is only a tiny fragment of the total set, which included valances, tester, curtains, bedspread, and pillow coverings.17.

Each honeybee is meticulously handcrafted, and, although they are all modeled on the same pattern, each bee has its own irregularities—a personal record of every remplisseuse involved in the project.

The fritillaria blossoms are formed by artful working of the lace in three degrees of density, achieved by extra loops and twists within each basic stitch. This adroit treatment of the linen creates the effect of three different shades of white. The buds and undersides of the petals are made in such a tight stitch that unless inspected very closely, it appears they are solid and perhaps even made of fabric stitched onto the net surface.

13 In 2010, point d’Alençon was inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity for France.

UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage: Alençon Lace” UNESCO.org (2010), http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00438 (accessed January 17, 2015).

14 J. Leboulanger, Les dentelles de l’Orne. (Argentan, FR: Imprimerie Émile Langlois, 1919), n.p.

15 Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, Symbols of Power, 106.

16 Despierres, Alençon Lace, 34.

17 N. Hudson Moore, The Lace Book, engravings by Charles E. Cartwright, decorations after Bodoni (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, [1904]), 140.

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Where the undersides of leaves are seen, and in the interiors of the flowers, a more loosely constructed stitch conveys a less opaque ‘color.’

Lastly, the tops of the leaves consist of the least dense stitch—or the lightest ‘color,’ which is only slightly smaller than the réseau. In such a way, the execution of the fritillaria garland creates a truly amazing sense of depth and realism. Such realistic rendering is typical of French decorative arts at the time, and testifies to the level of skill retained in the lace industry during the Empire, despite its long hiatus caused by revolutionary upheaval.

According to Despierres, the laborious process through which a piece of lace such as this was produced included twelve steps18: (1) le dessin (drawing the design), (2) le picage (pricking the design onto parchment or velum), (3) la trace (laying couching threads along figure outlines), (4) le champs (the grounding réseau), (5) le fond (the most basic filling in of the figures), (6) la bride (links between ornamental figures) or rempli (open net, creating even lighter ‘colors,’ also linking figures), (7) les modes (the most complicated figural stitch), (8) la brode (thick, knotted outlining of figures, sometimes with horsehair padding), (9) l’enlevage (detaching and lifting the lace off the parchment), (10) l’eboutage (pulling out couching threads still attached to the lace), (11) la régalage (repairing damage suffered caused by the detachment), (12) l’assemblage (the

“putting together consists of putting the designs in order and joining them by sewing. When it is a matter of the champ [sic.] [the main body], be it brides or réseau, the meshes are remade so that the assemblage does not show”).19 In the case of an average-sized, high quality piece, eighteen women may have been employed, stitching segments to be assembled.20 If an average piece of lace is a flounce or a veil, then it would have taken dozens of workers to produce the Alençon lace bed. The commission was a physically enormous undertaking: each curtain measured 144 by 98 inches, and the bedspread came to 85 by 75 inches.21 Hand-made lace is rarely seen in such great quantity because of the hours of craftsmanship and the number of laborers required to produce such a work of art. Josephine was fully aware of her husband’s dedication to rehabilitating French industry and would have been conscious of the statement that an entire bed furnishing of Alençon lace could make. This was a high-profile commission, even for the imperial household, and a great expression of the regime’s support for the lace industry. Josephine’s order of such an extensive quantity of handcrafted lace reflected both the economic agenda of the Empire and her astute understanding of the visual politics at work in Napoleonic Europe.

Napoleon considered his first wife to

18

Despierres, Alençon Lace, 30-45.

Ibid., 45.

20 Emily Leigh Lowes, Chats on Old Lace and Needlework (London: T.F. Unwin, 1908), 77.

21 Levey, Lace, 83.

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be an intelligent confidant regarding the needs and goals of his Empire, intimately involved in establishing and disseminating Empire style as form of socio-political power.22 Framed as such, and given the delicate and extremely costly nature of such an amount of Alençon lace, combined with the political motif, this lace was presumably intended to adorn a bed of state. During the First Empire, the state bed did not carry the same performative cachet as it had in the ancien regime, but it did retain a degree of symbolic functionality.

According to A. Beldegreen, the Revolution put an end to the glorification and ceremoniousness of the bed in general, and the bed of state particularly.23 Josephine and Napoleon shared a practical bedroom at Tuileries, where there was no réveillé ceremony (as there had been under the ancien régime). The Emperor’s valet, Constant, would enter between seven and eight in the morning to take their morning beverage requests. This was a purely intimate setting, devoid of a retinue of attendants.24 Afterwards, however, Josephine would spend the morning in her own apartment, which included a formal bedroom centered around a state bed. Josephine was famous for the marketplace-like atmosphere of her bedroom during the morning hours when dozens of vendors and marchands de mode came to 22

her apartment with the knowledge that the she could not resist satisfying her appetite for the latest fashions.25 The state bed would have been mainly used for receiving if the Empress was feeling somewhat indisposed but was still able to accept visitors. S.M. Levey’s proposed reconstruction of the lace bed is comparable to the state bed at Compiègne.26 Interior decoration was entirely revamped after the Revolution, and although Empire style utilized some elements popularized during the Directory, the interiors designed for—and influenced by—Josephine and Napoleon adhere to the distinct aesthetic of the Empire period. The style is based on classical simplicity of line, in conjunction with somber luxury, richness of materials, and bold colors. Beds were based on a classical model (as opposed to those in the style of Daniel Marot and the ancien regime), usually set against the wall on their long side, furnishings suspended from a central point in a tent-like manner.

This fashion originated during the Directory, during which Josephine was the toast of Parisian society, one of the so-called “Three Graces,” alongside Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier.27 From this privileged social position Josephine became a central arbiter of taste, two attributes which ran hand in hand in nineteenth-

André Castelot, Sur les pas de Joséphine, (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 114-117.

Alecia Beldegreen, The Bed, photographs by Thibault Jeanson and Lilo Raymond (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991), 29.

24 Christopher Hibbert, Napoleon: His Wives and Women, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), 146.

25 Ibid., 145.

26 Levey, Lace, illustration no. 365.

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century France where it was “tacitly understood that décor [was] a reliable index of ones taste and certainly social status.”28 Josephine’s take on the predominant styles of the early nineteenth century quickly became codified into the Empire style, as the French court regained its position at the center of design. Josephine had long been a patron of the arts and had a knack for picking out the artists and designers that came to define the era—such as Prud’hon, Percier, and Fontaine, who were responsible for some of her most well-known interiors, including her favorite residence, the Château de Malmaison.29 In the context of early nineteenth-century Europe, political legitimacy and power were intimately linked to the effective deployment of a coherent visual program of fine art, architecture, and decorative arts. The objects with which Josephine surrounded herself and the imperial court as a whole served not only to identify the Napoleonic regime with a stylistic lexicon, but also to imbue it with gravitas and legitimacy by means of taste.

Once Napoleon crowned Josephine his empress, he mobilized her renowned taste and superb social abilities to attain an atmosphere of legitimacy and refinement about the imperial court. As an aristocrat of the ancien regime, formerly the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, Josephine knew the old families Napoleon needed

to incorporate back into his own court, in the name of prestige and legitimacy. She also understood how things ‘ought’ to be at court. Josephine and her extensive familial ties, social connections, and knowledge of the old etiquette, …served as catalyst for the successful amalgamation of émigrés from the ancien regime with [Napoleon’s] own aristocracy of merit… Her unfailing sense of style and her savoir faire are universally admitted, and they significantly compensated for the emperor’s rude outbursts, which alienated people who could have been immensely useful to him.30 In a way, Josephine was the embodiment of Napoleon’s agenda for legitimacy, which above all depended on a carefully constructed image, drawing from ancien regime etiquette and formality, and Neoclassical design.

She understood how to present both herself and the physical spaces of the court in a way befitting an empire.

The Cooper Hewitt lace fragment is a physical testimony to Josephine’s understanding of the importance of proper representation, and to the crisp naturalism indicative of Empire Neoclassical style applied especially to flowers and insects.31 The Alençon lace bed was likely intended to be the centerpiece in one of her formal bedchambers, where it would have served as an elegant propaganda piece of the Empire.

27 Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution, (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1988), 127.

28 DeLorme, Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, 57.

29 DeLorme, Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress, 6.

30 Ibid., 3.

31 Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, Symbols of Power, 246-298.

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Uses of Precious Red Coral in Renaissance Italy, c.1400 - 1600 Anna Rasche

INTRODUCTION

The story of precious red coral in Renaissance Italy is one of superstitious beliefs rooted in the deepest past. Ancient peoples imbued coral with magical and apotropaic powers which were recorded by scholars of the classical era. These classical texts were preserved, translated and reinterpreted by learned men up through the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, Italians, like their Roman ancestors, still treasured the magical properties of coral but had also adopted coral as a symbol of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Scientifically-minded individuals puzzled over coral’s proper taxonomical classification—was it animal, vegetable or mineral? Fine

specimens became a popular addition to collectors’ cabinets of the sixteenth century. Because of the great longevity and potency of symbolism ascribed to red coral, Renaissance families employed it for a wealth of decorative objects that played parts in some of the most intimate and sacred moments of family life. These objects appear with frequency in artworks and inventories of the period. Less tangible in the historical record of the Renaissance are the medicines eagerly imbibed by those who would seek to benefit from coral’s purported powers. A study of coral materials and objects sheds light on the ancient and contemporary origins of the hopes, fears and motivations of one of the most studied societies in Western history.

Fig.1. Domenico di Bartolo, Birth of the Baptist, c.1440, painted panel birth tray. Galleria Franchetti, Ca’ d’Oro, Venice.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CORAL ON THE ITALIAN PENINSULA

Corallium rubrum, or precious red Mediterranean coral, consists of colonies of tiny sea creatures called polyps. These polyps secrete calcium carbonate and other minerals to form a bony skeleton, which anchors to a hard surface and grows outwards from its base in branch-like formations.

The skeleton, which in the case of corallium rubrum is a highly saturated, orangey-red color, is what is harvested and used as ornament in the decorative arts. Falling between three and four on the Mohs hardness scale, coral is durable enough for ornamental use but soft enough to be carved with ease.1 The greatest limitation to the craftsperson is the size and shape in which the branches grow. When unmolested by humans or disease, corallium rubrum can grow up to 50cm tall and live to be 100 years old.2 Sometimes, branches of coral break off and are washed up on shore, which is probably how humans first encountered it in prehistoric times. It can be hypothesized that early humans associated blood with life, and red coral with blood. Thus, by wearing a piece of coral, one possessed a tangible piece of this vital life force.

1

Eventually, people would have become proactive about acquiring coral instead of waiting to find a piece by chance.3 The first Italian coral fisherman are unknown, but the practice must have been well established by Roman times because methods are mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the 1st century CE.4 Gathering coral is a simple trawling operation, and the general principles have remained unchanged throughout the centuries. A boat is maneuvered above the rocky patches of sea-floor where coral is known to grow. Then, cross-shaped frames that have been weighted down and hung with nets are lowered onto the coral with long ropes. The crosses are dragged across the coral branches, which ideally break free from the rocks and become entangled in the nets.5 Once the coral was harvested it would have been separated into different grades. The finest specimens were kept intact as branches, whereas smaller pieces of quality material could be turned into beads. The lower quality portions— pieces that were discolored, crumbly or too full of holes—could have been ground to powder for medicinal uses.6 Like coral fishing, bead making is an ancient art of unknown origin, and traditional methods are very similar across time and place. Basilio Liverino,

“Captivated by Coral,” Gemological Institute of America, accessed December 6th, 2014 http://4csblog.gia.edu/2014/captivated-coral Georgics Tsounis, “Demography, Reproductive Biology and Trophic Ecology of Red Coral (corallium rubrum L.) at the Costa Brava: Ecological Tool for Management” (Diss. Universitat Bremen, 2005).

3 Basilio Liverino, Precious Red Coral Jewel of the Sea, translated by Helen Jane Johnson (Bologna, Italy: Analisi Trend s.c.r.l, 1989), 9.

4 D.E. Eichholz, Pliny’s Natural History (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1949-54), Book XXXII, Section XI. 5 Liverino, 72.

6 Thanks to Tanya Piacenti for pointing out this likelihood on Nov. 18th, 2014.

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a coral manufacturer in Torre del Greco whose family firm dates back to the nineteenth century, records the traditional methods of making coral beads in Italy: first, larger branches are cut into more manageable sections using a saw and pliers. These sections are cut down further into vaguely bead-sized chunks. The smaller pieces are held against a hand-cranked sandstone grindstone in order to roughly shape the beads. The beads are then drilled through by use of a bow and abrasives. Those that survive the drilling process are further shaped and polished with files and increasingly finer abrasives.7 Corallium rubrum grows throughout the Mediterranean sea, and on the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and West Africa.8 This places the Italian peninsula in an ideal location to exploit the resource. Though all of the various Italian city states participated in the coral fishing to some extent, during the fifteenth century it was the Genoese and the Doria family who became leaders in the trade. The Doria controlled the rights to Genoese waters, and also fished areas belonging to the Vatican, Tuscany, Catalan and

along the coast of Northern Africa.9 Matching portraits of Aurelia and Madalena Doria, painted c. 1570, show the young ladies decked out in long ropes of large coral beads, coral bracelets, and dresses embellished with pieces of coral, their outfits a tribute to their family’s fortune.10 The success of the Doria and others meant that coral was readily available throughout Italy, but it was by no means inexpensive.11 In sixteenthcentury Torre del Greco an ox cost four ducats but a bundle of “good coral” cost between 100 and 150 ducats.12 As expected, whole branches of coral were more of a rarity and therefore more costly than beads. The 1492 inventory of Lorenzo de Medici cites “a slender branch of coral” as worth three florins, yet “two strings of large pieces of coral, the number of coral pieces 60,” as only worth two florins.13 Because of its plant-like shape and mineral-like composition, it took many great thinkers a great many centuries to realize that coral was actually a member of the animal kingdom (credit for this realization is generally given to the Frenchman Andre Pissonel

7

Liverino, 140-1.

“Precious Red Coral Corallium Rubrum,” Oceana, accessed December 6th, 2014 http://oceana.org/en/explore/marine-wildlife/mediterranean-red-coral 9 Liverino, 73-5.

10 Images can be found in catalogue for Sotheby’s New York sale N0832, Important Old Master Paintings and European Works of Art Including Property of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Sale occurred June 8th, 2007.

11 Jacquelin Marie Musacchio, “Lambs, Coral, Teeth and the Intimate Intersection of Religion and Magic in Renaissance Tuscany” in Images, Relics and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sally J. Cornelian and Scott B. Montgomery (Arizona: Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University, 2005), 152.

12 Liverino, 75.

13 Richard Stapleford, Lorenzo De’ Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013), 122.

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in 1723).14 Part of the reason for this delay was the millennium-long acceptance of the writings of classical Greek and Roman scholars. When the Christian church rose to power in the fourth century CE, systematic exploration of the natural world and secular learning took a back seat to the examination of spiritual matters.

The natural histories written by Pliny the Elder and others did not obviously conflict with Christian doctrine, and so were allowed to circulate unaltered accept for the idiosyncrasies of translation. In fact, the supernatural beliefs and unexplainable phenomena recorded in so many ancient texts on medicine, biology and natural history easily synchronized with the Christian emphasis on faith and belief in miraculous happenings.15 Thus, like methods of fishing and processing coral, Renaissance Italians’ understanding of its uses and biology was not far removed from that of their Roman ancestors.

CORAL AND THE CLASSICS

So, what did classical authors have to say about coral? In Ovid’s Metamorphosis (written in the early 1st century CE), a source of great inspiration for later Renaissance artists and thinkers, the origin of coral is told as part of the myth of Perseus and Medusa. After removing the gorgon’s head, Perseus places it on a bed of seaweed. Medusa’s blood petrifies the 14

seaweed and turns it red. Nymphs toss the stoney plants’ seeds into the ocean, and so coral is created and spread throughout the ocean.16 Pliny the Elder, who was also much admired and widely known by educated Italians during the Renaissance, classifies coral as a plant and writes in his Natural History (c. 7779 CE): In shape coral is like a shrub, and its colour is green. Its berries are white under the water and soft; when taken out they immediately harden and grow red, being like, in appearance and size, to those of cultivated cornel. It is said that at a touch it immediately petrifies, if it lives;… The most valued coral is the reddest and most branchy, …Branches of coral, worn as an amulet by babies, are believed to be protective, and reduced to powder by fire and taken with water are helpful in gripings, bladder trouble and stone; similarly, taken in wine, or, if fever is present, in water, coral is soporific. Coral resists fire for a long time, but they say also that taken in drink repeatedly as medicine it consumes the spleen. The ash of coral branches is good treatment for bringing up or spitting of blood. It is a component of eye salves, for it is astringent and cooling, fills up the hollows of ulcers, and smoothes out scars.17 Theophrastus, a third-century BCE Greek author whose works also made their way through to the Renaissance18

Liverino, 13.

Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), 8-9.

16 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book the Fourth, translated by Sir Samuel Garth (John Dryden, et al. 1815).

17 Eichholz, Book XXXII, Section XI. 15

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Fig.2. Tagliere, 1532, made in Gubbio, Italy, maiolica (tin-glazed earthenware). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

is less decisive in his taxonomical classification, stating that “Coral, for its Substance is like that of stones: Its Colour is red, and its shape cylindrical, in some sort resembling a root. It grows in the Sea.”19 These ancient works are but a few of the classical texts that were read and translated up through the Middle Ages by various learned men. Their content was often used as source material in a genre of medieval works known as lapidaries, which frequently discuss coral. Lapidaries are the mineralogical equivalent of bestiaries, where creatures (or in this case rocks) real and imagined are recorded both in terms

of their physiological traits and their usefulness to humans. Two treatises that were in print and available in on the Italian Peninsula, though neither authored by Italians, during the Renaissance were written by the French Bishop, Marbode of Rennes (1035 - 1123), and the English monk Albertus Magnus (12th century).20 Albertus writes in his Book of Secrets: Take the stone which is called Corallus … And it hath been proved that it stemmeth anon blood, putteth away the foolishness of him that beareth it, and giveth wisdom. And this hath been proved of certain men in our time.

And it is good against tempests, and the perils of floods.21

18 Marina Belozerskaya, Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Ghetty Museum, 2005), 51.

19 John Hill, Theophrastus’s History of Stones (London: St. James Street, 1774), 167.

20 Belozerskaya, 56.

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Marbode cites Zoraster as a source of his knowledge of coral, and also references Pliny’s Natural History. He states that coral protects the wearer from lightning, wind and hail, brings abundance and fertility, protects from monsters summoned by spells, and “Gives happy opening and successful end/And calms the tortures that the entrails rend.”22 The preceding excerpts, from Ovid to Marbode of Rennes, are representative of the ancient and Medieval passages regarding the uses and properties of coral that would have been available to literate Italians during the Renaissance. Within these texts are hidden the meanings that drove the creation of coral objects during the Renaissance.

The magical powers associated with coral and other gemstones were not just randomly assigned, but are generally based on the premise of sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is the simple concept that a person, thing or event can be affected by an object representing it.23 In its most basic form, this representation is based on physical similarities. The purple color of amethyst is similar to that of wine, therefore if a man wishes to drink wine yet remain sober, he should

put an amethyst in his mouth.24 If a man wished to turn the sun a “bloody color”—and why wouldn’t he?—he must use a heliotropum, which is covered with red speckles that resemble blood.25 In the case of coral, as can be seen by the earlier mentioned writings, its shape and redness associate it with blood, fire and lightning, and its watery home associate it with the ocean, rain and floods.

FEAR OF (THE BLACK) DEATH

The writings of Greece and Rome were not the only powerful influences on the population of Renaissance Italy.

The fear of the black death and the demographic crises that arose from the waves of plague in the fourteenth century affected people whether they were reading classical texts or not.

These great stretches of sickness and death created a society desperate for the production of healthy children.

The city of Florence dropped from a population of 120,000 in the 1330s to 37,000 in 1441.26 This loss placed enormous pressure on young women to produce offspring, preferably sons,27 so that there were enough people to keep cities up and running.

Unfortunately, both childbirth and the spread of the plague were little

21 Albertus Magnus, The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World, ed. Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc, 1999), 35.

22 Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidus, trans. C.W. King and John M. Riddle (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1977), 59.

23 Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The Evil Eye an Account of this Ancient & Widespread Superstition (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1895), 48.

24 Magnus, 33.

25 Ibid., 35.

26 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, editors, At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010), 135.

27 Ibid., 128.

36

Fig.3. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Giovanni de’ Medici as a Child, c.

1545, oil on wood. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

37

Fig.4. Two-piece Cutlery Set, late 16th century, made in Italy, coral, brass, niello, silver, iron and gold. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis.

understood at the time.28 The tools on hand for dealing with complications arising from either scenario were not very effective. To keep up their best chance of survival, Renaissance Italians found themselves turning to a number of different prophylactic and curative measures, in the hope that if one failed the others would act as a safety net. The three paths through which people sought remedies and protection can be divided into medicinal, magical and religious. Coral played an important part in all three of these traditions.

CORAL AS A MEDICINE

Though there was organized, formal education for physicians in 38

Renaissance Europe, both academic and common knowledge of health was was derived from the ancient Greek theory of bodily humors. They held that the body’s well-being depended on achieving the correct balance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These humors could be become unbalanced from environmental, emotional and dietary factors. Each person had their own unique proper “balance,” and physicians’ primary task was prescribing medicines or regimens to help ill patients retain and regain their proper humorous balance.29 If a medicine was prescribed, it was made either at home, or, if more complicated, provided by an apothecary.30 Apothecaries

specialized in carrying precious or rare materials, such as coral and other gemstones, whose exclusivity added to their perceived curative abilities.31 Since coral was traditionally associated with blood and the circulatory system, it made frequent appearances as an ingredient in medicines related to the heart. In the Ricettario Fiorentino, a standardized recipe book for apothecaries that was published in Florence in 1499, over a dozen recipes call for coral. To make a popular type of medicine, called Manus Christi, which was supposedly good for the heart, Florentine apothecaries would mix powdered coral with various spices, pieces of silk, ground nuts, amber, pearl and rose petals and boil the whole thing in sugar to create little candies.32 In the Trotula, a medical text that had its beginnings in the twelfth century at the university at Salerno, powdered coral mixed with gum arabic, pomegranate, and a number of herbs was recommended to treat excessive menstrual bleeding.33 The great profusion of ingredients must have made it a challenge to pinpoint any one material as being effective or ineffective.

Although it may be difficult to see a difference between these seemingly

random medicines and what might be considered magical potions, for Renaissance Italians the realm of physicians and pharmacies was believed to be truly separate from the realm of superstition. Their humorous notions of bodily health were based on the learned men of ancient Greece, and because everyone had a different bodily composition, personalized medicines could effectively target an individual health concern in a more specific manner than amulets or even prayers.34 Additionally, many people, recognizing that faith in church and prophylactic magic had failed to keep sickness at bay, were eager for further remedies. It is worth noting that red coral is composed primarily of calcium carbonate, which, although no longer derived from coral, is taken today as a dietary supplement by people with a calcium deficiency. Among other important bodily functions, sufficient calcium is needed for a healthy heart.

Calcium carbonate is also commonly taken to help relieve upset stomach and heartburn.35 It appears Marbode knew at least slightly what he was talking about when he declared that coral “calms the tortures that the entrails rend.”

28

Ibid., 134.

James Shaw and Evelyn Welch, Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (New York: Editions Rodophi B.V., 2011), 31.

30 Ibid., 42.

31 Ibid.,194.

32 Olimpia Fittipaldi, “Nuovo Ricettario Fiorentino (1498),” accessed December 2nd, 2014 http://www.pluteus.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/nuovo%20 ricettario.pdf 33 Monica H. Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 81.

34 Shaw and Welch, 32, 35.

35 “Calcium Carbonate,” Medline Plus, accessed December 2nd, 2014 http:// www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a601032.html 29

39

CORAL AS AN AMULET

Highly visible in the artworks of Renaissance Italy are the bright branches and beads of coral worn by infants, both real and mythological.

Pliny plainly states that coral branches had been used as protective amulets for children since Roman times,36 but the question remains as to why it was considered prophylactic by the Romans and their Renaissance descendants. The answer lies in the myth of Perseus and Medusa. As described earlier, Ovid explains how coral was born from the blood of Medusa’s severed head. Medusa’s infamous evil power was her gaze that could turn any living thing to stone. In other words, she was a personification of the evil eye.37 Belief in the evil eye is the belief that certain people can cause harm or ill luck to other people or even inanimate objects simply by looking upon them.38 It was not always possible to tell who had the power of the evil eye, and often times the possessor themselves was unaware. At any rate, to the Greeks and Romans, and through them the Renaissance Italians, this malignant force was represented

by Medusa. By virtue of the premises of sympathetic magic, wearing an amulet that was representative of Medusa (or any other manifestation of the evil eye) would be effective protection against it. Ancient amuletic gems carved with an image of the gorgon’s face illustrate this belief.

One such gem, illustrated by F.T. 36

Elworthy, is handily carved with the inscription “I Protect Roromandre” and if genuine confirms beyond doubt the apotropaic powers of the Medusa’s face.39 Being formed from the blood of Medusa, a branch of coral was similarly representative and would have had the same perceived effect as an actual representation of her head.

The evil eye was thought to manifest itself in moments of envy or anger, and those who found themselves in good fortune were worried about catching an evil stare from jealous individuals. A healthy baby boy was the dearest ambition of many a Renaissance man and wife, so couples who found themselves parents to new sons would understandably be concerned about the envious stares of those who had been less lucky in childbirth.

Life was quite dangerous for a baby in Renaissance Italy. Infections, accidents, malnutrition and other mysterious ailments (brought on by the evil eye, of course) meant that death in infancy and early childhood was a reality for a large percentage of Italian families. To help protect themselves from tragedy, it was common for families to procure a number of prophylactic amulets for their infants to wear. Because of the ancient associations outlined earlier, coral branches were particularly popular choices as agents against malignant forces.40 What was likely used as just such an amulet was found

Eichholz, Book XXXII, Section XI. Elworthy, 145.

38 Ibid., 8.

39 Ibid., 158.

37

40

Fig.5. Andrea Mantegna, Madonna della Vittoria, 1496, tempera on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

at an archaeological dig in Liguria, and dates to around 1600.41 Its form is quite simple: the amulet is a small branch of polished coral. One end has been whittled down slightly, so as to accommodate a metal bezel that is no longer present.

In the fifteenth century this same sort of amulet often shows up on the babies and cheery putti who were painted on 40 41

birth trays for new wives and mothers.

A birth tray, known as “Birth of the Baptist,” made c.1445 and attributed to Domenico di Bartolo, illustrates this nicely. On one side a new mother, sitting in bed and all dressed up in a fancy hat, greets female visitors who are similarly attired. In the foreground of the scene a healthy infant, naked except for a necklace of coral beads

Musacchio, 152.

Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 120.

41

hung with a coral branch, is fussed over by attendants (Fig. 1). The scene would have been meant to reassure an expectant mother, and encourage her with images of a healthy child and the fun celebrations that follow the hard work of labor. The other side of the tray shows two chubby toddlers, one wearing a coral branch bracelet and the other a coral branch necklace. It was believed that gazing upon these healthy and robust children would help women conceive offspring of a similar caliber.42 A look at maiolica dishes from the sixteenth century shows that the tradition of decorating young children with coral was alive and well a century later. A plate, c.1530, now in the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, prominently features a muscular male child wearing coral branch amulets, the wish of expectant couples glazed onto a dish (Fig. 2).

Despite the many obstacles an infant had to overcome if it was to survive through its formative years, many Florentine families chose to send their children to wet-nurses far from home.

Men were in charge of the expenses related to wet-nurses, and one Lucha de Panzano recorded sending his son off to the wet-nurse with, among other amulets, a branch of coral for protection.43 The fact that a father would concern himself with the finances of coral amulets indicates how integral objects like this were to early childhood; they were not frivolous 42 43 44

42

Ibid., 129-130.

Musacchio, 141.

Stapleford, 122.

good luck charms.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household also provided coral for its children. The 1492 inventory of Lorenzo’s estate records that a little room above the stairs contained: A large coral branch f.5 A thick coral branch with a gilt silver ferrule f.10 A slender coral branch f.3 A beautiful coral branch f. 3 A little coral branch made of three parts with a gilt silver ferrule f.4 A little coral branch with a mother-of-pearl Agnus Dei and a canine tooth f.5 Two strings of large pieces of coral, the number of coral pieces 60, weighing 6 oz f.2 One string of tiny coral pieces weighing 7 oz f.2 44 Other items in this same room are womens’ linen undergarments and menstrual cloths, and a “ladies book.”

This gives the impression that the room was used by the women of the house as storage. Likely the coral branches were set aside after children outgrew them, and saved for reuse when the next baby came along.

So, how old did a child have to be to set aside their coral charm? What milestone had to be crossed to trade in the flashy coral branch for the hidden amulets worn by adults? A portrait of Giovanni de Medici as a child painted by Agnolo Bronzino c.1545 would indicate that two-year-olds were still in need of the coral branch’s protection, but beyond this it is difficult to definitively state (Fig. 3). At age three, little boys stopped wearing the

same dresses as girls. At age seven, they began their formal education.45 Likely the shedding of coral amulets occurred at one of these stages in a young boy’s life. Girls and women are depicted wearing coral beads throughout all stages of their lives.

Men and women who survived to adulthood may not have worn branches as overtly as infants, but they still had them, tucked inside their clothes and safely away from the prying eyes of art historians. The Medici records reveal that in 1456 poor Piero the Gouty had “a little chain of silver-gilt with a branch of coral.”46 Women wore coral as a charm towards fertility,47 and it was also recommended that they use coral branch amulets to ease the difficulty of labor. The Trotula states, “There are certain physical remedies whose power is obscure to us, which are helpful when done by midwives…Coral suspended from the neck is good.”48 Perhaps these branches, which aided in a child’s birth, were the very same piece of coral that protected them once they were born.

CORAL AS A DETECTOR OF ILLNESS AND POISON

Coral was also believed to warn of impending or existing disease—as well as the presence of poison—by losing its color or growing dull when

in the vicinity of either of these much feared, invisible forces. In the sixteenth century Gerolamo Cardono wrote that he had seen this phenomenon more than once, and believed that even where the wearer is not yet attacked by the disease, its threatening vapor, though not strong enough to provoke decided symptoms in the human body, was sufficiently powerful to offset the more delicate and subtle essence of the mineral substance.49 Belief in coral’s ability to detect poison and disease is not as reconcilable with modern medical knowledge as its ability to cure indigestion. Coral can lose its color or luster when exposed to harsh chemicals,50 so it could be possible for its appearance to be altered if put in direct contact with a strong poison.

As for Cardono’s claim that mere “threatening vapors” will cause coral to lose its color, for that his word must suffice.

For the wealthy and powerful elite of Renaissance Italy (or the rest of Europe, for that matter) death by poison was not necessarily an irrational fear. Multiple poisoning plots and scares are recorded in the Medici archives. Ferdinando I de’ Medici wrote to a friend in 1590, “A little poison is being sent to you ... the entire quantity is sufficient to poison a whole

45

Ibid., 140 - 141.

R.W. Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1992), 207.

47 Liverino, 119.

48 Green, 120.

49 George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (New York: Halcyon House, 1938), 160.

50 “Captivated by Coral.”

46

43

Fig.6. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, 1488, tempera on panel. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

flask of wine.”51 Pope Alexander VI of the Borgias was rumored not only to have poisoned multiple cardinals, but also to have died of poisoning himself when his steward accidentally served him a bottle of wine meant for others.

One of the more popular choices for poisoners was white arsenic; a powder that had no color, taste or smell when mixed with food or drink. A large dose brought on quick death, while a series of small doses brought on symptoms of drawn-out disease with fatal results.52 Naturally, methods of detecting this stealthy enemy were much sought after.

One of the more elaborate and weird solutions came in the form of an object that is today called a languier. Languiers are made of a large branch of coral, mounted upright to resemble a tree. The tree would have been placed on the sideboard or table, among prepared dishes of food, its steady color offered as a proof to host and guests that their dinner was not tainted. Of the four surviving languiers known today, three are hung with fossilized sharks teeth, which were also believed to have poison detecting powers. The fourth example, dated c.1550-1575, is the only one with

51 Sheila Barker, “The Art of Poison,”The Florentine, September 4th, 2008, accessed December 2nd, 2014 http://www.theflorentine.net/articles/article-view. asp?issuetocId=3464 52 Roger Smith, “Arsenic: A Murderous History,” accessed December 2nd, 2014 http://www.dartmouth.edu/~toxmetal/arsenic/history.htm

44

an Italian provenance, and does not have any sharks’ teeth hanging from it, although it may have originally.

Instead, its poison detecting function can be confirmed by the presence of poisonous snakes embossed in the metal about the base of the tree.53 A crucifix is also attached to the tree, just in case.

A more integrated method of getting coral near food was to use cutlery with branches of coral for handles. A fork and spoon of this type, made in Venice during the late sixteenth century, are now housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Fig. 4). Despite Cardono’s affirmations, it appears that coral objects were more of a back-up safety net than the primary method of detecting poison.

In Italy, as well as in France and Germany, a ceremony was made of a trusted servant tasting dishes in full view of the guests. In fact, the Italian word for sideboard is credenze, (credence in English), because the tasting of food upon the sideboard gave credence to a host’s promises to not poison his guests. 54 CORAL AS A SYMBOL OF CHRIST

Coral amulets are frequently included in painted images of the Christ child. It is not uncommon to see biblical birth scenes painted as though they occurred in contemporary Renaissance households, as exemplified by the object Birth Tray with Nativity painted by Masaccio c. 1427.55

The birth tray shows a nativity scene taking place in a well-to-do fifteenthcentury Florentine household. The Christ child, like any Renaissance infant who could afford it, is shown wearing his coral branch amulet. By depicting the birth of Christ in a contemporary context, Renaissance women could more easily empathize with and emulate the Virgin Mary.

Portraits of the infant and Madonna, commissioned outside of the direct context of birth objects, often show Christ either wearing, holding, or associated with coral beads or branches. The Christian church had an excellent track record of appropriating pagan symbols for Christian uses, and it’s no surprise that the blood of Medusa became the blood of Christ, and the evil eye became Satan. So a pagan amulet became a potent symbol of Christ’s power over the devil, and would have represented the redemption of mankind brought on by Jesus’ death.56 The Madonna della Vittoria, painted

by Andrea Mantegna in 1496, was commissioned by Francesco II Gonzaga to celebrate a victory over Charles VIII of France on the field of battle (Fig. 5). The painting is rife with symbolism, and a large and beautiful branch of coral, strung up with long festoons of coral beads and pearls strikes the viewer. The branch dangles far above Francesco, who is expressing his thanks to the Virgin Mary for granting him victory. The coral branch

53 George Zammit-Maempel, “Fossil Sharks Teeth A Medieval Safeguard against Poisoning,” Melita Historica (Malta Historical Society 6, 1975), 391-410.

54 Ibid.

55 The object is now housed in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

56 Musacchio, 151.

45

represents the blood of Christ and his future death upon the cross, and implies that Francesco went to battle under the protection of Christ. The branch may also be up to its old trick of offering protection from the evil eye, as Francesco must have garnered much envy from his spectacular defeat of the French.57 Besides offering protection of either the Christian or pagan variety, the branch is an excellent, if unrealistically perfect, specimen of coral. Such a branch would be much sought after by collectors of naturalia and would cost a great deal of money. By including this branch in his painting, Francesco is showing his wealth as well as his affinity to Jesus.58 CORAL AS A SYMBOL OF THE VIRGIN MARY

Renaissance Christians used paternosters or rosary beads to aid in the counting of prayers, making sure that they said the correct number of repetitions. One wore rosary beads around the neck or belt as an outward sign of piety for all to see. In Italy and other Mediterranean countries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance coral was a popular choice for these beads because in addition to representing the blood of Christ, red coral symbolized the Virgin Mary, to whom many of the prayers counted upon the beads were directed.59 The rose, a symbol of beauty and perfection to the ancient Romans, was adopted as a symbol of

the Virgin Mary when Christianity spread throughout the West.60 The red color of coral likened it to the red rose, and deemed it an appropriate representation of the Virgin. Of course, apart from its religious associations, coral was still a precious gem material, and a rosary of fine coral beads was not inexpensive. So, in addition to displaying the wearer’s great piety and devotion to the Virgin Mary, coral rosary beads informed peers of the wearer’s more earthly attributes. A posthumous portrait of Giovanna Tornabouni (who died in childbirth c. 1488) features a large string of coral rosary beads hung in a prominent position, informing the viewer of both her piety and the wealth of her family (Fig. 6).

CORAL AS JEWELRY ON YOUNG BRIDES

As seen in the image of Giovanna Tornabouni, coral was a powerful symbol used in Renaissance portraiture of young women, calling upon a huge well of tradition, magic and religion.

Commissioned to commemorate betrothals or weddings, these portraits provide a wealth of images of young Renaissance ladies decked out in their bridal best. These women often wore a newly received set of wedding jewels that for a specified amount of time identified her as a new bride.

In many fifteenth-century portraits of Italian women, the sitter wears the telltale head brooch, another

57 Helene Roberts, editor, Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 291.

58 Thanks to Tracy Ehrlich for pointing this out on November 18th, 2014.

59 Lois Sherr Dubin, The History of Beads (New York: Abrams, 1987), 90-1.

60 Ibid.

46

brooch pinned to her shoulder or a substantial necklace to designate her status as newlywed.61 The necklaces are especially interesting for this study, because they are not uncommonly composed of bright red beads which appear to be coral.62 The symbolism of coral is particularly suited to a new bride. The red color symbolizes the rose and the Virgin Mary, but it also carries ancient connotations of fertility. The bright, full color of the beads shows that the wearer is in good health, a further sign of fecundity, and the value of the material displays the wealth of her family. A prominent display of coral beads perfectly represents the dual duties of chastity and fertility so sought after in a Renaissance wife, while at the same time heralding the financial successes of the men in her life. What more could a Renaissance man ask for?

CONCLUSIONS

Coral encompasses the various motivations and aspirations of Renaissance Italians. Objects made of coral and depicting coral represent a wonderful mash up of Christianity,

ancient pagan traditions and the beginnings of modern science and medicine. A simple branch of coral strung on a necklace is equally as representative of Roman magic as it is of belief in the power of Christ.

It shows the hopefulness, desire and necessity for healthy children tempered by an ever present awareness of the threat of illness and death. A fine specimen of coral was a source of pride for wealthy men and an object coveted by collectors, as it belied their interest in and understanding of the natural world. It could be worn externally to offer protection, or ingested as powder to calm disease.

Chaste young ladies showed off their coral beads to broadcast their devotion to the Virgin Mary and hint at their family fortune, making themselves the most eligible of brides. Though coral is beautiful, bright and unique and certainly a worthwhile object of adornment in its own right, its strange form and ancient origins encouraged Renaissance Italians to take its uses well beyond the realm of mere aesthetics.

61 Andrea Bayer, editor, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 102-3.

62 The workshop of artist Domenico Ghirlandaio seems to have especially favored coral beads in their late fifteenth-century portraits of young women. The Portrait of Selvaggia Sasetti (painted c. 1487-88, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Portrait of a Girl (c. 1490, now in a private collection) and Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1490, now in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian) all prominently feature coral beads. It is worth noting that the necklaces differ from one another in terms of bead-size, so it does not appear that the same necklace was used in all three portraits as a “prop” provided by the artist.

47

Enwheeled: Wheelchair and User in Early Film1 Penny Wolfson

[In film], objects burn bright constellations of meaning and crackle tactile effects; things take on life.

— Rachel Moore, “Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic”2 In the realm of objects, chairs are literally king. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton note the chair’s special status in The Meaning of Things: Domestic Objects and the Self, first pointing to the blurring of identity of human and chair—“with its worn velvet fabric, musty smell, creaking springs, and warm support”—and going on to reiterate the strong relationship of the chair with human power: “It is difficult to imagine

a king without a throne, a judge without a bench or a distinguished professor without a chair.”3 Jules David Prown, too, in the essay “Style as Evidence,” notes that “chairs are particularly revealing of cultural values because they so easily become human surrogates . . . We use such analogies as feet, legs, back, and seat . . . It is not unreasonable to speculate that aspects of an object that seem to echo the human anatomy may reflect in abstract terms the ways in which individuals . . . perceive themselves.”4 One might call wheelchairs the “chairiest” of chairs. For many users they are not just comfortable places to sit, but are transportation, shelter, and identity. For many, if not all, their sense of self includes

Opposite page: Fig.1. Lon Chaney as Phroso in West of Zanzibar, 1928, Directed

by Tod Brown. Credit: MGM/ Photofest 48

49

their wheelchair; they may perceive the chair as their environment or personal space, as an extension of themselves or a means of selfexpression. For some, the wheelchair is completely incorporated into their body image.

Although the last few decades have seen a surfeit of literature on disability, little scholarly work has in fact been done on the wheelchair as a designed object. Herman Kamenetz’s 1969 book on the wheelchair stood for several decades as the only work documenting this object’s development over the centuries.5 It is now quite dated.

More recently, the British researchers Nick Watson and Brian Woods have made valuable contributions with their 2003 report on the historical sociology of the wheelchair, in which they emphasized the impact of disability activism on new technology.6 The life writing of physically disabled people is less rare, but surprisingly little focuses on the wheelchair itself. Much more has been written about what has

been called “the illness narrative”: the tale of woe and adjustment that at times attends the disability experience.7 None of these works has used the lens of the design historian to explore what I have here: the close personal relationship between the wheelchair and its occupant, the subtle interplay between disabled human and necessary object. Exactly what is the transaction between this specialized machine and the person who uses it? Does it function as a tool, an instrument, an extension, or a part of the body? How does the user impact the chair, and vice versa? Is the wheelchair master, imprisoning its user, as implied in the phrase “wheelchair-bound”? Or is it, as a 1970s wheelchair catalog puts it, touting an improved power chair, the user’s slave, able to propel him anywhere—to do his bidding—with the touch of the joystick?8 In the user’s often profound dependence on the chair, and in the chair’s adaptation to the user’s needs and idiosyncrasies, to his actual shape and hand or eye movements,

1∗ This article is adapted from the author’s master’s thesis, “Enwheeled: Two Centuries of Wheelchair Design, from Furniture to Film,” (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Parsons The New School for Design, 2014).

2† The epigraph for this article is taken from Rachel Olivia Moore, “Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997), 139–40.

3 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Objects and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15.

4 Jules David Prown, “Style as Evidence,” Winterthur Portfolio 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 199.

5 Herman Kamenetz, The Wheelchair Book: Mobility for the Disabled (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1969).

6 See Brian Woods and Nick Watson, “A Glimpse at the Social and Technological History of Wheelchairs,” International Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation 11, no. 9 (2004): 407–10; and Brian Woods and Nick Watson, “A Short History of Powered Wheelchairs,” Assistive Technology 15, no. 2 (2003): 164–80.

7 Arthur Kleinman is generally thought to have coined the phrase in The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

8 “Whether it’s a trip around the house or outside around the block, an amazing

50

he and it are inextricably connected.

The wheelchair and person have to adjust to each other, as the disability researcher Myriam Winance has said, and in the process, become one: “the aid becomes part of the body and the person . . . It modifies the way the person perceives, moves, and relates to the world.”9 Wheelchair and person are linked through a common and continuous circuitry; the chair becomes literally a vehicle through which emotions and actions are carried out.10 In research on patients with spinal cord injuries, Italian psychologist Mariella Pazzaglia and her colleagues have also noted the seeming dissolution of the chair/ human boundary. In one study they concluded, “among all patients the regular use of a wheelchair induced the perception that the body’s edges are not fixed, but are instead plastic and flexible to include the wheelchair.” Many voiced the sense of being “enwheeled,” of having the corporeal boundary between the person and the machine disappear,

in the process radically revising their body schema. ”11 In this article I examine this special relationship of wheelchair and user as evidenced in early film.

From the start, motion pictures have offered “a unique opportunity to study the visual record of our culture and reflect on the world caught on film”;12 powerfully revealing the culture’s prejudices, aspirations, and beliefs—including notions of disability. According to disability/ film scholar Martin F. Norden, wheelchairs are often used as symbolic items that telegraph societal prejudices, aspirations, and fears.

According to Norden, “moviemakers have ascribed a wide range of qualities and functions to wheelchairs over the years, including humor, evil, helplessness, confinement, deception, heroism and dehumanization.”13 In this study, I have turned my own camera slightly aslant from Norden’s: is it possible, while keeping in mind the powerful societal associations of wheelchairs, to train the lens more tightly on

Power-Drive chair is its owner’s slave.” Everest and Jennings, Premier catalog, April 1972, 42.

9 Myriam Winance, “Trying Out the Wheelchair: The Mutual Shaping of People and Devices through Adjustment.” Science, Technology and Human Values 31, no. 1 (January 2006): 52–72.

10 The tool as part and parcel of human circuitry is Gregory Bateson’s notion as put forward in “The Cybernetics of ‘Self ’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” Psychiatry 34, no. 1 (1971).

11 Mariella Pazzaglia, Giulia Galli, Giorgio Scivoletto, and Marco Molinari, “A Functionally Relevant Tool for the Body Following Spinal Cord Injury,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 3 (March 2013): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058312.

12 Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller, introduction to The Material World in American Popular Culture and Film, ed. Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller, Beyond The Stars: Studies in American Popular Film vol. 3 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 2.

13 Martin F. Norden, “Reel Wheels: The Role of Wheelchairs in American Movies,” in Loukides and Fuller, 187.

51

the relationship between chair and user on screen? Norden and other disability scholars, such as Rosemarie Garland Thompson or Cynthia Barounis, are concerned primarily with the depiction of disabled characters in movies, what Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic have called the “projection of the problem body.14 My subject is the closeness of the wheelchair user to his or her machine. I am concerned with the wheelchair as the mediator of feelings, as an agent in the process. In my examination, through interaction with the chair, the wheelchairist is not a victim; he is simply a man—or a woman—and his machine is an extension of his or her personhood.

All objects can be seen anew when depicted in art; an object can have a power it does not possess in real life. Art narrates and elucidates design not only because it documents history, but because it frames and focuses the object.

Thus the pearl earring of Vermeer or the Torah scroll of Chagall are weighted, visually and emotionally, by being framed, focused, set apart.

This is even truer in film, where magnification and repetition play a large part. “One of the recurring

fascinations within early film theory was cinema’s unique ability to animate and enliven the . . . material objects of our everyday world, to reveal their ‘personalities’ and ‘faces,’ even to grant them a kind of mute ‘voice,’” says the blogger Brook Henkel on a website about thing theory; she asserts, “in doing so, film was understood to transform the relationship between people and inanimate objects . . . ”15 The film scholar Tom Gunning has spoken of what he calls the cinema of attraction.16 Silent films, he says, did not simply or inevitably lead to talking narrative film in some sort of natural evolution; rather, the silents were substantially different, closer to the variety and exhibitionism, implicit or explicit, of vaudeville and Coney Island amusements than to the linear stories most later films became.

The purpose of silent films, no less sophisticated than talking narrative pictures, and possibly more—was to show. We see this, for example, in the lingering shots of people and objects in an early film such as Lucky Star (1929) where the director frames, in the backdrop of an open doorway, the picture of his two stars facing each other, one in a wheelchair, the

14 Rosemarie Garland Thompson, “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability,” Narrative 15, no. 1 (January 2007): 113–23; Cynthia Barounis, “Crippling Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body,” Journal of Visual Culture 8, no. 1 (April 2009): 54–75, doi:10.1177/1470412908091938; and Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic, The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010).

15 Brook Henkel, “Cine-Things: 1924,” thing theory (blog), June 29, 2009, http:// thingtheory2009.wordpress.com/author/brookhenkel/(accessed April 2, 2014).

16 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 63–70.

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other in a chair of similar height; he holds the spectator’s attention for an extended moment. And the thing— that is, the wheelchair—and the two people are equally on show.

“Film is a medium that makes things visible,” says the media historian Judith Keilbach, in an article about the loss of objects during the Holocaust. She writes, “it is eminently suited to depict the connection between objects and emotions . . .”17 Keilbach cites Béla Balázs, the Hungarian critic, who states in his classic work, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, that “film lends a different kind of meaning to visible objects because any difference of degree between persons and objects is minimized by pictorial representation.”18 Wheelchairs are not just objects that can take on life; they are naturally performative objects, and thus perfectly suited to examination through film, a medium that shows physically as well as emotionally “moving’” images of the ways various wheelchairs have been utilized by a variety of fictional and nonfictional characters with different impairments. We can repeatedly watch how the chairs are operated; we can witness the expression of fear,

anger, hesitance, cowardice, joy, love, and alarm through the agency of the wheel, or later, the joystick; we can watch as both users and others often unconsciously accept the assimilation of the wheelchair into the corporeal body. Viewed as a “cinema of attraction,” these already special objects are enlivened; we sense their creative potential as powerful partners to humans.

To explore the early use of these wheelchairs in movies, I looked at five films from the teens to the thirties: The Good-for-Nothing and Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (short silents, 1914 and 1915, respectively); West of Zanzibar (1928) and Lucky Star (1929) (silent features), and On Borrowed Time (1939, featurelength “talking picture”). The Fatty Arbuckle film, Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition, particularly showcases what was then a novelty: the battery-powered Osborn Electriquette, produced especially for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. Generally, manual chairs from the early film era were rigid-framed wooden and metal structures with high cane or rattan backs often capable of reclining, wide single footboards, and large, bicycle-style wheels, often made of

17 Judith Keilbach, “Houses, Vases, Bicycles, and Rocking Horses: ‘Aryanised’ Objects in the Documentaries Die Akte Joel and Mariannes Heimkehr,” trans. Gabriele Rahaman, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 57, no. 1 (2012), 295, doi: 10.1093/leobaeck/ybs014.

18 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Film Europa, vol. 10 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 23, quoted in Keilbach, “Houses, Vases, Bicycles,” 296.

19 Norden, “Reel Wheels,” 201. The author points out that wheelchair choices in film were often random; moviemakers used what they had in the stockroom. He cites Lauri Klobas, who writes in Disability Drama in Television and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988), that filmmakers often chose wheelchairs ill-suited to their occupants.

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Fig.2. Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, Lucky Star, 1929, Directed by Frank Borzage.

Credit: Fox Film Corporation/ Photofest.

rubber, with spokes.19 Most were three-wheeled, with a smaller caster wheel at the rear, and most had wheel rims for self-propulsion.

Viewing these five films, we see over time an attempt to show wheelchairs and users in a more realistic and more sympathetic way. The Arbuckle film completely ignores the chair’s potential as 54

a disability device, for example, while the Chaplin movie takes a dim view of disabled people: they are shown as dishonest, cunning, and bad-tempered. But the chair itself is performative, in the way Gunning conceives film “less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because

of their illusory power . . . and exoticism.”20 In these early films we see a number of sketches, almost amounting to a flipbook, in which a mechanical instrument is utilized over and over again to create an effect, an entertainment, irrespective of the storyline, such as it is. Who cares what happens to the uncle or the lovers? We just want to see the

man/wheelchair perform, in an “act of showing and exhibition.”21 West of Zanzibar, with its bizarre premise, could not be called a realistic film; although the character Phroso operates the wheelchair smoothly, the chair and user are also a magical, powerful unit. Lucky Star may be the first film that offers a more sophisticated approach, depicting a disabled character skilled at using his finely tuned instrument. Still, it retains that silent-film quality that levels object and subject in a way noted by early film critics and thing theorists. On Borrowed Time is unusual in that the wheelchair is not seen as tragic or as all-important; it has a casual presence, and its user, the elderly Gramps (played by the disabled Lionel Barrymore), inhabits it comfortably.

What we often see in early shorts like The Good-for-Nothing, also called His New Profession, a Mack Sennett short with Charlie Chaplin, or Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition with Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle, also produced and directed

by Mack Sennett, is the chair used as a comic prop, as Norden notes in “Wheels on Reels.”22 There is often a disjunction between chairs and people, and what is comical— or tragic—is that the person and 20 21 22

Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 64.

Ibid.

Norden, “Reel Wheels,” 187.

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the chair, or the chair and the environment, or a wheelchair occupant and his attendant—do not jibe. This can be because of problematic technology or lack of knowledge; in The Good-for-Nothing, the man’s injury is temporary, and the Chaplin character has been asked, temporarily, to look after him.

Almost immediately, upon giving a little push to what seems like a heavy, difficult-to-move chair, Chaplin falls flat; when he attempts to maneuver the chair over a curb, he stumbles and falls backward several times.

The man in the chair is constantly arguing with the Chaplin character: “Take me here! Don’t do that!” The chair is the crux of this; it is at the center of their transaction.

Even in a comedy that exploits stereotypes about disability, one can pick up some subtleties of the interaction between chair and human. Other characters seem to unconsciously use the wheelchair itself as an extension of the disabled person’s body; Chaplin, when asking a favor of the “crippled” uncle, leans into the back of the wheelchair with his hand directly on the upholstered lining, bringing him closer but still some distance away from the man’s corporeal body. “Slip me a dime on account,” he coaxes the man, who simply waves his arms angrily in an effort to get Chaplin moving again.

Although most of the action here is around one wheelchair, a plush version with large self-propelling double wheels, another wheelchair appears briefly in two scenes on the boardwalk. A beggar—he wears a 56

sign that says “Help a Cripple” and has a tin cup for coins—sits there in a more modest wheelchair; this one has single metal or possibly wooden wheels, a high, caned back, and wooden arms. Chaplin, ever the opportunist, grabs the sign and cup, places them instead on the now- sleeping uncle, and collects the donations to buy himself a drink. The wheelchairs, therefore, serve either as encumbrances or opportunities for the Chaplin character. One of the more striking aspects of the film is how the Tramp does not seem to differentiate between person and object; he leans on the wheelchair back, armrest, or wheel, and then on the uncle’s broken, casted leg as if it were a table, and polishes the man’s bald head with his handkerchief as though wiping a counter. When the chair and uncle cramp his lifestyle too much, the Tramp simply gets rid of them; while flirting with a woman, he carelessly shoves the uncle’s wheelchair away with a planted foot.

It rests on the dock, just at the water’s edge. Both chairs are later used by their inhabitants—who suddenly don’t seem very disabled at all—as battering rams that in turn knock over the male lead, the Tramp, and a police officer, who eventually arrests the wheelchaired uncle.

The Fatty and Mabel film is valuable primarily because it features the Electriquette, an open-style, wicker electric vehicle made for two, powered by a half-horsepower motor—the first power wheelchair we see in action. Meant to “supplant

the antiquated push-car and jinrikisha” of earlier fairs,23 and capable of going three-and-a-half miles per hour, the vehicle could be steered with a long metal wand set horizontally in front of the driver.

What the film displays, however, is how problematic these chairs would have been for a truly disabled person, and how impersonal: anyone could rent one if they had the money, and there didn’t seem to be any way to stabilize an injured or weak body within the vehicle. Fatty and Mabel use the chair as a device for pleasure and play; they leap in and out and through the vehicle and fall in and out of the front or sides for comic effect. None of the early photos of the Electriquette or the movie feature people with obvious physical difficulties.

Even in these silent films, however, we do sometimes see a moment of grace between human and machine.

In the grim, fantastical West of Zanzibar, where, as Norden has pointed out, the disabled character is demonized, there are moments of astonishing ease and companionship between the wheelchair and the man.24 In this Tod Browning feature starring Lon Chaney, the cuckolded magician Phroso is thrown from a balcony and crippled by his rival, played by Lionel Barrymore.

Coming upon his dead wife and a baby he assumes belongs to the other man, Phroso vows revenge against both father and daughter. The

convoluted, Sweeney Todd-like plot takes Phroso to the deepest reaches of Africa, “west of Zanzibar,” where he ensconces himself in his wheelchair as a kind of king among a tribe of cannibalistic natives. Though they have their own chief who arrives by way of a slave-carried palanquin, Phroso outdoes him with his steeland-woodwork chair, a modern means of mobility and marker of civilization, as well as part of his own magic. His wheelchair thus becomes a sort of throne into which, ironically, he must crawl; the fact that he always appears in this chair when the natives come by—and he performs his tricks (such as fire eating), seems to impart his magic and majesty to the chair.

(Or does the chair, in fact, impart power to Phroso, as a metaphoric “seat of power”?)

The wheelchair is at center stage many times in this film. The most poignant scene comes when Phroso learns that the girl, whom he placed in a brothel years before as a weird sort of payback, is actually his own daughter. Unfortunately, he has already set in motion the plan to kill her and her father. When he hears of her identity, he is on the floor, crawling up to his wheelchair, as he often does in the film. Chaney looks up into the camera in horror and pain, and leans backward, with one hand resting onto the seat of his chair. The chair seat supports him; the two are held together in one long shot, the wheels framing Phroso’s

23 Advertisement for the Electriquette, Exposition Motor Chair Company, San Diego, 1915. Wickercarts.com, http://wickercarts.com/wp/historical-info.

24 Norden, “Reel Wheels,” 190.

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shoulders, his head posed squarely in the center of the chair back (Fig.1). His crippling may have been the impetus for his hatred and evil, but in that moment on screen, he and the wheelchair become almost equal, living relatives. This harks back—or maybe forward—to Tom Gunning’s insistence on the nonnarrative showcasing—here, of the wheelchair-man unit—which silent film enables.25 Later films, in emphasizing rehabilitation and the courage of the disabled individuals, often overlook their wounding, literally and metaphorically. It is only perhaps in the ultimately sad and true story of the Iraq war veteran Tomas Young in the much later film Body of War (2007) that we may feel the misery and bitterness that some experience and do not necessarily overcome because of their disability. And in thinking of later “wheelchair” films, I believe there is also a link between Phroso and the young warrior Mark Zupan, whom we encounter in Murderball (2005), both of whom possess forms of magic—fire eating, tattoos—and both of whom have nearly a mystical connection with their wheelchairs.

The film Lucky Star has an especially interesting history: born on the cusp of new technology, it was released in the United States as a sort of part-talkie, with some sound included, but in Europe as a

silent film.26 The American version was lost, and the European one only discovered in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. It stars Janet Gaynor as Mary, an unsophisticated farm girl, and Charles Farrell as a disabled World War I veteran who falls in love with her (Fig. 2).

The film’s set, ensconced in the misty, shadowy landscape of early film, consists of the two homes of the main characters and the little road between them. As the New York Times reviewer noted when the film was shown in New York in 1991, the filmmakers had the ingenious idea of using a Dutch door for Tim’s house, so that when Mary first approaches she only sees his top half and doesn’t realize—neither do we—that he’s sitting in a wheelchair.27 Both the wheelchair and Tim himself seem quite extraordinary: when Tim opens the door the viewer doesn’t know what to expect, but we are immediately treated to the sight of a young disabled man able to do every chore imaginable in his household by a variety of clever moves and contraptions. He lives alone, apparently, and is able deftly to cook, mend broken objects, and generally keep house. Later, he shows his ability to operate machinery—he appears to be generating electricity— and to go fishing off his back porch.

At Mary’s entrance, Tim seamlessly backs his chair into the kitchen, lifts up and adroitly pulls out a chair

25

27

26

28

Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 63–70.

Janet Maslin, review of Lucky Star, directed by Frank Borzage, New York Times, Nov. 1, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/01/movies/review-film-naiveteand-sophistication-join-in-a-1929-silent.html; IMDb, Lucky Star, http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0020122/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv.

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for her, rolls out his little wheeled table, and brings her tea. He also amuses her by performing tricks in his wheelchair, spinning and twirling around multiple times with a sort of delirious joy, which seems to be connected to his feelings for Mary.

Some of Tim’s agility seems related to the chair itself, which, unlike previous versions seen in the shorts or in West of Zanzibar, is more compact and lower to the ground, and has a more circular, humanshaped profile. Chairs with a similar look were available as far back as the 1870s, although one doubts they operated as smoothly. In Lucky Star, Farrell has mastered the movement of this chair in a way that conjures up much later films like The Men (1950) or even Murderball; the man and the chair show a fluid unity that seems almost shocking for the time.

The story line works against the character’s ease and skill. Mary’s mother is dead set against her marrying a “cripple,” and oddly, Tim, so perfectly capable in his house, never seems to venture outside his own yard. When he does, finally, it is during a snowstorm; planning to ask Mary’s mother if he can marry her, he is racing to beat her other suitor. The chair’s wheels are defeated immediately, spinning around despite Tim’s frantic arm movements. The mired wheels reflect Tim’s powerless state of mind, and he quickly retires inside. But the film

has an improbable ending which allows a newly able-bodied Tim to marry Mary. While speeding toward Mary’s departing train, Tim is able to rise from his wheelchair and use crutches, very ably, to pursue Mary through the snow. At the last moment, he casts off the crutches and embraces Mary as a fully erect man. One can compare this to scenes in The Men where the paralyzed veteran Bud Wilocek trains madly in the weeks before his wedding so that he can stand up, and not sit in his chair, at the ceremony. In each case it seems the man must appear fully erect to marry.

One of the few actually disabled actors to play the roles of disabled people in early film was Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore had been an actor for several decades when worsening arthritis got the better of him and he began using a wheelchair on film.28 He starred in the Dr. Kildare series of movies, in which he played the older, disabled Dr. Gillespie, and later took the memorable role of the stingy Mr. Potter in the classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In On Borrowed Time, he is Julian Northrup, “Gramps,” an elderly man raising his grandson, Pud, who is orphaned at the start of the film. Despite the loss of his parents, Pud seems to be a carefree boy who adores his grandfather, whom he accompanies everywhere. Their relationship expands to Gramps’s wheelchair.

Maslin, review of Lucky Star.

Martin F. Norden, “The Road to Rehabilitation,” in The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), Kindle edition.

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Both he and Gramps have a casual, affectionate relationship with the chair. Pud leaps on and off the back apparatus, touching the wheels and backrest often when communicating with his grandfather.

Barrymore/Gramps has what seems like a supremely comfortable relationship with the chair. In a way unlike that of any of the nondisabled actors, he leans in one direction, toward his dominant hand, when sitting in the chair, and he seems to be making a physical effort when he pushes along the double-rimmed wheels. In the first scene, his suit jacket is draped through the chair’s backseat in a kind of intimate way, and he has a little shelf on the back of the chair where he keeps books and other items. His cane is stowed up front; the tip rests on the footboard. We see him carry out minute actions like setting or releasing the brake, and those around him, including his wife, don’t have any particular reverence or respect for the chair: for example, in an early scene, she grumbles when he tracks mud into the kitchen from the chair’s wheels. It is the kind of attitude a character would only have in a film where the wheelchair is simply an ordinary object, the opposite of Phroso’s magical throne.

The movie revolves around two themes: Death, with a capital “D,” and the desire of Pud’s Aunt Demetria to take over the care of her orphaned nephew. She implies that Gramps is not a suitable caretaker, but despite

his infirmity he seems young and capable. “I feel spry as a cricket,” says Gramps, in one of his old-fashioned characteristic pronouncements. As far as Pud is concerned, he loves Gramps most of anyone in the world—so he says—and the wheelchair is just part of the package.

The wheelchair itself is a fourwheeled vehicle with two large self-propelling wheels in front and two much smaller ones in back.29 Though its caned back is relatively low, it is longer than the one used in Lucky Star, with space for a shelf and a rider on the back. Presumably the fourth wheel makes this a more stable vehicle. The house or the set is designed so the entrance is on a slight incline, and Gramps never has to go upstairs; thus, there are no encumbrances. Although Gramps and Pud take a trip into town—we see them on the street—they never encounter a curb, and so we don’t see how this wheelchair might behave in such a circumstance. Certainly Barrymore would have needed assistance in his four-wheeled backcaster chair, but this is not shown in the film, perhaps because it would counter the idea of the character’s independence, which either the director or Barrymore might have been loath to question.

Such early films as I’ve discussed provide a remarkable window for examining wheelchairs, both historically—it is the first record we have of wheelchairs in action—and as framed or performative objects.

In early shorts like The Good-forNothing, we see both disjunction between people and technology, as well as the blurring of distinctions between objects and people noted by early-film theorists; in Lucky Star, the framing of object and person—the wheelchair and the character(s)—in extended camera shots make us consider this dyad in literally a new light. Tim’s fluidity in his more compact, better-designed wheelchair signals a future direction where man and machine operate as one: a harbinger of the modern wheelchair as prosthetic device. In On Borrowed Time, there is a matter-of-factness and acceptance of the chair, an assumption that the space of human and wheelchair are one complete sphere.

While some early films demonstrate dated and disturbing images of disability, as described in Norden’s writings, if we look at them through the lens of Gunning or Keilbach, we can read more closely how the chair and user are symbiotic and related: powerful demonstrations of material culture in action. In understanding the potent and nearly magical quality of things, early filmmakers may have shown us the unity of chair and person in their purest form. They provided many of the situations and much of the scaffolding for movies and characters in wheelchairs that would come later in the century and beyond.

29 He may have used more than one wheelchair, as evidenced by a careful reviewing of the film. One chair may have had three, not four, wheels.

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Of the Future. For the Future: The Translation of the New Soviet Man from Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism Rebecca Gross

In 1937, the Soviet Union marked the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Revolution that gave birth to the concept of the “New Soviet Man.” That same year, the Communist state showcased the ideological and material construction of the New Soviet Man in the form of Vera Mukhina’s statue Rabochiy i Kolkhoznitsa (Worker and Collective Farm Woman) mounted atop the USSR pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) in Paris (Fig. 1).

Cast in the style of Socialist Realism, Mukhina’s monumental sculpture embodied the energy, spirit, and ambition of the Soviet

nation. It portrayed a dynamic and determined young man and woman striding ahead, holding the national symbols of the hammer and sickle aloft. In profile, its form loosely traced the shape of the Soviet fivepointed star. It also recalled an earlier representation of the New Soviet Man: avant-garde artist El Lissitzky’s 1920-21 lithograph Neuer Man (New Man) which was conceived for his version of the show Pobeda nad Solnstem (Victory Over the Sun) (Fig. 2). Lissitzky created a modernist, abstract figure composed of three-dimensional geometric shapes and floating planes. It, too, was a symbol of the future—a figure leaping forth with one arm raised high and the

Opposite page:Fig. 1. Vera Mukhina, Rabochiy i Kolkhoznitsa (Worker and Collective Farm Woman), 1937, stainless steel.

Photo by James Offer, Flickr.

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emblems of Communism clearly in sight.

These two images of the New Soviet Man, executed in different artistic manners, under the governance of different political party leaders, and during different manifestations of Soviet culture, are united by their underlying form, iconography, and ideological content.

Indeed, Mukhina’s sculpture may be perceived as a tangible expression of Lissitzky’s lithograph, rendering the ideological and the material of the avant-garde in Socialist Realism form.

In this paper I discuss the ideology and characteristics of the New Soviet Man and focus on these representations to consider how Lissitzky and Mukhina transformed them from the style of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s to Socialist Realism in the 1930s. In doing so, I consider the broader context of the USSR, situating these representations within two theories of Soviet culture: Boris Groïs’ claim that Socialist Realists fulfilled the avant-garde dream of a transformation of society; and Vladimir Paperny’s dichotomous model of Culture One and Culture Two.1 It is worth noting that the comparison between Lissitzky’s New Man and Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Woman has seemingly

rarely been recognized. Danilo Udovicki-Selb’s essay “Facing Hitler’s Pavilion: The Uses of Modernity in the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition,” establishes the remaining presence of Constructivism and Suprematism during Stalin’s cultural revolution and argues that this is most visible in the USSR Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair. However, his argument focuses primarily on architecture with only a brief note that Mukhina’s sculpture recalls Lissitzky’s New Man.2 I seek to elaborate on this discussion.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW SOVIET MAN

A revolutionary movement emerged in Russia during the First World War that sought to eradicate the nation’s hierarchical and religious institutions. Socialist ideals underscored the movement, and the Bolshevik Party instituted propagandistic imagery to promote and foster a single Soviet society.

In November 1917, the Bolsheviks, under the direction of Vladimir Lenin, seized control of Russia and established the Soviet state—the first country to be committed to the institution of Communism. The party initiated large-scale reforms for the creation of a new society without distinctions

1 Boris Groïs, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle, (USA: Verson, 2011); Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill, Roann Barris, Paperny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

2 Danilo Udovicki-Selb, “Facing Hitler’s Pavilion: The Uses of Modernity in the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, No. 1 (2102), 27.

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Fig. 2. El Lissitzky, Neuer Man (New Man), 1920-21, lithograph on paper. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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of religion, class, culture, or ethnicity.3 The Bolsheviks introduced symbols, rituals, and visual imagery to communicate the messages of the revolution and to gain support for the new establishment.4 It adopted the hammer and sickle as the state’s official emblem, commemorating two recognizable tools that symbolized the spirit of Communist ideology: the unity of the workingclass proletariat and the rural peasant.5 The Bolsheviks identified workers and peasants as the heroic embodiments of the new regime, their fundamental purpose being their usefulness to society and their ultimate goal being their contribution to the better life of future generations. By 1918, Bolshevik imagery of the new Communist hero—the New Soviet Man—began to take form.6 He was customarily depicted as a male blacksmith; a female version did not emerge until the early 1920s.7 Toby Clark suggests the concept of the New Soviet Man stemmed from

the Marxist belief that a harmonious society would enable an individual to develop wholly—mentally, morally, and physically—which would facilitate the long-term Communist endeavor to improve humanity.8 Similarly, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal proposes the concept may be traced to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed the New Man was a goal for humanity to set itself.9 Indeed, the New Soviet Man personified Nietzsche’s New Man, with “boundless energy, daring, hardness, and physical vitality.”10 Painters, photographers, writers, and sculptors provided visual imagery and poetic descriptions that exalted this heroic ideal and expressed the concepts of work, fitness, and citizenship.11 Avantgarde artists of the 1920s portrayed the New Soviet Man as an ultrafunctional machine prototype, linking him to science and efficiency at a time when Russia strived for modernity. By the 1930s, Socialist Realism artists depicted the New Soviet Man as a superhuman model

3 Vladimir Brovkin, Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture & Society, 1921-1929. (USA: Taylor & Francis E-Library, 2005), 1-13, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www. revalvaatio.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/brovkinrussia_after_lenin_politics_culture_ society_1921-1929.pdf 4 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (California: University of California Press, 1997), 1.

5 Ibid., 25. Christopher Wharton, “The Hammer and Sickle: The Role of Symbolism and Rituals in the Russian Revolution,” Westminster College, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www.westminstercollege.edu/myriad/index. cfm?parent=2514&detail=4475&content=4797.

6 Bonnell, 3.

7 Ibid., 23.

8 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: the Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 87-8.

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra (excerpts),” accessed May 12, 2013, Praxeology.net: The Website of Roderick T. Long, http://praxeology.net/zara.htm.

10 Andrada Fätu-Tutoveanu, “Constructing Female Identity in Soviet Art in the 1930s. A Case Study: Vera Mukhina’s Sculpture,” Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov 3, No. 52 (2010): 251.

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emphasizing the stamina, strength, and loyalty of the working class.12 This shifting characterization is evident in comparing Lissitzky’s lithograph of 1920-21 and Mukhina’s sculpture of 1937.

EL LISSITZKY, NEW MAN (1920–21)

Lissitzky (1890-1941) assumed the role of a leading figure of the Soviet avant-garde and the Constructivist art movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Like many of the avant-garde artists, he embraced color, geometric shapes, and machine-like forms to make artistic statements about political change, extolling the revolutionary ideas of the new Communist state.13 The 1917 Revolution marked a new era for Soviet artists when art moved beyond merely representing the world to creatively transforming it. Avant-garde and Constructivist artists wanted their forms to become symbols of the new spirit, and they imbued their material work with ideological constructions.14 In 1921 Aleksander Rodchenko (1891-1956)

and his wife Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) founded the First Working Group of Constructivists, dedicated to “synthesiz[ing] the ideological with the formal.”15 Victor Margolin establishes these two principles—the ideological and the formal—as being fundamental to the design and practice of Constructivist artists and their quest to build a new society through forms and values.16 However, while Rodchenko believed revolutionary consciousness could be represented in material form— emphasizing the formal relationship between objects and humans— Lissitzky perceived revolutionary consciousness as transcendental— accentuating the facility of an object to embody paradigms and ideals beyond itself and contemporary experience.17 In 1920, Lissitzky announced a new type of artwork he named the “Proun,” an acronym for the Russian phrase meaning “project of the affirmation of the new.”18 Between 1919 and 1927, Lissitzky produced a large volume of Prouns: paintings,

11

Clark, “The ‘New Man’s’ Body: a Motif in Early Soviet Culture,” in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a one-party state, 1917-1992, eds. Matthew Cullerne Brown and Brandon Taylor (New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 33-50.

12 Clark, “The ‘New Man’s’ Body: a Motif in Early Soviet Culture,” 33-50.

Rosenthal, 189-190.

13 Rosenthal, 211. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed, eds. Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (Canada: Getty Research Institute, 2003).

14 Boris Groïs, “The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian AvantGarde,” in The Culture of the Stalin Period, ed. Hans Günther (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990), 127.

15 Aleksander Rodchenko and Varvara Steponova, “Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists,” in The Industrial Design Reader, ed. Carma Gorman (USA: Allworth Press, 2003), 104.

16 Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 42-3.

17 Ibid., 10, 22.

18 Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 347.

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Fig. 3. El Lissitzky, USSR: Die Russische Ausstellung (USSR: Russian Exhibition), 1929, gravure. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

prints, and drawings that combined three-dimensional forms of architecture with the abstract visual language developed by Kasimir Malevich, called Suprematism.19 Lissitzky endowed his Prouns with utopian values and aligned them with the evolutionary and revolutionary.20 Lissitzky created the Proun

New Man as a puppet for his electromechanical reworking of the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun.21 Poet Alexei Kruchënykh wrote the opera, first performed in 1913, to announce the death of the past and the commencement of a new era.

Endorsing the ambitions of the Bolshevik Party, the opera presented

19 Museum of Modern Art: The Collection, “El Lissitzky, Proun 19D,” Museum of Modern Art, 2013. http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79040.

20 El Lissitzky, “Prouns: Not world visions, BUT – world reality,” in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 333.

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a figurative staging of the revolution to come; the sun represented the outdated world, and its capture and death signified the dawn of a new age.22 Indeed, the character Old Man symbolized a culture that found meaning in the past, while New Man embodied the energy of the new Communist regime.23 Lissitzky’s New Man represented a model for the New Soviet Man. Drawn in profile, his form traced the shape of the Soviet five-pointed star, with one arm and leg extended in front, and the other arm and leg stretched behind. In place of eyes, he has a black star and a red star—as if the ambitions and future of Bolshevism guided his vision.

Udovicki-Selb proposes that the black and red stars acknowledged the role of the anarchists in the Russian Revolution. He notes the reappearance of this association in Lissitzky’s 1922 Dva Kvadrata (The Story of Two Squares), reading the story as a possible reference to the Kronstadt rebellion—the unsuccessful uprising against the

Bolsheviks in 1921.24 The Story of Two Squares is a pedagogic tale that may be likened to Victory Over the Sun, in which the black square signifies the old order, chaos, egotism, and death, while the red square symbolizes life and a new order with unlimited possibilities.25 Lissitzky placed a red square at the very core of New Man, which emulated Malevich’s Red Square (1915). For Lissitzky, Suprematism denoted “a sign and symbol” of the new world “which issues forth from our inner being.” Furthermore, Lissitzky perceived the “square of Suprematism” as a “beacon.”26 Thus, he positioned the red square at the center—or “inner being”—of New Man; for he believed it was from here that the new world would emanate and emerge.

New Man celebrated modern man’s technological capabilities, and Lissitzky described the character as being fully in tune with his socialist environment, writing “the flying human being is at the frontier.”27 Rosenthal describes New Man,

21 Museum of Modern Art: The Collection, “El Lissitzky, Neuer Man,” Museum of Modern Art, 2013, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www.moma.org/collection/object. php?object_id=88312.

22 John Milner, El Lissitzky – Design (UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2009), 14.

23 Radford University, “Deconstructing Utopia: From Constructivism to Socialist Realism,” Radford University, 2013, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www.radford.edu/ rbarris/art428/constructivism%20introduction.html.

24 Udovicki-Selb, 27.

25 Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “About Two Square: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions,” ArtsConnectEd, 2009, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www. artsconnected.org/resource/101032/about-two-squares-a-suprematist-tale-in-sixconstructions-gallery-label-current.

26 El Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Construction,” El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 331.

27 Rosenthal, 215.

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who appeared to glide through space, as being “both poised for movement and already in motion” as an expression of the hope that electrical energy would propel the Soviet nation into the modern era.28 Thus, New Man—as an embodiment of the New Soviet Man of the early 1920s—represented the technology, progress, science, and efficiency of the revolutionary Communist regime that aspired to leave the traditions of the antiquated world far behind.

EL LISSITZKY: USSR: RUSSIAN EXHIBITION (1929)

In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having gained effective leadership of the USSR, initiated the first Five-Year Plan, a radical attempt to transform the Soviet empire into a major industrial power. He focused on building a completely socialist state, and zealously pursued the policy of mass collectivization.29 As government officials challenged and steadily suppressed the active participation of Constructivists in the new society, avant-garde artists began to return to figurative principles.30 Lissitzky employed photomontage techniques to present the human face and anatomy while still maintaining a sense of modernist abstraction.31 Lissitzky’s poster USSR: Die Russische Ausstellung (USSR: Russian Exhibition) for the May 1929 exhibition held in

Zurich presented a formidable image of a teenage boy and girl fused to become one (Fig. 3). With “USSR” branded in red across their merged foreheads, they portrayed the ideal of the Soviet state and its egalitarian, collective consciousness. Their relaxed, collared shirts and tousled hair spoke to their healthy outdoor lifestyle, declaring the vigor of the state.32 The physical appearance of the teenagers in Lissitzky’s poster demonstrates the evolution of the New Soviet archetype. By the end of the 1920s, youthfulness, stamina, strength, and party loyalty characterized the ideal of the New Soviet Man. Clark proposes Lissitzky’s poster anticipated many of the Socialist Realism practices that materialized in the 1930s—the centrality, inflated size, and elevated position of the human figure portrayed with equal significance given to men and women, and a euphoric gaze directed toward a distant point.33 These formulaic practices expressed the relentless optimism and progress the ruling AllUnion Communist Party demanded New Soviets embrace, raising them to a superhuman scale and power.

Additionally, Clark suggests, “a temporal overlap in which the present is infused with the spirit of the future” is expressed through the forward-andupward gaze.34

Fig. 4. Éditions Art et Architecture, “U.R.S.S.” (Soviet Pavilion) from Exposition 1937: sections étrangères, 1937. WolfsonianFIU, Miami Beach.

VERA MUKHINA: WORKER AND COLLECTIVE FARM WOMAN (1937)

Under Stalin, the concept of the New Soviet Man became authoritarian and instructive; it was intended to “remold and educate” citizens in the “spirit of socialism.”35 Subsequently, Socialist Realism artists presented a future ideal person or society, as exemplified by Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Woman atop the USSR pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition.

In 1932, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party abolished independent Soviet art groups and formally instated Socialist Realism as national policy, alleging the mass audience could

not understand nonrepresentative forms of art.36 It contended Socialist Realism was accessible, relevant, and comprehensible, and therefore suitable for the popular audience.

Socialist Realism artists strove for a mass character with enduring appeal that would provide an aspiration and inspiration for the glorified working class.37 Mukhina (1889-1953), a renowned Soviet artist and sculptor during the 1920s and the following decades, employed readily recognizable imagery to represent and champion a new image of the New Soviet Man.38 Her epic Worker and Collective Farm Woman crowned the Soviet pavilion—a sweeping mass of

28

Ibid., 212.

Brovkin.

30 Margolin, 163.

31 Groïs, “The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian AvantGarde,” 125.

32 Juliet Kinchin, ed., Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, Museum of Modern Art (Hong Kong: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 124.

33 Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, 89-90; Kinchin, 124.

34 Ibid., Clark.

29

70

35

Andrada Fätu-Tutoveanu, 250.

Ibid., 74.

C. G. Holme, Art in the USSR: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Graphic Arts, Theatre, Film, Crafts (London: Studio, 1935), 9.

38 D. Arkin, “Introduction,” Vera Mukhina: A Sculptor’s Thoughts, trans. Fainna Solasko (USSR: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow), 7-8 36 37

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Fig. 5. Vera Mukhina, Rabochiy i Kolkhoznitsa (Worker and Collective Farm Woman), 1937, stainless steel, Moscow.

architectural blocks designed by Soviet architect Boris Iofan (Fig. 4).

The surging upward movement of the pavilion accentuated the form of Mukhina’s sculpture as if thrusting the young man and woman, striding from east to west, onward and upward. Reminiscent of New Man, the profile of the larger-than-life sculpture formed the shape of the Soviet five-pointed star, with each figure extending one arm and leg in front and the other arm and leg behind. Their arms stretched high in a gesture of victory, and they appeared directed and intent, looking ahead unwaveringly as Lissitzky’s 39

youths had done in his 1929 poster.

The woman’s stole flowed behind her, symbolizing the red banners of revolutionary demonstrations, and the figures’ swept-back hair and clothes portrayed their momentum from past to present (Fig. 5).39 Worker and Collective Farm Woman embodied the promise of the future.

Mukhina found inspiration in the everyday Soviets around her, whom she described as “the young and forceful spirit” of the nation, “full of movement and determination…”40 The virtues of youth, agility, fitness— and gender equality—are clearly visible, reflecting the qualities desired

Mukhina, “About Myself and My Work,” Vera Mukhina: A Sculptor’s Thoughts, 36 Ibid., 34 41 Fätu-Tutoveanu, 254.

42 Bonnell, 105 40

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for Stalin’s mass collectivization.41 Artists created a new image of the Soviet woman during the 1930s. No longer a female peasant of the past, she became a collective farm woman of the future, reflecting the political shift that emphasized women’s participation in agricultural labor.42 Indeed, Mukhina created a powerful material representation of Stalin’s superhuman New Soviet Man—and Woman—of the 1930s.

Cast in stainless steel—a new industrial product in the USSR at the time—Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Woman represented the modernizing twentieth-century Soviet Union.43 In 1920–21 Lissitzky depicted the New Soviet Man as a model technological phenomenon.

Seventeen years later, Mukhina created the New Soviet Man as an actual technological phenomenon.

Her sculpture was formed from modern material molded into the essence of Stalin’s superhuman, absorbing the 1920s avant-garde faith in technology, progress, and efficiency, and transforming it into the 1930s faith in stamina, strength, and human power.44 Mukhina had synthesized Rodchenko’s formalist principles and Lissitzky’s ideological tenets and infused industrial material with transcendent revolutionary consciousness. Her statue translated the ideology of the Soviet avant-garde to the aesthetic of Socialist Realism.

THE NEW SOVIET MAN: OF THE FUTURE; IS THE FUTURE; FOR THE FUTURE

An exploration of these three representations of the New Soviet Man within two theories of Soviet culture—proposed by Groïs and Paperny—reveals the evolution of the Communist state, its future hopes, and citizen ideals during the first two decades after the Revolution.

Groïs argues that both the avantgarde and Socialist Realists moved beyond the art and the utility of an object to exert active influences on life and social development.

Furthermore, neither the avantgarde nor the Socialist Realists portrayed life as it was; rather, they created an artistic shaping of life with the objective of projecting the new, the future, and the hopedfor.45 Lissitzky’s New Man depicted a radical reconception of life based on technology and science, while Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Woman portrayed the anticipation of a promised destiny. For both, the future was the ambition. The avantgarde future was radical; the Socialist Realists’ future was mythical. Thus, the avant-garde depiction of the revolutionary future was conceptual and rarely realized, while the Socialist Realists sought to make it tangible and monumental.

The evolution of the New Soviet Man also mirrors the development of

43

Mukhina, “About Myself and My Work,” 32 Groïs, The Total Art of Stalinism, 60 Groïs, “The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian AvantGarde,” 113, 124-6.

44 45

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the Soviet state and the cultural shifts that took place between the 1920s and the 1930s. Paperny examines these cultural paradoxes in his famed argument, Kul’tura Dva (Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two), defining the revolutionary trend of the avant-garde in the 1920s as Culture One, and the stabilizing, restorative trend of Stalinism in the 1930s as Culture Two.46 From the analysis of the three images discussed, it may be perceived that the representation of the New Soviet Man grew and matured with the Soviet nation. Lissitzky created New Man, born of Culture One—the groundbreaking period of Soviet history when Bolshevism took radical steps to reconstruct a new future—as a mechanistic superhero prototype; a profound reconstitution of Man, informed by Culture One’s fascination with the electric and the mechanical. Conceived of the new world, he functioned as a revelation of the New Soviet of the future.47 By 1929, the socialist state had entered its second decade and a period of transition as Stalin stabilized and expanded his power.

Fittingly, Lissitzky’s poster USSR: Russian Exhibition featured two adolescent youths. They represented a realistic vision of the future as the nation underwent a major shift that would be realized as Culture Two. Indeed, Lissitzky presented an image in which the New Soviet is the future.

Both of Lissitzky’s representations 46

Paperny.

Ibid., 13, 119, 222.

48 Ibid., 115.

49 Ibid., 15.

47

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expressed the ways in which Culture One sought to eliminate or equalize cultural differences between men and women.48 He did not assign New Man a gender, other than in its title, and the youths featured on his poster are of equal size and merged together.

By 1937, Stalinism had become entrenched in the state. Accordingly, Mukhina’s sculpture presented a man and woman in their twenties in the same year the USSR celebrated its twentieth anniversary. In this period of Culture Two, Paperny explains, the future was indeterminately suspended; the “movement forward [became] even more joyous, but there did not seem to be an end in sight to that movement—the movement had become an end in itself.”49 Mukhina’s statue encapsulated this motion, perpetually advancing towards the mythic future. It represented the determination of the Soviet Union and provided citizens with an ambitious and exemplary model of the New Soviet for the future.

Fig. 6. El Lissitzky, USSR in Construction, Illustrated Monthly Magazine---The Stalin Constitution, issues 9-12, September-December, 1937. Special Collections Department, University of Saskatchewan Library.

EL LISSITZKY: USSR IN CONSTRUCTION (1937)

In September 1937, Lissitzky united his work with Mukhina’s, combining the artistic movements of avant-garde and Socialist Realism and the concepts of Culture One and Culture Two into a single image. He designed an issue of the magazine USSR in Construction, celebrating the Soviet state’s twentieth anniversary

and commemorating the Stalin constitution of December 1936.50 He used photomontage on the title page to place Mukhina’s statue atop a globe; its form, direction, and placement on the page echoed New Man (Fig. 6). A vast open sky—a

symbol of unlimited possibilities— filled the background; the man and woman’s outstretched arms reached to the sky as an emblem of national triumph.51 The pair seemingly impelled the world forward with them and propelled their bodies

50 A. Kosarev, E. S. Yezhova, and S. B. Uritzki, eds., USSR in Construction: Illustrated Monthly Magazine 9–12, (September–December, 1937), http://library2.usask.ca/ USSRConst/gallery/constitution.

51 Margolin, 199.

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higher through space and across the page. Lissitzky translated the red square at the heart of his radical New Man into a revolutionary flag planted at the central axis of the globe where it continued to function as the beacon of the evolutionary and revolutionary new world order.

Indeed, by utilizing an image of Mukhina’s sculpture, Lissitzky had realized and rendered his New Man to fulfill the aesthetics and politics of Socialist Realism, Stalinism, and Culture Two. Accordingly, as Groïs argues, Socialist Realism was the fulfillment,

not the antithesis, of the avant-garde dream of a transformation of society, writing: Under Stalin, the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life of society was organized in monolithic artistic forms, though of course not those that the avant-garde itself had favored. 52 Additionally, as Maria Gough contends, the Constructivist project of revolutionary transformation did not end with the triumph of Stalinism. Rather, it constituted the emergence of a “line of historical

inquiry and philosophical possibility” that would and will continue to circulate and reappear in different landscapes and moments of time.53 OF THE FUTURE. FOR THE FUTURE.

In 1937, Mukhina created a monumental Socialist Realist vision of the New Soviet Man to be exhibited and celebrated at the Paris Exposition. The form of her Worker and Collective Farm Woman recalled elements of Lissitzky’s earlier abstract and avant-garde New Man and his poster USSR: Russian Exhibition. Through an analysis of the

similarities in form, iconography, and content, the images reveal the Soviet Union’s desired and anticipated reality during the first two decades of its statehood; together, they symbolize the avant-garde and Socialist Realism dream of societal transformation.

Indeed, the evolution of the ideology and characteristics of these depictions demonstrates the shifts in Soviet culture as the USSR moved from the 1920s to the 1930s—from avant-garde to Socialist Realism, from Lenin to Stalin, and from Culture One to Culture Two. Thus, the New Soviet Man became an expression of the progression and development of the revolutionary state: from a symbol of the radical new order that the USSR strived to create and achieve to a model of the mythical and ideal future that the Soviet Union ambitiously endeavored to attain.

52

Ibid., 9, 36 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (USA: University of California Press, 2005), 191-2.

53

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77

Perspectiva corporum regularium Julia Pelkofsky

The Perspectiva corporum regularium is a Renaissance book of shapes and perspective. The first pages display publication information for a Dutch bookseller, a title page and a frontispiece.

A Latin introduction follows, written

by Wenzel Jamnitzer and describing the purpose and contents of the book.

The body consists of a progression of five multi-sided shapes, or polyhedra, executed in linear perspective. The first of the five is a tetrahedron, introduced with a frontispiece depicting fire; manipulations of the tetrahedron follow in two rows of three encircled pyramidal shapes, each showcasing various cutouts to illustrate these three-dimensional forms in accurate perspective (Fig. 1). This theme is repeated for three successive pages, totaling twenty-four Opposite page: Fig. 1. Wenzel Jamnitzer, Plate A.IIII. in Perspectiva corporum regularium, 1568, engraving on white laid paper.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

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iterations of the tetrahedron. With each successive change in treatment of the polyhedron, the associated numeral changes; the first of the series being AI, then AII and so forth, until the introduction of the next polyhedron.

The letters go from A through E as the number of sides increase. B is the cube and earth, represented by a leaf; C is the octahedron and air, symbolized by the bellows; D shows an icosahedron or water, represented by a shell; and E is the dodecahedron and the heavens, portrayed as an ethereal circle. At F the pattern switches and the polyhedra are abandoned for other geometric forms, hollowed out to display the intricacy of the designs. Section G depicts several treatments of a sphere, while section H illustrates the proper perspective handling of cones (Fig. 2). The final pages display an arrangement of shapes and manipulations on a stage (Fig. 3).

An engraving mark created during the printing process can be felt around the 79

edge of each page. Every sheet of paper is creased down the middle and displays a watermark on the back.

Designed by Wenzel Jamnitzer, with engravings by Jost Amman, Perspectiva corporum regularium, or “Perspective of regular bodies,” was first published in 1568. The frontispiece establishes the framework in which the treatise as a whole should be viewed. Personifications of arithmetic, geometry, perspective, and architecture are presented as four of the seven liberal arts known as the quadrivium. Traditionally, the quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. In medieval education the quadrivium was the second stage of study, following mastery of grammar, logic, and dialectic1 and it was expected that Renaissance Humanists would study all seven subjects. In replacing music and astronomy with perspective and architecture, Jamnitzer focused attention on the skills he believed most important. With his title page, Jamnitzer declared these subjects to be necessary for the understanding and application of his designs.

Jamnitzer’s designs achieved an elevated status through his incorporation of classical elements as well as his display of artistic innovation and talent. These features were highly valued throughout Renaissance culture, especially in the sorts of objects collected

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for a Kunstkammer, or Curiosity Cabinet.

Kunstkammern were an invention of the late Renaissance, for the collection, study and display of naturalia, items like coral branches and exotic shells; scientifica, or scientific instruments; and artificialia, or man-made objects.2 Objects in the Kunstkammer were particularly prized when they incorporated more than one of these categories, furthered the collector’s knowledge, or facilitated scientific research. Jamnitzer’s book exemplified an ideal object of the Kunstkammer through its display of masterful technical skill and classical elements, and through the practical application of the designs contained in the book. Jamnitzer’s successful career and his skillful designs made Perspectiva corporum regularium both a collectible object and a resource for artistic production.

Wenzel Jamnitzer was born in 1508 in Vienna, eventually moving to Nuremberg where he became one of the city’s foremost Mannerist goldsmiths.3 His reputation was based on his remarkable technical abilities, showcased through his complex execution of silver chests, writing cabinets, cups and other sumptuous objects.4 His talent led to numerous appointed positions in Nuremberg, including die-cutter for coins and seals in 1543 and master of the city mint in 1552.5 These associations undoubtedly

1 Kei Yee Chan, “The Geometry in Art: Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularium” (master’s thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2005), 7-8.

2 Wolfram Koeppe, “Exotica and the Kunstkammer: Snake Stones, Iridescent Sea Snails, and Eggs of the Giant Iron-Devouring Bird,” in Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court, 1580-1620, eds. Dirk Syndram and Antje Scherner (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 80.

3 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 2004), 330.

4 Ibid.

5 Philippe De Montebello ed., The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 289.

Fig. 2. Wenzel Jamnitzer, Plate H.III. in Perspectiva corporum regularium, 1568, engraving on white laid paper. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

elevated his status: not only were his works recognized as those of a master craftsman, but also he became an artist collected in his own right. Jamntizer’s work came to be so highly regarded within Nuremberg society that he and the engraver Jost Amman were employed by the wealthy patrician Paulus Praun to assist in collecting items for Praun’s Kunstkammer.6 Praun likely saw Jamnitzer as the perfect person to advise on his collection, because Jamnitzer’s works, as well as the works of other craftsmen executed from Jamnitzer’s designs, were found in Kunstkammern as renowned as those of August I, Elector of Saxony and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. In fact, Rudolph II’s inventory of 1607-

1611 listed no fewer than eleven items that can be attributed to Jamnitzer.7 The basis of Jamnitzer’s treatise comes out of classical texts studied

by Humanists, in particular Euclid’s Elements and Plato’s Timaeus.8 These two ancient philosophers are named in Jamnitzer’s introduction to establish the relationship from the beginning. The writings of classical philosophers were considered important references for Humanist study;9 Jamnitzer’s designs outline Euclid’s and Plato’s discussions on the five naturally occurring regular polyhedra or “Platonic solids,” as they are known. Platonic solids are regular polygons, made three-dimensional through the repetition of a single twodimensional shape touching at each

6 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The Transformations of Patrician Tastes in Renaissance Nuremberg,” In New Perspectives on the Art of Renaissance Nuremberg: Five Essays, ed.

Jeffrey Chipps Smith, (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 1985), 94.

7 Clare Vincent, “Prince Karl I of Liechtenstein’s Pietre Dure Tabletop,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 22 (1987): 175.

8 Frank J. Swetz, “Mathematical Treasure: Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Platonic Solids,” Mathematical Association of America, http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/ convergence/mathematical-treasure-wenzel-jamnitzers-platonic-solids.

9 Chan, 14.

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Fig. 3. Wenzel Jamnitzer, Plate I.I. in Perspectiva corporum regularium, 1568, engraving on white laid paper. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

side to create a polyhedron or multisided solid.10 The five Platonic solids are the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and the dodecahedron.

Plato took the five naturally occurring solids and combined them with the four elements—air, fire, earth, and water.

Plato explains this association stating, “…as is evident to all, fire and earth and water and air are bodies… And next we have to determine what are the four most beautiful bodies which are unlike one another and of which some are capable of resolution into one another.”11 The tetrahedron’s point stings like the heat of fire; the cube represents the grounded nature of earth; the octahedron is meant to represent air; the icosahedron is meant to evoke the properties of water. That leaves the dodecahedron; with no correlating element, Plato equated its shape to the all-encompassing universe, because just as the universe contains all elements, the dodecahedron incorporates all other polyhedra.12 Euclid further diagrams this association in his Elements. These ancient theories would have been

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recognized and highly regarded by Humanists, and their use as subject matter for Jamnitzer’s treatise enhanced its status as an object worthy of placement within a Kunstkammer.

Written works of classical mythology, science and philosophy were regularly among the curiosities collected for a Kunstkammer. Humanist scholars and aristocrats who studied such texts would also need to be familiar with popular Renaissance works of learning and science, and Perspectiva corporum regularium was viewed as one of these works.13 Its importance was confirmed through its incorporation into the Kunstkammer of August I, Elector of Saxony, who created and maintained one of the first and largest Kunstkammern in Dresden.

All items in his Kunstkammer were required to possess an exquisite finish and display the most recent technical and artistic developments.14 Perspectiva was kept within the Elector’s book collection, which focused on theoretical and scientific sources.15 The placement is worth noting because August I, probably more than any of his elite

10

12

11

13

Swetz.

Michele Emmer, “Art and Mathematics: The Platonic Solids,” Leonardo 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 278.

Ibid.

Koeppe, 81.

14 Ibid..

15 Chan, 23.

contemporaries, actually understood the technical aspects of Jamnitzer’s work.

The Elector was proud of his ability to turn ivory on the lathe, a skill requiring a wealth of technical knowledge.

Understanding of mathematics, geometry, mechanics, and perspective were all necessary;16 these skills were noted in some form on the title page of Perspectiva. But how does one translate or relate Jamnitzer’s geometric exercises to ivory? While Perspectiva demonstrates Jamnitzer’s personal knowledge and skill, it also served as a pattern book.

In the introduction to the treatise, Jamnitzer proposes his work as a tool for the inexperienced artist to use and apply.17 August I and his wife Anna encouraged their son, the future Elector Christian I, to work the lathe like his father, and hired Nuremberg goldsmith Hans Lencker as Christian’s tutor.

Lencker taught Christian in the ways of modern perspective, and required him to sketch perspective designs. The drawings Christian completed during his tutoring sessions seem to indicate that his curriculum might have included Perspectiva corporum regularium or a similar treatise.

When comparing pages of Perspectiva to Christian’s drawings, it is no great leap to think that Jamnitzer’s book, owned by the Elector, could have been used as a sort of textbook.18 Unfortunately, the Cooper Hewitt’s copy of Perspectiva is not the same as that of August I. Though Jamnitzer designed the work in 1568, the publication pages of the Cooper Hewitt copy reveal that it was most likely printed circa 1618, thirty-

two years after August I’s death. Further inspection reveals that this particular copy was printed by an Amsterdam bookmaker named Jean Janson. In the short paragraph above the publication information, the book is lauded as important to sculptors, architects, bricklayers and others who concern themselves with portraying something with precision. Fifty years after the initial publication of Perspectiva, Jamnitzer’s work was still being utilized as a pattern book, though the audience was far less elite. Thus, the practical applications of the book remained, as exhibited by August I at the lathe and the instruction of Christian I, but its relevance waned as an object of theoretical, educational and methodical study within a Kunstkammer.

Regardless of the non-royal provenance of this copy of Perspectiva, the contents and technical ingenuity of Jamnitzer’s treatise remain unchanged.

The designs in Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva corporum regularium required considerable technical skill and knowledge to replicate.

Though Jamnitzer’s designs could be recreated practically by craftsmen, without a Humanist education and a thorough understanding of the designer’s perspective techniques, it was impossible to use the treatise for its greater purpose: as an object to aid intense theoretical study within one’s Kunstkammer. Perspectiva corporum regularium should be considered more than just a pattern book; it is a work of art in its own right, viewed as a remarkable example of Humanist practice worthy of the most important collections.

16 Jutta Kappel, “Turned Ivory Works,” in Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court, 1580-1620, eds.

Dirk Syndram and Antje Scherner (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 175.

17 Chan, 35.

18 A drawing by Christian I can be found within Kappel’s essay. Kappel, 176.

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Introduction to a Thesis on the Music Box Roi Baron

Decoding and interpreting various layers of meanings embedded in objects through the long history of their existence is probably the most complex task within the fields of art history and material culture studies.

Countless theories and approaches have been presented over the years in the attempt to arrive at some method, or system, by which to analyze an object and uncover its meanings. In many cases, and depending on the methodology applied, such endeavors prove to be successful. It is when we try to apply art historical and material culture methodologies in order to explain our fascination with certain objects, however, that these methodologies reach their boundaries; some objects seem to defy our

Musical Box, ca. 1820, Swiss, Geneva, Gold, Enamel, and Diamonds. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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reductive wish for systematic labeling and categorization. This is especially true when the object in question is ambiguous and multi-layered by nature.

One such object is the music box.

The music box holds a special place in Western imagination. It arouses a wide range of emotions, from curiosity and delight to anxiety and terror. On the one hand, it is an innocent-looking object, often associated with childhood, perhaps decorated with delicate figurines of dancing ballerinas. On the other hand, its use in a sinister and menacing context in popular culture, and especially in the medium of film, is common; music boxes are frequently used in horror films or dramas dealing with the dark side of human nature, and are often understood as eerie, unsettling, or uncanny. But through what discipline can this aspect of the box be approached? Material culture would examine the box, its 85

materials and use, in order to extract knowledge about society and culture, which means that the box would be treated indirectly, as a prism through which to arrive somewhere else. Art history would attempt to place the box in the context of epoch and style.

Art historian George Hersey criticizes this as the “source-hunting, styledistinguishing, and influence-tracing that dominate the practice of art history nowadays.”1 Both disciplines, then, would teach us a great deal about the history of the box and/or that of its maker, but neither would approach it as a self-intelligible whole (as “context” necessarily means something outside the object), thus leaving most of the questions regarding its essence, and the source of our fascination with it, unanswered. In various books

that survey the history of mechanical musical instruments—the category of objects to which the music box belongs—words like “enchanting,” “fantastical,” “uncanny,” and “hypnotizing” are frequently used to describe the nature of these objects and their effect on the viewer, but we have to deduce what it is that causes the effect, as the books do not tell us.2 A “THING-IN-ITSELF”

In recent years, “thingness” and “affect” theories have emerged as ways of approaching objects as selfintelligible wholes and dealing with the visceral forces beneath, alongside, and generally other than the conscious or cognitive knowledge that so often drives us into perceiving objects a certain way when we study them

1 George L. Hersey, Architecture, Poetry, and Number in the Royal Palace at Caserta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 3.

2 The scholarly study of mechanical musical instruments is relatively young.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literature on the subject consisted mainly of sections included in larger works on horology. Notable writers who have contributed to this field in the twentieth century include Albert Protz, John E. T. Clark, Roy Mosoriak, and Alfred Chapuis. Protz published Mechanische Musikinstrumente in 1940, focusing mainly on the earlier stages of automatic and mechanical music. In England, Clark published two editions (1948, 1952) of his Musical Boxes: A History and an Appreciation, where he traced in close detail the history of the disc musical box, which began to appear in several countries after 1885. The book also included an extensive list of manufacturers of all types of mechanical musical instruments. Mosoriak, an American writer, published The Curious History of Music Boxes in 1953. This is considered to be the first comprehensive work on the history of mechanical music. Chapuis’s History of the Musical Box and of Mechanical Music was published in France in 1955. In the introduction to his book Chapuis discusses the contributions made by Protz, Clark, and Mosoriak as works of “considerable merit, apart from the drawback of having been composed too far from the primary sources of information.” As those writers were approaching a relatively new subject, Chapuis writes, they necessarily treated it “somewhat incompletely.” Chapuis therefore took on the task of writing a book “as complete as possible” on the subject. The book examines the industry of mechanical musical instruments – from a scholarly yet compact introduction, to the production of sound, and through different stages in the development of the carillon and of mechanical organs to musical clocks, barrel organs, fair organs and orchestrions.

Chapuis (1880-1958) is considered the foremost authority in the fields of horology and mechanical music, and his book remains the most comprehensive contribution on the subject and a quintessential reference book in the field.

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through the prism of art history and material culture.3 Prominent contemporary writers such as Bill Brown, Lesley Stern, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, Nigel Thrift, and Julian Bleecker have all discussed “thingness” as a theoretical approach through which we may arrive at some satisfactory explanations regarding the nature and essence of objects.

While these ideas have resurfaced recently, they are not new. They go back to the eighteenth century, and to the Kantian concept of the “thing-in-itself.” Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich, which could be translated as “thing-as-such” or “thing per se”) is a core concept in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as a central theme in the history of modern thought. The unknowable "thingin-itself" as discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the source and foundation of sensory material (phenomena), but also of the unknowable that lies beyond human cognition (noumena).4 According to Kant, we have cognition only of “appearances,” not of “things in themselves.”5 Humans, Kant argues, can make sense of phenomena in various ways through human reasoning, but can never directly know the noumena, the “things-in-themselves.” This idea is made somewhat clearer in Martin

Heidegger’s “The Thing,” where he discusses the concept through the example of a handmade ceramic jug. The jug, as an object, is made of a specific material and has a form and a function; Heidegger argues that these qualities are derived from a fundamental “thingness,” and that “thingness” is in fact the void inside the jug.6 If the jug’s function, or essence, is to contain—then it is actually the void inside it that defines both the form and the essence.

The thing as this absolute, strange “otherness” also appears in Jacques Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis, where it has the status of an “unusual, impossible object” that we cannot explain, because “it is outside the prison house of language or discourse.”7 EXPERIENCING THINGS AS THEY ARE

From these brief descriptions that link the “thing-in-itself ” to both objects of the senses and objects of the mind, we can see why, in contemporary art history, “thingness” is often brought up in instances of multiple and paradoxical relationships between objects and words, materials and ideas, reason and belief, and in those cases where the full meaning of an object cannot

3 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

5 Allen W. Wood, Kant (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 29.

6 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in The Object Reader, eds. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 114.

7 Mario Vrbančić, The Lacanian Thing: Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Culture, and Cinema (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2011), 1.

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be understood theoretically, but is rather felt or perceived. The need for this old-new approach in our inquiries into the nature of objects is the subject of Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” published in 1966.

Sontag argues that in the new critical approach to aesthetics, the spiritual importance of art is being replaced by an emphasis on the intellect. Rather than being keenly alert to the sensuous aspects of a work, contemporary historians and scholars put emphasis on the idea of content. Thus, by claiming to disclose a work’s “true meaning,” they are actually altering it.8 Sontag refers to this process as “the project of interpretation.” The main problem with this approach, according to Sontag, is that “interpretation takes the sensory experience of a work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The transcendental power of art, she argues, cannot be taken for granted, and she offers what she calls “transparence” as a liberating value, which she defines as “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”9 Sontag, of course, did not originate the idea; her essay is an attempt to restore an appreciation of form, rather than content, in our commentary on the arts, based on ideas previously articulated by Kant, Heidegger, Gilson and others. The importance of Sontag’s essay to the 8

themes explored in this study of the music box, however, lies in the fact that Sontag’s essay came about as a reaction not only to the split between form and content in contemporary commentary on the arts, but also to the false distinction between fine art and decorative art.10 It is because of this false distinction that theories on the sensuous aspects of a work of art now seem inapplicable to objects of the decorative arts.

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN THE FINE ARTS AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS

In The Principles of Art (1938) R. G. Collingwood discusses the origins of the separation between the fine arts and the decorative, or useful, arts.

The ancient Greeks and Romans “had no conception of what we call art as something different from craft,” Collingwood writes, because art used to have a purpose, or telos: art was part of everyday experience, serving a religious purpose, and so there was never a question regarding its nature or purpose, nor a need to justify its value or distinguish it from craft.11 Similarly, artists of the Renaissance thought of themselves as craftsmen.12 It was not until the seventeenth century that “the problems and conceptions of aesthetic [began to be separated] from those of technic or the philosophy of craft.” In the late eighteenth century the separation “had

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York, NY: Picador U.S.A., 2001, 1966), 6.

Ibid., 13.

10 Ibid., 4.

11 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 5.

12 Ibid., 6.

9

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Porcelain Snuffboxes In The Form Of Animals, German, 1745 1760. Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York.

gone so far as to establish a distinction between the fine arts and the useful arts.” At this point, Collingwood writes, the separation of art from craft “is theoretically complete. But only theoretically.”13 The reason, then, for this theoretical divide between the fine arts and the useful arts as discussed by both Collingwood and Sontag, is the modern need to justify the value of art.

In other words, the need to treat the fine arts and the useful arts differently arose from the question of purpose.

Because we know what objects of craft, or useful art, do, we do not approach them with the same sense of fascination and mystery we reserve for 13

objects of fine art. When we consider a utilitarian object like the music box, however, we see that even with the knowledge of the object’s purpose —what it does—we still remain with the question of how it does it: there is something about the music box, some kind of inherent quality or essence in its form and materiality, that continues to fascinate us and occupy a place in our imagination since its invention centuries ago, and long after the object is no longer in popular use—as the countless depictions of the object in contemporary film prove. When we consider the music box through this aspect of materiality and sensory

Ibid., 7.

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Tabatières (Musical Snuffboxes), about 1815-30. The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata, Morris Museum, New Jersey.

experience, we can see that the question we ask about this object is essentially the same kind of question we ask about art (how it does what it does).

In a more recent essay, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies” (2011), Michael Yonan brings focus to the question of materiality and the need for a more inclusive methodology—“a broadly defined interdisciplinary material culture”—in our examination of objects.14 In the essay, Yonan argues that the study of material culture is itself a field that resists “simple disciplinary classification,” drawing from diverse theoretical approaches.

Materiality, he further argues, “has been an implicit dimension of arthistorical inquiry for more than a

century, one that has suffered at the expense of other artistic qualities. Art history has tended to suppress its status as material culture even as it has flirted continuously with materiality, and this has evolved into a serious intellectual limitation.”15 Yonan therefore suggests that art history “can form a model for examining the materiality of diverse sorts of objects well beyond the category of high art.”16 Yonan’s idea of materiality as a dimension that has suffered at the expense of other qualities in our inquiries into the nature of objects reinforces Sontag’s concern regarding the “steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience,” and the need for an approach to objects that would show us how rather than what.17

14 Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th 18, No. 2 (2011), 233.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 234.

17 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 14.

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A study of the music box, therefore, must consider its significance and continuous presence in Western culture by addressing this question of how, that is, by putting emphasis on form and on our sensory experience of the object. This is not to suggest, however, that putting the box in social or historical context is unimportant.

Formal analysis does not, as Yonan argues, contradict or replace what can be learned from the disciplines of art history and material culture studies, but is rather complementary to them.

Different aspects of the music box can be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, using a combination of theoretical approaches, material culture methodology and formal analysis to show how a fusion of all three disciplines—art history, material culture, and “thingness”—enables a more profound understanding of the object. The first and most obvious reason for this approach is that the music box itself as an object combines different elements—form, motion, and sound—a combination that invites an active participation of our senses in ways that inert objects do not, and therefore demands a more complex reading.

THE UNCANNY OBJECT

The frequent deployment of music boxes in contemporary film is a curious phenomenon, considering that the object itself is no longer as ubiquitous as it has been in the past; the popular habit of producing and collecting mechanical musical

instruments entered its last phase around 1878, with the invention of the phonograph by Thomas A. Edison.18 The fact that the music box is still frequently used in movies testifies to its enduring emblematic power as an uncanny, anxiety-inducing object in Western culture. It could be argued that these cultural associations are formed and influenced by what we see in movies and that cinematic formulas tend to replicate themselves (hence the ubiquity), but such an argument would be a reversal of cause and effect; there is something more profound, inherent in the music box that must have inspired such depictions in the first place. One can elucidate, through discussion of the object’s theoretical underpinnings and by highlighting its more unsettling formal aspects, what this “something” might be and the reasons for its uncanny and consistent attraction throughout the centuries.

In order to determine a conceptual framework in which to work, however, two main problems first needed to be addressed: the problem of definition, and the problem of scope.

THE “ESSENCE” OF THE MUSIC BOX

The music box belongs in the larger category of automata—non-electronic self-moving machines, especially those that have been made to resemble humans or animals—but at the same time is a distinct category in itself.

The problem of definition arose from the complexities involved in the word “automaton,” which underwent a number of changes throughout history

18

Heinrich Weiss-Stauffacher, The Marvelous World of Music Machines (Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International LTD., 1976), 10.

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and now has several meanings. The ancient Greek word automaton had a very general meaning of “self-mover,” denoting an object that possessed the capacity to be mobile without manipulation by an outside force.19 In some instances it referred specifically to mechanical devices, but that was not the common usage in classical writings. Hero of Alexandria, for example, used the word zoan (image) to describe moving figures of humans and animals in his treatises. It is in the second half of the seventeenth century, in the most important moment of the automaton idea (as manifested in countless fictional and theoretical writings of the period), that the word became prominent in European writings as meaning a self-moving machine. The definition was broad enough to encompass objects serving a utilitarian function. In the second half of the eighteenth century a narrower definition emerged—the automaton as self-moving machine built for the specific purpose of mimicking a living creature. The word was used in both senses in the nineteenth century, but the newer meaning became the dominant one and remained prevalent during the twentieth century, until it was eclipsed by the modern “robot.”20 Today, most modern dictionaries provide three definitions of “automaton.” The following definition is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. A moving mechanical device made in imitation of a

human being.

A machine that performs a function according to a predetermined set of coded instructions, especially one capable of a range of programmed responses to different circumstances.

1.2 Used in similes and comparisons to refer to a person who seems to act in a mechanical or unemotional way.

1.1

The question of whether to define the music box as belonging in the larger category of automata is essential for determining its appropriate historical context, since using the contemporary definition (according to which the music box is not technically considered an automaton) would mean excluding from discussion the significant role of the automaton as a disturbing object in the philosophical, scientific, and medical discourses of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. To settle the question above, one might follow the approach suggested by Hans Sedlmayr in “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art” (1931), where he argues that—since art history does not deal with questions of essence—in order to fully comprehend an object, to grasp its “artistic form, sense and construction,” we need to focus on the structural principle of the thing rather than on pre-existing definitions and conceptual schemas, as those will result in a fragmentary and often accidental understanding of the object.21 Mechanical musical

19 Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7.

20 Ibid.

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Suicide of Cleopatra, Automaton, c.1880 - 90, Phalibois, Paris, France. The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata, Morris Museum, New Jersey.

instruments are the precursors of the human-mimicking automaton, just as the automaton is the precursor of the modern robot. Many mechanical musical instruments incorporate automata of varying sizes, and most of the automata produced in the nineteenth century have concealed within them musical box mechanisms.22 A similar determining structural principle is operating, then,

and is responsible for our reaction, in both music boxes and automata: a machine that includes a hidden mechanism, which performs a function according to a predetermined set of coded instructions, accompanied by sound. This definition, derived from the structural principle that operates in both the musical boxes and automata, would include the music box within the more general category of automata—regardless of

21 Hans Sedlmayr, “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art,” in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 2000),136.

22 Ellen M. Snyder, Musical Machines and Living Dolls: The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata (Morristown, NJ: Morris Museum, 2011), 12.

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the changing definitions of the word “automaton” at different times.

The problem of scope comes from the fact that automata can be traced back to ancient times. In Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination Minsoo Kang writes: “For thousands of years, Westerners have been constructing, thinking about, and telling stories of automata, as many provocative examples of them, real and imaginary, can be found from ancient times to ours.”23 To survey the entire history of automata would not only be impossible; for the themes pursued in this thesis, it would be mostly irrelevant given the disparate nature of automata from the ancient world. Since the purpose of this thesis is not to present an encyclopedic history of the music box, but to approach its “thingness” through consideration of theoretical and formal aspects of objects most similar to the one we are familiar with today, one might well begin the discussion with the eighteenth century, the period considered to be the golden age of both the automaton, and the snuffbox—an object which later evolved into the musical box.24 OUTLINE

The first chapter examines the symbolic meanings of the boxes, and surveys prominent writers and theories that deal with “thingness.”

This discussion begins with one of the earliest and most famous myths 23

involving a box concealing a dark and harmful secret—Pandora’s box.

The depiction of the box in ancient mythology as a symbolic object conveying ambiguous meanings— impending doom, but also imminent hope—suggests its inherent quality.

Every subsequent incarnation of this object derives from that basic quality, amplified and enhanced through a long history of cultural associations. One such association is the eighteenth-century snuffbox, considered in both its historical context and utilitarian purpose—the popular, yet controversial, habit of snuffing tobacco during the eighteenth century, as well as the cultural associations built around porcelain, which during the eighteenth century achieved the status of a semi-magical material— “white gold.”25 This analysis is based primarily on the Schrezheim porcelain snuffboxes in the Linsky collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hawkins Meissen Collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The second chapter of the thesis focuses on the evolution of the eighteenth-century snuffbox into the musical snuffbox and then, during the nineteenth century, into the music box, highlighting those unsettling formal and psychological aspects that are responsible for the music box’s enduring place as an anxiety-inducing object. This analysis is based on objects from the Guinness Collection

Kang, Living Machines, 5.

Ibid., 9.

25 Alden Cavanagh and Michael E. Yonan, The Cultural Aesthetics Of EighteenthCentury Porcelain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010), 4.

24

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of Instruments and Automata at the Morris Museum in New Jersey. The chapter will discuss the adjustments that were made over time in form and sound, as the box accrued additional, more specific cultural meanings to those addressed in the first chapter, becoming linked to, or even a symbol of, the uncanny. Sound was a key element in this process: the eerie tone produced by the music box has become so recognizable in itself that a listener or viewer no longer needs to see the actual box to get the ominous effect in full. This analysis is supported by theories put forth in George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1955) and in Eduard Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music (1957); in both those works, the authors treat sound as an object in itself.

A final analysis of the music box is based on its depiction in film. Popular films such as Music Box (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Black Swan (2010) use themes associated with the music box as central plot devices.

The box is depicted as the place where dark secrets or incriminating evidence are hidden, and more generally as an ominous object, to enhance the narrative. Cinema is the medium that comes closest to representing or “capturing” the essence of an object in all its visual, cultural, and historical connotations by combining image, sound, and movement. In discussion of these films, semiotics, material culture methodology, social theories and “thing” theories can be applied to demonstrate how multiple media and

Cylinder Musical Box with Bells,1863, Geneva, Switzerland.

The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata, Morris Museum, New Jersey.

disciplines are successfully brought together to communicate a complex, multi-layered message.

Despite the growing popularity of “thing” theories and the obvious need for them in the fields of art history and material culture studies, because of their complexity and the inaccessibility of certain elements in the theories of Kant, Heidegger, and Lacan (in all of which the thing plays a central role), many of the ideas connected with these theories remain misunderstood, or limited to the realm of theory. Following the evolution and metamorphosis of the music box can result in what is seldom reached: the integration of “thingness” with other disciplines, and the application of it to an actual object, thus bringing this abstract concept into the realm of physical objects.

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Ways of Curating Hans Ulrich Obrist with Asad Raza.

New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2014.

Book Review Catherine Powell

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London, is one of the world’s best-known curators; and one expects that his book Ways of Curating will contain a set of principles or a guide to curating. Ways of Curating is many things: a diary, a directory of important artists, curators, and penseurs, an inventory of Obrist’s exhibitions. What it is not, however, is a textbook or instruction manual on curating--as impressive as Obrist’s compendium of anecdotes and reminiscences might be.

Perhaps therein lies Obrist’s message: there is no method, no direct path, indeed, no formal definition of what it means to be a curator. An astute reader might have foreseen this inconclusive denouement when, in the first few pages, Obrist states: “the best definition of art: that which expands the definition.” Ways of Curating is replete with such Stein-esque gnomic pronouncements.

Paradoxically, given Obrist’s well-deserved praise for making contemporary art and exhibitions more readily accessible to the general public, he has written a book that can be, at times, frustratingly

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opaque. Nevertheless, for the patient reader, willing to tolerate the flotsam and jetsam, there emerges an approach to curating that celebrates the seemingly random and irrelevant, and one can decipher the curatorial theories and organizing principles animating Obrist’s world.

Ways of Curating is best described as a collection of short essays assembled without great concern for an orderly progression of analysis or, for that matter, internal consistency.

One small illustration of this would be trying to understand how Obrist managed to see Harald Szeemann’s Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition some forty-one times during his adolescence, when Zurich was an hour away from his home in St. Gallen and his parents took him to Zurich once per month. Puzzles like this leave a reader distracted by the math and/or wondering why the anecdote matters. Deciphering exactly whom Obrist credits with having “given birth” to him as a curator, providing him with his “Eureka!” moment, changing his life, or having the most profound and lasting influence on his work is also a challenge as there are so many such “births,” changes, and profound moments described.

Yet, persevering through Obrist’s mostly solipsistic narrative is ultimately rewarding. His boundless energy, inexhaustible curiosity, and willingness to take risks with art and people and, perhaps most of all, his unshakable faith that people deserve such risk-taking, are worth the

reader’s patience.

In the essay “Curating, Exhibitions, and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” Obrist sets out what he perceives to be the four historical foundations of curating: art preservation; the selection of new work; art historical contributions; and exhibition development. Throughout this collection of essays, Obrist does not reject these foundations, but is implicit in his views that the practices of selecting new work and contributing to art history have become stale, and that exhibitions can easily become formulaic and devoid of impact as a result.

Perceiving a current tendency to choose amongst objects that already exist, as opposed to creating new objects, Obrist sets out one of the few clear overarching principles contained in the book. In reference to French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who believes that exhibitions should “resist the pressures towards an ever more uniform experience of time and space,” Obrist writes: If that is to happen, it’s important to shape exhibitions as projects of long duration and to consider issues of sustainability and legacy. Fly-in, fly-out curating nearly always produces superficial results; it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion of applying the word ‘curating’ to everything that involves simply making a choice.

Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art.

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Obrist’s hyper-kinetic approach to curating espouses this principle.

He eschews convention, and seems uninterested in curating a blockbuster Old Masters exhibition in a traditional museum setting.

His kitchen, private apartments, hotel rooms, and the Zurich sewage museum are just some of the places in which Obrist has curated exhibitions. Any space can serve as a laboratory for art installations.

Thus, Obrist christened a removable vitrine in the restaurant at Hotel Krone, in the foothills of the Alps, with the august title “Robert Walser Museum.” Walser, an important modernist writer (and one of Obrist’s many heroes), after decades of institutionalization, would stop at the hotel for a drink in the last years of his life. Touchingly, Obrist writes that his objective was to “establish a nonmonumental, modest contemporary trace” of Walser in the area where he might finally have found some solace.

Certain words appear repeatedly in Obrist’s text: “toolbox,” “dialogue,” “bridge,” “crossover,” “facilitate,” along with “vital,” “groundbreaking,” and “fascinating.”

It would be facile and wrong to dismiss them as convenient buzzwords; for Obrist they become organizing principles. Reacting against the perceived frequent insularity of art and art museums, Obrist insists on the need to build bridges between art, poetry, literature, music, dance, theatre, and science. He resents the “fetishization of the object,” and welcomes 98

opportunities to challenge established notions of time and space in art.

Obrist’s Marathons at the Serpentine Galleries are a perfect example of these principles put into practice.

The Marathons are essentially temporary think tanks where leading individuals in their fields gather for a continuous twenty-four hours to engage with an issue. Art installations and performance art occur alongside panel discussions among artists, scientists, musicians, and writers.

The topics thus far have included experimentation, poetry, and climate change.

Obrist believes that art does not have to be static, that it exists not only in objects but can also be live and ephemeral. Design is everywhere, and curators should endeavor to connect—to build bridges—between various art forms, people, and places. At the very core of his curatorial practice are countless interviews with artists around the world. He asks them about their inspiration and current projects, but more importantly, their unrealized projects, thereby stepping into unexplored territory. One of the most intriguing essays in Ways of Curating is entitled “Curating (Non-) Conferences.” It recounts how, in 1995, Obrist was asked by art historian Christa Maar to organize something related to art and science for the conference Mind Revolution.

Reflecting on his experience at the numerous conferences he attended, Obrist determined that the best way to generate new ideas was not

by forcing scientists and artists to formally collaborate. Instead, “it could be more interesting, and more unpredictable, to produce a context for chance encounters.” Accordingly, Obrist decided not to organize anything for the conference beyond hotel accommodations, name badges, and scheduled coffee breaks, allowing the participants in the conference to engage with one another randomly, and thus collaborate freely.

Obrist’s attitude towards curating may be the product of the period in which he started to work: the second half of the 1980s. After the economic crash of 1987, lavish art shows with generous budgets were not often an option. Obrist’s creative tactics and self-reliance allowed his career to flourish in spite of these obstacles. These same traits enable him to remain relevant and renowned in an age of digitization and shrinking humanities budgets.

Innovations like his Instagram museum (@hansulrichobrest), in which he posts random messages written by artists on post-it notes, continue to expand the definition of curating beyond the museum and into virtual space.

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Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet Jacqueline Adams. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Book Review Carolina Arévalo

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Art can be a mighty medium of resistance against oppression. During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990) women from shantytowns, political prisoners and relatives of los desaparecidos (individuals who were detained by the secret police and not seen again) created arpilleras, a textile art that depicted poverty, violence and coercion. Arpilleras provide evidence that objects are about ideas and play a crucial role in cultural meanings. Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras under Pinochet by Jacqueline Adams explores arpilleras as an example of solidarity art, and beyond that as a solidary art system. The author addresses the subject with an interdisciplinary approach, using different methodologies such as interviews, photo elicitation (whereby interviewees discuss photographs of works they’re shown), fieldwork, creation of a visual database, archival research, and memoirs by people who had lived in or visited shantytowns in Santiago during the dictatorship.

The main characteristic of solidarity art is that it is distributed, sold, and bought by people expressing solidarity with its makers by sending them money.1 Solidarity art is also characteristically classified as

craft rather than as fine art.

In this case, arpilleras’ solidarity system was born from repression and denouncement, but was also motivated by financial considerations and a desire to lessen women’s distress. The author explores how solidarity art emerges and how its production spreads under a repressive regime, the consequences of its production for the makers, their society and the people it informs abroad. Jacqueline Adams proposes solidarity art groups as cells of resistance against an oppressive government, even if the artists do not join them with resistance as their intention.2 She also demonstrates how arpilleras shift gender roles and empower women, in this case, within a sexist social context aggravated by political circumstances.

UNEMPLOYMENT, FEMALE POLITICAL PRISONERS AND RELATIVES OF LOS DESAPARECIDOS

After the 1973 coup, the Chilean economic model abruptly shifted.

Pinochet’s dictatorship translated into oppression; it caused job loss, family impoverishment, and the destruction of social organizations and reference (or community) groups, to which people once belonged. As Adams notes, detention, hiding, and politically-motivated firing of leftists generated unemployment; husbands could not easily earn an income in a society where men were traditionally the main economic pillar in their

homes. Here lies the first reason why women joined local groups and started arpillera making: to earn an income. This opportunity fit the gendered expectation that mothers feed their children and look after the home and family. However, it is noteworthy that female prisoners, arrested because they belonged to leftist groups and clandestine resistance organizations, also made arpilleras. These arpilleras were often sharply denunciatory, portraying prisons, exile, protest, repression, and human rights issues.

A third group was also involved in arpillera making: the relatives of los desaparecidos. They had no resources and nothing to do while searching for their loved ones, but they had a huge need to express themselves.3 For this group, arpillera making was an effort to give relatives the chance to come together around an activity.

Because of intense emotional distress at their situation, they were not able to embroider or work with small needles. As a consequence, appliqué was often an easier technique to use in making arpilleras.

Given ways and reasons for their making, arpilleras served as an objective cultural index because they were an artifact that expressed beliefs of a particular community, in a specific society at a given time. They also express culture unconsciously; their value resides in their historical life, representativeness and veracity.4

1

Jacqueline Adams, Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 12.

2 Ibid., 16.

3 Ibid., 79.

4 Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no.1 (Spring 1982): 3.

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Anonymous Work, Arpillera depicting the story of Carmen Gloria Quintana and Rodrigo Rojas, c.1973 -1990. Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton Alberta, Canada.

THE MEDIUM

Arpillera is a fabric traditionally used to pack potatoes. As a textile art it consisted of sewing fabric remnants into the arpillera to create images. Using this medium, women depicted their life and the subject matter of workshop conversations.

Subject matter always related to their own personal experience, and it was done with the wish to denounce acts of the Pinochet regime. Themes were later encrypted or silenced because of the risks that came with spreading these sentiments. For a time, women added a small piece of paper to the arpillera with an explanation of what 102

the arpillera depicted, so as to help the buyer understand its subject matter.5 The subject matter was explicit in its wider social meaning. It was strongly attached to the practical experience of the arpillera and its expressive connotations as supported by the solidarity community.

The composition of an arpillera may contain a scene or a set of scenes. Arpilleristas use other materials such as wool, cotton, and paper to create different textures, perspective, volume and details, which can be seen especially, for example, in the repetitive elements of the Andes Mountains. The book proposes

that Anabella (no last name given), a socially-involved Chilean artist, taught the first groups of arpilleristas the basics of drawing, human proportions, composition, and color.6 In her workshops, they learned visual rules related to numbers of figures, contrasting fabrics, deconstruction of layers, and placement of objects.

Visually important elements of arpilleras are also the size and edges of crocheted wool, the technique used to attach the shapes to the canvas.

The rhythm of the scenes and the actions of narrative are defined by these lines.

As artifacts, arpilleras are the result of what Jules Prown calls historical causation; it is possible to identify the craft tradition which supported them.7 Arpilleras are strongly influenced, for example, by the tapestries made by Chilean folklorist and artist Violeta Parra during the sixties. Parra was the first Latin American to merit a solo exhibit at the Louvre in Paris in 1964. Her naif embroideries depicted daily scenes of her town.8 Motivated by economic problems, the tradition was then followed by the embroiderers from Isla Negra (a seaside community where families—among them the Nobel Literature Prize-Winner Pablo Neruda—lived off fishing, baking and running small businesses).

Adams also notes a similarity with

Molas from Panamá. She uses these examples to demonstrate the historical causation and references surrounding arpillera making.

Handmade practices historically have been a medium employed to express experiences which cannot be verbally communicated. The imagery of handmade textiles also effectively crosses language and social barriers in foreign communities allowing dissemination of sentiments.

Given this perspective, arpilleras transcended a textile or craft dimension, transforming into an artistic, living expression temporarily and spatially. Arpilleras presented a description of real life: the daily life in the shantytowns, depictions of the common kitchen, the laundry areas, the groceries, the unemployment and the strikes. Lastly, arpilleras functioned as testimony; they are part of the collective memory, allowing, appreciating and recognizing the past in the present through each individual’s creating and depicting.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF ARPILLERA MAKING

Adams suggests that arpilleras are endowed with a unique identity in Chilean history. These textiles record the human rights violations and social problems under the dictatorship in Chile. They stand as a medium of political resistance that

5

Adams, 86.

Ibid., 81.

Jules Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 3.

8 Marjorie Agosín, “Agujas que hablan: las arpilleristas chilenas,” Revista Iberoamericana 51, no. 132 (1985): 525.

6 7

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claims non-violence against violence, as a therapy for emotional pain, as a way to participate socially in different roles than those imposed by the dictatorship, and also as a way to earn income.9 For the makers, arpilleras helped them to develop social consciousness, particularly related to issues of justice. The women acquired a broader social and political knowledge in the workshops through their own talks and debates. As Adams explained, by “developing a sociological imagination, that is, seeing the links between [their] family’s problems and wider social forces,” they understood the injustice they endured.10 They also began to understand repression and rights concretely, the existence of political prisoners, disappearances, torture and different forms of violence.

They learned about legal and policy developments, the significance of the plebiscite, how to vote, and how to start democracy.11 They were introduced to the concept of human rights and the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Paris, 1948).

Arpilleras are most especially endowed with symbolic significance in gender terms. Some of the women interviewed described how making arpilleras gave them a sense of selfworth, a measure of independence 9

from their husbands, a way to protect themselves and to bring dignity through money earned in an honest way. Their production through a collective of women also brought people out of isolation during a time when group socializing was difficult. “In politics, as in art, only collective solutions can have decisive significance.”12 A solidarity-oriented world survived using arpilleras to promote individualism and consumerism. The preservation of these values alone was a form of cultural resistance, representing unity, solidarity, and historical record-keeping of a sort.13 Such democratic practices were particularly important in the absence of democracy as a political system. By the late 1980s, after over a decade of dictatorship, the groups were spaces in which people could relearn what democracy meant.14 When Adams addresses the hidden character of arpillera making, she indicates the extent to which it is generated, supported, and simultaneously rejected, enabling the reader to interpret multiple forces in Chilean life and culture at that time in a subjective and affective way.

From a material culture perspective, Art Against Dictatorship offers a classic formal analysis (line, color, shape, texture and space) and also subtle distinctions of form

Adams, 220-251 Ibid., 227.

11 Ibid., 228.

12 Theo van Doesburg, “The Will to Style” in The Industrial Design Reader, ed. Carma Gorman (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), 101-103.

13 Adams, 242.

14 Ibid, 243.

10

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(geometric qualities, expressive gesture, and emotional effect).

Probably because Adams’ scope is so broad and rich, the book did not include a deeper iconographic analysis. The interdisciplinary approach, especially the visual database and memoirs, must contain many more subtle meanings inherent to their common figurative elements, their use of color, their sewing styles, and many others qualities that reveal further dimensions of Chilean cultural beliefs. Despite this observation, the book is a worthwhile contribution to the study of sociology, Latin American politics and history, gender studies, dissident and activist art, and, of course, material culture studies.

Through Adams’ approach, the intrinsic meaning of arpilleras was clearly detailed, providing a thorough understanding of both the visible event and its intelligible significance.

The reader comes away impressed by the importance of arpilleras and the ways in which their making can be experienced and interpreted as tangible evidence of extremely difficult historical circumstance.15

15

Prown, “Mind in Matter.” 3.

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Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in EighteenthCentury Paris Andrew McClellan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

“Aimed at Universality and Belonging to the Nation: the Enlightenment and the British Museum” in Enlightenment Kim Sloan. London: The British Museum Press, 2003.

Book Review Catherine Gale

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The Louvre and the British Museum, two of the world’s greatest assemblages of art and artifacts, provide rich histories of instances in which a nation—sometimes with its citizens— opts to gather and manipulate art to assorted purposes, noble or not. The manipulation of art and objects in the interest of national identity and heritage is central to the foundation of both institutions. Andrew McClellan examines the Louvre in this context in his 1994 book Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, and Kim Sloan looks at the foundation of the British Museum in an introductory essay in Enlightenment, a catalog published by the British Museum to coincide with the 2003 opening of its Enlightenment Gallery.

Both McClellan and Sloan illustrate the intricacies of art and artifact collecting and institutional display in relation to the cultural patrimony of nations.

“The Revolutionary Louvre” chapter of McClellan’s work focuses on the organization and 1793 opening of the Louvre as being crucially symbolic of revolution. McClellan ably substantiates claims that countless threads of early

Republican tumult were entangled in debate over how best to exploit the proposed museum as both a proclamation of the glories of revolution and a means to educate a burgeoning Republican citizenry to whom, it was declared, the national treasures of France now belonged. In a letter written to Jean-Louis David in October 1782, the Minister of the Interior asserted:

was to redirect memory of the past and promote faith in the future, and to those ends, a range of issues had to be exactingly considered—what art to include to best assert Republican mores and virtues, how that art ought to be displayed and identified, matters of connoisseurship and conservation— and how best to convince the public that opulent troves were indeed an appropriate symbol for a nation This museum must demonstrate the nation’s born of recent bloody revolution great riches....France must with abounding residual terror and extend its glory though the panics. Masterpieces of French ages and to all peoples: the national museum will manufacturing and artistic tradition embrace knowledge in all were no longer to bedazzle a its manifold beauty and will coterie of courtiers, but to instruct, be the admiration of the universe. By embodying these edify, and nurture a citizenry now grand ideas, worthy of a steeped in Republican rhetoric and free people...the museum... symbolism. The sumptuous legacy, will become among the most powerful illustrations of the products of which had long since French Republic.1 been the envy of courts throughout Confiscation of hoards of Europe, had to continue to bolster ecclesiastical, royal, and aristocratic the pride of France, but on very possessions, purportedly on behalf different terms than before. As of the newly sovereign populace, McClellan states, “it was at this promised a way in which to both moment that the Louvre museum hearten and awe once placed into formally entered Revolutionary a public national repository. It was political discourse as a sign of both hoped that the display of such spoils triumph over despotism and culture would do wonders to further the born of liberty.”3 McClellan goes into fascinating notion of a benevolent and stable Republican government, social and detail of the treacherous political landscape as well as the fierce material equality, and the absolute renunciation of the disgraced former debate among those responsible for the structural and administrative regime, “the administrators of policies attached to both Museum despotism.”2 The purpose of the museum and Academy. Amidst these 1 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91.

2 Ibid, 94.

3 Ibid, 95.

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Opposite: “British Museum from the North East” by Ham Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Right: “Le Louvre - Aile Richelieu” by User:Gloumouth1 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

battles, artworks continued to be accumulated both within France’s borders and from without via the near-constant military campaigning of the time. The periodic conquering of others ensured a steady flow of artwork and artifacts into the country, all serving to reassure France’s cultural and aesthetic superiority in the process. Great and elaborate processions of looted bounty wound through the streets of Paris. It was widely understood that as the one nation of true Republican integrity, “home of the arts and of genius, the land of liberty and equality,”4 France was the only rational place for these masterpieces to reside; it 4 5

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was only there that all men equally could gaze upon and learn from such works. There was no hesitation whatsoever, therefore, in resituating great works of classical Rome in a palatial Parisian setting. Indeed, it was considered fated to happen. In 1794, one official made the appeal to “Imagine Paris...as the capital of the arts: imagine the inestimable advantages of it becoming the home of all the treasures of the mind...it must be the school of the universe, the hub of human science, and command the respect of the whole world through knowledge and instruction.”5 In a climate of such sentiments, the government and its generals unabashedly laid

claim to treasures and to all of the amplified cultural responsibilities tied to the ownership and care (and manipulation) of such things. Once assembled and offered to the public, these expansive holdings would familiarize the people of France with past and future glories, an extraordinary contribution to the arts and to the grandeur of revolution.

Maneuvered around social and political turmoil, artworks and their cultural heft became a sort of keel to Republican momentum. It was in this climate of acquisition and pompous moralizing that Napoleon set off on his scattered conquests marked as much for military adroitness as for their tactically

thorough looting, much of which would serve as equipage of his ascent to emperor.

As the organization and spirit of the Louvre reflected the shocks and bounces of late eighteenthcentury Paris, the British Museum and the institutions born of it betray behaviors of a particularly British and Georgian sort. In her essay in Enlightenment, a catalogue of essays on the Enlightenment in Britain, Kim Sloan provides intriguingly contrasting motives surrounding that museum’s foundation. The 1753 establishment of the British Museum was a calmer affair than that of the Louvre as England’s revolutionary

Ibid, 116.

Ibid.

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chaos and bloodshed belonged to the previous century. By mid-eighteenthcentury, England, like France, looked to classical Greece and Rome as model and mantle for cultural majesty. Enlightenment thinkers and their enthusiasms for classification and the boundless spread of knowledge provided much of the intellectual framework on which the British Museum was established.

A firm belief that mankind had reached a zenith of knowledge and reason led to an exuberant sharing of research and discoveries. Sloan situates the foundation of the British Museum at the very heart of the Enlightenment and describes the age as one of self-appointed unique intellectual promise from which humankind would ever benefit: Through an empirical methodology, guided by the delight of reason, one could arrive at knowledge and universal truths, provide liberation from ignorance and superstition that in turn would lead to the progress, freedom and happiness of mankind....It was a period when the culture of the educated person was thought to take in the whole of human knowledge, a time of polymaths, when philosophy and science could not be divorced from theology, when men, and to an increasing extent women, did not specialize but instead could be artist, scientist, historian and philosopher all in one.6 The British Museum became

the epicenter of this scholarship and accumulation, starting with Hans Sloane’s magnificent natural specimens, then through the assembly of artworks, artifacts, and most importantly, a collection of books said to span the entirety of recorded genius. (The personal library of George III, open to scholars throughout his reign, would be given to the Museum in 1823 and kept in a lavish space called the King’s Library built specifically for the collection. In fact, it was the restoration of the King’s Library and installation of the Enlightenment Gallery within it that prompted the publication of this catalogue).

The British Museum was open to all, free to all, and was a place to satisfy, “the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge, and information of all persons,”7 dedicated to the glory of God and the good of mankind.

Like the French, the motives and designs of the British were carefully wrapped in a language of moral imperative and cultural superiority, claiming labors for their national institutions were solely for the edification of the public. As Britain extended its reach across the globe, a universal and frenzied need to know prompted voracious collecting and accumulation in support of the conscientious study and theorizing of stores of material. The British, like the French, were self-congratulatory

with regard to conservation and noble rescue of the precious from those unable to protect or, in certain cases, to understand its cultural significance.

Sloan evokes an aspect of Georgian Britain still evident when she speaks of a “peculiarly British notion of ‘public spirit’ and trusteeship of the future combined with ‘clubability’ which ensured the fast spread of new ideas and at the same time ensured that these ideas crossed disciplines amongst the polymathic members—developments in natural history were soon informing how one thought about history, antiquities, art, commerce and one’s fellow man.”8 With discoveries surfacing and furious efforts to classify and contextualize, disciplines were both redefined and born anew, “the rejuvenation of the antiquary and the attendant birth of archeology,”9 for instance, which combined classical knowledge and methodology with the scrutiny of contemporary discoveries. The voracious accumulation of lore and objects likewise provided just the sort of momentum that supported an expanding empire with cheers, wanderlust, and pride in mission. The scope of objects culled from scattered British roaming about the world must have awed the visitor to the British Museum then as it does now.

Since the establishment of these formidable institutions, the collecting philosophies and holdings of the Louvre and the British Museum—

each redolent of national history and myth—have generated considerable discussion on collecting and related narratives. One institution’s origins are inextricably tied to the frenzy of revolution and the reinvention of state, while the other was formed in monumental tribute to the frenzy of the hyper-ambitious collection of a material record of civilization. Each remains of paramount importance to its nation and to ongoing questions of national identity and the cultural role of art and artifacts in the daily life of a great city and its people.

Along with those considerations is the great thicket of controversy attendant to the ethics and legality of gathering the far-flung treasures of other cultures and making them important components of the cultural hegemony of a forcibly adopted resting place. Questions of repatriation and the responsibilities of the inheritors of these astonishing collections will continue to see to these debates. Both McClellan and Sloan go to admirable lengths to sort out the earliest days of these stillthriving monuments of eighteenthcentury thoughts and deeds. It is without question that both are of epic importance to the understanding of man, of nation, and of the power of possession.

6

Kim Sloan, “‘Aimed at universality and belonging to the nation’: the Enlightenment and the British Museum” in Enlightenment, Kim Sloan, ed. (London: The British Museum Press, 2003),13.

7 Ibid, 14.

110

8 9

Ibid, 21.

Ibid.

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Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish Jane Munro. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014.

Book Review Rita Ostrova

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Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish provides an answer for all those who have wondered why figures in Old Master-style paintings sometimes appear stiff and wooden despite the artist’s apparent desire for naturalism; it is a book for those who want a peek into the artist’s studio to see some tricks of the trade. A thorough and painstakingly researched effort, Silent Partners is the companion to an eponymous exhibition organized by Jane Munro, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, on view from October 14, 2014 through January 25, 2015. Both the book and the exhibition elucidate that secret of the artist’s craft: the mannequin, which, like the camera obscura, was a regular presence in the artist’s studio. Munro reveals the mannequin as the artist’s silent partner—as an object, tool, and means of inferring something of the esprit du temps—especially in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. The exhibition and subsequent catalogue open a window onto a rarely visited world where the uncanny and the fetish are palpable.

Possibly originating during the Renaissance (if not before), the mannequin, as a substitute for the real human body, appears in various permutations over time: as an artist’s lay figure; a dressmaker’s model; a display figure used in museums, theatre, or advertising; an anatomical model; funeral effigy; shop window dummy; a cousin of the waxwork; and sex toy. While relatively few early mannequins remain intact today—having fallen victim to vermin, moths, and other common afflictions—the archival evidence, in the form of inventories, business accounts, deeds of inheritance or sale, and similar records is instrumental in telling the story of how these objects were manufactured, distributed, and sold.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the lay figure (the artist’s term for the mannequin) was a widely adopted studio aid. It was employed by Michelangelo, Poussin, Cezanne, and countless others who were aware of the paradox of using a man-made object to create a naturalistic image.

The same desire for naturalism also inspired innovations by manufacturers of mannequins, who were often also employed as toymakers, carpenters and other fine craftsmen. The most sophisticated and realistic mannequins were manufactured in France, especially Paris, which became the center of toy and automata making in Europe, and where craftsmen competed to produce the most

perfect, naturalistic mannequin.

This mannequin perfectionné was life size, with articulated limbs and a realistic face, giving it an eerily human appearance. Since it was also expensive, artists would either rent one on an as-needed basis or acquire it as a major investment to be passed from one generation to another.

In the nineteenth century, as Paris grew into the undisputed center of fashion, avant-garde art, literature, and scientific enquiry, so too did the mannequin acquire further meaning in popular imagination. As a silent, pliable, infinitely submissive studio companion, the mannequin became a commentary on the status of the contemporary woman. By the end of the century, the mannequin emerged from the artist’s studio entering the dressmaker’s atelier, transforming further into a shopwindow dummy visible to all street passersby. Firms such as Pierre Imans and Siégel produced the finest, life-like humanoids, whose role was to inspire consumers’ longing to buy the clothes they wore, with sexual fantasy as a byproduct.

Artists such as Degas, de Chirico, Carrà, and others, intuited the unnerving psychological nature of these objects and used them in their paintings. Artists, like writers of the period, explored the lay figure in more voyeuristic terms, imagining what might be happening behind closed studio doors between the male painter and his female

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Alan Beeton, Reposing, c.1929, oil on canvas. The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK.

mannequin—be it a reenactment of the Pygmalion myth or something more.

Simultaneously, some of the most fascinating research in the budding fields of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology, led by Jean-Marie Charcot (1825-1893) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), among others, was either happening or forthcoming. Dr. Charcot was conducting groundbreaking studies and giving public lectures at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, focusing on mostly female patients, who displayed multiple symptoms

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of various neuroses that constituted hysteria (the fashionable malady of the Belle Époque), laying the foundation for future classification of psychiatric disorders. Charcot and his followers, as part of their research, photographed patients at Salpêtrière in various states of psychosis or during treatments including hypnosis; immortalizing their twisted seized bodies through plaster casts. These photographs and casts, as well as new theories on mental disorders were widely published and discussed. Women during psychotic episodes were

highly suggestible and unable to offer physical or verbal resistance; they became putty in their doctors’ hands. These hysteric episodes created “mannequinized” women, and female patients were referred to as such in contemporary publications; they were still human but not capable of independent thought and action. These mannequins were a welcome contrast to the threatening Femme nouveau of the period, women thought too independent and scarily beyond the charms and control of ordinary men.

Silent Partners offers an illuminating perspective on the complicated connection between humans and the humanoid forms we create as a means to expressing or fulfilling our own needs. The book is well-written, informative, engaging and proposes an enlightened perspective on the practice of painting itself. After reading it, Prada’s traveling show, “Prada: The Inconoclasts” took on special resonance when I spied photographs of it on Instagram.

It presents the brand’s SpringSummer 2015 collection, arranged

by Milena Canonero, the awardwinning Italian costume designer.

The show took the entire space of a Prada store, transforming it into a stage filled with countless lifesize, life-like mannequins, arranged in a variety of poses so that they looked like actual live models.

Based on the comments posted on Instagram under #pradaiconoclasts

(1,072 posts), visitors were just as mesmerized and terrified by these effigies as their fin de siècle predecessors would have been, proving that encounters between humans and androids in the same space is always uncanny.

To those whose interests are now thoroughly piqued by the mannequin, as both objet and symbol alive in the contemporary world, I highly recommend visiting Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin at the Museum of Art and Design, New York City (on view March 31, 2015 to August 30, 2015). The exhibit explores the work of the New York-based designer Ralph Pucci, known for his novel approach to the ubiquitous mannequin; it plans to unveil how Pucci creates his mannequins as sculptural forms, adding yet another level to the story of this object.

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You Can’t Take It With You A revival that played at the Longacre Theater, New York, September 27, 2014–February 22, 2015 Written by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman, directed

by Scott Ellis Scenic Design by David Rockwell

Review of Scenic Design Matthew Kennedy

Look, Mother, I’m coming home at three o’clock tomorrow. Will you have everything down in the cellar by that time? The typewriter, and the snakes, and the xylophone, and the printing press . . .

—Alice Sycamore, You Can’t Take It With You1

Preparing one’s home for company is never an easy task; typically, it might require stashing away some dirty laundry or a pile of old magazines.

In the case of the Sycamore family, however, it means hiding all the bric-a-brac of an eccentric, multigenerational, and free-spirited family—such as xylophones and snakes.

You Can’t Take It With You, written in 1936 by staples of the American theater George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, tells the story of the unusual Sycamores, including a grandfather, a mother and father, two daughters, one with a husband, as well as a slew of family friends who came for one purpose, but evidently never left the Sycamore house to pursue another. This clan is asterisked by daughter Alice, seemingly the only member of the family plagued with the self116

awareness to realize how this madcap family is perceived by the rest of the world. The play’s plot centers on Alice’s attempt to bring her more conventional and well-heeled fiancé home to meet the family and present them as normal (think . . . every episode of Arrested Development).

Naturally, hilarity ensues.

The play itself is a structural marvel, as at almost 80 years old, it feels fresh and familiar to the modern viewer, each of its three 40-minute acts feeling like an episode of a thoughtfully written television show. All the sitcoms we’ve been binge-watching on Netflix have been borrowing their humorous tropes from the comic stylings of Messrs.

Kaufman and Hart. Act 1 serves as an informative exposition; act 2 is an eventful dinner party gone wrong that ends in an accidental gunpowder explosion (and includes a police raid for tax evasion and the innocent printing of polemical and antipatriotic political propaganda).

Act 3 delivers a heartfelt resolution eliciting the appropriate and audible “aw,” as the Sycamores, despite their eccentricity, offer a palliative solution to the travails of life itself. In the midst of all this, the play’s setting becomes an additional character and the aesthetic realization of the narrative text. This space doesn’t drive the plot, but rather propels it, creating an encouraging environment

for whatever mayhem or serenity (but mostly mayhem) takes place. So, without further ado, welcome to the Sycamore home, where the family living room functions as the sole location for the story.

But before we enter the Sycamore home as guests, we must first be introduced to its exterior. According to scenic designer David Rockwell, “We wanted the audience to get the sense that this family doesn’t quite conform to their surroundings . . . so, rather than a standard show curtain, [the audience first sees] the front porch of a fully three-dimensional, faintly Victorian, turn-of the century house.”2 Comically sandwiched between two towering modern apartment buildings, this period house set in the context of the urban landscape possesses an architectural twinkle in its eye, “playfully hinting at the quirky family that the audience is about to meet.”3 This charming facade also alludes to the iconoclastic appreciation of history and ancestry possessed by its residents. After all, the house has been in the family for years: “The family’s patriarch, Grandpa Vanderhof, had acquired his house in 1913 . . . and by contrasting its Victorian exterior with the new lithographic images of townhouses on either side would suggest [a] history, and reflect the family’s individuality amidst the changing world outside their door.”4

1

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, You Can’t Take It With You (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1964), 39.

2 David Rockwell, “You Can’t Take It With You: Upstage Guide” (brochure distributed by Roundabout Theater Company, New York, 2014), 14.

3 Ibid.

4 David Rockwell, e-mail message to author, January 29, 2015.

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The Exterior © Paul Warchol

While the exterior of the house does not play an active role in the play itself, it does quite literally set the stage for what is to unfold.

In order to allow the audience to enter the family home, Rockwell employed a turntable, a trope of contemporary scenic design. Often used as a convenient vehicle for transporting large sets quickly and efficiently, the device is occasionally more thoughtfully utilized, either to offer the audience more complex perspectives of the onstage action, or to conjure a more cinematic motion for the performance space. Rockwell explains, “It is a simple way to reveal something while still being able to have a solid foundation—in this case, 5

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Ibid.

the interior of the house with its staircase and walls of set dressing.”5 Alongside this idea of concealing and revealing, the turntable also aids in pacing the audience’s departure from the episodic world of the play.

At the end of the second act, for example, as fireworks explode over the frazzled houseguests (the result of the rogue spark of gunpowder), a theatrical blackout would not be appropriate, as such a severe device generally indicates a narrative conclusion; in farce comedy, continuing momentum is key. Thus, “as each act concludes, the action continues and eventually fades away as the house revolves back to its gray facade.”6 And here again, we are left

with a nervous anticipation of what lies behind that charming facade—in this case, the Sycamores and their living room.

In modern theatrical design, like other design fields, the reductive question is typically asked, “What objects are necessary to define this space?” But in developing a space that nurtures and suggests a legacy, perhaps the more appropriate question is, “What objects make a home?” From the initial description of the setting in the script, we get the idea that a simplistic and conventional approach to living and decorating will not suffice: “The room we see is what is customarily described as a living room, but in this house the term is something of an understatement. The every-manfor-himself room would be more like it.”7 Kaufman and Hart describe a “room” that accommodates every man (and, of course, woman) and every desired action. They continue, “for here meals are eaten, plays are written, snakes collected, ballet steps practiced, xylophones played, printing presses operated—if there were room enough there would probably be ice skating. In short, the brood . . . goes on about the business of living in the fullest sense of the word.”8 This attitude comes to its comic and visual height in act 2 when, arriving on the wrong day for a dinner party, Alice’s fiancé enters the living room with his fancy Wall

Street family (dressed in tuxedos and an evening gown) to find the room the bazaar for a ballet lesson, with a drunk actress passed out on the couch, another woman (the mother) rediscovering her love of painting with her portrait subject a man costumed in the garb of antiquity, and an Erector set somehow being jerry-rigged, all of which is accompanied by the cadence of a xylophone played by the Sycamore son-in-law.

The chaotic composition of people and props in the space leaves no rest for the eye. Regardless of Alice’s frustration at her family’s inability to be “normal,” it is clear that this is a space of familial contentment and joy. As sociologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton report in their survey of domestic furnishings and attitudes, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, “[People] rarely complain about the house being in a mess or lacking in amenities or style, as long as the family is friendly, warm, active, and comfortable…because the interaction is harmonious.”9 In the case of the Sycamore family, it may be a cacophonous harmony, but it is a harmony all the same.

While the furniture is arranged as haphazardly as necessary, the surrounding walls tell the story.

The famed and much feared contemporary New York Times

6

Rockwell, “You Can’t Take It With You: Upstage Guide,” 14.

Hart and Kaufman, You Can’t Take It With You, 5.

8 Ibid.

9 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132.

7

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theater critic Ben Brantley too simply enumerated his thoughts on the space as a “gloriously cluttered townhouse set.”10 So much more adorns these walls! Buttressed by a sturdy wooden staircase that connects the first floor to the second, dusty red walls embrace the room.

Communicating excitement amid maturity, these walls are fortified by “shelves . . . filled chock-a-block with books, art, and objects.”11 According to Rockwell, the room is inspired in part by Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, a historic house famous among architects for its aesthetic of collecting and display. Executed with an intentionally less connoisseurial eye, the walls of the Sycamore house replicate this idiosyncratic layering with family artifacts and heirlooms— or, as actress Annaleigh Ashford, who played Sycamore daughter Essie, called it, an “organized hoarding situation.”12 While most audience members are probably never close enough to admire the details of each piece, the objects’ presence en masse speaks to us from a place in history without forcing that history upon us.

The costumes and text of the play anchor us in the period of the Great

Depression, but the set presents a more timeless history.

While the spinning set and farcical action certainly provide enough to look at, the most compelling visual elements are these objects that collage the living room walls, as many possess stories of their own.

Portraits of playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, for example, gaze knowingly over the proceedings, as does a picture of the original 1936 Broadway company of the Sycamore family.13 But it’s not just the theatrical foremothers and forefathers who look out over the performance each night. The cast members of the Broadway production were invited to supply an object or two to decorate the set. According to Rockwell, “[Director Scott Ellis] felt that it would help the cast feel more connected to their setting by having some personal mementos present.”14 Objects chosen by cast members included a jeweled trinket box, glass candlesticks, a duck-shaped pitcher actually used to pour water in performance, and scans of family photographs that adorn the desk of the playwright mother. Giving more

10 Ben Brantley, review of You Can’t Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Scott Ellis, Longacre Theater, New York, New York Times, September 28, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/theater/you-canttake-it-with-you-handled-properly-ages-well.html (accessed March 2, 2015).

11 Rockwell, “You Can’t Take It With You: Upstage Guide,” 14.

12 “Ask a Star: Annaleigh Ashford,” Broadway.com, http://www.broadway.com/ videos/155706/you-cant-take-it-with-yous-annaleigh-ashford-cant-describe-herfriends-in-one-word/ (accessed January 23, 2015).

13 Joe Dziemianowicz, “‘You Can’t Take It With You’ Set Design on Broadway Is a Family Affair,” New York Daily News, September 25, 2015, http://www. nydailynews.com/entertainment/set-family-affiar-article-1.1952910 (accessed January 22, 2015).

14 Rockwell, e-mail message to author, January 29, 2015.

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© Paul Warchol

© Paul Warchol

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be the tangible expression of one's existence, the “stuff” we leave behind becomes the description of who we were and of how and why we lived.

As Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton noted, specifically about the home: “The material environment that surrounds us . . . either helps the forces of chaos that make life random and disorganized or it helps to give purpose and direction to one’s life.”16 So these personal objects from the cast, specifically in conversation with the purchased and found elements of the set, make a profound point.

Creating this familial continuum contributes to and celebrates the timelessness and universality of the

play itself, in which disparate families from different classes come together like the “stuff” that fills the stage.

To once again refer to our friends Csikszentmihalyi and RochbergHalton: “People still need to know that their actions matter, that their existence forms a pattern with that of others, that they are remembered and loved, and that their individual self is part of some greater design beyond the fleeting span of mortal years.”17 In this set design, a pattern of human “mattering” is evidenced by objects collected, cherished, left behind, remembered and collected again, because, as you know, you can’t take it with you . . .

© Paul Warchol

depth to the idea of generations of family, a portrait of James Earl Jones’s (Grandpa Martin Vanderhof) father, Robert Earl Jones, rests on a shelf near the stairs. On the other end of the lineage spectrum, artwork created by David Rockwell’s children hangs on the wall near this portrait. On the decision to include these pieces, Rockwell commented, “It is not something we have done before at this level.

Delicate and precious objects can be a liability, but we really enjoyed adding personal touches that help the cast relate to their surroundings more.”15 What results is an organic eclecticism, an unspoken web of human history through objects that personalize the setting for both actors and audience.

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Like this smattering of objects throughout the room, politics pervasively pepper the dialogue of the play like Twitter hashtags, but in the form of inconsequential statements about democracy, taxes, communism, the Bolshevik revolution, capitalism, and Wall Street. Rather than attempt to make academic, articulate points about any of these things, their mention functions to contradict the play's eponymous thesis—that “things” do not matter if you have not lived a life worth living. This thesis is, of course, slightly paradoxical for historians of material culture. On one hand, objects become cynically and manifestly unimportant in a life void of happiness. But on the other hand, if material culture can

© Paul Warchol 15

Ibid.

Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, 17.

17 Ibid., 145.

16

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Installation view of The Collector’s Cabinet. Photo courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

The Collector’s Cabinet January 24th, 2015 March 29th, 2015 Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Review by Samantha Wiley

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It is not hard to find the Morbid Anatomy Museum. The two-story building located at the corner of 7th Street and 3rd Avenue in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn stands out from its neighbors. Painted matte black and bearing its name boldly across two sides of the exterior, the façade of the museum building hints at what’s inside to approaching visitors. From the onset, it’s obvious that you are not about to enter the ‘white cube’ gallery spaces so commonly associated with museums; nor are visitors about to enter a dark, dungeon-esque chamber of horrors, skulls, and sideshow attractions as one might assume. There is more to the Morbid Anatomy Museum than the name might lead you to believe.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum, a nonprofit institution founded by director Joanna Ebenstein, opened its doors in June 2014. Before the exhibition space opened, there existed the Morbid Anatomy Library, founded in 2008, and the popular blog, Morbid Anatomy—Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture. Now, the 4,200 square foot building unites the library and museum under one roof. The museum’s website offers a general

description of the function of the Morbid Anatomy Museum as being “dedicated to the celebration and exhibition of artifacts, histories and ideas which fall between the cracks of high and low culture, death and beauty, and disciplinary divides.”

Visitors to the Morbid Anatomy Museum are immediately welcomed into the store, which consists of displays and bookcases filled with literature and handmade gifts, from the pastel taxidermied rear-ends of rabbits mounted on plaques to beautiful ceramic mugs made in the shapes of skulls. There is a large, open seating area with tables for perusing books, working on laptops, and enjoying the newly opened café. Here, the museum manages to keep the sense that it is a collection of curious objects and a place for inquiry despite its commercial purposes.

Visitors are then invited to walk upstairs to the exhibition space and library. Currently on view is The Collector’s Cabinet, the first installment of a series of exhibitions dedicated to the tradition of collecting and highlighting the private collections of the ‘Morbid Anatomy community.’

I first experienced the the exhibition space as rather small, because it takes up only a single room on the second floor. However, as I continued throughout the exhibition, I realized that the space and exhibition complemented each other nicely,

both elevating the sense that the visitor was truly in a collector’s cabinet.

The exhibition comprises an array of diverse objects, from a two-headed kitten in a bell jar to a sixteenth-century painting titled ‘The Witches Cove’; a pair of ca.

1900 prosthetic arms to a paper dollhouse album from the nineteenth century. The display of these objects is what uniquely connects the space to the process of collecting, and the collection as a whole. The collection is encased in antique wooden cabinets, rather than steelframed vitrines, hung on the walls, and some objects are even in their original displays, like the cases of anthropomorphic taxidermy scenes of squirrels partaking in human activities, titled ‘The Woodland Fairground’ and ‘The Squirrel Bar Scene,’ displayed in the middle of the room.

There is no linear progression to the exhibition; the objects are not arranged chronologically or by theme. Instead, they are displayed as you would expect a seventeenthcentury cabinet, like that of Danish physician and curiosity collector Ole Worm, to have appeared. The wide assortment of objects is visually organized to best fit the space, and also to create relationships between seemingly unrelated objects, like a c. 1922 advertorial lithograph for magician Howard Thurston which asks “Do spirits return?” and a nineteenth-century reliquary featuring ten saints. Both pieces highlight the constant interest in 125

a world beyond our own, whether mystical or religious.

The selection of objects for the exhibition challenges preconceived notions of what merits display, whether it be in a museum or at home in a personal collection. A number of the objects are not intrinsically or historically valuable or even visually compelling in their own right, like the common, domestic plastic lamp finials or an assortment of brushes. It is when these benign objects are assembled and displayed in greater relation to collecting that they assume a significant presence and demand visual attention.

Mark Dion’s collection of ivorycolored plastic lamp finials, for example, becomes a set of miniature monuments or tombstones, standing tall and unmovable. Indeed, the most visually pleasing display of the entire exhibition is Jeffrey Jenkin’s collection of brushes that have been arranged on the wall by the collector in a neat grid full of textures and colors.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum’s process of distilling information for visitors also adheres to this non-linear progression of the exhibition. There are no wall texts or object labels. Instead, visitors are handed a substantial catalog with information on each object written by their respective collector. This information usually tells the tale of the collector’s particular interest in collecting, how they discovered the objects, and what, in their opinion, makes it special. Contrary to the typical museum catalogue, The 126

Collector’s Cabinet catalogue brings a personal association, rather than historical, to these objects. It’s not just the objects that are on display, it is also the story of their collection.

This is not to say that the Morbid Anatomy Museum does not offer historical information on its objects, exhibitions, and more. The Morbid Anatomy Library is located adjacent to the exhibition space. Here, an impressive collection of books, ephemera, medical wax sculptures of illnesses, trinkets, and much more are displayed in a similar, but compact, fashion to the exhibition. Visitors are invited to read through the books at a large, centrally located wooden table. The library offers a chance for visitors whose curiosity has grown from the exhibition to research more information about any of the objects on display.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum challenges perceptions about many themes we often try to avoid, like death. These themes - the occult, death, medical oddities, spirituality and more - have plagued people’s curiosity for centuries, and for a reason. They remain the unknown and unfamiliar. The Morbid Anatomy Museum allows you to stare at these things within the comfort of the exhibition, but also to progress beyond this visceral reaction and to learn more. By becoming familiar with these themes, we can better understand them, their historical significance, and why they still contribute to a constant curiosity. These themes are becoming increasingly explored,

The Woodland Fairground (Detail), Twentieth-century animated anthropomorphic taxidermy tableau, Once displayed at Cress Funeral Home, Madison, Wisconsin; From the collection of Mike Zohn, Obscura Antiques and TV’s “Oddities.”

Photo courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

as The Art of Mourning exhibition recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates, having opened up the public discourse on mourning rituals. The Morbid Anatomy Museum devotes itself to the continual exploration of these sometimes macabre, but often misunderstood, themes through its exhibitions, library, and rich array of programming, from lectures to taxidermy classes. It provides a most

unusual and off-the-beaten track museum-going experience for anyone intrigued by the potential of material culture to speak to the observer.

The Collector’s Cabinet is the first in a series of exhibitions on the subject.

The following exhibition, Do The Spirits Return? From Dark Arts to Sleight of Hand in Early 20th Century Stage Magic, will open on April 11, 2015 and be on view until January 5, 2016.

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Pieter Coecke van Aelst, The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony, c.

1560 - 75. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry October 2014– January 2015, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Review by Mae Colburn

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On an afternoon in early January 2015, visitors milled around the galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, lingering before the tapestries far beyond the average fifteen to thirty seconds a museum visitor pauses to view a work of art. Grand Design was the third of the Met’s major tapestry exhibitions, and the first to focus on a single artist. Wherever possible, it brought together sketches and cartoons associated with each tapestry’s production, enabling an almost endless game of “spot the difference” as visitors traced design elements from their initial conception to their final presentation. The tapestries, some as large as fifteen by twentyfive feet, commanded the greatest attention, and visitors responded to their pictorial and technical properties in equal measure, standing some fifteen feet back to view the work in full, then moving closer to a point where, squinting, they could make out warp and weft crossings, pixels that comprise the tapestry’s surface.

Questions abounded, but it was clear that Coecke’s tapestries were at once foreign and familiar to modern viewers, both bewildering and

undeniably compelling.

Trained in Antwerp, Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-50) worked across media, and the exhibition includes drawings, paintings, woodcuts, and even books that bear his mark.

As a tapestry designer, Coecke’s central task was to create a sketch (petit patron) of about ten by twenty inches that could be scaled up into a cartoon (grand patron), and later woven. Rendered in pen and ink, the sketches on display reveal Coecke’s acute talent for staging, for placing and posing figures so as to bring a scene to its dramatic limits. This is particularly evident in a sequence of two sketches for the Stoning of Saint Stephen, a tapestry in the Life of Saint Paul series (1529-30), where Coecke seems to have shifted the action to hasten the victim’s eventual fate.

The second sketch appears slightly altered, as if presenting the scene a split second after the first. Faint grid lines appear on several of Coecke’s sketches, indicating that they were scaled up into the cartoons used to guide the weaving.

While designers often left cartoon painting to specialists, Coecke is believed to have participated in this process, and the cartoons on display reveal a persistent effort to explicate the ideas present in his sketches. In a fragment depicting a horse from the Conversion of Saul, also from the Life of Saint Paul series, thick black lines delineate masses, and shadows

cast them in three dimensions. The horse, its tongue jutting out, is no doubt emitting an emphatic whinny in response to the blistering light surrounding the Jesus figure above.

It is no surprise that the cartoons on display are fragments. Cartoons were often used numerous times and occasionally copied, as is evident in a fragment depicting a man’s turbaned head, eyes cast upward and lips parted, from Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, also from the Life of Saint Paul, where the main features are outlined with faint prick points.

This tendency to use cartoons multiple times is emphasized by the curators’ decision to include tapestries from different editions of the same series. Placed side by side, each edition reveals its own distinct character, unique to the workshop where it was woven, the materials used, and the patron’s preferences.

The Seven Deadly Sins tapestries (ca. 1532-34) demonstrate this well, some gleaming with metallic threads, and others, still impressive but duller, made of wool and silk.

The borders also differ: some with sumptuous flora and fauna, and others, such as those in the Story of Vertumnus and Pomona series (ca.

1544), with trompe l’oeil patterns and carved cartouches. Perhaps the most daring changes occurred in an effort to re-size a series to accommodate a specific interior.

The clearest example of this is Saint Paul Preaching to the Women of Philippi, also from the Life of Saint Paul series, a truncated version of Coecke’s 129

sketch with its contents slightly shifted to accommodate the change.

Tapestries were, after all, functional in both material and symbolic senses. Coecke’s tapestries were sold to Europe’s wealthiest clients, among them King Francis I of France and King Henry VIII of England, and one can imagine them hanging in palaces and castles, providing insulation, dampening sound, and infusing an interior with vibrant colors and textures while also providing a glimpse into another world. In today’s reality of controlled heating, electrical lighting, mechanized weaving, synthetic color, and, perhaps most important, moving pictures, the need for these emphatic surfaces has diminished, and the original visual impact of tapestries is often overlooked. Grand Design’s greatest achievement, it seems, is its tactful insertion of ephemera related to the design process to remind viewers that tapestry is a medium unto itself, and that tapestry design is its own aesthetic language, both distinct from and related to other visual forms.

If there is one contemporary medium that Coecke’s tapestry designs seem to anticipate, it is film—not, of course, in technique, but in language. Both command sustained attention, requesting that viewers watch rather than look. While in film events occur in time, one moment fading into the next, in Coecke’s work these events occur in space, characters repeated across a landscape depicting various moments in a scene’s development. This is 130

perhaps most patent in God Accuses Adam and Eve After the Fall, part of the Story of the Creation series (ca.

1547-48), where the protagonists appear twice, first in the foreground, looming in front of the viewer at the moment when Adam exposes Eve, and second, a short distance away, shamefully clasping hides around their bodies. Like a cut in a film, the intensity of the scene relies on the friction between these moments, which in this case illustrate both the revelation and its consequence.

This analogy can be taken further.

Coecke appears to have been markedly aware of the relationship between the figures and the viewer, and, like actors, his figures participate in the drama while remaining aware of the viewer’s gaze. Recognizing this, the exhibition becomes a tangle of appeals, deflections, even invitations. In Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, another example from the Life of Saint Paul, a pink-faced man with one hand on a young scribe’s back glances toward the viewer as if to say, “Don’t get caught writing heathen texts!” A similar admonishment occurs in Saint Paul Preaching to the Women of Philippi, a quiet scene depicting the saint communing with female converts while a man in the foreground, looking sternly at a pair of squirming children seated opposite him, raises his hand to the audience as if to say, “You, too—be quiet.” In these instances and others, the invisible fourth wall between the figures and the viewers seems to disappear.

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, The Life of Saint Paul: Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, 1529 or 1535, pen and brush and brown ink, heightened with white gouache. Ghent University Library.

Further collapsing this invisible wall is Coecke’s extraordinary aptitude for illusionism, which enables him to translate, at least for a second, the drama of the scene into the viewing environment.

This is visible throughout Coecke’s tapestries, but most palpable in Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, where books, heaped upon sheaves of wheat, tumble into the center of the scene, one falling just below the frame. This renegade marks a point of crossing where the scene penetrates the viewer’s reality, and where the viewer can, in turn, penetrate the scene, starting with the individual words written on the pages of the burning books, which appear in sharp focus, then following the smoke upward to adjacent

scenes at the left and right, which are visible but less distinct. Coecke appears to be dealing in vision as well as narrative, defining the viewer’s passage through the scene with optical effects.

As long as the process of tapestry design remains foreign to contemporary viewers, so too will the staggering achievements of an artist such as Pieter Coecke. Grand Design made great strides in closing this gap, bringing to light Coecke’s process such that the outcome, the tapestries, could be seen afresh. Perhaps most profoundly, the exhibition exposed the labor in the genius, and, in turn, the genius in the labor, placing front and center aspects of an artistic production too often overlooked.

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Installation view of Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye. The Museum of Modern Art, November 15, 2014–November 15, 2015. © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: John Wronn

Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye November 15, 2014 November 1, 2015 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Review by P.J. Carlino

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In 1958 the Philips corporation commissioned Le Corbusier to design a pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair. The designer provided visitors with a multi-sensory experience that unified the soaring vascular space with a site-specific musical composition by Edgar Varèse, titled Poème électronique, and a synchronized film of surreal images. The curators of the exhibition Making Music Modern: Design for Ear And Eye, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, aspire to present the visitor with similar examples of the intersection of music and design. Objects and related media from the permanent collection have been selected to sketch the reciprocal influences of design and music since the late nineteenth century.

Four loosely chronological groupings are installed in the pristine white interior. Objects are evenly distributed across large platforms along each wall, with significant graphic work from the period installed on the wall behind. Each of the four walls addresses a particular theme relevant to the era represented. The central vitrine holds additional items related to each theme. Large video screens and two small video monitors with headphones accompany each grouping, and a

cluster of umbrella speakers and hidden speakers attached to the central vitrine play period-specific music.

The first grouping, titled Vibrations to the World, introduces the visitor to the radical transformation in the spatial, visual and aural experience of sound in the latenineteenth century. An Edison home phonograph (1908-1912) aptly represents the technological developments that initiated sweeping changes in the composition and experience of music. For the first time sound was affordably recorded and played back; and, just as the fidelity of the photograph liberated late nineteenth-century visual artists from the demand to create representative art, the phonograph liberated musicians from the demand to create and play traditional heroic and pastoral symphonies, historical music that could be bought affordably on disks and cylinders. When music moved toward abstraction, architects and designers followed by creating interiors and graphics that were suited to the new musical forms. In a lyrical watercolor sketch of a music room (1902) Charles Rennie Mackintosh

and Margaret MacDonald evoked the rhythm of notes on a score by combining multiple pendant light fixtures flanked by a series of gridded windows and columns. A concert hall sketch by Hans Poelzig demonstrated a concrete form for the new sound as a series of swirling forms emanating from the stage. Theo Van Doesburg and other graphic designers adapted abstract mathematical music into bold typography and brilliant colors for concert posters.1 The next grouping, Wired for Sound, follows the diffusion of the experience of music out of the concert hall and into the home in the first half of the twentieth century.

Designers applied fundamental reductionist principles of modernism and streamlining as an aid to further commodifying the listening experience. Walter Dorwin Teague’s blue-mirrored Sled Radio (1937) is a prime example of the use of modern design principles to transform radios from an intimidating technological machine to a visually pleasing object of desire. The curved edges, sleek reflective surfaces and smooth horizontal fins express forward movement and optimistic embrace of technology. Through the 1940s and 1950s the appearance of home electronics continued to be simplified into unornamented surfaces in muted colors suited to fit into any modern domestic environment.

Dieter Rams’s loudspeaker (1960), an unornamented metallic box

1

David Pimm, “Some Notes on Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) and His ‘Arithmetic Composition,’” For the Learning of Mathematics Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jul., 2001), 31-36.

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Hans Poelzig, Concert Hall Project, Dresden, Germany, Interior perspective of preliminary scheme, 1918, Color pencil and graphite on tracing paper. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Henry G. Proskauer.

covered with black mesh, heralded the clean lines of high modernism as an enduring style for music- related electronics. The perfect crystalline shape of Jacob Jensen’s Beomaster turn-table (1969) and the Bang & Olufsen cassette player (1979), for example, adhere to the pared-down aesthetic. Music and minimalism are related on an architectural scale in Jørn Utzon’s model for the iconic Sydney Opera House—an experiment in the slicing of sections from a chaste white sphere. Graphic design followed a similar reduction in ornamentation from the vibrantly colored geometric shapes of a 1937 Rural Electrification Administration 134

poster to W. Eugene Smith’s monochromatic 1964 album cover Monk, composed of sans serif white lettering above a black-on-gray portrait of the artist.

The exploration of the late 1960s and early 1970s, entitled Revolt to Style, touches on the close cultural connection between the aesthetics of music and design. The twisted donut of the Panasonic Toot-A-Loop radio (1972) and Bellini’s cherry-red lozenge shaped record player (1968) are placed next to De Pas, D’Urbino and Lomazzi’s candy-colored Blow inflatable arm chair (1967) creating a tableau for the counterculture movement. Nina Simone singing

“Revolution” from the 1969 Harlem cultural festival and psychedelic posters designed by Milton Glazer and Bonnie Maclean are a fitting backdrop. In breaking with the conventions of graphic design the illegible fonts and clashing neon colors of the posters were visual manifestations of the protest music of the era. A great

Lester Beall, Radio – Rural Electrification Administration, 1937, Silkscreen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer. © 2014 Lester Beall Estate / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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number of late twentieth-century album covers and punk and new-wave music posters illustrate the transition of the aesthetics of counter-culture from a political statement to an enduring graphic style.

The final section, Sonic Worlds explodes the dichotomy of culture and counterculture in the post-structuralist era of individual freedom of expression.

Advancements in the design of electronic and digital equipment led to otherworldly design that freed the music from the musician and that severed the musician from the listener. Joe Jones’s cyborglike Mechanical Violin (1964) has a parasitic mechanical playing box attached to a violin suspended from a music stand. The piece is one of several instruments from playerless 1965 Mechanical Flux Orchestra. Yashura Kira’s Wind MIDI looks like an assemblage of black plastic industrial parts, and his Tenori-on, a 6 inch magnesium frame holding 256 LED switches, dazzles as it produces sounds in response to touch. Vertiginous album covers of Philip Glass and Brian Eno represent the ethereal soundtrack to these new worlds. A selection of drawings from Daniel Libeskind’s series of architectural meditations on themes from Heraclitis (1983) harkens back to the earlier rhythm-infused architectural conception of Poelzig, but rhythm in Libeskind’s frenzied line drawings appears appropriately chaotic 2

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Wall text

and cacophonous as music and architecture sought new ways of being. Jonathan Ive’s Apple iPod caps the exhibition with the moment when the materiality of music was reduced to a portable metal and glass box that released the listener from all constraints of space and time and empowered the nondesigner, non-musician to design his or her own soundscape.

Moving through the exhibition the viewer is exposed to a gradual reduction in the materiality of music.

But for this viewer the exhibition lacks a consistent argument about how design “empowered us to create and explore an unprecedented range of music,” nor how “music has been a model for many avantgarde designers.”2 The name of the exhibition, Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye, implies that designers had an active role in making music modern but causation is rarely evidenced here. Few concrete connections between musicians and designers are discussed or presented. The curators have not analyzed modern music sufficiently to explain what qualities of music influenced designers, nor what qualities of design have influenced music. This visitor left with an understanding not of an intersection of art forms but of a parallel evolution in aesthetics.

The lack of spatial context also challenges a fuller understanding of that relationship. A deeper cultural context would have helped to show

how modernizing cultural changes stimulated both designers and musicians. For example, I would like to understand how the experience of sound changed as urbanization and technology altered the soundscape of cities, how the mid-century suburban home influenced form, how a lengthening of adolescence contributed to identity and rebellion through music and design, or how an increasingly mobile society demanded portability.3 Although analysis of the objects themselves is minimal, there is a great deal of value in this exhibition for those interested in how designers used visual aesthetics to facilitate the commercialization and democratization of the listening experience, which may in fact be the primary purpose of this exhibit.

The exhibition clearly illustrates how phonographs, radios and speakers, boom boxes and iPods were designed at price-points to appeal to a broad audience and with the formal aesthetics to be used in a variety of settings. Objects in the exhibition demonstrate how the design of electronics not only diffused the ondemand experience of music to a wider audience of the population, but also how design distanced the listener spatially and temporally from the performance of music. By making products that were small, portable and individual, designers facilitated a shift in listening from an intimate, shared, passive experience in the home or concert hall, to a

Panasonic, Toot-A-Loop Radio (model R-72), c. 1972, ABS plastic, Mfr.: Panasonic Company, Secaucus, NJ. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Anne Dixon.

disconnected, personalized, active experience suited to the modern culture of choice and individualism.

Making Music Modern introduces the public to new ways of thinking about the relationship between the ephemeral art of music and the physical arts of graphic design, product design and architecture.

3

Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT Press, 2004), 150-155 137

Ten Questions With:

Gregory Herringshaw Assistant Curator in Charge of the Wallcoverings Department, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Objective: Could you explain a bit about your academic and professional background and how they led you to the Cooper Hewitt?

Greg Herringshaw: I have a BFA in Graphic Design and Sculpture, and am a creative person at heart. I also received a graduate degree in Museum Studies: Applied Arts from FIT. It was my internship at Museum of the City of New York during grad school that led to my job at the Cooper Hewitt. The printmaking classes I took in college appealed to both my internship supervisor and the Cooper Hewitt.

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Objective: Do you have a favorite wallpaper?

Objective: Do you have a least-favorite wallpaper?

G.H.: It would be really hard to say what my favorite wallpaper is. I have an appreciation for craftsmanship and good design from all periods. Probably my favorite period would be early twentieth century, as I would love to be able to decorate a bungalow with period wallpapers. I also get a charge from Art Deco papers. I really enjoy having a mix of different patterns on the wall.

G.H.: I can find something engaging about almost any wallpaper, it’s just a matter of putting the wallpaper into the right context.

Objective: What is a typical workday like for you—what sort of projects are on your desk right now?

G.H.: As a one-person department I wear many hats. I do collections management, work on getting the collection photographed and accessible

online, look for new wallpapers to add to the collection, and do research and share my knowledge with others. Right now I’m working on acquiring some new pieces for the museum, ongoing collections photography, selecting wallpaper rotations for the current exhibitions, and preparing for a couple spring lectures.

Objective: Do you ever put your wallpaper and curatorial skills to use outside of the Cooper Hewitt collections?

G.H.: I have consulted on a number of interesting homes and film sets over the years. There was a minister’s home 139

in Hawaii from the mid-nineteenth century—I have no idea how they got wallpaper to Hawaii at that time; the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens; the Spam House, where the inventors of the infamous meatproduct lived; the Davidson House of Harley-Davidson fame; The Biltmore Estate; Morris-Jumel Mansion in Manhattan and the Van Cortlandt house in the Bronx. I also spoke with one of the set designers for the Great Gatsby film. Most of the properties I have consulted on once belonged to well-to do families, but there was also a ghost town out West, and a former slave cabin down South. Wallpaper is one of those things—it doesn’t always matter how much you spend but it can still add beauty and make a room feel special.

preservation question. Conservation of wallpapers is usually reserved for pieces going on exhibition, and this is usually a negotiation between how I think a piece should be presented vs. what the conservator is able to do with the time and budget available.

Objective: How do you work with conservators to ensure the wallcoverings collection is properly preserved?

Objective: The Wallcoverings Department is in charge of an impressive collection of bandboxes. What are these and why do they fall under your jurisdiction?

G.H.: I can approach the paper conservator at any time if I have a storage or

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Objective: If you could wish for any new acquisition for the Wallcoverings Department, what would it be?

G.H.: Perhaps I have simple tastes but I’m rather fond of papers showing pop culture. I would so love to acquire the wallpaper for the original Star Wars movie, the 1964 Beatles wallpaper, or one of the Super Hero designs from the 1960s.

G.H.: Cooper Hewitt has about 100

bandboxes, which were a favorite of the museum founders. These were originally designed for storing and transporting men’s collar bands, but were popularly used as hat boxes and general carry-alls. Bandboxes consist of a paperboard support wrapped with a block-printed paper, either a wallpaper or a specially printed bandbox paper. The bandbox papers frequently contain scenes of historic interest such as the Erie Canal or the Battery Park entertainment complex Castle Garden.

Objective: As part of the Cooper Hewitt’s reopening, a large portion of the museum’s wallcoverings are being digitally displayed in the Immersion Room. Could you speak a bit about what the Immersion Room is, and how it has been received by the public?

and-match borders, hear designer audio clips, and see related objects. They are also invited to play designer by creating their own wallpaper. The Immersion Room is a big hit and has become the go-to spot for selfies.

Objective: If you could tell the world one fact about wallpaper, what would it be?

G.H.: Wallpaper makes you happy. With the endless variety of wallpapers available and with unlimited customization options, wallpaper helps create a special place. Whether you want to unwind or get energized, there is a wallpaper for you.

G.H.: The Immersion Room is a wonderful gallery devoted to wallpaper, projecting designs at full-scale and in repeat.

Along with displaying papers from the permanent collection, visitors can mix-

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Special Thanks We would like to express our immense gratitude to all those who have helped in making the inaugural issue of Objective a success: our dedicated faculty, Sarah A. Lichtman, Program Director, Ethan Robey, Associate Director, and especially Dr. Marilyn Cohen of the History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA Program; Caroline Baumann, Director and Cara McCarty, Curatorial Director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Sarah E. Lawrence, Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design; Savanna Kustra and Jennifer Soong for their vital administrative support; The New School University Student Senate for their funding contribution which has been integral to the journal’s production; Greg Herringshaw of the Cooper Hewitt, for being great all the time; Pamela Horn and Matthew Kennedy, also of the Cooper Hewitt for their printing insights; and a special thanks to Mae Wiskin and Rachel Smith of Plot(s) and Lauren Sagadore and Stephanie Herold of BIAS for their collaboration and support throughout this process.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the expertise and tireless efforts of our design team Carolina Arévalo and Roi Baron, and our discerning copy editors Laura Handlin, Samantha Wiley, Elizabeth Scheuer and Mae Colburn. Lastly, we thank our fellow classmates and alumni of the Master’s Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies for their scholarly efforts which serve as an endless source of inspiration and admiration.

Sidewall - Sample, 1906-08, USA, machine-printed on paper. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.