I I unexpectedly left school in the winter of 1981. It was complicated. I had just turned seventeen, so everything was complicated except the simple things in my life: I was going to be a Poet and a Potter and be apprenticed and go to Japan. I couldn’t stay at home. I went to New York and stayed with family friends in Gramercy Park and walked and walked, and bought books at the Strand and read them on park benches, and went to poetry readings at the Y (queuing for Joseph Brodsky in the rain, Anthony Hecht reading “The Venetian Vespers”), and haunted the Chinese ceramics galleries at the Met (those celadons, the sky-after-rain and kingfisher blues, the mutton-fat grays). And late one January afternoon, near closing time, weary, baffled by Boucher, I met Chardin for the first time. It was the Frick and it was love: that rectitude, that sensuality. “We stop in front of a Chardin as if by instinct like a traveler weary of the road choosing, almost without realizing, a place that offers a grassy seat, silence, water and cool shade,” said Diderot. Chardin’s Still Life with Plums with its handful of plums dusted with autumnal bloom, that glass two thirds full of water in front of the dark carafe, the two squash, the terracotta shelf of a pantry, and that scumbled wall. It was life barely arranged, more like life discovered. And yet the formal pleasures, one object in front of another, the different gleams and glints on
fruit and glass, contained a sense of “things known and handled,” to borrow the words of David Jones. They had what he termed haecceity,y the thusness of the world: they were themselves not idealized versions of themselves. This was how objects felt. Or, to be more precise, how I wanted the world to feel, how to make the world singular in the way that a poem by, say, Marianne Moore, allowed an inhabitation of a moment of encounter. Norman Bryson got it right: . . . it was rumoured that he applied the pigment with his fingers. Which may well be true: paint in Chardin is trowelled and stroked, it mimics the texture of terra-cotta or of glaze; it dribbles; its texture is buttery, or like cream cheese, it is an almost comestible substance which everywhere announces that it has been worked. Inside the painting, one sees objects which are constantly being touched: polished metal, familiar plates and cups, linen freshly pressed and tables swept and cleaned. It is an epiphany, of course. I’d been making pots since childhood, spent hours every afternoon in the workk shop of an elderly potter. I knew how to prepare clay, knead it in spirals so that the air was expelled, cut it into pieces with the twisted wire made from rabbit snares,
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weigh each ball and sit at my kick wheel and throw one onto the spinning surface and wet my hands and center it. Bring the world into focus. And then to create board after board of vessels that were almost the same: some approximation of the litany of domestic ware, pots for use. It was an attempt at starting out. I hadn’t lived. They didn’t. That is what epiphanies are: moments when the place you are stays exactly the same but everything is transformed. To be seventeen and away from home and see that the world can be as simple as this glass of water and know that it is what you want more than anything else. To be able to pick something up and drink and put it down again.
II
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It is steel. The strike breaking, the pulse of violence, the money, the shifting of allegiances, the law, the litany of mills, coking plants, logistics, profit and loss, confrontations, litigation, the iron ore and railroads all return to smoke and dust. It is Pittsburgh. And all this starting out—this founding industry, the labor of myths, beginnings, narratives of where you start, what you give back, how far you have come—returns to dust. This made me shades into I made this. And because it is steel, it is about one material being made of
several: iron and coke and flame transforming the rawness of the world. And then this one singular material becoming everything else in the world: railroads and ships and factories, the girders for buildings, cities. So when you buy Goya’s Forgee painting, what are you buying? Three men, one about to bring his hammer down onto the red hot metal held with tongs by two others in the forge. It is a nexus of limbs, arms straining, feet placed to give stability. The clothes are torn and rent. It is pure heat and sound, density. The forge is an ellipse of scarlet. Bodies and fire: this is transformation not through the gods but through labor. Forget Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is the work of work. And work is not redemption. I think of the apotheosis of labor in the vast mural of Carnegie in Pittsburgh. There is no ascent: it is a bringing down. I stand here and hear the hammer blow and then the next, the regularity a pulse as direct as the counting in a work by Steve Reich. And because I count the world too, count vessels, hear words and phrases and see their rhythms, I begin to feel that this is the sound of this exhibition. The auditory imagination, wrote Eliot, is where the “feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to
the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back.” So repetitions traverse these installations. There are pieces of milled steel, some as heavy as girders, others cut and polished to a sixteenth of an inch in thickness. Some pieces are patinated, some are aged and stained, some rusted, and some waxed. There are pieces of steel formed into angles and then powder-coated in implacable white. Some are leaning against porcelain w vvessels, some stacked nearby. Edges are cut surgically or left raw. Steel is here to support, to topple, to balance, to arrange, to disarrange, to derange, to gather and to isolate, to shelter, to map, to count and to recount. Also to ground. d I use steel as grounds for porcelain. I think of all that ormolu—the chased bronzes that hold porcelain jars away from the riverine marbled surfaces and delicate veneered storytelling of the French furniture at the Frick—and want more contact. So for the Boulle commode, among Boucher’s The Four Seasonss in the West Vestibule, I make steel light. Five black steel V grounds, each ground with a few blackglazed porcelain vessels, each vessel supporting a few very thin steel shards. Some are gilded. Leaning one object against another makes me think of leaning against a wall like a Daumier tramp or an itinerant
in some damp Dutch painting. You feel the wall, the tree, the flank of the horse. This contact is not forever: it is a moment. This installation of porcelain and steel catches the light from the window. I’m bringing something back.
III It is said, disparagingly, that Frick bought Cuyp’s Cows and Herdsman by a River because it suggested the Youghiogheny River as it meandered past the Overholt Distillery in Broad Ford. And Hobbema’s Village Among Treess because it recalled his childhood. And that his penchant for portraits of women in hats—Lawrence’s Julia, Lady Peel—was l because his wife and daughter liked hats. Which apart from the toxic snobbery (who is he to have these masterpieces?) lets the idea of resemblance slip away into the shallows of comedic anecdote. It is far more intriguing. Proust weaves recognition into encounters with people and memories of places. The sight of Odette makes Swann remember a figure in a Botticelli, Albertine a portrait by Luini, Bloch is “an astonishing likeness … the same arched eyebrows and hooked nose and prominent cheekbones” of Bellini’s portrait of Mehmet II. This interweaving of a remembered image and an encountered person brings a space of aspiration,
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a possibility of being not likee someone else but someone else. I think of the portraits that Frick chose for the Living Hall. El Greco’s St. Jerome, attenuated fingers lightly placed on a passage of his great Latin translation of the Bible. Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desertt with his missal on his desk, Holbein’s Thomas Cromwelll and Sir Thomas More with those firms hands holding a document, a command, a sentence. And Titian’s portrait of the writer Pietro Aretino. These are men of power who become his peers. The Living Hall becomes an idea of a study, centered on the great black and gold desk by Boulle from 1710, a bureau platt that speaks of authority. Boulle invented this form, simplifying it so that there are fewer drawers and four rather than eight legs: this desk is a place where you sit and write. It is a room without books where the word rules. So I make an installation for a study. It is called sub silentio. It shares the language of steel light, with five steel grounds and tall porcelain vessels and leaning steels, but here they are held within vitrines. This enclosure is a holding back: the withheld, the not yet said. The paper in the hand, the thought not written, the closed missal, the finger on the text.
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At the Frick, you can become, sequentially, French, then English, and then possibly
Dutch, before ending in a reverie of Siena in the Enamels Room. You move as Frick moved, through rooms and passages that are stage sets, places of theatrical intent, of aspiration and possibility. To be in the Boucher Room or the Fragonard Room means hoping to be French. Which means, of course, desire. The staging, theater, pause, and revelation of desire. Not only in The Pursuit, The Meeting, g The Lover Crowned, d Love Letters, Reverie, and Love Triumphantt but in the unfolding mechanical table by Carlin, the way in which you pull a shelf forward and release a catch and fold up and over so that this table becomes a dressing table with a tilted mirror with compartments for items for your toilette, with another space for paper and a quill and inkpots. So that your day starts by looking at yourself, writing to your lover, beautiful and witty. This is the seduction of the perfectly modulated. Look again at the small gesture between a Sèvres garniture of porcelain potpourri vases, peasants attractively disporting themselves under the trees as the clouds change. There is nothing to do and so much time in which not to do it. It is hard to think of surfaces and veneers and inlays without the admonishments of Ruskin on authenticity, the horror of one material inserted into another. It is duplicity. It is material intrigue, a whispering and
steel light I–V IN THE WEST VESTIBULE
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The West Vestibule leads to a glass door that opens onto the Fifth Avenue garden, the ingenious idea of an architect whose client wanted his house set back from a busy New York street and, consequently, became the owner of one of the few New York Gilded Age residences with a garden facing Central Park. The garden was accessible through the glass doors of the West Vestibule, as well as through those in the Living Hall and the Library. Today, the door in the West Vestibule is used only occasionally. Its main benefit is to provide a view of the garden and an ever-changing natural light in which to admire the eighteenth-century French works of art in the room, most of which, by pure coincidence, evoke the outdoors. These include The Four Seasonss (1755), a series of paintings by François Boucher, and a set of chairs covered with tapestries representing lavish bouquets of flowers and fruits (ca. 1730–70).
Steel light I−VV is a true garniture, the term for a set of decorative items, especially porcelain vases, that while dissimilar in shape, size, and decoration are closely related. De Waal’s garniture of black porcelain vases, thin steel shims (some gilded), and steel plinths is placed on an elaborate commode attributed to Louis XIV’s cabinetmaker, André-Charles Boulle (ca. 1710, with later alterations). The commode is decorated with trelliswork parquetry panels veneered with kingwood and tulipwood, as well as wonderful gilt-bronze mounts representing bearded river gods with shell-like headdress and keyhole escutcheons in the shape of satyr heads crowned with grape leaves and smiling nymphs with ivy leaves and berries in their hair. Steel light I−V is displayed on the commode to capture the light streaming in from the door window, which casts changing shadows on the black glazes of the pieces. As de Waal says, “black CV is never black.”
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