Oy vey, does she really want a painting to go with her sofa?!
A documentary film about the abbreviated life of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was reviewed recently in The Paper (you know, the Paper). Towards the end of the article the writer references a “tantalizing anecdote” where either one of the invited talking heads appearing in the film or Basquiat himself “tells of his [Basquiat’s] disgust at a patron who asked him to color-coordinate a painting to her living room”. This is a real-life version of a frequently repeated mise-en-scène in which the artist becomes aghast at the notion that his or her work could possibly be considered as somehow related to the surrounding décor. A fictionalized dramatization of the same scenario occurs in Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters when Dusty Frye (Daniel Stern) visits the studio of the artist Frederick (of Hollywood?) played by Max Von Sydow, who flies into a rage when the moneyed but obviously boorish Dusty explains his desire to find some art of sufficient scale for a place in Southhampton he’s renovating with the help of an interior decorator.
The aversion among the cognoscenti to the idea of connecting fine art to its physical environment is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries this was not at all the case; quite the contrary – art was very much viewed as part of a larger whole, rather than as self-contained, autonomous objects floating in their own hermetically sealed bubble. We can start by citing the ancient Greeks, who adorned every square inch on the inside of their pagan temples with works of painting and sculpture, all organized to harmonize with the surrounding architecture. The Romans continued the tradition, developed some new media to add to the mix (e.g., mosaics) and extended it into secular buildings and private dwellings. The practice reasserted itself with a vengeance in the art-crazed Renaissance, its apotheosis being the riotous agglomeration of artistry inside the Christian church, especially those in the northern reaches of Europe.
Things visually calm down a bit in the more restrained Neo-classical era, but in truth it’s during this period that the concept of the consummately designed environment – what would later be broadly labeled the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’ – emerges as a desired objective among design professionals working at a domestic as well as an institutional scale. Perhaps no entity better represents this new empowerment than the architectural and interior design firm headed by Robert and James Adam. As impresarios of a new attitude towards interior design, the Adam Brothers are among the first to regard the modern domestic interior as a weave of the fine and applied arts, and then to choreograph the execution of these spaces in a masterful assemblage of multiple media down to the smallest detail. To coordinate the parts into a coherent whole, their scope of work necessarily included the design of tableware, decorative accessories, furnishings and floor coverings, as well as the development and commissioning of the fine art program.
You might be thinking at the moment that this is all fine and good for the olden days, but hey, we’re in the 21st century now and we just don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Well, not so fast: the first generation of Modern Masters were very much of the same mind as the Adam boys when it came to the idea of the totality of the arts. The doctrine of the gesamtkunstwerk underpinned the curriculum of the Bauhaus through its entire history, to take just one of many celebrated examples of modernism’s embrace of this philosophy.
Excuse me, Mr. Molina – I mean Rothko – there’s no smoking in the studio, even your own.
So when and why did artists start to think differently? Honestly, we can’t say for sure, but we can surmise that, like so many things, it all changed with the War (you know, the War) and the demise of the Beaux-Arts. To bolster this assertion we again cite a literary dramatization about artists – this time, the award-winning Broadway play Red. The play tells the story of the painter Mark Rothko in the late ‘fifties after he’s received a commission from noted architect Philip Johnson to paint some murals for the upscale Four Seasons restaurant inside New York’s Seagram’s Building. Rothko is both flattered and repulsed by the invitation, and ultimately decides to turn down the work in part because he felt the atmosphere was undignified and his artwork a mere palliative for the unenlightened fat cats who would be dining alongside them. Among the snippets of dialogue there lingers a whiff of familiar disdain for anyone who dares think of art as merely ‘decoration’ tacked onto a wall.
In historical fact, Rothko was among the last of a generation of artists who very much wanted to embed their art in the larger context of a holistic environment. His canvases for an eponymous chapel in Houston and his research in preparing for the project represent the very embodiment of an artist in search of a physical grounding for his work. So again, we ask, when did things go awry? Okay, here’s another stab: when the artist’s studio and the art gallery became White Cubes.
But that’s a story for another day. For now, we would simply like to note that our efforts to promote a modular art stem in part from our desire to see art and its setting re-united in a common vision. For one of the most appealing characteristics of modular art is its customizability, which provides the artist, collector and designer with a powerful tool for re-linking the components that make up a space. After all, isn’t the whole nearly always greater than the sum of its arts?
References
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Screenplay for Hannah and Her Sisters by Woody Allen
Website for the Broadway Play Red by John Logan
