In
An Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein suggests she learned to write by looking at walls.
About 1903, she and her brother Leo began
amassing what became one of greatest collections of modernist paintings.
She wrote in the same room that the paintings
were hung floor to ceiling, and she charts how her writing changed as the rows
of paintings she looked at shifted as well.
John Ashbery also has described the ways his aesthetic
developed through looking at walls.
Although
he is known well for his art criticism and has, as one might expect, a
wonderful art collection, the inspiring walls he describes, unlike Stein’s, are bare of paintings. In a 1980 review
of a wallpaper exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum for New York magazine, Ashbery writes: “Many people’s first aesthetic
experience is triggered by wallpaper, and it is usually the illusionistic,
break-through-the-wall kind. One of my
earliest memories is of trying to peel off the wallpaper in my room, not out of
animosity but because it seemed there must be something fascinating beyond the
surface pattern of galleons, globes, and telescopes” (Reported Sightings, 383)
In
the Hudson house there is a lot of wallpaper. The choices of pattern, however,
are not exactly the child-like, peel-off-the-paper kind that he describes in
this review, but they do provide a direct link to a feeling of childhood.
Most
of the Hudson house wallpapers, particularly on the second floor, are William
Morris prints. These prints connect
Ashbery to the very Victorian, nineteenth-century aesthetic that he remembers at
his grandparents’ home and that helped inspire his choice to buy the Hudson
house. In a 1985 interview, Ashbery
explains: “I never intended to buy a house but then I saw this rather lovely
nineteenth-century house, which was very cheap.
It reminded me of my grandparents’ house where I lived when I was a
child in the city of Rochester. My
grandparents were both born in the 1860s.
They were actually Victorian people and I spent a lot of time with them….I
was always very attracted to the coziness and the gloom of Victorian life, and
always felt very much at home in that environment.” (P.N. Review). That environment was very much an interior
one; in Eccentric Spaces (1977), Robert
Harbison identified why William Morris’s wallpapers epitomized Victorian
interiority: “Ruskin and William Morris for all their allegiance to plants
forms were not really happy till they had brought the leaves inside and got
them down on paper” (20).
Here
are a few examples: First, William
Morris’s “White Pimpernel” Print--in the context of the master bedroom (in Ahndraya Parlato's photo)
and in a close-up:
One more example, from the Upstairs Sitting Room, in context (with the corner of a Trevor Winkfield and some ceramic objects in a photo by Ahndraya Parlato):
and in a close-up:
Ashbery
ends his review of the wallpaper exhibit by pointing out that looking at old
wallpapers, even if “inconsequential” are “oddly fascinating” in part because
wallpapers can provide some slight insight into history.
It
seems fitting to consider that Ashbery likes both the insight into history that
wallpaper provides and the slightness of that insight.
The essay mentions several times that
wallpaper, in its own unassuming way, thwarts a certain kind of certain
knowing: patterns repeat, but not always exactly as they repeated before or not
always a complete repetition, that most of the great wallpapers were created by
artists who generally did not make wallpaper, and that there is a limitation on
what one can discern about wallpaper.
As
Ashbery points out: “it is frequently impossible to ascertain [wallpaper’s]
provenance, period, or even nationality.”
I like the idea that in wallpaper, which covers every room of the Hudson
house, one is invited to enter into the aesthetics of this home—seriously but
slightly.
