Hudson house--Wallpaper [by Karin Roffman]

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.

Comments

[DL]

Great post. The "coziness and gloom of Victorian life" is a very telling phrase.

[Jason Crane]

I never would have thought I'd read -- and be fascinated by -- an article on wallpaper. I love these looks at Ashberry's house. Thanks so much for writing them.