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PRODUCTIVE WEEK SO FAR, settling in to my Prospect Heights pied-a-terre. With the help of a friend, I carried out a plan to hang pictures “salon style,” covering a wall from top to bottom — an assortment of original art and prints acquired over the years at antiques shops and estate sales, mostly. (That’s it, above, though in need of further refinement, not to mention straightening).
Only later did I realize I was sub-consciously trying to emulate the Barnes Foundation, which I visited for the first time in August. That’s the incredible collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art soon to be rudely displaced from its longtime home, below, in a Neo-Classical mansion just outside Philadelphia, to a new site on Benjamin Franklin Parkway that’s almost certain to be more sterile and institutional. I’ve even copied the yellow walls, though the art I couldn’t copy: Albert Barnes had Modiglianis, Cezannes, Renoirs, etc., up the wazoo, and interspersed his paintings with collected metal objects and African sculpture.
The so-called salon style of picture-hanging goes back centuries in European tradition, long before the contemporary gallery style — hanging art in horizontal eye-level rows — came into being.
Monet’s dining room at Giverny, below, another contributor to my current infatuation with yellow, has art hung salon-style in the far corner.
The picture below, from Apartment Therapy, makes me feel I ought to have even more pictures and hang them closer together.
Read more about salon style in this article from Portland Monthly:
For two centuries or more, art was enjoyed salon-style, with big and small pieces mixed together and displayed from floor to ceiling. In European museums, art often is still shown this way.The term “salon-style” derives from the famed Parisian art school École des Beaux-Arts, which, in the mid-17th century, began to exhibit the paintings of graduating students in huge public shows.
The era’s artistry, of course, is now mostly relegated to the Louvre, but the style of hanging pictures is again fashionable in galleries, museums, and especially homes. There are really no rules; all it takes is a good eye—or more to the point, confidence in your eye.
I don’t know about confidence, but I do know it helped to lay the pictures out on the sofa in rough approximation of the proposed arrangement, and to start at the bottom, using the sofa back as a guide to a more-or-less even line. Then we just winged it. The OCD part of me is driven a little crazy by the inconsistency of the negative space between pictures and the desire to constantly straighten them (don’t they sell some sticky thing you can put on the backs of pictures to prevent their moving around?) Still, there’s something very satisfying about a methodology that allows you to get all your art up there in one fell swoop.
The new Brooklyn Bridge Park, Garden Design Nov/Dec 2010. Photo: Julienne Schaer
NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT, writing for garden and interiors magazines. When I first started, in pre-computer days, I hated it; I suffered terrible anxiety and writer’s block, brought on by wanting so badly to be brilliant. Until I got an article written and delivered, I went entire weekends without leaving the house, or even changing out of my pajamas.
Date palm allee, Garden Design Nov/Dec 2010. Photo: Robin Hill
It’s a whole lot easier now that I’ve realized brilliance isn’t necessary — just good interviewing and reporting skills, a general understanding of the subject matter at hand, clarity and hopefully a bit of sparkle in the writing.
Below: Central Park West apartment by D’Aquino Monaco, New York Spaces Nov. 2010. Photo: Peter Murdock
This month, I have five articles in print: two in the new issue of Garden Design – “Down by the Riverside,” about the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, top, and the cover story, “Inspired Italy,” a South Florida garden by Sanchez & Maddux, influenced by classical European tradition; two in Hamptons Cottages & Gardens holiday issue, out Nov. 24; and one in New York Spaces, an over-the-top, avant garde interior by D’Aquino Monaco, above.
House in Amagansett by architect Alex Porter, Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, Holiday 2010. Photo: Tim Street-Porter
Burnin’ up the newsstands!
RAINY SIDEWALKS FULL OF SOGGY GARBAGE. Racing to move the car by 8:30AM or risk getting towed away. Crowded buses creeping up Flatbush Avenue. Ah, it’s good to be back.
No, really, it is. The weather was spectacular my first three days back in Brooklyn, and it feels almost like I’m traveling in a new city — London keeps springing to mind — even though I lived here 30+ years before buying my cottage on Long Island a year-and-a-half ago. I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but right now, I’m enjoying exploring my new neighborhood of Prospect Heights, especially the restaurants, cafes, and bars along Vanderbilt Avenue. It’s all new to me: the trendy Australian-owned Milk Bar, where you can get whole grain toast piled with strawberry butter or mashed avocado, and the unpretentious Joyce Bakery, below, very welcoming on a gray morning.
My block is lined with classic, elegant brownstones, and I’m extremely pleased with my garden-level apartment. It’s all a pied-a-terre should be. My main worry, that it would be too dark, has not (like most worries) materialized. The north-facing back bedroom, under the owners’ deck, is indeed cave-like; I wake with no clue what time it is. But the south-facing living room gets lovely warm light that moves from the white marble mantel across my beloved hooked rug, to spatter the opposite wall, painted Benjamin Moore’s Dalila, a strong sunflower yellow, in the late afternoon.
The space feels very familiar. I’ve lived in so many mid-19th century Brooklyn row houses, where the details and proportions are all of a piece. The ceilings are high, even for a garden floor, the parquet is in excellent shape, the window moldings and four-panel doors and wood shutters and iron gates are all original and intact. The kitchen is in the right place (the center of the space) and attractive for a rental apartment; the built-in bookshelves are a godsend. The bedroom, though light-challenged, is huge, and I’ll be painting it too — peachy-pink to warm things up.
My move on Monday was uneventful, except for their having to unscrew the chrome base from the 8-foot-long sofa to get it in the door. Since then, I’ve been unpacking my stuff from storage and filling the car for my maiden voyage back to Springs with items I’ve got no space or use for here. Clothes and shoes (so easy to toss, with the hindsight a year-and-a-half of storage fees will give you) are going to LVIS — the Ladies Village Improvement Society thrift shop in East Hampton. Other things I’ll put in the basement for next spring’s first yard sale.
The book I’m reading in between cartons, and late at night when I’m too wired from unpacking to fall asleep, couldn’t be more appropriate: Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House, Meghan Daum’s amusing memoir of real-estate addiction. I’m relating on many levels to her tales of compulsive house-shopping, frequent moving, and shoestring decorating, feeling smug that my own case is a tad less severe.
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