The Decoration of Houses (The Original 1897 Edition)

admin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:34:00 +0000

Amidst today’s seemingly endless supply of domestic guides and treatises on interior decoration, Edith Wharton might be surprised that her The Decoration of Houses (co-authored with architect Ogden Codman, Jr.) would still be as relevant and necessary as it is a century after its first publication. Long before “simplicity” and “classic” became catchwords for branding, Wharton took a public stand against the bland, trite excesses of Victorian décor in America. Favoring the considered, informed and complex processes of design rooted in architectural principles, her graceful humility was matched only by her assertive plea against the contemporary dominance of thoughtless, conspicuous consumption visible in New York society. As she determinately decreed: “According to the creed of the modern manufacturer, you have only to combine certain ‘good’ to obtain a certain style.”

Often associated with the frivolity connected to historical descriptions of femininity, this volume might be a surprise for those who prefer to view Wharton as a New York literary powerhouse. While her 40 books in 40 years (many of which were devoted to travels through European residences and gardens) are a testament to the force of her pen, it’s the themes of beauty, pleasure, societal indulgence, cultural education and cosmopolitanism in America’s modernity that make her analysis, and eventual ruling on the importance of design and space, a necessary extension of her literary thought. As she aptly begins her historical and aesthetic analysis, “Rooms may be decorated in two ways: by a superficial application of ornament totally dependent of structure, or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organism of every house, inside as well as out.” And it’s through these sixteen chapters that reflect on everything from the front door to the dining room to bric-a-brac that she offers readers a glimpse at the historic function of furnishings, as well as her claims about taste, beauty and the impact of residential design.

The Italian, French and British capacity for decorating in accord with the Grecian edict of “wise moderation,” so admired by Wharton, is illustrated by black and white plates. The illustrations also reveal that the author’s penchant for “classic” beauty wasn’t about recreating kitschy historic facades or stoic sparseness. Rather, a considered pleasure seems to be her goal as she concludes, “There is no absolute perfection, there is no communicable ideal; but much that is empiric, much that is confused and extravagant, will give way before the application of principles based on common sense and regulated by the laws of harmony and proportion.” True to her appreciation for sincerity in the application of decorative principles, readers can see the realization of her rules if they visit the Mount, a 113-acre Lenox estate designed by Wharton in 1902.

Recreated by Rizzoli using photographs of the original 1897 pressing, the only change made by the publishers in this edition is the use of the original interior dust jacket as the model for the printed design that now covers the book. But I don’t think Wharton would mind, as she truly believed that design was about the external reflection and illumination of what’s on the inside.

Written by: Joanne Molina, July 11th 2007

Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History

admin — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 13:15:00 +0000

By Amelie Hastie

Duke University Press

Caught between the somewhat clichéd “fleeting moment of stardom” and the somewhat fatalistic blow of having images captured on film for what could be an eternity or lost to everyone forever, to be a celebrity means cultivating and wearing a Janus-faced mask. In Cupboards of Curiousity, Amelie Hastie reads the various images in the montage that is the female celebrity—illuminating how they produce forms of knowledge in the realm of the cultural imaginary, thus achieving agency in unlikely and unusual ways. Using the work of noted philosophes Benjamin and Bachelard, film theorists Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane, cultural historians Susan Stewart and Maya Deren, and other erudite samplings of intellectual powerhouses from the disciplinary stables, Hastie offers a nuanced reading of “memory” and “collecting” to inform her inquiry and assertions. Though clearly written for an academic audience seeking a “geneaology” of sorts, all readers will find themselves captivated by the historical detail and optimistic exegesis Hastie delivers in each chapter.

Feminists in the academy will laud the way Hastie consciously avoids the traps that appear with the language of psychoanalysis often used to read both cinematic and extra-cinematic activities of these women. When discussing the cultural economy that sustained the interest in, and also produced the possibility of success for, silent film star Colleen Moore’s dollhouse, Hastie didn’t attempt to collapse the significance of the interest or activity into a fetish, disorder or symptom of her womanhood or her particular childhood and adolescent circumstances. Nor does she rely on these terms to explain the interest in the traveling object or in her role as “woman” in the cinema.

Instead, as in her reading of Alice Guy Blanché’s autobiography, Louise Brooks’ short essays and Zazu Pitts candy cookbook, she discusses in great length how these stars and star-makers actively sought out ways to explore the dimensions of their cultural (and yes, economic) capital. Like a good film historian, she looks at both the social conditions that gave the films and their stars success and the specific knowledge produced by each individual film within the context of the star’s complete oeuvre. Louise Brook’s Pandora’s Box only makes sense when read against the documentary Lulu in Berlin—and this is a difficult task, given our proclivity to simultaneously collapse the images we see into an oblivion of “Personality.” And while I wish Hastie would have spent more time discussing more controversial contemporary film/music/socialite film stars (who doesn’t approve of Turlington’s yoga?), I anticipate another volume that attempts to read the current onslaught of female “purveyor of goods” personas during an age when the politics of fashion, beauty and feminism are the complicated questions du jour.

Written by: Joanne Molina, April 8th 2007