Gotham Diary:
Hung Up
26 February 2015
Ray Soleil came up after work last night and hung pictures on the last empty wall — the vertical sliver, a little more than two feet wide, behind the bookroom door. As I rarely close this door, even I will rarely see the pictures, but they’re safe, hanging neatly as they’re meant to do, and not slumped in a stack behind a sofa or voluminously wrapped up at the back of a closet. Now: to deal with the pictures that won’t be appearing on these new walls.
Three are handsome photographs from Jen Bekman, handsomely framed for the gallery in the old apartment. That they worked well in the old apartment is but a clear sign of the subtle disorganization that reigned in those rooms — the disorganization of accretion. Over thirty years, Kathleen and I acquired a lot of things, one at a time, and fit them in with what was already there. Every now and then, I would take apart the corner of a room and put it back together more coherently. Five years go, I even had the old foyer and the corridor leading to the blue room repainted — the corridor became the “gallery.” But although I was often moving things around, I was never moving everything around. In the bedroom, there was on one wall a crazy pavé of pictures large and small, most of them placed to hide the nail holes from earlier decorating schemes. There was a similar patch in the blue room as well.
The move, hellish as it often was, gave me the chance to re-place everything, and what couldn’t be placed was gotten rid of. The Bekman photographs — a pair of quietly arty shots of a pond in different weathers, and a long shot of a swimming hole in California, taken by somebody else — don’t work in this apartment because they’re not quite interesting enough to fit in any of them rooms, where pictures have been grouped with great deliberation. As to the long entry corridor, I have made it a very different kind of gallery, a miscellany of graphic images of all sizes, all of them important to me, and all of them requiring a close view. This is not the space for dreamy nature photography, to be seen at a distance. That three rather lovely pictures didn’t find a place down here, out of the dozens and dozens that did, is really no cause for regret. I’ll take them Housing Works and hope that they’ll find nice homes.
That leaves two groups of rejecta. There are pictures that have been used up. In one case, literally: it’s a print of that painting in Rome that is the centerpiece of Sacred Heart iconography. I can never remember its name (it’s a picture of the BVM), but it was given to Kathleen when she was a girl, and it is now almost unintelligibly faded, to shades of gold and cream. Then there is the “Bodley Plate” graphic of the principal buildings at Williamsburg, together with sketches of flora and fauna; copies of this eighteenth-century illustration are sold by Colonial Williamsburg, mounted in good-looking plastic frames. I had it in my bathroom for years, and I’d probably hang it in my bathroom down here, if that were possible, but it isn’t, because the tile goes almost all the way up to the ceiling. I have perhaps had my fill of the Bodley Plate. Then there’s the oval frame.
The oval frame, made out of a dark wood that I used to assume to be mahogany, is Victorian, about eight by ten, and pleasingly turned. Four ogival ridges surround the picture plane, rising to a crest about an inch above it. From this crest, four deeper ogival folds descend to the outer edge of the frame. I bought the frame a very long time ago, during one of my summer jobs on Wall Street. The shop that I bought it in was at the basement of one of the twin buildings that flank Thames street, just above Trinity Church. I recall a musty room with the air of an abandoned curiosity shop. I don’t know why I bought the frame, exactly, but I’m sure that I meant to replace the image that it came with (as frames always do), a bland botanical, no doubt cut from a rectangular page, showing a plant with small, pale yellow orchidy blooms, and leaves like Italian parsley. I’m familiar with the image, because I never did get round to finding something else to put in the frame. I’m reluctant to get rid of the frame, precisely because of the senselessness with which I’ve held on to it all these years. I feel bound to keep holding on to it, until it finally tells me the secret that it was always meant to impart. Perhaps it is telling me that message right now (it’s a lesson that I have really, seriously learned): don’t buy things just to buy things.
The final group is made up of gifts, many of them given to us in their nice frames! I review the pictures that are hanging on the walls. There are a few items of inheritance, but gifts? Here’s a little paper sculpture, showing a vine against a lattice. Kathleen, to whom it was given, was surprised to see it up on the corridor wall: “This isn’t very interesting.” (I disagree.) There is the two-page storyboard for an AT&T ad that a friend then at Young & Rubicam gave me — signed by the creatives — when I told him that I’d seen this ad on a plane and really liked it. That’s also in the corridor. There is a lithograph in the dining ell, showing a “woodie” — an old cabin cruiser — tied up on the Thames River at Mystic. It might be a gift, but it might also be a purchase, as we were taken to visit the artist, right aboard that boat, one day long ago. I’d like to think that it was a gift, because then I wouldn’t feel so bad about disposing of another picture, a gift for sure this time, from the same friend. Finally, there is the striking photograph of what turns out to be the Budapest Opera House, now finally hung for maximum visual effect. A friend of mine ran it on his blog and I asked him if I could download it. Permission granted, I had the print made myself. And then I had it framed. The extent to which this photograph is a gift, and not something that I paid for with a peppercorn, seems largely technical; certainly it lacked the element of surprise.
In the old apartment, I tended to hang anything that was presentable. Down here, you would never know how riotously we used to live. I sometimes feel that an art director has set up the apartment for a biopic. But whose? I’d like to think that it’s about a person I’ve yet to become.