Have a Seat!

On Wednesday of this week fellow Fellow in Museum Education, Kate Moioli, gave an express gallery talk on the Art of Chairs. Her choices inspired me to revisit my favorite pair of chairs in the Art Institute, a pair of musician’s chairs from the 18^th century.

I have always been drawn to these petite perches for the posterior because they embody everything social about the 18^th century interior. These would lend an air of luxury and elegance to the home is ways beyond the rich materials used (the original leather upholstery is a finely dyed red) but in its skill and craftsmanship as well. The artisan has carved and ornate, ribboned vegetal design on the fronts and backs of the chairs. But, as the scholar Mimi Hellman has discussed, there was luxury (a joy in fact!) to owning sets! In this day of mass production we are apt to forget that to create an identical series of the same object requires more than just molds, patterns, and exact measurements. Each object is unique, with its own set of problems (err, features) be it grain, warping, dryness and any other  natural occurrence that comes about in the process of growth. It’s the same reason why, as a potter, you’ll never receive a tea set or set of bowls from me as a present.

That said, the joy of owning sets went beyond the mere expense and showiness of the home’s décor. In the 18^th century hundred of pamphlets and manuals on the art of furniture arrangement were published (think: the predecessor of the feng shui craze in mid-American households in the 1990s). The lady of the household could make or break social encounters merely by the coy placement of a settee or pair of chairs. A marriage proposal or physical rebuff could be facilitated by a chair cornered just so. It was a testament to the social elegance of the woman who arranged her own interiors. What is fascinating about these chairs is that their décor is our first clue as to how and where these were meant to be placed. Though they are called musician’s chairs, I have my doubts if that name refers to their actual function. In looking at the object as a whole one finds that the most elaborate decoration is on the backs of the chairs. So that presents a tricky problem for how place them in the room—one certainly can’t face their guests to the wall! Unless…you see, there are two of these chairs. It could only mean that they are meant to face each other and away from the main action of the room. Oo la la!

18^th century European interiors followed the fashion of the French court and the style in the late 18^th century was dominated by Louis XV and the maîtresse-en-titre (the officially titled royal mistress), Madame du Pompadour. The Madame du Pompadour designed tiny, intimate worlds for the king to escape from the world of politics (which were getting quite sticky!), small hunting lodges, tiny private theaters and small gatherings of choice guests. These types of private encounters needed a new form of furniture, a kind that was so drastically different from the very majestic, grand and public style of court held by Louis XIV.

These chairs could be arranged to facilitate a whispered conversation while still allowing the sitters to turn around and briefly join the wider conversation(s) throughout the room. The low backs also allowed the wide carriages of stylish dresses (see images from the Metropolitian Museum of Art’s exhibition, Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century.) Imagine how the body must position itself to balance yourself and your clothing on this teeny perch. It would take a great deal of elegance and graceful movements. One awkward move would expose any façade of gentility!

The intimacy of these two chairs reminds me of another pair of chairs on view right now in the Art Institute. In the recently installed Hyperlinks exhibition in the Architecture and Design galleries are two chairs designed by Arik Levy called Confessions (2010). They allow the sitter to crawl up into them and turn to their partner to whisper a private word or conversation in the same way one behaves in a confessional booth of the Catholic church. But what’s innovative and different about these chairs is that they are meant to swing around. Their openings can meet and close in the occupants allowing for an even more private encounter, à la Louis XV!

Blue Genes

At the museum, we have an internal database that catalogs every (or almost every, save an odd teaspoon or stamp) object in the collection. The database is searchable by date, title, material, when the museum acquired it, exhibition history and other parameters. Oftentimes, however, when searching by "keyword" some interesting and seemingly unrelated finds can come up. I don't know how this next object came up when I was searching for objects to feature in an upcoming Arts of Islam talk but nevertheless it caught my attention.


Levantine (possibly Syria)
Portrait Head (Glass) 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D.

To be honest, the first thing it reminded me of was an episode of the show Pete and Pete (early 1990s children's show on the cable channel, Nickelodeon) whereby a blue marshmallow portrait of President Eisenhower gets stuck up Pete's nose. It was an odd TV series. That aside, I tried to pinpoint what exactly about the little azure portrait that drew me to it. It isn't exactly unusual to come across portraits in molded glass in ancient Rome and there were equivalent objects and workshops in the Levant during the first century. So what was it about this portrait? If it were a snake it would have bitten me right between the eyes. It's blue! The face, a youth perhaps when Augustus-style hair and a clean shaven face were trendy in the early Roman empire, is saturated in ultramarine blue. It almost appears as if it were carved from the stone, lapis lazuli (which would have been very pricey to acquire at the time). But this particular shade of blue had a particular resonance. I'd seen it before. But where? Could it be that this was International Klein Blue?!


Yves Klein, installation view of Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers. ©2010 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Lee Stalsworth.

Yves Klein was one of the first modernist painters to experiment with monochromatic paintings in the 1950s. He is most known for his monochromatic blue paintings where he developed a specific blue that he patented, "International Klein Blue." Painting in monochrome was a way for Klein to not only experiment with paint but to move beyond limitations of the rectangular canvas. A recent retrospective of Klein's monochromatic works at the Hirschorn in Washington, D.C. (pictured above) had sponges, sticks, and globes all tinted, painted and dyed International Klein Blue. For Klein, blue had spiritual, mystical properties that other colors could not offer. In 1959 in a lecture at the Sorbonne, Klein stated,

"Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… …All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract."

Klein's association of the color blue with the sea and sky is not without its historical precedents. In the late 19th century the Symbolists, a group of artists who valued expressing abstract ideas through indirect means (thus through symbols, metaphors...), valued the color blue because of its celestial association. Blue for the Symbolists symbolized spirituality (one of the unwieldy concepts the Symbolists believed could not be captured by mere representational description or Realism) because it could reference the sky, thus celestial realm.

Klein's monochrome experiments with IKB got quite conceptual and even performance-based when he painted nude young women with the color then rolled them about a canvas. His patenting of the color was less about protecting a formula and more about the application of an idea. How monochrome, or IKB, can transform not only the idea and what we expect from a 2-D painting, but everyday objects as well. Perhaps Klein couldn't have patented the blue of our Levantine youth after the fact but that sapphire hue to the face, hair, neck permeates every highlight and shadow across the molded surface. It transforms it from being a mere bottle topper (as it likely would have been) to something quite celestial.

New title for blog

Dear friends: I've changed the name of the blog from the sexy Latin phrase to one that encompasses more of the focus on this blog: Object Lessons! In museum education, when we write lesson plans on objects in the collection for use in the classroom we use the phrase "object lesson" to state the goals and the certain angle with which we want students to engage with the work of art and what we want them to take away from the lesson. But who says lessons are relegated to the classroom?

Personal Things: Patch Boxes

In Berthe Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875/80), we see a woman in a state of undress, perhaps preparing for a ball or having returned from one. Her chemise gracefully falls off her shoulders as she fiddles with the pins in her hair. She turns away from us, making this rather intimate view unto her dressing room a bit awkward for the uninvited viewer. Nevertheless her toilette is spread before us for our perusal. A glass jar for cotton balls, a box for powders and a puff to dust those powders onto the body. These personal things and their reflection in the mirror are the only details Morisot gives us when we want so badly to just see her face.

Items of the toilette are some of the most intimate since they come in contact with the naked body, the body which is not yet dressed for social appearance, yet they play a very public role as well. Consider the painting by Francois Boucher of the Madame du Pompadour at her Toilette, a place where she frequently received guests and if one could use the phrase, held court. Thus these boxes, jars and cases not only held expensive mineral powders and scented oils but they themselves were items of luxury.

There is a poem, written around 1700, by Mary Evelyn in which she writes a humorous travel guide through a lady’s boudoir. As to the accoutrements of the dressing table she writes:

A new Scene to us next presents,
The Dressing-Room, and Implements,
Of Toilet Plate Gilt, and Emboss'd,
And several other things of Cost:
The Table Miroir, one Glue Pot,
One for Pomatum, and what not?
Of Washes, Unguents, and Cosmeticks,
A pair of Silver Candlesticks;
Snuffers, and Snuff-dish, Boxes more,
For Powders, Patches, Waters store,
In silver Flasks or Bottles, Cups
Cover'd, or open to wash Chaps;

You can access the whole poem here and I would very much recommend it (and don’t miss the introduction and “fop dictionary”!)

I want to occupy my thoughts with the “patches” with which Mary Evelyn mentions in her verse. There are two Patch Boxes on view in the American galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, both of silver and about the size of a pill box. These were made for holding patches, one of the most fascinating things about the 18th century face. One is pictured below, the oval about the size of a half-dollar.



Patches were part of an elite woman’s cosmetic attire. They were cut from black silk, velvet or luxury papers from Spain and placed in various places on the face. Their origin was in the courts of Louis XIV, on the faces of youths with blemishes to hide. But what fun and fantastical ends patches attained when they became the height of courtly fashion! Far beyond the simple circle or oval, patches came to resemble comets, moons, and stars. It was even reported that women could have silhouettes of their dear friends made and pasted onto their bosoms. One satirical print shows a woman with a full carriage with six horses across her forehead.

And what is in fashion in France is in fashion in New England. The wives of Whigs wore their patches on the opposite side of the face than those of Tories. During the Great Awakening, a time of religious fervor, moralists cried out against the use of such vain foppery. In the case of one patch box, it was found buried in the garden, an attempt to hide the precious item by the wife of a preacher who came under critical fire. This patch box was made by the silversmith, John Dixwell, the same maker of the patch box pictured below, on view in the American galleries of the AIC (look for something the size of a quarter).



With a folksy tulip pattern on the cover, this may have been given to the owner by the time she reached adolescence. In fact we are able to trace the owner quite easily because her name, Abigail Taylor, is engraved on the bottom. As if that wasn’t enough to stake her claim, she scratched “AT” right over her name. Patch boxes must have been quite cherished by their owners as most all of them are inscribed with their name and are always mentioned in surviving household inventories.

As I powdered my face today, it occurred to me that our make up and cosmetic cases still play a very public role today. Except that historians centuries from now might wonder as to why so many of them were owned by “CG” or “M.A.C.”