Canaletto is known to have used Camera Ottica to mechanically assist in creating his cityscapes of Venice, but closer study reveals that that wasn't the end of the story. He manipulated the perspective in his scenes, sometimes changing the vantage point and giving a more flattened and distant view. Pushing the stationpoint back gives the viewer a more panoramic and flattened picture plane.
I call
it Superman Perspective. It’s the flattened way things would look if you could
see detail from a thousand miles away. In his “Westminster Bridge” painting, we get the sense that
Canaletto must have used a high-powered telescope to see his subject. There’s
very little evidence of linear perspective in the arches under the bridge. The
closer you are, the more distortion will be apparent. In reality, you’d have to
swing your head around to take in this whole scene, and the bridge would appear
to balloon towards you in the center. Canaletto has made the artistic choice to
straighten the bridge ‘unnaturally’.
It’s
more impersonal, but it depends upon your goal. Maybe, in the end, the
telescopic view speaks volumes about Canaletto’s personality. Perhaps he wanted
to see the world from a distance, to rise above the cacophony of human
interactions. For someone like Caravaggio, on the other hand, human drama was clearly the very stuff of life. He'd have us sit right at the table in Supper at Emmaus, involving us directly in the conversation.
These
cubes drawn in two-point perspective (above) illustrate my point. In A, on the
left, the viewer is positioned a thousand miles away from the cube, viewing it
as if with Superman’s supervision. The red orthogonals (lines drawn along receding parallel lines to the
vanishing point) of the cube stretch out to some
infinitely distant theoretical point on either side when presumably they would converge
into Vanishing Points 1 and 2. The further away from the object we are, the
further away the vanishing points are.
They
closer we get to the object (or more accurately the picture plane), the closer to the centre line those Vanishing Points come. In B, on the
right, we are so close to the cube that it’s sides have become completely
distorted and are towering over us. You can see that the vanishing points (VP1
and VP2) are so close to the center line that they are visible within the frame.
This is known in architectural draughting as “accelerated perspective,” because
it gives an exaggerated sense of spatial depth.
In both
these photos of the same vase from the Vanderbilt mansion in Rhode Island, the
horizon line is level with the lion’s head. However, there’s a difference: we
can tell that the camera was closer to the vase in the photo on the right. How
do we know? The orthogonals on the right photo recede to vanishing points
closer to the center line. This creates the kind of distortion we saw in the
cube illustration.
In a
large mural of a niche, for example, we would want to paint the vase more as it
appears on the left, regardless of the stationpoint of the viewer in actual space. Why? Too much distortion in a mural is ugly (that's just my opinion). I'm not talking about anamorphism here (where the stationpoint strictly determines the construction of the paintings perspective), I'm talking about wall sized paintings in the style of the French landscape panoramas of Zuber et Cie. I'd argue that large murals are meant to be viewed from a distance, so our linear perspective should reflect that.
Pierre Finkelstein is the owner of Grand Illusion Decorative Painting, in New York City. His client list includes many of Forbe's wealthiest from around the world, the very best interior designers, celebrity clients from Bon Jovi to Bill Gates, and venerable institutions such as the Getty Museum in L.A. and the Frick Museum in New York.
Firstly, I'd like to thank Pierre for letting us into his private atelier to view what is clearly a lifetime's worth of incredible reference books, and that's not to mention the filing cabinets full of catalogued photographs from all over the World, and what must be a vast digital library too. This is a man who understands that no matter how good you are, you're never too good to learn from the past.
Author, painter, teacher, bookseller, even manufacturer of his own line of brushes and tools, Pierre's been at the top of his game professionally for years, so it's not surprising that his shelves are overstuffed with obscure reference manuals and folios of vintage prints. These are the shelves of someone who clearly uses books.
Of his collecting and his "thirst for reference," Pierre admits that he is"a book and brush fiend:"
"What can I say?" he adds, "I especially cherish the folios i have acquired over the years, and my rare out of print editions of paint and decorative manuals. I have paid as much as $600 for an out of print Italian book on ceiling painting ( took me 10 years to find it) and $250 for a 10 page folio.. no matter the price, if one plate (page of a folio) or one page will give me the idea that I need to realize a several thousand dollar project, it is a well worth investment."
I won't list every title, because I couldn't possibly, but here are a few highlights. Starting from the top, a Strand bag gives a clue to the possible source of some of Pierre's purchases. Boasting "eight miles" of shelves, with most of them seemingly dedicated to art books, Strand is a must-see for any New York tourist.
Next shelf down, we start with Gamle Trehus, literally "old wooden house;" a book about architectural details in Norwegian folk buildings. Continuing with the North European theme, Brockdorf's Palace, otherwise known as Frederik VIII's Palace, in Copenahgen is the subject of this book dealing with the restoration in 2009. Neo-Classicism in the North is a book I highly recommend for those interested in Swedish interiors, and that particularly Scandinavian color sense and formality with regard to decorative painting.
Nicolas Petit and Jean-Francois Hache get the monograph treatment for their outstanding marquetry. Williamsburg: decorating with style is more a reference book on period details than it is about painted interiors per se, and is more general in theme than the highly recommended Paint in America volume by Roger Moss, which gets into fascinating detail about historic colors of america. It's a much dog-eared and underlined book on my own shelf. Architect Russell Versaci's popular book on how to convincingly create that New Old House look, from an American perspective yet using classical ideas of proportion. Paris Rome Athens is dedicated to the Grand Tours of some of France's best known architects of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, featuring many of their stunning ink-wash renderings of antiquities.
I'm a sucker for books on French wallpaper, so I spotted Joanna Banham's Papiers Peints right away, along with Papiers Peints Francais (Rizzoli, French version), and Les Papiers Peints En Arabesques. Textile designer Fortuny sits next to stencil books by Althea Wilson and A. Desaint . The justly ubiquitous Dover publications are next, along with a couple of Pepin press classic reference books. Pepin's print quality has always trumped Dover's, in my opinion, although Dover is just so damn cheap and they cover so much ground that they're unbeatable.
Large format Konemann volumes on Italian Palaces, and smaller books on Italian frescos are hidden behind a loose stack of books.
Barberot's rare Traité Pratique series is here represented by his book on cabinetmaking (or Menuiserie), published by C. Béranger in 1911. I couldn't find that one for sale, so nice score, Pierre!
Okay, well that should keep you all busy for a while. And I didn't even get to the bottom shelf (below), or any of the Henri Vial editions that Pierre offers on his website.
You'll just have to hit the reference library for copies of these superb vintage titles, I'm afraid
These last three images are of some of the many excellent titles that Pierre offers for sale at his site
A parting shot of another set of Pierre's personal collection. You'll just have to do your own digging for these titles!
Famous for his magnificent monkey paintings - known as Singeries -Christophe Huet painted this extraordinary set of panels for the Hotel du Rohan, in Paris. Popular to this day, these cheeky and occasionally racy anthropomorphic painted scenes of monkeys cavorting in human garb were hugely fashionable in Eighteenth Century France.
Though Berain and Audran were justly as famous in their day, Huet has perhaps been better remembered because of the quality of his surviving examples at the Chateau de Chatilly. Bertrand du Vignaud, head of the World Monuments Fund in Europe, says, “I consider the Grand Singerie the most important décor in the chateau,” claiming that “It is Huet’s masterpiece."
I was thrilled to come across this practically unknown set of phototype plates of his Cabinet des Singes for Rohan from a volume called LesVieux Hotels de Paris, printed in 1905. One of a series of large folios containing beautiful prints, these books were an attempt to archive surviving examples of interior and exterior decoration around Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
His work at the Hotel du Rohan is lesser known than Chantilly, but deserves recognition. Originally built in 1705, and home to successive cardinals and bishops, Huet's Rohan panels were eventually commissioned some time around 1750 by the Cardinal de Soubise, who gave the Hotel (by which term they mean mansion) a complete transformation. According to the book Debut de l'Imprimerie en France, Huet was assisted in painting the panels by Dutour, who painted the animals, and Crespin, who painted the landscapes. Huet is said to have painted the "flowers," by which I am assuming that means to include the ornamental borders and frames.
Those were heady times, to be sure. Marie Antoinette would regularly come poncing by for some cake with her entourage, before the whole party went tits up. Then, during the Revolution, it was placed into receivership and all its furniture and magnificent library were scattered to the winds. Later, after Napoleon had acquired it, the National Printing Press settled into it as their plush new 10,000 square meter HQ. It was eventually left to the National Archive in 1927, when Robert Danis was responsible for the gargantuan task of restoring the mansion to its former glory. Years of abuse, including the stripping out of the grand staircase to accommodate printing offices, left it a shell of its former self. Despite extensive efforts, much of the old decorations have not survived.
The panels have that unmistakable Huet look. His linework when seen up close and in black & white, has the quality of an engraving that's received washes of color.
I had the pleasure of restoring these antique Chinese panels for Thomas Jayne
Congratulations to Thomas Jayne for winning the Arthur Ross Excellence Award for Interior Design, announced by ICAA today. It's no surprise really, as Jayne and his team have been producing stunning interiors informed by history yet resolutely facing the future, for over two decades.
Beaux-Arts apartment in New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]
Schooled with the likes of Parish-Hadley and Kevin McNamara (who once quipped that "rich people don't need towel bars because they never hang up their towels"), and having received a scholarly education at Winterthur, the Met and the Getty, Jayne was a shoo-in for the Architectural Digest Top 100 list of best decorators in America.
Cabinet Room, downtown loft, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]
His traditional schooling might otherwise imply the production of dry "period" rooms, but Jayne is always conscious of the current time and place. And that place, for him, is America. In his most recent book he traces his lineage back 400 years in America, through each of his family's homes, citing the likes of America's very first interior designer, Elsie De Wolfe, as influences. He refers to her ability to reference and assimilate European taste and style into something quintessentially American, and while he allows that there is no such thing as an absolute definition of American decoration, it is something he consciously strives to achieve in his own work.
He also, somehow, finds time to write weekly for his blog, for a personal glimpse into the working mind of one of America's top designers.
Jayne also authored the renowned Finest Rooms in America, showcasing the very best in interior and architectural design, from classics like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frances Elkins, to contemporary designers such as Bunny Williams, John Saladino, and of course, Albert Hadley.
Well, there's been such a huge response that I'm going to be making this into a series of posts. I'm getting palpitations thinking about all the money I could blow on the books I don't have here. Artist Wiley Purkey submitted this great selection. The period in American Art around the 1920s is fascinating to me. Artists reacted in different ways to the mechanization of Industry. Disenchanted by the industrialization of America, the likes ofEdward Hoppercaptured the sense of urban isolation felt by so many. An intensely private man, and a lifelong celibate, he painted this America from the inside. The Regionalists, on the other hand, represented an artistic belief that rural America and back-to-basics labor off the land could replace urbanization and the factory-line. Illustrators Howard Pyle, and his student N.C. Wyeth, espoused a similar (called Brandywine) Romanticism of New England. Burchfield portrayed similarly heightened visions of the American landscape, turning his back on the urban world of his old friend Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was called a 'Regionalist' by his detractors, but he painted a "Pennsylvania [that] seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue" [source]. This was not quite the Romantic regionalism of his contemporaries. Wyeth's was darker, more private. A rural version of Hopper's urbanity. Impressionists in Winter is, in my opinion, the best of Impressionist art. When the artist's palette is reduced to almost nothing, there's a reliance on composition and value that is almost Japanese at times. Not surprising then to see a copy of Whistler's beautiful Etchings here too.
Art's The Answer! is the fantastic blog written by Theresa Cheek, who clearly has a passion for the decorative arts, and for sharing all she comes across. Konemann does a great job of bringing out large format, lavishly photographed, and reasonably priced books on architecture and ornamentation. This is just a tiny selection of Theresa's vast collection on a huge variety of subjects. Be sure to check out her blog. And just peeking in on the far right is a book that's very popular with my West Coast friends, called Ca'toga. It's about the Dali-meets-Baroque-meets-Antiquity estate of Venetian artist Carlo Machiori. I've yet to come across a book dedicated solely to the painted surfaces of Versailles, but I'm sure it's out there. Until then, I love to browse through books such as Splendors of Versailles, for snippets of Oudry's landscapes and Fontenay's flowers and vases. Incredible stuff.
The St. Laurent book is a rare glimpse into the decor stylings of one of the 20th Century's very best designers. Jacques Grange features heavily in the selections, and though the lavishness of the homes becomes makes me feel a bit claustrophobic after a while [I want to run off and live in Wyeth's cabin by the end of the book], it's well worth the investment.
The 1920s once again putting on a strong show, this time from a European design perspective. Karen of Chicago's Des Travaux sent us this great shot, showing some of the stalwart classics we all know and love, along with some real treasures. Jansen Furniture is a great book about the powerhouse Paris-based design company, who's ebony and ivory geometrical inlay doors are a real treat. I narrowly missed the opportunity to create replicas of those doors once. Jean Dunand is also a master interior designer, and perhaps the greatest lacquer artist of the Art Deco period. I've downloaded any image of his incredible standing screens that I can get my hands on. Paul Poiret is the creator of the most beautiful dresses ever made. Click the link and you'll see what I mean. It's tragic that he was ruined completely by WWI and made bankrupt. As someone who'd backed myself into a rarified corner of decorative painting, I'm all too aware that tough times reveal the precariousness of this business. Elkins, on the other hand, thrived, and by the end of her illustrious career had created a huge number of interiors for the West Coast glitterati. And what I wouldn't give for that copy of Antonio Basoli's stunning designs.
This should quicken the pulse of at least a few ornament nerds out there. I know I'm not completely alone. Yeah, you know who you are. This is my second post on the subject of the extremely rare full color set of engravings, hand-painted in gouache, of Raphael's incredible designs for the Vatican Loggia.
I posted an enormous set with 277large format details, taken directly from the original engravings, on my Flickr page. You won't find these anywhere else, you lucky lucky bastards. Except if you happen to own one of the only three full surviving color sets, of course. In which case I hate you.
For information on the engravings themselves, and background to the Vatican loggia, see this earlier post on my blog.
Enjoy!
Wearing black ski masks, and suspended from the ceiling so as not to trip the alarms
Here's an oblique detail showing the beautiful gilding on the Noah's Ark panel
I could have just posted the link on Facebook, but I'm dedicating a blogpost to it instead. You won't regret it.
Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that there is an inherent human desire to build and decorate, simply.
This Irish short film by Tony O Donoghue (which just won the prize for Best Animated Short at Sundance 2013) is totally charming, and though as an Irishman I find subtitles of the brogue a little distracting, it's a lovely reminder that since we crawled out from the muck humans have made aesthetic choices about everyday objects, and that the roots of art are in gnarled knuckles and mindful living,
The real (in case it wasn't obvious) Halstatt, in Austria [image]
China's unveiling of it's $9 Billion fake Alpine village was in the news recently, when it was "revealed" that "spies from a Chinese developer [Minmetals Land Inc.] had been secretly preparing detailed blueprints on furtive European trips, posing as tourists." According to Breaking Travel News, "the plan was discovered when a Chinese guest at one of the village hotels left blueprints behind."
The real Halstatt is an idyllic lakeside hamlet in Austria nestled in the mountains of the Alps, which are incidentally quite difficult to fake owing to their being humongous. China wisely avoided papier-maché mountains, and instead opted for plopping their version in an industrial park.
Mary Tudor in America anyone? Sefton Manor, at Mill Neck New York [source]
It's easy to scoff, but remember that America was, and continues to be, just as infatuated with buying the credibility that Old Europe affords. The Vanderbilts and Astors built towering "cottages" in the European style, appropriating ready-made culture to offset the shiny newness of all that money. The Breakers is no different in it's intent than the Alpine replica of newly minted China.
The Venetian Casino, Las Vegas
In fairness to the Chinese, they did a pretty good job copying Halstatt. Interestingly, if not ironically, more Chinese tourists now travel all the way to Austria to visit the original than their homegrown replica. I doubt if the same can be said of Americans visiting Venice, since the vast majority don't even have passports.
Brrrr; creepy mustachioed man in a trench coat
From Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to The Truman Show (1998), Hollywood reflects our simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the fake environment. In The Experts (1989), John Travolta and Kelly Preston are "two young hipsters" drugged and kidnapped by the KGB and shipped unknowingly to Russia. They awake thinking they're in Nebraska, open a nightclub and teach the Russian townies to dance. But what happens when the townsfolk taste freedom and the KGB want to kill them? Will our heroes awake from their nightmare in time to escape? It's xenophobia and paranoia wrapped up in bad hairdos and worse comedy.
What could be more grim than this Chinese replica of an E German town?
The Chinese Halstatt announcement caused a mixture of "astonishment, amusement and ... outrage" among Europeans. They may have forgotten that the very European idea of the Grand Tour was exactly the same in nature. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, young "cultural ambassadors" (basically spies) were encouraged to venture forth by a government greedy to keep it's cultural advantage in a dangerously unstable Europe. Young men came home with armfuls of drawings of monuments, studies of the classics, and copies of Italian paintings. They weren't seen as grave-robbers. On the contrary, they were seen as the advance guard in a very serious war.
You could argue that even the "real" Halstatt is faked for the tourists [Getty Images]
British historian E.P. Thompson explains that if the British were to maintain control of their Empire they must be seen to be at the forefront culturally, and that meant studying the classics at their source. According to Thompson, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or
physical (military) power."
The Chinese Dorchester
This isn't the first time it's happened in China. "Chengdu British Town is modeled after Dorchester. Shanghai has xeroxed sections of Barcelona, Venice and Germany (the latter, a 2005 generic modernist village designed by Albert
Speer Jr., remains a ghost town)." [source]
"In Pujiang, another Shanghai suburb, 100,000 citizens will soon occupy an Italian dreamscape complete with languid canals. In all, at least 500,000 people are expected to live in Shanghai's seven new satellite towns, each designed in the style of a different Western nation." [Der Spiegel]
What all this appropriation signifies, at least in part, is the belief that Knowledge is there for the taking. Just as European and American ruling elites believed that might makes right, and stole or destroyed everything they could get their hands on during their initial Empirical expansionist phases, so too does China. It's the cultural equivalent of the land-grab.
In an age where an ever increasing number of people don't pay for movies or music, they just grab them for free from the internet, it's hardly surprising that this is simply being met with a shrug of the shoulders. Old news is no news, it seems.
Kijong Dong, or "Peace Town" in the North Korean DMZ
Sometimes it's not the buildings themselves that are designed to deceive, but the intentions behind them. So called "Potemkin villages," fake Hollywood-style facades built by secretive governments intent on waging a propaganda war, are fascinating relics of political paranoia and xenophobia. Perhaps the most infamous is Kijong-dong, in North Korea with its 323 foot flagpole. Supposedly a 200-family collective farm built by "the illustrious leader" in the 1950s on the South Korean border, it has been exposed as an elaborate fake to fool the world into thinking North Korea is anything other than a complete disaster. The only "residents" are skeleton crews of street-sweepers hired to keep up the ruse. Keeping the streets nice and tidy, they wear earmuffs to block out the blasting anti-Western propaganda speeches emanating from speakers all over town.
In many ways, Europhilia and Euroscepticism inform each other. As one group is wearing pastel sweaters tied around their necks and fawning over French cheese, another is battoning the hatches against foreign cultural "invasion." In "What are we doing to stop our beloved Britain being taken over?" journalist Peter Hitchens argues for a British bulwark against cultural dilution, just as the French have argued for the removal of anglicized French words from ledictionnaire.
Source for a slideshow of renderings of the interior
Religion, not surprisingly, is no stranger to these bold statements of culture and empire, usually reserving their most bombastic architecture for either frontier outposts or GHQ. Scientology built it's so-called Superpower building in Clearwater, Florida, to "expand on technology developed by NASA to train astronauts." Despite antigravity simulators said to "speed the release of Super Power," it has been lying empty and unused for years. In reality, the building was conceived and thrown up as a propaganda backlash against the media storm surrounding the Lisa McPherson trial.
Occasionally, fake towns become real over time. Take the case of Agloe, New York. A fictitious map entry, designed as a copyright trap, Agloe was a "paper town" that existed in name only. Initially just a dirt-road intersection in the 1930s, until along came some pioneering entrepreneur who staked his claim and opened the Agloe General Store and suddenly the "town" started appearing on the Rand McNally Atlas. Not surprisingly, the store went out of business before long proving that not all small businesses are a good idea.
The West Texas movie set town of Alamo Village [image source]
Now over 50 years old, a fake movie facade of the Alamo is beginning to take on the real patina of age. Despite the historical re-enactors, this copy of 1836 San Antonio is surprisingly convincing and blurs the line between fake and real.
"It's like a real old-west town - difficult to tell the difference most of the time between what are essentially movie props (although built as real, functional buildings, not just facades) compared to real century-old buildings in western ghost towns."
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