CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/262951
HYLAND A rather esoteric children's book, Mr. Meredith and the Truly Remarkable Stone by Grace Chetwin, illustrates my point per- fectly. When Mr. Meredith finds an old cracked stone in which he perceives spectacular beauty, he builds a series of ever grander structures to house it, beginning with a small pavilion, culminating in a palace and finally a city. With the consumma- tion of each structure comes the entertainment of guests, at first simply, with greater largesse as the structures expand. Eventually Mr. Meredith forgets all about the stone, nucleus of these establishments, until one day he trips over it. I once constructed an interior around a particularly prized pos- session, a rare oil painting from the early 1980s by the German artist Rosemarie Trockel, of a black vessel with two playing cards against a smoky grey background. Two spectral eyes floated above the vessel. Like Mr. Meredith I bought ever more expensive accoutrements to comport with the grey and the black of the painting: a cabinet by Gilbert Rohde, a slate- topped table, shelves of raw stained mahogany, silver teapots by Christopher Dresser; an ebonized chair by Tiffany. Even- tually, not quite forgetting the origins of the room but finding myself in a pinch, I sold the painting to finance a misbegot- ten trip to India. The ashram did me no good. I thought I was sacrificing mere material for the sake of my psyche, but all I managed was to rob the room of its core. Still, the room, conceived and organized around a single object, remained beautiful if now lacking its retablo. Wharton's text—not to mention my own depredations-- reminds me of another disquisition upon the relation of seem- ingly minor accoutrement to harmonized totality, one in the context of literature rather than interior decoration. I was privi- leged, in the late 1970s, to take a seminar in French literature HYLAND