Street photography for Zin magazine of slightly older women
and men.
Photograph by Misja B
Tuesday, 17 July 2018
Sunday, 15 July 2018
The Hameau de la Reine, Versailles / £326million restoration project.
The Hameau de la Reine, The Queen's Hamlet) is a rustic
retreat in the park of the Château de Versailles built for Marie Antoinette in
1783 near the Petit Trianon in Yvelines, France. It served as a private meeting
place for the Queen and her closest friends, a place of leisure. Designed by
the Queen's favoured architect, Richard Mique with the help of the painter
Hubert Robert, it contained a meadowland with lakes and streams, a classical
Temple of Love on an island with fragrant shrubs and flowers, an octagonal belvedere,
with a neighbouring grotto and cascade. There are also various buildings in a
rustic or vernacular style, inspired by Norman or Flemish design, situated
around an irregular pond fed by a stream that turned a mill wheel. The building
scheme included a farmhouse, (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the
queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the
French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse. Each
building is decorated with a garden, an orchard or a flower garden. The largest
and most famous of these houses is the "Queen's House", connected to
the Billiard house by a wooden gallery, at the center of the village. A working
farm was close to the idyllic, fantasy-like setting of the Queen’s Hamlet.
The hameau is the best-known of a series of rustic garden
constructions built at the time, notably the Prince of Condé's Hameau de
Chantilly (1774–1775) which was the inspiration for the Versailles hamlet. Such
model farms, operating under principles espoused by the Physiocrats, were
fashionable among the French aristocracy at the time. One primary purpose of
the hameau was to add to the ambiance of the Petit Trianon, giving the illusion
that it was deep in the countryside rather than within the confines of
Versailles. The rooms at the hameau allowed for more intimacy than the grand
salons at Versailles or at the Petit Trianon.
Inspired by a wave of naturalism in art, architecture, and
garden design, the Hameau de la Reine was constructed between 1782 and 1783.
The garden surroundings of the Petit Trianon, of which the hameau de la Reine
is an extension, began their transformation from formal pattern gardens. Under
Louis XV it had been an arboretum and the new arrangements eliminated this
famous botanical garden, replacing it with a more informal "natural"
garden of winding paths, curving canals and lakes under the direction of Antoine
Richard, gardener to the Queen. Richard Mique modified the landscape design to
provide vistas of lawn to west and north of the Petit Trianon, encircled by
belts of trees. Beyond the lake to the north, the hameau was sited like a
garden stage set, initially inspired in its grouping and vernacular building by
Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, philosophically influenced by Rousseau's
cult of "nature", and reflecting exactly contemporary picturesque
garden principles set forth by Claude-Henri Watelet and by ideas of the
philosophes, their "radical notions co-opted into innocent forms of
pleasure and ingenious decoration" as William Adams has pointed out.
Artists played a more direct role in French picturesque than they probably had
done in England, as can be seen by Hubert Robert's involvement.
The stylistic design of the Hameau de la Reine was
influenced by the hameau de Chantilly, a similarly rustic “village” with
half-timbered façades and reed-thatched roofs. A wave of naturalism and an
affinity towards the “simple” life was sweeping across France in the 18th
century. French aristocrats loved to act like shepherds and shepherdesses,
while still enjoying the comforts of their social position. This idealism of
the natural life came from the extremely influential works of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who emphasized Nature. The hamlet seemed completely rustic and
natural from the outside, while the Rococo interior provided the desired
comfort and luxury of the Queen and her friends.
The Petit Trianon, originally built for Madame de Pompadour
under the reign of Louis XV, was a private domain. Encircling the Petit Trianon
was the Jardin Anglais (the English Garden), a wilder style of garden that
arose in response to traditional French manicured gardens. The Hamlet is built
in a hybrid architectural style. A combination of Norman, Flemish, and French
styles came together to create the village full of sylvan charm. Typically Norman,
the cottages have half-timbered façades and reed coverings. The brick,
“sparrow-stepped” gables and the stained glass windows are distinctly Flemish.
The roofs covered with dormer windows and the plaster-covered façades, though,
were native to France. The French architect Richard Mique designed and built
the Hamlet with the garden in mind, and it is almost an extension of the Jardin
Anglais. His buildings lend themselves to the surrounding landscape in their
arrangement around a small lake, giving the illusion of a perfect and
functioning village.
The barn, occasionally used as a ballroom, was destroyed
during the French Revolution, while the rest of the houses survived the
tumultuous period of French history.
Courtiers at the Palace of Versailles constantly surrounded
Marie Antoinette, leaving her in need of a refuge. She escaped the
responsibilities and structure of court life to her private estate. The Hamlet
was part of Marie Antoinette’s estate, and she enjoyed dressing as a young
shepherdess or milkmaid and acting like a peasant, while surrounded by the
comforts of a royal lifestyle. This unintentional mockery of the economically
depressed French peasants helped build the resentment towards the monarchy
among the French people, eventually leading to the French Revolution.
While still in power, Marie Antoinette enjoyed acting as a
tableau vivant, as if she were part of a painting. She brought her idyllic,
picturesque village to life by stocking the barn with animals, and bringing in
“simple” people, such as milkmaids and herdsmen, to act like residents of the
Hamlet. Marie Antoinette would stroll around her perfect world in simple
peasants' garb with her children, part of an idealized Nature. Her closest
friends joined her in her ornamental village, where they also enjoyed
pretending to live a simple life. Their isolation at the Hameau caused
suspicion among the French people. Already resentful of Marie Antoinette for
her profligate spending in times of economic depression, the secrecy
surrounding her life of amusement led to suspected hedonism and scandal. It was
rumored that Marie Antoinette had lovers, and they met at the Hameau, a surreal
place that was completely her own. The extravagance and subtle mockery of peasant
life did not help Marie Antoinette’s already suffering image.
In spite of its idyllic appearance, the hamlet was a real
farm, fully managed by a farmer appointed by the Queen, with its vineyards,
fields, orchards and vegetable gardens producing fruit and vegetables consumed
at the royal table. Animals from Switzerland, according to the instructions of
the Queen, were raised on the farm. For this reason the place was often called
"the Swiss hamlet".
The Queen sought refuge in peasant life, milking cows or
sheep, which were carefully maintained and cleaned by the servants. She
preferred to wear simple clothing uncharacteristic to the frivolous fashion of
the French Court while at the hameau, and often dressed in a sun hat and
informal muslin dress, a Polonaise gown, or a Chemise à la Reine. The chemise,
worn without panniers and with a high waistline, was first worn by women in
warmer climates in the colonies and was popularised amongst the aristocracy
through Marie Antoinette. The simplicity and high waistline of the garment
would lay the foundations for Regency/Empire fashion in the later decades
during and after the Revolution. The Queen would often wear a straw Bergère hat
and a fichu alongside a Polonaise gown; the term Polonaise referring to the dress
of Polish shepherdesses who would hoist and drape their overskirts in two or
three loops in order to keep their dress clean while farming. Marie
Antoinette's wardrobe was generally imitative of the peasantry of the period.
Marie Antoinette used buckets of Sèvres porcelain specially
decorated with her arms by the Manufacture Royale. The place was completely
enclosed by fences and walls, and only intimates of the Queen were allowed to
access it. During the Revolution, "a misogynistic, nationalistic and class-driven
polemic swirled around the hameau, which had previously seemed a harmless
agglomeration of playhouses in which to act out a Boucher pastorale." The
queen was accused by many of being frivolous, and found herself a target of
innuendos, jealousy and gossip throughout her reign. Although for Marie
Antoinette, the hameau was an escape from the regulated life of the Court at
Versailles, in the eyes of French people, the queen seemed to be merely amusing
herself.
Cottages
Marie Antoinette’s Hamlet consisted of a variety of
different cottages and buildings, all built around a small lake. Each building
had a specific function, and each played its part in the daily life of the
Hamlet. The twelve cottages constructed in the hamlet can be divided into two
groups: five were reserved for use by the Queen; the other seven had a
functional purpose and were used effectively for agriculture. Marie Antoinette
had her own house, connected to the pool. Nearby was her boudoir. The mill and
the dairy received frequent visits from the Queen.
Queen’s House and Billiard Room
The Queen's house and billiard room is situated in the
middle of the Hamlet, and it is the largest and most important building. Its
construction is innovative: two rustic buildings are connected by a covered
gallery that is curved in a half-moon shape. A spiral staircase offers access
to the second floor on one end of the house. These buildings included the
Queen’s private chambers, as well as her salons and her parlors. The upper
level comprises the petit salon, also known as the "room of the
nobles", an anteroom in the form of a "Chinese cabinet" and the
large living room with wood panelling hung with tapestries of Swiss style in
embroidered wool. From the room's six windows, the Queen could easily control
the work fields and activity of the hamlet. Access is via the staircase of the
round tower. At the center of the room is a harpsichord which Marie Antoinette
loved to play. On the ground floor, paved with single slabs of stone, the
building includes a backgammon room and a dining room. The lyre-backed chairs
in mahogany lined with green Morocco, were created by Georges Jacob. To the
left, another building housing the billiard room is connected to the Queen's
house by a wooden gallery decorated with trellises and twelve hundred St.
Clement faience pots, marked in the blue figures of the Queen. Upstairs, a
small apartment which seems to have been inhabited by the architect Richard
Mique, has five rooms including a library. Despite the rustic appearance of
facades, the interior finish and furnishings are luxurious and have been
created by the carpenter Georges Jacob and the ébéniste Jean-Henri Riesener.
Inside Marie Antoinette's pretend 'hamlet' in the grounds of
Versailles as it opens to the public for first time as part of £326million
restoration project
The Hameau de la Reine was constructed in 1783 about two
kilometres away from the main chateau
Majestic building was modelled on her vision of a
countryside farm and took three years to complete
Now the attraction in north central France is expected to
welcome seven million visitors every year
By PHOEBE SOUTHWORTH FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 19:06 BST, 4 May 2018 | UPDATED: 23:51 BST, 4 May
2018
Marie Antoinette's stunning hamlet in the grounds of the
Château de Versailles has opened to the public for the first time after an
enormous £326million restoration project.
The Hameau de la Reine, constructed more than two centuries
ago in 1783, is situated two kilometres away from the main chateau in north
central France and served as a haven for the queen.
Modelled on her vision of a countryside farm, she used it to
entertain guests, introduce royal children to nature and animals - and even
reportedly to play 'dress up' when she got bored of palace life.
Antoinette's single bedroom, with a protective curtain which
could be pulled around the wooden bed and a long mantelpiece in front of a
large mirror.
Antoinette's single bedroom, with a protective curtain which
could be pulled around the wooden bed and a long mantelpiece in front of a
large mirror
The young queen would allegedly dress in as a shepherdess or
milkmaid and take great join in 'acting like a peasant' while at her hameau.
And although she loved pretending to work the farm, the
hameau and its animals were kept in pristine condition by her many servants.
As this behaviour reached the ears of the people, it was not
well received, and interpreted by many as mockery of their lifestyle.
Although she had been popular during the early days of her
reign, her popularity swiftly fell over her reign and she became a symbol of
the excesses of the monarchy.(…)
Thursday, 12 July 2018
The Cazalets and the Life and Times of Elizabeth Jane Howard
All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard – review
Alex Clark enjoys the final volume of Howard's series on the
upper-class Cazalet family
Alex Clark
Thu 14 Nov 2013 09.01 GMT First published on Thu 14 Nov 2013
09.01 GMT
In the early 1980s, with several novels, including After
Julius and Something in Disguise to her name, Elizabeth Jane Howard was casting
around for a new fictional project. Apart from artistic considerations, she was
in the process of separating from Kingsley Amis, to whom she had been married
since 1965, and needed both absorption and funds. In Slipstream, her 2002
memoir, Howard describes how she had "two ideas that I found
paralysing": an updating of Sense and Sensibility and a trilogy about a
family that would begin in 1937 and span a decade. She invited her stepson
Martin to come for a drink and talk it over; when she told him about the family
saga, his response was immediate: "Do that one."
The current (and recurrent) vogue for adapting Austen
notwithstanding, Amis was probably right. In 1982, the same year that the
highly popular TV adaptation of Something in Disguise first aired, Howard began
The Light Years, the first volume of what was to become The Cazalet Chronicles.
Such was the sprawling nature of the narrative – it kept to its 10-year
framework, and largely to its London and Sussex settings, but featured an
ever-expanding cast – that the proposed trilogy became a quartet, published
between 1990 and 1995. Now, nearly 20 years later, the 90-year-old Howard has
added a fifth volume, which rejoins the upper-class Cazalet family, its inlaws
and exes, its staff, associates and fellow travellers, in 1956.
Howard's original inspiration to write a wartime series had
a particular impetus. "When people wrote about that time," she
explained in Slipstream, "it was largely in terms of the battles fought;
family life was merely a background. I thought it would be interesting to do it
the other way round. England had changed so much during the war, but this
hadn't been much written about." In All Change, the battles are over a
decade in the past, their participants returned, their dead mourned and the
seismic shock of war dispersed to some extent; but its aftershocks provide the
novel's low‑key and yet insistent backdrop.
At the beginning of The Light Years, the Cazalets congregate
for a summer holiday at Home Place, the family pile in Sussex. The story is
structured around the four adult children of "the Brig" and "the
Duchy"': their three sons Hugh, Edward and Rupert, each of them with wives
and children in tow, and their unmarried daughter Rachel, who is conducting a
discreet relationship with "Sid", speedily revealed to be a woman. In
among the personal dramas – a dangerous birth, a spoilt younger wife, unhappy
step-children, covert lesbianism – the largely silent Brig busily buys a spare
farmhouse and sets about converting it for his family's use, adding wings and
bathrooms and whatnot, all on the rolling proceeds of the family timber firm.
But 20 years later, the firm is foundering, its revenues falling and its
property portfolio rapidly becoming a liability rather than an asset. All three
sons – uxorious Hugh, faithless Edward, indecisive Rupert – are now in charge,
but they don't have their late father's head for business; and, even more
fatally, they aren't equipped for or don't want to recognise the disaster about
to befall them. It is as though the possibility of failure – and of the
profound effect that it will have on their material circumstances and social
standing – has simply not occurred to them; they are insulated until the moment
an impertinent bank manager, certainly of a class below theirs, informs them to
the contrary.
Other certainties are also fracturing. Edward's divorce and
remarriage to the ghastly snob Diana, whose dresses are too small and makeup
too liberally applied, has had its effects on his children: Louise, having
walked out on her first husband and their son, is a wealthy man's mistress, and
her brother Teddy flits between debs and barmaids. Hugh's daughter Polly, now
Lady Fakenham and one of the series' most reliable favourites, is trying to get
a wedding reception business going in her husband's dilapidated ancestral home,
and is running into problems because the clients won't put up with one loo and
salad cream instead of mayonnaise. Nannies and governesses are succumbing to
senility. In protest at the whole crumbling edifice, one far‑flung
relative has gone off to become a monk. Elsewhere, bohemianism laps at the
family's respectability: Clary, once an awkward child who has become a literary
type married to a much older man, writes a play candidly dissecting her marital
trials and tribulations; her younger brother, a raffish photographer, falls in
incestuous love. It's a far cry from nursery teas.
And yet there remains something deeply and comfortingly
old-fashioned about what we are told will be the last slice of Cazalet life. It
has its minor subversions, not least because its female characters, often the
most interesting and sympathetic, are portrayed with an increasing sense of
their own agency; even Rachel, the stay-at-home daughter rooted in the family
home but with no actual control over what will become of it, proves herself to
be surprisingly adaptable. But in spite of these developments, and a few small
anachronisms, it cleaves to the reassuring form of the family drama, in which
people come and go, get born and die off, fall in and out of love, and either
stay firmly on track or go spectacularly off the rails. Even in 1990, it was
hardly innovative, and now, despite our Downton-friendly, pastiche-loving
times, it is difficult to imagine many more novels like this appearing. No
matter. What the Cazalets had on their side was the strength of Howard's
characterisation and her canny blend of sympathy and curiosity. Despite her
finale's title, that has not changed.
Elizabeth Jane Howard: Hilary Mantel on the novelist she
tells everyone to read
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s exquisite and understated novels
have been overshadowed by her turbulent private life. But is the real reason
why they are underestimated because they are books ‘about women, by a woman’?
Hilary Mantel
Sat 30 Jan 2016 11.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018
12.53 GMT
Elizabeth Jane Howard: 'I never felt that Kingsley was a
better writer than me'
Read more
In recent years Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was always known
as Jane, has become famous for a quartet of novels known as the “Cazalet
Chronicles”, which draw on her own family story and were adapted for radio and
television. Tracing the fortunes of an upper-middle-class family, the quartet
begins in 1937 and covers a decade; a fifth novel, All Change, skips ahead to
1956. The novels are panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and
generous in their storytelling. They are the product of a lifetime’s
experience, and come from a writer who knew her aim and had the stamina and
technical skill to achieve it. It would be rewarding if the readers who enjoyed
the series were drawn to the author’s earlier work, when her talent seemed so
effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take
her. From the beginning she attracted superlatives, more for the gorgeousness
of her prose than for the emotional extravagance of her characters. Their
laughter was outrageous, their weeping contagious, their love affairs reckless.
But there was nothing uncalculated about the author’s effects. From the first,
she was a craftswoman.
Howard’s first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John
Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize. It is daunting to think that The Long View, so
accomplished, so technically adroit, was only her second book. It begins in 1950,
and each part draws us backwards through the life of Antonia Fleming, till we
arrive in 1926, when we find her as a young girl about to be tenderly deceived,
baffled and bullied into wifehood.
Despite early praise and attention, it was hard for Howard
to make a living. She came from a background where the necessity was not much
considered. In The Long View, Mrs Fleming’s passport states her occupation as
“Married Woman”. In this world, men are not obliged to explain or account for
themselves. Creatures endlessly to be placated, they look to mould a woman into
a satisfactory, if not perfect, wife. Conrad Fleming seeks to mould Antonia. He
is a man of unblemished conceit, immaculate selfishness. Young female readers
today may view him with incredulity. They should not. He is faithfully
recorded. He is the voice of the day before yesterday, and also the voice of
the ages past.
Howard was born in 1923 to a family who were affluent, well
connected and miserable. Her father and his brother were the directors of the
family timber firm. They didn’t do much directing; “they just had a jolly nice
time,” she said. They had earned it. Her father had enlisted at 17, survived
the great war on the western front, brought home a Military Cross. He was a warm
father, but duplicitous and unsafe. Her mingled fear and fascination fuelled
the Cazalet novels, which are less cosy than they appear. Her parents’ marriage
and their subsequent relationships, together with her own, provided a model of
instructive dysfunction for almost every story she wrote. “There were only two
kinds of people,” thinks Conrad in The Long View, “those who live different
lives with the same partner, and those who live the same life with different
partners … ” It is one of many such jaundiced observations – pithily expressed,
painfully accurate.
Howard’s mother, Kit, was a disappointed dancer. She had
given up her professional career for marriage. The dancer’s world is so
brutally testing that it’s hard to say, in any particular case, whether such a
choice was coloured by a suspicion of being not quite good enough. Second-rate
young men went abroad, their CVs condensed into the acronym FILTH: Failed in
London, Try Hong Kong. Women in retreat from their potential could choose the
internal exile of marriage, and the results were often dingy. Kit does not seem
to have liked her daughter. Perhaps she was jealous of her. Howard was a young
woman of spectacular looks. Repeatedly in the novels, mature adults gaze in
mingled envy and delight at the person least to be envied, an adolescent who is
a writhing mass of uncertainties. Howard had little formal education, but she
was a reader. And her piano teacher imparted something of great value: “how to
learn: how to take the trouble and go on taking it.”
Briefly, she became an actor. The second world war blighted
her career hopes. Like Mrs Fleming, she saw “the value of lives rocketing up
and down like shares on a crazy stock market”. In such an atmosphere, decisions
were taken quickly – there was no long view. She was 19 when she married the
naturalist Peter Scott, then a naval officer, aged 32. The night before the
wedding, her mother asked her if she knew anything about sex, describing it as
“the nasty side” of marriage. Howard’s daughter Nicola was born during an air
raid. It was a horrific experience. She knew to save it up and use it later.
When the war was over she abandoned husband and infant daughter, something the
world does not readily forgive. She moved into a dirty flat off Baker Street:
“a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails … the only
thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write.”
There was another marriage, a brief one, to a fellow writer.
Then she became the second wife of Kingsley Amis, an acclaimed and fashionable
novelist. Jane wanted love, sexual and every kind; she said so all her life,
and she was bold in saying so, because it is always taken as a confession of
weakness. The early years of the Amis marriage were happy and companionable.
There is a picture of the couple working at adjacent typewriters. It belies the
essential nature of the trade. Howard was strung on the razor wire of a paradox.
She wanted intimacy, and writing is solitary. She wanted to be valued, and
writers often aren’t. The household was busy and bohemian. She kept house and
cooked for guests, some of them demanding, some of them long-stayers. She was a
kind, inspiring stepmother to Amis’s three children. The marriage was, as
Martin Amis has said, “dynamic”, but the husband’s work was privileged, whereas
Jane’s was seen as incidental, to be fitted around a wife’s natural domestic
obligations.
During those years she wrote a number of witty novels, full
of the pleasures of life, while enduring periods of deep misery. Her husband
was making money and collecting applause, but she kept faith with her talent.
Well-bred people did not make a fuss or make a noise, her mother had told her,
even when having a baby. That is a prescription for emotional deadness, not
creative growth. But if pain can be survived, it can perhaps be channelled and
put to work. In her novels Howard described delusion and self-delusion. She
totted up the price of lies and the price of truth. She saw damage inflicted,
damage reflected or absorbed. She had learned more from Austen than from her
mother. Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now
I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame
and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity
to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it
is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.
The journalist Angela Lambert has asked why The Long View is
not recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century. One might ask
why Howard’s whole body of work is not rated more highly. It’s true her social
settings are limited; so are Jane Austen’s. As in Austen’s novels, a busy
underground stream of anxiety threatens to break the surface of leisured lives.
The anxiety is about resources. Have I enough? Enough money in my purse? Enough
credit with the world? In various stories, Howard’s characters teeter on the
verge of destitution. Elsewhere, money flows in from mysterious sources. But
her characters do not command those sources, nor comprehend them. Emotionally,
financially, her vulnerable heroines live from hand to mouth. Even if they have
enough, they do not know enough.
Their unarmed state, their vulnerability, gives them a claim
on the sternest sensibility. Why should I care, some readers ask, about the
trials of the affluent? But readers who do not care about rich characters do
not care about poor ones either. Howard’s novels can be resisted by those who
see the surface and find it bourgeois. They can be resisted by those who do not
like food, or cats, or children, or ghosts, or the pleasures of pinpoint
accuracy in observation of the natural or manufactured world: by those who turn
a cold shoulder to the recent past. But they are valued by those open to their
charm, their intelligence and their humour, who can listen to messages from a
world with different values from ours.
But the real reason the books are underestimated – let’s be
blunt – is that they are by a woman. Until very recently there was a category
of books “by women, for women”. This category was unofficial, because
indefensible. Alongside genre products with little chance of survival, it
included works written with great skill but in a minor key, novels that dealt
with private, not public, life. Such novels seldom try to startle or provoke
the reader; on the contrary, though the narrative may unfold ingeniously, every
art is employed to make the reader at ease within it. Understated, neat, they
do not employ what Walter Scott called “the Big Bow-wow strain”. Reviewing
Austen, and admiring her, Scott saw the problem: how can such work be evaluated,
by criteria meant for noisier productions? From the 18th century onward, these
novels have been a guilty pleasure for many readers and critics – enjoyed, but
disparaged. There is a hierarchy of subject matter. Warfare should get more
space than childbirth, though both are bloody. Burning the bodies rates higher
than burning the cakes. If a woman engages with “masculine” subjects, it has
not saved her from being trivialised; if a man descends to the domestic, writes
fluently of love, marriage, children, he is praised for his empathy, his
restraint; he is commended as intrepid, as if he had ventured among the savages
to get secret knowledge. Sometimes, perfection itself invites contempt. She
gets that polish because she takes no risks. Her work shines because it’s so
small. I work on two inches of ivory, Austen said, ironically: much labour, and
small effect.
Time has sanctified Austen, though there are still those who
don’t see what the fuss is about. It helps that she was a good girl, with the
tact to die young; with nothing to say about her private life and her heart
guarded from examination, critics had to look at her text. Modern women have
less tidy careers. When Howard died in 2014, aged 90, the Daily Telegraph’s
obituary described her as “well-known for the turbulence of her personal life”.
Other “tributes” dwelled on her “failed” love affairs. In male writers, affairs
testify to irrepressible virility, but in women they are taken to indicate
flawed judgment. Cecil Day-Lewis, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee
and Ken Tynan were among her conquests; though of course, the world thought
they had conquered her. Divorces and breakups may damage the male writer, but
the marks are read as battle scars. His overt actions may signal stupidity and
lust, but the assumption is that at some covert level he acts to serve his art.
A woman, it is assumed, does rash things because she can’t help it. She takes
chances because she knows no better. She is judged and pitied, or judged and
condemned. Judgments on her life contaminate judgments on her work.
Though authors such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine
Mansfield opened up a new way of witnessing the world, good books by women
still fell out of print and vanished into obscurity: not just because, as in
the case of male writers, fashion might turn, but because they had never been
properly valued in the first place. In the 1980s, feminist publishing put them
back on the shelves. Elizabeth Taylor, after a period of neglect, has come back
into fashion. Barbara Pym was neglected, rediscovered, consigned again to being
a curiosity. Sometimes a contemporary writer has to hold up a mirror for us; we
have learned to read Elizabeth Bowen through the prism of Sarah Waters’s regard
for her. Anita Brookner’s critical fortunes show that it is possible to win a
major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued. For all her late success,
and perhaps because of it, Howard’s work is misperceived. Her virtues are
immaculate construction, impeccable observation, persuasive but inexorable
technique. They may not make a noise in the world, but every writer can learn
from them. In teaching writing myself, there is no author I have recommended
more often, or more to the bewilderment of students. Read her, is my advice,
and read the books that she herself read. In particular, deconstruct those
little miracles, The Long View and After Julius. Take them apart and try to see
how they are done.
I can’t remember the exact date I met Jane. It was at the
Royal Society of Literature, in the late 1980s, at one of their meetings at
Hyde Park Gardens. The RSL is lively now and based elsewhere, but in those days
the gaunt premises, their lease shortening, seemed left behind by the world.
Knowing the dust and decrepitude of the upper floors, the empty chill of the
basement beneath, I was not awed by the grand neglected rooms, nor the grand
neglected Fellows who stood looking out on to the terrace. Sometimes when you
admire a writer you are disinclined to find out much about them. I must have
seen photographs of Jane, but ignored them. My mental picture was of a small
sinuous creature, with a gamine haircut and wide eyes like a lynx; someone who
spoke in a dry whisper, if she spoke at all. The reality was quite different.
Jane was tall and stately, with a deep, old-fashioned, actressy voice. She had
the feline quality I had imagined, but it was leonine, tawny, dominant, not
slinking nor fugitive. If she had purred, the room might have shaken. She was
an impressive and powerful woman.
But in conversation, I found, she was kind and unassuming.
She never forgot, in her fiction, what it was like to be a young girl, and she
carried an ingénue spirit inside a wise and experienced body. She seemed
self-conscious about the impression she created, and anxious – not to efface
it, but to check and modify it, so as to put others at their ease. If they were
not at ease, they could not show themselves and there would be nothing for her
to carry away. She was interested in people, but not simply in a beady-eyed
writer’s way. When she took the trouble to make a friend of me, she also made a
friend of my husband, who is neither an artist nor a writer. She dedicated her
last published book to us, jointly. It seemed too much. She had given me years
of delight and instruction, and I felt I had not repaid her. In those years I
was short of energy for friendship, though she must have seen I was not short
of capacity. Our work did not make much of a fit, and we appeared together just
once, at a small bookshop event. She read beautifully. Her professional
training shone through, her voice strong and every pause judged to a
microsecond. But she read unaffectedly, smiling, with pleasure in the
audience’s enjoyment. I was happy that the Cazalet novels brought her new fans.
As much as her style, I admired her tenacity. She was still writing when she
died: a book called Human Error. I wish I had asked her which of the selection
available she had chosen as her focus.
No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite
occur. I sensed that we both lived in hope, and had frequently lived on it. I
always felt there was something I should ask her, or something she meant to ask
me. The morning after she died, I was one interviewee among many, talking about
her on the radio. I was working in Stratford-on-Avon, so used the RSC’s studio.
It was a last-minute, short-notice arrangement and I had only just learned of
her death, so I may not have been eloquent. But I saw her face very clearly as
I spoke. She had acted in Stratford as a girl, and she would have liked what
the day offered: the dark wintry river, the swans gliding by, and behind
rain-streaked windows, new dramas in formation: human shadows, shuffling and
whispering in the dimness, hoping – by varying and repeating their errors – to
edge closer to getting it right. In Jane’s novels, the timid lose their
scripts, the bold forget their lines, but a performance, somehow, is scrambled
together; heads high, hearts sinking, her characters head out into the dazzle
of circumstance. Every phrase is improvised and every breath a risk. The play
concerns the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of love. Standing ovations await
the brave.
Novelist known for The Cazalet Chronicle which was adapted
into a popular BBC television series
Janet Watts
Thu 2 Jan 2014 19.40 GMT First published on Thu 2 Jan 2014
19.40 GMT
For much of a career spanning more than 60 years, the writer
Elizabeth Jane Howard, who has died aged 90, suffered a certain condescension
from literary editors as a writer of "women's novels". But it did not
deter her. She herself described her readers as "women and educated
men", and expressed "puzzlement" when Margaret Drabble left her
out of her 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Jane (as she was always called) achieved a triumph in her
70s with The Cazalet Chronicle, a highly praised tetralogy of novels set in the
England of 1937-47. The first two books, The Light Years (1990) and Marking
Time (1991), became an acclaimed BBC TV series, The Cazalets, in 2001; though
the BBC then cancelled a planned second series of the last two books, Confusion
(1993) and Casting Off (1995). Jane bore both triumph and disappointment with
the dignity that had already seen her through decades of literary acclaim and
disdain.
She herself thought her work had improved with age. These
novels show her maturity as a compelling storyteller, shrewd and accurate in
human observation, with a fine ear for dialogue and an evident pleasure in the
English language and landscape. She was thoroughly at home in their setting,
which was just the sort of upper-middle-class English family, London locations
and country houses (the main one is called Home Place) in which her own roots
lay. In a later novel, Falling (1999), she chiselled a perfect structure for a
story that contains many of the torments of love, betrayal and misjudgment that
bedevilled her own life.
Like the Cazalets, her background was privileged but not
easy. She was born in London. Her father, David, was a timber merchant who had
swept her mother, Katharine, off her feet when she was a dancer in Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes. The family lived in a big house in Notting Hill with a tribe of
servants; there were enchanting childhood summers in her grandparents' country
house in Sussex. Her education was typical of her class and time: she had
governesses at home while her two younger brothers went away to school.
This lack of formal education fed her self-doubt, but she
showed great self-discipline and dedication in her chosen profession. Her
output was prolific and her books achieved popularity and recognition. Her
first novel, The Beautiful Visit (1950), won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize; as
well as further novels she wrote short stories, articles, television plays,
film scripts and a book on food with Fay Maschler. She also edited several
anthologies. Her contributions to literary life included organising the
Cheltenham and Salisbury festivals. She was made a CBE in 2000.
Jane was a very handsome, impressive woman. Though she
looked rather grand, she did not use hauteur; there was a disarming candour and
even humility in the way she talked about herself. It took her almost a
lifetime, years of which she spent in psychotherapy, to come to terms with her
relationship with her mother, who – she believed – did not like her. This
experience, she said with harsh honesty, had made her "a tart for affection"
for most of her life. Her striking looks, intelligence and varied talents
brought her many admirers.
As a young woman she acted and modelled, and later she
broadcast, cooked, sewed, gardened and decorated houses with flair and skill.
But looking back, she declared that she had made a complete hash of her life,
admitting and regretting her mistakes.
She was a bit of a bolter, as she was the first to admit:
she married three times. The first, in 1942, was to Peter Scott, later a
world-renowned naturalist and at that time a naval officer and war hero. She
had her only child, Nicola, at 19. When Nicola was three, Jane – unhappy in her
marriage and feeling unable to give her daughter as good a life as her
distinguished husband could – left them both, an abandonment that brought deep
difficulties between mother and daughter for many years, although they found
resolution.
The poets Laurie Lee and Cecil Day-Lewis, whose wives were
her friends, were among her lovers after her first divorce. Yet if there was
duplicity in her makeup there were also qualities that attracted devoted
friendship. Both the Lees and both the Day-Lewises wanted her to be godmother
to their daughters; she accepted both requests. Day-Lewis wrote his last poem
on her table, while staying as a guest in her house in the weeks before his
death.
Her second marriage, to James Douglas-Henry in 1959, was for
Jane a disaster of which, even in her many frank interviews, she could barely
speak. But she indicated that he was unfaithful, did not make love to her, and
was only interested in her money, of which she had very little. She left him
after five years.
As an innovative director of the Cheltenham literary
festival of 1962, she invited her fellow novelist Kingsley Amis to discuss sex
and censorship in literature with Carson McCullers and Joseph Heller. The
attraction between Amis and herself was powerful enough to end both their
marriages. Their 18-year relationship made a gut-wrenching but fascinating
public story, which began with romantic passion, high hopes and an elopement to
Spain. It looked like a perfect match. One reason why she loved him, she said,
was that he made her laugh. They married in 1965.
For eight years the couple held court to their friends and
colleagues in a beautiful house on Hadley Common in Barnet. Jane later revealed
that under the appearance of effortless glamour, she was single-handedly trying
to do everything, from repairing and decorating the house to tending the huge
garden. But she was not writing very much. Kingsley did that. His two
adolescent sons, her brother and mother and a painter friend lived with them,
and she produced regular meals for the household and spectacular ones for
weekend guests, while struggling to cope with the idiosyncrasies of her husband.
Years later it pleased her greatly when her stepson Martin Amis expressed
gratitude for her contribution to his life as a writer. It was Jane who spotted
ability and ambition in the teenage layabout. She got him reading (Jane Austen
was the first breakthrough), and thence to Oxford. In his memoirs, Martin
placed her – as a novelist – in the august company of Iris Murdoch, praising
her "poetic eye" and "penetrating sanity".
The collapse of her third marriage was understandable, with
its many pressures, but no less painful for that. In its latter years,
especially after they moved from Barnet to Hampstead because Kingsley was
missing his London life and friends, it became clear to Jane that he had come
to dislike her. Nonetheless it was brave of her to leave him in 1980. This was
not the first time she had been hurt by a man she had loved, but starting again
was now a more daunting prospect. She was 57, and – although she did not seek
or receive Amis's financial help – not as well-off as she seemed.
She planned her departure with a stratagem designed to
minimise the hurt to Kingsley, which nevertheless outraged him. She went to a
health farm for 10 days, thinking it would help him get used to her not being
around; then, on the day she was due back, she had a note delivered to the
house from her solicitor to say she was not returning. She went to live in
Camden Town, in a house facing the traffic of a rat-run.
Kingsley never spoke to her again. His undisguised animosity
to Jane figured in his late novels, and resurfaced in letters and biographies
published after his death. The cruelty, subtlety and sharpness of this drama as
it played out also proved worthy of her own pen, and the relationship and its
protagonists appear several times in her fiction.
In 1990 Jane moved out of London and finally settled in a
lovely old house in Suffolk, with some land, a riverbank and an island. There,
she wrote, read, gardened, did her beautiful patchwork and tapestry, cherished
her dog and her plants, and welcomed her friends, godchildren and family at
weekends.
Her frank and detailed autobiography, Slipstream (2002),
revealed how closely the Cazalet family was modelled on her own and that the
roots of her novel Falling were in her own encounter with a conman. In November
2013, a fifth Cazalet novel, All Change, was published, shortly after a
long-running dramatisation of the original quartet on BBC Radio 4.
In her later years she seemed blessed with a peace and
pleasure that had hitherto eluded her. She was alone, and made it clear that
she would have preferred not to be. But reconciliation had ended the years of
estrangement with Nicola, and she basked in the affection of her daughter, four
grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, who all survive her.
Jane once admitted that writing was the most
"frightening" thing she did, and that she did not enjoy it. "I
find it much too anxious a business," she said. She once tried to give it
up altogether. But she couldn't. "When you write something which comes
off, it's a feeling like no other," she said. "It's like being
visited by something outside yourself."
• Elizabeth Jane Howard, writer, born 26 March 1923; died 2
January 2014
Monday, 9 July 2018
As "Preppy" as you can get ....vineyard vines /The Official Preppy Handbook / VIDEO:Every Day Should Feel This Good | vineyard vines
Vineyard Vines is an American clothing and accessory
retailer founded in 1998 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, by brothers Shep
and Ian Murray. The brand markets upper market ties, hats, belts, shirts,
shorts, swimwear, bags for men, women, and children. It has grown to a collection
of retail stores and outlets across the United States.The company's main logo
is a pink whale. Their clothing is considered preppy and southern styled.
Shep and Ian Murray grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and
spent their summers on Martha's Vineyard, where they were introduced to the
coastal lifestyle of sailing, fishing, and boating. The two brothers originally
held jobs in New York City, but soon grew tired of the corporate lifestyle. Ian
claims the duo "traded in [their] business suits for bathing suits"
and “started making neckties so [they] didn’t have to wear them.” Before
quitting their jobs, the two brothers opened credit cards so they could buy
silk and launch vineyard vines. The company's entire startup capital was raised
from the brothers' accrued credit card debt. Shep and Ian sold their neckties
on Martha's Vineyard, selling out of a backpack from their boat or Jeep rather
than a storefront. Initially, they offered four different styles of ties. After
they sold 800 ties on a single weekend in July, Shep and Ian quickly re-ordered
more, paid off their accrued debt, and moved into a new office. The Murray
brothers claim that the business was founded through a philosophy of
"living the good life," which is reflected by their slogan
"Every day should feel this good." Shep Murray claims his goal is to
be "a cross between Warren Buffett and Jimmy Buffett" in building the
"lifestyle brand" he founded. Vineyard Vines is still owned outright
by the two Murray brothers.
Since the summer of 1998, the Vineyard Vines company has
expanded nationally, particularly along the East Coast. Vineyard Vines has
opened numerous company, outlet, and retail stores. In addition to these
traditional channels, Vineyard Vines has expanded its sales to online shoppers.
The company manufactures licensed NFL and MLB product, which it sells through
its retail channels. Vineyard Vines also manufactures licensed college apparel,
which is sold primarily through campus stores. Vineyard Vines was placed on
Inc. magazine's list of the 5000 fastest-growing businesses in the U.S. in
2007. Between 2004 and 2007, the relatively new company's revenue tripled.[5]
In 2015 the company inaugurated a new headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.In
January 2018, sportscaster Jim Nantz announced a partnership with Vineyard
Vines to create a golf-oriented lifestyle clothing line set to launch in spring
2019.
The first stores were opened in Northeastern locations
associated with the sea such as Martha's Vineyard. The first was in Edgartown,
Martha's Vineyard, followed by Greenwich, Connecticut. The company has expanded
to more than 59 stores as well as 15 outlet locations across the U.S. states.
The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) is a tongue-in-cheek
humor reference guide edited by Lisa Birnbach, written by Jonathan Roberts,
Carol McD. Wallace, Mason Wiley, and Birnbach. It discusses an aspect of North
American culture described as prepdom. In addition to insights on prep school
and university life at socially acceptable schools, it illuminates many aspects
of the conservative upper middle class, old money WASP society. Topics range
from appropriate clothing for social events to choosing the correct college and
major.
The book addresses "preppy" life from birth to old
age, lending understanding to the cultural aspects of "preppy" life.
In general, elementary and secondary school, college, and the young adult years
receive the most attention. Coverage lessens during the book's latter
chapters.The book was first published in 1980 by Workman Publishing.
The Official Preppy Handbook explains and satirizes what it
takes to be a preppy person in the 1980s, parodying the lifestyle of the WASP
elite. Birnbach reveals through an ironic tone where preps go to school, where
they summer, what brands they wear, and how they decorate their homes. Birnbach
divides The Official Preppy Handbook into 7 sections, each devoted to a
different period of the preppy lifestyle. The Handbook begins by caricaturizing
the childhood of a preppy person in 1980. Lisa Birnbach satirizes a prep’s
ideal family lifestyle, and humorously advises readers how to pick, interview,
and gain acceptance into a prep school.The book then wittily discusses “the
best years of your life”- a prep’s college years.[7] With tongue in cheek,
Birnbach elucidates which college courses to take, how to design one’s dorm
room, and how to party at college. In Chapters 5 and 6, the book explains the
prep adult life as first a “young executive”, and later as a retired adult in
“the Country Club Years”. Birnbach jokingly educates readers on navigating a
cocktail party, networking, and vacationing. The Official Preppy Handbook also
teaches readers how to dress preppy. In chapter 4, Birnbach emphasizes the
importance of appearing effortless, preppy and casual, writing, “socks are
frequently not worn on sporting occasions or on social occasions for that
matter. This provides a year round beachside look that is so desirable that
comfort may be thrown aside”.By teaching readers on where to shop, what to
wear, and “the merits of pink and green”, Birnbach makes preppy culture
attainable to anyone – contrary to the popular belief that one needs to be born
into a preppy lifestyle, she makes prepdom something anyone can cultivate.
The book's reflections on young urban professional culture
inspired Arthur Cinader, the founder of the J. Crew clothing line. Cinader
hoped to capitalize on the book's success.
The book also represented a resurgence of interest in preppy
culture that aided the growth of retailer L.L. Bean, which the book describes
as "nothing less than Prep mecca." The book's exposé of university
life and the drug and sex culture at various schools had a significant impact
on public thought about those schools. The book spawned many other
"official" handbooks for other American subcultures.
The Handbook exposed preppy culture to the masses, and
helped to democratize the preppy subculture. Prior to the book, primarily only
wealthy WASP elites adopted the preppy subculture. From the 1920s, WASPs
dominated American universities, and preppy fashion was traditionally worn on
university campuses. However, as universities became less exclusive as a result
of economic and cultural shifts, preppiness as a subculture became less
exclusive. Preppy fashion adopted new nuances, and preppy culture has become
more inclusive. By writing The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach helps to
further democratize preppy fashion and culture. Birnbach explains in her
introduction that the handbook is not intended as an exclusive text describing
preppiness as subculture reserved for “an elite minority lucky enough to attend
prestigious private schools”. Rather, the Handbook was written as a guidepost
for the revival of the preppy style. It shared the secrets of the preppy code,
making preppy seem “neat, attractive, and suddenly attainable”.
Tuesday, 3 July 2018
Adolf Loos: Why A Man Should Be Well-dressed / VÍDEO: Adolf Loos Architecture
“Throughout his life Adolf Loos raised his eloquent voice against the squandering of fine materials, frivolous ornamentation and unnecessary embellishments. His admirers consider him to be the inspiration for all modern architecture. Yet, few are acquainted with his amusing, incisive, critical and philosophical literary work reflecting on applied design and the essence of clothing in fin de siècle Vienna. Adolf Loos often had a radical, yet innovative outlook on life that made him such a nuisance for many of his contemporaries. His provocative musings on many subjects portray him as a man of varied interests and intellectual refinement as well as possessing a keen sense of style, which still has value today. For the first time the Loos Dress Code is available in English. Included is a short social/historical look as the birth of Modernism in Adolf Loos Vienna.”
Learning to Dwell:
Adolf Loos in the Czech Lands – review
Riba, London
Rowan Moore
Sunday 20 February
2011 00.03 GMT
"The naked
woman," said the architect Adolf Loos, "is unattractive to
man." It is one of the more striking statements in the history
of architectural writing, and one that may not seem to have much to
do with architecture, but it is part of a theory that has done much
to shape the buildings of the past 100 years. If you have eaten in a
restaurant or visited a hotel describing itself as "minimalist",
or ever been struck by the lack of ornament on any modernist
building, you will have witnessed the after-effects of this strange
thought. According to a 1930s critic: "There lives not one
single architect who does not carry within himself a bit of Loos."
Women, argued Loos,
have to dress and ornament themselves to appeal to "man's sickly
sensuality". They have to wear impractical things such as long
skirts that stress their decorative role. It would be much better if
both men and women wore plain, well-made clothes like the English
suits that he especially liked. Ornament, he famously said, is linked
to degeneracy and crime and should be removed from objects of daily
use: not just clothes, but furniture and buildings.
Loos is usually
described as Austrian, but he grew up in the town of Brno, then part
of the Hapsburg empire, now in the Czech Republic. Some of his best
works are in that country, in Brno, Prague and Plzen. This week, an
exhibition opens at the Royal Institute of British Architects that,
originating in Prague, seeks to reclaim Loos for his homeland. It
should also, distributed across several floors of Riba's
headquarters, be a good introduction to the work of this astonishing
man.
It will show the
houses and apartments that Loos designed in the 1920s for prosperous
bourgeoisie of a country, Czechoslovakia, minted after the Great War
by the Treaty of Versailles. He built for a paediatrician, a
manufacturer of screws and another of wire, a chemist serving the
brewing industry and the hugely successful building contractor
František Müller. These were people keen to distance themselves
from the past, but also to embrace high culture, and their homes
tended to be furnished with pianos and art.
The exteriors of the
houses are as plain as Loos said they should be. The house he built
for Müller, on a steep slope facing towards Prague Castle, is
startlingly white and cubic. Villa Müller's interiors, however, are
far from being puritanical boxes. They are lush with oak, flaming
mahogany, poplar and elm, and marbles with evocative names:
cipollino, with layered patterns like the inside of an onion, and
fantastico, with dazzling patterns of black on white. He would use
yellow-gold silk for curtains and lampshades and, when it suited, the
newest materials of his time, with their own exotic brand names:
Xylonite, linoleum, Salubra wallpaper and Duco automative paint that
gave the finish of a new car.
He loved mirrors,
using them to multiply rooms and dissolve their boundaries, and
played games with the veining of marbles. In one convulsive music
room, as in a gestalt test, you can read monsters and pudenda into
the symmetrical patterns of matched fantastico panels. His shapes are
severe, almost all straight-lined and right-angled, but they are full
of constrained sensuality. Economy was not the purpose – one of his
assistants said that you could build "a very nice detached
house" for the cost of one of his rooms. These rich rooms are in
fact consistent with Loos's theories of ornament, as they use the
inherent patterns of natural materials rather than decoration
contrived by man.
He believed that the
materials of a room should match its use and mood, with marble in
more public places and wood in more intimate rooms, or pale maple in
a woman's dressing room and oak in a man's. The dimensions, including
height, should also be varied to suit each room, with the result that
his houses became three-dimensional jigsaws of interlocking spaces,
with many floor and ceiling levels, connected by short flights of
steps and crisscrossed by views from one to the other.
Loos was born in
1870 and died in 1933, lived in Vienna at the time of Freud, and
makes an easy subject for amateur analysis. His father was a
stonemason and his happy early memories of playing in his workshop
were cut short at the age of nine when his father died. His mother
was strict and he escaped her to join the army as early as possible,
only to contract syphilis. She then cut him off, in return for paying
for his fare for his three-year trip to the United States.
He married three
times, had a long-term mistress, and towards the end of his life he
was accused of paedophilia. He had a particular penchant for
actresses and dancers. As described in a new book by Anne Anlin
Cheng, Second Skin (Oxford University Press), he was fascinated by
Josephine Baker. On the basis of a slight acquaintance, he
volunteered to design her a house, never built, whose main features
were a glass-walled swimming pool surrounded by corridors for viewing
her body at exercise, and an exterior in vibrant black-and-white
stripes which may have represented his wish to mingle his European
restraint with her African-American energy.
He was, in other
words, a sensualist, of a possibly twisted kind. His houses, with
their blank, mask-like outsides and their intricate,
lush-but-disciplined interiors, make perfect emblems of his
well-dressed outer self and his complex inner self. Both buildings
and writings express a singular, tortured personality, with strange
views on desire, yet had a general influence. Architects such as Mies
van der Rohe and Le Corbusier learned plainness and controlled luxury
from him ("Whatever is good in Le Corbusier's work, he learned
from Loos," said Loos, half-ironically.) Mies and Corb were then
the dominant influences on architecture for two generations.
His interiors are
inward-looking, mesmerising, sometimes a little creepy. There is an
air of fragility or tragedy about them, reinforced by later events.
His many Jewish clients were forced out of their marbled nests into
exile or camps. In 1945, the commanding officer of the local
Wehrmacht shot himself in the flat with the convulsive music room,
which had been appropriated as headquarters. Old Müller was
dispossessed of his fortune by the postwar Communist regime, but
allowed to stay on in the house, in whose boiler room he would
eventually be found dead; he had operated the equipment wrongly,
whether accidentally or on purpose, and poisoned himself with fumes.
Müller's wife,
Milada Müllerová, stayed on, lodged in the recesses of the house,
and fought with the authorities to stop them wrecking it. Thanks to
her, it survived and is now restored, opened to the public, and one
of the more compelling of the many compelling sights of Prague.
Adolf Loos
1870-1933
Key buildings
Café Museum (1899)
Kärntner Bar (1908)
Goldman &
Salatsch (1910)
Villa Müller (1928)
Key texts
Potemkin City (1898)
Architecture (1910)
Ornament and Crime
(1913)
 |
‘The evolution of
culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects
of everyday use’
|
Adolf
Loos (1870-1933)
8
OCTOBER, 2013BY PAUL DAVIES
Controversial
in both private and professional circles, the life and work of Loos
are reviewed by Paul Davies
Adolf Loos was
Moravian. His father, a stonemason, died when he was nine. His mother
was domineering. He caught syphilis while in a brothel with his
godfather at 21. His mother cut him off in return for passage to the
USA, where he spent three years, among other things, happily washing
dishes.
Originally from
Brno, he returned to the intellectual café society of Vienna in
1894, a clan righteously circumspect in believing in almost anything.
He especially fell in with Karl Kraus and poetic muse Peter Altenberg
and out with Viennese architects; publishing witty, sarcastic pieces
satirising the Secession, Germany’s bad plumbing, propensity for
dressing up and other bad habits. Fashion, including underwear, is a
prominent subject, but it was not an unusual one for the time, as the
strictures and hypocrisy of the Habsburg Monarchy and its corsetry
were progressively undone. Collected as ‘Spoken Into The Void’,
Loos’s essays culminated in Ornament and Crime (1908) that
precipitously stated: ‘the lower the culture, the more apparent the
ornament’.
He began
architecture with his own apartment in 1903, then with a succession
of rooms, shopfronts, bars and eventually whole houses (Steiner
House, 1910) for clients mirroring his interest in Gemütlichkeit or
cosiness. The later houses have a strikingly modern pose (but plenty
earlier do not) and even though he was only seven years older than
Gropius and Mies, it made a big difference to die in 1933 rather than
1969. Loos was eclipsed as a more energetic Modernism progressed. It
didn’t help that Loos had little interest in saving the world; that
his orientation was inverted, practically and psychologically, to the
interior; and that he was ideologically inappropriate.
For instance Loos
had no interest in the ‘honest’ expression of structure; only the
appropriate use of material. For him architecture was like dressing,
and one should be well dressed. For other members of the Modern
Movement such an analogy would assume an enthusiasm for striptease.
And his horizons were modest. He did grapple with larger projects
(various hotels in particular, some housing) but they remain
unappreciated. He had a tendency to ziggurat, or to plainly terrace,
or to do both at the same time. He took, then left, his position as
chief architect of the housing department of Vienna the same year
(1922). Neither was he interested in teams or groups, and there are
no disciples to speak of, just those he influenced. He hence becomes
interesting as much for what he wasn’t as what he was, unconnected
while thoroughly linked-in, with a process rather his own.
For
Loos architecture was like dressing, and one should be well dressed.
For other members of the Modern Movement such an analogy would assume
an enthusiasm for striptease
This internalisation
has made him most attractive to the more literary minded
Postmodernists. Aldo Rossi saw him as a template for Musil’s The
Man without Qualities and in the backlash against technocratic
utopia, rediscovered his respect for craftsmanship and his wit;
especially admiring his giant Doric chess piece for the Chicago
Tribune (1923) notable for its singular and conspicuous label on the
plan: ‘Pipes’. Loos’s lack of interest in redemptive urban
planning served him well with those who now reviled it. Frampton
embedded him in the problematics of Wittgenstein, emphasising his
laconic analysis of what architecture was and what it could do; which
was not much.
However, his
Raumplan, the imagining of rooms as wholes, contained within rigid,
blank forms − of which the Müller House (Prague 1930) is exemplary
− still breeds speculation. The austerity is understandable (the
daring Goldman & Salatsch store of 1910 so infuriated Emperor
Franz Josef that he demanded his curtains be permanently drawn
against it) but it is Loos’s interior comforts that are more
troubling.
He married three
times, all younger women, the last dramatically so, and was involved
in two trials regarding child pornography and molestation (1905 and
1928). One person’s comfort might be another’s claustrophobia.
The interiors are now considered voyeuristic (Colomina), a sexualised
reading circumstantially reinforced when we compare the Raumplan with
the free plan.
This reading is
helped by scrutiny of his unbuilt project for Josephine Baker’s
Parisian residence (1927) where he put the exotic dancer in a fish
tank, and by his bedroom for his first wife Lina, also a dancer,
which seems to have been lined in fur. Meanwhile Loos enjoyed an
emphatic but voyeuristic interest in Josephine Baker while Le
Corbusier enjoyed an equally emphatic but intimate one. Further his
(so-called) elephant trunk side table legs look more like eight
female dancers’ legs balanced on tiptoe and his lounge chair
demonstrates that perhaps the only way he found peace was to stare at
the ceiling.
His necessary
restraint showed itself in fastidiousness. He was exacting of
craftsmen on the building site, and enjoyed the fact that his
interiors rarely photographed well, but that they had to be
experienced with ownership.
His method was
intimate rather than professional. He considered practising
architecture no better than washing the dishes, he thought the best
definition of an architect a bricklayer who spoke Latin, believed
so-called ‘Architecture’ generally despoiled the landscape,
considered the only venue for art in architecture to be the tomb and
the monument, and the best place for the architect invisible. He
didn’t even have a bank account. Dressing so well, he chalked up
debts with his outfitters, Goldman & Salatsch, and repaid them
with schemes culminating in the famous store.
Central to the
appreciation of Loos is, problematically, good taste. Not many people
go out of their way to buy a couple of Josef Hoffmann’s black wine
glasses and submit them by post to Gustav Pazaurek’s official
‘Cabinet of Bad Taste’, but Loos did. However, black wine glasses
are distasteful and life with Loos was not unpalatable. His last
wife, Claire Beck Loos, revered him, indeed, in one of the strangest
examples of potential grooming; she was raised in one of Loos’s
early rooms. However, she left him, and wrote the touching A Private
Portrait (just republished in English), a memoir of their itinerant
later years in various straits in hotels along the Côte d’Azur,
with Loos now deaf, and with luggage and dogs, like something out of
EM Forster or Somerset Maugham.
His proclivities may
not have been considered so offensive by his set. Peter Altenberg
also had a thing for young girls. Meanwhile all bourgeois mores were
repugnant to polemicist Karl Kraus and Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who
remained a client, and for whom Loos built an extraordinary and
uniquely uncomfortable house in Paris in 1926.
There are obviously
many sides to Loos, many paradoxes; in photographs he rarely looks
the same way twice. He appeals to the detective, that most postmodern
of professions. The theorists ponder the psychology, but commercial
architects have found much inspiration in his luxurious use of
materials, and non-commercial ones wonder at his ingenious use of
space, and in both cases Loos can become far more practically useful
than Le Corbusier or Mies. Every architect can have the dream to do
an American Bar as good as The Kärntner, even if it’s for
Starbucks. As my wife said perusing Roberto Schezen’s photographs:
‘It looks so much better than modern architecture!
’
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