Art I'm Looking At: Houghton Hall at The Legion of Honor

After seeing the Keith Haring show at the De young Museum, it took a moment to adjust to the very different mood of the Legion of Honor's show of work from Houghton Hall, in England, a large house originally built by Sir Robert Walpole, in 1776, generally considered a masterpiece of Palladian architecture. The show includes a large number of paintings from the Houghton Hall collection displayed along with furniture, dinner ware, silver, rugs, and other objects laid out in several large rooms. The walls have been covered from floor to ceiling with photographic reproductions of the original rooms, which give a fairly good sense of how the various object on display would look in context.

There's an entire room of Sargents--probably the highlight of the exhibition--paintings that rarely travel. They included a painting Sargent did to document World War I damage to a cathedral. His painting of gassed WWI soldiers is well known, but the captions in the Houghton Hall show suggest he was commissioned to do a lot of this type of work, which I hadn't known. There are a couple of full-length Sargent society portraits of note and several attractive charcoal portraits of Houghton Hall residents, but I especially enjoyed a quickly sketched head of a gondolier (c. 1878) from a visit to Venice (pictured).

In the room with the Sargents, I was surprised to see a very familiar-looking head of Pope Innocent X, clearly related to the famous Velazquez portrait. Approaching a little closer, I read the label. The painting turned out to be a Velazquez study for the larger painting.

I also enjoyed a portrait of Catherine Shorter, Lady Walpole (c. 1710) by Swedish artist Michael Dahl. The wall tag mentions that she was extravagant--"frequently attending the opera and buying expensive clothes and jewelry," although she is fairly modestly attired in the portrait. The Dahl portrait is shown in a facsimile of the Houghton Hall library, with walls covered in faux books--large photographic wall coverings like the ones mentioned above. The room displays several pieces of furniture and an interesting wool rug described as English, but I noticed that triangles, apparently cut from the borders of oriental carpets, have been worked into its four corners.

Among the most beautiful objects in the entire show are two large rolls of handmade Chinese wallpapers (detail below). It wasn't exactly clear, but these appear to be actual leftovers from papers made for bedrooms in Houghton Hal, papers that presumably still cover the walls in some rooms today. The many birds on the papers are exquisitely drawn. The foliage, rocks, and other background elements are highly stylized, in some places becoming almost entirely abstract, while somehow retaining the power to evoke environments the birds might have been found in. The blue is especially striking. The show was worth seeing just for these wallpapers. The Houghton Hall exhibit runs through January 18, 2015 at the Legion of Honor.

 

Art I'm Looking At: Wire Sculptures by Ruth Asawa at the De Young (June 21, 2012)

The day before yesterday I spent most of the day in San Francisco. After taking a walk on Ocean Beach and having a grotesque and virtually inedible bowl of oatmeal at a little café down by the water (the coffee was fine; the oatmeal looked and tasted like it had been made the week before and then freshly microwaved--don't people know what good oatmeal should taste like?), I drove over to see the De Young Museum for the first time in a year or so. I mostly saw the regular collection, choosing not to spend the extra money to see the JeanPaul Gaulthier exhibit now going on. It was funny (and a pleasure), though, to see that many people in the museum seemed to be rather better dressed than usual.

There is a good Sargent in the De Young, an 1884 portrait of Caroline de Bassano, Marquise d'Espeuilles. Sargent depicts fabrics with a skill that's breathtaking. A few seemingly random strokes conjure up textures so real that you can almost hear the cloth rustle as the subject moves ever so slightly (the figure is static yet animated). The strokes of paint in the dress are abstract and painterly, yet, if you step back a little, they suddenly lose their substance and become part of an ethereal whole. The dress worn by this Caroline de Bassano is an excellent example of Sargent's ability to paint fabrics that seem alive. My photograph of the painting here can't do it justice.

Painting faces, Sargent captures the flesh but also the personality. I have no doubt that Caroline de Bassano looked just as Sargent has painted her (not very flatteringly--with her very large eyes, receding chin, and thin upper lip)--but he's also captured her personality--or so it seems. She looks ambitious and superficially confident, but somehow extremely insecure at the same time. She seems deeply in need of something. A pleasure to see this painting again.

Most interesting, however, was a set of sculptures by Ruth Asawa tucked away in a back corner. I would have missed them entirely if I hadn't decided to climb the tower at the museum. "Climb" is a misnomer. I was disappointed to find there is no access by steps (although, in the event of a fire, there must be, during normal conditions the stairway is reserved for staff use, as this area houses administrative offices). Reluctantly, I went up by elevator. The tower gives a surprisingly good view of the surroundings. It's well worth the detour--even without the sculptures in the elevator hall. These are wire constructions that cast shadows as interesting as the sculptures themselves. I must confess that I enjoyed the shadows as much or more than the wire pieces--although it goes without saying, perhaps, that the two are inseparable. In any case, the sculptures are well worth seeking out.