The Art Set
Charlie Scheips

In Search of the Continuous Present

This week sees the return of the art world back to the cities from summer holidays and artistic pilgrimages around the world. Life gets going in New York. By next week it will be in a full throttle and really won't relent until the holidays descend upon us in mid-December.

The Art Set is a fluid milieu of creators, distributors, and consumers of our cultural world. There are bravado show-offs and hermetic loners — flashy dealers and erudite curators, fashionable collectors with big wallets and younger wannabees (sometimes with big pocketbooks too) — and scads of other characters in between. The art world is really a series of worlds, some of which intersect, and some that simply don't. It can be an elegant world of discretion and discrimination (as in taste not bigotry) or a fleeting world of the latest fad.

The boundaries of art, commerce and entertainment have long been dissolved into an ever-changing mosaic of contemporary artistic expression. There is no such thing as eternal aesthetic standards but instead a sense of consensus at any given moment about what constitutes "art" with a capital A. You may not know of or like the work of an artist like Cy Twombly.

However, the gallery and museum attention given to this important artist ranging from his exhibition which opened the new Gagosian space on Britannia Street in London this past June, as well as the traveling retrospective of 50 years of his works on paper at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and London's Serpentine, are evidence of his continuing influence. And it goes without saying that the high price that Twombly's work fetches represents a consensus in critical circles of his place in the art of today.

Matthew Barney, Big Ears.

The visual arts, the musical world, poetry, literature, fashion, and the pop culture mediums of film, video and the computer, have all come together to form the art of our time. The "art set" is a convenient way to describe this international group of individuals and institutions that are the engine of cultural creativity. It takes a Matthew Barney to imagine his enigmatic cocktail of personal mythology, photography, film video and performance, but it also takes a dealer like Barbara Gladstone to help bring the artist's vision to life by financing the productions and selling the work in her gallery. It also takes collectors and museums to buy Barney's work, as well as the general public to purchase tickets to his exhibitions and screenings, to complete the circle. Lastly, it takes time to see if it was all as interesting as it once seemed.

This viewpoint can rub some people the wrong way. It is usually people who are not part of the "art set" that feel this way. They harbor deeply entrenched beliefs and habits formed by their upbringing, education, and socio-political affiliations. Many of them simply ignore the art of their own time and take comfort in the safer realm of Tradition — whatever that might mean. I frequently encounter these people when seated next to them at dinner or on a plane. First, they do believe they know what art is — period. Second, they hate (and I mean hate) most contemporary art and they usually include Picasso at the top of the list even though he was born of the 19^th century, died in 1973, and is viewed by a great many artists and art historians today as the most protean and influential artist since Leonardo and Michelangelo.

There is no sure way to become a member of the "art set" and even when one does get in there is only a slim chance it will be a lifetime membership. "Everything comes and goes marked by lovers and styles of clothes" as Joni Mitchell sings. Find yourself a 10 year old copy of Art in America or Art News, as you peruse through its pages, I doubt if you would recognize 90 percent of the artists' advertised in the issue. Remember there were estimated to be over 100,000 artists in Paris during the last 40 years of the 19^th century. Only a handful of them are remembered today.

Burt Lancaster in The Leopard

I've been thinking a lot about the 19^th century during the summer. A couple of weeks ago, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I went to the Film Forum with art consultant Darlene Lutz to see Luchino Visconti's epic film The Leopard from 1963. The film wasn't a box office success when it came out despite the incredibly nuanced performance of Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Selina (the Leopard) and Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in supporting roles at the prime of their respective handsomeness and beauty. The film is set in 1860 as Garibaldi's middle-class revolution is threatening to (and did) transform the aristocratic feudal world of Italy into a unified state.

The movie is based on the 1958 book of the same title by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which was a bestseller when it was published. Set in Palermo, the author based the book on an earlier ancestor. After a life of literary connoisseurship, di Lampedusa wrote the book in the last two years of his life. Today it is considered one of the greatest novels ever written and possibly the greatest Italian novel of the 20^th century. I picked up a used paperback of it in Cape Cod soon after seeing the movie. It is an amazingly visual book that allows one to draw comparisons with Marcel Proust — although these two authors' interests and obsessions were decidedly different. In the book, the "Leopard" knows that the changes in society are inevitable and for the better but is conflicted over the loss of the remaining vestiges of his old familiar world and ways.

Top row: Napoleon III. Second row: Alexandre Dumas-vater; Emperor Maximilian; Charles Garnier. Third row: Jacques Offenbach; Paris Opera House.

I also re-read this summer John Bierman's Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire. Louis Napoleon was Bonaparte's nephew who became President of France in 1848 and three years later its emperor. Much of what we know of Paris today is in large part thanks to Napoleon III and his chief engineer Baron Haussmann who completely re-designed the ancient city. The world conjured up by the book is the Paris of Offenbach's La Vie parisienne, grand courtesans a la Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias, the new grand boulevards and the abundant and ornate overstuffed interiors that can be seen today in the restored Napoleon III grand appartements at the Louvre. It was an era when wars and the threat of wars dominated both America and Europe. Both "old world" and "new" were attempting to expand their empires through border tensions and competing colonial interests. In Europe, Napoleon III was responsible for inciting four major conflicts, not to mention setting up the disastrous and short-lived monarchy of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico — who was also the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph.

It was a time of promiscuous decadence, rapid change, and dangerous politics. In many ways, this period shaped the modern world. It was only in 1865 after the end of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's death that America could focus its attention on ejecting the French-led Mexican monarchy. This culminated in Maximilian's death by firing squad later immortalized by that star of Napoleon III's Paris Edouard Manet.

So why should I be telling you all of this? It is a world long vanished you would think. Like the Paris of the late 19^th century, New York has been the center of the political, social and economic world for the past half century. The Paris we love today is but a sandblasted bourgeois ghost of its former vital glory; even though I continue to love her passionately. The composer Virgil Thomson told me once that when he "first arrived in Paris in the 1920s she was a brunette — and now (in the 1980s) she was a blond." But out of this "carnival" of decadence and warmongering came political, cultural and sociological change.

Watching and reading The Leopard and imagining the Paris of Napoleon III, led me to ponder our own time. Who are the artists, writers, composers, architects and fashion designers that will be our Manet, or our Alexandre Dumas, Jacques Offenbach, Charles Garnier and Charles Frederick Worth? Who and what shaped New York? The New York we think we know was largely shaped between the 1920s and the 1960s. It was the New York of Jackson Pollack, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Mies Van der Rohe, and Charles James, to name but a few.

Will our current luminaries such as John Currin, Brett Easton Ellis, Jean Nouvel, and Zac Posen (to name but a few) endure and flourish in ways that put a lasting stamp on our own era? Or perhaps is it instead the images and sounds from film, video and music — our so-called popular culture that will more appropriately reflect our contemporary aesthetic values. Or sadly it will perhaps be our gossip driven obsession with money and stardom that defines these times in the future — it certainly is a possibility. For the last two decades I have increasingly wondered why the New York Times even calls it's Sunday section "Arts & Leisure" rather than "The Movies, Music and Theater." Indeed for several years it seems the visual arts are simply relegated to its own paltry "second section" as almost an afterthought.

Clockwise from top left: A Zac Posen gown; John Currin; Jean Nouvel; Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

From the blue chip Upper East Side galleries, to the equally blue chip but trendier Chelsea gallery district, from art enclaves in Dumbo in Brooklyn, to the burgeoning new galleries popping up in the lower east side in anticipation of the opening of The New Museum on Bowery and Prince Street in 2006 there is a dynamic and diverse world thriving both above and below the radar. Perhaps the effects of September 11 three years ago will be seen in the future as a beginning of a whole new cultural renaissance for New York and the rest of the world. I certainly hope so.

But maybe not — if we stifle creative freedoms for too long, the artists do move on. After all, that's why New York became the cultural capital of the world in the 1940s, when the intelligentsia of Europe escaped the encroaching Nazi madness. In general, artists break rules to achieve new ground, and we seem to be obsessed with rules today — not exactly the nurturing climate for the arts. Safer maybe, but ...

Of course, history is always in the present even in the most contemporary of settings. Seeing it is always not so simple. The arrival of the fantastic September issue of the World of Interiors brought cover story news of a different sort — word that the country house in Lèves of the famed French interior decorator Madeleine Castaing was up for sale. While she lived most of her life in the 20^th century — her inimitable style was that of the past. A past where time stood still and one could spend an afternoon reading Flaubert without interruption from the modern world. The contents of her house as well as the contents of her famous Paris shop will be offered at Sotheby's France — Galerie Charpentier in a two-day sale beginning September 30^th.

Castaing was a cult figure amongst a certain international set for decades before her death in 1992 at the age of 98. She was particularly famous in Francophile American design circles. I first succumbed to her mystique during the early 1980s when my friend, the landscape historian Bryan Fuermann, took me one evening by her shop at 30 rue Jacob on our way to dinner. The shop then took up the entire ground floor a fairly non-descript building by Paris standards. While the entrance was at the corner on rue Bonaparte, one best viewed the shop by a series of large windows lining the rue Jacob. I later learned that Castaing lived in an apartment above. The flat was bought later purchased by filmmakers Ishmael Merchant and James Ivory — but only after they filmed The Proprietor (1996) staring Jeanne Moreau there. But that night I was being treated to a very memorable virgin aesthetic experience.

The facade was painted black lacquer with grey (could they have been white at one time?) canvas awnings emblazoned simply with Madame's initials similar in style to the classic typeface used by Coco Chanel. But while Madame Chanel helped engender the look and attitudes of the modern liberated woman, Castaing embraced instead what the late interior decorator Mark Hampton call the "style of an invented past."

Yo Picasso, 1901.

The shop seemed as if it had always been there but projected no need to impress, as do so many of the shops in that toney neighborhood. Instead its seemed an oddity—and slightly surreal. The shop is (now in a smaller space) just above Paris's smallest square, the Place Furstenberg where Eugene Delacroix's studio can still be visited.

As we peeked though each window at the dimly lit tableaux, we observed several glamorous but vaguely déshabillé rooms. I noticed, dotted about the rooms, lamps that I would later learn were a key element of le style Castaing — her signature robin's egg blue paper "coolie" lampshades perilously propped atop all manner of bases ranging from animal horns to discarded gas light fixtures.

In many of the room "settings" pieces of fabric seemed to have simply been pinned to a settee or ottoman almost as if Madame hadn't made up her mind. Which was again part of her distinctive point of view. And scattered amongst the windowsills were an assortment of carte postale portraits of people such as Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Proust, sheafs of old letters tied with aged pink ribbon, a stack of old leather bound books and all other manner of bibelots, giving one the feeling that you were looking into a cosmic window somewhere in time. It was not Miss Haversham's cobwebbed tomb—no Estella peeking from behind a Castaing designed curtains waiting for her Pip. Instead it was a comfortable and elegant room for living that seemed to emerge from history's ether.

L'Univers de Madeleine Castaing

She developed her style in her country house during the 1920s and 30s. Born nearby Chartres on the Loire to a distinguished family, Castaing met and married at the age of 16 the love of her life Marcellin Castaing who hailed from a wealthy family in Toulouse. They soon were part of the café life of Montparnasse during the 1920s — becoming friendly with the artistic beau monde that included Olga and Pablo Picasso, and Chaim Soutine. Soutine regularly painted at the Castaing's country house between 1930 and 1935 where he painted some of his greatest masterpieces. Soutine's famous portrait of Madeleine Castaing is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. Seven of the last Soutines in the Castaing collection were sold earlier this year at Sotheby's in London for record prices. The Castaings abandoned the house during the Occupation and opened a shop on the rue Cherche-Midi. After Marcellin's death she moved to the rue Jacob.

Since my first encounter with the shop that evening, no trip to Paris is complete unless I at least pass by. On one occasion in the late 1980s I went in to find la diva de la rue Jacob seated at her desk in conversation with her manager Madame Laure Lambordini. She was wearing simple, no-nonsense clothing and strangely beautiful despite her age and the reddish wig held on by a string around the chin, heavily mascared false eyelashes and brightly rouged cheeks and red lipstick. She was comfortably in situ-polite but distant. I felt as elated as if we had spotted Greta Garbo.

After her death, I once went in with a friend to buy a small table he had seen in the window. Madame Lambordini told us she would have to check on the price — she would call the Le Duc de Saint Simon hotel later and leave a message.

When we got back to the hotel there was a message that it would be 8000 francs — probably around 5 times the amount my friend wanted to pay. I later learned that the real success of Madeleine Castaing had been the lucrative sales of her carpets and fabrics to decorators around the world.

There was a reason she didn't want to part with the props of this successful business—they were the tangible props of the mystique she had so uniquely made her own. The odd mix of Russian, Biedermeier, Napoleon III, and English regency furniture, on ocelot patterned carpets in rooms always populated by books. This look, that effortlessly came together on the rue Jacob and at the house in Lve, was rarely if ever successfully imitated by others. Jacques Grange once worked as her assistant and while he has formed a distinct style of his own, one can detect the influence of this unique master of imaginary time and space.

I don't know if I will be able to afford any of the pieces at the sale (entitled l'Universe de Madeleine Castaing) this month. I have a friend who once managed to get a crisp, clean piece of Madame's black and white stationary that he framed simply. It sits on a table in his living room amidst the books, art and objects he has assembled over the years. An object that imbues the Castaing spirit. Not the remembrances of things past—but as Proust's masterpiece is now more appropriately translated "in search of lost time."

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