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拍品專文
The present series of floor lamps most likely formed part of the furnishings of James’s London residence at 35 Wimpole Street. His London home offered interior schemes that were no less intriguing than those subsequently developed for Monkton House and West Dean. A celebrated 1939 portrait by Norman Parkinson shows James languid in his office, draped ceilings above antique furniture and Italianate ornaments, suggestive of an eighteenth-century collector in the campaign tent of his Grand Tour (see inside front cover). By contrast, the bathroom completed in 1932 by artist Paul Nash for James’s wife Tilly Losch, was a dazzling modernist mosaic of tinted glass and mirrored surfaces, fluorescent lighting and machine-age chromed-metal appliances. One scheme for the drawing room included white skeletons and arteries painted on dark wine-coloured silk, another proposed to clad the walls with a re-creation of the jagged rocks of Cadaqués, Spain, to which he had been introduced by Dalí.
James’s embrace of Surrealism, therefore, can be assessed as a kaleidoscopic landscape of overlapping metaphorical planes that owed some resonance to Dalí’s ruminations upon paranoic furniture. By contrast, the aesthetic terrain invoked by Jean-Michel Frank offered a transcendental elegance that was determined not by what was included, but rather by what was excluded. The consequence was a conceptual interpretation that was allied with the Surrealist notions of absence, memory, disinheritance and loss. Frank had been intrinsically involved with the leading members of the Surrealist movement since the early 1920s, when he formed friendships with Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. He was also amongst the first Parisians to meet Dalí at a dinner hosted by Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles in 1930, leading to Frank commissioning several works from him. Frank was noted for his collaborations with Alberto Giacometti, and with the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, amongst many others. Frank also secured an example of Edward James’s and Salvador Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa for the Parisian apartment of his client, which was also briefly displayed in Elsa Schiaparelli’s boutique in Place des Vosges.
The present series of lamps relate closely to a model, featuring rectangular rather than circular bases, designed by Frank around 1928. An outwardly sophisticated and elegant design, the translucency of the shaft and the mirrored surfaces respond to light to accumulate shadows that instead attest to the mystery, and thus ambiguous presence of the object – fluently summoning François Mauriac’s eloquent interpretation of Frank’s oeuvre as being defined ‘l’étrange luxe de rien’ (the strange luxury of nothingness).
James’s embrace of Surrealism, therefore, can be assessed as a kaleidoscopic landscape of overlapping metaphorical planes that owed some resonance to Dalí’s ruminations upon paranoic furniture. By contrast, the aesthetic terrain invoked by Jean-Michel Frank offered a transcendental elegance that was determined not by what was included, but rather by what was excluded. The consequence was a conceptual interpretation that was allied with the Surrealist notions of absence, memory, disinheritance and loss. Frank had been intrinsically involved with the leading members of the Surrealist movement since the early 1920s, when he formed friendships with Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. He was also amongst the first Parisians to meet Dalí at a dinner hosted by Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles in 1930, leading to Frank commissioning several works from him. Frank was noted for his collaborations with Alberto Giacometti, and with the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, amongst many others. Frank also secured an example of Edward James’s and Salvador Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa for the Parisian apartment of his client, which was also briefly displayed in Elsa Schiaparelli’s boutique in Place des Vosges.
The present series of lamps relate closely to a model, featuring rectangular rather than circular bases, designed by Frank around 1928. An outwardly sophisticated and elegant design, the translucency of the shaft and the mirrored surfaces respond to light to accumulate shadows that instead attest to the mystery, and thus ambiguous presence of the object – fluently summoning François Mauriac’s eloquent interpretation of Frank’s oeuvre as being defined ‘l’étrange luxe de rien’ (the strange luxury of nothingness).