Objects of use fit for hanging as art

After a recent installation in London, I took a short respite to East Sussex, where I toured Sissinghurst, Great Dixter and Nymans to celebrate the June bloom.

While there, I happened upon a fabulous country restaurant, which served local harvest transformed into an exquisite cuisine. But what stopped this designer dead in his tracks was the innovative décor there.

Guests stepped onto highly waxed and dramatically figured walnut floors, surrounded by a sleek modern interpretation of old English paneling. Painted in a matte dark green-gray, these minimally structured paneled walls sported not a painting nor a print, but a sumptuous brown velvet frame with contemporary rosewood mouldings. Upon each of these velvet surfaces was placed a series of three Victorian silver pieces.

Almost like observing the tiny Tiffany jewel box windows, 
these three-dimensional 
displays of cutlery were magnetic—drawing attention to the magnificent chasing, intricate embossing and elegant luster.

The Victorian period was renowned for its elaborate meals, laid out with course after course of varied foods. Each course had specifically designated flatware assigned to it: the fish knife, oyster fork, butter tongs, etc. When in silver antiques stores, I have seen the most sophisticated of designers remark, “Now what would that piece have possibly been used for?” And the astute dealer has pointed out the most impossibly specific task that the beautifully wrought three-pronged or splayed fork was meant to javelin.

For the most part, these beautifully wrought creatures are mostly hidden in drawers; their stunning craftsmanship wasting away in the dark. But this clever restaurateur linked her rarefied profession ingeniously to the even more rarefied tools it takes to consume her fare. The lesson relearned by this designer was to look around for the beautiful artifacts undiscovered and underappreciated and invent new ways to observe and elevate even the most mundane of objects.

The simplest objects have filtered through the aesthetic design process (some more successfully than others) and before one thinks conventionally about displaying sculpture, paintings or prints, one might look no further than great-grandmother Ethridge’s teaspoons for inspiration.

In fact, the concept of collecting and displaying is a fairly recent one. The Victoria & Albert Museum, London’s treasure trove for the decorative arts, notes in its materials that up to the late 1600s, nothing but utilitarian objects were to be found—and then not as a display for aesthetic enjoyment.

Not until the early 1700s did objects, sculpture and paintings find their way into the provenance of artistic adulation. As a means to enjoy and/or impress, collections simply did not exist, which is hard to imagine for those of us who are addicted hoarders!

I started to ruminate about all that could be contemplated as “wall art,” and thought of how I enjoy seeing dealers illuminate their treasures. I remember many years ago stumbling onto a Kansas City dealer who had purchased an entire warehouse of Edwardian bathing suits. Now who would have thought? But she mounted these woolly dark creations onto a white background and framed them in a severe black frame, and now you see these graphic wonders in practically every beach house across America.

Sadly, one of our most intriguing and dedicated dealers who taught us to re-imagine our rich inheritance of utilitarian, commercial and domestic objects has passed on. Amy Perlin—a big-hearted, obsessive antiques dealer—showed us how to look at vintage eyeglass moulds as sculpture.

She was the first to bring us antique dental tools and cabinets as furnishings. She wrapped her furnishings in burlap, allowing the needle and calve’s gut string to showcase an upholsterer’s artistic underpinnings. She celebrated the detritus or patina that only the often carelessly worn can provide.

Huge architectural fragments were never too heavy or large for Amy to use as a focal point above a fireplace. She would introduce antique ledgers as wallpaper or frame them as a rare window into a piece of the curiously remote financial world. She reveled in the bizarre with bones, skulls and bronze brains as final punctuation to this ephemeral world of decoration.

Worn, soiled, seed packets collected and mounted for the inveterate gardener was a vision Amy saw long ago. She found overdrawn tiebacks with gargoyles, and while possibly frightening the rest of us, she displayed them as treasures to be adored.

This inveterate dealer would cheer for those artists who have taken the common soap sponge and repeated it enough to 
create wallpaper. And she would revel in the “Belgian” movement that promoted bleached dry woods and worn antiques of monumental scale, because she was the original conspirator-inspirator of this movement. Amy had a passion for the theatricality her objects conveyed, no matter how humble their beginnings or how worn their condition. Original aged patina was extraordinarily beautiful to Amy.

Her shop in Bridgehampton has always been a testament to her gutsy pursuit of pieces that command a presence, but her New York shop is like Aladdin’s cave, inspiring, overwhelming, slightly scary and always intriguing and compelling. Her passion for objects and their 
charisma was palpable. Our world will miss her sensibility, but we will have profited and learned from her most unique visions.

Amy Perlin’s influence across the globe has been legendary. And it will live on—from those visual treats at that little restaurant in East Sussex to the rooms Manhattanites and East Enders have created with her treasures.