Modern | Russell Brightwell

ANGELO AND I

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The Laurens’ Fifth Avenue Apartment by Angelo Donghia, c. 1980

Angelo Donghia died in NYC April 12,1985. I was still at Parsons studying Graphic Design and not aware of his unprecedented success as an interior designer and business man. Or of the figure he cut though Manhattan society from Studio 54 to the Metropolitan Opera Club.
But decades after his death he seems to be “haunting” me in the best possible way. First came “Angelo Donghia: Design Superstar,” a retrospective at the New York School of Interior Design in the Fall of 2015. The venue limited the scope of the exhibition, but it gave me a glimpse of Donghia’s Fifth Avenue duplex for Ralph and Ricky Lauren. More Tribeca [before Tribeca was Tribeca] than Upper East Side, it was low-slung, white and spare – no molding, no art, just overstuffed white furniture and unadorned white walls as far as the eye could see.
Not long after, I was talking to a friend, Liz Youngling, who’s career has included stints in fashion and as an interior designer. Having attended meetings in that gorgeous apartment when she worked for Ralph Lauren, she could confirm it was even more spectacular in person. Recently via email, Liz also remembered, “Angelo used to come to our office quite a bit to see Ralph and he was the most elegant man! So well-dressed, handsome, and kind to all of us peons. I’ll never forget being around him the little bit that I was – not many men like that anymore.” Certainly something to aspire to.

Angelo Donghia and unamed friends in NYC

I read more and learned that the Donghia studio’s signature included silver-foil ceilings, lacquered walls, bleached floors and oversize upholstered furniture. His use of grey flannel, a reference to his family’s tailoring business, prompted the moniker, “the man in the gray flannel sofa.” And his business acumen led him to produce furniture, textiles and wallcoverings for the design trade, and he licensed his designs for sheets, towels, china, glassware and giftware produced for the general public, to great success unheard of for an interior designer of the day.

A vignette in the Donghia Dallas showroom featuring vintage books, ceramics and silver from my inventory.

Today, Donghia, Inc., operates twelve showrooms across the United States with collections including textiles, wallcoverings, case pieces, accessories and upholstery. The Dallas showroom is helmed by the dynamic Jessica Craig. I was introduced to Jessica by my dear friend, interior designer Alice Cottrell, with an eye toward making advertising industry connections. A second meeting clarified two things for both of us: my dream job wasn’t in advertising, but in selling beautiful objects, books and art; and Jessica and I could work together.

I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with Jessica and the Donghia Dallas showroom, providing thoughtfully chosen books, ceramics and silver accessories. I hope to bring even a bit of Angelo Donghia’s wit and flair to the showroom’s already smart décor. And I hope he would approve.

Doing Dallas

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The Library on Parry Avenue with books, collectibles, ceramics, and silver on display.

I’m the guy that moved into the loft directly across the street from Fair Park in Dallas the day the State Fair of Texas commenced. For the next three weeks, it was mayhem down here. Not to worry, I was a prisoner of the loft anyway, getting everything from the TPRB office and the Inwood Manor condo that had been in storage in Houston for past six months sorted and stowed. It was all the more important that everything be just so, since the loft is my home AND my livelihood. That it is so beautiful is due to the talent and hard work of interior designer and dear friend, Alice Cottrell, and her trusted jack of all trades and all-around miracle worker, Steven Hauser.
The loft is “done” and I’ve been working to launch my new endeavor – selling artist and architect designed objects; original art and editions; vintage ceramics; collectibles; rare art, photography, and fashion books; fashion and design collaborations; and commissioned objects by Texas artists to interior designers and directly to clients. I’ve gone to every event [“He’d go to the opening of a drain!”], talked to everyone, and have had enough delicious meetings/meals with fantastic people to need bigger pants. With a job providing thoughtfully chosen accessories for Alice’s latest Museum Tower project under my belt, some press coming out in January [fingers crossed] and a collaboration with the Donghia showroom in Dallas [see my next post], things are coming along. This gig is certainly not a “sure thing,” but people and the universe keep stepping in just when I wonder if it “will ever happen.” It has happened. It is happening.

A MOVING STORY

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Dallas bound

I moved from Houston, where I grew up, to New York in August of 1983, ostensibly to attend Parsons School of Design, but really to become the person I was meant to be – creative, sophisticated, artistic, chic and ultimately open and honest about who I was in all areas of my life. New York did the trick – it was everything I had hoped for and so much more.
In June of 1995, I moved to London to get away from both a contretemps at the ad agency I worked for and my best friend’s gruesome lingering death from AIDS. London was a great distraction. It was all familiar, but all a little different. A New York with more age and more green space, London in the mid 90s was THE center of design, theatre, pop music and culture in the world. It was so much fun to be a part of it all for a few years.
In June of 1997, I returned to New York – the ad agency having closed the London office. I settled in for an increasingly unhappy few years. Nothing was doing the trick anymore. Not the job, not relationships (such as they were), not even the things I loved – art, theatre, fashion. I resorted to what had worked for me in the distant past to change the way I felt. It worked until it didn’t.
In the last days of 2001, my father scraped me up off the floor of my apartment near Madison Square Park and took me back with him to Houston. I did recover from what ailed me [and continue to] but I was horrified to be back where I started. The place I had run from. Feeling I had little choice, I made the best of it. I opened an ad agency in Houston with a terrific business partner and made a good life. I had close friends. Dated. Traveled. Bought and sold beautiful homes. Made my peace with not being in New York and returned 3 or 4 times a year.
The agency was great for 11 out of the 13 years we were open. The last year was not one of them. We closed the doors in March of this year. I sold my apartment in February, and a few months later, moved into the garage apartment of a friend’s home in Broadacres, a leafy inner loop neighborhood in Houston. I began to look for employment and talk to everyone who would speak to me. It was a terrific experience. The universe met me more than halfway by bringing me a lot of lovely, smart, creative, and to a fault, generous, people. What I didn’t find was a job in Marketing or Advertising. Free of the agency and real estate [and, sadly, my lovely 17-year old American Eskimo dog Holly, who had passed away at the end of 2016], the universe seemed to be telling me that I could be free of my career as well, something I hadn’t really considered.
As I continued to look for a job in my “chosen” field, I began to consider what I might really choose. I’ve collected architect and artist designed objects, fashion collaborations, art and photography, and books on all of it for decades. It’s what I love. I love the stories behind the objects and artworks – the designers and artists, the makers and marketers, and how these works fit into the whole of their output and the world. Inspired by an article about a gentleman who sells design objects from his home in Brooklyn, I started to talk to people about creating such an endeavor myself. The response was overwhelmingly positive – a chorus of “it’s very you.”
At the end of this week, I’m moving to Dallas to pursue my new business there, perhaps along with an advertising or creative gig – I’m open to whatever the universe brings. A full 34 years after I first left “home,” I’m leaving again to strive to be even more of the person I am, without apology or obligation. There is a pretty good chunk of risk involved, but I have a lot of love and support including that of a lifelong friend, a sister really. And at this stage, “success” is whatever comes next, as long as I let the universe move me.

Stern Expression

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Robert A. M. Stern’s “Century” Candlestick for Swid Powell, 1984

Robert A.M. Stern is perhaps the most prominent representative of New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture in this country. In much of his work – from pre-war on steroids buildings for potentates in Manhattan to shingled 10,000 square foot “cottages” in the Hamptons – his muscular approach to contemporary classicism is evident.
Swid Powell, founded in 1982 by Nan Swid and Addie Powell, produced innovative housewares designed by the foremost architects of the 1980s, including Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Robert A. M. Stern, among others. Executed in silver, ceramics and glass, these objects have in many cases, become design classics. None more so than Stern’s 1984 “Century” fluted column candlestick.
One may never have the opportunity to live in one of Stern’s iconic towers or homes, but one can live with this hefty silver-plated column, the perfect distillation of Stern’s approach to design on a decidedly more manageable scale.

Met Monster Mash

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A contemporary figure holds a 300 year old Egyptian hippopotamus head in Adrián Villar Rojas’ Met roof graden installation, “The Theater of Disappearance”

Adrián Villar Rojas’ “The Theater of Disappearance” is New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s summer rooftop installation. Sixteen sculptures are arranged throughout the outdoor space, on and around banquet tables and chairs strewn with plates and glasses, the aftermath of some monstrous party. Villar Rojas has chosen pieces of the Met’s mind-bogglingly extensive collection and combined them with likenesses of friends and family [and himself] to create the otherworldly guests. Through the use of laser scanning and photo measurement techniques combined with machine milling and 3D printing, an 18th Century Ganesha tops a girl in trainers who in turn straddles King Haremhab as a royal scribe from 1336 BC. A young man who you might see every day in your local coffee shop sits atop a banqueting table holding a 3000 year old Egyptian Hippo’s head and has upside down disembodied hands (complete with arms) for glasses. Each combined sculpture is finished in the same light or dark material [that reads as stone or bronze or marble] so that they each seem of a piece, in spite of their multiple sources. Villar Rojas’ has freed these works from the museum’s collection and recombined them in exuberant modern mashups, bringing them to life in a way The Met’s traditional methods of display never could.

Early Yesterday

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Jack Early’s Man Boobs, 2014

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to see and then learn more about artist Jack Early and his work, part of Bill Arning’s terrific “A Better Yesterday” at CAMH. Early grew up gay and creative in the south of the 1970s just as I did. The tightly cropped hypermasculine 1970s dude chest of “Man Boobs” (2014) – and the other 2 paintings in the show – all live on a background of toy soldier wallpaper – the kind typical in the boys’ bedrooms of my childhood. I felt the tension in the picture even before I heard Early say in his recorded “Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes” (2014), also in the show, “I was a gay eight-year-old in 1970. I would have chosen flowers or a circus theme, but it wasn’t lost on me that choosing soldiers would lend some air of masculinity.” He abandoned himself to pass in a world that told him it was dangerous to be him. I abandoned myself to stay safe. We all did.

Jack Early’s work is exactly what I was missing in The Speed Art Museum’s “Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art.” [see my earlier blog post, Due South.]

I could tell you more about Jack Early’s life and career, but he does it best in:
Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes!

Chicken Little

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Tapio Wirkkala’s Pollo Vase, Rosenthal Studio Line, Germany 1970

Tapio Wirkkala (1915-1985) was perhaps Finland’s most famous internationally known designer. He brought his optimistic minimialism to thousands of objects from banknotes to cutlery, from plastic to porcelain, for some of the world’s most sophisticated manufacturers.
Wirkkala worked with Rosenthal AG in Germany for decades beginning in 1956, producing 15 porcelain tableware services and over 200 different objects. He carefully considered the ergonomics of these utilitarian pieces and he also developed an etched porcelain finish that was pleasing to the eye and touch that would be known as “silk matte.”
The “Pollo” vase pictured, designed around 1970 is one of my favorite Wirkkala designs. Available in a variety of sizes, this, the smallest “chicken,” fits comfortably in my palm. Made in black or white porcelain, all share Wirkkala’s silk matte finish – they are wonderful objects to handle. Rows of raised dots eminate from the “neck” opening that sits to one end of the “body” of the bird-shaped vase. Its bottom is rounded, so it rocks gently back and forth – an animated little thing.

Not Your Old Bamboo

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Sun, 1980 by Tanabe Shōchiku III. Bamboo, rattan & lacquer

The newish (2012) Asia Society Texas Center is housed in Yoshio Taniguchi’s elegantly rendered building in the Museum District. Best known for his expansion and renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, for this his first free standing building in the U.S., Tanaguchi combined graceful design with stunningly beautiful stone, wood and glass. The building alone with it’s exquisite materials, amazing spaces and ethereal Watern Garden Terrace [complete with periodic spools of artificial fog] are well worth a visit, especially with some additional reading on the Center’s website about the building beforehand.

Another reason to stop by the Center is “Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art,” an exhibit of the work of 16 contemporary Japanese bamboo artists on display through July 30th. These skillful, soulful artists use ancient basket-making techniques to create modern, often surprising and playful works. Using humble bamboo – a type of grass rather than wood – rattan and lacquer, they have created forms that look like otherworldly pillows, sails, sets of armor, insects and water droplets. Some even resemble the baskets and flower vases from which they evolved – with a “twist.” The dark green walls and dramatic lighting of the exhibit accentuate the range of colors found in the works – from tan and brown to red and nearly black – and add drama to the sometimes alien shapes. It’s a joy to see and understand that these artists have repurposed utilitarian “making” traditions and their everyday materials to create objects for artistic expression. May this even newer tradition thrive for generations to come.