Taste and time

We have been doing what we do long enough now to observe an evolution in the public's architectural taste and thought it would be interesting to highlight a few of the watercolors that have come to the forefront over the years and examine why. Of course this has nothing to do with contemporary architecture but only applies to the range of historical subjects we treat, but with our exhibitions and through the sale of our note cards we've seen strong and definite trends develop and it's certainly worthwhile looking more closely into what lurks behind them.

From the outset, we have drawn the full range of traditional architectural styles: neoclassicism, baroque, rococo, Chinoiserie, neo-gothic, rustic, and exotic—a variety of building types: chateaux and pavilions; garden follies in the form of grottos, pagodas, trelliswork pavilions and tents—and the gamut of garden ornament: vases, ironwork, sculpture, fountains and other details.

The surprise favorite to appear from our first exhibitions at Didier Aaron—at least to me—was an unrealized project for an octagonally planned trelliswork pavilion designed in the early 1680s for Louis XIV's gardens at Trianon. Between us opinions were divided as to its architectural merits (I must admit I found it naive and awkward and bizarrely conceived—what a dark, dank, wretched spot the central fountain would have been, set under that huge expanse of roof). It took some time and persuasion for Bernd to convince me to include it in the show, and I grudgingly dubbed it "the Cheese Bell" because of its massive, baroquely curved, wood-shingled roof.

Bref, the Cheese Bell was a huge hit. It and another large watercolor were purchased immediately by a well-known Manhattan-based fashion designer and his wife and it could have departed with several other gallery visitors. (Oh, how we envy photographers, for whom an original constitutes an edition of eight prints!) A few years later, in the late House & Garden, we spotted the watercolors hanging prominently in the living room of their country house. We launched our note cards soon after the show and the image was far and away the bestseller of an already rather large collection and remained so throughout the late 90s.

Having been proven so thoroughly wrong, I wanted to fathom the mystery of the Cheese Bell's success. Well, it certainly evoked gardens quite powerfully with its forest-green trelliswork, and this led us to create several other treillage pavilions which surprisingly left the public indifferent. In fact one of them, a personal favorite for us both in design and execution, lingers inexplicably orphaned to this day, so obviously trelliswork was not the key to its popularity.

We had drawn several domed structures for the first show, the Cheese Bell among them, and this, along with the alchemy of the pavilion's other attributes, was the key to its appeal. People love domes. They give three-dimensionality effortlessly to the flat elevations we draw, which one gallery visitor summed up by remarking, "I love the rich perspective you've created with the dome." Of course an elevation is not a perspective, but the comment was perfectly true. I've also come to believe that domes subconsciously evoke the maternal breast—they are round, generous and comforting; not sharp-edged and rectilinear.

In general though, in the late 90s taste was evenly divided between pared-down neoclassicism and the most sober of Chinoiserie, represented by the Belvedere at Trianon (with its soft, low dome) and the Pagoda at Chanteloup, a picturesquely tiered stone building with a classically columned base.

With 911 all that changed dramatically. (As an aside, its aftermath was also devastating to the art world at all levels and it took long, difficult years for the public to regain its interest in art.) When the public did return, it delighted in the rustic and anything having to do with nature—intimations of a rural, arcadian past and evocations of earth and gardens. The most popular watercolors from that time were simple, small-scaled, approachable; a moss-covered, Medicis-form urn from the Château de Raray sums up the mood.

In the last few years before the Crash of '08 (just as it had on the eve of the French Revolution, it must be noted), interest in the exotic and in "imaginative" Chinoiserie simply exploded. Despite the implications of history repeating, this remarkable wave of enthusiasm has been gratifying as Chinoiserie has been an abiding interest of ours, and nothing captures this yearning for fantasy and escapism better than an unrealized project for a garden niche at Trianon designed for Marie-Antoinette. A bold, light-hearted, theatrical pastiche, this small, flamboyant structure has had a simply magical appeal.

In the past year, this watercolor, which has become iconic for us, has been replaced by another that has again surprised us much as the Cheese Bell did—a small neoclassical pavilion from the late 18th century that once stood in the gardens of the French estate of Romainville. Sun-struck, unassuming, flanked by orange trees in Versailles planters, it has gained steadily in popularity practically by stealth.

It is a dramatic shift in taste from exoticism to classicism, but the appeal of an intimate, almost miniature scale remains constant. The building is in no way unique and in fact is quite similar to several other small pavilions we have drawn, but this one has captured the imagination as the others have not. As to the why, we believe it is due to its approachability and human scale, to the solidity and reassurance of its simple form and the justness of its detailing, the openness suggested by its large, glassed, arched door and oblique windows, and to its unforeseen power of evocation—who would not want to spend a summer's afternoon in and about such a structure, especially today?

Charles Ryskamp

In January we received the Sotheby's catalogue for the auction of Charles Ryskamp's estate, handsomely illustrated and deeply melancholy and still something of a shock, this thick, elegant publication. Charles died almost a year ago now, on Friday the 26th of March 2010 and quite suddenly, as he had kept the true nature of his fatal illness from his friends, so typical of him, not wishing to cause a morbid fuss in his final days.

To see his drawings for sale wasn't discomfiting; he always said that art should go back into the world to benefit younger generations, but it was a curious feeling to see illustrated—and know that you could purchase—the crystal tumblers that he served gin and tonics in, or the silver plate that held the cheddar crackers that went with them, or the cherrywood cocktail table that it stood upon, or the armchair on which he sat when we visited, or the delicate painted wood sculpture of a pear that he had placed on the side table (he had a great fondness for pears and had several drawings of them as well). All those personal things that were so much a reflection of him, even if simply inanimate objects—one better understands why the Pharoahs were entombed with their possessions.

Needless to say, though it must be said, the news of his death came as a terrible shock and remains a great loss. Charles was also an authority on Elizabethan poetry (particularly Cowper) and a professor of English while I majored in English at Princeton, and we turned to him when we conceived our first large exhibition, of French garden architecture. We visited him at his then-home in Princeton and spread out the first half-dozen watercolors on the living room floor and he studied them and said it would be a wonderful exhibition to be sponsored by The Frick Collection (he was then its director) and he put us in touch with Hervé Aaron and Alan Salz at Didier Aaron and well, that pretty much was that, our careers were decided there and then.

Charles was patron of our first two exhibitions at Didier Aaron, which in part benefited The Frick Art Reference Library, for which he worked tirelessly. He also authored the preface to Pleasure Pavilions and Follies, our first book, and we always sought and relied on his advice when planning our exhibitions. But he was first and foremost a friend of rare fidelity and generosity of spirit.

Charles had a nearly unique ability to make the world a finer, richer, more interesting place simply by being in his presence—a place of abundance and fascination. We've met only two others with this rare gift and it is certainly the reason for his remarkable life and career. But we've also rarely laughed so hard with anyone, and remember wiping away an evening's worth of tears when he impishly took us to a curious cabaret on the outskirts of Vienna dedicated to an old-fashioned and sentimental local folk music known as Schrammermusik, a Surrealist's dream frozen in time that simply had to be experienced to be believed. During that trip there was also stifled laughter echoing down the dim, imposing and surprisingly vacant corridors of the Vienna Academy from a corner room in which hung a massive Hieronymus Bosch, though we weren't laughing at the Bosch but something it somehow provoked that we spun out having to do with the medieval relic trade. (Well, we'd just seen room after room of Habsburg relics that morning at the Imperial Treasury and as the saying goes, you had to be there.)

We've always been interested in garden vases; they were the subject of our earliest exhibition and we later published a book dedicated to them. Once we'd sent him a small sketch of one made into a birthday card and he liked it so much that he commissioned another and, typically of Charles, requested it hold an orange tree (as they did at Versailles) "to give it life." We'd never thought of that and did as he asked and mailed it off to him in New York. The day it arrived he was with a curator from the Morgan Library, selecting drawings for the exhibition of his collection that they were then preparing. He could not wait until the curator had left to open the parcel (a framed cartoon hung in his hall showing a man clutching a book in one hand and pushing someone off a cliff with the other and was captioned "the collector") so they first saw it together and that is how we came to have the rare honor of having a work exhibited at the Morgan, and to discover a theme that we pursued with several watercolors that remain favorites to this day.

That watercolor and several others of ours in his collection appeared in the Sotheby's sale and a friend and collector from the other end of the country wrote soon after to inform us that she had purchased the vase and had also once met Charles when visiting New York and that he had given her and her husband a personal tour of the Frick that she would never forget, and that the watercolor would remind her of him and the day. Certainly all this is nothing of more than personal note; simply a train of small, fortuitous events more than coincidence that Charles, simply by being Charles, enabled; a small circle closed as his drawing, just as he had wished, found its new home.

(The photograph is of Charles in his office at The Frick Collection, the holders of its copyright)

Guard Pavilions

One of the most distinctive elements of the French château are the paired guard pavilions (guérites) that flank the entry to the forecourt and that announce and distill the estate's architectural style. We have become quite fond of these small architectural jewels and have been searching for and painting a number of them in the past few years.

Until well into the 18th century, the rectangular block created by the château and its forecourt, and occasionally the garden parterre also, was often delimited by a wet or dry moat—an esthetic holdover from the middle ages when châteaux were actually châteaux forts, or fortified castles. Even after moats fell out of fashion, the forecourt was still enclosed by high stone walls or ironwork grilles that abutted the guérites for privacy and security.

Even Louis XV's Petit Trianon, safely ensconced in the Great Park of Versailles, held to these traditions, though its architect Gabriel reduced the guard pavilions to dollhouse-like miniatures barely large enough for a sentry to stand in. Others, such as those built at Chanteloup for the king's disgraced First Minister, the duc de Choiseul, are small cubic pavilions set far from the château itself. (Below, top: Petit Trianon, bottom: Chanteloup)

At Blérancourt and Chantilly, both dating from the 17th century and sharing the same distinctive slate roofs, the pavilions border moats, dry and wet respectively. Quite clearly, guérites also lead charmed lives, as many of them—including those at Chanteloup and Blérancourt pictured here—survived the destruction and parceling of their estates after the French Revolution.
(Below, top: Blérancourt, bottom: Chantilly, shown also in the lead photograph)

A personal favorite are the rococco guérites at Champlâtreux, with their overscaled oculus windows set in gracefully sweeping mansard roofs.

The 2011 Arthur Ross Awards

We have been honored by the 30th annual Arthur Ross Award for Fine Art from the Institute of Classical Architecture/Classical America. From the ICA/CA website:

Established in 1982 by Classical America chairman of the board, Arthur Ross, and its president, Henry Hope Reed, the Arthur Ross Awards were created to recognize and celebrate excellence in the classical tradition. From the beginning, the awards have recognized the achievements and contributions of architects, painters, sculptors, artisans, landscape designers, educators, publishers, patrons, and others dedicated to preserving and advancing the classical tradition.

Past honorees for architecture have ranged from well-known practitioners such as Allan Greenberg and Quinlan Terry, to relatively unknown but no less accomplished ones such as A. Hayes Town and Harold H. Fisher.

The awardees are chosen each year by a selection committee made up of members of the ICA&CA Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Fellows, and distinguished members of related professions.

This year's honorees include Franck & Lohsen Architects for Architecture and Ralph Lauren for Patronage. The awards ceremony will be held at the University Club in Manhattan on the evening of Monday, May 2, 2011.

Watercolor Magazine, Winter 2011

Watercolor Magazine's current issue contains a ten-page article on our work written by Naomi Ekperigen, "Attaining Perfection with Watercolor." We certainly strive to live up to that title, and the article is copiously illustrated with a variety of our watercolors, as well as with our porcelain designs.

Bernd was interviewed while on a trip to New York and Andrew by phone in Paris, and the resulting text is extensive and engagingly written, touching upon our formative years as well as the mechanics of our watercolor technique and the design process for the china services.

ANTICOMANIA

Under the category Better Late than Never, we are remiss in not having mentioned Anticomania, the remarkable and recently ended exhibition at Galerie J. Kugel, the Parisian antiquaires located on the quai Anatole France near the French National Assembly.

The sumptuous exhibition, mixing exceptional Greco-Roman antiquities with Renaissance and Grand Tour objects, was staged by Pier Luigi Pizzi, who designed a spectacular coffer-domed Palladian rotunda that stood in the gallery's courtyard and housed Antique marbles. The objects assembled, as is the case with every one of the Kugels' exhibitions, were of exceptional quality, beauty and rarity, and their presentation in the gallery recalled the grand interiors of Roman palaces.



The brothers Alexis and Nicolas Kugel requested a design for the invitaton and cover of the catalogue that would evoke the paintings of Hubert Robert, the Ancien Régime's master of Italian ruins, and the final image is the result of weeks of consultations and refinements.

Launching Chinoiserie and Swag, Limoges Porcelain for BRFC

Early in our careers while at Robert A. M. Stern Architects, we spent a good deal of time designing furnishings, bed linens, textiles and porcelain for private clients and international manufacturers. This was in the mid 1980s, during the first, great wave of the architect as product designer, whose icons today are Michael Graves' famous tea kettle and the Tizio desk lamp.

These Stern designs were among the most interesting and rewarding work we have ever done, and we are particularly pleased to again have opportunities to pursue product design anew, this time under our own names. Years after our initial, stillborn Limoges porcelain designs for RAMSA, we have had the great, good fortune to ally with Bryn Reese Fine China, a fledgling company dedicated to reviving the art of the table with innovative porcelain of the highest quality.

We were approached by BRFC's eponymous founder two years ago with a proposal for collaboration and the end result, after a fascinating gestation, are two services, Chinoiserie and Swag, that offer something contemporary porcelain has rarely seen—designs that build and interrelate among separate, unique pieces to create a harmonious ensemble, designs that tell a story that unfolds as a meal itself unfolds, enriching the dining experience with what we hope are successive notes of elegance, harmony, whimsy and surprise.

A mere handful of patterns have ever employed this approach; almost all are simple repetitions of the same decorative band, enlarged or reduced as needed to decorate the shoulder of each piece in the service. The result is, frankly, monotony, and in truth the vast majority of traditional patterns offer not the slightest nod to contemporary design aesthetics. This stultifying combination is, we believe, a major reason for the current crisis in fine porcelain, which cannot simply be blamed on the encroachment of low-priced Asian offerings or the belief that fiancées consider bridal registries for fine tableware to be démodé.

When we surveyed the market at the outset of this project, what surprised us most was the severe lack of patterns that combined understatement and a fresh perspective on traditional porcelain. We saw a real need to create services that both respond to today’s more informal entertaining and that reinvigorate the timeless qualities of traditional designs with lightness, concision and grace. We also remarked that many contemporary patterns were overly graphic and frankly overpowering "statements," and we saw that our task as designers was to accentuate the natural beauty of finely made porcelain, not to employ it as a backdrop for our designs. We hope that these new patterns embody a unique synthesis of abundance and restraint—lively yet balanced, each service is in fact five related patterns that, like a musical score, build a whole far richer than any single movement.

We intended both patterns to be "backbone" services, to be chosen and used as the host's "good china"; and so we selected fine porcelain from Limoges, France with clean, classic forms. We wanted that both Chinoiserie and Swag be equally at home at a formal dinner or an impromptu luncheon, combined with heirloom crystal and silver or with contemporary tableware. The Limoges blanks were decorated at Pickard Porcelain, the only quality porcelain company in the United States and the traditional supplier of State services to the White House (in fact, one set of proofs was delayed while the company rushed to complete the Obama State service).

The following posts treat each pattern in greater detail.

To inquire or receive a catalog, please contact us at: contact@architecturalwatercolors.com.

Swag

Swag was inspired by a gouache sketch of a ceiling pattern executed by the great Prussian architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and thus recalls the understated, refined neoclassicism of late eighteenth-century interiors. Evocative rather than imitative, Swag pares the visual vocabulary of its source to its essentials, though we hope with a contemporary eye toward balance and restraint. The pattern is really an exercise in minimalism and evocation: the sparing use of decoration, enriched with burnished gold accents, complement the service’s classic forms and allow the natural beauty of the Limoges porcelain to take center stage.

The design both combines and alternates a Greek-key band in Cherokee red with delicate, abstracted laurel garlands, highlighted with burnished gold and touches of faded periwinkle blue. The understated masculinity of the bold red key—simple, rectilinear and finely scaled—finds an ideal partner and foil in the laurel garlands. Festooned in graceful, repeating arcs or running in simple bands, the trompe l'oeil gold garlands enliven the service and provide both counterpoint and balance to the red Greek-key bands. Both Greek key and blue garland teacups are available.


Swag is certainly a more "formal" service than Chinoiserie, and that was our intention. We believe that the use of classic design elements, employed with subtlety and address, makes Swag an extremely versatile service, ideal for entertaining and any occasion that merits a beautifully dressed table.

Chinoiserie

Chinoiserie was developed from a watercolor of a fantasy Chinoiserie bridge, "The Buttery Bridge at Poltow." The pattern is intended to evoke the playful spirit of the exotic pagodas and garden pavilions which embellished the landscape gardens of Ancien Régime Europe. Like the charming garden follies that are its inspiration, Chinoiserie freely mixes diverse elements to surprise and delight throughout the meal.

Chinese Chippendale treillage and celadon porcelain with a craquelure glaze dominate the pattern, with certain pieces highlighted with colorful accents of butterflies at rest and in flight. Chinoiserie features rich color harmonies of juniper green and dusky rose, embellished with burnished gold accents, that enhance the subtle white of the Limoges porcelain and highlight its classic forms and timeless elegance. Both juniper green and Chinese red service plates are available.


The teacup, with its miniature vignette of the original watercolor, echoes the scenic views of the great eighteenth-century porcelain manufacturers, while the butterflies themselves are a contemporary reference to the insects originally added by the early artists of Meissen to obscure the minor imperfections of porcelain pieces.

Above all, our intention with Chinoiserie was to create a mix of patterns which both capture the style's unique spirit with understatement and a lightness of touch; we hope we have succeeded, and that the service can be effortlessly used for both formal dining and informal occasions.

Librairie Galignani, Paris

Librairie Galignani, located at 224, rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries Gardens in Paris' First Arrondissement, is the oldest English-language bookseller outside the English-speaking world and was founded in 1801 by the Venetian Giovanni Galignani, an advenurous member of an illustrious publishing family whose first work was printed in 1520.

Today, Galignani is the foremost Parisian bookseller of works on art and art history, architecture, design, fashion, politics and English literature, and maintains a beautiful bookstore fitted out with tall mahogany bookcases, herringbone oak floors, and wheeled ladders fixed on a brass rail to reach the highest shelves, all bathed in natural light beneath a large, old skylight. An important part of Paris' cultural life, Galignani regularly hosts lectures and receptions for authors of newly published works.

For several years, Galignani has been featuring our architectural notecards in exclusivity, having refused the entreaties of all other producers. The new director, Madame Danielle Cillien Sabatier, commissioned this watercolor of the bookstore's facade with the intention to reproduce it as a folding card, to be used for invitations to special events and offered for sale in the store as well. It will also be reproduced as the store's bookmark, which is offered with every book purchased, and of which over 100,000 copies are distributed each year.

The watercolor depicts a portion of the famous arcades bordering the Tuileries, drawn in elevation, and is combined with a detailed one-point perspective of the bookstore's display windows and the interiors behind, the central doors left open to catch a glimpse of the annex at the far end of the store.