Renewing my appreciation for sculptures at home after a visit to the Met
Last weekend, while in New York trying to stay out of the freezing drizzle, DC and I, along with half of Manhattan, ducked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The packed museum seemed more so because visitors were bundled in coats, hats and scarves. Each body was twice its normal size, so you felt as if you were in a crowd of corndogs. Thus, the art of seeing art turned into a combat sport. When I tired of jockeying between the padded players, dodging, tackling, craning my neck, extending on tiptoes and inserting myself like a comma to catch a glimpse of Van Gogh’s “Cypresses,” I gravitated away from the walls toward the salons’ centers, where I discovered, or rediscovered, the beauty of sculpture.
The museum’s many sculptures were blessedly surrounded by air, enough space to appreciate them.
So, while others formed a gaggle around John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” I could take in Degas’s “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer,” in bronze, from all sides.
And so I have the grim New York weather and a thick Sunday crowd to thank for my renewed appreciation of three-dimensional art. I left the New York Met that afternoon
wondering why we don’t do more with sculpture in our homes.
Now I’m not talking about installing Michelangelo’s David or Rodin’s Thinker in the living room, but sculpture by definition is any figurative object that is lovely to look at from a variety of angles, that can be seen in the round, or half round, and that can bring depth and dimension to a room that flat art simply can’t. I had to call someone to talk about this. “I love when a piece of art is not just flat,” said my friend Christopher Grubb, a Beverly Hills designer whose rooms, to my eye, always manage to strike a perfect pitch. “Sculptural objects do what paintings can’t by giving that third dimension. They have a richness of shadowing, and give a room visual relief.”
“So sculpture is to painting what television is to live theater,” I added, getting carried away as usual.
“Sculpture feels more personal because it shares your space,” he said.
“But why is installing sculpture in a home so intimidating?”
“When you frame a work and hang it on the wall, you tell the world, ‘I think this is important,’ but set it out in three dimensions, and you’re saying, ‘I think this is super, super important,’ ” he said. And that can quickly cool creative courage. “The idea of adding sculpture makes people nervous,” Grubb said, “because they think it needs to be a Roman bust or a Giacometti piece, something that should be in a museum. But sculpture is anything that cuts through space.” “Like a great chandelier,” I said. “Or a fantastic lamp base,” he added. “An arching orchid.” “A side table of twisted wood.” “An architectural fragment.” And, of course, a statue. When designing a room, most of us think in terms of backgrounds (floors and walls), furniture and wall art. And while that can pull a room together well enough, what really punctuates a space, I decided in that overcrowded museum, is sculpture. We all could use a little more depth.