Gris, en couleur
Because my co-authors and I spent so many hours looking at black and white photos while we were working on Hollywood Arensberg, encounters “in the wild” with the color-filled artworks that were once part of the Arensberg collection always manage to surprise!
This sensation is perhaps heightened for me because I mostly work with Ancient American sculpture and objects, originally adorned with bright pigments that have been lost to time.
At a recent exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Color and Illusion: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, I found myself captivated by Gris’ Lamp (1916), which hung in the Arensbergs’ living room. On the accompanying label, the show’s curators (the BMA’s Katy Rothkopf and Nicole R. Myers of the Dallas Museum of Art) wrote that in this painting, “Gris renders the light emanating from a lamp as jagged shards speckled with brightly hued dots,” which, “in a nod to [the color theory of Georges Seurat] paired yellow and purple […] complementary colors [that] enhance each other’s intensity." This reminded me yet again of how colorful and luminous—even overwhelming—a visit to the Arensberg home would have been.
The exhibition lighting allowed me to cast shadows with my hands that echoed those in Lamp. As I did so, I remembered that the Arensbergs had paired Gris’ painting with a mid-19th century Fang reliquary figure that cast its own shadows on the home’s north wall, an effect caused by the windowed French doors running floor-to-ceiling across the entirety of the south wall.
By accident or design in their display, the shadow in the painting seems to become yet another shadow cast by the sculpture. More remarkable still, the Arensbergs placed an actual desk lamp in front of Lamp. In their essay The King and Queen Surrounded: The Arensberg Collection in Context, Bill Sherman and Mark Nelson point out the myriad ways that Louise and Walter utilized these and other visual puns in the display of their collection.
And, as it turns out, Bill and Mark also knew that the lamp itself was still in use at the Huntington Library! It was among those items retained by the Huntington after the Francis Bacon Library closed and for many years it sat on the desk of Laura Stalker, retired Avery Deputy Director of the the Huntington Library, who swears the bulb never seemed to need changing! Thanks to Laura and Anne Blecksmith (Head of Reader Services), the lamp now has a proper collection catalogue number and quality reference images. With this new photography provided by the Huntington’s senior photographer Manuel Flores, one can even imagine how the decorative copper insert in the shade would have looked alongside the vibrating dots in Lamp!
— Ellen Hoobler
