Leseprobe

117 is of particular interest, since it raises the issue of what the ironwork does to the paintings, what they do together to the spectators that the paintings alone could not do, and whether the wrought iron pieces are parerga to the paintings, or erga in their own right, or play roles that aremutable and exchangeable. The oddity lies in the disregard that their combination manifests toward taxonomy and hierarchy, mixing as it does paintings by the likes of Cézanne and Matisse with anonymous appliances, fine art of the greatest symbolic and financial value with specimens of the so-called decorative and applied arts, whichmay be beautifully crafted but are much less prized. How should one account for this unusual yet intentional feature of display? An answer came to me during my first visit to the Foundation in Merion, on 30 Jan- uary 2009, by way of observations I made and photographs I took, in response to the question itself. 5 What dawned uponme after a while and became a crucial element in the experience of my visit was that there exist meaningful and consistent relations between the paintings and the ironwork, relations that one could call resemblances, analogies or (metaphorically) rhymes, and that the pieces of wrought iron point to characteristics of the paintings. The iron fittings placed on top of Charles Demuth’s Masts and of Henri Matisse’s Reclining Nude in Room 18 (Fig. 1), for example, parallel the respectively vertical and horizontal formats of the two pictures and emphasize their contrasted compositional structure: the geometric, almost orthogonal skeleton provided by the mast and yards in Demuth’s painting is further abstracted by a hinge topped with a keyhole escutcheon; the same process is applied by a serpentine hinge to the sensuous arabesque of Matisse’s odalisque, while the centrality of the nude’s belly is wittily underscored by a sixteenth-cen- tury repoussé plaque in the shape of three intertwined crescents. Such analogies, once their possibility has entered into one’s consciousness, prove to be too systematic to be accidental. Their existence also finds a confirmation and an expan- sion in echoes of the same kind noticeable among the various paintings as well as between the paintings and other objects, such as pieces of early American furniture or ceramics, the presence of which also tends to confuse visitors used to the purist aesthetics of the white-box displays of modern art. In Room 23, for example, a chromatic, formal and directional analogy connects the nude boy carrying a vase on his head in Pablo Picasso’s Young Girl with Goat (1906), the red tower of an eponymous painting by Giorgio De Chirico (1913) and an oversized candle, placed side by side. 6 There is a special quality in the experience of noticing such relations oneself, without being alerted to their existence, and of being at first unsure of discovering or inventing of the outstanding collections of wrought iron objects in the United States,’ with works coming ‘mainly fromAmerica, France, and Germany, but also [...] by Spanish, Italian, Netherlandish, and English smiths,’ while ‘the origins, nomenclature, and dates of fabrication often remain imprecise’ (Wattenmaker, ‘In the Light of New Material,’ 2015, p. 26).  5 My thanks to Martha Lucy for welcoming me at the Foundation and authorizing me to take and reproduce photographs of the displays.  6 Reproduced in Gamboni, ‘“Musées d’auteur”,’ 2011, p. 199.