I was just reading a piece about art critic Kenneth Clark in the August
14 edition of the "New York Review of Books." The reviewer of two books about Clark mentions that Clark came from an affluent Scottish
family that had a lot of art in the house.
This made me think about the art we had in our house on Spruce
Street when I was growing up, although there certainly wasn't much
of it. I'm thinking back 75 years here, and wrack my brain though I might, I can only come up with several disappointing images.
One was an elevation of a cathedral (Chartres? Winchester? Notre Dame?) done in some kind of waxy stuff so it was layered and you could feel the arches with your finger. It looked carved in ivory but it wasn't. This small work was hung too high and now that I'm thinking about it,
I cannot possibly imagine what it was doing there. Someone must have given it to my parents.
Over the couch, there were copies of Redoute roses in two Victorian
walnut frames, hung one higher than the other. In two arched niches
flanking the entrance (also arched) to the dining room, was an
encyclopedia taking up most of the space. On the top shelves were
two bisque figures of ladies in flowing gowns and they must have
belonged to my father's mother.
There were a few other books jammed in with the encyclopedia. I
know there was a slim volume by the American poet Eugene Field.
"The Yellow Cur: A Story of Love and Life Before the World's War"
by Clarence Holton Poage (1932) is even more a mystery. Heaven knows
what that was doing along with "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1858).
This was early on in my childhood. Later, when my parents subscribed
to The Book of the Month Club, a bookshelf was created on the landing
leading upstairs. When they forgot to send selections back,
I had a lot of adult reading to myself. completely unsupervised.
I read "The Carpetbaggers," and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," both
books with unsuitable material for a pre-teen. I read "A Bell for Adano"
and I can recite the captions for Bill Malden's Willy and Joe World War II
cartoons. I read "Hiroshima" and "Cluny Brown" by Margery Sharp and
many other bestselling novels of the immediate post-war era. I got myself
a good introduction to popular literature although there was a some of it
I didn't understand.
I realize this: aside from the above, when I was growing up there was not one single picture or anything that could be described as "art" in the entire house. There were empty walls but nobody put anything on them. The dining room wallpaper was huge cabbage roses so maybe nothing possible there. But really, there had to be total disinterest by two adults.
Years later, when Aunt Dot took up oil painting, there were a couple of
her works, one a nice green landscape above the table just inside the front door.
