Stephen Rose

Stephen Rose

The Worn Leather Chair

circa 2012

     An old, torn, pathetic-looking armchair glorified for its overuse and obvious mistreatment. Is this beautiful? Does this scene bring out a pitiless kind of sadness in the viewer? Does is evoke shock? Seeing as none of us really views a piece of furniture as an animate, 'real' thing (or do we?), could anyone really care for something so crude?

     Yes. This answer speaks on behalf of no matter how small the minority is who treats and cares for its so-called non-living things as parts of their personality, as their defining tags of identity. This chair means something to someone, to this contemporary artist - so much so that he immortalised its portrait so lovingly, so accurately and realistically, down to the dull shine of the legs and railings and to the fraying tongues of the stained leather cushion and back, that the naked presence of this chair is far more striking as it is now than if a bejewelled Catherine Deneuve sat herself down in it for a short rest. This chair is a slice of time; it shows slash after slash of days gone by, of moments lived and lost. It shows age at its ugliest. It shows that Rose attempts to bring out the truth of how the things we choose to label as unimportant or silly can manifest themselves in tangible forms, in things that simply cannot be swept under the rug. Slightly askew in its frame, a bit wobbly here and there, this chair proves this truth - thus Rose succeeds.

the Wiener Werkstätte: Rudolf Kalvach

Rudolf Kalvach

Postcard (no. 148)

circa 1895 to early twentieth century

     A puzzle-like parade of vagabonds and weirdos. A demon-possessed chamaeleon hisses at a black racoon; a panther cub as dark as Indian ink perches warningly on top of a grotesque yellow claw of the tallest male stick figure, his dress robes seemingly made of red button mushrooms (and his other claw caressing the buttocks of what looks like a very large and polka-dotted armadillo). Beneath the cub is a sun-burnt neckless dinosaur (tail included) with numerous pits and cavities and a pair of over-sized contact lenses (of which we can only see one, thankfully). In the sky above is nothing but the deepest blue of nothingness characteristic of the waning minutes before nightfall, topping a terrain of green-bordered hills and white-sanded bays tumbling down to a narrow Matisse-cut strip of lake. Making up the rear of the parade is a snake-necked, chicken pox-stricken rooster whose remaining body - if one could name it that - is made up of a many-tentacled, red-brick road patterned crinoline dress, the latter being covered slightly by a yellow-specked cape. And lastly, leading this character is a snobby-looking figure who, nose high in the air, clearly thinks her yellow skin colour goes very well indeed with her putrid green, fur-lined manteau (a bad choice, no doubt).

     Whatever this scene is meant to depict, the joy of guessing is at least meant to be neverending.

Siegfried Stoitzner

Siegfried Stoitzner

Wood Gnome and Squirrel

circa early 1900s

     Are we looking through a lense? Our perspective is narrowed and focused on the central part of the scene where the bark of the branch is clearest, as are the warm tufts of orange squirrel hair and the scrawny fingers and ferocious white coif of the little man, giving us the sense that we are huge in comparison to these two creatures over whose squabble we loom. The details, however minimal, are well-drawn. They tell us that the artist was skilled in executing anatomy no matter how small the scale or how playful and comical (as this picture is) the subject. He and Arthur Rackham share the same foggy depiction of colour and the same motionless animation of fantasy-based figures, each bringing to life a world that undoubtedly catches the attention of both children and adults.

     The watercolour is odd, though: either it was never completed during the artist's lifetime or, as already noted, it is meant to appear slightly out of focus. Surely the dense green wall of foliage has faded nevertheless due to constant handling without protective gloves (as natural hand oil tends to eat away or dissolve less-durable media as watercolours), but this is probably not the sole reason for its fading: the picture's edges are too evenly paled all round. However, having once sold for nearly 1'000 Euros the fading clearly does not affect the picture's evident charm - nor does it seem to interrupt the creatures' 'whose-nut-is-whose?' argument.