Peter Thornton on comfort

Regular readers of this column will have noticed that Witold Rybczynski, in his Home: A short history of an idea, failed in my opinion in a recent post to define comfort or to identify at what point “home” came to represent “comfort”.  Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the last two thousand years has seen some kind of development towards an idea of comfort that most people are familiar with today. Look at any contemporary advert for a sofa, and you can see a very clear and tempting idea of comfort being presented to you.

Undeterred by the lack of a clear signpost in the book on home, I have moved on to the books Rybczynski quotes as his inspiration: titles by Mario Praz and Peter Thornton, both writers known for their writings on interior decoration. Thornton’s Authentic Décor: the domestic interior 1620-1920 is a fabulous visual index of interior views, each of them created at the time of the original décor, and so authentic. It’s a lovely idea and one that, I felt, could provide clues towards identifying comfort and what it comprises.

Does Peter Thornton explain comfort? Not really. Nonetheless, there are a couple of tantalizing mentions of comfort, which provide some guidance. Thornton quotes Henry Wotton's  Elements of Architecture 1624): “Well building hath three Conditions – Commoditie, Firmness and Delight”. He continues:

The word comes from the French commodité, which means convenience but carries an implication of comfort. Creating commodité was indeed an important aim of leading French architects in the second half of the seventeenth century. One might even say that comfort as we understand it was invented by them during that period. 

Nonetheless, Thornton almost invalidates the whole idea of comfort in his dismissive description of the other title of inspiration for Rybczynski: Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration. I haven’t been able to get hold of this book yet, but Thornton (quoting Hugh Honour) describes it as “not interior decoration but the visions and fancies prompted by paintings of interiors”. Well, It’s those “visions and fancies” that interest me. I’m not so interested in the specific items of furniture in use at a certain time, rather in what that furniture (or lack of furniture) meant to the people involved.

To give you a visual idea. It looks to my untrained eye that there was a development towards comfort at some point in the period covered by Thornton’s book, and perhaps it took place in the seventeenth century. Compare the following two illustrations:

In the first picture, from 1630, a family is arranged for a group portrait. They look stiff and formal, and the room in which they are based is not geared around comfort – no carpet, no soft chairs (it looks like the man is sitting on a wooden bench). 

Now move to the elegance of a Parisian house in the 1640s. There is a fire burning, women are seated around a table conversing comfortably, perhaps reading books to each other. There are what appear to be soft chairs In a row under the window. The windows have some kind of curtain. There are wall-hangings. All in all, this second picture presents to me a vision of comfort, while the first picture does not. Whether that means a decisive shift in taste in just ten years is something to be investigated further; but the contrast between these images is, I think, very clear. One displays comfort, one does not. Now, you could argue that these images represent very different situations. One is a formal family portrait, the other a relaxed gathering. Perhaps that suggests that comfort was invented by the French, rather than the Dutch, and the Dutch only discovered such ideas much later. 

In defence of Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier, interior of Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau (1925)

Witold Rybczynski has two main ideas in his book Home: a short history of an idea (1986). The first suggested that “home” should be equated with “comfort”, and tracked interior design over the last 500 years or so to see how ideas of comfort have evolved.

The second idea is far more contentious. WR suggests that modernism, in the guise of Le Corbusier, is antithetical to comfort, and therefore fundamentally opposed to the idea of “home”. Only one example of modernism is given in his book: Le Corbusier’s pavilion for the Paris Exposition of the Decorative Arts of 1925. The background to this event is significant. Corbusier was making a statement about the whole exhibition:

Despite calls for revolutionary thinking, the Paris Decorative Arts Exposition ended up still valuing artisan production over industrialism in pavilions brimming with furniture and accessories that featured exquisite craftsmanship and expensive materials, including exotic wood imported from the French colonies. This style, named “art deco” for its exposition debut, clearly targeted the haute bourgeoisie, more than broadening the market. The modernist Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, designed and built by the architect Le Corbusier, stood in stark contrast to the other pavilions on the fairgrounds. Built entirely of industrial materials (concrete, steel, and glass), Le Corbusier’s pavilion exposed the Exposition’s vision as complacent, even timid. His own vision extended far beyond questions of style to encompass everything from the design of chairs to the design of houses to the design of cities. Le Corbusier claimed that his work reflected universal modern values, from which emerged a new aesthetic. Spurning the exposition organizers’ invitation to design “an architect’s home” with the elitism it implied, he famously preferred to present a house for the new, modern “everyman” or “cultivated man” emerging in the age of machines.  [Lynn Palermo, “The 1925 Paris Exposition”]

Despite Corbusier’s deliberately provocative statements, there is some fundamental truth in his argument. He was not creating designs for an elite; his creations were scalable. He was reacting against a world of Art Deco artisan objects with an integrated statement. He was responding to a France that had lost hundreds of thousands of dwellings as a result of the First World War. And notice that Corbusier’s interior includes not one armchair, but two.

What is comfort?

Interior of Ralph Lauren's Office

“During the six years of my architectural education the subject of comfort was mentioned only once.” Witold Rybczynski, Foreword to Home: A short history of an idea (1986).

This is a fascinating notion, yet Rybczynski’s book is not entitled “comfort” but “home”. The author loosely equates home with comfort throughout the book, but unfortunately, he doesn’t give a definition of either term, so we readers have to hunt around to work out what he means. He admits his own study is untidy but states “there is comfort in this confusion”, and then adds “hominess is not neatness. Otherwise everyone would live in replicas of the kind of sterile and impersonal homes that appear in interior design and architectural magazines”. In other words, comfort is for the author contrasted with sterility.

Finally, right at the end of his book, he returns to the term “comfort”, which he states approximates to “a domestic atmosphere that is instantly recognisable for its ordinary, human qualities”.  He continues:

“Domestic comfort involves a range of attributes – convenience, efficiency, leisure, ease, pleasure, domesticity, intimacy and privacy – all of which contribute to the experience; common sense will do the rest. Most people – 'I may not know why I like it, but I know what I like' – recognize comfort when they experience it.”

This is sloppy thinking. My subjective comfort may not be your comfort; what if we judged books on the basis of how nice they make us feel? The utilitarians had enough difficulty trying to work out how much good an action did, quite apart from how good something makes us feel; it’s hardly the way to have an informed discussion. For example, the author ignores “efficiency” for most of the book, yet suddenly includes it in his list of attributes of comfort.  What is efficient about a Chippendale chair? When he describes images of contemporary comfort, he uses Ralph Lauren interiors as a model. These interiors, available in four themes, “Log Cabin”, “Thoroughbred”, “New England”, and “Jamaica”, sound as fake and kitsch as the titles suggest. The interiors (and Lauren's own office  suggests something similar) look like a commercial. If that is comfort, give me a prison cell any day.

The author admits that “comfort” has changed over time – although he never examines in detail what constituted “comfortable” for the inhabitants of the many domestic interiors he describes. When Odysseus returns home after many years, he is not recognized by anyone in his own house except for his dog, which recognizes him and wags its tail. Perhaps that is what some people mean by “home” – nothing to do with interior design at all.

The author tries to distinguish “comfort” from “the idea of comfort” (p32), but this doesn’t really help. He claims that medieval humans had different priorities: “it is not so much that in the Middle Ages comfort was unknown … but rather that it was not needed” (p35). That is highly suggestive, but not followed up in this book. If ideas of comfort have changed over the centuries, then why do we judge the Durer engraving of St Jerome in his study by present-day standards of comfort?

The idea of home

Durer, St Jerome in his study, 1514

What a lovely idea, that of home. We all instinctively recognise what is homely and comfortable, but, as Witold Rybczynski points out, “home” and “comfort” are not words often used in architecture courses. If we think of comfort, we often imagine it as the details that architecture leaves out: sofas, table lights, paintings on the wall. Witold Rybczynski, in his book Home: A short history of an idea (1986), begins by describing Ralph Lauren interiors as examples of comfort.

However, Mr Rybczynski also insists at the outset that his book is not a book about interior decoration.  I wondered why he should try to differentiate his text in this way, particularly because of the use of Ralph Lauren as the exemplar of home comfort. In the absence of any other examples, I would see this book as equating home with comfort and with interior design, or, if you want to be more sophisticated, with the idea of interior decoration.

Sadly, the author’s sweeping generalisations and lack of specifics are immediately apparent.  A quarter of the way through the book, I still haven’t found a definition of “home”. Instead, the book provides a whistlestop tour of major domestic improvements, such as the chimney, the water closet, and the layout of houses; but each of the topics is covered only in the briefest outline, none of them is illustrated, and all the topics seem to have been derived from secondary literature.  I don’t mind him providing a sense of anticipation, when he writes of Durer’s engraving of St Jerome in his study (1514) “bookcases had not yet been invented”, but he fails to tell us just when they were invented (and how he can show examples to justify that claim). Considering the same engraving, he tells us “upholstered seating, in which the cushion was an integral part of the seat, did not appear until a hundred years later”.  But here again he fails to complete the story; just when was the sofa invented? Isn’t that one of the fundamental aspects of “comfort”? Topics are introduced and then dropped with bewildering speed, leaving statements such as “The modern fascination with furniture begins in the 17th century”. If this is the case, can he demonstrate it? Can he explain it?

The Durer engraving used as a frontispiece to one of the chapter headings, is instructive – as the only illustration from before the 18th-century, it has to stand for all Rybczynski’s claims about medieval home life. The author uses the Durer engraving as an example, but curiously uses his reading rather than the evidence of his eyes. We see St Jerome seated by himself in a comfortable working space with a dog and a lion contentedly sleeping near his feet. However, the author tells us, this is not an image of comfort; instead, he states sternly “it was unusual for someone in the sixteenth century to have his own room”. It’s irrelevant for this artwork to know if it was unusual or not; we see a solitary man in pensive reflection, and we see comfort. The fact that a “study … was really a room with many uses, all of them public” is neither here nor there; we see solitary comfort. The author spends a page telling us how uncomfortable this room must have been, while we see the opposite.

Where is the author’s definition of “home”? We are told what home is not: “homeliness is not neatness” (p17). Instead, home is equated with “comfort”, although we spend two pages in a leisurely aside about earlier, irrelevant, meanings of comfort, before the current meaning, which Rybczynski states arose in the 18th century. Well, I disagree, because Durer’s 1514 engraving is for me an image of comfort and of homeliness. But not content with insisting that Durer’s image represents the opposite, Mr R continues by arguing that the lack of comfort in medieval lives was so widespread that people living at the time had no idea of “home” and hence no idea of comfort. This was reserved for the bourgeoisie in towns.

Strangely, Rybczynski himself subsequently appears to recognise the homeliness of the Durer image. He refers to (althoug he does not illustrate) a painting by Antonello da Messina of St Jerome in his study, and points out that the Antonello version has none of the intimacy and homeliness of Durer's version. Rybczynski's book raises topics galore on every page, but seems in too much of a hurry to consider what has already been said - in this case, pages 43-44 on Antonello contradict what was said about Durer on pages 18-19.

Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in his study (NG)

The author’s wide-ranging assertions would be justified only by the use of several visual (or textual) examples to illustrate each claim. For example, comfort is equated with the chair, which, we are told was invented by the Egyptians, used by the Greeks and Romans, then forgotten until the 15th century. Instead, the medievals had benches, and benches were not comfortable.  In fact, continues the author, “little importance was attached to … individual pieces of furniture; they were treated more as equipment than as prized personal possessions”.  Yet medieval art is full of objects, such as reliquaries, which clearly had great personal significance for the owner. Even in the Durer engraving, there are cushions visible on the bench. This is explained away: “the seat cushion does offer some padding against the hard, flat wood, but this is not a chair to relax in”.

Perhaps in his enthusiasm to contrast earlier ways of living with the present day, Mr Rybczynski excitedly tells us that, for example, there were over 300 commodes in the palace of Versailles. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really tell us much about comfort. People of the period clearly found it tolerable to use commodes, while we find it unacceptable; it doesn’t mean their lives were any less comfortable than ours, simply that they had different ideas of comfort.

The author equates “privacy” with home, claiming that the lack of privacy in medieval life was revealed by the public nature of the spaces medieval humans occupied. “Only exceptional people – hermits or scholars (like St Jerome) - could shut themselves up alone.” St Jerome might be exceptional, according to Rybczynski, but in Durer’s engraving, he looks to me a very comfortable hermit. I’d choose his solitude any day. 

The Enlightenment: progressive or reactionary?

Not only do scholars dispute details of the Enlightenment; nowadays there are those who claim that the Enlightenment didn’t really happen at all. For example:

As the intellectual historian John Robertson pointed out in The Enlightenment: a very short introduction (2015), two distinct conceptions of the European Enlightenment are currently in circulation. According to the first, commonly held by philosophers and public intellectuals, the Enlightenment was a coherent project of religious secularisation, philosophical and scientific modernisation, and political liberalisation … The second conception is typically held by historians, who have largely abandoned grand narratives of the Enlightenment … many of those we refer to as Enlightenment thinkers were not politically or religiously “progressive” in any way.

Dmitri Levitin, review of The Republic of Arabic Letters (LRB, 22 November 2018)

I assume Rousseau is intended as a member of that second group – Enlightenment thinkers displaying some remarkably anti-Enlightenment characteristics.  Rousseau is so different to Voltaire and Diderot that is is difficult to think of a definition of Enlightenment that encompasses all three. 

One area that reveals Enlightenment thinkers being anything but progressive is easily found by examining their statements on Islam. Levitin, in the same review, reveals some surprising bias about Islam by thinkers who should have known better, including Voltaire.

Voltaire perpetuated the myth of Ottoman backwardness; Gibbon … said it [Islamic civilization) lacked “the spirit of enquiry and toleration”. (LRB 22 November 2018)

Men writing for men, women writing for women

Alice Fishburn set herself the goal of reading only books by women for one year. 50 books later, she comments:

There’s a strange sense of relief that comes when you find a writer who understands a fundamental aspect of you. Parts of my own inner life were suddenly echoed or imagined by someone who really, truly, got it. This, I realised one day, must be what reading is like for men the majority of the time. The ability to hear the beauty of literature without a faint but persistent discordant note …

Alice Fishburn FT, 15 December 2018

This text betrays two myths: first, the myth that only women can write about women, and only men can write about men. Secondly, the equally fallacious myth that there is some kind of a gender-based commonality, by which literature by women for women means a kind of understanding. Why should a male writer - any male writer, just because he is male - understand me, or echo my inner life? I find I have very little in common with, say, Ernest Hemingway, and I find his idea of maleness very foreign. I watched a bullfight once and I could not comprehend how anyone could find such a horrific event in any way noble. Hemingway is a male writer, but much of his writing is persistently discordant to me. Should I admire Henry Miller? When reading him, is there no “faint but persistent discordant note”? That’s not my experience when he gloats about his latest sexual conquest in Paris.

Equally, there is no universal ideology behind women’s writing, just because it is written by a woman. Here, for example, is Kathryn Hughes writing about Deborah Levy:

To ground herself in her eyrie Levy rereads Simone de Beauvoir, that great explorer and explainer of what damage home making does to creative female minds.
Kathryn Hughes, Guardian, 1 Dec 2018

Is this a universal law, that creative females should not make a home? You may agree or disagree with de Beauvoir's view, but Alice Fishburn's implication is that only a woman can understand fundamental aspects of her. Perhaps she should immediately abandon any thoughts of setting up a home.

Why Woolf?

My problems began with the title of this show (Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings,). If this is an exhibition inspired by Woolf’s writings, then did all the artists shown read Woolf? I don’t think so. Were they all influenced directly by Woolf? I don’t think so either. So I questioned the justification; why choose these seemingly unrelated works? Some, but not all, of the works clearly had a family connection, or a geographical connection - Virginia Woolf had many childhood holidays in St Ives. But most of the works have no connection with St Ives. Why, then, this show?

After reading several reviews, it seems the connection is a very broad one indeed. The Times described the exhibition as “not … about her life per se. Rather, spanning the period 1850 to the present day, it will use her work as a prism through which to look at her influences. About 250 works, by 80 or so female artists … will reflect her ideas about the depictions of landscape, about domesticity and ways of representing the feminine persona.” That explains the exhibition; or at least, it gets us started.

On that basis, the exhibition is a survey of art very loosely based around Woolf’s major themes, including landscapes, the role of women, and interiors and exteriors (Laura Smith, the curator, states Woolf “is always pointing out the dichotomies between interior and exterior”). So far so good.

Male and female spaces

It is only when looking at the specific works, and what commentators say about those works, that questions arise. Of course, given Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it is to be expected some works will be about interior spaces; for example, the Vanessa Bell Interior with Table. But is this a specifically female space?

In what way is it feminine, without imposing stereotypes on what constitutes male or female spaces? Does this mean I, as a man, am restricted to the terraces of a football stadium? Can that interior not also be mine?

Similarly, Jackie Wullschlager, writing in the FT, attempts to characterise male and female visions of nature: “Many [of the artists here], as Woolf does in The Waves, subvert the heroic macho seascape — Courbet, Monet — into psychosexual landscape or image of interiority.” As soon as you start to provide gender labels to images of nature, you run the risk of falling into stereotypes rather than subverting or ignoring them.  For me, the sea is neither male nor female. But for this exhibition, it seems that every painting and every natural vision has to be one or the other. JW talks about “powerful feminised takes on landscape”, as if the natural world is a battlefield to be captured either by the male or the female gaze. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times claims that female landscapes are simply not always from one view: “What emerges [from this exhibition] is a multifaceted patchwork of possibilities that challenges the clear divisions of the conventional — and perhaps typically masculine — viewpoint that tends to bisect the landscape with a horizon line right across the middle.” It is an unlikely claim, that there is a specifically masculine or feminine landscape.

Woolf as the inspiration for all C20 feminist art

Of course, this exhibition cannot be held responsible for some of the wilder statements by enthusiastic reviewers. For Vivienne Hopley-Jones in Varsity “Smith’s exhibition tore away any remaining misconceptions I had been fed about the historical contributions of women to the arts”. If that is the justification, that Woolf talked generally about women contributing to the arts, then any female involvement from that point on becomes fair game – fine, but I wonder why Woolf’s statement should be the key that drives all female contribution to 20th-century visual art? Is this not perhaps another example of British audiences having a rather inflated idea of the importance of British cultural figures in the history of art? To continue with Hopley-Jones, “[in this exhibition] Woolf is used as a point of access to the vast world of female art within which she is situated.” My question is, why Woolf? I have nothing against an exhibition or a gallery of women’s art, but why unite it through a wealthy aristocrat who dd not believe in equal opportunities for women and had a patronising attitude towards her own female servants? Or perhaps, quite simply, the word “Woolf” in the title brings the crowds in, even if she wasn’t even a painter?

Even Jackie Wullschlager in the FT, although her review was more balanced than any other I have read, makes claims for this exhibition that are I think unwarranted: “Unfolding like a stream-of-consciousness novel, the show explores across more than a century of women’s art Woolf’s key concerns: memories, Modernist form, sexual politics, and the relationship between them.” That’s fine. However, Wullschlager also states: “These connections [between Woolf’s writings and the paintings displayed] are vibrant, affecting and make sense biographically and art historically: here are artists like Woolf seeking in Modernism a new language for female experience”. Many of the paintings on display (as for example those by Laura Knight) are not Modernist, and in any case, I don’t think it makes sense to claim Modernism as a specific language for female experience.

Poor paintings

Jackie Wullschlager pointed out that "overall, quality is tepid". There are certainly some poor paintings, even by painters who are normally talented, such as Laura Knight's The Dark Pool. An unmemorable landscape, a solitary woman, not much of a pool, and not dark. 

As for Dora Carrington’s Spanish Landscape with Mountains, it’s just a bad painting. It belongs to that period of heavily male-dominated surrealism when artists felt encouraged to depict any non-representational shape in the hope that it might suggest some deep-seated unconscious idea. Surrealist landscapes fill the store rooms of many 20th-century collections except when dusted down, as here. The mountains may be breasts, but that hardly makes it a female vision – breasts, and breast-like shapes, are ubiquitous in Dali landscapes.

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin seems to be a touchstone. I question how her Morning (1965) can be seen as part of Woolf’s vision, without any evidence from the painting that links it to Woolf or even to the female experience. Wullschlager links this painting to the show in the following way: “Agnes Martin’s softening of austere minimalism in “Morning” (1965), whose quivering lines and atmospheric veils evoke grey dawn by the Atlantic.” Perhaps they do, for her, but I see the achievement of Martin as what she has left out, so that the result is not male, or female, or even representational, but a kind of satisfying symmetry; Martin herself described it as “I was painting about happiness and bliss and they are simple states of mind I guess”. Not, in other words, specifically feminine (I hope). Next time I visit St Ives, and look at the sea out of the Tate St Ives window, perhaps I should remind myself that this is Virginia Woolf’s vision, not mine.