New York Behind Closed Doors

Polly Devlin

• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781423647324
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Interior Design

A look inside the homes of New York City's artists, designers, writers, and social influencers, including in-depth interviews. These twenty-four homes reflect the tastes and styles of real New Yorkers who live in small spaces with art, books, collections, treasures, and fabulous, sometimes funky furniture—each space expressing the resident's unique personality. Bright, captivating photographs throughout pair dynamically with Polly Devlin's in-depth interviews with the homeowners. Her critiques of their spaces are at once delightful, bold, and irreverent—and always lively and opinionated. From architectural grandeur to streamlined modern buildings, see how individuals turn older apartments and historic structures into places for comfortable living. Houses and apartments are sampled from across the city, including Tribeca, Murray Hill, Union Square, Harlem, Midtown, Brooklyn, and more. Assembled by a former Vogue editor and a photographer who has worked for House Beautiful, Travel + Leisure, and other major publications, this is a visual and literary feast. "Showcases some of New York City's most unique residential dwellings."— Elle Decor

Hothouse of the Imagination

Barbara Jakobson

In the double-height living/garden room Jeff Koons’s Winter Bears stand sentinel against the view of an enamel paint-on-steel sculpture by Stefan Knapp. The ghost shadow of Frank Stella’s relief Felsztyn III (1971) soars above the 1970s classic “Non-Stop” Italian sofa, the DS-600 for the De Sede company. On the wall opposite, an inscription by Lawrence Weiner and a blue fluorescent piece by Dan Flavin and, on the floor, Carl Andre’s Copper-Copper Plain.

If you maneuver down the steepish staircase to Barbara Jakobson’s double-height central room, an astounding crate of air and much besides, and you’re looking out at (“what are those in her garden?”), you’ll soon be stopped short by Con Ed orange and white barriers (Alarm! Stop!! Look!!!). These ubiquitous symbols of New York’s energy company are here transformed and transforming by being used as the edging to the installation posing as a cocktail bar by artist Tom Sachs. They are an apt metaphor for many of the things in this house. Not that you’d easily find yourself down here, since on the way you would pass so many things to warrant your total attention (Stop! Here!! Now!!! Look!!!)! And total attention is her philosophy – although she might eschew the word. “If you inhabit the world by being aware of its artifacts, whether you’re out on the street or inside a supermarket, you’re likely to have a much better time. All you’ve got to be in this world is a noticer. You just have to notice what everything looks like.”

But let’s rewind the movie and come back up this midtown street on the East Side lined with brownstone houses, so beloved of many New Yorkers and so often vilified in print. Edith Wharton haughtily pronounced that they were built with the most hideous stone ever quarried, and in the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill was even more hostile: “Let the wrecking ball of the present tumble the mediocrities of the past . . . little in the 1960s is apt to surpass in stultifying dullness those uncountable blocks of cheap, speculator-built nineteenth-century brownstones.” Owners of these now cherished (and fabulously expensive) houses would not thank him for that command.

You know it’s Barbara’s house ahead because you’ve already been inundated with quotes about her originality, her signal place in a golden New York art age, her span of knowledge – and her sense of fun. This house has two squirrels perched on the pillars outside its door. Lead, as it turns out, but totally lifelike. And a frieze of metal squirrels scampers across the facade. The lead squirrels are by the sculptor Jane Canfield, the frieze is to disguise a crack in the wall. This entire frolic is typical of Barbara. Passionate, generous, restless, for decades she has been one of the brightest stars in the art firmament as a vatic collector, enabler, advisor and mentor right at the heart of cultural and curatorial art life in New York.

Walking down the street with her is an education. She’s in black leather today and young men stop and congratulate her on her look; she always was a beauty and she still is. (There’s a ravishing photo of her by Horst seductively draped in a Carlo Mollino chair and a vintage Dior evening dress, a Robert Mapplethorpe quadriptych of her as a young beauty in 1977, and a 1983 Mapplethorpe in which she looks sleek as a seal.)

Fellini once said: “the visionary is the only true realist,” and Jakobson is a realist by that definition. She is brisk in her knowledge of and love for art of the twentieth century in all its aspects, a deal of it made by people she knew and who were her friends. And visionary? She is not only constantly tuned in to her time and place, she’s also ahead of the curve, anticipating shifts in taste, spotting new talent, buying in the forefront.

She once said, “I“m a person who wants to be engaged in the intellectual and cultural life of my time in more than simply a superficial way.” And she is coiled into that life and time. You’d have to snip a lot of the threads that bind a culture together to get her standing clear. She has been a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, serving on many and varied committees including Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Design. She’s served on the International Council of MoMA, the board of the Architectural League of New York, the Visiting Committee to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. As head of the Junior Council of MoMA she organized a groundbreaking exhibition of architectural drawings; chaired poetry evenings with John Giorno, Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, and performances by Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. As consultant to Knoll International she enlisted Frank Gehry to design a group of chairs and tables for the company and oversaw the project.

The Argentinian architect Emilio Ambasz, then curator of design at MoMA and an early proponent of “green architecture,” encouraged her interest in architecture, and James Stirling, Richard Meier and Cedric Price were among her friends. These architectural adventures are reflected in her house, in its layout and function, its accord with the freewheeling art and seminal pieces of postwar and contemporary art which line it top to toe − five stories up from garden level. I note a drawing by the visionary Cedric Price on a crammed notice board as I walk up, past a library office called the Transportation Room, full of images and objects that move, models of planes, cars, trains and automobiles and stunning early posters for American Airlines (slogan: “Every hour on the hour”). She has her veuvière at the very top, like an aerie – with her study, and an eccentric back-to-front library designed in 1974 by Emilio Ambasz.

Her spectacular bedroom, with its Lucite furniture, is almost dominated by a photograph of a room with leopard-spotted walls and a symbolic army of 316 butterflies in cases in Carlo Mollino’s mysterious shrine, Casa Mollino, his secret apartment in Turin. It is now a private museum and has been described as a modern day Egyptian Book of the Dead. He never lived in it and no one knew of it till after his death. Here it opens a bedroom in New York into a puzzling, other and esoteric world.

On one wall of the hall Julian Schnabel’s What To Do With a Corner in Madrid towers over a day bed by Rachel Whiteread and a fiber and polyurethane vase by the Campana brothers, while on another a Jim Dine portrait of Barbara hangs above a drawing by Eric Fischl. To the left of the painting is a Frank West “Uncle” chair. The framed drawings in the arched doorway are by Jőrg Immendorf, and a William Eggleston photograph can be glimpsed through the alcove.

When Barbara Jakobson encounters new art she embraces it as a complicated intellectual challenge demanding new alignments of her habits and sensibility, and the origins of that sensibility lie in how and where she grew up. She was lucky from the start in her environment, culture and nurture, born as she was across the street from the Brooklyn Museum and with visionary relatives who encouraged her in her passion for looking. As soon as she was old enough she escaped to the museum as much as possible. She was transfixed. “It was my way of imagining myself in a place other than the one in which I lived, and that was a frequent necessity for me.” The place in which she lived was a pretty apartment, filled with fine English furniture in good quiet taste. “I think that my attraction to modernism came as a form of reaction and rebellion against my mother’s taste.”

She lived, in her own words, “in the hothouse of the imagination.” Her older cousins Donald and Harriet Peters became her first mentors. “I was just growing up. It was the mid-fifties and they took me everywhere and gave me license to become involved with contemporary art. And in their house I’d see paintings by Hans Hofmann, by William Baziotes, by Robert Motherwell. Once I saw this little painting of a white number 4. I said, ‘What is that?’ It was a Jasper Johns.”

They introduced her to the crucial gallery owners of the time, including Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, and later she became great friends with Sidney Janis, another legendary dealer. “From my early twenties, I started buying things and taking them home and making them my own.”

So this house in which she has lived for fifty years is an almanac of New York art weather, recording storms, tornadoes, high winds, maybe even sunny days, over the last decades. It bulges with surprise, intelligence and energy and is infused with wit. A looming Robert Morris felt sculpture hangs gravely in her hall near the dancing sunlight of an Eric Fischl drawing and an imposing Julian Schnabel. In the balcony – within the house, overlooking the big room – a rug by Barbara Bloom, a simulacrum of that famous green Olympia Press paperback cover (what a thrill the sight of that used to give to a convent school girl) is the anchor for the confounding furniture sculpture Chair by Richard Artschwager, made from red oak, Formica, cowhide, and painted steel. (I’d advise the unwary not to try to sit on it.)

Tom Sachs used carefully chosen and labelled bottles and Con Edison barricades to make up the cocktail bar art installation, surrounded by BassamFellows bar stools and a rug adapted from a photograph by James Wellings.

A 1970 felt sculpture by Robert Morris hangs against wallpaper commissioned from Peter Halley.

A work by Matthew Barney above Sebastian Errazuriz’s foldable Occupy 2012 chair.

A 1977 quadriptych portrait of Barbara by Robert Mapplethorpe hangs above a Lucite and patent leather “Corset” chair by Grosfeld House.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP A Charles Eames chair sits below a Diego Giacometti plaster mirror flanked by Italian sconces from the 1950s. Not Picasso, a painting by Mike Bidlo, hangs above the Salterini day bed. The table is by Gilbert Rohde. Two works by Matthew Barney flank another portrait of Barbara by Robert Mapplethorpe; Chair, a sculpture by Richard Artschwager, sits on the cover of Lolita, realized in a rug by Barbara Bloom; next to it, a side table by Jens Risom. On the mantelpiece in the Transportation Room, Poole pottery and British royal souvenirs, including an Eric Ravilious Wedgwood Coronation mug, stand in front of a 1930s poster from Heal’s Mansard Gallery; to the right, a similarly iconic poster for American Airlines; on the desk, a Tizio lamp.

A table by Danish-American designer Jens Risom, one of the first to introduce Scandinavian design to the United States, is next to a piece by the Campana brothers – a terrifying vase that looks like a glass Medusa.

There’s a kind of jubilation about the placement of art on every floor, an understanding of its aesthetic functionality. I have never been in a house with so many personally significant and historically personal pieces. It’s an archive, of course, but there is nothing static or fixed about it – it breathes the energetic genius of its owner. The Diane Arbus photographs for example – she and Diane Arbus had been friends since 1958, when they met as young mothers in the Central Park “Mommy Playground,” and she would often look after Diane Arbus’s daughter Amy in her pram while the photographer roamed the paths looking for subjects.

She and her husband, John Jakobson, a financier, bought this house on a freezing day in 1965. “We’d looked at a lot of brownstones and then came into this and bingo we bought it in a minute.”

The house has form. Elia Kazan lived here in the late 1940s, sold it to Peter Gimbels, heir to a famous department store, who made the revolutionary double-height central space and the steep staircase. Billy Baldwin...

Table of contents

• The Bowerbirds
• Incandescation
• A Garden In Brooklyn
• A Substantial World
• A Jewelled Life
• Artfull
• Felicitations
• Arcania
• Intellectual Eden
• Memphis in Chelsea
• Brio In Blue & White
• Head Over Heels
• Strange Places Cramm’d
• A Dandy Place To Live
• Cargoed Brightness
• Lighthouse On Fifty-Eighth
• Top Hat
• Silk Stocking Ascendancy
• Some Secreted Island
• Wilder Shores
• Hothouse of the Imagination
• Time’s Fine Telescope
• Things Being Various
• Well Fashioned
• Fantasy In Harlem