Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
The Art of Living
By Diane Johnson
A Charmed Couple: The Art and Life of Walter and Matilda Gay
by William Rieder
Abrams, 239 pp., $45.00
Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton
by Marion Mainwaring, with a foreword by Richard Howard
University Press of New England, 346 pp., $30.00
Someone a hundred years from now browsing in Dominique Nabokov's 1998 book of photographs, New York Living Rooms,[1] will understand the sort of room stylish, affluent, influential people considered to be tasteful and comfortable at the end of the twentieth century. Though the owners of the photographed rooms no doubt all consider themselves unique and individualistic, and though there is a wide socioeconomic range, still there is considerable unanimity of taste among them. Nearly all the rooms have white walls; most floors are bare, with Oriental or other patterned rugs. The wall-to-wall carpet, having had its mid-twentieth-century reign, seems to have declined among those who have handsome parquet or hardwood or stone floors to reveal, though Prince and Princess Romanoff, perhaps with some vestigial memory of snowy steppes, or aristocratic indifference to fashion, still have theirs, and so does Al Sharpton. Curtains are gone. Furniture is usually a mixture of traditional and contemporary, the latter style preferred for the sofas, which must be heaped with pillows.
Review, 3470 words
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