Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKS:Home, sweet home. It can be even sweeter and neater when designed and built to fit female tastes and needs. Women and the Making of the Modern House documents six homes that were collaborations between some of this century's best-known architects and their female clients.
With poetic imagery, novelist Tony Ardizzone chronicles the lives of
Sicilian immigrants in America. In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu is a
lovely, earthy fable of one family's joy and sorrow in the New World.
AND CONSIDER THIS :
If you missed Brazil's great actress Fernanda Montenegro, who was
Tony-nominated this year for her moving role in Central Station,
you can now see her on video; Claudia Dreifus is a veteran journalist,
and a collection of her writings in Interview' shows what she does best.
A Home of Own's Own
Women and the Making of the Modern House
by Alice T. Friedman (Abrams; 240 pages; $39.95--Amazon: $27.97)
Seventy years have gone by since Virginia
Woolf's famous phrase "a room of one's own,'' and the words still evoke
powerful feelings. The idea of a woman having a room that is solely
hers, a retreat from all the bustle and expectations of society and a
haven for thought and contemplation is almost as revolutionary today as
it was in 1929, and the notion of a woman having a house of her own is
even more radical. Alice Friedman is a professor of art and the co-director
of the architecture program at Wellesley College, and her book Women and
the Making of the Modern House focuses on landmark houses designed by
six of this century's most innovative architects. Each of the homes, in
the U.S., The Netherlands and France, have one thing in common: they reflect
the taste and living requirements of an independent and strong-willed
woman who either headed the household or had an unconventional living
arrangement either with friends, husband or lover. While several of the
master builders--Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi --have
stamped 20th Century architecture with their conceptions for grand public
buildings, the domestic dwellings they made for a woman client, though
widely different, as Friedman makes clear, document the shifting attitudes
about privacy, family life and women's role in society.
The book, which has 140 illustrations including 30
plates in full color, is a skillful blend of 20th century social history
and architectural theory. It is enlivened by author Friedman's sharply
drawn portraits of the six legendary architects and the now almost forgotten
women whom they served. At times, they were true collaborators sharing
a single vision of a domestic life. One pair were lovers; another are
mother and son. In two cases, architect and client were woefully
mismatched. For Aline Barnsdall, an eccentric oil heiress with a flair
for the dramatic, Frank LLoyd Wright planned a grandiose project on a
hillside block of land she bought in Hollywood. It was to be a little
artistic principality over which she would reside as queen, and Wright's
design included a sumptuous home called Hollyhock House, terraced gardens
and an open-air theater that was to be an artists' community. The two
squabbled over money and remained at odds for 20 years, and in the end
the theater was never built. Hollyhock House, with its pueblo-inspired
design, spacious high-ceilinged rooms and splendid garden court,
is now the centerpiece of a public park. Barnsdall failed to create the
almost Utopian artists' community that she believed would ennoble society,
but it would have pleased her to know that her breathtakingly beautiful
home serves such a useful purpose.
If the relationship of Wright and Barnsdall was
difficult, the one between Mies van der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth could
be called impossible. At 42, single, and a nephrologist in Chicago, Farnsworth
in 1945 had a small parcel of land by the Fox River, and engaged Mies
to build her dream house. Instead, it became a minimalist nightmare. Now
considered a masterpiece, Farnsworth's home was the first "glass box,''
essentially a flat-roofed, one-room house made with free-standing partitions
and surrounded by see-through walls. The press mocked it, and crowds flocked
on weekends to peer at the great man's folly and the woman inside it.
For his part, Mies deplored the heirlooms she put inside because
they polluted the purity of his design. She complained when costs were
too high, and when she refused to pay his fee, Mies sued. Farnsworth
countersued, claiming he was a fraud and demanding the money
spent that exceeded his original estimate.
Happier relationships resulted in two homes that perfectly
suit the need of the women who live in them. Constance Perkins, an art
professor at Occidental College, knew exactly what she wanted, and worked
closely with Richard Neutra to achieve it. The house was to be both home
and studio for a single woman, with walls to hang her paintings, shelves
for books, doors and windows that let in plenty of light, and a small
reflecting pool that meandered from outside to inside. All to be done
on a tight budget. She got her wish, and as the photographs demonstrate,
the home made for one woman's distinct needs, made "California Modern''
the future for modest, well-designed contemporary middle-class homes.
For his mother, then in her 70s, Richard
Venturi built a home in a Pennsylvania suburb that looked ahead
to how she would have to live in advancing years. All the main rooms
are on one floor. Venturi honored traditions of architectural history
by including moldings, panel doors and a fireplace at the same time
as he celebrated her way of life by planning antique and reproduction
furniture that were reminders of their shared past as mother and
son.
Sicily, My Love
In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu by Tony Ardizzone
(Picador; 339 pages)
To Papa Santuzzu, laboring
in the unforgiving stony fields of Sicily, the
far-off land of "La Merica'' beckons. He has heard others
whisper of its three villages where a man can grow rich: New York,
Brazil and Argentina. The Land of Plenty is not for him,
for he would never abandon his beloved island of Sicilia. But for
his seven children, to leave is to succeed, and as the years pass
he sends them all across the sea. Their ignorance of La Merica
matches his. So many of the street signs in New York City say Ave,
notices one son, that it must be a holy place. Author Tony Ardizzone
has a blazing imagination, and makes the everyday struggles and
joys of the Santuzzu family into a magical, moving novel of Italian-American
life in the early part of the century. Steeped in the history of
the times, it's a book to be read slowly and savored.
By turns, the Santuzzu brothers, sisters and
spouses tell of theiradventures and confusions, as if following an old
custom of sitting at night before a roaring fire, passing stories
one to another until the circle is complete. The living commune with the
dead. They are irreverent: God is talked about as just another old man
who wants "to sit back in his most comfortable chair and listen to Verdi
on the radio.'' Nature is revealed in human terms, as old myths come alive
to fit the present, and fables of people transformed into animals take
a modern turn. Before departing for La America, son Luigi becomes
a bandit, howling and joining the wolf pack of men who live in the hills
and rob the wealthy, callous landowners who make life miserable for the
peasants. Catholic miracles occur in the new land, and to one granddaughter
the Madonna shows her surprising feminist side. For most of the family,
life is harsh. They left with hope only to find life equally hard in cities
of their adopted homeland. Not only are the streets
not paved with gold, they aren't even paved
and it is the immigrant sons of Italy who are expected to pave them.
Gaetanu, the eldest,
discovers work in the dark satanic mills of Massachusetts
to be more hurtful to the soul and body than tilling the
barren soil at home. The youngest daughter,
Assunta is condemned by a university
dean as coming from a race of criminals. This paragon of higher
education claims that Italians as a race,
"have weak chins, low foreheads, little
or no intellect, are short in stature, volatile, unstable, and lacking
in any morality.'' Hearing this, her rich suburban boyfriend abandons
the pregnant Assunta, and she becomes a proud, ahead-of-her-time
single Mom.
At home, Papa Santuzzu
rejoices that he has done the right thing by sending
away his family. Alone, he is surrounded by memory, seeing in his
barren field a garden where everyone from his past
joins in a dance of joy with Sicilians of
an older time who worshipped ancient gods in temples long
since destroyed. After all the years of difficulties and small
triumphs, the scattered family of Papa Santuzzu
reunites in New York City for a funeral
and pours out their grief. The oldest daughter reflects: "Now
that we're put our own brother--our own flesh-- into the ground, now we
truly belonged to this place.'' After his death, America is no longer
a new place for them. The words "family values'' have become cheapened
in past years; with this poetic book, Ardizzone gives them dignity and
worth.
And Consider This:
Video:Central Station directed by Walter Salles
Brazil's most acclaimed actress is Fernanda
Montenegro, and she has been a star on TV and in films since the '60s.
Moviegoers in the U.S. hadn't known much about her until this year when
she was nominated for an Academy Award for her brilliant portrayal of
a bitter woman's trip with a young boy to find his father. To earn a living,
a former teacher (Montenegro) has set herself up in Rio's Central Station
as a letter-writer. She takes the money of the illiterate people, but
doesn't mail their correspondence. Life is hard, she seems to believe,
and to survive, you have to be harder. Against her better judgment, she
befriends a boy--after first selling him to a corrupt adoption arranger--and
together they head out for the interior of the country. For her it is
a journey into the mysterious places of the heart.
Montenegro deserved her nomination--and some
would say, ought to have won the award. Certainly it was the least glamorous
role to be so honored in many years, and its greatness lies in its simplicity.
On Monetenegro's plain, worn face and in her sad, brown eyes, we see the
cynical, cold-hearted woman slowly being warmed and redeemed by love and
goodness.
Books:
Interview by Claudia Dreifus
(Seven Stories: 337 pages)
Reporters ask questions, and people give answers. It sounds so simple, but it isn't. Claudia Dreifus, who is a contributing writer at the New York Times, shows how it is done in this new paperback of her 1997 collection--which includes four more recent interviews--of some of her perceptive sessions with the famous and celebrated she has conducted over a period of years. The parade of names is striking. She has talked to the Dalai Lama and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to Mel Brooks and Benazir Bhutto, to General John Shalikashvili and Toni Morrison. Dreifus is a veteran journalist and has an uncanny way of getting people to open up about themselves. The great interviewers are seducers, she asserts in the introduction to the book, and one of the great secrets of interviewing, is ''its unspoken sexual element.''
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