The Off Brand

It's Alive

Herman Rosse, Untitled, circa 1930, watercolor on board, 11 x 13.5 inches, gilded oval frame

I bought this trompe l'oeil watercolor on masonite the other day at the Alemay Flea market. The artist is Herman Rosse (1887-1965), a dutch-born painter, who worked in America for much of his life. He's not a household name, but more about him in a minute. The painting appears to date from the 1930s. It's in the trompe l'oeil tradition, which in Holland goes back to Vermeer; in America, the technical prowess to support the style doesn't appear until the second half of the 19th century with artists like John F. Peto.

I labored over the purchase despite the painting's low price and obvious technical virtuosity. The problem wasn't the scratch but the ubiquity of victorian sentiment: photo of a kitten and child, fringe on linen, peacock feathers, and a cloying female draped in fabric, clutching a bouqet. It tasted saccharine and I puckered at the thought of standing next to this cliche of feminine domesticity when it came time to resell. If not for a little voice from some far away place telling me the painting was somehow less than the sum of its over-ripe parts, that each element weirdly canceled out the others, leaving an emotionless tableau where there should have been a melodramatic one, I'd have put it back down on the concrete and walked away. But that's the kind of mystery I thrive on, so I got over my trepidation and paid up.

Herman Rosse, Eurydice, 1915, cartoon for mural, Peace Palace, Hague, Netherlands

Back home, I began to research Herman Rosse in earnest. I couldn't find a single other easel painting, but I uncovered a rich narrative that weaves him directly into the mainstram of American art and entertinment. In 1915 at age 25 Rosse won a commission to paint the murals in the Hague. That's the Peace Palace, bitches, built to accommodate the International Criminal Court, where they try people like Slobodan Milosevic for genocide. Soon after the project, Rosse came to America, worked as an architect, designed houses for important cultural figures, painted murals, designed art deco silver and avant garde sets for Broadway. A number of these are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He illustrated a book with his best friend Ben Hect, a co-writer of my favorite film, His Girl Friday. I began to wonder, how do I not know this person?

Herman Rosse, Dining Room, c 1930, mixed media installation, collection Metropolitan Museum of Art

Then came Hollywood, where Rosse was art director for the 1930 King of Jazz, an art deco vehicle for band leader Paul Whiteman. He designed the sets for Bela Lugosi's 1931 Dracula, and Lugosi's 1932 prodution of Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. The names of my heroes were starting to pile up. I love old Hollywood, I love old horror films, I love Edgar Allen Poe, and I love to document artists of the past who crossed over into entertainment, given how the line between the two is now blurring. But it was only when I learned that Rosse also designed the sets for James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, possibly the best early American horror film, whose look influenced countless other bits of 20th century culture, that I looked down at the painting and could fnally say, "It's alive!"

Frankenstein (the reanimation scene), 1931, Universal Pictures, set design by Herman Rosse

With this new information in mind, the painting was in fact coming to life in a new way, the contingent natue of art-looking asserting itself against the stability of objecthood with a Hollywood  sci-fi vengeance. What first appared as a jumble of strange elements now felt like the design of a cryptic stage set. What first looked sentimental now came off as diabolical and surreal, the eyes of the peacock feathers gloomily surveillant, the innocent females dangerously seditious.

Herm Rosse, Untitled (pin cushion detail), circa 1930

A little-noticed pin cushion doll in the background thrust itself to the fore. An odd figure decked out in purple smoking jacket, top hat and creepy mustache, it is the only male in a sea of problematic females, and its torso just happens to be pierced through with little knives like St. Sebastien. I'm not sure I've decoded the painting's text but I get the sense that there are some interesting reading's there.

Chess Tournament Julien Levy Gallery, circa 1945, photograph  Dorothe Tanning

Continued Research into the existence of other paintings by Rosse yielded little except this one tidbit: In 1948 he exhibited a series of "reflection" paintings at a little space in New York City. It's called the Julien Levy Gallery, which just happens to be the birthplace of surrealism in America. Case closed. Defense rests. Another fascinating American artist who nobody seems to know or care about, rediscovered in a pile of stuff at the flea market.

Imperfect Bodies

    The line dividing professional artists from their self-taught counterparts is heavily policed by curators, critics and the professional artists themselves. Few collectors have the nerve to cross it. Most remain on one side or the other as though it were the 38th parallel. Like a child driven to test boundaries, I still get a thrill by mixing the two worlds, dealing in them both. So when I sauntered into my favorite San Francisco thrift store recently, and glimpsed the wrongness of outsider activity peeking out from plastic bins on the floor, I knew I was in for an adventure tailor-made for me.

     This is a large thrift store, with maybe eight or nine employees and usually no less than 15 or 20 mission hipsters on the floor. When you're trying to sort through a giant pile of paintings in the middle of this action people get curious. It's the opposite of what you want, which is to work under a cloak of invisibility. The employees become giddy at first, then nervous. They try to justify the low prices. You act sympathetic and polite.

    After scumbling in the bins, I discern the artist's full name, Helen Director. It's almost as odd as the paintings. IPhone yields info on a few low-end auctions, a dubious reference to an obscure German museum, and the listing of her Central Park West apartment: Not enough to decide on whether to buy 40 portraits no matter how cheap they are. As is often the case with outsider work, these paintings would have to be judged on the merits, which rewards connoisseurship (yea!) and penalizes those who simply operate by the numbers (other people).

     Scratching my head, I try to place the work in a cultural framework before dealing with the formal issues. The vast majority of the sitters are women, and they cover a wide spectrum of types, from rough trade lesbians to tea-drinking grandmas. One recurring muse is a buck-toothed brunette with a casual fashion sense and hilarious frontal charisma. Perhaps it's the artists' girlfriend. Another woman is depicted in her superman shirt, yet another is pantsless in a football jersey and ankle boots. There are transgendered figures and several men of color. A Caribbean woman in Olivia-Newton-John leg warmers confirms the eighties vintage. The signature is a dead ringer for that of Tamara De Lempicka, a rich,  bi-sexual artist of the '20s and '30s, who famously painted beautiful women and hung out with lesbian poets and artists. I thrill to the fantasy that Ms. Director might have been painting the New York lesbian scene of her time, a mostly invisible tribe.

     The paintings are all 20 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas. About half the surfaces are wan and smooth, the others frantic and impastoed, giving the collection a bi-polar quality.  At first glance, a few of the works seem dorky enough to have been made during a women's Sunday art club. But something off about them always emerges to keep them interesting. Sometimes the wrongness is barely visible and haunts the image like a perfume. These works seem the most dangerous for the way they court mediocrity, only to pull back at the last minute into their strangeness. Most of the pictures, however, are more overtly tattooed by eccentricity and read as symptoms of delusion and weirdness, both of which maintain a special currency in an art world driven by rational, careerist MFAs. I realize I can sell these as clichés of otherness and I grow more comfortable with the idea of buying the pile.

     Driving to my warehouse, I realize that my cheap art historical take cannot account for the strong emotional experience I am having now that I own the paintings. I struggle for an explanation and it occurs to me that I am drawn to their tightly woven inner fabric, which protects them from my desire to slice them up into critical chunks. The paintings are intensely unified by a force field connecting painter and sitter and dramatized by the way the bodies' hold together until some crucial moment when they fall apart into disfigurement. It is unclear if this is intentional, a politics of physical imperfection, or merely the product of flawed draftsmanship. Or both. It doesn't matter. Static and absorbed, the figures harbor rich interior worlds that vibrate against entertaining, colorful backgrounds. It's corny, I know, but you want to crawl into these funny little worlds like some clubhouse of oddballs and hang out. I find this kind of an invitation from a work of art a rare thing.

Curated Art Walk #127

Like many things done at marathon length, a trip to the flea market can turn into an fever pitch death march, a flaneur's heroic odyssey amidst a sea of curiosities, human and object, in which you're blown about by your interests and hunches, until just getting back to your car with your mind intact, if not some captured trophy, seems a triumph.

During six hours under the hot sun at the once-monthly Alameda Flea Market last week, I carted off a succession of things, whose warped eccentricities fun-house mirrored the event's twisted dreaminess. I got there early, and before light dawned, I bought a painted jug lamp for $25. I like painted furniture because it allows me to enjoy a relaxed decoration that I could never tolerate on a formal painting. There are three scenes that encircle this jug like an endless narrative, in which a family of monkeys poses with modernist furniture, watches themselves on TV, and observes the distance through binoculars. The paint handling is milky smooth and the figuration cartoon realism. It's hard to say how old the actual jug is, but the images and the electrical hardware date from the 1970s, that anthropology-obsessed decade which reflected us back to ourselves through entertainments like Reel Family and Planet of the Apes.

           Three long hours later I found a painting by Gordon Wagner, a post-war artist from L.A. best known for his assemblages, which came at the beginning of a tradition that includes George Herms, Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, and Betty Saar. It's awkwardly titled Water Pool, probably dates from the early '50s, before Wagner shifted entirely to assemblage. I read it as an essay on pictorial flatness, and an attempt to create an abstract language to represent the depths of consciousness. The top coat, we'll call it, is a coarse black scrim that hangs on the red layer beneath it like a moth eaten sweater. These two layers form the ruddy physical protection for the eerie pond underneath, illuminated in one tiny area by a chartreuse moon, partially obscured to indicate that this inner light is no landscape reflection but some interior glow.

          
Buoyed by the fact that at $175 there is lots of money to be made on a Gordon Wagner, I talked myself into buying a small scale ink and watercolor abstraction from 1964 by John Ihle, a printmaker who taught for many years at San Francisco State. I'm a low wattage fan of Ihle. The works are usually semi-figurative etchings that are hard to sell, but this 7 x 9 inch picture contains a world of interesting decisions, and the seller neglected to research the artist. For $35 I agreed to continue my pro bono employment as superintendent of the isle of lost paintings.

       
     I next stumbled on an older, exurban guy divesting himself of an outsider art collection. Part of me would like to give up on the world of mainstream art and just focus on the weirdoes that fill the pages of Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Art. I never fail to respond to the wrongness of art that's so bad it's good. It must touch on something like the wrongness in me. But in this guy's collection the wrongness was generically reconstituted as style and I wriggled off the hook on everything but two campy pictures inspired by the golden age of Hollywood from the 1990s by someone named Colleen Young. The dealer's speculative biography of the artist was highly unlikely, implying she painted these demanding pictures in her nineties, further placing into doubt the confused story behind the entire collection, which I never could completely put together. And it made me realize that what really I should do is liquidate these lame ass objects I find into an oral history of the sellers' accounts that go with them. I went ahead anyway and popped $75 each for them. Back at my car, I cold see that the artist cheated her way to painterly detail by working on top of collaged pictures of the images. It wasn't like she tried to hide it, I just missed it in the visual scrum of the booth. Even so, the picture's red carpet gaiety and horror vacui kept me entertained.

The Eternal Return of Western Gentrification

            Before I ever went to Hawaii I learned about it at the flea market through the incredibly loud shirts and Polynesian-style menus people brought home from their vacations. I envisioned the archipelago as one interminable Elvis film with a giant Tiki bar on the beach selling hula-dancer lamps and the other tchotchkes of colonialism to fat pink tourists.

            Then after a few years of living in California, I began visiting the islands myself: first Maui, then Kauai, and finally the Big Island.  I remember sitting on the beach in Maui where the trade winds would role in at 3pm everyday like clock work, and realizing how the flea market got so full of all that ridiculous memorabilia. The beauty of the place gets under your skin, and you want to keep that tan after it fades.

            I never felt the urge to commemorate my trips with anything more than a pound of Kona coffee. I already own too much junk to start buying manipulative tourist trash. And most of Hawaii’s contemporary art—the thing that I really sort of collect—is dreadful; but the historical pictures that document the representation of the Islands by western visitors over the centuries are beautiful, painful art objects aerated by biblical myths of paradise that eventually bog down in the eternal return of western gentrification. These are worth having. They are very different from other new world landscapes, in which we celebrate euro-centric painters who rolled through imposing their increasingly ratiocinated modes of perception on the landscape. By the time we get to the depiction of Hawaii's evolution from paradise to tourist zoo, we're mostly watching ourselves doomed again to kill the thing we love.

            It's that Groundhog Day perfume that I look for in those landscapes and I get it from this little painting by Gage Taylor from the 70s that I bought last week at Alemany from someone who knew him at the time. Taylor is one of a small group of painters from the San Francisco bay area who came to be known as visionaries, after a show curated by Walter Hopps at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Working in the late '60s and early '70s, they painted hallucinatory dreamscapes with pantheistic undertones that translated Haight Ashbury drug culture into a formalist painting project. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, they were a quirky group of aesthetes going against the grain of the conceptual art and performance experiments which dominate their age.

            This watercolor by Taylor lacks the alien fantasia that energize his most complex and entertaining magic kingdoms. However, the low-key naturalism allows the heightened rhythm and compositional unity which covers the paper like a DNA code to occupy center stage.  Like so many counter culture people from the San Francisco bay area in the 1960s, I'm sure Taylor fled to Hawaii when it became clear that the utopian aims of the 60s were being replaced by the nihilism of the 70s. You can sense his passion for this patch of pristine landscape. But the grey clouds, and the absence of twinkling hallucinations imply an older, sadder artist, and one who probably senses the impermanence of his present paradisal view.

Disney and Dissent

    I’m a Disney hater. I admit it. I’m one of those people that takes pleasure in the ridicule and abuse of the magic kingdom. I find the parks sterile and controlling, and the uplifting movies deeply false and saccharine. The whole Disney project, which grew from the brain of a penny pinching, union busting control freak, is a tidy, retro spinster’s fantasy that I find alien and life-sapping. It reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” another ridiculous, upbeat Hollywood vision drenched in lies, and designed to hide shadowy prejudices and purposes. When you add in Disney’s lopsided influence on the rewriting of American copyright law, which now protects Mickey from unauthorized reproduction until 2048, crippling the free flow of images, and helping to solidify the corporate control of popular culture, you have a company worthy of deep scorn from all but its shareholders.

         Thusly predisposed, I executed my purchase of this 1970 Disney takedown poster with a rare degree of bile and relish. Titled Disneyland After Dark, this 20 x 23 inch unauthorized and unsigned Day-Glo screen-print, originally sold in head shops around the country—a wildly underappreciated archipelago of dissent!—depicts Disneyland as a scene from a candy colored bukaki cartoon. Pluto has showered a smiling Mickey with a splatter of uric gold. Snow White gives way to the hungry hands of five of the seven dwarfs, while doc gives it to dopey from the rear. The three little pigs are in a daisy chain. Goofy is inexplicably riding Minnie. Cinderella’s legs are spread for Prince Charming, who is removing her shoe. The castle is emanating dollar sign rays of energy, while Tinkerbelle gives table dances to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Nice.

    On the way back to my car, I ran into several old stoners who'd hung the poster in their childhood bedrooms back in the day, and who recalled how Disney had hounded the author, whose name appears nowhere, until all publication of the poster had ceased. My frustration at the company’s image obsession is only tempered by the pleasure in knowing the object’s scarcity will bump up its selling price. I paid $65 and expect to make something, dammit! The seller contends there was another version of the poster, in which the phrase No Longhairs! adorned the castle. That would improve this angry bit of 70s head shop corporate critique, but it’s pretty good as it is.

Pillow Talk

    There are precious few ways to improve an Eames 670 rosewood lounge chair, especially when your cherished example is a down-filled, early production model. But there are even fewer chances for a heterosexual man slightly insecure in his masculinity to publicly buy a vintage pillow to decorate his house. I managed to do both this morning with the purchase of a 1981 trompe l'oeil paint tube pillow manufactured in Japan by a firm called Petit Loup, Co., Ltd. I hadn't put the pillow and the chair together when I was examining the thing at the flea market. Mercifully my mind doesn't work that way. I was occupied with how the pillow related to pop art and the soft sculpture of Claes Oldenburg. But the reds and the silver and the everyday objectness of it really light up the black leather of the chair and charge the ensemble with, uhhmm, a sense of the uncanny. On the chair, for some reason, the pillow looks like a Robert Gober sculpture. And cradling the pillow the iconic mid-century throne is rendered newly strange.

    Maybe I'm grasping—but It was that kind of a day at the flea market—a real grab bag. After the pillow, I found this 1969 poster from an obscure porn film called Sisters in Leather. No where to put it, wanted to leave it, had to have it. It's the kind of thing Richard Prince would buy and figure out later how to knock off.

    The cherry on top of my day, however, was this Oscar Wilde Action figure. Not worth a lot, except to someone for whom the inversion of depth and surface was a milestone in their intellectual development, and who just happened to name his one and only child Ernest. This one will hang from the christmas tree next to my other male hero: Captain Kirk.

A Gloomy Hawaiian Sun....

Marguerite Blasingame, undated, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches

 Because I gravitate to obnoxious, political, bad boy art, I would normally not pursue Marguerite Blasingame's gloomy, child-like, pacific surrealism. But that's why I love the flea market. It's like a chat roulette for objects. It gleefully imposes on my intellectual and aesthetic patterns it's own. So now I am the owner of this funereal Hawaiian flatland. Is it dusk or is it dawn? The artist died very young. Could it be her prophetic fear of the impending darkness? Or could it be the nuclear dawn trying to crack the grey yolk of an Yves Tanguy wasteland? All we really know, is that is one eerie fire ball.

Marguerite Blasingame, 1906-1947, was a WPA sculptor, painter and author, who was born in Hawaaii, studied at Stanford, and died while traveling in Mexico.

Radical Cheek

In my gallery practice I am hyper-conscious of the so-called death of the avant garde and its repressed desublimation. That pretentiously describes a situation in which we no longer rage against the machine but sell each other artifacts made by people who once raged against the machine as a way of staying slightly miffed at the machine or accoutred for a battle with the machine that we never intend to fight. I am both a victim and a perpetuator of this practice, as is most everyone in the art world, and my pennance is to program shows in which the art is genetically designed, at least, to draw attention to this problem, as solving it seems a bit above my pay grade.

Rene Burri, 1975, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches

With that beautiful loser dialogue as the default backdrop for my daily activities, you can only imagine how excited I was to come upon this photograph at the Alemany Flea Market yeaterday. That's Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther Minister of Information, and the author of Soul on Ice, posing in a pair of codpiece pants from his 1975 fall collection. The photo by Rene Burri of Magnum fame was taken through the window of a shop in the Les Halles district on the right bank of Paris, with Saint Eustache church in the reflection.

For me, Black Panthers are the ne plus ultra of revolutionary commitment in post war America, and they had extremely good fashion sense. Therefore they don't fit neatly into the jeremiad paradigm of a lost revolutionary authenticity that keeps getting swallowed up by capitalism and spit back as bourgeois fashion. They were both revolution and fashion at the same time. At least for a while. When he designed these clothes Cleaver had been on the run for six years after being charged with ambushing two Oakland Police officers in an incident that ultimately led to the death of fellow panther Bobby Hutton. He would soon recant his revolutionary activity, come back to America and become in sequence a born again christian, a moonie, a mormon and eventually a republican. That's not just repressed sublimation, that's only-in-America-crazy. Which Cleaver, as cagey and intelligent as he was, was.

Cleaver also had a disturbingly good sense of humor, as you can see from this ad for his line. He's toying with the critique of militantism in America as cynically fashionionable, called out most famously by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's. But let's not let the politics of politics keep us from glimpsing Cleaver's sexual politics in these clothes. By foregrounding the penis, a dicey move for a famously self-described rapist, and one that illustrates Cleaver's ability to be revolutionary and shameless at the same time, Cleaver said he was trying to make clothes more honest and combat the trend of using fashion to erase sexual difference. This would have definitely gone over well in France at the time. If a man got an erection he should be able to show it, said Cleaver. If there is a better definition of revolution in fashion than that, I've not heard it.

And Mine Were Separated

Rarely do the flea market gods dangle success with such promise, only to yank it away, as they did to me one recent weekend at Alemany. By not counting my chickens, I've generally innoculated myself against the emotional highs and lows that haunt the intrepid investigator who seeks his fortune among the soiled piles and broken dreams of this recycled, second-hand world. This time, unfortunately, I broke my own rule.

The egg in question is a white glazed ceramic pitcher or tea pot designed around 1937 by Paul Schreckengost for the Gem Clay Forming Company in Cleveland. Paul Schreckengost is the brother of Viktor Schreckengost, one of the most celebrated American industrial designers of the mid-20th century. Viktor made ceramics, the first banana-seat bicycle, and lots of other amazing things. Paul is largely remembered for this art deco masterpiece, which he supposedly made as a Christmas present for the employees of Gem Clay.

I grew up hating design. My parents were big folk art and antiques collectors, and one of the ways they tried to keep their marriage from imploding—which it eventually did anyway—was to distract themselves on Sunday afternoons by rearranging their collection like deck chairs on the Titanic. I was commandeered to do the lifting and my discomfort during this process contributed, I'm sure, to my disdain for the world of objects as a sullied version of the higher and more beautiful world of ideas that I began to explore as a teenager.

Art Deco's hyper-masculinity, emphasis on geometry, and reverence for technology, which I discovered in my late 20s, was the Trojan Horse that brought me back down to the earthly world of things and design. I've since moved on to more conceptual and political kinds of objects, but I'll always have a soft spot for the Tom Swift designs from the 1930s and 40s, eerily the time of my parent's youth.

When I saw the outline of the bulbous, streamlined pitcher on the folding table against the rising dawn that day I made for it quick-like. Usually objects that advertise their art deco genes this broadly are revival objects from the '70s and '80s. But as the sun rose I could sense the age in the faint black veins that had begun to appear beneath the pitcher's white skin. As in some old movie illustration of time travel, the calendar pages began to flutter in reverse until I was back in that land of kitchen aprons, picket fences, brimmed hats and color-saturated magazines.

At $30 it was a no-brainer. When I got back to my car, I could just make out the company's name impressed underneath. This is where it got ugly. iphone brought me to a website that identified Schreckengost's authorship: Bing! iphone brought me to the websites of important museum design collections: Bing! Bing!  iphone brought me to a website that proclaimed a $15,000 auction return: Bing! Bing! Bing!

I know you're thinking that when I got home I found a hairline crack. Wrong. I scoured the pitcher for damage from its journey through time like a novice tele-transporter on Start Trek, ensuring that his body was still intact. Everything was okay. Unfortunately it turns out that Schreckengost designed a tiny chromium-plated top that matches the metallic speed lines on the pitcher's edge to sit DISCONNECTED atop the spout. A strange and utterly impractical decision by the god-like designer, given the top's tiny size and how perfect the pitcher looks single and alone. And if he had to make a top, should he not at least have designed a hinge?  For how could this mouth and its cover, even though connected as intimately as two inanimate objects could be, ever stay together over time without some more profound bond? And mine were forever separated. God it hurt when that sunk in.

Oh well.  Cancel the flight to Paris.

The Paul Schreckengost pitcher with all its parts together.

 

 

 

An Umbrella Shaped Umbrella

There are so few accessories that a man can get away with without seeming affected, and an umbrella is one of the really theatrical ones. I find umbrellas to be strange, spidery, web-like things. Especially the old-fashioned kinds with pointy noses and u-shaped handles. They are artifacts from the past, and yet we still use them; spiky phallic vectors when closed, vaginal demi-spheres of protection when they blossom. No wonder the surrealists found them useful in conveying the uncanny.

   Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, 1958, 61 x 50 cm, private collection.

I always feel better defended when I go out with an umbrella. And I don't just mean against the rain. I mean against the vast nameless threat that resides outside my doorstep. You know the one. It's written in the sky, etched onto the curb, and lurking around every corner. Once in a while it fades away but then it always returns more menacing than ever.

Women seem to know how to carry umbrellas when they're open better than men. They seem better at exploiting their potential for shelter and expression. Men seem to like to keep their umbrellas shut, sometimes even during the rain. We find it soothing to grab onto something firm and sword-like. You can lean on an umbrella, almost as though it were a fancy cane. It's like a weapon but in the way that a toy gun or an english accent is like a weapon. An umbrella's magic has something to do with its formality, the way it makes you feel proper, genteel, correct – states of being that are hard to conjure these days, but that retain certain powers even in a world of hoodies and emoticons.

Julie Andrew in Mary Poppins, Walt Disney, 1964

 For a man, carrying an umbrella is a tiny taste of what it must feel like to be in drag. Just beyond the umbrella is the morning coat, and then the cigarette holder, and then before you know it, you're on stage in a Noel Coward play or you're the Penguin to someone's Batman. (If I have to be the Penguin please let it be Burgess Meredith, not Danny DeVito.) Even though umbrellas have been with us for thousands of years, and are unlikely to be surpassed by a new technology, they seem on the edge of extinction. One good push from the hoodie and they'll become a collectible. I notice they got no umbrellas on Star Trek.

 With this, the usual churning of ludicrous, abstract thoughts just beneath my consciousness, and the unquenchable thirst for yet another consumer transaction, I stopped in front of a brass umbrella-shaped umbrella stand at 5:30 a.m. one recent Sunday at Alemany Flea Market. Like most brass objects that I see at the flea market, I assumed from a distance that this one said "Made in India" underneath. As usual I'd forgotten my flash light, so I couldn't confirm. But the longer I stared at the umbrella's sleek rippled body, beaded trim, tripod base, well-cast handle and tiny jester pompons, the suspicion of kitsch gave way to the suspicion of haute design. When the seller informed me the price was $30, I picked it up to see if it possessed an inner life. Yes, I have that power.

The object in question, cast brass umbrella stand, French, circa 1970, as attributed by the author.

There are very few objects made in the style of architecture parlante or narrative architecture, where the form of the thing literally represents the thing. The ones there are have an eerie presence and this one is no exception. I grew up driving past one that we used to call the Big Duck. A fowl-shaped folly on the Sunrise Highway in Riverhead, New York, built by a farmer out of concrete to sell eggs, it marked the passage each summer from our regular life in New York City to the escapist delights of the beach on Long Island. The only other contact I've had with architecture parlante is the outsider drawings of A.G. Rizzoli, whose delineations of baroque skyscrapers are really portraits of the kids in his neighborhood. Thus conditioned, I wondered driving home if I hadn't found a piece of American folk art. But that didn't add up. This umbrella is a thing of chic refinement, most likely distributed by some cool boutique. No, I thought, this self-reflexive brass container has to be French '60s, or French '70s, more Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg than Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain, more sculpture than functional object. And isn't that the way we think of the French? I really can't see myself sullying it with dripping versions of the real thing.

 

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964, directed by Jacques Demi