Comfort zones

Comfort zones From the backless bench to Matisse's 'good armchair', furniture has always been about more than bums on seats. But when the surrealists entered the drawing room, domestic interiors would never be the same again. By James Hall Femme-Maison by Louise Bourgeois. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve James Hall Sat 12 Jun 2010 00.05 BST https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jun/12/horace-walpole-strawberrysurreal-house Are you comfortable? Since you are reading the Saturday edition of a British newspaper published in the summer of AD2010, you are probably sitting or lying down rather than standing, your body supported by upholstery, or by moulded or flexible material of some sort. If seated at a computer, or reclining in a hammock, you may be gently rocking. By most western standards, you are comfortable – though whether your present position is doing long-term damage to your spine is another matter . . . The concept of comfort and discomfort, as social historians and historical novelists are at pains to point out, is a modern invention. It is a key issue in two current exhibitions, the V&A's Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill and The Surreal House, which has just opened at the Barbican in London. Walpole was one of the first to identify domestic comfort and discomfort with particular historical periods, and he concluded that comfort was both something very modern and very desirable; the surrealists rejected home comforts as too bourgeois, and instead romanticised discomfort. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even elite Europeans had little furniture, and what they had was rudimentary. They sat on backless benches, stools and the x-shaped "Savonarola" chair, or on straight-backed wooden chairs placed against the wall. Loose cushions – squabs – might sometimes be provided, though as people often wore several layers of clothing to ward off the cold, these might have been redundant. At court, or in big households, being seated while others stood was a sign of prestige – hence, the terms "chairman", the bishop's "seat", and the "heir to the throne”. Sir Walter Scott concluded his description of the interior of a medieval castle in Ivanhoe (1820) with a penetrating aperçu: "Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort there was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed." Unmissed – and unnecessary? If you spend most of your days in the saddle or standing around, whether as a medieval knight or a modern polo player (see Jilly Cooper), you develop superb core stability and rock-solid buttocks. Maintaining a ramrod-straight back is both effortless and desirable, and that's the principal behind modern saddle-style office chairs. In an equestrian society, high chairbacks are largely for show, a sort of priapic peacock's tail. Upholstery, interior decoration and the science of ergonomics came of age in the 18th century. New furniture types, properly padded so as to remain unlumpy, yet light enough to be moved around and into intimate groupings, catered to a relatively informal "leisure" society in which women played a more prominent role. Houses tended to have smaller rooms, each with a specialised function that required appropriate furnishings. The new siège courant (movable or "fly" chair) contrasted with the static, wall-bound siège meublant. They ranged from the chaise longue and cabriole to the reading and lolling chair. Slanted, broader backs and curved arms enabled the sitter to be more comfortable and mobile enough for conversation and flirting. Sitting with legs crossed became a male fashion. English cabinetmakers such as Chippendale pioneered the use of mahogany, a hardwood imported from Jamaica that was strong and resistant to woodworm, but extremely light and stable even when cut very thinly. Orchestrating all the newfangled fixtures and fittings was the task of the new breed of interior designer, Daniel Marot, Jean-François Blondel, William Kent and Robert Adam. Until the 18th century, the word "comfort" had usually referred to spiritual succour and consolation, or to something medicinal. But now it started to take on its prime modern meaning of general physical well-being. In 1770, Horace Walpole wrote to say that, arriving unexpectedly at a friend's house, the housekeeper "has given me a good fire and some excellent coffee and bread and butter, and I am as comfortable as possible". Comfort was crucial even in Walpole's pioneering Gothic-style house at Strawberry Hill, as he explained in the visitor's guide: "In truth, I did not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, and modern refinements in luxury." Refinement meant "French gaiety", and the house only had a single piece of furniture that might have been from before 1600 – a wooden chair from Glastonbury Abbey. The woodenbacked "gothic" chairs that were specially made to Walpole's own design had anachronistic padded seats, but these were anyway outnumbered by state-of-the-art settees and fauteuils. Nineteenth century gothicists were surprisingly tolerant of upholstered furniture which, thanks to the industrial revolution, was now being supplied to the middle classes (upholstery with iron springs was introduced in around 1825). Sir Walter Scott commissioned gothic-style furniture for his house at Abbotsford, and visitors must have feared the worst when they saw the serried ranks of stark wooden chairs lined up against the wall in the entrance hall. But Scott's antiquarianism was selective, and in the reception rooms and library the chairs were conventionally upholstered. Pugin copied the Glastonbury chair, but his clients demanded comfort, and the upright chairs for the Houses of Commons and Lords are almost obscenely well padded. William Morris & Co didn't just make simple wooden chairs with rush seats inspired by traditional rural furniture: the famous Morris chair, with its adjustable upholstered back, was made for sensual slumbers, and dreams of Avalon. Henri Matisse, the greatest modern painter of textile-filled interiors, epitomised this ethos in his Notes on Painting (1908): "What I dream of is an art of balance, or purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue". It was an odd thing for Matisse to say because armchairs and upholstery had been conspicuous by their near total absence in his paintings. When his sitters sit, they perch awkwardly or hieratically on simple Sussex-style and slat-backed chairs. Matisse must have been trying to disarm critics, and shake off his reputation as the bourgeois-bating leader of the Fauves. His statement applies much better to the art of his intimiste contemporaries, Vuillard and Bonnard, who specialised in pictures of women basking in opulently-upholstered interiors, preparing for the return of their businessman spouses. The first sofas appear in Matisse's art in around 1910, but this was a bit of a false start, not least because in 1912-13 he spent time in Morocco where (as in most of the non-western world) people sat, knelt and squatted on the floor. Matisse's first bona fide "good armchair" painting arrives in around 1916, when a womb-like crapaud upholstered in pink fabric cocoons a slumbering female model in a green dressing gown. During the 1920s, Matisse's art does, to a greater extent, enter a comfort zone, but his interiors are brashly exotic, and upholstery doesn't often get the upper hand. His topless odalisques are just as likely to stretch out on cushions and rugs as they are to lie on day-beds, and when they do sit, their backs tend to remain severely vertical. Many of his models' poses are ones that most westerners would find uncomfortable. There's probably more yoga than "French gaiety" here. Matisse has never been forgiven for his "good armchair" mission statement, because its validation of soporific home comforts smacks of bourgeois complacency, rooted in male ownership of property, possessions and women (his biographer Hilary Spurling claims that it arose from his "intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation, rejection and exposure"). The myth of "home sweet home" was one of the Victorians' greatest creations, but it had already come under gentle fire in George and Weedon Grossmith's serialised novel The Diary of a Nobody (1892), where the house-proud, homeloving George Pooter falls asleep in his chintz-covered armchair, and where Padge hogs the best chair. Home comforts were to become one of the principal targets for the post-war avant-gardes. For the monkish Gerrit Rietveld, designer of the ruthlessly angular Red Blue Chair (1918-23) and member of the De Stijl movement, spiritual comfort was more important than physical. Central to these artists' reforming agenda was their rejection of sophisticated, soporific furniture that turned the sitter into a slothful couch potato: the most extreme manifestation of this was and still is the entirely chairless, whitewalled art gallery. Avant-garde suspicion of domestic bliss is one of the pervasive themes of the Barbican's The Surreal House, a sprawling smorgasbord of modern art, film and architecture that seeks to expose and revel in the dark and unhomely sides of home life. The exhibition includes plenty of quasi-crime-scenes in which furniture and architecture play a leading role – Rachel Whiteread's sepulchral Black Bath; Claude Cahun's traumatic tight-squeeze, Self-Portrait (in a Cupboard); René Magritte's painting of a cupboard containing a "dress" on a hanger made out of a buxom woman's skin; Louise Bourgeois's reclining female nude with her head encased in a house, FemmeMaison; Francis Bacon's convulsive bed-scenes (included in a section called "Panic Space"). More elaborate is Giacometti's bronze tableau, Surrealist Table. Each leg of the asymmetrical table is in a different period design, which makes it seem both historically and physically unstable. Perched on the table top is a heavily draped and partially veiled female bust and a cast of a left hand, both of which suggest a mind- and time-bending séance or satanic ritual. Giacometti has not provided a chair (or a pedestal), for neither is needed if the human spirit is to be set free. Salvador Dalí made the classic "anti-good armchair" statements when he turned to furniture design in the 1930s. He created a red upholstered sofa based on Mae West's lips for the English collector Edward James (Brighton Museum), and a stool whose back consists of a pair of predatory arms. Dalí insisted that a chair "can be used to sit on, but on condition that one sits on it uncomfortably". Here, the discomfort arises from the sitter's being, as it were, sexually assaulted by the chair and by being forced to think about sado-masochistic sex. A chair also had to express the spirit of the age and cause the "proud, ornamental, intimidating and quantified spectre of a period to spring forth instantly". It was usually vast public buildings such as Gothic cathedrals that were said to express the spirit of their age, but Dalí wanted to bring the unsettling sublimities associated with colossal symbolic structures into the home. The Barbican exhibition includes photographs of Dalí's lubricous Dream of Venus pavilion (1939), and his lugubrious beach-scene painting The Dream (1937), in which a biomorphic beanbag head is painfully propped up by wooden crutches driven into the sand. Coloured a viral seaweed green, this is a stranded merman on a splayed bed of nails. For Dalí, crutches supported individuals or classes that were on their last legs, such as the European aristocracy. The Dream measures 50 x 77cms: the abiding paradox is that almost all surrealist paintings are "cabinet" pictures – small, easel paintings that fit snugly into any bourgeois sitting-room. The abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, famous for his hyperactive, ectoplasmic paintings of naked, seated women, had Matisse in his sights when he said: "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. . . some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They do not want to 'sit in style.'" Ed Kienholz's dingy tableau of a 1930s interior, The Wait (1964-5), suggests that to "sit in style" is living death: an old lady sits regally in a throne-like wooden chair, but now transformed into a clothed skeleton. On the wall behind her is a 19th-century photograph of a man we presume to be her husband. She's a working-class Queen Victoria, endlessly mourning and yearning. Kienholz's tableau must have been inspired by Warhol's Electric Chair (1963), but it implies that any form of sedentary activity is bad for you. The Surreal House omits authentic modern furniture, possibly because quite a lot has been exhibited at the Barbican recently – there have been shows of the modernist architects Le Corbusier and Aalto, who designed chairs of varying degrees of comfort, and they've just had Ron Arad: Restless. This postpunk British chair designer caters for those who like to sit dangerously. Arad's Bad Tempered Chair resembles a cluster of inflated air-bags. "I can't stay still in one place for too long," he says defiantly. But where avant-garde permanent revolution ends and novelty-seeking consumerism begins is a moot point. The architectural elements found in The Surreal House are equally uncosy – a mixture of womblike prisons and vertiginous mazes. The best example here is André Masson's Piranesian painting The Labyrinth (1938), inspired by the Cretan legend of the Minotaur, the bull-headed man who resides at the centre of King Minos's labyrinth. The surrealists understood the labyrinth as an image of the human mind at whose centre resides the Minotaur, symbol of irrational impulses. In Masson's painting, the labyrinth is incorporated within the Minotaur's own mutilated body, which is a juddering architectural ruin made from skin, brick and stone. The Minotaur perches on a barren rocky ledge, and his body is partly flayed to reveal a labyrinth within, with the main entrance through his left hand (his right arm is missing). Masson had been badly injured during the first world war, and this creature is both monster and heroic survivor, one who has been made and unmade by endless violence and dynamism. What better place for it, and for the exhibition, than in the brutalist labyrinth that is the Barbican Centre? Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill is at the V&A until 4 July; The Surreal House is at the Barbican until 12 September.