Francis Bacon – one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and subject of a current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – arrived at his artistic career via a spell, in the 1930s, as an interior designer. It’s not something that is widely known, because in those pre-social media halcyon days of yore it was possible to expunge anything you didn’t like from record, and Bacon preferred to suggest that he’d spent his youth drifting from bar to bar. In fact, he designed furniture and rooms for, among others, Madge Garland, former editor of House & Garden’s sister magazine, Vogue. Little has survived - certainly no complete rooms – but accounts record that his look was white monotone and made use of much steel and glass, while he curtained windows with what Madge described as “white rubber sheeting, that hangs in sculptural folds.”
We know that art is an essential addition to an interior, and that, more than just decorating, it adds to a layered aesthetic and delivers a sense of the personal, too. We also know that art can inform a scheme: both Tamsin Saunders of Home & Found and Sophie Ashby of Studio Ashby have recounted deriving a palette from a painting, while Philip Hooper, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, says he has often found curtain ideas in clothing details. But this is less about looking at art, and more about what else we can take from an artist’s vision.
For once upon a time, before interior design became a recognised service, it wasn’t just architects who were responsible for the insides of the grand houses that they built; artists, too, would take commissions for interiors. Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini was one of the leading Venetian history painters of the 18th century, but he also had a hand in the decoration of, among others, Kimbolton Castle and Castle Howard. And there are artists, points out the Turner Prize-winning Jeremy Deller, who have changed how we view the world: he specifies Andy Warhol, and Pop Art’s impact on our aesthetic view through its elevating of ordinary objects to a higher realm. Then there are artists’ own homes - and there are two in the November issue of House & Garden, on newsstands now. Bedded between and within are interiors that have inspired, or at least aided, creativity, and demonstration of a mindset that we could – and perhaps should – adopt; a mindset that embraces self-expression, experimentation, improvisation, and more.
Arguably, artists were among the first to start thinking about what their interiors might look like to the external eye (the forerunner to making our homes look good on Instagram). Not only was this because their home might be where they met dealers, curators, and collectors, but also because it might be reproduced - as a subject, or background for a portrait. In Arles, Vincent Van Gogh designed the rooms of the Yellow House to convey a humble simplicity, and then eternalised them on canvas; his bedroom (currently among the paintings being exhibited at the National Gallery) features on many a Pinterest inspiration board. The Irish artist John Lavery’s London studio, where visitors (and sitters) included George V and Queen Mary, resembled a smart society drawing room. A century or so on, Mike Silva’s interior paintings (currently being exhibited at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex) encourage us how to see the beauty in the incidental: he captures the interplay of light in a manner that harks back to the Dutch painters of the Golden Age, but with fewer black and white checkerboard floors and more rental-familiar stainless-steel sinks (never have they looked so appealing.)
Notable is that, in doing this, artists have long set trends, and laid foundations for interior schemes of the future. James Hall, in his book The Artist’s Studio, dates using homes to project a particular artistic identity to the Italian Renaissance and the Florentine painter Cennino Cennini, who suggested that his fellow artists find a room in their houses and arrange it in a similar fashion to a scholar’s studiolo, thus bestowing intellectual weight to the process. Fast forward several centuries, and in her biography of artist Mabel Nicholson (wife of portrait and landscape painter William Nicholson, and mother of modernist Ben Nicholson) Lucy Davies points out that both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Abbott McNeil Whistler “studded their homes with outré objects designed […] to signal themselves as alternative to the mainstream.” Mabel’s own designs were “for the time [the early 20th century] . . . extraordinary,” notes Stephen Calloway in Twentieth-century Decoration – and Lucy describes her drawing room as featuring “a black satin sofa, a deep blue ceiling and dragon carpet in bright colours.” Then, think of Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall at Leighton House, and Monet’s colour palette for his house at Giverny, which has inspired countless interior designers. Jeremy Deller’s hallway was colour-drenched in dark green and the floor tiled to match almost a decade ago – i.e. before the term ‘colour drenching’ even really existed. In other words, it’s in our interests to pay attention.
At times, the envelope is pushed so far that the private home becomes a large-scale artwork: witness Maison Colbert, artists Charlotte and Philip Colbert’s collaboration with Buchanan Studio, where marble lobster busts and a womb-shaped headboard give Bacon’s rubber curtains a run for their money. It’s not the first: the artist Franz Stuck designed and built the Villa Stuck in Munich as a Gesamtkunstwerk, which translates to ‘total work of art.’ His aim was that it should amalgamate life, architecture, art, music, and theatre all in one space, and he designed literally everything – furniture, furnishings, and finish. It’s an approach that blurs the lines between home, gallery and studio – and it can happen in a more low-key way too: we all know of Charleston Farmhouse – a look that has spawned a thousand imitations (for good reason). In Primrose Hill, the textile artist Pauline Caulfield lives with a mural on her kitchen wall that was started by her late husband, the Pop Art-associated Patrick Caulfield, when he came across some tester pots sitting around - while the house is filled with furniture that has been adapted and painted, by both Pauline and Patrick. It’s entirely individual – and enviably appealing.
The attitude of creative can-do has seen some artists develop a cross-disciplinary practice, which differs from Bacon’s in that it’s been sequentially secondary. Instances run the gamut from William Morris’s arts and crafts ethos (and his eternally relevant point that we should have nothing in our houses that we do now know to be useful or believe to be beautiful) to minimalist artist Donald Judd’s functionality-focussed designs (fans number John Pawson and Kim Kardashian) whose premise he explained in an essay entitled It’s Hard To Find a Good Lamp. The French conceptual artist Bernar Venet lives with furniture by Judd (who was a friend), mural-esque wall pieces by Frank Stella (that in one case extends over the dining room table), and his own steel furniture (that he started designing out of dissatisfaction at what was commercially available.)
There are other instances of homeware too (worth knowing about because it can be a more affordable means of owning work by an artist whose output you admire) and sometimes the segue is almost imperceptible from artistic practice. Jonas Wood’s wallpaper, currently on sale at the Gagosian shop in the Burlington Arcade, W1, developed from his series of paintings of interiors - hanging at Gagosian Grosvenor Square. Georgie Hopton’s vegetable block printed wallpaper and fabrics, on view and available from Lyndsey Ingram gallery, were created when her enthusiasm carried her beyond the bounds of paper. Rana Begum’s wallpaper collaboration with Maharam, designed as a digitally printed large-scale wall installation, is a continuation of Rana’s research into colour and pattern. And then there’s Maison Colbert’s range – which includes a ‘fallopia vase’ and a ‘lobster lamp’.
But all this isn’t to say that innate ability is ubiquitous among artists - or that interior design is ubiquitously practiced. Lucian Freud turned to Wendy Nicholls and Mathew Claridge at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler for his Kensington house, proving that you can be brilliant, and yet decide to cede to an expert (a valuable lesson). Other artists have lived in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily want to: Picasso, who hoarded until a room was full and then simply closed the door and moved on (though the focus of his hoarding did inspire work), turned his kitchen into a workshop for his lithography and engraving. Louise Bourgeois, after her husband died, gradually got rid of more and more of the furniture in their Manhattan townhouse to make more space for producing art, and even threw out the stove. As for Bacon, it’s probable that he effaced all trace of his designs because he felt they weren’t good enough (he did the same with his paintings) and certainly rubber curtains haven’t exactly caught on (beyond industrial settings.) At the same time, his own taste developed, becoming less spare. Later, his trinkets numbered a William Blake life mask by James Deville which he bought from the National Portrait Gallery shop. It’s been re-made, for the shop, giving us opportunity to experience something of his taste in interiors - and the designs that inspired him - after all.
