From the archive: S. I. Newhouse Jr's Manhattan apartment (1970)

William Grigsby

S I Newhouse Jr, New York publisher and art collector, believes that art is worth living with as well as collecting. When he decided to decorate his apartment his brief to William Baldwin, the internationally-known designer-­decorator, was simple enough: comfortable furniture, but nothing with too strong a per­sonality of its own.

Mr Baldwin met the brief exactly, with a series of simple and eminently livable settings, as hospitable to his client's sculpture and paintings as to his client's guests.

The living-room is white-walled with fur­niture and furnishings in deliberately under­played tones: pale straw rug, loose covers on sofas in beige cotton, suede ottomans, beige­striped cotton blinds. Visual excitement is concentrated upon the brilliantly coloured paintings: Barnett Newman's 'The Word' above the fireplace, another wall dominated by a vast Morris Louis, on the ceiling an Alexander Liberman.

Paintings are not the only contributions to the collector's decorative scheme: a green steel structure by Anthony Caro cuts across the room's cool space, a sculpture by David Smith, set on a white pedestal, makes its uncompromising mark behind the grouped sofas, and a Max Bill marble is set athwart the heart.

Every table has its further offering to the appreciative eye, every vantage point a fresh visual challenge. A full list of the works in the living-room alone would seem like the opening pages of a catalogue raisonné from a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, with a Kenneth Noland ablaze above a powerful Jackson Pollock in black and white.

None of these works is spotlighted, Mr Newhouse enjoys the differences he sees in each work as the light in the room changes. Again, he sees no reason why large paintings demand large rooms. He has, for example, hung two enormous canvases–a Jules Olitski and a Kenneth Noland–in his minute card room, and as if this confrontation were not enough, faced them with a radiant Barnett Newman. For him the size of paintings he admires makes the dimensions of a room irrelevant.

This visual paradox of a small room accommodating vast works of art with no sense of claustrophobic oppression is shown in a masterly manner in Mr Baldwin's treat­ment of the master bedroom which is virtually a beige-brown carapace for bed and paintings, with huge mysterious Mark Rothko above and facing the bed.

'You don't have to limit yourself to white walls to enjoy paintings and sculpture,' Mr Newhouse says. 'Any solid colour makes a satisfying backdrop.