Muse

She enjoyed the attentions of painter Gustav Klimt, composer Alexander Zemlinsky and painter Oskar Kokoschka. But she married composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. Some she inspired and some she tortured. She being, Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (née Schindler), the most beautiful girl in Vienna.





Danae by Gustav Klimt.





Double portrait (Kokoschka and Alma Mahler), 1912-13
Museum Folkwang, Essen




Alma Mahler, 1912
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo




Bride of the Wind, Kokoschka's self-portrait expressing his unrequited love




Two Nudes (Lovers), 1913
Self-portrait of Kokoschka with Alma Mahler


Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Testimony to a Passionate Relationship




The polydrama Alma by writer Joshua Sobol and director Paulus Manker.



My Life, My Loves: Memoirs of Alma Mahler, out of print

Diaries 1898-1902 by Alma Mahler-Werfel

It very well may be jousting at windmills...

But it just might be possible to produce a glazed finish at will.

Well, only that in the dark days of food shortages my mother was relieved to find two sacks of rice in the back of her store cupboard. It made a lot of puddings (I doubt if she could buy the ingredients for curry) but it was originally intended for reglazing her chintz curtains. Now there's a thought..

Yes, indeed Rose C'est La Vie, now there is a thought.

A thought now heightened by the fact many of the fabric houses are discontinuing some of their best chintzes. While it is relatively easy to have fabric printed in small runs (20-50 meters) it is impossible to have it glaze finished. Unless of course one is prepared to order 250 meter runs, and foot the cost of screens and strikes. One day, but not just yet.




In the meanwhile Belgian rice starch, superior to other types, seemingly gives the highest quality finish on natural fibers.

The degree of sheen is entirely dependent on the concentration of starch and the pressing of the cloth.

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Like Alice, through the looking glass

Boissiere House
Port of Spain, Trinidad

In Trinidad, a Painted Lady in Distress
The New York Times




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Through the keyhole

Who lives in a house like this?

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From A to C without Lucia

Dresser of souls led to...



The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant by John Singer Sargent

The symbol of the English clique known as The Souls.



Which in turn led to...




Clouds: The Biography of a Country House

The house built by Percy and Madeline Wyndham that would become known as the house of the age.




And finally ...




Cabinet designed by Philip Webb in 1861.

Philip Webb was the architect who not only designed Clouds but also William Morris's country retreat, The Red House.



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Dresser of souls

Lady Duff Gordon




Lucile: London, Paris, New York and Chicago








Stage costume by Lucile, circa 1915



For me there was a positive intoxication in taking yards of shimmering silks, laces as airy as gossamer and lengths of ribbons, delicate and rainbow-coloured, and fashioning of them garments so lovely that they might have been worn by a princess in a fairy-tale. - Lucile


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Something for the weekend

Liquid Sky (1983)




In her book The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism Wendy Steiner opines that Liquid Sky is a concise presentation of postmodern concerns. She writes: Here we have all the ingredients of the postmodern romance: parody; voyeurism; fetishism; a pastiche of modes, stylistic levels and esthetic allusions; simultaneous humor and insensitivity about serious issues like the Holocaust, rape, and feminism; the collapse of binary oppositions, as with identical male and female models; the equation of art with assault; the inclusion of the audience in the action and therefore in the ethical responsibility for what is represented; and the outrageous cost of ecstasy.


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Bright young things

David Mlinaric (on the left) and Julian Ormsby-Gorge engaged in conversation while attending a party at Chrisopher Gibbs's place. Photographed by Terrence Spencer in May of 1966 for Life.

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Eye for the rich and the splendid

The Christie's catalogue for the Geoffrey Bennison sale.



Bennison's Malabar, and its companion Malabar Stripe, used fearlessly and lavishly just as Geoffrey Bennison had intended.


There, under low ceilings, he created rooms that felt more like an Irish-Georgian country house than Mayfair. Pictures were massed between groaning, untidy bookshelves. His own deliciously faded-looking fabrics and old crewelwork draperies were mixed with Moroccan textiles, and all these elements were held together by his favorite Red Riding Hood red, a beautifully subtle scarlet described by Bennison’s friend and fellow antiquarian Christopher Gibbs as the color that lines the insides of old Moroccan chests.

This interior, with its Caravaggesque light, its perfectly judged drama and easy comfort, was in many ways the culmination of the designer’s ideas concerning decoration. His sense of color was unfailingly sure: He would sit for hours in a room just watching the play of light, and he mixed his paints himself. “Never,” he said, “trust a painter or a color chart.” When it came to objects, his philosophy could be summed up in another of his memorable phrases: Always put “something mad on top of something very good, or something very good on top of something mad.” On Geoffrey Bennison’s death, as all dealers perhaps ultimately wish, his things—the very good and the very mad—were dispersed in a great sale

Stephen Calloway
Geoffrey Bennison: Extravagant Patterns and Remarkable Objects Define Exotic English Rooms
Architectural Digest, January 2000

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The happy few

The late Bill Blass's New York dining room.



The late great Geoffrey Bennison once remarked to the art historian John Richardson regarding Bill Blass, Bill’s one of my favourite clients...no cobwebs on his cheque book.



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