Opinion: Universe In A Cabinet

There is something slightly nightmarish about 19th-century cabinets with all of those little nooks and hidden drawers. They presume an order, a hierarchy of place and space that no longer exists in our own Prozac-soaked sensibility.

I remember a knobby oak sideboard in my parents' house that stood god-like at one end of the dining room. It had a dozen different doors and drawers, half of which were perpetually stuck from humidity. (I recall a set of marrow spoons lying at the back of one drawer. Black with tarnish, the long narrow spoons had the sinister look of surgical instruments.)

The panels were carved with woodland scenes of hunters and a nymph disappearing into the deepest cut of Gothic shadow - too remote even for a boy's imagination to chase.

Distractions

Like most people I learned to ignore the cabinets and chairs in museum galleries (except the Reitvelds and Wrights). They were distractions to be bumped into when you were backing up to look at a painting. The chair with overstuffed upholstery and a velvet rope tied between its arms couldn't compete with the night scene by Whistler or the headless nude by Rodin.

We hardly know what to do with a free-standing cabinet anymore. There are too many places for dust and neuroses to collect. Freud and Gropius did away with the need for so many secretive little chambers. We expect total exposure in our furniture and architecture. Pieces are either built in as part of the greater whole, or stripped down to their structural components.

Our furniture is no longer designed to intimidate and amaze.

Elaborate Cabinetry

The current exhibit at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton, "Living With Art - The American Esthetic Movement 1875-1900," reminds us of how it used to be. The show is a mix of 19th-century paintings, photographs, prints, and art pottery, but a group of cabinets by the Herter brothers steals the show. For once, it appears that the paintings serve as a period backdrop for the furniture and not the other way around.

The German emigre furniture makers Gustave and Christian Herter managed to crowd an entire universe of meaning into their elaborate cabinets.

One of the pieces included in the Vered show is framed in ebonized wood with marquetry borders of various stained woods. It is one of the most dreamlike pieces of furniture I have ever seen.

Pure Theater

Narrow vertical panels at either side are painted with funereal themes: amphoras with masks and flowers. The top of the cabinet is made of Mexican onyx. The muse of the cabinet is set into the center panel - the profile of a woman's face cast in bronze. Each panel discloses a successive act of some domestic ritual that we are no longer familiar with.

Here is an example of cabinet-making as pure theater: a cross-fertilization of all the arts into a single gesture of utilitarian use - an object that could be stared at for hours but also hide the cutlery. It is hard to imagine what sorts of household treasures could have been worthy of such enshrinement.

There are nine other examples of the Herter brothers' work in the Vered show, including a side cabinet designed in the Japanese influence with simple black frame and cherry wood panels; a fire screen; bookcase; a library table, and dining chairs.

East Hampton Progeny

Christian Herter's son was Albert Herter, who, with his wife, Adele, owned the estate called the Creeks in East Hampton (which is now Ronald O. Perelman's), and whose son Christian became Secretary of State.

The show also includes many late 19th-century works that complement the furniture. A powerful nude by Thomas Eakins from 1869 hangs in a little back gallery. The Eakins painting which may be a self-portrait, is surrounded by a revealing series of albumen print photographs from the 1800s taken by Eakins as studies for his paintings.

His naked subjects strike oddly camp poses: "Two Students Post in a Deathbed Tableaux," "Nude Youths Boxing," "Motion Photograph of Unidentified Model."

Landscapes, Too

There are also several etchings by James MacNeill Whistler and an oil painting by Childe Hassam. Two large pastel drawings by Walter Shirlaw (c. 1892) were done as studies for allegorical murals at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago.

The East End's landscape is well represented with drawings by Oscar Bluemner of the windmill in Bridgehampton and the beach in Westhampton. There is a splashy little oil of a girl with a red bow on the beach by Edward Potthast (c. 1900) and a perfect watercolor-and-gouache study of the Montauk Lighthouse by Thomas Moran (1880).

"East Hampton Pond With Ducks" was painted by Bruce Crane (c. 1881) with a reckless vigor of sweetness and light. It shows Town Pond long before the days of the Jitney. A group of ducks waddles along the banks of the pond with the bright imprint of a child remembering her first summer outing.