Sara Berman’s Closet @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The wall text was also printed on a small poster for the viewer to take:
Sara Berman was born in the village of Lenin in Belarus on March 15, 1920
...
Sara and her family moved to Tel Aviv in Palestine in 1932.
There they lived in a shack near the ocean.
Sand covered everything.
The women were always baking, washing, starching, and ironing.
The Middle Eastern sun bleached the laundry a blinding white.
Fanatically pressed linens were precisely folded and stacked.
The clothes were so heavily starched they could get up and walk away.
In 1954 Sara left Tel Aviv and moved with her husband and two daughters
to New York City. …
Many things happened, including a divorce
after thirty-eight years of marriage.
In 1982 Sara moved into a studio apartment at 2 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.
She was happy in a room of her own.
…
She wore only white clothes.
We really don’t know why.
…
This closet ....
all lined up with military precision and loving care,
represents the unending search -from the monumental to the mundane-
for order, beauty, and meaning.
Maira Kalman & Alex Kalman
This child’s chair designed by Alvar Aalto Sara Berman used at her dining room table.
The color, the simplicity of form, and its inclusion in Sara Berman’s apartment whose atypical-typical NYC closet in which she alongside her clothing, linens and Chanel No. 5 kept her graeter and cookie press reminded me of the tea set I’d just seen in the previous gallery, 746, with the exhibit The Aesthetic Movement in America . I could imagine Sara Berman serving tea from this set at her low dining table with inflatable globes strewn on the floor of the minimal, bright, light studio. She might have even found a spot for it on a shelf in her closet.
The earthenware tea set was produced in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1879-83) by Chelsea Keramic Art Works in a style inspired by the late nineteenth century interest in Eastern motives, Japanese hammered metalwork and the designs of Christopher Dresser [paraphrased from the exhibit signage]
“Throughout the nineteenth century, morally based theories of design and construction suggested that deceptive or “sham” manufacture, such as veneering and the use of illusionistic decorative devices, corrupted the consumer by extension. Dresser believed that the ornamentalist could, through truthful or false design, “exalt or debase a nation.” In search of a moral design vocabulary, he established principles based on Truth, Beauty, and Power; Truth criticizes imitation of materials, Beauty describes a sense of timeless perfection in design, and Power implies strength, energy, and force in ornament, achieved through Knowledge. Finding inspiration in plants and their structures, which he determined were geometrically balanced, Dresser took a radically scientific approach to art and design. He believed that truth was founded in science and that art reflected beauty. Knowledge, the manifestation of Truth and Beauty, as Dresser resolved, is Power. However, rather than depicting plant forms in a naturalistic manner, he followed the guidelines set by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament that “Flowers and other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations …” (Proposition 13). Equally important, Dresser took from Jones the precept that “All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction” (Proposition 8) whereby stylizing or abstracting the “source” ornament through geometric reasoning removes all preconceived associations from the source and thus creates pure ornament.” (from: Essay- Christopher Dresser. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. online)
This was a photo on the wall, a view into Sara Berman’s apartment. The dining table and chairs are on the left, globes on the floor to the right. Bed in the foreground. Low, two seat sofa under the window. It was small, but it was hers.
This stained glass window in the previous gallery’s exhibition with the tea set would be out of place in Sara’s space.
Squash window with pebbles. Louis Comfort Tiffany 1885-1890.
But then again, maybe it would have fit in Sara’s space.
It is a fairly experimental work for its time in both form and use of materials...the pebbles are polished stones collected from a beach...but no more out of place in the 1880s NYC than Sara in 1980s NYC.
Maybe the materials and subject would have reminded her of her youth and young adulthood in Tel Aviv?
Lightness is a key component of this work just as lightness was a key component of Sara Berman.
Her shoes lined up in a row like the pebbles at the top of the window.
And the glass balls and mirror artfully placed on the top shelf to the right side of the closet… next to the grater, a red metal box with her glasses sitting on top.
The distance between Sara Berman’s Closet and The Aesthetic Movement in America is not wide.