Word: temperament
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...back, what? An aged dory, weathering silver among the four thousand blades of brown grass, each painted separately in egg tempera? In fact, no: a dark, secretive-looking Stutz Blackhawk, $38,500 worth of Republican Mafia dream-hearse with a Cadillac engine and custom-fitted luggage, polished like an immense eggplant. Frank Sinatra has one, Elvis Presley owns two; but this model, an engraved plate on the dashboard attests, was fabricated in Turin for Andrew Wyeth. "People expect me to get around in an oxcart," says the painter. "But this thing's pretty useful. I can drive it into...
...Russian peasants are reknowned for their wood-carving skills, and I was happy to find a few segments of intricately-sculpted decorative house trim, plus about 30 wooden distaffs (for spinning wool into yarn). Half the distaffs are covered with figures of birds, animals, and fanciful arabesques in bright tempera; the others are blond wood so delicately carved that they give the impression of lace. A great find was a group of clever toy whistles made by craftsmen in the Arkhangelsk and Tula regions from 1890 through 1910. The whistles are in the form of horses, dogs, bears...
...craft tradition has never occurred, the results are most successful--for example, plates and pitchers of iron inlaid with silver from Daghestan, and silver filigree jewelry, from Georgia. Two showcases display the products of lacquer-work masters from Ralekh--little papier-mache boxes, decorated with elaborate designs in egg-tempera (often depicting the exploits of Russian fairy-tale heroes), coated with transparent lacquer, then dried and highly polished. One box astonishes: a winter's scene of three youngsters in a troika superimposed on an oval plate of mother-of-pearl to simulate the look of the rays of the setting...
Other contemporary offerings are not so successful. In the vicinity of the beautiful lacquer boxes are some of the most God-awful tempera and lacquer wall placques I have ever seen. A display of good crystal is flanked by a five-piece set of red glass vases with standardized workers' images frosted into the sides. Fortunately, an entire wall is allotted to an imaginative wall hanging of a woolly owl with immense purple eyes--if not, it would be lost in a forest of skillfully constructed by thematically banal tapestries...
...Cover: Watercolor and tempera by Boris Chaliapin...