If your answer is 'no' then I am definitely your girl because I will make you LOVE it because it is super friggin cool.
This newfound fascination in said wallpaper is due to my most recent project (add onto my ongoing 7 projects), which is to learn everything I can about a piece of 4 panel wallpaper called "vue de lyon" (view of lyon, a city in France) that was made in 1823 in Paris. Here's what's so cool about wallpaper in the 18/19th century - it was hand printed with woodblocks on hand made paper. Even cooler - this series of wallpaper likely took 3000 individual woodblocks that probably took about 2 years to carve. So cool!
With this basic information acquired I spent the entirety of yesterday in the registrar (aka where the records of EVERYTHING are kept) reading the giant file on this piece of art. Now I am about to launch into the harrowing tale of what a day researching in the registrar is like. It is this wonderful/frustrating/complex adventure that is like a living an episode of Sherlock or Doctor Who but without near death experiences or monsters. You see in theory, the file contains literally every document pertaining to the piece, any article referencing the piece and all manner of other odds and ends. In reality it contains a whole of it, but with the passage of time, different people working there and lack of focus preserving documents early on has resulted in a lot of gaps in information.
In other words, my goal is to piece together the story of this wallpaper from bits of information gathered in the past 90 years. Basically what happened is I began reading the letters on top and from the information in those letters questions arose. I kept reading, some are answered but more questions formed. I asked the registrar about a bit of it and she proceeded to pull out 2 d-ring binders and another folder to search through. Having sifted through those, I am now paused as I need to find out how in depth I need to go.
Anyway, I love it. It's frustrating not having the information easy to access, but if it was just a matter of typing stuff into a computer it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. This way I get to read newspaper articles from the 20's and letters written between socialites, curators, french curators, etc. Also I'm learning all this crazy specific stuff about wallpaper, which I never would have studied otherwise and about how records are kept in museums.
Oh and something completely unrelated to wallpaper that this project is teaching me is about new england culture. There is an incredibly strong sense of pride in ancestral roots/the objects in their family lines/place. I brought this up to the registrar because the wallpaper file is packed with letters from people who moved into the house that the wallpaper came from, wanting any information we had on "their" wallpaper. It's like they moved into this historic home in Vermont, found out this priceless wallpaper used to be there and think it is somehow partially theirs. The registrar even said that she lives in a town in massachusetts (everything is town based) and that she isn't considered to be from that town because she wasn't born there. She just lives there. These new englanders are super proud of their birthplaces. And why shouldn't they be? New england is wonderful and historic.
No comments:
Post a Comment