Inside the Home of a Fashion Icon

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The New York Sun

Geoffrey Beene never courted popularity for the sake of it, remaining “a stealth force on the fashion scene,” according to writer James Wolcott. The Louisiana-born fashion designer died last September at the age of 77, with his clothes fondly set in the memories, and closets, of fashionable women around the world. His dresses were worn by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Paloma Picasso and are archived in the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Now, posthumously, he is broadening his circle of admirers.


Mr. Wolcott’s quote comes from a new book, “Beene by Beene” (Vendome Press, 208 pages, $65), a survey of Beene’s career to which the designer himself contributed before his death. Its publication coincides with the auction of the designer’s collection of furniture, art, and decorative knickknacks at Sotheby’s tomorrow and Saturday, capping off a weeklong Beene tribute at the auction house. The auction and book are bringing renewed attention to Beene’s singular eye for structure across disciplines.


“He was a designer’s designer,” the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Valerie Steele, said. “He was really respected by his peers.”


Through the auction of his highly curated personal collection, estimated to bring $2 million, Beene’s sensibility is getting a second look from a new audience of design enthusiasts, as well as those too young to have appreciated a $5,000 frock in the 1970s. The contents of Beene’s homes in Manhattan, Long Island’s Oyster Bay, Palm Beach, Fla., and Hawaii suggest a procession of black-and-white patterns marching across walls, couches, screens, and pillows. He designed duo-chromatic upholstery for sofas and stools, as well as his own pyramidal Art Deco-inspired lamps (estimated at $1,000 to $1,500). Everything looks dusted with the Deco craze, even when it’s a pair of leopard-print 18th-century Louis XV fauteuils (estimated at $3,000 to $5,000).


But the overriding theme, said Sotheby’s design specialist Victoria Rodriguez Thiessen, is no certain theme. “It’s how he put them together for a single fabulous look,” she said. “Some pieces are Asian in style, such as the Karl Springer tables; others are French traditional. It’s a lot more eclectic than just Art Deco.”


That willingness to play around, within limits, fits in with Beene’s fashion sense. “There’s a certain amount of whimsy, in all the funny dog paintings, for instance, and that does have an echo in the witticism of his clothes,” Ms. Steele said. Beene’s appreciation for canines spills over into an array of dog memorabilia, from British genre portraits of bulldogs to dachsund statues.


Beene so enjoyed a solid-looking black wood-and-metal Jean Prouve “Trapeze” table he had in his Manhattan apartment that he had a second one made for his Oyster Bay home. Both are being auctioned, the original for an estimated $40,000 to $60,000, the knockoff for $3,000 to $5,000.


“Geoffrey Beene had an original eye, he collected differently from other people. It was not a received taste,” longtime friend Amy Fine Collins, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, said. “He went to auctions, galleries, flea markets – he never stopped looking, every shop window, every catalog, every museum.” A passion for spherical shapes might turn up on spotted chairs, as with a squat 1925 vase by Jean Dunand (estimated at $2,000 to $3,000), or on form skimming polka-dot dresses.


Beene’s clothes glorified feminine strengths. “There was simultaneously a daring and a discretion about the way he dressed the female body,” said Ms. Steele. The designer himself once pithily summed up the difference between the genders: “Men are square, women are round.”


If in Beene’s career he precisely defined a woman’s languid geometries, at home his substantial collection of paintings emphasized elongated masculine proportions. He amassed dozens of works by neo-Romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and Keith Vaughan, both of whom painted semi-abstracted male nudes. Neither is widely known, but Ms. Fine Collins believes this auction could change that. “Geoffrey Beene is a tastemaker whom people follow, sometimes at a great distance,” she said.


Beene also bought prints, lithographs, sculptures, and smaller paintings by more famous artists, such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Diego Rivera, Kees van Dongen, and Ellsworth Kelly. A two-page spread in the Sotheby’s catalogue shows a Lucite shelf in his Oyster Bay home, mounted above a mirror and crowded with works by Arp, Dali, Vaughan, and William Steiger – four artists who probably have never been hung all together before or since. But the geometric shapes of the Steiger and Vaughan help lift the Dali and Arp out of Surrealist stasis and into a kind of advanced architectural understanding of space. Reflected in the mirror is a neoclassical polka-dot couch whose pattern is picked up by the wallpaper.


When Beene won the 2002 National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the judges were surely relying on the evidence of his long fashion career. But the Sotheby’s catalog photograph of the designer’s private luxuries shows an equally independent discernment.


Two exhibitions – a fashion retrospective and selections from the sale – and are up through this afternoon at Sotheby’s. The collection is being auctioned September 23 and 24.


***


Asian art continues to sell well during New York’s fall Asia Week. On Tuesday, a Christie’s auction of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Art took in $14.5 million, just above its high estimate. Wang Meng’s rare 14th-century scroll painting sold for $1.7 million, while an unusual Persian-inspired 16th-century vase also sold for $1.7 million, which was 10 times its high estimate. Sotheby’s sale of Indian and Southeast Asian art made $8.15 million, just over its high estimate. Contemporary Indian art led all works, with an untitled abstract painting from the 1970s by Ram Kumar quadrupling its estimate to sell for $396,800, a record for the artist.


Christie’s Indian and Southeast Asian art sale yesterday took in $11.3 million. The star lot was Tyeb Mehta’s “Celebration,” which established a new record for a contemporary Indian painting, surpassing the mark set by Mr. Kumar the day before at Sotheby’s. The painting sold for $1.58 million, far above its $600,000 to $800,000 estimate. Sotheby’s two-day sale of Chinese art ends today. Yesterday the house sold a Ming vase from the Laurance S. Rockefeller estate for $3.9 million, 10 times its $300,000 to $400,000 estimate. Today Christie’s holds its Japanese and Korean art sale.


The Collection of Geoffrey Beene : Highlights


Keith Vaughan, “Two Figures by a Sea Wall” (1948). Estimate: $20,000 to $30,000. Geoffrey Beene’s collection of works by Vaughan, a British neo-Romantic painter who died in 1977, rivals that of the Tate Britain. A dozen are offered here; a dozen are in the Tate. In his home, Beene installed this small, bright painting on a Lucite shelf among a tight grouping of works by Salvador Dali and Jean Arp.


Christine Herman Merrill, “Sir Lancelot and Maximilian” (1988). Estimate: $1,200 to $1,800. Beene’s affection for his two miniature dachsunds is immortalized in this portrait of them in front of his estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, which is also up for sale. Beene did well by dogs in general, purchasing portraits of bulldogs and pugs and dog-shaped andirons and doorstops.


Jacques Adnet, black lacquered sideboard, ca. 1940s. Estimate: $12,000 to $18,000. In the 1980s, Beene started buying Art Deco and modern furniture, after a previous enthusiasm for 18th- and 19th-century French furniture. His homes in New York, Long Island, Palm Beach, Fla., and Hawaii matched zebra and leopard armchairs and sofas from both eras with such pieces as the French modernist Adnet’s sideboard, whose dark colors and sleek lines look very Deco.


A black-and-white painted stool, with three needlepoint seat cushions. Estimate: $400 to $600. Discreet self-portraits lard Mr. Beene’s collection; his figure is sewn into these seat cushions. The bench they accompany typifies Beene’s mix of high and low in his homes. Who knows who made it, and who cares? It goes perfectly with the wallpaper.


The New York Sun

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