The World of Interiors

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JW ANDERSON

Contributors

Editor’s Letter

ANTENNAE

What’s in the air this month

Trail Blazons • Cut velvet has been a top-of-the-pile textile since its king-cladding days – but don’t let its olden pomp persuade you there have been no innovations since. As we’re trumpeting with a princely procession of heraldic tabards and banners, fabric houses are perennially raising standards, with a range of colours, patterns and textures as varied as the realm is wide. So there’s no excuse to settle for less than the royal plush, counsels David Lipton.

Wholly Relics • The Greenwich Village home of Barton Beneš was filled with inspirational curios. Friends donated oddities and ephemera – from a mummified toe to Mark Rothko’s paint-spattered tie – that he mounted as witty and thought-provoking themed grids. And when Aids hit, the artist turned the body itself into an object of remembrance – and protest. Aptly, the apartment is now a museum artefact.

Orangery Revolution • What’s that lurking only slightly rebelliously in the luxuriant foliage of Flintham Hall’s Grade I-listed Victorian conservatory? Why, some equally lush modern furniture that would do well in any interior, not just a Nottinghamshire hothouse. Grab a seat (or table), you’re among fronds, says armchair activist Ruth Sleightholme.

Urban Jumble • Róisín Tapponi’s debut novel deals with London life in all its cluttered and confused glory, so it’s perhaps entirely apt that her study at home in Hackney should be – how to put this delicately, asks Alice Kemp-Habib – such a mess. Intense creativity, stray earrings and sticking-plaster solutions are on full display here. Photography: Steph Wilson

Motivated by a Madeleine • Beginning under Ms Castaing, Jean-Louis Riccardi embarked on an illustrious career as a decorator.

Why oh why oh YBA? • What is it with the world’s enduring obsession with Hirst, Emin and the rest of the Sensation gang,

'I am Jealous, Wicked... Seething'

Pay and Display

Flying Sorcerer • Leonor Fini: Magically Surreal

Woman of Easel Virtue

Network

What’s in the air in the art world

Off-the-cuff Marks • When they leave their studios, great artists don’t stop being creative. Dalí bombarded Picasso with gnomic postcards. Bonnard sketched village scenes on his receipts. Giacometti doodled profiles on his café newspaper. Never intended for display, such ephemera – on show, nonetheless, at a London gallery – make you feel like you’re peeping at the author’s spontaneous thoughts.

VISITOR'S BOOK

REBIRTHS OF VENUS • The immortal beauty of the goddess Aphrodite seems almost outside time. But in fact, as a new show at the Ashmolean Museum reveals, this personification of pulchritude has seen many reincarnations as her cult sailed across the world, from Cypriot warrior woman to piercing-studded fertility symbol. And plenty more sea changes besides, as Holly EJ Black explains.

MOLLOF COCKTAIL • Take one traditional Victorian building, then add a shot of era-defining Brazilian furniture and some dynamite paintings, sculpture and photography. What do you get…? A potent concoction even by the slightly bohemian standards of London w2. The resident mixologist – contemporary-art adviser Alexandra Mollof – is simply da bomb at shaking...