Paul Walter moves his W.A.S. Benson chandelier

Magazine Antiques, June, 2008 by Martin Filler

In every medium there are culture heroes whose work is even more admired by fellow artists than by the general public--the painters' painters Velazquez and Cezanne come to mind, as do the architects' architects Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa. Even in today's fiercely competitive art and antiques market, peer-group esteem among top-tier collectors survives as one of the few things money alone cannot buy. Collectors' collectors can be as antithetical as the courtly, scholarly Henry Francis du Pont and the raffish, intuitive Sam Wagstaff. But all are alike in possessing diligent expertise, instinctive taste, and that all-important "eye."

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When I hear the term collectors' collector now, I think of one of the few current cognoscenti worthy of that designation: Paul F. Waiter. Though the seventy-two-year-old Walter remains largely unknown to the museumgoing public (save perhaps for his name on donor labels or as a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art), experts in several wildly disparate fields concur that his imprimatur is a byword for excellence.

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Over the past few months, Walter has been conducting a personal archaeological dig inside his newly acquired Long Island weekend house, as he painstakingly unpacks one after another of the two-hundred-plus cartons of objects he has not seen in eight years since he sold his former retreat in Southampton, New York, and put most of the contents into storage. Shedding light on his herculean reclamation effort is one of Walter's major unpacking epiphanies, an unexpectedly versatile W. A.S. Benson copper electrolier of about 1899, which he has installed on the dining room ceiling, and which, to his surprise, works better in the new place than it did in his old one.

In Southampton the arts and crafts architecture of his 1899 mansion had inspired Walter to use a dense layering of nineteenth-century furniture, objects, pictures, and garden ornaments to create a rich and somewhat strange aesthetic period ensemble, so comprehensive and convincing that one houseguest, the British writer Nigel Nicolson, couldn't believe he was actually in the United States. But would objects ideal for such high-style architecture look absurd in a faux-rustic folly?

The once-forgotten Benson was one of the pioneering nineteenth-century British designers for whom Walter- has been instrumental in winning long-overdue recognition. During the 1970s, years before other collectors and all but a handful of specialist dealers caught on to their importance, Walter began accumulating prime pieces by several now-revered Victorian design polymaths--including Christopher Dresser, E.W. Godwin, and William De Morgan--on his frequent trips to London. He also identified another figure he considered their equal: William Arthur Smith Benson, the innovative metalworker who created the first great lighting designs of the modern age.

Most of Walter's initial British arts and crafts acquisitions cost him a fraction of their present value. However, he is quick to point out that, despite his reputation for getting things on the cheap and ahead of the market curve, he has always been willing to spend big when necessary. He applies no arcane financial formulas to his bidding and buying strategies, and sees the equation in the simplest possible terms: "A thing is worth what you're willing to pay for it."

Benson's career spanned a chaotic period during which oil, gas, kerosene, and electricity supplanted each other in rapid succession as the dominant mode of artificial indoor lighting. His inventive efforts to keep abreast of constant technological change impressed the influential design reformer and social activist William Morris, who recruited him to design furniture for his decorating and retail furnishings firm, Morris and Company. Benson (who became head of the firm in 1900, a few years after Morris's death) produced domestic lighting of every sort, often in his characteristic mix of contrasting copper and brass: candelabras, chandeliers, gasoliers, oil lamps, and the first generation of residential electrical fixtures for wall, ceiling, floor, and table.

Many Benson pieces incorporated leaf-and flowerlike forms, but they were always highly stylized rather than imitativcly representational in the art nouvcau manner--a crucial distinction according to the Morris philosophy. Some would term Walter's newfound Benson electrolier art nouveau because of its sinuous lines and subliminally naturalistic shapes, but like all his work it is firmly grounded in the ultilitarian principles of the arts and crafts movement rather than the "art for art's sake" reveries of art nouveau. With its lilypadlike reflectors forming a shallow dome above three silk-shaded light bulbs, this clever design was pure Benson in its use of shiny metal to magnify the limited wattage available then, and its uninhibited display of a revolutionary energy source, unlike retrograde attempts to disguise electricity as candlelight. If anything, Benson's designs flaunted the novelty of electric bulbs, frequently thrusting them to the forefront of his fixtures in proud confirmation of keeping up with modern times.