My New Sofa - Short Story

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Sidney Tillim

Surveying his New York City apartment, the author turns the acquisition of a piece of furniture into an occasion for some personal speculation on collecting, class, taste, photomechanical reproduction and the nature of democracy.

When long-time A.i.A. contributor Sidney Tillim, painter and critic, died in August [see obituary on p. 45], his wife, Diane Radycki, found several unpublished essays among his papers, including "My New Sofa." The piece was completed in 1997, not long after the death of Tillim's first wife, Muriel Sharon.

I am crazy about my new sofa. It was delivered several days ago, and I have been sitting in it and falling asleep on it since. It's big and soft, and dominates the living room. I'm glad I took the advice of a friend, with whom I go shopping often, and waited to choose rugs that would complement the general decor of the living room, which includes several different kinds of tables, chairs and lamps. I surprised myself in buying the sofa, because it is almost Ralph Lauren-chic.

But I was persuaded by its comfort, which increases almost exponentially the pleasure I expect to feel when my redecoration of the living room is complete. I have always wanted my own home, and I now realize my vision of it was mainly a fantasy of a particular interior. What comes to mind is the study in Professor Henry Higgins's home in the movie version of Shaw's Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. No, it was probably the musical version, My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. The study was a library with shelves to the ceiling and a ladder to climb the stacks. Higgins sat in a well of upholstered and learned seclusion, a monkish but worldly scholar and brittle misogynist who was contemptuous of the humbug of his class-ridden society. I want to turn my library-cum- living-room into a study in which I can better escape, if I cannot entirely ignore, the late 20th century.

I am of the middle class, out of an underclass of grocers and tavern keepers by virtue of my education, talent and aspiration, but part of a cultural elite as a result of the social advantages of democracy. A democracy compensates for its lack of a "natural" aristocracy by creating a cultural elite which gravitates toward "society" because that's where the money is. In turn, "society" is drawn to a cultural elite to acquire further status or culture, while the culturati--is that a word?--acquire money and celebrity. The mores of the middle class meet the folkways of the moneyed class and the result--especially in the last two decades--has been a metastasizing spectacle of conspicuous cultural consumption and speculative greed on a global scale, merging art, fashion, celebrity, deposed Royals and a few surgically retouched TV journalists.

Thanks to the contradictions of capitalism, everyone is a little fucked-up from the start. The loner in American culture is an appealing mythical type who is free of such contradictions. But at what price? The monastic movement of the Middle Ages was as much cultural prophecy as religious dedication. A late friend of mine once wrote, "How all-inclusive the world is when it's only an apartment."

Late in my professional career, I feel that further mobility has been denied me. But I am approaching 72 and have only just discovered the roller-ball pen--a good, cheap fountain pen is hard to find--and the need for refuge (not retirement) grows on me. I felt this long before I was eligible for Medicare--perhaps because I increasingly distrust my culture and virtually all of its institutions, my society and virtually all of its corporations, my government, and all but a few friends who seem willing to indulge my fits of paranoid pessimism.

So, you see, my couch (or sofa) is no ordinary couch. Neither is it a version of two of the most important couches in Western civilization--the psychoanalyst's couch and the casting couch. Mine is the family seat (of just one, now), a throne without a court, from which, sans retinue, I behold my solitude.

But it is not merely a symbol of refuge. It is an object in a room of many objects crucial to the polyglot unity I seek. One's taste is loaded with implications of contradictory impulse and necessary variety. There is a colonial drop-leaf table from the 1820s that my wife, Muriel, and I bought in Vermont in the '60s; a fine armchair, possibly a Hepplewhite, which is what Muriel was told when she bought it at auction before we were married in 1956. There is a late 19th-century landscape by one Patrick Vincent Berry, bought at a Third Avenue antique shop for $15, including the fine period gilt frame. I thought, My god, it might be an early Inness or Constable! Also there's an early 19th-century sepia wash drawing (English), with the clearly false signature of Fuseli, showing a group of classically draped women grieving over a recumbent nude male. I traded one of my own still lifes for it with Robert Schoelkopf, who was my dealer at the time (ca. 1966).

Hanging above a bookcase is one of my own paintings from 1953, a small black-and-white abstraction on crumbling cardboard, mounted and framed under glass, which seems to fuse Mondrian with Franz Kline. Below it is an albumen print depicting a late-19th-century Academician; he is painting a model. The subject is Bouguereau, whose saccharine art, now rising in popularity again, was painted with such exquisite craft. On the drop-leaf table sits a little lamp from the late '30s whose base is a stylized horse in black ceramic; its triangular, red parchment-like shade has edges laced like a dimestore wallet. Kitsch is art with a happy ending. It is a useful antidote to unconscious cultural snobbery (including one's own).