Todd Eberle is smitten with the Brody collection in Vanity Fair. He pines at the thought of having missed the chance to photograph the Brody’s A. Quincy Jones house as it was decorated by Billy Haines:
It’s incredibly rewarding to mine photographs of the collection in situ for signs and symbols of the Brody manifesto, especially since we are accustomed to seeing work of this level only in museums, and certainly absent of the environment that completes the statement. Some hyper-cropping bears great gifts that the more general image denies. Full disclosure: I would have given blood to have photographed the Brody temple.
The stratospheric level of Mrs. Brody’s taste and sophistication is something that has been lost to time, a sad reminder that we no longer live in the rays of the bright optimism of the modern. The house echoes with her un-fussy gestures. Some examples of the manifesto: Hang your Picasso in a taut black frame on the white brick wall near the black baby grand with a very grand arrangement of dried pussy willows, a Braque objet with custom stand by Haines, and the Giacometti, also on a Haines-designed pedesta (looking on in a hallway, no less). Completing the modern tableaux is the Edgar Degas’s sculpture, La masseuse, which observes from the wings near a very Waspy (but, in reality, Tang Dynasty) horse sculpture, jauntily kicking its hoof. One notices, too, that the Haines’s custom-designed chairs all face away from the art, a reflection that living with such a collection didn’t require the art being the center of attention.
What Modern Was: A Manifesto by Mrs Sidney F. Brody (Vanity Fair)
