The Windows of
buck house Fabulous Fictional Females
deborah buck acanthus press
the windows of buck house: fabulous fictional females By Deborah Buck
Photography by Jaka Vinšek www.buckhouse.com www.deborahbuck.com
acanthus press new york : 2014
table of contents
viii foreword
x preface
1 artists 2
Ink Lee | Artist — Shanghai, China, 1885
8
Blue Heel | Animation Artist — Philadelphia, 2010
14 Velocity La Rue | Automobile Designer — Detroit, Michigan 1960 20 Lulu Aquamarine | Movie Star — Hollywood, 1959 26 Stella Stitch | Fashion & Fabric Designer — Milan, Italy 1984 32 Rosa Valencia Fu Del Torres | Bull Fighter — Barcelona, Spain 1961
38 business women 40 A. Muse | Paramour, Bohemian — Paris 1934 46 Queenie | Royal Head of State — London, England, 2012 52 Goldy Banks | Investment Banker — Geneva, 1974 58 Belmont Blue | Jockey — Baltimore, 1973 64 Avril Médoc | Winemaker — Bordeaux, France 1980 70 Anna Force | Ad Executive — New York 1965
76 scientists 78 Lily La Roma | Perfumier — Grasse, France 1995 84 Maddy Tscientist | Chemist — West Berlin, 1951 90 Dawn Geary | Clockmaker — Vienna, Austria 2000 96 Berty Cardinal | Ornithologist — Vitória, Brazil 1952 102 Sheelock Holmes | Detective Extraordinaire — London, England 1900
108 explorers 110 Dusty BonVoyage | Author, World Traveler — New York 1927 116 Waverly | Surfer — Wailuku, Hawaii 1973 122 Iris Hunt | Photographer — Tanganyika Territory 1959 128 Alexandria Tombs | Egyptologist — Valley of the Kings, Egypt 2009 134 Eureka Miner | Prospector — Park City, Utah 1890
140 making the windows
144 about the author
143 acknowledgments
foreword by Ken Carbone
foreword
Looking into someone else’s window can get you arrested. Coveting someone else’s personal belongings is naughty. Reading someone else’s private letters is scandalous. But at Buck House, all is welcome. In 2001, artist and entrepreneur Deborah Buck opened the doors of Buck House. This emporium of furnishings, lighting, accessories and other delectable objets was clearly more of a gallery than a retail store, and before long gained a gallery’s following. The shopper looking for an eclectic, eccentric, but oh-so-perfect thing to accent her life always found it at 1318 Madison Avenue. Before crossing the shop’s threshold, a square and compact front window welcomed customers into a fantasy world that was both timely and timeless. In this world powerful women reigned, celebrated their passions, and could not have cared less if you learned their secrets. These “artists, tycoons, scientists, and adventurers,” each complete with a past, present, and future story, were all brought to life through the imagination, artistry, and impeccable taste of Deborah Buck. Biweekly “performances,” starring one “fabulously fictional female” after another, were crafted with luxurious detail in these dioramas. Looking closely, the peculiar book jacket on a romance novel, the curious headline on a vintage advertisement, and Buck House’s signature turquoise on racing silks, all raised suspicion. And they should have, because
this was where faux finish, trompe l’oeil, and period curiosities were all deftly combined under a patina of authenticity to complete a deliciously romantic illusion. But where were these women? There were twenty-two of them. They were all very contemporary, though some were from the nineteenth century. We saw their lives displayed in the window like spilled handbags and heard their voices as they pronounced their exploits. Fortunately, with the help of Deborah Buck’s craft, we can also still see them clearly in our minds. I imagine “Rosa Valencia Fu Del Torres,” bullfighter extraordinaire, in her gold-braided toreador pants, taut body, sculpted face, returning my gaze with fierce intensity. The chain-smoking “Anna Force” is a highenergy advertising maven. Her platinum blond hair and shocking red lips accentuate her cool. Being so tall, thin and stylish, she suffers no fools. A personal favorite is “A. Muse,” paramour bohemian, an artist’s model. With eyes as green as absinthe, she is freely expressive with her ripe, full body and knows the influence of her power. The Windows of Buck House: Fabulous Fictional Females is both a visual feast and a time capsule. The windows are gone but the photographs in this book offer a beautiful and lasting chronicle of an idea, a dream, and an artistic achievement that blurs the line between fantasy and reality. My remaining question: where does Ms. Buck find all of this stuff? Ken Carbone is a designer, artist, musician, author, and teacher. He is the cofounder and Chief Creative Director of the Carbone Smolan Agency, a design and branding firm in New York City.
preface by Deborah Buck
preface
Buck House was a dream. When I opened my gallery on Madison Avenue in 2001, I wasn’t sure what direction it would take. I only knew that after years of solitude in a painting studio and several reinventions of myself, I had found a home for my vision of a design lab, a space to connect with other like-minded, creative people. I now had a public platform for my restless eyes and my even more restless mind to reflect on art and design. By 2012, Buck House had become a very different entity. It had grown in size and had proven itself as a business. Press coverage and a reputation for forging into new territory were our claim to fame. The windows were the talk of the neighborhood and the making of them was my treasured activity. Each window was an environment, a poem, a musing on color and form and a celebration. They were smaller worlds within the world of New York. Looking into imaginary realms has always fascinated me. As a child, I loved train set villages, displays in department stores and of course, Barbie’s dream house. This book began innocently enough with a window I facetiously decided we would create for “Miss Buck House”. I imagined her in her home office as we had a gorgeous French, red leather topped desk that needed to sell. Miss Buck House quickly came to life with all the proper Buck House accouterments; a Chinese Foo dog lamp, a gilded desk set, blue opaline glass boxes and a turquoise feather boa draped over her chair. Everything in the window was so HER but she wasn’t there. She had just stepped away. And with that the light bulb went off in my head. Miss Buck House
was just a start. I wanted to know more about her and give her a stronger sense of place and personality. I was curious about who she was. What was she doing in that moment? What were her thoughts? It was narrative and theater all in that storefront window. More characters soon followed, each more outrageous, eccentric, and daring than the last. I loved getting lost in fleshing out these characters and creating intricate environments for them. Pushing the details to the extreme became the fun and the challenge. They were all women, all trailblazers, frequently inhabiting professions and worlds previously open only to men. All were fierce in their way, willing to take on the odds to prove to the world what they had inside of them. We tirelessly searched for the perfect props and if we couldn’t find them, we made them. The team designed graphic backdrops and we printed the props of each one’s trade — an ad campaign poster for a car here, a handful of Buck House “foo dog dollars” there. No detail was too silly or too small. We spray painted Styrofoam blocks gold in our back garden. We bought dozens of live birds in Long Island and drove them to Manhattan. We had a blast. Jaka Vinšek was hired to document the windows by day and night and he went at his work with passion and devotion, arriving every two weeks anticipating his new girl. The results of this endless creativity are in this book. Although the lairs of these fabulous, fictional women have been dismantled, this book is a testament to just how alive they were. I love them all.
business women business women
Anna Force | Ad Executive — New York 1965
Anna Force Ad Executive New York, 1965
Crap. She says it again, crap. She banishes the creative team to a conference room, where presumably, they will come up with better ideas than they have given her thus far. Her own efforts — crumpled balls of paper — layer the floor around her desk. She rises from her chair, walks to the bar — one mark of executive status in this male-dominated game — pours herself a shot of J&B, and downs it. This should not be so damned difficult. When she’d first started out, for her first big client, they had come up with the concept for Detroit easily enough: she had presented the design in turquoise blue with an opera window, and the carmaker had approved it on the spot. Six months later the cars were rolling off the production line and she was driving one to Oyster Bay. Since then, she’d had a lot of successes, but in this city and in this business, you were only as great as your next great idea. She shakes her head and taps an impeccably red-lacquered fingernail on the bar. Hell, she had come face to face with her ambition for the first time during World War ii, working on an assembly line, started on Madison Avenue as a secretary and worked her way to the top. She isn’t about to bow out now. Returning to her desk, she spins her chair around to gaze out of the window. There, smack dab in front of her, against the velvet black of a winter night is the Empire State Building — her beacon since she opened Anna Force Agency 10 years ago — awash in a high energy, high impact turquoise light. Seeing the color — her color — her mind suddenly clears. She sketches the client’s new logo, classic, eye-catching, and presses the intercom to summon the creatives. She would name the color Buck House Blue. The world would call it the new black.
70
anna force 73
“ What you call love —
LOVE was invented by guys like me
to sell nylons. – DON DRAPER
scientists scientists
Sheelock Holmes | Detective Extraordinaire — London, England 1900
Sheelock Holmes Detective Extraordinaire London, England, 1900
Rain began to slash at the windows as I returned from the opera. I brewed a good strong black tea and prepared to enjoy the company of Watson, my feline companion. Nights are quiet at 221 Foo Street. When I settle into my armchair, those parts of my brain that function on the borders of my awareness play freely. This is when intuition is at its most potent — women’s intuition, that much derided power I am graced to possess. The knock came at my door at the precise moment Watson leapt from my lap. Answering it, brass poker in hand, I saw a poor rain-soaked soul standing before me. He wrung his cap in dismay as he related his discovery of a pile of bones on the Isle of Dogs. I quickly donned my overcoat, and we scurried through the wet streets to a deeply shadowed alley, redolent with the putrid stench of the East End. There indeed lay a large heap of bones littered with feathers, clearly from an exotic species. I suspected foul play. Nearby lay a Meerschaum pipe, an expensive object for this dismal place. I drew forth a magnifying glass. Aha! The pipe, clearly made in Vienna, was recently discarded. Who was the smoker? Searching farther, I saw the body, and, of all things, an empty medical bag — an odd assortment of clues indeed. Leaving my guide to alert Scotland Yard, I returned home, clues fogging my brain. I brewed more tea, and exhausted, dozed in my armchair, dreams swimming through my head. Suddenly, I woke. In my dream, bones and feathers had assembled themselves into — yes! — a peacock. My intuition had taken account of the taxidermist’s sign in the alley! He was the victim, en route to his shop with a specimen, his tools in a medical bag, the pipe probably a gift from an Austrian prince known for his fondness for taxidermy. The killer was doubtless one of the gang of thieves terrorizing White Chapel. In the morning, I would find him.
102
sheelock holmes 105
“ We’re all like detectives in life. There’s something at the end of the trail that we’re all looking for. – DAVID LYNCH
explorers
explorers
Iris Hunt | Photographer — Tanganyika Territory 1959
Iris Hunt Photographer Tanganyika Territory, 1959
At night, in the Serengeti, the earth stretches away in every direction toward an immeasurably distant horizon, and the sky is incomparably vast and studded with countless stars. This place feels otherworldly, like eternity itself. To a girl from England, where landscapes are cozy and restricted, this place is magical, freer and more majestic than one ever could have imagined. Out here, both animals and people seem wild, adapted to a world that may seem harsh to some but is infinitely beautiful and intelligent. The elegant Maasi, who pass in the day herding their cattle, call the Serengeti “the endless plains.” I came here out of curiosity, lured by a book I read as a young girl. In it, Karen Blixen wondered, “If I know a song of Africa… does Africa know a song of me?” Like her, quite unexpectedly, I was forever changed, not because of the magnificence of Africa, but because of its fragility. I am always aware that while its landscape may seem endless, its living creatures are not. So with my camera I preserve what I see: the cheetah, black rhino, leopard, giraffe, lion, ostrich, elephant, buffalo, the awe inspiring migrations of wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, and eland, the Kikuyu and the Maasai. Today, en route from one campsite to another, our jeep passed the carcasses of elephants killed for their ivory tusks. Lions may make short work of their prey, but their hunt is a study in calculation, patience, and grace, and they only kill what they will eat. My brethren kill for trophies. Africa is a dangerous place with wild animals, natives, malaria, smallpox, tse tse fly. But Africa has its own rhythms and laws. Nothing here is as dangerous as what we call civilization. What I see now and what I capture with my camera is a vanishing image. I don’t much care whether Africa knows a song of me or not. But someday, when what I love has disappeared, it would please me if it knew a song of itself.
122
iris hunt 125
“
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
– ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
making the windows
making
the
windows
acknowledgments
acknowledgments The Windows of Buck House is the work of many talented, bright individuals but the book itself owes a great deal to Tamara Connolly. As always, she was unflagging in her enthusiasm and attention to detail in the graphic design of the backdrops and props. Once completed, she tirelessly worked with me to assemble and refine the text, photographs and layout of this work into the wonderful compilation that it is. Tamara is brilliant, but most importantly, she did all of this with a twinkle in her eye and a grand sense of humor. Everyone who worked at Buck House during the year and a half that it took to create the windows put their all into the process, whether it was painting Matchbox cars turquoise or creating fake scripts for a movie actress. There was a buzz in the store during the installation of the windows as everyone was vested in making the next window the best one ever. I especially thank Jean Guy Simard whose uncanny problem solving made all of my images come to life. Whenever I asked “Can we?” he said, “You bet!”. Jaka Vinšek is a formidable photographer. Without his zoomed in sense of place when documenting the windows, we would not have this living document to the amount of sheer effort that went into creating these fabulous females. I think Jaka fell in love a little bit every time he showed up to face a new personality. It was his ability to do that combined with his technical prowess that has given us these phenomenal photographs. Suri Bieler at Eclectic/Encore Props in New York went way out of her way to accommodate almost every wish that we had, even when we wanted to rent the impossible. Her incredible cache of the quirky and the unusual never disappointed and frequently helped us add a dimension to a character that we hadn’t even thought of ourselves. Everyone stretched for us. Suri’s team worked with us in good spirit, always curious as to who the next star would be. Lastly, I thank Miguel Oliveira, who took to the project as if it were his own. Endlessly he brainstormed with me to hone the personalities, locales and stories of these women. Nothing was too much and no imagining was a trip too far. He frequently told me “No” when it was called for and embraced the “Yes” more often than anything else.
about the author
about the author Deborah Buck’s creative foundation lies in her painting, which informs all of her endeavors, including forays into design and entrepreneurship with her Upper East Side flagship, Buck House. Originally from Baltimore, Buck credits her early artistic and intellectual development to her encounters with the legendary Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, who mentored her as a teenager after reviewing her work. “He talked and I listened,” Buck recalls. “He told me, ‘Nobody can teach you to paint; you already know how to do that. You should learn everything you can about the world around you: religion, politics, design, science.’” As Still opined on the painters and critics of the day, his council made a true impact on the young artist. “I knew I was in the presence of something culturally significant,” Buck remembers. After winning the Skowhegan Medal for Painting from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, Still recommended Deborah to attend the program on the full scholarship given in his name. Upon graduating, with honors, from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Buck accepted a position with a subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions, where she designed animated displays for installation throughout the United States, and abroad; she credits daily drawing and engineering exercises with helping her painting practice. Buck began exhibiting her work professionally during the 1980s and following her move to New York City in 1990. Most recently, Buck presented her work in a solo exhibition at The Garrison Art Center in Garrison, New York, in 2012. She also was featured in a one-person exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery in New York in 2012. In 2000, Buck began to shift her attention back to design while collaborating with architects, metal smiths, and other artisans on the renovation of a rambling, pre-war apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I designed it and found that my home became my painting — two dimensions became three,” says Buck of the space, which hadn’t been touched in 25 years. Her efforts were ultimately documented in many shelter publications such as Elle Décor, the New York Times and House Beautiful. In 2001, Buck opened Buck House, an art and antiques gallery situated on Madison Avenue. Operating as a successful business, Buck House often
hosted members of the art and design communities. “Having been inspired by turn-of-the-century Parisian intellectual salons, I sought to make a gathering place of my own in that fashion — as a place for artists and creatively-minded individuals to meet.” After a run of eleven years, Deborah closed Buck House as a bricks and mortar retail gallery. It remains a strong presence on the Internet and operates as a home for the latest on all of Deborah’s design and fine art projects. In 2007 Buck joined the faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Design program, where she teaches a seminar for Master’s thesis students. “The energy students bring to the classroom feeds my head,” she says. “I tell my students: ‘only you can put you in a box.’” Buck also sits on The Board of Trustees of The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York actively working to enhance the education of art and design students. Deborah continues to be an active painter, with her most recent works on paper revealing a fluid use of pastel and acrylic. She continues to explore the interplay of surrealism and abstraction in her work, where her long-held interests in absurdity, romanticism, and the darker side of fairy tales lend a strong narrative sense to her practice.
the windows of buck house: fabulous fictional females
is both a visual feast and a time capsule. The windows are gone but the photographs in this book offer a beautiful and lasting chronicle of an idea, a dream, and an artistic achievement that blurs the line between fantasy and reality. — Excerpt from the Foreword by Ken Carbone www.buckhouse.com www.deborahbuck.com