.
Object Lesson
Houses and people remind me of each other. Both have facades behind whose stone and brick, smiles and frowns, lie other, often hidden aspects. The Hughes house on Lexington Avenue is covered in wisteria. I’m told the massive vine blossoms purple for one week in the spring, and now its gnarly brown branches are naked, obscuring the house, insinuating mystery—it is winter, when nature is under attack by its own elements, stripped to a raw, needy-looking state.
Fred Hughes has lived in the house on Lexington Avenue since 1974. Built in 1889, the four-story house was designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who also designed the Dakota, an uncanny actor in Roman Polanski’s modern gothic, Rosemary’s Baby . Hughes’s house once belonged to Andy Warhol who, for thirteen years, shared it with his mother. From 1967 until 1987, Hughes was Warhol’s business manager, friend, confidante and fellow avid collector. He helped Warhol build upon his fame and realize financial gain from his paintings, for one thing by introducing him to socialites and collectors who commissioned portraits at Hughes’s instigation. After Warhol’s death in 1987, Hughes played a fundamental role in developing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He was executor of Warhol’s estate, chosen by Warhol to be king, stewardof all that Andy had achieved in his lifetime. But fate often treats kings poorly; many suffer and fall. Hughes fell to multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed in 1984 but did not become active until after Warhol’s unexpected, unnecessary death. Hughes has been bedridden since 1998.
The language associated with royalty and lineage fits Fred Hughes like the English custom-made suits he once wore. He venerates the royals, and stories circulate about his English accent—he was born in Texas in 1943—scathing wit, dandyism, elegance, savvy, temper, eloquence and pretensions to being a royal. Like other people who collected around Warhol, or whom Warhol collected like art, Hughes made himself a legend and a superstar. He invented himself much like a novelist might a fictional character. But instead of writing his character, he lived it. Taken up by art collectors Dominique and Jean de Menil, who recognized his astute eye when he was twenty and sponsored his entry into the art world, Hughes gave birth to himself, left Texas and family, and maybe, as in fables, never looked back.
An abundance of desires and tastes overwhelms me upon entering this house. On the first floor, Warhol’s portrait of Prince Charles appears to greet if not oversee the visitor. When Warhol painted him, the prince was young, unblemished; but recent history has cast its shadow, and the image is now marked by trouble. Turquoise-green, the portrait’s background, is the color Hughes selected for the adjoining room’s walls—“the arsenic room,” he calls it—where the Tudors dominate. A naive portrait of Queen Elizabeth I claims center stage, while a Duncan Phyfe card table, with ornate legs—“dolphin supports”— stands decorously in oneof the corners. In the other room on this floor, where Hughes now rests and sleeps on a high-tech hospital bed, a Warhol “blue Jackie Kennedy” in a gilt frame hangs above a Tudor portrait and, separated by a great, elaborate mirror, the pair repeats on the other side. The American and English royals keep Hughes company, their coupling a visual pun that might amuse him.
Objects—Russian, English, Mexican, Native American, or hailing from New Orleans—fraternize in the house, sharing space across time and culture. Near the staircase, a twentieth-century American naive or outsider painting of a snake charmer stops me: She’s a black woman, in a green leaf-skirt, with a green snake clenched ferociously in her teeth and another wrapped around her arm. But my eyes dart everywhere, and everywhere there’s something unusual. I’m drawn to some pieces more
Object Lesson
Houses and people remind me of each other. Both have facades behind whose stone and brick, smiles and frowns, lie other, often hidden aspects. The Hughes house on Lexington Avenue is covered in wisteria. I’m told the massive vine blossoms purple for one week in the spring, and now its gnarly brown branches are naked, obscuring the house, insinuating mystery—it is winter, when nature is under attack by its own elements, stripped to a raw, needy-looking state.
Fred Hughes has lived in the house on Lexington Avenue since 1974. Built in 1889, the four-story house was designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who also designed the Dakota, an uncanny actor in Roman Polanski’s modern gothic, Rosemary’s Baby . Hughes’s house once belonged to Andy Warhol who, for thirteen years, shared it with his mother. From 1967 until 1987, Hughes was Warhol’s business manager, friend, confidante and fellow avid collector. He helped Warhol build upon his fame and realize financial gain from his paintings, for one thing by introducing him to socialites and collectors who commissioned portraits at Hughes’s instigation. After Warhol’s death in 1987, Hughes played a fundamental role in developing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He was executor of Warhol’s estate, chosen by Warhol to be king, stewardof all that Andy had achieved in his lifetime. But fate often treats kings poorly; many suffer and fall. Hughes fell to multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed in 1984 but did not become active until after Warhol’s unexpected, unnecessary death. Hughes has been bedridden since 1998.
The language associated with royalty and lineage fits Fred Hughes like the English custom-made suits he once wore. He venerates the royals, and stories circulate about his English accent—he was born in Texas in 1943—scathing wit, dandyism, elegance, savvy, temper, eloquence and pretensions to being a royal. Like other people who collected around Warhol, or whom Warhol collected like art, Hughes made himself a legend and a superstar. He invented himself much like a novelist might a fictional character. But instead of writing his character, he lived it. Taken up by art collectors Dominique and Jean de Menil, who recognized his astute eye when he was twenty and sponsored his entry into the art world, Hughes gave birth to himself, left Texas and family, and maybe, as in fables, never looked back.
An abundance of desires and tastes overwhelms me upon entering this house. On the first floor, Warhol’s portrait of Prince Charles appears to greet if not oversee the visitor. When Warhol painted him, the prince was young, unblemished; but recent history has cast its shadow, and the image is now marked by trouble. Turquoise-green, the portrait’s background, is the color Hughes selected for the adjoining room’s walls—“the arsenic room,” he calls it—where the Tudors dominate. A naive portrait of Queen Elizabeth I claims center stage, while a Duncan Phyfe card table, with ornate legs—“dolphin supports”— stands decorously in oneof the corners. In the other room on this floor, where Hughes now rests and sleeps on a high-tech hospital bed, a Warhol “blue Jackie Kennedy” in a gilt frame hangs above a Tudor portrait and, separated by a great, elaborate mirror, the pair repeats on the other side. The American and English royals keep Hughes company, their coupling a visual pun that might amuse him.
Objects—Russian, English, Mexican, Native American, or hailing from New Orleans—fraternize in the house, sharing space across time and culture. Near the staircase, a twentieth-century American naive or outsider painting of a snake charmer stops me: She’s a black woman, in a green leaf-skirt, with a green snake clenched ferociously in her teeth and another wrapped around her arm. But my eyes dart everywhere, and everywhere there’s something unusual. I’m drawn to some pieces more
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