In May 1816, Lord Byron rented the Villa Diodati, a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva once owned by John Milton. He invited John William Polidori and Mary and Percy Shelley – who leased the nearby Maison Chapuis – to join him for the season. Yet rather than enjoy the pleasures of the lake, the group stayed inside. This was the Year Without A Summer, when a volcanic blast in Indonesia had caused global climate change, and it was unusually rainy and dark. The group of poets told ghost stories to pass the time. Within those gloomy walls, Polidori penned the short story The Vampyre and Mary Shelley started the first draft of Frankenstein. Paradise may have been lost, but a Gothic masterpiece was definitely gained.
Houses – and their atmospheres – can be real cornerstones in our understanding of artistic and literary movements. The product of the people who inhabited and passed through them, such spaces hold an auratic quality that feels deserving of protection and reverence. While today the Villa Diodati is luxury flats, in the 1940s it was inhabited by the artist Balthus (who claimed to be related to Byron). Here he rekindled his friendship with fellow Surrealist Alberto Giacometti, and produced many jaunty sketches of the mansion’s trees (with his signature girls in the foreground).
Home represented an equally conducive artistic springboard for others in the movement, too. In 1949, photographer, model and war reporter Lee Miller and her husband, critic and collector Ronald Penrose, made the somewhat surreal decision to buy a farm house in East Sussex (WoI, Jan 1999) where they lived until their deaths. The couple’s guestbook at Farley House is a who’s who of Surrealism: Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning. (One guest, Man Ray, signed the visitor’s book with a forced perspective that can only be viewed from an oblique angle).
The house – unassuming from the outside, with its simple red brick exterior – is something of a Tardis. Any misconceptions of its being a typical English country house, indeed, are quickly swept away through the rich decorative detail within: from the turquoise-and-lemon walls to the Picasso tile above the Aga – not to mention all the art. But Farleys was also a place of refreshing normality: a place where famed Surrealists would help out with DIY, feed animals and forage for mushrooms. One artist was particularly struck by the change of pace. ‘Picasso found the world was very English; the landscape of the Downs with Constable clouds,’ as Miller wrote: ‘the driving on the left, the red and white Ayrshires, black and white Wessex pigs, open log fires, whiskey and soda nightcap, hot water bottles, cooked breakfast and tea.’
Many decades before Picasso made it to Farleys, he could be found at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris. This address in the 6th arrondissement is where, between 1905 and 1938, Gertrude Stein hosted her famous literary salons for the cosmopolitan avant-garde. Owned by her brother, Leo, the place had initially been filled with paintings by Renoir, Manet and Degas. But when Stein’s allegiances to Modernism and experimentalism strengthened, Leo left, dragging his Impressionists behind him. Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, promptly filled the space floor-to-ceiling with works by Cubists, Fauvists and other contemporary artists. The resulting collection was so good that, when it was sold in 1968, the New York Times called the Fleurus salon the ‘first museum of Modern art’. Unlike a museum, though, the salon years were notable for their dynamism and drunkenness. ‘People came and went, in and out,’ wrote Stein; these many high-profile aller-retours inspired scenes in the novel A Moveable Feast (titled in French Paris est une fête) by regular guest Ernest Hemingway.
‘More a poem than a house…’ is how Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in turn, described the Red House, the home of William Morris and his wife, Jane. Designed by Arts & Crafts architect Philip Webb, the house became a testing ground for the movement, where Morris and his friends (including Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Siddal and Charles Faulkner) could live according to their artistic ideals. In the house’s entrance hall, a painting called The Joyous Gard depicts Morris and his friends in costume inside a Medieval garden. The attic ceiling, designed by the printmaker, was painted in by the Pre-Raphaelites. Before commuting to London got too arduous, Red House was also the headquarters for the newly founded Morris & Co.
Another address, Hilles House (WoI, Sept 2010), built by Detmar Jellings Blow in 1914, was similarly inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement. However, its status as a notable artists house was only established towards the end of the millennium, when it was inhabited by Blow’s grandson (also Detmar) and his wife, Isabella (WoI, March 2009). The fashion editor and stylist was reputed as a finder of talents and a friend of creatives, many of whom – Alexander McQueen, Tracey Emin, Malcolm McLaren, Philip Treacy, Tim Burton and Bryan Ferry, to name a few – would come and stay. Filled with heirlooms and armour, it became a sort of fortress for Blow and her friends, and was the perfect backdrop for their punkish aesthetic subversion. (On one occasion, McQueen caused alarm by stealing a Botticelli-inspired Morris & Co tapestry from the wall.)
No discussion of the houses of artists groups would be complete without a nod to Charleston, the much-visited home of painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell in Lewes, East Sussex, which was frequented by the Bloomsbury set and became a living canvas for their art. Though perhaps less richly adorned, a handful of other buildings also still tell the story of British Modernism. Take Garsington Manor in Oxford, where several Bloomsberries came to work for the duration of World War I; or Sissinghurst Castle, where the writer Vita Sackville-West welcomed Virginia Woolf (their affair is immortalised in Orlando).
It may not be just one house, per se, but London’s Isokon building remains equally alive with Modernist energy and fateful meetings. Inhabited by Bauhaus émigrés such as Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, these flats enjoyed visitors like Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, who would dine at the block’s built-in restaurant. Incidentally, Agatha Christie also lived there – fitting, as many of the residents were later revealed to be Soviet spies.
While the concept didn’t wholly go away – take Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, for one thing – the idea of a house for artist movements became rather muted in the late 20th century. Responding to his image of art as commodified and reproducible, in New York Warhol opened the Factory, instead: a studio for work and parties where an assembly line of celebrities would turn up. In Russia, meanwhile, the Moscow Conceptualists like Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, in the face of their work not being recognised as art by the government, turned their private apartments into installations for the public to visit. (Here stands the artist meeting house, turned inside out.)
Bored of the loneliness of studio spaces, by contrast, in the 1990s Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, key members of the YBAs, decided to open a shop in Bethnal Green – which was palpably more of a house than a space of commerce. When everyone else was painting their walls white, they painted theirs a homely magnolia. They kept sleeping bags upstairs, and, whatever the time of day, anyone could drop in for a cup of tea or a glass of wine.
The places where creatives meet are dense microcosms of wider artistic movements, zones where experiments can be played out and ideas tried and tested before being sent out into the wider world. But these meeting points are increasingly something we associate with history and states of artificial preservation: in the 21st century, artist’s houses don’t seem to behave in the quite same way. We can attribute this to the atomising effect of the internet, as well as soaring living costs and a private rental market in which studio spaces, let alone well-sized homes just aren’t affordable (and in which painting murals would be ill-advised). That’s not to say artists have become more individualistic, or less likely to gather – virtually or physically – only that, in years to come, we won’t have the likes of Charleston, Farleys and Hilles House to visit. These interior lives will be lost to history.
