I'm currently rather enjoying a passive aggressive battle with my boyfriend over my penchant for nineteenth-century fireside dogs. We've just decorated our living room, painted it brilliant white and built some shelves into an alcove. I've managed to sneak past him my ceramic bookends with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok on horseback, but he's less than pleased with my array of ceramic dogs in all different sizes perched atop a 1950s side table. Every time I go out he moves them out of sight, and every time he goes out I move them back, to menace him with their hilariously badly painted faces. These proud little dogs are his design nemesis, the quintessence of tat, and remind him of his grandma's house. But that's why I love them. And I'm in good company.
Modernist architect Bertold Lubetkin, famed for his sculpturally dramatic use of reinforced concrete at the Penguin Pool in London Zoo (1934), was also partial to a pair of fireside dogs. In fact, he had two pairs, one at his Highpoint apartment in London and one in his modernist retreat at Whipsnade. In their modern surroundings Lubetkin's porcelain dogs stand apart as outmoded icons of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior. Epitomising the ornamental bric-a-brac compulsively swept away by architectural modernism, their presence is subversive. Obstinately gathering dust, the porcelain dogs articulate a critique of over-rationalisation, that modernist compulsion to standardise and sterilise. Lubetkin's dogs are the material embodiment of his Whipsnade Manifesto, a satirical rage against Corbusier's machine for living: 'self-obliterating…in its hygienic anonymity'.
Asserting the idiosyncratic and the personal, knick-knacks and oddities like these are a reinstatement of the house as home. In my living room the fireside dogs and wild-west bookends not only make a great contrast with modern furnishings, but they subvert the anonymity of white walls. And in further defence of my taste, ceramicist of chic Jonathan Adler recently added a stylised pair of fireside dogs to his Menagerie range. But top of my wish list at the moment is a 50s style poodle table lamp by Abigail Ahern. I don't rate my chances of getting it past 'him indoors'.
Author Resource:-
Catherine Gregg is a features writer at Furnish.co.uk. She graduated with an MA in Design History from the Royal College of Art in 2009 and has a market stall in London selling 20th century pieces for the home. Often up at all hours reading and writing articles, she's always on the lookout for good table lamp and another pair of eccentric bookends.
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