Absolutely Fabulous

The coffeepot is exquisite silver, engraved with delicate flowers and foliage, it sits atop a stand crafted in the shape of a lotus bloom. The pot’s graceful handle is insulated at each end via a wafer of ivory, so as to keep it from getting hot. It is nice to look at and, apparently, pleasant to pour with.

Beyond that, the English urn from 1823 has “oomph”--that which elevates it beyond the pedestrian and warrants its Plexiglas display case at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--thanks to craftsmen, as Martin Chapman explains it, who went the extra distance.

“It’s so beautifully engineered,” says Chapman, curator of European decorative arts for the museum. “When you lift up the lid there,” he says, pointing, “it’s like a snuffbox: There’s a little ‘Pop!’ It’s a high-luxury object.”

Elegant objects are Chapman’s passion. In his nine years at LACMA (and the 16 before that at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum), the 47-year-old expert has puzzled over how to bring furniture, metalwork, ceramics and glass to life. By understanding the things we live with--whether European or American, simple or ornate, medieval or modern--we learn a lot, Chapman believes, about who we are.

“People want to put their own stamp on their interiors and their environments,” he says during a private museum tour. “I think that’s a very strong and natural instinct. And that inclination can turn the way we live into art. The art of living.”

Part of his job is to discern how best to display the museum’s vast decorative arts collection, much of which belonged to California’s most important collector, William Randolph Hearst. Chapman also struggles to decide what superlative items--a porcelain tobacco jar? a suit of armor?--to buy next. And he’s always hatching new schemes to pay for them.

In other words, Chapman wrestles, on a much grander scale, with the same issues as any style-conscious Angeleno. He just has a broader mandate: to assemble a sampling from cultures around the world, the better to teach his adopted city about the power of fine craftsmanship.

He has his work cut out for him. In sleek, futuristic Los Angeles, where 1950s Googie coffee shops pass for architectural landmarks, he knows that his recent acquisition of a surrealistic 18th century Italian rococo mirror, for example, may seem absurd.

“It’s true, this is a modernist city. But the downside of minimalism is that it doesn’t allow for individuality to be expressed very easily. And, in average hands, it becomes quite simply dull,” he says, standing before the $120,000 mirror, a recent acquisition from a London dealer. It was paid for by the Decorative Arts Council, a museum support group, and by donor David Copley.

“This was made in Milan in 1760, which, of course, was under the sway of the Austrians,” he says. The frame’s extravagant; writhing scrolls look as if they could reach out and grab him. “Isn’t it marvelous? They look like leaping flames! Torn silk! Cresting waves!”

Chapman has been a great advocate of integrating the museum’s collections--displaying its furniture with paintings and sculpture of the same period and culture--to better convey the context within which people actually lived. The mirror faces the gallery of 18th century European art.

For all its attachment to modernism, Chapman notes, Los Angeles also was home to “the great last flowering” of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, in the work of Charles and Henry Greene. And there is no escaping the influence of Hollywood--a topic explored in a museum seminar yesterday titled “Baroque, Baroque: Opulent Decoration in the 20th century Related to Film, Fantasy and Fashion.”

“There’s an interesting point and counterpoint between modernism and opulence in Los Angeles,” Chapman says. “Of course, the art director is a very important figure here. So we need to look not just at the Eameses [Charles and Ray], who I adore and regard as great gods, but also at how people lived who had more of a romantic bent.”

Chapman clearly is one of those people. An expert in 18th century European metalwork, (“They call me Mr. Gilt Bronze,” he jokes), he organized a premier exhibit in 1992 of 18th century miniature gold boxes, inset with tortoise shell, mother-of-pearl, lapis lazuli, porcelain, diamonds and other precious and rare materials. To this day, he pronounces them positively “swoon-making.”

“I could lick them, they’re so wonderful,” he says.

Striding exuberantly from gallery to gallery, his lavender tie fluttering against a pale yellow dress shirt, he pauses to heap praise on several objects. “Fab-ulous,” he says of a 19th century so-called “talking vase” by Galle--free-blown, acid-etched glass inscribed, in French, with the words “Beneath the Water of a Dream”--that is striking for its murky coloring, conveying a sense of being underwater. “It’s very evil-looking,” he says, “which I rather like.”

He points out a scene of an elephant hunt engraved on one of a pair of 16th century Renaissance silver tazzas, or footed dishes. “These,” he says, “are as rare as hen’s teeth.”

A wall lantern, decorated by Chicago School architect Louis Sullivan with fleshy, stylized foliage, is pronounced “utterly thrilling,” while a pair of Frank Lloyd Wright side chairs are simply “innovative.”

Still, “they’re clever, subtle designs. World-class stuff . . . . Probably not very comfortable, so not very useful,” he concedes, though he doesn’t see that as much of a flaw.

The chairs beg the question: If utility is not essential, then what is it, exactly, that turns a stick of furniture into a museum piece?

“Utilitarian objects can also be very beautiful--Shaker furniture, for example,” Chapman explains. “The simplest objects can sometimes be the most aesthetically pleasing. But there’s also technique and craftsmanship to consider. There’s the difficulty of the craft, when an artist has had to overcome his materials--a very hard wood, for example--to create beauty.”

And then there are just weird flights of fancy, as in the museum’s English art pottery by the Martin Brothers from the late 19th century, in the shapes of odd creatures with grimacing and contorted faces. “Look at the demented cat! Quite bizarre,” Chapman says. Next to it is something indescribable. Its label reads: “Grotesque bat-like spoon warmer.”

Chapman recalls being enamored of beautiful objects when he was as young as 10, on tours of English castles. Schooled in England and France, he received his training in the decorative arts at Sotheby’s auction house and became a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974. He first came to Los Angeles in 1983 on a yearlong fellowship at the J. Paul Getty Museum. In 1990, he returned to work at LACMA. Chapman travels often, mainly to London and Paris but also to New York, visiting dealers and auction houses. Occasionally, a collector approaches him with objects for sale.

He lives in Santa Monica, in a beach cottage built in 1919. He’s been there six years, and the place still looks spare. But the furniture he does have is classic: a round Mission table and several Mission chairs, a Gothic revival pine table, a carved oak Regency chair.

“I like mixing things up,” he says. At home and in the museum, he believes in moving things around every once in a while. (“New adjacencies between objects can sometimes be very interesting.”) And he disdains the common practice of lining objects up. (“What do rows tell you of things?”)

Whether you’re curating a museum collection or decorating your den, he says, the key is to divine “what has staying power.” It’s also important to know how much you’re willing to sacrifice function for form. Chapman’s tolerance for inconvenience is high, as evidenced by the 1960s chrome toaster in his kitchen.

“It doesn’t work very well. You have to throw the piece of bread in several times, and then it eventually goes down on its own. And then it burns it,” he says with a laugh. “But it looks great.”

What doesn’t look at all great, he laments, is the boxy gray PC in his tiny book-lined office at the museum. Parked opposite a sleek Eames office chair and next to a mouse pad depicting a scene from a cobalt-blue piece of Italian Renaissance majolica, the machine has about as much “oomph” as a block of concrete.

“This is such a common part of modern life! Why does it have to be so banal?” Chapman exclaims. “Modern technology has a way of not integrating itself well enough. I mean, microwaves with plastic ‘wood strip’ on them? Why do we have to put up with these dreary-looking objects?”

The tour is coming to an end when Chapman ducks into a storage room, flips on the cruel fluorescent lights and exposes his latest find: a bookcase made in 1869 by the avant-garde English architect Edward William Godwin for a castle on Ireland’s west coast. At first glance, the oak piece looks austere and heavy. But closer examination reveals the Japanese-inspired simplicity of its cabinets, the arch-shaped ornaments under its lowest shelf and the tiny scrolls on its feet.

“This man was a great genius. He brought Japanese tastes into English life,” Chapman says. He looks lovingly at the bookshelf, regarding its sturdy body as if it were proof not just of man’s ingenuity, but of the goodness of humankind.

“This,” he says finally, “is where furniture becomes art.”