To most people, art and everyday life are two different things. An exhibition at Manhattan’s Architectural League last week showed how close they often are.
It was a wallpaper show, featuring the work of a 52-year-old artist and housewife named llonka Karasz (rhymes with Saharas). The show will spend a year on the road, in Cleveland, Philadelphia,
Grand Rapids, Andover, Mass, and Baltimore. Local decorators in each city will design new interiors to go with several of the wallpapers, and possibly local painters will be tempted to try their hands at an art form as big as a room.
But it is not easy, says Miss Karasz, to cross the no man’s land that separates “pure” art (the kind that comes in frames) from applied art. “You must have a sponsor, just as in the Renaissance, only nowadays it’s a company instead of a duke. I’m lucky to have a manufacturer [Katzenbach & Warren, Inc.] who lets me design pretty much as I please. And I’m not dependent on inspiration. I’m dependent on what I wish to do. This does not mean I work without inspiration—I just don’t wait for it; I work, and sometimes it comes.”
The entire family—her husband (Willem Nyland, a chemist), two children, a collie and 17 cats—sometimes congregate in the studio while she draws wallpaper designs or New Yorker covers. It doesn’t bother her a bit.
Miss Karasz succeeds in staying serene even when her children call her work “bad modern.” Her house is completely bare of wallpaper except for her twelve-year-old son’s room, which is papered with one of her designs. “We had to change that paper three times,” she recalls, “before he was satisfied.”
Her cool, keen eye for the construction of things in nature and on paper makes Karasz’ designs consistently acceptable, but like any artist she hits her peak only occasionally. One of the best papers in last week’s show, a linear, oriental-seeming study of ducks in long grass (see cut), was inspired just back of her Brewster, N.Y. house. “We had a pair of yellow ducks,” she explained, “and the children were chasing them. All I had to do was put it down. Things often come that way, but of course I understood how the blades of grass grew, from having studied them before.”
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