The ancient Aztecs, in a religious ritual of renewal, burned all their belongings every 52 years and began again.
Ursula Wagner didn`t go quite so far as to torch everything, but she did nearly the Aztec equivalent as far as changing her lifestyle goes.
”I worked in antique shops, and in 10 years I had collected all these antiques, some Victorian, some Shaker pieces,” Wagner explains. ”Then one day I`d had it with the clutter. My kids had moved out. We didn`t need the large house, a five-bedroom Colonial I`d filled with antiques.”
She and her husband decided to buy a contemporary townhouse.
”Buying the townhouse was part of a lifestyle change. Both of us work. It is really difficult, even when you decide to have all the maintenance work done. I`d find myself communicating with the gardener by notes to weed this flower bed or that. It is not as easy as it sounds to have it all done. Here
(with the townhouse), they maintain the outside, they prune, do everything.”
Buying the townhouse gave her the idea to weed out her belongings.
”Initially I wanted to get rid of a few Victorian things, create a more eclectic environment, mix the antiques with more modern pieces. Something snapped in me, and it was like a craze: `Let`s get rid of the whole thing and then start all over again,` I thought.
”We expected to have a huge house sale. But it sort of became word of mouth. Neighbors and friends began to come. Everything went without having a sale. I had pie safes with original tins, claw foot tables I`d been collecting for 10 years. I got rid of a lot of stuff among people at work. The couple that bought our house literally bought the den, coffee tables, everything.
”I got rid of every towel, every pot, every utensil. All of a sudden I couldn`t take one more mismatched pot.” Once everything was gone, she went into a large department store and started from scratch.
Her only decorative indulgence now is a small but select collection of African art that punctuates the stark, clean lines and the neutral colors of the interior of the townhouse.
”What I basically try to do is have one African piece in each room to keep the theme going,” Wagner says, a slight accent hinting at her Dutch birth.
The drastic change was ”scary,” she acknowledges. ”I had never lived with contemporary pieces. I came from a home in Holland with antiques. My parents` home is furnished with antiques. And the antiques over there go back to 1700. That`s all I`d really known. I grew up with antiques and Orientals.
”When we first got married, we were going to go Danish modern, but we blew our entire wad on a china set. And we could never afford anything else because my husband was in the military and was transferred a lot.”
About her recent paring down, she says, ”some people say, `Well, you gave up all your roots and traditions.` I almost wondered if I was throwing out my value system by doing that. But I felt the need to do that once in my lifetime and do it my way. I knew if I don`t do it now, I won`t do it when I`m 60.”
When she got married, she says, her furnishings were ”early attic” and included a few pieces from in-laws and things picked up along the way, which were ”upgraded to clawfoot oak stuff. Couples with one income didn`t do then what (two-income) couples can do now,” she says.
”And as I went to work for these antiques shop owners, I became more educated and found better antiques. But there was always this feeling we were patching things together as we went along.”
Her new home in the townhouse, which she moved into three years ago, is
”very stark.”
The interior is very simple and clean with a beige and black color scheme. ”I did work with an interior designer, Irv Kaplan,” she says. ”Now he says I was the easiest customer, but I know he didn`t trust me in the beginning. I`d look at only three pieces, and tell him, `Don`t confuse me by showing me 15 couches at the (Merchandise) Mart.` ”
The final accessorizing, however, was all hers. ”I decided I don`t want just plastic, chrome, acrylic in here. I wanted something that says this home is different.” She didn`t know what that would be at first and considered American folk art.
By sheer serendipity, she discovered African art and how well it melds with contemporary.
Her choices in it, she says, ”are all mine,” though her designer approved of it.
One recessed wall defied proper decoration. ”I had a tryptych commissioned, but I realized it wouldn`t be right for me and cancelled it.”
She was a regular jewelry customer at a shop called Eye On Design in Hinsdale, owned by Lavinia Tackbary, who deals mainly in ethnographic jewelry, with a side room called the Museum Gallery, out of which she sells select African and Oceanic art.
One day while in the shop, Wagner told Tackbary about her problem with the recessed wall. Tackbary suggested a long, pieced African textile in a repeat geometric design, a dowry piece from West Africa that fills the recess as if woven for it.
The ”Queen” was her second piece, she says, referring to a large carved wooden figure that dominates the living room. She is a ceremonial piece from Zaire, originally one of a royal pair with a matching ”King,” from whom she has been separated. She has an exotic hairdo or headdress that Tackbary believes resembles ”pigtails” and wears a hishi or ostrich eggshell necklace.
Wagner is fond of the Queen. ”That`s why I like that shovel in there,”
she says, referring to a rice shovel hanging in the contemporary black and white kitchen. There is a carved female figure at the top of the handle with the same headdress as the Queen. ”I even like the worm marks in the Queen`s face,” Wagner says.
Equally intrigued was her previous owner, Lavinia Tackbary, who says
”the look of the face is Ashanti. She`s got to be a hundred years old. She was my prized possession, and Mrs. Wagner bought it. I never got over it. Her face is so natural and so wonderful.”
But the Queen doesn`t please everyone.
”When I walked in with her initially, we almost got a divorce,” Wagner says, referring to her husband, Richard, who said, ”She is not coming in here!”
Other than that, she says, ”he had no trouble letting go of the traditional and going contemporary.”
Her husband says the change did give him pause. ”It was like walking into someone else`s house for about six months. Over time you adapt and take emotional possession of it. I like the African art; I just don`t like that one piece,” he says.
His wife bargained for it, however. ”I told him I want her for my birthday, my anniversary and Valentine`s Day. His answer was, `I don`t like to give something I don`t like.` People do like her, though; so he has acquiesced to the fact that it is a conversation piece. The women like her better than the men. They`re a little bit threatened by her. She may be too explicit,”
Wagner says, ”too erotic a piece.” It has become something of a family joke now, with her husband finally posing for a photograph hugging the Queen.
Another ”bone of contention,” as Wagner calls it, is a ceremonial mask with a heavy mane of raffia hair, which hangs in a loft above the living room. Tackbary calls it ”the most ferocious tribal mask that has ever been made, a white face with black eye makeup. It`s supposed to scare.”
”My husband wanted to know, `What kind of wild creature is this?`
” Wagner says.
Her collection also includes two pieces in niches on either side of the entrance to the family room: a carved wooden chicken from Zaire and a Sonji sculpture from West Africa of a woman who holds a jar where exotic spices might be kept.
There are several Ivory Coast mudcloths (a kind of batik with mud that leaves a design on the cloth after the mud is washed off), an Ashanti elephant chair and a flute in the hall.
Her last piece is a marvelous bronze of a rooster, made in Benin, West Africa; it`s at least 60 years old, says Tackbary, who fell in love with African arts 18 years ago. She says she always intended to keep her pieces, never sell them, but sometimes sold them to make room for more.
Wagner, when she first saw Tackbary`s interest in African art, told her, ” `Lavinia, either you`re way ahead of your time or way out of touch with reality.` Now I see more and more in the newspaper about African art exhibits. Lavinia was ahead of her time. She kept telling me, `Ursula, you`ll see, you`ll see.`
”Spiegel came out with an African motif in its latest home furnishings catalogue. I almost hate to see it now becoming a fad. I have a little of the same feeling about contemporary things. Three years ago nobody had black lacquer tables. Now Wickes has them,” Wagner says.
”In a way I feel vindicated. Lavinia told me the truth, but there`s a sadness to it. I wanted something unique, and now I`m seeing it in catalogues. But I`m glad I got some good pieces before this rage started. Everybody has this furniture now. If I didn`t have the African art, I`d feel like this was a lobby in a hotel,” she says, looking around the space that exemplifies her new lifestyle: spare but special.
