"As they say on the awning, it’s the funeral chapel," Cynthia Talmadge tells me, describing the subject of her latest batch of paintings: Frank E. Campbell, a legendary funeral home on the Upper East Side. "A lot of very famous funerals have taken place there: Judy Garland, the Notorious B.I.G., Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s this very public-facing institution for death."
Opened in 1898, Frank E. Campbell more or less established the model of the funeral parlor. For society folks dealing with the particulars of death, it offered a more agreeable way of doing things than the at-home service. By 1926, when the police had to be called to hold back a mob of fans, hungry for a glimpse of silent film star Rudolph Valentino's body being laid to rest upstairs, the parlor's reputation was solidified. As Talmadge's press release so eloquently explains, it's "the only place a member in good standing of New York society would be caught actually dead."
After a series of funerals in her immediate family, Talmadge became taken with death's famed Manhattan address, 1076 Madison. And in a new series of pointillist paintings, she renders its imposing image time and again, capturing the brownstone in various seasons, angles, and times of day. Through December 23, eight of those paintings hang from elegant, bow-tied cords, at an address downtown: 56 Henry, a small gallery in Chinatown that has been transformed into a dusty-pistachio salon by New York–based firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero.
"It’s a fusion of three things," Adam Charlap Hyman explains of the scenography. "The reception room in Frank E. Campbell, which might look something like this—that's where the carpet comes from—the proper Parisian apartment [he was looking, in particular, at the Jean-Michel Frank–designed home of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, where Cubist paintings hung from ropes tied into bows], and the Park Avenue home belonging to the person that collects the Impressionist paintings who's having their service at Frank E. Campbell."
With crown moldings, silk-sheathed walls, velvet tape, and elegant, bow-tied ropes from which the paintings (set inside pointillist-speckled frames) are hung, Charlap Hyman has totally transformed the gallery space into something at once eerie and elegant. He even trimmed the shoddy light switch plate and electrical box near the door in velvet tape. "It's my homage to the Upper East Side," he jokes.
For the color scheme, they went with a pale eau de Nil.
"We wanted it to feel a little drab, a little dusty," says Talmadge.
"This is not Prada," says Charlap Hyman of their distinctive choice of palette, which could have easily gone macaron-box saccharine. "We didn't want people to get confused. It’s more like some forgotten corner of the Met."
And much like a period room in a museum, the setting feels as if it has been installed into the space—something from another time, dropped in and slotted into place. Where the molding ends, an inch or two of the white box gallery pokes through. Fluorescent lights still radiate overhead.
"The vision is really not that we, like, decorated the room, but that we made three walls on which these paintings hang," Charlap Hyman explains. "This is in a gallery and the ceiling is part of the gallery. You see the Chinatown project space showing through."
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