Essay, Made of Antique Glass

Abstract

Essay, Made of Antique Glass Jehanne Dubrow (bio) Brussels was the city of our comfort and languor. By the time I was sixteen, our family had moved many times. Belgrade. Zagreb. Lubambashi. Washington, DC. Warsaw. The District of Columbia again. Warsaw again. And now Brussels, with its wide avenues and gilded cafés. Our house, on a little corner of a street in a green neighborhood, had an elevator and a tennis court, both of which made us feel as if we were visitors to some grander life. Driving ten minutes from home, we might have arrived in the municipality of Waterloo, passing the tall grassy mound—a pointed hill, really—crowned with a bronze statue of a lion. This was the site of that famous battle between Napoleon and Wellington. We seldom stopped, driving on instead to a cheese or bread shop. Ten minutes in another direction from our house was a restaurant that specialized in moules-frites, the national dish of Belgium, mussels served in great cast iron pots and the fries accompanied by a small dish of mayonnaise. After our years in Warsaw, Brussels felt like falling onto a smothering, luxurious featherbed, my parents back from the Embassy by dinnertime, no strikes or Martial Law or history rioting on our doorstep. Brussels was the city of divided languages, city of red tape and paperwork. The closest we came to difficulty was one August when my father walked to Mary Chocolatier, an official supplier of chocolate to the Belgian royal court, only to discover the store closed for the summer holiday, the ballotins of dark pralines gleaming behind locked doors. The closest we came to deprivation was when it rained too many days in a row, the sky that same low gray one might find in a painting by Brueghel. —I am thinking lamplight through the branches, blossoms dark against an amber sky. I am asking what curve of tango-orange? What’s held in the cupping hands of glass? — [End Page 72] On the rue Américaine, my mother and I visited the Horta Museum, designed by the Belgian architect Victor Horta and built between 1898 and 1901. We often went on these kinds of excursions in Brussels; I was a junior in high school by then, past the worst years of adolescence and relieved to live in a place where I wasn’t teased and bullied for my strangeness. For me, Brussels was coffee and a slice of cake filled with passion fruit mousse. It was an afternoon at the movies and a bag of candied orange peel robed in dark chocolate. It was my first sip of raspberry beer. I was so grateful for the pleasures of Brussels, how seldom anyone looked at me on the street. In Poland, my black curls and dark eyes had marked me as foreign—was I Roma? or worse, was I a Jew? In Brussels, I could be the one doing the looking. In the cool, cream light of a gallery, I could stand in front of a surreal nude, her body turning from skin to summer sky. Or I could regard the Breughel painting that Auden once described, with its “expensive delicate ship” sailing past a pair of white legs protruding from the indifferent sea. Or, inside the Horta Museum, I could look and look—how everything was coiled, flowing shapes of tile, wood, and metal that evoked the bent gestures of flowers. A skylight arched above me. The brass railing of a staircase curled against my hand. The aesthetic movement known as Art Nouveau began in the 1880s and lasted until the start of the first World War. Art historian Cybele Gontare explains that Art Nouveau “endeavored to achieve the synthesis of art and craft . . . encompassing a variety of media.” Depending on country and language, the movement was called Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Secesja, Modernismo. Art Nouveau was interdisciplinary, its bent lines interpreted on paper, cast in precious metals, cut in stone, printed on fabric, and blown in glass, its influence visible in music, dance, and literature. By the beginning of World War I, it had been supplanted by Art Deco, whose forms were more streamlined...