> > > "HOW MANY THINGS I CAN DO WITHOUT!"
--Socrates
How To Edit.
The late Van Day Truex, designer, painter, former head of Parsons School of Design and former creative head of Tiffany, instructed his students to "control, edit, distill." Billy Baldwin, until his death in December 1983, was considered to be the foremost society decorator. His clients included Jacqueline Kennedy, Cole Porter and the Washington social leader Mrs. William McCormick Blair. Billy once said, "Beauty is always simple."
Van and Billy were great friends and they were the biggest heroes to American designers and decorators because they shunned pretentiousness. They lived by Keats's famous words from "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Both men understood that caned furniture can be charming in a New York apartment -- it is simple, not grand, affordable and attractive.
Van and Billy had seen the best of the best and their eye was so strict they only wanted to feast on true beauty. Both of them practiced editing in their work.
(Daring To Be Yourself, by Alexandra Stoddard.
Copyright 1990. Avon Books / The Hearst
Corporation. New York, New York.)
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