The Meaning of Wallpaper
Thank you, Lindsay Johnstone, for the prompt.
Above is a 30 sec. video of my hand turning the pages of my mother’s “Wallpaper Sample Book ©Mimi Weisbord 1979” (but begun years before). The thumbnail image is a painted page with many thin parallel lines surrounding a lacey border pattern. Six additional hand-painted pages are of different floral patterns, including one that presents as torn on a wall.
Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
“What is the meaning of wallpaper?,” a friend in the UK asks on Substack as her daughter prepares to remake the room where she once rocked her as a baby.
I’ll carry that question to the wallpapered rooms of “Brooklands,” my childhood summer house in Western Massachusetts.
In its red-papered parlor, my brother and I used to play a game made of wooden coins and dice carved from bone that were stored in a slender box with an orange lid. This is the parlor where my mother painted my dollhouse on a table backdropped by its wall’s red pattern, a scrap protruding off the table’s edge as a knife in a Balthus still life.
My parents bought Brooklands furnished, I’ve come to realize through memories and photographs of vintage games, quilts, bureaus, dishes, and other objects that followed us after it sold. There, my father painted a still life in the studio they built in the woods. And my mother removed layers of paper from the farmhouse’s 200-year-old walls.
In her Manhattan studio, fifty years later, I found a portfolio with clear sleeves of the crumbling floral designs, their backsides oxidized brown. Among them, I recognized the exploded patterns of her City Walls mural proposals from the 1980s.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
In the how-to book she wrote on recovering from asthma, she mentions Brooklands and the wallpaper. They’re part of her origin story for her debilitating illness: “In 1970, my then husband and I bought a country house which had once been occupied by sixteen cats […],” she writes. “While removing wallpaper and pulling up old linoleum, I inhaled mold and mildew in addition to the leftover dander.”1
My mother suffered from asthma for years from that triggering event and the suffocation she felt in her marriage.
And yet, the wallpaper worked its way into a multitude of her creations.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
Another find in her Manhattan studio unlocked a related memory for me: my mother in our apartment in Brooklyn, sitting at our dining table in what was also our living room. She is painting in a spiral-bound sketchbook. I approach and find her light-heartedly drawing lines freehand with a paintbrush, thin and parallel, one after another, unaided along the page.
I didn’t know she could do that. I didn’t know anyone could do that.
I recalled the memory when the sketchbook turned up in the loft after her death, pulling forward that memory from our Brooklyn apartment (where she moved after leaving my father) and pulling forward the patterns of Brookland’s vintage wallpaper. I had not made it up. (She did have that power!) Here were those lines in a spiral sketchbook, a question resolved I’d not known I carried. Those lines were part of a wallpaper pattern. She was copying the designs.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
The sketchbook showed me that I could trust my earliest impressions and mine them for my memoir. It was an early instance of a repeated phenomenon; dim recollections condensed to become physical in the loft, materializing out of thin air as “a bottle amber perfect,” drawn from the “earth-deposits of our history” (Adrienne Rich, from “Power”)2. In this case, a sketchbook held a memory of the grace and power of my mother’s hands even as she worked with material that made her ill.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
Her fingers worked with an ease and confidence that seemed suspended from the rest of her. I recalled how once, when we still lived together as a family, I wanted to know how to draw a tree. I saw a difference between the trees my kindergarten classmates, and I drew with waxy knots of green on brown stalks for trunks and a real tree. Remarkably, she stopped whatever housework she was doing and picked up a drawing pad and pencil. Perched on the edge of the bed, illuminated with just the light from the hall, she drew branches from a trunk that spread one to the next with fluid movements (and without my fits of erasing). As she drew, she asked if this were what I wanted, the tree developing from her fingers and my mind. The moment was quick and never repeated. A lesson patiently provided, I recall as I’m writing this, because my father had said no. I was confused to be rebuffed by the parent who spent all day painting and drawing for himself. But the parent who did not, I was learning, could also do this thing for me: draw a real tree. It was thrilling. It was the same ease that would later paint those wallpaper lines, the same hands that, still later, held a knife and fork at her memory care residence. Despite her agitated mind, she carved her plate with elegance.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
I’ve learned from reading her journals and letters, or something else I came across, that her wallpaper sketchbook was her way of holding onto the house she reluctantly planned to sell to buy the loft in Soho.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
She thought of her wallpaper murals — made of petals, vines, and blooms — as erotic. Likely, she was preserving more than the vintage patterns. After separating from my father, she enjoyed trysts at Brooklands on her weekends without us. Among her lovers were a poet and classist who taught at Amherst, a well-known sculptor and Brancusi art historian, and a minimalist who showed his work in NH. And others. In the final year that we still owned Brooklands, I begged to go to the country, but she rarely took us. Brooklands, she explained, was about to be sold.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
In a transcribed interview from her time with an artist residency at PS 1, she says her earliest childhood memory is drawing on wallpaper. She also says she teaches her students to lean into their childhood obsessions to make their art. After years spent running away from her, I now know I am faithfully following her instructions.
Louise Bourgeois comes to mind. Did she think of her, too? Bourgeois found her artistic power by engaging childhood wounds. (Her father’s betrayal, an affair with her governess.) I’m peeling back my mother’s wallpaper to find what it was wrapping.
She kept everything: letters, dream journals, sketchbooks, canvases, the little balsa house that is my profile pic for this substack, our childhood toys, dusty shell collections, scraps of wallpaper, linoleum, and textile patterns. Hardened buckets of spackle. She kept it because it was HER LIFE she’d tell me, glaring as I grew panicked about all she was defending: the bundle of takeout menus too heavy for its magnet found dropped between the fridge and the cabinet. But like the dementia she’d often predicted, she always suspected I’d want to know everything.
And it turns out I do.
What is the meaning of wallpaper?
Pure narcissism, I concluded, running away from her and her spinning self-obsessions, away from the loft in the angry artists’ coop. Chasing Brooklands.
What is the meaning of the wallpaper? It’s what it papers over. Conceals. Holds together.
I could never get enough of that summer house during the brief time we were there as a family: my father painting in the little studio by the frog pond, my mother in the kitchen garden, and later claiming the studio for herself (as well as the house in the separation agreement). That longing landed me building a life in New England, loving and marrying a woman from Maine.
The wallpaper patterns live inside me. They govern. I’d not seen it, living so close to the picture plane.
Weisbord, Mimi. Asthma: Breathe Again Naturally and Reclaim Your Life. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997, p. 1.
Rich, Adrienne. “Power.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. New York; London, Norton, 1993.
So interesting! I thought of The Yellow Wallpaper, as others have mentioned, but also the paintings of Shani Rhys James: 'There is something dark and wild and crazy about flowers ... Yet in wallpaper designs they are controlled in a pattern and prettified. In our culture women are also prettified – she is part of the floral background, part of the furniture in a way.'
Lovely— you are peeling back layers in the structure of the essay too. And those repeated questions as subheadings function like the parallel lines your mother drew, establishing rhythm and borders. It’s all very cohesive and evocative!