A Taste of Success

In 1956, Nell joined the new Poindexter Gallery. Reviewers praised her first show. The following year, she was awarded a residency at Yaddo (the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York), meeting poets Jane Mayhall and May Swenson. Afterward, she traveled to Mexico City and Oaxaca, where she worked at night by the light of an oil lamp. On her return, she spent several weeks at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, followed by another stay at Yaddo in December, when her fellow residents were poets Barbara Guest and Jean Garrigue. Nell spent the summer of 1958 in a rented studio in Gloucester. It was there that ARTnews writer Lawrence Campbell visited her to write a major piece about her work on Harbor and Green Cloth, illustrated with photographs by her friend Rudy Burckhardt. A second version of this painting was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Reconsidering Hyperreality

The term “hyperreal” is generally associated with sites that take anachronistic decorative styles and eclectically recombine them into environments that claim to surpass mimicry by creating a fully immersive experience. At Franklin Smith’s Pompeia in Saratoga Springs, New York (1892); the Roman ruin garden of Louise du Pont Crowninshield at Hagley, Delaware (1924); and John Paul Getty’s recreation of Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri in Malibu, California (1974) hyperreality is a lens through which to examine the reintegration of Classical tropes into the domestic architecture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. In each of these sites hyperreality extended beyond the boundaries of the built artifact into the garden environment where the dialogue between built space and greenspace expresses an ongoing, living relationship between Classical past and contemporary present. The role of hyperreality in creating Neo-Antique made places and imaginative portals is considered in terms of enchaînement, the socially anchored process of deliberate breakage and reuse that recombines fragments to generate new forms of cultural self-perception.