Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Masterpiece Home Office: How to spiff up your pandemic pad with art from Mia
By Tim Gihring, Minneapolis Institute of Art
With work-from-home in full swing, are you finding your quarantine quarters a little lacking? Do you dread logging into the morning meeting, coveting your colleagues’ digs while you slump at your desk seemingly made of Legos and leftover Ikea hardware? Yes, the ideal home office is the new status symbol, and Mia is here to help with Zoom-ready rooms straight from the galleries.
Dining Room in the Country, by Pierre Bonnard, 1913. Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Pierre Bonnard was an artist and illustrator in fin de siècle France who considered himself the last of the Impressionists. In fact, he was one of the first Post-Impressionists, for those keeping score, influenced by the graphic arts of Japanese printmakers like Katsushika (The Wave) Hokusai. He made a comfortable living at it, in any case, and in 1912 he bought a country house in a small town on the Seine. That’s his wife leaning in, but the rest is more or less a feeling rendered in color, a desire you may be harboring right now: to throw open the house and take in some fresh air.
St. Jerome in His Study, by Albrecht Dürer, 1514. Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
When you have the patience of a saint, maybe you can work with an enormous lion at the foot of your desk. Of course, St. Jerome was said to have removed a thorn from the lion’s paw, so a grateful lion may be the best coworker of all —no one will bother you with an unwelcome ask, at least not more than once. The natural light is pretty great, too, coming through those circular panes, but if that’s not enough you’ll always have the supernatural light from your halo. Assuming, like St. Jerome — diligently translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin — that you’re doing the Lord’s work.
The writing nook of the Purcell-Cutts House
Inside the Purcell-Cutts House, a historic home in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Almost too modest to be called an office, this little nook in the living room of the Purcell-Cutts House was the sublime sanctuary of Edna Purcell, the wife of architect William Purcell, who would write letters and sort through photos here. In spring and summer, she could look out the long, rectangular window onto the blooms of a wildflower garden —replicated, abstractly, in a flower pattern on the window itself. The house was designed, in the Prairie School style, to make efficient use of space and to break down some of the old barriers between dining, living, and study spaces. “The useless division,” as William Purcell called it, “quietly slipped away,” replaced by spaces “all free and open, filled with soft light.”
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