I was reading a profile of the designer Kelly Wearstler in the NY Times, and there was an interesting quote from Amy Astley, the editor of Architectural Digest (which I love, and subscribe to), where she said: “…’I do think she’s a master of jolie-laide,’ or finding beauty in the unconventional or strange.” I was not familiar with that phrase before, but I like it, as I think I definitely have a tendency to find beauty in the unconventional or strange, and I’ll show you some examples of my own jolie laide.
But back to that phrase, having never heard of it before, I wanted to look it up for an extended definition beyond what Ms. Astley said. The top search result for a definition of it is: “a French phrase that describes a woman who is attractive despite not being conventionally pretty.” But Astley wasn’t talking about Wearstler’s appearance, she was talking about her artistic vision, and how she sees things. And sure enough, if one breaks down the individual French words literally, “jolie” is “pretty” and “laide” is “ugly.” So that certainly works in Astley’s use of it, in describing Wearstler’s designer vision in seeing beauty in things that others might find ugly – let’s leave Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s application of it to a person out of the discussion.
So how do I think I have a vision of jolie laide? I like to take a lot of photographs of things that appeal to me, and one could argue that plenty of them are things that others might not find any interest or beauty in. For example, the pictures above at the top of this post were taken yesterday, before I even read the article with the mention of jolie laide today. I was visiting the Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, and after the tour of the mansion, I walked around the grounds. These pictures are from the greenhouse frame, which once housed an extensive collection of rare plants but burned to the ground in the late 1880s. I can see that many people might be focused on the grounds, or imagining what it used to look like, or seeing the beauty in the nearby rose garden, and what was I focused on? I thought the rusty apparatus was beautiful and could make for a fine abstract sculpture. Does this count as jolie laide?
Here’s another example: I had been walking around Chelsea (west side of Manhattan) visiting art galleries, and as I was walking back to Penn Station to catch a train, I walked by this construction site, with heavy equipment stored behind a blue wooden wall. It’s just a bunch of construction equipment, a plain blue wall, nothing special … but there’s something about it, the composition of these elements, that struck me as a nice abstract art image, and perhaps even having some aspects of it that make me think of Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings. Would you call this jolie laide?
I could probably come up with hundreds of examples of how I find interest in unexpected places, but I’ll just put one more out there for your consideration. When I was exploring towns along 9W and the Hudson River, I saw this space between two homes in Highland Falls near West Point. It caught my attention for the odd way that the opening was much wider than the back space, both homes are positioned at angles that create this pizza-slice-like wedge of space between them. And the way that both downspouts curve and recede to the back at about the same height creates some artistic balance and draw the eye towards the back. One could say, this is just a dumpy space between two old buildings, but I think it has plenty of visual interest – or, some jolie laide!
Okay, I think I made my point. What do you think? Share any thoughts in the comments section below.