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(Welles has instructed Leaming to go to the Chicago Art Institute, to see something he only refers to as “the Thorne Rooms,” with no further explanation given.)
And so I took the walk that Orson had mapped out for me, past the magical toy store that no longer existed, past the bronze lions with their rippling tails (that the young Welles used to sit upon), and into the cavernous lobby of the Art Institute, where a guard directed me to the children’s museum in the basement.
And there they were.
It was difficult for me to see at first, because they were set low, for children. But when I bent over and looked in, I was mesmerized. The Thorne Rooms were a series of illuminated boxes set into the wall. To see inside, you had to look through a picture frame and a piece of glass that separated you from a densely furnished miniature room. The rooms suggested a dazzling variety of periods and places. The picture frames sealed off those richly detailed fantasy worlds, intensifying their sense of strangeness.
Some of the rooms- the most interesting ones- provided tantalizing hints of the imaginary spaces that adjoined them. Through a little window, you could catch a glimpse of a fragmentary garden in the distance. Through a tony double door, a patch of hallway was visible. Again and again, I found my eye being drawn by these interior frames- windows, doors, archways- and to the strange, teasing, evocative spaces they enclosed which, only naturally, were the hardest to see.
( Read more... )
And so I took the walk that Orson had mapped out for me, past the magical toy store that no longer existed, past the bronze lions with their rippling tails (that the young Welles used to sit upon), and into the cavernous lobby of the Art Institute, where a guard directed me to the children’s museum in the basement.
And there they were.
It was difficult for me to see at first, because they were set low, for children. But when I bent over and looked in, I was mesmerized. The Thorne Rooms were a series of illuminated boxes set into the wall. To see inside, you had to look through a picture frame and a piece of glass that separated you from a densely furnished miniature room. The rooms suggested a dazzling variety of periods and places. The picture frames sealed off those richly detailed fantasy worlds, intensifying their sense of strangeness.
Some of the rooms- the most interesting ones- provided tantalizing hints of the imaginary spaces that adjoined them. Through a little window, you could catch a glimpse of a fragmentary garden in the distance. Through a tony double door, a patch of hallway was visible. Again and again, I found my eye being drawn by these interior frames- windows, doors, archways- and to the strange, teasing, evocative spaces they enclosed which, only naturally, were the hardest to see.
( Read more... )
