I was re-watching Mad Men
recently, when I saw something that made me sit up and hit Pause: a
piece of kitsch art on the wall of Joan Holloway's apartment. It was
a fake Chinese scroll painting of a red bridge over a deep gorge, and
I had grown up, during the Mad Men era, with its
identical twin.
It's from a paint-by-number kit. My
father had painted it, with his usual care and patience -- if it's
worth doing, it's worth doing right -- and it hung on the wall of our
kitchen for a number of years. I dredged the Internet for a picture
of that scene, so I could email it to my siblings; the best I could
find was the one you see above.
I liked Mad Men when
it first aired, and still do. When I found out that Matthew Weiner,
the show's honcho, had been a writer/producer for The
Sopranos, I figured: well, OK, it'll have one or two good
seasons, then it'll get all Hollywoodish and up its own butt. But,
no. It was very good from start to finish.
And, as a bonus for us Boomers, it did
a very nice job picturing the world of the 60s. Some of the cultural
stuff was contorted by modern wokeness (no, the average American
didn't smoke three packs a day, and no, women's lives were not a
relentless hell of misery and oppression), but the details were right
on the money.
Kudos to the anonymous set-dresser or
prop-buyer who found that paint-by-number scroll and put it on the
apartment wall.
2 comments:
In the first episode, season 1, of Mad Men Peggy Olson goes to the doctor to get birth control. In that scene, there's a close-up shot of the calendar on the wall: March, 1960. That is precisely my birth year and month. Weird
Relative to set dressing I have some friends who collect mid-century Modern furniture - certainly Mad Men had its share of that style all over the place, and it took me a minute to recall which show had the best MCM furnishings that I ever saw depicted in a series. It was, in fact, Perry Mason, which makes sense because when that show was filmed all that furniture was brand new. Lamps, desks, chairs, paintings, ash trays, every single decorative item, even the architecture of the offices and houses the characters inhabited was spot on. Having lived through those times I have not the slightest interest in collecting or even seeing those things in my house - I am kind of over it, but I understand how youngsters find the style interesting. Googie architecture, on the other hand, that I like.
Very cool that you were able to find a picture of the exact PBtN painting - those are the kind of stories that connect one generation to the next. Back in the early '50s when my father worked at the NIH he took up the hobby of plein-air painting. That was a thing back in those days and he and his friends and the wives would troop out somewhere, set up their easels and paint. He did one of a someone flying a kite in front of a church steeple and after his death I asked around to see if I could retrieve that - nope, it was gone, his second wife or her children had gotten rid of it - it wasn't much of a painting, I get that, but it had some sentimental value to me. So it goes...
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