BY LEE CULLUM
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SMITH
OF BEASTS
AND BEAUTY
MAN VS. NATURE INFORMS A CAREFULLY
CURATED ART COLLECTION BY ASHLEY TATUM.
I
had never seen a Rottweiler until I stopped by a house
on Lakeside to meet art consultant Ashley Tatum whose
adventuresome direction could be seen inside. But there
was Meika to greet me at the door. She was only seven months
old and 20 pounds short of her full physique, but impressive
nonetheless, formidable, descended, some say, from guard
dogs of the Roman Empire, deployed by the army to herd
cattle and protect the camp at night. It was a relief to realize
that it did not seem to her necessary to protect the house
from me, though I was unnerved at first, remembering that
Princess Diana used to call Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the
second wife of Prince Charles, Rottweiler. Camilla even took
to answering the phone, “Rottweiler here.”
Rotties, however, are nicer than Diana supposed, as
Ashley Tatum explained. Unless provoked, they have a vast
capacity for happy devotion. They do not, however, go in
for “immediate and indiscriminate friendships,” according
to the American Kennel Club, which ought to know.
The same could be said, I suspect, of Ashley, though that
hidden reserve would take a long time to uncover. She has
about her an effervescence that has carried her far in the
contradictory world of art, where commerce and culture,
society and solitude, the sensational and the sacred collide
and, sometimes, converge.
Holding the opposites—that’s what Ashley Tatum does.
It explains her early ennui at the Margaret and Trammell
Crow Collection where the work was too quiet, too pure
in its Asian elegance for her restless imagination. (She had
landed there with the aim, nurtured at Westminster College
in Missouri, of going for a PhD in art history and a career in
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This page: David Bates, The Flood, 1989, oil on canvas, 76 x 96 in.; two sculptures on side tables, Anita Huffington (Left) Dark Moon, 2003, bronze, 22 x 8.5 x 6.25
in.; (Right) Grace, 2000, bronze, 23.75 x 9 x 8.5 in.; small orchid, Mark Quinn, cast silver. Opposite: David Bates, Barn Owl II, 2004, oil on canvas, 86 x 62 in.
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Sam Gummelt, Untitled, 1998, mixed media on wood panel, 108 x 72 in.; lounge chairs, Cassina, Scott+Cooner; coffee table, Kerry Joyce, George Cameron Nash; stone and acrylic
lamps, Allan Knight; Bergamo fabric in Goya on custom pillows, Donghia.
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“There are no still lifes in this house. It’s man versus
nature, man with nature.”
–Ashley Tatum
Clockwise from left: E.V. Day, Mummified Barbie, encaustic, twine, plastic, 12 x 2 x 3 in.;
founder of Tatum Art Advisory, Ashley Tatum, consults with collectors of 20th century and
contemporary art; Hans Hoffman, Untitled, 1951, oil on paper, 29 x 23 in.
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museums.) It was essential to her early success, long before
the age of 30, running the Gerald Peters Gallery in Dallas.
It propelled her out of there and into Carey Ellis Company,
a national art advisory firm, as the economy was crashing.
It also steadied her when she started her own operation,
consulting with clients such as the one whose handsome
house by Frank Welch I visited that afternoon.
Brown brick, heavily shaded by greenery, high and
overhanging, this home was built originally for John Dabney
Murchison, grandson of the oil magnate. “When I got the
job,” Welch told me, “I said this house has got to harmonize
with other houses in the neighborhood,” a part of Highland
Park he calls “the valley of kings.” Conceived as a big place
but with only nine rooms, the spaces are generous and
welcoming to art. The current owner has supplied quite a lot
of that, and Ashley has added her own inspiration, carefully
honed once she understood she would never be a great
painter herself.
Her touch was apparent in the living room where a
recent acquisition by Julian Schnabel from the Dallas Art
Fair throws wild, energetic insights across the great expanse
to a calming Sam Gummelt, mostly monochromatic white
tending to gray, announcing its own strength and durability.
Nearby are two early works on paper by Hans Hofmann,
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surprisingly lyrical in their black-and-white articulation of
human joy.
In this highly personal assemblage whites keep coming
back like a song. A large geometric arrangement of squares by
Terrell James radiates the dining room. (Ashley had intended
it to go where the Schnabel is now, so the Gummelt would
have someone to talk to.) A small collage by Dan Rizzie
is matched by another at the far end of the foyer. One has
stacked sheets of painted wood, thick as a relief. The clarity
of white is a soothing counterpoint to the explosion of David
Bateses everywhere, suffusing the atmosphere with the
power of accumulated knowledge. Bates simply knows more
than many artists working today about the inner imperatives
of the natural world. “There are no still lifes in this house,”
Ashley explained. “It’s man versus nature, man with nature.”
Bates explored the primordial swamps and cypress trees
near Caddo, the only natural lake in Texas. All that is here
in this house. But an unexpected object of his interest is an
enormous owl, presiding over the landing and best seen from
the top of the stairs. It has a special resonance for Ashley
Tatum, who admitted she actually likes animals better than
things. She also values owls more for their “predatory skill”
than the wisdom for which they’ve been relegated to the
status of silent, skeptical observers.
This page: Julian Schnabel, Untitled (Chinese), 2010, oil, ink, resin on polyester, 104 x 79.5 in.; chair, A. Rudin, E.C. Dicken. Opposite (left): Erick Swenson, Ne Plus
Ultra-Artifact, resin, 10 x 5 x 2 in. (right) Alexis Rockman, Gerbera Daisy, 2007, oil on wood panel, 56 x 44 in.
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That silence, Ashley pointed out, allows them to fly like
stealth bombers, with no noise to alert their prey. They also
can operate in darkness because their “acute sense of hearing
[can guide them] to a mouse under three feet of snow based
upon the sound of the heartbeat.” I bring this up because to
me it unlocks the secret of Ashley Tatum who keeps journals
and once noted this from the book Wesley the Owl: “We can
overcome enormous obstacles with patience.”
So for all the glamour, drive, and connections cultivated
during her association with Jerry Peters and his one-time
business partner Ted Pillsbury, there are other, subterranean
aspects that inform her life. Horses may consume whatever
leisure time she can muster, fox-hunting in Celeste, Texas,
from fall to spring and leasing half a horse’s time at the
Rocking M Stables off Walnut Hill in the summer, but it is
on the oddity of the owl that she is the most penetrating and
thoughtful. Like the homely, ungainly Rottweiler, this is not
an animal you would associate with the affections of a lover
of art. But as I said at the beginning, Ashley Tatum knows
how to hold the opposites, and she’s not afraid of the shadow
side of life.
Marco French, the interior designer with whom Ashley
shares an office in the Design District showroom of J. Robert
Scott, projects less complexity, but that may be because he’s
lived longer and resolved more. When I arrived to see him,
he was watching over the hanging of four etchings: finely
realized European gardens of the 18th Century in the
Chinoiserie style so popular in that era. In Britain it was an
enthusiasm that led to the colonization of Hong Kong, a
concession in Shanghai and two Opium Wars.
Marco had bought them at East & Orient for friends
whose house he was renovating in Waxahachie where he
grew up. That was thirty years ago, but they circled back
to him again this summer when the family had a sale. In a
This page: At left, Terrell James, Cosmopolitan, 2008, oil on canvas, 59 x 107 in.; At right, David Bates, Lake with Lilies, Blue Crane, oil on canvas, 60 x 96 in.; dining chairs by Rose Tarlow,
David Sutherland. Opposite (above): Alexis Rockman, Bromeliad: Kaieteur Falls, 1994, oil on canvas; (below) John Alexander, Taboo Family, 1991, oil on canvas, 70 x 60 in.
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gesture to the ever-present past, he snapped them up again.
He can see them now from his desk if ever he sits there.
It’s a splendid creation of cinnamon lacquer and glass that
stands free and clear of any detritus an agitated owner might
have strewn about. Nearby, near eye level, stretches a long,
thick, cream-colored shelf bearing neat stacks of books on
art, architecture and accouterments of the good life, plus
objects collected during Marco’s travels all over the world.
That was when he worked for Wilson Associates, doing
hotels in far-flung places such as India, Pakistan, Japan,
Russia and Indonesia. His first interview was there after
graduation from the architecture school at UT Austin, and he
loved the firm so much and so immediately that he cancelled
all other appointments and said yes.
Now Marco is on his own, helping clients such as the one
on Lakeside where he and Ashley Tatum now work together.
“We have a master plan,” he explained, “to reupholster
everything when the dog grows up and stops chewing on
rugs.” He was happy to report that some renovation is about
to happen. At one point Marco rehung the art and redirected
the lights with special attention to how and when they
should be dimmed. He edited heavily and spread things out
to reveal treasures long obscured by an excess of objects. As
for the architecture, “I’ve never seen [anything] so perfectly
detailed,” he said. “It’s my favorite Frank Welch house. It has
the elegance and stateliness of Lakeside but not the formality
of it.”
Marco French is committed to the classical ideal, to
symmetry, order and proportion. Every work of art “is either
classical or baroque,” said New York art dealer Sidney Janis.
“Maybe so,” Marco replied when I quoted this to him, “but it
all begins with the classical.” The conviction that everything
flows from the formal vocabulary of Greece and Rome came
from his mother, a war bride who moved from Florence to
Texas to marry a U.S. soldier she met during World War II
when he was stationed on the banks of the Arno, in the land
of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi. She took her son, Marco
Joe French (the middle name is for his American grandfather),
to Italy when he was 8, then back at 13, and again after both
high school and college graduations. He still has family there
and would love to get “the tiniest little house in Florence.”
Marco still has a house in Waxahachie, where his father
owned a cotton farm, not unlike Ashley Tatum’s grandfather
whose cotton business was in Greenville. The two of them
agree that creative people are born, not made. They both
like to see a mix of styles that represent the taste, sometimes
multifaceted, of their clients. Most importantly, they are
reliable as civilizing influences in a city that can never get
enough of that.
As for art, Ashley Tatum no longer believes, as she once
said, that everything has been done. “You have to take a step
back,” she observed. “What is art? Painting, new media,
performance. [We are] reinterpreting, mixing the media.
Reinterpretation is endless. What we need to avoid,” she
added, “is ‘historical amnesia,’ forgetting what we never took
the time to learn.” Her aim is to keep that from happening.
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