Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1528556
61 T his is a story of the marriage of art and science, of artist Salle Werner-Vaughn and her late husband, patron and mathematics-obsessed James Vaughn (Jimmy, as she always called him). Their half-century romance unfolds in the beautiful and faded beauty of a River Oaks home, where the couple began the early days of their marriage, and which over time increasingly became Jimmy's domain for reading, research, and collecting rare books. Above all, this domestic retreat was the seat from whence he bestowed philanthropy from the foundation he headed, which benefited Houston's cultural entities for decades, as well as international mathematical and scientific endeavors. For Salle, their handsome home on Brentwood Drive — which they moved to in 1975, a year after the Tyler, Texas, grade-school friends had reconnected and married — became an incubator for her art. Difficult to categorize and narrowly define, her talent is informed by an inveterate taste for collecting, which veers into the depths of preservation, home design, the decorative arts, art history, fashion, and even archaeology. C o n s e q u e n t l y, h e r artmaking goes far beyond her daily studio practice edged in Surrealism — although her paintings and drawings are very good indeed, and in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Morgan Library in New York, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Menil Collection. Transcending brush and canvas, she ventured into an intense and intuitive dialogue with interiors that remains singular, unique, and a This is not a story about a pedigreed home with designer flourishes and the latest Gaggenau kitchen. Nor a tale about clean-lined minimalism and shiny, brightly lit interiors where each piece of furniture, objet d'art, and canvas holds court in perfectly curated order. Don't expect these photographs to showcase rooms bearing pristine bookshelves and coffee tables displaying recent volumes that function as decoration, rarely read and almost never cracked open. Our narrative is about the passion of two souls as matched as the leaves of a book, and their selfless and single-minded pursuit of beauty and knowledge. Left: In the dining room, a British Surrealist artwork purchased during the couple's honeymoon hangs near a cache of Jimmy's rare books, among the most important collections assembled by a private individual on the history of mathematics. In the living room, a pedestal from A La Vieille Russie, New York. Italian painted desk from Helen Fioratti, New York. Photograph by Ed Powis Jones. French 18th-century sofa from the Theta Show. Neoclassical Danish antique chairs acquired at auction, originally in Salle's New York apartment. Opposite page: "It's all about place, and a dialogue with the past," Salle says of the graceful stairway; her trompe l'oeil scene depicts ivy, a stone wall, and niche. Globe from the collection of Jimmy's father. The artist's watercolor of a Mandarin duck in London's Kew Gardens, painted on the couple's honeymoon.