Full confession. I am a leaner.
In 2006 I worked for a man who wrote about art, architecture and design for Vanity Fair, filed from more countries than I have been to, and has since gone on to direct films about Valentino and other luminaries. One afternoon I stood in his apartment in Soho. Hard light, low furniture, the whole place out of a Mies van der Rohe dream. Glorious photographs. Glorious paintings. Almost none of it on a hook.
He said it the way a man hands over a family recipe: “Never hang your pictures.” I have been leaning ever since, and here is the case for it.
1. A hook is a decision. A lean is an opinion.
A hole in the wall says this picture, this spot, this height, for good. Most of us are not that certain about anything, least of all where the light falls in a room we have lived in for a year. A leaned picture says: this, for now. It can be slid along a shelf, swapped with the one in the hall, turned to face the sofa instead of the door. Nothing about it is final, which is exactly why it keeps looking considered.
2. The gallery line is not your line.
Galleries hang to a line. The centre of the work sits roughly 145 to 152 cm from the floor, near standing eye level, so a whole room of pictures reads as one row (the 57 to 60 inch convention). It is a fine rule for a white room whose only tenant is the art. Your home has a skirting board, a radiator, a light switch, the back of a sofa and a dog. A leaned picture takes its line from the furniture instead, which is the line you actually live along.
3. You will change your mind, and your pictures should let you.
Rotation is not laziness, it is museum practice. Conservators recommend lighting works on paper and photographs at no more than 50 lux and limiting display to about three months every five years, because light damage is cumulative and irreversible. None of us are running a climate-controlled store room at home and we should not pretend otherwise. But the principle holds. What moves out of the sun, and out of sight for a while, lasts longer and stays interesting. Leaning turns rotation into a five second job instead of an afternoon with a spirit level.
4. Most of us do not own the wall.
In England, 4.7 million households, 19 per cent of us, rent privately, and the average private renter has been in their home 4.3 years. Landlords can take the cost of damage out of a deposit, and holes in walls are on the list. So a whole generation has effectively been told to live with bare walls and keep its pictures in a cupboard. Leaning is the way round that. You get the wall without asking permission, and you take it with you when you go.
5. Old plaster has a long memory.
Look up in a Victorian or Edwardian room and you will find a picture rail running round it. It is there because lime plaster and lath do not forgive nails, so pictures were hung from the rail on wire and cord and moved about at will. Our great-grandparents were dodging the drill too. The lean is the same instinct, without the brass hooks.
6. Not everything wants to live above the fire.
Restorers are blunt about the chimney breast, the most over-hung spot in the British home. Soot lays a dull veil across a surface and flattens the colour, and heat brings cracking, blistering, warping and brittle frames. So lean, by all means, but lean on a console, a sideboard, a bookshelf, the floor. The mantel of a working fire is the one ledge worth thinking twice about.
7. Leaning looks alive, and the people who style rooms for a living know it.
The architect Georgina Wilson describes a move towards "looser, more individualised ways of showing art", and the designer Shona McElroy puts it more plainly: "There is a casualness to leaning artwork that is really cool." Both were talking to Livingetc, and both land on the same point I would. Layered pictures read as a collection gathered over time rather than a scheme installed in an afternoon. A room where everything is fixed to a grid looks finished. A room with a few leans looks lived in, and looks like somebody is still thinking.
The rules of the lean
- Big pieces belong on the floor. Small ones belong on a shelf, a mantel, a console, or a stack of books.
- Pull the base a few centimetres out from the skirting. Too upright and it looks like it fell off the wall.
- Layer two or three deep, largest at the back, and let them overlap. The overlap is the whole trick.
- Felt pads under the frame. Nothing scuffs a floorboard faster than glass and a hard corner.
- Secure anything heavy, and do not lean where a toddler or a big dog will test it.
- Keep pictures out of direct sun, and move them when the sun moves. That is the advantage of not hanging them.
- Lean some, hang some. The tension between the two is the point.
Never hang your pictures
It is too strict, as instructions go. I hang things. I have hung things this year. But it was the right thing to say to someone in their twenties standing in a room that beautiful, because it turns a wall from a filing system into something you keep working on.
A wall of hooks is a decision you made once. A wall of leans is one you are still making.
Our frames arrive ready to hang, with D-rings and cord already fitted. Nobody will mind if you put them on the floor instead.
