As far as Betti Franceschi is concerned, every last part of her apartment is alive.
“I’m an animist,” she said, referring to her sense that there’s a soul in everything, including inanimate objects. “And anyone who’s not — I don’t understand it.”
The 90-year-old artist has lived in her Upper West Side apartment since 1990, and she’s accumulated a lot of life in the place.
Each room is defined by its art. Ms. Franceschi has curated her collection over a lifetime and added in some of her own portraits and sculptures along the way. There are dozens of paintings and drawings, some photographs and sculptures and stained glass. There’s a samovar converted into a lamp, and a framed apron — woven by her grandmother in Belarus more than a century ago — hangs on the wall. In one hallway, Ms. Franceschi displays three portraits: her mother, her daughter and herself. There’s a lamp shade from Venice, Italy, and a vase from Hangzhou, China.
A few large prints are bundled in a corner, remnants from a book of photographs featuring pre-eminent dancers from the New York City Ballet, her most recent project, which took nine years to complete and was published this year.
An armoire is the only piece of furniture that she didn’t build herself or buy used. When she moved into the apartment she gut-renovated it, picking up a sledgehammer to do the work with a small crew. She converted a second bedroom into a study and lined it with bookshelves, each deep and tall enough for art books. She built extra drawers into beds and extra shelves into closets. “Storage is how you make it in this town,” she said.
She remembers when she found her vintage bathroom sink on the street: “I called a neighbor and said, ‘Get in a cab!’” And she remembers scoring her vanity at the Salvation Army after a week of hard negotiating. “Finally the guy said to me, ‘I’ll give it for the price you want if you promise never to come back here,’” she recalled, laughing.
Each object has a story, a past of its own, and each is important to how Ms. Franceschi envisions her future. “If I become immobilized and can’t leave the apartment,” she said, “I want my house to reflect everything I’ve enjoyed and loved.”
Each square foot is lit with uncommon precision, tailored to the colors on the canvas or the bay window seats or the shelves displaying Ms. Franceschi’s collection of 19th-century English china.
Her work studio is the most carefully lit room. It is a 25-by-9-foot rectangle at the corner of the building, and her understanding of the space is shaped by decades of working there to produce drawings, paintings and sculptures. “My studio has south and west light, which walks and changes color as it walks,” she said. In order to control the light she keeps shades over the windows and relies on the full-spectrum lighting system that hangs from the ceiling.
$2,500 | Upper West Side
Betti Franceschi, 90
Occupation: Artist
On aging: Ms. Franceschi turned 90 on Halloween but downplayed the milestone. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “My theory is age is a point of view. It’s where we look out from. In my mind I’ve always been 14. That’s the age I’m grounded in.”
On motherhood: Ms. Franceschi’s artistic career helped inspire her daughter, Antonia Franceschi, who showed an early interest in ballet. “I discovered I had a daughter who happened to be a freaky talented dancer,” she said. Antonia appeared in films such as “Grease” and “Fame” and danced with the New York City Ballet, working with choreographer George Balanchine for more than a decade. Today she’s retired with a family of her own and lives just a few blocks from her mother.
Ms. Franceschi studied art at Carnegie Tech (before it became Carnegie Mellon). “The guys I went to school with didn’t like girls who were pretty and talented,” she recalled. “You could be one but not both.”
The words of a drawing teacher still hang in her memory: “He said, ‘Why would I teach you? You’re just going to get married and have kids.’”
Ms. Franceschi did get married and have children — a son and a daughter — and she moved to New York to continue making art. Once the marriage was over and the kids were older, she was still making art. When her daughter, Antonia Franceschi, began her career as a ballerina, it inspired Ms. Franceschi to produce a collection of drawings, which were published in a book called “The Still Point.” The drawings explore the movement of the body at the dancer’s core.
A decade ago, Ms. Franceschi had an idea for another book. “My first book is about what it feels like to dance,” she said. “Well, I thought the second should be what it looks like to dance.”
She wanted to accomplish this with photographs. There was just one problem. “I am not a photographer,” she said.
It was a friend and fellow artist who convinced her she could do it. “He told me, ‘You may not understand the camera but you know what a picture looks like.’”
She wanted each image to be of an older dancer — artists from her generation. “My fundamental motivation,” Ms. Franceschi writes on her website, “is to refute the youth-enthralled ageism of the American culture we live in.”
She leaned heavily on the advice of friends. The filmmaker Michel Negroponte showed up at many of the shoots to document the process. “He’s a perfect filmmaker,” Ms. Franceschi said. “He enables connections, but he never intrudes. You don’t even feel him there.”
The book, “Ageless Dancers,” which was published in March by Brilliant Editions, is available online. It’s 70 images of dancers between the ages of 62 and 101, including Jacques d’Amboise and Carmen de Lavallade, Martine van Hamel and Edward Villella.
“People think I art-directed this book,” Ms. Franceschi said. “You don’t direct these people — they know what they’re doing. You just pray you see it and your finger moves at just the right time.”
In each image she pursued a precise frame. “And each figure is in dialogue, or a romance with the frame,” she said.
Some of the subjects took convincing, and Ms. Franceschi’s skills as an indefatigable negotiator came in handy, particularly with Mr. d’Amboise. “Originally Jacques said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’” But after nearly four years she convinced him to change his mind. “I told him my approach is just to flatter and flatter and flatter and eventually it’ll work — it worked on you!”
Mr. d’Amboise and every dancer who walked into Ms. Franceschi studio are now incorporated into the story of her apartment. The black backdrop against which all their photographs were taken still hangs in a corner of the studio, a new addition to the accumulation of life throughout the home.
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