memory artist; Celebrated for abstract canvases that mine the past, Philip Taaffe brings layers of meaning to a landmark Chelsea Hotel apartment.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

I try to draw parallels between different geographical and historical structures. . . . I like telling stories that way," declares artist Philip Taaffe, who spins his visual narratives both in his dynamic canvases, dense with allusion, and at home at the storied Chelsea Hotel, where his sophisticated juxtapositions of objects, furniture, and pictures draw attention to the unexpected relationships between pieces from different centuries and cultures.

For the hypnotically layered works that Taaffe is preparing for his latest show (opening February 13 at the Gagosian Gallery), he utilizes motifs and elements as seemingly disparate as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nature printing plates, the motifs from a turn-of-the-century Tunisian textbook, clay spinning-wheel bobbins that he discovered in a Lausanne museum, bark panels from a 500-year-old Douglas fir, the sixteenth-century acrobatic human-pyramid drawings of Juste de Juste, and the totemic art of the Northwest Pacific Coast-but combines them in painstakingly considered ways that suggest surprising connections.

At home, Taaffe spins more visual narratives. The artist has long been engaged by romantic and historically resonant environments. In the early nineties, Vogue visited him at the Villa Pierce, a florid mansion built over a rock that jutted into the Bay of Naples, where he lived and worked for several inspiring years. "I had a very particular attraction to Naples," Taaffe has said, "to its energy. The anarchy. It paralleled New York in a certain way. It had this very profound tradition, and I wanted to be a part of it." His memories of the four years he rented the house are magical. "I used to fall asleep hearing the waves against the rocks under my balcony," he recalls. "That was the hardest thing to get out of my system, the sound of the water. It was really spectacular to live there."

After his Italian sojourn, Taaffe decided to return to New York but didn't have a place, so was obliged to stay in hotels when he visited-until a friend and Chelsea Hotel resident told him that the apartment where the great American composer and acerbic critic Virgil Thomson had lived since 1938 was available. Garlanded with flowering cast-iron balconies, this stately redbrick mansion was built in 1884 by a consortium of Manhattan's preeminent families as a luxurious experiment in cooperative living-at twelve floors the Chelsea was once the city's tallest residence. Over the decades, it slipped into genteel dereliction, an island of bohemia with a guest-and-resident list that reads like a roll call of artistic provocation-from Jackson Pollock to Edie Sedgwick. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey here; Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. "The Chelsea was not part of America-[it] had no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no taste, no shame," wrote Arthur Miller. "It was a ceaseless party."

Taaffe raced to see Thomson's apartment before his collections of Victoriana and modern art were dismantled. Stanley Bard, the Chelsea's all-seeing manager, was enthusiastic about having another artist inherit the space; and Taaffe was

immediately drawn to its legacy and dusty beauty, a Manhattan counterpoint to the splendor of the Villa Pierce, which in its day hosted Garibaldi and Egypt's Pasha Ismail.