Anthony Duquette

Anthony "Tony" Duquette died in Los Angeles on September 9, 1999. He was eighty-five. Born in Los Angeles on June 11, 1914, he became a designer of interiors, costumes, jewelry, and environments so maximal they made restraint look like a failure of nerve. He worked for films and for private clients who wanted rooms that felt like theater. Shells, antlers, gold leaf, Chinese export, and California sunlight somehow coexisted in his spaces. Elsie de Wolfe encouraged him early; Hollywood and society followed. With his wife, the artist Elizabeth Johnstone Duquette ("Beegle"), he built a shared aesthetic life that treated a house as a set you were allowed to live inside. Duquette's jewelry and objets turned up on famous necks and in museum cases. He designed for stage and for the occasional public folly. Critics who preferred modernism's clean lines found him excessive; his admirers found modernism underfurnished. Los Angeles, a city that understands fantasy as infrastructure, was the right hometown. The workshops and the legend outlasted him. Excess, in his hands, was a discipline.