This is one of the earliest American wallpapers in the Cooper-Hewitt collection. This is a memorial to George Washington and was produced within a year of his death. The design shows an obelisk with the portrait of Washington, an angel above, and trophies of war at the base. Flowering vines form an arch over the obelisk. Designs in this format are referred to as pillar and arch papers, which were designed in England later in the 19th century. This paper is a rather loose interpretation of this style. Traditionally these papers have a large repeat and were printed in a monochromatic colorway. Because of their large scale they were usually reserved for entry ways or stair halls where they lent an air of formality and stability with their strong architectural presence.

This memorial paper is much smaller in scale, was printed in bright primary colors, and is a rather crude design and printing. It lacks the severity often seen in pillar and arch papers and the polychrome colors give it fresh look. This design also lacks much of the symbolism present in another paper honoring Washington in the Museum’s collection, Sacred to Washington. Produced around the same time Sacred is much grander in scale and contains the figures of Liberty and Justice in mourning, along with an eagle, with head bowed, sitting atop an urn. The scene appears staged and has an almost theatrical appearance which is not uncommon for this style of paper.

Papers of this type are usually created to honor or pay tribute to individuals or events, as this one was. It is interesting to note that this design has been reproduced at least twice since its original incarnation.

Some people still remember men who, from a small slit pocket in a waistcoat, pulled out a round pocket watch on a chain, can only think of knapsacks and hiking gear when they hear the word compass. We think of the sundial like the nice old bronze one on a stone base that I saw upstate, still giving the time as the sun set on it last week.  Yet, in eighteenth century Augsburg, Germany, a center of scientific learning, engraving and the arts of metalsmithing, this sundial and compass might have been pulled from an elegant gentleman’s waistcoat.  It also made him an elegant traveller or could also have enhanced a room of collected objects, a popular pastime in the mid-eighteenth century.  Augsburgers were especially enthusiastic about engraved scientific objects. 
This combo pocket object shows all the signs of an erudite owner-who cared about accuracy as seen by the use of a plumb-bob below the dial to level the and about artistry as seen by the level of engraving in the designs with allegorical animal references to the four continents at the four corners and a Neptune and mermaid on the face.  The engraver might also have been one who put similar motifs around the borders of maps for which Augsburg was famous too. However, as he was made a master goldsmith in 1748, he probably had enough work on the specialty objects to keep him more than busy.  These specialty objects included the compasses and sundials made of copper and brass created in Augsburg starting in the mid sixteenth century and lasting in popularity through the early nineteenth century.  While the early examples were full size, by the mid eighteenth century when the maker Jacob Emmanuel Lammit was working, the pocket dial industry had become large enough to include a broad range of quality.  This object represents the combination of the artistic trades of Augsburg, with the tremendous fascination with specific scientific instrument making.

June of 1967 marked the beginning of the Summer of Love in San Francisco.  The city’s psychedelic scene was in full force and created a zeitgeist of music, art and attitude that’s been fabled in the American patchwork.  This aesthetic had its greatest reach through the stylized concert posters commissioned by the legendary promoter Bill Graham for his shows at the Fillmore Auditorium. After falling out with artist Wes Wilson, Graham enlisted his wife, artist Bonnie MacLean to take over as designer.  MacLean went on to create around 30 posters between 1967 and 1970 for bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and Pink Floyd.  Her style was more figurative than the other poster designers, imbibing the romance of the female form or gaze.  MacLean would also invoke motifs from other cultures, be it Polynesian, American Indian, or Medieval Europe.

The Monterrey Pop Festival was a watershed moment during the Summer of Love.  Performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who were legendary, establishing them in the pantheon of rock stardom.  The Who were on their first trip to the West Coast and Bill Graham booked the UK import at the Fillmore on June 16th and 17th, creating buzz for their Sunday night gig at Monterrey Pop.  One can imagine the mayhem of Pete Townsend guitar thrashing that ensued for three nights on this eager American audience!

Bonnie MacLean immortalized the coming of The Who with her own pantheon of British characters, reminiscent of the knights of Arthurian legend.  Circling the rim of this horn of plenty, each face morphs and flows into the other and even calls to mind the artwork for the film version of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot which also debuted that year.  The summer of '67 really was a lovely one indeed.

Marimekko’s fashion and textile designs from the 1970s captured the free spirit and funky aesthetic of the decade with bold yet simple organic forms. The Finnish company’s approach to design also reflected interest in a youth culture which questioned conformity and authority. Marimekko famously blurred the lines of gendered fashion systems. The company also challenged traditional design methods, adjusting their approach to allow for mass customization.

As a designer for Marimekko, Pentti Rinta created pieces that customers could mix and match to suit their individual tastes. He also designed this textile, titled Heraaminen, with an enormous repeat size of almost 70 inches. With such an unusually large repeat, each dress or blouse could be made with pattern pieces cut from a different part of the design. A variety of unique looks could be cut from the same cloth, giving consumers more agency.

Rinta and other designers for the Marimekko brand created unisex garments, loose and comfortable leisure wear for women, less restrictive menswear, and fashions suitable for a wider variety of body types. Of the iconic looks, author Carolyn Benesh wrote in the periodical Ornament that they made her “feel free and individualistic, feminist and female … feminist and male … They signaled my growing and evolving social convictions about equality, freedom and justice. They mirrored my belief in the possibility of positive change, that we can make a difference if we so act.”¹

Carly Lewis is currently earning an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons. She has a B.S. in Textile Design from Philadelphia University and is focusing her studies on gender issues in regard to textile design practices in the 20th century.

The Landi chair, created by the self-taught designer Hans Coray, was one of the first highly successful designs for seating furniture using sheet aluminum, a relatively new material in the 1930s. Introduced in Zurich, at the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition (Schweizerische Landesaustellung, nicknamed “Landi”), the chair was the official seating for the exhibition grounds. Aluminum was the chosen material not only for its associations with modern industry and innovation, but for its status as one of Switzerland’s most important exports. The Landi’s seat and back are made of a single aluminum sheet, molded into shape and perforated with circular holes. The arm-and-leg elements are each formed of a single, thin, bent aluminum strip. The chair was probably influenced by seats and structural elements designed for aircraft, an area in which aluminum was already used extensively by the late 1930s. The Landi’s aluminum body is extremely light weight at about six pounds, weather resistant, portable, stackable, and practical for both indoor and outdoor use. The perforations in the metal not only lighten the chair, they allow rain or melting snow to drain through.

The chair has been in continuous production since 1939. In 1962 the manufacturer changed the number and arrangement of the perforations, reducing the rows from 13 to 10, and the number of holes from 91 to 60. This facilitated mass production rather than individual processing, made the seat less springy, and reduced a tendency for cracking in the curve where the back transitions into the seat.  In 1971, the Italian firm Zanotta S.p.A. began marketing the chair as the “2070 Spartana.”  This example is from the pre-1962 Blattmann production showing the original number of perforations.

In honor of the opening of Romantic Interiors, 19th Century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection at the Beijing World Art Museum today in China, Cooper-Hewitt is featuring one of the most recent gifts from Eugene and Clare Thaw to the Museum.  Design for a Smoking Room by French architect and set designer Léon Feuchère (1804-1857), a recent addition to the Thaw Collection, is a relatively early example from nineteenth-century European vogue for themed domestic interiors.  The scene shows an octagonal space whose walls and domed ceiling display pseudo or tromp l’oeil Moorish filigree plasterwork with arched openings presumably on four sides. The central arch leads to a receding colonnade while lateral arched niches display two large urns of Western neoclassical form with exotic painted decoration.  Beneath the side niches are Turkish-style settees covered with French mid-nineteenth century fabric.  A large neo-gothic pipe stand occupies the center of the kiosk and an octagonal table sits to the right.  Barely noticeable amidst the room's richly patterned surfaces and furnishings is a man reclining on a central ottoman smoking a hooka, attended by a male servant to his left. 

Feuchère must have thought highly of his design as he incorporated an engraving after it in his publication, L'art industriel.  Recueil de dispositions et de décorations intérieurs, comprenant des modèles pour toutes les industries d'ameublement et de luxe.. Plate 68, Tabagie. Intending this book to be a source for decorators as well as artisans, the designer organized the illustrations around a fictitious country house of H-shaped plan with rooms and furnishings decorated in different styles, including all the Louis, Byzantine, Islamic, and Chinese.  The Moorish Smoking Room is proposed as one of the ground floor pavilions; the Petit Salon, a composite of Henri IV/Louis XIII and Louis XIV, is in the opposite pavilion; the Grand Escalier is in the Louis XIV style; while the Salon de Spectacle was to be in Louis XV.  One wonders if publications such as this, with examples of themed interiors, might have sparked the concept of individually themed interiors within the same house, a fashion that only came to fruition in the last decades of the nineteenth century.   

Tadanori Yokoo’s designs are the result of an effortless combination of eclectic visual motifs from across time and borders. In this poster for Kanox, a Japanese production company involved with television, film radio, stage and commercial advertising, Yokoo juxtaposes classical architecture from an Italian Renaissance villa with a surrealist galaxy filled with brightly colored celestial bodies. Though the poster’s subject doesn’t immediately seem relevant to the business of production, the composition alludes to the innovative and inventive nature of Kanox. Following in the tradition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which blurred the line between artistic contemplation and functional purposes, Yokoo’s designs represent both cherished art objects and innovative commercial advertisements.

When creating a new design, Yokoo used photographs as the foundation and then drew from elements of traditional Japanese woodcuts and contemporary Pop art. After traveling through India in the 1970s, Yokoo became more interested in mysticism and psychedelic art, and incorporated these influences into his work as well.

Yokoo was born in Nishiwaki, Japan in 1936. His humble dreams of working at a post office and painting were quickly surpassed due to the growing success of his poster that was shown at the Persona group’s joint exhibition in 1965. Throughout the 1960s, Yokoo was involved in the Japanese avant-garde scene and created designs for a number of dance and theater companies as well as for musicians such as the Beatles, Carlos Santana and Cat Stevens, among others. Since designing that first seminal poster in 1965, Yokoo’s work has appeared in at least one exhibition every year.

This piece offers a unique take on border designs. Borders with the bottom edge cut out to follow the printed design began appearing shortly after 1900. This die-cut and embossed example came into fashion around the same time and carried this cut-out idea a step further. This paper is embossed to give it some relief, die-cut to create an irregular bottom edge and expose areas of the background, and airbrushed in a single color to make it more decorative and give it more depth. This paper is one repeat, and multiple repeats would fit together like pieces of a puzzle by connecting the positive and negative cut-out ends together.

The idea behind cut-out borders was to help blend the wallpaper with the top border.
Traditionally, borders were cut to a straight edge at the bottom making a clear delineation between the sidewall and border. The cut-out bottom edge helps blur that division, while the perforated areas let the sidewall paper show through creating a more cohesive or unified wall design. The monochrome and very subdued color palette used on most of these borders would allow them to easily blend with a multitude of different patterned sidewall papers. Unlike trends today, at the time of this border’s production I don’t believe wallpaper borders were ever used over a painted wall, and would always be hung over a sidewall paper. I imagine the use of cut-out borders became popular as ceiling heights were lowered. People no longer wanted to divide up their wall in horizontal divisions to visually drop their ceiling heights, quite the opposite was probably true. 

There were a lot more rules in decorating at the turn of the 20th century. Wallpapers at this time were frequently designed to be room specific. Numerous sidewall papers, borders and even ceiling papers designed at this time contain grape motifs. I did a quick count of the Cooper-Hewitt collection and there were over 30 papers in the collection produced between 1905-1915 with grape designs. This count just included loose samples and not papers contained within sample books, easily another 30! These designs were always used in the dining room. This trend of grape wallpapers being used in the dining room seemed to reappear in the late 1920s, but then quickly died out with the Great Depression.
 

Beauty is an interesting take on a stripe design. The design is composed of thin stripes in brilliant shades of green creating silhouettes of women's faces, alternately facing left then right. The overall effect is a wide stripe or column of green against a white background. Papers of this sort are used to create a very mod interior, frequently pasted on a single focal wall, offset by the remaining walls in white with coordinating furnishings.

The designer, Werner Berges, was one of the leading figures in German pop art. He began his formal training at the University of the Arts, Bremen in 1960, studying commercial art with an emphasis on fashion design. He then attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin where he studied painting. This is where he began working with figures, the female figure in particular. Browsing images of his artwork online, his work clearly captures his fascination with the female form, and he draws on his fashion design training. His figures are posed and perfectly coiffed, long flowing hair surrounding faces turned to the perfect angle, as might be seen in fashion plates. Many of these works were done in oil colors or gouache pigments but he also made silk-screen prints. His artwork frequently reduces the female body to simple forms where the figure is combined with a range of circle or stripe patterns. The figure is shown in silhouette, either against the brightly colored and patterned background, or composed of these graphic patterns against a white ground. This later format is the approach used in his wallpaper design for Xart walls in 1972. The wallpaper was flexograph-printed meaning it was printed on a machine with rubber rollers which impart a textural finish to the pigments. The Museum has this paper in two colorways, the green shown and also with red stripes.

The Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco was “ground zero” for the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. The so-called psychedelic subculture that emerged in the Haight explored new possibilities in art and living that stemmed from a desire to remake American culture. The artistic endeavors of this community, be it poetry, theater, dance or music, were expressed in weekly “concerts” held in two primary venues. The first was infamous promoter and entrepreneur Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and the other was the Avalon Ballroom operated by a small commune called The Family Dog.

Concert posters used to promote these shows were as unconventional as the performances themselves. They were more than just advertisements; these posters were “totemic expressions of the collective consciousness.” The Haight’s psychedelic posters were inspired by a fusion of Art Nouveau swirls and Optical Art geometry. Together these elements intentionally but playfully overwhelmed the informational content. Decoding a poster’s material required the viewer to suspend conventional methods of processing in order to discover the full extent of the message within.

This particular poster in the Cooper-Hewitt collection was designed by Lee Conklin for a 1968 concert featuring performances by Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot and Cold Blood. The central textual motif seems to billow out of an urn at the bottom of the image in a mushroom-like shape. This mushroom cloud of words is surrounded by a border of interconnected figures, faces, breasts and swirls.

The small group of graphic artists that produced these psychedelic concert posters was very much engaged in the developing field of optics and the science behind how the brain processes both information and color. The point of their posters was not to announce information. Instead, concert posters emerging from The Haight engaged the viewer in the experience and essence of the community that created them. Today these posters remain one of the most visible representations and embodiments of the Bay Area scene during the 1960s. 

Has there ever been a more felicitous pairing of artist and technique than Maurits Cornelius Escher and damask? Escher’s work, which is so dependent on interlocking forms and the seamless use of positive and negative space, is executed here in linen damask, a technique in which two surfaces, one shiny and one matte, are literally the face and reverse of the same weave structure. 

Escher is best known for his complex illusionary drawings and modernist graphic design. Trained as a graphic artist, he also developed a deep interest in mathematics. Travelling throughout Europe, his was particularly attracted by the geometric Moorish tile designs at the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain.[i] He read numerous texts on geometry and crystallography, and developed his own concept, which he referred to as the “regular division of the plane.” This involved filling the entire plane with interlocking figures, which features prominently in Escher’s work after 1937.[ii]

The so-called regular division notebooks consist of numbered drawings that are ‘definitive’ versions from his sketchbooks, along with Escher’s notes on symmetrical systems.[iii] Drawings 88 through 90, from 1952 -1953, are directly related to this napkin: drawing 88 depicts the interlocking seahorses, and drawing 89 two versions of the fish which appear in both the center and the corners of the napkin design. In drawing 90 he appears to be working out the integration of the two motifs. These transitional areas are critical to the overall symmetries of the design: In everyday use, a napkin may be folded vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, and Escher’s design is fittingly symmetrical around all of those axes. The white-on-white design, entirely dependent on reflectivity to be seen, further enhances the intrigue and complexity of the visual experience.

Michelle Everidge Anderson is a Ph.D. student in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She earned her M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from the program offered jointly by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Parsons the New School for Design (2006) and her A.B. from Princeton University (2004).

Typography has been used on wallpaper since the early days of children’s wallpaper in the 1870s, but wasn’t used as a decorative graphic element until the early 20th century, reaching its peak of popularity during the 1960s. The early children’s papers were educational in nature and as many were inspired by literature, carried captions beneath the illustration to encourage children to read. Typography was first used as a decorative element in the wallpapers of Jean Lurçat on his Dada papers created in the early 1920s. On his wallpaper design called One Who Loves Writes on the Wall he illustrates words into a musical score. Numerous designs from the 1950s followed in the tradition of the children’s papers with captions identifying images. Moving on into the 1960s typographic elements came into their own, being used in a decorative fashion for the first time. In this design rather abstract letters are overlapped and turned on their sides in a dense assemblage of elements. This design is showing two of the avalable four different colorways. In 1971, a similarly styled mural called Number Please composed of numbers rather than letters was produced by The James Seaman Studio, another company active in mural production.

Murals became very popular post-war and differed from scenic wallpapers in that they usually only covered one wall, or part of one wall. They have had a resurgence in recent years and many well-known companies are producing them in infinite variety.

Clarence Hawking, a graphic artist by trade, joined the firm of Jack Denst Designs in 1951 as one of the chief designers. Murals of this sort formed an important part of the company’s production. The Jack Denst Designs, Inc. was originally founded as Denst & Soderlund in 1947.

"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He shan't know who sends it...."[1]

Not long after rereading "A Christmas Carol," I was reminded of mid twentieth-century Christmases and consumer habits when I came across our research file for this Tiffany & Co. silver telephone dialer. The main function of the telephone dialer (at a time when telephones had rotary dials) was to make dialing easier, preventing sore fingers and chipped finger nails. Telephone dialers came in a variety of styles and materials, and became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Some dialers were even made to rest in a telephone dial’s finger holes when not in use, a design feature that reduced the risk of their being misplaced.

Tiffany fashioned its dialer with a handle like a very small spoon, but instead of a bowl, there is a half-globe with a disc at the end that would fit into the finger holes of the rotary dial. Unlike plastic dialers made at the time, the Tiffany dialer, being made of silver, had a very pleasant heft to it, elevating it to the quality of a gift. This specialized object was part of a group of Tiffany & Co. items priced under $100, designed to appeal to the growing market of upwardly mobile customers. The telephone dialer sold for about $6, with 20,000-30,000 dialers sold per year. Tiffany dialers became popular housewarming gifts and even became much appreciated as thoughtful and handy Christmas gifts. Tiffany & Co. advertisements highlighted their dialer’s sleek design and ease of use. Monograms could be added to the handle of the dialer, as seen in this example, transforming a stock item into a personal one.

The telephone dialer was created at a specific moment of change in communications technology.  Prior to the late 1950s, the placement of a long distance call, or trunk call, required the assistance of an operator. With the advent of technology that permitted direct-dialing of an area code and seven-digit phone number to make a long distance call, users dialed more numbers and found the dialer to be a helpful tool. At this time, virtually all American homes and offices leased their telephone equipment, and used the same type of table top phone, the Henry Dreyfuss-designed model 500 rotary-dial telephone, introduced in 1953. One of Dreyfuss’s innovations was the placement of numbers outside the dial, rather than under the finger holes. This allowed the user to better see the numbers while dialing and made the use of dialers that much easier. The dialer's fate however was linked to rotary phones. The dialer started to loose its usefulness when in 1963 the model 1500 telephone ushered in the era of touch-tone calling. Thereafter, dialing with a push-button keypad gradually replaced the use of the rotary dial. By the late 1980s, keypads became standard for landline service, and a few years later, cell phones. Touch-tone dialing made the function of the dialer obsolete and the giving of a dialer, the giving of a relic of a bygone era. Classic films, like the 1962 motion picture Breakfast at Tiffany’s, helped immortalize the telephone dialer and probably encouraged people to add it to their Holiday gift list for friends and family.

[1] Charles Dickens. The Christmas Books, Volume 1, A Christmas Carol/The Chimes. London: The Penguin Group, 1971. p. 129.

Samplers are embroideries that showcase needlework skills. The word “sampler” is derived from the Latin exemplar, meaning “model.” The oldest surviving samplers date from the fifteenth century, and were used by women and girls to practice stitches, alphabets, and other designs. Their motifs were worked in horizontal bands, and referenced when embroidering clothing and domestic textiles. As pattern books became readily available in the 1750s, sampler arrangements were increasingly pictorial, usually featuring a central image or design surrounded by scattered motifs, names, initials, letters, and verses on religion or morality.

Sampler designs not only vary by date, but by country and region. Like many other samplers from the country at this time, this nineteenth-century German sampler was worked in an array of stitches in red thread on a cream-colored cotton ground. German samplers were among the first to include alphabets, and those from the nineteenth century often feature multiple versions, usually with one rendered in a Gothic script, as seen here. The maker’s delicate, naturalistic rendering of leafy wreaths and sprigs is also characteristic of samplers made in nineteenth-century Germany.

Although samplers were sometimes worked at home with a governess, this sampler was likely made at school. Many nineteenth-century German samplers of this style feature armorial crests that bear their school’s location and initials, such as “Dresden” and “O. P.” in the center of this example. The elaborate initials “H” and “E” on either side of the armorial may reference the maker’s instructor, and the scattered and sometimes repeating names that surround it could allude to the embroiderer’s classmates.

A stylistically similar German sampler, dating to 1844 and once belonging to Queen Victoria’s governess Baroness Louise Lehzen (1784 – 1870), may be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection.

Laura Camerlengo is an Exhibitions Assistant with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Costume and Textiles department. She is the author of the Cooper-Hewitt DesignFile e-book, The Miser’s Purse.

Floral designs make up the largest grouping of wallpapers in the Museum’s collection by far. Many of the gilded embossed leathers, some of the oldest wallcoverings in the collection dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries, contain repeating floral patterns and I would guess that every style and period has representative samples in the collection. While the style in which they have been rendered varies greatly over time, they have never fallen out of fashion. Talk about longevity! A few of the floral papers are nondescript and can be hard to date, but most are quite representative of the period in which they were produced. Poppies is a beautiful example of this. Printed in high contrast with bright red and blue on a white ground the flowers have been reduced to minimal detail, in some cases just a void in the printed background color. The scale is large and the design is very flat, no shadows or highlights were added to suggest depth. There is a nice flow or rhythm to the arrangement of the flowers and your eyes travel from the fire of the red poppies to the cool blue background. The design is strong but not overpowering and would not overwhelm if used on four walls.

I have been unable to find any information on the designer Ben Morris. This is the only paper in the collection known to be designed by him. However, Hubbell Pierce, the manufacturer, has a very interesting story. He was born in Atlanta where he started singing and he later moved up to New York City, where he continued performing and established his wallpaper company. Pierce was a jazz singer and pianist who specialized in the songs of Cole Porter. He took nearly a 20 year hiatus from his jazz career to design textiles and wallpapers during which period Poppies was produced. He returned to his career as a performer in the late 1970s, and sadly, died of cancer at a young age in 1980.

I would like to talk about one of the more enduring motifs in wallpaper design, the trellis, or diamond trellis to be more specific. This bamboo design is from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (completed 1823) which was the residence built for George IV, Prince of Wales. This is about the earliest this motif shows up as an all-over wallpaper pattern. This paper was used in the Duke of York's bedroom, George IVs brother. The Pavilion contained a great variety of wallpaper designs and this pattern was likely used as a border to accompany another paper. This intricate design of bamboo even contains trellis-work in the voids of alternating rows. The trellis motif appeared much earlier on gilded embossed leathers but was always a motif used to ornament another motif; it didn’t fill the entire background. Around the 1860s, the same trellis framework appears but is frequently covered with lush flowering vines. Around 1905 these flowers were replaced by grapes, with grape-encrusted papers hanging in many dining rooms across the land. In the 1920s American watercolorist Charles Burchfield designed a trellis wallpaper with floral inserts (see left image), and in the 1930s English painter and illustrator Edward Bawden included star motifs on his trellis pattern. In this period the wallpaper would have been used on all four walls, floor to ceiling, or wainscot to ceiling. I remember an episode of Betty Boop from 1934 called Betty in Blunderland, a spoof on the Lewis Carrol tale, in which Betty has an elegant diamond trellis wallpaper in her living room. In the 1950s the trellis pattern morphed into the harlequin papers (see right image) which contained an identical format except the trellis structure was replaced by solid blocks of diamond-shaped colors. The harlequin papers contained a more dominant pattern and would most likely be used as an accent paper covering one wall, with a coordinating paper on the remaining three walls.

The Object of the Day for October 3, 2013 featured one of the last posters the celebrated poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer produced in England. After experiencing 25 years of commercial success as a graphic designer, the outbreak of World War II meant that commissioned work dried up and, as an American citizen, he was forced to return to his native country. He arrived in New York in mid-July 1940 (with his partner, the textile designer Marion V. Dorn—they married in 1950) with no money and no immediate prospects.

He set about designing book jackets for the Modern Library imprint and Alfred Knopf, and offered his services to a number of war-time organizations, designing posters for the Office of Civilian Defense, the CAA Air Training Service, the American Red Cross, and the US War Bond Drive. Seeking more remunerative work he was introduced to a man who was to become an important friend and benefactor. Bernard Waldman, owner of the Modern Merchandising Bureau, remembered seeing Kauffer for the first time. “He was directed to my office. [He was] tall, thin, sensitive face, red-brown hair, carefully brushed, and extremely well-dressed…He looked more like a college professor with four or five books under his arm”.  From this meeting, in early 1943, a life-long friendship developed. Waldman found him work, often taking a risk by introducing his clients to Kauffer’s uncompromising style of design. In 1945 Waldman received a large poster commission from American Airlines that he entrusted to Kauffer, again a risky tactic, but Waldman was so convinced they would be a success that he told the company it wouldn’t have to pay if it did not like them.  

Over a five-year period Kauffer produced thirty posters for American Airlines (most of these are in the Cooper-Hewitt collection). As is the case with much of his work the style varies according to the perceived problem. Some of the American Airlines posters show a cityscape, others a pastoral scene, but many of them reflect his modernist and symbolic approach to design. The one I have chosen is indicative of the latter and is, to some extent, redolent of his work from a much earlier era. The stylized silhouette of a winged helmet-wearing Greek goddess, rendered in an unusual combination of dark gray and olive green, is, perhaps, intended to be symbolic of the flagship’s figurehead. It is not clear, however, from the poster alone what exactly is being advertised. Could it be that the American Airlines flagship was the most stylish mode of air travel of the time, or was it a comment on the contemporary look of the flight attendants’ uniforms?

In his struggle to gain a credible reputation as a graphic designer in New York the series of American Airlines posters (and six posters for Pan American airlines—also in the Cooper-Hewitt collection) gave Kauffer some regular, high profile work. Some years after McKnight Kauffer’s death Bernard Waldman disclosed that he once received a letter from the president of American Airlines stating that Kauffer’s series of posters for his company were the best they ever had.

Dr Graham Twemlow, whose Doctorate thesis focused on an investigation into the posters of E. McKnight Kauffer, is an academic and design historian.

In design history as in art history, works are often organized into distinct chronological styles or movements. Such a rigid framework tends to neglect a certain natural fluidity inherent in the evolution of style. For example, 1920s French designs cannot always be simply defined by such broad strokes as Art Deco, Moderne, or Cubism. Many examples from the era notoriously blur those lines, like this woven silk from 1925. This design is the product of a successful dialogue among multiple influences. The layout and subject matter, fruit, flowers, cornucopias and leaves are quite traditional, indicative of a trend to historic revival. The simplified, flattened look of those lushly saturated motifs coupled with a restrained colorway, can be characterized as Art Deco.

André Mare designed this fabric while working at La Compagnie des Arts Français, which he co-founded with Louis Süe. Both men were trained as painters, but were also well known for their furniture and textile designs. The multi-disciplinary decorating firm was made up of specialized designers but they also commissioned work from independent artists. These types of companies, known as artistes décorateurs, of which La Compagnie des Arts Français was the most famous, were known for producing this type of eclectic design largely due to the independent nature of its employees. The formal language and cohesiveness of a completed interior were always an important consideration in the designs produced by artistes décorateurs, but the freer method of collaboration that they used showed a marked transition away from the strictness of the German Gesamtkunstwerk.

Carly Lewis is currently earning an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons. She has a B.S. in Textile Design from Philadelphia University and is focusing her studies on gender issues in regard to textile design practices in the 20th century.

What makes Pop-Ups POP??

The answer lies in a variety of methods of cutting and folding, and in mechanisms hidden behind and underneath the page. The construction methods are endless, but they can be divided into four categories: movable parts that lie flat, images that pop up, books that fold, and fantastic forms that use multiple mechanisms.

Fold, Pull, Pop, and Turn   http://library.si.edu/digital-library/exhibition/paper-engineering

This pop-up by Marion Guild, is an example of the pop-up construction technique known as: Stage set or multiple layers: A book becomes a theater set when it is viewed opened to a 90-degree angle. It is one of the first constructions to be used for pop-up books and particularly suited for creating scenes.

This is the story about Rudolph, a young reindeer who possesses an unusual glowing red nose. Teased and taunted and excluded by the other reindeer because of this trait, Rudolph manages to prove himself one Christmas Eve after Santa Claus catches sight of Rudolph's nose and asks him to lead his sleigh that night. The glow of his nose is so great that it lights Santa’s path in the skies the through snowy weather and he is cheered by his fellow reindeer for saving the day.

One simply cannot ignore her sultry eyes, knowing smile and beauty. Bachelor’s Wall Paper features the charming Gibson Girl, the fictional New Woman illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Gibson Girl was America’s first commercial female icon. She was the idyllic American woman: full of grace and class, with just the right amount of confidence and charm. Her stories appeared in magazine illustrations, and her image exploded on the commercial market. Fans could show their devotion by owning her image on their china, matchsafe, pillow covers, a flask, or a souvenir spoon.

The Gibson Girl is a controversial figure among feminists today. She was esteemed as a New Woman, educated and interested in public affairs, but she wore a corset and was against suffrage. Her activities set her apart from Victorian conventions. The Gibson Girl could drink and smoke, play sports alongside men, and she could even go to college if she chose. As the Bachelor’s Wall Paper suggests, she was also an object of desire. In Gibson’s illustrations, she can be seen tantalizing and flirting with men. In a courtship, the Gibson Girl was in control while the men skittishly tried to impress her.

The Bachelor’s Wall Paper depicts three women. Part of the Gibson Girls appeal was that there were many varieties, all with their own personality. One reviewer claimed that there were seven categories: the Beauty, the Athlete, the Flirt, the Sentimental Girl, the Girl with a mind of her own, the Ambitious Girl, or the Charmer.  Women could choose which Gibson Girl to be or perhaps choose a mix of a few. She was a mere commodity but so desirable that Americans did whatever they could to make her real. Acting like her, looking like her, and replicating her image over and over again. The wallpaper was originally published in Life magazine in 1902, and then manufactured in 1904 by M.H. Birge and Sons Co.

Shannon Murphy is a school and family programs educator at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Art History from the City College of New York.