At the time of Alphonse Mucha’s birth in present day Czech Republic, the struggle for independence from the Hapsburg Empire was reaching a boiling point. The people in this region had a strong nationalist consciousness and were fighting for greater political and cultural freedom. The heavily political atmosphere in which Mucha grew up continued to influence his work throughout his career. Even after moving to Paris in the 1880s to study, Mucha rooted his artistic practices in the decorative traditions of his home, and used art as a vehicle to express his devotion to these traditions and beliefs while also incorporating Byzantine and Celtic motifs into his designs.

Mucha is most readily associated with the Art Nouveau movement that swept through fin-de-siècle Europe. His designs are characterized by decorative motifs drawn from and based on organic forms, as well as an integration of the abstract patterns and designs that evolved as a reaction to the stoicism of 19^th-century artistic practices. He often used realistic elements to create innovative decorative forms from “formless” materials such as a woman’s hair or the winding stalk of a flower.

While a majority of Mucha’s compositions juxtapose the female form with nature, this rare textile design is purely floral. Some scholars have attributed the large-scale floral motif featured in this design to the influence of the designer Charles Voysey (1857–1941) who had a prolific career as both an architect and a textile/furniture designer. Contemporary designers such as Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869-1942), described Mucha’s compositions as innovatively coupling a very stylized design with one that was true to nature. Mucha’s work is both a celebration of natural beauty as well as a demonstration of his graphic dexterity for creating fluid and ornamental designs.

Though most famous for his works on paper, Mucha did produce designs for textiles, wallpaper, furniture and even the interior of a jewelry shop for Georges Fouquet (1862–1957). All of these designs were handled by the Parisian firm C.G. Forrer, who then sent the designs to England for production. These furnishing fabrics may have be been used as screens or pillows to compliment an Art Nouveau interior. Though it remains unclear as to how many of his designs were actually produced, a few printed velveteen textiles of Mucha’s design exist in the Cooper-Hewitt collection, among others. 

The holiday season is a special time of year to reflect on family and… jewels! Hemmerle’s Egyptian Story bangle is a particularly exceptional jewel. Not only does it evoke the firm’s distinctive voice, showcasing innovative techniques and material combinations to create a bold, modern jewel enriched with cultural references, but it provides a bit of personal narrative about the fourth-generation family-run atelier.

Hemmerle was established in 1893 in Munich, Germany, which for centuries has been a center of high-quality craftsmanship in gold, silver, and jeweled work. The firm quickly became renowned for offering technically sophisticated, high-quality jewelry and decorations, and was appointed purveyor to the Royal Bavarian Court. But it wasn’t until 1995 that Hemmerle took a dramatic aesthetic turn, pairing gemstones with unconventional, provocative materials including iron, copper, rare woods, even walrus teeth. Their bold, sometimes understated modern aesthetic has become a signature. It is this combination of high jewelry with a lean aesthetic that enables their creations to be worn with casual clothing, still a rarity in this field of jewelry. It is Hemmerle’s unusual material combinations and modern aesthetic, paired with innovative techniques, which make them a good choice for Cooper-Hewitt’s collection.

Hemmerle is currently run by Stefan and Sylveli Hemmerle with their son, Christian, and daughter-in-law, Egyptian-born Yasmin. In fact, it was a visit to Cairo to meet Yasmin’s family that sparked the inspiration for their Egyptian Story collection of jewels, for which this bangle was created. While the collection is part of a broader tradition of Egyptian revivalist jewels, each piece bears Hemmerle’s signature and distinctive interpretation of Egyptian references. The bangle, made of striated pockwood, features lotus terminals in two colors of green tsavorites, a semi-precious stone. The two tones of turquoise seem to evoke the Egyptian sky and the sandy color of the pockwood, the sun-baked Egyptian earth. The bangle’s invisible pivot hinge, as well as the matching of the lines of turquoises and green tsavorites to the wood striations, is an important and subtle design element. It is a jewelry design that celebrates the culture which inspired it, and, for the designer, the importance of family.

This charming little object-an étui or case, is also called a necessaire. It literally held objects that might be necessary to women of social status, wealth or social pretensions.  Inside, a variety of objects, all very small, are fitted in with the skill of someone who not only knows how they are made but has thought about how their shapes can be put together.  This necessaire includes scissors, useful for cutting thread, if one needed to mend something, or perhaps even an errant hair, a pen knife and tweezers.  It also has the place to hold some thread, and a needle case.  The small pencil and ivory tablet, while they could be used to record something to remember, were more often used as a re-useable dance card with pencil to inscribe the names and order of the gentlemen who asked the owner to dance. 

The outside of the case shows the end user with its feminine delicate rococo scrolls, and images of Diana, the huntress and her dog-a combination of a woman with flare and the dog, when used with a woman,  a symbol of her fidelity.  The object would therefore most likely have been given as a token of affection from a husband to wife.  The concept of a little hand-held accessory evolved into cigarette cases and compacts of the 1920’s but there, the symbolism was more risqué as women stepped out more on their own, and no fidelity was implied.

The case, of enameled copper, is a product of the burgeoning industrial revolution in England. Newly rich merchants- from trade and from industrial products of the Midlands (the central area of England northwest of London) wanted objects that suggested the latest in fashion, but were not necessarily anxious to patronize foreign or London goldsmiths to get these objects, especially when new industries in cities of the Midlands such as Birmingham were producing very good alternatives.

Staffordshire was home to both ceramics and other factories.  Birmingham was a big center for cutlery production-knives, steel-tined forks, and scissors that could be adapted to these miniature fittings.  Enameling was also booming with the firing kilns in that area –for candlesticks, snuff boxes and other objects. In addition the merchants of enamel colors were in that region.  The art of painting on these small boxes often overlapped with the skills of those who painted enamel portrait miniatures, watch-backs and ceramics.  With a strong watch-making industry in London, and Frederick Zincke, a German enamellist who was a court favorite of George II painting enamel miniatures in London during the first half of the eighteenth century, the enamel industry took off by the 1760’s further north as well.  Some of the enamellists who came to England from continental Europe found their way up to these northern enamel factories for additional or steadier income after George II’s death in 1760. There, they and local talent produced enamels in large quantities from tried –and- true designs, but also added new motifs and new fashion influences. 

This étui is the combination of the suggestiveness of French rococo with the skills of the English cutler to produce a personal accessory of fashion and practicality.

Roger Palmer, the first Earl of Castlemaine, was an English writer, diplomat and courtier who sat in the House of Commons. Palmer was a devout Roman Catholic and a staunch supporter of the Stuart Monarchy. Palmer’s loyalty was so committed that he even  acquiesced to the appointment of his wife, Barbara Villiers as Charles II’s favored mistress. It is in honor of his wife’s services in the King’s bedchamber that Palmer received his title as Earl of Castlemaine, and not for his service in the King’s court.

Following James II’s accession to the throne in 1686, Castlemaine was appointed Ambassador to the Vatican and sent to Rome on diplomatic errands for the crown. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688 however, he was imprisoned in the Tower and accused of high treason for his embassy to Rome the year before. Castlemaine was a committed patron to the arts.  His collection was so valuable, that it was auctioned off on April 20, 1689 for £10,000 in order for him to post bail.

A formal, published account of Castlemaine’s entry into Rome as English ambassador is preserved in John Michael Wright’s illustrated work, An Account of His Excellence Roger Earl of Castlemain’s Embassy… to his Holiness Innocent XI (1688). In An Account, there are engravings depicting the numerous works of art he commissioned to celebrate and adorn his entry. Included in these works are ten elaborate carriages.

As the European roads were in a state of disrepair, and traveling by carriage was far from comfortable, the primary function of these carriages was ostentation. Carriages like the ten commissioned by Castlemaine, were used a display of magnificence. This print shows the intricacies of the carriage itself.

Print: Front view of the Second Carriage of Lord Castelmaine, 1687–1700. Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane. 1945-17-6-b.

Fully figured putti, acanthus leaves and scrolls adorn the side and front of the carriage.

Print: Rear view of the Second Carriage of Lord Castelmaine, 1687–1700. Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane. 1945-17-6-c.

The back of the carriage features a group of four children and a seated woman that rises over the rear axle. The woman is carrying a bracket with four crowns. It would likely have been entirely gilded, giving the carriage the appearance of a large-scale metalwork object.  In the context of his embassy to Rome, these carriages acted as moving propaganda for the English monarchy, specifically James II. They were a tribute both to the power of the crown as well as to Castlemaine himself.

The holiday season brings out the idea at least of festive parties, and, to some, that means putting on fancy clothes and jewelry.  The idea of glittering adornment to dazzle goes back to antiquity and gold has been a constant. However, innovative use of new materials, so popular now, is not new. The choice of materials is ever evolving. 
Aluminum, first produced in 1827 by a German chemist named Wöhler, did not leave the lab and become available through industrial processes until the early 1850’s.  When it did, it was rare and expensive; so it seemed an appropriate choice for jewelry.  It had the advantage over silver that it did not tarnish, and was very light, making it easy to wear.  It also was extremely malleable which lent itself to the fancy scrolls and flourishes of the organic, scrolling rococo style that was being revived and expanded during the 1850’s. Exhibited at the Great Exhibition “Crystal Palace” in London in 1851, Queen Victoria had aluminum jewelry, which also received a fashionable endorsement through Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III in France, who was among the first to wear such pieces.  Some of the most important French jewelers took it up, thereby making the quality of the workmanship fine in the early examples of this new metal.  Its cost seems to have made it the province of the specialist jewelers, such as Charles Henry Villamon, one of the possible authors of this suite, for the first few years. But, as the metal rapidly dropped in value with commercial production, it soon moved away from being used for jewelry for the few to almost costume-like status. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was no longer featured as a material for jewelry but moving closer to its modern associations with industrial usage.
More recent jewelers and designers who cut across classifications, such as David Tisdale's bracelet (2013-29-1), have worked aluminum into more contemporary jewelry and even flatware.  This jewelry is not about the preciousness of the materials, but about the design of the object, and the role that aluminum, by being light and not tarnishing, can play interacting in a large piece that otherwise might be too heavy to wear comfortably.  With more traditional styling, it would just seem false.  In the hands of a true jeweler and designer, the medium is understood and used for its properties.
These pieces are large, and would be very heavy to wear-look how long the earrings are-2 ½ inches. Think about the weight in the ears, or the brooch pulling on silk-were they to be made of gold, solid silver or bronze.   What is also interesting is that these pieces were given during the Hewitt sisters’ era, at a time when aluminum had long since been made inexpensive and no longer used for jewelry.  They were already rare antiques in 1928.

These simple, sculptural goblets, named Paro (“I protect” in Italian), were designed by Italian industrial designer and design educator, Achille Castiglioni. A major figure in twentieth-century design, Castiglioni was known for bringing a curious and inventive sensibility to solving design problems and investigating materials and processes. Paro’s cleverly designed versatile form is reversible, having both deep and shallow cone-shaped bowls suitable for either red or white wine. The shape of a wine glass, either deep and bucket-like or shallow and wide, is thought to affect the rate at which wine oxidizes, altering its bouquet and flavor. Different shaped cups are used to accentuate the characteristics of different wines.

The design of this goblet is not only influenced by ideas about wine, but also by Castiglioni’s careful study of glass shaping and production techniques—blowing and forming the molten material, breaking off the finished form from the glass blower's punty rod, and grinding the cooled glass to create fine, straight edged rims. The goblet’s two inverted cones are joined near their apexes, and look almost as if they are sliding past each other. When one bowl is upright to hold wine, the opposite, empty bowl acts as a broad, stable base, making for a delightful study in shapes, and a game of right side up versus upside down.

So as this festive season draws to a close, bottoms up!

René Lalique has long been considered the most brilliant and original French Art Nouveau designer of jewelry and glass.  His lifelong study of nature in drawings and photographs including wildflowers and rare floral species, animals and insects such as swans, bats, birds, and dragonflies provided the unusual repertory for his jewelry and accessories.  In place of traditional gemstones, Lalique developed a technique of incorporating non-precious stones including opals with enamel on materials such as ivory and horn that changed the look of nineteenth-century jewelry.  

Among the jewelry types that Lalique designed was the comb.  This hair accessory was especially popular at the turn of the century when women wore their hair long or piled up on their heads which necessitated some kind of pin or comb to hold their hair in place.  Non-coincidentally, combs were an important feature of Japanese fashion.  

Lalique included nine large tortoiseshell, ivory, and horn combs in his display at the 1898 Salon which were reported to be very Japanese in flavor.  One comb with a fish theme particularly attracted the attention of Raitif de la Bretonne (Jean Lorrain), who wrote about “the large fins and the head with gaping gills…whose twisted body resembles images in Japanese prints.  The animal arches its back and twists in the transparent horn captured in the vitrified lacquer...It is the subject of the decoration itself, the blue-green life of water frozen in the material of the comb.” 

This description corresponds closely to a Lalique drawing in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection, Comb Design with “Flying Fish” Motif, a spectacular watercolor and gouache study on paper. (The design has characteristically darkened over the years due to a coating--possibly of resin--to make the paper translucent to heighten the visual impact.)   In the drawing, the fantastic fish leaps out of the water with mouth open and fins flaring causing the water to fly up around it and fall through its curving body.  This design might date from 1898 or more likely to 1904-06 when Lalique created a number of jewelry pieces using the fish motif.   

In an effort to identify the unusually dramatic fish depicted in the comb design, the image was shared with Smithsonian curators at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History who claim that no similar fish existed and that it was probably the product of Lalique’s prodigious imagination.

I was recently scrolling through images of wallpapers in the collection and was surprised and delighted to see how many of them contained images of dogs. While dogs appear on wallpapers intended for adults as well as children, the imagery on papers for children is far more amusing and the focus of this blog. The early 20th century was the highpoint of children’s wallpaper design and many delightful wallpapers for children were created. Children’s papers at this time were educational in nature, and child experts thought imagery should be realistically rendered to help engage the child without being confusing. The following papers all show animals easily recognized by children, wonderfully illustrated and beautifully colored. Dogs were frequently used to illustrate nursery rhymes and ABCs. Hey Diddle Diddle, one of the earlier children’s papers by Walter Crane has characters illustrating the verse, with the little dog laughing to see such a sight. Another much later paper designed by William Wegman shows his very patient weimaraners forming the letters of the alphabet. The “Hunting” frieze by Cecil Aldin shows a long parade of horses, dogs and carriages, though what is being hunted remains a mystery. Shown is one panel from a set of seven, which when joined end to end creates a border 35 feet long with no repeat. Kindergarten Cut-outs was very innovative in that it was designed to decorate as well as entertain a child. The animal shapes could be cut out and pinned to a fabric wallcovering. This was lithograph printed with oil colors so could be wiped clean. The Child World illustrates a child utopia, where each child is shown with a beloved animal in a bucolic setting. This is one panel from a set of two which create a border 10 feet long without repeating. The two panel set can be repeated indefinitely.

Sheila Hicks has lived and worked in many countries, and always immerses herself fully in the culture. In 1965, she was approached by a representative of Commonwealth Trust of Calicut, Kerala, India. CommTrust was (and is) the longest continually operating hand-weaving mill in India. The mill had thousands of highly skilled weavers, but their fabrics were rejected by European buyers as incompatible with modern furniture. Hicks had been suggested more than once as a textile designer whose ideas were at the forefront of contemporary design thinking. CommTrust believed Hicks could revitalize the designs of the mill, and were confident in her ability to work in a non-industrialized setting.

Hicks stayed in Kerala for 2 ½ months, each day sitting down to experiment at the loom, working with the vibrantly colored yarns in stock, and using the traditional equipment and techniques well-known to the weavers there. When she arrived at a successful design, she turned the loom over to one of the weavers, and moved on to the next loom. Introducing slubby hand-spun weft yarns and using complex combinations of colors, she created richly textured cotton fabrics suitable for upholstery, curtains and table linens.

Hicks encouraged the company to capitalize on the unique qualities of hand-woven fabrics, rather than compete with machine-woven goods from Europe. She selected a group of 20 designs to become the Kerala Collection, and named each design for a village in the area. The samples were stitched to hand-made paper and presented in a hand-woven bag. The anonymously-produced line was a success, winning CommTrust the state’s Best Exporter award for three years from 1968 to 1970. Hicks returned two years later to create the Monsoon Collection, which included some silk fabrics. One of the designs from this second collection, Badagara, has been in continuous production for more than 45 years.

In the 1590s, life as a Huguenot in France was tenuous.  Daniel Mignot, a trained goldsmith, must have felt this acutely, for he left his native France and re-established himself in the city of Augsburg, in present day Germany.  While Augsburg offered him the religious freedom to live openly as a Protestant, the city’s laws prevented Mignot, as a foreigner, from practicing his craft.  Mignot turned to printmaking as a way of showcasing and disseminating his innovative designs for jewelry.  It also proved to be a lucrative form of generating income. 

Between 1593-6 Mignot produced approximately one hundred plates of engraved designs for jewelry and enameling.  Among them was a series of eight designs for pendants featuring Christian imagery of the Temptation of Adam and Eve and the seven Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Courage, Faith, Hope, and Charity.  The prints were so popular that in 1616 the well-known engraver and publisher Jan Theodor de Bry (1561 – 1623) reprinted the series. 

Mignot’s prints are remarkable for the way in which they meld real and fantastical imagery. 

Detail of Pendant Design with The Temptation, plate 1 from the series Pendants with the Virtues.

In the first plate from the series seen above, depicting Adam and Eve, the figures are surrounded by animals rendered in such detail as to be familiar, even if they are an amalgam of parts. Squirrels, rabbits, sheep, snails, goats, rams, and butterflies keep company with winged deer, women whose bodies taper into the tails of snakes, bushy-tailed birds, and a devilish-looking serpent with the arms of a man and the head of a bird.  With his breathtaking attention to detail, Mignot, here by the hand of de Bry, transports us into the magical realm of the Garden of Eden, and the luxurious world in which such a pendant might have been imagined.  

The popularity of Mignot’s designs might well be attributable to the remarkable decorative quality of the prints themselves, rather than for their intended use as source imagery for jewelry design. Each sheet features not only a central pendant, but also independent designs for ornament that fill the otherwise unused space of the page.  Mignot, and later de Bry, employed two entirely different styles of engraving to simulate different modes of decoration.  The pendants are presented as sculptural elements, adorned with dangling, pear-shaped pearls and sumptuously encrusted with jewels, all rendered in engraved linework.  The surrounding designs for enameled jewelry, including designs for the sides and tops of rings, are showcased in blackwork, a relatively new technique that had emerged in printmaking less than a decade earlier.  In engraving, blackwork refers to the technique of deepening the surface of a copper plate to enable large areas to print in a rich, saturated black.  Mignot may have chosen to use blackwork to suggest champlevé.

I have always been curious and slightly amused by wallpapers containing imagery of cob webs. Seems to me people are always taking brooms and vacuum extensions to get rid of these pesky things and I could not understand why people would buy papers with these spider-inspired motifs to decorate their homes. The sample I’m showing was produced from 1906-08 and was available in five different colorways, all very pale shades of off-white, yellow and green. Due to the very pale coloring and subtle patterning I would assume these were intended to be used as ceiling papers. The pattern is non-directional which can also indicate its ceiling intent. The design on most ceiling papers was non-directional so the pattern would appear the same when viewed from anywhere in the room. The earliest paper I found containing printed cobwebs was one designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, which was illustrated in the catalogue “What Shall We Do with Our Walls” written by Clarence Cook in 1880. While this may seem like a Victorian stab at humor, or possibly a way to mask the inevitable appearance of these in one’s home, it did continue into the 20th century. William Justema designed a similar pattern called Web for Katzenbach & Warren in 1948. This was printed by silk-screen, the latest technology in wallpaper printing. Justema’s Web was also printed in a subtle color on a taupe ground, and as ceiling papers were in fashion into the 1950s, this could have been designed for either the ceiling or the wall. In 2004 Marthe Armitage produced a wallpaper titled Cobwebs, which was printed by linoleum block. While the design contains other elements along with the cobwebs, the web is central and shown delicately suspended in a tree. This pattern was designed with a vertical format and was intended to be used on the wall and not the ceiling.

What were you doing when you were twelve years old: riding bikes with friends, lip synching to your favorite band, watching bad TV shows, making cookies? I might have a hard time remembering exactly what occupied my time when I was twelve, but I am absolutely certain that I was not embroidering an intricate sampler as Margaret Barnholt was in 1831.
This sampler is made from silk embroidery thread on a simple cotton foundation fabric and shows six scenes: a church with a garden, figures, animals, birds and butterflies; the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and a mourning scene with a weeping willow, grave with funerary urn, and more figures. Three additional vignettes show figures with animals and trees. A rose vine border surrounds the piece and a verse reads: ‘Mother dear weep not for me/ When to this yard my grave you see/ my time was short and blest was he/that called me to eternity.’
Young girls like Margaret Barnholt created samplers as part of their education, showing the alphabet and numbers, as well as verses, poems or tracts- combining lessons in needlework with morality, or in the case of some samplers, memorializing the death of a loved one.
The vignette with the grave, weeping willow, and family is a classic format seen in many mourning samplers. Margaret may have had a sibling who passed away, and the addition of the grieving family and the initials on the gravestone makes this more of a personalized story- a mourning sampler within the larger sampler, showing a portrait of her family and recording the death of a brother or sister.
Every sampler is a historical document of sorts. It reflects the milieu of the girl who made it, the emphasis her family placed on education and home-making, as well as her skill at needlework. Parents proudly displayed the samplers as markers of their daughters’ talent and status- the equivalent of basketball trophies, walls filled with photos from school plays, graduations, and similar milestones. In this case, the likely possibility that Margaret may have lost a sibling further highlights the differences between the concerns of families in the 1800s and those of the present day.
Samplers help shed light on the lives of young women in early America- lives that otherwise went completely unrecorded and undocumented.

By the 1930s, the vast majority of American urban dwellers had access to electricity in their homes and businesses.  But those in impoverished rural areas were often not serviced by private electric companies, who believed that it was not cost-effective for them to invest in extending power lines into areas of the country that would generate only a handful of new customers.  As part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Rural Electification Adminstration (REA) sought a way to provide rural residents, primarily farmers, with access to electricity.  The private power companies argued that the government could not compete with private enterprise by providing electricity directly to consumers, so instead the REA offered loans to local electric cooperatives, which in turn installed power lines and distributed electricity to the rural population.

Lester Beall was already a successful graphic designer when he was commissioned by the REA in 1937 to produce a series of posters that would increase awareness among the rural population about the benefits of electricity.  Beall employed a simple, patriotic color scheme of red, white, blue, and black and used bold, stripped down imagery (a light bulb, a farmhouse, a faucet) with arrows to suggest the flow of electricity.  The REA found the posters so successful that they commissioned Beall to create two additional series of posters in the subsequent years.  For the second series, Beall employed the increasingly popular technique of photomontage, integrating photographically sourced imagery with flat planes of color and humorous slogans.  Beneath the printed phrase “When I Think Back,” for example, an older man in a rocking chair turns on his radio, while red arrows signal the invisible electric current.  

In the third series, for which the poster depicted above was designed, Beall utilized photographic imagery entirely to set the scene.  Here a woman in an apron stands poised over her oven, pulling out a perfect tray of biscuits while pots of food cook atop the stove.  Absent is the mess of coal, wood, or oil.  Electricity is no longer signified by power lines or arrows, but by the dominant pattern of red dots that suggest the flow of electric current and the heat it generates (and nicely mimic the polka dots of the woman’s apron and dress).  With his slogan “A Better Home,” Beall's message was clear: electricity will improve your kitchen, which will improve your home.  And besides, who can resist a tray of biscuits?

This bowl is a fantastic example of work by Klaus Moje, a master designer known to “paint with glass.” To design this object, Moje used kiln-formed fused twisted canes (glass that has been stretched into thin rods or strips) of semi-opaque red-orange glass with deep transparent blues.  Next, the strips were heat laminated together to create a pattern of blue parallelograms arranged perpendicular across the red ground.  Then, he wheel-cut and shaped the glass as an octagonal bowl with a broad flat rim. The result transforms an everyday object like a bowl into something brilliant to behold!

A major force in the international studio glass movement, Klaus Moje has pushed the expressive and technical possibilities of glass for more than five decades. Born in Germany, Moje first began his life-long exploration of the material  in the early 1950’s as a glass cutter and grinder at the Moje family workshop in Hamburg.  During the 1960’s and 1970’s Moje explored the expressive potential of glass as an art form in its own right and began exhibiting internationally.  A year after designing this bowl, made in 1981, Moje immigrated to Australia to become the founding Head of the Glass Workshop at the Canberra School of Art.

Over the years, Moje has continually pushed the boundaries of studio glassmaking and conducted innumerable workshops throughout the world. Moje’s pieces have been in more than fifty international collections including Cooper-Hewitt and he has been the receipt of many significant awards in Australia, Europe and United States.

With the temperature outside at record lows this week, I can’t help but think of William Henry Bradley’s The Blue Lady.  Clutching her ice skates in her left hand, she makes a cold winter’s stroll through the thin, bare trees look elegant and placid.  (It is a sad contrast to the bundle of blue layers I’ve been hunkered down in as I head for the subway).

The Blue Lady was Bradley’s second poster for The Chap-Book, America’s first “little magazine.”  The publication was conceived of by two Harvard students, Herbert Stuart Stone and Hannibal Ingalls Kimball, Jr., who graduated the year it went into production.  The Chap-Book featured poetry, prose, and art from the up-and-coming members of the artistic and literary community.  Bradley, who was born in Massachusetts in 1868, had worked as a printer, a wood engraver, and a typographer before establishing a career as a graphic designer, and he had already designed the cover of the first issue in May 1894.  Stone and Kimball had decided to to employ a commercial strategy that had become common in Europe: they produced posters of the cover illustrations of their magazine that would serve as both advertisements and as collector’s items.  In addition to being hung in shop windows and on billboards, the posters quickly made their way into the homes of poster collectors in America and abroad.

The Blue Lady is a stunning example of the early introduction of the Art Nouveau aesthetic to American graphic design, but as Paul Stirton pointed out in Modern Times, part of the Morse Historic Design Lecture Series, the poster also reflects a nuanced influence of the Japanese woodblock prints from the middle of the 19th century, which had become widely circulated among collectors not only in Europe, but also in cities such as New York and Chicago.

Print, Great Wave at Satta Beach, Suruga, from the series The Thirty-Six Views of Fuji (Fuji Sanjuroku Kei), 1858. Designed by Ando Hiroshige. Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Robert H. Patterson. 1941-31-120.

Bradley’s design for The Blue Lady also reflects a sophisticated understanding of the lithographic printing process.  The flat planes of the design lent themselves to lithographic printing.  Using only two contrasting colors of ink, a sumptuous blue and a vibrant vermilion, Bradley was able to generate a third color by overprinting them, resulting in the rich, dark purple that colors the trees and the woman’s coat.  Bradley also made use of the paper itself as a fourth “color,” thereby limiting the number of plates needed to print and ultimately reducing production costs.

As the winter drags on here in New York, I’ll be keeping The Blue Lady in my thoughts.  But I’ll be dreaming about another woman, the one featured in a poster by E. McKnight Kauffer for American Airlines to California.  

Poster, American Airlines to California, ca. 1947. Designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. Gift of Mrs. E. McKnight Kauffer. 1963-39-131.

Beneath a sun in the shape of a beach ball and with the sand at her toes, she looks like she’s got it all figured out, far away from sub-zero temperatures!  

Wow! I remember thinking that as a youngster, when I first saw the slightly flickering black and white picture on the Sony portable TV at a friend’s house—on the patio. That was the last place I could imagine anything like a television, something I had previously experienced only as a piece of furniture in people’s living rooms.

The portable Sony TV-8-301 marked several firsts in television history: it was the world’s first fully transistorized television set, the first direct-view transistor TV, and the first Japanese TV to be sold in the US. The set reflected the advanced technology of its day, in which transistors were used instead of vacuum tubes. This allowed the television to be small and portable rather than contained in the furniture-like cabinets of earlier television sets. Sony’s picture tube was mounted horizontally, allowing the picture to be viewed from all angles. The curved shape of the housing is derived directly from the tube; the designers removed any excess material to minimize the size of the object as much as possible. The black plastic handle is centered on the top for balance while carrying the TV, a weighty 12 pounds by today’s standards. The retractable antenna, for reception, was at the back left. There was no remote control at that time: the station selection dial and volume dial were conveniently on the top right, and three square white control buttons were in the front, under the picture tube. This set also introduced the now-famous style of the centralized SONY logo.

Akio Morita, the co-founder and head of Sony, did not believe in using market research to develop new products (a trait shared a couple of decades later by entrepreneur Steve Jobs of Apple Computer fame). Morita thought Sony was adept at creating consumer electronics and introducing them to the public. The TV-8-301 is proof that his instincts were right. Marketing experts in the U.S. did not think small, portable television sets would sell, but the TV-8-301 launched Sony’s television business. Two years later, Sony’s smaller model TV5-303 became a big hit with American consumers. The drive to miniaturize has continued, and today we watch digitally available TV shows (including 1960s reruns) on the go, on our wireless tablets and smart phones, in the palms of our hands!

Making a cup of coffee in 2014 is nothing like it’s ever been before. There are just about a thousand ways to make coffee these days in every contraption one could imagine. Whether you’re making an artisanal pour over in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or slowly dripping a pot from your beautifully crafted glass Chemex on New York’s Upper East Side, it still ends up being the same delicious caffeinated beverage it has always been.

This Traveling Coffee Service from the late 19th century was ahead of its time in many ways. What could be better than a little briefcase with all of the parts required to make a fresh pot of joe on the go? The individualized leather case has the initials “BM” engraved into it. It has designated areas for the cylindrical silver coffee pot with ivory handle that unscrews to fit into its own compartment, the burner, two covered cannisters-one for coffee and one for sugar, a knife and two spoons. The size of the pot suggests Turkish coffee, a taste that was popularized in the late 19th century. A coffee pot in a traveling set adheres to the social atmosphere that the drink inherently creates. Rudi Matthee writes in “From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran", “Coffee is no longer viewed as a mere commodity in the trade and consumer revolutions, but is now explored as an emblem and symbol of religious practice, social relations, or political change.” Today, coffee is exactly that--a representation of identity, taste, wealth and ritual. Whether you like your coffee black, or with three pumps of some holiday syrup that you paid $6.00 for, this very choice exemplifies your identity every day. You are walking around with your name brand cup or your traveling hot mug brewed just the way you like.

Aeropress, Brazilian cafezinho, Chemex, Clover, Cold Brew, Espresso Machine, Eva Solo, French Press, Instant, Melitta, Moka Pot, Percolater, Siphon/Vacuum, Stove Top Espresso, Turkish (Ibrik), Vacuum Pot, Vietnamese (Flat Drip/Ca Phe), and the standard electric machine are just a few of the many ways to crack open a bean, grind it to dust and make it into hot liquid. The appliance you choose is only part of the equation. The beans, the grinder and texture you work with, the quality of the water and the temperature you rise it to, each contribute to the final experience in your mug. Today we call it “coffee culture”, and this traveling set brings us back to where it all began. The time when you took your coffee pot with you, symbolizing the trade and travel of the beans, as well as your social status. For people who have a serious relationship with their coffee, it is not just a drink, but a way of life.

“As the curtain rises, on an almost lightless stage, there is a loud singing of wind, accompanied by distant, measured reverberations like pounding surf or distant shellfire.” (1)

El Camino Real refers to a series of highways dating to the Spanish colonies in North America, most typically associated with the California Mission Trail. Today much of this trail has been incorporated into U.S. Route 101. An ambiguously identified seaport town along this titular road serves as the destination for Tennessee William’s play Camino Real. Premiering in 1953, it was not a mainstream success, while being tucked amidst some of Williams’s greatest contributions to American drama. Williams is hardly known for a warm-hearted, touchy-feely approach to drama, with his most well-known plays dealing with abandonment, insanity, depression, substance abuse—a veritable concoction of human misery given a uniquely American twist. In Camino Real, Williams ponders mortality and irrelevance through a nearly incoherent string of vignettes described as “blocks,” creating a world of quasi-realism populated by a host of literary and historical figures, including Don Quixote and Lord Byron. (2) Williams simply describes it, however bleakly, as “nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.” (3)

Peter Wexler’s scenic design created the environment for the 1970 Broadway production at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starring Al Pacino as the lead character of Kilroy. As a playwright, Williams is infamous amongst set designers for his dictation of strict and detailed sets, making pointed use of location and space; but after nearly two pages of poetic description in Camino Real’s text, Wexler presents a largely abstract design. Noted theater critic of the Saturday Review Henry Hewes commented that the design was “boldly abstract” but that the narrative “needed a more specific set.” (4)  Director Milton Katselas, however, embraced the abstract quality and, aided by the thrust stage (audience on three sides) of Lincoln Center, “gave the performance a carnivalesque quality, with action over and around the stage, up and down the aisles, and had one character make his entrance by being lowered from the ceiling over the audience.”  This abstraction of space and imaginative play within it heighten the phantasmagoric qualities of Williams’s script, calling into question the realism of the play’s location.

The quote above starts the stage direction and the play, suggesting an emptiness on the vacant stage. Dominating the mise en scène are stairs stacked like the vertebrae of a disembodied spine, limply connecting the desolate plaza to the outside world. The rugged, rocky aesthetic and jagged texture gives the space a nearly prehistoric feel, distancing itself from any reality that might exist in the play’s eponymous location and instead reinforcing the themes of alienation and mortality. Williams aimed to stress the sense of isolation created by the stairs by naming the location to which they lead “Terra Incognita,” a Latin cartographical term for unmapped space. Wexler exacerbated this desolation by depicting space described on stage left by Williams as “the luxury side of the street” with yet another pile of rock-like forms—elevated above the plaza, but lifeless no less. Through his design, Wexler synthesizes and emblazons Williams’s themes in a world that seems at once real and inhabitable, but also imaginative and barren.

1.Tennessee Williams, Camino Real (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1953), 5.
2.  Downing Cless, “Alienation and Contradiction in “Camino Real”: A Convergence of Williams and Brecht,” Theatre   Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Aporia: Revision, Representation and Intertextual Theatre (March 1983), p. 44-50.
3.  Ben Brantley, “Theater Review: Lost Souls, Not So Different From Their Creator,” nytimes.com, June 28, 1999, accessed January 5, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/28/theater/theater-review-lost-souls-not-....
4.  Matthew C. Roudané, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 84.
  Variety,

5.Variety, “Camino Real,” January 14, 1970, 84.

Matthew J. Kennedy is one of a precocious few who, at eight years old, could claim his favorite department at the Art Institute of Chicago to be European Decorative Arts. He recently completed the Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt graduate program, pursuing research focused on the intersection of design, popular culture, and his recreational passion of theater. He currently handles image rights and licensing for the Cooper-Hewitt’s publishing projects.

I have always found these cubist wallpapers charming and attractive in their simple design format. These were produced in a wide array of styles but all contained some arrangement of seemingly random cube patterns printed in pastel colors. Virtually all of these designs were printed on an ungrounded paper. The application of a ground color became more important with the introduction of wood pulp paper in the 1850s. As you are probably aware, papers containing wood pulp tend to oxidize and start turning brown shortly after production. The ground color would disguise this discoloration and extend the original beauty of the paper. Ungrounded means inexpensive. Not applying a ground color to a wallpaper saved an entire step in the production process and eliminated the need for a grounding machine.

These wallpapers are casual in nature and streamlined in their geometric format and soft pastel colors. To get more information on the use of these papers I looked through a number of wallpaper sample books ranging in date from 1928 through 1935. These designs were recommended primarily for use in kitchens, breakfast rooms, and pantries, but were also suggested for use in upstairs hallways. As I mentioned, these papers were not of the highest quality so were not appropriate for high traffic areas, hence being relegated to the upstairs. But they were also modestly priced, as the samples I checked ranged in price from 12 ½ cents per single eight yard roll (sold only by the double roll) to 18 cents.

The only information printed in the selvedge of this paper is “Printed with Fast Colors”. This notation is significant and helps date the paper. Wallpapers became light fast, or fade resistant, in 1928. This meant the papers could be exposed to light for longer periods of time with less fading. It does not mention that the wallpaper is washable, which came about in 1934. These were two of the biggest developments in wallpaper manufacture during the early 20th century, and manufacturer's were very steadfast in printing this information on their wallpapers as a marketing tool. I did not notice any of these designs prior to 1930 and, as this does not state it is washable, will assume it was produced before 1934.

This poster, entitled Big Nudes, was originally displayed in 1967 at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in Gramercy to announce an exhibition of large nude paintings. This poster is the work of American graphic designer and illustrator Milton Glaser. Glaser has designed more than 400 posters, record-covers, illustrations, magazine covers and advertisements throughout his prolific and diverse career. Despite the popularity of his 1966 design for Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” album, Glaser’s work encompasses more than just the widely known representations of Pop Art and Psychedelic work. Glaser moved away from away from these bold expressive styles, and instead incorporated greater naturalism along with softer, more subtle colors into his work, as demonstrated by the Big Nudes poster.

This poster depicts a nude woman’s lower body shown in profile including her lower back, buttocks, and legs. The nude is so large that the entirety of the figure cannot be contained to the space of this poster. Instead of restricting the figure to the boundaries of the paper, the oversized figure extends out of the realm of the drawing and into the space beyond it.  Glaser is playing with the conventions of the traditional nude by including only a view of the legs rather than a more typical and sexually charged depiction of the torso. Rather than show the body at rest, allowing the viewer total visual access to its form, the woman seems to be in the midst of crawling out of the frame entirely. Glaser also seems to be commenting on the distinction between drawing/illustration and design by distorting the figure around the inner rectangular frame. By warping it across three straight lines, the body is taken out of the figural realm and into the realm of design. Glaser is known for engaging with traditional, even obsolete styles of design and coupling them with innovative concepts from the present. He wanted viewers to reconsider these forms through new perspectives in order to take design in a direction that contradicted the stoicism and seriousness of the pervading International Style.  

Kristina Parsons is a Masters student in the History of Decorative Arts and Design program at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum/ Parsons New School for Design. After graduating from Columbia University in 2013 with a background in Art History, she is pursuing her interests in costume history and contemporary design while assisting the Drawing, Prints and Graphic Design curatorial department as an MA Fellow.