One can’t go through the mid-century without being shown some poodles. French poodles appeared on numerous wallpapers during the 1950s. This is Gigi, printed on Super Sanitas. As you can see, Gigi is getting coiffed for a night out in Paris. The design contains 4 different scenes, showing Gigi getting coiffed and pedicured, having her hair set, and promenading with her beau in front of Club Chien. The color is predominantly pink, with accents of metallic silver and gold. Very 1950s! I always thought this fascination with the French Poodle was rather odd until I did some research. The standard poodle was the popular size of the 1930s and the one most frequently shown on wallpapers. At this time, a standard white started winning championships across Europe, and went on to win Best of Show at the Westminster Dog Show in 1935. This is the first time a poodle has ever won the top award at Madison Square Garden. The amazing publicity sparked an interest that has never subsided. By 1960, poodles had become the most popular breed in America, a title it held for many years. Also fueling the interest in all things European was the international travel boom following the war, with its new transatlantic flights.

Sanitas was an oil-impregnated fabric introduced in 1903 by the Standard Table Oil Cloth Company and was one of the early washable wallcoverings. The fabric support was initially soaked in oil pigments which created a very durable, washable surface. As technology advanced the manufacturer began treating the fabric with latex and the product was renamed Super Sanitas. There were very few washable wallpapers prior to 1934 so Sanitas was a major advancement in wallcoverings. Sanitas is still available today.
 

Thomas Moran painted this beautiful watercolor of the Grand Canyon on a 1901 trip that was organized and paid for by the Santa Fe Railroad.   The Railroad treated Moran and other artists to a three-week excursion at the Canyon, together with a guide to point out the most picturesque views.  The Railroad’s aim was to get artists to paint the sites which would encourage tourists to visit the Canyon.  It is a revealing example of artists collaborating with business to simultaneously promote both the artists’ work and develop the tourist industry and land sales.

Speaking of tourism, Moran’s drawing takes me back to the days when my children were young and my husband and I were deciding where to go with the kids for a spring vacation.  I never wanted to take them to the National Parks.  All my friends were going out West in campers on a circuit of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite.  This, I said, was not my idea of fun!   I dreaded driving in the camper or trailing a camper behind our car.  I lobbied instead for a trip to Provence where we would rent a house for a week or ten days and I would introduce my family to the language and culture of France.  Of course, I won the argument and we did go to southern France.  So my sons never got to see the National Parks I said, so what!

Twenty-five years later, during a family vacation to Sedona, Arizona, we took a one-day trip up to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  I will never forget the truly awesome, spiritual experience I had there.  I had remembered seeing the Grand Canyon from a plane on the way to California, and being amazed at its size:  it took ten minutes to fly over it!  Now, standing on the rim of the Canyon, I had a new appreciation for Moran’s watercolor.   Gazing across at the pink rock formations and into the deep precipice, I wished we had the time to really explore the Canyon by trekking down the steep trails.  Thomas Moran had done it on a mule, but I really wanted to hike, even though I knew that climbing up would  hurt.   Perhaps one day, when our granddaughters are a bit older, my husband and I will take them on a tour of the National Parks, but not in a camper.  A decent, clean motel bed would do nicely!

Today is Thomas Moran's birthday!

Visit our website to find the catalogue for the Cooper-Hewitt's 2006 exhibition Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape.

This innovative stacking chair is arguably Danish designer Verner Panton’s best known work. While not the first cantilevered chair—Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld’s 1934 wooden Zig-Zag chair is an earlier example—the Panton chair was the first cantilevered chair made from a single piece of injection-molded plastic. Its fluid organic shape is made to fit the human form.

Panton first studied architecture in the late 1940s. By 1952, he was working for the modernist architect and furniture designer Arne Jacobsen, whose rigorous research into production techniques and materials such as bent wood influenced Panton. He struck out on his own in 1955. Converting a Volkswagon van into a mobile graphics studio, he frequently traveled around Europe, visiting designers and manufacturers and observing developments in international design. Panton returned to Denmark with many unconventional ideas—his style diverged from the characteristic soft, organic Scandinavian modernism and its emphasis on natural materials, particularly wood. Panton was passionate about experimenting with man-made materials, and by the end of the 1950s, his chair designs were very experimental with no discernible legs or backs.

Panton conceived the idea for this chair in about 1960, a time when plastic, a relatively new low-cost petroleum-based material, was increasingly employed by the furniture industry for use in affordable mass-produced goods. It was also a time of cultural shifts: a growing emphasis on youth and a developing Pop culture.  Avant-garde designers focused on creating goods for a youthful consumer market that enjoyed a casual lifestyle. The impact of color was seminal, and designers turned to new materials and a palette of primary hues. Lightweight and strong, many plastics could be produced in vibrant colors with glossy surfaces. Panton originally wanted to make this chair in rigid polyurethane foam, but the design did not work in that material. He was ahead of his time. It was not until 1967/68 that plastics production technology caught up with his idea, and the chair could be mass produced in fiberglass-reinforced polyester. Panton’s highly sculptural form is a unified design: rather than being made of assembled parts, the S-curved chair combines seat, back and legs in a continuous molded form. The design eliminates the need for wood or metal supports. The concave base provides stability and takes advantage of the material’s lightness, while allowing the forms to nestle for stacking.

Originally produced in white, blue, black, red, yellow, and green, the chair has become an icon of modern design and is in production today.

Today is Verner Panton’s birthday.

Color was a central element in all of Verner Panton’s designs for interiors and furniture, and in particular, textiles, which became his most important vehicle for color in the futurist environments for which he is best known.  Born in Denmark, Panton lived and worked most of his life in Basel, Switzerland, where by the mid-1950s he was an internationally acclaimed interior architect and designer.  He studied at the Technical College from 1944-47 followed by architecture studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen from 1947-1951.  He was greatly influenced by his mentor, Poul Henningsen, a Danish designer known for his iconic lighting design of the mid-20th century.  Equally influential was Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen, and between1950 and -52 Panton worked in his office.  When he left Jacobsen’s office, he traveled throughout Europe introducing designs for chairs, lighting, and textiles to a number of companies and obtaining commissions mainly for Danish projects.

In 1968 Panton was commissioned by the paint and fiber manufacturer, Bayer, to design an environment at the Cologne Furniture Fair using synthetic fibers and materials.  Intended as an annual series of exhibitions to take place on a boat, Panton advised Bayer to call it Visiona.  For Visiona 0 in 1968, the futurist environment by Panton was referred to as the Dralon Boat, and included furniture, lighting, and textiles.  Walls, ceiling, and floor were treated identically and as described by one writer, these environments were a “melding together of walls, floor and ceiling into a passageway of colorful folding formations.” 

The Anatomical Designs, which included Lippen, were initially part of Visiona 0 (1968). Round rooms of various colors were bedecked with draperies and round floor carpets on which were printed large photo-realist representations of hands, feet, mouths, eyes and ears (the model for these body parts was his wife, Marianne).  Later, the Swiss textile company, Mira-X, produced these designs under the name of Anatomic.

The Visiona series continued until the mid-1970s under Panton’s leadership and featured such illustrious designers as Joe Colombo.  However, it soon featured only home textiles rather than presenting Panton’s idea of a model living environment,  where every new technical innovation in the field of synthetic materials was put to use.

This extremely rare trade catalog from 1940, in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum Library, represents the output of 10 state-owned ceramics factories all over the Ukraine in small towns and villages after industry was nationalized in 1918. Katalog farforu fa︠i︡ansu i maĭoliky is a primary source document for studying the decorative arts, material culture, and political history of the Ukraine and the former Soviet Union.

We tend to be more familiar with the graphic arts of Communist Russia as vehicles for propaganda—especially posters. The decorative arts, especially utilitarian objects like the tableware featured in this catalog, were important vehicles for disseminating political concepts of the new social order and Soviet nationalism to the masses in everyday life.

The Stalinist era of the 1930s combined “peasant” or folk art motifs and patterns with propagandistic symbols that emphasized social and communal values while depicting positive images of workers and peasants.  

Various nationalistic symbols integrated with nature, figural, or floral folk art scenes/motifs. Katalog Farforu. Left: Pl. XI; right: Pl. XIII.

In Plate XI, there are many examples of propaganda and folk art used together. Cup 79 commemorates May 1^st as International Workers' Day, an annual celebration of the revolution of 1918. Cup 80 features a hammer and sickle, symbols of the industrial proletariat and the peasantry; together with the floral folk art motifs the design they symbolize the unity between industrial and agricultural workers. Cup 84 depicts a silhouette of Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), a poet and painter who became a Ukrainian hero for his writings, which indicted his country's oppression by Tsarist Russia. Cups 82 and 83 are decorated with fighter planes and parachutes, portraying the military might and wartime spirit of the Soviet Union. 

Several of the designs come directly from traditional Ukrainian geometric folk patterns used in embroidery and textiles.

Geometric Ukrainian embroidery patterns. Left: KatalogFaforu, Pl. IX, figures 61, 66. Inset: Pl. VII, figure 41. Center: Ukrainsʹka narodn︠i︡a wyszywka. Serija III by Klemens B. Habdank-Rohozynskyj. [S.l. : s.n., 1948] Plates 3, 22.  Smithsonian Libraries. TT771 .H113 1948. Right: Handwoven textiles. Peasant art in Russia. edited by Charles Holme. London; New York [etc.]: "The Studio," Ltd., 1912. Smithsonian Libraries. qNK975.H6

A column, cello, cowboy-looking boot and ballet’s foot represent the drama of the Municipal Theater in Basel, Switzerland, at the time of this event. The poster, made by a freelance designer named Armin Hofmann, was created for the famous theater in Basel for their latest performance. Hofmann believed that black and white photography gives a better visual of colors than colored photography. The black and white photo was meant to bring emotion, life and imagination of colors to the average person. Because of Hofmann and his artist ideals, this poster became one of Switzerland’s cultural prides. This poster, and many others done by Hofmann, became an inspiration for thousands of others. Who would’ve thought?

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is fortunate to have in its collection three textiles designed and woven by Ethel Stein, a preeminent twentieth and twenty-first century American artist and weaver.  Stein’s early design influences include studying in the 1940s with the Bauhaus artist and designer, Josef Albers (1888-1976) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers . The threads of Albers teaching appear often in Stein’s woven works; her interest in color interaction and basic geometrical shapes, her exploration of order/disorder and positive/negative, and her mastery of technology and process.

As a weaver, Stein’s work is informed by her research in museum textile collections, a rich source of design resource material. Starting in the 1970s, Stein regularly studied and analyzed textiles in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.   At Cooper-Hewitt, Stein worked closely with former Curator of Textiles, Milton Sonday, and was exposed to the museum’s extraordinary collection of textiles, dating from ancient to contemporary pieces.  Stein studied with Sonday analyzing through the microscope the woven surfaces of textiles in the collection which she documented by producing drawings of the structures.  The experience was crucial to Stein’s development as an artist and stimulated her interest in decoding how these historic textile structures could be produced on a contemporary draw loom.

One of the first structures that Stein studied at Cooper-Hewitt was damask, a weaving technique that uses one set of warps threads and one set of weft threads  to achieve a pattern  through the visual contrast between two interlacing orders,  one warp-oriented and one weft-oriented.  In the panel pictured above, Stein combined the damask structure with double ikat, a resist dyeing technique in which, before the weaving process, the yarns of the warp and weft are dyed in a pre-determined pattern created by binding the yarns with a material that resists the dye.  The preliminary process is complex; the yarn must be arranged precisely as it will be used during weaving.  During the weaving of ikat yarns, the alignment of the pattern invariably changes slightly, resulting in the distinctive off-register effect in the final product. 

Ethel Stein’s mastery of a variety of historical textile techniques gives her a wide range of artistic expression through the control of color and pattern.  In this piece, Stein’s meticulous planning and craftsmanship allow her to explore design issues revolving around geometry and spatial interplay, order and chaos, negative and positive, transparency and opacity.  Stein uses the damask structure and double ikat yarns to efficiently produce a variety of color mixtures and densities.   The simple precision of the grids contrasts with the nervous energy of the ikat patterning within each square.  Still actively weaving, Ethel Stein will be honored in the summer of 2014 with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago drawn from a group of 33 of her recently acquired hand-woven textiles.  In addition to Cooper-Hewitt and the Art Institute of Chicago, Ethel Stein’s works can be found in the collections of many museums and private collectors.

Objects have many stories but this vase connects different cultures and different periods in more ways than most.  When it appeared in Rococo: The Continuing Curve 1730-2008 at CHNDM, the Peacock Vase represented with its organic, sinuous forms the re-emergence of a curvilinear aesthetic in the Art Nouveau era of the Rococo style created in the 18th century. Shah Jahan, the seventeenth century Mughul ruler in India, had a throne bed with peacock motifs in jewels that became an object of desire for other rulers.  Peacocks as birds no doubt gain special status in many cultures from the vivid coloration of the male’s tail feathers.  As they drop and re-grow new feathers annually they are associated with rebirth and renewal, and by extension, resurrection and immortality. Peacocks have the ability to eat poisonous snakes unharmed, connecting to a belief that the tail’s shimmering colors enable it to turn snake venom into solar iridescence. Perhaps it is this last idea that made Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Peacock Vase’s creator, think of combining this motif with his iridescent glass.  Both the peacock and Tiffany connect to the ancient world: Tiffany in creating iridescent glass.  Iridescence was strived for to imitate the appearance of recently excavated glass in Syria and other places during the time of Roman rule. Ancient glass owed its iridescence to the mineral deposits and effects of the glass being buried for centuries. Tiffany was not the first to seek to re-create this effect.  Glass excavated in Hungary prompted glass creators in the late-nineteenth -century Austro-Hungarian Empire, to find a formula slightly before Tiffany to re-create the surface of their dug-up glass as an example of a national style. Tiffany succeeded not only in creating his own formula for iridescence but in understanding that it could have appeal to an international market of the great world’s fairs, thereby creating demand for this technique. He also understood the importance of connecting the decoration to original forms related to each other in organic ways - such as the peacock that is suggested-rather than literally represented- by both the form and the decoration of this vase.

An image on the front cover of I.D. Magazine first drew me toward this weekend vacation home by 2008 National Design Award Winner Tom Kundig, with the unlikely name of Chicken Point Cabin. The interconnection of domestic and natural space was especially alluring to me. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Kundig comes from a craft-based design culture with roots in the area's industrial and timber heritage. As an accomplished alpine climber, he is familiar with the rugged outdoors of tall trees, rocks, lakes, and big sky, along with the ropes and other equipment for mountaineering, all of which have influenced his architectural practice.      

The primary request of the family who commissioned the Chicken Point Cabin was that the architecture actively engage the wooded, lake-side site. This stipulation gave birth to the building's main feature, a huge twenty by thirty-foot pivoting window, indicated in the drawing above by the two people standing in the open area.

Working in collaboration with an engineering colleague, Kundig conceived of a hand-cranked "gizmo,” comprised of a set of gears, that requires a minimal amount of energy input to pivot the window open and closed. Even a child can do it, as you can see in the video's on Olson Kundig Architect's website.

Drawing: Design for Chicken Point Cabin, Hayden Lake, Idaho:Big Window Gizmo, 2000-03.  Tom Kundig. Gift of Tom Kundig, 2010-10-5.

The almost cinematic act of pivoting the window and beholding the awe-inspiring view highlights the dramatic aspect of Kundig's architecture. Chicken Point Cabin is a superb example of Kundig's innovative domestic structures. It also exemplifies today's fascination with hand-crafted, low-tech design that energizes a segment of the design and architecture community.

 Les mots en libertéfuturistes (Futurist Words in Freedom), published in 1919, has an ingenious typographic design and an explosive layout.   Its different styles and sizes of typeface defied traditional rules of structure and punctuation and heralded a revolution in modern visual communication.

This pocket-sized portfolio is a mini-anthology of the writing and typographic experiments of Italian poet and theorist FilippoTommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). In 1909, Marinetti published an essay in a French newspaper shocking the world and launching Futurism, Italy’s most notable art movement of modern times. HisFuturist Manifesto, a celebration of change, violence, youth and technology, called for nothing less than a total revolution in art and design.  Its harsh and stirring words mandated the destruction of outdated assumptions about vision and language.  It also implored artists, poets, and designers to unite in creating a modern aesthetic that could articulate the new realities of a scientific, industrialized twentieth century.

The visually strikingly graphic concepts that were developed, christened “les mots en liberté” (words in freedom) by Marinetti, introduced a powerful technique for representing the noisy energy of twentieth-century life.  With great ingenuity, Futurist artists created dynamic typographic compositions intended to evoke an emotional reaction from the reader-viewer. Free, dynamic, staccato words could be given the velocity of trains, waves, explosives and airplanes.   Words were not only used to convey thought, they became part of the design.  The method and formal composition of this work were widely imitated and became remarkably influential in modernist print and the emerging culture of the European avant-garde.  

This fold-out plate (pictured above) entitled Montagne + Vallate is Marinetti’s vision of a journey where he visits a war front (lower left), France (upper left), and his friend the artist Fernard Léger (top right).  View images of the cover, other plates, and some of the text pages of this portfolio.

Les mots en liberté futuristes, both written and designed by Marinetti, represents a high point of futurist typographic experimentation, and showcases his genius as a designer and visual poet.  It was a pioneering example of what is known as visual or concrete poetry, in which avant-garde artists have harnessed typography and page layout for expressive purposes.

Though most people only know of his first wife Joséphine, Napoleon I of France was married twice during his lifetime. Napoleon and Joséphine were married on March 9, 1796. Their marriage was a strained one, due to Napoleon’s extensive travel and their inability to have children. Though their correspondence shows that they had once cared for one another, by 1809, Napoleon was looking to divorce Joséphine and wed another woman who could offer him money and children. He chose Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria, and great-niece to Marie Antoinette. In 1810, they were wed and, by all accounts, quite pleased with one another and their union. The Embroidery Design under discussion was commissioned around this time as a commemoration of this occasion.

The design was likely meant for a chair back or wall hanging and is, in many ways, a superb example of French empire style. During and after the French Revolution, Napoleon had risen steadily through the ranks of the military, culminating in his being crowned Emperor in 1804. As he was not of royal blood, it was exceedingly important that he create and implement motifs which could be used in place of heraldic, royal imagery. He quickly adopted Roman empirical motifs including eagles, laurels, bees, and stars – many of which can be seen in this design. Often, Napoleon’s initials, or cipher, were displayed on his personal furniture. In the center of this design are the intertwined initials 'N' and 'M'. In spite of this commemorative object, very few of the pieces that Marie-Louise received as Empress were commissioned in her honor. Several objects, including an embroidered velvet mantel, a lavishly decorated state bedchamber, and jewelry had been commissioned for Joséphine, but were returned to the state and used by Marie-Louise.

Christina Malman was born in Southhampton, England in 1912. When she was two year’s old she moved to New York City, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. Christina began her career as a cover artist for the “New Yorker” magazine in the mid 1930’s. Over the course of twenty years, she designed numerous covers, 34 of which were actually published by the New Yorker.  She also drew more than 500 "spot" illustrations, many of which were used in the “Goings on About Town” section of the magazine.

Christina’s work was known for its good-natured yet satirical view of New York City dwellers. This particular cover, which was designed in 1939 but never used as a cover, clearly displays this sentiment. In fact, it’s what drew me to her. Five birds painted in lively colors stare down from a tree at seemingly industrious members of the Audubon Society, all of whom are busy looking through field glasses, scribbling notes, pointing and generally thinking themselves to be quite superior. Christina skillfully flips this notion on its head by placing the birds in the foreground, high above the crowd. The birders are not so much observing as being observed. In other words, they are far less important than they think. Her use of color to convey meaning is quite clever. The alert birds are bright and vibrant with blues and reds and yellows while the birders, looking every which way but at their winged friends, are much more subdued in black and white. The social commentary she makes in this drawing is astute and her light-hearted drawings elegant. 

Christina’s last cover for the New Yorker was published in the March 11,1956 edition of the magazine. She died in 1959.
 

In this ornate design made of cut paper, contemporary artist Ernst Oppliger depicts three pairs of couples in windows at the top of a towering structure, while the windows below contain silhouettes of many exotic animals, including elephants, giraffes, and ostriches.

Silhouettes became a popular art form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and were frequently created as a form of portraiture.  To create a portrait silhouette, the portrait sitter’s shadow was cast onto a wall by a lamp, and the outline of the shadow was then traced and cut from a sheet of monochromatic paper. Placing the silhouette against a uniform colored background accentuated the design, an effect replicated here in Oppliger’s use of black cut paper on a white background.

As a fashionable craft, the process of producing silhouettes was practiced as “parlor art” by upper‐class men and women who not only cut out portraits, but also landscapes and decorative motifs. In Switzerland, where the craft was particularly popular, the paper cuts often featured religious subject matter, which was referred to as “cloister art,” or depicted the Swiss landscape and the animals and mountain folk who occupied it. Silhouettes also became a form of street‐art, with professionals and amateurs ready to cut customers’ profiles quickly as a cheap alternative to the painted portrait.

The fad of cut-paper silhouettes came to an end in most of Europe and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. However, this is not the case in Switzerland, where the art form has become a part of the nation’s cultural heritage and is considered a traditional folk-art. Several contemporary paper cutters in Switzerland are adapting traditional subjects in a more personal manner to create innovative designs in cut paper. Oppliger is a master of the medium, notable for the refinement of his cutting, the large scale of his works, and the sophistication of his designs. Oppliger carries on Swiss traditions of the past while breaking new ground in the art of cut paper.

Winslow Homer and his brother Charles Savage Homer Jr. were avid fly-fishermen.  They went on many fishing trips together in warm weather at the North Woods Club in the Adirondacks and at the exclusive Torelli Fish and Game Club in the province of Quebec, and during the winter months on the Saint John’s River, Florida.  Fortunately, Homer was able to combine his avocation with his professional career as an artist.  He was acutely aware that his watercolors of fishing-related subjects would be popular with a certain male clientele who were keen fishermen.

This beautiful watercolor, among the best of Cooper-Hewitt’s Homer works, shows an isolated fisherman, on the edge of  Lake St. George in Canada, casting his rod and line with the expectation of catching a land-locked salmon native to this area, known as ouananiche.  The work is among a small group of monochromatic watercolors that Homer executed fairly late in his artistic career between 1893 and 1902.  By this time, Homer was an acknowledged master of the watercolor medium and had experimented with a variety of watercolor techniques.  Working in monochrome created a new technical challenge of using a limited range of values from black to white to achieve the impression of different colors.  The silvery stillness of this scene reaches the level of poetry, unlike anything else in Homer’s oeuvre.

Visit our website to find the catalogue for the Cooper-Hewitt's 2006 exhibition Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape.

One of the main goals with our new collections website has been to create connections between the Cooper-Hewitt collection and the rest of the world that already exist out on the Internet. Wikipedia is a key part of that world, and Wikipedia is becoming more 'museum-friendly' every day.

Right now we know that we have 1,376 matches between people in our collection and Wikipedia. For each of these matches, visitors to our collection can find additional information directly from Wikipedia embedded in our site.  But what about Wikipedia as a means for the public to discover our collection?

In the month of January, the collections on our website received 4.75% of its traffic from Wikipedia. This was actually the largest source of traffic from other websites, with Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and the Smithsonian's main portal coming in slightly behind.

We used an experimental Wikipedia Article Traffic Tool to look at number of page views for individual Wikipedia articles and for the top articles sending us traffic. Here are the top 5 pages from inside Wikipedia that sent us traffic in January compared to the amount of traffic each page received on Wikipedia itself.

It's a little interesting to note how some of the lesser known pages contributed a higher referral rate, and nearly as many total referrals as the second highest article. I sort of wonder if this has to do with the finer detail searching that someone might be doing, or the over-saturation of information on the bigger and more widely read Wikipedia entries.

Looking at traffic from the top 25 Wikipedia articles that linked to us in January, I find it really interesting how some of our lesser known designers are more popular than some of the artists and designers that we have featured throughout our museum's history. Not only that, but these designers are beating out the Wikipedia page for the museum itself! Not only that these visitors take a bit of a look around the site when they arrive.

What I find really interesting about this sort of traffic is that it comes to us from a new point of view. People are exploring our collection in their own way, for their own ends. They aren't necessarily starting (or even looking at) the things "we" think are most important.

If you'd like to connect up some Wikipedia articles to objects or themes in our collection we've made it easy. At the bottom of each collection page there is a 'Wikipedia citation template' readymade for cutting and pasting. We were inspired to add this by the Powerhouse Museum and the National Library of Australia, both of whom also feature 'easy Wikipedia citation templates'.

This design for a stained glass window of a mermaid beneath the sea was commissioned by Associated Artists (the decorating firm of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler, with (at times) Samuel Colman and Lockwood de Forest) for the Manhattan home of Wells Fargo President Ashbel H. Barney at 101 East Thirty-Eighth Street.   This subject is a variation on the theme of the fisherman and the mermaid (a fantastic tale of a fisherman's encounter with mythical underwater creatures and his eventual union with them after he dies), about which Vedder executed many drawings and several paintings. 

Elihu Vedder was known for his depictions of the mysterious and unreal.  In his biography, he wrote: "I am not a mystic or very learned in occult matters.  I have read much in a desultory manner and have thought much, and so it comes that I…wade out into the sea of mystery around us." 

Tiffany and Company, who fabricated the window after Vedder’s design, also produced several other mermaid-themed stained glass windows. One extent example is the Field Museum’s untitled stained glass window which depicting a green, blue, and purple, bubbling and seaweed-filled underwater world from which a mermaid rises to greet a bright yellow fish. Cooper-Hewitt’s ornate and flowing composition of a seated underwater siren peering into a mirror and surrounded by swirling sea weed, shells, and fish, was typical of the art nouveau-styled stained glass decorations in many late-nineteenth-century New York mansions.

I have always been fascinated by these wallpapers with flying space ships and astronaut papers designed for boys in the 1950s. With their scenes of lunar landings and astronauts charting their progress, they really were looking to the future. Printed in 1954 this paper pre-dates Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite in 1957, and the first walk on the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969. This is one of many wallpapers featuring space ships and astronauts designed for boys in the 1950s. All of these are freely drawn and designed to fascinate and amuse as much as to educate. Later papers began using photography for more realistic representations of the lunar surface and outer space regions. These were in turn followed up by more fantasy as each of the films in the Star Wars trilogy had its own wallpaper.

It is interesting to note that boys had a much greater selection of wallpapers to choose from than girls did at this time. For boys, along with astronauts there were also wallpapers with ships, cowboys and Indians, and boy scouts. Girls were pretty much limited to wallpaper with pretty floral designs. Doesn’t seem fair, but this remained unchanged until the 1970s when things began to even out.

Industrial-grade cardboard. Probably not the first material you would associate with the voluptuous ribbon like curves and thick, luxurious looking cushion of architect Frank O. Gehry’sBubbles chaise longue.  Known for his deconstructivist buildings, Canadian-born Gehry experimented with furniture design as early as the late 1960s. He was introduced to furniture design while serving in the U.S. Army where he designed furniture for soldiers.  

With the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the growing awareness of the environmental effects of consumer waste, plastic lost some of its appeal. Some designers turned to more ecologically friendly materials. For his furniture designs, Gehry chose the industrial material cardboard, particularly the heavy sturdy type used in hollow-core doors. His first series, called Easy Edges, produced between 1969 and 1973, consisted of inexpensive mass-produced seating and side tables in rectilinear shapes that were sold in department stores. This line, considered the Volkswagen of furniture, was produced to suit the needs of all—young or old, city or country dweller.

Gehry’s second series, Experimental Edges (1979-82), showed a more modernist approach; employing highly curving lines, these very structural pieces were handmade and sold through galleries as limited edition, high-end art furniture. Cooper-Hewitt’s ca. 1988 Bubbles chaise longue embodies such features.  Number seven in an edition of fifty, it is constructed of corrugated cardboard with a fire-retardant coating. The arabesque form is dictated by the light-weight cardboard that has been layered and rippled into S-curves and looks like a giant continuous ribbon covered by a thick, layered, almost shaggy-looking cardboard cushion. Gehry has taken this disposable material and made it into a sculptural piece of art furniture, giving the humble, utilitarian substance an extravagant feel. Gehry has said of cardboard: “It is fascinating to work with a material that has resiliency and keeps its form. The aesthetic qualities of it were very special because it looked like corduroy, it felt like corduroy and it was seductive. It was warm and could be used in a variety of settings….”

Gehry’s later experimentation with furniture design included a third series using bent wood, introduced in the early 1990s. The bentwood furniture group for Knoll (each piece named for a different ice hockey term) is still in production today.

Today is Frank O. Gehry’s birthday.

While Steinberg trained as an architect he is best known for his satirical cartoons in The New Yorker. He began drawing shortly after enrolling in college and had his first cartoon published in The New Yorker in 1941, and even after joining the US Navy in 1943 he continued sending in cartoons from his various stations across Europe. Over the span of his career he was given 85 covers and had 642 illustrations published in The New Yorker.

During the 1950s he was also busy designing wallpapers as the Cooper-Hewitt contains eight different designs created from 1946 through the early 1950s. All but one of these was printed by Piazza Prints. All contain the wonderful line illustrations Steinberg is famous for, with his whimsy, anecdotal humor, unusual perspectives and changes in scale. The horses in this design are performing a number of different feats, from performing in the circus, to pulling carts and serving the military. Some are awkwardly drawn, while others are quite majestic. There are splashes of color added throughout and the weight of his line varies, each of which add visual interest to the design. There is also a great sense of movement created by the gestural drawings of the horses, and the changing scale of the figures keeps one’s eyes moving from the foreground to the background.

Other Steinberg works in the Cooper-Hewitt permanent collection include drawings for some of his wallpapers, posters, and printed textiles with similar and different designs. Owing to the fun and timeless nature of the designs, Horses and other Steinberg designs are still available on wallpaper and textiles through Schumacher.
 

Gunta (Aldegunde) Stölzl is known for her weaving and teaching at the Bauhaus. Her compelling textile designs, which play on line and color, appeal as independent artworks in themselves.

Stölzl began at the Bauhaus as a student, where she trained in the fine and decorative arts. In a diary entry from 1919-1920, Stölzl remarked on the process: "[Hans Itten's] first words were about rhythm. One must first educate one's hand, first make the fingers supple. We do finger exercises just like a pianist does. In the beginning we already send through what it is that rhythm occurs; and endless circular movement begun with the fingertips, the movement floods through the wrist elbow and shoulder it the heart; one must feel this with every mark, every line; no more drawing that is not experienced, no half understood rhythm. Drawing is not the reproduction of what is seen, but making whatever one senses through external stimulus (natural internal too) flow through one's entire body; then it re-emerges as something entirely personal, as some kind of artistic creation or, more simple, as pulsating life..." This "pulsating life" that Stölzl wrote of can be seen in staccato rhythm of the blocks of color and short black lines placed around the border of the design.

Color was also an essential element for Stölzl. Before entering the Bauhaus she practiced art on her own, painting vibrant watercolor landscapes, while she worked as a nurse during the brutal years of World War I. Stölzl brought this vibrancy to her textiles as well. Her woven rugs and wall-hangings, as well as her designs for factory-produced textiles, are composed of subtly interrelated forms and colors. Stölzl also sought out this aesthetic in her students. The beginning of her introductory textile classes was a period in which the students could experiment with the art form, rather than impressing technical skills upon them. Stölzl would then analyze the students' aesthetics, particularly looking for a sense of color, which she viewed as a prerequisite for aptitude in textile work.