Yusaku Kamekura achieved what most only hope to accomplish in more than half a century of professional longevity. Kamekura was born in Japan’s Niigata prefecture in 1915 and was schooled at the Institute of New Architecture and Industrial Arts, built by Ranahichiro Kawakita. As a student, Kamekura was heavily influenced by Bauhaus design theories and the principles of constructivism. His designs synthesize the post-war influences of modernism with the classical elegance of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Kamekura’s work often utilizes orderly forms composed on a spare plane to uniquely couple his traditional sensitivity with the influences of western design.

After substantial recovery and rebuilding in the post-war period, Japan experienced enormous economic growth that promised to drive the traditional society into the twenty-first century. As Japan continued to modernize and industrialize, a gap emerged between the spiritual culture and material civilization. Design promised to bridge this fissure and unify Japanese society as well as establish Japan as a global power. Recognizing these possibilities, the Design Promotion Committee proposed a major international design competition in order to improve the global standard of design (with Japan at its center) and to promote cultural exchange on an international level. Osaka, already considered Japan’s industrial design center, was announced as the host city for the International Design Festival, which commenced bi-annually in 1983.

Kamekura, with his predilection for wedding modernism with classicism, seems the natural choice to promote such an endeavor. His poster for the inaugural International Design Festival demonstrates that the strength of the Japanese is in their ability to be both modern and deeply rooted in heritage.

This sketch documents Lockwood de Forest’s trip to India. In 1880, he and Meta Kemble were married in New York and soon thereafter they departed for India on their combined honeymoon and buying trip. By this time, de Forest had already abandoned landscape painting as a profession and committed himself to design and the decorative arts. He had started a partnership with Louis Comfort Tiffany, called Tiffany and de Forest, and was looking for decorative arts objects and jewelry to send back to Tiffany for use in interior design commissions. He traveled to Ahmedabad where he met Muggeunbhai Hutheesing and made the arrangement for Hutheesing to manage a workshop producing Indian carved teak and perforated brass, backed by de Forest family money. In spring 1881, the workshop was sufficiently organized that he and his wife left for a tour of Delhi and northern India, which brings us to the location of this wonderful sketch: Fatehpur Sirkri, Birbal’s Palace, in Agra, outside of Jaipur dating from March 19, 1881. This area was especially known for its red sandstone architecture which particularly impressed de Forest. He wrote in his letters, “We spent several days at Fatehpur Sikri and occupied the House of Miriam, and we might have had the Birbals House if I had only told Mr. Lawrence we had been going. It was the one he occupied when he went out himself and it was fully furnished with rugs etc. It was opened for me to see however and I made some sketches of the details of the interior and a sketch of the outside which was a wonderful red in the sunlight. It is a perfect example of the architecture at the time of Akbai and has been preserved just as it was built.”

From telescopes to the Erie Canal, to planes, trains and automobiles, technological innovations have long been incorporated into wallpaper designs. With cast iron reaching new aesthetic and structural heights in architecture beginning in the 1850s, it made sense to capture its more decorative aspect in a wallpaper design. This paper highlights views of New York City architectural landmarks including Trinity Church, Federal Hall, Exchange Place, Grace Church, and Castle Garden, with each view enclosed within a decorative cast iron framework. Flowering vines are entwined around the support columns. A narrow border fragment is still attached at the top edge with the border colors matching those found in the sidewall paper. The format of this design is quite typical for the period but the normal framing elements of scrolling foliage and wood moldings have here been replaced with decorative cast iron. While the maker of this paper is unknown it is appropriate that the cast iron design incorporates New York City landmarks as there were numerous cast iron foundries in New York City. The SoHo (South of Houston) district of New York City contains possibly the largest collection of cast iron architecture in the world.

With origins dating back to ancient China, cast iron was not a new material at this time but there was a boom in its use for architecture. Refinements in its production allowed the material to be used as a structural element in large building projects beginning in the late eighteenth century, while its cheapness and availability in the 1850s led to its increased use in architecture. Support columns made of cast iron were more slender than those of masonry supporting a similar weight, which created more usable interior space, and also allowed for larger, more decorative windows when used on the exterior.

Over a century ago, IBM founder, Chairman and CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. (1874-1956) held a meeting with NCR (formerly National Cash Register) sales managers to brainstorm ways to improve the business. With little progress made, Watson’s frustration led him to declare the following:

“The trouble with every one of us is that we don’t think enough… knowledge is the result of thought, and thought is the keynote of success in this business or any business.”

These statements inspired the creation of IBM’s five letter motto: “T-H-I-N-K.” As a leader who always looked into the future, Watson knew IBM’s potential for creating technology that helped people think; he understood that knowledge led to innovation, and innovation had the power to transform the world.

Watson would have been proud to know that the THINK culture was promoted in a collection of posters during the 1960s-80s, designed by IBM’s former senior graphic designer Ken White. These posters quickly became popular, as they were seen displayed on walls and desks throughout IBM’s offices. Though this poster’s exact provenance is unknown, it is most probably part of the THINK propaganda collection.

Through a sophisticated design and a profound message, Ken White emulates Watson’s belief that knowledge is power. The poster depicts insects swarming around a light bulb, an iconic symbol that indicates a revelation or an idea. As insects attract and follow light, people attract and follow ideas. This reinforces Watson’s way of thinking, such that ideas are the result of thought and knowledge, all of which will bring success to any business, and most importantly, bring purpose to life.

The Ken White collection is housed in the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, his alma mater. The archives include publications designed for specific clients, such as IBM, Better Homes and Gardens, and the Phoenix Art Museum. In 1986, the collection was donated by his wife, Jo Ann White, and is open for research.

Carolina Valdes-Lora is a Masters student in the History of Decorative Arts and Design program at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum/Parsons the New School for Design. With a fine art and design background from RISD and Parsons, she aspires to pursue her interests in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American and European design. Additionally, her Cuban-Spanish heritage inspires her interests in Latin American art history. She is a MA fellow in the Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design Curatorial Department at the Cooper-Hewitt, as well as an intern at Christie’s Auction & Private Sales, 20th Century Decorative Art & Design Department.

The R-72, also called the “Toot-A-Loop,” is a wonderful example of Pop Art-inspired design. Departing from the square box format, this battery-operated portable radio is shaped like a donut with an off-center hole. It could be worn on the wrist like a bracelet or carried like a purse. 

Simply by twisting the swivel joint at its thinnest point, the radio opens out into a snake-like “S” shape with a bold, circular station selection dial at the top and the speaker grill at the bottom. The volume control is a little, slim black dial in the perimeter of the body, so it can be used when the radio is in either open or closed position. There is also a jack for a mono earphone that, while not offering the deep sound of stereo, would still provide private listening.

This example in red is characteristic of the bright hues that were available, including yellow, white, and blue. Made of molded ABS plastic, the R-72 was easy and inexpensive to mass produce. It was made to appeal to a burgeoning youth market that wanted its music anytime, anywhere, and that craved novel, “fun” forms.

The Shells wallpaper is an interesting hybrid design combining a traditional vining floral design and shell art, or coquillage. The vine, foliage, and flowers are all composed of a variety of large and small sea shells. This design is screenprinted in five colors on a white ground. The 1960s sparked a revival of historical styles and there was a resurgence of art nouveau and art deco designs, restyled and colored to meet the current taste. Shells is an obvious play on the art nouveau style with its gentle flowing and curving forms.

Floral wallpapers form one of the largest wallpaper genres and have remained popular since their inception. The rendering of the floral motif changes with fashion, from realistic to stylized, small-scale to large, and this design offers a new interpretation of an old style. This design also takes its inspiration from another old tradition, that of shell art, said to be one of the oldest decorating techniques in the world. Shells have long been used to ornament clothing, make jewelry, and to line the walls of grottoes. The motif became popular during the Victorian era to create elaborate boxes, mirrors, and art pieces with shells. More recently, it has been suggested that a nautilus shell inspired Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Woodson Wallpapers was founded by A. Woodson Taulbee in 1956. Woodson was known for its use of bright and vivid colors, and is credited with re-introducing the trend of using matched wallpapers and fabrics within a room. In the early 1960s, about 60% of his wallpaper collection was available with matching cotton or linen fabrics. Frederick Bradley was one of the more prolific designers at Woodson, and after joining the company in its early years, remained with the firm for over a decade.

In 2009-10 five teams of architects, landscape architects, and other professionals were invited to take part in a workshop at PS 1, organized by MoMA and Barry Bergdoll, then Head of the Architecture and Design Department, to address the problem of global warming and its impact on lower Manhattan. This was three years before Hurricane Sandy battered Manhattan in October 2012.

City officials from various agencies including the Office of Emergency Management, Department of City Planning, and various New York State agencies, along with climate scientists and the public, were invited to attend these meetings. The workshop led to five different interventions for the treatment of the Upper Harbor of New York and New Jersey by the design teams and an exhibition at MoMA in 2010.  The Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design Department has recently added one of these projects to document in the permanent collection the proposal of National Design Award winners Architectural Research Office (ARO) in collaboration with Susannah C. Drake of delandstudio. Drake’s contribution came out of an earlier solution she designed in 2008 for cleaning up the Gowanus Canal with what she termed "Sponge Park" – strategically located planted areas absorb and filter storm water runoff before it enters the Canal. The ARO/delandstudio proposal, called "A New Urban Ground," transforms lower Manhattan through a series of constructed wetlands along the coastline and absorptive open-mesh concrete streets into a green and eco-friendly transitional field that will allow Manhattan to survive by interacting with the rising sea levels that are predicted as a result of climate change. These systems will provide a buffer against rising water and restore the natural dynamic of the water and the landmass.

Five digital renderings were acquired for the collection. This rendering is a schematic view of lower Manhattan showing the extent of the proposal connecting land and water. The proposal adds two miles of shoreline to Manhattan and shows the levels of interventions in different colors of green. The light green areas are salt water marshes, the medium green areas are freshwater wetlands, and the dark green areas are parks. An outer dotted line shows high tide based on a projected sea level rise of six feet. The inner dotted line shows the area that would be flooded by a 24-foot storm surge from a level 2 hurricane. Another rendering (2013-52-2) imagines a perspective view of lower Manhattan to illustrate the new ecological inter-connectedness of the Park areas the salt and freshwater marshes, and a marina.

Two additional views, seen above, illustrate lower Broadway (2013-52-3) and Hanover Square (2013-52-4). These images show the porous, layered concrete streets that will absorb and distribute the flood waters in different levels. They also illustrate two kinds of underground vaults. One is for dry utilities, such as electricity and telecommunications wiring; the other is for wet utilities – water, gas, and sewers.

Finally, there is a view of the eastern shore of lower Manhattan (2013-52-5) seen below, illustrating a series of raised walkways connecting the man-made estuaries and people kayaking, allowing for public enjoyment of the landscape.

The Quakers, or the Society of Friends, played a primary role in establishing the earliest charity schools in New York City, which provided access to secular education for those who would not otherwise have had the opportunity. During the Revolutionary War, the Quakers' strict adherence to principles of non-violence made them suspect to their countrymen. Compelled to find alternative ways to serve, they were responsible for the creation of the earliest large-scale war relief program. After the war, the scope of their efforts grew. In 1794, female Quaker ministers began emphasizing a policy which would later be coined "not only ours, but others," encouraging Quaker women to attend to the care and education not only of their own children, but also the poor.

Early in 1798, a group of ladies, all members of the Society of Friends, formed the Female Association for the Relief of the Sick and Poor of New York City. Although the education of poor female children was not the focus of the society, it was widely held that the lack of adequate education was a root cause of destitution. The first Female Association school opened in 1800, with the goal not only of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also to prepare young women to change their circumstances, primarily by teaching or working as domestic servants. To this end they were also taught basic sewing, marking, and embroidery.

Unlike Catharine Parsell's sampler, most of the surviving Female Association samplers were intended as gifts, and bear inscriptions to important visitors or supporters of the school. Catherine's simple text bears evidence to the influence of the school's Quaker founders, while the use of the strawberry vine border is a common element of New York City samplers.

Jennifer N. Johnson holds a degree from the Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt Master's Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. While pursuing her studies, she completed a two-year fellowship researching the Cooper-Hewitt's American sampler collection. She is currently a Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow in the American Decorative Arts department at Yale University Art Gallery.

Children's Frieze Makes Learning Fun

Cecil Aldin was a well-known painter and book illustrator, highly esteemed for his animal portraiture. This children’s frieze was made up of seven different panels that would be joined end to end to form a non-repeating scene thirty-five feet long. This is long enough to wrap around an average-size room without repeat. By comparison, most machine-printed wallpapers repeat every 18 inches. The panels consist of a pack of dogs in active pursuit of something, followed by riders on horseback with more dogs, a horse-drawn carriage, more riders on horses, and finally, this horse-drawn cart holding the goose and the one final dog. Nowhere is it apparent what is being hunted. The animals and figures are all beautifully illustrated while the scene itself is void of any background imagery with the exception of a horizon line.

The period from about 1900 until the Depression in 1929 was the heyday of children’s wallpaper design. Many wonderful and clever designs were produced by renowned illustrators and these wide block-printed friezes were true show-stoppers. Normally a frieze is hung at the top of the wall, but for children it was recommended to hang the frieze lower to make the room more accommodating to the child. Also, these friezes were normally hung with another patterned paper or oilcloth below, and a second patterned paper above, running up to the ceiling.

While the charming illustrations would certainly delight children and adults alike, early children’s wallpapers were designed to educate, not to amuse. The implied action, recognizable animals, and bright colors were said to be stimulating and educational for children, and child scholars believed designs for children should contain realistically rendered, recognizable objects so as not to be confusing.

The Cooper-Hewitt Library owns many types of pattern books for architecture, textiles, wall coverings, and ornament for use by designers. Among our more unusual “how to” pattern books and trade catalogs are two recently digitized hair jewelry pattern books - The jewellers' book of patterns in hair work and Charles T. Menge's price list of ornamental hair jewelry and device work.

During the Victorian era, having jewelry made from the hair of deceased loved ones was a way of literally keeping the person with you always, even after death; it is the one of the most enduring and intimate of human relics. It is a woman's crowning glory and a precious keepsake; my mother kept locks of our hair in little boxes in a dresser drawer. Think of all the myths and stories that involve hair- Samson, Rapunzel, Lady Godiva, the short story The Gift of the Magi, by O’Henry- you can see why owning something made with  the hair of a loved one would be so important in remembering and memorializing the dead. Sentimental jewelry is part of the Victorian cult of mourning that was so much a part of everyday life and customs.

Hair was fashioned into a piece that was braided, woven or otherwise worked into a form and a design. Brooches, bracelets, earrings, watch fobs, and rings could be made from hair. Not all hair jewelry was mourning jewelry; these pieces be could be made and given as tokens of affection and sentimental gifts between friends, keepsakes of your children, siblings or parents. Or they could be more intimate, private exchanges between lovers. Nineteenth century periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and other types of fancywork instructional manuals told you how to make your own hair jewelry- a labor of love for sure. 

If this was too much of a challenge, you could have an item custom made for you by a jeweler or specialist in hair jewelry and have it made professionally. You could pick a design from pattern books and catalogues like these below; all you had to provide was the hair.

 Companies like Halford & Young and Charles T. Menge’s would make the jewelry, providing the types of findings (component parts such as clasps, ear wires, pins, chains, etc.)  that you selected from the catalogue. It was exciting to study the museum’s hair jewelry collection and connect them to some original design sources in our pattern books. You can read more about hair jewelry and the museum’s hair jewelry collection.  Bracelet (r) USA, ca 1870, hair, gold, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Georgina and Louisa L. Schuyler, 1916-29-54

Illustrated accounts of travels to the Far East served as guides for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists in Europe, who used these illustrations to create fanciful and imaginative chinoiserie scenes. This textile’s design is in the style of the prolific French chinoiserie artist Jean-Baptiste Pillement. Pillement’s astronomers were inspired by the travel accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries, as well as by earlier eighteenth-century chinoiserie designs, such as The Astronomers tapestry from the series The Story of the Emperor of China (ca. 1697 – 1705). Though similar to known Pillement designs, such as his Etudes de differentes figures Chinoises (1758), this astronomer design lacks the fanciful, whimsical hand typical of Pillement’s work. The textile is comparable to a set of silk wall coverings in the collection of the Musées des Tissus et des Arts Dècoratif, which have the same image but are significantly larger the Cooper-Hewitt’s example. The textile’s small scale as well as its hastily printed design, which has several noticeable gaps, suggests that it was a print trial.

Laura L. Camerlengo is an Exhibitions Assistant with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Costume and Textiles department. She previously served as a fellow with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s Textiles department. She has a Master of Arts degree in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from Parsons, the New School for Design/Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

In post-apocalyptic cinema the slow sweeping shot of a half-submerged shopping cart in a river is a standard - just before the horde of zombies lurch onscreen. Symbolic of consumerism under late capitalism, in these films the shopping cart is a marker of our (lost) civilization. Shopping carts also evoke memories of childhood - hours spent strapped into uncomfortable seats, being pushed around endless shopping malls and supermarkets

For me, though, it is Berlin's experimental musicians Einsturzende Neubauten ('Collapsing New Buildings') who brought shopping carts into memorable focus. Their live concerts in the late 1980s and early 1990s combined the brutal power and force of industrial tools - angle grinders, jackhammers, sledgehammers - with the comparative delicacy and 'ordinariness' of shopping carts played like harps. Sculpting sound from destruction and urban waste, Einsturzende Neubauten was far from folksy concepts of 'junk percussion'. In this performance of their 1987 song Zerstörte Zelle ('Destroyed Cell'), the generic shopping cart becomes a key instrument.

New shopping carts redesigned by IDEO on ABC's Nightline TV show in 1999 along with the multi-award winning colorful, bubbly Target redesigns in 2006 would both fail in such a musical or cinematic contexts.

Chair, Consumer's Rest. Frank Schreiner (German, b. 1959), Stiletto Studios. Berlin, Germany, ca. 1991. Museum purchase from the Eleanor G. Hewitt fund, 1992-112-1.

"Consumer's Rest", is a 1983 design from Berlin's Stiletto Studios acquired by the museum in 1992. Like the zombies, it has lurched its way to the top of our online leaderboard in the past few months driven by an unprecedented interest in it on Tumblr.

Decontextualized from the museum, its image now drifts in the seas of Tumblr where it has accrued 46,115 reblogs and a quantum more views. Strangely, though, it barely registers any concurrent interest on the museum's own Object of the Day blog where it was first posted on April 12, 2014 (read 93 times), nor in the museum's own collection database (viewed 23 times) between April 1 and today.

Things are different, it appears, not only online but also 'where' online.

Digital humanities professor at University College London, Melissa Terras, asks about institutions' 'most wanted' as a way of probing issues of 'shallow versus deep engagement' and the different publics for our collections. She writes "Asking to see Digitisation's most wanted opens up wider questions of public engagement, the impact of social networks on internet traffic to digitised collections (from highlights posted by the institution, to those identified and shared by others outside it, often quite unexpectedly), and the role of making images of primary historical sources open for others to discover, use and share."

What will be our next unexpected Tumblr success?

This is a wallpaper dado, in the neoclassical style which would be hung at the bottom of the wall between the baseboard and chair rail. As it is located near the floor, the dado is visually supporting the weight of the wall and for this reason it was frequently architectural in nature. The deep colonnade of Corinthian columns and the massive figure of Hercules seem capable of this task.
Hercules, known for his strength, is shown here supporting the weight of the world, while at the same time holding up the wall. Set between the repeating figures of Hercules is a framed vignette of a clothed Venus, standing in a shell being pulled by a pair of dolphins. A winged putto rests on the back of another dolphin nearby. The sun is breaking through the clouds, casting a golden glow on the scene. This vignette is set within a faux stone panel, hung with foliate festoons loaded with fruit. Festoons were a popular motif of neoclassical architecture and of the decorative arts.

This design is a woodblock print of joined sheets of handmade paper. Prior to 1820 all paper was made by hand, in single sheets, which were then glued together end to end to form rolls. A ground color was applied over the entire front surface and then the design was printed, with one block for each color. This design is printed in nine colors over a painted ground of light green.

Numerous wallpapers printed during this period are printed in grisaille, or shades of gray. This paper is printed in a monochrome green color scheme with accents printed in grisaille. The use of this technique made the printed elements appear more sculptural and gave them a look of antiquity. The use of grisaille on this paper allows the figure of Hercules to be the dominant feature, while the more delicate garlands draw attention to the rather subtle landscape scene.

Eve Andrée Laramée is an installation sculptor whose work challenges assumptions about the authority of history, science, and art. This textile, which Laramée designed as the focal point of A Permutational Unfolding, her 1999 Exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center Gallery, confronts the standard history of the computer as a descendant of calculating or statistical devices. It presents an alternative narrative through the history of the textile arts, specifically the jacquard loom.

This history begins with early modern European automata, whose mechanical features were the antecedents for Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s (1752-1834) celebrated loom, created in 1801. Jacquard’s innovation was the use of punch cards to automatically control the raising of the loom’s warp threads and thus determine the woven pattern. Jacquard’s punch cards effectively created a binary code (warp thread either raised or not) and this system was the basis for a further invention, a calculating machine created by British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) in the 1850’s. Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” is generally acknowledged as the precursor to today’s computer technology.

For her Exhibition, Laramée transformed MIT’s List Gallery into a late Baroque-Rocco style French period room. She filled the room with a combination of 19^th and 20^th century artifacts of binary code, including an historical jacquard loom and a primitive memory core panel from a mid-20^th century computer. Laramée designed this brocade fabric for the room’s elaborate curtains and upholstery. Woven by a contemporary jacquard loom fed by a CAD weaving program, rather than punch cards, to control the patterning, the textile itself evidences a continuum that spans almost two centuries.

The elements of Laramée’s design present a rich visual network of information, past and present, about programmable computers. For example, Joseph-Marie Jacquard is prominently featured in a jacket patterned with zeros and ones, a paradigmatic 20^th c motif. The black and white Art Nouveau-like patterned square at Jacquard’s elbow is Laramée’s rendering of a circa 1972 computer chip design. The woman is Ada Lovelace (1816-52), an accomplished mathematician and close friend and supporter of Charles Babbage. The duck is a diagram of the ingenious automaton created by Jacques Vaucanson (1709-82) in 1733, which actually ingested and digested grain and then defecated. The hand is a diagram of the prosthetic created by Ambroise Paré (1510-90) in 1564. The spider signifies today’s World Wide Web. As the textile unfolds, the juxtaposition of these elements and others is revealed, causing a reordering or permutation of the common understanding of the history of computers.

Maleyne M. Syracuse is a candidate for a Masters Degree in the History of Decorative Arts at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/Parsons New School for Design and is President of the Board of Directors of Peters Valley Craft Center. She recently retired as a Managing Director in the Investment Bank at JP Morgan and continues to work part-time as an independent professional in corporate finance and investment management.

Jun Tomita is a Japanese textile artist who has worked with the traditional dyeing technique of kasuri for over two decades, while adding his own rich and contemporary interpretation. Kasuri, the Japanese word for ikat (which is derived from the Malay-Indonesian word mengikat, meaning "to tie or to bind"), has been popular in Japan since the 17th century. The technique was established much earlier, but was used only in very special circumstances on clothing worn mainly by the aristocracy.
In this piece, Tomita employs a warp kasuri where only the warp threads have been bound and dyed. After these steps, he splashes dye on the warp threads and then begins the weaving process. As Tomita weaves, a blurring occurs at the junction of different colors, creating subtleties of colors within colors and a pattern that permanently captures the creative process.

Lux in Tenebris, Latin for "Light in Darkness", is a line from Dylan Thomas’s “One Warm Saturday”, the last story in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.”

“The barman switched on the light. ‘A bit of lux in tenebris.’”

A Latin-quoting barman, a high remark in a lowly setting, light and dark; such correlative contrasts come out in two very different book jacket designs by Alvin Lustig, one selected and one rejected.  The image you see above is the rejected cover.  The image below is the accepted one:

Maquette, Book cover,  Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, ca. 1953.  Alvin Lustig for New Directions Press. Gift of Susan Lustig Peck, 2001-29-2

Lustig writes about his own process when designing a book cover: “Sometimes the symbols are quite obvious and taken from the subject itself. Others are more evasive and attempt to characterize the emotional content of the book”. The two versions here portray both ends of this spectrum.

By tracing the fate of an image, much can be learned about taste, marketing strategies of the time, and factors that may forever remain mysterious.

The chosen cover with a photograph of Thomas smoking on the top and a dog smoking on the bottom is often reproduced, highly visible all over the internet. I grew up seeing it on my parents’ bookshelf.

The other, cryptic, Modern, and abstract, has fallen into obscurity.

All because, on a particular day, one highly influential individual (James Laughlin, editor of New Directions) rejected a poetic image in favor of a more direct one .  The latter image is so concrete it becomes a witty parody of itself. Why select this one? Certainly, New Directions had published plenty of other abstract book jacket covers.

Was the intention to match Thomas’s shocking title? “Thomas claimed in a letter to Vernon Watkins that he ‘kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons.’"

The chosen cover design seems far from the prevailing abstract aesthetic of the Mid-20^th Century. Characterizing the time is a quote by Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, who, in their letter to the New York Times in 1943; state “The world of the imagination…is violently opposed to common sense”.

Thomas and Lustig, great artists and thinkers of the earlier half of the 20^th Century, might gravitate more towards imagination and abstraction. Abstraction was a mode of expression Lustig was keen on and influenced by, a fan of Miro, Klee, and others whose influence can be gleaned here.  

Here, in rejected cover, Lustig constructed a series of universal yet private symbols in response to Thomas’s stories.  These range from stars with varied points, with their accompanying elusive symbolic meanings, to typographic symbols, enlarged and aesthetically pleasing on their own terms.

The other, selected cover is an absurdly concrete illustration of words taken to a comedic extreme, more in keeping with the eventual rejection of Modernism’s subtle mysteries towards a Post-Modern, ironic perspective.  A smoking dog, humorous and obvious, is a tongue-in-cheek nod to a provocative title with immediate impact.

As a museum educator and artist, one comment frequently asked of me is, “Why is THIS artwork in this museum?” Luckily, Cooper-Hewitt has both in their collection!

Reflecting Well, by Junichi Arai, continues his life-long investigation into materials and textile techniques and the transformation of two-dimensional cloth into sculptural and vibrant surfaces. In this polyester and aluminum piece, Arai combines a melt-off technique, which dissolves the metallic thread leaving behind a transparent cloth, with shibori, a type of tie-dyeing technique that, in Reflecting Well, ultimately protects the metallic areas when dyeing the cloth. The results are large, circular, metallic puckers that reflect light and create an incredibly animated cloth.
Since 1950, Arai has been working in some aspect of the textile industry, developing new manufacturing processes. In 1984, he and Reiko Sudo co-founded Nuno, a company and retail store that produces and sells innovative functional fabrics. He has taught textile workshops all over the world and his work is included in the collections of major museums. The museum’s holdings of Arai’s work represent a cross-section of his career.

This design consists of five different structures of ancient Rome, including some of the more well-known ruins such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Roman Forum. All of the structures are seen in silhouette, as are the peculiar cast of characters patrolling them. Appearing in front of each structure are Roman soldiers either on foot, horseback, or riding in a chariot. Both the figures and the structures are highly stylized, while the figures appear as caricatures. The design is printed in two colors on a pale yellow silk ground.

Each of the colors is printed to suggest a linoleum block or rubber stamp print, or possibly the appearance of much wear or abrasion, as one would expect to find on an “ancient” artifact. The Museum collection contains several other wallpaper designs by Hawking for Denst & Soderlund that have a similar appearance, giving his designs a handcrafted look, with a certain elegance.

Clarence Hawking is a graphic artist who joined the firm of Denst and Soderlund in 1951 as one of the chief designers. He remained with the company for a number a years and designed many wallpapers including both repeating patterns and murals. Denst and Soderlund was a Chicago-based company active from 1947-1961 who became known for their stylish and trendy wallpapers. John R. Denst (Jack) and Donald K. Soderlund both graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946 and founded their partnership the following year. The partners remained together until 1961 when Denst set out on his own and founded Jack Denst Designs. After landing a major job with the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, the company began receiving orders from set designers and one of the Jack Denst wallpapers was used in the 1971 thriller “Play Misty for Me.” Denst became known for the whimsical names he gave his designs, which intrigued the producers of “What’s My Line” enough to invite him to appear on their show in the early 1960s.

While the genre of still life painting dates back to ancient times, it had emerged as a specialty by the late sixteenth century. Still lifes depicted mostly inanimate objects and could include natural things such as fruit, flowers or animal trophies, as well as man-made objects such as vessels or books. While it is not known if this firescreen with cat and canary is copying an actual painting, the inclusion of cats in the genre of still life painting became quite prevalent from the seventeenth century on. Most frequently the cat is shown toying with a dead catch of fish, whether just being inquisitive or in the process of having lunch.

Most of the early still life paintings contained a moralistic message which was frequently about the fleeting nature of life. This appears to be the theme applied here. The overall scene displays bounty, fruitfulness and youth. The abundance of fruit displayed is plump and ripe; the various cut flowers are fresh and either in bud or full bloom. The parrot and cat appear vivacious, groomed and well fed. There is no sign of wilt or decay or aging. And to all concerned, be it the home owner, the parrot or the cat, life is good. It's a different story if one happens to be the little yellow bird, where all is not well. As there are two living entities in the print, the parrot and the cat, the fact that the parrot is helping himself to a juicy cherry, is possibly suggesting a similar fate for the cat’s trophy.

Firescreens and overdoors were of a similar format and followed in the nature of paintings or scenic wallpapers in that they did not have a repeat. Firescreens of the paper variety were used to cover the fireplace when nothing was burning to make it more decorative, while overdoors filled the space between the top of the door frame and the ceiling. This firescreen was woodblock-printed in about twenty-eight colors on a deep taupe ground. Four sheets of handmade paper were pasted together to form the support.

It is easy to think, in the age of Pinterest and the Knot, that weddings have never before been so extravagant.  Without knowing the history of weddings in the West, we all too often find ourselves rolling our eyes at 30,000 dollar weddings.  But, those tasty, miniature, artisanal canapés with pickle remoulade (at fifteen dollars a pop) are not actually as generation Y as you might think.  In fact, they are a pretty striking carry over from weddings in Early Modern Europe.  During the Renaissance in particular, lavish weddings were reserved for nobility, merchants, and money men (such as the Medici) – essentially, the top tier of society.

This print from Italy was executed in 1608.  Neptune is perched high above winged male figures who appear to propel the ship along with oars.  What does this have to do with weddings, you might ask?  It is a print from a “Series of Naval Battles for Wedding Festivities of Cosimo Il de'Medici.”  The depicted attraction was likely actualized, along with several others, and floated in large outdoor “oceans” as wedding entertainment.  These spectacles were assuredly only a few among innumerable others that celebrated the union between Cosimo II de’Medici and Archduchess Maria Maddelena of Austria in 1608.  Not only was the marriage a political triumph, but the wedding itself also served a propaganda role--deftly displaying the magnitude of the Medici fortune and the importance of their family.  The food, entertainment, and events were all conspicuous and outlandish, even by today’s standards. 

Cosimo II was a great patron of the arts and it was under his rule, and other members of the Medici family, that weddings became massive public events meant to be striking displays of power and money.  Similar to our current desire to challenge the ephemeral nature of a wedding by taking photographs, the Medici wished to immortalize the union and all that it stood for – both politically and lineally.  This desire provoked the Medici to commission prints of wedding festivities such as the ones  in the Cooper-Hewitt collection.  This made the event portable and tangible, allowing for its easy dissemination throughout the rest of Europe.  It was with events such as these, and their consequent representations, that Italy became one of the culture capitals of Europe during the Renaissance. 

So, the next time you find yourself at a wedding, wondering just how much it costs to wine and dine 250 guests on quail eggs and a delectable vintage named after the happy couple, you at least know when and where it all started.