The Museum’s skyphos, a small wine cup, is from 5th century BC Apulia in Southern Italy, a Greek region at the time. It is in the style of red-figure vase painting, a progressive technique that allowed for greater perspective, contouring of human form, expressiveness and emotional dimensions than the earlier black-figure style.  The technique, originating in Attica, an important cultural center and home to Athens, arrived in Apulia in 530 BC.  The decoration of vase painting first reflected the cross-fertilization of influences from Attica, but over time, adaptations from classic themes blended with local tastes and styles.  Finally, native themes emerged distinctive from Greek culture.  Over 11,000 vases have been uncovered in excavations from this period, mostly in burial sites.

Apulian vase painting developed  two stylistic styles, plain and ornate.  The ornate style was used  for large vases with complex multi-layered figures. The plain was reserved for smaller vases, simple in style, depicting four figures or less.

The Museum’s skyphos appears to be in the plain style. Two figures are depicted, each on opposite sides of the vessel.  On one side, we find a young woman dressed in a long flowing garment called a chiton, arms outstretched, holding a wreath, and perhaps, running to the right.  On the other side sits a naked young man on a draped rock, holding a staff and staring to the right.  Stylized palmetto-like vines form scrolls under and beside the handles. 

So, is the young woman on a romantic quest? Is she honoring a hero returning from games?  Or does this scene represent part of the preparation for an “after -life”?   Are the figures, Apulian  or Athenian?  The story depicted on this skyphos is yet to be identified.

Bluette is a textile by an unknown designer made in the design school Atelier Martine. The school was founded by Paul Poiret (1879 – 1944), a celebrated Parisian couturier known for exotic fashions inspired by the Middle East and Asia. Named for his daughter, Atelier Martine embraced the notion of an unstudied, instinctive creativity. Poiret opened Atelier Martine in 1912 following a European tour where he was greatly impressed by the printed textiles of the Wiener Werkstätte of Vienna. There he saw an integrated approach to fashion and interior design through the use of hand-printed geometric textiles. Inspired by the Viennese commitment to the artistic process, he opened his own Paris school devoted to interior decoration. He selected untrained working-class girls to sketch exuberant, colorful designs of flowers, fruits and animals found at local parks, markets and zoos. Deliberately unsophisticated, the best designs were developed into drapery, upholstery, wallcoverings and carpets.

Produced as a textile and wallcovering, Cooper-Hewitt’s example of Bluette has a large-scale floral design in shades of pink, purple and green on a brown ground. Rendered in a simple outline, each petal and leaf is printed with flat areas of color to create a boldly modern design. Acquired in 1984, Bluette was a gift to the Cooper-Hewitt from Louise Dushkin, daughter of Louis Rorimer (1872 – 1939), a well-known interior designer from Cleveland, Ohio. He most likely purchased Bluette in Paris during one of his many buying trips for American clients. Rorimer believed art was essential to daily life: it was an approach to living he developed while studying art and design in Germany and France. When he returned to the United States, he began designing handcrafted furniture, and later, through a series of strategic mergers and partnerships, he expanded his interior design business to include hotel and residential accounts. The appeal of a textile like Bluette must have been immediate for Rorimer as he was a great admirer modernist European design.

Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695 –1750) is recognized as a creative genius behind the French Rococo style. He first published his influential Livre d'Ornements (Book of Ornaments) in 1734 and then again in 1748. These small booklets were circulated among countless craftsmen and artisans who applied Meissonier’s designs to decorative artwork such as ceramics, metalwork, marquetry, and textiles. 

This sheet, from the later edition, shows a small fanciful scene beneath the design for a silver candlestick. This small view is an early French interpretation of a capricci, fantastic architectural landscapes then popular in Italy. The design could have been applied to a small item, such as the lid of a snuff box.

Meissonnier trained as a silversmith in his hometown of Turin, where he absorbed the experimental atmosphere beginning to permeate the arts in Italy, and developed an inventive design vocabulary that broke with the formal and grand style of the preceding century. 

The miniature view is composed of a tangle of interior decorative elements—cornices, volutes and crests—used with a license that deliberately flouted architectural conventions. The overblown C and S curves which comprise the scene are no longer ornamental, as in the candlestick above, but are momentous architectural forms in their own right. This foreshadows the maturing Rococo impulse to legitimize its characteristically ‘frivolous’ motifs through their integration into structural forms.  

Similar to contemporary Italian capricci which appropriated architectural vocabulary to express pure fantasy, Meissonier’s design liberates ornament from the demands of realism. However, his design differs from the typical views of architecture in a state of ruin, by its portrayal of a complete and thriving environment. The work is typically Rococo in its synthesis of artificial and natural forms, and was an exercise in imagination on the part of an immensely prolific designer.

You can read more about Meissonier and Rococo in our publication Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008 available at shop.cooperhewitt.org

Has Tax Day left you pinching your pennies? Then you may appreciate the secure storage offered by miser’s purses. These oblong purses often have small center slit openings with sliding rings to secure coins in the purses’ ends (though sometimes clasps are used). Although these purses have existed in various forms since the seventeenth-century, they developed the shape seen here in the early nineteenth century. At this time, miser’s purses were called short or long purses (based on their lengths, which were gender specific until the mid-nineteenth century), gentlemen’s purses, or purses. Their reputation as especially tight money holders earned them their “miserly” moniker.

Miser’s purses were made in myriad colors and patterns usually from silk net, knit, or crochet, though sometimes other materials were used. While many of these designs were purely ornamental, some were intended to make the purses more functional. This purse, for example, was worked in two different colors to help its wearer distinguish the contents of each end, for example, gold and silver coins.

Miser’s purses were deeply embedded in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture. They were often given as gifts to friends and family members, and were sometimes sold at fancy or fundraising fairs. The purses’ social functions were adapted by contemporary writers and artists, who used them as literary and artistic devices in their works. Purses appear to help young women capture the attention of male suitors, to serve as representations of filial or familial love, or to foreshadow marriages between characters. The purses and their makers were also parodied by satirists, often in negative depictions of women.

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has an impressive collection of miser’s purses, which I had the opportunity to study while a student in the History of Decorative Arts and Design graduate program, jointly run by Cooper-Hewitt and Parsons, the New School for Design. My research was recently published as The Miser’s Purse, a Cooper-Hewitt DesignFile eBook.

You can find the full selection of Cooper-Hewitt DesignFile eBooks here.

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.

The provenance of this piece is kind of a fun rags to riches story. This wallpaper is a very mass-produced example of mid-century design, containing a dense pattern of organic, stylized foliage forms with boomerang overlays, quite typical for the 1950s. The paper was donated to the Museum by a woman who was interning in the Wallcoverings Department, who happened to mention that her husband had been walking down the street and found this cool wallpaper in the garbage. When the intern was telling the story, the curator was intrigued and asked if she could see it. It turned out to be this really fun design. It’s well drawn, very vibrant, and quite representative of the period in which it was produced. The 1950s were a very high-period for wallpaper usage. The war had ended and new homes were being built for the returning veterans, and this was the last time in the 20th century when everyone used wallpaper. The Cooper-Hewitt collection contains nearly 1,000 different wallpapers produced during this period.

After seeing the paper the curator liked the design and presented it for acquisition to the Museum’s permanent collection. After acquisition it was then shown in an exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt, From Kitsch to Corbusier: Wallpapers from the 1950s. It also appeared on the cover of a desk calendar that accompanied the exhibition. It  was then borrowed by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1995 to be shown in Vital Forms: American Art in the Atomic Age, 1940-60. So from being dumped in the garbage by someone who thought it was trash, to being acquired by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and included in exhibitions at two major museums, this wallpaper definitely achieved its 15 minutes of fame in a story that would have made Andy Warhol proud.

A set of eighteen remarkable buttons each feature a small painting of groups of people of mixed races in a British West Indies island, then called Dominica, now Haiti and Santo Domingo. The artist, subjects and traditional history all collide to make the buttons an extraordinary combination of artistic significance, social history, and inventive design use.

Look at all the details the artist included on this very small surface! Think of the idea that someone would choose to wear paintings as buttons. That idea might make sense if the stated history is true that these belonged to Toussaint l’Ouverture, the former slave who became ruler of Haiti and adorned the jacket he took with him when exiled to France after his capture. They would have been his treasured pictures of the island.  Each button has a different scene-a variety of well-dressed mixed race and black women, African servants, and a few whites, all set in tropical landscapes with palms and thatched houses.

Brunias’s full scale paintings have similar scenes; some traveled to London, commissions  for Royal Academy exhibitions, others were for rich sugar plantation owners. These owners were not always white; black and mixed race owners’ families are shown wearing the hats and clothing of status: European dress for the wealthy; various amounts of textile patterns establish the roles of other figures.

The people depicted in the buttons are mostly black. Their clothing runs the full range from the wealthy European style to the simplest. 

Some scenes on the buttons match engravings by Brunias, so a few researchers have thought that the buttons were painted from the prints by someone else. But close attention to the style suggests Brunias’s hand, so perhaps he created designs from which he did both buttons and prints. I wonder if Brunias’s interest in the multi-racial culture with blacks as part of a society with fashion might have made him subtly sympathetic to Toussaint l’Ouverture. 

The history that accompanied these buttons connecting them to Toussaint makes sense. However, it lacks documentation for a few generations before they came up at auction in the 1930s, when the descendants of the boy to whom Toussaint is said to have given the jacket conveyed the history through the auctioneer to a French dealer who purchased the buttons for Mrs. Robert Noyes. She lent them to Cooper-Hewitt, where they later entered the Collection. They were detailed enough for them to provide design inspiration for a New York Theater Guild 1942 production of the play “The Pirate” with Lunt and Fontaine. I would love to see photos of that!

From the New York Subway system to American Airlines, Massimo Vignelli is responsible for some of the most iconic and enduring graphic identities of the twentieth century. Born in Milan in 1931, Vignelli displayed an interest and aptitude in design at a relatively early age. At sixteen, he began working as a draftsman at Castiglioni Architects in Milan. Here, he not only became immersed in the practice of architectural design, but also in the ideas of key modernist thinkers. 

As a designer, Vignelli firmly believes that design should be clean, simple, and completely timeless. He detests trends and what he refers to as the “culture of obsolescence.” For him, good design surpasses the merely ephemeral, something he believes causes waste and “visual pollution.”  He favors primary colors and simple typefaces. “I don’t believe,” he has written, “that when you write dog the type should bark!”  While Vignelli limits himself to just a few colors and typefaces, he is able to create intriguing, eye-catching designs through his play of proportion, space, and balance. Like many of his modernist peers, he is obsessed with the grid and his negotiation with its stark boundaries produces elegant and beautiful results.

In 1967, Massimo Vignelli was commissioned to redesign the graphic identity of the American furniture company, Knoll.  Known for its modernist furniture by designers such as Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, and Harry Bertoia, Knoll’s products are perfectly suited to Vignelli’s timeless aesthetic. In the graphic program that Vignelli produced for Knoll, one can see many of his ideas at work, from his preference for clear, organized space to his use of the new (at the time) Helvetica typeface, something Vignelli no doubt favors because of its versatile simplicity. This poster depicts the Knoll logotype in large letters that overlap to form an almost abstract pattern. While a number of Knoll’s products are depicted as line drawings on the back of the poster, none are visible on its front. Alone, the colorful, bold type communicates beautifully the power and elegance of the Knoll brand.

Of the 300 folding fans in the Cooper-Hewitt, Nation Design Museum’s collection, very few have as fascinating a provenance as this beautiful fan designed by the artist Simon Lissim (1900-1981).  Lissim was a prolific painter, stage designer, illustrator, metalwork designer, ceramicist, and textile designer whose works are found in the collections of over 70 museums worldwide.  In addition to this folding fan, the Cooper-Hewitt collection includes drawings, porcelain, silverware, and buttons designed by Lissim.

Drawing: Design for a Plate, 20th century. Designed by Simon Lissim. Gift of Simon Lissim. 1974-82-26.

Plate, 1927. Designed by Simon Lissim. Bequest of Simon Lissim. 1981-37-2. 

Simon Lissim was born in Kiev and began his career as a stage designer for the Kiev Repertory Theater.  He was closely allied with the Russian theater world, including Sergei Diaghilev and Léon Bakst. Lissim moved to Paris in 1919, where he continued to design for the theater, opera, and ballet throughout Europe.  It was in Paris, around 1922, that Lissim designed and decorated this fan as an engagement gift for his fiancée, Irène Zalchopine whose initials, “IZ” are centrally placed on the fan leaf.  The abstract exotic natural motifs, which he used to decorate the fan closely relate to his other work of the period, as illustrated in the images below from a book in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Plate 11, Textile Design (1926), from Simon Lissim, by Raymond Cogniat, published in Paris, 1933.

Plate 14, Vase, “The Bird” (1924), produced by the Manufacture National de Sèvres, from Simon Lissim, by Raymond Cogniat, published in Paris, 1933.

The fan was assembled, using Lissim’s painted leaf, by the famous fan house in Paris, Duvelleroy.  The rivet of the fan, which is the metal pin at the base of the fan that holds the tortoiseshell sticks together, is also embossed with Irène’s initials. 

In 1941, Lissim emigrated to the United States, where he continued with his design work and became involved in design education through a program at the New York Public Library and as a professor at the City College of the City University of New York.  In an interesting footnote to this story, Lissim’s gift of the fan to Cooper-Hewitt in 1973 was made in memory of Agnes Howson Waples (1874-1968). Mrs. Waples was the mother of Dorothea Howson Waples (1907-1994), who worked in the New York Public Library from 1939 until the year 1946, when she married Simon Lissim.

This charger belonged to the Meissen Swan Service, one of the largest and most magnificent porcelain dinner services ever created. Produced at the Dresden manufactory between the years of 1737 and 1743, the service comprised of over 2,000 unique pieces; its splendor is illustrative of both the artistic genius of the factory’s master modeler, Johann Joachim Kändler, as well as the ambitions of its director, Heinrich Count von Brühl, for whom the service was commissioned.

The plate displays the coat-of-arms of Heinrich Count von Brühl on the occasion of his wedding in 1731. At this time, the fashion for ornately painted heraldic porcelain was in decline, as sculptural relief modeling grew in popularity. The Brühl arms are relatively small and marginalized; the plate’s primary decoration is the beautifully modeled central motif of two swans floating serenely on rippling water amidst rushes and reeds. They are accompanied by a pair of heron, one of which is in flight.  The sky spirals out across the cavetto, presenting a shimmering sunburst.  The entire service is a tour de force in porcelain modeling, from the low relief decoration of its plates, to the full sculptural glory of its centerpieces. J.J. Kändler was skillful in exploiting the sculptural potential of porcelain; he is considered one of the greatest modelers in ceramic history.

The aquatic theme of the Swan Service is a play on the name Brühl, which means a ‘marshy ground’; depicted is a delightful selection of marine flora and fauna: snail, shells, oyster, dolphins, and coral; as well as mythological figures associated with water: Neptune, sirens, mermaids and more. In preparation for his work, Kändler spent several days making careful drawings of shells in the natural history collections of the Royal Palace.  The era’s growing interest in naturalism and organic forms, a trend that would  come to characterize the Rococo, is seen emerging in the service.

The sheer extravagance and unprecedented scale of the Swan Service is a symptomatic of von Brühl’s love of ostentation. As director of the factory, it was his privilege to commission whatever porcelain he wished, free of charge. With the Meissen Swan Service on his table, Count von Brühl must have hosted incredible feasts; the extravagance of his table service would have been matched by extraordinary delicacies. It is possible that with the Swan Service, the splendour of von Brühl’s table might have exceeded the King’s.

This off-set lithograph shows a black and white image of a film strip depicting men carrying signs and marching forward.  The juxtaposition of the vivid orange paint splatters on a grey background draws the viewer into the piece. Strips of orange strategically frame the edges of the rectangle, and appear to sit on top of the surface. In the upper right hand corner, text reads “TEATR NOWY"; the text across bottom reads "Oskarzony: CZERWIEC PIECDZIESIATSZESC.” The direct translation from Polish into English is “New Theater,” and “The Accused, June 1956.”

What makes this theater new? The theater the text refers to depicts a historical landmark that represented a shift between the two World Wars and Poland’s sole source of entertainment at the time. The antithesis of the old Polski Theater, calling it the New Theater suggested a less serious, light hearted genre. The founder of New Theatre was Mieczysław Rutkowski. Throughout a twenty year time span, many directors held positions there and various dramas and concerts were performed. By the 1980’s the theater became known for its political involvement, a prime example of this being the performance staged in 1980 entitled "The Defendant:  June 1956". This political performance references the The Poznań 1956 protests, also known as Poznań 1956 uprising. The working class were protesting against communist dictatorial government and better working conditions. The protest resulted in many injuries to the Polish people and a period of political persecution.

The poster illustrates a major shift in society; furthermore associating the act of protesting as an act of performance. This image is a culmination of many time periods, and an architectural and artistic revolution. The marching men mimic the move for change through time. The paint splatter graphically connotes the protests violent reaction while also celebrating a new arena for Poland where their voices could now be heard.

Le Garde-meuble, ancien et moderne (Furniture repository, ancient and modern), was a periodical consisting entirely of illustrations depicting French furniture, interiors, and window treatments.  It was published in Paris from 1839 to around 1935 originally under the direction of furniture designer Désiré Guilmard. The title, Le Garde-meuble refers to the name of the office Louis XIV created in 1663 charged with the care of royal residences and their furnishings. Guilmard added the subtitle, ancien et moderne, to indicate that images would depict Louis XVI, Louis XV, Gothic, Renaissance and other historic revival styles as well as more “modern” styles that incorporated technological innovations that better accommodated nineteenth century lifestyles.

Le Garde-meuble was issued every other month containing nine loose lithographic plates with three images of sièges (seating furniture), three of meubles (case furniture, i.e., non-seating objects such as cabinets, chests, tables, etc.) and three of tentures (bed and window hangings).  This seemingly odd arrangement has its origins in the French pre-Revolutionary guild tradition when chairs were made only by menuisiers (carpenters) and case furniture by the ébénistes (cabinetmakers). On occasion, ceiling plans and floor plans with furniture arrangements, wall ornamentation and window drapery patterns for dining rooms, parlors and bedrooms were included. 

The more than 400 colored lithographs held by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Library represent a nearly complete collection of the early plates of Le Garde-meuble dating from the late 1830s to the 1850s.  They depict richly tinted, very detailed, and skillfully delineated sideboards, dining, side and gaming tables, armoires, beds, bookcases, upholstered sofas, tête-à-têtes, dining and side chairs, washstands, prie-dieus, jardinières, desks and storage cabinets, as well as drapery patterns in revival and modern styles. An online display of Le Garde-meuble is available.

The clarity of the intricate details of the carving, marquetry, inlay, fabric patterns, garniture (trimmings) and passementerie (braids, tapes and tassels) and the dense glazing suggesting furniture surface treatments employing gleaming French-polishes, ebonizing, grained-painted highlights, and glistening gilt bronze mounts additionally make Le Garde-meuble a rich research resource.  No doubt, Le Garde-meuble was originally created to promote French design worldwide and to inspire decorators, architects, cabinetmakers, upholsterers and designers who regularly traced and adapted its detailed forms, styles, colors and patterns. Today, it remains a valuable visual resource documenting historic styles as well as tool for contemporary furniture restorers, set designers, historians, curators, historic preservationists, upholsterers, and interior decorators.

This parquet border design came into the collection with a group of wallpapers all produced during the late 19th century. And if memory serves me correctly, this group of papers was found in San Francisco which means they survived the great earthquake and fire of 1906 which devastated the city. This was a diverse group of papers ranging from high-end block printed designs to more inexpensive mass-produced machine-printed designs. This roll of paper belonged to the latter group. It was printed in very few colors on very thin paper with a wood pulp composition. Having the identical design printed two across the width of the paper identifies this as a border meant to be cut apart. This paper’s design was always perplexing to me as the thought of using this on the wall as a border seemed awkward and I couldn’t imagine what fill pattern you would coordinate this with on the wall.

Then one day I was in the Design Library doing some research on an unrelated topic and came across an article in the October 1883 issue of Decorator & Furnisher that talked of papering your floor. I had never heard of this decorating concept but I immediately thought of this parquet wallpaper. The article gives full instructions for preparing the existing floor and adhering the wallpaper, followed by coatings of size and varnish, which makes the surface washable. The design of this wallpaper then made perfect sense. It was a border design but was intended for use on the floor and not the wall. Ornamental parquet borders were fashionable at this time but were expensive and probably not affordable to a lot of people. The center area of the floor was usually covered with a large rug, which left the border running around the perimeter of the room as the only exposed area of flooring. As this is also the area least traveled, paper borders become a viable option. This less expensive alternative to wood borders made this home fashion accessible to the middle and lower-middle consumer. While this might seem like an odd use of “wallpaper,” designers continued receiving patents for floor paper designs until at least 1903.

How does a critic design textiles? With a typewriter, of course! Bernard Rudofsky was one of design’s great polymath thinkers. The exhibitions he organized in mid-century New York provoked designers to look at the world in new ways. Trained as an architect in his native Moravia (present day Austria), he was not licensed to practice architecture in the United States. He went on to have an enormously influential career as a curator, writer, critic, exhibition designer, and even fashion designer.

Rudofsky’s screen-printed textile “Fractions” was part of a series of fabrics called the Stimulus Collection, commissioned by Schiffer Prints in 1949. Joining a group of well-known artists and designers who had never created textile patterns before, Rudofsky used his typewriter as a design tool, exploiting the regular width of standard typewriter letters to create fabrics gridded off with evenly sized, mechanically made units. Other contributors to the Stimulus series included George Nelson, Ray Eames, Paul McCobb, Edward Wormley, and Salvador Dali.

Born in Moravia in 1905, Rudofsky trained as an architect and traveled widely during his youth in the 1920s and 30s, spending time across Europe, the Middle East, and South America before settling in New York City in 1941. Rudofsky’s travels exposed him to a rich variety of indigenous design practices. Producing copious sketches and photographs of the world around him, he marveled at the native intelligence of villages, buildings, and artifacts created by builders and makers attuned to the local climate and the natural forms and rhythms of human habitation.

Rudofksy’s early travels inspired a lifetime of incisive books and exhibitions that critiqued both modernist theory and popular culture. His exhibition Are Clothes Modern? (Museum of Modern Art, 1944) ridiculed the incessant cycle of Western fashion, which for centuries had forced the human body into shapes that were both unhealthy and uncomfortable. Also at MoMA, Rudofsky organized the influential exhibition Architecture without Architects (1964), which celebrated vernacular modes of building and dwelling. One of his last exhibitions, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, was held at Cooper-Hewitt Museum in 1980.

We are proud to include in our collection this iconic work by one of design’s great minds, a man who helped museums rethink the way we look at the landscape of people and things.

The South Dome, Yosemite, CaliforniaThe South Dome, Yosemite, California

Thomas Moran was one of the artists who in the mid-nineteenth century produced landscape images of the West that contributed to and reinforced the development of an American identity.   These views, however, were frequently constructed, edited, or manipulated to reinforce a sense of national pride and feeling of unity during and immediately following the Civil War.  This ethereal view of the famous site of Half Dome in Yosemite was based on Moran’s many sketches of the scene, drawings and photographs by other artists, as well as his recollections of his many visits there. 

Cooper-Hewitt’s Moran collection includes two other significant works on paper showing the same scene over more than a decade; a black and white sketch from 1872 and an etching from 1887. 

Drawing: Half Dome, Yosemite, 1872. Artist: Thomas Moran. Gift of Thomas Moran. 1917-17-15. 

In the earlier view, Moran is located in the middle of tall woods on a hillside opposite the bald mountain.  Following a standard landscape convention going back to Thomas Cole in America, he places tall dark Sequoia trees behind some large boulders in the lower right corner to create the feeling of distance between the foreground and the upper section of Half Dome looming beyond. 

Print: The South Dome, Yosemite Valley, 1887. Artist: Thomas Moran. Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. Gustav E. Kissel. 1949-102-2. 

A comparison of this sketch and the etching made fifteen years later shows that the artist in the etching has captured an aerial view from further away and at a higher angle.  Moran retains some of the trees in the earlier sketch but they are much smaller in respect to the landscape and the two boulders have become large outcroppings of rock on the near mountain side.

The fresh and airy watercolor view of Half Dome from 1873 uses the same artistic convention of placing dark trees in the lower right corner to establish the foreground but rather than fill the front plane with trees he employs several  large rocks or boulders.  Behind the foreground plane, the hillside slips away into the valley from which grows the Half Dome and two other mountain ranges behind.  The beautiful purple shadows on the distant mountains create the sensation of a cold wintery day in the late afternoon.  Most likely, Moran constructed this highly finished watercolor in his studio rather than on the spot in the open landscape.  He referred to this watercolor when creating the 1887 etching that follows the same basic composition.

The point of this brief discussion of the Half Dome views is that Moran edited out what he would have actually observed to achieve the best possible view of this amazing landscape that has become part of the American imagination.  Artistic images like these were among the factors that convinced Congress to declare Yosemite a national park in 1890. 

Jack Lenor Larsen (b.1927) is one of America’s most prolific and innovative 20^th Century textiles designers. He came to prominence in the 1950s with his distinctive hand-woven casement fabrics for the commercial contract market. But he was not surprised to later become best known for his sumptuous printed fabrics like Primavera. For Larsen, it was all about color. “My goal from the sixties,” he said, “was to bring the effulgence of country gardens indoors…”[1]

The intricate floral pattern for Primavera, inspired by the paintings of Gustav Klimt, took Larsen and freelance artist Don Wight more than a year to perfect. With so much going on – exuberant clusters of small flower heads, shadowy leaves, and pulsing biomorphic shapes, all scattered freely against a ground of wavy stripes – the pattern had to be just right.  And it had to be printed on a fabric that would show it to best advantage.

Sensuous velvet was the ideal medium for Primavera’s rich, intoxicating design. But in the late 1950s, it was almost impossible to screen print complex patterns on traditional velvets. The dye could not penetrate the thick pile. Larsen the weaver was not deterred. After extensive experimentation, his studio successfully wove a cotton velvet, luxurious to the touch, with a pile low enough to take the hand screen print dye with no loss of color intensity, a first in the American textile industry. Primavera was introduced as part of Larsen’s Palette ’61 collection with deeply saturated hues, in a variety of exotic colorways.

Primavera’s energetic composition and colors worked well for furnishings in open, airy modern interiors and was perfect for the freewheeling, exuberant residential market of the sixties. As a reviewer in Industrial Design noted: “It is not easy to be rampantly luxuriant and succeed; [Primavera] does.”[2] In fact, in its day, Primavera was the most successful printed velvet in the industry. Today it remains an icon of the period.  

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.

By the time of his death in 1799, George Washington had become one of America’s first national heroes. This drawing is an example of one way the American public coped with the first President’s death: through mourning pictures.

Simply done in black and white, the drawing depicts Washington’s home at Mount Vernon with sailboats on the Potomac in the background. I was drawn to this idyllic image because it contrasts a peaceful American landscape with a prominent symbol of Washington’s death, his tomb, located in the foreground. I was also intrigued that this drawing was created twenty years after Washington died, which highlights his lingering presence in the minds of early Americans. An even greater indication of Washington’s lasting importance is that the drawing’s primary use of chalk and pen suggests that it is unlikely the work of a professional artist—even amateurs felt it was important to create works that mourned the President’s passing. Although Washington was no longer physically present, this drawing underscores his mythology and how he represented early American ideals.

With Washington’s passing, the public grappled with the question of how to best mourn the man who had transformed from a prominent private citizen to a national symbol. Mourning pictures were a solution drawn from the English decorative arts tradition. Generally small-scale, these images often featured neoclassical motifs and emphasized themes from nature. These commemorative images appeared throughout the fledgling nation as either prints for public consumption or as amateur works for an individual’s personal use. They were incredibly popular as the young country sought to create its own national iconography in the early years of its governance. The Tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon reflects a trend in American art that sought to balance the commemoration and commercialization of one of the United States’s first iconic heroes.

When I saw a few of these wonderful butterfly brooches while creating the checklist as curator of Cooper-Hewitt’s 2011 exhibition Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels two things came immediately to mind. The first was what perfect Cooper-Hewitt objects they were, as examples of jewelry design, and as examples of Japanese lacquerwork, a technique represented in the collection but not in jewelry.  The wonderful combination of historic techniques from two cultures combined to create a contemporary object appealed to me for the collection. 

The other thought was how wonderful a whole cluster of butterflies would look together in the former conservatory of the Carnegie Mansion, now part of the Museum, with the greenery of the garden around them.  Fortunately, the exhibition designer agreed with me, and created a large bubble for them right on access with the openings to the conservatory.  In between came a great search to see how many butterflies could be found for the installation.  What I found was that although the group was a great effect, I also was drawn to study the individual characteristics of each one. 

When Van Cleef & Arpels said they would be willing to donate two of the butterfly brooches to the collection, choosing from a number of designs made me appreciate the individual qualities of each, while I weighed the design merits of the ones I wanted to present.  The two that I chose are quite different.

 
The butterfly form is created in gold with a mother-of-pearl base in the Van Cleef & Arpels workshops.  The pieces are then sent to Japan where the lacquering is created to previously approved designs based on Japanese symbolism. These master craftsmen have been trained in centuries-old  lacquering techniques, such as those used in lacquer inro, flattened cylindrical boxes with compartments that often held medicine.  Junichi Hakose, maker of the butterfly’s lacquer renders traditional design sources with a modern eye, enhancing them with the use of materials such as eggshell worked into the lacquer for innovative finishes.

The name Araiso U refers to water. The lacquer shows large waves, a motif based on the Japanese sea found in Japanese prints and in Christopher Dresser’s Japanese-influenced ceramics.

To the Japanese maker, water represents strength, power, clearness, depth and unity. It can be calm as well as aggressive. Pure and serene, water may be fun or inspire fear; it is an uncontrollable element. Here it seems both powerful and fun as it gives texture to the butterfly’s  wings, while the white surf capping the waves is rendered in diamonds.  This referencing the past while creating something new, is part of the continuum of design that I like to seek out in good contemporary design.

You can find the catalogue for Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels at shop.cooperhewitt.org

When I first saw this Noh robe I thought about the changing of seasons, though not the change from winter to spring that I am eagerly anticipating at the moment. The robe’s colorful brocaded chrysanthemums remind me of the beginning of autumn. The robe conjures images of the chrysanthemum’s overwhelming beauty during the Japanese fall celebration, kiku matsuri. The gilded paper shines through the warm terracotta silk fabric and illuminates the carefully patterned, iconic flowers, reminding me of the warm, long evenings at the beginning of fall.

 But this robe has a grander story to tell. Dating from about 1800, brocaded robes like this one were used in Japanese Noh theater.  Noh Theater is a combination of dance, chant, music, mime and costume, and has been performed in Japan for over 500 years. The costume itself is considered to be part of the scenery, as the stiff fabric folding over the body creates a dramatic silhouette on stage. The intricate motifs and colorful costumes serve as an extension of a characters’ mood and give the audience a clue to the actor’s emotions. The Noh costume helps transport both the actor and the audience into the play.[i]  I can imagine how magnificent Cooper-Hewitt’s Noh robe once looked on stage as it moved gracefully with the actor. The craftsmanship and beauty of the fabric combined with the function and purpose of the costume makes this robe an important example of design in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection.

Nadia Vanek is Cooper-Hewitt’s School Programs intern for Spring 2013. She is currently earning her Masters Degree in Museum Education at Bank Street College of Education. Nadia is from Los Angeles and holds an undergraduate degree in Studio Art: Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. 

Embossed and gilt leather hangings were one of the earliest known wallcoverings. Frequently referred to as Spanish leather, these wallcoverings were widely made across Europe. This example dates to the mid-18th century and is designed in the Rococo style as can be seen in the scrolling diaper or trellis framework and the asymmetrical arrangements of the floral bouquets. Always one of the most costly wallcoverings available, gilt leathers have never totally fallen out of fashion and new leather can still be purchased today. To create a piece of gilt leather for walls, the leather is first tanned. The entire surface is then covered with a layer of silver gilt and brushed with yellow varnish to give it a golden appearance. The leather is then turned upside down and pressed into a mold to emboss the surface. It is them painted in oil colors to further decorate the surface. Silver gilt was the only metal used to cover the face of the leather, as the guilds were very strict in this regard. On a recent trip to Boston I visited the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum and was pleasantly surprised to find an entire gallery covered with gilt leather. The antique gilt leathers have a tactile surface unlike any other wallcoverings. The layer of silver gilt reflects the light and exudes a warmth and energy not realized by other surface treatments. More contemporary embossed leathers copy the patterns of the antique examples but their use of metallic pigments in place of the silver gilt don’t have quite the same effect. To install the gilt leather hangings they were frequently tacked onto boards which were then hung on the wall. The pieces could also be stitched together. Many of the gilt leather pieces have aged very well as can be seen in this piece, while others show the ravages of time.

Anyone who has scuffed their brand new sneakers can attest to the difficulty of keeping shoes in good condition. One of the best ways that Cooper Hewitt’s conservation department can ensure the preservation of the collection is through proper storage. Take for instance the recently acquired pair of Nike HTM FlyKnit Racer shoes.  While the sneakers are new, it is our responsibility to create storage that will support and protect in order to best slow deterioration and preserve their current state. The shoebox they came in doesn’t cut it--the brown cardboard box and tissue are acidic.

A custom box was built out of acid-free board, which creates a pH neutral barrier protecting the shoes from two of their biggest enemies, light and dust. The box front drops down, which allows an examiner to easily access the shoes by sliding out the support tray. The tray was built with cutout, graded depressions where the soles can rest, securing the shoe from sliding. Last is a layer of cotton stockinette with enough texture to prevent the shoes from shifting during transport.

Interior of shoe box with support tray. Photo courtesy of the author.

Their innovative knit design is the component that posed the biggest support challenge. The knitted structure allows the shoe to effectively mold to the wearer’s foot by flexing, stretching, and contracting with each movement of the runner. This flexibility means that the shoes have the possibility of stretching out or collapsing over time if improperly stored. Interior supports were made by sewing two muslin pillows stuffed with polyfill to fit the inner dimensions of the shoe. It’s a Goldilocks moment – if the supports are too small, the shoe can collapse over time because it’s unsupported; too big and the supports can stretch out the shoe.

Sewing an inner support pillow.  Photo courtesy of Matilda McQuaid.