An intrepid rescuer, clad in a seaman’s oilskin garb, and a swooning maiden, unprepared for the elements and limp in his arms, are thrust together by calamity. A blank sky with a threatening storm cloud heightens their isolation. We wonder where they are headed: at what or to whom does the hero direct his gaze?

In his Study for “The Life Line,” c. 1883, Winslow Homer places his protagonists on a white sheet of paper, separated from what we imagine their surroundings might be. The lack of a detailed setting urges us to focus in on the intimate coupling at the points of connection – the rescuer’s thumb grazing her breast, his other hand cupping her soft shoulder and supporting her head, and the contrast of his sinewy, dark forearm to her thin, white garment. Homer’s drawing allowed the artist to work out the important aspects of his figural grouping in preparation for the final painting, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Life Line, 1884.  Winslow Homer, American, 1836 – 1910. Oil on canvas,
28 5/8 x 44 3/4 inches (72.7 x 113.7 cm). The George W. Elkins Collection, 1924.

The only distraction for the viewer from the two figures is the breeches buoy that connects them. This device, a life-preserving ring with integrated short pants, moves by a block along a life line during ship-to-shore rescues. What is omitted in the study and, indeed, mostly omitted in the final painting, is the rest of the narrative. Like a photographer viewing a scene through a telephoto lens, Homer is creating his own “zoomed in” representation of a life line rescue.

American pride in the developing professionalization of the U.S. Life-Saving Service (USLSS) during the last half of the nineteenth century inspired many artistic representations of sea rescue. Conventional renderings for popular periodicals of  disaster response and frequent brigade drills attempted to embrace the full scene – the shore, the ship, and the rescued - thereby calling for an unsatisfying long distance view.

Page from Harper's, April 16, 1881.

In contrast to depictions that leave much in the way of human drama to the imagination, Homer’s close-up perspective enhances the connection between viewer and victim and allows us a rare intimacy.

Homer was no stranger to the thrill of sea rescue. After his stay in Cullercoats, England – a village at the forefront of life-saving technology - he traveled to Atlantic City in the summer of 1883 and befriended the USLSS men there, perhaps seeking an analogue to scenes he had grown accustomed to in England. He took the idea for The Life Line back with him to New York, where he started work on the painting, and subsequently to Prouts Neck, Maine, where he finished the picture. On the rooftop of his New York studio, Homer supposedly drenched his models with buckets of water in an attempt to faithfully reproduce a scene of two ocean-soaked figures. The finished nature and fine details of the drawing attest to the hard work accomplished in the studio setting.

Ultimately, Homer made alterations between the drawing and the final painting.  Most notably, he obscured the face of the rescuer, thereby directing attention to the maiden. Cloaking the hero’s identity allowed one lifesaver to act as proxy for the unseen brigade of onshore heroes pulling the couple to safety.  The painting hints at the remains of the ship and the direction of the shore, elements wholly absent from the drawing. The innovation Homer brought to depicting a life line scene as a union of two strangers is perhaps even more evident in his drawing than it is in the resultant painting.

For an in depth study of The Life Line and its artistic precedents, I encourage you to take a look at Kathleen Foster's exhibition catalogue Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line” for which I was delighted to serve as curatorial first mate!

Margaret Adler researches and writes about historic American art and popular culture. She was the 2011-2012 Barra Foundation Fellow at the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In the Textiles collection is a wonderful example of a dyer’s record book for printed textiles. The book has special significance as it was the personal property of Edmund Barnes, a textile dyer and printer from northern England. Barnes was working at an unspecified print works, probably in the early 1820s, when he began recording his dye recipes. The inside cover has an inscription: “Blackford Bridge near Bury,” which is near Manchester, England – an area known for its leading role in the development and mass manufacture of printed textiles in the nineteenth century.

Page from Edmund Barnes' record book showing swatches and notes.

Study of Barnes’ book reveals that at some point in late 1820s, Barnes left England for New Hampshire where he was employed by the Dover Manufacturing Company to teach American apprentices the practice of “steam printing,” a process used to produce colorfast fabric. His first entry there is “Dover Nov 18th 1829," and he continued to add recipes and swatches until the early 1830s. “Providence” is inscribed on the inside back cover of the book, and research shows that Barnes left New Hampshire for Rhode Island as another of his record books is in the Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Barnes worked in the textile industry in the period before the development of synthetic dyes. Cotton could be resistant to the many forms of dyestuffs that readily dyed fibers like silk and wool. Barnes’ book contains dye recipes for cotton that include typical ingredients like cochineal, madder and logwood. Other substances used were alum, dung, lignin, pipe clay, olive oprussiate of potassium, and chromate of potash. Some of these ingredients are metallic salts or mordants traditionally used in applying dyestuffs to cotton. Mordants act on dye molecules by breaking their existing chemical bonds so they will form new bonds with the cotton fabric. The dyer's record book provides a fascinating glimpse into the chemistry and manufacture of early nineteenth century textiles.

Alexander Girard was trained as an architect and began practicing architecture and interior design in the 1920s, and became the design director for Herman Miller’s textile division in 1952. Girard also became fascinated by international folk art which he began collecting on his travels in the 1930s and managed to amass over 100,000 pieces including toys, costumes, masks, textiles, beadwork and paintings. This formal training as an architect and love of folk art designs are two streams of inspiration apparent in Girard’s work. Many of his designs are strongly geometric and streamlined expressing the precision required of an architect. His use of bright colors reflects the influence of folk art designs. The use of bright colors was unusual in this time when the norm was for muddy or dulled-down color palettes.

This wallpaper collection designed for Herman Miller in 1953 contains eight different patterns with each available in multiple colorways. All of the papers are printed in a single color on a range of neutral grounds, and as they were designed to coordinate with Girard’s line of textiles, they helped create a more harmonious interior. A number of these patterns are available today as both textiles and wallcoverings through Maharam.

Several of Girard’s designs were included in the 1953 Good Design Show, a series of exhibitions jointly sponsored by the Merchandise Mart of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Girard was also responsible for the design of the exhibition space for this installment.

Today is Alexander Girard’s birthday!

Check out the Girard Alphabet Blocks and other Girard pieces at shop.cooperhewitt.org!

Years ago, I was out sick the week that my fellow high school students studied the periodic table.  I’ve always blamed missing that foundational moment of scientific education for my very poor mastery of some basic chemistry.  But there are certain concepts that I have had the opportunity to learn through personal experience.  Every day when I try to make salad dressing, I am confronted with one of them—oil and water just won’t mix.

Tragically, we were all reminded of the dire consequences of this aspect of chemical polarity three years ago, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  In the fall of 2010, as the hard work of the cleanup began, Tom Galle and Cecilia Azcarate Isturiz, the creative team at the innovative communications agency Happiness Brussels, approached the British graphic designer Anthony Burrill.  Isturiz and Galle wanted to create a project that would raise money for the restoration efforts.  Together they devised the idea of producing a benefit poster that would be printed with oil from the spill.  Burrill, whose work often features witty yet commonplace slogans set in bold types and bright colors, was intrigued by the proposal, and felt drawn to the opportunity to produce something positive out of the devastating disaster. 

Burrill completed his design within days.  Galle and Isturiz then flew to Louisiana, armed with buckets to capture the oil that had leeched into the sandy beaches of the coastline.  But when they arrived, they discovered that the entire beach had been cordoned off.  Undeterred, the pair decided to stick around, and when the BP security personnel left for lunch, they slipped past the barriers and quickly filled their buckets with the crude saturated sand. 

The team brought the oil to Purple Monkey Design, a commercial print shop based in New Orleans. The printers mixed the oil and sand with extender base, which allowed the oil-turned-ink to pass smoothly through a screen that had been stenciled with Burrill’s design.  When the oil was pushed through the screen with a squeegee onto the paper, it produced a shimmering, golden color that gave radiance to Burrill’s eloquent design of the straightforward idiom, which transformed into a slogan of protest and a grave warning: “OIL & WATER DO NOT MIX.” 

The posters were sold through a website, with all proceeds benefiting the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL).  Happiness Brussels produced a short film about the making of the posters, which you can watch below.

OIL & WATER DO NOT MIX from Happiness Brussels on Vimeo.

This poster is part of the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, co-organized by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Walker Art Center.  The exhibition will be traveling to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, opening this July.  You can find the exhibition catalogue at shop.cooperhewitt.org

Joseph Urban’s design for the Roof Garden at the Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati, Ohio, reflects turn of the century summer-dining at its finest. Late-nineteenth century American roof gardens were inspired by European pleasure gardens, often devoted to entertainment.  New York producer, composer, and entrepreneur Rudolph Aronson is credited with not only bringing the roof garden to the United States, but also making it a place for entertainment as well as for food and drink.

Restaurants that providing such services and distractions were already well established in American metropolises. Business boomed for the majority of the year until summer when the insufferable summer heat curtailed customer interest. Before air conditioning, concert halls had to close for the summer and ride out the heat wave.  The introduction of the roof garden soon allowed for entertainment and dining as well as fresh air.  Summer in the city was no longer a concern.

The roof garden also provided an escape within a city’s confines. While a new view from the garden atop a building served as a point of interest for tourists, the roof garden decorations permitted a city’s permanent residents to imagine that they too were on vacation. Thus, many roof gardens were decorated with real flowers and live birds creating an exotic atmosphere at an easily accessible location.

The popularity of roof gardens hit their peak in the early 1890s.  However, the public interest in roof gardens made them over-populated, and ironically, overheated. By the late 1890s the gardens had already begun to fall out of favor. Owners of these spaces, therefore, had to constantly invent new ways to keep people interested and coming back to their establishment during the summer months.

This search for novelty is seen in the roof garden at the Hotel Gibson. Within a year of becoming manager of the hotel in 1927, Ralph Hitz spent over $300,000 in improvements, $150,000 of which went to the remodeling and redecoration of the roof garden.  Reopened in May 25, 1928, the hotel publicized the roof garden as cool and colorful, which in fact, it was. The newly installed ventilation system provided for maximum temperature of 78⁰F in the height of summer. This was guaranteed by a process called “manufactured weather,” which could use up to ninety tons of ice in one day in order to maintain the desired temperature.

In addition to its cool temperature, this roof garden had the added caché of being designed by a premier, international designer: Joseph Urban. Urban, an Austrian-born architect, who had been working in the United States from 1904 , had already served as the main designer for Ziegfield’s Follies and the Metropolitan Opera. His design for the roof garden at the Hotel Gibson promised excitement.

Urban delivered a stimulating roof garden through his characteristic use of color and light. The windows and glass skylight of the Hotel Gibson were covered with Japanese silk, which created a soft radiance. Additional lighting effects were achieved with the help of a dimmer control in red, blue, and amber which, along with the indirect reflection from the silken panels in the walls and ceilings, created an overall kaleidoscopic affect. Urban also opted to replace, real plants with colorful plant-inspired murals, which swept across the walls and served as a vibrant backdrop to the musicians. With this alteration, guests were able to feel as though they had escaped the city, while the open space on the floor no doubt also allowed air flow and ultimately a cooler garden.  Although the design for the Hotel Gibson roof garden was, in fact, almost directly taken from Urban’s previous 1927 design for the St. Regis Roof Garden in New York and the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, the roof garden would have been unique in Cincinnati, thus bringing some New York pizzazz to the Mid-West. 

Today is Joseph Urban's birthday!

Title translation: A representation of Inland and Foreign Wood: As well Trees as [sic] Shrubs Which are Collected by the Lovers of Natural History in Their Cabinets of Natural Curiosities for Use and Pleasure. According to Their Inward Properties and Natural  Colors  ...

In a page headlined Advertisement, Sepp says this book is for “Kings, Princes and Lovers of Nature”. Exotic and unusual wood samples were often artifacts that were part of a collection of curiosities, as well as being the woods used in crafting a cabinet of curiosities.

Icones lignorum exoticorum.  Plates 9, 16, 7

Cabinetmakers and their patrons would have found this book invaluable for selecting and identifying different woods for using contrasting colors and wood grain patterns in designs using veneers, for marquetry.  Sepp states that  “when they are sawed in thin, flat pieces, and that no care or pain is spared in working and polishing them with all the art, they appear as beautiful as the finest marble tables. “

Cabinet On Stand, 1675–1700. Bequest of Mrs. John Innes Kane, 1926-22-43.

The text is in Latin and Dutch, with some plate indices in Dutch, German, English, French and Latin.  Sepp’s beautifully illustrated Icones lignorum exoticorum… is a survey of indigenous woods from around the world. Examples of exotic trees like Jaboubalie-wood, Liquorice-wood, or the roots of many plants that can be used for veneers are shown, like Mandrake and root of Iris of Florence. The book features 556 hand–painted wood specimens on 66 engraved plates identifying the types of wood. This work is an important source of information about the knowledge and use of wood in the 18th century.

Wide landscape friezes were popularized by Walter Crane in 1896 and remained in vogue until around 1913. The use of these friezes led to a more simplified wall treatment in the Mission interior, and even though multiple patterns were still being used on a wall, the frieze became the dominant element. Wide friezes were usually hung at the top of the wall where the perspective shown in the landscapes visually expanded the size of the room. A coordinating sidewall paper in a solid color or tone-on-tone pattern that matched a dominant color in the frieze would run from the baseboard to the bottom of the frieze. A narrow wood molding normally separated the two papers. Landscape friezes were also popular in dining rooms where it was common to hang the frieze at eye level, with a sidewall paper rising up to meet it, with the intersection of the two covered with a plate rail molding. The ceiling paper could then be brought down to the top of the frieze.

Even with the advances made in the high-speed printing machines, machine-printing was seen as a lesser form of printing through most of the nineteenth century. One reason for this was that machine-printed papers had smaller repeats than block prints: the standard 6-inch roller printed an 18 inch repeat.  While the repeat of a block print could be any size, the hand printing also afforded the option of alternating motifs or design elements as you printed down the length of paper. The design was not limited to what could be carved onto a 6 inch roller. Many critics saw these small repeats as a flaw and felt that having one scene or motif repeating endlessly around the room would be monotonous and not be engaging to the viewer. Some manufacturers got resourceful and tried to disguise the small repeat or at least make it appear more varied. If you look at the green trees in the foreground of this frieze, each clump is identical, as are the brown trees in the background. What makes this interesting is that the repeat size of the foreground is larger than the repeat size of the background. The manufacturer used two sets of rollers to print this, one set larger than the other. When you look through the green trees, the landscape view in the background changes with each repeat, making the repeat appear more random.

Patterns found in nature have influenced human creativity for millennia and continue to inspire designers today. Can you guess what natural forms were used to create the designs in this pattern book?

Published in Kyoto by Unsōdō in 1913, its bold calligraphic lines, sweeping curves, and organic forms share characteristics with both Japan’s Rinpa and Europe’s Art Nouveau movements.  However, these shapes were derived in a new and unique way by a scientist, not a designer.

Yoichirō Hirase, a prominent malacologist (mollusk scientist) in Japan, collected over 3500 seashells, 1000 of which were new discoveries. Hirase explains in the introduction on this book that he is not a designer or artist, but that he came up with the idea for this book while researching shells and cutting them at various angles.  He found the cross sections so strange and interesting that he used seal ink to stamp them on paper.

These “inside wonders” created interesting patterns which he further explored with illustrator Jun Nishikawa.  The result of their efforts, Kaigara Danmen Zuan, has over fifty pages of designs based on the cross sections of 12 different shells.  One hundred years later, these designs still embody a timeless and modern feel that continue to capture the imagination and inspire new creations.

On a long ago walking tour of downtown New York, I was charmed and mystified to see people pulling refrigerator magnets or little alphabet letters out of their pockets and having them cling to the deceptively ordinary front of a building! They stuck! This is the test of a cast iron building. The Library has in its collection a rare, original copy of Daniel Badger’s 1865 “Illustrations of Iron Architecture made by The Architectural Iron Works of the City of New York.” They were a leading foundry in New York City during the 1850’s and ‘60’s, and this catalogue was produced to display buildings constructed by the company as examples of what it could manufacture for potential customers, and to demonstrate the diversity of iron architecture to architects. High-quality, monochromatically-colored lithographs depict buildings and examples of their details, such as window arches, columns, capitals and cornices. 

The majority of the illustrations depict the popular cast-iron facades that were used as storefronts. Cast-iron facades were very attractive to New York business owners and architects for several reasons. They were flame-resistant; they could be assembled very quickly - the fast construction made possible by prefabricated cast-iron parts was unprecedented. The strength of cast-iron meant that it could support large windows, a real asset in workrooms before electricity and in displaying goods for sale. 

The decorative elements of the facades were as attractive to customers as they were to business owners. During the Victorian era, elaborate ornament and historic revival styles were very popular, and iron facades could provide fashionable decoration at a lesser cost that hand-carved stonework.

The highest concentration of cast-iron buildings in the United States is in downtown New York City, where historic preservation efforts have saved many important buildings. A walk around the SoHo Cast Iron District demonstrates this important part of New York’s architectural history

A digital edition of the 1865 catalogue is available. Notably, the first-floor façade of the Cooper Union building on Astor Place, where this museum originated, was produced by the Architectural Iron Works, as you can see in the online edition.  The decline of cast-iron architecture around the turn of the century was due to the new technology of steel construction, which allowed for taller, more cheaply constructed buildings. Though cast-iron construction influenced the development of the steel-frame skyscraper, cast-iron architecture did not evolve with twentieth-century architectural styles, and has remained a testament to the intricacies of Victorian architecture. 

The end of the American Civil War saw the rise of the Gilded Age. A time of opulence for some and hardship for many, this era reached its heyday towards the end of the 1890s. From the salons and opera houses of Paris to the halls of the fine houses that lined Fifth Avenue, women’s fashions took a turn toward the modern. Where old and new money, adorned in fine silks and exquisitely beaded attire rubbed shoulders over fine wine and respectable conversation, women’s fashion blossomed.

This beautiful fan, dating between 1880 and 1890, is a fine example of craftsmanship, a fashionable yet functional accessory. With a fan in hand, a woman displayed a particular air of refinement while remaining cool and refreshed in crowded ballrooms. This piece has a finely scalloped black lace leaf and mother-of-pearl sticks carved à jour and gilded. When folded, each ornately decorated guard displays a medallion with what are most likely the initials of the owner, “B. F.”  When unfolded, the fan transforms into a statement. The lively figures dancing across the surface may be mistaken for cherubim. However the images on this piece these are thought to be the classical putti. Unlike their religious counterpart, putti were most often associated with secular values—erotic love, romance, leisure, prosperity and wealth. The sentiments and values artfully reflected in the delicate layers of this fan are a subtle yet true reflection of the times.

Joanna Burgess is a Design Educator who has been immersed in the field of education for over ten years, first as a classroom teacher and now as a consultant working with various museums and organizations around New York City. When she isn't teaching, writing or spending an inordinate amount of time on the internet, Joanna can often be found knitting or tending to her apartment garden.

Utilitarian object? Small-scale abstract sculpture? Both. When I first had the opportunity to investigate this lamp close up, I was struck by the way it’s form, composed of the simplest geometric shapes—circle, sphere, cylinder, cube, seemed to articulate a perfect balance between the functional and the artistic.

 The lamp was designed by Dutch architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter (J.J.P.) Oud in 1927, as a wedding gift for his friends Harm Kamerlingh Omnes and Titia Easton. Created to sit on top of a piano, cantilevered out to light the sheet music and keyboard below, it features a cylindrical bulb housing asymmetrically attached to a thin shaft, in turn attached to a circular base, and a heavy spherical counterweight sitting on the back of the shaft. The contrast between the matte metal surfaces and the shiny chromed-metal counterweight heightens the play of forms. Oud had the lamp made by W. H. Gispen, who later put it into production as the “Giso 404” piano lamp.

Oud described himself as a “poetic functionalist,” and like most early modernist architects rejected ornamentation and historicism of any kind. He, architect/designer Gerrit Reitveld, and the artist Theo van Doesburg were leaders in the avant-garde De Stijl (The Style) movement. This group of artists, architects, and designers was brought together by van Doesburg, and published the periodical De Stijl from 1917-1928. It was an international publication spanning architecture, design, and the visual arts. However, by 1922 Oud and van Doesburg had a disagreement and Oud left.

Oud was also strongly influenced by the geometric work of the Bauhaus. In addition, he believed that using standardized building components could create a new kind of harmony and beauty, and result in less costly and more efficient construction methods, eliminating the need for specialized labor which was in short supply in the years after World War I. His buildings were similar to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and von Doesburg, whose works were composed of ‘standardized’ elements (rectangles, squares, primary colors).  The Giso 404 lamp is a wonderful construction of standardized elements on a small an intimate scale.

English publishers William Robert Dickinson (1815-1887), Lowes Cato Dickinson (1819-1908) and Gilbert Bell Dickinson (1825-1908) received a royal commission to compile this colorful folio commemorating Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations held in Hyde Park, London May to October, 1851. The folio includes 55 chromolithographic plates depicting the building and exhibitions of the fair reproduced from paintings by English watercolorists and lithographers Joseph Nash (1809-1878) and Louis Haghe (1806-1885) and Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864). The accompanying text provides accounts of the exhibition hall, select domestic and foreign displays, and events associated this first international world’s fair. The frontispiece is an image of the glass-cast iron exhibition hall (nicknamed the Crystal Palace), designed by landscape designer Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) and structural engineer Charles Fox (1810-1874). The building, consisting of 1,000 iron columns supported 2,224 trellis girders and 30 miles of guttering and sheets of cast plate glass, was prefabricated and erected at the site in less than one year.  A dramatic multi-storey glass-cast iron barrel-vault spanning the width and dividing the 990,000 square foot rectangular structure is at the central entrance portal to the space as seen in the image here.   

More than fifty scenes –complete with figures in period costume– illustrate a few of the more than 14,000 displays at this fair. One will see exotic objects displayed from faraway lands, such as China, India, and Tunisia. Other displays included luxury items, such as the finest porcelains from France.  There were also demonstrations of new machines and manufacturing processes, such as a paper folding machine and one demonstrating the automatic weaving process. There were also exhibitions of raw materials, such as minerals, furs, and woods from Canada and the United States. More than two-thirds of the displays, however, promoted British products of all kinds. The fair was visited in the six month period by six million people.  The book recreates the experience of being at this monumental event of the nineteenth century. The Crystal Palace Exhibition not only became the model for many later world expositions, it was also the forerunner of the modern museum.

Today marks the 138th wedding anniversary of Margaret and John Hoog, an event memorialized in this unusual sampler. While the majority of sampler makers were schoolgirls working to complete their needlework education, Margaret Hoog took needle in hand to commemorate her 1875 marriage. In the center of the sampler, instead of the usual alphabets, verse, or family history, she stitched a poignant message to her husband: “John the Hoog/O Love/Remember me/Margaret Hoog/Married 1875 June 3.”

Margaret and John Hoog were married in Manhattan. All that is known about them comes from the information recorded on their marriage certificate. Margaret was born in Ireland in about 1854, and John was born around 1850 in Belgium. It is possible that John’s last name may have been “de Hoog” prior to his immigration, and that Margaret’s reference to him as “John the Hoog” was a joke between the couple. Although only twenty-one at the time of her marriage to John, Margaret had been married once before and was undoubtedly a widow.

Hints to the mystery of the Hoogs’ story can be found in rich imagery of Margaret’s sampler. At the top is an eagle perched atop a United States shield with multiple flags in its talons, including those of America, her husband’s native Belgium, and possibly the Red Ensign, a British naval and merchant flag sometimes used on Irish merchant vessels. Around these central elements is a whimsical mix of swooping birds, flowering sprigs, baskets of flowers, and symbols that include stars, eyes, an anchor, and a heart pierced by an arrow. Depicted in the sampler’s lower section is a train leaving a town populated with houses and a horse and carriage and passing into a rural landscape. One of the train’s cars is marked “PRR,” for Pennsylvania Railroad.

The sampler’s message, with its plea “Remember me,” hauntingly alludes to an impending separation. While it is possible that John Hoog was divided from his bride by his profession—listed as seaman on their marriage certificate—the image of the train indicates that his journey was to be by rail rather than by sea. It is possible that he left New York in an effort to improve their circumstances, and that Margaret planned to join him once he was established in a new location. Whether that reunion ever took place is unknown. One possible outcome to their story is found in the 1888-89 New York directory, which contains a listing for “Hoog, Margaret, widow John.” There is no evidence, however, that the listing refers to the couple named in this sampler, so we can hope that their love story had a happier ending.

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.

On August 27, 1783, the skies above the French commune of Gonesse were briefly darkened by a floating figure. The peasants, filled with fear by the unusual sight, shot down the hovering object and attacked it with pitchforks because they believed it was a monster. The “monster” was actually a hot air balloon. This scene of armed farmers surrounding a deflated balloon is one of the vignettes depicted on Le Ballon de Gonesse, a commemorative textile that captures the popularity of balloons in late eighteenth-century France. 

The experimentation with and successful flights of hot air balloons in France from 1783 to 1787 resulted in “Balloon Mania.” During this period balloons became favored motifs in the visual and decorative arts.  For example, the French sculptor Clodion proposed a monument (never realized) dedicated to the inventor of the balloon and Marie Antoinette owned a set of chairs with hot air balloon finials. Textile producers realized that depicting contemporary events on fabrics would result in greater sales because the fabrics would appeal to a wider audience and, in addition, serve a patriotic purpose by celebrating French achievements. Le Ballon de Gonesse, produced by the Oberkampf factory in Jouy, depicts three balloon scenes from events that took place in 1783. These events were popular in the press and were a source of national pride, perfect subjects for a printed textile.  The first scene shows the August 27^th flight of an unmanned balloon that was launched by Jacques A. C. Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert and unexpectedly and dramatically ended by the people of Gonesse. The second scene shows the beginning of the December 1^st flight of Charles and Robert over the Tuileries Garden in Paris, and the third scene depicts the end of this 25-mile flight with their arrival in Nesles Prairie, outside of Paris.[1]

It was important to place textiles depicting contemporary political and cultural happenings into production quickly in order to capitalize on public interest. This proved to be challenging since engraving the copperplates for printing and the printing process itself could take up to two months in the best conditions.[2] Although these fabrics had the widest appeal, it is not surprising they also went out of fashion quite quickly and became unsellable, especially if commemorating political events, as the public’s focus shifted to the most recent news. Since these textiles were made for clothing and interior decoration, their ephemeral popularity can be understood, after all, no fashionable eighteenth-century woman would want to be caught wearing yesterday’s news.

Megan Elevado is a Brooklyn native who is fascinated by East German and Soviet culture and design. She earned her BA at New York University and completed her MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons The New School for Design in May 2013.

In 2010, Cooper-Hewitt held its fourth installment of the National Design Triennial series, featuring global design innovations that addressed environmental and social challenges. ProSolve 370e was among the projects displayed in the exhibition, selected because it represents a practical and elegant design solution for environmental needs. I remain particularly drawn to it for its sculptural form and visual complexity, seemingly inspired by the molecular technology it contains.

The ProSolve 370e system consists of modular architectural tiles coated with titanium dioxide that, when activated by daylight, neutralizes nitrogen oxides—harmful for their effect on the respiratory system, acid rain, and ozone depletion—in the surrounding environment. While the antimicrobial and air-purifying effects of titanium dioxide have been known for years, it is the form and application of ProSolve that is particularly innovative. The tiles are designed for absolute material efficiency, exposing more surface area to daylight to activate the pollution-fighting technology.

ProSolve is intended for installation as a functional, and quite topographical, element on an existing building façade, enabling the building to perform in ways other than initially intended. Most recently, ProSolve 370e was installed as an exterior facade on a hospital in Mexico City. The elegant, organic form becomes a memorable signifier on the building, reminding passersby of the city’s air pollution problem.

Paige Dansinger is an artist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We first met Paige at the 2012 Museum Computer Network conference in Seattle. Since meeting Paige we have been following her #DrawArt project which attempts to create a new understanding of art in a context that is both online and accessible by many. At Cooper-Hewitt we are always looking for ways to make our collection more accessible and so we were really pleased when Paige started to draw our Object of the Day series. 

At Cooper-Hewitt we are always looking for ways to augment the low amount of digitization that has happened to date (around 7% of our collection is professionally photographed). To this end we have been encouraging the public to connect their own photographs and 3D models to our collection objects, and also experimenting with a small project called 'Hand Drawn Design Museum'

So we were really excited when Paige started to draw our Object of the Day series.

Over to Paige, now, to tell us what she has been doing

I have been drawing the Object of the Day from Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Inspired by National Museum Month, I dedicated the month of May to drawing the collection that was presented daily on their new multi award-winning Public Alpha website. 

This Spring, I visited New York City to experience seeing my art in a museum for the first time. I had made 200 Digital Trading Cards for the Gutai Card Box included in the past exhibit, Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim. Luckily, I was welcome to stay with my relatives in the Upper East Side. As often as I could, I'd walk over to the Guggenheim to see the exhibit and then on to the  nearby Met, so I may draw their collection in a #DrawArt Digital Sketchbook.  I loved my adventure in NYC so much I returned a couple weeks later with my son to show him where we should live one day! 

On my way back and forth between the apartment and the museums, I'd walk past the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Closed for renovation, it was wrapped in plastic sheeting with metal girders covering the facade. Along with fine art, I always had a fascination with objects of material culture. It's likely a result of the opening scene in the first Indiana Jones movie (so GenX) that ignited a life dedicated to museums, cultural heritage and online collections - as well as my imagination & sense of adventure.  I wondered about what it looked like inside - what was in there? I wanted to know the architectural and interior details of the site and galleries, it's objects for exhibition, and most of all, the contents organized in main storage. My experience an intern/volunteer assisting the Main Registrar of Collections, from 2005-2012,  at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts inspired a deep interest in learning the contents of museum's collections. This interest contributed to my dedication in  drawing over 1000 works of famous art from museums digitally on my iPhone & iPad and sharing them with Social Media. Using #DrawArt, I have also recently performed two one-day Digital Art Residencies. 

Cooper-Hewitt's mysterious exterior under-construction and the fact that it was closed to the public, completely inaccessible to me heightened my curiosity. How could I get inside and access the treasures in their collection? It would occupy my thoughts as I passed by. I wondered about the museum collection's vases, chairs and wall sconces. I wanted to know about their silver, plates, fans, and wallpapers. I could feel my inner-Indiana Jones was coming out.. I was on a quest and had to know more about the contents of the collection. As I walked by the museum, like a modern-day Indie, I whipped out my iPhone and checked-out their website.

Cooper-Hewitt's new website gave me exactly what I needed. It let me know just what was up - right away. It shared that even though they are closed, there's still many things happening at programs in other local spots and it offered me three easy opportunities for engagement. Intellectually, I may learn more by reading about the Object of the Day, physically I may integrate good design in my life by shopping in their online store, and spiritually or holistically by becoming a member of the museum community. In my opinion, these forms of engagement are good examples of sustainable ways to make most people interested in this museum and to return to their website. When I read about their objects in the collection I was able to learn insights about the works that are more relevant today, in a language that was a mix of profesional museum voice, hip best friend with a twist of street vernacular - it a voice that anyone could identify with. I even had the option to see the collection organized by color - like shoes or color-coated candy. With the site easily organized and communicated in a language I understand, I wanted to return and learn more. For me, it was a return I made every day this month. 

Watch the Object of the Day at Cooper-Hewitt video playbacks here  

I have accomplished my goal of drawing the Object of the Day for the month of May. In the middle of June, I will have another opportunity to get my Indiana Jones-on during a 3-week tour in Israel. My plan is to use #DrawArt to illustrate significant archeological sites and historic art and objects and to create an Indiana Jones-style illustrated story and game experience with the images I draw.  I will likely continue to draw works from the collection at the Cooper-Hewitt until I leave for my new adventure and anticipate continuing drawing from the collection when I return later this Summer. When the museum reopens in 2014 I will come back to New York again. Hopefully I may be a Visiting Artist and use #DrawArt live in the museum!

I have always found the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to be among the most subtly inspiring and innovative works that I have seen.  Before I experienced the take-your-breath-away effect of seeing the whole of a Willow Tea room installed in a Mackintosh exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1996, I was already drawn to individual elongated chairs, textiles and other design objects. Many of these have a stylized naturalism with a muted pale palette, some of which appeared as a result of Mackintosh’s collaboration with his wife, Mary MacDonald, and her sister May, who designed and produced embroidered textiles. The resulting whole environments used nature in a more angled way than the art nouveau movement that was blossoming out from Paris. They drew beauty sometimes from unexpected motifs: such as thistles, the symbol of Scotland, their home.
In the commission for Catherine Cranston’s Argyle Street Tearooms, for which this chair was made,  Mackintosh collaborated with the architect George Walton, who designed the more stationary elements such as paneling, screens, billiard tables, fireplaces, wall and ceiling decorations and some electric light fittings. Mackintosh designed the furniture, including for the smoking and billiards rooms. The tall chairs and thin-lined aesthetic he chose for the main tea rooms he designed for this and the Willow Tearooms in Glasgow, Scotland, reflected decorum. Ladies in daytime long dresses sat up straight to take their tea, and these chairs gave them elegant posture and provided a certain formality to rooms that were otherwise more casual  than in the fancy late Victorian gilded and scrolled tea rooms.  This chair is very different. It is not for the main tea room, but rather for the smoking and billiards rooms. Those would have been frequented by men, probably smoking cigars, who would be able to be a bit more casual than a high back would allow. The low backed chairs had arm rests to support raised cigars; the low height let smoke escape.   There is stylization too: the seats have recessed sitting spots, in demi-lune form like the shape of the skirt.  The rectilinear profile of the sides made the chairs fit in with the architectural design full of straight lines and are frequently seen up against the walls, much as furniture was in the eighteenth century-the antithesis of Victorian clutter.
These chairs were influential too.  A photograph of their home interiors both newly married Mackintoshes designed in 1900 shows this same model of chair. The Argyle rooms appear to have been photographed in 1897, even though they were not published until 1906 (in The Studio), whereas Mackintosh published the chairs in Modern British Domestic Architecture in 1901.  The furniture firm responsible for making the chairs, Francis Smith & Son, sent many pieces to Argyle Street in 1898 and 1899, showing on-going additions to the furnishing of the rooms, which included gaming tables with stools with the demi-lune cut-outs that matched the chairs’ skirts. It was at just this time that Mackintosh’s work was shown at the Vienna Secession  Exhibition in 1900, influencing the designers of the Wiener Werkstätte such as Josef Hoffmann

 "Purkersdorf Sanitorium Dining Chair, Designed by Josef Hoffmann, Vienna, 1904-6,-1;1968-6-1

Box, Designed by Koloman Moser, Vienna, Silver-plated brass, 1902-5

and Koloman Moser with his combination of linearity, use of geometric ornament and a pared down aesthetic.

This art-deco style wallcovering was created in the early twentieth century in France. It was first featured as an advertisement for its importer, W.H.S.  Lloyd Co., in the March 1930 edition of House Beautiful. W.H.S.  Lloyd Co. was a significant importer of English, French and Japanese wall hangings, so they definitely had a distinct eye for collecting beautiful wallcoverings around the world.  Literally translated into the “Modern Bird”, this wallcovering is a premier example of the French modern movement. The stylized foliage, the animated birds and the choice of vibrant colors, enhanced by gold metallic paint, combine to show off the appeal of art deco.  However long ago this piece was made, its exuberance remains as fresh and modern today, which is always a sign of good design.

This elegant piece of silver is both modern and ancient. Not only does it connect to designs by Hoffmann in other media, such the glass vase with fluted base he designed for Lobmeyr (2009-18-75) and a fluted sidewall paper by his follower Dagobert Peche, (1930-11-1f) but also relates to designs of ancient Greece and Rome.  Look at the flutes! They mimic the flutes of marble columns from the Ionic and Corinthian orders used in Greek temples. Image: - http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonianlibraries/5684213857/in/set-7215...

These orders were presented in books starting in the Renaissance and throughout history whenever the fashion for antiquity or a sense of classical proportion re-appeared. Hoffmann was showing that despite his interest in creating a design that was fresh, it was based on his training in designs of the past that he could adaptively re-use.  He also referenced designs from the neo-classical era of the late eighteenth century.  English teapots of the 1780’s used flutes for the sides of teapots. Paul Revere created almost identical teapots in 1790’s Boston, (see an example at Yale http://ecatalogue.art.yale.edu/detail.htm?objectId=35093) showing the widespread appeal of this decorative element. While Hoffmann was not looking to Paul Revere, he may have seen English fluted silver.  Despite the similarity of Revere’s and Hoffmann’s flutes the Revere’s flutings were formed in sheet silver, a seemingly more modern technique. This newly developed mechanical technique that was the latest contribution of the industrial revolution in eighteenth-century England resulting in sheets of silver which were rolled flat.  The silver was then formed into a fluted cylinder shape and seamed to make a teapot body, with a separate piece soldered to the sides for the base. Hoffmann wanted to get away from mechanization so his bowl goes back to the old fashioned method of hand raising the silver, meaning to beat it out of a block or sheet of silver into the oval shape with flutes created by pinching the silver at intervals.

Upon first glance it is difficult to tell if we are looking up or down this spiral staircase.  Clean lines intersect with natural light, casting shadows that create a deceptive flattening effect from this vantage point. What appear to be stairs descending counterclockwise with no railing is actually the underside of the staircase designed to mimic the stairs above.   

French architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945), was known to gracefully combine the stylishness of Art Deco with the principles of Modernism.  This residential commission for sculptors Jan and Joël Martel is located at 10, rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris.  Several other Cubist houses by Mallet-Stevens can still be seen along this road today. 

Amassed by Mabel Thérèse Bonney, this image collection holds over 4,500 photographs depicting the modern architecture and design of 1920s and 1930s France.  Subjects include architecture, furniture, interior design, window displays, graphic design, and individual objects and furnishings. From book bindings to mannequin displays, serving as both a photographer and a collector, Thérèse Bonney documented the traditions, trends, favorite places and the designs of Art Deco in Paris.