Art Nouveau

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Hector Guimard: Art Nouveau to Modernism
Delve into the life and legacy of one of France's most famous architects.
Image features a brown wooden chair with straight legs and low stretchers, slightly angled back and rectangular seat, both upholstered in tan to brown fabric. The legs and frame back are decorated with square ebony inlay. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Nieuwe, Not Nouveau
Refined, rational, and demonstrably Dutch, this was the aim when Hendrik Petrus Berlage designed this chair for the Amsterdam-based firm, ‘t Binnenhuis (The Interior). This important architect and designer opened the firm in 1900 in collaboration with the insurance company director, Carel Henny, jeweler, Willem Hoeker, and interior designer, Jacob van den Bosch.[1] Motivated by...
Image features cover design of Majorelle trade catalogue. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
French Elegance
Authors: Stephen Van Dyk and Adrienne Meyer This early 20th century trade catalog in the Cooper Hewitt Library includes furniture, lighting, and decorative objects in the art nouveau style created by the French firm of Majorelle. Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), an important French furniture manufacturer, took over his father Auguste’s cabinet making workshop in Nancy in...
Image features a wallpaper with a scrolling floral design printed to imitate a silk damask. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Rococo Influences
This floral wallpaper was produced in the early 20th century where the large-scale floral motif and scrolling stem and foliage convey the organic and sensuous nature of the art nouveau style. This paper is part of an unbound wallpaper sample book that contained a wide variety of designs in the art nouveau and Mission styles....
Image features a rock concert poster showing a face in profile, surrounded by pink, black, and grey streams of flowing, wavy hair. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Deliberately Disorienting
A pioneering example of psychedelic design, this work was one of the 56 posters that Wes Wilson produced between 1966 and 1968 for the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. The posters were commissioned by the rock concert promoter Bill Graham, who gave Wilson free rein over his designs until disputes about money severed their connection....
Image features table clock in curving glazed earthenware case with polychrome linear decoration of stylized plant forms on a cream-colored ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Nieuwe Kunst, Nieuwe Clock
This Dutch glazed earthenware clock, manufactured in 1910 by the Arnhem Faience Factory exemplifies the Art Nouveau style, or Nieuwe Kunst as it was called in the Netherlands, prevalent in that country from about 1892 to 1910. Art Nouveau had origins in England and quickly gained popularity in France and the rest of Europe as...
Image features tall, slender, slightly cylindrical vase with globular shoulder, no neck, incurving rim; no foot. Design of tall flowers (stylized carnations) and curving leaves that rise up onto the shoulder. Beneath and between these are smaller flowers and leaves. A few random dots on top of shoulder. Decoration in metallic lustres on an iridescent ground, in shades of peacock blue, lavender, crimson, and green against a copper glaze ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Flowers Bloom amidst a Field of Iridescence
To celebrate the opening of Iridescence, on view through March 24, 2019, Object of the Day this week will feature iridescent objects in the collection. This vase with its shimmering colors and fluid lines was designed by Jacques Sicard for the Weller Pottery between 1902 and 1907. It was created using gray-white clay and is...
A pitcher of squat bulbous gourd form with a large leaf-shaped spout and handle in the form of a gathered root or vine; green and gold iridescent luster finish.
Eosin, from “Eos”- Greek Goddess of Dawn
To celebrate the opening of Iridescence, on view through March 24, 2019, Object of the Day this week will feature iridescent objects in the collection. This turn-of-the-twentieth-century leaf-form pitcher utilizes the innovative eosin reduction glazing technique developed and trademarked by the Hungarian porcelain firm Zsolnay only a few years earlier. Lusterware, which had been revived...
Image features a wallpaper border with a rose bush motif. Please scroll down for to read the blog post about this wallpaper.
One Thorny Wall Treatment
This is a wallpaper frieze containing stylized rose bushes printed on a striped and swirled ground, while an upside down heart motif placed behind the bush defines the shape of the climbing roses. The motif of the rose vines is nearly symmetrical and the delicacy of the scrolling and curving vines shows the influence of...