about

The Object of the Week blog is written by Cooper Hewitt’s curators, graduate fellows, and contributing researchers and scholars. Posts are published every week and present research on an object from the museum’s collection. With over 210,000 objects spanning thirty centuries of decorative arts and design, Object of the Week explores the material culture of textiles, graphic design, furniture, products, architectural drawings, wallcoverings, and much more.

Image features a kitchen filled with dancing and singing pots, pans, and other kitchen tools and implements. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Up all Night with the Pots and Pans
What goes on in the kitchen late at night? This whimsical print imagines the pantry come to life, as its normally inanimate occupants enjoy a jolly party. Dishes and cutlery dance to a merry tune played by a band of jugs, mops, pots and pans. A suckling pig, a goose, and a cabbage-headed meat-figure lend...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Julia Siemon
Date
January 2, 2020
Image features a white curtain panel printed in blue with chinoiserie design. Two Asian-inspired figures climbing a fantasy stairway in mid-air, a figure pointing to the top of a hill where a pagoda-like structure sits. Oversized flowers, foliage, and rococo scrolls accent the landscape. Narrow rectangular panel with six tabs along top edge for hanging. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Inspired by Pillement
This textile’s whimsical chinoiserie scene was inspired by the work of French artist Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728 – 1808), and printed by Bromley Hall, a prominent textile printing manufactory in Middlesex, England. Pillement’s illustrations inspired many late-eighteenth-century textile designs. Although this design features many of the artist’s signature motifs – oversized flowers, a winding staircase and...
Read Time
1 minute
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
January 1, 2020
Image features the Desta Stahlmöbel book cover showing a photomontage of tubular steel club chairs on a yellow and light blue background. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Celebrating The Bauhaus at 100
The Bauhaus, a school of design and architecture founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by Architect Walter Gropius, had the goal of developing unity of the arts through craftsmanship taught in specialized workshops by key theorists and practitioners, among them Johannes Itten, Marcel Breuer, Lázló Mology-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Oskar Schlemmer, Josef Albers, and...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Stephen Van Dyk
Date
December 31, 2019
Image features tan wallpaper showing a pillar and arch design with a very deep perspective. Please scroll down to read the blog post this object.
Pillar of the Unknown
This is a pillar and arch paper, the format of which was introduced in England in the late eighteenth century. These papers consisted of a series of pillars and arches, with any variety of motifs used to occupy the space under the arch. The scale and repeat size was usually quite large so these designs...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
December 30, 2019
Image features th e poster “Centrale Bond 30.000 Transportarbeiders (Central Union 30,000 Transport Workers)”, showing a large figure composed of photomontage standing before two red figures with their backs to the viewer, all on yellow background; "CENTRALE BOND" in black in a curved line at top, the number 30,000 in white superimposed on the large figure, "TRANSPORTARBEIDERS"in black across the bottom. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
The Wisdom of Crowds
This rare poster was created in 1930 Paul Schuitema (Dutch, 1897–1968). The poster came to Cooper Hewitt in 2019 as a gift from Merrill C. Berman, one of the world’s most influential collectors of modern graphic design and a longtime collaborator with our museum. With this recent gift, Schuitema’s poster is coming home to Cooper...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Ellen Lupton
Date
December 27, 2019
Image features: Natural off white colored ground with vertical stripe pattern felted. Stripes have areas left natural with straight felted areas. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
SI Alpaca
SI Alpaca demonstrates Claudy Jongstra’s interests in combining sheerness and opacity in lightweight, translucent structures, and in reintroducing historic dye plants such as madder and weld to the Netherlands. Jongstra planted a research garden specifically devoted to dye plants, and has studied with dye masters to learn historic techniques. SI Alpaca is dyed with walnut....
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Susan Brown
Date
December 26, 2019
Image features a wallpaper commemorating the Paris Exposition of 1855. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Walls Celebrate Industrial Progress
Wallpapers have a long history of celebrating innovations in technology, especially when it involves mobility. Early steam-powered locomotives and paddle boats, automobiles and airplanes are frequent themes. Feats of civil engineering including the Brooklyn Bridge are also highlighted. Here is a wallpaper celebrating industrial progress. This paper is commemorating the Exposition Universelle of 1855, the...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
December 25, 2019
Image features black and white photomontage combining image of roast pork apparently flying in the sky alongside US Army bombers. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Recipe for Victory
A pork shank flies through the air, flanked by nine Allied bombers. Perspective lines shoot out from a distant point of origin, emphasizing the speed, impact, and patriotic urgency of the heroic ham and her military escort. But why? Signed “herbert bayer” in the upper left corner, this mysterious black-and-white printed photomontage is part of...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Ellen Lupton
Date
December 24, 2019
Image features: a U-shaped drawstring purse in green, with a stylized design of fuchsias in two greens, violet, two pinks, yellow and white. Long green cord with tassel. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Sophisticated Sample
Author: Rachel Pool This green purse is made from silk embroidery, plant fibers, and glass beads. A single tassel dangles from one side of the purse. Made between 1910 and 1912, the purse exhibits the Art Nouveau design style, indicated by the embroidered motif that displays organic patterns taken from nature, shown in the form...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
December 23, 2019
Image features a circular dish, the surface with airbrushed geometric decoration of pale peach, grey and yellow triangles and small circles on a cream-colored ground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Spritz-Deco
A compressor rumbling. A nozzle hissing. The colorful geometric shapes decorating this otherwise straightforward dish were not painted by hand. Rather they were applied by a device novel to the world of ceramics: the airbrush. The important and prolific German designer, Martha Katzer (1897–1947), created this dish for the Karlsruhe Majolika Manufaktur (KMM) in Baden,...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Devon Zimmerman
Date
December 20, 2019
Image features a vinyl wallcovering with a dense pattern of thick yellow rings rendered in trompe l'oeil. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Wallcovering for your Sweet Tooth
In case these gray winter skies are getting you down, here is a perky wallpaper to brighten the mood. Aptly titled “Life Savers,” this wallcovering enlivened the interiors market sometime in the early 1970s. The design consists of circles, or life savers if you will, tightly aligned in polka dot fashion. The front of each...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
December 19, 2019
Image features a drawing of a night scene showing an idealized rocky landscape with falling snow. In the sky is the star of Bethlehem. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Night Visitors
Amahl and the Night Visitors was the original Hallmark Christmas movie. The one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti was the first opera composed for television in the United States. Commissioned by NBC, it was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1951 from a studio in Rockefeller Center. Sponsored by Hallmark, it was also the debut...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Laura Fravel
Date
December 18, 2019
Image features: Brisé fan with pierced sticks. Moire effect produced by darker brown color swirling through tan color. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Ivory Substitute
This fan is in “good” condition for cellulose nitrate and therefore a rarity. Cellulose nitrate is an early plastic polymer invented in the mid-nineteenth century and derived from cellulose that is treated with nitric acid. The material gradually degrades, releasing nitric acid. This fan documents a time of experimentation when substitutions for costly natural materials,...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Lucy Commoner
Date
December 17, 2019
Image features a wallpaper with a repeating floral bouquet printed on Tyvek. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Scrubbable Flowers, Pre-pasted Even
This delicate floral design by Lanette Scheeline was one of the early wallcoverings printed on Tyvek. The design consists of a fairly small repeat, actually, a single small bouquet of mixed flowers, perhaps wildflowers, repeated two across the width and repeating vertically on the diagonal. The flowers are rendered in a stylized manner, and printed...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
December 16, 2019
Image features a large scale model of the Ricinus communis (also called the castor bean, or castor oil) plant with red stigma rising from a green spiny capsule and long green leaves on a thick green stem, mounted on a black turned-wood base. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Botanical Lessons
This Object of the Day post celebrates the opening of Nature by Design: Botanical Expressions, on view from December 7, 2019-January 10, 2021. In the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century, the expansion of industrialization was accompanied by an increased interest in science. Alongside major discoveries such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendeleev’s periodic table,...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Mina Warchavchik Hugerth
Date
December 13, 2019