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 pitcher composed of a globular, translucent green glass body with a cylindrical neck covered in silver-plated metal with an inverted U-shaped handle, short spout, and an inset circular lid. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
“Without Light Everything is Lifeless”
Designer Massimo Vignelli was known for the sense of sophistication and refinement he brought to the product, graphic, and furniture design that he produced first in Italy, and later in the U.S. working with his wife Lella, also a designer.  While a student at the School of Architecture in Venice, Vignelli learned about glass from architect and glass...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Cynthia Trope
Date
November 21, 2019
Image features an Empire-style wallpaper with two figural landscape views. Please scroll to read the blog post about this object.
Roses and Music, or Cat and Mouse
This wallpaper format is fairly typical of a new genre that appeared following the upheaval of the French Revolution. The designs consist of one or two landscape views which alternate with one or two smaller secondary elements. These are almost always printed over a spotted or otherwise patterned ground. This particular design contains two each...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
November 20, 2019
Le Corbusier’s Serbian Vase
As a young architect in search of inspiration, Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (Swiss, 1887 – 1965) traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.[i] Early in the summer of 1911, Jeanneret (today better known by his adopted name, “Le Corbusier”), then twenty-four years old, set out on a five-month journey that would take him through the Balkans,...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Julia Siemon
Date
November 19, 2019
This object features: Small, square weaving with a grid of stepped motifs alternating off-white with a palette of soft shades: violet, blue-green, brown, terra cotta, and yellow. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
James Bassler, Thread by Thread
Paired sets of stepped blocks in harmony and balance echo an ancient process. James Bassler (American, b. 1933), in his work Six by Four II, incorporates an aesthetic of pure color through the interlacing of warps and wefts in a special way. By changing the colors of each block, linked one to the other, thread...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Elena Phipps
Date
November 18, 2019
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...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Devon Zimmerman
Date
November 15, 2019
Image features a design of a black sheep or ewe performing a variety of beauty rituals. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
This Ewe Rocks!
I always get good feedback when I blog about poodle wallpapers from the post-war period. They seem to trigger an emotional response, and people either love them or hate them. I’ve pretty much exploited all the poodle wallpapers in the collection, but fear not, I’ve found a substitute. This paper features a black sheep, primping...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
November 14, 2019
Selling Victorian Wallpaper
The wallpaper manufacturer, Jeffrey & Co. published the trade catalog, The “Victorian” wall-papers, embossed leather-papers, staircase decorations, ceiling papers, detailing their collection of wallpapers, in 1887. Based at 64 Essex Road in London, the firm worked with a variety of designers who were active in the aesthetic and arts and crafts movements, such as E.W....
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Erica Schaumberg
Date
November 13, 2019
Image feature two drawings on one page. In the upper left corner, an alligator sits in a coal bucket, facing towards the right. In the lower right, a little girl, seen from behind, reaches for the top shelf of a bookcase, rising on her toes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Little April Fool
The collection at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum includes nearly 500 drawings from the estate of illustrator Florence Choate. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1878, Choate studied at the Art Students League in New York where she was awarded scholarships in portrait and figure drawing.  There, she met fellow student Elizabeth A. Curtis, who...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Laura Fravel
Date
November 12, 2019
Weaving Wonders of Richard Landis
American weaver Richard Landis’s works are characterized by complex design systems that echo the logic of their construction with a limited vocabulary of materials, texture, geometric forms, and colors. From his earliest days at the loom, Landis decided he would work only in plain weave and within the opportunities offered by handwoven, loom-controlled design. He...
Read Time
4 minutes
Posted By
Maleyne Syracuse
Date
November 11, 2019
Image features a bronze brooch in the realistic form of a decayed and torn dried leaf, in tones of ochre to golden brown. Please scroll down to read the blog post about the object.
Capturing a Bit of Autumn
This bronze brooch by John Iversen, in the form of a delicate decaying leaf with all its ripples and tears, celebrates the variety, cycles, and even decline found in nature. Variations in the metal’s color and finish meticulously capture a dry leaf’s faded hues and brittle textures, heightening a sense of nature’s unpredictability and randomness....
Read Time
1 minute
Posted By
Cynthia Trope
Date
November 8, 2019
Image features a wallpaper with mosaic-like design composed of butterfly wings. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Winging It
Thought it was time to show another wallpaper by Damien Hirst. Like many modern and contemporary artists who turn to wallpaper design, Hirst uses his artwork or installations as inspiration. This is based on the “Kaleidoscope” paintings Hirst began creating in 2001, where butterflies, or butterfly wings, were arranged in elaborate patterns and adhered to...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
November 7, 2019
In this Russian-designed poster for the German film ‘The Boxer’s Bride,’ the disembodied faces of a man and a woman smile out at the viewer from a black background, hovering above a stylized boxing ring. Their heads are enveloped in concentric circles, to give the impression of their presence as an apparition. In the boxing ring below, two fighters spar on a vibrant red floor, the white perimeter of the ring cutting rectangular outline, which appears as a stack of three suspended squares. Below, in blocky black letters on yellow, the title of the film in Russian. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
USSR In The Ring
In the early years of the Soviet Union, there was a strong urge to understand all elements of life in terms relating either to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Many longstanding assumptions pertaining to the role of arts and leisure in society were subject to ideological debate. Constructivist artists, eager to secure a role for...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Mir Finkelman
Date
November 6, 2019
Waist Not, Want Not
Author: Virginia Pollock While this textile might seem unrecognizable to modern eyes, to consumers in eighteenth-century France this textile was an object of fashionable and economic significance. These uncut waistcoat fronts display the layout of a pattern, adorned with copperplate printed motifs of vegetal imagery, intertwined dolphins, and a wooded scene at the bottom with...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Kimberly Randall
Date
November 5, 2019
Image features a large, mottled-blue irregularly shaped plastic vessel tapering to a narrow neck with a circular mouth. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Big, Blue, and Bioplastic
Designers Rutger de Regt and Marlies van Putten, the principals of Handmade Industrials, are both inspired and concerned by today’s production processes that are increasingly driven by computers. They ask, are we reducing or removing the presence of human experience and experimentation in manufacturing? Are we losing touch with our environment—is it becoming increasingly artificial?...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Cynthia Trope
Date
November 4, 2019
Image features a wallpaper with an arabesque design containing floral bouquets, cupids, vases, and acanthus scrolls. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Stellar Arabesque
France started making advancements in wallpaper manufacture in the 1770s, and by the 1780s they were making papers of a quality that has never been surpassed. Réveillon is one of the better-known manufacturers from this period, and was most celebrated for his arabesque designs, which were influenced by the recently discovered wall paintings at Herculaneum...
Read Time
2 minutes
Posted By
Gregory Herringshaw
Date
November 1, 2019