Matilda McQuiad discusses this ombré textile by prominent Austrian designer Dagobert Peche.
Sarah D. Coffin and Cynthia Trope discuss this lavish yet modern sharkskin desk, now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.
Elizabeth Broman discusses the 1920s trade catalogue The Master Silk Printer.
Gail Davidson discusses modernist designer Ilonka Karasz's geometric iterations for tableware.
Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi discusses this Caldwell lighting fixture, created for Rockefeller Center in 1932.
Elizabeth Broman discusses the work of influential Jazz-Age photojournalist Thérèse Bonney.
The piano plays an intricate, rhythmic solo. The trumpet vocalizes a “wa-wa” sound that is explosively bluesy. The trombone whinnies bizarrely, both expressive and perverse. These are the sounds of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” one of the defining musical pieces of his fifty-year career. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was involved with music...
In the 1920s, the New York department store was an early promoter and exhibitor of European modernism and a distiller of these new styles for the American consumer. Good Furniture magazine reported in 1928 that “Lord and Taylor has taken a very definite step forward toward the actual placing of modern furniture in American homes.”[1]...
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library librarian Elizabeth Broman discusses a 1929 American wordless novel.