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.
This post is relevant to the exhibition The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s. Godly brawn characterizes the classical subject of this drawing: Hercules and the Nemean Lion. According to Greek mythology, King Eurystheus tasked Hercules with vanquishing a lion that was terrorizing the region of Nemea. He ultimately succeeded, killing the animal with his...
Sarah D. Coffin discusses the technical excellence of this Lobmeyr Ambassador vase, now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.
Caitlin Condell discusses this Russian movie poster that utilizes themes of modernity, Constructivism, urban imagery, and the avant-garde found in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.
Join curator Sarah Coffin for a Facebook Live tour of The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.
Ryan Maloney, Directory of Education and Programming at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, connects the themes found in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s with the musical culture in Harlem at the time.
Elizabeth Broman discusses Joseph Urban's theatre design. His murals for the Ziegfeld Theatre are now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.
