Previously On View: April 7, 2017 through August 20, 2017

See exhibitions currently on view.

“A multisensory blockbuster of a show…” —Associated Press

The first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste during the creative explosion of the 1920s, The Jazz Age is a multi-media experience of more than 400 examples of interior design, industrial design, decorative art, jewelry, fashion, and architecture, as well as related music and film. Giving full expression to the decade’s diversity and dynamism, The Jazz Age defines the American spirit of the period.

During the 1920s, the influences that fueled design’s burst of innovation, exoticism, and modernity were manifold and flowed back and forth across the Atlantic. Jazz music, a uniquely American art form, also found a ready audience in Europe. An apt metaphor for the decade’s embrace of urbanity and experimentation, jazz captured the pulse and rich mixture of cultures and rhythms that brought a new beat to contemporary life.

Organized into the themes of Persistence of Traditional “Good Taste,” A New Look for Familiar Forms, Bending the Rules, A Smaller World, Abstraction and Reinvention, and Toward a Machine Age and presented on two floors of the museum, The Jazz Age highlights the dynamic changes in American taste and lifestyles that prompted an outpouring of design and heralded an exhilarating new era.

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is co-organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

 #JazzAgeAmerica

highlights

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Installation view of World of Radio

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Shop the Jazz Age

Take home the exhibition’s sumptuous catalog featuring hundreds of full-color illustrations and essays by the exhibition curators. Available at SHOP Cooper Hewitt.

Supporters

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is made possible by the generous support of Madeleine K. Rudin and Grant S. Johnson in memory of Jack Rudin.

Additional major support is provided by Amita and Purnendu Chatterjee, Robert and Helen Appel, Helen and Edward Hintz, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian National Board. Funding is also provided by the August Heckscher Exhibition Fund, The Masinter Family Foundation, Shelby and Frederick Gans, Nion McEvoy, Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation, Ehrenkranz Fund, Esme Usdan Exhibition Endowment Fund, Siegelson, New York, Cooper Hewitt Master’s Program Fund, Karen and Joe Levine, and The Felicia Fund.


Featured image: Photo by Matt Flynn © 2017 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A Bed for Living
This stylishly and supremely practical day bed reflects a collaboration between Frederick Kiesler and Marguerita Mergentime. It was created for Mergentime’s NYC apartment in the mid-1930s, and is Kiesler’s only known residential commission. Containing three storage compartments, a bookshelf, a swing-out bed tray for reading or eating, and an attached lamp, the bed is really...
Image of textile piece 1919.
Peche’s Ornamental Ombré
Matilda McQuiad discusses this ombré textile by prominent Austrian designer Dagobert Peche.
Surface of Luxury
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.
The Master Silk Printer
Elizabeth Broman discusses the 1920s trade catalogue The Master Silk Printer.
Image of drawings by IIonka Karasz.
Tabletop Geometry
Gail Davidson discusses modernist designer Ilonka Karasz's geometric iterations for tableware.
Alternating vibrant yellow and blue lines form staircase-like zigzags diagonally across a cream-colored textile, with horizontal black lines accenting each "stair."
Painterly Effects
Tissu simultané no. 46, a bold geometric design of blue, yellow, and black lines on a white ground, has the hallmark characteristics of Sonia Delaunay’s textiles from the 1920s: contrasting colors with abstract, geometric, or rounded patterns that are block-printed on cotton or silk fabric. In fact, she often printed the same pattern and colorway...
Photograph of ceiling fixture, Rockefeller Center, 1932.
Cosmic Caldwell
Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi discusses this Caldwell lighting fixture, created for Rockefeller Center in 1932.
Paris, Indoors and Outdoors: Thérèse Bonney
Elizabeth Broman discusses the work of influential Jazz-Age photojournalist Thérèse Bonney.
View of a liviing room designed by Sue et Mare at Lord & Taylor. The round display consists of two padded arm chairs, a low coffee table with rounded legs, and a tall, paneled plinth on which stands a statue of a nude figure.
Beautiful Objects for General Consumption: The New York Department Store and Modern Design in the 1920s
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]...