The book, Recueil des figures, groupes, thermes, fontaines, vases, et autres ornemens tels qu’ils se voyent a present dans le Château et Parc de Versailles / / gravé d’apres les originaux par Simon Thomassin, graveur du Roy provides a comprehensive catalogue of the sculptures within the gardens at the Palace of Versailles. Authored and published...
The Central Park Zoo: home to exotic birds, barking sea lions, and remnants of artist, William Hunt Diederich. Upon the Zoo’s 1934 renovation, Diederich was commissioned to complete a series of iron weathervanes. Today, on the roof of a maintenance facility on the Zoo’s south end, four replicas of those original weathervanes remain. A cat,...
In celebration of The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, this Object of the Day post takes a multisensory approach to an object in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. This cut and folded paper sphere created by Masahiro Chatani in 1980 is a complex example of “origamic architecture,” a type of kirigami (切り紙)—from the words kiru (to cut)...
Felieke van der Leest’s Grey Heron Airplane ring is full of the whimsy which is an integral component of the artist’s imaginative and sophisticated design process, which incorporates techniques such as bead weaving and crocheting. This ring, like much of Van der Leest’s work, focuses on the use of mass produced toy animals, highlighted by...
As a young child, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), born Leah Berliawsky, immigrated to the United States from Kiev, then part of the tumultuous Russian Empire (and the capital of present-day Ukraine). She and her family settled in Maine, where she adopted the more American name, Louise. After her 1920 marriage, Nevelson enmeshed herself in the New...
Of the many bound prints from our Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design collection that were recently digitized, there are a few in particular that stand out. In these prints, French architect Germain Boffrand depicts the step-by-step process employed by Swiss founder Jean-Baltazar Keller to build a larger-than-life, 38-metric-ton sculpture of King Louis XIV on horseback, including...
This drawing of St. Nicholas of Bari, the model for Santa Claus,[1] was done by the artist Jean-Robert Ango (b. unknown, d. 1773) after the statue of the saint on the colonnade of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Ango, originally from France, lived and worked in Rome from 1759 to 1772. During this time he...
One would not have thought that “fragment” and “porcelain” could co-exist as happily as they do in this teapot, from Marek Cecula’s “Fragment Series”. Why fragment? Cecula (born Poland, 1944, working in New York) writes that, in creating the “Fragment Series”, he wanted to “substitute conventional functionality into a utilitarian sculpture.” In this sense, the...
How wild can you go with design! These dazzling images of ewer-shaped ornaments by the German rococo designer Franz Xaver Habermann prove that German rococo can be pretty flamboyant. This sheet comes from an album of ornament prints of designs for mirrors, candelabra, wall sconces, console tables and other furniture. While Habermann was trained as...
