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In keeping with yesterday's theme of going to museums that were former residences, after the Neuegalerie, i went to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, which is the former Carnegie mansion. The mansion itself is something to see, even more opulent than the Neuegalerie, with lots of interesting secret passageway doors to spy and beautiful fireplaces and light fixtures in every room. There's a spacious, shady private garden with tables for eating lunch, and it was clear that museum members often come just to hang out in the garden and relax with a book and a glass of wine or something.
There are three exhibits running right now, "Campana Brothers Select: Works from the Permanent Collection," "Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008," and "Multiple Choice: From Sample Book to Product." The websites have a LOT of images of the works displayed, if you are in a surfing mood.
The Rococo exhibit is the largest, taking up two floors of the museum. There's a ton of actual Rococo stuff from the 18th century, everything from furniture to housewares to fabric, jewelry, personal effects, all beautifully preserved and intact. Wandering through that segment of it, i was reminded how hit-or-miss i find Rococo, in terms of my own personal taste. (For example, I really don't like ormolu furnishings, or the easter-eggy porcelain holloware, but i love the brocades and the little personal items like matchsafes and snuffboxes.) Some highlights of this section were the folding fans, automata, chatelaines, shoe buckles, and bejeweled hair ornaments with "tremblants" (what modern folk often call "dangly bits"). I have to say, there was a triptych vanity mirror whose tain was almost wholly intact, and i freaked myself out a little looking into it and thinking about how many women must have done the same over the past 300+ years, wondering what they were like, what happened to them in their lives, and the high probability that at least a couple of them were beheaded in the French Revolution.
Upstairs were the rooms full of post-rococo work that drew inspiration and aesthetic elements from rococo style, particularly Art Nouveau. I was thrilled to discover rooms full of Lalique jewelry, Mucha ornaments and printed velvet, Gaudi and Horta and Guimard pieces--furniture and embroidery and glassware. There were even more modern pieces, a Chihuly lamp of glass squiggles, a Prada shoe design. It was very literally overwhelming.
The Campara Brothers exhibit was contained in a single room, and the theme of it was basically, "stuff they like." Quirky, unusual, striking pieces, displayed at random. My favorite things in there were some kata-gami stencils for printing yukata fabric, some cochineal-dyed horsehair jewelry (and other undyed hairwork jewelry) from 1830, and a piece of 17th-century Flemish embroidery that was so thickly worked it featured a three-dimensional tree whose knotwork branches actually came out of the ground like a frieze sculpture.
The basement level, that was my favorite--the sample book exhibit.
Man, where do i even begin? There were 18th-century button sample books with handwritten notations of style and cost, embroidered waistcoat-pocket-flap samples, ribbon books, china plates divided into pie-slices showing different glazes and patterns. There was a 19th-century Japanese shibori sample book, a dye recipe book with swatches from 1879, 1950s glove leather samples cut into tiny glove shapes, and even a sample book of textile designs from the Wiener Werkstaette (crazy coincidence!). There was a book of swatches of "chocolates," dark-colored calicos considered appropriate for half-mourning fashions. There was an intact copy of Alexander Paul's 1888 reference text, The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer, and running on a loop was a video of each book flipped through from start to finish. I watched the entirety of a book of millinery straw and a collection of 1930s percales. I could have sat there all day and watched every one, in fact. Some of the videos (as well as many of the pieces exhibited) are on the website though, so i can watch them at my leisure. And, if you are so inclined, you can too.
In the bookstore, i purchased a couple of cool books, too. Keith Hagan's Complete Pattern Library with accompanying CD-ROM looked like it could be a great tool for doing custom fabric print designs--i figure it may come in handy for some of my students, too, when they do the printmaking project in dye/paint class. Supersurfaces by Sophia Vyzoviti was another one i just couldn't leave on the shelf--it's full of cutting and folding diagrams and photographs for how to turn flat surfaces into three-dimensional objects, mostly wearable. You can use the methods on any number of base materials, too: leather, vinyl, felt, foam, plastic, tyvek, paper, etc. It seemed like a good resource to have, for situations where you have a vague costume rendering and a range of research and your job is basically, "make something cool that's kind of like these forms..."
I took a lot of photos of the grounds, and a few more random neighborhood ones as well.
( photography )
There are three exhibits running right now, "Campana Brothers Select: Works from the Permanent Collection," "Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008," and "Multiple Choice: From Sample Book to Product." The websites have a LOT of images of the works displayed, if you are in a surfing mood.
The Rococo exhibit is the largest, taking up two floors of the museum. There's a ton of actual Rococo stuff from the 18th century, everything from furniture to housewares to fabric, jewelry, personal effects, all beautifully preserved and intact. Wandering through that segment of it, i was reminded how hit-or-miss i find Rococo, in terms of my own personal taste. (For example, I really don't like ormolu furnishings, or the easter-eggy porcelain holloware, but i love the brocades and the little personal items like matchsafes and snuffboxes.) Some highlights of this section were the folding fans, automata, chatelaines, shoe buckles, and bejeweled hair ornaments with "tremblants" (what modern folk often call "dangly bits"). I have to say, there was a triptych vanity mirror whose tain was almost wholly intact, and i freaked myself out a little looking into it and thinking about how many women must have done the same over the past 300+ years, wondering what they were like, what happened to them in their lives, and the high probability that at least a couple of them were beheaded in the French Revolution.
Upstairs were the rooms full of post-rococo work that drew inspiration and aesthetic elements from rococo style, particularly Art Nouveau. I was thrilled to discover rooms full of Lalique jewelry, Mucha ornaments and printed velvet, Gaudi and Horta and Guimard pieces--furniture and embroidery and glassware. There were even more modern pieces, a Chihuly lamp of glass squiggles, a Prada shoe design. It was very literally overwhelming.
The Campara Brothers exhibit was contained in a single room, and the theme of it was basically, "stuff they like." Quirky, unusual, striking pieces, displayed at random. My favorite things in there were some kata-gami stencils for printing yukata fabric, some cochineal-dyed horsehair jewelry (and other undyed hairwork jewelry) from 1830, and a piece of 17th-century Flemish embroidery that was so thickly worked it featured a three-dimensional tree whose knotwork branches actually came out of the ground like a frieze sculpture.
The basement level, that was my favorite--the sample book exhibit.
Man, where do i even begin? There were 18th-century button sample books with handwritten notations of style and cost, embroidered waistcoat-pocket-flap samples, ribbon books, china plates divided into pie-slices showing different glazes and patterns. There was a 19th-century Japanese shibori sample book, a dye recipe book with swatches from 1879, 1950s glove leather samples cut into tiny glove shapes, and even a sample book of textile designs from the Wiener Werkstaette (crazy coincidence!). There was a book of swatches of "chocolates," dark-colored calicos considered appropriate for half-mourning fashions. There was an intact copy of Alexander Paul's 1888 reference text, The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer, and running on a loop was a video of each book flipped through from start to finish. I watched the entirety of a book of millinery straw and a collection of 1930s percales. I could have sat there all day and watched every one, in fact. Some of the videos (as well as many of the pieces exhibited) are on the website though, so i can watch them at my leisure. And, if you are so inclined, you can too.
In the bookstore, i purchased a couple of cool books, too. Keith Hagan's Complete Pattern Library with accompanying CD-ROM looked like it could be a great tool for doing custom fabric print designs--i figure it may come in handy for some of my students, too, when they do the printmaking project in dye/paint class. Supersurfaces by Sophia Vyzoviti was another one i just couldn't leave on the shelf--it's full of cutting and folding diagrams and photographs for how to turn flat surfaces into three-dimensional objects, mostly wearable. You can use the methods on any number of base materials, too: leather, vinyl, felt, foam, plastic, tyvek, paper, etc. It seemed like a good resource to have, for situations where you have a vague costume rendering and a range of research and your job is basically, "make something cool that's kind of like these forms..."
I took a lot of photos of the grounds, and a few more random neighborhood ones as well.
( photography )
