(Image of Met’s Period Rooms via Diana: Muse )

Today I headed to the Metropolitan Museum’s symposium of the “Past, Present and Future” of the Period Room, which was an amazing day of lectures. I enjoy period rooms for their romance and human scale — they are often a respite from museum fatigue. However, I’ve also wondered how museums will handle the continuing addition of “period” rooms. I mean, in a hundred years, what rooms will people want to see? Uber modernist rooms? 1950s playrooms? Bomb shelters? Ina Garten’s kitchen? The last lecture of the day was the best in many ways as it addressed this very question of the future of the period room. The lecture was given by Julius Bryant who has the delicious title of “Keeper of Word and Image” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He mentioned the artist Mark Dion, whose work, focused on the processes of collecting and discovery is fascinating. I did a little google research and found that Dion is playing with the aesthetic and fantastic qualities that attract us to these displays. Here are two samples:

(image via nature network )

(image via )

One quote from Dion that I loved (since I’m a student of the decorative arts) is this: “I am very excited by the decorative arts. To study the history of the decorative arts, one must follow developments in science and technology, political economy and aesthetics and iconography.” Yes! Yes! Yes!

Full text of the interview here.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Founded in 1977, the Society works to promote and support the study and understanding of design history. (How cool is that?) Its activities are focused on demonstrating the widespread cultural and economic significance of design history.

I’ve MIA as I’m studying studying studying for finals and working on various projects (like my garden)! Posts to come on Thursday.

In the meantime, a taste of what I’m cramming into my brain, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, built in the 1920s. He considered it his “machine for living.” I find the whole concept of the house as machine or the chair as machine creepy — I like to believe in soul — the importance of comfort and the reality that a house can be “alive” vs. “machine”. I think Corbu and I would have gotten into it had we ever shared a meal together. Still, there is something special about this house, even in its machine-ness.

I came across this *beautiful* image on a new to me blog Abbytryagain. I want to find the book Stockholm’s Apartments. Lust!

I spent some additional time looking at the Sotheby’s auction of Margaret Weston’s photography collection which all highlight our continuing fascination with nature and the challenges of capturing the fleeting vitality of the natural world. The upper right photograph captures the lacy silhouette of trees against the sky, something that is easy to see with our eyes, but hard to capture on film. T. asked me to marry him underneath just such a silhouette of a tree. The luminosity of the water lilly, the sinuousness of the fern print, the simplicity of the still life of fruit are all delicious.

These are shots I took of my parents house in Vermont when we were there two weeks ago. My childhood home looks so different, so much more elegant through my 28-year old eyes. As we struggle to find the right mix of modern and elegant, I realize how much this house grounds me, how much I hope to recreate this mix of comfort and elegance in our own home. I realize looking at the photos below that my interest in print rooms has a very early start in the laundry room where my mother put up all my sister and my art.

We’ve been in the new apartment for a week — chaos still reigns, but we’re making progress. We have internet, a bed, only two forks (my fault, I left the rest in Brooklyn), this oversize lamp and a craigslist find of a $40 “english butler table”.

Hand and Heart: Collecting, Curating, and Creating American Folk Art

Saturday, March 31, 9:15 am–5:00 pm
Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall

The 15th Annual Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Memorial Symposium is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Made for Love. On Friday evening before the symposium, Steven Mintz, Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, University of Houston, presents the keynote Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Lecture, “Private Passions: Art and the Hidden History of Love and Friendship.”

The conference program, including registration information, is available as a downloadable PDF. Or, for more information, please call 203.432.0615.

Exhibition organized by Erin E. Eisenbarth, the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition is supported by an endowment made possible by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and by Friends of American Arts at Yale Exhibition and Publication Fund.

As the daughter of a writer who spent her formative years in independent bookstores, I have an ambivalent relationship with Amazon.com — on the one hand, anything that gets books into the hands of readers is a great thing. On the other hand, I’ve seen the thinning of the range of titles most bookstores carry, independent or not, as the more obscure titles are now solely purchased online. This thinning has diminished one of the true pleasures of a bookstore — browsing. However, every now and then, Amazon’s suggestions will provide me with the serendipitous experience of browsing in a good book store, which is finding an unexpected pleasure. Case in point: Period Rooms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I bought the book immediately because the period rooms at the Met fascinate me — I’m a new comer to much of the Met, discovering it in pieces as classes at school require me to delve into uncharted territories (French ceramics, German architecture, American silver) and my some of my best experiences in the Met so far have been getting lost in the period rooms, which always seem empty.

In the course of my auction research I found the site igavel.com, which has a showroom in New York. The prices are high, but the quality is too. One highlight of their current auction is this miniature room (complete with French scenic wallpaper!). “Pink Parlor, Graeme Park, Hursham, PA, circa 1722″ was built by Mrs. Farnum and Thomas C. T. Brokaw, Harry Smith, Edward G. Norton and according to the auction website, was first exhibited at the Philadelphia Flower Show, 1977.

This room reminds me of the Doll’s House of Petronella Oortman c. 1686-1705 I studied in Survey of Decorative Arts I.

This is one of three seventeenth-century doll’s houses that have survived intact. It was commissioned by Petronella Oortman, a wealthy Amsterdam lady. The house is remarkable in that all of the components are made exactly to scale.

“Seventeenth-century doll’s houses were not children’s toys, they were a hobby. In the 17th century, many wealthy Dutch merchants had collections of one sort or another, which they kept in display cabinets. The wives of these well-to-do gentlemen also had collections, which reflected their personal interests: their homes. Some had large cupboards full of miniature furniture and dolls, replicas of a real home. These doll’s houses were sometimes on a magnificent scale. Whenever an important visitor dropped by, the host and hostess would show their collections. The master of the house would open the drawers of his cabinet and explain the contents to his guests, while his wife gave a comprehensive demonstration of her doll’s house. She would display the contents of the cupboards, reveal hidden spaces, light the lamps and would let real water gush from the fountain in the garden. Doll’s house demonstrations sometimes went on for hours. for ladies, comparable to the cabinets in which gentlemen kept their collections.”

I love the fact that 300 odd years apart, on different continents, two wealthy women produced such creative, unique objects that reflected themselves, no doubt.

For my weekly post on decorative arts, I thought I’d write about material culture and the history of card writing and of Christmas cards in particular, since I finished sending mine (shown here) just last week! I’m interested in the study of “material culture” since it explores the relationship between artifacts and society. Christmas cards are certainly a cultural artifact, reflecting our collective interests, decorative tastes, social aspirations and beliefs.

This post was prompted by coming across George Buday’s The History of Christmas Cards when I popped in to Heights Books this afternoon. It is my favorite bookstore, the place I go when Tim’s out of town, when I’m lonely, killing time, or looking to get lost in the world of ideas. It was here that I discovered Japanese gardening at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that interior decorating (something I had previously held in some contempt) could be about making were you live home, and fed my obsession with stamps.

The “first” christmas card was designed by John Callcott Horsley, an English designer, in the 1840s.

A quick comparison of my Christmas card to the one of the first commercial cards made in England in the 1840s shows both similarities (a non-religious image and greeting) and differences (my card is much more abstract, whereas the earlier card shows images of Dickensian poverty, my card is personalized, and printed by hand). More on material culture at a later date!

I’m fascinated by the idea of private space and the extent that studies have remained unchanged over the last 500 years. I found this image of Andrew Carnegie’s study, completed in 1901. Note the paintings around the room and the bust on the filing case. And the dinosaur too! If you are in New York, come to the Cooper-Hewitt gift shop and walk around the inner room of the shop which is what is left of the study in the current incarnation of the Carnegie mansion. The paintings and the woodwork are all that remain.

I’m drawn to multiples in design. I love wallpaper with its often repeating patterns, I love blocks of stamps, I was drawn to the multiple prints at the Photography museum and today at the flea market saw multiples again in the repeating pattern of Christmas Trees from turn of the century Germany scrapbooking paper. I don’t see all the edges of this yet — I used to just think I was into wallpaper — but I’m beginning to think that its more about multiples in design. Just a note to myself (images to follow) and keep trying to identify what holds my attention about multiples and how to apply it to my business and art.

The trees:

We went to the Musee de Cluny today to escape the heat. The site was originally Roman baths and then later an abbey — a somewhat odd juxtaposition. I could still smell the wet presence of the baths which make the museum all the more cool and lovely inside.

I visited Meeta in Oxford and we went to Bath and stopped at the Roman baths there — the smell there was identical to the smell at Cluny today — earthy, damp, limestone — which a perfect antidote to the heat, noise and pollution of Paris.

From the decorative arts perspective, however, the tapestry of the Lady and the Unicorn was the highlight of the museum. It has been superbly curated; you step up and around a corner into a darkened room and when you turn the corner, there it is, coolly glowing at you. Dramatic, yes, but deservedly so. I want to know more about it — how long it took to weave, how many weavers there were, why it was commissioned. Compared to the other art of the period, which to me appears religious and moody, this tapestry vibrates with a vitality missing from much of the other art in the museum.

We weighed our wedding invitation today and found that is was… 2.10 ounces. A 2 ounce stamp = .63 cents of postage. Anything over 2 ounces a .87 cent stamp. So much for using the beautiful, pastel .63 cent “wedding” stamps. The post office only sells one .87 cent stamp. Of a scientist.

Visted zazzle.com and stamps.com which were too expensive at a $1.30 a stamp for the face value of .87 cents. Six hours later I’m still looking and now am desperate for 1970s stamps. A selction below:

I was trying to explain to the budding stamp obsession/appeal to Tim: is it that stamps somehow represent our collective best intentions in less than a cubic inch? And, they are just beautiful, affordable design in our every day lives. To be continued…