Articles
Posted 04/02/09
What modern was: Mid Century masters of luxury
May 2008 | "Whatever is new, is bad,” Wallace Nutting wrote in 1925. A minister-turned-entrepreneur who almost single-handedly popularized the colonial revival style via the sale of period furniture reproductions, Nutting (1861–1941) was one of the most acerbic partisans in an aesthetic fight waged in the early decades of the twentieth century—a battle between modernism and tradition.
Posted 04/02/09
May 2008 | The craftsmen and the carved furniture of the Rappahannock River valley, 1740–1780
Posted 04/02/09
The Butterfly Man of New Orleans
May 2008 | Local collectors have come to know the anonymous maker as the “Butterfly Man” for his signature use of the double dovetail—a bowtie-shaped interior patch also known as a butterfly or flying Dutchman—to strengthen the glued panels that comprise the side walls (see Fig. 11).5 This common reinforcement method has not been found on any other armoires made in Louisiana.
Posted 04/02/09
July 2008 | The jewelry created in France, Belgium, and other parts of Europe by a select group of avant-garde artists at the close of the nineteenth century was revolutionary. It reinvigorated what had become a formulaic naturalism with new forms drawn from outside sources, including the arts and crafts movement in Great Britain and the arts of Japan.
Posted 03/13/09
February 2009 | Utilitarian boxes with devotional woodcuts pasted to the insides of their lids remind us that the secular and the sacred were inseparable in the fifteenth century
