Friends and colleagues share their thoughts and memories of a beloved scholar and curator
Tradition and innovation at Longwood Gardens
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Preservation was Pierre S. du Pont’s goal in 1906 when he purchased a derelict arboretum thirty miles to the west and south of Philadelphia. And preservation remains the most complex challenge today at what became, under du Pont’s hand, one of the premier public landscapes in North America, the internationally renowned Longwood …
At home with Christopher Dresser
Photography by Paul Rocheleau| from The Magazine ANTIQUES, December 2009. | When you visit Janet and Lawrence Larose’s New York dining room, you are surrounded by hundreds of objects designed by Christopher Dresser. They are artfully arranged on a series of shelves: teacups perch on lily-pad saucers; frogs leap around a bowl; butterflies flit across cloisonné skies; and cranes are buffeted …
At home in modernism: The John C. Waddell collection of American design (From our Archives)
Waddell’s New York City apartment is filled with striking examples of American design from between the wars
Melting pot modern (From our Archives)
The 1920s was a creatively explosive period in the realm of design
Melting pot modern
Creating an American style in the 1920s.
About books
Recent noteworthy publications that are a pleasure to read and a delight to behold French Art Deco by Jared Goss (Metropolitan Museum of Art, distr. Yale University Press). 280 pp., color and b/w illus. As an artistic term, art deco is one of the most misunderstood. “Art Deco is commonly referred to as a ‘style,’ a designation that suggests specific shared characteristics,” …
At home in modernism: The John C. Waddell collection of American design
Photography by John M. Hall | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | The art of today must be created today,” the designer and author Paul T. Frankl wrote in 1928. “It must express the life about us. It must reflect the main characteristics and earmarks of our own complex civilization.”1 Over the past four decades, collector John C. Waddell …
The Bixby House
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Largely unheralded, this Kansas City masterwork of modernism deserves its place in the pantheon of great American houses. Fig. 1. View of the entrance hall from the main stair in a 1937 photograph by R. B. Churchill. Except as noted, the photographs and renderings illustrated are in the Kem Weber Archive, Architecture and …
Aschermanns
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2011 | The story of the rise of modern American design has long been told in the same way: first came the arts and crafts movement from Britain and art nouveau from the Continent in the 1890s. Then, in the mid-1920s, spurred by the Paris exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Americans embraced …