Imagine walking along your downtown street, ready to spend an afternoon shopping. But as you’re glancing into shop windows, you don’t see wool sweaters or cotton dresses—instead, it’s all paper.
Exhibitions: Out of Obscurity, into the Light
Works by artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet are rare and seldom exhibited because fewer than two dozen are known to exist. Nearly all of them are included in Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch, the first-ever museum survey devoted to this elusive American artist, whose important contributions to twentieth-century art, especially in the field of sculpture, have only lately been fully recognized.
Udotopia
Maverick, villain, libertine, genius. Austrian eyewear designer Udo Proksch has been known by many names, but the book excerpted here dives deeply into his archive, puts emphasis on his working methods, fecund productivity, and the undeniable impact he had on design in the twentieth century—and to this day.
Exhibitions: Late Bloomer
Although Rachel Ruysch is not exactly a household name, she is hardly anonymous: while she lived, she was an honored painter in the Old Masters tradition, and she has had her admirers ever since her death in 1750, at the age of eighty-three.
Objects: Enmeshed in Luxury
Unable to stop a spear but singularly effective at getting people to stop and stare, metal mesh handbags were all the rage at the beginning of the twentieth century.
When the Bulb Bubble Burst
400 years ago, the world experienced its first major financial crisis — and Dutch “Tulip Mania” was to blame.
Four Decades of Olde Hope
It may be worth noting on the fortieth anniversary of one of the treasures of the American antiques business, that the portraits, painted furniture, weathervanes, and quilts they purvey at Olde Hope Antiques are, in an important sense, emblems of the owners’ belief in bedrock values of our democracy.
A New Home for American Classicism
For decades, Kelly and Randall Schrimsher have acquired the best of the best in early nineteenth-century American furniture. Now, much of their collection has a period-appropriate showcase in Charleston, South Carolina.
Trail of Tiles
A fantasia in ceramic, Leighton House in London testifies to the decorative sense of its namesake builder, artist Frederic Leighton, and the craftsmanship of William De Morgan.
Exhibitions: Tales from the Other Side
For the unbeliever, the skeptic, the misanthrope, few movements could elicit greater disdain than the spiritualism that arose in the late 1840s and swept through American society into the 1920s.