 Ning, everyone. Hello. I'm Caroline Bowman, director of Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome to our Enid and Lester Moore's historic design lecture, for which we invite scholars and experts from the field to investigate and illuminate the historical richness of our permanent collection. Made possible, made possible thanks to the extremely generous support of trustee Denny Morse and her husband Lester, this biannual event augments the enormous body of knowledge available through our collection and helps to make that knowledge accessible to all audiences. A massive thanks to you both for this very thoughtful special gift to design enthusiasts and for all that you do for Cooper Hewitt all the time. Thank you Denny and Lester. This lecture coincides with the opening of Alanka Karas works from the collection in our second floor galleries, which I hope everyone enjoyed earlier tonight. And I'm not sure you realize, but you are the very first to see this glorious exhibition. It was just installed. One of the most successful female designers of the early 20th century, Alanka Karas, deployed her modern aesthetic to design everything, everything from ceramics and toys to rugs, silver, furniture, jewelry and more. A prolific illustrator in 1924, she began her nearly lifelong relationship with the New Yorker for which she created 186 covers. Yes. And by mid-century, she had become one of the nation's leading designers of wallpapers and murals. Cooper Hewitt maintains the preeminent collection of wall coverings in the United States with over 10,000 examples from the 17th century to the present day, including the largest and finest selection of Karas wallpapers, close to 100 in total. The museum also holds 19 Karas drawings and prints and several exceptional examples of Karas' product designs. This exhibition celebrates the gift of Karas murals and drawings from the Edelman family. Matthew and Debbie and Matthew's father, Hank, and a selection of Karas ephemera gifted by Cooper Hewitt trustee, Marilyn Friedman. Hank Edelman was the owner of Edelman Studios, which printed all of the blueprint murals for the Katzenbach and Warren wallpaper firm, including the idealized space Karas designed for the Serenade mural, which is on view upstairs. A sincere thank you to Matthew and Debbie, and a special thank you to Marilyn, who also expertly leads our collections committee at the museum. Congratulations to our wall coverings curator, Greg Herringshaw, for the magnificent installation. I know he had a ball researching it and installing it, and a very warm welcome to the entire Karas family who traveled from near and far to be here with us this evening. This evening's lecture will be delivered by Ashley Callahan, the foremost scholar of Karas' body of work. Ashley is a former curator of decorative arts at the Georgia Museum of Art and is currently curating an exhibition on the history of the University of Georgia's studio craft instruction for that museum. She has organized exhibitions on both Alanka Karats and her sister, Mariska, a fashion and textile designer. And she is the author of Enchanting Modern, Alanka Karats, Modern Threads Fashion and Art by Mariska Karats, as well as Southern Tufts, the regional origins and national craze for chenille fashion. Her devotion to Karats extends to her own collection of design from which Ashley has gifted to Cooper Hewitt two Karats ceramic plates just a few weeks ago. So thank you so much, Ashley, and over to you. Thank you. Well, thank you to everyone at the Cooper Hewitt for inviting me to speak about one of my favorite topics of all time, and thanks to all of you for joining me here this evening. It is such an honor to be here, and I do wish to acknowledge Mr. and Mrs. Morse for making this possible. Thank you very much. I want to begin with a little background on how I came to study Alanka Karats. When the Cooper Hewitt expanded its master's program to have a branch in Washington, D.C., I was one of the first students. In my textiles class, my teacher, Madeline Shaw, who's at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History now, told us all to select a name from this list of under-researched American modern female textile designers for a project, and I got lucky and selected Alanka. So I first saw her name on March 3rd, 1997. At that time there was just a scattered record of a few aspects of her career. She was included in books on American art deco or American modernism. She was known for doing covers of the New Yorker and Railroad China collectors knew her name. But I quickly realized that she did so much more than that. And I had the good fortune while I was in graduate school of meeting her niece, Sol Vang Cox, who lived in Alexandria. And she shared lots of family stories with me, and she was just so happy to have someone researching her aunt and her mother, Alanka's sister, Marishka Karats, who worked as a fashion designer and as an artist. And like Alanka, she's well represented in the Cooper Hewitt's collection, and this embroidered wall hanging is from the museum here. I kept on with Alanka after the class and I wrote my thesis on her. And I later met Alanka's granddaughter, also named Alanka, who I was thrilled to learn, had a lot of Alanka's portfolios and papers and basically just piles and boxes of stuff in her barn. And then in 2003, I curated an exhibition on Alanka at the Georgian Museum of Art, where I was the curator of Decorative Arts. And then in 2007, I curated one on Marishka. And throughout all this, I've met more dear family members, many of whom are here with us this evening. And I have taken such pleasure in seeing Alanka's work included in more and more books and exhibitions. And most recently, her work even appeared in a book on pictorial cartography of all things. And the author, Stephen Hornsby, describes a map of hers as one of the most striking pictorial maps of the era. So when Susanna Brown, the Cooper Hewitt's publication manager, was explaining the significance of the Morris Historic Design Lecture Series to me and emphasizing how it highlights lesser known artists and the farther reaches of design history, I couldn't help but think to myself, but Alanka's so much better known than she used to be. I had to really question why she still has that image. And I thought about how the Cooper Hewitt has been considering an exhibition on Alanka and Marishka for at least 10 to 15 years, and how it's the wall coverings curator who finally did one on Alanka. And I realized that one of the aspects of her career that I most admire and most enjoy is that she did everything. And that makes her elusive. Few curators or collectors get to diversify like she did. So yeah, she's one of the great and prolific post-war wallpaper designers, but that may not matter to someone who's interested in her late 1920s modern furnishings. She did a lot of paintings, actual framed paintings, but she's hardly known for that work at all. She is known for her textiles, but so few of them survive. She did ceramics, silver, furniture, interiors, Christmas cards, book illustrations and book jackets, lithographs, woodcuts, maps, furniture, silver, advertisements. She patented a hobby horse. She even designed a shower curtain. And I don't know anyone who collects those. So there we go. Sorry, I got off. Alanka doesn't fall neatly into typical curatorial or collecting divisions. She defies easy classification. But the Cooper Hewitt has an outstanding collection of her wallpaper, which is the heart of this exhibition and important examples of other areas of her work. So thank you to Greg Herring Shaw for taking her on and to the Cooper Hewitt for having such an amazing collection. After 20 years of Alanka, I still encounter new information and I'm kind of surprised and kind of not surprised when I learned about yet another project that she had her hand in. And I know there's still a lot to learn. And there's still tantalizing clues, like a mention in the Milwaukee Journal in 1917 that she did backgrounds for performances of Arthur Schnitzler's plays in Vienna. And that she acted in a Hungarian theater in the village in 1921. And there are frustrating elements, like we still don't know exactly when she came to this country. We know the year, but not the date. Jules Stern, who gave a past Morse lecture, was recently researching the details of how and when many of these early modernists came to this country. So she was figuring out which port they left out of, what ship they traveled on, and where they arrived. And the only one she couldn't track down was Alanka. So yes, she's an elusive modernist. And taking almost any small aspect of her career as a focus would make for a great exhibition or article or talk. But I want to give you an idea of the scope of her career tonight and how the works on view here at the Cooper Hewitt fit into it. And since we can't cover everything she did, this evening I'm going to highlight four moments in her career. So I'm going to look at the mid and late teens, the late 1920s, the mid 1930s, and the post war wallpaper years. Alanka Karaz was born in 1896 in Budapest, Hungary, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. She had two younger siblings, Mariska and Steve, and they grew up spending part of each year in the country. Their father was a silversmith and he died while the children were young. Their mother moved to this country before his death, and Alanka's sister Mariska came here in 1912, and then Alanka came here sometime in 1913. Alanka had studied at the Hungarian Royal National School of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. She studied textiles her first year and graphics her second. And once here, she studied at Veenold Rice's school on Christopher Street, and he was a German-born American artist and designer who became best known for his work for the Cincinnati Union Terminal and his portraits of Native Americans. Alanka settled pretty quickly in Greenwich Village and worked in a modernist style heavily influenced by the Wienerwerkstatte and Hungarian folk art, influences that were prevalent in Budapest when she was a student there. And for this first moment, the mid and late teens, we learn a lot about Alanka through a series of avant-garde little magazines. And one was the Modern Art Collector, or the MAC, which you see here. And this was published from 1915 to 1918 by the Society of Modern Art, which was founded in 1914 by a small group of artists, including Veenold Rice and Alanka. So she was not just a bystander or a contributor, she was actively involved in promoting modern design in this country. The Society of Modern Art wanted to help Americans stay up to date with modern European design at a time when it was difficult to travel there. And one way they did this was through the pages of the MAC, to which Alanka contributed designs for dress goods, wallpapers and textiles, as well as theatrical poster designs, book illustrations, cover designs, advertisements, typography, and decorative borders. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between Alanka and Veenold Rice's work and the pages of the MAC, and their careers intersected for about the next 20 years. And because of the close connections between their work, I spent some time looking through books on Veenold Rice and ran across this painting titled Simply Girl in Peasant Costume. And this is now in the Siam Russell Museum in Montana. And I'm sure you recognize her now, as I did when I saw it. And it was exciting to be able to reconnect Alanka's name with this painting and to be able to put these little bits of history back together. And there's even a photograph of her in this outfit and the embroidered panels on the sleeves of that dress survive as well. The photographer for this image is probably Nicholas Marai, a fellow Hungarian American in Greenwich Village, who captured many striking images of Alanka and her sister Mariska as well. Another important little publication for introducing Alanka in the teens is Bruno's Weekly, which was published from July 1915 to December 1916 for about a year and a half by Guido Bruno, who was a colorful Greenwich Village character who had a garret in Washington Square. He included an article about her in 1915 titled Alanka Karaz, the Hermit Painter. And he described her home as a tiny house in a tiny yard that you could only get to by going through the house in front of it. And he wrote, perhaps it served as a storehouse or as a woodshed. Today it is a hermitage. Ms. Karaz chose it for living space and studio combined. She painted the walls and the windowsills and its furniture and its floors. The paintings on her easel and here and there on the walls harmonize with it and color and style. And this chest from 1916 perhaps gives a hint of the color and style that studio would have had. And these small paintings from about that time suggest the type of work that she was creating there. Bruno describes her as a recluse making commercial art so that she could afford to make paintings. And she did nothing to dispel that image writing of herself. I am living here in the secluded little place I found. I work and I make occasional trips to art editors. So already we have this dichotomy of Alanka as an engaged promoter of modernism and Alanka as a very private person. In addition to her involvement with the little magazines and the teens she was also involved with textile design. And this image on the left is a design for a silk chiffon she created for H.R. Mallinson around 1917. She taught textile design at the modern art school which is a progressive school founded in the village in 1915. And she participated in an important series of annual textile design contests sponsored by the trade publication Women's Wear Daily between 1916 and 1921. And these contests were part of an effort to help American manufacturers develop an American style independent from Europe and Alanka won awards in several of these contests. Participants were encouraged to study the historical arts of the Americas for inspiration especially from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History and Alanka did. And an exhibition at Bard a couple of years ago about this even featured Alanka on the cover of its catalog. Mallinson even put some of her designs from these contests into production including the one that's based on a batik design that you see on the sleeves of the dress Mariska is wearing on the right. And while this batik was designed as a repeat pattern intended for manufacture Alanka also created batiks as individual works of art and she exhibited them with venal dress. And these examples were illustrated in a book titled first lessons in batik from 1921 and the one on the lower right is actually by venal dress. The one on the left called the king also appeared in an earlier publication from 1919 which had this description of Alanka. Her batiks reflect her gypsy sympathies she dreams what she wishes to create and creates without fear what she has dreamed. And such sort of exoticized appraisals of her and her work appear periodically throughout her career. In 1920 Alanka married Willem Nyland a Dutch American chemist and pianist and they built a home in Brewster New York out in the country. And this shows the original house which was painted fate of vermilion ultramarine gray and white with decorative painting around the door and on the fascia boards. They continued adding to the house over the decades and adding eventually creating a quirky assemblage of 21 rooms though one account I read said 40 winding up the hill. The furnishings by the late 1920s included modern custom built furniture designed by Alanka a Dutch clock and Indian wall hanging dishes with peasant designs from many countries rustic chairs from Santo Domingo and Virginia and Bavarian homespun curtains and by all accounts it was a magical and colorful place filled with secret nooks and unexpected turns and surprising stairs. And while she maintained an apartment in the city for most of her life this was Alanka's home throughout her career. Now we'll jump ahead briefly to the mid 1920s. As she had done in the teens Alanka continued creating covers and illustrations for publications including New York not so little and not so old from 1926 by Sarah Lockwood which you see here and the New Yorker. As you heard Alanka created 186 covers for the magazine between 1925 the year the magazine was founded and 1973 and these earliest covers are dynamic modern depictions of city life. Then in the late 1920s our second area of focus she received a lot of attention from modern objects and interiors. Generally her designs are simple modern forms with a strong emphasis on geometry like you see in these chairs and they're composed simply of four flat planks each and she favored that scalloped edge that you see on the chair on the right and you also see it in the lamp and in the mirror that's behind the lamp. She created at least three designs for silver plated wares for Pay and Baker a company in North Adelborough Massachusetts. This ribbed pattern on the left which also relates to that scalloped design she used a lot and the pattern on the right with cylinders and half-circles and this cone and fin pattern and these objects are all in the Cooper Hewitt's collection including the sketches on the right and it's really exciting to have these sketches where she's working out what the forms are going to be in a collection that also has examples of the finished manufactured products and Alaka continued designing textiles in the late 1920s and this Oakleaf pattern was manufactured by Lesher and Whitman around 1928 and this example is in the collection of the MFA Boston and it's just another really rare and exciting object to have survived and Oakleaf was so successful that it was even knocked off by another manufacturer and you see an ad on the right for LeFrance textiles which offered it as Art Mauder and Moquette pattern 3213 and these designs are also for textiles and the one on the left is in the Cooper Hewitt's collection and it's another design for Lesher Whitman from about 1931 and the one on the right is an oil cloth for standard textile company from about 1928 but they're flat abstract floral designs with cross hatching which was a design element that she used a lot and she designed interiors in the late 1920s. She was of course one of many European born and trained artists and designers in New York at the time and her peers included Donald Deskey, Paul Frankel, Gilbert Rodey, Wolfgang and Paula Hoffman, Marguerite Zorak and Veenald Rice and by joining together to form groups based on European models Alaka and her peers presented significant exhibitions, developed ties to manufacturers and promoted modern design in this country and one of these groups was the American designers gallery which held two exhibitions so not very many but they were important and they got a lot of press and Alaka was a member of the executive committee so again she wasn't just participating from the edge she was actively involved. For the first American designers gallery's exhibition which took place in late 1928 Alaka contributed two rooms a modern studio apartment which you see here in a nursery. The central element of the apartment which was very much like her own in New York was a monumental DeVon bookcase a big rectilinear multi-purpose piece of furniture that address the space needs of urban dwellers so if you don't have room for both a big sofa and a big bookshelf let your sofa be your bookshelf and its upholstery was by Paul Rodier but the rug on the floor and the door hanging that you see in the background those were of her design as was the bookshelf along the walls which recalls Paul Frankel skyscraper designs. Alaka's other room for the American designers gallery 1928 show received a lot more media attention and it was a nursery seen here in a sketch of hers that featured primary colors and simple geometric shapes and related work had come out of the Bauhaus a couple of years earlier so she may have been influenced by that design. Her nursery had a chalkboard running the circumference of the room and everything was scaled to the size of the child and not just the furniture was small but she even brought the ceiling down so the whole room was the right size for a child. The publication Arts and Decoration Herald of the Room is the first nursery ever designed for the very modern American child and if you notice the rug with its geometric shapes and that female figure this was created to create sort of a playground like setting and that rug is now in the Met's collection and these two drawings on the right are other rug designs that are in the Cooper Hewitt's collection and their gifts of Donald Deskey and like the American designers gallery rug they each have a strong emphasis on geometry and employ bold colors. The second American designers gallery exhibition took place in 1929 after the stock market crash and the group sought to present designs that were affordable and the Alonka's room dining room which you see here the table folds down like a traditional gate leg table so that it could be placed against the wall allowing the room to be a living area as well so she was acknowledging the space limitations of small apartments and the limitations of smaller budgets and the colors in this room were warm coppers, yellows, browns and roses. Shortly after this exhibition she and her husband began an extended period of travel that included spending a little over a year around 1930-31 living in Java in the Dutch East Indies now Indonesia for his work. There they bought an old manor house seen in her painting here and Alonka created a modern interior. It had an open floor plan and rectilinear furniture that was made out of local materials and this chair is in the Met's collection. She also painted murals on the walls that were inspired by the tropical setting and this time in Java and her travels around Europe and to China beforehand proved inspirational for the rest of her career. Now for the mid 1930s by this time there's a stronger emphasis on nature and her New Yorker covers. That hard modernist geometry fades and her covers generally are charming, peaceful, colorful depictions of leisure activities in the city or vacation destinations out in the country. A lot shows scenes around Brewster and one of my favorite research moments was early on when I sat down with Alonka's niece Solveig and listened to the stories that go with all these New Yorker covers. So while they're part of the New Yorker and its role as a cultural artifact there are also little windows into her personal life. Because of this experience when I saw this large work six by nine feet in the Cooper Hewitt's collection I wondered if it had a story. So I asked her family and they said it's of her children Corolla who was born in 1932 and Eric who was born in 1936 and it's a view from the Lower East Side and they had an apartment down there near one of the bridges for a while and it shows the ferry and a fish market. So this is in the city but it also brings in a little bit of the country because that balcony with its distinctive balustrades was very similar to the one at the house in Brewster. So this is sort of a fantasy scene but it includes elements from her daily life. With Corolla's birth in 1932 Alonka returned to nursery design and in 1933 house beautiful featured Corolla's nursery and this is part of the layout from the magazine and this included the rug from the American designers gallery and furniture and primary colors and simple geometric shapes and the applique quilt that you see in the lower left may have been of Mariska's design. The chest on the right was yellow with a red base and it was designed to grow with the child. So when the child was a baby and the mother was the one putting things into and pulling things out of the chest you use the base then when the child's old enough to use the chest you remove the base and put the drawers down lower and then you could replace it when the child grew older. In 1935 Alonka designed a series of nurseries for Saks Fifth Avenue and this is one of the few areas of her work that she wrote about and in an article for house and garden she described children as unconditioned as reacting directly to an object rather than to any association it might have and she advised and explained surround the child with objects of elemental forms and colors of all kinds and shades and intensity vary the shapes and sizes of furniture and toys then he is more likely to arrange them for their own values than for their associative value of someone else's selection of pinks blue and pale green. He will thereby develop taste discrimination and be far more gratified by the world around him as a child and as an adult. For this nursery she designed a dresser that was color-coded so the child could learn to keep for example his socks in the red drawer with the red knob and his shirts in the blue. House beautiful described the rooms as the most enchanting nurseries ever built. This nursery for a boy had an unusual use of wallpapers one was white with small red dots and one was blue with small white dots and it was cut to resemble a large curtain pulled back in the corners with tangerine colored wallpaper bows. And this youth's room for a girl was painted in apple greens and pale yellows and one newspaper described it as being full of spring and sunshine. The white mahogany furniture was composed of units that could be arranged as the child saw fit and the nurse the furniture for these nurseries was produced by Amodec the American Modern Decoration Corporation which Donald Deskey founded in 1931. But this nursery furniture is best I understand it experience limited production. The rooms though met uniform praise. Also in the mid 1930s Alanka worked as a designer for Buffalo China. She created many designs that went into production including one that was shown at an exhibition of contemporary design at the Met in 1935 and that was an ornamented version of the set you see on the upper right which is in the Met's collection now. She created two designs for the Pennsylvania Railroad's finest train the Broadway Limited and those are on the lower left. She also designed a wallpaper in the 1930s that Donald Deskey used in this interior. It emphasizes two-dimensional abstract images from nature and its tropical trees and native figures certainly show the influence of her time in Java. And sometimes these images of her work look so restrained when you just see them in black and white. But Alanka loved and used color and it's exciting to be able to share this color image of her wallpaper with you which I can do thanks to Marilyn Friedman who found and shared with me this spread from country life from 1934 which has a detail of the wallpaper around the outside and then shows it used in Donald Deskey's interior. So during the mid 1930s Alanka was doing nurseries furniture, ceramic design, book jackets, magazine covers and at least one wallpaper. After that time she continued making book jackets and covers for the New Yorker and these are from the 1940s 50s and 60s. And when I went through the big book of New Yorker covers with Solveig she called the one with the bugs the beast that ate the garden and she explained that Alanka was a fabulous cook and always had a big garden that was always somewhat wild and I can just imagine her expressing disdain for these critters and then turning around and making them beautiful for the cover of the New Yorker. Now let's skip ahead to focus on Alanka's work with wallpaper which you may have noticed has been bubbling up periodically throughout her career. In the world of wallpaper she's known for her post-war work with the firm of Kotzenbach and Warren but Alanka actually began working with them before the war in 1939 and some of her papers including these two street games and seed store were in print by 1941. At least some of these pre-war papers show strong connections to her covers for the New Yorker so here's street games with a similar composition to a cover from July 1938 and here's seed store with a related cover from May of 1939 and Alanka often reused and reworked elements like this throughout her career. Wallpaper production pretty much halted during World War II but the post-war building boom and the post-war experimentation with new methods of printing made the later 1940s and the early 50s a really exciting time for wallpapers and Alanka became a well known wallpaper designer. William Kotzenbach who founded Kotzenbach and Warren described her papers as having the primitive qualities of an American sampler but the sophistication of the New Yorker and Alanka classified Kotzenbach and Warren as a benevolent sponsor that allowed her to design as she pleased. In June 1947 Kotzenbach and Warren introduced two groups of wallpapers by her almost all of which feature subjects from nature and one group was printed through an experimental technique similar to making architectural blueprints like these from the apple trees series which had three panels. The blueprint process was basically the same as that for making architectural plans but what was nice about it was that it was able to capture all the details of her original drawings which you can really appreciate when you go upstairs to see the show. The technique may have evolved a bit over the years and the terms mezzatone and luxograph are also associated with this kind of wallpaper but we haven't quite figured out all those details yet. These first ones were rendered in brown rather than the blue you would expect from blueprints and they were printed in both positives or negatives and one source reported that customers who wanted panels to fit in with particular color schemes could have some of these designs hand-painted to order by Alanka and William Kotzenbach later recalled that the process used for her blueprint papers was one of the firm's notable post-war innovations. The other group from her 1947 series was paired papers with these superimposed motifs so you see the chicken wire on the lower right and then you see the chicken wire with the chickens and then there was also fish with the fish net so on that back wall you just see the fish net but on the front wall you see the fish with the fish net and then there was one that had tigers with bamboo. Another trend of the time was textured wallpaper and though Alanka repeatedly emphasized the importance of two dimensionality in wall coverings her design inline which is in the Cooper Hewitt's collection and was on a beautiful invitation to this event was presented in a publicity photograph pasted over these vertical unevenly spaced boards lending it a true third dimension and giving it almost a drapery like quality and in the book Practical American Wallpaper by William Kotzenbach and his wife Lois they describe inline as one of the abstract modern designs which is met with great commercial success and they went on to say this may be due to the harmony of its purely abstract forms which entirely lack any sense of the grotesque so basically they said it was modern without being weird and certainly it's leaning towards the biomorphic shapes we associate with mid-century design. Kotzenbach and Warren's autumn 1948 collections presented many new hand-printed wallpapers by Alanka including the very popular ducks and grasses which even appeared in Time magazine where Alanka described its inspiration which took place in her backyard she stated we had a pair of yellow ducks and the children were chasing them all I had to do is put it down things often come that way but of course I understood how the blades of grass grew from having studied them before in the example on the rights in the Cooper Hewitt's collection and the one on the left along with many of the other images that I'm sharing this evening is from Alanka's family. The autumn 1948 collection also included a new blueprint wallpaper called serenade a courtyard fantasy with trellises balconies kite flying children and loop playing youth in this mosaic like setting serenade appeared on the cover of art news in October 1948 and on the right is shown in the Kotzenbach bedroom the Cooper Hewitt recently acquired the original graphite drawings for this paper which are huge they're 12 feet by 40 inches each and it also has examples of the printed papers as well in its collection which you see on the right. Alanka continued designing for Kotzenbach and Warren at least into the mid to late 1950s and her papers continued to be public publicized and favorably reviewed then in the mid 1950s she founded and directed design group Inc and this was about a dozen young designers many of whom had studied with her so I need to step back at this point and explain that in the mid 1920s she and her husband Willem especially Willem became involved with the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff a Russian mystic who advanced an eastern influenced holistic system of belief centering on the idea of work as a means of developing a human to his fullest potential. Gurdjieff had many students and followers in Europe and the United States beginning in the teens and lasting well beyond his death in 1949 to the present day and adherents of his teachings formed communities or groups to continue exploring his ideas and Willem Nyland helped found the Gurdjieff Foundation which still exists today and around 1960 he established his own group in Warwick near Brewster. Alanka taught art to many members of the group and they were part of her daily life at the Brewster house for many years and these are some album covers that Alanka designed for her husband's piano recordings which are related to the groups and there are a lot of connections between various projects of Alankas to people with connections to Gurdjieff and it's an area worthy of more study. By 1956 some of her wallpapers that she created for Katzenbach and Warren including serenade were being sold through design group Inc which briefly set up a store in the city and the details of exactly how design group operated still remain unclear to me it's another area for more research. Regardless we know that design group also sold Arabian Knights which you see here on a folding screen this was originally manufactured by Katzenbach and Warren beginning about nineteen forty nineteen fifty seven and you could have this paper in several color combinations including sepia and white black and white red and white black and pink or black and yellow. Then in 1960 design group probably independently of Katzenbach and Warren offered five new blueprint mural wallpapers each of which comprised multiple panels. These new wallpapers were water music closed garden trees east of the sun and air fire water earth and here are a mix of drawn and printed panels from the Cooper Hewitt's collection. Alonka's contemporary certainly recognized a strong eastern influence in her work at this time for example in American fabrics magazine included a feature on her wallpapers it described her work as oriental in feeling and suggested that that influence came from her preoccupation with eastern thought probably due to her Hungarian heritage and also portfolio magazine described papers like serenade as suggesting the flat perspective list drawing of Persia and we do know what her influences were around this time because in nineteen fifty nine the aluminum company of America Alcoa published a book called design forecast which begins with an essay by Alonka about inspiration and she she wrote inspiration is a moment of contact with another reality the moment when everything at once falls into its proper place when as it were the entire structure appears and every part is seen to be related to the whole she included images of a nautilus shell a sketch of an angel from short cathedral a cave painting and these of a kite from India an ecot textile from Sumatra a painted cash on dish a four hundred year old farmhouse in Japan and a drawing of carvings from the temple of Borobudur and Java which one of her granddaughters assures me she raved on and on about so we know pretty specifically what her influences and inspirations were at this point in her career and they were characteristically diverse with a strong eastern bent and they reflect what we might today call a globalist outlook and certainly her experiences in Java were influential and likely the connections with the idea's gorge have promoted reinforced her interests and non-western influences at this time along his association with alcoa actually began in nineteen fifty seven a couple of years earlier than the design forecast or the forecast book was published and this was when she was invited to participate in alcoa's forecast project in which the company invited noted artists and designers to experiment with aluminum in order to inspire new uses for the material and other designers involved with the project included Charles Eames and the solar do nothing machine came out of this and Donald desky and Marianne Stringel so it's a testament to Alonka's stature as a designer and specifically a wall coverings designer at the time that she was invited to be a part of this project and what she created was a mosaic wall covering of foil covered plywood shapes that would hang on a radiant heating panel of heavy-gauge gunmetal aluminum foil so the individual shapes were covered with this glittering array of foils that she collected from Christmas gifts and candy box liners and frozen food packaging and corsage wrappings some of them she left as is some of them she painted different colors and she added patterns to some of them and according to alcoa she envisioned this as a room central decoration in the home of tomorrow and that's what you see her working on here in her studio with some wallpapers and New Yorker covers in the background after about 1961 or so Alonka's output began to diminish in quantity my files go from these overstuffed ones that I have to divide the segments of just a few years the very skinny ones and she died in 1981 and then in 1984 the 5050 gallery in New York had a show and sale of her work but she was pretty low on the radar for a while and I expect that her gender and the diversity of her output contributed to that but Alonka Karaz was a remarkable artist and designer yes she's elusive and she's hard to classify but she's worth the effort she created a rich and distinctive body of work she was a force and promoting modernism in this country and her work touched so many aspects of modern design history that she shows up an incredible range of research projects today and I feel really fortunate to have been able to help shine a light on her again and to help put many pieces of her story back together again and I'm so glad to be here with her family and with so many people interested in design to celebrate this new exhibition brand new exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt and it's such a worthy recognition of her talent and it's so fitting that she's being recognized with this honor in her home of New York City and I look forward to continuing to learn more about Alonka and I hope I get to keep answering questions about Alonka and sharing information about her and I hope that maybe one day we'll gather again to celebrate a major retrospective of Alonka and Mariska together because that would be really nice so I could start with questions now I have two quick questions okay one is does the Brewster house survive and the second one is did she stay in touch with other Hungarians like Loyoshkosma or that whole group that was working in a similar folk inspired style back in Hungary I'm looking at Alonka and she's raising her eyebrows the Alonk the Brewster house still stands the Brewster house still stands I can answer that one did she stay in touch with Hungarian cohorts we're not sure she remained in touch with Ilona Fulup they set up a Hungarian theater in the village in the late teens early 20s so it's something that's another thing to look into yeah it's it's a never-ending series of questions I can answer more than that I promise or Alonka can Jeanine the piece that was done for Alcoa mm-hmm do you know if it survives anywhere not to my knowledge but I haven't done the deep dive to try and figure that out okay good question though I wonder if they kept those I wonder if it would have survived I don't know it's not with her family I can say that which is where most everything is no okay any other questions well thank you again for coming