 Good evening everyone. I'm Sarah Coffin, head of the product design and decorative arts department here and co-curator with Stephen Harrison of the Jazz Age American Style in the 1920s. It's my pleasure to welcome you here this evening. I and Stephen and Emily or the assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary American Design who all work together on the exhibition will look forward to presenting a few of our finds from the exhibition for you this evening. We will do it in the order that Stephen will be first and so I am going to introduce him first and then just tell you a little bit more about the evening. Just as a reminder, we are having this streamed online and obviously also available on CooperHewitt.org later, so please remember to turn off your cell phones and otherwise I also wait for the mic when we get to the Q&A because we need to be able to have the recording have the question as well as the answer. Stephen and I have had the pleasure of working together for some time not only on this exhibition but also in terms of loans back and forth and particularly to Stephen's award-winning exhibition Artistic Luxury Fabergé Tiffany Lalique, which happened in 2009 after I did a Rococo exhibition to which he lent Cleveland's extraordinary Mycenae Turin, which was really the star of this major exhibition that we did here. So that was a great pleasure and then we pulled our resources when we realized we both had had different reasons for investigating the 1920s. Stephen having moved forward a couple of decades from his previous work and I was reviewing the collection here at CooperHewitt for what we had that was extraordinary and that seemed to have little been seen and it's ended up that the exhibition here features 165 objects out of the 395 that are in the exhibition from our permanent collection which shows you that we had good reason to be interested in doing an exhibition on the 1920s. So this exhibition was really an effort to look at the broad range of styles that happened in America for American taste from abroad, the influences and the result as being we hope to show the diversity of stylistic interests in the era. Stephen has also done work and been curator. He is now head of the decorative art and design department at Cleveland but and previously he was at the High Museum at Atlanta where he oversaw the complete reinstallation of the High's collection of American and European decorative arts while simultaneously expanding its 20th century holdings. So he has also held curatorial positions in New Orleans and Dallas. I also want to give a shout out to Emily who has extraordinarily with all the work that we have been doing on Jazz Age including her authorship of some parts of the book managed to finish her thesis and get her PhD last year. Her thesis is entitled appropriately and connectedly to the exhibition but not related in its inception. Designing display in the department store techniques, technologies and professionalization 1880 to 1920. So that will give you a bit of background on why we're here and I will now turn over the turn over the floor and the podium to Stephen. Thank you so much Sarah and thank all of you for coming this evening. I want to just reiterate what a wonderful fun process this has been and part of what has made it so much fun has been working with Sarah and Emily on this wonderful project and this deep dive if you will back into the one of the most dynamic eras in American history in the 1920s. Although I have to say the recent this current decade is turning out to be a very dynamic one as well. Nonetheless what emerged after the 19 after the First World War I should say in terms of architecture and design was still probably a very conservative landscape even though trends and reform and design that had begun with the Arnouveau and the secessionist movements in Europe prior to the First World War even though they were well established in Europe prior to the First World War that material really hadn't seen a dissemination to America until the 1920s really. So artists and Americans designers going to Europe in the 1920s would have seen a European design aesthetic that really had its roots prior to the First World War and then brought it back for reinterpretation and a revival if you will in the 1920s in America. So what I was quite interested in in Cleveland Ohio we have many many buildings built in the 1920s but they don't look anything like Corbusier or Picasso might have had a hand in it at all. In fact they look much more like a tutor city as a matter of fact buildings that for all intents and purposes were modern in terms of their systems and their new building materials etc but clad on the outside with a veneer of traditionalism either Renaissance revival neoclassicism or indeed a great tutor revival. So all up and down Shaker Boulevard you'll see mansions but they will they're almost all of them very much in the sort of storybook tutor architectural style that developed in the 1920s. This traditionalism went along with the rise in moral leanings in terms of the city being something to be feared and the the virtues of the countryside as well as those the the steady drumbeat of prohibition which of course took hold in in 1919 1920 with the enactment of the of the I believe it's the 18th amendment to the constitution. So in in in New York as in other great cities around the country developments happened concurrently both those that were in modernist styles but also in very much in traditional historical styles. In Cleveland indeed our tutor city if you will was a large complex of apartment houses that were in fact contiguous called moreland courts they all tend to have very lofty sounding traditional often English names and inside of them they include wonderful woodworking woodwork beautiful moldings etc very traditional work that hearkened back to the bozards and the bellypock of of a generation earlier. Here you see a wonderful and and artisans by the way catered to this aesthetic. One of the greatest was Samuel Yellen in Philadelphia and here you see a fire screen made for his own home in the early 20s and then in Cleveland because this is one of one of the discoveries I wanted to bring to your to your attention and appeal back the the layers a bit with you is the Rose Ironworks. So Yellen was working in Philadelphia Rose in in Cleveland there were others in New Orleans Atlanta all around the country really almost every a major town major city had a foundry that catered to this kind of architectural traditional architectural metalwork. This the Rose Ironworks is a is still a going concern in Cleveland run now by this gentleman Robert Rose Bob Rose who is the third generation of his family to run the Rose Ironworks. It's a hand forged foundry and began with his grandfather Martin Rose who was from Hungary born in 1870 and emigrated to this country right around the turn of the century around 1897 settled in Cleveland Ohio where a large population of Hungarian immigrants had developed. Martin Rose worked in in several metalworking shops in Cleveland at the time it was a thriving business there and then finally established his own foundry in 1904 and so he catered from 1904 to the to the mid 1920s he really catered to this traditional aesthetic and architecture in Cleveland. Inside this little foundry which is still there and the the original building is still there he converted his house into the front office and all along the walls include examples that he could show to his clients of this little rose or this kind of turning this lock or this key that he could make examples of fence work and spindles and this etc. He didn't have a catalog of sorts it was all on the wall and so throughout this building you can see every flat surface of the walls are covered in whatever size and sort of metalwork turning you you might require in your work in in in your house he catered primarily to architects in Cleveland. He also collected on travels back to Europe and he had collected along the way as well examples of antique metalwork and so within the vault are these great panels of antique metalwork that all could be used as reference points for his designer and metalworkers in the back of in the furnace. Here you just see some of these incredible examples that he was able to amass. Samuel Yellen did the same thing he had this marvelous collection of metalwork from the the from the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries when Yellen passed away his works went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to their collection. Here they still reside in the Rose Ironworks in Cleveland. So this is the kind of work that Rose was doing in the period from Louis the 15th revivals as you can see in this panel to Renaissance revivals etc. Then in 1925 like so many other Americans he traveled to Europe to see what was touted as the the most current evocation of the modern in the western world which was the 1925 Paris Exposition the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs and Industrial Modern. Sarah says this a lot better than I do but anyway so he and his wife and one of his sons Melvin who was by this point working in the firm traveled and spent almost an entire year in Paris and going back to Hungary and traveling in to Vienna. Martin Rose the the founder of Rose Ironworks had studied in Vienna when he was younger and so they traveled back there and really absorbed the modernist aesthetic. They also admired the work of European metalworkers at the time in particular they were enamored with the style of Paul Kish of Hungarian working in Paris really very much influenced by Viennese design so it was a familiar aesthetic to Martin Rose and indeed there are a number of works several lamps one in that's included in this exhibition the Jazz Age the one on the right that they acquired in Paris during this trip and brought back with them as examples of the kind of of styling that they wanted to favor and you can see here this kind of patterning very much of Viennese aesthetic in the work of Paul Kish here's another example of French metalwork that they brought back well a few years later by in meeting Paul Kish and getting to know his work they also got to know his principal designer Paul Fair and in 1929 Martin Rose received a letter from Fair saying how would you like to have me come and work for you in Cleveland Ohio he had gotten into a dispute with Paul Kish and decided he would love to have a new life in America and so indeed Martin Rose brought him to America and he became the principal designer at the Rose Ironworks and in doing so he transformed the output of the company by this point Martin really wanted to embrace the modern aesthetic and was hoping his clients would too he wasn't so successful in getting his clients to embrace it in conservative Cleveland but certainly the output of the firm really took a complete change and it was a sea change really and so here you see what we've put on the cover of the book the great muse with violin screen because Paul arrived right as the crash was occurring in 1929 and so their output shrank to almost zero yet he had all of these Martin Rose had all of these talented designers and I mean talented workers working for him and he didn't want to let them go so even though the shop was about five to six people in the early years of the depression they worked continually on various designs and that were monumental in scale including this magnificent screen which showed every type of wood of metal working that that one could do the other great work that they they worked on was the magnificent console and mirror that you see in the show today which by the way is its first outing these things have lived all their lives in the in the shop in the front room of the Rose Ironworks the screen has been a bit more famous than the console and mirror and it's been in that it has been on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well as now in Cleveland in the Cleveland Museum of Art but this wonderful console and mirror you're seeing for the first time as all of us as well it's just incredible with detailing in sandblasted into the glass this combination of glass and metal was something that they favored quite heavily during this period but still the orders didn't really come and so Martin Rose was desperate to keep his workers working and one project that they did was to decorate the the rafters of the foundry itself with this incredible freeze a cutout freeze um depicting the history of metalwork from the very beginnings uh to the present it goes all around the foundry i'm just going to show you a few of these pictures and they're it's still there as inspiration but also in a way a sort of ode to those very very difficult times i particularly like this this one with the the anvil so everywhere you look in this wonderful shop one sees um a passion for the the the craft as well as um an understanding of design and from earliest to the present in the vault is another real treasure for any of you who are archivists it's just extraordinary they've kept all their records intact their accounts one need only take a book down to see the the full panoply and history of this company there are drawings there are photographs and indeed what's most interesting i think to sarah and i were the the the two safes full of period books of designs from this from the spanning the entire 20th century really and and historical volumes as well and then their vast blueprints that they used for their work so the rose ironworks for me was one of the great discoveries of this i mean i knew about them but really understanding their place in the spirit of change that was america in the 1920s was really one of the the great joys of this show so now i'd like to turn it over to um emily or dr emily or uh if you will uh to talk a little bit about uh her work and her discoveries in the art of the department store display emily so as sarah mentioned i've spent a lot of the past few years thinking about department stores at the turn of the 20th century and i think one of the major um story lines throughout the exhibition in the catalog is the importance of the department store in the 1920s and 30s as well as this purveyor of modern taste and um what i'll spend the next few minutes telling you a little bit about is the importance of the window display as an advertising surface and the professionalization of um this space in the modern urban city so when american visitors attended the 1925 paris fair their attention may have been caught not only by the products on view but also by the context in which they were exhibited indoors and outdoors a retail like atmosphere pervaded the fair department store pavilions filled the grounds merchandise arrangements appeared like showrooms and a series of 21 modern shop fronts built along a major thoroughfare exhibited window displays as design objects unto themselves photographs of those storefronts were assembled in the volume whose cover you see on the screen here the french architect and designer renais erbst completed the graphic design for its cover as well as compiled the contents this was one of a number of folios of inventive european retail designs that inspired americans including gilbert rodie who purchased this book while in paris in 1925 his name you'll see inscribed on the upper right corner of this cover three shops along the avenue were devoted to manufacturers of mannequins pierre iman showed one window display and seagal occupied two erbst himself served as artistic director of seagal and he introduced a new stylized format for the mannequin that had a head and body that soon crossed the ocean and was seen on magazine pages in new angles and in show windows of america's most fashion forward shops erbst was one of a number of prominent architects and designers who became involved with the retail sphere influencing design in both america and abroad stylish retail display along with the product's form materials and packaging increasingly became the responsibility of individual designers the show window and the retail interior emerged as additional surfaces for the industrial designer to manipulate and make saleable and attractive for their clients products norman belgettis who worked for a time as a theater stage designer specializing in lighting pronounced the store as a stage on which merchandise is presented as the actors one of his first forays into industrial design came in 1927 when he approached the franklin simon department store in new york disgusted with the cluttered appearance of many retail storefronts belgettis aimed to pare down the products and offer a new and different format for instance this 1929 window display featured an array of delicate pairs of shoes and various accessories propped on stepped blocks of a regular shape that radiated out from a wedge shaped sign announcing new spring shoes belgettis use of these blocks in addition to a mannequin with an angular face lent an abstract composition to the whole display the shapes of these elements and the shoes themselves rather than any superfluous decoration made the window visually compelling as well as saleable leading department stores benefited from this engagement of established designers and served as a career springboard for many others norman belgettis john vasos donald desky joseph urban edgar brant frederick keisler and raymond lowey just for example all became involved with department store design ranging from window displays and architectural elements to advertisements and shop fittings in the early 20th century the department store was revered as a discerning promoter of fashion ability an association with these retail empires guaranteed visibility and notoriety in a field that was just beginning giving beginning to give credit to its designers as an impressionable and malleable category and space of advertising the show window offered the designer great possibilities for creative experimentation and thinking like the department store itself the hybrid nature of the show window was key to its attraction the commercial arts were forging ahead in the 1920s and window dressers gained notions of layout and language from advertising a sense of focus from commercial photography and an emphasis on lighting and color from theater design in a 1930s article in fortune magazine macy's artistic director described the window display as a combination of a poster a newspaper newspaper advertisement a stage set a speech and a scarf dance major department stores thus charted new territory for the window displays as exhibition space american industrial designer donald desky's windows for franklin simon frequently featured folding screens as backdrops a prop often used in his interior designs for domestic interiors therefore desky embraced the window display as marketing strategy for not only the store's wares but his own design philosophy this overlap in desky's practice suggests the designer was applying his perspective on interior design to other contexts in the store window the screen served as an element of set design while also encouraging consumers to think about its application in their own homes in this design shown here he created a collage of bold shapes and bright colors accented with the use of metallics such as galvanized iron copper and brass for this window desky also recommended a floor made of quark an inexpensive yet durable material that was popular for adding textural contrast in the modern domestic interior on the right hand margin of the drawing desky also gives an alternate background suggestion that shows a cog wheel and an outline that appear like the body of an appliance evocative of the machine age the success of desky's windows for franklin simon brought him a commission in 1926 from saxford avenue to decorate their show windows and contribute to their graphic identity one advertising brochure covers shows an abstracted cubist composition reminiscent of a series of show windows themselves frederick keisler and austrian theoretician and architect with a background in set design found his first significant commissions primarily in the medium of retail display in 1928 he created what he proclaimed to be america's first representative exposition of modern show windows for saxford avenue keisler spoke of his spotlighted windows accent one chair one white fur one sees only a chair and a white fur collar the sense of simplicity allowed the consumer to focus on the goods these windows stood in stark contrast to the busier windows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries this move towards the unit principle as it was called by industry experts linked retails displays emphasis on shape and line even more closely to recent developments in modern painting sculpture and architecture formal principles of abstraction simplicity and asymmetry were used to dramatic effect in these windows his display furniture was based on pure geometries and basic industrial materials in 1928 keisler began assembling research materials for a book on retail window display design it was fully released in 1930 under the title contemporary art applied to the store and its display the result was an idiosyncratic volume that both offered practical advice to the retail manager while also providing a survey of keisler's insights on modern art and architecture introducing american audiences to a wide range of avant-garde european design keisler also presented futuristic applications of technology in window displays in which push button systems gave access to merchandise and screens and robots provided customer service on a page illustrating piccasso's the guitarist keisler included quote a scheme for a display fixture developed with characteristic horizontal vertical and slightly curved planes a geometric sketchy composition that related to the abstraction of the painting though keisler's device was likely never fabricated the motivations behind his design were very much in line with the department store's concentration on the creation of a shared language between contemporary visual culture and trade not only in advertising but also in the shopping environment lastly it is important to note that in addition to its visual advantages modern display was also promoted in the sound creation of an economically prosperous shopping environment in the 1920 in 1920 the authoritative american retail trade journal the merchants record and show window reported frequently do merchants estimate window sales or sales influenced by displays and show windows at better than 60 percent as many merchants have no hesitancy in crediting 75 or 80 percent of total business to the influence of goods displays with show window and sale floor interiors transformed by guest collaborations from the worlds of art and design and with the use of new technologies and tools that advanced the medium sophistication display played a pivotal role in the creative and financial success of the retail sphere in the 1920s and early thirties so now i'll pass it over to sarah to finish up thank you so much emily and steven and this has been wonderful to to hear some of these thoughts put together in this context too for those of us who've been working uh on our own sort of focus and now to be able to share them together i had been working very much on the idea of what was american in both what and how was american getting these new the idea for ideas for new taste and realize that came through the importation of objects the immigration of people and obviously the combination thereof as well as homegrown talent and some of the i think some of the discoveries for me were how unbelievably integrated at a new level first of all both americans were in terms of studying abroad uh and in the artistic sphere and transferring from artistic the artistic sphere to the design sphere i mean an artist sphere i should say so emily's point about how these trend this uh this organization came about in the department store display is very typical of how it crosses borders i wanted to start with another aspect of the importation and that is the role museums played very strong role museums played and while i won't say that i personally made this discovery i think that i began to realize that it was a much more insignificant part of the changing tastes in american design than i had certainly realized this chandelier which was it was in the veneverex data shop in new york which lived briefly from 1920 june 1922 to the end of 1923 designed by dago bear pecha who was the design director of the veneverex data at that point it was sold directly from the shop to the metropolitan museum the metropolitan had a fund set up by by edward c more jr who was the both the son of the president of tiffany's and himself was a principal of tiffany's and he felt it very important that the museum should not only make its collection available to designers and product creators for study of objects from the past but that they also become an example for the president so here it is electrified from the beginning shown as something that american museum had they also acquired we also have in the exhibition pieces by ruleman that were acquired and served as models just as the traditional pieces did for firms like the company of master craftsman founded by uh w and j slone uh doing uh ruleman esque pieces uh samuel yellen as steven mentioned was a major exhibitor in the product the uh industrial arts uh exhibitions um and he used the metropolitan museum as obviously as well as gave to it another discovery that i didn't make initially but uh i think i've uh expanded upon what uh are these incredible doors uh which were excuse me commissioned by the salomon gugenheim's uh in 1926 as a result of going to the paris world fair in 25 and uh with their uh british decorator um who advised them that he thought that dunon and sudbinin seraphim sudbinin and john dunon who was john dunon was the great lacquer uh specialist who'd studied with japanese lacquerists and he in fact was one of the major creators of screen design and this was a major part of 1920s design i think perhaps because of the change in architecture of the 20s that opened up free spaces and this allowed you to divide rooms in different ways in any case a suite of doors and screens were made for them for what was their music room and what is interesting is here is the music room and it is completely full of louis this and louis that um and then you can see on this just in the background the screens which are now at the metropolitan museum and we were they were given by mrs gugenheim after mr gugenheim died they were given um the screens and cooper huett was given this pair of doors and uh there are the screens up there obviously rather smaller but um you get the ensemble effect and what i became to realize which i felt was sort of the tipping moment for me was i thought wait a minute 26 they sudbinin and dunon were very aware of the american patronage potentially from the fair and sent them over and arranged for a gallery to exhibit these before they were sent to the gugenheims and so they were exhibited in a gallery in 1926 and then went out to port washington and um this was important because to me because it meant that the gugenheims were collecting something that was bordering on modern art before they actually collected their first painting that became went into what became the gugenheim museum and that did not happen until 1927 so this is a case of where the decorative arts introduced a collector towards moving into uh the new realms artistically another find that was not completely a fine but uh in the richard treehouse private collection in chicago were four panels that were discovered about seven years ago that had survived uh the destruction of the ziegfeld theater in new york and what was what was terrific was that not only does this give us a sense of joseph urban who created them with lily and gertner painting them uh but it it shows this sense of fantasy and in fact that urban came to this country as an opera set designer and then went in not only as an architect but also as a staged not only as a stage designer but as a film designer and everything else that related to both architecture the world of film and the world of theater and this is important because in fact it directly relates to the uh fantasy designs that occurred in in uh vienna again at the time and i think that ultimately the importance of vienna as an art artistic and design center that really as steven correctly said that it's before world war one in fact this dates really back to the turn of the 20th century all the so many people who came to this country trained in vienna uh they were products of the austral hungarian empire and they came out for economic reasons they found it but that they really were mixed and worked with both american designers and uh in various combinations in groups to uh produce a new aesthetic but here we have a picture of the interior of the zig-fell theater that is up the urban archives are up at columbia university and this is part of it showing the decoration and in fact they also have up at columbia the model of that urban did to show what it was he was intending and likewise he did a similar design for the waldorf-astoria hotel in 1927 and then it turned out a fellow austro-hungarian emigre uh was sent out of having been at the waldorf went out to be manager and uh of the hotel gibson in sincenady and invited urban whom he'd known in vienna to to design for that so urban created a very similar fantasy design for this hotel and this drawing is in uh cooper huitt another treasure from our collection that has enabled us to understand the breadth of urban's influence urban also designed the first movie with a modern interior called enchantment it featured marion davies the actress who was um promoted by herston in fact it was four herst's uh movie company um and after the success of enchantment which is about a very modern young woman whose um mother is very disapproving about her going out with all these men and putting on bright lipstick and you can see a snippet of it up in the exhibition but more importantly it features furniture and furnishings by urban and others of his friends um here we have uh what i think is key to understanding american style that has nothing really to do with the 1925 fair but it is absolutely central uh hu ferris uh these this is one of four drawings in our collection of studies for the maximum mass permitted by the 1916 setback law this was the law that said in order to get enough light down to the street you uh the uh that the upper floors should be set back and he produced these very dramatic drawings in 1922 and published all four of them which are in our collection in the new york times magazine this seems to have had huge circulation and was very influential on both in attracting uh architects to this country who were had become to look at as skyscrapers as a very major reason for cultural tourism uh key to the period is paul frankle one of the most important figures again austrian born and trained he came here just uh prior to world war one he set up a gallery he for a long time tried to sell modern design objects to americans not terribly successfully both of his own and others uh others creation but he's the one person who did not go to paris in 1925 he stayed here he worked up in woodstock vermont stacking boxes and other uh and woodwork to create the first skyscraper form piece of furniture and this is not the first of his examples but it is an extraordinary piece that steven found in the grand rapids art museum so not one that very many people have had the pleasure of seeing before and it has a complete sort of in the round architectural desk and then these wonderful skyline skyscrapers of bookcases uh growing up on three sides uh so this this presented a really a new original creation but it came out of feeling at home he'd now been in the country for um and he started making the skyscraper furniture in 2526 just at the towards the end of the um after the paris fair was over and uh this is a new expression and it's coming from this country from its architecture and the other great architectural influence having been frankloid right who influenced europeans but you see the beginning of abstraction in furniture which of course also relates to cubism and you see it in the work of donald deski who actually did go to paris and studied for a couple of years studied painting in paris he also made some screens in paris but he went back for the paris 25 fair but after he got back and he was doing the sax fifth avenue windows um the head of sax fifth avenue uh gimble introduced him to paul frankl and frankl invited him to display some of his screens um in his gallery and i'd like to think that i've been sort of tracking the pieces by frankl that are known date and it does seem that he had started working with this woodwork the actual wood grains and so forth as simple woods usually to begin with but some of the frankl pieces evolve into having lacquer which you will see and shiny surfaces and i actually think that's likely to be the impact of his interaction with donald deski a minnesota born raised in other words a completely american designer and they're interacting together in the selling of furniture of furniture in frankl's gallery and then and and then deski had also visited the bow house when he was in europe in 25 and he also then started working on chromed furniture which is part of another story where he worked with american manufacturers this waste basket by frankl even includes a skyscraper motif a wonderful object that came to light from one of our patrons here so um we are very glad to see these things in conversation with each other much as they might have been in the galleries this chair uh was um out of unknown until it surfaced auction a couple of years ago and through a friend and colleague um i tracked down the owner and who chooses to remain completely anonymous but it was in the macy's 1928 art and industry exhibition and here we do have an original image of where how it looked on display but again incredible use of the skyscraper motif by walter von nessen a german born architect who was mainly known for his lighting but it does show that the these unusual efforts that were combining perhaps a bit of a bedamire uh form of chair um in a new material and a new look uh for a new country another penny that dropped while working on this rather late in the day in fact was that um the this wonderful coverlet uh made of a textile called electric by ruth reeves uh uh in fact feted electricity with this completely abstract design ruth reeves had gone to parisans was there for i think seven years um in the in the 20s and when she got back she had a number of designs in mind and created fabrics ranging from designs of manhattan skyscrapers to abstract designs she had studied with lege but clearly picked up the influence of other parisian artists and transferred them to the world of textiles so you have all these different media talking to each other and this one was actually although made originally uh two-sided to be used for uh curtains and upholstery for a radio room uh knew the original media room perhaps the you remember the first broadcast of the radio is 1920 uh this in fact was printed on a loose weave cotton and used as a coverlet and was a the the coverlet was for a couple glendon and louise all vine who built uh built this house had this house built uh out in um long island uh and was one of the first um that's interesting we have the i've got the the uh the um uh text reversed apologies but in any case the um the all vine house uh dated from 29 to 51 and it was by a man who specialized in sort of two-ter mansions so this was a new assignment but all vine himself had been to paris seen the works of mallet stevens uh and others and he was a film uh uh done did publicity for fox films so he was out on the west coast and had seen the work of schindler and noitra and so on so he wanted to be the one and he really did build the first modernist house and it complete with by being on the short decks on all sides as well as on one side having portals port hole windows so very definitely referencing the sea in a modernist way but the mate to this screen which the one we have here in the exhibition a promise gift from george cravis um is in the virginia museum of fine arts and it goes down like the other way as if you might have had two one for each corner and the mate was also owned by the glendon all vines so suddenly i realized that here we've got in conversation with each other in the exhibition two pieces that were acquired at the same moment by the same collectors who were also the first among the first to do have the architecture to go with it and i think it's interesting because we do find this push towards modernism so also collected connected to the film world and then just briefly to show you a couple of other things as emily has discussed the department store but therese bombing a very great documenter of what's happening in the latest and greatest in paris we found this photograph in our therese bonnie archive at the library showing the probable model by leon jalot all covered in chagrin of shark skin very elaborate and expensive material and marie louise mcgummery who went and bought this vanity from lord and taylor had lord and taylor's modern shop make it for her obviously had either seen or seen a photograph of leon jalot's work and she was going to have one at a more modest rate for her as when she got married for her newly modern home and that's another point the young at heart you sometimes see the silver plated pieces selling better than the silver because it was the young at heart if not young and in age who were buying these things but it was also about american desire to mass produce and we find this tension between european hand crafting and americans desire for spreading mass product through mass production designs in play in the 20s it turned out to be a very good thing that we'd figured out how to mass produce things when the crash came another another point just here we have joseph urban this is the side chair from his office it's on our collection and um uh it there it is showing up in his office well urban hired paul frankle to do a suite of rooms upstairs at mara lago and here you can see mara lago um it was marjorie mary whether post when she was mrs e f hutton who commissioned uh urban to do a lot of the interior design and the exterior decoration there were tiled walls and and gothic and moorish sort of arches but in the back as they said yeah upstairs there were this suite of rooms and here's example of of frankle's lacquered uh sort of this yellow shiny surface very much influenced by frankloid right the strong horizontals the original blotter and uh seat coverer by paul rodier a french designer whom frankle carried in his in his shop so this all made sense uh and what what the reason yale now has this suite is because when uh mr trump bought mara lago he seemed to love all the louis this and louis that but he didn't love the modern pieces by frankle and they went out to a collector dealer uh in florida and ultimately surfaced at christie's one other discovery that we've just made was that when we started uh steven and i were love thought this carpet was a great example of showing the impact of the dutch to style movement it's from the art institute of chicago and very much reflects the aesthetic like the frankle desk uh we knew that we had from one photograph in our our our existing digit is a digitized images this image of a of a carpet designed by marion doran who married edward magnate calpher and so we thought we'd like to show that however uh we then suggested that in fact the drawings and the prince department might prioritize the rest once we found out it was in a book and the next thing i knew of the other day we were actually looking at the the new images and finally got them and lo and behold we have the design for the art institute of chicago sitting in the book right here um so that was very exciting a discovery we didn't make but the uh rhod island school of design in the process of preparing to send their wonderful coffee set the lights and shadows of uh manhattan by eric magnus and the danish um a designer who worked for gorham in this case this is a good example of silver and silver guilt that never sold um but and so remained in gorham's collection till they gave it to the rizdi museum but they found this picture this this drawing of the period and it clearly was much shinier with black and gold um uh of angles that straight out of a cube cubist design and they re they cleaned off what turned out to be i guess yellowed uh varnish or something and re re cleaned and found they indeed did have black gold and silver so this is the first time anybody will have seen this extraordinary set that um was featured as if it was a set of skyscrapers and then we'll just end up with a few fun items another product of doing the show and having the press was that bo brooch was in the new york times article and the next and two days ago i got a call from a man who said i'm the great-grandson of the woman who owned this brooch and if you can tell me if there's a little crack in the onyx and a little and i said yes there is actually and he said that's the one anyway and so so um any rate this was fun because we found out that this um baroness fun burnt store for this is her a little bit later she um uh who married umpteen times was apparently totally a family scandal so until she sort of took an interest in him that she lived 204 so he remembers her quite well but she had she uh she also had been married to two germans the second one of which she meant she was living in germany through world war one which didn't make her too popular with her american family but then she then she married an even richer um englishman and acquired a great amount of jewelry with him so and and he said that he remembered her wearing this bow with sweaters as the sort of day-to-day brooch it's enormous it's enormous another i hope discovery i think i contacted the curator at um newark but i've been suggesting that this bracelet this top bracelet that was retailed by um the um this one is by hayman and the one down below is retailed by je colwell is in the newark museum and i'm quite sure that it is by oscar hayman and um and he said he that certainly that he based on what i was able to show him uh felt that that was undoubtedly the case but it gave us another clue into the retail practices of certain firms that did jewelry not to sell directly so much as to sell through the shops and just to end on a couple of very funny notes this bracelet that's in the exhibition a good 1920s fabulous french bracelet was owned by um may west and this it is actually this bracelet on her arm she later developed uh she went did hadn't did an act with a got involved with bodybuilders in los vegas and and her dearly beloved bodybuilder bill there charles krauser was who was 30 years her junior and apparently stayed with her for the rest of his life and she left him his jewelry and her jewelry and he never sold it during his life and when he died they opened up the safety deposit box and uh neil lane who owns this bought it directly from his estate sale so it actually was a long ongoing and long-term relationship and then i thought just to end you had to see that this although she didn't own it in the 20s she probably jar jar gabor probably acquired this when she was married to conrad hillton and it may have been his mother's but she had a extender made so she could wear the bracelet as a necklace and was seen throughout her life she owned it at least until the round 2000 throughout her life wearing it in various at various ages and i think if you google her that you will probably see multiple images with her with this bracelet on so i bring these in at both for fun but also to remind you that all these objects have had a life a lot after the 1920s and we're lucky enough having done this created this exhibition now to still have enough people alive who remember people who even if we aren't talking with people who were adults in the 20s we are talking with people who remember people well and room settings that were and lifestyles that were created in the 20s and so with that i'm going to turn to ask my colleagues i will um turn up the lights and um i'm going to pose each of them a question and then we'll open it up to all of you for questions so thank you so the question i have because i was i thinking a lot about it is what were the big what were our big surprises and so i'll start with steven did you find something that particularly surprised you in doing the exhibition well yes i never really understood the motivation of a jewelry thief until i've handled some of these amazing jewels in the show that was one thing oh you mean you mean an object well no that was one of them and i i have to say you know coming across um objects like the great frankle bookcase and just knowing that uh in this exhibition it would be the first time that that uh the wider audience will have seen something like this uh that's really what makes being a curator so fun you know in putting together uh shows like this i think though for me really the one uh great discovery um was the is the portrait of haddie carneghi by gen du nom that you'll see in the exhibition upstairs um this portrait actually descended in the family of haddie carneghi to uh one of her her great nieces in cleveland ohio and um as happens uh and i can say this because it wasn't me but one of my colleagues in paintings an object like that which is part painting part decorative art sometimes falls through the cracks so when um this lady was dispersing her work uh i mean her her objects she called in the cleave the museum of art and we took all manner of other things but uh did not decide to take that beautiful painting um it was in a terrible 1950s frame and uh it was sold to a local antiques dealer and i was bopping around the pier show one day uh in a couple of years ago and this antiques dealer had decided to exhibit at the pier show just here in new york and lo and behold there was haddie carneghi on the wall um so he graciously uh put it on hold took it off you know took it off you and uh agreed to to lend it to the exhibition so has kept it in in uh you know his private uh stash since then and we've given it a new frame but the wonderful thing about haddie carneghi is that she's one of those great 1920s stories where she came off the boat as an immigrant with a different name and saw andrew carneghi on the headlines of the newspaper the new york times and took his name uh she then uh one of her first jobs was running uh peace goods back and forth in the lower east side between makers and and sellers and then she got a job at um saxford avenue and she continued to expand her horizon such that she would go back and forth to europe and bring back of small amounts of clothing dresses and then sell almost like a trunk show to to ladies that she'd met over the counter at saxford avenue this developed into a business uh and she then became one of the most successful boutique owners in um in the time the first woman to have a shop on fifth avenue of her own uh the first millionaire of her ilk and so it must have been in those in those in the 20s that's going back and forth she must have known the set of of glitterati in paris that included jean dunant and she like so many others of that uh ilk had her portrait taken now i want you to notice when you look at it again that she's not smiling she's looking over her shoulder at you with glaring eyes almost daring you to take away the success that she's achieved and i i love the fact that you know she's filled with the sort of diffidence and and um power that that that came with finally achieving the ultimate success so hats off to haddie carnegie and by the way rumor has it that uh she she was the woman who employed lucille ball who had come to new york uh to be on the stage and needed a job and so she employed her as a walker of fashion in her shop and rumor has it that she in in before uh modeling a red dress she was haddie carnegie told her to dye her hair red and that was the end of the story of course so anyway uh notice haddie carnegie and uh think of all that she achieved and uh that's my probably my greatest surprise at the show emily well one of the things that i find most fascinating about this period is how designers so freely work across media and at different price points so they're working from high to low they're doing very high-style private commissions at the same time they're being hired by major manufacturers to do restyle products that are being made at the serial and mass production level and i think as you walk through the show there are names that come up again and again it's this cast of characters but sometimes they come up in unexpected ways and i think one of the most dramatic examples in the show as you walk around is you'll see on the second floor a glorious screen by ratot in gold and black with a landscape scene of glamorous foxes that was made as a private commission for jean levin levin in paris the designer but then you'll see also on the third floor two more objects by ratot one that you might guess knowing the previous commission but one that you might not if you're paying close attention to the labels the first is a perfume bottle that ratot went on to design for lamba a gilded beautiful perfume bottle that stands next to the well-known lamba logo a kind of sculpture and perfume bottle pair but in a nearby case you'll also see a small box for a minneapolis department store so the quinland department store in minneapolis hired ratot in the late 1920s they had rebuilt their store as this grand modernist structure and so the story goes that one of the owners went to paris seeking a designer to redo their graphic identity and this woman sought out ratot and at the time he did all of the graphic design for the store in addition to their package design so you'll see this small little black box with a figure of an elegant female on the cover with a string of pearls lounging on a on a sofa so that's a great story of high and low and you really see this throughout the show I think that's a very good point and it also leads to perhaps another aspect that I noticed that surprised me a little bit but perhaps not as much as if I hadn't done the van cleef and our pells exhibition but the fact of the undead it wasn't just about the women getting the right to vote and feeling greater independence socially but or that the idea of seduction and makeup and drinking and smoking and doing all kinds of things that women didn't do before that or at least not an unreasonable company but the extraordinary role of the woman as with purchase power and the number of times when I did archival work where the women a woman was listed as the purchaser of the jewelry the woman was spending a lot of money on her fashion uh it was and also that it was had a carnage at Carnegie and Coco Chanel I mean you're talking about women designers actually designing you also have the profession of interior designer becoming a profession with many women involved obviously Nancy McClellan is represented with her importation of wallpapers it turns out to be significant we have Ruth Reeves what no one day this collector came in and he heard we were working on this and it was very recently too recently to add to the show but he suddenly brought in a Ruth Reeves textile and some other pictures and I realized with from what he was saying that Marion Dorn the one who married Edward McKnight Cowher had previously been married to Henry Varnum poor which he showed us a portrait of the two of them and they're total opposites and you would never have thought about it but that the two of them plus Ruth Reeves with whom I guess she first went to Paris and then later and met her American husband over there and then uh or the next American husband and then she and then they and Ilonka Carras and Donald Deskey all were part of the Audac the American Union of designers and so forth that were very much based on a similar Paris group but these names of these groups always include a fair number of women designers who are making a very strong impact in the design world and I think that we all tend to think about the professionalization of women as being somewhat later and it really you know we have a lot of women designers purchasers I mean and when I mean it I that it's not just their hubby's given it to them they're actually out buying and commissioning this jewelry in these outfits so that was a surprise I hadn't realized it would be that strong and it was so may we open it up to questions from the floor do wait for the do wait for the microphone so that it can get into the system so to speak so anybody want to continue this conversation or have comments or questions about the aims so I just I don't have a question but I do have a had a Carnegie story of sorts of when I was much younger back in the late stone age girls in school was still required to take courses in sewing and cooking and even had a millinery course at one point and I don't it's so long ago I don't remember whether it was for sixth grade graduation or ninth grade graduation we had to make our own dress we got the pattern we had followed the same pattern we could pick our own colors and whatever but when it came to the final the dress had to be machine sewn now we didn't have a machine and the teacher's being totally unreasonable and thought that it had to be machine sewn you must know somebody with a sewing machine well the only one I knew with a sewing machine was the aunt of my oldest sister's best friend who lived with the family and this woman was a seamstress for had a Carnegie and I asked if I could sew my dress on her machine and she said absolutely not but I will sew it for you so I had a graduation dress sewn by a had a Carnegie seamstress and I was very proud of this well as as one of the curators of this exhibition I deem it a had a Carnegie how about that I wish I still had it Lori yes hold on a second just so you can get it wait wait wait just sorry wait wait before this period were there were there many women who were clothing designers fashion designers jewelry designers was this really the period where women had this opportunity for the first time to do this sort of thing I think on the whole though baby Emily and Steven might want to also address that from their respective perspectives of having worked on department stores and jewelry of earlier date but certainly in my experience we have the the great discoveries about the Tiffany studio and how that turned out to be the Tiffany girls meet over back and so on that Tiffany had had women working for him who actually were responsible as designers but in fact what the piece that's up of Tiffany that's up there is in fact by me to over back and it is from the 20s but the style more reflects some of the things that the firm was doing earlier you do also have Clara what is it Wells in Chicago working with the Kalo workshops and that too is outgrowing of the arts and crafts movement in 1905 1910 11 and they produce jewelry but what do you think of it well well certainly yes there were where strong with female influences in the decorative arts as Sarah says around the turn of the century that I think of also the new compotery and in New Orleans which was a woman's college making the most extraordinary pottery during that arts and crafts period but I think really it was after World War one that women really come out of the closet as the the great unsung designers behind a lot of the designs that people now recognize from that era probably in the realm of jewelry that women had more to do with with the final iterations of various commissions than we might think but as with Tiffany you know they were they were largely anonymous and unknown and unsung their role but it's in the 1920s that you see the rise of the interior designer the professionalism of industrial design and women take their their place it was definitely still a man's world but they fight hard and that's why I want all of you to go look at that gaze of Hattie Carney because she she is definitely daring anyone to take away her success well and to Steven's point about interior design actually the department store is a great place to find early employment of women who you know for the most part started out behind the counter selling the wares but into the teens certainly and then by the 20s start doing much of the displays and a lot of the women working in the display realm such as Nancy McClellan whose wallpapers we have in the exhibition started out in interior design you know their first professional experience is we're working on the department store sales floor so it was really one of the first all inclusive I would say employment opportunities for women in the early 20th century and just to that point the other extremely important part about the role of the department store is I hate to say it but I'm old enough to remember when W and J Sloan was still around selling antiques as well as modern furniture and so was Lord and Taylor a major source still so on the other hand it was perhaps not as cutting edge as it was in the 20s but to that point and a very important point is that Lord and Taylor and Macy's both had repeat exhibitions the most important of which and the most cataloged of which were in 1928 of in the case of Lord and Taylor early in 28 it was French decorative arts with a few other things Macy's had a more mixed array and included American designers Italian Austrian German which Lord and Taylor had followed the suit of the 25 fair and not having any German design in any case these the designs that were picked out were by two women both Lord and Taylor's and Macy's had as the head of their design and the the principal curator cum organizer Dorothy Schaefer etc would go to Europe etc they were both women in both department stores in other words they were the ones who made the design selection of what designers and what pieces were going to be included and how they were going to be displayed and I think that is a very telling thing even though you have the role of the museum director of Joseph Hoffman writing a section of Robert de Forest writing an introduction which is another fact that you have the museums and the department stores in collaboration the museums viewed it or particularly the Met as its strong need for it to play a role in the improvement in the development of American taste for the modern and they therefore sanctioned these exhibitions they helped organize them and so Robert de Forest actually wrote the preface so for these exhibitions who as president of the Metropolitan Museum but the people who organized it were the men were the women I have a question about what what part of the story do you think is a Jewish immigrant connection because Hattie Carnegie is certainly Jewish I don't know if Rose is Jewish I have a suspicion yes yeah and of course a lot of the department store owners that were very successful that time were were Jewish immigrants and I'm wondering if that if a good percentage of the people that are the players I guess in this are Jewish yes is the answer certainly but the it's the reasons are varied and there certainly are plenty as in W and J Sloan and Lord and Taylor and so on they were plenty who were not but the this core group who were involved in the avant-garde bringing helping bring it with their training in Vienna a lot of them had in fact they had a lot of Jewish clients also in Vienna and I all but it was a limited sphere in terms of the number of people that they could sell to and it was but it was very much about the economics I think of world of the disasters of World War one and the rampant inflation afterwards that there wasn't much of a market so I don't think that they're being Jewish or not Jewish played a role as much in why they came as the overall opportunities of patronage as it would however it so happens that I am sure that the fact that there were a number here and there was New York in particular and also Los Angeles which were such centers for the advancement of this taste that there became a comfort level of people who were accepted and brought forward but it is a it's a very different reason from the mid 30s which we stopped before the next reason I mean and and there I'm sure there were political personal persecution reasons at times if people felt ostracized in their societies but you don't have that sense that anybody left Vienna I mean that the group we're talking about primarily left Vienna because of some sense that they were not being patronized because of their religion or their ethnicity it seems to be mostly economic but there is huge huge impact of in terms of the number of designers who who certainly were coming from those countries and perhaps for that reason do we have any more questions great well thank you all so much for being here tonight