Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877), a well-known British architect and art historian, championed the role of the designer in the manufacturing process.
The Schmitz-Horning Co. wall decoration catalogue from 1913-1914 is one of the Cooper Hewitt Design Library’s many trade catalogues. Schmitz-Horning Co. opened in 1905 as a wallpaper and mural manufacturing firm in Cleveland, Ohio.
Alpenmarchen tales (Alpine Flowers) is a 1922 illustrated storybook that describes the woodland adventures of two acorn children who are swept away by the autumn winds. Author Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956) was a Swiss painter largely known for his watercolor illustrations for children’s books about flower fairies and small creatures in the mountains, forests in nature....
The library owns books like Researches into the history of playing cards that supports research into the objects in the museum’s curatorial departments. In studying this book, I was able to make a connection between the illustrations and some playing cards in the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s Drawings & Prints collections. This book is an in-depth...
The first non-stop, first transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris in May 1927 was acclaimed around the world as one of the most remarkable and heroic accomplishments in history. The people of Paris were especially excited about the journey since their city was where Lindbergh would be touching down after nearly...
“’Solitude’ I wrote in 20 minutes in Chicago standing up against the glass office enclosure waiting for another band to finish recording.” Duke Ellington’s comment is hard for the musician in me to swallow, because the musical score, with its complex chording and swinging rhythms, sure doesn’t sound like its composition took place in the...
The piano plays an intricate, rhythmic solo. The trumpet vocalizes a “wa-wa” sound that is explosively bluesy. The trombone whinnies bizarrely, both expressive and perverse. These are the sounds of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” one of the defining musical pieces of his fifty-year career. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) was involved with music...
