Amahl and the Night Visitors was the original Hallmark Christmas movie. The one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti was the first opera composed for television in the United States. Commissioned by NBC, it was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1951 from a studio in Rockefeller Center. Sponsored by Hallmark, it was also the debut...
Stage designs occupy a unique place among Cooper Hewitt’s diverse holdings of works on paper. Unlike architectural fantasies or unrealized buildings, the intentional ephemerality of theater designs means that set designs, photographs, and models are often the only artifacts that remain to document these temporary spaces. The museum’s collection of stage designs spans the 17th...
One of several wallpaper designs by Saul Steinberg, this paper shows elevations of the Palais Garnier in Paris. Illustrated in signature Steinberg style, the design is fun and whimsical while drawing attention to some of the building’s notable architectural components. The two different elevations are drawn as caricatures which highlight the grandiosity and opulence of...
Between 1861 and 1875, French architect Charles Garnier designed the new Paris Opera House. With its heavily ornamented Second Empire Baroque style exterior and its sumptuous and ornate interiors, Garnier successfully designed a new cultural hub for the French social elite. However, Garnier’s design goes well beyond style. Garnier carried out careful and extensive studies...
Jan Lenica was a leading figure in the Polish School of Poster Art, a term he coined in 1960 in the Swiss magazine Graphis. This poster depicts a scene from of Alban Berg’s atonal opera Wozzeck. The opera’s title character stabs the mother of his child in a fit of jealousy and then throws the...
While Steinberg trained as an architect, he is best known for his satirical cartoons in The New Yorker. He began drawing shortly after enrolling in college and had his first cartoon published in The New Yorker in 1941, and even after joining the US Navy in 1943 he continued sending in cartoons from his various...
This gut wrenching poster, designed by the Polish graphic designer Jan Lenica, was produced to advertise the Polish National Opera’s 1964 production of Alban Berg’s avant-garde opera Wozzeck in Warsaw. An icon of Polish graphic design, the poster was awarded a Gold Medal at the 1966 Warsaw International Poster Biennale, and is Lenica’s best known...
While researching one of our printer-dyer record books for the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product, I discovered a curious fabric swatch on page 105. The fragment shows two incomplete figures in Japanese-style dress and includes the text “Dude Never Would Be Missed” and “Got Him On My List.” Both phrases are lyrics...
