Textiles, furniture, walls show Jazz Age designs
NEW YORK - A multisensory blockbuster of a show at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum here invites visitors to explore Jazz Age design in all its glittering, decadent and innovative glory.
Edgy furniture and tableware; textiles and wallpapers in rich oranges and teals; odes to the New York skyscraper — there’s nothing quietly “decorative” in “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” which is on view in New York through Aug. 20 and then opens at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sept. 30. It runs there through Jan. 14, 2018.
Visitors should check preconceptions about “Art Deco” at the door. That popular term for 1920s style was coined well after the era ended, says Sarah Coffin, a curator at the Cooper Hewitt, who co-curated the exhibit with Stephen Harrison, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It was co-organized by both museums.
The pivotal era that linked a more traditionalist aesthetic before it to the Bauhaus and midcentury modern eras that came later was more aptly known in its own time as the Jazz Age.
Through over 400 works, many of them from private collections and never before displayed in public, this show reveals “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s” is on display through Aug. 20 in New York, before the exhibit moves to Cleveland . why.
“Exploring the significant impact of European influences, the explosive growth of American cities, avant-garde artistic movements, new social mores and the role of technology, ‘The Jazz Age’ seeks to define the American spirit of the period,” says Cooper Hewitt Director Caroline Baumann.
The show begins quietly with a relatively staid section on the “Persistence of Traditional Good Taste,” focusing on the American colonial and Federalist designs in furniture and tableware (and a monumental tapestry woven by New Jersey’s Edgewater Tapestry Looms) that were favored by traditionalists of the early 1920s. This was a period when early American design found new respect with the opening of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the rise of interior design, led by pio-