by Jeanne Willette | Nov 23, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Willow Tea Rooms At the University of Glasgow Archive Services, a cramped and spare entry on “Cranston’s Tea Rooms Ltd, reads, Catherine Cranston owned four tea shops in Glasgow, Scotland, at the beginning of the 20th century. The most famous of these...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 16, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Willow Tea Rooms One could argue that there were two significant designers who ushered in the Modern. Working at the end of the nineteenth century, Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) took the ordinary object of everyday life, teapots, sugar bowls. creamers, toast...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 9, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Squaring the Circle Modernizing the Teapot A third generation modern designer, Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) was the successor to the great British reform designer, Owen Jones, who had been the successor to William Morris. Dresser was a prolific designer and much of...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 2, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Remaking the Teapot The Story of English Tea Along with beer and ale, tea is the national drink of England and Ireland, not the mention the former English colonies. The America Revolution was sparked off by an ill-considered tax on tea, a daily necessity and we all...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 26, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The First Modern Art? A Design Revolution “Art Nouveau” is directly translated as New Art but no where except for France was this new style ever referred to as New Art. Instead, Art Nouveau had local names or terms used in various nations and in several...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 19, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Precursors to Modernity: Arts and Crafts: Arts & Crafts In 1851 in London, in Hyde Park to be precise, in a huge glass palace that looked like an overgrown greenhouse, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened on the first of May. Planned...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 12, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
An English Movement Reforming Taste and Defining Design At the end of the nineteenth century, it was understood that product design, for lack of a better term, needed to be “reformed.” The first salvo was from William Morris (1843-1896) and the Arts and Crafts...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 5, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Before Art Nouveau Educating the Consumers for the “House Beautiful” Before Industrial Design, was a practice that we today would refer to as “Product Design,” encompassing both “hard” goods and “soft goods” and home...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 28, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
How to Say “Hello” Designing the Telephone “Telephone,” as a word, is, of course, related to “telegraph,” an existing technology, which also transmitted signals. The word fragment “tele” is from a Greek word meaning “distance,” and “phone,” also a Greek...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 21, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Building a Concept Understanding “Horseless” After a stuttering following the Great War, the slow economic recovery began. Even in Germany, where the financial situation was uncertain in the best of times and catastrophic in the worst years, the number of...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 14, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Building a Concept The Horseless Carriage How did the 19th century automobile become the contemporary car? Manufacturer Henry Ford may have produced the first affordable car, available for the masses, but the Model T did not “look like” a car, it retained the...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 7, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Inevitable Design Becoming Modern Art and design define our lives for us, teach us how to function in the world, and, from time to time, produce an object, whether human or inanimate, that is so fulfilling that it become unnecessary to alter the blueprint. Since the...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 31, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Avant-Garde and Design Building Modernity How “Modern” come into Being? Not just how but when, where, and why did modernity emerge? What was the interaction between artists, designers, and the public caught up in the unprecedented events that defined the twentieth...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 24, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Return of Painting in Germany, 1960s The Post-War Condition After the last bombs were dropped, the last soldier had surrendered, and all surrenders were ratified, an uneasy peace descended upon Europe. By 1946, the rebuilding was underway as people, determined to...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 17, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Smoke, Mirrors, and Power One of the problems any artist has when approaching any landscape with art in mind is that he or she is stalked by three hundred years of aesthetic convention. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Enlightenment thinkers did what philosophers...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 10, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Industrial Sublime and Power Places One of the earliest paintings of the industrial sublime could be Coalbrookdale by Night, painted in 1801 by Philip James de Loutherbourg, a German artist who migrated to London and become a theatrical designer. His penchant for...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 3, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Arcadia Electrified John Pfahl at Niagara Falls In 1881, the artist George Inness, famous for the Lackawanna Valley painting of a train uncoiling from a roundhouse and making its way into the frontiers of Pennsylvania, visited a more natural site, or so he assumed....
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 27, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Arcadia as a Metanarrative The Precursors of John Pfahl Ever since the historical Arcadia had been lost, swallowed up by the Roman Empire of Augustus, its memory has been mourned and a new Arcadia has been sought. Handed down from Virgil and from the known histories...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 20, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Invasion of Arcadia In writing of the state of landscape photography, post-Ansel Adams, the catalog of the 1990 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition of “The New American Pastoral. Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning” stated,...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 13, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Poussin and the Photographer Death in Paradise–a terrifying thought. Surely there must be places from which death is banished. But one of the most famous paintings hanging in the Louvre is about shepherds, a cast shadow, and the presence of death in the pastoral...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 6, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Odd Couple Missiles and Petroglyphs The forcible pairing a fragmented photograph of a missile on top of a part of a petroglyph may seem like an odd pairing, but the jarring juxtaposition of a machine on a mission of death and an ancient drawing actually has an odd...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 29, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Perspective as Photography One of the paradoxes of the discovery of perspective during the early Renaissance was the fact that landscape painting played so small a part in this new “science.” Today, art students are taught to use perspective to measure the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 22, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Other, Postmodern
The Wall, the Fence, the Desert In 1914 America’s poet Robert Frost wrote a poem, Mending Wall, made famous by its opening line: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 15, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Killing Fields And Acceptable Risks Who knows what the High Museum was thinking when it asked famed photographer Richard Misrach (1949-) to produce a series of photographs for their ongoing project, “Picturing the South.” By 1998, Misrach was known for...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 8, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Deliberate Destruction The Unblinking Eye of Richard Misrach There is the technological history of color photography and then there is the social history of color photography and finally, last but not least, is the art world acceptance of color photography. If one...
