by Jeanne Willette | Dec 8, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Design as Theater, Part One Designing for Dictators The history of Italian fascism is one of a movement begun in misadventure, characterized by misjudgments and mistakes, ending in farce. If it is defined by any one term, however, that word would be...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 1, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Traveler, the Logo, and the Wardrobe We all pack, wrestling with tiny cases, usually with long handles and wheels, stuffing clothes, cosmetics, and computers into a designated number of inches that can fit between the seats of an airplane aisle, jam into an...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 24, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The E. 1027 House The Architect as a Woman The story of this building, innocently named E.1027, reads like a novel–with heroes, villains, vandalism, and victims. The beginning of this saga was ordinary enough, a famous designer decided to design and built a...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 17, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Eileen Gray (1878-1956) Art Deco Furniture Design, Part Two The story of Eileen Gray, who vanished from history, leaving behind some of the most famous and iconic designs of the early twentieth century, is a strange one. She possessed many names, Kathleen Eileen Moray...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 10, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Eileen Gray (1878-1956) Art Deco Furniture Design If Cassandre gave the Jazz Age its distinctive graphic style, then it was a woman, an architect and a designer who gave the decade its most memorable piece of furniture, still in production today. The E. 1027 side...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 3, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Cassandre and Travel Posters By Land and By Sea The history of the luxurious trains that once traveled over the European continent is difficult to find. One can only imagine that the history of the “sleepers” or wagon-lits was a short one. Such elegant...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 27, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Cassandre: The Face of Art Deco Posters and Fonts One of the major artists to emerge at the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925 was the man who won the first prize for his graphic design, an artist known as “Cassandre.” The significance...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 20, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Fate of Fonts Typography and Danger in Germany, Part Three In the history of the Nazification of all things “German,” the suppression of the modern fonts might be a footnote to the destruction of modern art if it is mentioned at all. However, as was...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 13, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Fate of Fonts Typography and Danger in Germany, Part One One of the heroes of the modern font was Paul Renner (1878-1956), a founding member of the Deutsche Werkbund when it was established in 1907. In many ways, he was temperamentally conservative, not a...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 6, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Fate of Fonts Typography and Danger in Germany The debate about the appropriate typeface was not a new one in Germany. Introduced to the printing press as a substitute for handwritten Medieval manuscripts in the fifteenth century, the fraktur or Gothic script,...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 29, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
History of French Fonts, Part Two Cassandre and the Fonts of Art Déco A. M. Cassandre, as the artist sometimes signed himself, was also known more simply as “Cassandre.” Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron (1901-1968) burst on the Parisian scene as Cassandre with a...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 22, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
History of French Fonts, Part One Cassandre and Deberny et Peignot When an artist heaped with honors in his lifetime, including the being promoted an officer of the French Legion of Honor, ends his career with suicide that is a terrible tragedy and a great loss to the...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 15, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Fate of Fonts Typography in the 1920s, Part Two Printing and its old-fashioned fonts had long been viewed as problematic, and, in the nineteenth century, the English designer, William Morris, set out to revive what had once been an art form with the famous...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 8, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Fate of Fonts Typography in the 1920s, Part One Until the 1920s, a printer’s font was selected and combined into words with the intention that the words were going to be read. This assertion may seem axiomatic at first, but, in the modern era, fonts were...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 1, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Architecture of Commerce Selling Art Deco From Spring to Fall of 1925, The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris captured the attention of Europe and visiting dignitaries from America. Like the decade itself, this Fair was both...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 25, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Defining Art Deco as Consumerism The Artist and Product Design In the spring of 1925, the city of Paris hosted the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries), which was a...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 18, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau (1925) The House as a Machine Although the Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau met the fate of all exhibition buildings—it was demolished in 1926—the famous dwelling was rebuilt in Bologna Italy in 1977 by the architectural firm Oubrerie e...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 11, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Le Corbusier (1887-1965) From Purism as Painting to Purism as Architecture To use the term “Art Deco” today is to introduce an anachronism, because to the extent that the style of this period had a name at all it was “Art Moderne,” a name used in the 1920s and 1930s....
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 4, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Robert Mallet-Stevens (1885-1945) The Architect of Art Deco, Part Two The semiotics of Robert Mallet-Stevens was completely different from those of the other modern architects, such as Mies van der Rohr. The radical modern architects were dedicated to building for the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 28, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Robert Mallet-Stevens (1885-1945) The Architect of Art Deco, Part One The architectural counterpart to Le Corbusier and his purist radical modern architecture was the less purist less radical yet still modern architecture of Robert Mallet-Stevens. Time and shifting...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 21, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Defining Art Deco The Meaning of “Moderne” One should always beware of long titles, too many words usually conceal or reveal inner contradictions. Take, for example, the 1925 Paris International Exposition, the name of which is long and self-defeating:...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 14, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Brief Existence of Constructivism At the Paris Fair of 1925 The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts was “international,” stressing the nationalism of the post-war period, but the French, the host nation, proved to be...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 7, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Brief Existence of Constructivism The Years of Lenin The word “Constructivism” was a Russian word that came from multiple sources in Russia and spread to Western Europe very quickly, as soon as the Civil War ended in 1921. In fact, the slogan of the 1920 Dada Fair...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 30, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Producing Soviet Culture Popova and Stepanova The study of modern art and design is noteworthy for its lack of women included in the history. That is not to say that there were no women who were artists—to the contrary, there were numerous women who braved the odds...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 23, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938) The Last of the Avant-Garde Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova were lucky to live out their lives peacefully. In the brutal period of Stalin’s Russia, artists were suppressed. Starting in the late 1920s, the mood of the government...
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