Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts
Author: Charissa Bremer-David
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1993-09-09
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0892362219

This volume includes concise, illustrated entries on the more than 450 examples of furniture, porcelain, and silver from the Museum's collection. New to this expanded edition are sections devoted to maiolica and glass. An index of previous owners and updated bibliographies are of particular help to the scholar.

Selections from the Decorative Arts in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Selections from the Decorative Arts in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Author: Gillian Wilson
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 118
Release: 1983
Genre: Design
ISBN: 089236050X

J. Paul Getty began to collect French decorative arts in the 1930s and continued to do so until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection has continued to grow since then at a rapid pace and contains over three hundred individual pieces at the time this book is published. This volume illustrates fifty of them. The selection represents a cross section of the collection, which covers the period from approximately 1660 to 1800. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. Information about them and their clientele has been used in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is large and of high quality. This book is not a catalogue, nor is it a mere picture book or checklist. Each piece has been chosen because it represents a particular aspect of the crafts involved in the production of objects that were made by Parisian craftsmen for the crown, the nobility, and the rich bourgeoisie. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Translations of the French archival extracts, an index, and a concise bibliography have been provided.

Women Artists and the Decorative Arts 1880-1935

Women Artists and the Decorative Arts 1880-1935
Author: Janice Helland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351761188

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.

Sensuous Surfaces

Sensuous Surfaces
Author: Jonathan Hay
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2010-06-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1861898460

With Sensuous Surfaces, Jonathan Hay offers one of the most richly illustrated and in-depth introductions to the decorative arts of Ming and Qing dynasty China to date. Examining an immense number of works, he explores the materials and techniques, as well as the effects of patronage and taste, that together have formed a loose system of informal rules that define the decorative arts in early modern China. Hay demonstrates how this system—by engaging the actual and metaphorical potential of surface—guided the production and use of decorative arts from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, a period of explosive growth. He shows how the understanding of decorative arts made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of China’s early modern urban population. Enriching his study with 280 color plates, he ultimately offers an elegant meditation, not only on Ming and Qing art but on the importance of the erotic in the form and function of decorations of all eras.

With Pleasure

With Pleasure
Author: Anna Katz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300239947

A timely and expansive survey of a groundbreaking American art movement that overturned aesthetic hierarchies in a riot of color and ornamentation The Pattern and Decoration movement emerged in the 1970s as an embrace of long-dismissed art forms associated with the decorative. Pioneering artists such as Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Robert Kushner (b. 1949), and others appropriated patterns, frequently from non-Western decorative arts, to produce intricate, often dizzying or gaudy designs in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and collage to ceramics, installation art, and performance. This dazzling book showcases an astonishing array of works by more than 40 artists from across the United States, examining the movement's defiant adoption of art forms traditionally viewed as feminine, craft-based, or otherwise inferior to fine art. In addition to offering an overview of the Pattern and Decoration movement as it is commonly recognized, this volume considers artists of the period who are not typically associated with the movement. Rethinking the significance of patterns and the decorative in postwar American art, this panoramic view provides new insights into abstraction, feminism, and installation art. Essays explore the movement's feminist methods and values, including Miriam Schapiro's "femmage" practice; its impact on contemporary abstract painting; and its relationship to postmodern architecture and design. Artist biographies, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings further establish With Pleasure as the most expansive publication on the subject.