LeWitt House in Praiano

By Martin Friedman

Although Sol LeWitt never learned to speak Italian because of poor hearing, he could read it and write it. According to his widow, Carol, he studied the conjugation of verbs intensely to avoid using an improper formulation. His ties to Italy could not have been stronger. His first Italian journey was to Naples, in 1950, and, beginning in the early ’70s, he traveled the country extensively, familiarizing himself with its historic art and architecture, and meeting artists, collectors and owners of galleries showing contemporary art. His wall drawings are a continuation of the venerable Italian wall-painting tradition.

Read the entire article at ArtInAmerica.com

Chicago's Modern Wing Takes Off

The Art Institute of Chicago is set to open its new Modern Wing on May 16. Designed by Renzo Piano, the $300-million, limestone-and-glass structure adds 264,000 square feet to the existing 1893 beaux arts building, increasing gallery space by 35 percent and doubling education space. The wing debuts with an exhibition of 32 works from 2000-07 by Cy Twombly, on view through Sept. 13, and the installation of Charles Ray’s 38-foot-long sculpture Hinoki (2007), a Japanese cypress carved to look like a fallen tree, wormholes and all. Another feature of the new building is a 600-foot-long pedestrian bridge linking the museum to Millennium Park, which through October 2010 is featuring sculptures by four Chinese artists, a project of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. On view are stainless-steel “scholars’ rocks” by Zhan Wang, an oversize steel dinosaur based on cheap mass-produced toys by Sui Jianguo, camouflage-patterned oil pumps called “Kowtow Machines” by Shen Shaomin and a whimsical suspended cluster of gold-painted steel figures by Chen Wenling.

American studio ceramics at mid century

By Gregory Cerio

Mourning the loss of aesthetic purity in the modern age, Susan Sontag once wrote that “[I]n a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.” There are countless reasons why people become collectors. Doubtless there are many reasons that Philip E. Aarons, one of the nation’s leading real estate developers, became a collector. But it is clear that one impetus for his avocation was to salvage—or, better, to safeguard and celebrate—a group of artists whose reputations are not commensurate with the brilliance of their work.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

Indiana Modern

By Martin Filler

The cleverest exponents of modern architecture and design have furthered their cause by playing to a deep-seated human obsession: curiosity about how people live at home. Modernism’s radical reformation of the built environment would never have succeeded without the show houses, model rooms, and design journals that gave a broad audience tips on modern living. Persuasive as those methods were, though, nothing can make architecture more understandable and immediate than a visit to an actual house, even when its residents are long gone.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

The Way We Live Now: Thoughts on Russel Wright’s design legacy

By Russell Flinchum

At the New York School of Interior Design on May 6 the Manitoga Design Industry Council convened a panel, "Russel Wright—The Growing Relevance of Organic Modernism," that included landscape architect Carol Franklin; noted textile designer, author, and collector Jack Lenor Larsen; and mid-century furniture designer Jens Risom to discuss the relevance of Russel Wright on today's design environment.

This panel, which was moderated by Donald Albrecht, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, and Katy Moss Warner, president emeritus of the American Horticulture Society, served effectively as a celebration of Dragon Rock (Wright's home built into the site of a former quarry) and Manitoga (the larger site of 75 acres Wright acquired in 1942) located near Garrison, New York. Albrecht, who curated an exhibition on Wright at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in 2001, provided an overview of Russel and Mary Wright's non-elitist aesthetic of "casual elegance"—epitomized by Wright's iconic American Modern dinnerware. He discussed Wright's career as a series of concentric and evolving circles, beginning with Wright's early experience with set design and ending with Wright as an environmental designer as seen through his intricate series of pathways and constructed views at Manitoga.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

Celebrating Modernism in Connecticut

By Carolyn Kelly

While the most visible works of modern architecture are generally the most celebrated—Lever House or the Seagram Building, for example—the recent public opening of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, showed that the private residences of modern architects can offer tremendous insight into their individual design philosophies. New Canaan became a center for modern architecture in the late 1940s when the "Harvard Five" architects—Marcel Breuer, Landis Gore, John Johansen, Eliot Noyes, and Johnson—each chose to build their own homes there. More than one hundred modern houses were built in the area by the end of the 1970s, which were recently surveyed through a partnership between the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism (CCT) and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and documented by the Building Conservation Associates of New York City. To illuminate the significance of these residences, the CCT Gallery (One Constitution Plaza, 2nd floor, Hartford) has organized the exhibition Living Modern in New Canaan, which is on view through June 19, and offers a glimpse into several notable homes through photographs, architectural models, a small selection of furnishings, and period literature and film clips.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

Celebrating the Straight Chair: A conversation with Mira Nakashima

By Carolyn Kelly

An exhibition on view through June 6, George Nakashima and Knoll: The Making of an Object, at the Design Center at Philadelphia University explores the history of a single chair designed by George Nakashima. Named the Straight-Back Chair or simply the Straight Chair, it was among the few designs that Nakashima, known for his handcrafted studio furniture, allowed to be mass-produced by Knoll, who made a version of it called the N19 from 1946 until 1954. In 2008, Knoll decided to reissue the N19 chair so that it might be appreciated by a new generation. In the exhibition, this design and collaboration are illuminated through tools, prototypes, plans and design drawings, video, and production pieces. I recently spoke with Nakashima's daughter, Mira—a woodworker, designer, and director of George Nakashima Studios—about this time-honored chair and its place in the legacy of her father's work.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

In conversation with...Jeanne Rymer, modern chair collector

By Carolyn Kelly

Fans of 20th-century design will want to visit the Philadelphia Museum this summer to see A Taste for Modern: The Jeanne Rymer Collection of Twentieth-Century Chairs (on view through September 20), an exhibit of twenty-three chairs from a group of thirty-five that were donated to the museum by Jeanne Rymer in 2007. The collection spans the entire 20th century, with a special focus on design from the 1950s, and includes iconic chairs by Jean Prouvé, Hans Wegner, Harry Bertoia, and Ettore Sottsass, to name just a few. I recently spoke with Rymer, a former professor and head of the department of industrial design at the University of Delaware, about her passion for modernist chairs. The slideshow below will give readers a taste of the exhibition.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

The Rug Company debuts designs by Eva Zeisel

By Carolyn Kelly

To those familiar with the prolific career of the Hungarian-born designer Eva Zeisel it will come as no surprise to learn that the justly-celebrated 102-year-old ceramicist has added more new work to her portfolio. The design blog Apartment Therapy recently reported on Zeisel's collaboration with The Rug Company, for whom she created three original designs based on abstract and natural forms derived from her previous work.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

Antiques Bookshelf

In July the Museum of Modern Art will publish Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus Master, a book that offers an intimate look at the art of the modernist designer and weaver. As the title suggests, Stölzl was an influential member of the visionary Bauhaus school—working with Marcel Bruer, Johannes Itten, and Walter Gropius among others—first as a student, and later as head of its now famous weaving workshop. Here excerpts from Stölzl's journals, letters, and writing are presented with notes and an introduction by her daughter, Monika Stadler. The book is divided into three chronological sections: "Artist in a Field Hospital" shows art made during her service in Munich during World War I containing mostly figurative and landscape sketches; "Student at the Bauhaus in Weimar" highlights her pedagogical training at the school including her first experiments in textiles and her well known collaboration with Breuer; and "Master at the Bauhaus in Dessau" documents her mature abstract style and weaving methodology.

Read the entire article at TheMagazineAntiques.com

Postwar Poster Fest

By Darrell Hartman

Art of the Modern Movie Poster opens December 3 at Lincoln Center's Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery. Yes, the main purpose of these splashy broadsheets is (or, in the case of these historical specimens, was) to get butts into theaters. Now, though, they're part of art history: Just ask the collector who dropped $700,000 on a poster for Fritz Lang's Metropolis a few years ago.

There are 20 post-WW2 works on display, from a Belgian poster for Orson Welles' 1952 film Othello to Shepard Fairey's 2005 Walk the Line. Other highlights include the iconic poster for Blow-Up, featuring Vanessa Redgrave, legs splayed on a red background, and Kurosawa's own crayon design for his 1980 epic Kagemusha. Japanese posters for A Man and A Woman and Fellini's 8 1/2 demonstrate innovate integration of calligraphy, and photomontage. More than the others, the Polish designs—handwritten script against a backdrop of snowy mountains for Spellbound; blocky, quasi-abstract figures for Rocco and His Brothers—were linked to the avant-garde.

Read the entire article at Interview.com

Marc Newson

By Peter M. Brant

In 2007, when the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) announced plans to start private space tourism by the year 2012, it was no surprise that they tapped Australian industrial designer Marc Newson to create the interior of the spaceship. After all, the 45-year-old Newson had already designed everything on earth. His career arc has yet to actually arc—it’s pretty much a straight shot up. His early pieces, like the now-iconic Lockheed Lounge (1986) and Embryo Chair (1988), are examples of works that didn’t just revolutionize furniture design, but crept over into the realm of high art. With his solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2007, Newson broke the barrier between art and design—ultimately certifying design’s place in contemporary collections. But Newson isn’t only an artist—he’s, at heart, a problem solver. In the past, he’s designed watches, recording studios, doorstops, concept cars, plane seats, benches, and restaurants. In the new economy, the dream of million-dollar space travel may be floundering for the time being, but Newson, who now lives and works in London, isn’t giving up on the future. Friend and collector Peter M. Brant talked to the visionary designer about what it’s like to create the objects of the 21st century.

Read the entire article at Interview.com

More Interview profiles:
Konstantin Grcic | Ron Arad | Shigeru Ban | Alasdhair Willis

American by Design

By Aimee Walleston

At times, true innovation is most evident in design that makes a brave foray outside the confines of sanctioned good taste. As the International Contemporary Furniture Fair showcased sophisticated global design at the Jacob Javits Center, KIOSK, the Soho sponsor of revolving, internationally-inspired design, took a contrarian stance. Saturday evening, KIOSK and design company AREAWARE (the two share Spring Street digs), played host to an event celebrating the fair, and KIOSK's recent love affair with eccentric American design from the South, to a crowd presumably fresh from the on-site fair. Scrunched shoulder to shoulder under a hot pink sign advertising a "depressingly awesome reference library," design admirers took in the high kitsch of KIOSK's geographically-themed acquisitions, which toast Americana at its most artificial. The shop's current series, "American Installment #2," explores American design as a fruit cocktail-hued spectrum-including pink flamingos and a fetching chum bag-sourced from Florida.

In diametric opposition to KIOSK's Champale camp, Sunday evening celebrated the sleek charms and subtle humor of architecture and design magazine PIN-UP's 6th issue. The event's location served double-duty, offering a preview of concept shop No. 8b, and exalting design-smith Stefan Diez's newest creation for e15: an Eames-by-way-of-origami chair called the CH04 HOUDINI. At a time when most retail is contracting, Project no. 8 is expanding, opening their men's store at 38 Orchard Street. The ramshackle slate blue scaffolding that currently cocoons No. 8b is a clever dodge-housed within is a glass structure which deftly mirrors the store's refined take on modern, Minimalist-tinged design and men's fashion. Here, PIN-UP's Editor and Creative Director, Felix Burrichter, gives his thoughts on the magazine, the shop and thinking writ large.

Read the full article at Interview.com

The Campana Brothers Save Lacoste's Skin

By Rebecca Voight

It all began four years ago, when Philippe Lacoste bought the Campana Brothers' Alligator chair, a stuffed animal pile-up of poison green toy alligators for a lounge chair that's become one of the Brazilian salvage design duos classics. "We thought it was amazing and that perhaps Lacoste would furnish its headquarters with them and buy a lot," says Fernando Campana. "Two years later we were contacted by our colleague, the designer Michael Young, and we began our collaboration on the Lacoste polo."

This is the French polo maker's fourth holiday design collaboration, and it's one of the most amusing. It's also one of the most prestigious, as the Campanas are Latin America's foremost design stars.

For Lacoste's women's super limited edition (12 shirts will be produced) the Campanas turned the alligator logo into lace, inspired by Northern Brazil's lacemaking tradition, using 3000 of the little critters painstakingly hand sewn into a polo by seamstresses of the Coopa-Roca cooperative located in the Rocinha favela, Rio's largest slum with an estimated population of nearly 180,000 people.

Read the entire article at Interview.com

From Royal Prerogative to Executive Privilege

Eight decades after its debut, the Barcelona chair designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich still exudes the regal aura of its first incarnation. By Martin Filler

The steel-and-leather Barcelona chair of 1928-1929 was created by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his longtime interior-design associate (and lover), Lilly Reich, as part of her decorative scheme for his famous German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona. In the eight decades since its introduction, this deep, low-slung, armless lounge seat has become to captains of industry what the Hermès Kelly bag is to fashionistas or the Purdey twelve-bore shotgun is to British aristocrats: a costly trophy that epitomizes quality, utility, luxury, and longevity.

The steel-and-leather Barcelona chair of 1928-1929 was created by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his longtime interior-design associate (and lover), Lilly Reich, as part of her decorative scheme for his famous German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona. In the eight decades since its introduction, this deep, low-slung, armless lounge seat has become to captains of industry what the Hermès Kelly bag is to fashionistas or the Purdey twelve-bore shotgun is to British aristocrats: a costly trophy that epitomizes quality, utility, luxury, and longevity.

Elegant and ageless, the Barcelona chair may be the nearest that early modernists came to fulfilling their dream of halting the millennium’s relentless march of styles—romanesque, Gothic, renaissance, mannerist, baroque, rococo, neoclassical, neo-Gothic, arts and crafts, art nouveau—with a rationalized approach to architecture and design called the International Style, which they believed would remain unimprovable and therefore eternal. But time overtook them too, and the relatively short ascendance of the International Style—from about 1930 to 1980—has been followed by design trends of ever-accelerating evanescence.

Among the unapologetic status symbols of early modernism, the Barcelona chair was and always will be a luxury item. The authorized model, still made by Knoll International, retails for about $11,000, thanks to details impossible to omit or fudge without destroying the character of the whole. This saving grace has kept even its innumerable knockoffs from looking cheap in the way that mass-produced copies of other chair designs frequently do.

The Barcelona chair is most familiar upholstered in black or tan cowhide reminiscent of an attaché case, businesslike and masculine in a way that increased the chair’s appeal in the postwar workplace. But the surprising fact is that the 1929 originals were covered in white kid, as impractical as the spotless decor of the period’s Hollywood movie sets. That buttery-soft, immaculate leather—then most often associated with gloves de rigueur for ladies in the presence of royalty—was a witty acknowledgment of the design’s origin as a modern throne, a regal provenance unknown to most people who’ve sat in subsequent copies.

At the Barcelona exposition, Germany’s trade goods were not displayed in the pavilion proper, but rather in a separate installation (also by Mies and Reich) elsewhere on the fairgrounds. That division of labor freed the German Pavilion to be a showcase for the new architecture already synonymous with the cultural ferment of the Weimar Republic and its influential Bauhaus design school. But when Spain’s King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia agreed to inaugurate the German Pavilion, furniture for their visit was hurriedly added to the project.
Following custom, the monarchs were to autograph a golden book and listen to welcoming remarks, a ceremony which required a table for the guest register and a pair of chairs for los reyes to sit in while official greetings were pronounced. The Spanish court’s strict protocol dictated that almost everyone must stand in the sovereigns’ company. The few grandees permitted to sit had to make do with low, backless footstools, a vestige of the tabourets and pliants used at Versailles. For the grandees, Mies and Reich devised matching squared-topped stools, a design that has since become better known as the ottoman for later versions of
the chair.

On opening day—May 26, 1929—Mies took care to don the cutaway tailcoat, striped trousers, and black silk top hat prescribed for formal daytime ceremonies. King Alfonso and Queen Ena (as Victoria Eugenia was known, to distinguish her from other namesakes of her grandmother Queen Victoria of England) apparently never sat down during their whirlwind stop, and thus neither could anyone else. That one point of etiquette rendered all the expensive seating redundant.

No one knows what happened to the furnishings after the fair closed and the structure was torn down, early in 1930. (The building was reconstructed on its original site in 1986 in honor of Mies’s centennial.) Only the pavilion’s book-signing console is known to have survived. With a rectangular smoked-glass surface supported by a pair of x-shaped, chrome-plated steel legs—similar to but higher than those of the footstools—it appeared on the antiques market decades later and was bought by British collector Peter Palumbo, Baron Palumbo of Walbrook, who placed it in Mies’s Farnsworth House of 1947-1951 in Plano Illinois, which the Palumbo bought from its original owner in 1962 and sold to a landmarks conservancy in 2003.

In selecting white kid for the first two Barcelona chairs and their attendant stools, Reich followed a key Miesian principle: rich materials convey greater power when presented simply. Though cost-conscious modernists favored industrial components that gave their schemes a machinelike austerity, Mies encouraged his clients to indulge in top-of-the-line materials such as burnished bronze, Macassar ebony, and verd antique marble. He gave those venerable materials contemporary impact by applying them in large-scale, but minimally detailed, expanses. Like a chef who knew better than to gussy up a slab of foie gras with superfluous garnishes, Mies served luxury straight up, with a boldness that never failed to impress.

At the Barcelona pavilion, he pulled off his all-time showstopper: an interior screen wall faced with large book-matched panels of golden Moroccan onyx, near which the white royal chairs were placed at a right angle. Aglow with inner fire, this mineral room divider was breathtaking. (When the pavilion was rebuilt in 1986, the same rare onyx could no longer be quarried in Morocco, but an approximate specimen was found in Algeria.)

In a reference as subtle but unmistakable as the kid-glove upholstery, Reich based her color scheme for the pavilion’s main interior space on the red-gold-and-black horizontally striped flag of the Weimar Republic. The Barcelona chairs sat atop a rectangle of coal-black broadloom carpeting, and the plate-glass window walls were hung with ceiling-to-floor crimson velvet curtains, which created a broad band equivalent to that of the golden wall.

The centrality of Reich’s role in Mies’s career was not fully appreciated until she was honored with a monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. She was among several forgotten female associates of celebrated modernist masters—including Charlotte Perriand, éminence grise behind furniture that is usually ascribed to Le Corbusier alone—who were finally raised from obscurity after decades of neglect.

It is often impossible to determine who was responsible for what in any creative collaboration, even between such compulsive record-keepers as Charles and Ray Eames. Suffice it to say that Mies received his first furniture patent in 1927 only after he began working with Reich, and never got another after 1937, when he ended their partnership (personal as well as professional) upon coming to the United States and sending her back to Germany soon after he bade her to join him here.

Initially, Mies and Reich’s much-admired chair was reproduced by several European makers in small quantities. When he settled permanently in the U.S., in 1938, Mies reassigned production rights to the modern furniture company established by another German émigré, Hans Knoll. Only after World War II did Knoll and his wife, the Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna Florence Schust Knoll, realize the Barcelona chair’s untapped potential. They had Mies tidy up several details, and, in 1950, introduced the improved re-edition, which became an overnight success.
For the new version, the 1929 model’s chrome-plated steel was replaced with stainless steel. To achieve a more refined effect, Mies thinned down the crossing of the languidly curved bypass supports. He also gave a crisper outline to the down-filled back and seat cushions by reinforcing their button tufting and channel welting—a modular grid of five horizontal squares and four vertical—to prevent the baggy spread typical of older European models.

Mies’s most energetic American advocate, Philip Johnson, owned a pair of Barcelona chairs, made for the New York City apartment Reich decorated for him in 1930-1931. But when he used the design in his widely publicized Glass House of 1948-1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, the chair became more famous still. It caught on in image-conscious business offices to such a degree that by the late 1950s Barcelona pairs became an international corporate status symbol—or cliché, depending upon your point of view.

Critics have often noted the design’s affinities to the ancient Greek klismos chair and its many neoclassical reincarnations. In some less specific but persistent way, the Barcelona chair’s concave/convex stance reminds me of the insouciant mannequin posture—shoulders pulled back, pelvis thrust forward—decreed by the couturiere Coco Chanel to best show off her clothes for the modern woman.

It has been said that all designers create in their own image. If the comparatively low ceilings of houses by Frank Lloyd Wright relate to his less-than-average height, the width of the Barcelona chair—a capacious 29 1/2 inches—might well reflect the stocky builds of Mies and Reich, both older than springtime at the time of this supreme collaboration. Autobiographical or not, their Barcelona chair seems perennially fresh, like every other great work of art.

Martin Filler is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Magazine Antiques.

The Three Faces of Paul Evans

Paul Evans is the wild card of midcentury American design: a craftsman, artist, and ntrepreneur whose creations resist categorization. The Pennsylvania native’s primary medium was metal. Working with steel, bronze, chrome, and aluminum, he explored all the potential of his materials in form and texture, producing furniture lines that were by turns burly, phantasmagorical, and suave.

Evans’s designs tend to provoke reactions that are at once visceral and ambivalent. Todd Merrill, a New York dealer who showcases Evans prominently in his inventory, recalls his reaction to one monumental wall-mounted console in sculpted bronze: “First, I thought it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. A couple of days later, I loved it.” (Rock star Lenny Kravitz bought that piece. In Evans’s lifetime—he died in 1987, at age 55—his clients included members of Saudi royalty, the mordant playwright Paddy Chayefsky, and the sweet-souled puppeteer Shari Lewis, of “Lamb Chop” fame.)

For all the contrasts in Evan's body of work, his designs can be grouped into three signal styles:
Sculpted steel-fronted cabinets

Evans trained as a silversmith, and was making table-top objects—teapots, menorahs—when in the late 1950s he began a professional relationship with studio furniture maker Phillip Lloyd Powell in the late ‘50s. Powell, who had a studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, convinced Evans to create large-scale work. Among the first forms he conceived were wooden cabinets faced with rectangular patinated steel mounts divided into a grid of pockets, which Evans filled with an array of glyphs and runic forms. “At the time, there was a huge interest in American folk art, and I can’t help but feel there’s an affinity for folk art in Evans’ early work,” Merrill says. The steel compositions can be read as a kind of brawny album quilt. Jeffrey Head, a Los Angeles writer working on an Evans monograph, points out that Evans studied textile design for a time after high school, and says, “You can see how the idea of a tapestry, of a mixing of forms, could have had an influence on him.”
Sculpted-bronze forms

In the early 1960s, Evans formed a business relationship with Directional Inc. furniture company, an avant garde-minded New York showroom which was eager to have him create new furniture lines. By this time, Evans had expanded his New Hope studio and hired several assistants, chief among them a local craftsman named Dorsey Reading. Reading told Merrill that Evans wanted to work in bronze—but not in traditional cast bronze. Reading introduced him to a technique used in shipbuilding for spraying bronze on surfaces. In 1964 they developed a method in which epoxy was slathered and shaped on a wooden matrix, then coated in bronze. The forms Evans made are strange and primordial. He drew the epoxy down to make stalactite-like chair legs, or he built it up into stalagmites that serve as bases for glass-topped tables. Love them or hate them, the pieces are mesmerizing, and wholly original.

The “Cityscape” line

By the 1970s, Evans had a team of more than eighty workers. Because he insisted on hand-construction, he struggled to fill orders. Reading concedes that Evans devised the Cityscape line in part because it was relatively easy to produce. The line’s tables, desks, and lamps are finished with an irregular mosaic of square and rectangular plaques of chrome and bronze(either patinated or burnished). Their aesthetic is perfectly in keeping with the “high-tech” look of the day: slick, sleek, and cosmopolitan. Merrill notes that the Cityscape and sculpted-bronze pieces are most popular with European collectors, while Americans gravitate to the sculpted-steel designs. The auction record for an Evans piece—an early steel-front cabinet—is $150,000, but other examples of his work have sold privately for double that figure.

Celebrating 20th- and 21st-century design

The 20th century witnessed the birth of the cool, as the leading lights of culture and the applied arts cast off old models and embraced fresh viewpoints. This is the world of MODERN magazine. MODERN will explore the myriad styles of 20th- and 21st-century design—from the sleek and minimal to the bold and biomorphic—celebrating and contemplating the creative minds whose works changed, and continues to change, the way we live. As well, MODERN will serve as a platform for insights and opinions—a forum for curators, collectors, and the dealers who are the engine behind the most vibrant area of today's decorative arts market.

MODERN is a quarterly magazine, to be published three times in 2009. Look for MODERN with Art in America, The Magazine Antiques and at major art and design shows this May, October, and December.