I like the “Decorative Arts” – beautiful chairs, tables, desks, textiles. (I love home furnishings. What can I say?) I will visit a museum ostensibly to see paintings or sculpture, but, I will always find some way to wander into a room with furniture. Doesn’t matter from what era, I will always take time to visit every piece.
I like to look at fancy, frou frou Victorian furniture, the cool Art Deco pieces with all their inlay, and I particularly like the “Arts & Crafts” style of the early 20th century. The pieces are so simple in their beauty and detail – a chair as art? I think so.
The Newark Museum, with over 200 examples, has an exhibition, “Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement”
“Gustav Stickley was a tastemaker, a publisher, and a manufacturer. The home furnishings, house designs and interior decoration that he promoted, produced and lived with embodied his progressive vision of design, which rejected the conspicuous consumption of the Victorian era and embraced the concept of an honest and beautiful simplicity in shaping the ideal American home.“
Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement – until January 2011
The Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey
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