Photo By Gail
In 1935, Salvador Dalí transformed one of the most ordinary objects of then modern life — the rotary telephone dial — into a glamorous work of Surrealist design. Created in collaboration with fashion innovator Elsa Schiaparelli, Dalí’s Telephone Dial Powder Compact reimagined a functional makeup case as a miniature piece of practical art.
Continue reading Ring, Ring: Salvador Dalí’s Telephone Dial Makeup Compact
All Photos By Gail
Have you heard of Beach Pajamas? I never had until I visited The Met this past weekend and found myself in This Exhibit, which explores the influence of the Japanese Kimono on modern fashion.
All Photos By Gail
At the end of the 1920s, the prior emphasis on lavish surface embellishment transferred to printed textiles, which were fashioned into a variety of romantic permutations. The elegant Ombre-dyed silk chiffon of this evening dress was likely created for Gabrielle Chanel at her own Tissus Chanel factory in Asnières-sur-Seine, France. The delicate manipulation of the textile in this Floral Appliquéd Evening Dress (spring/summer 1935) is evidence of the superior capabilities of the Chanel couture workrooms
Continue reading Eye On Design: Floral Appliquéd Evening Dress By House of Chanel
Photo By Gail
Over the course of a career that stretched from the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel painted portraits of hundreds of friends, family members, lovers, artists art historians, writers, and political activists, believing that “people are the greatest and profoundest key to an era.” Seeking to express psychology above absolute physical likeness, she often used exaggerated colors and expressive brushstrokes and eliminated extraneous details in order to capture the inner lives of her subjects.
Neel was a longtime supporter of leftist causes. In the painting of Pat Whalen (1935), she depicts the Communist activist and union organizer for the longshoremen of Baltimore as a paragon of social justice. Whalen’s creased face and expression — along with a copy of the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, resting beneath his large, clenched — suggest both a noble archetype of the blue-collar worker and an all-consuming commitment to the working man’s cause.
Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
The shift in our perception of objects when they are displayed as part of a museum collection can sometimes elevate a practical piece into an art object. On deli counters in the 1940s, this commercial meat slicer designed by Egmont Arens (circa 1935) would have evoked cleanliness, efficiency and modernity. In an exhibition, it becomes an abstract pieceof streamlined design.
Photographed in the Brooklyn Museum.
New Photo Added October 1st, 2021:
