Wallpaper and the Artist: From Durer to Warhol (Special Publication; 27) - Hardcover

Hapgood, Marilyn Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0896599337 ISBN 13: 9780896599338

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1993

Synopsis

Aims to reveal how artists over the past five centuries have approached wallpaper design. From Durer, who conceived of his designs as seriously as he did a fine woodcut, to William Morris, who believed that wallpaper should transform our lives, to Andy Warhol who inspired wallpaper parodies.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

As this lavishly illustrated volume demonstrates, when a great artist turns his or her attention to creating wallpaper, the results are often so elegant and ingenious that they challenge the very notion that wallpaper design may be one of the lesser arts. The book examines how major artists over the last five centuries have approached wallpaper design. From Durer, who conceived his designs as seriously as he did a fine woodcut, to William Morris, who believed that wallpaper, like all good design, should transform our lives, to Andy Warhol, whose fascination with multiple images inspired brilliant parodies of the wallpaper tradition, the artists represented here reveal the rich complexity inherent in the art of pattern and form that constitutes wallpaper design. Among the seventy-five painters, illustrators, and architects featured are Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; architects Charles Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Art Nouveau artists Hector Guimard, Alphonse Mucha, and Louis Comfort Tiffany; Nabi Maurice Denis; Wiener Werkstatte artists Josef Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche; De Stijl's Piet Mondrian; architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright; and twentieth-century artists Raoul Dufy, Sonia Delaunay, Vanessa Bell, Charles Burchfield, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, and Saul Steinberg. By juxtaposing wallpaper and the artist, author Marilyn Hapgood has mapped out a hitherto unexplored part of the important area where the fine and decorative arts meet. The book concludes with an appendix on artists' wallpapers for children and a useful guide to manufacturers and shops that produce and sell artists' wallpaper. No one whoreads this book will ever think of wallpaper as neutral background again.

From Publishers Weekly:

Humble, perishable wallpaper leaps into the category of fine art in this exciting survey. Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) boldly sensual wallpaper bacchanal of a satyr and his wife amid phoenixes, grapes and twisting vine arabesques astonishes even today. Thomas Rowlandson's (1756-1827) wallpapers are rollicking comic strips whose grotesques satirize fashionable London society. The harmonious botanical motifs of William Morris (1834-1896) sing a hymn to nature. Modern architects like Josef Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier integrated wallpaper into comprehensively designed environments. Andy Warhol's deliberately banal "Cow" wallpapers parody both art and wallpaper conventions. Hapgood, an art historian who specializes in 20th-century design, redefines popular conceptions of wallpaper as she samples designs by Dali, Matisse, Calder, Mondrian, Magritte and others, illuminating her discussions with 240 illustrations. Her visually stunning volume opens up new territory for decorative artists as well as students of painting and architecture.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abbeville Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0896599337
• ISBN 13: 9780896599338
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272