CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/353528
the contributions of female designers to the repertoire of modernism in the applied arts. Whether we can derive the existence of a uniquely feminine aesthetic from these works is another question, probably unanswerable. The German designer Lilly Reich's furniture is so utilitarian as to be severe; witness the view of "the lady's bedroom" from the 1930-31 Berlin exhibition "The Dwelling of Our Time" in which the twin bed is made of tubular steel, elegant, yet ever so faintly evocative of a hospital. (The inaugural chair in the exhibition, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's—known for his collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald—wildly elongated Side Chair of oak and silk, is positively florid in comparison.) Numerous works from MOMA's collection by the Bauhaus designer and silversmith Marianne Brandt are happily on display. I was familiar with her angular silver teapot (again, the teapot!), less so with her Kandem Bedside Table Lamp of 1928 (in collaboration with Hin Bredendieck) and 1925 Ceiling Lamp of spun aluminum with milk glass shade. Eileen Gray, of course, is present; the architecture and furniture designs—condensed as they are--of her long, creative life make her a true peer, if not a superior, of masters of modernism Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier, the latter coveting Tempe a Pailla, the house Gray built in the south of France, eventually painting five wall murals there, arguably a defacement. Gray's 1922 Screen, of Greta Magnusson Grossman (american, born Sweden. 1906- 1999). Cobra Lighting Fixture. c. 1948. Enameled aluminum, enameled steel, and chrome-plated steel. Mfr.: Ralph O. Smith Co., Los Angeles, Ca. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. HYLAND