The 1920s and ‘30s witnessed a burst of creative energy in the fields of architecture, design, and fashion. Shaping new styles of buildings and furnishings, redefining fashion, and giving visual form to avant-garde performing arts, architects and designers forged a still-influential modern aesthetic. The era’s most creative figures rarely worked in isolation, preferring instead to participate in international dialogues that crossed national boundaries and linked capital cities in collaborative artistic enterprise. Between the world... Read more

The 1920s and ‘30s witnessed a burst of creative energy in the fields of architecture, design, and fashion. Shaping new styles of buildings and furnishings, redefining fashion, and giving visual form to avant-garde performing arts, architects and designers forged a still-influential modern aesthetic. The era’s most creative figures rarely worked in isolation, preferring instead to participate in international dialogues that crossed national boundaries and linked capital cities in collaborative artistic enterprise. Between the world wars, no two cities engaged in a more fertile conversation than Paris, capital of 19th-century refinement, and New York, the upstart challenger that represented 20th-century dynamism.

Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925-1940will explore not only architecture and design, but also film, fashion, and the performing arts. Styles from Art Deco to neo-romanticism will be examined along with the work of such legendary figures as Helena Rubinstein, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali­­, and Josephine Baker, and lesser-known figures such as costume and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew. The exhibition and its accompanying publication (Monacelli Press, forthcoming in September 2008) will bring together never-before-exhibited drawings, furnishings, decorative objects, costumes, photographs, posters, and films.