Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Passion for the Exotic: Lockwood de Forest, Frederic Church
December 12, 2014 – September 26, 2015
The former Carnegie Family Library, on the second floor of Cooper Hewitt, was created by the leading American exponent of the Aesthetic Movement, Lockwood de Forest. Painstakingly cleaned and preserved as part of the museum renovation, it is the only extant interior by de Forest still situated in the building for which it was created. Paying homage both to de Forest and to his mentor, the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church, Passion for the Exotic: Lockwood de Forest, Frederic Church evokes the fascination of late 19th-century America with the arts of India, where the library’s intricate ornamental teak woodwork was carved. Among some two dozen objects on view will be drawings, books, stencils, furniture and carved panels by de Forest, works on paper by Church (including a view of his home, Olana), and objects from the 16th through 19th centuries—such as tilework, a wall hanging, and a silverinlaid ewer—that originated from the vast region that Church, de Forest and Carnegie would have called the East.
