From: sbrock@teal.csn.org (Steve Brock)
Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.books
Subject: Wallpaper and the Artist by Marilyn Hapgood  (Art)
Date: 13 Nov 92 20:18:34 GMT
Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc.

WALLPAPER AND THE ARTIST: FROM DURER TO WARHOL by Marilyn Oliver
Hapgood.  Abbeville Press, 488 Madison Ave., N.Y., NY  10022. 
Illustrated, index, bibliography, notes, directory of manufacturers
and shops.  272 pp., $85.00 cloth.  0-89659-933-7

                             REVIEW

     Many famous artists have had second careers.  No, they didn't
flip burgers on the evening shift to make ends meet when their
paintings weren't selling - they had a secret passion that provided
them with an outlet for their fanciful flings - they designed
wallpaper.
     All the way back to when our ancestors lived in caves, to our
children's artistic efforts for which we punish them and hope will
wash off, we have delighted in drawings on our walls.  Seventy-five
major artists, illustrators, and architects are exposed in this
act, with outstanding photography and drawings, from extreme
closeups of rich detail to paintings in which the artist uses his
wallpaper designs on the walls of rooms.
     Hapgood goes back 400 years, to "the earliest great wallpaper
artist," Albrecht Durer.  His Greek themes, especially satyrs and
cherubs, were intricate and lively.  Other contemporaries from the
period 1500 to 1800 were Jean-Baptiste Reveillon and Thomas
Rowlandson.  
     As time goes forward, the time periods investigated grow
shorter.  Hapgood looks at the era before William Morris, 1800-
1860, dominated by Jean-Julien Deltil, Robert Jones, A.W.N. Pugin,
William Burges, and Owen Jones.
     Hapgood proceeds to the William Morris era, from 1860-1895, in
which Morris' work is labeled "unequaled by any other artist."  His
designs were usually complex patterns of leaves and flowers. 
Notable followers were Walter Crane, C.F.A. Voysey, James Whistler,
and Edward William Godwin.  Voysey also was productive in the Art
Nouveau style, from 1890 to 1905, as were Maurice Denis, Alphonse
Maria Mucha, and Otto Eckmann.
     The period 1900-1960, Hapgood says, was comprised of several
movements.  One is characterized as the "Movement Toward Re-
straint," dominated by Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, the seemingly
unrestrained Dagobert Peche, and the geometric patterns of Le
Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.  There was also "The Art Deco
Years," from 1910 to 1940, represented by Raoul Dufy (whose
wallpaper designs were used on the walls of the rooms in his
paintings), Jean-Emile Laboureur, Marie Laurencin, and the bright
colors of Jean Lurcat.
     A chapter is dedicated to Charles Burchfield, "one of the
first outstanding American artists to design wallpaper."  His
densely detailed wallpapers have a mystical quality.
     From the mid- to late-1900s, wallpaper artists pulled out all
the stops.  Surrealists Magritte, Dali, Picasso, Alexander Calder,
Saul Steinberg, and Andy Warhol made walls hallucinatory, with
shifting colors and distorted images.  A color wheel could be
rotated, facing the wall, and the images would move.  Other, more
traditional artists are detailed in the chapter "Art and Wallpa-
per," where the wallpapers of van Gough, Max Ernst, and Howard
Hodgkin are discussed.
     The book ends with an entertaining chapter on children's
wallpaper, again dominated by William Morris.
     As we travel through time on people's walls, Hapgood is a
wonderful guide, knowledgeable and amusing.  After reading this
book, one will never look at walls the same again.
Xref: sparky alt.books.reviews:80 alt.native:1260