PRESENT LAUGHTER.(Dagobert Peche, crafts and design, Neue Galerie, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 02-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The most exciting retrospective of the current New York art season presents more than four hundred objects of craft and design--furniture, fabric, wallpaper, women's fashion, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and jewelry, along with works on paper--by a nearly forgotten Viennese named Dagobert Peche (pronounced "Pehka"), who died of cancer in 1923, at the age of thirty-six. The show, which runs through February 10th, fills the top floor of the Neue Galerie, the lustrous little museum of early-modern Austrian and German art on the Upper East Side which is barely a year old but already feels like an indispensable New York cynosure. A hallway hung with wallpaper samples--the first thing a visitor sees--commandeered my attention with the instantaneous authority of great art. Tensile linear and bold floral patterns overlie glowing, subtle colors, which dissolve the wall surface into deep radiance. The rhythmic play of the patterns is like visual music. I was stunned. What do I know or, normally, care about wallpaper? Especially wallpaper that, like everything else by the prodigiously inventive Peche, appears to banish all human values save that of gorgeous caprice.

Peche's achievement memorializes a now obscure period in which decorative...

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