Museum accessions.(American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation)(Organization overview)

Last year five museums across the country received generous gifts from the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, a new organization created to increase appreciation for, and understanding of, American decorative arts of the period between 1880 and 1930. The foundation's founder, Bruce Barnes, and its curator, Joseph Cunningham, work closely with American museums and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, not only to enhance their collections through judicious gifts, but also to provide support for exhibitions and scholarship.

Besides the objects illustrated on this page, the foundation donated to the Saint Louis Art Museum a jardiniere designed by Frederick Hurten Rhead and made at the University City Pottery in Saint Louis in 1911; and to the Milwaukee Art Museum a side chair from Rockledge, a house designed in 1912 by the Prairie school architect George Washington Maher for Ernest L. King and his wife, Grace, in Homer, Minnesota. The gift of the Rhead jardiniere, with its Midwestern landscape decoration, honors Ellen Paul Denker and her recent work on the University City Pottery, undertaken with Saint Louis Art Museum curators David Conradsen and Cara McCarty. The Rockledge chair, given in honor of Cheryl Robertson, augments the Milwaukee Museums strong holdings of Prairie school decorative arts and architectural renderings and documents related to the work of George Mann Niedecken, who worked closely with the Prairie school's founder, Frank Lloyd Wright.

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The side chair illustrated here, designed by Wright himself, was presented to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is the first piece of his furniture to enter that collection. It was made for the house Wright designed for Warren Hickox in Kankakee, Illinois, completed in 1900, and is closely related to chairs he designed for his own use. Within Wright's open floor plans, such chairs placed around a dining table contributed to a sense of great intimacy for the rituals of family meals.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City received the drawing illustrated above, showing the design for a bowl in its collection by the Tiffany Glass and ...