The Wolfsonian–FIU is offering two traveling exhibitions:

 

In Pursuit of Pleasure: Schultze & Weaver and the American Hotel

 

In Pursuit of Pleasure highlights Schultze & Weaver’s New York and Florida hotels within a broader context of twentieth-century hotel development.

 

In Pursuit of Pleasure offers a provocative exploration of American hotels in the early twentieth century. The firm of Schultze & Weaver designed many of the finest hotels of the 1920s and 1930s. A number of these—like the Waldorf-Astoria, Sherry-Netherland, and Pierre in New York City, and the Breakers and Biltmore in South Florida—are still regarded as among the grandest in America. The exhibition offers a detailed look at these hotels, relying on architectural renderings and plans from The Wolfsonian’s collection, as well as tableware, photographs, and printed ephemera. It also includes material that illustrates the longer history of American hotel design, allowing viewers to understand the Schultze & Weaver hotels as the culmination of trends that stretched back into the nineteenth century.

 

Availability: fall 2008

Participation fee: $25,000

Publication: Grand Hotel of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze & Weaver (Princeton Architectural Press)

 

 

Fashioning the Modern French Interior: Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s

 

Fashioning the Modern French Interior is an exciting new exhibition that examines French interior design of the 1920s focusing on limited-edition luxury portfolios created using a traditional stencil technique known in France as pochoir. The revitalization of the pochoir technique offered a novel graphic approach to depict and disseminate modern interiors and decorative patterns to the public, artfully promoting new design while eschewing commercialization. The vibrant images in these portfolios document the furnishings and interiors of the leading designers of the time including Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Eileen Gray, among others, and provide a lens for understanding the tensions that existed within France at the time regarding matters of style and taste in interior decoration. The exhibition elucidates how the choice of the pochoir technique reinforced the designers’ conception of the modern interior from the traditional to the avant-garde. The spectacular color images from the portfolios present a great variety of solutions that will delight today’s audiences.

 

Availability: spring 2009

Participation fee: $12,000

Publication: Moderne: Fashioning the French Interior (Princeton Architectural Press, November 2007).

 

For more information please contact:

 

Lisa Li

Curatorial Assistant

The Wolfsonian–Florida International University

1001 Washington Avenue

Miami Beach, Florida 33139

T 305.535.2623

F 305.531.2133

www.wolfsonian.org