Landscape Wallcoverings (Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

The Cooper-Hewitt's Department of Wallcoverings - the most comprehensive survey of wallcoverings in the USA - holds over 10,000 examples. The collection is particularly rich in examples of 19th-century Frenchpapers, depicting exotic landscapes, as well as 19th- and 20th-century by photography. A selection of the most significant of these papers forms the subject of this book. At the heart of the landscape wall-covering lies society's views towards nature and its interpretation within daily life. Joanne K. Warner documents changing attitudes towards the natural landscape in Europe and the USA through wallpapers of the 18th- and 19th- and 20th-centuies. One hundred colour illustrations reveal the cultural connections between interior design and the actual landscape. The author shows how industrial production allowed experimentation with stylized and geometric patterns, which superseded more realistic panoramas, as the 20th-century embraced the modern.