Over the phone, curator Catherine Futter explained the show’s inspiration, lengthy gestation and throwback structure. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the treasures on display.

How did this exhibition come about? How long have you been working on it?

Well, I went to two world’s fairs: I went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and then I went to Expo ’67. So my love of world’s fairs started when I was very young. And then when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the architecture of the 1867 fair, because it was the first time that there were national pavilions … Then I worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the ’90s, and we started collecting decorative arts that had been shown at world’s fairs, and realized that they were sort of the epitome of design, of technological innovation. That got the idea bubbling forward, and then about four years ago, we partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art [in Pittsburgh], and that really got the exhibition going. That’s the timeline.

Before [the first world's fair in 1851], you had to go to different places [to see products from different countries]. If you wanted to go to trade fairs, they were national, as opposed to being about international competition and international mass communication, and dissemination of style, taste, education and, of course, manufacturing.

Why did you choose 1939 as the end date for the show?

First of all, [because it marked the beginning of] the Second World War. Second, all of the fairs really shift after that point. They become much more about ideas, and less about the products that were presented. So that seemed like a good closing point.

Can you describe how the exhibition is presented? You’re featuring works from all over the world inside the museum — but you’ve also built a real pavilion outside, right?

Exactly. The exhibition at least begins by re-creating the atmosphere of the world’s fairs. It’s still very object-driven; I shouldn’t let you think that it’s a playground or anything like that. But as you walk in, there’s a five-minute loop of vintage footage from world’s fairs from 1900 to 1939, [which shows that] these were incredibly popular, well-attended and very diverse kinds of events … The palette of the galleries changes from dark tones to tertiary tones to very bold colors — basically, white with bold accents of dark blue and orange, which were the colors of the New York 1939 fair … The whole way that the exhibition is laid out is echoing what was going on in the fairs.

We have three areas of music — not opera, not really high-style music, but things that were popular in the period. We also have some activities for our visitors; the first one involves 3-D technology in the time period of 1851-1939, because stereoscopes were introduced around 1851, and there were a lot of views of world’s fairs: the architecture, the people, buildings, the fans. People will have vintage stereo-viewers or stereo-cards to look at. And also, View-Master was introduced in 1938-39; one of the very first series was views of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 …

And finally, there’s the pavilion, which [looks at the theme of "What is innovation today?"].

The world’s fairs frequently presented new technology, but also celebrated the best of the past. How does that contrast play out in terms of the items on display here?

One of my theories is that if an object is very innovative in its style, then it tends to use very traditional materials or technologies — and if it’s very innovative in its technologies, then it tends to be more traditional in its style. Salviati glass stands, for example, [represent] the revival of 16th and 17th century Venetian glass techniques, but their scale and even some of their forms are more innovative. With the innovative techniques — like a papier mâché piano, for instance — [sometimes you see] a  more traditional form made of innovative materials. One of the things that I really like about our layout is the fact that [your encounters with the material might be sort of surprising]. A work may seem traditional to you — maybe it looks like hand-painting on a vase — but then it turns out it’s chromolithography on ceramics. Or acid etching on glass, even. It makes you think about how things were made.

I know that you gathered these objects from many different countries. Do you think it will be clear to people what they communicated about their countries of origin at the particular time that they were made?

I think one of the things that people will learn from the exhibition is that a lot of the countries — especially Japan, but even the European countries and American countries — were, by absorbing the other cultures, making them their own. So when the Japanese are catering to the Western market, their work might look Japanese to us, but to the Japanese it looks more Western. There’s a Japanese vase that is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it was purchased from the 1876 centennial. The form is Japanese; the decoration in terms of subject matter is Japanese, because it’s samurai fighting among the cherry blossoms; yet it is the Japanese doing Japanese art as seen through Western eyes, or European eyes … It would never have looked Japanese to a Japanese person. The whole palette has got purples and pinks and yellows that just weren’t even in the palette of the Japanese ceramic artists until the 1860s and ’70s, when a German chemist went to Japan, bringing German chemical glaze technology. That, to me, is the quintessential object of the exhibition — because it telegraphs to people that it’s different and new, but it’s got all kinds of other layers in it.

How did you choose which individual works to include?

There were probably tens of thousands of things we saw. Just in Nuremberg, in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, there were 1,750 objects that were purchased from the 1873 Vienna exhibition. Obviously, not all of them have made it to today, but many of them have. The exhibition’s co-curator, Jason Bush, and I went on five trips of varying length all over Europe, plus additional trips that we made independently — and then we went through collections in this country as well. We also wrote to Australia and other places further afield, but shipping costs made those objects price-prohibitive. We really let the objects drive what we were going to do. We knew that “innovation” was our key word, and through that we let what we saw out there tell us what the other themes were going to be.

There’s another important part of this, which is that these objects that we saw had already been chosen by directors and curators of museums. So they already had a process of selection. And then we, as curators in the 21st century, made that second choice. You could do a whole, completely different exhibition on gold prize winners at the fairs. Most of the juries who gave out the prizes were composed of the people who exhibited — so that would give you a very inside-manufacturing point of view. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a completely different exhibition.

One of the reasons we brought the exhibition up to 1939 is that some of the objects in the exhibition are still in production today. These object still are relevant to the way we live.

“Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939″ is on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Mo., through Aug. 19, 2012.

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How did Edward Lycett get into the ceramics business? What is known about his personal history?

Edward Lycett was born in Staffordshire, the epicenter of English ceramic production, in 1833. As a 12-year-old, he apprenticed as a china decorator at Copeland and Garrett, the former Spode manufactory in Stoke-upon-Trent, and later moved to London to continue decorating work.

When Lycett arrived in New York City in 1861, he was one of hundreds of ambitious Englishmen from the Staffordshire potteries who came to the United States in search of greater opportunity.  He, his two children, and his second wife, Rachel (with whom he would have two American-born children), settled in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lycett was a talented artist and skilled entrepreneur — qualities that fueled his commercial success and distinguish his story from those of many other industrious immigrants. His career ultimately spanned six decades and encompassed a White House commission for the Andrew Johnson administration, teaching positions in St. Louis and Cincinnati, and recognition by Edwin Atlee Barber, the pre-eminent 19th-century American ceramic historian. Lycett reached his creative peak in the late 1880s, when he directed the aesthetic repertoire of Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Co.

What is the history of the Faience Manufacturing Co.? Did it exist before Lycett became creative director? When and why did it shut down?

The Faience Manufacturing Company (FMCo.) was well established prior to Lycett’s arrival in 1884. It was common practice in the ceramic industry for potters to join forces with financial backers to start up a business. It’s likely that an enterprising potter approached Bernard Veit — a partner in the prosperous millinery goods company Veit and Nelson — to establish the Faience Manufacturing Co. in February 1881. On the business side, FMCo. was virtually a family affair: Veit appointed his son-in-law, Joseph Baruch, a former glove manufacturer, as secretary and treasurer; Veit’s brother and sons were among the directors. The firm produced ornamental pottery in their Brooklyn factory that was sold in Veit and Nelson’s showrooms in lower Manhattan.

Despite the great beauty of FMCo.’s wares, especially during Lycett’s tenure, the company’s sole focus on art pottery proved to be its downfall. Producing ornamental wares without a commercial line of goods to offset the expense forced them to cease pottery production in 1890 and reorganize as agents for a French porcelain manufacturer.

How typical — or unusual — was FMCo.’s work in terms of the Brooklyn craft trade in the 19th century? In terms of the wider American market?

During the last quarter of the 19th century, there were at least 12 potteries operating in Greenpoint. They produced a broad range of wares. Some manufactured coarse wares, including jugs, jars, crocks and flowerpots; others made fancy table wares as well as household articles such as doorknobs, drawer pulls, push plates and buttons for clothing. The Faience Manufacturing Co. was unusual in that it produced strictly artistic wares for display. FMCo.’s semi-porcelain vessels are of amazing scale, a characteristic that distinguishes them from the art porcelains produced at the time. The flamboyant vessels produced by FMCo. under Lycett’s supervision echo the expansive spirit of late 19th-century America.

How do the works on show change over the time period covered by the exhibition?

At first, FMCo. advertised that they would introduce new styles of artistic pottery weekly. In the competitive pottery industry, adaptability to changing taste was critical to viability. Objects on display from the pre-Lycett period of production range from French-inspired faience and Limoges wares with applied three-dimensional flowers or underglaze slip decoration, to an experimental vase with a Chinese-style red flambé glaze, and English-inspired, ivory-bodied wares painted with colorful flowers or birds and insects perched upon branches.

In 1884, FMCo. underwent a dramatic transformation that attests to their ambition to succeed at art pottery production. The firm expanded its Brooklyn pottery-making facilities, moved its Manhattan showrooms, and recruited Lycett, a renowned ceramic artist, as art director. Within two years of his arrival, Lycett had transformed FMCo.’s artistic agenda, creating bold and eclectic designs that continued to draw inspiration from fashionable English and European wares, as well as from venerated ancient, medieval, and Renaissance objects in major museum collections.

The firm used progressive production techniques, such as interchangeability of parts, that resulted in the creation of large-scale exotic shapes of Near and Far Eastern derivation that recombine a variety of elements. The vessels were embellished with exotic motifs in vivid enamels, with raised gold paste as well as jeweled and luster decorations that were also used interchangeably.

Who bought and displayed these works? How expensive were they?

In 1886, FMCo. made a big push to promote their stylish new wares in trade publications oriented towards jewelry and fancy goods wholesalers, as well as periodicals aimed at elite consumers. Positive press accelerated FMCo.’s success, and they soon sold at all the major retail establishments across the country.

Their opulent, large-scale ceramic objects were expensive to produce because fewer could be fired at once. Displayed on a mantel, or table, FMCo.’s vessels were prominent objects in a fashionable interior, the physical manifestation of their owner’s artistic and cultural sophistication. Try as I might, I have yet to locate a FMCo. vessel with provenance traceable to the original owner — or a period image depicting a FMCo. vessel in situ. These are some of the missing puzzle pieces from the firm’s story that would be thrilling to unearth!

The firm’s only surviving trade catalog dates from the pre-Lycett period, and lists objects that range in price from 40 cents to $30.  In contrast, a much-lauded monumental FMCo. vase made during Lycett’s tenure was promoted in the New York press as being the most expensive piece of American pottery offered for sale, and it cost between $300 and $500.

What drew you to study Lycett and his work?

As a graduate student searching for a fruitful thesis topic, I was drawn to the atmospheric interiors and eclectic objects of the Aesthetic Movement. The synthesis of Near and Far Eastern designs, exemplified by the Faience Manufacturing Co.’s exotic wares, resonated with me. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1986 exhibition catalog, “In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement,” identified the Faience Manufacturing Co. and Edward Lycett as significant, but there was more to discover about the enterprising pottery and its eminent art director, and I embarked on a re-examination of Lycett’s multifaceted career.

Many times, I imagined entering the Faience Manufacturing Co.’s Manhattan showroom, or the decorating department of the Greenpoint pottery, and the exhilarating visual impact of seeing the myriad colorful and eccentrically shaped vessels displayed together. This exhibition is a realization of that dream. It also presents the exciting opportunity to incorporate new research facilitated by the Internet and digitization of numerous 19th-century primary sources.

“Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company” will be on display at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York, from May 3, 2012, through June 16, 2013.

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Over email, curator Herb Tam explained the exhibition’s philosophy and themes. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the show’s photography.

Where did you get the idea for this exhibition, and why did you choose to put it together now?

The idea for the show came from exploring our collection and noticing how varied and idiosyncratic the photographs in our collection are. Looking at them made me think of the enthusiasm for photography that a lot of Chinese have, and how there’s a stereotype of Chinese as crass tourists constantly taking pictures of ourselves in foreign places. There’s been a growing interest in China and Chinese culture lately, and I wanted to show the Chinese perspective on the idea of America — how we actually see this country, how we picture it now that China is rising, and as America’s global position has become more precarious.

What do these photographs tell us about the Chinese-American experience?

These photos show a palpable tension between the spaces we inhabit and our own understanding of ourselves (identity) — that we’re still in the process of figuring out how we exist here as we move further and further away from urban Chinatowns.

In terms of photography, what types of themes, subjects and situations is the “Chinese lens” most sensitive to?

I tried to cover a range of photographic themes, but one motif that stands out is the automobile, and to me this is an apt symbol of America’s ethos of social mobility and a Chinese sense of class consciousness. New cars represented a step taken towards the American dream, and there are a lot of snapshots in our collection of people posed in front of their gleaming new cars.

To give us some sense of the range of the exhibition, can you describe two photos that sit at opposite extremes in terms of what the show covers?

First of all, there are photographs of poetic absurdity, like Yan Deng’s photograph of two young men with their dress shirts and pants on backwards and their backs facing towards the camera on a generic-looking suburban street [slide 9]. Then contrast that with a photograph from our collection of an unknown couple, probably from the ’50s, standing awkwardly in front of what looks to be their new suburban home [slide 3]. There’s a narrative in the connection between those photographs that speaks to the hopes and idealism of Chinese people as they began moving into the suburbs — and then the realization after a while that the suburban space in America is not just idyllic, but may also be threatening and absurd.

What are the most significant changes you notice in the style or content of the photographs over time? What are the most significant continuities?

Chinese artists who use photography now don’t seem as likely to photograph “about” their cultural identity as they were in the ’80s, when someone like Tseng Kwong Chi was photographing himself in Mao suits in various American tourist locales. Talking about one’s struggles with ethnicity fell out of favor, and we see it in how Chinese artists have photographed themselves in relation to their spaces. Artists don’t take oppositional positions now; in general they are more critically concerned with forms, subjects and processes of art-making.

It was important to me that the artists and photographers, as a group, reflected the diverse backgrounds of Chinese in America. Julie Quon grew up in New York’s Chinatown her whole life; her family is Cantonese. Arthur Ou and Amy Yao were born in Taiwan and grew up in California. Hai Zhang and Yan Deng were new immigrants coming over for college and career opportunities (Zhang decided to stay in America; Deng moved back to Beijing after studying at Parsons The New School for Design). Chien An Yuan and Wing Young Huie were born in and have grown up in the middle of the country. We also feature artists who visit America, but who haven’t established roots here, like Jiajia Zhang, who lives in Switzerland. This shows that the Chinese experience here isn’t a singular one, but that it’s multidimensional and ever evolving.

“America Through a Chinese Lens” will be on display at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York City, from April 26 through Sept. 10, 2012.

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Over the phone, curators Juliette Bianco (from the Hood Museum) and Pieter Broucke (from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where the show will travel next year) spoke to me about the themes of Burtynsky’s work, and the added context this particular exhibition brings. Click through the following slide show for a preview.

How did this exhibition come about? How many of these photographs have been exhibited before?

Pieter Broucke: I became aware of Burtynsky’s photographs by way of a friend of mine, Raphael Bernstein, who owns a number of the photographer’s works. [Bernstein] actually ended up loaning a number of photographs for the show. They’re absolutely amazing photographs. And since we are — I am, at least — at Middlebury College, here in Vermont, we thought it was worthwhile to look at the photographs that Burtynsky took of Vermont quarries, in a scholarly context. …

In a sense you could say that it’s here in Vermont that Burtynsky became Burtynsky — the internationally known artist who’s [recognized] for his environmental commentary through his photography. … Burtynsky came to Vermont six times — first in the fall of 1991, and then also in 1992. Over the course of these trips, you can see how his emphasis shifts from a formal approach — interest in the spectacular forms of the quarry space — toward the inclusion of an environmental commentary. Burtynsky increasingly looks at quarries as ecological scars, you could say.

As to the number of photographs that are new, I think it’s seven.

Juliette Bianco: And two of those show underground marble quarries [Slide 7] that we didn’t even know Burtynsky had photographed until Pieter and I were up at his studio about a year ago. Burtynsky had a chance to revisit all of his negatives with us, and we got the idea to present these underground quarries. Many people don’t even know they exist — and yet I think they’re the most expansive underground quarries in the world.

PB: They’re not open to the public. It’s the first time that I’ve seen any images of them — and what images they are, are absolutely otherworldly. Of the two that are included in the show, one evokes Piranesi — this cavernous, endless, very dramatic space — and the other looks like a scene from a science fiction film. They’re very powerful images.

The exhibition touches on the geological background to Burtynsky’s work — but it also examines the social and cultural history of the quarry workers who came to Vermont from Italy. Can you tell me a little about them?

JB: … [W]e saw Burtynsky’s photographs as a launching pad for looking at what else was happening in the region when Burtynsky captured this moment in time. Whose histories and what histories are embedded [here]? Of course, one of the most fascinating stories is that of these immigrants who came over at the turn of the last century — and how they helped transform this industry in Vermont.

PB: The first Italians who came to work in the marble industry were actually headhunted in Carrara, through a connection that Redfield Proctor, who was the director of the Vermont Marble Co., had in England.

Proctor was able to headhunt four initial Italian stone-carvers. They came to Vermont, but initially they didn’t plan to stay; they were just going to come and teach their skills and then go back. They did end up staying, though — and many, many Italians came in their wake.

[It's] remarkable that those Italians were headhunted. Unlike most of the Italians who migrated to the United States — [many of whom] came from the South, from Sicily, and were basically unschooled — the people who came to Vermont to work in the Italian stone industry came with very, very high prestige; they came with a very much sought-after set of skills, and also with very strong political convictions. All these things combined to form a strong Italian social/cultural presence in Vermont — around Rutland, and perhaps even more in Barre, where the granite quarries were.

Many of these people also migrated within Vermont; many Italians migrated from the marble industry to the granite industry. This was partly because of the way the industries were organized: It was very paternalistic in the marble industry, because Redfield Proctor controlled everything — whereas in Barre there were more individual workshops, and there were many more foreigners. [Barre] was really a multi-ethnic boom town for a while, and it became the de facto capital of anarchism in the U.S. between about 1915 and 1925 or so.

This was a very different kind of a migration experience for the Italians — because they were headhunted, they were wanted, they were desired, and they came with a sense of labor organization that they brought with them from Carrara, that goes back to the Middle Ages … Barre has an opera house; many small towns — small villages, even — in Vermont have opera houses; that’s because of the Italians, and the high prestige with which they came. To this day they celebrate the first of May in Barre — a holiday that is not celebrated (as far as I know) widely anywhere else in the United States.

JB: One of the nice things about this exhibition is that this history keeps wrapping around itself. When Burtynsky came to start photographing quarries in 1991, and he started talking with the quarry owners and the quarry workers and taking these photographs, they said, “Well, if you want to see really big, vast quarries, you have to go to Carrara, Italy.” So he did a reverse trip — his first trip outside of North America for his photography was to Carrara, because he was sent there by these quarry workers. This history profoundly affected Burtynsky’s own history of his photographic process — because once he went to Carrara, he wondered where else in the world he would see these quarries, and he wound up creating his first conceptual photography series, “Quarries.” He’s gone on to be internationally recognized for his conceptual work around other big industries, like oil and mining and manufacturing in China, etc.

One of the themes here does seem to be Burtynsky’s observation of industry interacting with the natural world.

JB: Burtynsky started with this impulse to photograph nature, but then tried to think about what his voice was going to be — what he was going to say. He chanced upon a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and started thinking about the relationship between industry and people and the industrial impact on our environment, based on consumerism. So even though photographs have been depicting the industrial landscape for over a century, and an art historian in our catalog talks about that history, it’s not really the social concerns or the labor concerns or the celebration of technology that were driving a lot of that earlier photography … There’s this consumer consciousness bent, then, to the photographs that Burtynsky takes subsequently.

PB: I think what sets Burtynsky apart from any other photographers who have taken photographs of quarries, and of nature, for that matter, is that he really works as a conceptual artist … [He started this project by looking] for what he called “inverted skyscrapers.” He said that for any skyscraper that is out in the city, there’s got to be a hole somewhere in the ground that is negative, downwards — a space rather than a mass — that more or less fits that shape. (This is not to be taken literally — but you see what he means.) He started going around in Canada, which is where he’s from, looking at all these quarries, and he got very frustrated, because nowhere did he find scenes that would allow him to take photographs that fit what he saw in his mind’s eye. It was actually a quarry man in Quebec who told him he should go to Barre. And so then he came, in the fall of ’91, and indeed, that was it. He came back five more times.

There’s a very strong conceptual component to his work. And I think this is what makes these photographs such strong works of art.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

PB: We’re both at educational institutions. Of course, these photographs have been shown widely — or at least the work of Burtynsky [has]. This exhibition looks at these photographs within the context of his career; the photographs of the quarries of Vermont really have a pivotal position within the evolution of Burtynsky’s development as an artist. The images themselves are worth examining … in the context of migration, social history, geology, things like that. So in addition to the photographs themselves, the exhibition also has a small section on geology, with chunks of granite, chunks of marble and a geological map; we also have two cases of vintage photographs that beautifully comment upon the social history [of Barre]. Not to compete with the images of Burtynsky, but really to enrich them. This is also why there are photographs from Carrara included in the exhibition [e.g., Slide 8].

JB: Yes. You can tell the story visually, as well as through all these words that we just used!

“Nature Transformed: Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context” will be on display at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, in Hanover, N.H.,  from April 21 through Aug. 19. It will be on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, in Middlebury, Vt., from Feb. 8 through April 21, 2013.

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Over the phone, curator Kendall Brown spoke to me about the themes and influences most evident in the works on show (and the complicated meaning of “art deco”). Click through the following slide show for a tantalizing peek at flapper-era Japan.

Am I right in thinking that most or all of this material hasn’t been shown in the U.S. before?

Yes. There was a big world art deco show organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum [in 2003], and I think a couple of the pieces were shown in that. But of the 190 [pieces in our exhibition], I’d say all but a handful are being shown for the first time in North America. (And in most cases, for the first time anywhere in the world, maybe since the 1930s.)

For the purposes of this show, what does “art deco” mean and not mean?

As you know — or I think your question indicates — “art deco” is a retrospectively art historical term. It was created in the 1960s to refer to a broad movement in the 1920s and ’30s. We’re talking about art deco first as a style, … both an outgrowth of and a reaction to art nouveau — geometric, clipped, short, rectilinear use of lines; streamlined shape; modernist, but with ornament … And we’re also talking about it in terms of things with color, a bright palette: Nile green, chromium yellow — a love of natural, organic form treated in abstract ways. That’s one thing that “deco” means.

Another thing that “deco” [represents] is an era. Sometimes we refer in the exhibition and catalog to the “deco era,” by which we really mean ’20s and ’30s Japan. There are some things in the show that might be considered constructivist; [with those,] we’re showing the impact on deco — deco and, let’s say, the shoulder of deco. …

In terms of what “art deco” doesn’t mean, we’re really looking at deco objects; we don’t look at architecture. We don’t have architectural elements [in the show]. If you were writing a book on Japanese deco, you could certainly expand to talk about architecture.

Would you say many of these pieces reflect a Western influence?

Indeed, they do. One of the things that’s appealing for what we’re calling Japanese deco style in the ’20s and ’30s is that it simultaneously fulfills two different functions. One is that it shows [Japanese artists] being up to date and international — European-American — so it’s very cosmopolitan … But [when the deco and art nouveau styles] are being developed in Europe, in Paris, there’s already a sort of Japan-esque element. The Japonisme is part of so much of European (especially French) modern art, from the impressionists to art nouveau to art deco. So for the Japanese, even as deco is a European, cosmopolitan, up-to-date, forward-looking style, it’s also a style that connects with, and in a sense utilizes, the Japanese past.

It’s familiar and unfamiliar, forward-looking and backward-looking simultaneously for the Japanese. But certainly there’s a strong European element. And in fact, the very first part of the exhibition, and the first part of the catalog, look at the cultural appropriation — how Japanese deco adapts Euro-American urban culture and adapts Egyptomania, the so-called “Nile Style.”

Can you talk about the theme of the “moga,” or the “modern girl,” in these pieces?

Thematically, the aspect of Japanese deco of the ’20s and ’30s that epitomizes this cosmopolitan urban culture is the subject of the “modern girl,” who is in some ways sort of the “flapper.” This kind of middle- to upper-middle-class urban woman wears Western clothes — and even if she wears a kimono, she might have a Western hairstyle and accessories. She goes window-shopping. She goes to cafes. She smokes. She drinks. She ostentatiously does her makeup, in a pocket mirror. The modern girl is perhaps the crucible of the deco culture.

Where would these works have appeared? Were they meant for the home?

The exhibition looks at art from four worlds or realms. [First, we have works] made for national exhibition. The Japanese had the equivalent of the French Salon — an annual, government-sponsored art exhibition — and there are a number of pieces made for that. We can call that “high art” or “museum art.”

There’s also the opposite, which is the art of the streets: commercial art, mass culture, posters, matchbook labels. So we have the high and the low, the fine art and the commercial art.

In between those [lies a middle category]. If we have highbrow and lowbrow, then there’s also “middlebrow,” which is art for the body, personal adornment: kimonos, haoris (the jackets you wear over kimonos in cold weather), obis [kimono sashes], and hair pins. This is art made to decorate the body.

The fourth area this art was made for is the home: the modern bourgeois home, which Japanese at this time, in the ’20s and ’30s, called a “culture home” (which is to say at least a partially Western-style home). You might have a piano; you would sit on chairs and a couch. You’d have an end-table with tchotchkes on it. You’d have a mantle with a clock, and Western-style books would be standing up there on their bookshelf …

We’re looking at art for these four distinct realms. But what’s interesting about the deco style is that it crosses between them. It’s highbrow; it’s middlebrow; it’s lowbrow.

I was a little surprised at the overt eroticism of some works from the show [e.g. slides 3 and 4]. Was this unusual or remarkable for the time?

In the late ’20s/early ’30s, there is a brief florescence — a little cultural moment in Japanese cities that Japanese at the time called “erotic grotesque nonsense.” It’s erotic; it’s a little edgy; it’s strange; and it’s kind of comical. Even with this cosmopolitan international jazz age, there’s growing political repression. Assassinations, laws, Communist Party outlaws, a move towards ultra-nationalism … And sort of as a backlash against that, there’s an erotic, edgy, subversive quality to a lot of art.

But at the other end — also appropriate for deco, and showing the style — is this growing ultra-nationalism and even militarism. This real tension of ’30s culture comes through in deco, and this exhibition, we hope.

When and why did the Japanese “deco era” end?

The very last [part] of my essay in the catalog says that really, the last gasp of deco would be [sometime in the] early ’50s. A few artists who never got around to it in the ’30s come to it after the war, and a few artists who did it in the ’30s and early ’40s do it a little bit after the war. But for the most part, this collection really stops [around the end of World War II]. I think our last dated piece is from 1943.

Deco isn’t just frivolity and lightness — it also has this heavy potential for [the] militaristic. But by the end of the war, not much of anything is made, and even the deco-ish nationalistic pieces are seen as a little suspect. I don’t have a perfect answer to your question, but for the most part, the deco era is really the ’20s to the early ’40s.

“Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945″ is on display at the Japan Society in New York city through June 10. All works on display are from the collection of Robert and Mary Levenson.

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