Rose Iron Works, Muse with Violin Screen (detail), 1930. (Image via Hyperallergic, courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art, on Loan from the Rose Iron Works Collections. © Rose Iron Works Collections. Photo by Howard Agriesti.)

• When we think of the Jazz Age, we think of the hairstyles, the fashions, the … jazz. You’d think the world was nothing but highball glasses and long, langorous cigarette holders. But who among us pauses to remember the zoning regulations of the Jazz Age? Who dares to stop and consider the period’s sideboards, bookcases, coffee services, and ironworks? I will tell you who: the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum. Their new exhibition, “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” aims to transcend the clichés of flapperdom by focusing on less celebrated objects and designs. At last, the vases and daybeds of the 1920s will get their fifteen minutes of fame. Allison Meier writes, “Many of the featured designers were immigrating from Europe, or having their creations imported to the United States. Others were Americans who went abroad to study and train, picking up tubular metal techniques at the Bauhaus in Germany or ideas for bold hues from De Stijl in the Netherlands … British designer Wells Coates’s green, circular Bakelite radio, one of the manufacturing innovations being spread to the new middle class, rests on German designer Kem Weber’s sage-hued, streamlined sideboard, which was also intended for serial production. Russian-born craftsman Samuel Yellin’s curling wrought iron fire screen mingles with Lorentz Kleiser’s monumental tapestry showing Newark’s transformation from an indigenous village to an orderly town, both pieces demonstrating the endurance of historical European aesthetics. A towering ‘Skyscraper Bookcase’ of California redwood with black lacquer, all designed by Austrian émigré Paul Frankl, incorporates the zoning-enforced architectural setbacks of the new skyscrapers, something which Erik Magnussen’s Cubic coffee service with its silver angles does on a smaller scale.”

• Not unrelatedly: the Bloomsbury Group’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once designed a lavish, 140-piece dinner set, and now you can see it. (You cannot eat off of it, unless you buy it.) As Francesca Wade writes, the set emerged from a deep depression; Kenneth and Jane Clark had visited Grant in 1932, and found him in the dumps. “ ‘In an attempt to revive his interest in decorative art,’ [Kenneth] writes in his autobiography, ‘we asked him and Vanessa to paint us a dinner service.’ Two years later, Bell and Grant presented Clark with 140 pieces, including 50 Wedgwood plates illustrated with portraits of famous women from history—twelve writers, twelve queens, twelve beauties, and twelve dancers or actresses, and one of each of the artists, painted by the other. ‘It ought to please the feminists,’ Bell wrote, offhandedly, to Roger Fry. The service vanished in the 1980s, last seen in the Normandy home of Clark’s second wife, who was presumed to have sold it. Anyone interested in it has had to make do with black-and-white photographs in which many of the plates are stacked up, their faces hidden. But it recently resurfaced in the collection of an undisclosed European collector, who has now put it up for sale. It was displayed by Piano Nobile at the Masterpiece fair this month, and will be shown in the autumn at their London gallery.”

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