1900: Adornment for the Home and Body

Drawing on the collection of Seattle residents Wayne Dodge and Lawrence Kreisman, the Frye Art Museum is pleased to present 1900, a celebration of adornment for the home and body. With over 200 objects by artists, artisans, and architects of the fin de siècle, the exhibition presents a microcosm of the extraordinary richness of artistic production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In his influential text The Artwork of the Future (1849), composer Richard Wagner urged artists of his day to pursue the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “great United Art-work, which must gather up each branch of art.” Wagner wrote that the artistic man and the architect should build an “artistic edifice which should answer to their art in worthy manner.” European and American artists answered his call with their own visions of a total work of art that embraced all aspects of everyday life. In Britain, the Arts and Crafts movement flourished between 1880 and 1910. In Germany, the artists of the Munich Secession, as well as those associated with Jugendstil and the journal Jugend, transformed the architecture, interior design, forms of dress, and jewelry of the day, as did the artists of the Vienna Secession in Austria. In France and Belgium, the natural world inspired organic designs of great beauty, and in the United States, designers sought honest and simple forms in furniture and applied arts.

The exhibition also includes key paintings from the Frye Founding Collection including artists such as Hugo von Habermann and Franz von Stuck, founding members of the Munich Secession.