The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh announces Inventing the Modern World Showcases Decorative Arts and Design Innovations from World’s Fairs, an exhibition on view from October 13, 2012.
From their inception in 1851, the world’s fairs showcased, obsessed over, and enthralled the visiting public with the cutting edge of industry, production, new materials, and methods, for creating everything from tools to jewelry, furniture to textiles. In doing so, artists and manufacturers used breakthrough scientific innovations to create art objects that embodied the latest aesthetics and techniques. A major co-production of Carnegie Museum of Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 assembles more than 200 art objects from world’s fairs, remarkable not just for their common pedigree, but for what they represent: the height of both science and artistry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Carnegie Museum of Art will supplement the traveling portion of this exhibition with a treasure trove of its own objects from fairs, making it the largest venue of the four-city tour, which also includes the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Co-curated by Jason T. Busch, Chief Curator and The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at Carnegie Museum of Art, and Catherine L. Futter, The Helen Jane and R. Hugh “Pat” Uhlmann Curator of Decorative Arts at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Inventing the Modern World showcases objects painstakingly assembled from European and American collections. For Busch, the exhibition represents a true achievement, since “the exhibition checklist comprises decorative arts unattainable as a group in any one museum in the world.” Futter adds, “We looked at literally thousands of decorative arts from around the globe…We kept refining our choices to find the objects that really spoke about innovation.”
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