Growing Interests: Expanding the collections at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

In 1926 John D. Rockefeller Jr. formally embarked on the project that would become the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation by purchasing Philip Ludwell’s house of about 1775 on Duke of Gloucester Street. That acquisition, the first “antique” in Colonial Williamsburg’s collection, came to play a pivotal role in the founding of what would eventually be the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.

Make Americana great again: The Wunsch family has a plan

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Among aficionados of early American decorative arts, the name Wunsch is legendary. The family’s art and antiques collection—started by the canny and ever-curious engineer E. Martin Wunsch (1924–2013), and administered under the aegis of the Wunsch Americana Foundation—is one of the most important in the field.

What Picasso inspired in Prague: The brief, bold flourishing of Czech cubist design and architecture

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The zigzag angles, the break in the line of a chair leg, or the dark stained wood immediately attract your attention to Czech cubist furniture. Each wooden element is beveled into the planes of a prism, resulting in the unique designs produced during a few brief years before World War I in what is now the Czech Republic.