NOVEDADES

Whether it's cocktails at the Carlyle, taking in a show at Lincoln Center, traveling via subway, or flying out of LaGuardia's venerable Marine Air Terminal, uptown to downtown to the outer boroughs, the art created for the walls of New York City's bars, hotels, offices, government buildings, and schools have themselves created the identities of the rooms they live in. Murals of New York City was the first book to curate more than thirty of the most important, influential, and impressive murals found within all five boroughs. Full-color images of works such as Paul Helleu's Mural of the Stars on Grand Central Terminal's ceiling, Robert Crowl's Dancers at the Bar at Lincoln Center, Edward Laning's New York Public Library McGraw Rotunda, José Maria Sert and Frank Brangwyn's Rockefeller Center murals, and work by artists such as Marc Chagall, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Maxfield Parrish, and more are accompanied by informative and historical commentary.

In the early 1960s a reawakening was happening on Nantucket. Into this world stepped Andy Oates and Bill Euler, one skilled in fine arts and the other in the art of hospitality. In 1968 they opened Nantucket Looms, which specialized in needlepoint, crewelwork, handwoven fabrics, and local artwork, forging their Nantucket style aesthetic. This modest homespun charm held great appeal to such style makers as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Bunny Mellon, and interior designer Billy Baldwin.

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., his wife, Liliane Kaufmann, and their son, Edgar Kaufmann jr., Fallingwater is lauded for its architectural daring and drama. Here the Kaufmanns sought to live in harmony with the natural world. The rooms of the house reflect this ideal and remain suffused with a natural aesthetic that embraces stone and wood, handwork and craftsmanship. In the living room, the great stone floor flows riverlike toward the horizon of Wright–designed built-in sofas and large-paned casement windows, where views open to balconies, to forest, and to cascading falls. From here “the hatch” opens to the flowing stream below. Pools and the waters of Bear Run were beautiful and for swimming. Relaxed elegance was the order of the day. Delicacy, softness, tactility are everywhere in evidence.