Wallpaper and the artist

As this lavishly illustrated volume demonstrates, when a great artist turns his or her attention to creating wallpaper, the results are often so elegant and ingenious that they challenge the very notion that wallpaper design may be one of the lesser arts. The book examines how major artists over the last five centuries have approached wallpaper design. From Durer, who conceived his designs as seriously as he did a fine woodcut, to William Morris, who believed that wallpaper, like all good design, should transform our lives, to Andy Warhol, whose fascination with multiple images inspired brilliant parodies of the wallpaper tradition, the artists represented here reveal the rich complexity inherent in the art of pattern and form that constitutes wallpaper design. Among the seventy-five painters, illustrators, and architects featured are Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; architects Charles Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Art Nouveau artists Hector Guimard, Alphonse Mucha, and Louis Comfort Tiffany; Nabi Maurice Denis; Wiener Werkstatte artists Josef Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche; De Stijl's Piet Mondrian; architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright; and twentieth-century artists Raoul Dufy, Sonia Delaunay, Vanessa Bell, Charles Burchfield, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, and Saul Steinberg. By juxtaposing wallpaper and the artist, author Marilyn Hapgood has mapped out a hitherto unexplored part of the important area where the fine and decorative arts meet. The book concludes with an appendix on artists' wallpapers for children and a useful guide to manufacturers and shops that produce and sell artists' wallpaper. No one who reads this book will ever think of wallpaper as neutral background again.