Artist's Designed Wallpapers

All of the papers shown here are in the Cooper Hewitt's permanent collection. They are all designs by artists active during the twentieth century. The earliest paper is designed by Charles Dana Gibson in 1902 and the most recent is by Trenton Doyle Hancock in 2003. While several of these artist's have designed mulitple wallpapers, designs were chosen to reflect the artist's signature work, or the style the artist was working on at that point in their careeer. The dates of the wallpapers range over the course of the century to show the style changes over time. Most of the designs are bold and not in the traditional vein of wallpapers. It is interesting to note how each of the artist's has chosen to deal with pattern repeats, something not usually dealt with as a fine artist. Some artists have chosen to treat the repeat like a single image on a canvas with no continuity between repeats, while others are more fluid, making it difficult to distinguish where the next repeat begins.