Director’s Foreword

Weber, Susan

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Director’s Foreword

Susan Weber

History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000

~Creating some form of textbook of decorative arts has been in the back of my mind since I founded the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts (BGC) in 1993. I realized that to expand the range of graduate and undergraduate courses addressing the decorative arts, we needed more pedagogical tools, and better ones. I remembered how central...

Author

Susan Weber

PublisherBard Graduate Center

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20615

Director’s Foreword

Creating some form of textbook of decorative arts has been in the back of my mind since I founded the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts (BGC) in 1993. I realized that to expand the range of graduate and undergraduate courses addressing the decorative arts, we needed more pedagogical tools, and better ones. I remembered how central Janson’s History of Art was to the survey courses I had taken while studying at Barnard College, and how, together, the book and the courses had provided me with a framework for further research. I envisaged a similar type of resource for our degree candidates at the BGC, and for students, teachers, and others outside the Center. There was simply nothing comparable at the time. This was largely because the examination of such things was seen as secondary to the exploration of the “fine arts” of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, to overturn this relegation of the decorative arts to a place of lesser importance was why I founded the BGC in the first place.

Publications have always been central to activities at the BGC (now the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture). Over the past two decades, the Center has created pioneering exhibition catalogues; supported books by outside scholars; published the scholarly journal Studies in Decorative Arts (expanded in 2011 and relaunched as West 86th); and, most recently, inaugurated a monograph series entitled Cultural Histories of the Material World. The volume before you, which covers a period of six hundred years and was almost ten years in the making, is part of the BGC’s continuing commitment to encouraging and facilitating studies of the decorative arts, design, and material culture.

In 2013, the BGC celebrates its twentieth anniversary as a Center for graduate studies, exhibitions, and publications. Looking back, I realize that our achievements have far out-reached even my most ambitious aims. Without the vision and leadership of Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, the BGC would never have taken shape. He was a constant advisor even when the Center was little more than an abstract idea, and I want to thank him for all his help and guidance over the last two decades. Dean Peter Miller, under whom the Center has grown to its recent status as a research institute with a broad disciplinary, methodological, and geo-cultural scope, also deserves my thanks, as does Nina Strizler-Levine, Gallery Director, who for almost twenty years has guided our ground-breaking exhibitions programs. I also owe tremendous thanks to my fellow editor and the director of this particular project, Professor Pat Kirkham, who took on an enormous project with energy and enthusiasm. Her broad knowledge and insights helped to shape and refine this book at every stage, from the commissioning of the chapters to their final iteration.

As Director of the BGC, I gratefully acknowledge The Tiffany & Co. Foundation for its leadership role in supporting this publication and The Sherrill Foundation and Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros which generously provided additional funds. Finally, as the BGC celebrates its twentieth anniversary, an occasion this publication helps to mark, I want to thank everyone who believed in the Center’s mission, and supported its development, as well as all those who are are contributing to its future growth.

Susan Weber
Iris Horowitz Professor, and
Founder and Director of the Bard Graduate Center

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