Author(s): Judith Gura

Interior Design

Who made New York the centre of the chic and urbane interior - a city where Andy Warhol entertained in a French Empire salon and Babe Paley served martinis and cigarettes in her taxicab yellow living room? The answer is discovered in the illustrated profiles of nearly 100 interior designers in the two-volumes of "New York Interior Design, 1935-1985", which introduces the Acanthus Press Visual Library. Over 600 photographs, assembled by author Judith Gura, present a visual biography of the city's interior innovators. From the refreshed Francophilia of Eleanor McMillen Brown to the high-tech minimalism of Ward Bennett, volume 1: "Inventors of Tradition" and volume 2: "Masters of Modernism", unfold a glittering panorama of New York's old world duplexes and river and park-view towers.In addition to the work of celebrated tastemakers - Mario Buatta, Billy Baldwin, and Melvin Dwork - Gura uncovers the interiors of once-influential, now-obscure designers whose work played an important role in the development of the New York look. Among these tastemakers are William Pahlmann, the pioneer of contemporary eclecticism in the 1940s; Emily Malino, a 1950s modernist with a soft touch; and the incomparable Barbara d'Arcy, whose trendsetting model rooms for Bloomingdale's electrified the 1960s and the 1970s. Acanthus Press Visual Library presents worlds of culture and design through images.