applied art

In fact, the more abstract avant-garde painting became, with visual representations of the visible world falling away in favor of pure color, geometry and gesture, the less the differences between fine and applied art seemed to matter.

He received a bachelor’s degree in applied art from Auburn University in Alabama in 1960 and later served in the Air Force Reserve.

“There are very different ways of being an artist in the modern world, and we thought we should show some applied art,” Halderman said.

If nearly everyone in Iceland has a local pool, said Hafstein, who is developing an exhibition on Icelandic swimming pools for the Museum of Design and Applied Art outside of Reykjavik, it’s because of a century-old, desperate bid to save Icelandic lives amid a sudden crisis.

Her capacity to blur the boundaries between fine art and applied art is one of the reasons it has taken so long for Taeuber-Arp to receive a major retrospective that would cement her international reputation as a pioneer of abstraction, said Anne Umland, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.