PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art announces the redesign of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries, which will open in November 2009. The renovated galleries will focus on the museum’s decorative arts and design collections, illustrating strengths from the 1740s to the present. Included among more than 550 objects on display will be the museum’s important collection of early Western Pennsylvania furniture, as well as its first permanent installation of the American painted and gilded parlor suite from PicNic, the distinguished Greek revival mansion built in Pittsburgh in the 1830s for William Croghan and his daughter, Mary Schenley. For the first time in its history, the entrance gallery to the Bruce Galleries will feature changing exhibitions of decorative art, craft, and design. Pittsburgh-based WTW Architects have been contracted to redesign the space, and Jason T. Busch, The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts at Carnegie Museum of Art, is leading the reinstallation.

“Over the past half century, decorative arts have become a large and important part of the museum’s collection,” says Richard Armstrong, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art. “The redesigned Bruce Galleries will help us share the multitude of exceptional objects now in storage. It’s reopening is a milestone in the museum’s evolution.”

Installation
Objects within the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries will be arranged chronologically, providing a universal perspective on American and European decorative arts and inviting comparisons East to West and past to present, beginning with the Rococo and Neoclassical periods of the 18th century to Modernism and contemporary design and craft of the 20th and 21st centuries.

“The transformation of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries affords Carnegie Museum of Art an ideal opportunity to trace the evolution of style and design in the Western world from the mid-18th century to the present,” says Busch. “During those same years, the Pittsburgh region has experienced dramatic growth and an increase in the production and use of decorative arts. Our new installation presents the unique juxtaposition of these parallel developments which should be of interest to people from this area and beyond.”

The decorative art and design objects on view will be complemented by the display of paintings, works on paper, and architectural drawings from Carnegie Museum of Art’s fine arts and architecture collections.

Acquisitions and Significant Works
Each of the style and design groupings in the Bruce installation will have focal points of significant works and recent acquisitions to the collection. Examples include:

a rare pair of porcelain vases (1754) with exquisite enamel decoration by Louis-Denis Armand l’aîné, which rank among the finest luxury objects made at the Vincennes Factory (1738–1756) and were retailed by the famous Parisian marchand-mercier Lazare Duvaux;

a refined mahogany china table (1765–1775) made by Robert Harrold of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for prominent merchant Stephen Chase after a design published in Thomas Chippendale’s famous English furniture pattern book, The Gentlemen and Cabinet-maker’s Director;

the Fully Elastic Armchair (c. 1810) by Samuel Gragg, which represents the beginning of bentwood design in the Western world and is the most intact example of its form known to survive;

the elegant suite of gilded and rosewood faux-grained parlor furniture from PicNic (c. 1835), the country home of the Croghan-O’Hara-Schenley families, which will be conserved and displayed in a simulated period setting for the first time;

the Tennyson Vase, a tour-de-force example of 19th-century English silver conceived as a testament to the high quality and ingenuity of British craftsmanship and exhibited at the influential World’s Fairs of 1867 (Paris) and 1873 (Vienna);

richly colored stained-glass window panels (1908–1912) by Louis Comfort Tiffany, which originated from a multipanel scene of an Italian garden made for the staircase landing of the Richard Beatty Mellon mansion, formerly at 6500 Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh;

a modernist and distinctly American walnut Skyscraper Desk and Bookcase (1927–1928) by Paul T. Frankl, which takes inspiration from the 20th-century American architectural icon: the skyscraper;

one of a set of unique, modernist dining chairs made with advanced slumped plate glass technology by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, and displayed in the “Miracle of Glass” exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City;

a unique polyurethane cabinet (c. 1969) designed by the Pittsburgh industrial design firm of Peter Muller-Munk Associates for Mobay Chemical Company to promote the “world’s first showcase series of all urethane furniture”;

the Lockheed Lounge (1986–1989) by Australian designer Marc Newson, a sculpted fiberglass chaise sheathed in aluminum sheets joined with rivets that give the impression of an airplane fuselage and creates, in the artist’s words, a “fluid metallic form, like a giant blob of mercury”;

You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories chest of drawers (1991) by the Dutch designer Tejo Remy for Droog, which features an assorted bundle of reused drawers held together as “chest” with a sturdy cloth utility strap;

and an oversized glass ewer and footed bowl called Chartreuse and Black Pair (1992) by master glassblower Dante Marioni, who reimagines traditional 16th-century Venetian glass designs in vibrant color and great scale.

Two decorative arts exhibitions will be held at Carnegie Museum of Art following the November 2009 opening of the Bruce Galleries. In December, Gods, Love, and War: Tapestries at Carnegie Museum of Art, an exhibition of the museum’s 16th- and 17th-century tapestries, will open in the Heinz Galleries. The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs, also on view in the Heinz Galleries, opens in January 2010.