Published: September 6, 2013

Art & Design

Design at Home, in Gardens, Up Walls

Exhibitions on William Kent, William Munroe and Wayne Higby

“Folding Screen With the Siege of Belgrade (front),” from Mexico, circa 1697-1701.

By EVE M. KAHN

Published: September 6, 2013

Old things that astonish and enlighten keep emerging from the shadows. In exhibitions and auction previews this autumn, long-hidden objects tell stories about Venezuelan pearls, Vesuvian eruptions, the political ramifications of British garden follies, porcelain forms that simulate craggy Western vistas and battles for fame in the pencil-making industry.

Persistent mysteries about the 18th-century British tastemaker William Kent have just been solved. Despite his prodigious output of murals, buildings, furniture, grave markers and soup tureens, he was long dismissed as a well-connected but superficial bon vivant. “William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain,” opening Sept. 20 at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, will set the record straight (with help from an eight-pound catalog from Yale University Press).

A door and surround from the east

drawing room at Devonshire House,

London, circa 1733-40, attributed to William Kent.

The Bard team scoured archives and auction listings for clues about Kent’s training, talents and charms. A working-class Yorkshire native, he spent a formative decade in Italy, virtually memorizing the streetscapes. He ended up advising aristocrats and royals on reviving classical motifs for cradles, picture frames and domed backyard grottoes. He persuaded his patrons of various political parties that emulating ancient Roman precedents would help them resemble the emperors of antiquity. And video footage in the Bard galleries follows the garden contours that Kent laid out for his richest clients that feature meandering streams cut through glades.

The Brooklyn Museum went on a mini-spree of acquisition for a show focused on Hispanic imperialists who flaunted wealth and influence. “Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898,” which opens Sept. 20 (with a catalog from the Monacelli Press), explores how European conquerors and members of native ethnic groups intermarried and then furnished their homes with Chinese export porcelain and Flemish tapestries. Commissioned portraits show the families slathered in pearls that had been harvested along a desolate stretch of Venezuelan coast. In the exhibition, a recently purchased Mexican screen about nine feet long is encrusted with mother-of-pearl scenes of victorious Hapsburg soldiers, and a Peruvian painting depicts masters and slaves dancing by a riverbank.

Slaves in Latin America, working in perilous environments, harvested an extraordinarily profitable export: mahogany. The logs ended up deep into New England, where cabinetmakers transformed them into high-end furniture that was sold to southern patrons. “Four Centuries of Massachusetts Furniture,” a statewide series of exhibitions and events through 2014, documents the conversion of raw materials into desirable exports. Two of the shows focus on single early-1800s artisans: “Delightfully Designed: The Furniture and Life of Nathan Lombard,” at Old Sturbridge Village, demonstrates Lombard’s skill at carving flamboyant eagle, leaf and flower inlays, and “The Best Workman in the Shop: Cabinetmaker William Munroe of Concord,” at the Concord Museum, showcases a paperwork stash from Munroe’s descendants. Their forebear’s handwritten autobiography details his stint making dependable clocks and glossy sideboards and then inventing ways to mass-manufacture pencils. Those cedar tubes, inlaid with graphite, were so popular that counterfeiters started applying fake Munroe labels to inferior pencils. The “Four Centuries” events are prequels to the creation of a searchable online database of Boston furniture made before 1930, now in development through the Winterthur museum in Delaware.

A mahogany “Timepiece,”

by the Munroe family of artisans.

Oak furniture from Boston, stained-glass lamps from Manhattan, an 1890s album of California seaweed samples, silver boxes from Russia, ceramic poet figurines from England, pewter dragons from China and Art Deco glass bats from France commingled at the stylish Manhattan home of Leo Lerman and Gray Foy. Lerman, a prominent editor, and Foy, an artist, clustered pieces by themes and forms at their Midtown fantasyland, in the Osborne, at 205 West 57th Street. Doyle New York has turned the estate into hundreds of auction lots for a Sept. 24 sale, mostly with estimates of several hundred dollars each. (A few other portions of the collection, including prints depicting fireworks and Foy’s own intricate Surrealist drawings, are headed to museums and are not for sale.)

The apartment, with carved heads still protruding over the doorways, has been on the market for $4.5 million, and it comes with its own attic.

Wayne Higby’s “Temple’s Gate Pass” (1988).

Dozens of the Doyle pieces carry images of Mount Vesuvius and other volcanoes. Reddish plumes appear on paintings, fire screens and ceramic plates; this used to give the rooms a kind of continuous undulating horizon.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has lined up 50 of the ceramist Wayne Higby’s clifflike vessels in turquoise, cream and rust palettes for a retrospective opening Oct. 4. Mr. Higby, 70, a Colorado native, glazes and gouges stoneware, earthenware and porcelain. The scale of the work has expanded in recent years to tiles spread across entire theater walls. “A topographical story line bleeds from one container to the next,” the curator Peter Held writes in the catalog for “Infinite Place: The Ceramic Art of Wayne Higby” (Arnoldsche). Catalog photos show Mr. Higby in his studio in a hamlet near Alfred, N.Y., surrounded by pictures of mountain landscapes and mounds of files and works in progress that suggest there are yet more discoveries to make in a master’s archives.

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