Order the book
Signed copies of the expanded edition are available from the gallery. Email info@toddmerrillstudio.com or call 212 673 0531.
Also available from Rizzoli, Amazon and Bookshop.org.
Modern Americana: Studio Furniture from High Craft to High Glam, expanded edition
Edited by Todd Merrill with Eve Kahn and Dallas Dunn
Rizzoli New York, October 2018
Hardcover, 320 pages, 9 × 12 inches
ISBN 978-0-8478-6284-9
$85
The 2008 first edition (272 pages, edited with Julie V. Iovine, ISBN 978-0-8478-3053-4) is out of print.
The first full survey of American studio furniture
Between the 1940s and the 1990s, while Knoll and Herman Miller mass-produced the furniture most people now call mid-century modern, a smaller group of American designers and craftsmen worked by hand, by commission and in tiny editions. George Nakashima, Paul Evans, Vladimir Kagan, Karl Springer, Wendell Castle, Tommi Parzinger, James Mont: their work went into Park Avenue apartments, Hollywood houses and department-store showrooms, then fell so far out of fashion that pieces were left on the curb. Modern Americana is the book that put the period back together.
First published by Rizzoli in 2008 and edited by Todd Merrill with Julie V. Iovine, it was the first full survey of the movement: maker by maker, the history of who made what for whom, and new photography of pieces from private collections, the gallery and the auction record. It restored the reputations of makers who had been forgotten and became the standard reference for collectors, dealers and auction houses. Architectural Digest called the new edition “a must-have for design collectors.”
The expanded edition (2018)
For the book’s tenth anniversary Rizzoli published a 320-page expanded edition, edited by Todd Merrill with Eve Kahn and Dallas Dunn. It adds 60 pages and about 150 new photographs, including record-setting pieces from auction houses around the world; updates every original chapter, Charles Hollis Jones and Karl Springer among them; and carries the survey into the 1990s with two new chapters:
- Women Makers, by Eve Kahn: Judy Kensley McKie, Wendy Maruyama, Kristina Madsen, Rosanne Somerson, Mira Nakashima, Bertha Schaefer, Willa Kim, Joyce Anderson and Erica Wilson, from the late 1970s to 2000.
- Showrooms, by Roberta Maneker: the department stores and showrooms, Bonwit Teller, Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, Grosfeld House and Directional among them, that commissioned and sold studio furniture from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Makers in the book
Samuel Marx, William “Billy” Haines, Wendell Castle, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Karl Springer, James Mont, J.B. Blunk, Michael Coffey, Wharton Esherick, Arthur Espenet Carpenter, Sam Maloof, Jack Rogers Hopkins, Paul Evans, Phillip Lloyd Powell, Vladimir Kagan, George Nakashima, Silas Seandel, Charles Hollis Jones, Philip and Kelvin LaVerne, Tommi Parzinger, Harvey Probber, Edward Wormley, John Dickinson, Arthur Elrod, Paul Laszlo, and the women makers above. Works by many of them are available through the gallery.
Modern Americana on film
From the press
- Architectural Digest, November 2018: “Todd Merrill’s New Book Is a Must-Have for Design Collectors,” by Craig Kellogg
- 1stDibs Introspective, February 2019: “The Icons of American Design Are Celebrated Anew by Todd Merrill,” by Pilar Viladas
- Dan’s Papers, December 2018: “Todd Merrill Reexamines and Expands ‘Modern Americana’ After 10 Years”
- aspire design and home, April 2019: “Must-Read: Todd Merrill’s Modern Americana Expanded Edition”
- Elle Decoration, January 2009: “5 Reasons to Read… Modern Americana”
- idfx, November 2008: “Book Must Read – Modern Americana”
- The Robb Report, October 2008: book review
- Men’s Vogue, September 2008: “Art + Design: Modern Americana”
- Antiques and the Arts Weekly, October 2008: the book’s launch exhibition at the gallery
About the author
Todd Merrill is the third generation of his family in the antiques trade and one of the first gallerists to recognize post-war American studio furniture as a field of its own. He opened Todd Merrill Antiques in New York in 2000, and today Todd Merrill Studio, at 80 Lafayette Street, represents both the twentieth-century makers in this book and an international group of contemporary artists.