http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/arts/design/renewed-interest-for-lockwood-de-forests-designs.html 2014-11-20 22:27:50 Renewed Interest for Lockwood de Forest’s Designs A gallery show of brass filigree panels by the furniture designer Lockwood de Forest is one of several exhibitions featuring his work. === The 19th-century taste maker Lockwood de Forest went through career phases, painting moonlit landscapes, importing antiques, designing interiors and furniture and running a workshop in India. Not much material from any of his pursuits has emerged until this year; now about 7,600 of his brass filigree panels, made at his Ahmedabad workshop, have come on the market. The Sullivan Goss Sarah D. Coffin, the lead decorative arts curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which reopens on Dec. 12 with a restored teak Sullivan Goss customers have been framing the panels and using them as molds for textured ceramics. “People love handling them,” Frank Goss, an owner of the gallery, said. The gallery has donated batches to more than a dozen institutions that have other de Forest material, including the Cooper Hewitt, the Brooklyn The Brooklyn Museum has long owned de Forest’s fragile album of paper templates for the brass filigrees. Barry R. Harwood, the museum’s lead decorative arts curator, said that “there’s no hint in the book itself” as to why de Forest ordered so many and where he expected to install them. The sheets resemble lacy screens used in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, where he traveled to paint, collect antiques and commission furniture. Roberta A. Mayer, the author of a 2009 de Forest Related ceramics and woodwork that he owned occasionally turn up at auction. In 2013, his Japanese elmwood chest sold for $45,000 at The art historian Amy G. Poster has been tracking down de Forest possessions. At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, she has helped excavate his long-forgotten architectural salvage from India. In 1915, the museum paid $3,000 for 300 pieces in stone, metal and wood, which fit together to form a wall 17 feet tall and 40 feet long. One pierced sandstone chunk will be on loan to the Cooper Hewitt show. On Dec. 20, an exhibition opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Sacred Traditions of the Himalayas,” that includes jewelry de Forest owned. In January, the A FAMILY’S ARCHIVES David, Gary and L. Anthony Greenberg, Los Angeles brothers, grew up in the 1940s and ’50s next door to the concrete-slab house designed by the architect Rudolph Schindler in the 1920s. The brothers, who inherited a retail store fortune, all went into the design field. Parts of their archives are now headed for public display. Anthony Greenberg, better known as Tony, died in 1993, at 55; he had a relatively brief career as a modernist architect known for low-slung beachfront homes and commercial buildings with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling windows and cantilevered balconies. His family is donating his meticulously organized papers, which his son, Marco Greenberg, preserved, to the University of Southern California. The staff there is now sifting through photographs, models, plans and sketches related to Greenberg’s own works as well as to buildings he admired. Gail Borden, an associate dean at the university, described the recent gifts as “an amazing cross-section” that sheds light on the evolution of California modernism. In the 1970s, David and Gary Greenberg helped run Environmental Communications, a somewhat chaotic collaborative of architects, planners, artists and academics. They traveled in a motor home nicknamed Big Mama, taking photographs of mundane streetscapes and off-kilter attractions. The company marketed its slides in batches with titles as inscrutable as “Human Territoriality in the City” and “Ultimate Crisis.” Researchers have sorted through the archive for an David Greenberg, who later became a specialist in Next fall, an expanded version of “Contact High” will be shown at the Chicago Architecture