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Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863–82
October 20, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
This tour will take place in person on:
Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Location:
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238
About this event
An in-person, after-hours tour of the Brooklyn Museum’s acclaimed exhibition, Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863–82. The show’s guest curator, Barbara Veith, and Medill H. Harvey, Ruth Bigelow Wriston Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of the Henry R. Luce Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explain the synergistic partnership of Manhattan-based artisans Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) and Joseph Cabus (1824–1898). Born into European furniture-making families, these two entrepreneurial immigrants supervised up to 100 employees and collaborated on Modern Gothic wares for middle-class and elite customers. Among their design signatures are caramel and ebonized woodplanes, incised gilding, inset tiles, dynamic diagonal supports and an architectural vocabulary of crenellations, gables, columns, and balustrades. Harvey and Veith mined archival sources and retrieved unsigned furniture from obscurity to realize a project that had long been a passion of (and was initiated by) the Brooklyn Museum’s late curator Barry R. Harwood. Don’t miss this insider view of the season’s most exciting mixed-media design exhibition.