Victorian Society in America

Northern New Jersey Chapter

​

VSA-NNJ meets monthly from September to June for lectures and events

related to 19th Century history, usually on the third Monday of the month. 

​

​Our next program will be:

​

The 1930's Victorian Design Revival

Presented by Alan Rosenberg 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Monday, October 16, 2023 at 7:00 PM  

Montclair Women's Club,

82 Union Street, Montclair NJ

 

This venue is handicap accessible.  Parking is available behind the building and on the street.

Light refreshments, coffee and tea will be served. 

The program is free for members, and $10 for guests.

​​​

In 1930, a Victorian revival was stirring among avant-garde tastemakers who just a few years earlier were devotees of the geometric deco aesthetic or the clinical chrome, glass and plain white walls of modernism.  For these cutting-edge trend-setters, Victoriana was so far out that it was suddenly in.  A pronounced neo-Victorian aesthetic was soon also championed by interior decorators and homemakers.

​

The Victorian revival in the 1930's was not simply an attempt to recreate historically accurate period décor.  For fashionable style-setters, mid-19th Century style was an explicit challenge to the modernist machine aesthetic, placing fantastic Victorian design elements within a modernist setting, achieving a juxtaposition that revealed a Surrealist undercurrent in interior design.  

​

Alan Rosenberg is a historian and curator of art and design. His essays have appeared in publications including Nineteenth Century, Silver Magazine and the Saint James Encyclopedia of Fashion and have accompanied exhibitions at venues such as the Palos Verdes Art Center and Galeria H2O in Barcelona. He has curated exhibitions for galleries including Icon20 and Octavia Art Gallery and has lectured at museums including the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Arkansas Arts Center. While working on his master’s degree in history of applied arts at the Fashion Institute Technology he was a Research Fellow at the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1991 to 1994 he was Director of the Metropolitan Historic Structures Association, an alliance of New York area house museums.  He is currently an instructor in the Master of Arts program in Fine and Decorative Art and Design at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

 

For more information, please contact christinapmayer@gmail.com or 973-886-9956.

​