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High Style: Masterworks from the Bernard and Sylvia Ostry Collection in the Royal Ontario Museum

A stylish new publication just in time for the holidays ...

The newest Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) publication, High Style: Masterworks from the Bernard and Sylvia Ostry Collection in the Royal Ontario Museum, highlights the ROM’s renowned Bernard and Sylvia Ostry Collection of principally Art Deco objects and furniture. The newly published book, by Alastair Duncan, is the perfect holiday gift for those on your list with discerning tastes.

The ROM’s Ostry Collection represents three of the decorative arts movements that spanned the late nineteenth century through to the end of the 1930s--Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco movements, with a special emphasis on Deco. Furniture, art glass, ceramics, silverware, light fixtures, and sculpture are represented. Through illuminating text and stunning, full-colour photography, High Style showcases the crème de la crème of the collection. These are objects that represent the highest level of achievement in their field and can truly be called high style.

The Ostry Collection has helped to establish the ROM as the most significant repository of early twentieth-century decorative arts in Canada as well as one of the premier North American institutions in this area of collecting. The collection’s range of twentieth-century silver is especially remarkable.

Celebrated artists and designers showcased in both the collection and the publication include Louis Chalon, Auguste Daum, Taxile Doat, Christopher Dresser, Camille Fauré, Paul Frankl, Émile Gallé, William Guérin, Maurice Guiraud-Rivière, Josef Hoffmann, Georg Jensen, Archibald Knox, Jacob and Joseph Kohn, René Lalique, Jules-Émile LeLeu, Louis Majorelle, Clément Massier, Paul Milet, Walter von Nessen, Karel Palda, Carl Poul Petersen, Albert Porteneuve, Jean Puiforcat, and Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann. Represented countries of origin include England, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Canada, and the United States.

Coinciding with the ROM’s temporary exhibition, Déco Lalique (on display from December 26, 2005 to January 2007), the stunning High Style is, like its subject matter, a timeless gift for the holidays.

High Style: Masterworks from the Bernard and Sylvia Ostry Collection in the Royal Ontario Museum is available in fine bookstores and in the ROM Reproductions Shop in the Museum’s Lower Level for $49.95. It is distributed in Canada by Hushion House and internationally by the Antique Collectors' Club.

Authors:
Alastair Duncan is a consultant on nineteenth- and twentieth-century decorative arts and was a specialist and consultant on the subject for Christie’s New York for fourteen years. He is the author of more than thirty books on Art Nouveau and Art Déco and has also contributed to magazines, including Vogue and Connaissance des Arts. Dr. Ross Fox is a curator specializing in material culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. He works with silver, furniture, ceramics, glass, and sculpture that are either Canadian-made or have a long Canadian history. Dr. Peter Kaellgren is a curator of European decorative arts at the Royal Ontario Museum. He has played a significant role in building the ROM’s outstanding collections of ceramics, glass, silver, furniture, and design graphics. Robert Little is the Mona Campbell Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Royal Ontario Museum. His interests are French eighteenth-century furniture and the history of interior design. Brian Musselwhite is an assistant curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and is primarily responsible for British and European glass as well as the Museum’s collection of European and Russian decorative arts.

For more information, please contact ROM Publications at 416.586.5582.

High Style:
Masterworks from the Bernard and Sylvia Ostry Collection in the Royal Ontario Museum
Alastair Duncan with contributions by Ross Fox, Peter Kaellgren, Robert Little, Brian Musselwhite
Royal Ontario Museum/ Cloth/ November 2005/ $49.95/ 0-88854-446-4/ 148 pages
300+ full-colour photos

 

 

Issue date:
December 1, 2005

For more information:
Media Relations
Tel.: 416.586.5547
Fax: 416.586.8022
E-mail: media@rom.on.ca

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