Living With Folk Art: Ethnic Styles from Around the World

Turkoman jewelry hung in glittering clusters above a cottage fireplace, a colorful array of Pueblo pots brightening kitchen shelves, an Indian house-shrine forming a miniature alcove for a flickering flame....Here are interiors of all kinds in which ethnic art shines out as a challenging and fashionable alternative to conventional home decoration. Nicholas Barnard and James Merrell's painstaking location work in Europe and America has yielded dazzling color photographs of tribal and folk art beautifully harmonized with the best of Western design. The art of "primitive" peoples--ceramics and textiles, masks and metalware, baskets and carvings--was once dismissed in the West as heathen and crude, but artists such as Picasso and Matisse led the new enthusiasm for folk art in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today the range of artifacts available to us is boundless, from delicate Indonesian floral batiks to ghoulish Mexican Day-of-the-Dead figurines, from African earthenware to intricately fretted Indian screens. Exotic, charming, but always unusual and provocative, folk art can transform interiors of all kinds. Nicholas Barnard provides inspiring ideas for displaying objects, whether functionally as furniture, architectural fittings, or kitchenware, or simply as decorations, and advises on their care and collection. A comprehensive directory lists galleries where art can be seen, and retailers from whom it can be obtained.