From works like Leonetto Capiello's "Asti Cinzano" and "Cognac Monet" to classic 1920s liquor advertisements to movie posters from the silent film era, American homes and apartments are filling up with vintage art. Classy, old, and conservative, these pieces provide color, shape, and form to otherwise "personality-less" rooms. However, unwitting decorators may actually overuse vintage art and thereby turn their living spaces into clichés. A more interesting way to design with vintage art is to mix your framed pictures with hard to find prints. For instance, you may want to frame some old Smithsonian American magazine covers and juxtapose those with your giant yellow and red 1920s French champagne poster. Alternatively, you can "do up" one room with vintage movie posters and keep another room poster-free. Typical vintage wall art connotes carefree living, depicts inebriated, barely-clothed women, and enlivens with bright, broad colors. True fans of the form may wish to explore oddball vintage paintings in more detail to develop an eclectic decorative scheme. All told, vintage pieces are by and large more adaptive than home-decor modern art pieces, which often work "too hard" for viewer attention and connote coldness and austerity. How long will the vintage art craze last? According to sociologists and culture watchers, few believe that the trend of collecting and hanging vintage art will go away any time soon. As more and more urban residents flee to the suburbs and exurbs, chances are that these cosmopolitan consumers will transport their vintage art with them and spark trends in outlying areas. |
