Modern Magazine – Summer 2010

After appearing just one year ago, Modern has already established itself as the most engaging, intelligent—and talked about—magazine covering the fields of 20th century and contemporary design, architecture, and decorative arts. While it is visually striking and alluring, Modern is no standard “shelter” magazine. You won’t find decorating tips here, but you will enjoy heaps of inspiration and information. Written for the dedicated connoisseur as well as the casual design aficionado, Modern plays host to the voices and views of today’s most discerning tastemakers and curators—unearthing overlooked vintage treasures, and pointing the way toward the innovative and elegant designs of this century.

The Summer 2010 issue of Modern shows the scope with which the magazine celebrates the past and the present. Features include a profile of the Belgian designer Jan Yoors, a man who lived an epic life—traveling with gypsies during his teens, running guns for the resistance during the Second World War, enjoying bohemian years in Greenwich Village with two wives—but whose lasting legacy will be the vivid, stunning abstract tapestries he created, breathing modernism into a medieval discipline. Another article offers a tour of the Sidney and Frances Brody house in Los Angeles, a triumph of 1950’s elegance engineered by enlightened patrons and two of the leading talents of the era: designer William Haines and architect A. Quincy Jones. The contemporary sphere is explored in such pieces as a profile of Joris Laarman—a young Dutch designer whose works are based on arcane scientific principles, yet are surprisingly lyrical in form—and a lively Q+A between two of today’s most inventive and spirited designers, Johanna Grawunder and Philip Michael Wolfson.

Be modern: read Modern