Post #804557 by Phillip Roberts on Fri, Jul 15, 2022 6:03 PM

The Alamac Hotel in Manhattan at 171 West 71st Street at Broadway home to the Congo Room circa 1923. The Alamac was sold at auction to a bank in 1938.

The Congo Room designed by Winold Reiss is a radical design for the era.

This is one of the great quality photographs of a holy grail in the library of congress collection. Photograph of a proof of concept Tiki bar in 1922-23.

Winold Reiss (1886–1953) arrived in New York in 1913, the year of the ground-breaking Armory Show. The exhibition shook the American art scene to its core and ushered in a radically new artistic sensibility, whilst Reiss’s exuberant, dynamic designs anticipated the American passion for this new European avant-garde art. Steeped in a German aesthetic, Reiss brought his unique brand of modernism to the United States, and established a reputation and material presence in New York’s cultural and commercial landscape.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a blockbuster. "The Congo Room is an unfortunate name from the research standpoint. ‘Clearly, it should be decorated with African art,’ the purist might posit and allow it to slip by unnoticed." It's clearly abundant by evidence, it was not Art of the African Continent here, but Polynesia of a sort.

It’s too early to be a Tiki bar, but it is. Don Beach is credited with creating the atmosphere genre, but… obviously this German architect and graphic artist immigrant flirted with the concept a decade earlier.

I wonder how Reiss (who is about 30 in 1923 and lives until 1953.) felt seeing his same concepts taken to the extreme, and blossom into knowing he is the (possible) originator of the style. We all hold so dear, and unheralded.

[ Edited by Phillip Roberts on 2022-11-03 12:37:35 ]

[ Edited by Phillip Roberts on 2023-03-22 10:58:53 ]