The Index of American Design is based on the work of New Deal artists under the Roosevelt administrations and commissioned between 1935 and1941 for various public works projects. This particular project documented products of indigenous American design through detailed watercolor illustrations. Furniture, costume, and toys of the period are described, including regional arts of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Shakers, and Hispanic American Southwest.
The project has been well documented in print, in The Index of American Design, by Erwin O. Christensen (Macmillan Company & National Gallery of Art, 1950) and the more recent Treasury of American Design and Antiques, A Pictorial Survey of Popular Folk Arts Based upon Watercolor Renderings in the Index of American Design, by Clarence P. Hornung (Abradale Press, 1997). Over 1,700 images were created by some 300 artists in 35 states. This Web site is a selection of those images with brief textual descriptions. It functions as an online exhibition with “tours” of the more popular decorative arts. Costume, dolls, metalwork, pottery, retablos, textiles, toys and woodcarving are the categories serving as individual sections.
Navigation through the site is predominantly linear. The user can select a “tour” and view the 16 to 26 objects on that tour in order. The annotations provided generally include the object’s dimensions, illustrator, location, provenance, and any print references. The names of the illustrators have hypertext links, allowing the user to see a list of all the project artist’s work, although these brief records do not contain images.
The Web site is simply and elegantly designed. Thumbnail images are used so that the heavily graphic site is not slow to load locally. Each thumbnail is linked to a larger image. The finely detailed illustrations do not always lend themselves well to the medium of the Web, where much of the objects’ detail is difficult to see.
Links are confined to the National Gallery’s home page and related areas of that site. Unfortunately, the Index site lacks its own search engine. The user is steered to the National Gallery’s site search engine, which yields results not useful to the Index itself.
For a brief view of some aspects of the American decorative arts in the 1930s, this is an interesting and potentially useful site. However, its scope is too limited to provide more than a taste in this well‐documented area. The Index of American Design Web site serves primarily as an outreach tool for the slide exhibit programs sponsored by the National Gallery. For most libraries, one of the printed works would provide more information and better illustrations.
