Video

Channeling Robert Chanler

The exotic and wildly imaginative design for the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio, created between 1917 and 1923 by artist Robert Chanler, features painted plaster reliefs of fantastical sea creatures on the ceiling and an extraordinary fireplace engulfed in three-dimensional plaster and bronze flames stretching twenty feet high. World Monuments Fund has worked with the New York Studio School for many years to understand more fully the original decorative campaign conceived for the room. In this discussion, WMF and the graduate students who completed this project reveal their findings about the artistic practice of Robert Chanler.