Manufactured fountains have been refreshing, amazing and amusing people since before the 15th century, a new exhibition in New York City shows.
"Fountains: Splash and Spectacle," a selection of about 250 drawings, prints, photographs and videos--just right for summer vacation viewing--is at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through Oct. 11.
Fountains, created to satisfy the simple human need for clean water, quickly became associated with politics, mythology, memory, power, propaganda, art, commerce and other cultural phenomena, exhibition curator Marilyn Symmes says.
Such connections are explored in the exhibit and in a companion book, "Fountains: Splash and Spectacle: Water and Design From the Renaissance to the Present" (Rizzoli, $60 hardcover), edited by Symmes, the museum's curator of drawings and prints.
The book is a fine alternative for those who miss the exhibit. It is full of detail about and images of fountains.
Both exhibit and book give a clear account of the history of fountain-making from the 15th century to the present.
Among celebrated modern waterworks is the Fountain of Nations at Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., opened in 1982. Four miles of pipes and 35 miles of electrical wire support a water show that sends almost 30,000 gallons of water cascading down tiered walls while hundreds of jets propel more water into the air, all synchronized with music from Disney movie soundtracks.
Early fountain designers relied mainly on gravity instead of electricity and computers as at Epcot. Yet they too achieved spectacular effects.
At the Villa d'Este, built outside Rome around 1568, the Water Organ Fountain combines dramatic displays with a water-driven organ concert. The Avenue of the Hundred Fountains is ornamented with 100 individual water sprays.
The fountains at Villa d'Este, once a private home, included a collection of active jokes in which a jet could suddenly shoot up from a grotto floor or flood a bench of visitors. (Now that the Villa d'Este is a public museum, the jokes have been turned off, perhaps recognizing a changed concept of humor.)
There is also a domestic side to the world's love affair with moving waters. Inexpensive fountains are increasingly popular in home gardens and sun rooms.
Small table and wall-mounted fountains as well as birdbaths with recirculating pumps, water tubs and novelties such as a stone with water spurting out of it can be purchased in garden centers and through mail-order catalogs.
