St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 81

t. 4 Suction SW Thursday, January 6, 2000 ST. LOUIS POST-OISPATPH 1 i A 7 I ifefl (MS Gard ourish inside useu ms en f'-K 1 hit ft to 4 i. A 'f A '5' if iff 1 11 i fyi-' msr' 1, c. I By Marty Ross Universal Press Syndicate ART AND NATURE meet in the pleasant galleries of the museums of the world.

Artists and designers have always turned to nature and gardens for inspiration, and the product managers of museum shops have taken note of the relationship. If you're looking for a gift for the gardener on your list, the shop near the museum's exit is likely to have just the thing. It can be daunting to shop for someone whose deepest desire is for a truckload of compost. Gardeners have a way of buying all kinds of practical gifts for themselves during the year, but the small indulgence of a dashing silk scarf decorated with grapevines in a design adapted from a stained-glass window by the Art Deco genius Louis Comfort Tiffany may well have been overlooked. It is sold through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Metropolitan Museum also sells a cheerful sprig of bronze holly for the gardener's lapel. The design was borrowed from a 16th-century tapestry in the collection. Sparkling "sun catchers," colorful disks of recycled glass stamped with the old-fashioned images of handsome and beneficial insects, brighten a wintry window without threatening the health of houseplants on the sill. They come from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which also sells sterling silver bumblebee pins suitable for organic gardeners and a wristwatch decorated with a water lily adapted from Claude Monet's paintings of his garden in France. "Gardening has been such a hot trend that all aspects of it are important in the market, and they are obviously important to us," says Dan Reardon, general manager of MFA Boston, which has five shops in the Boston area besides the shop at the museum, and a well-stocked online gift shop.

"Art is about people's lives, and gardens and flowers are, too," he says. The difference between gifts from museum shops or catalogs and those you might find elsewhere is significant. Museums develop their extensive merchandise inventories around their own collections, so their products have an auspicious artistic provenance. Gardeners with a whimsical sense of reality might turn to the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for an umbrella covered with the image of an emerald-green lawn, the work of Tibor Kalman. His "grass" and "sky" umbrellas (the sky umbrella has puffy clouds on the inside against an azure sky) have a 40-inch span, large enough for two on rainy spring garden-tour days.

Stylish vases in the museum's gift collection look like sculptures even when they're empty, and like poetry when they are filled with fresh flowers. Colonial Williamsburg takes old-fashioned gardeners back to the 18th century with a collection of prints, needlepoint pillows and hooked rugs based on the fantastic illustrations in an English nurseryman's 1720 seed catalog. Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester dinnerware, decorated with ripe fruit, bees and butterflies, places the garden squarely on the dinner table. At Winterthur museum, the former private estate of H.E du Pont in Delaware, garden motifs appear indoors and out. "Mr.

Du Pont's philosophy was to bring the garden inside," says Bonnie Maradonna, general manager at Winterthur. Du Pont collected fine Oriental decorative art, and the shop offers two garden sculptures with a distinctly Eastern influence: a Chinese woman sitting on a garden seat, and a heron standing in the rushes. From an illustration in a children's book in the museum's library, designers created a brass garden bell decorated with a fairy swinging on a garland. Regional styles and interests are reflected in museums across the country, and in the products found in their shops. At the Art Institute in Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright's stylized water lilies have been adapted for a silk scarf and a stained-glass panel for a bright window.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., sells calendars, prints and posters emblazoned with the artist's bee's-eye-view of petunias, jimson weeds, hollyhocks and roses. Poppy jewelry and a scarf and an umbrella decorated with poppies are inspired by O'Keeffe's shocking-red poppy paintings. A gardener's good intentions for the new millennium may be encouraged with a box of fancy garden note cards from a museum shop. A gorgeous calendar or datebook full of roses, botanical prints, bouquets or landscapes will help busy gardeners keep track of time, while reminding them of the timeless-ness of afternoons in the garden. Cs.

l. Winterthur Winterthur museum offers this 33-inch-high sculpture of a Chinese woman, palm fan and plum blossoms In hand, for $180. The sculpture is made of polyresin and is painted antique white. A sampling of shops and what they se rugs, $160 (rectangular) and $190 (round); Duke of Gloucester dinner-ware, $310 for a 5-piece place setting, teapot, $389. I Winterthur, (800) 767-0500, www.winterthur.org; catalog free.

Chinese woman on a garden seat, $180; heron, $78; fairy wind bell, $26. I The Metropolitan MuMunt ol AH, Now York, (800) 468-7386, www.metmuse-um.org; catalog free. Tiffany grapevine scarf, $38; holly pin, $48. I Tho Minouia of Flno Arts, Barton, (800) 225-5592, www.mfa.orgshop; catalog free. Sun catchers, set of 5, with insects, animals or cats, $34; bee pins, $55; Monet wristwatch, $35.

The Art Institute of Chicago, (800) 621-9337, www.artic.edu, catalog free. Frank Lloyd Wright water lily scarf, $40; water lily glass panel, $75. The Georgia CKeeff Museum, (505) 954-4393, Ext. 1002; www.okeeffemuse-um.org; catalog free. Calendar, $13; petunia or jimson weed poster, $30; silk poppy scarf, $95; earrings, $45; pin, $95, umbrella, $95.

MUSEUMS HAVE BEEN in the business of selling reproductions based on their collections for generations. Catalogs increase public awareness of art, and purchases help support museum programs. Museum members often receive discounts (usually 10 percent). Prices quoted below are catalog prices for nonmem-bers and do not include shipping charges. All the Web sites listed offer online shopping: Th Museum of Modern Art, Now York, (800) 447-6662, www.momastore.org; catalog free.

Tibor Kalman umbrellas, $45; Alvar Aalto vases, $120 (large), $49 (small); Peter Hewitt vases, four sizes, $45 to $85. I Williamsburg, (800) 446-9240, www.history.org; catalog free. 18th-century garden catalog prints, $185 in gold-tone frames, $50 unframed; needlepoint pillows, $40; hooked.