Richard Riemerschmid's Extraordinary Living Things

At the beginning of the twentieth century, German artist Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957) was known as a symbolist painter and, by the advent of World War I, had become an important modern architect. This, however, the first English-language book on Riemerschmid, celebrates his understudied legacy as a designer of everyday objects—furniture, tableware, clothing—that were imbued with an extraordinary sense of vitality and even personality.

Freyja Hartzell makes a case for the importanc…