Spotlight on Ingo

Any interior designer will tell you: Light—natural or artificial—is wholly transformative. And no one manipulates lighting and shadow better than the master whose four-decade retrospective, "Provoking Magic: Lighting of Ingo Maurer," is illuminating the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York.

Maurer has designed more than 150 lighting systems since the mid-1960's, and this exhibit gathers 53 of them starting with his first, the 1966 Bulb. The story continues with such breakthroughs as Tableaux Chinois's live goldfish, 1989, and Pensatoio d'Oro's luminous cube of gold-plated paper, 2004, and culminates with new site-specific installations and the deep-blue polyurethane-resin figure of Remember Yves, meaning Klein—making its U.S. debut. September 14–January 27; 212-849-8400; cooperhewitt.org.