The strange career of Christopher Dresser can be summed up in a frieze and a teapot, both on view at the Cooper-Hewitt. The frieze shows an outlandish convocation of stick insects, wobbling forward in mock procession. Here the insect kingdom is, literally, a kingdom: the bugs’ antennae are drawn up to form crowns and their iridescent green wings unfurl like royal robes of state, while tridents gripped in bony limbs serve as scepters. Here is that curious Victorian impulse to wed the comical and the nightmarish; Dresser dubbed the frieze “Old Bogey.” An altogether different sensibility pervades the teapot. No more than a silver square, it sits diagonally, two of its sides extending to form spout and handle. A smaller square is cut out of the middle, placing a void at the pot’s center of gravity that declares the axis around which it rotates and pours. Unlike the botanic-insectile phantasmagoria of Old Bogey, this is as laconic as a geometric proof.

It seems impossible that these works could come from the same civilization, let alone the same man. Yet each is an absolutely characteristic product of Christopher Dresser’s mind. Such is the revelation of the Cooper-Hewitt’s “Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser’s Design Revolution,” an exhibition organized for the centenary of his death. The rather generic title is unfortunate for the story is anything but generic. It is nothing less than the cultural revolution in which the High Victorian suddenly disintegrated, its components of truth, energy, and muscularity