Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design

MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design We passed from the hand to the machine, we enjoyed our era of the triumph of the machine, we acquired wealth, and with wealth education, travel, sophistication, a sense of beauty; and then we began to miss something in our cheap but ugly products. Efficiency was not enough. The machine did not satisfy the soul. Man could not live by bread alone. And thus it came about that beauty, or what one conceived as beauty, became a factor in the production and marketing of goods. Earnest Elmo Calkins, 1927 ([121], 147) One of the results of the Paris exposition was to awaken the public press in the United States to the existence, if not the importance, of modern design. Whereas the specialized magazines in art and decoration had been supporting the strong interest of the establishment in traditional styles and the cultural aspects of design, now American newspapers and magazines began to promote design for its economic value. It was stated that America was beginning to catch up as big business was losing its “timidity in the presence of Art.” An editorial in the New York Times challenged industry: “American captains of industry must soon change their traditional characters. True, the public may still cling to its conception of them as iron-jawed, level-headed giants of efficiency.… But if the present international competition keeps up, we may find them, like the Germans, openly cooperating with museums and industrial art schools; or, like the French, proclaiming themselves merchants of beauty.” [187] The various American decorative-arts associations were quick to point out that the French had only achieved what they themselves had been proposing all along: the collaboration of artists and designers with industry that would result in better and more marketable products. The Art-in-Trades Club issued a manifesto in 1926 challenging all American artists to compete in a competition for modern furnishings. Others, however, recalled that as early as 1923 it had been proposed that American manufacturers did not need to produce cubistic chairs or futuristic consoles, “because our native sense of the fitness of things and our demand for the beautiful serviceable article, as opposed to the irritating, eccentric one, comes to our rescue in furnishing our homes and business offices.” ([110], 18) It was even suggested naively that, since the modernist style belonged to the Europeans, Americans should look to their own native sources and draw inspiration from the Alaskan, Mayan, and Toltec cultures. American museums moved quickly to capitalize on the interest in design and the decorative arts that had been sparked by the success of the Paris exposition and to reaffirm their hope to be tastemakers for the public. Within a year after the close of 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design the show in Paris the American Association of Museums had organized and imported a selection of products from Paris, primarily French and Swedish, to tour its member institutions, beginning in February 1926 at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The preface of the catalog for the show illustrated once more the museums’ well-meaning but short-sighted attitude toward American design: “The collection has been brought to America not to stimulate the demand for European products nor to encourage copying of European creations, but to bring about an understanding of this important modern movement in design in the hope that a parallel movement may be initiated in our country … to bring to us new forms appropriate to the living conditions of the twentieth century.” [216] A second stage in the new role of the museum as a cultural reporter was reached in 1927 when the Metropolitan Museum provided space for the first time to a foreign country in the field of the decorative arts. In a move that inaugurated the reign of Scandinavian design in the United States, the museum staged a special exhibition of Swedish industrial arts. The net effect of the exhibition was to demonstrate a new and sincere attempt to speak the language of the day—a language of simplicity and truth. Some cultural historians have pointed out that the Scandinavians had long been familiar with the spare elegance and reverence of the Shakers’ furniture and their other ingenious and appropriate objects for everyday living. Perhaps the appeal of Scandinavian design to Americans stems from a renewed conscience for design that has sent hundreds of American craftsmen and designers to study and work in the studios of Scandinavian designers and has made titles like Swedish Modern and Danish Modern part of the American design vocabulary. 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design The American Association of Museums was quick to arrange for a national tour of objects selected from the Paris exposition, and borrowed the art from the original catalog. Once American museums had bestowed cultural respectability upon the modernist movement, it became inevitable that department stores on this side of the Atlantic would emulate the Parisian stores at the exposition by staging their own exhibits and supporting the design and production of products in the new style. Even if the products displayed were too modern for the average consumer, they would at the very least attract the public into the stores and sharpen its appetite for other products. The French had displayed such rooms in the United States earlier, but not until the smashing success in Paris did the idea catch on. Now Macy, Altman, Wanamaker, Lord and Taylor, Franklin Simon, Marshall Field, and others decided to stage their own 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design “ensemble” exhibitions in the style of the French. To this end it seemed natural that they should turn to the worlds of the theater and promotion for designers to help them conceive and install their exhibits, to decorate their show windows, to design some of the furnishings, and to offer other promotional ideas that would stimulate public interest. Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Russel Wright, and others were already well established as designers of stage settings, theatrical spectaculars, costumes, and decorative accessories before they were attracted by the glamor and excitement of the Art Moderne spirit to try their hand at staging the public debut of decorative and utilitarian products. It was a relatively small step for them to shift their attention from the make-believe world of the theater to the world of real products presented in make-believe environments. In 1927, the R. H. Macy Company staged an experimental exposition to show the advances American manufacturers had made in introducing good design to everyday products. The public response was good enough to convince Macy to stage, in 1928, the most ambitious project of all of the department stores, an “International Exposition of Art in Industry.” This show was a major activity of Macy’s new department of design under the direction of Austin Purvis of Philadelphia. Lee Simonson, designer of sets for the Theater Guild, with Virginia Hamill as co-director, designed the background of the galleries and show windows for the exhibition, which consisted of an arcade of 15 rooms in the “ensemble” manner. The rooms themselves were designed by a selection of internationally known designers. Josef Hoffmann, director of the Academy of Industrial Art, designed a boudoir and powder room that included products from the Wiener Werkstaette. For France, Maurice Dufrêne designed a dining room and Joubert et Petit a studio living room. Bruno Paul, director of the German state schools of fine and applied arts, combined handmade and machine-made products in his designs for a man’s study and a dining room. For Italy, Gio Ponti designed a country living room and, of all things, a butcher shop. The Swedish exhibits included Orrefors and Kosta glass in addition to metalwork, textiles, and ceramics. The American rooms were particularly interesting because they included not only handmade and manufactured decorative arts but also a selection of manufactured appliances. A three-room apartment by Kem Weber of California included a General Electric refrigerator, a Hotpoint electric range, and a sink and bathroom fixtures by Crane. William Lescaze’s penthouse studio contained a sunlamp and electrical fixtures, and the living room by Eugene Schoen included lamp fixtures designed by him and handmade silverware by Peter Muller- Munk, the recent German émigré who was later to become a prominent American industrial designer. 5 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic Art Moderne Becomes Industrial Design The Macy exposition was the first useful opportunity for American designers and manufacturers to show their work in the modern spirit. Even so, the magazine Architectural Record still regretted the failure of the Americans, despite the pleas of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan and designer-craftsmen like Gustav Stickley and Louis Tiffany, to find a connection between art and industry. It further expressed a sense of embarrassment that Americans had to go abroad to learn what America’s own modern designers had taught the Europeans. Nevertheless, the demand for more handsome manufactured products had reached a point where it could no longer be denied. Robert W. de Forest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a museum monograph on the Macy exposition, speculated (as did many others at the time) on the most appropriate title for the emerging profession.

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