ART REVIEW : A Nostalgic, Endearing Look at Modern Design Since 1935

Design exhibitions are the visual equivalent of bringing on the Rockettes glittering with sequins and prancing like ponies. You can let your hair down at a design show. If it is like the one opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you can have a good wallow in the-way-we-were nostalgia.

Titled “Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was,” it consists of some 250 examples of the decorative art that succeeded Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Organized by Le Musee des Arts Decoratif in Montreal, it is a particularly open-handed and encyclopedic look at the waves of modern design styles. Here it is supplemented by a section on California material arranged by Martha Drexler Lynn, LACMA’s associate curator of decorative arts.

Nothing beats design for its ability to define the intimate atmosphere of past periods. A lot of folks are going to find their faces laced with wry little smiles when they recognize the shape of an amoeba-form coffee table and a high-tech poster they had in their starter apartment just before the first baby came. The baby, now grown, will be agog at all that over-designed stuff their folks thought was hip. Quaint and a little tacky today. Secretly they’ll wish they could afford it now that it’s neo-chic at four figures on Melrose Avenue. Any way you slice it, this show is endearing.

On the other hand, visitors inclined to shift their minds to higher gears will find plenty to ponder here in terms of the study of material culture. A smart catalogue essay points out that the rise of this kind of design paralleled the birth of Big Brother government from the fascists in Germany and Italy to the communists in the U.S.S.R. and the social welfare policies of Britain and New Deal America. There is more than a little common ground between their paternalism and the programmatic background of modern design with its rather coercive insistence that design could improve your life but only design as dictated from above.

Modern design evolved out of the fine arts, notably the German Bauhaus. The show is heavily laced with objects conceived by people who were also practicing architects, sculptors or painters like Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi or--of all people--the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. The idea was a kind of popularization of the fine arts that would benefit ordinary people by bringing the most honed contemporary aesthetic to their daily lives. That aesthetic basically worshiped the stripped-down, unornamented style dictated by mass-produced industrial goods.

By happy coincidence, “Modern Design” appears simultaneously with other relevant shows. LACMA’s new Liubov Popova survey looks at a member of the Russian avant-garde. Her work set the stage for “Modern Design” which, in turn, shows how the fine arts influenced popular culture. An extravaganza over at the Museum of Contemporary Art does the opposite. “High & Low” demonstrates how popular culture influenced the fine arts. All should be seen and mulled.

Modern design pretended to a kind of rational detachment. It’s at least poetically significant that after World War II it was the neutral Scandinavian countries that emerged as the great designers, along with Finland and Italy who seemed to have been in it more for style than substance.

All insisted that less is more. That’s obvious from some 1941 modular furniture by Saarinen and Charles Eames. It’s like a dressing-table version of a building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, all right angles and puritanical plainness. It undoubtedly benefited the common man by providing a prototype for useful austerity still found today in countless unpainted furniture shops. Modern design gurus professed to hate ornament and decoration. Poetic justice that their work should wind up in museums’ decorative arts departments.

Nearby, stands Marcel Breuer’s birch-plywood Isokon Long Chair. It’s plain enough but its curves are decorative and its intent appears more sculptural than anatomical. Truth to tell, the fruits of modern design resulted as often in pure conceptual design objects as in utilitarian workmanship in the service of the people. Further proof of motives beyond the public weal is the fact that much of this work was exquisitely crafted and very expensive, reaching the public only in downscale knockoffs.

Nor was the impulse ever as pure as the purists would have it. Designers who lusted after the elegant chic of Art Deco took the concept of streamlining to update Noel Coward. Employing a wind tunnel to reduce the drag of an airplane or locomotive is authentically useful. Using one to reduce the air flow around a juke box or a silver pitcher by Peter Muller-Munk is an occasion for pure hilarity. All the same the idea produced such classic objects as Henry Dreyfuss’ lovely 1935 Thermos pitcher.

The truth is that design in this period followed the fine arts like a private eye trailing an adulterer. Artists wanted a bigger audience. Ornament appeared despite the mandarin’s ban. What did artists like Picasso, Matisse and Miro care about their rules? Designers wanted to be seen as artists. Piero Fornasetti produced a memorable set of plates bearing women’s faces in the erotic-surreal style of Max Ernst’s engraving collages. George Nelson Associates came up with clocks that look like Pop-Constructivist sculpture.

When those blob-shapes called biomorphs appeared in Miro’s painting and Arp’s sculpture, the designers were close behind as we see in paramecium-shaped glass vases by Vicke Lindstrand and Noguchi’s chess table. Noguchi looks very good in this show.

When Abstract Expressionist painting had been around long enough to be domesticated designers used it for one of the most eccentric of styles. Gunnar Andersen made a throw-away chair out of lava-layers of rubber. Poland’s Magdalena Abakanowicz got a foot each in the fine and decorative arts with hairy, sexual hangings that look like cloaks for Attila the Hun. Peter Voulkos actually forged clay into art and started the L.A. avant garde.

Neither was the modern impulse as modern as it styled itself. It reached into the historical past bypassing much of European design. The Dane Hans Wenger derived inspiration from Shaker furniture. Jens Quistgaard and others took huge drafts of Oriental art into everything from chairs to ice buckets. In the real world, graduate students became enamored of Japanese boutique crafts for their simplicity and low prices.

After World War II Americans wanted safety and conformity but with more style than Spam. Postwar modernism got a bit eccentric and self-congratulatory as in cars with tail fins. Saarinen’s “Womb Chair” looks like a flayed pinto pony. Charles and Ray Eames designed a table inspired by a surfboard. Glass artists like Nils Landberg, Carlo Scarpa and Gio Ponti had the guts to use lovely liquid color.

Today we have renewed affection for these excesses. We’re still not quite sure how we feel about the moment when the ‘60s rolled around and designers joined that branch of the fine arts going crazy for Pop culture. The ‘50s were Baroque. The ‘60s started to get rococo-silly.

You have to admit they were refreshingly brash. The key Italian designer Ettore Sottsass managed to combine Pop with primitive in a series of vases. George Nelson Associates joined small orange pillows and called the result “The Marshmallow Couch.” Matta made a whole room full of furniture that jigsaw-puzzles into a soft sculpture.

The California section is a nice way to end the show. There is a quality of relaxed originality. R.M. Schindler’s folding chairs look like modernized Snow White. A. Quincy Jones’ custom sofa unit is so nicely proportioned that its cantilevered attenuation barely shows. The ceramic people like the Natzlers and Beatrice Wood look freshly classical and unforced. Bernard Kester has played so many roles in the local design scene, we’d near forgotten he was an accomplished fabric designer.

“Modern Design” needs little puffery in an era that has once again become dominated by design and architecture. Today, however, we call it “Post-Modern.” Obviously that is a kind of revolt against the austerities of modernism. People really want ornament and elaboration. They are getting it all from mansard roofs to modern silver. The only difference seems to be that there is little influence from painting and sculpture. One branch of that has virtually melded with architecture. Much of the rest blends so seamlessly with design that distinctions are blurred. That is both democratic and disturbing. It suggests a culture empty of fresh ideas.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., June 30-Aug. 25 , (213) 857-6522 . Closed Monday s .