For the Love of Modernity

For much of this century, people were excited by the ideal of modernity, eagerly applauding the triumphs of technology and fervently hoping it would improve their lives. Dictators and democratic leaders alike employed designers to glorify their regimes and sway the masses. “Designing Modernity: the Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), explores a turbulent love affair with the new through six decades of social and political upheaval.

Posters and postcards, furniture and fine art, appliances and automobiles have been selected to challenge assumptions and bring history to life. Too often, museums and books have presented a beauty parade of design classics, from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Bauhaus to Le Corbusier and Raymond Loewy, ignoring whatever failed to fit the canon. In contrast, this show is full of surprises and grabs the imagination by telling unfamiliar stories. Most of the 285 objects were made, not just for use or delight, but to convey an idea, subtly or brutally. They are arranged by theme, in three chronological sections.

The first, “Confronting Modernity” covers the formative decades of Modernism, 1885-1920, during which the Arts and Crafts movement rebelled against the tyranny of industrialized production and reformers strove to reconcile machine and craft in order to create affordable, well-designed objects. It was an era of wrenching change, as people poured into factories and cities, and--as today--there were many who tried to close their eyes to reality. The writhing tendrils of Art Nouveau and the folk-inspired designs of romantic nationalists obscured the achievements of pioneers who were far ahead of their time.

One of the earliest and most arresting pieces in the show is a sideboard, created in 1876 by English designer Edward William Godwin. Floating planes of ebonized mahogany are trimmed in silver. The piece looks forward to the lightweight architecture of the 1920s, and back to the heritage of Japan--which had just opened up to the West--and demonstrates how beauty can be achieved through pure form, without surface ornament.

Two complementary sections cover the years 1914-45. “Celebrating Modernity” explores the revolution wrought by high-speed transportation and communications. “Radio broadcasting . . . has made the world a neighborhood,” boasts a plaque from the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress Fair in Chicago. The plaque’s circular maps of the world are flanked by a console radio of 1935, designed by Walter Dorwin Teague with a big disc of blue-tinted mirror glass concealing the mechanism. A circular glass table incorporates a magazine rack that suggests an airplane propeller or turbine blades. Although this section focuses on progressive design, the curators devote a room to traditionalists who refused to join the march to the future and instead continued to create unique pieces for affluent clients.

“Manipulating Modernity,” shows how design was exploited to serve the state--notably in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and New Deal America. Similar images were employed in support of radically different goals. Three eagles fly together: one carrying a fasces, another a swastika, a third thunderbolts and a gear. The first two extol the brute power of fascism and remind us of the destruction it would soon unleash. The third is the familiar emblem of the National Recovery Administration, which Roosevelt established to fight the Depression. In propaganda too, modernity was challenged by the forces of reaction. Regimes of every political stripe evoked the past to achieve a sense of legitimacy in uncertain times. Renderings of the British viceroy’s house in Delhi appear as much like a pompous stage set as the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, though the goals of their occupants had nothing in common.

Nearly all the works here were selected from the 70,000 items amassed by Mitchell Wolfson Jr. As a boy, Wolfson began a collection of hotel keys while traveling the world with his parents. Back home in Miami, he absorbed the spirit of fantasy in the family’s vintage movie theaters. He studied art and European history at Princeton before inheriting a fortune that allowed him to devote all his energies to collecting.

Skeptics wondered if Wolfson was simply a rich dilettante in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst--especially after he acquired the matchbox collection of King Farouk--but this exhibition confirms his originality and prescience. Now 58, he is still searching for offbeat treasures in his favorite fields of artist-designed furniture, transportation, world’s fair memorabilia and the arts of persuasion. Hurricane Andrew knocked out his two private Pullman cars, which he liked to use to travel across North America, but he still maintains an exotic castle in the Italian city of Genoa and hopes to install part of his collection there.

The smartest move he made was to hire Peggy A. Loar, who had headed the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibition service, to help convert a vintage Miami Beach storage depot into an institution he called the Wolfsonian. As its director, she brought in scholars to research, catalog and display his hoard. “Designing Modernity” opened last November as the fledgling museum’s inaugural exhibition, curated by Wendy Kaplan and Marianne Lamonaca. After its Los Angeles showing, it will continue on to other cities in the United States and Europe.

Here, senior LACMA curators Leslie Greene Bowman and Timothy O. Benson have spaced the exhibition more generously than in Miami and have added two iconic automobiles. One is a custom-built Delage, created for the French Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, as an epitome of luxury and elegance. From teardrop fenders to tapered trunk, its curves are as sleek and complex as those of a Brancusi bronze.

The other car is a humble Volkswagen Beetle, made in 1951, but conceived in 1934 by Ferdinand Porsche as a car for the people--Germany’s answer to the Model T. On the street, it would appear too familiar to merit a glance, but here--surrounded by exotic treasures--its harmony of line is almost as seductive as that of its snooty companion. Incredibly, the same essential shape is still in production in some parts of the world, making this the most durable automobile design of all time.

In the ‘20s, and still more during the Depression, only a privileged few could enjoy the thrill of planes, ocean liners, and high-powered cars, but everyone could dream of escape from the mundane. Games and models demonstrate the public’s intoxication with speed. “Always faster,” bragged a German railway poster. “To New York in 6 1/2 days,” boasted a promotion of 1932 for the Rex and Savoia liners. “Two days to Europe,” countered another, showing a dirigible with Nazi insignia hovering over the mist-shrouded towers of Manhattan. The crash of the Hindenburg, later in that year of 1937, would set transatlantic air travel back a decade.

Even at home, one could enjoy a sense of acceleration. Streamlining became a fetish in the ‘30s, as clocks and cameras, water pitchers and meat slicers were styled to look as though they should cut swiftly through the air. Prototype chairs of 1931 by Alvar Aalto in bent birch and by Mies van der Rohe in tubular steel showed that furniture, too, could be aerodynamic--though there were few sales at the time. Italian futurists were the first artists to celebrate speed, and Filippo Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto, declared that a racing car was more beautiful than any classical sculpture. The sculptor Renato Bertelli turned Mussolini’s porcine features into a “continuous profile” of bronzed terra cotta that could be mistaken for a spinning top.

Skyscrapers were another potent symbol of the brave new world. Paul Frankl’s skyscraper bookcase of 1928 keeps company here with Man Ray’s photograph of the RCA Building, and a stepped silver pitcher. A faceted wooden desk, inspired by Rudolph Steiner’s angular Goetheanum in Switzerland, climbs skyward. A height and weight meter takes the form of a high-rise inviting customers to “step on it.”

A man prepares to step off an elevated window ledge in Stuyvesant van Veen’s moody painting, “Suicide With Skyscrapers.” The exhibition is full of such provocative juxtapositions. “Celebrating Modernity” ends on a note of optimism, however, with a silvery maquette of the Trylon and Perisphere from the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40.

This was an era in which communism and fascism fought for preeminence in Europe, while America remained self-absorbed in the quest for prosperity or economic recovery at home. (As late as 1925, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover thought that the United States had nothing to show at or learn from the now-legendary Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and declined an invitation to participate.) The exhibition shows how quickly America overtook Europe in styling cars and consumer goods for mass production, however.

Design also played a key role in selling ideologies, and later, when war loomed, in demonizing the enemy. “Heave ho--to the left” proclaims a poster for the Social Democrats of Austria, showing Hitler as a runt in a felt hat. An Italian baby food company sponsored a board game, resembling our Chutes and Ladders, in which children could demonstrate their patriotism by sharing in the conquest of Abyssinia, moving their counters along the road to Addis Adaba, as defenders fled in confusion. An anti-fascist sketch depicts Mussolini as an ape reviewing his goose-stepping troops.

Some of the images have an immediacy that leaps across the years. A magazine cover shows an idealized Aryan family sunbathing on a beach with an eagle soaring above; it is easy to guess that this is Nazi racial propaganda. But the impact of Norman Rockwell’s painting of an American family enjoying “freedom from fear” has been dulled by familiarity, and it is hard to recapture the impact it must have had in the ‘40s. The most brutal caricature in the show is also American: a poster of 1942 that urges servicemen to “Fool the Axis--Use Prophylaxis,” and depicts Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo as grotesque carriers of venereal disease. On the home front, the Fuhrer was modeled as a handy pincushion, bending over for punishment.

Little is shown of the war effort that challenged designers to transform planes, ships and weapons into tools of victory. That would require another show and vast galleries. Here, the effort is implied, and the one tangible product of war on display is a molded plywood traction splint, created by Charles and Ray Eames for the U.S. Navy. That functional life-saver led on to glider nosecones and, at war’s end, to the chairs that furnished the homes of returning veterans.

‘Designing Modernity” offers the shock of the old, reminding us of how many innovations we now take for granted, and prompting the thought that many Americans seem to have given up on the future to seek cozy refuge in an imagined past. The exhibition evokes the optimism that carried people through tough times, and the ways in which design mirrored those decades. It serves as a time capsule, crammed with sharp insights and found objects that give us a fresh perspective on present-day challenges. And it allows visitors to fantasize about a rich assortment of covetable goods and decide which one to collect for oneself. (I’ll take the Delage.)

A companion book with the same title (Thames & Hudson: $60 hardbound, $34.50 softbound) illustrates almost every included object and contains 10 scholarly essays on the exhibition’s themes.

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“Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945,” L.A. County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Ends Sept. 22. Adults, $6; seniors 62 and older and students with ID, $4; ages 6-17, $1; ages 5 and under, free. All admissions are free on the second Wednesday of the month. (213) 857-6000.