Goldilocks Goes Modern

The Asterisk, the Kite and the Atom--a trio of triumphal mid-century clocks conceived by George Nelson--elegantly tick time as Goldilocks digs into an Eva Zeisel Town and Country soup bowl. Raising a Gio Ponti-designed asymmetrical spoon to her lips, she takes a whiff of the Three Bears’ steaming chili. This is no regressive daydream of a Modernist collector striding La Brea Avenue, but author/illustrator Steven Guarnaccia’s version of the children’s story, retold and scrupulously redecorated as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne,” to be published by Abrams this April.

In his dedication, Guarnaccia pays tribute to his great-uncle, California builder Joseph Eichler, who, even more than Neutra or Schindler perhaps, spread Modernist sensibilities among middle-class suburbia. The author’s more immediate inspiration came while he participated in a French exhibition devoted to the Goldilocks tale. “A lightbulb went on,” Guarnaccia recalls. “This is essentially a story about furniture. Goldilocks comes in and tries out the chairs, the beds, although the traditional tale doesn’t explicitly take you through this.”

Guarnaccia’s retelling is that explicit. Goldilocks seats herself on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s paternal, severely uncomfortable 1903 Ladderback chair, then moves to the 1958 Arne Jacobsen Egg chair--”what could be more mom-like and nurturing?” the author asks--before settling into baby bear’s 1946 Eames LCW, which, although the most comfortable, shatters into a pile of bent plywood beneath the intruder’s weight. “I’m sure I’m going to hear from the Eames people about the sturdiness of their chairs,” Guarnaccia says. Although design elements are duly identified on the book’s inside cover, Guarnaccia, fearing Disney litigation, swapped out baby bear’s mouse ears for a Davy Crockett coonskin cap.

While the Zeisel bowl and Ponti spoon may stir stronger pangs in the adult collector, Guarnaccia puts emphasis on the book’s preschool viability. “Kids come into contact with a design environment every day,” he says. If, in a child’s world, even the most banal Home Depot breakfast chair can be charged with radiance, then imagine the synaptic splendor when they make the acquaintance of Alvar Aalto’s Savoy vase, undulating as hypnotically as the water in it.

“Children already imbue objects around them with personality,” Guarnaccia argues. “By introducing them to designers who imbue their chairs with more personality than any chair has a need for, I hope I’m nurturing budding designers.”