Contours of an era

The task was daunting -- to capture an American era in a couple of hundred objects, to trace the mid-20th century in art and design.

Brooklyn Museum of Art curators Brooke Kamin Rapaport and Kevin L. Stayton eventually settled on 240 artworks and objects in their exhibition “Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960,” which opened a year ago at the museum and landed in San Diego last week.

They chose paintings and sculpture by Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly and Alexander Calder along with Eva Zeisel china, Claire McCardell dresses and boomerang-patterned Formica. They found links between Jackson Pollock’s abstractions and a 1953 Corvette; the Slinky and Eero Saarinen’s TWA airport terminal in New York.

“The basic idea is that every time period has a visual expression, a vanguard aesthetic that was an indicator of the times,” says Rapaport, project director for the exhibition.

And the “vanguard aesthetic” for the Atomic Age? “The softly curving line, the contour that evokes the human body,” writes Stayton in the book that accompanies the exhibition.

“Just as the machine seemed to be the source that informed art and design between the wars,” Stayton adds now, “the rejection of that coldness in favor of a more naturalistic, biomorphic form seemed to be what the postwar era had to offer as its most original contribution.”

“People realized that the machine’s promise didn’t pay off, that it was destructive as well as creative,” Rapaport says. So artists and designers turned “to shapes based on nature, the human body, back to the handmade and the man-made.”

Not that such a strategy could erase the anxieties of the era, as many of the works attest.

“No art is produced in a vacuum,” Rapaport says, “and the works we’ve chosen for this exhibition really relate to the historical context.”As the show was being installed in San Diego, we asked the two curators to make one more pass at summarizing the era. If they could choose only two or three objects to make their points, what would they be? Rapaport, now an independent contemporary art curator, whittled the artworks to two exemplary pieces. Stayton, a decorative arts scholar who is currently the Brooklyn museum’s chief curator, selected three objects.

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Leg Splint (1941-42)

Charles Eames and Ray Eames

Designed for the U.S. military during World War II, it is, to Stayton, a beautiful embodiment of biomorphic form following function -- with new technology tossed in. “It encapsulates what so much of the show is about,” he says -- a point where design meets history.

The Eameses pioneered an assembly-line method to mold compound curves into laminated plywood, and then made it conform to the human leg. “This wasn’t just a search for curvy lines and flashy, strange shapes,” Stayton says. “It really comes out of a search for making objects that make sense. It’s about a search for a practical solution to a real problem -- how to move a soldier that has a damaged leg. It looks biomorphic because it is biomorphic.”

Ray Eames was so enamored with the medical devices that she transformed a few into artworks -- the so-called Splint sculptures -- one of which is in the show, as is the device itself.

The Eameses subsequently expanded on the theme in their contoured mass-produced postwar furniture designs, most famously in their molded-plywood “potato chip” chairs.

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‘Predicta’ Television Set (1959)

Catherine Walker, Severin Jonassen, and Richard Whipple, Philco Corp.

Talk about biomorphic. Stayton calls Philco’s Model 4654 a “big eye that was looking at you.”

The Predicta was simply a television tube encased in a plastic and brass housing and set atop a pedestal that contained the controls and a speaker. “It looks like a science-fiction creature, a one-eyed monster,” Stayton says. “Most televisions from this period look like the rest of your furniture; here is television that is self-consciously modern. It’s not trying to hide what it is, bringing you this new medium, but at the same time it’s a little ominous.”In 1950 there were a million television sets in American households; 10 years later, there would be 50 million. “It presents this image in the American home that begins to homogenize culture,” Stayton says. “It symbolizes the dichotomy between the promise of modern technology and the parallel threat that it brings.”

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‘Entombment #1 / The Entombment’ (1944)

Mark Rothko

“When we think of Mark Rothko, we usually think of his later large canvasses, velvety masses of color,” Rapaport says. “Here, in the 1940s, he created a number of paintings with Christian content, focusing on the emotional and psychological complexity of the times.”

She considers it a particularly eloquent example of the way artists rejected the traditional figure -- no longer relevant to the era’s urgent issues -- but still made reference to it.

Painted in the year before V-E Day and Hiroshima, the work “places survivors grieving over a horizontal figure,” says Rapaport of the composition that echoes Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Christ taken down from the cross. “Rothko is symbolizing the wartime deaths of many innocent people with the death of one innocent person,” Rapaport says. “The colors are very muted earth tones, somber, sad and grievous.”

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Coffee Urn (1961)

Richard L. Huggins, Gorham Manufacturing Co.

One piece of a matching silver service made for the officers’ mess of the U.S. guided-missile cruiser Long Beach, this urn’s “vital form” is biomorphic-atomic. Stayton points out its humorously bulbous shape and its more ominous finial, a direct reference to the weaponry and fuel source on board the cruiser.

In the 1950s, that stylized spinning-electron model of the atom was everywhere. “The period was looking at nuclear energy as this wonderful thing that was going to save the world, cheap energy and unbounded benefits for everyone,” Stayton says. Meanwhile, it also held “the menace of total annihilation.”

“The thing that I find almost poignant about the object is that it was so optimistic,” he adds, “so light and bubbly and playful, yet it was made for use on this battleship of war at the height of the Cold War” -- the Cuban missile crisis came a year after this piece was designed -- “when the world was on the verge of nuclear destruction.”

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‘This Tortured Earth’ (1943)

Isamu Noguchi

Rapaport calls this 26-by-26-inch bronze model a “proto-earthwork.”

“The idea of sculpting the earth followed me through the years, with mostly playground models as metaphor, but then there were others,” Noguchi would write in the 1980s, 40 years after creating this work. “ ‘This Tortured Earth’ was my concept for a large area to memorialize the tragedy of war. There is injury to the earth itself. The war machine, I thought, would be excellent equipment for sculpture, to bomb it into existence.”

The scarred and gouged design was never realized in a physical landscape, but in 1952 Noguchi finished two bridges commemorating war dead in Peace Park in Hiroshima.

Noguchi makes more than one appearance in “Vital Forms,” a fact Rapaport ties to the versatility of artists in the 1940s and ‘50s. His famous amoeboid glass-topped coffee table, designed in 1944 and back in production as of the mid-1980s, is in a furnishings “suite” in the San Diego show.