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Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Copyright O zoog by Kristina Wilson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including

illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by

Sections to7 and 1oB of the U.S. Copyright Law and except

by reviewers for the public press), without written permission

from the publishers.

Designed by Rita Jules, Miko McGinty lnc.

Set in Stempel Garamond and Whitney type by Rita Jules.

Printed in China by Regent Publishing Services Limited

Wilson, Kristina. The modern eye : Stieglitz, MoMA, and the art of the

exhibition, 1925-1934 / Kristina Wilson. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

lsBN 978-o-3oo-t49t6-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

t. Modernism (Art)-United States-Exhibitions. z. Art, American-zoth century-Exhibitions. 3. Design-United States-History-2oth century-Exhibitions. 4. Modernism (Art)-Public opinion-United States. 5. Art museums-New York (State)-New York-History-2oth century. 6. Art and society-United States-History-zoth century. l. Title.

N65rz.5.M63W55 2oo9

709.73'ogo42-dc22 zooBo53367

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of nNst/Ntso 239.48-t992 (Permanence of Paper).

ro9B76543zt

Jacket illustrations: (front) lnstallation view of Summer Exhibition:

Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art (detail of fig. 66); (back) Joseph Urban, "Man's Den," in The Architect and

the lndustrial Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, t9z9 (detail

of fig, zo) Poge ii: lnstallation view of Murals by American Painters and

Photographers, Museum of Modern Art (detail of fig. 5o) Paget: Philip Johnson, installation view of Machine Art,

Museum of Modern Art (detail of fig. Zg) Page zoo: lnstallation view of Art in Our Time: toth Anniversary Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art (detail of fig.3)

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worst of the Great Depression, Machine Art offered critical revisions to the world as created by the Little Review. Although Alfred Barr obviously felt the

need to referencc the earlier show as an "important

pioneer effort" in his essay for the catalogue (quoted

as an epigraph for this chapter), he simultaneously

cast aspersions on that effort by labeling it "romantic" and the art shown as "fantastic" and

"modernistic." His exhibition countered the naive,

celebratory inclusiveness of the earlier exhibition

with what it deemed a more rigorously defined machine aesthetic and a more constructive agenda

for advancing the transformation of daily lives through machine products. But it also, through the commercial drama of Philip Johnson's installation,

challenged even its own pretenses about the ultimate

social efficacy of machine art. MoM.Ns boutique

outfitting converted the morally improving geom-

etries of machine-made forms into fabulously

desirable material commodities.

MACHINE ART

Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr must be understood

as coauthors of the intellectual agenda that motivated

Machine Art. AlthoughJohnson selected the objects for the show and masterminded its evocative, sump-

tuous installation, he did so within the institutional logic that Barr had established at MoMA. Further- more, both Barr and Johnson wrote substantial

introductory essays for the catalogue (Barr's was

four pages, Johnson's four and one-half); inasmuch

as a catalogue is the version of an exhibition that

is preserved for posterity, Barr and Johnson contrib-

uted equally to the intellectual and interpretive

parameters of the show. The goal of Machine Art, trumpeted by both Barr and Johnson in the cata-

r8z sptnttunL AND MATERTAL GoDS tN THE MAcHtNE AGE

logue, and subsequently in the press discourse they

spawned, was to celebrate the underappreciated

beauty of machines, machine parts, and the products

of machine processes. Barr opened his foreword

to the catalogue with a quotation from Plato which pronounced that objects that were "always and

absolutely" beautiful were composed of "straight

lines and circles, and shapes, plane or solid, made . . .

by lathe, ruler and square."4e The exhibition installa-

tion itself emphasized the "platonic" beauty of the

machines by presenting them in isolation from all

functional context: elevated on pedestals and set

against pristine, polished wall coverings under care-

fully modcrated soft lights or spotlights. According to this explicit intellectual rhetoric, the objects on

display had nothing to do with everyday life-with functional needs, with product availability, or with consumer desires.

Floweveq the catalogue that invoked Plato in

its foreword also inciuded the prices of the objects

on view, along with the names of their manufac- turers and New York area retailers (fig. ror). Indeed,

the latter sections of the catalogue essentially were a

buying guide. They included a substantial section

focused on eminently affordable domestic goods

such as stew pans and mixing bowls (7y to 9o cents),

and another on the newest, most technologically

practical appliances, such as a vacuum cleaner

($3a.7y;.r' None of the objects illustrated bore the

traditional ornamental excesses of more expensive

goods: as prices varied, the objects stayed uniformiy spare. Thus the catalogue depicted a world appar- ently without pecuniary distinctions, and made its

audience into a kind of radically equalized group

of consumers. It implied that all would seek out these economical and useful commodities regardless

of social and class status, and that no one would

see any reason to spend more on superfluous

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Building and purge the Ritz Tower of its Baroque

cosmetics! They would not thereby become great

architecture, but they would at least be clean."it Throughout his foreword to the Machine Art

catalogue, Barr argued for the moral authority of simple designs through a deftly woven web of allu-

sions. Most notably, he chose quotations from Plato

and St. Thomas Aquinas as epigraphs for his essay.

He then, in explaining platonic and thomistic beauty, repeatedly used such loaded terms as "purity" and "perfection" to describe the philosophers' aesthetics. Barr also argued for the morality of machine-based

aesthetics by likening it to the unimpeachable

aesthetics of nature: "The beauty of the machine art

in so far as it is a mere by-product of function may seem a meagre and even trivial kind of beauty. But

this is not necessarily so. The beauty of all natural

objects is also a by-product-the helix of a snail's shell (and a steel coil), the graduated feathering of a

bird's wing (and the lear.es of a laminated spring),

the rabbit's footprints in the snow (and the track

of nonskid tires), the elegance of fruit (and of incan- descent bulbs)."1r He thus implied, in an argument

remarkably similar to L6ger's and Heap's of the

previous decade, that the objects shown in this

exhibit had an aesthetic innocence not often seen in

the self-conscious, self-styling, and self-promoting

art world. From their innocence, these objects derived a unique moral authority.

Scholars have tended to analyze Barr's theory of design as a battle between his interest in aesthetics

and his commitment to function.is From his writ- ings it is clear that the two were not so easily divided in his mind. A passage from Macbine Art demon- strates atypical instance of how Barr frequently

conflated the functional and aesthetic appreciation

of objects: "A knowledge of function may be of considerable importance in the visual enjoyment

r84 setntrunr AND MATERTAL GoDs tN THE MAcHtNE AGE

of machine art, though Plato might have considered

such knowledge an impurity. . . . \Thoever under-

stands the dynamics of pitch in propelier blades (No. 4r) or the distribution of forces in a ball bearing (No. yo) so that he can participate imagina- tively in the action of mechanical functions is likely to find that this knowledge enhances the beauty of the

objects. In the same way, using or understanding

the use of the calipers (No. 294), the retort (No. lg+), or the rotary floor polisher (No. 7r) is likely to

increase their aesthetic value."J4 \fhen we consider that his views on design were laced with a moralizing

agenda, the apparent dichotomy between function

and aesthetics becomes less divisive. Rather than

deciding that Barr believed aesthetics to be more

important than function, or vice versa, one can see

his theory as one of mutual reinforcement: the objects

that possessed the purest aesthetics were a product

of the most efficient, economical achievement of

function, and these constituted, for him, the most

honest, empowering examples of design. The nuanced

nature of his approach to design theory echoes my

discussion of his broader aesthetic concerns from

Chapter 3: in this early phase of his career, Barr

seems to have rarely insisted on strict dogma.

At the heart of Barr's proselytizingideas was an ideology of good design that he had absorbed from

both European and IJ.S. sources. Modernist design

reform originated with \X/illiam Morris, the British socialist, among whose more famous decrees was

the injunction: "Have nothing in your houses that

you do not know to be useful or believe to be beau-

tiful."tt Morris maintained that consumers who purchased simple, well-functioning goods made by

satisfied craftsmen would benefit, for those objects

would foster an environment in which both indi- viduality and functional efficiency were valued.

Morris's views influenced many succeeding

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enlightenment by furnishing their houses with intelligent, status quo-defying objects -in essence, that the principles behind well-designed furnishings

could act as a role model for the human psyche. Furthermore, he believed that the Museum of

Modern Art had a responsibility to educate the American pubiic about the qualities that constituted

good modern design. It could do this by exposing the public to such design and persuading people to

outfit their homes according to the machine modei. In a typical statement of the museum's goals in r938, Barr asserted the importance of teaching the

American public about intelligent domestic products

that also embodied good aesthetics: "Education in

industrial design and commercial art,like education in architecture, is perhaps more important to the general public than education in painting and sculp- ture. . . . Existing organizations concerned with the consumer's point of view in objects of industrial

art approach the problem entirely from the stand- point of wtility. The Museum's Department of Industrial Art would be concerned with the qwality of the design."6t

It is important to note that Barr's Morris-via- the-Bauhaus reform impulses in no way carried the

radical rhetoric of Mumford's reform agenda, or that of the Bauhaus or \flerkbund, for that matter.

Central to Mumford's revolution ary cry was the economic reorganization of society: because

machine-made objects would be readily affordable and desirable for their efficiency, divisions in society

based on commodity ownership would disappear (and thus everyone wouid benefit intellectuaily

and spiritually through ownership of good design).6' Barr did not explicitly advocate this kind of economic radicalism, but Machine Art, inadvertently or not, lent itself to such social theorizing. From

one perspective, the prominently iisted prices and

r86 sprnrrunL AND MATERTAL GoDs IN THE MAcHTNE AGE

retailer information for each object on view

converted the exhibition into a directory of equal- opportunity consumerism. As much as the publicity for Machine Art emphasized the aesthetic purity of the objects on view, it also emphasized the accessibility and affordabiiity of the objects as prod- ucts. Writing in MoMAs own Bulletin, Johnson pronounced: "Another purpose of the Exhibition

is to serve as a practical guide to the buying public.

The exhibition will contain no objects which are not already in mass production, or are not on sale in

the United States. . . . The Catalog will contain . . . special photographs of all the objects in the exhibi-

tion . . . accompanied by the narne of the manufac-

turer, the New York distributor, and the price. The book will thus serve as a useful guide for the person who wants to use or study the art of the machine."6l

And so, without actually making a politically radical statement, Machine Art provided all of the ingredients for just such a claim: it argued that unadorned design held the moral high ground over

ornamented period styles, it implied that humanity would benefit from the example of such moral purity,

and it offered concrete evidence of the affordability and accessibility of these powerful goods. Mumford may have noticed this potential in the exhibition, for he included among the plates in Tecbnics and Ciztili- zation four images of objects that were featured in

Machine Art (which he identified as such). Helen Appleton Read was among the few critics who

pursued the implications of the world created by the exhibition. "The exhibition proves both in its instal- lation and content," she asserted, "that attractive

backgrounds of living are possible to people of the smallest incomes if the rules set forth by the exhibi- tion are followed."6a

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qloorus 's.ra1eaq lroreroqel se aldrurs s? sos?A'septxal

ureld :drrligrcnporde.r'ssauqtoorus'flrcrldurls

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sri parou8r dyaS;e1 pue u8rsep urepoul;o stcadse

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sn..'s8ulql Jo ePIS

aldrs aqr ur potseratur arour araa. I pu? lool{ctrH [11assng-d.ruag] rng 'sn?qn?g oql ruorJ Sutruoc

sr 'cr1sqdls dla,rnd s?rd, tr aur qlrnd. pu? 'rusruetr.rnd

sq qtrna. q8no.rqr au?r eH 'per?r1s dlpar pa-r;1y

reqf 'fep 1?r{1 Jo ulslleicos I?roru elol{nd. eql

'auo8 sr snladrur eloq,rr aqt 'aas no,,( 1ng 'qceordde

sn?qneg er{l uo paseg dpsour s?nd. tr tnq 'stsunlnC oql uroJJ .Ie,r.o tdal 'tr;o Ued tueuodurt ue sea.

eurqf,pui eqt yo drqsroa er{I 'nd.or{s rJerpu?q-rtu? uB sgne lL, :aorl;Olur 166r B ur uorlrqrqxe ar{t ot

saqcro.rdde s(rr?g pue srr{ ueaatog secuaraJJrp oql

petpaurlop JIesurn{ uosugof 'rusrleuort?sues s(uorl

-lqgxe agr ur dlpeprcap ,,(e1 uoungrrluor s.uosuqof uaqr 'aurqcerr aqr dq paiuroJer pu€ poruJoJsueJl

ltercos Jo uorsrl e uV aulqc?IAtr or rr{3no-rq rr?g }J ol^ls eurqlew :uosur.lof drlrqd

outfit one's home-and to make that sensibility, that

style, as appealing and seductive as possible.

The lnstallation

Tohnson's installation of Machine Art was far more dramatic than anything the museum had put up

to date, and it solidified his reputation as "our best

showman, and possibly the world's best."6e

Throughout the museum's town house, he mounted

wall and ceiling panels to mask its existing domestic

interior fittings (see Chapter 3), erected special

shelves and pedestals on which to display the objects,

and installed dramatic spotlights. He created, in

short, a perfect environment for showing off the

machine objects to their benefit, and one which,

owing to its all-encompassing, hermetically sealed

nature, was highly effective in luring audience

members to adopt its point of view The wall panels

were of avariety of materials. Some-large sheets of aluminum, stainless steel, and copper-were

examples of the materials used in fabricating many

of the objects on view (although, tellingly, Johnson wanted his walls of industrial materials buffed to

a degree of surface perfection rarely achieved in

most commercial production)'zo others-unfinished

and painted woods, and linen canvases painted pastel

blue, pink, and gray-complemented the industrial

materials with their minimalist planes of varied

colors and warmer, natural textures. Johnson also

suspended a iinen scrim just below the museum's

ornate plaster ceiling and its lighting tracks; the result

was a flat ceiling, in keeping with the minimalist

textures of the walls, that glowed with diffused light

over his entire gallery space.Tr There were no didactic

iabels explaining the history of machine design, nor

even individual object labels. The only signs bore the

names of various manufacturing companies and

were mounted on the walls near their products' In

r88 sptnlrunL AND MATERTAL GoDS lN THE MAcHINE AGE

addition, the quotation from Plato that Barr used as

the catalogue epigraph was, as the Neza Yorle Times

noted, "conspicuously posted in the museum."z'

The objects themselves were installed on a variety

of pedestals, shelves, and glass cases. Some objects,

such as the ball bearing from the catalogue cover or

a large aluminum propeller, sat alone on a pedestal

or were hung on a wall, their geometric simplicity,

harmony of interchanging parts, and glistening mate-

rial strong enough to command the devoted attention

of visitors (fig. roz). Other objects were grouped on

shelves in multiple series of increasing or decreasing

sizes, such as the selection of four cylindrical

aluminum Wear-Ever food containers from the

Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company, ranging from

squat to tall; four two-tone enameled stew pans

from Markt & Hammacher of varying sizes; or four identical stainless steel saucepans, silver-colored

cylinders with long metal handles bolted to the side,

by Revere Copper & Brass, Inc. (fig. ro3; see frg.D).

Against black velvet, under tightly focused spot-

lights in the third-floor "jewel room," glass boiling

flasks, hydrometer jars, and stender dishes were aiso

displayed in series, glistening inadizzyingarray of

sizes from the enormous to the microscopic (fig. roa).

Johnson also arranged related objects near one

another, underscoring their similarities but main-

taining their differences: the assortment of springs

along one wall, mounted on pedestals of varying

heights or hung from above; or the curved black

countertop on which avariety of glass objects, ranging

from a large spherical vase to a set of a dozenwhiskey

glasses and a wide deep bowl, were staged (fig' ro5)'

In the end, as with the Machine-Age Exposition, the

installation itself became a mammoth piece of machine

art according to the principles of the show: a set of

interlocking, geometric spaces constructed of pristine,

beautiful materials into which visitors could .walk.Tl

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Fig. to4. Philip Johnson, installation view of Machine Art, Museum of Modern Art in the West Fifty-Third Street town house, March 5-April 29, t934. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

r92

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same agenda as the \fleissenhof exhibition-it did not seek to promote the unqualified omnipotence of

the American state-but it borrowed the same basic tools to construct its own agenda.

And what was that agenda? The installation,

most obviously, argued for the beauty of the objects

on view. The gallery architecture, as we have seen,

reflected and amplified the harmonious composi-

tions and clean materials of the objects it framed. Furthermore, the display acted as a defamiliarizing

agent for those objects: throughJohnson's orches-

tration-placing a series of crystal-clear glasses, dramatically lit, on a shelf, or arranging a set of perfectly shiny, flawless saucepans along a wall,

inverted and reflected against several other sets of saucepans-the pieces ceased to be the dreary acces-

sories of a mundane life. They were, in the words

of many critics, transformed into works of art. One

critic proposed that "a sugar and oil refractometer

suddenly suggested Brancusi's sculpture," while

another pointed to an isolated "water faucet,

mountled . . .] otr a pedestal like a Greek statue."

Henry McBride, whose review expressed skepticism

about the exhibition's claims in general, conceded

that the installation was a highly persuasive advocate

for an alleged art of the machine: "fiohnson] has such

a genius for grouping things together and finding just the right background and the right light that it is no wonder at all that Miss Amelia Earhart . . .

mistook a small chromium-plated spring for a

concrete expression of the modern human soul."

Other critics commented that the installation taught

viewers to "see" the objects on view as if for the first time, taught them to appreciate their "pure forms"

in a way that made them seem quite different from

their "matter-of-fact familiarity." "By isolating and giving dramatic point to those elements of aesthetic

satisfaction which the machine itself can create,"

rg4 SPIRITUAL AND MATERTAL GODS rN THE MACHINE AGE

;. ; I

Fig. ro6. Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, lnstallation

view of erc display, The Dwelling, Stuttgart, Germany, tgzT. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive.

Opposite: Fig. to7. Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,

lnstallation view of German Linoleum Works, The Dwelling,

Stuttgart, Germany, t927. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mies van der Rohe Archive.

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treatment complied with the fundamentals of commercial architecture of the day. In one article on retail store design from r933, the author stressed that a low-key, monochromatic architectural setting,

with minimal detailing, was an essential component of store design: accompanying a photograph of a

Chicago store, he wrote, "Simplicity is desirable as a

background for effective merchandise display. . . . \Walls and ceiling, light gray; carpet, dark blue;

metalwork, stainless steel" (fig. ro8).zl This advice was followed in numerous modern stores featured in

architectural journals throughout the mid-r93os,

such as the Steuben glass showroom (March r934)

Fig. toB. Holabird and Root, architects, Kenwood Mills store, Chicago, t933.ln American Architect, November t933, 33.

r96 scrnrrunl AND MATERIAL GoDs rN THE MAcHTNE AGE

(fig. ro9). \While Johnson's walls were more varied

in their colors and materials, their monochromatic,

unornamented planar expanses and palette of darker

and lighter, but never electric, hues accorded

perfectly with the commercial architect's guidelines. His two-tier lighting system-the diffused, general light from behind the ceiling scrim and the focused

spotlights on various items-also mimicked the carefully developed lighting techniques of retail

stores as explained, for example, in another I933

article on retail display. The authors of this piece

counseled commercial venues of all sizes to first illu- minate their spaces evenly throughout by positioning

lamps to reflect light off the ceiling, and then high-

light products in cases and cabinets with focused, higher-wattage spotli ghts. 8o

Ultimately, Johnson managed to capture the

easily legible, open space prescribed for retail stores

of the time, in which items for purchase were

offered to the viewer like so many "object[s] posed

in a polished isolation." The trade journal Retailing:

Home Furnishings Edition found the exhibition's installation so effective that it proclaimed, "It holds an eloquent message to display mangers on

the glorification of the practical." The critic for Art Ner.ex attested to the public's awareness of the commercial tropes in Machine Art with the following wry anecdote, in which the retail under- current of the exhibition seemed to have broken

the surface: "There were also a few interesting

couples in the crowd, among them a particularly

engaging young girl accompanied by her somewhat

recalcitrant boy friend. The young girl fluttered

and giggled as she lavished a truly feminine rapture upon the wonders of the streamline monel metal

sinks and the Silver Streak carpet sweeper. The man,

exasperated almost to the point of matrimony, stood

and scowled more deeply as the scheming female

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greeted with a bountiful array of mechanical parts, each promising to fit into a larger system and fix a problem. Yet the mechanical parts in this exhibition, presented in multiples, refused to do any work; on their pedestals, clean shelves, or velvet-draped

platforms, they did not speak to each other or to a grander infrastructure. In their self-sufficient obses- sion with beauty, they resonated like so many pieces of jewelry, whose function is to adorn and add value through workmanship and precious materials.

But these objects were emphatically machine-made

(the show was, after all, an "anti-handicraft show") and their materials were industrial, not precious.

If the exhibition was a jewelry store for hardware items, the result was that the objects on view could

be neither jewelry nor hardware, neither adornment nor functional tools. In its refusal to reconcile these competing display idioms, the installation attempted

to mark its difference from the actual commercial realm. This elegant, entrancing showroom tickled

the fantasies of the bourgeois individual-who views a world of machine-made plenty and turns to her pocketbook to prove her elevated taste-and then it drove a wedge deep into those fantasies, frustrating them with the persistent strangeness of aestheticized, functionless machines.

Ultimately, in Machine Art, the modernist critique of popular consumer culture did not take

the form of Barr's moral, equal society made righ- teous through the thoughtful, productive use of the machine. Rather, the critique arose from within the consumer workings of Johnson's installation, through its collision of hardware store and jewelry

store. It posed an assault on the narrowmindedness of consumer taste, seemingly asking of its visitors:

Vould you dare to buy a machine as art or jewelry?

\flhile historians have documented the French designer Charlotte Perriand's ball bearing necklace

r98 sernrrueL AND MATERTAL GoDs tN THE MAcHtNE AGE

(r93os) and the painter Gerald Murphy's display of a ball bearing on a pedestal in his Paris apartment in the r9zos, these are examples of a decidedly modernist appropriation of the vernacular.8l An anecdote recounted in the Nep Yorker describes a different response to the exhibition, by those who could not quite emulate the cool, critical eye of the

modern artist: "People wandered about, looking at electric-light bulbs and bathtub fittings for-so to speak-the first time, and you could tell that most of them didn't know what to say about them. \(hen they did say anything, it sounded rather silly. \We

observed the confrontation of one very soignde lady by a huge and rather grim-looking porcelain insulator-the kind they use for attaching high- tension cables to the poles. She stared at it for some time, digesting its meaning, then turned with a sort of rapt look and said 'Superb!' It sounded hollow, though. . . .'We ran into several things like that."8+ These visitors had modern eyes: impressed by the

museum, they agreed to try to learn something about modern art; seduced by the salesmanship of the installation, they willingly began to covet the objects in the exhibition. But when the objects appeared to laugh at this fetishized attention-what, covet me) a mere lightbulb?-modern eyes were perhaps not enough. It was no longer adequate to be passionate and enthusiastic, to be coaxed into cele- brating modern art by cuitish atmospheres, movie

allusions, fantasies of wealthy homes, or awesome

industrial spaces. In persistently invoking, but then

twisting, its commercial metaphors, Machine Art demanded that its audience think about how to look,

and in the process encouraged viewers to add some skepticism to their modern eyes.

The Machine-Age Exposition and Machine Art have several points of similarity. Both put machines and

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