“Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900” and “Berlin 1900–1933: Architecture and Design” at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York

Abstract

“ART NOUVEAU BING: PARIS STYLE 1900” AND “BERLIN 1900—1933: ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN” AT THE COOPER-HEWITT MUSEUM, NEW YORK MIRIAM R. LEVIN As if in answer to Ruskin’s complaints about the ugliness of indus­ trial culture, Art Nouveau and the International Style emerged in the last years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th in fairly rapid succession. While obvious aesthetic differences exist be­ tween these two dominant styles, both owe their existence to the growth of consumer-oriented businesses and mechanized industries in capi­ talist countries. The organic and highly crafted forms of Art Nouveau designs were rooted ideologically in the social idealism and antimachinism of the arts and crafts movement. The precise geometry of Werkbund and Bauhaus products, exemplifying equally idealistic views about the power of design to reform society, affirmed the rationalized and mechanized system epitomized by German industry from the 1890s to the 1930s. The symbolic relationship posited between the aesthetic character of these products and the character of the manufacturing system that produced them was not fortuitous. Entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and designers often collaborated, with governmental encouragement, to develop new designs intended to persuade consumers to buy new products and use new technologies such as electrical power. We are, however, only beginning to explore the complex ideological and social impulses that stimulated such fruitful collaborations and to under­ stand how these styles became identified with particular production systems, technological innovations, and liberal democratic ideals. Two exhibitions held last year at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the relationship between these new cultural styles and commercial and manufacturing activity in the years from about 1890 to 1933. Dr. Levin is adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a program officer at the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy. She is guest curator of a 1989 Mount Holyoke College exhibition of prints and photographs on the Eiffel Tower and public reception of technological innovations in late-19th-century France.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X788/2903-0009Î01.00 622 “Art Nouveau Bing” and “Berlin 1900—1933” 623 Coming as they did on the heels of exhibits on “The Machine Age” and “Vienna: 1900,” the Cooper-Hewitt shows avoided redundancy by focusing on the dynamics of changes in material culture that the previous shows had brought to the public’s attention. “Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900,” curated by Gabriel P. Weisberg , who also wrote the book published in conjunction with the exhibit, centered on the contribution to French decorative arts reform made by the entrepreneur Siegfried Bing at the end of the last century. The exhibition included ceramics, jewelry, prints, and domestic fur­ nishings that Bing sold in his Parisian shop. The Smithsonian Insti­ tution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) organized the show, which went to three other venues before coming to New York (JulySeptember 1987). “Berlin 1900—1933: Architecture and Design,” cur­ ated by Tilmann Buddensieg and designed by O. M. Ungers, was commissioned by the Cooper-Hewitt (November 1986—January 1987) to commemorate its own tenth anniversary as the National Museum of Design and the 750th birthday of the city of Berlin. This exhibition and the accompanying collection of informative essays by German scholars surveyed the products and projects of three generations of German architects and industrial designers whose influence on mod­ ern culture has been enormous.1 Among those included were Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marguerite Friedlaender. Displayed were electric fans, ceramic dinnerware, movie set designs, and plans for housing projects developed for German industries such as the Allgemeine Elektricitats-Gesellschaft (AEG), the Jena glassworks, and the Thonet furniture company. For me, the most interesting feature of these exhibitions and ac­ companying texts was their consciously revisionist character. In the face of contemporary criticism of Art Nouveau as self-indulgently bourgeois and elitist and of modern designers as unconcerned with human values, Weisberg and Buddensieg offered new evidence to the contrary. Both argued through the aesthetic appeal of the objects and the arrangement of the displays for...