Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art's Design Crusade, 1933-1950

Abstract

1) Barbaralee Diamondstein, in Pushing Future Directions in Modern Art News 76 (September, 1977): 44, quotes department chairman Arthur Drexler's characterization of automobiles as floating, hollow sculpture. What Is Modem Design? Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.'s, 1950 statement of the museum's design philosophy (Introductory Series to the Modern Arts, no. 3 [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1950, 1978]), actually compares, using photographs, Brancusi's Bird in Flight with a vertical propeller blade and stainless steel knife (enlarged to scale). The helicopter, highly publicized, became the collection's virtual signature piece at the time of the opening. 2) Arthur Drexler, in and The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the Collection (New York: Abrams, 1984), p. 387, writes that the collection is organized to emphasize the continuity and transformation of ideas, rather than the disruption of tradition.... Now that modernism itself has assumed the status of an historical event, the greater depth and variety of the present collection accord well with a growing interest in the origin of ideas, and in the design alternatives that have begun to seem attractive When the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City reopened in newly expanded quarters last year, much of the press commentary centered around and rejoiced in the fact that the museum's basic character had not significantly changed. True, the physical plant was larger, allowing for the display of far more material, but the intimate scale of the galleries and their visibly clean, squared-off spaces (once one left the somewhat grand, glassed-in Garden Hall) seemed very much the same. This was still the optimum viewing environment for the museum's checklist of modernist masterpieces (Van Gogh's Starry Night, Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon, Matisse's Red Studio, and others) to be closely, judiciously inspected in more or less chronological sequence with full comprehension of their formal and stylistic values, said even the most apprehensive MOMA watchers. The Architecture and Design galleries, relocated to the fourth floor of the new west wing and infinitely more spacious, also emerged basically unscathed in the expansion. Although the press concentrated mostly on counterpart galleries in painting, on close inspection, the architecture and design section's physical ambience, generic object type, and didactic intent, like those of the painting section, have remained virtually intact. MOMA's traditional lionization of industrial design as art in a Brancusismooth propeller blade, bright red Cisitalia automobile, and deliciously compact orange-and-green helicopter suspended above the up escalator at the gallery entrance are immediately recognizable. l Inside the galleries, MOMA's particular view of design history again unfolds along a discrete exhibition platform and in well-spotlighted display cases. Here, as if lifted from the pages of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design, are forerunners, exemplars, and first cousins of classic modernism: gracefully curvilinear bentwood furniture by the Thonet Brothers; planar constructions by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit Rietveld, and Frank Lloyd Wright; machine-age chrome classics by Miis van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier; trendsetting stackables, molded designs, and unit furniture by Alvar Aalto, Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, and Charles Eames; and a myriad of later variants of taut, functional furniture, such as Mario Bellini's Cab armchair of 1977. 2 Shining home appliances and commercial products appear in display cases opposite, exhibiting an almost breathtaking sheen and confidence of good workmanship. A partial list includes such stars as Peter Schlumbohn's Chemex coffeemaker (1941), Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni's red-encased vacuum cleaner (1956), Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper's minimalist black-cube television set (1969), and Jakob Jensen's steely, authoritative Beogram 6000 turntable (1974). Design in these galleries is presented as a kind of post-Victorian triumph of logic over excess, technology over handicraft,