Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America by Terry Smith

Abstract

642 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE reshaping our vision. It opens the way to future studies that will, perhaps, provide the note of passionate urgency—and suggestions for social policy remediation and change—that the subject so definitely deserves. Jui.ie Wosk Dr. Wosk is professor of humanities at State University of New York, Maritime College. She writes about both 19th- and 20th-century art and technology, and her book Breaking Frame (Rutgers University Press, 1992) explores artists’ images of the industrial age. Making the Modem: Industry, Art, and Design in America. By Terry Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. xv+512; illustrations, notes, index. $50.00. At one time the concepts of modernity and modernization were the preserve of social scientists who used them to chart the progress (or lack thereof) of developing nations toward the Western standard of eco­ nomic and political life. Today the concept of modernity has become substantially relativized, historicized, and generalized, and it is largely accepted that “Modernism” was a vibrant and internally contradictory movement, but one that has receded into history. Making the Modem, a vast and ambitious study by art historian Terry Smith, is the latest contribution to the ongoing debate over the character of modernity. Confining his analysis to the United States, Smith argues that the visual imagery of modernity emerged in the 1920s and 1930s and was more or less securely in place by the beginning of the Second World War. The new iconological “regime” was the product of a shifting but mutually reinforcing series of alliances among the industrial technolo­ gies of mass production, corporate industry, various New Deal federal agencies, art-and-documentary photography, painting, and design. The social setting of this interlocking process is the shift from entrepreneur­ ial to monopolistic capitalism, and its markers are the prevailing depictions of industry and workers, cities and crowds, and products and consumers. The overall effect of this confluence of tendencies is that “modernity circa 1930 was taking form in domains of representation devoted above all to aestheticizing American industry” (p. 425). The body of the book consists of richly detailed case studies of the emergence of a newly “modern” way of seeing, beginning with the visual symbolism of the Ford Motor Company empire and ending with the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40. Part 1 consists of a compelling examination of the modernization of work in Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant, 1910-29. Smith shows how the moving assembly line promoted a new way of framing space, abetted by the industrialfunctional architecture of Albert Kahn and the documentation of the factory system by painter-photographer Charles Sheeler. TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 643 The separate chapters of part 2 study the role of periodicals such as Time, Life, and Fortune in the drive toward a modern business imagery conceived along Fordist lines, the resistance to this program manifest in the epic murals of Diego Rivera and the private retablos of Frida Kahlo, and the work of Social Realist photographers such as Lewis Hine and Roy Stryker, enlisted by the Farm Securities Administration and other agencies to publicize the New Deal vision ofAmerica’s past and future. Together, whether wittingly or not, they created an aesthetic that served to bring into harmony the contending elements of modernity. Part 3, finally, extends the argument to the commercialism of the nascent industrial design profession, the purist modernism endorsed by the Museum ofModernArt, and the futurism projected by the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Although full of shrewd judgments and arresting insights, the author’s discussion of “the priority of the visual” in design relies excessively on a small number ofdated sources, with the result that this section is the least persuasive in the book. Although written with the perspectives and priorities of an art historian, Smith’s overall argument rests on premises that are directly pertinent to the history of technology. In its leaps from the gravity-fed conveyor belt to the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, from Harley Earl’s idea of “dynamic obsolescence” to Alfred Barr’s struggle for custodianship of the standards of Modern Art, Making the Modem demonstrates that in structural ways, “modernity in...