Review: Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home, by Monica Penick

Abstract

Monica Penick Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful , and the Postwar American Home New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 260 pp., 132 color and 55 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300221763 In recent years scholars have been actively constructing a new narrative of postwar architecture in the United States, reframing the remarkably resilient architect-centered tale of transplanted European modernism and replacing it with a more complex account that addresses a much broader cast of characters, contexts, and methods of influence and design. Monica Penick's Tastemaker is an important contribution to this rereading and rewriting of American architectural and cultural history, broadening both the discussion and the dramatis personae.1 As the subtitle suggests, the book is, at heart, a biography, but it is a departure from those biographical works that lionize well-known designers. Quoting George Nelson, Penick notes that “most of what happens to architecture is out of the hands of architects” (vii). She offers what she describes as a “critical professional biography” of Elizabeth Gordon, the influential editor of House Beautiful from 1941 to 1964 (viii). Chronologically organized around her tenure at the magazine, this monograph highlights Gordon's work with collaborators in graphic and interior design, photography, architecture, manufacturing, advertising, journalism, and even philosophy and contemporary cultural theory. Together with James Marston Fitch, Frances Heard, John deKoven Hill, Cliff May, Eiko Yuasa, Barbro Nilsson, Maynard Parker, Ezra Stoller, and others, Gordon sought to shape the postwar American way of life by advising and educating the public about home design. Citing Russell Lynes's 1954 concept of “tastemaker” as a framework, Penick offers a highly detailed, intensively researched, and boldly presented narrative of Gordon's influential activities as a design propagandist. Through an exploration of Gordon's editorial activities, this book puts issues of taste formation, …