“The Total Absence of Foreign Subjects”: The Racial Politics of US Interwar Exhibitions of Scandinavian Design

Abstract

Typically viewed as a postwar trend in home furnishings, Scandinavian design, then classified as “art”, gained a following in the United States between the First and Second World Wars. It melded traditional and modern aesthetics, and was viewed by curators, critics, and audiences as familiar, and even “native” to the United States. This article contends that keywords in the promotion of Scandinavian design, namely “democratic”, “craft”, and “traditional”, reflected concurrent cultural debates surrounding American identity, immigration reform, and race in the interwar years (1912–46), rather than exclusively representing Scandinavian design. Focusing on the exhibitions Contemporary Swedish Art (1916), the Exhibitions of Arts and Crafts of the Homelands (1919–20), Swedish Contemporary Art, or the Swedish Art Exhibition (1927), and Paintings, Sculpture, and Arts and Crafts of Denmark, or the Danish National Exhibition (1927–29), the author establishes the cultural context in which these exhibitions and the works included were viewed, distinguishing the exhibitions of the 1910s as racially exclusive and the displays of the 1920s as models for American designs. In the postwar period when racial pseudoscience fell out of favor internationally and US immigration policies were in place, the meanings of “democratic” and “traditional” design shifted, removing the racialized mythmaking from Scandinavian design’s promotion.