A rich selection of images greeted visitors to the Museum of the City of New York from 5 December 2012 to 31 March 2013. Hints of American fairs’ modernist glamor shown in scenic renderings in the entrance hall forecast more pictures in the main display room. On the perimeter walls of a large gallery, black-and-white photographs illustrated American fairs of the 1930s: Chicago’s Century of Progress (1934–34), San Diego’s California Pacific International Exposition (1935–36), Dallas’s Texas Centennial Exposition (1936), Cleveland’s Great Lakes Exposition (1936–37), San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, and New York City’s World of Tomorrow (both 1939–40). On intermediate partitions, visitors saw renderings of vistas and individual pavilions, objects displayed at the fairs, and advertisements for sponsors’ products. Here and there, they paused to see short news and commercial films, although in the well-filled room, no seats could be provided. Souvenir brochures, booklets, catalogs, and commemorative trinkets appeared near the entrance and in vitrines. Captions to the photographs and short wall-mounted essays offered explanatory information. Crowded captions and pictures made the former sometimes hard to read, dissuading many visitors from learning more about the content of some of the images.The fraternal twin exhibitions in Washington and New York gave a coordinated overview of the fairs, almost as if they were one fair with varied sections. Laura Schiavo and Deborah Sorensen curated the initial and somewhat larger exhibition at the National Building Museum; Jessica Lautin played the same role in New York City. This later version included additional locally pertinent material. A well-illustrated catalogue contained essays on various topics; those not mentioned later in this review are the introduction by Robert W. Rydell; “ ‘Industry Applies’: Corporate Marketing at A Century of Progress,” by Lisa D. Schrenk; a photo-essay by Laura Burd Schiavo titled “Modern Design Goes Public”; Kristina Wilson’s “Designing the Modern Family at the Fair”; “Spectres of Social Housing: San Diego, 1935,” by Matthew Bokovoy; and Robert Bennett’s “Pop Goes the Future: Cultural Representations of the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair.”The fairs on which the exhibitions focused were diverse in size and not equally successful artistically or financially. The architectural taste and much of the construction at the Texas Centennial Exhibition were more conservative than that of the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, for instance, which emphasized prefabricated materials and innovative construction that kept costs down. Chicago’s use of colored lighting to animate bland planes of temporary materials over metal frameworks stimulated imitation primarily in San Francisco. Robert A. González’s essay, “Beyond the Midway: Pan-American Modernity in the 1930s,” pointed to the fairs’ presentation of inter-American areas through imitative architecture, modernist innovation, or stripped classicism. The participation of nationally recognized architects such as Ralph T. Walker and Raymond Hood was conspicuous in Chicago and New York. Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings worked in Chicago and New York, planning and designing individual pavilions. By 1937, Gordon Bunshaft, their employee, designed Venezuela’s pavilion, which he characterized as “only semi-good” compared to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazilian pavilion. Wallace K. Harrison assisted with the New York fair.The purpose of these fairs, like that of their many predecessors, was commercial, although each one also offered live performances, films, a midway or its equivalent, and art exhibitions. Most displays and much of the fun we would now call infotainment—amusement with a commercial message, although some companies conspicuously sponsored patriotic displays. These American fairs were meant to increase public confidence in the economy during the Great Depression, to stimulate business, and to increase public attention to prominent national companies. Unlike most earlier fairs, they employed overtly modernist forms. The pavilions featured smooth walls and geometric shapes, and were devoid of historic ornament and adorned, if at all, with semiabstract designs. Their asymmetrical plans, sweeping planes, sometimes colored and at other times illuminated, looked novel: some with shapes inspired by New York’s setback skyscrapers, others with ramps and planar interchanges suggesting the new automotive highways or inspired by the innovative forms of the model houses of International Modernist architects of the 1920s. Some of the pavilions, with their curved corners and angular walls, evoked Dutch and German avant-garde architecture, particularly that of Erich Mendelsohn, while others drew on models from the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, and from the progressive sections of American architecture magazines. William Lescaze presented a model modernist house for the Socony-Vacuum’s Magnolia Petroleum Company at the Texas Centennial Exposition, and, with J. Gordon Carr, designed a streamlined Aviation Building in New York. One alcove at the museum emphasized industrial designers’ contributions to American visual culture through product design, specifically the work of Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, and Gilbert Rohde. In his “Reflections on Modernism and World’s Fairs,” Richard Guy Wilson suggested that “the modern suburban California-style ranch house caught on because of the Golden Gate International Exposition” (198), which displayed houses suited to the local climate.The commercial and industrial products, with their smooth contours, simple color combinations, and innovative typefaces, complemented the modern looks of the pavilions in which they were housed. New products emphasized their modernity by using new materials such as Bakelite, chrome-plated steel, colored aluminum, glass block, safety glass, and fiberglass.The exhibition in New York emphasized the commercial aspects of the expositions rather than murals created for the fairs by Stuart Davis, Aaron Douglas, Diego Rivera, and others; photomurals, which were still unfamiliar to the public; or the displays of historic art borrowed from museums abroad. (Neil Harris’s essay, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Masterpieces Come to the Fairs,” addresses the last subject.) Explanatory material accompanying the exhibition’s photographs divided the images into sections such as Design, Technology, Transportation, Science, Materials, and Homes, reflecting commonalities among the six fairs. Images from each fair confirmed the overall theme of modernity in design, but plans to scale and general statements characterizing each fair would have differentiated them; I noticed only the axial plan of Chicago’s Century of Progress along its then recently developed lakefront.The expositions were represented primarily by large photographs, often admirably composed. The accompanying book identifies only Ezra Stoller, but photographs constituted the principal elements of the show. Few films gave artistic credit to their creators. The images often included dramatic tonal contrasts, night views, and unusual angles that emphasized stylistic innovations. Daylight images often glorified the brilliant sunshine of semitropical cities, or the broad white planes of fairground buildings, as if promising a sunny and optimistic, sanitary, wholesome future. Many pavilions were simply boxes of various shapes, sometimes without windows. Planners evidently valued the flexibility inherent in large undifferentiated spaces, and expected artificial means to control lighting and the indoor climate. Images showed transportation devices, including train engines, airplanes, dirigibles, and exciting rides in purpose-made cars or automobiles shown on real roads and imaginary freeways. Others showed assembly lines in model fairground factories, where industrialists displayed methods of production and the reassuringly clean processing of canned and packaged food. Purchasers in the 1930s still had to be persuaded that factory-made products were rational, sanitary, wholesome, and made by well-regulated white workers. Today, we notice the many industrial laborers who have been replaced by machines and robots or by low-wage employees abroad.The objects included a large robot, Elektro Motor-Man, an aluminum chair, various domestic consumer products such as dishwashers and nylon hosiery, and several architectural models. For the Chicago fair, Frank Lloyd Wright’s former sculptural collaborator, Alfonso Iannelli, designed a Sunbeam toaster and a coffeemaker. Museum visitors saw dramatic (although not entirely explicit) photographs of the Ford Motor Company’s Road of Tomorrow, General Motors’ Futurama, or less immense pavilions sponsored by Wonder Bread at the modest end and by governments at the grandiose end. Playful small pavilions and innovative small houses attracted a largely white public, if the photographs of fairgoers are representative. Larger, often more formally planned pavilions were meant to impress people with the power, authority, and strength of a government that was rescuing the country from economic calamity.The last point is made clearly by the exhibition’s linkage of the fairs to city planning. In New York City, the peripheral benefits of the World of Tomorrow included the elimination of the trash dumps in Flushing Meadows in favor of fairgrounds and the present park, the development of LaGuardia Airport and the Grand Central Parkway, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Whitestone Expressway, the IND subway system’s present E, F, M, and R lines, and the provision of a site for the 1964 World’s Fair. The other fairs had fewer far-reaching urban consequences, but San Francisco’s fairground development of Treasure Island, a landfill operation, allowed for its rapid naval military occupation during the Second World War.The exhibition ended intelligently with a section devoted to the present state of each fairground. Probably the visitors in New York most appreciated the presentation of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, an active recreational area serving a large population that includes ethnic groups barely represented in the city during the 1930s. The park long retained a few structures from 1939 and the fairgrounds provided the layout for the 1964 fair, itself almost a half century in the past.Related PublicationRobert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, eds., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 224 pp., 30 color and 102 b/w illus. $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780300149579