Golden Gate International Exposition Research Articles

Marguerita Mergentime: American Textiles, Modern Ideas by Virginia Bayer et al.

Reviewed by: Marguerita Mergentime: American Textiles, Modern Ideas by Virginia Bayer et al. Douglas Schaller Marguerita Mergentime: American Textiles, Modern Ideas. By Virginia Bayer, Linda Florio, and Donna Ghelerter. (New York: West Madison Press, 2017. Illustrations, chronology. $39.95.) As evident in the 2019–20 Jewish Museum exhibition on Edith Halpert's legacy and her astute promotion of Pennsylvania German designs and folk art more broadly, our changing understanding of this material's early proponents recalibrates contemporary perspectives on the work. This recent monograph on the 1920s and '30s designer Marguerita Mergentime (1894–1941) belatedly recognizes the foresight in broadening the mass appeal for Americana. Like Halpert, Mergentime grasped the inherent design appeal of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century fraktur and painted furniture but boldly reimagined their adaptation into everyday living and modern fabrics. As documented by the sales tallied in department store advertisements with her name prominently featured alongside the designs, she successfully reached middle-class urbanites. A member of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen, Mergentime's signature style achieved prominence rapidly enough to be name-branded in ads and to produce a linen collection, titled "100 Years of American Design," for Lord & Taylor in 1936. The volume's forward, by the scholar Madelyn Shaw, notes that "good design" as defined by frequent Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art exhibits of the 1920s and '30s united forces among manufacturing, design, and curatorial spheres to challenge domestic production to raise both its profile and allure. It was an opportune time for a forward-thinking and historically inclined designer, such as Mergentime, to launch domestic furnishings that would affirm tasteful, modern, yet homegrown idioms. Although antiquing in rural Pennsylvania was by the 1920s a popular pursuit for fashionable and affluent women, Mergentime eyed these handworks not solely with the intention of collecting but more shrewdly as design inspiration. In her essay, Donna Ghelerter cites Mergentime's loan of items from her collection of Pennsylvania German folk art to the 1939 Popular Art in America exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and her unorthodox pairing of these finds with her family's penthouse duplex in the Beresford in New York City, designed by Frederick Kiesler. The collectors Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Electra Havemayer Webb, advised and shaped by Halpert, significantly altered American [End Page 92] museums' approaches to and connoisseurship of folk art. Mergentime viewed the same objects as both central to American identity and a vernacular tradition for modernism to draw upon, though she took a more business-centric approach. Indicative of how fluidly Mergentime could pivot in her design idioms and inspirations, she drew from Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts for her first printed tablecloths and napkins, naming the patterns after phrases ("Once in a While" and "Have to Have") from Stein's libretto. That fluidity is perhaps the strongest argument to be made for Mergentime's visionary strategy for injecting "good design" Americana into the modern American interior (one cut short by her death from cancer). Further evidence of her democratic and progressive stance is Mergentime's ten-foot Americana tapestry (1939, created for the Golden Gate International Exposition), which combines colloloquialisms, personalities, products, and pastimes in such a flattened typographic manner that regionalisms collapse. Prescient in its utilitarian and box stenciled typefaces, it projects unity and a pseudo-folk identity decades before the 1960s, when the aesthetic became more popular. Just as Mergentime's business strategies and forecasting skills anticipated those of the better-known Halpert, she also foreshadowed another 1960s tastemaker, the textile designer Vera Neumann. This provocative volume accompanied an installation of Mergentime's designs at the Cooper Hewitt; each essay succinctly frames the exceptional craft and historicism that characterize Mergentime's work. With this invigorating light shed on Mergentime's legacy, it is time to delve more deeply into her career and its influences. [End Page 93] Douglas Schaller Temple University Copyright © 2021 Historical Society of Pennsylvania

OREGONSCAPE

BUD DIETLEIN’S Haceta Head on Oregon Coast Highway animated diorama, pictued in the image above, was first displayed at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939–1940). Dietlein, an artist based in Vancouver, Washington, took three months to complete the project. The diorama measures thirteen feet wide and five feet tall and consists of a featured seascape with a foreground, middle ground, and background. It also includes a patented “wave action” mechanism to produce an ocean spray effect using a series of rollers and cut out celluloid. The diorama was an instant success — with some noting at the time that it was the best part of the large Oregon exhibit. During the years after the Expo, Dietlein continued to work on the diorama ­ — including adding the sound of crashing waves — and in 1947 it premiered in the Northwest at his Vancouver art studio. OREGONSCAPE Fifteen hundred people lined up to see the contraption on the opening day. The Oregonian reported on March 6 that Eleanor Roosevelt, in town to attend the Pacific Northwest College conference at Reed College, also made time to visit. According to a March 2, 1947, Oregonian article, Dietlein travelled east in April to exhibit the diorama, although no specific itinerary was noted. Dietlein unfortunately passed away unexpectedly in 1964, and the current whereabouts of the diorama are not known. The Oregon Historical Society would love to know if readers have any information on the diorama’s whereabouts. If so, please let us know so we can work to get it up and running, possibly for the first time, here in Oregon. — Matthew Cowan, OHS Moving Images and Photography Archivist ...

OREGONSCAPE

BUD DIETLEIN’S Haceta Head on Oregon Coast Highway animated diorama, pictued in the image above, was first displayed at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939–1940). Dietlein, an artist based in Vancouver, Washington, took three months to complete the project. The diorama measures thirteen feet wide and five feet tall and consists of a featured seascape with a foreground, middle ground, and background. It also includes a patented “wave action” mechanism to produce an ocean spray effect using a series of rollers and cut out celluloid. The diorama was an instant success — with some noting at the time that it was the best part of the large Oregon exhibit. During the years after the Expo, Dietlein continued to work on the diorama ­ — including adding the sound of crashing waves — and in 1947 it premiered in the Northwest at his Vancouver art studio. OREGONSCAPE Fifteen hundred people lined up to see the contraption on the opening day. The Oregonian reported on March 6 that Eleanor Roosevelt, in town to attend the Pacific Northwest College conference at Reed College, also made time to visit. According to a March 2, 1947, Oregonian article, Dietlein travelled east in April to exhibit the diorama, although no specific itinerary was noted. Dietlein unfortunately passed away unexpectedly in 1964, and the current whereabouts of the diorama are not known. The Oregon Historical Society would love to know if readers have any information on the diorama’s whereabouts. If so, please let us know so we can work to get it up and running, possibly for the first time, here in Oregon. — Matthew Cowan, OHS Moving Images and Photography Archivist ...

Let There Be a Firmament in the Midst of the Waters

Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay was created to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, a World’s Fair, in 1939-40. The fair was an expression of an idealized order of both design and international relations. Neither survived much longer than the fair itself. The author considers the creation and re-creation of Treasure Island and the problem of building for an uncertain, ultimately unknowable future. This article is a critical appreciation of Andrew Shanken’s Into the Void Pacific, a design history of the fair.

India for the Masses: the Typical and the Topical in the Murals at the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940)

This paper deals with the representation of India in the murals at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940) and the codes and examples used by the author Miguel Covarrubias to show the massive North American audience – generally, poorly interested in India – the people, the Art, the native dwellings and means of transportations, the flora and the fauna and the economy of the Indian subcontinent.

Review: Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s and Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s

Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 2 October 2010–10 July 2011 Museum of the City of New York, New York 5 December 2012–31 March 2013 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 …

Review: Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s

Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s . National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 2 October 2010–5 September 2011 The American world's fairs of the Depression years were over-the-top, optimistic projects that made future-gazing a cultural staple. According to the fairs' organizers and promoters, such looking ahead could bolster people's sagging faith in the country's economic and political systems. These fairs decanted a messy decade into neat packages of hope, dramatized the shape of things to come, and distorted or denied social reality to accommodate corporate America's consumerist utopias. Creating a museum exhibition decades later, out of such extravagantly hopeful projects, poses a robust intellectual challenge. How does one recreate the particular mood of the fairs in their historic times without overinvesting in their seductive messages? Balancing an authentic representation of past events with the unavoidable lessons of hindsight is a daunting task. The exhibition at the National Building Museum titled Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s deftly negotiated this challenge. It rendered momentarily irrelevant the question of whether or not one left the show with a deep and nuanced knowledge of 1930s America by presenting a visually pleasurable array of artifacts from six Depression-era fairs: the Century of Progress International Exposition, held in Chicago in 1933–34; the California Pacific International Exposition, staged in San Diego in 1935–36; the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas of 1936; the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland of 1936–37; the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco of 1939–40; and the New York World's Fair of 1939–40. Bringing together original objects, drawings, posters, souvenirs, multimedia, reproductions, and even a replica of Westinghouse's Electro robot from the 1939 New …

Elmer Keeton and His Bay Area Negro Chorus: Creating an Artistic Identity in Depression-Era San Francisco

On June 25, 1939, a vibrant show, the Swing Mikado, opened at the Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco's Treasure Island. Featuring an all-black cast, the production was a brashly irreverent adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado (Hobart 1939b) with the locale changed from Japan to an unidentified coral island in the South Seas. The Swing Mikado preserved Sullivan's intact--albeit with minor changes in lyrics to omit racist references and adapt to the changed geographical setting. Added to the score, however, were a half dozen swing arrangements and specialty dances that were greeted with immense ovation and that accounted for the sellout, standing-room-only crowds. The Swing Mikado--which had originated in Chicago a year earlier--represented one of the most successful endeavors of the Theatre (FTP), one of four arts programs collectively called Federal that were sponsored by the Works Progress Adminsitration (WPA), the federal government's massive employment effort of the Depression era. San Francisco's version of the show featured fifteen soloists, a of about fifty, and a dancing of about twenty. John Hobart, in the San Francisco Chronicle, characterized the singing group as really magnificent.... After the anemic voices that usually make up the ensemble in G. and S. revivals, he wrote, is wondrous to hear this huge crowd of singers, with full-bodied voices, pitching into the music (Hobart 1939b). This was well-known to locals: under the inspired direction of Elmer Keeton, it had become one of the most prominent ensembles in northern California's (FMP)--another One unit. (The FTP and the FMP often collaborated on musical theater productions. The other two components of One were the Art and the Writers' Project.) Keeton's Bay Area Chorus had been attracting large crowds and exceptional reviews for the previous three years. Critics predicted that the Swing Mikado was in for a long run. Two weeks after its opening, however, Congress shut down the FTP, bending to conservative opposition to the WPA in general and to rumors of Communist influence within the Theatre in particular. 4100 Off Rolls; 'Mikado' Show Closed, lamented the Chronicle in a page 1 story the day after the closing (4100 Lopped 1939). The Project, which felt invested in the production because of Keeton's chorus, tried to convince WPA authorities to take it over from the defunct FTP, but to no avail (Ness 1939; Music Project 1939). A month later the Swing Mikado reopened under private sponsorship in the city and then went on tour. Thereafter, the chorus continued to perform concerts under Keeton's leadership, and was even featured in several nationwide broadcasts. The story of Elmer Keeton and his Negro chorus--pieced together here from programs, reviews, WPA documents, and recordings--is one of musical artistry and success, but also of racial exclusion and marginalization. Keeton himself walked a tenuous line between tolerating the segregation of the WPA and promoting the extraordinary musical heritage of U.S. blacks. His nonconfrontational approach cultivated positive interactions with the white population, whose responses to his programs were for the most part appreciative, but also, at times, patronizing. With the exception of a small minority of white singers directly threatened by the group's success, Keeton and his chorus attracted well-deserved praise from the city's arts critics. Keeton's quiet attitude toward racial issues stands in stark contrast to that of younger arrivals to San Francisco, among them one of the solo singers in his musical productions. Joseph James, featured in two theatrical presentations with the chorus, spearheaded a contentious legal battle that led to the integration of local labor unions. …

Introduction: The Americas, Otherwise

Taking as their point of departure the murals painted by the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, the editors address the development of comparative literature as an academic discipline in the U.S. and, more particularly, the recent development of the comparative study of the Americas. This growing field is variously referred to as Americas Studies, Transamerican Studies, Interamerican Studies, Hemispheric Studies and, depending upon the program or curriculum, it may also involve area studies programs that focus on the U.S./Mexico border, the circum-Atlantic, the Pacific rim, the Caribbean, and/or the recently developed conceptual area of the Global South. The editors address these emerging American comparativisms—their limitations and potentials, their disciplinary commitments and conditions, their theories and practices, and their shifting regions and relations. The editors call for a more expansive definition of academic work in the U.S., a definition based on the example of Latin American public intellectuals, and they also call for greater commitment to the teaching and learning of languages and to the translation of literature and literary theory from all areas of the hemisphere.

Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, radical politics, and San Francisco's public murals

The boldly political mural projects of Diego Rivera and other leftist artists in San Francisco during the 1930s and early 1940s are the focus of Anthony W. Lee's fascinating book. Led by Rivera, these painters used murals as a vehicle to reject the economic and political status quo and to give visible form to labor and radical ideologies, including Communism. Several murals, and details of others, are reproduced here for the first time. Of special interest are works by Rivera that chart a progress from mural paintings commissioned for private spaces to those produced as a public act in a public space: Allegory of California, painted in 1930-31 at the Stock Exchange Lunch Club; Making a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, done a few months later at the California School of Fine Arts; and Pan American Unity, painted in 1940 for the Golden Gate International Exposition. Labor itself became a focus of the new murals: Rivera painted a massive representation of a construction worker just as San Francisco's workers were themselves organizing; Victor Arnautoff, Bernard Zakheim, John Langley Howard , and Clifford Wight painted panels in Coit Tower that acknowledged the resolve of the dockworkers striking on the streets below. Radical in technique as well, these muralists used new compositional strategies of congestion, misdirection, and fragmentation, subverting the legible narratives and coherent allegories of traditional murals. Lee relates the development of wall painting to San Francisco's international expositions of 1915 and 1939, the new museums and art schools, corporate patronage, and the concerns of immigrants and ethnic groups. And he examines how mural painters struggled against those forces that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.

World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions

In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly 100 million people visited expositions celebrating the century of progress. These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. In All the World's a Robert W. Rydell described how Victorian-era world's fairs helped create a blueprint for modern America. Now, with World of Fairs, he shows how the interwar exhibitions heralded the arrival of modern America - a new empire of abundance built on old foundations of inequality. Rydell demonstrates how the fairs reached their height of popularity following the crash of 1929 by offering a vision of recovery from the Depression through the united powers of science and industry. Beneath the surface, however, lay persistent themes of imperialism and racism as government officials, industrial leaders, and intellectuals alike used the fairs to reinforce their own authority and the established social order. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.

Tests of Timber Structures from Golden Gate International Exposition

Seventeen trusses, thirty-seven joints of structural frames, and three 15-ft struts, all of which had served for some 2½ years as structural parts of the Golden Gate International Exposition buildings at San Francisco, Calif., were removed from these buildings when they were dismantled, stored for some weeks in the open air, and later were tested for failure in a large testing frame constructed especially for this purpose. Also, one hundred and three laboratory specimens, constructed to find the lateral resistance of nails in plywood and the shearing and buckling strength of plywood panels, were tested. The trusses were of various types, spans, and sizes. Thirteen were entirely of timber. Seven of these had connections framed with split rings or shear plates, and the other six had connections of volts and washers.

Closure to “Tests of Timber Structures from Golden Gate International Exposition”

Closure to “Tests of Timber Structures from Golden Gate International Exposition”

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Fine Bookbindings exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco: MCMXXXIX. Privately printed, The Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. HENRY THOMAS HENRY THOMAS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s4-XXVI, Issue 4, March 1945, Pages 312–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s4-XXVI.4.312 Published: 01 March 1945

Magic in a Bottle

This book does for the chemical trail breakers what De Kruif's "Microbe Hunters" did for the bacteriologic pioneers. The author, by virtue of his experience in scientific circles on the Pacific Coast especially in connection with the Golden Gate International Exposition, is well qualified to write it and has done so ably. The book deals with the discovery and introduction of morphine and quinine, digitalis, cocaine, the antisyphilis drugs, acetylsalicylic acid, barbituric acid and its derivatives, the vitamins, the hormones and the sulfanilamide group. The book is written in the best tradition of popular science writing. All the heroes are struggling young men with big ideas which are scornfully rejected by scientific stuffed shirts. Right always triumphs, which makes for the progress of science and also makes excellent reading. Much of the commendably accurate but regrettably dull scientific writing for the public could be greatly improved with a little touch

Meteorites on Exhibition at the Golden Gate International Exposition

Meteorites on Exhibition at the Golden Gate International Exposition

Sealing the Lagoon Lining at Treasure Island with Salt

Fine-textured earth materials, such as clay or clayey sand and gravel, are potentially impervious to water. Sometimes, however, experience in the use of such material for watertight construction has been disappointing. In some cases, clay membranes placed with the greatest of care have been found to be semi-pervious and have failed to perform the function for which they were designed. This paper describes such an experience at Treasure Island, the site of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco Bay, California, and the simple method in which the defect was remedied by utilizing an electro-chemical phenomenon of colloidal clay.

Painting the golden gate international exposition with light

ON a man-made island of 400 acres which President Roosevelt has referred to as our latest insular possession, architects, artists, and engineers have constructed a magic walled city about an architectural plan that combines the ancient designs of Burmese, Cambodian, Incan, Mayan, and other Pacific cultures into the unique and surprisingly beautiful Golden Gate International Exposition. One and a half million dollars spent on landscaping and another million dollars worth of sculptures, murals, and decorations have made of it a “Garden of Paradise” and a comprehensive artistic architectural unit rather than a disconnected assemblage of exhibit buildings.

Painting the Golden Gate International Exposition With Light

a man-made island of 400 acres which President Roosevelt has referred to as our latest insular possession, architects, artists, and engineers have constructed a magic walled city about an architectural plan that combines the ancient designs of Burmese, Cambodian, Incan, Mayan, and other Pacific cultures into the unique and surprisingly beautiful Golden Gate International Exposition. One and a half million dollars· spent on landscaping and another million dollars worth of sculptures, murals, and decorations have made of it a "Garden of Paradise" and a comprehensive artistic architectural unit rather than a disconnected assemblage of exhibit buildings. To design the lighting for such a composition requires that the engineer approach his problem with tolerance toward the view of others. The lighting must be in harmony with the work of the architects, artists, sculptors, and horticulturists, and strictly engineering considerations subordinated in many instances to those of aesthetics. This spirit of compromise between the science and art of illumination will be noted in the effects described in this paper.

Cathodic Protection on Domestic Distribution System at Treasure Island

Journal AWWAVolume 32, Issue 2 p. 305-338 Article Cathodic Protection on Domestic Distribution System at Treasure Island Charles H. Lee, Charles H. LeeSearch for more papers by this author Charles H. Lee, Charles H. LeeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 February 1940 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1551-8833.1940.tb12973.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume32, Issue2February 1940Pages 305-338 RelatedInformation