Mid-century Modernism Research Articles

A Clamoring Revolt: Restaging, Reseeing, and Reteaching the Womb Chair

The Womb Chair Speaks project is an ongoing, collaborative installation that remakes Eero Saarinen’s 1948 Womb Chair and reimagines the womb’s cultural phenomenology. We begin by providing an overview of the project’s roots and the historical background of mid-century modernism’s erasures of women’s labor and artistry. Second, we consider how the project’s theory and praxis relate to labor. Third, through our personal narratives, we examine how recontextualizing the chair requires the queering of domestic and institutional spaces and traditional pedagogies to support the project’s creative labor. This process affirms individual experiences while embracing communal work and knowledge, forming an antithesis to modernism’s smooth, anonymous standardization and its association with singular genius.

Race, Religion, Healthcare, and Architecture: Benjamin McAdoo's Pagoda of Medicine

The Pagoda of Medicine, a mid-century modern building, sat on the northern outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. Located within the Seventh Day Adventist Church's Riverside Sanitarium/Riverside Hospital campus, the building was designed as the medical offices for the African American doctor Carl A. Dent. At its core, the building looks like an International Style box, however its roofline adds a more organic and striking feature that has interested the preservation community in Nashville for years. In addition to its unique structure, the building's African American history increases its historical significance. This paper seeks to identify the site's origins and influences and argues its design resulted directly from three intersections: from the need to symbolize modernity for African American healthcare facilities, from the design style of African American architect Benjamin McAdoo, and from the religious and modern architecture of the Seventh Day Adventist church.

‘All across Europe it had come’: The Black Death and Fascism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s wartime novel The Corner that Held Them (1948), about a nunnery during the Black Death, reflects on female community and bonding in a period of male fascist violence. The novel explores the shift from pacifism to acceptance of the need for anti-fascist war which characterised Warner’s intellectual beliefs from the 1930s into wartime, probing the arts of peace in compositional practice. Such a dialectic of war and peace is considered in relation to what Maud Ellmann has described as the outward turn to collective choral consciousness in mid-century modernism. This article explores both the staging of fascism as plague and the feminist daring and limits that Warner saw as operative in female witnessing and withstanding of Nazi ideology and menace. It closely reads key scenes from the panorama of a novel (notably Alianor’s stillness as her husband is killed, Alicia’s plans to withstand the economic impact of the Black Death and the cure of Ralph’s plague symptoms) to register the satirical and allegorical substance of Warner’s rescripting of Woolfian notions of resistance to warmongering misogyny by a society of outsiders. The readings seek to consolidate a varied and multiple sense of the book as a Marxist historical novel that gives voice to the ruled. In doing so Warner analyses the Black Death as a moment in history that saw the emergence of early modern capitalism and labour relations out of the feudal system, even as the religious framework that had structured medieval Europe gave way to more secular beliefs in autonomy, self-determination, citizen and collective dreams, projects and affects. At the same time the plague as a political trope, rooted in anti-fascist rhetoric that turns Nazi anti-Semitic uses of the Black Death motif on their head, triggers readings that bring those historical scenes into allegorical relation with the ways in which the Second World War was experienced by marginalised female communities.

Zubovich , Katherine Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 784 of the Vodlozero National Park in Karelia. Working heroically through the catastrophe of the 1990s, Cherviakov imbued his park with a messianic mission of spiritual renewal for all of humanity. Even though Vodlozero has failed to meet those grandiose goals, the man’s clarity of vision (or illusion) emanates from the text, reminiscent of medieval Russian monks’ transfiguration of Solovki described by Alexei Kraikovskii and Julia Lajus. In another chapter, Mark Sokolsky grapples forthrightly with the fact that the most progressive conservation measures in the Russian Far East were undertaken in conjunction with classist and racist exclusion. Even more troublingly, the Soviet Union’s signalsuccessinconservingtheAmur(Siberian)Tiger,oncethoughthopelessly on the road to extinction, resulted largely from the state’s increasing violence and repression. Similarly, Robert Dale pinpoints Soviet authoritarianism as a signature strength in its reaction to a 1924 Leningrad flood. In one of the book’s photo essays, dealing with the industrial history of the northern Urals, Catherine Evtuhov reports returning to St Petersburg ‘somewhat crumpled […] but thrilled by the intensity of our experiences and encounters’ (p. 183). Readers of Place and Nature will feel a similar thrill and intensity from the sense of material immediacy and unresolved contradiction the book provides, while — hopefully — avoiding the crumpling. Department of History Ryan Tucker Jones University of Oregon Zubovich, Katherine. Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2021. xii + 274 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $39.95: £34.00. Moscow Monumental focuses on the plan announced in 1947 to design nine imposing neo-Gothic skyscrapers to be distributed across the Soviet capital like grandiose, ornate charms on a commanding chain — eight buildings intended primarily for residential use by different constituencies, plus the long-delayed Palace of Soviets — and describes the bureaucratic efforts and urban ramifications as seven of the nine buildings were constructed over the course of the ensuing five years. Supported by an array of original material from Moscow archives, the book attends especially to such topics as the interest on the part of Soviet architects and engineers in selected precedents in the United States, the influx of workers into Moscow to carry out the necessary construction labour, the urban displacement the overall process entailed, and Muscovites’ efforts to obtain homes within the new, magisterial structures. Katherine Zubovich builds her story, as it were, from the ground up, exploring REVIEWS 785 the experiences and perspectives of those most immediately engaged in and affected by the planning and construction of these extraordinary edifices. Intended as towering symbols of Stalinist power and achievement and easily the best-known Soviet buildings (at least to those outside the discipline of architecture history), Moscow’s ‘seven sisters’ served from the start as midcentury modern havens for members of the Soviet elite. In 1952, one juicy archival morsel reveals, Lily Brik entreated Lavrentii Beria — without success — for a home for herself and her second husband, the critic Vasilii Katanian, noting:‘Thedoctorsaysthatafifth-floorapartmentwithnoelevatorwillkillme. Comrades who are already living in the tall building on the Kotel´nicheskaya embankment have told me that there are some 3-room apartments there still unoccupied’ (p. 172). The towers’ construction tore Moscow apart and proved equally tumultuous for the city’s inhabitants, many of whom were dislodged to the urban outskirts, as Zubovich details in the four strongest of the book’s eight carefully circumscribed chapters (‘Moscow of the Plan’, ‘Moscow of the Shadows’, ‘The Vysotniki’ and ‘The View from the Top’). While centred on the five-year span from 1947 to the buildings’ completion, Moscow Monumental begins its tale two decades earlier, with an engaging chapter entitled ‘Red Moscow’ structured around seven images from an album of photographs of Moscow published in Berlin in 1928. Questions of architectural representation (visual or discursive) otherwise play little role in the book, which addresses process more than product, although Zubovich tantalizingly notes that the Palace of the Soviets, while never built, nevertheless existed ‘in text and images, not to mention candy wrappers and stationery’ (p. 28). Chapter two, ‘The Palace’, presents the history of the ongoing competitions for the Palace of Soviets from 1931 to 1934 — all overseen...

Midcentury Modern: The Emergence of Stakeholders in Democratic Practice

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

Design and Social Change: An Architectural History of the University of California, Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), campus as it stands today appears as an architectural mash-up of midcentury modern institutional buildings, both low rise and high rise; a smattering of World War II–era wooden buildings; 1970s-style double wide trailers; and new science buildings built by a who's who of internationally famous architects. In this case study, the author shows how the UCSB campus's architectural history mirrors the post–World War II boom in educational facilities throughout California and the social, cultural, and architectural history of the region as a whole. The key to discovering this history is archival research, both at the University Archives at the UCSB Library, as well as at the architecture-specific Architecture and Design Collection at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum on campus. In this case study, the author explains how the architectural history can be traced through the archival records to more fully understand the history of the campus.

Video Review: The Soothsayings of Iris

Video Review: <i>The Soothsayings of Iris</i>

Unstable Modernism in the Barron Studio

Mid-century modernism in music largely flowed in two streams. One was the austere, hermetic music of composers such as Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Their “serialist” music was built from refined, logical, even mathematical systems, but listeners often experience it as the opposite: haphazard, frustrating, incomprehensible.[1] Akin to the flat,

About the Authors

Previous articleNext article FreeAbout the AuthorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJenny Anger is professor and chair of art history at Grinnell College. She is the author of Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (2004) and Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme (2018). Anger’s long-standing interest in gender and art extends here to an exploration of mental illness.Paisid Aramphongphan earned a Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, and previously held a Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His book Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960s New York is forthcoming (May 2021).David Brody is a professor of design studies at Parsons School of Design at the New School. He is the author of Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor (2016) and Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (2010), and co-editor of Design Studies: A Reader (2009). He is on the editorial board of American Art.Rhoda Eitel-Porter is the editor of Print Quarterly, based in London. Her master’s thesis was on portraits of women by Otto Dix; her Ph.D. dissertation on Cesare Nebbia was published in 2009. Much of her research focuses on Italian art of the sixteenth century, and American and German art of the twentieth century.Elizabeth S. Hawley is a visiting assistant professor in art history and visual studies at Northeastern University. She received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her research on Native and non-Native art in the American Southwest has been supported by the Lunder Institute, Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Pittsburgh Foundation.Jennifer Quick holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was previously Research Curator for the Polaroid Consultant Photographers Collection at the Harvard Business School. Her book manuscript, “Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s” is under contract with Yale University Press.Jennifer Van Horn is an associate professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware. She is the author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2017) and her second book, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery, is due for publication next year.Kristina Wilson is a professor of art history at Clark University and the author of numerous books, articles, and essays on modernist design and modernist fine art practice in the United States. Her book Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design is due for publication in April 2021. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 35, Number 1Spring 2021 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714334 Views: 198 © 2021 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Materiality of Mid-Century Modern Furniture in Turkey

The modern interior emerged as a complex phenomenon, an interchange of modernity and its materiality. One of the constituent elements of this complexity is the progressive relationship with technology. This paper explores the materiality of furniture in terms of its material qualities, production technologies, craft component and inefficacies. The paper focuses on mid-century modern furniture in Turkey as a unique example in the history of furniture design, especially in terms of materiality. In order to understand the material qualities of this historical context, oral history provided a vital methodological tool to uncover the philosophy behind production, contemporary conditions and the designers’ personal experiences through their own words. This enables the study to add significantly to the limited knowledge about modern furniture and especially materials in Turkey. The analysis is divided into three parts: materials, production technologies and difficulties. By investigating the material qualities of a furniture piece, the study extends beyond mere forms or styles to cultural productions that narrate the country’s efforts to develop and thrive. In addition, it reveals the evolution of both materials and manufacturing techniques. Finally, by connecting these stories to specific furniture pieces, this study documents furniture not just as an artefact but also as the final product of an assemblage of people, materials, and techniques.

Opus in Brick and Stone: The Architectural and Planning Heritage of Texas Tech University by Brian H. Griggs

Reviewed by: Opus in Brick and Stone: The Architectural and Planning Heritage of Texas Tech University by Brian H. Griggs Kathryn E. Holliday Opus in Brick and Stone: The Architectural and Planning Heritage of Texas Tech University. By Brian H. Griggs. ( Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Illustrations, appendices, notes, index.) Texas universities have long used their architecture to create a visually distinctive identity and to compete with each other through the grandeur and scale of campus facilities. Rice University's Collegiate Gothic, the University of Texas at Austin's Beaux-Arts ensembles, Trinity University's mid-century modern, and the University of Texas at El Paso's Bhutaneseinspired quads all create unified campus environments that contribute to clear visual narratives of the university's role in civic and educational culture. Texas Tech is no exception, and Brian Griggs's exhaustive exploration of its campus history focuses particularly on the Spanish Revival core of the campus, built gradually from the 1920s through the 1940s. Griggs is especially interested in the ways that the neo-plateresque Spanish Revival style, based directly on university architecture in Spain rather than the Spanish colonial architecture of Texas, was exploited by the university's architects and administrators to solidify the university's reputation and status in the competitive world of Texas higher education. When Texas Tech was founded in 1923, it did not immediately have the full support of the Texas Legislature. Because Texas A&M University already existed, many in the state believed there was no need for an additional agricultural college in Lubbock. Griggs takes a deep dive into the machinations of early supporters, including Amon Carter and John [End Page 92] Carpenter, who used their political and economic influence to found the university and insure its growth. The university's early architects, primarily William Ward Watkin of Houston and Wyatt Hedrick of Fort Worth, were savvy negotiators of this business and political climate and navigated the thorny problem of creating an image for Texas Tech from scratch on an apparently vacant, flat plain. The Administration Building, still standing today, is an excellent example of this early period, a relatively modest brick structure ornamented with beautifully crafted cast stone finials, scrolls, balusters, towers, and pediments typical of the style. Problems with funding, material, labor supply, and political chicanery are well-documented. Some of the more interesting aspects of Texas Tech's campus that make it distinctive receive less attention than its style. The campus was designed from the beginning to be sprawling, open, and navigated by car. Later advocacy resulted in a more pedestrian-friendly campus that pushed cars to the perimeter. Tech's early sponsors also visited technical campuses like the Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania and Lowell Technological Institute in Massachusetts to understand the needs of agricultural college buildings, particularly those dedicated to cotton and textile sciences. The campus's history of modernist architecture, especially the often-maligned brutalist tower of the Art and Architecture Complex, designed by Ford, Powell & Carson, receive relatively short shrift. These projects were certainly curtailed by funding and have been unpopular, but they also reflect the idealism of designers who believed that breaking with the past could provide freedom from its constraints. Griggs is a Texas Tech graduate, an architect who designs buildings for the campus today, and a passionate advocate for the campus's historic architecture and continuing the university's Spanish Revival style in its new buildings. His book is a product of both of those missions, providing an argument for how closely connected the Spanish Revival was to the ideals of the university's founders and early administrators. Architectural historians have increasingly interrogated these revivalist styles for their associations with Europhilia and whiteness during the era of Jim Crow. Debates during the 1930s over the inclusion of sculpted portraits of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, for example, point to the inherently political nature of architecture on a public university campus. Both portraits, as Griggs clearly shows, were ultimately left out. Opus in Brick and Stone is lovingly documented, well-illustrated, and important reading for all Texas Tech graduates and students as well as anyone interested in the ways that campus architecture shapes...

Mid–Century Modern Furniture Representing Modern Ideals in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey

This study focuses on how the modern furniture designed for Turkey's third parliament building, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, represented the country's new modern ideals by breaking with its Ottoman heritage. While the architecture of this building has been studied, there are no assessments of its interiors and furniture as integral elements. This study uses archival research and interviews with interior designers who worked on the project. The findings shed light on how modernization was brought to life through the spaces and furniture in this powerful, symbolic building.

Mid-Century Modern Interiors: The Ideas the Shaped Interior Design in America

Mid-Century Modern Interiors: The Ideas the Shaped Interior Design in America

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry: A Genealogy

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry:A Genealogy Jae Won Edward Chung (bio) In 1948, four months before the Republic of Korea was established, Sinsiron ("new poetics") published their first anthology volume. In it, co-founder Kim Kyŏng-nin (1918–2006) declared that modern poetry began with "the annulment of all promises about language." What did he mean? In the past, language had been but a tool for the explication of concepts and the circulation of ideology. With modern poetry, language became a scientific mode of thought that could produce its own "fusion" of reality. [I] wish to propose an experimental course for a new trajectory of modern poetry. In order to express a new way of thought (sago), we must adopt reality through a scientific perspective, at the right speed, and this reality must be constituted through a new fusion, with a fresh, pictorial imagination (imijineisyŏn). It is poetic thought that regulates this new fusion, and what adds speed to this new form of thought is art's comprehensive action (aeksyŏn).1 [End Page 245] According to Kim, reality is both recreated and contemplated through poetry, and the "pictorial imagination" combined with "speed" allows the poet the opportunity to engage in "action." The promise of autonomous poetic agency and its reliance primarily on the power of the image would become attributes most consistently enshrined by modernist poetics in the coming decade. Almost forty years later, in his publication of the collection Seoul, Wild Horse-like (1987), Kim states that while modernism should not be constrained to a "dictionary concept," underlying its multiplicity through history were the principles of surrealism or imagism that allowed poets to draw from their contemporary contexts to "unfold new movements."2 It is not enough, however, to say modernism allows for multiplicity. We must look at how historical developments set the terms for what kind of multiplicity modernism may hold—that is, how they shaped the outer limits of modernism's constitution as a field of organizational, creative, and discursive activities.3 This is especially true for the cultural politics of South Korea's turbulent early years. At the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korea was divided (the northern zone administered by the Soviet Union and the southern by the United States). Across the South, there was widespread ideological mobilization across virtually all organizational units. If 1930s modernism solidified its position in the cultural field in the wake of the dissolution of KAPF (Korean Artists Proletarian Federation) by the Japanese colonial authority, then jockeying for position in the post-liberation era by various factions unfolded more or less concurrently after Liberation, in a shorter span of time, overlapping with migrations, strikes, [End Page 246] demonstrations, acts of terror, political and economic uncertainty, and eventually, the outbreak of the Korean War. The legacy of this civil war and its decades-long solidification into a sustainable postwar system involved the entrenchment of Cold War ideology and continual disavowal by state and citizenry. Modernism was implicated in this process. As we examine the complexity of this implication, a genealogical method allows us to pay attention to moments of diverging possibilities at an early juncture of South Korean literary history.4 It also allows us to engage in ongoing debates about how aesthetic and discursive borders of modernism in Korea have been constituted. Kim Hansung and Choi Junga, for example, have shown how acts of translating or creatively adapting the works of W.B. Yeats yielded varying possibilities for modernism across generations of Korean poetry.5 While Kim and Choi show how Yeats's oeuvre became a fruitful Rorschach test for Korean modernists of their respective eras, Janet Poole's work on "midcentury modernism" seeks to trace the resilience of modernist themes across discursive boundaries shaped by the Cold War.6 By showing how Ch'oe Myŏng-ik's aesthetics of melancholia and negation persist across the 1945 divide, Poole offers a way of understanding modernism less in "specific formal terms" and more as a questioning of unidirectional progress. [End Page 247] If Kim and Choi privilege variation, and Poole repetition, I attempt to track both in early South Korean modernist poetry. I also...

Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present by Pamela M. Lee

Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present by Pamela M. Lee

The Art of Texas: 250 Years ed. by Ron Tyler

Reviewed by: The Art of Texas: 250 Years ed. by Ron Tyler Rachel Hooper The Art of Texas: 250 Years. Edited by Ron Tyler. (Fort Worth, Tex.: TCU Press, 2019. Pp. x, 446. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-87565-703-5.) The Art of Texas: 250 Years is an ambitious survey of artists who have lived and worked in the state now known as Texas, including Spanish colonial portraitists, Minimalist sculptors, and everyone in between. The project is both an exhibition of more than one hundred paintings and sculptures at the Witte Museum in San Antonio as well as a ten-by-twelve-inch hardcover book with more than 350 full-color illustrations and fourteen essays by preeminent scholars of Texas art. The editor, Ron Tyler, also edited The New Handbook of Texas (Austin, 1996), and The Art of Texas has a similar encyclopedic feel. It is broad in scope and well researched, and it will be a useful resource for both experts and newcomers to the unique visual culture of the region. The hefty book joins a number of recently published works that celebrate Texas as a significant incubator for the arts: Pete Gershon’s groundbreaking Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972–1985 (College Station, Tex., 2018), William Middleton’s meticulously researched Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil (New York, 2018), Jay Wehnert’s reflections in Outsider Art in Texas: Lone Stars (College Station, Tex., 2018), and Katie Robinson Edwards’s award-winning Midcentury Modern Art in Texas (Austin, 2014). Whereas other books focus on art historical questions of originality and patronage, most essays in The Art of Texas situate artworks in the context of social history and a uniquely Texan culture that was formed over the centuries by a mix of indigenous, immigrant, and enslaved peoples. Half of the authors hold Ph.D.s in history or American studies, and this training gives them useful methodologies for studying regional art history. Texas may not be recognized as a major art center in most art historical texts, but The Art of Texas makes a compelling argument that culture in the state was built from the ground up by a myriad of artists who were taken with the beauty of the landscape and were strongly supported by their communities. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, starting with Tyler’s history of Texas art from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and [End Page 461] concluding with an essay by K. Robinson Edwards on “Liberty and Lone Star Modernism” in the twentieth century. Many of the authors, including Susie Kalil, Sam DeShong Ratcliffe, William E. Reaves Jr., Francine Carraro, and Michael R. Grauer wrote influential books in the 1990s on Texas art, and their essays in The Art of Texas are updated summaries and revisions of subjects in which they have substantial expertise. Kalil writes on landscape paintings, Ratcliffe on nineteenth-century history painting, Reaves on the 1920s wild-flower painting contests known as the Davis Competitions, Carraro on Depression-era regionalism, and Grauer on western art. Kenneth Hafertepe and Light Townsend Cummins have recently published books on Texas architecture and material culture and bring their knowledge to bear on paintings and sculptures for this volume. Hafertepe considers work by artists who emigrated from Germany, and Cummins writes on sculpture. Curators Rebecca Lawton and Jay Wehnert also offer insights on Texas Impressionism and Outsider Art, respectively. A highlight of the book is Richard B. McCaslin’s text on the sculptor Pompeo Luigi Coppini, which is an exciting preview of his forthcoming biography of the artist. The roster of established scholars who have contributed to The Art of Texas is impressive. However, there are some notable omissions. Texas is home to two world-renowned scholars of Latinx art, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Mari Carmen Ramírez. Neither are included as authors in this volume or cited in Ricardo Romo’s essay on “Hispanic Art in Texas.” Texas is also home to legendary curator and scholar Alvia Wardlaw, and Houston is the subject of a revelatory book by Darby English about a racially integrated exhibition of abstract art, 1971: A Year...

Re-Worlding Postwar

The exhibition, Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (2016-17), presented nearly 350 works by 218 artists from sixty-five countries, providing an ambitious and expansive account of mid-century modernism. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Postwar proposed a vision of artistic production in the post-World War II period that foregrounded experiences of war, decolonization, transnational movement, and changing technology. This review situates the show within a history of global exhibitions, articulating the stakes of the project for curatorial practice and pedagogy. It also evaluates its organization and display in the institution’s gallery spaces, reckoning with the limits of the exhibition format and the mode of decentering enacted through a simultaneous presentation of works created by artists in widely varying contexts.

Living in a modern way in The Moon is Blue (1953, Otto Preminger): mid-century modern architecture, interiors, and furniture

This article focuses on The Moon is Blue (1953, Otto Preminger), a light-hearted romantic comedy starring Maggie McNamara as an aspiring young actor, Patty O’Neill, and William Holden as architect Donald Gresham. The first Hollywood movie largely set inside a high-end Mid-Century Modern domestic interior, it features some top-quality machine mass-produced furniture by leading US designers and manufacturers. After considering the design production team, I discuss the ways in which the film promotes the furniture and the performance of modern ways of living. I also discuss how the film uses the interiors in a neighbouring apartment as a counterpoint to that of Gresham.

Taking measure of mid-century modernism

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Rufus Nims: Mid-century Modern and Florida Tropical Architecture

Mid-century modern architecture developed after the Second World War as numerous technological advancements allowed for open house plans with the increased use of glass and a reconfiguration of indoor-outdoor relationships. Rufus Nims, a Miami architect (1913–2005), hybridized emerging ideas of mid-century modernism with climatic design that emerged in field of tropical architecture after the Second World War. Nims experimented with homes that had disappearing walls; and that could be comfortable in the hot and humid climate of Florida. This paper will analyze Rufus Nims’ role in the development of Florida Tropical Architecture, through his seamless integration of indoor and outdoor spaces. Further, this study will assess how Rufus Nims used tropical architecture strategies in South Florida, such as screened-in porches, disappearing walls, and landscape integration. The paper argues that Rufus Nims’ architectural ideas were based on emerging redefinition of the indoor-outdoor spatial relationships as was evident in the broader mid-century modern movement and Florida Tropical Architecture.