Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present 9781501343735, 9781501343759, 9781501343766

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Plates
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction Beyond the Commercial: Corporate Patronage Reconsidered
Notes
Part 1: Rethinking Corporate Patronage
Chapter 1: Corporate Patronage at the Crossroads: Situating Diego Rivera’s “Rockefeller Mural” Then and Now
Coda
Notes
Chapter 2: Maxfield Parrish’s Creative Machinery for Transportation
The art of Clark Equipment
Landscape and the terrain of suggestive advertising
Parrish’s parts
“The sky is the limit”: Manufacturing the M.P. brand
Notes
Chapter 3: Connections and Conflicts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Corporate, Commercial, and Documentary Photography
Notes
Chapter 4: Incorporated Philanthropy: The General Education Board,
Changes in philanthropy and medical education
The architecture of early-twentieth-century medical schools
The General Education Board and medical education
The impact of the General Education Board on the architecture of American medical schools
Methods and Problems of Medical Education
Notes
Part 2: From Tastemaking to Marketing: Corporate Patronage Networks
Chapter 5: The Corporate Person as Art Collector: Andrew Mellon’s Capital and the Origins of the National Gallery of Art
Corporate vision
Plotting the capital
The corporate collector
Notes
Chapter 6: “To Live Is to Look and Move Forward”: Lord and Taylor’s 1928 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art
Modern design on the rise
Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art
The enticing ensembles
The critical and public response
Shaping the consumer citizen
Notes
Chapter 7: Merchants, Manufacturers, and Museums: The Patronage Networks of Modern Design in the United States, 1930s–50s
Art and the machine: The cultural repositioning of industrial design
Window-shopping: Modern art for the masses
Art and commerce: Useful Objects and Good Design at the Museum of Modern Art
For modern living: Culture and commerce on display
Furniture showrooms
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: Marketing Hawaii: Eugene F. Savage and the Matson Murals
Notes
Part 3: Corporate Commissions as Branding and Public Relations
Chapter 9: Civic Space and an Iconic Brand: Paradoxes of Corporate Patronage in the Carnegie Library Phenomenon
A different type of civic space
The process and the role of women
A civic space as a brand
From brand image to brand identity to brand icon
Notes
Chapter 10: Banking with Family in Postwar California: Howard Ahmanson, the Millard Sheets Studio, and the Home Savings and Loan Commissions, 1953–91
Millard Sheets, California artist
Howard Ahmanson, patron
The Home Savings tower
Notes
Chapter 11: Rusting Giant: U.S. Steel and the Promotional Material of Sculpture
Notes
Chapter 12: From Bank Lobbies to Sportswear: Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley, and the Shift in Corporate Patronage in the Twenty-First Century
Goldman Sachs, “Public” art, and Julie Mehretu’s Mural
Kehinde Wiley, PUMA, and the corporate artist
Contested narratives: The complications of corporate patronage
Coda—Corporate patronage today
Notes
Contributors
Bibliography
Corporate Art Collections & Exhibitions
Corporate Sponsorship & Philanthropy
Index

Citation preview

Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present

Contextualizing Art Markets This series presents new, original research that reconceives the scope and function of art markets throughout history by examining them in the context of broader institutional practices, knowledge networks, social structures, collecting activities, and creative strategies. In many cases, art market activities have been studied in isolation from broader themes within art history, a trend that has tended to stifle exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Contextualizing Art Markets seeks to foster increased dialogue between art historians, artists, curators, economists, gallerists, and other market professionals by contextualizing art markets around the world within wider art historical discourses and institutional practices. The series has been developed in the belief that the reciprocal relation between art and finance is undergoing a period of change: artists are adopting innovative strategies for the commercial promotion of their work, auction houses are expanding their educational programmes, art fairs are attracting unprecedented audience numbers, museums are becoming global brands, private galleries are showing increasingly ‘curated’ exhibitions, and collectors are establishing new exhibition spaces. As the divide between public and private practices narrows, questions about the social and ethical impact of market activities on the production, collection, and reception of art have become newly pertinent. By combining trends within the broader discipline of art history with investigations of marketplace dynamics, Contextualizing Art Markets explores the imbrication of art and economics as a driving force behind the aesthetic and social development of the art world. We welcome proposals that debate these issues across a range of historical periods and geographies. Series Editor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, UK Editorial Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Christie’s Education, USA Christel H. Force, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA Charlotte Galloway, Australian National University, Australia Mel Jordan, Royal College of Art, UK Alain Quemin, Université Paris-8, France Mark Westgarth, University of Leeds, UK

Forthcoming Volumes in the Series: Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Museums and Movements, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France (1853–1914), by Elizabeth Emery Pioneers of the Global Art Market: Paris-Based Dealer Networks, 1850–1950, edited by Christel H. Force Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows, by Zachary Kingdon Théodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth-Century France, by Simon Kelly Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Hustle and the Scramble, by Maria Quirk

iv

Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present Edited by Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Chicago Picasso (1967), Daley Plaza, Civic Center, Chicago, Illinois © David Rius & Núria Tuca/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4373-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4376-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-4374-2 Series: Contextualizing Art Markets Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction  Beyond the Commercial: Corporate Patronage Reconsidered  Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn

ix xiii xv

1

Part One  Rethinking Corporate Patronage 1 Corporate Patronage at the Crossroads: Situating Diego Rivera’s “Rockefeller Mural” Then and Now  Mary K. Coffey 2 Maxfield Parrish’s Creative Machinery for Transportation  Jennifer A. Greenhill 3 Connections and Conflicts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Corporate, Commercial, and Documentary Photography  Mark Durden 4 Incorporated Philanthropy: The General Education Board, Abraham Flexner, and the Architecture of American Medical Schools  Katherine L. Carroll

15 39 63

77

Part Two  From Tastemaking to Marketing: Corporate Patronage Networks 5 The Corporate Person as Art Collector: Andrew Mellon’s Capital and the Origins of the National Gallery of Art  Seth Feman 6 “To Live Is to Look and Move Forward”: Lord and Taylor’s 1928 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art  Elizabeth McGoey 7 Merchants, Manufacturers, and Museums: The Patronage Networks of Modern Design in the United States, 1930s–50s  Margaret Maile Petty 8 Marketing Hawaii: Eugene F. Savage and the Matson Murals (1938–40)  Elizabeth B. Heuer

99 117 136 154

Part Three  Corporate Commissions as Branding and Public Relations 9 Civic Space and an Iconic Brand: Paradoxes of Corporate Patronage in the Carnegie Library Phenomenon  Douglas Klahr

171

viii Contents 10 Banking with Family in Postwar California: Howard Ahmanson, the Millard Sheets Studio, and the Home Savings and Loan Commissions, 1953–91  Adam Arenson 11 Rusting Giant: U.S. Steel and the Promotional Material of Sculpture Alex J. Taylor 12 From Bank Lobbies to Sportswear: Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley, and the Shift in Corporate Patronage in the Twenty-First Century  Daniel Haxall Contributors Bibliography Index

190 206

225 245 249 270

List of Illustrations

Plates Plate 1

Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Modern Art in America,” PM, June 2, 1946, M13. Ad Reinhardt papers, 1927–1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Plate 2

Detail of Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934. Fresco. Museum Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. De Agostini Picture Library/M. Seemuller/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 3

Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets, 1931. Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework, 94 ⅛ × 74 3/16 inches. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico. Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 4

Maxfield Parrish, The Spirit of Transportation, 1922. 11 × 7 inches. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Plate 5

Maxfield Parrish, The Spirit of Transportation, November 1920 (altered by The Clark Equipment Company, 1925). Oil on board, 35 ½ × 27 ½ inches. Courtesy of American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection.

Plate 6

Udo J. Keppler, “The Magnet” from Puck 69, no. 1790 (June 21, 1911). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Plate 7

Cover of catalogue for Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art, 1928. Dorothy Shaver Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Plate 8

Eugene F. Savage, Aloha . . . A Universal Word, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 9

Eugene F. Savage, Festival of the Sea, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 10

Eugene F. Savage, Island Feast, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 11

Eugene F. Savage, Pomp and Circumstance, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

x List of Illustrations Plate 12

Eugene F. Savage, A God Appears, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 13

Eugene F. Savage, Hawaii’s Decisive Hour, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 × 96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 14

Matchbook, Arcade Restaurant, Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1930. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

Plate 15

Susan Hertel and Millard Sheets Studio, stained-glass windows fabricated by John Wallis and Associates, Home Savings Studio City branch, Los Angeles, completed 1969. Photograph by Hunter Kerhart, 2017.

Plate 16

Julie Mehretu, installation view of Mural, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 262 × 960 inches. © Julie Mehretu. Courtesy of the artist and Goldman Sachs. Photo credit: Jason Schmidt.

Plate 17

Kehinde Wiley, Unity, 2010. Oil on canvas, 108 × 114 inches. © 2010 Kehinde Wiley. Used with permission.

Figures Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934. Fresco. Museum Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

16

Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1932. Pencil on paper, 31 × 71 ¼ inches. MoMA, New York. Anonymous Gift. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

18

Maxfield Parrish, Fisk Tires: The Modern Magic Shoes, 1917. Photomechanical reproduction, 13 × 28 ½ inches. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

45

Figure 2.2

Maxfield Parrish, “From Maxfield Parrish, Windsor, Vermont,” Collier’s: The National Weekly 40 (January 11, 1908): 19.

46

Figure 2.3

Maxfield Parrish, Solitude, 1932, illustration for Edison Mazda calendar, 1932. Color lithograph, 9 ½ × 7 inches. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

52

Margaret Bourke-White, At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937. Gelatin silver print, 9 ¾ × 13 ⅛ inches. Gift of the photographer. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

73

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 2.1

Figure 3.1

List of Illustrations Figure 4.1

xi

Dwight James Baum and John Russell Pope, Syracuse University College of Medicine, Syracuse, 1937, with the nearby Syracuse Memorial Hospital at far right. Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho; Syracuse University Photograph Collection, RG 50, Box 27836, Folder “B+G/Medicine, College of/Exterior—3rd building,” University Archives, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, New York.

81

Figure 4.2

Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 1906. Photo by Elmer Chickering; Record Group M-CL02, Series 00097, Image 97.488, Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts.

81

Figure 4.3

Coolidge and Shattuck, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Hospital, Nashville, 1925. “Vanderbilt University, Medical School, Nurses Home and Power House, Nashville, TN #028, 1926” files. Courtesy of Archives of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, Boston, Massachusetts.

82

Andrew W. Mellon in his apartment at 1785 Massachusetts Avenue NW, with A View on a High Road by Meindert Hobbema hanging above the fireplace mantel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gallery Archives.

101

Harris & Ewing, photographer, “Secretary of Treasury Mellon and model of showing new buildings Uncle Sam will erect,” April 27, 1929. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

107

Figure 6.1

Ensemble by Lord and Taylor, circa 1927. Reproduced in Edwin Avery Park, New Backgrounds for a New Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927).

120

Figure 6.2

Sigurd Fischer, photographer, “View of Chareau study at Lord & Taylor,” 1928. Sigurd Fischer Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

125

Sigurd Fischer, photographer, “View of American dining room at Lord & Taylor,” 1928. Sigurd Fischer Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

126

Installation view of the exhibition “Machine Art”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 5, 1934–April 29, 1934. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. Copyright: unknown. Acc. No.: IN34.5 © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence.

138

Herman Miller showroom, Chicago Merchandise Mart, circa 1939, designed by Gilbert Rohde. Courtesy of the Herman Miller Archives.

147

Figure 5.1

Figure 5.2

Figure 6.3

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

xii List of Illustrations Figure 7.3

Herman Miller showroom, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1949. Courtesy of the Herman Miller Archives.

148

Figure 9.1

1845 Carnegie Library, Carrol [sic], Ia. Postcard, 1905. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

179

Figure 9.2

No. 384. Carnegie Library, Green River, Wyo. Postcard, 1906. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

181

Figure 9.3

Crescent Hotel, Catholic Church and Carnegie Library. View from East Mountain, Eureka Springs, Ark. Postcard, 1953. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

186

Figure 10.1 Renzo Fenci sculptures flanking entrance to Home Savings Beverly Hills branch, 9245 Wilshire Boulevard, completed 1956. The Ahmanson Foundation Archives.

195

Figure 10.2 Home Savings advertisement featuring Renzo Fenci sculpture and Howard Ahmanson signature, 1962. Courtesy of Fieldstead Archives. 196 Figure 10.3 Photograph of Vertis Hayes’s sculpture for Vermont-Slauson branch, Los Angeles, completed in 1972, as reproduced in 1978 Home Savings calendar.

199

Figure 11.1 Unisphere, New York World’s Fair, 1963. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “[Completed structure]” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 9, 2018. http:​//dig​italc​ollec​tions​.nypl​.org/​items​/ eb59​bf20-​16aa-​0132-​da17-​58d38​5a7b9​28.

211

Figure 11.2 Scale models of Chicago Picasso sculpture in warehouse, HB-29086-F2, Chicago History Museum, Hedrich-Blessing Collection. 212 Figure 11.3 Unveiling of Chicago Picasso sculpture, unknown photographer, 1967. Collection of Alex J. Taylor.

214

Figure 12.1 Julie Mehretu, Mural, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 262 × 960 inches. © Julie Mehretu. Courtesy of the artist and Goldman Sachs. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.

226

Figure 12.2 Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto’o, 2010. Oil on canvas, 72 × 60 inches. © 2010 Kehinde Wiley. Used with permission.

233

Preface Corporate patronage has had a major impact on the development of art, design, and architecture in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on examples ranging from the funding of public libraries and the design of medical schools to the commissioning of large-scale murals, product advertising, and the creation of private collections, contributors to this volume show how the interests of corporations and their stakeholders have impacted public taste and shaped individual careers. Chapters offer an important reassessment of the reasons behind, and impact of, corporate patronage. On the one hand, the risk attaching to the shaping of public goods by corporations and the ensuing transformation of financial power into cultural dominance is a recurrent theme in the volume. On the other hand, chapters reveal the presence of complex aims and interactions that underpin the role of corporations in philanthropic networks, local communities, and civil life. Throughout the book, authors explore both the creative possibilities and the social frictions generated by corporate sponsorship of the arts and challenge preconceptions about the rise of the “culture business” over the course of the twentieth century. It would be easy to conflate corporate patronage with product branding or, at least, with the curtailment of creative independence. As the editors note in their Introduction, however, the motivations that shape corporate commissions are varied. The sheer scale of projects backed by the financial power of corporations can often give artists and designers an opportunity to work on an unprecedented scale. The advantages of accepting this form of sponsorship are reflected in the range of artists who have worked with or for corporations over the past century. These include familiar names from the twentieth century such as Margaret Bourke-White and Diego Rivera as well as international contemporary artists, Julie Mehretu and Kehinde Wiley. Having regard to these complex risks and opportunities, contributors to the volume show that the close study of corporate patronage and the works produced under its aegis challenge easy distinctions between “high” and “low” art or between “art” and “design.” They also reveal that unexpected results—both social and creative—can ensue from apparently routine commissions. A close analysis of these issues makes this book a particularly welcome addition to the Contextualizing Art Markets series, for chapters reveal the existence of important transactions involving art and design that take place beyond both the dealer network and auction house activity. One of the compelling aspects of this volume is to show how the imbrication of corporate and creative interests can generate a reassessment of both the market for art and the writing of its histories. The beliefs, tastes, and interests of individual personalities do, of course, shape the actions of corporate entities. Accordingly, several of the case studies included in

xiv Preface the present volume examine the cultural influence of individuals including Howard Ahmanson (president of Home Savings and Loan), Andrew Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr., among others. The activities of such individuals anticipated many of the developments seen in the contemporary art world, ranging from the founding of private museums to the rise of art as an asset class held and traded by multinational corporations. As the present volume makes clear, the activities of corporations as patrons, collectors, and traders have wide ramifications that demand ongoing scrutiny for the purposes of understanding the contexts in which markets for art and design have emerged in the United States and how they may develop in the future. Kathryn Brown, Series Editor Loughborough, Summer 2018

Acknowledgments This volume is supported by generous publication grants from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists and the Textbook & Academic Authors Association.

xvi

Introduction Beyond the Commercial: Corporate Patronage Reconsidered Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn

After all, the chief business of the American people is business. Calvin Coolidge, “Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C.” Although corporations have been one of the most significant sources of art and architecture patronage in the United States since the nineteenth century, their commissions have been frequently dismissed by scholars as solely “commercial”—not “fine art”—and therefore not worthy of serious study. Thus these commissions have been omitted from, and even deliberately marginalized in, most histories of modern and American art.1 The twelve chapters in this volume bring to light examples of corporate commissions that have long been forgotten, and demonstrate the significant role corporate patrons played in the American art world in the twentieth century.2 The case studies herein employ new and varied theoretical approaches in order to go beyond the usual focus on corporate sponsorship and collecting, and to explore the complex organizational networks and wide range of motivations behind corporate commissions. Altogether, the chapters in this volume are a call for the field to reevaluate standard accounts of both art production and patronage in the United States. Despite their ubiquity in American culture, corporate commissions are conspicuously absent from the art historical canon. This has led to a skewed picture of the development of modern art and architecture in the United States. Take, for instance, artist Ad Reinhardt’s well-known and oft-reproduced 1946 genealogy of modern art, in which he divided the art world into two distinct branches based on style (Color Plate 1). On the left, stemming from predominantly French roots, leaves inscribed with the names of abstract artists thrive on healthy branches. On the right, leaves labeled with artists whom Reinhardt categorized as “illustrative” hang precariously on strained and breaking branches weighed down by terms such as “subject matter,” “business as art patron,” “Pepsi-Cola contest winner,” “war art,” and “Mexican art influence.” At the lower right, Reinhardt placed corporate patrons such as Life, Fortune, International Business Machines (IBM), Container Corporation of America, and Pepsi-Cola in the cornfield graveyard of modern art. Yet such patronage was far from dead.

2

Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States

Corporate commissions have in fact been the dominant form of cultural patronage in the United States, especially since the late nineteenth century.3 As critic Frank Caspers affirmed in Art Digest just three years prior to Reinhardt’s cartoon, “Business, in a way, is assuming the role of patron held by the church and aristocracy in past ages.”4 And, like the European popes and princes of the past, American corporations sought out artists for a range of projects and for diverse reasons.5 Corporations used such commissions variously to educate and shape the taste of their customers as well as employees; to attract new clientele; to adorn both interior corporate spaces and exteriors of corporate sites and buildings; and to enhance their advertising, marketing, messaging, branding, and public relations programs. Corporate patronage in the United States, then, is not homogenous, and such an array of commissions did not deserve to be lumped together and dismissed as in Reinhardt’s oversimplified schematic of the mid-century art world. Indeed, as the varied chapters in this volume show, corporate patronage resists easy categorization, and the complexity and range of these commissions blurs such binaries as abstract/figurative, high/low, avant-garde/kitsch, and fine art/commercial work. Furthermore, while many scholars have framed the majority of “fine artists” as above such commercial partnerships, many modern artists—including those “pure” and “abstract” artists flourishing on the left side of Reinhardt’s cartoon, such as Charles and Ray Eames, Josef Albers, Romare Bearden, Fritz Glarner, and Karl Knaths—enthusiastically accepted and even sought corporate commissions.6 Even modern masters like Pablo Picasso—one of the three artists listed on the trunk of Reinhardt’s tree—participated in such projects, as Alex J. Taylor shows in his chapter in this volume. The chapters in this volume resurrect corporate commissions from modernism’s graveyard—from mosaics for Home Savings and Loan buildings and murals for ocean liners to department store displays and sportswear designs—and reconsider them, thereby challenging preconceptions and biases about the history of American art patronage. To be sure, a survey of the literature on patronage in the United States would seem to indicate that the Public Works of Art Project, the Federal Art Project, and other programs formed under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s were practically the only source of patronage for American artists, designers, and architects in the twentieth century.7 The majority of patronage studies in the American field have focused on government support of the arts during the Great Depression, with far fewer devoted to civic, private, or even ecclesiastical commissions. While the Federal Art Project’s importance in American culture is undeniable, though, it only lasted eight years, from 1935 to 1943, and corporate patronage has been an ongoing source of support for artists from the late eighteenth century to the present.8 The twelve case studies in Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present confirm not only the consistency of corporate support for the arts but also the centrality of these commissions to the larger story of American art. In fact, many of the most prominent modern artists and architects readily accepted corporate commissions at all stages of their careers, challenging the widely held assumption that established artists rejected such sponsorship.9 As historian William Leach described, “So many artists worked for business in the

Introduction  3 twenties that Herbert Hoover, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce, could say in 1925 that no ‘artist in America need live in an attic or in a patron’s hall bedroom.’”10 As art historian Michele H. Bogart has pointed out, countless artists in the first half of the twentieth century found employment through corporate commissions, producing paintings and advertisements for companies ranging from Cream of Wheat to Fisk Tire Company to Dole Pineapple.11 Such commissions have continued up to the present, and many contemporary artists routinely partner with corporations to create advertisements and logos, retail and exhibition spaces, and an assortment of products, including limited editions. Artists accepted such commissions for a host of reasons, beyond the strictly financial. Some viewed such patronage as akin to, or even a logical extension of, the private-, church-, or state-supported patronage of previous eras. Others saw it as a steady, reliable form of income, especially from the 1940s on, as corporations—more so than churches, governments, or private individuals—continued to patronize artists in large numbers. While certainly some artists viewed such corporate support as “selling out,” many more viewed it as an opportunity not only for work but also for national exposure. Moreover, corporations could often provide the funding necessary for large-scale projects that would normally be beyond the reach of many artists and other institutions. Corporations, likewise, had a range of motives in seeking out artists: from the capitalistic to the idealistic. Commissions variously stemmed from a company’s desire to rebrand itself, to shape or redirect its public image, to align itself with more creative endeavors, to bring art into the lives of its employees and clients, and more recently, as Daniel Haxall’s chapter shows, as a nod toward inclusivity and diversity. Corporate patrons also commissioned art for contests, calendars, and a variety of products.12 For example, the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company commissioned Georgia O’Keeffe to produce paintings, some of which were used for scarf designs.13 Many artists also found regular employment creating art for companies such as Lucky Strike, Standard Oil, American Tobacco, Steinway, RCA Victor, PanAm, and De Beers Consolidated Mines.14 Life magazine commissioned art from a wide range of artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Doris Lee, Peter Hurd, Tom Lea, Marisol, and Robert Rauschenberg, for its weekly stories.15 Henry Robinson Luce’s Fortune also hired a diverse group of photographers and artists—including Romare Bearden, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Jacob Lawrence, and Diego Rivera—to produce works for various articles and covers.16 Luce publications were not the only periodicals to commission artists. Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Bazaar also hired artists and photographers for a wide array of projects. Edward Steichen did commercial work for various popular magazines; Miguel Covarrubias worked for many years as an illustrator and caricaturist for Vanity Fair; Charles Sheeler produced fashion photography for Vogue; and Stuart Davis rendered his personal impressions of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair for Harper’s Bazaar.17 World’s Fairs were not only a subject for commissioned works of art but also a source of support for artists. From the late nineteenth century to the present, artists

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Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States

and architects have received commissions to create ephemeral structures, murals, art, and displays for corporate pavilions at local, national, and international expositions and fairs.18 Commissions for World’s Fairs—along with civic commissions and government-funded programs such as the WPA—provided important precedents for corporate mural commissions, and, from the 1920s onward, companies from coast to coast regularly began commissioning murals for newly built corporate headquarters.19 Many of these corporate murals were also produced in connection with corporate artcollecting programs. Commissions were a way for businesses to practice corporate social responsibility and to invest in their community, as well as a means of promotion. Naturally, much of the publicity produced in connection with commissions portrayed the company as a benevolent and committed patron of the arts.20 Indeed, businesses were quick to realize the powerful role art could play in shaping public perception, as Dore Ashton noted in her seminal study on the New York School: “The shift of patronage from the government to industry represented a significant change in social attitudes toward the arts. I have no doubt that the vast government project forced the issue; that the establishment of the arts as legitimate agents in American society during the WPA days alerted industry to their potential use.”21 Yet corporate commissions of art both preceded the WPA and continued long after it ended in the 1930s. While the WPA was certainly one model for corporate patrons, companies also looked to other sources for inspiration and, in some cases, developed new forms to fit their specific needs. Moreover, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, corporate commissions are not always the result of a singular vision on the part of one individual; often they stem from the interaction of complex organizational networks. Projects frequently go through rounds of negotiations, with the artist and client debating the direction and messaging of the work. In some instances—most notably Diego Rivera’s mural for Rockefeller Center—such tensions can end in censorship, as can be seen here in Mary K. Coffey’s chapter revisiting that case. The twelve chapters in this book not only document examples of corporate patronage but also reframe the topic. For this volume, we purposely brought together a wide range of essays by academics and curators working in the fields of art history, history, business history, American Studies, architectural history, and design history. Indeed, research on corporate patronage requires the bridging of disciplinary silos. Studying corporate patronage not only demands interdisciplinary work but also requires resourcefulness and inventiveness, and a move beyond traditional methods and sources. Scholars working on corporate patronage have quickly realized the research challenges, especially the difficulties in accessing corporate archives, many of which are not preserved or easily accessible. Furthermore, many of the objects resulting from corporate patronage no longer exist, or are difficult to access. Some of the chapters here are the result of new archival discoveries, many in recently opened archives; others re-examine well-known artists or commissions and reconsider them in a new light. All the chapters offer new methodologies for the subject of corporate patronage, present fresh ways for future scholars to approach this fertile field, and reveal the key role corporations have played in the American art world. In addition,

Introduction  5 the volume contains an extensive bibliography on the subject of corporate patronage, which is organized in thematic sections—patronage, art collections and exhibitions, sponsorship and philanthropy—to allow for ease of scholarly use. The four chapters that comprise Part One, “Rethinking Corporate Patronage,” offer strikingly different approaches to the study of corporate patronage. Mary K. Coffey’s chapter revisits the well-known commission of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Rockefeller Center Management Corporation, to execute a monumental fresco for the lobby of the RCA tower in Rockefeller Plaza. The infamous destruction of the mural has always been viewed as an act of political censorship that established a cautionary precedent for the perils of corporate patronage. Coffey situates the controversy over the censorship of Diego Rivera’s mural within contemporary debates over corporate arts patronage, and questions the nature of corporate patronage in the 1930s, as well as how Rockefeller’s private interests determined the commission and destruction of the work. Jennifer A. Greenhill explores the multifaceted meaning of “transportation” in the context of commercial illustration, specifically in the work of Maxfield Parrish. Her incisive analysis of his 1920 commission from the Clark Equipment Company to visualize “The Spirit of Transportation” shows how Parrish, instead of figuring the concept of transportation allegorically or as exotic, came up with another alternative, producing a landscape picturing a recognizable American site, the Royal Gorge of Colorado. Although Parrish initially included in his composition two tiny cargo trucks negotiating a narrow mountain road, Clark chose to remove them when it reissued the print in 1925. Greenhill examines how this decision reveals both advertising strategies of the period and the goals of the Clark Equipment Company. Mark Durden offers a new take on photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s commercial work. Durden considers her documentary photography in terms of its dynamic with her corporate projects and commissions. Using Bourke-White’s work as a case study, he shows how the tensions and crossovers between these types of photography are a particularly productive way to frame her work and also distinguish it from the photography of her peer, Walker Evans. Concluding Part One of this volume, Katherine L. Carroll examines the General Education Board, a corporate philanthropy founded by John D. Rockefeller Sr., which supported the construction campaigns of fifteen medical schools in the early twentieth century. Although the General Education Board never generated a formal architectural program, an investigation of its patronage reveals that through the work of Abraham Flexner, the Board shaped the development of American medical school design. Carroll’s case study highlights the importance of examining the patronage of philanthropic organizations, and demonstrates that the Board’s influence on medical education extended to the architecture of medical schools. Part Two, “From Tastemaking to Marketing: Corporate Patronage Networks,” consists of four case studies that delve into the complex networks of corporate patrons and the motivations behind their commissions. Seth Feman analyzes Andrew Mellon’s role as the founding benefactor of the National Gallery of Art and argues that the notion of corporate personhood complicates the study of art collecting by raising questions about not only what constitutes a corporate art collector but also the aims behind such

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support. Feman’s chapter examines the corporate bodies Mellon established when he served as secretary of the US Treasury (1921–32) and laid plans for the National Gallery, in an effort to differentiate between individual and corporate art collectors and to explore how their distinct visions of art became inscribed into their collections. Next, Elizabeth McGoey offers a fascinating case study of corporate-sponsored displays of modern interiors. Lord and Taylor’s 1928 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art has been overlooked by scholars, in part due to the challenges that department-store exhibitions present, as they combined fine art, decorative arts, design, and popular culture. Her chapter argues that such exhibitions are central to the study of American art, since such carefully crafted spaces not only shifted the course of modernism in the United States but also became prescriptive tableaux for the promotion of taste education and consumption for a mass audience. Margaret Maile Petty also addresses the role of department stores in the dissemination of modern design through her analysis of the interconnected patronage systems of mid-century America. She looks at how key cultural institutions and individuals partnered with major manufacturers in the United States. Petty persuasively argues that such collaborations were motivated by a desire not only to improve the products of American industry but also to educate the public on the social, cultural, and economic benefits of good design. Her chapter demonstrates that the successful reception of modern design in the United States owes much to the powerful infrastructure of market-focused patronage. To end the section, Elizabeth B. Heuer recounts the commission of murals by artist Eugene F. Savage for the Matson Navigation Company’s newly built ocean liner, the SS Lurline, and offers a powerful case study of the complex negotiation between corporate interests and an artist’s personal ideology. Featuring highly stylized and richly colored scenes of Hawaiian culture, Savage’s murals were sold to Lurline passengers as a set of six color lithographs and later were reproduced as menu covers. Initially intended to be part of a marketing strategy to promote Matson’s economic interests in both Hawaiian tourism and statehood, Savage’s idealized images of island life also became works about the loss of traditional Hawaiian culture due to modernization. Part Three, “Corporate Commissions as Branding and Public Relations,” considers the varied ways corporations have used commissions as a part of brand development and in sophisticated public relations campaigns. Douglas Klahr examines Andrew Carnegie’s financing of the construction of over 1,600 public libraries throughout the United States. He shows how, even though the library buildings themselves had no consistent architectural form, the business magnate managed to establish a diffuse, malleable, and resilient nationwide brand that was recognizable to millions of Americans: the Carnegie library. In the next chapter, Adam Arenson looks at a series of commissions in California and analyzes the corporate partnership between Howard Ahmanson, president of Home Savings and Loan, and artist Millard Sheets and his studio. Arenson outlines how these commissions celebrated regional history and promoted idealized images of the family as part of a larger marketing strategy aimed at the Home Savings and Loan clientele of California. Then Alex J. Taylor examines the success of Cor-Ten steel as a popular medium for contemporary sculpture in the late 1960s. Exploring U.S. Steel’s

Introduction  7 role in the fabrication and promotion of the “Chicago Picasso,” installed in Chicago’s new Civic Center in 1967, Taylor shows that the popularity of this material was no accident of artistic taste, but rather the result of the aggressive marketing strategy of its manufacturer. He examines why U.S. Steel encouraged the use of their trademarked Cor-Ten alloy for use in sculpture, and how such artistic validation served the public relations and lobbying requirements of the beleaguered industrial giant. The volume concludes with Daniel Haxall’s investigation of contemporary corporate patronage. Haxall reconsiders corporate patronage through a comparison of two twenty-first-century commissions from two artists of color: Julie Mehretu’s monumental Mural for Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in New York, and Kehinde Wiley’s portraits and sportswear designs for PUMA. Exploring the tensions and contradictions inherent in the two projects, Haxall shows how, although the intentions behind the commissions were quite different, both signal a significant shift in corporate patronage in the twenty-first century toward greater inclusivity and the use of diversity as a branding strategy. Corporate patronage has taken many forms and continues to evolve. In fact, the corporate interests behind such patronage are as complex and varied today as they were in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1938, Walt Kuhn, artist and organizer of the controversial 1913 Armory Show in New York, reflected upon how quickly business incorporated the radical new modern art on view. He noted that the “Armory Show affected the entire culture of America. Business caught on immediately, even if the artists did not at once do so. The outer appearance of industry absorbed the lesson like a sponge. Drabness, awkwardness began to disappear from American life, and color and grace stepped in. Industry certainly took notice.”22 Business has long been tracking developments in the arts, and as the chapters in this volume clearly demonstrate, many artists in the United States equally pursued the corporate world, welcoming and even seeking opportunities. The cases in this book confirm that artists are savvy entrepreneurs, adept advertisers, successful businesspersons, and expert negotiators, and that corporations are not in the culture business just to make money. Indeed, these complex collaborations between artists and corporations challenge traditional narratives of American art and compel us to rethink the modern canon.

Notes

Thank you to Evelyn Rosenthal for her insightful edits, and to Margaret Michniewicz, Kathryn Brown, and our two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on our introduction.

1 This is partly because in the early years of American art history, scholars and curators looked to European models, whose histories of patronage focused predominantly on the church and the aristocracy. Only recently has the American field of art history begun to embrace economic analyses of art. Historians of architecture and design have devoted more attention than art historians to corporate commissions, as evidenced by the existence of the term “corporate modernism” to describe such architectural

8

2 3

4 5

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Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States forms. However, the majority of these studies have centered on postwar examples. Our volume focuses on the long twentieth century, including instances from the first half, and concludes with a commission from the twenty-first century. This book expands on a double session on corporate patronage organized by Melissa Renn and Monica E. Jovanovich for the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) in Savannah, November 9–12, 2011. Two recent nineteenth-century studies include Kevin M. Murphy, no. 2/3 “Painting for Money: Winslow Homer as Entrepreneur,” Winterthur Portfolio 37 (2002): 147–60; and John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). Corporate commissions continue to be a major source of funding for contemporary artists in the twenty-first century; see Daniel Haxall’s chapter in this volume. Frank Caspers, “Patrons at a Profit—Business Discovers Art as a Selling Force,” Art Digest 17 (May 1, 1943): 5. See, for example, the diverse range of patronage projects discussed in Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Indeed, as scholar Louise Rice recently observed about Haskell’s foundational text, “The reader comes away with the impression that, within the wider definition of the phenomenon, there were as many varieties and scenarios of patronage as there were patrons.” Louise Rice, “Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque,” in The Books That Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, ed. Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 144. For more on the commercial work of Charles and Ray Eames, see Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998); Donald Albrecht, ed. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress, 1997); Daniel Ostroff, ed., An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, and Speeches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); and Wim de Wit, Design for the Corporate World, 1950–1975 (Stanford: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in association with Lund Humphries, 2017). Josef Albers and Fritz Glarner, for instance, produced murals for the lobby of the Harrison, Abramowitz & Harris-designed Time & Life Building in 1960. See David W. Dunlap, “Press ‘L’ for Landmark; Time & Life Lobby, a 50’s Gem, Awaits Recognition,” New York Times, June 17, 2002, and also Landmarks Preservation Commission, July 16, 2002, Designation List, 338, http:​//www​.nyc.​gov/h​tml/l​pc/ do​wnloa​ds/pd​f/rep​orts/​timel​ife.p​df (accessed October 28, 2017). Karl Knaths, Willem de Kooning, and many other modern artists designed advertisements for the Container Corporation of America. For examples, see Modern Art in Advertising: An Exhibition of Designs for Container Corporation of America (Charleston: Carolina Art Association and Gibbes Art Gallery, 1946), and Neil Harris and Martina Roudabush Norelli, Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of America–A Gift to the National Museum of American Art (Washington, DC: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

Introduction  9 7 Furthermore, the WPA’s primary goal was stimulating artistic production by supporting artists through jobs, and it was less concerned with creating art for posterity. In fact, after the program ended, some of the art was auctioned off, which was covered in the media. See, for example, “End of WPA Art,” Life, April 17, 1944, 85–86. See also Jillian Russo, “The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered,” Visual Resources 34, nos. 1–2 (2018): 13–32. 8 One of the earliest examples of corporate patronage in the United States is that of the Insurance Company of North America (today the CIGNA Corporation). Founded in 1792 as a fire and marine insurer, the company commissioned sculptor Claudius Francis LeGrand in 1796 to create a lead eagle-themed fire mark (a metal plaque affixed to a building to identify its insurer). LeGrand was paid $512 for 256 fire marks. See Thomas Harrison Montgomery, A History of the Insurance Company of North America of Philadelphia: The Oldest Fire and Marine Insurance Company in America (Philadelphia: Press of Review Publishing and Printing Company, 1885), and M. J. McCosker, The Historical Collection of the Insurance Company of North America (Philadelphia: Insurance Company of North America, 1945). 9 For instance, a diverse range of internationally renowned artists, including Fernand Léger, Henry Moore, Herbert Bayer, Leo Lionni, Philip Evergood, and Ben Shahn, accepted commissions from the Container Corporation of America (CCA). For more on the CCA, see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Neil Harris, “Designs on Demand: Art and the Modern Corporation,” in Harris and Norelli, Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation, 8–30. 10 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 303. 11 For more on these commissions, see Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The Dole Pineapple commissions have also been discussed in Richard A. Hawkins, A Pacific Industry: The History of Pineapple Canning in Hawaii (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010), 92–93; and Patricia Jennings and Maria Ausherman, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawai’i (Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2011). For more on artists’ work for advertising agencies, see especially Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 12 On illustrated calendars in particular, see Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Domestic Magic: Floating ‘Friendly Thoughts’ of Art and Commerce All the Days of the Year,” in A Date with Art: The Business of Illustrated Calendars, ed. Christine B. Podmaniczky (Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2014), 7–11. 13 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “The Colors of Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Cheney Brothers, and the Relationship between Art and Industry in the 1920s,” in Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 228–46; and Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

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14 For an overview of these commissions and for a thorough history of corporate collecting, see Mitchell Douglas Kahan’s introduction in Art Inc.: American Painting from Corporate Collections (Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1979). 15 Life also highlighted other corporate patrons in its weekly pages. See, for example, “The Artists Look at U.S. Industry: American Business Has become Painters’ Patron and Subject,” Life, January 5, 1953, 78–80. For more on Life’s patronage, see Melissa Renn, “The Picture Magazine: Life and the Limits of Photography,” in Writing Visual Histories, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova and Florence Grant (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). On Benton’s commissions for Life, see Erika L. Doss, “Regionalists in Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925–1945” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1983); Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Austen B. Bailly, American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood (New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2015). On Life’s wartime patronage of artists, see Melissa Renn, “From Life: Tom Lea and the World War II Art of Life Magazine,” in Adair Margo and Renn, Tom Lea, Life Magazine, and World War II (El Paso: Tom Lea Institute, 2016); and Renn, “‘An Enduring Record’: Peter Hurd’s Art for Life Magazine,” in Magical & Real: Henriette Wyeth and Peter Hurd, A Retrospective, ed. Kirsten M. Jensen (Doylestown, PA: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2018). Life was not the only corporation to commission art during the war. Abbott Laboratories commissioned Thomas Hart Benton to create a series of paintings, and Standard Oil hired artists to depict the role of oil in the war effort. See Thomas Hart Benton, The Year of Peril: A Series of War Paintings (Chicago: Abbott Laboratories, 1942), and Oil: Documentary Paintings from the Collection of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) at the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996). 16 Lesley K. Baier, Walker Evans at Fortune, 1945–1965 (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1977); John R. Stomberg, “Art and Fortune: Machine-Age Discourse and the Visual Culture of Industrial Modernity” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1999); and Daniel Okrent, Fortune: The Art of Covering Business (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Publishing, 1999). On Jacob Lawrence’s commissions for Fortune, see Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 158–63. For more on Rivera’s work for Fortune, see Susana Pliego Quijano, Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera’s Mural at Rockefeller Center (Mexico City: Trice Ediciones, 2013), 55. On Bearden’s commissions for Fortune (and also Time), see Emily Hage, “Reconfiguring Race, Recontextualizing the Media: Romare Bearden’s 1968 Fortune and Time Covers,” Art Journal 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 36–63. Mark Durden’s chapter in this volume explores Fortune’s commissions from Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White. See also Isadora A. Helfgott, Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), for a discussion of Fortune’s and Life’s patronage. 17 See Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Adriana Williams and Doris Ober, Covarrubias (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994); and Kirsten M. Jensen, Thomas Mellins, and Donald Albrecht, Charles Sheeler: Fashion, Photography, and Sculptural Form (Doylestown, PA: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2017).

Introduction  11 18 Companies also used the fairs to showcase their corporate collections. For example, IBM, whose collection began in 1937 when its president Thomas J. Watson acquired a painting from each of the seventy-nine countries in which it operated, exhibited works from its collection in 1939 at both the New York World’s Fair and the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition. See Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, 273. See also Jo Gibbs, “IBM: 1936–46,” in Work for Artists: What? Where? How? ed. Elizabeth McCausland and Walter Baermann (New York: American Artists Group, 1947), 107–17. 19 On this topic, see especially Catherine Coleman Brawer and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière (New York: Andrea Monfried Editions, 2014); Monica E. Jovanovich, “Power and Patronage: Public Art and Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles, 1928–1936” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2016); Bobbie Malone, “Arthur Covey’s Kohler Murals: Honoring the ‘Dignity and Nobility’ of Men Who Work,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 93 (2009–10): 28–37; Christine Roussel, The Art of Rockefeller Center (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); and Sarah Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 20 For more on the concept of corporate social responsibility, see Morrell Heald, The Social Responsibilities of Business, Company, and Community, 1900–1960 (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970); Archie B. Carroll, “Corporate Social Responsibility: Evolution of a Definitional Construct,” Business & Society 38, no. 3 (September 1999): 268–95; and Richard C. Hoffman, “Corporate Social Responsibility in the 1920s: An Institutional Perspective,” Journal of Management History 13, no. 1 (2007): 55–57. 21 Dore Ashton, The New York School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 146. 22 Walt Kuhn, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Self-published, 1938), 24–25.

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Part One

Rethinking Corporate Patronage

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1

Corporate Patronage at the Crossroads: Situating Diego Rivera’s “Rockefeller Mural” Then and Now Mary K. Coffey

Within the art world, the discipline of Art History, arts policy circles, art journalism, and even Hollywood filmmaking, the fate of Diego Rivera’s “Rockefeller Mural”1 at the hands of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Todd, Robertson, and Todd Engineering Corporation is legendary (Figure 1.1, Color Plate 2). Nearly any account of public art scandals or the perils of a capitalist art market for contemporary artists evokes the destruction of Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center in 1934 as a foundational episode in the modern history of art censorship and corporate arts patronage. So renowned is this episode that it helped to familiarize the more obscure story of Marc Blitzstein’s scuttled play, The Cradle Will Rock, as a consequence of political attacks on the New Deal Federal Theater Project in Tim Robbins’s 1990 film, Cradle Will Rock. As that film draws to a close, Robbins moves between the wildcat staging of Blitzstein’s socialist play, a mock funeral procession up Broadway for a Vaudevillian’s ventriloquist dummy, and the destruction of Rivera’s mural. Large chunks of frescoed plaster fall from the wall as the procession mournfully proceeds uptown, all to the heroic strains of Blitzstein’s Brechtian libretto of working-class solidarity. At the end of the film, only a fragment of the mural survives—an image of a venereal disease microbe—clinging to the wall as an emblem of corporate blight. The close-up of the fragment slowly fades back to Broadway, as the 1930s mise-en-scène gives way to a view of today’s Times Square, filled with the gaudy visual extravaganza of commercial entertainment on steroids. Robbins’s point is clear, market-based arts patronage is a disease that constrains artistic freedom and converts visual culture into a commodity fetish that has no capacity for social uplift, let alone enacting progressive change.2 While this story is well known, my purpose here is to revisit it within the specific context of contemporary corporate art patronage, to assess whether or not the Rockefellers and their management team were prototypical patrons of this sort, and to determine what, if anything, the commission and destruction of Rivera’s mural illuminates about the privatization of culture today. While wealthy elites have been patrons of art since the emergence of market-based systems of patronage in the early

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Figure 1.1  Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934. Fresco. Museum Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. modern period, today’s corporate art patronage is typically understood as a result of changes in the federal subsidization of art that began in the 1980s.3 Prior to the Reagan-era push to shift the bulk of cultural funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to the private sector, numerous private foundations and nonprofit organizations existed.4 Likewise, as the Rockefeller Center episode makes clear, corporate patronage, while less prevalent than private philanthropy, has existed in the United States since at least the turn of the latter half of the nineteenth century (consider the Railroad Companies’ patronage of western landscapes).5 In fact, following Alan Trachtenberg’s arguments in The Incorporation of America, the corporatization of all sorts of enterprise, not just arts funding ones, was a defining feature of the Gilded Age.6 Nonetheless, since the 1980s there has been an exponential boom in corporate collecting, corporate sponsorship of cultural events, and corporate patronage as handmaiden to real estate development. Due in part to changes in the tax code as well as new marketing logics that view cultural capital as an integral part of a “cause related” branding strategy,7 the “intervention,” to use Chin-tao Wu’s term, of corporations in the art world is typically viewed as a deformation of the cultural landscape. On the one hand, it has led to the encouragement and privileging of market-friendly aesthetics over and against controversial or less commodifiable forms of art. For critics, the worry is that this taste culture constrains artists and limits consumer choice. On the other hand, concerns about the conversion of cultural capital into economic capital, and vice versa, through corporate art patronage have lead critics to wonder about the way that a company’s marketplace advantage can be leveraged not only in social and cultural life but also in political decision-making.8 Related to these concerns are worries about the collaboration between artists and the interests of big business, as some appear to embrace the subordination of their work to commercial agendas, as witnessed, for example, in the participation of artists in high-profile corporate advertising campaigns. Critics worry that this commercial art ethos has supplanted the oppositional ethics of the avant-garde. And certainly, the controversy over Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller



Corporate Patronage at the Crossroads

17

Center pinpoints the historical moment when the relationship between artists and private (as well as federal) patrons became vexed as a consequence of an emergent avant-garde ethos (bolstered by an affiliation with socialism) among American artists that often ran counter to the capitalist or conciliatory goals of their funders.9 These concerns raise the following questions with regard to the Rockefeller incident: What was the nature of corporate patronage in the 1930s? If John D. Jr.’s “private interests,” to quote Catha Paquette, determined the commission and destruction of the work, what were those “private interests” and do they prevail today within the corporate sector?10 To begin, we need first to review the general facts of the Rockefeller Center case, which, despite a few disagreements between scholars, have achieved the status of consensus within the extant literature.11 In January 1932, several years into the massive development of Rockefeller Center,12 Diego Rivera was having lunch at the townhouse of Abby Rockefeller along with her son, Nelson, and her friend and art advisor Frances Flynn Paine, among others. Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo had been frequent guests of the Rockefellers since Rivera’s one-man show at the newly established Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) earlier in 1931. While at that lunch, the topic of a mural in the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) tower came up, and Abby suggested Rivera for the commission. John R. Todd had already been at work attempting to secure Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for the commission, but had failed. So when Nelson brought Abby’s suggestion to his father, John D. recognized that Rivera, while not an artist he “personally cared for,” might indeed be a “good drawing card.”13 With John D., the Todd, Robertson, and Todd management team, and the architect Raymond Hood on board, Rivera secured the commission, but not before he had renegotiated the terms to allow for the use of a full-color palette (as opposed to painting in a monochromatic one) and true fresco (rather than painting on canvas that would then be glued to the wall).14 He would receive $21,000 for the mural, $7,000 when he began and the remaining $14,000 as severance pay when he was dismissed from the project.15 This money covered not only the artist’s labor but also his expenses and the salaries of his assistants. In exchange for this sum, Rivera signed a standard contract agreeing that, upon final payment, the mural would be owned by Rockefeller Center and that its managers would determine whether or not the work was on view.16 While still completing his cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Rivera began working out his interpretation of his patrons’ ponderous theme, “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision Toward the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” And by November of that year, he had submitted a preliminary sketch and a statement of his intentions to both Nelson and Abby (Figure 1.2). The verbal description made Rivera’s Leftist orientation clear to anyone familiar with the language of Marxism. “My panel will show the Workers arriving at a true understanding of their rights regarding the means of production,” he wrote.17 The sketch was less pointed, although anyone schooled in the iconography of the Left would have been able to discern Rivera’s point. It centered on a worker in blue overalls holding hands with a peasant and a soldier, a motif that appears multiple times in his Ministry of Public Education cycle (1923–28) in Mexico City, in which he openly espouses proletarian revolution, and where he had specifically taken aim at American

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Figure 1.2  Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1932. Pencil on paper, 31  ×  71 ¼ inches. MoMA, New York. Anonymous Gift. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. robber barons in Wall Street Banquet, a panel that includes an unflattering caricature of John D. Rockefeller Sr.18 To the worker’s right (viewer’s left) are scenes of social unrest, including children playing tug of war and a television screen that depicts gas-masked soldiers. To his left (viewer’s right) are scenes of social cooperation. Here the television screen shows a robust worker’s celebration taking place before a ziggurat-like structure that resembles Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Despite Rivera’s reputation as a communist propagandist, and these early indications of his intentions, the sketch and concept were approved by Raymond Hood shortly thereafter. By early 1933, Rivera was at work on an enormous scaffold (that obscured much of the evolving imagery), painting night and day before crowds of ticketed onlookers to make the May 1 deadline for the inauguration of the mural and building.19 Rivera’s mural was to have covered three sides of the enormous elevator vestibule in the grand lobby at the 5th Avenue entrance. The main wall alone was 63 feet wide and 17 feet high. While the mural was always structured by a contrast between capitalism and socialism, with the worker at center poised to “choose” between them, the iconographic details of the central panel, in particular, underwent major revision as Rivera worked. He sidelined the triumvirate of worker, peasant, and soldier, and focused instead on the worker, now depicted at the helm of an enormous machine (the eponymous “Man at the Crossroads”) (Color Plate 2). This change was likely a consequence of Rivera’s general shift away from the immediate concerns of post-Revolutionary Mexico as a consequence of his encounter with US industry and labor politics. While modernization had always been a cornerstone of his vulgar Marxism, once in the United States, he became fascinated with modern industry and its capacity to both liberate and enslave humanity.20 This theme is most famously explored in his Detroit Industry mural (1931–32) where he lionized Henry Ford’s River Rouge factory while also expressing doubts about the technocratic management of life under capitalism.21



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In front of the worker Rivera depicted two crossed ellipses, one detailing the biological world of the microcosm—disease microbes, cell-division, the fertilization of an egg alongside a developing fetus—and the other, astronomical phenomena of the macrocosm—a lunar eclipse and the Milky Way galaxy. To the right of this worker, Rivera painted the social unrest of the period in unmistakable detail, including a scene of people demonstrating for work and food being beaten by riot police, a cadre of gasmasked soldiers marching to war, and a group of wealthy elites drinking and playing cards before a multiracial audience seated as though witnessing their debauchery on a television screen. Floating in the ellipsis positioned between the reveling capitalists and the soldiers were scientifically correct images of bacilli for gonorrhea and syphilis. On the worker’s left, by contrast, Rivera expanded his depiction of Red Square to encompass the entire composition, showing healthy female athletes, workers gathered and marching in celebration of May Day, and a scene of Communist Leader V. I. Lenin grasping the hands of a black farmer and Soviet soldier as an emblem of international solidarity through socialism. While Rivera was a notorious “red” artist, his original sketch and description had given no indication that he would include a portrait of Lenin. And it is unclear exactly why this portrait tipped the scales for his patrons, given the message writ large across the mural as a whole. Moreover, Lenin, while not ubiquitous in the murals of Mexican artists, had appeared on public walls in the United States at this time.22 José Clemente Orozco had included Lenin as a modern leader in his murals for the New School for Social Research (1930–31), where he garnered little comment. And in fact, Abby Rockefeller, serving as an anonymous donor, paid for Orozco’s commission at Dartmouth College a year later, suggesting that Orozco’s celebration of Lenin was not a problem for her. Of course, the New School was a progressive university while Rockefeller Center was a commercial enterprise, and as most scholars point out, even though Rivera’s conception of capitalism was congruent in some ways with the views of his North American industrial and financial patrons, this detail was a deliberate provocation.23 Having weathered several controversies over his murals in California and Detroit, Rivera likely felt immune to censorship.24 In the past, he had enjoyed the unflagging support of his patrons despite controversy,25 likely because he had always demonstrated a clever ability to address multiple audiences simultaneously, with iconographic programs that could be interpreted as both critical and complicit with capital depending upon the proclivities of the viewer.26 His “Rockefeller mural” was far more explicit and propagandistic than the murals he had painted in the United States leading up to this commission. His overt endorsement of not only the Soviet system and communist ideology but also the founder of the Soviet state could only be interpreted by non-fellow travelers as a repudiation of capitalism, and along with it, the American system of government. It seems clear from the record, that Abby and Nelson, both of whom visited Rivera frequently while he worked to view and discuss his ideas, were aware of the decidedly Leftist orientation of the mural and may even have encouraged the artist to go further (one firsthand account even claims that Abby suggested Rivera add Lenin to the

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composition).27 However, the record also suggests that John D. Jr. and his managers, including the architect, Raymond Hood, were less attentive to the mural as it was unfolding and thus may have felt blindsided when Joseph Lilly, a journalist working for the New York World-Telegram, published an expose with the sensationalist title “Rivera Perpetuates Scenes of Communist Activity for R. C. A. Walls—And Rockefeller, Jr., Foots the Bill.”28 Shortly thereafter, the Lenin detail was brought to Hood’s attention, and the controversy ensued. While Rivera had been pronouncing his Marxist orientation in the Press for months in his futile attempt to curry favor with the Communist Left29 (he had been expelled from the Communist party in 1929, and was under constant attack for his unorthodox Marxism, painting for “millionaires,” and above all, his support of Trotsky),30 his patrons seemed to have persisted in the belief that he could be “reasoned with” as regarded his politics and iconography.31 Nelson attempted to intercede with a letter requesting that Rivera substitute the head of Lenin with something more suitable. Rivera replied, with Ben Shahn as ghost writer, refusing to remove Lenin, but offering to add several portraits of equally illustrious Americans (Abraham Lincoln, Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowe) to “balance” the issue.32 He concluded the letter, famously, and rather fatefully by stating: “I am sure that the class of person who is capable of being offended by the portrait of a deceased great man, would feel offended, given such a mentality, by the entire conception of my painting. Therefore, rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety, but preserving, at least, its integrity.”33 When Nelson failed to bring Rivera to “reason,” Hugh Robertson took over, accusing Rivera of deliberately misleading his patrons, using the commission to enhance his own political position, and reminding the artist that Rockefeller Center and its management owned the wall.34 Rivera consulted with a lawyer and attempted to continue work on the mural. Lucien Bloch, one of his assistants, took surreptitious photographs for posterity anticipating the worst. By now the conflict had become a cause célèbre within the media and artists were organizing in support of Rivera’s rights. Nonetheless, Robertson, accompanied by Joseph Brown, vice president of Todd & Brown, Inc., and backed by a group of uniformed guards, ordered Rivera off of his scaffold, presented him with his outstanding pay, and had the mural temporarily covered as the Rockefeller Center team determined what to do with it.35 Nelson lobbied for the transfer of the mural to MoMA, but neither the museum nor the Rockefeller Center management team were willing to take on the costs or the responsibility for the move.36 In 1934 the mural was unceremoniously chipped off the wall, ending the prolonged drama for good. Rivera would go on to paint a much reduced version in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, but the controversy over his RCA commission cost him a lucrative and high-profile commission for the General Motors Building slated for the Chicago World’s Fair. He would never get another corporate commission in the United States, and despite several more years of mural work in Mexico, 1933 marked the apex of his career as an international public artist.37 What becomes clear in this account is the sheer number of individuals and agents at play not only in the commissioning of Rivera but also in the decision to cease



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production, and eventually, destroy his work. As Daniel Okrent writes in his definitive history of Rockefeller Center, “a knot of committees and consultants, interwoven with layers of architects, managers, and Rockefellers” oversaw the decoration of Rockefeller Center.38 “Most ideas originated with the architects,” he continues, “and final say resided with Junior, but John R. Todd guarded the gates.”39 Okrent refers here to the decisions regarding not only the architectural style of the buildings within the complex but also their interior design and the commissioning of nearly forty living artists to create decorative murals, sculptures, and mosaics for their interiors, exteriors, plazas, and courtyards. Additionally, John D. Jr. hired Hartley Burr Alexander, a philosophy professor, to articulate the overarching theme for the decorative scheme (“New Frontiers”) while also composing advisory panels comprised of museum directors, academics, and interior decorators to lend advice about aesthetic matters. Finally, as with all Rockefeller endeavors, John D. Jr.’s publicist, Merle Crowell, and lawyer, Tom Debevoise, were frequently consulted along the way. We might also recall that Frances Flynn Paine, Abby, and Nelson also served as more informal advisors when it came to the Rivera commission, and that, Rockefeller Center’s major tenant, the Radio Corporation of America and its notorious president, David Sarnoff, may also have influenced the decision to censor the mural. This “knot” bears emphasizing because it helps us to appreciate a key complexity of corporate culture, namely the relationship between a wealthy elite, such as John D. Jr., and the corporate entities and individuals deputized to manage his philanthropic and for-profit endeavors. It also reminds us that corporate patrons are often linked by blood, class-affiliation, or business to the power brokers in other cultural and financial institutions, such as museum trustees, and the CEOs of banking and brokerage firms. Then, as now, corporate leaders retained considerable power in decision-making over arts patronage but they did not act without consulting with or considering the interests of other stakeholders. In the case of Rockefeller Center, however, the system of corporate patronage was far more ad hoc and less formalized than the bureaucratized system that prevails today. As scholars of corporate art patronage point out, since the 1970s a whole class of professional curatorial consultants and advisors has emerged to mediate between elite patrons and the marketplace.40 In forming his advisory committees, John D. Jr. sought council from academics, commercial designers, and museum trustees. However, in the end he relied more on the expertise of family members, like Abby and Nelson, and business managers, such as John R. Todd, when identifying artists or making decisions about interior and exterior space. Frances Flynn Paine functioned as something like today’s curatorial consultant; however, her relationship with John D. Jr. was highly mediated by Abby, and her involvement in Rivera’s commission was motivated by her own political agenda, rather than serving the business interests of John D. Jr. Today, corporate art patronage takes many forms. The most prominent being: corporate art collecting (something that existed in the early twentieth century as well) and corporate art sponsorship (something that has evolved in the last couple of decades into a highly codified marketing strategy). In the case of the former, corporations amass large collections of art that are displayed on the grounds and in

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the lobbies, corridors, and offices of corporate headquarters and their branch offices. In some cases, corporations create exhibition spaces onsite or loan their collections to museums. Corporate art sponsorship entails a form of corporate philanthropy whereby the business or firm sponsors cultural enterprise, such as museum exhibitions and performing arts programs, or creates public art prizes, to name only a few examples. With corporate art collecting, art is viewed as a financial asset, and a form of investment that shields profit from taxation. However, presidents and CEOs typically argue that the collection has been amassed for the purposes of enhancing the office environment for employees and clients, alike, and perhaps more significantly, in order to promote an “environment conducive to good living and good business.”41 While high-profile corporate collections certainly contribute to public relations by presenting the corporation as high minded or associated with “progressive” or, even in some cases, “cutting edge” art, it is through corporate sponsorship that corporations undertake specific forms of image marketing. To take just one recent instance, when Citigroup-Banamex traveled an exhibition of Mexican Folk Art (Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art, hosted by multiple venues in the United States between 2001 and 2004), it was sponsored by Tequilas Heradura and Aeroméxico, among others. These companies sought to capitalize on the exotic appeal of Mexican folk art to support their share in the US alcohol and tourism market. Moreover, the exhibition’s launch was timed to coincide with the Citigroup buy-out of Banamex, and thus its support of Mexican folk art was staged to assure concerned Mexicans that the transnational bank would not sell off Banamex’s considerable holdings in Mexican cultural heritage while also seeking to improve its relationship with US based Mexican migrants, who it hoped to integrate into its new transnational banking network.42 Corporate sponsorship as a marketing ploy is so common today that museum development offices typically have employees solely dedicated to identifying, wooing, and creating special openings, receptions, information packets, and “goodie-bags” for corporate sponsors whose product or image profile they believe has significant tie-in with a given exhibition. John D. Jr. certainly engaged in both collecting and sponsorship activities in his private life and in his role as a philanthropist through the creation of private foundations. However, unlike his philanthropic endeavors, Rockefeller Center was John D. Jr.’s first major business venture. His speculative development of the four blocks of real estate between 48th and 52nd Streets and 5th and 6th Avenues would spur the development of Midtown as the center of business in Manhattan as well as the nation in the postwar years. In this sense, the closest counterpart among today’s corporate patrons would be property developers who view art commissions as a way to market new real estate and to facilitate the letting of space for high rents. “By displaying what seem to be functionless objects in an apparently disinterested way,” writes Chin-tao Wu, “real estate entrepreneurs are actually capitalizing on the high social status that comes with the possession of ‘art.’”43 The most cited example of this kind of corporate patronage is the development of the Equitable Life Assurance headquarters in New York City in the 1980s. Here, in addition to office space, the architect, Edward Larabee Barnes, designed exhibition



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space for the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a commercial art gallery. Numerous blue-chip contemporary artists, such as pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, Minimalist Sol Le Witt, and Neo-Expressionist Sandro Chia, were commissioned to execute monumental murals. In the public statement issued by Equitable upon the opening of its galleries, its authors make the links between real estate development and arts patronage explicit, while also citing Rockefeller Center as its model and inspiration: “The Equitable’s decision to commission outstanding contemporary American artists to enliven and enrich the urban landscape stems from the example set by Rockefeller Center a half century ago  .  .  . by providing spaces for acclaimed artists. .  .  . The Equitable hopes to create a public urban space that combines functional amenities with dramatic aesthetic appeal.”44 Notably, there is no mention of the censorship scandal in this press statement. What is significant is the recognition of Rockefeller Center as a precedent for the ambitious integration of contemporary art into an urban real estate development. In statements such as this one, however, it is the commissioning of art, itself, and its “dramatic aesthetic appeal,” that matters more than the specific messages contained in the works installed throughout the complex. While Rockefeller Center was indeed the forerunner of this kind of corporate art patronage, statements issued by John D. Jr.’s publicity department emphasized the message of the arts ensemble as a whole rather than the act of patronage, in and of itself. In this sense John D. Jr.’s patronage was more consistent with the ethos of 1930s corporate philanthropy. In an essay on Pierre Samuel du Pont’s arts patronage during the same period, Volker Kirchberg contrasts today’s “nonpersonal . . . bureaucratic-rational motives” with the “personal, paternalistic, and sociable individual motives” of corporate elites then.45 “In the 1920s and 1930s,” he writes, “motives of product advertisement and corporate image promotion by arts sponsorship were almost unknown.”46 John D. Jr.’s selection of contemporary American artists was less attuned or sensitive to market values than today’s corporate collecting and real estate development. In the Equitable Life Assurance development, Lichtenstein, LeWitt, and Chia were selected for their name-recognition and prominent place within the 1980s art market. And while they worked closely with the architect and designers to create site-specific works, their murals are stand-alone representations of their unique styles rather than components within an integrated decorative scheme. Despite his belief that Rivera would be a “good drawing card,” John D. Jr.’s decision to hire living artists was due to his desire to articulate a unified message throughout the Rockefeller Center complex. Redeploying a collection of great masters would not have facilitated the “New Frontiers” theme that he settled upon nor would they have been appropriate for the monumental scale and modern interiors of skyscraper construction. And while Todd had tried to secure the modern masters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for the marquee commission, and celebrated American artists such as Gaston Lachaise and Paul Manship participated, most of the artists who worked at Rockefeller Center were young and relatively unknown and thus, inexpensive.47 The amount allocated for art in the original budget was a mere $150,000. The final cost was probably closer to one million dollars, however, as John D. Jr. sunk additional funds into the artistic program in pursuit of his lofty ideal. Okrent notes that John D. Jr.

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lacked an appreciation for current trends in modern art. He was often at odds with Hood over the modern appearance of the RCA tower, and he disapproved of the nudity in the mosaics on the building’s exterior. What mattered to him was communicating with the public through works of art. “Satisfying Junior’s cultural wishes demanded more than a trained eye or an informed aesthetic,” Okrent argues, “his inclinations required the pedantic march of exposition, justification, meaning [emphasis in original].”48 Catha Paquette has convincingly argued that John D. Jr. viewed Rockefeller Center as more than just a commercial enterprise or an architectural monument. He saw it as a “social enterprise” through which the “spiritual progress of man” could be affected through a visual program that espoused economic, technological, and scientific advancement in the service of “brotherhood.”49 She writes, Spiritual progress to John Jr. clearly was not so much a matter of conventional expressions of religious faith such as church attendance but rather of service— efforts to minister to the physical, mental, social and spiritual in others. In his mind, spiritual sentiments such as consideration for others, unselfishness, self-sacrifice and service— . . . motivated activities in the fields of medicine and public health, charity and education, as well as efforts to improve living and working conditions.50

This conception of “spiritual progress” manifested itself not only in the international dimension of Rockefeller Center (through the inclusion of international buildings, the commissioning of foreign artists, and the cultivation of foreign governments and foreign-owned industry as tenants) but also in his particular conception of labor management laid out in the so-called Rockefeller Plan. The “Rockefeller Plan” refers to the solutions John D. Jr. proposed for labor problems in the wake of the Ludlow Massacres and the growing support for labor unions.51 In short, the “Rockefeller Plan” sought to improve the living and working conditions of its employees through improving housing, setting up company club-houses for social activities, and establishing a committee mechanism for workers to express their opinions and grievances over labor issues.52 Within this paternalist and owner-friendly model of labor negotiation, workers and managers were viewed as “brothers” engaged in mutually beneficial negotiations rather than as opponents whose interests were inherently at cross-purposes. Through analysis of the publicity documents drafted for Rockefeller Center, Paquette demonstrates that John D. Jr. adhered to a developmental belief that the United States, with its advances in science and technology, should take a leadership role in international relations for the spiritual good of mankind.53 Likewise, she shows that he was deeply invested in forging a new and, in his view, “fair” relationship between capital and labor, that was anti-union but rooted in “mutual understanding,” or what he referred to as “brotherhood.”54 Quoting the publicity document, she writes, Rockefeller Center would be influential not only as a building enterprise and a set of standards for new forms of esthetic expression and beauty, but it would also “be influential socially, for it has at least the chance of becoming the first clear



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expression in our economic life of a new social ideal, that is of human welfare and happiness as centering in the work that we do, and not in some incidental wage.”55

The publicity document makes clear that according to John D. Jr. labor was something that should be measured by the fulfillment it brings to the hard worker not by some “incidental wage.” In statements like this, the anti-union stance is clear. Rockefeller Center was meant to espouse a vision of scientific and technological work that was a reward in and of itself rather than a vision of the worker as a self-advocating wage earner. Paquette points out that the decorative program at Rockefeller Center, centered on Alexander’s “New Frontiers” theme, was in essence conceived of as propaganda for John D. Jr.’s religio-social vision of capitalist labor relations and international cooperation at a moment when this conception of labor was under attack by socialists, union-organizers, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government. From this summary of John D. Jr.’s convictions it is easier to understand Rivera’s original appeal. As a communist artist whose proposed mural would focus on the worker (as well as science and technology) within an international frame, he served his patron’s desire to make overtures toward the anti-capitalist left while demonstrating “good neighborliness” toward Mexico. And, at least on the basis of the sketch, Rivera’s vision of labor, progress, and social development could be viewed as congruent with the themes laid out for Rockefeller Center’s decorative program. Likewise, his inclusion of the nascent technology of television as an iconographic motif reinforced the media concerns of its biggest renter, RCA. Paquette makes clear how the “Rockefeller Plan” and the proposed decorative scheme reflected one another and served the interests of corporate management over those of laborers, but what is important here is to understand the peculiar nature of philanthropy in the 1930s.56 And here I am equating the Rockefeller’s enormous investment in the arts at Rockefeller Center with the family’s other charitable foundations, as both involved a considerable outlay of money in the service of what they felt was the “public good.” John D. Jr.’s conception of the “public” was different from our consumer-oriented approach today. As Neil Harris notes in his study of polling and audience surveys, the 1930s were marked by a “professional self-confidence” in the ability of managers, informed by the ascendant social sciences, to orchestrate environments for maximum impact on visitors.57 This period of “authoritarian experimentalism” was “far more concerned with the nature of the environment being visited than the nature of the visitor.”58 I think we can extrapolate from Harris’s general observations about the professional idealism of the managerial class of the period, that John D. Jr.’s investment in orchestrating a meaningful built environment through visual art reflected a faith in the ability of elites and their managers to effectively shape public experience from the “top down.” This differs from today’s focus on audience behavior or visitor psychology through focused market research that seeks verification of management theories in the feedback gained from test-subjects. Today’s corporate patrons are highly sensitive to the taste culture and dislikes of their clients (if not their employees). And they tend to tailor

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the display of art to the presumed audience. If that audience is an elite clientele in a cosmopolitan city, then the art is more likely to be aesthetically edgy or to reflect current art market trends.59 Thus, Equitable Life selected representatives from the generally unpopular (within the culture of corporate collecting) postwar movements of Pop, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism because of its location in New York City, where its clients are imagined to have a clearer sense of the contemporary market value of big-name artists. However, when the clientele is drawn from a regional or rural market, then figurative works executed by local artists are more prevalent in keeping with a longstanding public preference for figurative aesthetics, genre painting, and landscape.60 Similarly, corporations often calibrate the display of art to the spatial hierarchies within a building, reserving large-scale “major” works for public spaces and the offices of upper management, while relegating smaller, less significant works to corridors and the offices of line employees.61 The art at Rockefeller Center was not dispersed according to hierarchies of use. And while the Rivera mural and the sculpture by Paul Manship received pride of place at the 5th Avenue plaza entrance, every work of art within the complex was expected to reflect some feature of John D. Jr.’s progressive theme of “New Frontiers,” regardless of any notion of audience taste or preference or spatial, employee, or visitor hierarchies. John D. Jr.’s faith in the social sciences and the professional management of the public was particularly significant given the role Rockefeller Center was slated to play in new media technologies and mass communication. As Robert Linsley points out, Rockefeller Center is the “heart of the culture industry on the East Coast, and it was built at the moment when that industry was preparing for a major expansion into the new area of television.”62 He recalls that of the many companies dedicated to mass communication, Rockefeller Center was set to house RCA, NBC, Time Life, Warner Communications, McGraw-Hill Publishing, and Associated Press. Additionally, after the war the development of 6th Avenue would also bring in CBS and ABC, along with numerous other local radio and television stations.63 For Linsley, Rivera ran afoul of his patrons because of his depiction of mass communications (namely television) as “revelatory and educational.”64 “Rivera’s socialist vision of a future in which technical progress is inextricably bonded to social change,” he writes, “was incompatible with the ambitions of businessmen who wanted to exploit technology within capitalism.”65 He argues that David Sarnoff and John D. Jr. envisioned a top-down model of mass communications in which communications technologies would be put in the service of commerce and driven by the interests of big business. And while it is certainly true that they had a vision of their message and a belief that they could orchestrate change from above, Linsley’s portrait of John D. Jr. as maniacally consumed with corporatized social control verges on caricature. Barry Karl and Stanley Katz have argued in their study of early foundations, in which the early history of the Rockefeller Trust and Corporation are prominently featured, that the desire of early founders like the Rockefellers to “defend and support capitalism, did not require foundation trustees to seek to suppress socialism.”66 In fact, it is an interesting aside that in 1931 Fortune magazine printed a full-page color



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reproduction of Frozen Assets (1931) (Color Plate 3), one of Rivera’s most pointedly critical images of Depression Era New York, in which the artist makes clear that the hoarding of wealth by the elite is linked to the poverty and misery of the masses. Michael Augspurger argues that the short essay that accompanied the reproduction endorsed the artist while also gently guiding the reader to see the work through its “own corporate liberal lens,” by de-emphasizing themes of “alienation and exploitation” in favor of “understanding and engagement.”67 While corporate elites could tolerate and rework socialist messages, their sensitivity to Leftist critique of their person or philanthropic motivations was acute given the Progressive Era attacks on “robber barons,” and the extent to which public suspicion of their wealth countered their own self-image as middle-class do-gooders. As Karl and Katz write, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie saw their own business origins in Cratchitt-like terms. .  .  . Neither ever understood how they could finally be publicly perceived as Scrooges; they never ceased to think of themselves as friends of labor. . . . Their paternalism—wishing to help employees in need and to reward virtue—made opposition from organized labor seem almost conspiratorial, an affront to their generosity, of which they were inordinately proud.68

John D. Jr.’s legendary fear of negative publicity stemmed from this elite paternalism, but it was exacerbated during his humiliating defense of the Rockefeller family during the hearings of the United States Industrial Relations Commission over the Ludlow Massacre. The fact that the newly founded Rockefeller Foundation was ultimately implicated in the Massacre, made “John D. Jr.’s efforts to work out a new ‘constitution’ for workers—incorporating a new concept of corporate cooperation between workers and managers—seem part of a more general conspiracy,” according to Karl and Katz.69 It might be tempting to view John D. Jr.’s ire over Rivera’s mural largely in terms of the mural’s content, given that his patronage was directed by a profound concern for conveying a message to the public. By this logic, Rivera’s deviation from the script he had been handed required sanction in order for John D. Jr.’s pro-capital conception of “brotherhood” in labor and international relations to succeed. However, it seems as though the decision to censor was less due to a specific reading of Rivera’s mural and its iconography, than to concern about the negative publicity Rivera’s antics were drawing to the Rockefeller Center project. Today, one might imagine any number of marketing strategies that could convert negative publicity over a “communist” mural in a corporate complex into an audience draw and a performance of democratic largess. However, given the fact that corporate patronage, itself, was not yet viewed as a marketable feature of corporate philanthropy, and John D. Jr.’s discomfort with any negative publicity, it seems more likely that it was his concern about the way the mural might detract from his integrated theme and generate more suspicion about the personal motivations behind his patronage of the arts that pushed him toward censorship. In light of this, Anna Indych-López’s argument that it was the threat of yet another negative publicity scandal on the heels of a controversy over a Rockefeller-funded

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exhibition of American murals at MoMA that tipped the scales, proves insightful. Murals by American Painters and Photographers was ostensibly organized to assuage criticism of the Rockefellers for not commissioning enough US American artists in the Rockefeller Center Complex.70 However, included within the show were works that openly criticized “robber barons,” including John D. Sr. In the case of the exhibition, Nelson, acting as curator in consultation with his father, and his father’s publicist and lawyer, elected not to remove the offending works from the exhibition, a decision that some critics characterized as support for the communist sensibilities of the artists in question.71 So when the scandal over Rivera’s portrait of Lenin erupted a year later, Indych-López argues that John D. Jr. “had to take a firm stand against the portrait of Lenin once the press reported it, whatever their actual opinions or their tolerance of socialist themes. Any other course of action would have seemed tantamount to capitulation again.”72 One further point bears mention as it has recently been forwarded as an alternative explanation for the censorship of Rivera’s mural. In her 2011 exhibition, Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art, Leah Dickerman argues that John D. Jr. objected to Rivera’s mural on highly personal, rather than political, grounds. Citing a letter that John D. Jr. sent to his father after the mural’s destruction in 1934, Dickerman proposes that John D. Jr. and his management team censored the mural because it was “obscene, and in the judgment of Rockefeller Center, an offense to good taste.”73 Rivera’s depiction of venereal diseases just above wealthy elites drinking and playing cards, claims Dickerman, offended John D. Jr.’s devout Baptist opposition to alcohol and immoral sexual behavior. Dickerman believes that Rivera placed John D. Jr. among the reveling capitalists suspiciously proximate to the gonorrhea microbes. Rivera did add John D. Jr. to the version he painted in Mexico City, however, it seems clear from the visual evidence that he was not specifically indicated in the unfinished version at Rockefeller Center. David Rockefeller, in a contemporary interview with the curator, suggested that “ad hominem” attack was the final provocation for his father, lending credence to this theory.74 However, it is likely that David Rockefeller, like so many others, has conflated the subsequent Palace of Fine Arts version of the mural with the original. My point here is not to definitively side with or against David Rockefeller’s memory and Dickerman’s thesis. But rather to suggest that John D. Jr.’s belated claim about obscenity be viewed as an untried strategy, a final attempt to find a way to legitimate his decision to have the mural destroyed in the aftermath of heavy public criticism. That he did not mobilize this defense publicly, despite his stated belief that it might bring the public to a “sympathetic understanding of our position,” but only tried it out privately, suggests that his publicist, lawyer, and business partners had already dissuaded him from going down this path.75 What is suggestive from our standpoint today is that the charge of obscenity had little traction in 1934, whereas since the 1980s it has become perhaps the most effective strategy for public art censorship. In this sense, Rockefeller’s private musings seem to foreshadow not only our present condition in terms of public art but also the interdiction within corporations against patronizing art that is sexually explicit or deemed indecent.76 Whereas the censorship of political speech continues to be a risky maneuver, branding a work as obscene has been a far more successful tactic in the contemporary Culture Wars.77



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Coda In what might be viewed as a historically ironic twist, David Rockefeller was one of the private funders for the aforementioned MoMA exhibition Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (2011). A didactic exhibition that sought to revisit the institution’s early, eclectic, exhibition history by reconvening the portable frescos, including Frozen Assets, which Rivera had executed for his one-man show in 1931. The exhibition also revisited Abby Rockefeller’s early support of Rivera’s career (through her patronage of his Moscow Sketchbook [1927–28]) and the controversy over his commission at Rockefeller Center. Is this a case of history coming full circle, where the wealthy elites who once found Rivera too controversial now see him as an asset within a privatized funding environment that encourages museums to diversify their audience and market among Latin Americans and Latino/as? I’m not so sure. In his admiring review, art critic Peter Schjeldahl notes the “resonance” between the “moneyed interests” of the 1930s and of those of our time while also indicating the greater complexity of art’s implication in wealth today.78 And indeed among insiders the exhibition did seem to speak to the byzantine power relations within the contemporary MoMA as a consequence of the growing influence of elite patrons who hail from Latin America and seek to promote it in and through US museums. For example, one might consider Patricia Phelps Cisneros, the wife of a Venezuelan media mogul and one of the most powerful collectors and supporters of Latin American art within US museums operating today. As a board member, donor, and trustee of MoMA, Cisneros’s support led to the endowment, by Estrellita Brodsky, of a permanent curatorial position for the museum’s significant holdings in Latin American art. She has also loaned key works of South American abstraction to the collection. And while the institution’s renewed interest in this part of its collection has been welcome,79 some scholars and critics have noted a decided preference for abstract and conceptual art over the more politically explicit figurative traditions from the region, especially Mexican art from the 1930s. The Rivera exhibition was viewed by some, therefore, as a subtle response and corrective to the “Cisneros effect” within the MoMA. Within the context of this discussion it is notable that the censorship of Rivera’s Rockefeller mural was revisited within the current institution in an exhibition dedicated to the very paradigm of Latin American modernism—the politically radical, figurative tradition emblematized by Mexican Muralism—that his “Rockefeller mural” compromised for US corporate patrons. Likewise, this paradigm stands in contrast to the growing dominance of another—more poetic and conceptual forms of abstraction that while often political within their context of production are difficult to decipher as such by today’s US audiences—that corresponds with the kind of art corporate patrons supposedly prefer. The Rivera exhibition’s didactic nature also recalled the progressive origins of the institution and its early experiments with pedagogic exhibition design within the context of a new guard of corporate trustees and interests who seem to prefer the neutralizing effects of the “white cube,” an exhibition style that MoMA helped to pioneer and one that has generated decades of criticism.80

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The Cisneros communications fortune was amassed in much the same way as the Rockefeller family’s oil fortune. Likewise, the Cisneros Foundation sponsors a host of scientific and cultural philanthropic activities in clear emulation of the US system of private philanthropy initiated by the Rockefellers and their “robber baron” peers. However, Patricia Phelps Cisneros represents a new era of moneyed interests, one that is transnational, representing a class of elites that are not associated with the interests of nation-states but rather with globalized flows of capital. These patrons operate in and through the corporate structure of US arts patronage and institutions, but not necessarily in the service of US capital or its paternalist vision of international cooperation or the “public good.” Cisneros represents what Mari Carmen Ramirez identified in 1996 as a supranational, neoliberal private sector that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and complemented, challenged, or, in some cases supplanted, national states in arts patronage throughout the region. “Whereas in the past, the visual arts functioned as banners of prestige for nationalist states,” she writes, “today they can be seen to embody a type of marketing tool for Latin American neo-liberal economic elites.”81 Ramirez distinguishes the “boom” in exhibitions of Latin American art that began in the late 1980s from earlier booms in the 1930s or during the Cold War era, periods often characterized as “Imperialist” in which Latin American art was put in the service of the political and economic interests of the US capital and power  (one can certainly see John. D. Jr.’s decision to hire Rivera in this light). The post-1980s “boom,” she argues, has been “directly or indirectly associated with the selfpromotion of Latin American economic interests (particularly Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan and Cuban-American elites) in the United States and Western Europe.”82 These elites, Ramirez asserts, seek not only to legitimate their origins within Latin American nation-states but also “recognition of the positive achievements of their modernization project.”83 Since 1996 when Ramirez published this essay, the power of displaced elites from countries like Mexico and Venezuela has only increased as the United States has become not only a base of operation but a permanent place of residence due to the escalating violence and unstable economies in their nations of origin. While in the period Ramirez was writing, exhibitions tended to focus on the early twentieth-century avant-gardes in Latin American nation states, periods of intense artistic nationalism, as well as national modernization. The exhibitions of the past decade or so have been more focused on the mid-century avant-gardes, works of art that do not traffic in specifically nationalist iconography, and which often appear to be indistinguishable from European and postwar US abstraction.84 Thus, these movements lay claim to an aesthetic cosmopolitanism that asserts parity with rather than difference from the canon of Western modernism. Today, one might argue that patrons like Patricia Phelps Cisneros seek to distance the region from its associations with radical politics (and, it must be said, the messy politics of US multiculturalism as well) in order to maintain a vision of rational order and high-cultural achievement that serves to sustain networks of money and power among a transnational economic elite who profit from business in and to the region.



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Thus, we should not be surprised to find that in addition to David Rockefeller, the major sponsors for the recent Rivera exhibition were BBVA BANCOMER (Banco de Comercio/Commerce Bank), Mexico’s largest financial institution, now a subsidiary of the Spanish bank BBVA, and CONACULTA (Consejo Nacional para Cultura y las Artes/the National Council for Culture and the Arts), a government agency founded in 1988 by Mexico’s neoliberal president Carlos Salinas as an extension of his cabinet to assert more presidential control over cultural programming at home and abroad and to circumvent the bureaucratized and unionized cultural ministries founded in the 1930s and 1940s. Additionally, the show was supported by a group called the “Mexican Friends of Rivera,” comprised of very wealthy and well-placed individuals—curators, museum directors, the Chairman of José Cuervo and its subsidiaries, and so on—within Mexican society and the contemporary art world. Within this context of transnational corporate patronage in which the interests of the Mexican art and financial elite are pitched against the interests of Venezuela’s cultural and financial elite through exhibitions of Latin American art staged at and through a New York art museum, the Rockefeller family interest in MoMA’s exhibition seems relatively insignificant. As a quaint vestige of an era of “robber baron” philanthropy, the private foundations established in the mid-century United States continue to be essential to the operation and prestige of the US cultural sector and New York museums, in particular, especially in the aftermath of the defunding of the NEA. But as the aforementioned discussion of the “Cisneros effect” suggests, their “private interests” no longer predominate within today’s transnational funding environment and globalized public sphere.

Notes 1 The official title of the mural that Rivera was commissioned to paint at Rockefeller Center was “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision Toward the Choosing of a Better Future.” When Rivera re-painted the mural at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City in 1934, the title was changed to “Man, Controller of the Universe.” However, for many, the destroyed mural is simply known as the “Rockefeller mural.” In order to distinguish it from the Palace of Fine Arts Version, I will refer to it this way. 2 In the final scenes of the film, Robbins conflates three historical events for narrative effect. The performance of Blitzstein’s play occurred in 1937 when the Federal Arts Project was reorganized, its budget slashed, and the play’s opening delayed; the destruction of Rivera’s mural took place in 1934; and the funeral procession of Larry Crickshaw’s dummy took place in 1939 in Los Angeles, when the Federal Theater Project was actually shut down for good. For Robbins, the demise of federal subsidies for the arts augured the rise of privatized funding and with it, a renunciation of working-class or popular forms of visual culture like political figuration, vaudeville, and socialist theater. He makes this transition evident in a scene where the patriarch, who represents John D. Rockefeller Jr., sits with other tycoons discussing their intentions to avoid political art in favor of abstraction in the future. While Robbins rehearses, in brief, the thesis that there was considerable

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collusion between the government and private interests in the postwar period to promote Abstract Expressionism as part of a cultural Cold War, he glosses over the very significant role of the National Endowment for the Arts (established by Congress in 1965) in abetting the continued ascent of abstraction. Needless to say, the NEA is a federal arts program, and while it essentially picked up where Cold War initiatives had left off, albeit under a different discursive rationale, the acceleration of corporate patronage did not occur until the 1990s, after the Reagan-era attack on the NEA and attempts to move government funding of the arts to the private sector. Robbins takes other liberties for visual and narrative effect, the most glaring is showing Rivera’s mural completed, rather than unfinished, and depicting the single panel Palace of Fine Arts version rather than indicating the three-part structure of the Rockefeller Center version, wherein only the central image of the worker surrounded by scenes of social unrest and social organization would have been visible. For discussions of the Cultural Cold War and the promotion of abstraction, see Eva Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 15 (June 1974): 39–41; Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum 12 (May 1973): 43–54. For a discussion of the founding and dismantling of the NEA, see Michael Brenson, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (New York: The New Press, 2001) and Toby Miller and George Yudice, “The United States, Cultural Policy, and the National Endowment for the Arts,” in Cultural Policy (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 35–71. 3 For a discussion of the advent of corporate patronage in the 1990s, see Miller and Yudice, Cultural Policy, 2002, Rosanne Martorella, Corporate Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2001). For an industry point of view on how to build a corporate art collection, see Charlotte Appleyard and James Salzmann, Corporate Art Collections: A Handbook to Corporate Buying (London: Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012). 4 For discussion of nonprofit foundations in the arts, see Paul J. DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 5 See, for example, Nancy K. Anderson, “‘The Kiss of Enterprise’: The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 237–83. 6 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 7 For a discussion of this term and phenomenon, see Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 8 Chin-tao Wu discusses the way Phillip Morris leveraged its cultural sponsorship during the political fracas over banning smoking in New York City’s public institutions. She notes that museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art supported smoking against Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s bill after Phillip Morris called in an “IOU.” Wu, Privatising Culture, 147–51.



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9 It is important to note that avant-garde artists did not only run afoul of their corporate patrons, those working for federal patrons were also subject to forms of censorship or message control. 10 Catha Paquette, At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2017). 11 The literature on Rivera’s Rockefeller mural is large, but the key bibliography includes Dora Apel, “Diego Rivera and the Left: The Destruction and Recreation of the Rockefeller Center Mural,” Left History 6, no. 1 (1999): 57–75; Lucienne Bloch, “On Location with Diego Rivera,” Art in America (February 1986): 102–23; Irene Herner de Larrea, Diego Rivera: Paraiso Perdido en Rockefeller Center (Mexico City, Mexico: EDICUPES, S.A. de C.V., 1986); Laurence Hurlburt, “Diego Rivera: Rockefeller Center, 1933,” The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 159–74; Anna Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States: Controversies, Paradoxes, and Publics,” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 208–28; Robert Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 2 (1994): 48–62; Paquette, At the Crossroads; Daniel Okrent, “What Do You Paint, When You Paint on a Wall?” in Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (New York: Viking, 2003), 287–320; Diego Rivera, with Gladys March, “Holocaust in Rockefeller,” in My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1991); and Bertram Wolfe, “The Battle of Rockefeller Center,” in The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Scarborough House, 1963), 317–40. 12 Rockefeller Center began its life in 1928 as a proposal for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, an initiative spearheaded by New York’s elite. John D. Jr. was originally one of several investors, however, with the economic collapse of the Depression, he managed to buy out the group and embark on a campaign of land purchases in order to initiate the real estate development that we know today. By 1932 he was in control of the development, however, his management team was still seeking renters. They had secured Radio Corporation of America in 1930, which agreed to house its offices and the offices of its subsidiaries in the new tower, nearly one-third of the projected office space. While this did not guarantee the financial success of the complex, it helped to anchor future rent-seeking endeavors among media moguls thereby shaping the future of the complex as the heart of the US media industry. Okrent, Great Fortune, 133–44. 13 Ibid., 289. 14 For a sense of what the patrons had in mind, one can see the extant murals by the Spaniard José Maria Sert and the British artist Frank Brangwyn. Both artists painted in oil on canvas in sepia tones. Both had been commissioned originally to execute murals that would have flanked Rivera’s mural with complementary themes. When Rivera’s mural was destroyed, Sert was given the spaces above and beside the central elevator vestibule. It is his mural that we see there today. 15 “Rockefeller Center Ousts Rivera and Boards Up Mural,” New York Herald Tribune, May 10, 1933. 16 Rivera probably did not read the contract carefully, even though he was encouraged to do so by Todd. His English was not that good, and he had basically been operating on a “hand-shake” basis for his entire career as a public artist. Reportedly

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he shrugged off suggestions to review the contract with lawyers, arguing that Todd reviewed his sketches hastily, indicating mutual trust and that he would return the favor. Okrent, Great Fortune, 303 and Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, 161. 17 For a transcript of the entire verbal description, see Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 320–21. 18 Note that most authors assume the Rockefellers were well aware of Rivera’s caricature of their patriarch at the Ministry of Public Education, but in her article on Abby’s patronage of modern art, Wendy Jeffers has pointed out that when the image was published in the New York Times Abby and John D. Jr. were on a trip to Egypt. They may have heard about it from friends, but it is also possible that John D. Jr. was unaware of the panel. Nonetheless, Abby was well aware of Rivera’s Marxism, she had purchased his Moscow Sketchbook and seemingly delighted in his provocative nature. Wendy Jeffers, “Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: Patron of the Modern,” The Magazine Antiques 166, no. 5 (November 2004): 118–27. 19 Okrent, Great Fortune, 303–04. Okrent claims that the inauguration was originally scheduled for May 1, coincidentally the worker’s holiday, May Day. It was subsequently pushed back a week prior to the controversy. 20 For a discussion of Rivera’s growing interest in US industry, see Anna IndychLópez, “Mural Gambits,” Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 129–56. For a discussion of Rivera’s views on modernization in his postRevolutionary Mexican frescos, see Mary K. Coffey, “‘All Mexico on a Wall’: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education,” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical Anthology, 56–74. 21 For insightful readings of Rivera’s ambivalent exploration of biology and industry in his Detroit murals, see Anthony W. Lee, “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 201–22 and Kathryn E. O’Rourke, “Science and Sex in Diego Rivera’s Health Ministry Murals,” Public Art Dialog 4, no. 1 (April 2014): 9–40. 22 Hugo Gellert had also depicted Lenin in his 1928 murals for the Worker’s (Communist) Party Headquarters in Union Square, obviously a more appropriate venue than Rockefeller Center! Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States,” 222. 23 See Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised,” 48–62. 24 For a discussion of the various scandals that accompanied the murals executed by Mexican artists in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s, see Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States,” 208–28. 25 In both California and Detroit the controversies around Rivera’s murals had more to do with what conservative members of the public viewed as either obscene or inappropriate subject matter, specifically, Rivera’s penchant for depicting nude figures that were only vaguely legible as allegories. Likewise, in Detroit, he was accused of blasphemy for converting a Nativity scene into an image of vaccination, and some members of the public also objected to his emphasis on working-class subjects rather than the city’s elite. Nonetheless, in each of these cases his patrons supported and defended his murals. In none of these controversies were his



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patrons’ singled out in the Press. Linda Downs has even suggested that in Detroit, William Valentiner and Edsel Ford (both members of The Arts Commission as well as being Director of the Museum and a key patron, respectively) may have even initiated the public controversy to drum up publicity for the museum during tough financial times. Summaries of the controversies over Rivera’s murals in California and Detroit can be found in Lee, Painting on the Left; Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera; and Linda Bank Downs, “The Controversy,” Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 173–80. 26 For discussions of the multiple narratives in Rivera’s murals, see Renato González Mello, “Manuel Gamio, Diego Rivera and the Politics of Mexican Anthropology,” RES 45 (Spring 2004): 161–85; Max Kozloff, “The Rivera Frescoes of Modern Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Proletarian Art Under Capitalist Patronage,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 216–29; and Anthony W. Lee, “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in The Social and the Real, 201–22. 27 Lucienne Bloch, “On Location with Diego Rivera,” 102–23. 28 Joseph Lily, “Rivera Perpetrates Scenes of Communist Activity for RCA Walls—And Rockefeller, Jr. Foots the Bill,” World-Telegram, April 24, 1933. 29 See Herner, Diego Rivera: Paraiso Perdido en Rockefeller Center, for reproductions of most of the press around Rivera’s commission. 30 David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-Revolutionary Road,” New Masses, May 29, 1934 and Wolfe, “The Communist War on Rivera,” The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 225–39. 31 Frances Flynn Paine argued in a letter to Abby that since Rivera had been expelled from the Communist party he could now be “reasoned with.” Frances Flynn Paine to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, August 13, 1930, box 107, folder 961, Cultural Interests Series, RG 2 OMR, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC quoted in Paquette, At the Crossroads, 50. 32 Reportedly Rivera was contemplating compromise, but he was pressured by his more radical peers, especially the artist Ben Shahn, not to capitulate. Scholars seem to agree that Rivera dug in because of his desire to win the regard of the Left despite attempts by Kahlo and others to get him to reconsider. 33 Quoted in Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 326–27. 34 Okrent, Great Fortune, 313. 35 The management team claimed they could not remove the work without destroying it, but Catha Paquette argues convincingly that this was not the case. A special frame had been constructed for the mural precisely with this possibility in mind. See Paquette, At the Crossroads, 193. 36 Ibid., 191–96. 37 In 1940 Rivera received his final US commission for a series of portable frescos for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. 38 Okrent, Great Fortune, 290. 39 Ibid. 40 For a discussion of the role of “gate keepers” in today’s corporate art collecting, see Martorella, Corporate Art, 133–59. 41 Ibid., 139.

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42 Mary K. Coffey, “Banking on Folk Art: Banamex-Citigroup and Transnational Cultural Citizenship,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29, no. 3 (July 2010): 296–312. 43 Wu, Privatising Culture, 237. 44 Ibid. 45 Volker Kirchberg, “Structures of Corporate Arts Patronage between the World Wars: A Case Study of the Corporate Leader P. S. du Pont,” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 33, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 280. 46 Kirchberg, “Structures of Corporate Arts Patronage between the World Wars,” 274. 47 For a complete list of the art at Rockefeller Center, see Christine Roussel, The Guide to the Art of Rockefeller Center (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 48 Okrent, Great Fortune, 289. 49 Catha M. Paquette, “Public Duties, Private Interests: Mexican Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 1929–1954” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002), 83–84. 50 Paquette, “Public Duties, Private Interests,” 85. 51 The Ludlow Massacre refers to an attack on a tent colony of miners who had been evicted from their company-owned houses by their employers when they went on strike. The event took place in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. The strike was led by the United Mine Workers of America against coal mining companies in Colorado, the largest of which was the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, owned by the Rockefeller family. The attack was undertaken by camp guards working for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company along with the Colorado National Guard and hired thugs. In a planned attack they fired bullets and set the tents on fire, resulting in the deaths of eighteen people, including four women and eleven children who asphyxiated and burned to death while huddled in trenches that had been dug to keep them out of the way of stray bullets. 52 Paquette, At the Crossroads, 102–08. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 105. 55 “Rockefeller City: Thematic Synopsis,” page 4, quoted in Paquette, “Public Duties, Private Interests,” 93–94. 56 Paquette, “Public Duties, Private Interests,” 87–93. 57 Neil Harris, “Polling for Opinion,” Museum News (September–October 1990), 49. 58 Harris, “Polling for Opinion.” 59 Martorella, Corporate Art, 104–22. 60 Ibid., 122–32. 61 Ibid., 91–102. 62 Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised,” 49. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 59. 65 Ibid., 58. 66 Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 19. 67 The original piece was published in “In Our Time: The Industrial Civilization of New York Seen in the Cross Section of a Rivera Fresco,” Fortune 5, no. 2 (February 1932): n.p.; Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 77.



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68 Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty, 22. 69 Karl and Katz note that during the federal hearings it was determined that the Rockefeller family was corresponding with the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company from their offices at the Rockefeller Foundation which both implicated the foundation in the massacre and proved that the Rockefellers had, indeed, been informed about the attack, which contravened their claims that their Colorado subsidiary had acted alone. Karl and Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” 29. 70 Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States,” 212. 71 Ibid., 213. 72 Ibid. 73 Leah Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 41. Daniel Okrent also quotes this letter, but he views it as part of an ongoing, and relatively unsuccessful, process to legitimate the censorship of Rivera’s mural. Okrent, Great Fortune, 318. 74 Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” 40. 75 Ibid., 41. 76 Martorella, Corporate Art, 74–75. 77 For a brief discussion of how charges of indecency have impacted public art, see Michael Hallinan, “Art Hits the Wall: Property Rights vs. Artistic Expression,” Public Art Review 6 (1994): 6–9. 78 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Painting on the Wall: Diego Rivera in New York,” The New Yorker (November 28, 2011): 84. 79 The MoMA has one of the largest collections of Latin American art in the world. They were collecting in this region from the start, and yet, rather than integrating Latin American objects into their departments of Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, and Design as unmarked works of modern art, they decided to organize these works into a regionally specific collection within the larger collection of modern and contemporary art. They did not make a similar effort to distinguish works of American derivation from those of French or Russian derivation. For years Latin American works, especially postwar painting, conceptual and/or abstract works, were largely marginalized, and with the exception of a few major, figurative paintings by artists such as Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and the Cuban, Wifredo Lam, rarely on view. This began to change in the 1990s, and there was a pronounced change in 2004 when the museum reopened in its new, expanded building. Since then, Latin American objects have been integrated into the chronological hang of the permanent collection. While the institution was rethinking its relationship to Latin American art prior to the opening of the new building, there can be no doubt that Cisneros’s influence and money were a major force in both viewing the collection as a political and cultural asset and in dedicating resources to a consistent flow of exhibitions and programming around it (one of the new galleries bears her name). Her interest in de-emphasizing the overtly nationalist and figurative work from the collection in favor of its holdings of abstraction are apparent not only in the works on display but also in the exhibitions curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas. Pérez-Oramas was the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA (the only curator on staff whose position is dedicated to regionally specific part of the collection). He was formerly the Curator of Modern and Contemporary art for the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. For histories of the MoMA and its relationship to Latin American art, see Waldo Rasmussen, “Introduction to an Exhibition,” in Latin American Artists of

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the Twentieth Century, ed. Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht, and Elizabeth Ferrer (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 11–18; Miriam Basilio, “Reflecting of a History of Collecting and Exhibiting Work by Artists from Latin America,” in Latin American and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo, ed. Miriam Basilio, Fatima Bercht, Deborah Cullen, Gary Garrels, and Luis Enrique Perez-Oramas (New York: Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, 2003), 52–68; and John Yau, “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 133–39. 80 For a discussion of MoMA’s early exhibition practice, see Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). For critiques of the “white cube,” see Tony Bennett, “Art and Theory: The Politics of the Invisible,” The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 163–76; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Special Issue (1987): 201–10; Carol Duncan, “The Modern Art Museum: It’s a Man’s World,” Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 102–32; Christopher Grunenberg, “The Modern Art Museum,” in Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. Emma Barker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 26–49; and Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 81 Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 30. Shifra Goldman also described this phenomenon in her essay, “Metropolitan Splendors,” in Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 326–33. 82 Goldman, “Metropolitan Splendors.” 83 Ibid., 31. 84 It must be noted that Ramirez is implicated in this turn toward South American abstraction as a curator and “cultural broker” working at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. She has been a vocal critic of the tendency to favor figurative artists like Rivera and Frida Kahlo in US exhibitions, arguing that they reinforce stereotypes about regional culture. Her preference for the political abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s must be understood as a response to the spate of shows in the 1980s and 1990s that featured figuration. While originating from a different impulse, we cannot overlook the extent to which her curatorial work is contributing, nonetheless, to the privileging of abstraction over figuration that I’m calling the “Cisneros effect.” For an indication of her centrality to the current boom and her opposition to the “Frida effect” in US exhibitions, see Arthur Lubow, “Movers & Shakers; After Frida,” New York Times, March 23, 2008.

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Maxfield Parrish’s Creative Machinery for Transportation Jennifer A. Greenhill

In 1923, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s monthly publication, The Nation’s Business, proclaimed Maxfield Parrish the winner of a competition between twelve artists to picture “The Spirit of Transportation” (Color Plate 4).1 The Michigan-based Clark Equipment Company—a manufacturer of truck axles, electrical steel castings, and high-speed drills—mounted the competition in 1920, in the midst of a significant expansion of its business, with the construction of a new plant and the development of a line of short haul and lift vehicles.2 The advertising campaign was the brainchild of Ezra Clark, a veteran of the Army Air Corps during World War I and the brother of the company’s president, Eugene, who hired him as an advertising manager after the war.3 The artists commissioned to participate in the competition—which amounted to the company’s most extensive and ambitious advertising venture to that point— were given a free hand to visualize the transportation theme “each according to his own conception.”4 Along with Maxfield Parrish, the contributors included Frank Leyendecker and Coles Phillips, the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, and eight other artists largely forgotten today: Max Bohm, the painter from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent most of his career in Europe; the Impressionist George Elmer Browne; Franklin Booth, whose pen-and-ink drawings appeared regularly in popular journals like the Ladies’ Home Journal; James Cady Ewell, a Chicago-based painter, sculptor, and commercial artist; the Norwegian-born painter Jonas Lie; F. Luis Mora, the Hispanic American painter and illustrator who split his time between New York and Connecticut; the mural painter and illustrator William Mark Young; and the highly regarded illustrator R. F. Heinrich, whose contribution was used in an advertisement promoting the competition.5 The six judges of the entries—representing U.S. Steel, the railroad and shipbuilding industries, and General Motors, along with the heads of two museums, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—split the onethousand-dollar prize between Parrish, the newcomer Lie, and Ewell, who had done previous ad work for the company.6 But Parrish emerged as the popular favorite with Clark marketing. In 1923, the Fine Arts Division of the U.S. Printing and Lithography Company reproduced his submission as a large-scale print, which “perpetuate[d]

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every characteristic of the truly marvelous Maxfield Parrish original—to the smallest detail, to the finest brush stroke.”7 Instead of figuring the concept of transportation allegorically, as Leyendecker, Phillips, Ewell, and several others did, or taking the route of the vaguely exotic, a popular period trend that marked more than a few of the competition submissions, Parrish offered a landscape that evoked a recognizable American site: central Colorado’s Royal Gorge on the Arkansas River.8 In contrast to Lie’s crammed urban scene, which features automobiles, trains, ships, and planes—leaving no question as to the subject of his picture—Parrish treated the transportation theme with greater subtlety, hitching his vision of modern technology to nineteenth-century aesthetic formulas. With two tiny motor trucks negotiating a narrow mountain road, their contours bleached by sunlight, Parrish’s composition rendered industry harmonious with nature. Indeed, he downplayed this element of “pure commercialism” to such a degree that, when the company wanted to reissue The Spirit of Transportation as a print without the trucks in 1925, it had no trouble making this alteration (Color Plate 5).9 “It will be a comparatively simple thing to merge the outlines [of the trucks] into the rocks of the cliff,” Ezra Clark wrote to the artist in February 1925.10 Parrish agreed. Now and again, he would repurpose compositions in the same way, by painting out the figural elements of his landscapes, making what had been backdrop into the primary subject of the work.11 He was willing, he told Clark, to paint over the trucks but he would be just as happy for the company to arrange this without his involvement. “If that axle of yours is any good at all,” he quipped, “they should have taken the trucks out of the picture long ago, in spite of the grade.”12 It might be surprising that Parrish would support Clark Equipment’s alterations of his painting, but his response to Ezra Clark’s request is fitting for a commercial artist who made work in order that it be taken out of his hands and dispersed, negotiating a complex network of editors, advertisers, reproductive processes and transportation mechanisms. Parrish always had the mechanisms of his art’s dispersal on his mind, and his personal papers are filled with references to the printing technologies through which his imagery found form as a mass-market commodity, and to its geographic reach, to the trains and trucks taking it here and there. Parrish had these mechanisms in view and he also thought according to them; born into a family of mechanical skill, he, simply put, knew machines. He adopted painting techniques to suit reproductive printing technologies, and he filled his extensive basement workshop with tools and heavy machinery that allowed him to experiment with other sorts of materials as he designed levers, latches, and little vehicular conveyances for his home. Against this foundation, the artist built up painting after painting of airy atmosphere, of figures perched on mountaintops, inspired by their material surroundings to depart conceptually from them. Designed to travel via reproduction and distribution, these painted visions of imaginative flight are, I argue, fully invested in the material logistics of their own physical dispersal, on the ground, perhaps even on a truck, circulating the Parrish brand along the way. The Spirit of Transportation gives us a way into this central concern of Parrish’s art and its consistent mystification of those grounded particulars as precisely the intangible stuff period advertisers were working to tap



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in their marketing strategies. Parrish’s work epitomizes the techniques of suggestive advertising and The  Spirit of Transportation, although overlooked in scholarship on the artist, helps us to see why. Made just as landscape was becoming for Parrish both a privileged creative space and also a repetitive system, it demonstrates that landscape did not function for the artist as a space for expression beyond commercial restriction, as has been argued, but was instead where the market-driven mechanics of his art fully congealed.13

The art of Clark Equipment Parrish had a reputation for taking viewers to faraway places almost from the moment he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the early 1890s. As the artist John La Farge wrote early in Parrish’s career, the young artist’s “marvellous imaginativeness” could “transport one suddenly into .  .  . fairyland.”14 His visual style—with its “minuteness of detail” and “smoothness of figure”—was so popular because it “looks like the real thing, but has more attraction than the real thing would have,” J. L. Conger, the art director for General Electric, argued in the 1930s.15 The imagery’s commingling of the mundane and the magical made it an especially effective marketing tool for products ranging from perfume to automobile tires to electric lighting. “Parrish’s work, we have found, appeals to vast numbers of people who are left emotionally unmoved by the work of others,” Conger explained. Working to preserve the perceived distance of the artist’s imagery from mundane experience, General Electric minimized the ad copy that accompanied it in the calendar designs Parrish produced for the company to advertise Edison Mazda Lamps beginning in 1918. “As you can see from the illustrations,” Conger said, “each border design carries an incandescent lamp and the words ‘Edison Mazda Lamps’ clearly but artistically unobtrusive.” Rendered unobtrusive, almost as afterthought, the sales message of General Electric’s calendars would be floated each time the owner admired Parrish’s composition, subliminally reinforcing the positive associations the corporation was after when they commissioned the artist. “No one can estimate how many of these reminders are carried over year after year, except with the certainty that such cumulative publicity must be large,” Conger declared.16 Like Conger, Ezra Clark understood how visual art might be marshaled to create positive feelings about his company’s products and he surely noted the appearance of Parrish’s imagery in 1918 as part of the Edison Mazda campaign. Known for his “natural flair for salesmanship and promotion,” Clark was one of many in the business community who turned to well-known artists as a promotional shortcut in the teens and twenties. In these years, art and industry were increasingly intermeshed as aesthetic considerations became paramount to product design and marketing decisions.17 The influential advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins unsurprisingly viewed his trade as generating the shift. “It might be said that good taste passed from the advertisement to the package, and from the package to the product,” he reasoned in a 1927 Atlantic Monthly piece entitled, “Beauty the New Business Tool.”18 According to Calkins, an

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advertisement thus had the potential to both shape public opinion and reshape the product itself, as manufacturers allowed visual marketing strategies to inflect their own conceptions of their wares. This may have been the case for Clark Equipment, whose executives were unsure how to market their products in the context of the growing prioritization of aesthetic value, at least before the Spirit of Transportation campaign. “It is rather too bad we are not producers of some article which can more properly be advertised in a national way,” Eugene Clark lamented in the company’s annual report for 1920, “for our success with this series of paintings has been beyond our expectations and of great publicity value.” That Clark Equipment sold in bulk devices that would be integrated into other machines before making their way to the public made them more difficult to advertise “in a national way.”19 (“Clark Equipment is found only on good motor trucks,” reads the slogan appearing in the full-page advertisements the company took out in these years, underscoring the relationship between Clark’s smaller parts and the bigger machines they served.20) But the abstract relationship between Clark Equipment’s product and the ideals the company wanted Americans to associate with them—artistry and craftsmanship chief among them—made The Spirit of Transportation campaign and its prioritization of aesthetic values the perfect promotional vehicle. The company reiterated the link between its products and art by making the Spirit of Transportation contest pay in multiple ways and for various publics. In 1922 the company copyrighted small-scale color prints of the twelve paintings in the competition and the following year had them reproduced in a color supplement that appeared in The Nation’s Business.21 People also had the opportunity to see the originals in exhibitions at the Hotel Commodore in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, and the salesrooms of the automobile dealer Thomas J. Doyle in Detroit—four of possibly as many as twelve venues to which the paintings traveled. Ezra Clark also used the paintings as his visual aid when he lectured across the country in 1921 to men’s clubs, whose members he addressed on topics such as “Art in the Business Man’s Life” and “Art in Relation to Industry.”22 Presenting the paintings as part of his personal collection, Clark shrewdly played the role of an art patron generously sharing his works with the public, downplaying the commercial goals of the campaign and stressing its civic value. By this time, Americans were accustomed to the conjunction of corporate tycoon and philanthropist—a standard figure since the days when the Gilded Age robber barons built the country’s great public museums—as civic purpose made ostentatious wealth acceptable.23 The strategy of emphasizing the company’s connection to art was augmented by the poetry contest it mounted in 1922 to provide a textual supplement to the paintings. Six judges—the editors and publishers of popular journals ranging from Century Magazine to Bus Transportation—awarded Roy George, an amateur poet of Scottsdale, Arizona, the one-thousand-dollarprize.24 Rhetorically linking art and industry, all of these facets of the campaign were designed to draw positive attention to Clark Equipment by elevating its interests as representative of not only the American automotive industry but of “world advancement” generally.25



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Landscape and the terrain of suggestive advertising Parrish’s art was perfectly suited to this task. The copy appended to his composition when it appeared in The Nation’s Business described it as “a dramatic portrayal of how civilization has conquered the heights, and other difficulties, opening to commerce the vast regions beyond.”26 Infusing this caption is a fantasy of mastery over one’s environment, a common conceit of period advertisements devoted to cars and trucks and other mobility-enhancing technologies. At times, vehicles are pictured speeding up a hill, unimpeded by steep grades, or triumphantly perched atop a treacherously rocky mound, the summit reached.27 Clark’s ads typically put the viewer in the position of a figure kneeling down on the ground for an up-close vantage of their products, but in The Spirit of Transportation, Parrish opted instead for a distanced perspective, too far away from the trucks to tell the story of a masterful axle yet positioned perfectly to communicate technological progress more symbolically.28 Retooling tropes of nineteenth-century landscape painting, his strategies for glorifying the tools and conditions of modernity departed from those of his modernist contemporaries who did not need anything beyond the machine—certainly not some natural setting— to convey its exhilarating force. Instead of plunging the viewer into the heart of the machine’s roiling gears for a dazzlingly disorienting ride, Parrish pulled back in multiple ways, structuring his composition according to the previous generation’s strategies for assuaging doubts about technological progress by minimizing industry’s disruption. Take, as an example, Albert Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit (1873), which only hints at the industry led by its patron, Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad. It does so with a line of tiny railroad snowsheds, which made travel possible during the high snow drifts of winter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.29 Pushed to the far right of Bierstadt’s wide horizontal expanse, dwarfed by the mountain peak above, and rendered in the same muddy tones of the rock face, the railroad is incidental to the majesty of Donner Lake and the surrounding sun-kissed topography.30 Parrish extended Bierstadt’s visual language for reiterating the constancy of natural beauty in the face of industrial change, although instead of Bierstadt’s managerial view from the summit, Parrish situated the viewer at a low vantage in his vertically oriented composition, which suggests nature’s limitless upward ascent with dramatic cropping at the scene’s upper edge. Asking viewers to lift up their gaze to the little trucks climbing this terrain (which becomes more ethereal as it stretches heavenward), Parrish orchestrates a heroizing vision of industry’s efforts. And he grants his vehicular agents of progress more presence than Bierstadt had as he transmutes the late-nineteenth-century worry about the environmental effects of technological progress into an effective marketing technique for the early twentieth century. Parrish’s trucks that are perched at the edge of the cliff, their winding path echoed in the roiling water below, appear to be at one with the majestic natural setting they conquer with merchandise. Although the hot commercial color of the first truck—that eye-catching red—stands out, Parrish renders it a hazy patch of pigment that blends into the warm tones of the rock face. The tack worked so well that the second truck behind the first

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seemed to disappear entirely when Parrish took a look in the 1960s at the print he had retained of the composition. “Recently some bright eyes in the family have discovered what looks like a ghostly truck behind the red one. May be a slip of the paint brush,” he wrote, underscoring the material substance of the objects that appeared in his pictures.31 If the promotional literature for the Spirit of Transportation series described Clark Equipment’s products as “prosaic things”— “hard,” “material,” “utilitarian” things whose “sale and use rest on transportation”—Parrish’s painting makes their products something more by transforming them into another kind of material—into painted atmosphere.32 The final stroke was to paint over the trucks entirely, to blend them into their natural surroundings, render them ephemeral like the puff of smoke in Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit—the indexical sign of the train that has passed out of sight into the mountain tunnel. Parrish’s painting exemplifies early-twentieth-century advertising’s investment in atmosphere. If “dematerialized desire . . . animated consumer culture” in this period, as the historian Jackson Lears explains, advertising imagery’s fundamental task would be to take the material substance of a given product and transmute it into something beyond these obdurate particulars, reinforcing Marx’s conception of the “mystical” and “mysterious character of the commodity-form.”33 Suggestive advertising was the business of thought floating, of indirect direction, and the trade literature of the period goes to great lengths to try to codify visual and verbal techniques for undertaking this nebulous task. Walter Dill Scott, who began his career as a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, suggested in his handbook, The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice (first published in 1908 and reprinted into the 1920s), that the strongest illustrators in the field were those who could transport a viewer, through visual imagery, to the sight, smell, and touch of something that might not be visualized at all. Calling on William James’s conception of the stream of consciousness, Scott presented mental imagery’s constant fluctuation, its flow here and there, as an opportunity for the enterprising artist who knew how to direct its movements.34 Parrish had been thinking about landscape as an apparatus for creating “good feeling” about products associated with vehicular transport, specifically, since at least 1917, while he was working on the Fisk Tires campaign.35 “There seems to be a move in advertising to show the ends and not particularly the means in motoring,” he wrote. “All tires look alike and all cars resemble each other much more than they did, so that delightful places to visit and delightful means of getting there are about the only thing left with which to tell the story.”36 The unremarkable sameness of the commodity thus required the artist to downplay its material particulars; stunning scenery and its romantic associations with imaginative flight fill the void. As Parrish wrote, a “background . . . could be made most interesting, with a kind of romantic, ideal landscape, with all that gives joy in nature: water-falls and castles and mountains and a rocky shore, etc.”37 Parrish pushes this strategy in a playful direction in his Fisk Tires composition, where the tire encircles an inviting arrangement of rock, separating it out for the viewer’s contemplation (Figure 2.1). This site on which Parrish asks the viewer to focus is meant to operate as a kind of porthole, facilitating conceptual movement into this expanse where the modern tire supplants the old shoes of legend



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Figure  2.1  Maxfield Parrish, Fisk Tires: The Modern Magic Shoes, 1917. Photomechanical reproduction, 13 × 28 ½ inches. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. and, as one period viewer wrote, “[takes] its owner through boundless spaces.”38 That movement is free and easy: with large, snow-capped and jagged outcroppings at his back, the fairytale varlet whooshes forward, his path unimpeded. (Note how his pointy toes hover just above the purple peak in the distance). The tire’s evenly spaced tread lugs also suggest easy progression forward, although the traction they offer would seem to be unnecessary for aerial travel. The shadow falling on the tire’s back side draws lug and void into a smooth, almost glossy surface. Slick and fanciful flight is thus what Parrish offers here in a visual formulation that punningly commercializes the “womblike enclosure” of mid-nineteenth-century landscape paintings such as Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849), which domesticated the wild by facilitating ocular access.39 Parrish’s tire, an eye-like form doubling as vehicular conveyor, powerfully demonstrates the endurance of this longstanding trope, re-imagined in his works focused on the theme of vehicular travel.

Parrish’s parts But if Parrish pays homage to romantic conceptions of transport rooted in the natural world, demonstrating its effectiveness for early-twentieth-century visual marketing, he simultaneously undercuts this framework by envisioning transcendence as cargo trucks barreling through untouched nature, kicking up dirt as they charge along, producing an atmosphere made up as much of dust particles as of sunlight and shadow. Indeed, the painting might be seen to ironize nature’s sublimity, countering the sunny glow of landscapes like Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit with stuff blown up from the ground, and echoing, as if in a sort of call and response, the loud din of raging waters with the rumble of heavy, careening machinery. If the kindred spirits in Durand’s painting—the poet, William Cullen Bryant and the

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painter, Thomas Cole—rise high above the noise and crush of the marketplace in their wilderness retreat, then, Parrish might be seen to bring the market to their perch, putting an end, once and for all, to the fantasy that there existed some natural outpost that commerce could not pollute. Parrish’s wry glorification of commerce on the move is unsurprising, since he was preoccupied with negotiating the land in very practical material ways. Like any artist, he was concerned with his art’s transport, with getting it from point A to points B, C, and D. In the cartoons he used to decorate shipments of his work to Collier’s: The National Weekly, Parrish humorously explored the logistics of shipment with an express truck carrying his cargo to the journal’s Art Department, for example, and figures pushing boxes marked “from Maxfield Parrish” toward their final destination (Figure 2.2).40 In contrast to the boxes that are angled this way and that in these cartoons, as if about to topple onto the ground, Parrish’s packages are steady as they make their way to his editors for reproduction and distribution. This is fitting, since time and again Parrish’s agents, editors, and clients remarked on his masterful packing skills as undisturbed paintings arrived in boxes that had been perfectly secured. The packaging was a critical part of the product for Parrish, as he explained to Stephen Newman of the House of Art, the New York firm that published his works as art prints: “I never send away my paintings in raw wood boxes: I always paint the sides of the box (which, in a way, act as a frame when the lid is removed) as the raw wood detracts greatly from the

Figure 2.2  Maxfield Parrish, “From Maxfield Parrish, Windsor, Vermont,” Collier’s: The National Weekly 40 (January 11, 1908): 19.



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effect of the painting, and the first impression is not as good as it might be.”41 Fully attuned to the importance of packaging at a time when merchandisers were paying more and more attention to package design and its role in stimulating consumer desire and satisfaction, Parrish conceived of the logistics of conveying his work as part of his creative process, a tool by which he could ensure his paintings’ continued mobility, as canvases that made strong first impressions would then be translated into a host of reproductive media, all of them extending his art’s reach and impact.42 Parrish was a pragmatic artist-businessmen who understood the material conditions and logistical requirements of his art’s circulation. The period’s “new institutional framework of art,” as the art historian Michele Bogart has explained, “included small companies, large corporations, print and lithography businesses, and artists’ agents”— constituencies that Parrish shrewdly negotiated as he worked to disseminate his art, to solidify the Maxfield Parrish brand, and to achieve the highest possible returns on his creative product.43 By retaining copyright of many of the paintings he designed for advertisements, Parrish was able to profit considerably as these designs were reproduced in the form of art prints, bringing in thousands of dollars each year in royalties.44 Parrish did not retain the rights to The Spirit of Transportation, and in 1923 he asked Clark Equipment if he and his art publishers might circulate it as a print. The transformation from advertisement to art print would “[spread] the picture to many thousands over the world,” and thus, perhaps “help out the axle business in times of business depression,” Parrish wrote, pulling out all the stops to sell Ezra Clark on the idea. But Clark rejected Parrish’s request, no doubt disappointing the artist since he knew that “one picture sold as a print may bring in a small fortune.”45 This was the case for his phenomenally successful composition, Daybreak, made in 1922 for the House of Art.46 Parrish’s long association with the firm was creatively generative and highly lucrative, although the firm’s partners attempted to curtail his work’s circulation in forms other than what they specialized in. In the early 1920s, just as Daybreak was making a killing, they complained to Parrish about his calendar work interfering in their business.47 Parrish tried to pacify them by insisting that this was the nature of the commercial art product: to inspire creative repurposing on the part of consumers who might just as soon frame an advertisement than go to the House of Art to purchase a print specifically designated for this purpose. “About everything I have done for reproduction outside of my work for you has been framed and hung up on a wall,” he wrote in 1935, after having addressed this issue on many previous occasions. “People who like attractive pictures are going to cut them out and possibly frame them no matter in what form, illustrations in books, in magazines, calendars, etc.”48 The commercial artist’s work was designed to function as a flexible commodity, and it was only by cultivating its versatility that the artist could fully reap the rewards of his product. Parrish understood this perhaps better than most. Indeed, Parrish in many ways wove versatility into his practice as he worked to fit his artistic conceptions to the specifications of individual jobs. He could be quite conciliatory, for example, in taking suggestions from editors and agents. When Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, sent Parrish extensive notes on the design he had submitted for a glass mosaic mural, to be completed by Louis Comfort Tiffany

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for the lobby of the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, Parrish took them agreeably. “I do not like the vases and am glad they are to go,” he wrote, responding to Bok’s suggestion that they be eliminated. “But I know there must be many other things that are questionable, and I wish to goodness you would jot them down,” he continued. “Owing to the reputations artists have for sensitiveness, they don’t get anywhere near the help they need. Anything like an ‘Artistic temperment [sic]’ I have got out of my system long ago . . . Send the sketch back and I will begin alterations at once.” Bok then requested further changes, closing his note, “I am really delighted with the splendid spirit of your letter. It is great to deal with a chap who is so amenable to suggestions.”49 Parrish knew he was just one part of a collaborative puzzle. Because his pictures were “made to order,” as he put it, he approached commercial art, “a darn peculiar form of merchandise,” as a layered procedure integrating multiple perspectives.50 Parrish’s varied, extensive output is a testament to how successfully he managed the demands of the made-to-order art trade. Parrish’s conception of his role as a commercial artist may have been informed by his experience working with others to build other sorts of things. He saw his artistic practice with the eyes of a mechanic or, as he put it, a “creative machinist.” With an extensive machine shop in the basement of his house, Parrish fashioned toys for his children and crafted many of the practical gadgets and decorative elements of the house he helped to design in Windsor, Vermont. As Carrie Brown points out in her catalogue for the exhibition devoted to Parrish’s mechanical sensibility, the artist fashioned all sorts of conveniences, including a device to automatically close the door to his photographic dark room; worm gears and hand cranks that opened his immense studio windows; and a system for transporting wood to his studio, consisting of train tracks, a dumb-waiter, and a little vehicle that finally shuttled the wood to the fireplace. Parrish’s maternal family line included several men of mechanical skill—inventors and tool manufacturers—and the artist made machinery part of his creative practice. He split his days painting in the mornings and working in the machine shop in the afternoons with his neighbor, George Ruggles, who worked with Parrish on his various home improvement and artistic projects.51 Fascinated by levers and latches, gears and gadgets, Parrish would have surely respected the artistry of Clark’s axles. Indeed, he would have been more attuned to their products than most of the other artists in the Spirit of Transportation competition. Period critics took note of Parrish’s mechanical activities and described his art in mechanical terms during the period when Clark Equipment marketed his composition as a large-scale print. Parrish rejected the “cut-and-dried formula that the artist must never be ‘mechanical,’ in fact, must keep far away from machinery and the exact sciences,” Adeline Adams wrote in 1918. “He does not renounce art, but rather pays tribute to it, when he works in his shop, now upon a beautifully designed brass latch, now on a picture-frame to be turned, fitted, carved, stained or gilded, now on one of those sturdy half-humorous Elizabethan tables of his, richly painted and rubbed, glaze upon glaze, with here and there a gleam of vermilion or ultramarine leaping to their sober surfaces, satisfying to the touch as a piece of Chinese lacquer,” she wrote with obvious delight at the artist-mechanic’s range and his investment in “weekday



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things like chairs and tables, door-latches and water-works.”52 This became a common refrain in the press. “Did You Ever Hear of Maxfield Parrish? ‘Who, the Artist?’—‘No, the Mechanic!’” reads the headline of a Boston Globe piece from 1923.53 Although this headline sets apart the two trades, of artist and mechanic, many situated Parrish’s work at the conjunction of those terms. The writer Walter P. Eaton, who had been contracted by the Saturday Evening Post to write a story about Parrish in 1927, envisioned a section on “the kinship of the creative designer of machinery with the artist.” After posing the question, “Has machinery beauty?” Eaton suggests, in his preliminary notes for the article (never realized), that “beauty comes from pleasant proportions and the immediate sense a good machine gives that it is adapted to its job.”54 The earlytwentieth-century fascination with the beauty of the machine informs this assessment, which Parrish would reiterate in 1930 in an American Magazine piece devoted to his “understanding and love of machines.”55 By working to situate Parrish’s adaptable art of “pleasant proportions” according to the logic of the machine, Eaton taps into the deep structure of the work and also hints at period conceptions of commercial work as repetitive drudgery that was potentially without sincerity, without feeling.56 But it was in its conjuring of the machine that Parrish’s work seemed so moving to period critics, who will help us to see how fully embedded his art was in the mechanical, especially those paintings that appear most distanced from such concerns—his landscapes delivering fantasy in the clouds. “In carrying out the given picture he uses a fantastically accurate draughtsmanship and a touch of the brush that is, in its mechanistic way, fairly magical,” Royal Cortissoz wrote in 1936.57 Much earlier, the British artist and writer Hubert von Herkomer, referring to one of the illustrations Parrish made for Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (1898), asked if anyone would “ever have drawn trees as in this illustration without having seen them through the mechanical representation of the camera?”58 Parrish was born to work in the age of mechanical reproduction; he employed photographs as he plotted his compositions, which he often designed after first making models of the castles and mountainous landscapes he would feature, playing with artificial light sources in the studio until he reached the desired effect, that perfect blend of crisp detail and otherworldly atmosphere. With a dark room in his house, Parrish did his own lighting, shooting and printing, and like so many artists of his day, he would project and trace photographic compositions onto his painting supports, piecing in figures where he wanted them. Because the majority of his works were designed explicitly for reproduction, Parrish often drew and painted according to printing technologies, composing dramatic gradations of light and shade through a meticulous building up of pen-and-ink dots mimicking the look of mezzotint prints, for example, or applying layers of colored glazes to correspond to four-color printing procedures, which overlapped cyan, magenta, yellow and black in the construction of pictures.59 Because Parrish knew that reproduction typically dulled vibrant color, he adjusted his work to these conditions, producing originals that he thought might strike clients as “a bit too brilliant.”60 But he instructed them to see the original in terms of its eventual reproduction, for this was how Parrish saw his art, having internalized the mechanical procedures through which the work was circulated.

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Thinking according to the mechanisms and logistics of his industry, Parrish attempted to isolate the precise aspects of his work that made an impression on the public and thus made for “good business.” A symmetrical, balanced compositional structure seemed to please, he told A. E. Reinthal, of the House of Art, after the success of Daybreak led the firm’s partners to ask for another picture directly in that line, putting significant pressure on the artist to again “deliver the goods.” Reinthal concurred: “We agree with you fully that the symmetrical impression of a picture (and without any abbreviated trees), seems to be the attractive feature for the masses.” If Parrish read any of the many advertising trade manuals produced in the early twentieth century, he would have noted the link theorists made between sales and pleasing compositions informed by the “laws of balance and symmetry,” and scholars have acknowledged the influence of Jay Hambidge’s ideas of “dynamic symmetry.”61 The color blue was another sure-fire route to sales. “They all seem to like the tiresome M. P. blue,” Parrish wrote, “and girls having a pleasant chat.”62 Clients often asked for these specific “Parrishy” elements and complained when mountains were “too flat” and girls were “not pretty enough.”63 Parrish worried about repeating himself—about, as he put it, becoming a “rubber stamp” artist—but he ultimately gave in on most occasions.64 The ease with which his pictorial idiom could be broken down led to a host of imitators, some of whom, Parrish admitted, were rather good.65 His visual formula was already codified as early as the 1918 General Electric commission, when his “peculiarly unique” and ostensibly “inimitable” work was “almost instantly identifiable.”66

“The sky is the limit”: Manufacturing the M.P. brand This was good business for G.E. and for the Clark Equipment Company, who would trade on Parrish’s increased popularity right at the peak of his career. But the familiarity of his idiom could lead to strained business relations as executives overstepped their bounds by submitting sketches aping Parrish’s style, even attempting to dictate the artist’s working methods, as G.E. did right as Parrish was embarking on The Spirit of Transportation.67 Clark Equipment gave Parrish more latitude than G.E. would to picture the concept they wanted promoted, which may be one reason why their industry is idealized in his painting as possessing aesthetic, even spiritual, value.68 The competition marked the beginning of Parrish’s prioritization of landscape, the genre to which he would devote himself fully during the second half of his career. Although the bulk of this work, from the 1930s on, would be destined for the calendars and greeting cards mass produced by the promotional products distributor, Brown & Bigelow, the artist nevertheless seems to have associated the genre with creative autonomy. He declared time and again, when rejecting other sorts of commercial projects, that landscape was the only thing he wanted to paint.69 Parrish’s intuitive understanding of machines was matched by a special understanding of the natural world. “No painter better understands the very heart and soul of trees, rocks, clouds,” Adeline Adams asserted in 1918. “He has communed long and deeply with them, he has studied them root and branch, spine



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and sinew . . . He knows their whole epic story, and he makes you feel the glory of it in form and color.”70 Other illustrators jaded by the constraints of commercial work, such as N. C. Wyeth, also linked landscape painting and creative freedom.71 This association is reinforced in an advertising manual of the period, which suggested that landscape was not suitable, on its own, for selling products. It was rather a genre of painting the illustrator pursued “just for his own entertainment.” “It is here,” wrote one art director, “that [the illustrator] will seek the enjoyment of perfect freedom from the discipline of work made to please someone else.”72 Parrish’s agents repeatedly told him, as they did in 1928, that “pure landscape is not at the present [emphasis in original] the sort of subject which is looked for.”73 By 1932, however, Parrish predicted that “landscapes are coming in for magazine covers, advertisements and illustrations,” in part because natural scenery was hard to come by in the city, where the majority of his admirers encountered his work.74 “There are pretty girls on every city street, but a city man can’t step out of a subway and watch the clouds play tag with the top of Mount Ascutney. It is the unattainable that appeals.”75 If landscape was the unattainable to which Parrish himself was drawn, it is not surprising that he would consistently incorporate it into his figural compositions, often by packaging it as a discrete unit in competition with other pictorial elements. He sometimes sets off landscape through various framing strategies, designating it as something worthy of focus, as he does in his Fisk Tires advertisement.76 Such compositions provide a visual corollary to Parrish’s statement that his landscapes offered “windows for [shut-in people’s] minds,” “outlets for their imaginations.”77 But Parrish often complicates this mental journeying by hinting at lush, detailed landscapes but largely blocking the view with a busily patterned flag, say, or the flourish of a decorative scroll. By making landscape peek through here and there, Parrish makes the viewer strain to see it.78 One’s experience of landscape is somewhat frustrated in such compositions; the viewer gets no sense of place from slivers of space seen as if through a keyhole. These are not, then, spaces that invite conceptual meandering; this is nature packaged into partial units and largely withheld as a space just beyond reach. The art historian Alexander Nemerov has argued for a similar structural logic in the work of N. C. Wyeth, who meditated on the restrictions of commercial illustration by giving them spatial form in interior scenes that confine and stifle, rarely opening up to the broad view Wyeth would take in so many of his paintings not destined for commercial reproduction.79 As Wyeth began to reject the lessons of his mentor, Howard Pyle—whose high drama seemed to Wyeth closer to theatre than to lived experience—he looked to landscape to find an alternate route. He often painted outdoors with the inspiring words of his hero, the mid-nineteenth-century writer Henry David Thoreau, in his mind. Wyeth sought to be one with nature and to express his individual, subjective response to it in his paintings. (This proved to be a struggle for him throughout his life both because he had difficulty fully finding his groove and because he spent the bulk of his time on commercial commissions.80) Parrish’s investment in nature was different. Despite longing to paint landscapes, he was not as much of an idealist as Wyeth was; his landscapes were never really for himself alone

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but always targeted toward broad appeal, toward the kind of thing he thought admirers of his work would go for. He never really departed from the “Parrishy” vein; he did not, for instance, explore modernist techniques as Wyeth did in so many of his paintings dating from the late 1920s and 1930s.81 Landscape did not, therefore, ever truly exist for Parrish as a liberating space of experimentation beyond commercial restriction, as has been argued, but was rather where he most fully developed the mechanisms that drove his market-oriented art.82 Parrish’s landscapes with figures—paintings like Dawn (1918), Daybreak (1922), and Solitude (1932)—help to demonstrate why this is (Figure 2.3). Featuring figures

Figure 2.3  Maxfield Parrish, Solitude, 1932, illustration for Edison Mazda calendar, 1932. Color lithograph, 9 ½ × 7 inches. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.



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inspired by nature to travel far and wide in the mind’s eye, these “girl-on-rock” pictures modeled blissfully untroubled transport for the viewers Parrish targeted—those for whom the unattainable appealed, those seeking a vision of, or from, the mountaintop.83 These compositions could almost stand as illustrations of Earnest Elmo Calkins’s arguments for why beauty should be allowed to infuse the commercial world: “In beauty the sky is the limit,” he wrote. Beauty was “in the air.”84 With Parrish, figures seem to train their eyes on the air itself, as if to designate it as the amorphous, abstract stuff stimulating their simultaneous desire and fulfillment. These compositions embody a tension of commercial rhetoric generally in this period, when advertisers sought to direct the stream of consumer consciousness toward a particular object, but indirectly, through positive association with the less tangible and more abstract.85 These paintings are then, in some ways, about consumer psychology, about the kind of conceptual flight that advertisers knew they had to produce as the first step toward creating a buyer. As metacritical testaments to early-twentieth-century marketing procedures, goals, and expectations, these paintings are far more rooted in everyday particulars than their fantasy frameworks suggest. Indeed, these paintings constitute a veritable machinery for transportation. They are built out of cogs, axles, and all the rest that went into the modern machine. Calkins, again, gives us a way into the mechanical foundation of Parrish’s art in the clouds. Employing a layered, sub- and superstructure organizational model, Calkins explained how an investment in beauty might begin to take precedence over more “practical, hard-headed” economic priorities. “We are just on the threshold of creating a new world on top of our modern industrial efficiency,” he wrote, “a world in which it is possible through the much criticized machines to replace the beauty that the machines originally displaced.”86 This utopian fantasy of a “new world” where machines restore the beauty they once made superfluous, might seem to take us far from Parrish’s art and into the more avant-garde modernist visual idioms that Calkins himself favored.87 But if Calkins’s fanciful scheme reinforces the line separating aesthetic from industrial concerns by layering one on top of the other, Parrish’s art serves as a meeting point where the strains come together. For these paintings that live in the clouds are nevertheless fully grounded in the material particulars of the artist’s industrial enterprise, which commodified conceptual release through an endlessly reproducible formula for selling this desirable psychic state. If it was widely understood that the tempo of American life had quickened in the teens and twenties, and if the new speed of modernity sparked anxiety about keeping pace, Parrish offered visions of time slowed down, where the rush of modernity appeared to have no place.88 “Art is long,” he would say to clients by way of explanation for the time he took with his compositions, always wishing for more of it as he strove to keep pace with the world of business himself. (“Art is long, and business is business and a man does not like to put aside a good commission,” he wrote in 1918.)89 Thus these pictorial fantasies might be seen to function as wish fulfillments both for their creator and consumers. And yet, if these pictures did their job, they would speed Parrish’s art (along with whatever product it advertised beyond itself) to an ever-expanding network of buyers who were on the move too.

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When these pictures were most successful, then, the conceptual release they offered viewers would coincide with the release, via reproduction and dissemination, of the Parrish brand, whose particulars hardened into a system through repetition. As the girl-on-rock theme became routine, it began to be less about subjective flight and more about material particulars, about parts—the various components of the brand: the vaguely antique, timeless attire; the craggy rock; the hazy, distant mountains; the tiresome M.P. blue. Parrish’s landscapes evacuated of figures possess many of the same elements as the girl-on-rock pictures, such as, for example, the tall evergreen cropped at the picture’s top edge and positioned off to one side. The same tree that appears in Solitude and in New Hampshire: The Winter Paradise (1939), for example, appears in The Spirit of Transportation. “The tree was taken outside my studio window,” he explained, while the brook in The Spirit of Transportation “was from the back of Windsor [Vermont], the rocks from Bellows Falls, and a mountain or two from Arizona.”90 These compositional cogs, interchangeable across pictures, knit together the artist’s vast body of work, reinforcing the Parrish brand. And, as is clear in the case of The Spirit of Transportation, even his landscapes conjuring recognizable sites were composites. Rarely did Parrish worry about staying true, in some old-fashioned artistic sense, to a particular site. When he was cajoled into painting a promotional picture of the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs in 1919, Parrish rearranged the natural elements so that he could feature two of the main attractions of the scenery— the Rocky Mountains and the artificial lake.91 He would travel to the site and work with photographs to assess the main features, but documenting them was not his aspiration, which was rather to tap into something more elusive. “[W]ith a certain temperment [sic], a literal rendering of the material facts can be avoided,” he explained, “and the part that stays in the mind can the better be brought out, the spirit and atmosphere of the place.”92 But these “parts” achieved something like solidity as they were retained in the artist’s mind and transferred onto canvas, superseding less atmospherically resonant details. Dislodged from their original “material facts,” they achieve another kind of material presence through their reiteration in Parrish’s densely layered and multifaceted reproductive art. This materiality was given new form when some of Parrish’s compositions were deconstructed in order to be pieced back together as puzzles in the 1930s. “So many of my pictures are puzzles to begin with I doubt if they are any clearer after being cut up,” Parrish wrote, endorsing this fitting transformation of his imagery into literal pieces.93 His theatrical set designs, comprised of landscapes whose features were partitioned in horizontal bands—comprised of a backdrop, upstage wings, and overhead drapes—fit with this conception, as spatial pieces locked together to create a whole world.94 Late in his life, Parrish joked about his reliance on the compositional devices that structured his pictures, presenting his artistic process as a kind of game of slight alteration and substitution. “You will notice a great innovation this time,” he wrote to the art director at Brown & Bigelow, with tongue in cheek. “I put the tree on the left and the house on the right. I take no credit for this, it is congenital, a gift, a sort of supernatural afflatus that descends upon an humble individual once in a generation.”95



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Mocking the pretensions of artists who would employ such high-flown rhetoric, Parrish simultaneously acknowledged his art’s distance from it; he acknowledged, essentially, how grounded his art was in the demands of the market and the particulars of the M.P. brand. By developing just enough variation, Parrish was, by the mid-1920s, we could say, simply “manufacturing pictures with the equipment he ha[d] built up,” to borrow the phrasing of a period advertising manual.96 This is where I think Parrish’s work gets interesting, as he tests how landscape, as a commercial mechanism of and for transport, might sustain his perpetual circulation. The Spirit of Transportation marks the beginning of the substitutional logic of Parrish’s art. It is perhaps the work that most obviously demonstrates his art’s market-driven, material underpinnings, as truck parts are transmuted into atmosphere, but incompletely, with the material and immaterial vying for precedence in his construction. Because Parrish’s pictorial “equipment” was made for transport and with it in mind—because the multiple senses of that term came together almost imperceptibly in so much of his art—he was perhaps the ideal artist to picture the Clark competition’s elusive yet grounded theme. It’s no wonder that the executives at Clark Equipment would favor Parrish’s vision as they worked to naturalize their involvement with art—an incredibly successful marketing ploy. Parrish’s visual strategy for blending art and industry in his contribution may have prompted the company to pursue their public relations approach, with Ezra Clark touring the country to lecture on art and business, presenting himself as an altruistic art patron sharing the competition submissions with the public. At the very least, Parrish’s entry provides a visual analog for the strategy the company adopted, downplaying the commercial goals of the campaign to emphasize its aesthetic value and civic virtue. It is thus perfectly fitting that Clark Equipment would eventually erase the trucks altogether and still use the painting as an advertisement for the Clark brand. Merging the outlines of the trucks into the rock face in their alteration of the composition, Parrish’s patrons sacrifice iconographical detail so that “transportation” could have a life beyond the cargo convoy—so that the concept could breathe a bit more, pulse through the scene, evoke transport in that other, immaterial (and incredibly marketable) sense. Parrish may have set the Clark Company on the path toward fully sublimating its commercial goals, and the company, in following his lead by painting over and blotting out those trucks, unwittingly tapped into the guiding logic of Parrish’s art, as landscape became his machinery for transport.

Notes 1 “From a painting, ‘The Spirit of Transportation,’ by Maxfield Parrish,” The Nation’s Business 11 (March 1923): 20. 2 This line of production endures to this day at the international Clark Material Handling Corporation, which has been headquartered since 2005 in Lexington, Kentucky. On the campaign, see Eugene Clark, “Report of President for Year 1920 to Board of Directors, Clark Equipment Company,” March 11, 1921, 13, box 28,

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unnumbered folder, Clark Equipment Company Papers, Berrien County Historical Association, Berrien Springs, Michigan (hereafter BCHA). On the Tructractor line and the Battle Creek plant, see Eugene Clark, “Report of President for Year 1921 to the Board of Directors, Clark Equipment Company,” February 15, 1922, 11–12 and “Clark Equipment Company History” (notes for a slide presentation prepared by R. E. Simmons on April 12, 1965), 3, box 1, folder 13. For more on the early history of the company and its various iterations (as the Celfor Tool Company and the Buchanan Electric Steel Company, before the name “Clark Equipment” was adopted in 1917), see “Highlights—History of the Clark Equipment Company” and “Clark History,” box 1, folder 2 and “40 Years of useful growth,” box 1, folder 4. I thank my research assistant, Lauren Applebaum, and Robert C. Myers, Curator at the BCHA, for providing access to these materials. 3 See Arthur Hrobsky, “Power Train: An Informal History of the Clark Equipment Company, 1976,” chapter 6, unpublished manuscript, n.p., box 2, folder 1, BCHA. 4 “The Spirit of Transportation,” The Nation’s Business 11 (May 1923): 32. 5 “The Spirit of Transportation,” The Nation’s Business 9 (January 1921), inside cover. 6 On the jury, see “Artists’ Exhibit Depicts Spirit of Transportation,” Chicago Daily Tribune (January 30, 1921). On the judges’ decision, see the letter from Eugene Clark to Parrish, April 11, 1921, Maxfield Parrish Papers, ML-62, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College (hereafter RSCL), box 1, folder 35. For an example of Ewell’s previous work for the company, see the Clark Equipment Company Papers, box 1, folder 6, BCHA. 7 “The MAXFIELD PARRISH Painting exhibited on page 36 in this issue now available in large size,” The Nation’s Business 11 (special edition) (June 5, 1923): 61. For the marketing of Parrish’s painting, see the letters from Ezra Clark to Parrish, October 31, 1923 and December 21, 1923, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. See also “The Spirit of Transportation,” The Nation’s Business 11 (special edition) (June 5, 1923), 32; “Have You Sent for Yours?” The Nation’s Business 11 (October 1923): 74; “Its Colors Have Depth and Beauty,” The Nation’s Business 11 (November 1923): 96. 8 It only evoked that site because, as Parrish explained, the various elements of his composition were drawn from many different places. “And I’ve heard some say they had been to just that spot,” he remarked, poking fun at his viewers. See the letter Parrish wrote to Stephen Newman of the House of Art, May 19, 1923, quoted in Coy L. Ludwig, “Maxfield Parrish: Sharp-Focus Visionary,” American Art Review 3 (March–April 1976): 87. This letter is unfortunately missing from or misfiled in the Parrish Papers, RSCL. I thank Sarah Hartwell, Reading Room Supervisor in 2013, for looking into this on my behalf. 9 See Parrish to Clair Fry of Brown & Bigelow, July 24, 1963, RSCL, box 1, folder 30. 10 Clark continued, “But I do not feel like making even the slightest change in your painting without your knowledge and consent.” Ezra Clark to Parrish, February 28, 1925, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. 11 In 1935, for example, Parrish painted out the female figure of Moonlight (1932), which had been used in 1934 as a General Electric Edison Mazda Lamps calendar. See Alma Gilbert, Maxfield Parrish: The Masterworks, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001), 185, and Alma Gilbert, Maxfield Parrish: The Landscapes (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1998), 13–16. 12 See the letters dated February 28, 1925, and March 3, 1925, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. Although Ludwig, “Maxfield Parrish: Sharp-Focus Visionary,” 88, states that “the



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trucks were removed by the artist after the initial publication of the work,” I have found no evidence to support this in the existing correspondence between Parrish and Clark Equipment. “As to the trucks in the painting I did for you, surely you may take them out,” Parrish wrote in his letter of March 3, 1925, offering to “change the trucks on the original, if you wish.” Much later, however, Parrish noted in a letter to Clair Fry of Brown & Bigelow, July 24, 1963, “The truck was taken out of the picture: possibly because it was thought a shame that such a beautiful work of art was used to further the sale of pure commercialism; I wouldn’t know.” RSCL, box 1, folder 30. The painting, which hung in the Clark Company’s Chicago office, was sold at Sotheby’s in New York, November 30, 2000, Lot 181. See Sotheby’s, American Painting Sale, November 30, 2000 (New York: Sotheby’s, 2000), 226. 13 For this view, see, for example, Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, Maxfield Parrish: A Retrospective (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), 14–15. 14 John La Farge, letter to Charles Scribner’s Sons, January 19, 1910, RSCL, box 2, folder 28. 15 J. L. Conger, “Maxfield Parrish’s Calendars Build Sales for Edison Mazda Lamps. Noted Artist’s Imaginative, Colorful Paintings Carry Appeal of Beauty and Result in Continued Sales for General Electric’s Product,” The Artist and Advertiser 2 (June 1931): 5. 16 Conger, “Maxfield Parrish’s Calendars,” 4, 7. 17 Hrobsky, “Power Train: An Informal History of the Clark Equipment Company,” chapter 6, n.p., box 2, folder 1, BCHA. Michele H. Bogart addresses advertising’s investment in art in “Promotion and Painting,” chapter 5 of Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 205–55. 18 Earnest Elmo Calkins, “Beauty the New Business Tool,” Atlantic Monthly 140 (August 1927): 145–56. See also (among his many books), Calkins, Business the Civilizer (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928). 19 Eugene Clark, “Report of President for Year 1920 . . .,” p. 13, box 28, unnumbered folder, BCHA. 20 This ad appears in The Literary Digest (April 26, 1919): 95. I thank Robert C. Myers of the BCHA for sharing this and other of the company’s ads from this period. 21 The collection is housed at the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collection, LOT 5946 (F). I thank Dorothy Moss and James Bigwood for providing study photographs of the group. They are reproduced in “The Spirit of Transportation,” The Nation’s Business 11 (May 1923): 32–36; (June 1923): 32–36; and (June 5, 1923) (special edition): 32–36. 22 On exhibitions of the works and Ezra Clark’s lecture tour, see “Artists’ Exhibit Depicts Spirit of Transportation,” Chicago Daily Tribune (January 30, 1921); “Chicago,” American Art News 19 (February 5, 1921): 5; “Boston,” American Art News 19 (March 26, 1921): 4; “Collector Will Show Pictures,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 19, 1921; “Detroit,” American Art News 20 (February 18, 1922): 10; and “New Orleans,” American Art News 20 (February 25, 1922): 8. The paintings seem to have also been exhibited in May 1923 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual convention in New York. See the letter from Ezra Clark to Parrish, October 31, 1923, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. 23 Neil Harris explores these ideas in “Collective Possession: J. Pierpont Morgan and the American Imagination,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 250–75.

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24 See “Clark Equipment Company Gives Prize for Best Poem on the ‘Spirit of Transportation’,” Railway Age 74 (January 13, 1923): 204. 25 For this rhetoric, see “Twelve Artists Compete. Prize for the Best Presentation of ‘The Spirit of Transportation’,” New York Times, January 27, 1921. See also K. B. White, “Axles and Art Advertise an Industry,” Printers’ Ink Monthly 2 (March 1921): 30–31, 119. 26 “From a painting ‘The Spirit of Transportation,’ by Maxfield Parrish,” The Nation’s Business 11 (March 1923): 20. 27 See, for example, the ad for Clark Equipment in The Literary Digest 60 (March 22, 1919): 94. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 229, notes the prevalence of advertisements featuring “total control over one’s destiny” in this period. 28 See the selection of Clark Equipment advertisements housed in the BCHA, box 1, folder 6. 29 Nancy K. Anderson discusses the painting in “‘The Kiss of Enterprise’: The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 237–83, and especially, 260–68. 30 Critics appreciated “Bierstadt’s solution to the problem posed by the ‘hard fact of the railroad,’” as Anderson notes in “‘The Kiss of Enterprise’: The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource,” 263. 31 See the letter from Parrish to Clair Fry of Brown & Bigelow, August 12, 1963, RSCL, box 1, folder 30. 32 “The Spirit of Transportation,” The Nation’s Business 11 (May 1923): 32. It is perhaps fitting that the company Lightolier, a manufacturer of decorative lighting founded in 1904, may have also used Parrish’s composition in their advertisements. See the letter from Stephen Newman of the House of Art to Parrish, August 20, 1923, RSCL, box 2, folder 70. The Lightolier Company (a division of Philips) has not been able to confirm their use of Parrish’s design, however. 33 Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, 215; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 164. 34 Walter Dill Scott, “Practical Application of Mental Imagery,” in The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1921), 67–85. Scott first published his ideas in 1902, in a series of articles in the advertising trade journal, Mahin’s Magazine. See also Harry Dexter Kitson, “The Imagination of the Buyer,” in The Mind of the Buyer: A Psychology of Selling (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 97–105. For a broader discussion of these ideas, see Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures,” Art History 40 (June 2017): 582-611. 35 See Kitson, “Good Feeling a Requisite,” in The Mind of the Buyer: A Psychology of Selling, 89–96. 36 Parrish to Rusling Wood, February 1, 1917, quoted in Sylvia Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1999), 113. Earnest Elmo Calkins would say much the same thing in Business the Civilizer, 84–86. 37 Parrish to Rusling Wood, quoted in Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 113. 38 Robert M. Barker, “Notable Advertising,” Syracuse Journal clipping included in letter to Parrish, August 23, 1917, RSCL, box 4, folder 1.



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39 Bryan Wolf, “All the World’s a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44 (Winter 1984): 329. 40 For an example of one of these envelope cartoons, which Parrish called “funnygraphs,” see Gilbert, Maxfield Parrish: The Masterworks, 62. 41 Parrish to Stephen Newman, February 20, 1936, RSCL, box 3, folder 11. 42 On packaging, see Neil Harris, “Designs on Demand: Art and the Modern Corporation,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, 366–69. 43 Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, 234. 44 For one of many letters mentioning Parrish’s “right to have [his compositions] published as prints etc. when [companies such as G.E.] were through with them,” see the letter from Parrish to Celia Mendelsohn, Manager of the American Artists Company, February 2, 1935, RSCL, box 1, folder 6. Parrish noted his early naiveté about royalties in a letter to Stephen Newman, April 30, 1936, RSCL, box 3, folder 4. 45 See the letters exchanged between Parrish and Ezra Clark, October 26, 1923, and October 31, 1926, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. Letter from Parrish to Celia Mendelsohn, January 12, 1935, RSCL, box 1, folder 6. Later, when Clark asked Parrish if he would mind if they had the trucks removed from his composition, the artist asked him not to market the image as a print, since this would step on the toes of his art publishers. See the letter from Parrish to Clark, March 3, 1925, box 1, folder 35. 46 The painting is reproduced in Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 14–15. 47 See the letters Stephen Newman wrote to Parrish on March 8 and 13, 1923, RSCL, box 2, folder 70. See also A. E. Reinthal to Parrish, February 8, 1929, box 3, folder 1; and Newman to Parrish, December 20, 1935, box 3, folder 3. 48 Letter from Parrish to Stephen Newman, December 28, 1935, RSCL, box 3, folder 3; Parrish to A. E. Reinthal, February 15, 1929, box 3, folder 1. A possible solution, Newman suggested in a letter of March 13, 1923, would be—in the case of compositions appearing as advertisements—to retain “the lettering, or rather advertising matter . . . so that at least a third of the picture must be cut off to remove the ad and in that way, we hope, make it uninteresting for framing as a print.” RSCL, box 2, folder 70. 49 Parrish to Bok, February 17, 1914; Bok to Parrish, February 20, 1914. Both are in the RSCL, box 1, folder 48. “You are a wonderful cooperator,” Orion Winford of Brown & Bigelow, wrote to Parrish on April 30, 1936, box 1, folder 22. 50 Letter from Parrish to A. E. Reinthal, February 15, 1929, RSCL, box 3, folder 1. 51 This summary is heavily indebted to Carrie Brown, Maxfield Parrish: Machinist, Artisan, Artist (Windsor, VT: American Precision Museum, 1995). See also Alma Gilbert, The Mechanic Who Loved to Paint: The Other Side of Maxfield Parrish (Burlingame: Alma Gilbert, 1995). 52 Adeline Adams, “The Art of Maxfield Parrish,” American Magazine of Art 9 (January 1918): 95, 101. 53 “Did You Ever Hear of Maxfield Parrish? ‘Who, the Artist?’—‘No, the Mechanic!’” Boston Globe, April 15, 1923. 54 Notes for a prospective article, contained in a letter from Walter P. Eaton to Parrish, December 14, 1927, RSCL, box 3, folder 11. 55 M. K. Wisehart, “Maxfield Parrish Tells Why the First Forty Years Are the Hardest,” American Magazine (May 1930): 28–30, 166–67.

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56 This was a common period conception, which the art critic Royal Cortissoz—in “Recent Work by Maxfield Parrish,” New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1936— evoked when he suggested that Parrish’s art was “as unimpassioned as a photograph.” 57 Cortissoz, “Recent Work by Maxfield Parrish.” 58 Herkomer, quoted in J. H. Irvine, “Professor von Herkomer on Maxfield Parrish’s Book Illustrations,” International Studio 29 (July 1906): 41. 59 “He uses only three or four colors, getting the different ones desired by glazing one upon another, very much like the printing of a four-color half-tone,” wrote Wisehart in “Maxfield Parrish Tells Why the First Forty Years Are the Hardest,” 30. See also Mark F. Bockrath, “‘Frank Imagination, within a Beautiful Form’: The Painting Methods of Maxfield Parrish,” in Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 122–40. 60 “We all know how, in the process of reproduction and the reduction in size, this life and brilliancy is lost to a certain extent, and to avoid this loss, if possible, I have made the design stronger in this respect than would be warranted if this were a painting plain and simple, not intended for reproduction.” Letter from Parrish to Clarence A. Crane of Crane’s Chocolates, March 6, 1916, RSCL, box 1, folder 45. 61 Ellen Mazur Thomson summarizes this thinking in “‘The Science of Publicity’: An American Advertising Theory, 1900–1920,” Journal of Design History 9 (1996): 253–72, especially pp. 263–66. On Hambidge, see Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 101. See also Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Selling Structures: The Periodical Page and the Art of Suggestive Advertising c. 1900” in Forschergruppe 2288 “Journalliteratur” ed., Visuelles Design. Die Journalseite als gestaltete Fläche / Visual Design: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, forthcoming 2019). 62 Parrish to A. E. Reinthal, December 25, 1928, and February 15, 1929; Reinthal to Parrish, December 31, 1928, RSCL, box 3, folder 1. 63 Celia Mendelsohn to Parrish, November 8, 1935, and February 26, 1936, RSCL, box 1, folder 6. 64 Parrish expressed this concern repeatedly. See, for example, his letter to A. E. Reinthal, December 25, 1928, RSCL, box 3, folder 1. 65 Although he acknowledged that many of these reproductions were quite good he complained that they could spell ruin since “the vast ignorant public does’nt [sic] know the difference.” Parrish to A. E. Reinthal, February 15, 1929, RSCL, box 3, folder 1. 66 C.M.P. “A Note on Some New Paintings by Maxfield Parrish,” International Studio 47 (August 1912): 26; Conger, “Maxfield Parrish’s Calendars,” 4. 67 See H. S. Morgan to Parrish, October 7, 1919, RSCL, box 2, folder 9. 68 There were, however, strings attached. Ezra Clark worked hard to induce Parrish to make a related picture for his associate, L. M. Allen, vice president of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, who wanted a painting of “Carriso Gorge” (now more commonly called “Carrizo Gorge,” in San Diego County). Allen tried to get Parrish to travel to California “and paint the Gorge en route.” See the letters from Ezra Clark to Parrish dated November 24, 1922; October 31, 1923; December 21, 1923; February 28, 1925; and, for Parrish’s rejection of the proposal, his reply of March 3, 1925, RSCL, box 1, folder 35. 69 See, for example, his letter to Martin Birnbaum of the Scott & Fowles Gallery in New York, June 7, 1918, RSCL, box 3, folder 14; to Orion Winford of Brown & Bigelow, December 27, 1929, box 1, folder 22; and to Celia Mendelsohn of the American Artists Company, April 20, 1952, box 1, folder 6.



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70 Adams, “The Art of Maxfield Parrish,” 91. 71 See Alexander Nemerov, “N.C. Wyeth’s Theater of Illustration,” American Art 6 (Spring 1992): 36–57. 72 Gordon C. Aymar, An Introduction to Advertising Illustration (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 205–06. 73 A. E. Reinthal to Parrish, November 19, 1928, RSCL, box 3, folder 1. 74 “Maxfield Parrish Will Discard ‘Girl-on-Rock’ Idea in Art,” Associated Press (April 27, 1931), quoted in Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 113. 75 “Parrish Turns to Nature,” The Art Digest (July 1, 1931): 16. See also “Turns from Girl on Rock to ‘Pictorial Window’ Art,” San Diego Union, May 3, 1931. 76 This was a common strategy in advertising imagery devoted to vehicular transport. See, for instance, Ray Winters, cover of Touring Topics (November 1924), in which landscape is literally framed as a work of art, and thus as worthy of aesthetic contemplation, for travelers standing next to their automobile, taking a break from their physical, if not conceptual travels. This design is reproduced and analyzed in John Ott, “Landscapes of Consumption: Auto Tourism and Visual Culture in California, 1920–1940” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, ed. Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 50–67. 77 “Turns from Girl on Rock to ‘Pictorial Window’ Art,” San Diego Union, May 3, 1931. 78 See, for example, the cover design (known as Jack and the Giant) for Collier’s: The National Weekly (July 30, 1910); the illustrations for “Mutabile Semper, Chocolate” and “Dies Irae” in Kenneth Grahame, Dream Days (1898); and the title page design for Louise Saunders, The Knave of Hearts (1925). 79 See Nemerov, “N.C. Wyeth’s Theater of Illustration,” 36–57. 80 Wyeth wrote frequently about his training with Pyle, his love of Thoreau, and his investment in painting from nature. See Betsy James Wyeth, ed., The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901–1945 (Boston: Gambit, 1971), letter numbers 197, 208, 246, 278, 349, 391 (on Pyle and his desire to move beyond illustration); 311, 352, 364, 385, 409, 410, 422, 455, 483, 510, 519 (on Thoreau). For his paintings devoted to Thoreau, see Christine B. Podmaniczky, N.C. Wyeth: Experiment and Invention, 1925–1935 (Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine River Museum of Art, 1995), 40–43. 81 See Podmaniczky, N.C. Wyeth: Experiment and Invention, 1925–1935. 82 Cutler and Cutler, Maxfield Parrish: A Retrospective, 14. 83 “Parrish Turns to Nature.” See also “Turns From Girl on Rock to ‘Pictorial Window’ Art.” 84 Calkins, “Beauty the New Business Tool,” 151. 85 See Scott, The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, and Kitson, The Mind of the Buyer. 86 Calkins, “Beauty the New Business Tool,” 145, 150. 87 On Calkins’s appreciation for modern art, see his “Beauty the New Business Tool,” 152–54, and Lears, Fables of Abundance, 308–22. Lears notes on 310–11, how often Calkins mentions Parrish’s art, however, during his travels in Europe, where everything he saw seemed to strike him as related to Parrish’s pictures. Calkins discusses Parrish at length in Business the Civilizer, 138–39. 88 Roland Marchand writes about this tempo change in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 12–13. See also Frederick C. Kendall, ed., The New American Tempo

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and Other Articles on Modern Advertising and Selling Practice (New York: Advertising and Selling, 1927). 89 Parrish, letter to Martin Birnbaum of the Scott & Fowles Gallery in New York, June 7, 1918, RSCL, box 3, folder 14. See also his letter to Celia Mendelsohn, January 12, 1935, box 1, folder 6. 90 Parrish to Stephen Newman, May 19, 1923, quoted in Ludwig, “Maxfield Parrish: Sharp-Focus Visionary,” 88. The RSCL includes an extensive collection of glass-plate negatives that the artist used as he composed his arrangements—photographs of rocks and streams that he pieced into his compositions. 91 See Parrish to M. M. Goodsill, of the Northern Pacific Railway Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, October 30, 1934, RSCL, box 1, folder 22. For Parrish’s correspondence with Spencer Penrose of the Broadmoor Hotel from 1919 to 1921, see box 1, folder 17. See also “Parrish First to Catch Tone of Region in His Painting,” Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, April 13, 1921. 92 Letter from Parrish to Spencer Penrose, September 15, 1919, RSCL, box 1, folder 17. Sometimes he worked in the opposite direction, having “a good arrangement in mind” but wanting to “find something in nature more or less like it,” as he explained to Orion Winford of Brown & Bigelow, in a letter dated August 2, 1937, RSCL, box 1, folder 23. 93 The puzzles were marketed by Charles Scribner’s Sons. See Parrish’s letter to Stephen Newman, March 4, 1933, RSCL, box 3, folder 3. 94 See Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870–1966, 88–89, for a color reproduction of the stage set Parrish designed for The Woodland Princess in 1916. On Parrish’s set designs, see also RSCL, box 3, folders 29 and 30. “My theory is that you should use all objects in nature . . . just as stage properties . . . on which to hang your idea,” Parrish wrote. Quoted in Cutler and Cutler, Maxfield Parrish: A Retrospective, 15. 95 Letter from Parrish to Clair Fry about the painting New Moon, April 12, 1955, RSCL, box 1, folder 28. 96 Aymar, An Introduction to Advertising Illustration, 206–07.

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Connections and Conflicts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Corporate, Commercial, and Documentary Photography Mark Durden

Her technique overdramatizes virtually everything she treats. She shoots from bizarre angles and in operatic lights. She photographed a girder, for example, not from the side so that one might see how it joined two parts of a building, but from directly on it, looking down its length, so that the girder appeared like a metal highway running spectacularly nowhere. . . . She would freeze a facial ­expression (and the viewer’s blood) with a livid flash three feet from her subject. And the purpose of these unusual techniques was just to be unusual: to pep up the content, to wheedle the viewer into emotion by making it seem that what he looked at was fresh, subtle, and passionate, and not what it was: a sentimental cliché. William Stott1 William Stott’s damning account of the photographic technique of Margaret Bourke-White, made in his 1973 book Documentary Expression in Thirties America, published two years after her death by Parkinson’s disease, did much to distort her work and damage her reputation. Stott’s book attacks the photography of Bourke-White in order to champion that of Walker Evans. In the epigraph above Stott shifts from a reference to her industrial photography to her documentary portraits made in 1936, when the writer, Erskine Caldwell, commissioned her to travel within the South in order to make a book together about the “plight of the Southern sharecropper.”2 Stott views her documentary photographs in the same way as he interprets her corporate commissions. While the two forms of photography certainly intersected, Bourke-White’s turn to documentary nevertheless marked a decisive shift in her relation and attitude to the realm of commercial photography. The collisions and correspondences between these two forms of photography are revealing and deserve greater attention. Things are certainly not as simple as Stott makes it seem.

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Stott’s criticism is made in the chapter that analyzes Walker Evans’s photographs for the book he published with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Published in 1941 but begun in 1936, it is often set against Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s 1937 You Have Seen Their Faces. Agee and Evans had themselves been heavily critical of Bourke-White in the notes and appendices to their book, which reproduced a review on the photographer from the New York Post. It begins by describing her flamboyant appearance, wearing “the reddest coat in the world,” from the same designer of clothes worn by Hollywood stars. She is referred to as “one of the highest paid women in America,” barring movie stars. The same article does however quote her saying how she is “tired of glorifying big business, tired of photographing empty-headed models stepping into beautiful automobiles”—a detail that is telling and significant in light of the course of her shift from corporate and commercial photography.3 But set in relation to Praise’s lengthy detailed response to the lives, homes, and belongings of three tenant farmer families and Agee’s own anxieties about the inequality in terms of class between him and those he represents, Bourke-White comes across as brash and naive in the article. Distinct as they are, Faces and Praise establish an ongoing dialectic about documentary forms—polarized between a dramatic embellishment of the real versus a seemingly more authentic, straight, and unimposing representation. Both books began in the same year, 1936. Praise was originally commissioned as an article for Fortune, a luxurious monthly business magazine that had an especially close relation to BourkeWhite, since she was its star photographer. Agee initially was unable to find a publisher for Praise because of the success of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s Faces. Published as a five-dollar hardback in November 1937 Faces received mostly positive reviews and it went into a paperback edition within a month, selling at seventy-five cents. Agee and Evans’s 1941 book, selling only 199 copies in its first two years, was remaindered at nineteen cents a copy, and only met with success in the 1960 reprint after James Agee’s death and after he had been given a posthumous Pulitzer prize for his 1957 novel Death in the Family, published two years after he died.4 On a number of occasions Stott refers to Bourke-White’s “emotionalistic photography” as a problem in terms of documentary.5 In one of his first references to her pictures he writes that she “overemotionalized the look.”6 For him, the social message of Walker Evans’s more distanced and detached pictures “comes across more strongly for not being overemotionalized.”7 Reading his account one is left wondering about the distinction drawn between an emotive photography and one that is more neutral and detached. When Stott states that Evans did not care to move his audience, it might also be interpreted as a way to address his distance from the documentary context and tradition itself. Stott’s championing of Walker Evans also comes in the wake of John Szarkowski’s 1971 retrospective exhibition of the photographer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Stott’s emphasis on Evans’s work not being crafty, or pulling at the sleeve, echoes Szarkowski’s description of his pictures as “reticent, understated and impersonal.”8 While Szarkowski downplays their documentary import, Stott instead tries to use the less emotionalized look of Evans’s pictures of poverty to speak about the way in which



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his documentary is about respect not pity. Stott gives an ethical dimension to Evans’s photographic portraits—“He photographs straightforwardly, as people take (or used to take) snapshots: from the front and center, from eye level, from the middle distance and in full flat light.”9 Stott is careful to note revisions between the first and the 1960 second editions of Praise—in particular the fact that in the later edition Evans replaced a more dramatic and harsh portrait taken in strong daylight and showing the subject with a dirty collar. The portrait removed from the second edition might be seen to be more in keeping with those in Bourke-White’s Faces. Stott uses the distinction from Evans to make a moral judgment about Bourke-White’s mode of picturing. But what she brought to her southern subjects, and what was paraded to the book’s northern urban audience, was another form of modernism—the dynamic and dramatic modernist form developed in her pictures of industry and inspired by cinema. Bourke-White was an avid moviegoer; she had met Sergei Eisenstein in New York before she went to Russia in 1931 and on another later visit had been taught filmmaking by Eisenstein’s cinematographer Eduard Tisse.10 Her photographs in Faces are dominated by a variety of often dramatic and unusual points of view—we look from below and from above at her subjects. And also face to face. Evans’s is a different aesthetic sensibility, more visually neutral and cooler. But one is not less coded than the other. While his face-on portraits are seen as less stylized, less dramatic, less pepped up, it is a convention and aesthetic nevertheless. Stott gives an ethical value to this straight, face-on look, which is seen to be respectful and dignifying. But one could just as well say that such images are equally troubling, pacifying, and comforting us with the impression that the gulf between viewer and subject is less than it really is. Bourke-White does not hide the distance that exists between viewers and those she pictured—her depictions are more revealing and uncomfortable in this respect, less restrained and less polite. Evans and Bourke-White signal two different formal languages of photography. Bourke-White’s pictures can be loud, while Evans’s photographs, strongly anticommercial, are reticent and ambiguous. Success and the contradiction set up by her success when she turns to documentary created the rancor. This is why the newspaper article from the New York Post is included in Praise. Its reproduction is also in keeping with the form of Agee’s text, with its varied styles and interruptions, including at points, departures from the conventional page layout when we encounter the broken and fragmentary typographic mimicry of newspaper cuttings, the transcription of a handwritten sign and a handwritten name and address in a family bible. Agee’s prose also shifts between attempts at mirroring photography’s descriptive detachment and a florid subjective stream of consciousness, in which his own fantasies and desires are uninhibited. But Evans’s pictures throughout remain constant in their formal austerity and restraint, their non-emotionality. John R. Stomberg has shown how this distinction between Bourke-White and Evans stems from a sustained campaign initiated by Evans in relation to his 1938 American Photographs exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, involving Lincoln Kirstein, Thomas Mabry, and Agee.11 Mabry, who organized the show, wrote the

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four-page press release, and while he did not name Bourke-White, Evans is defined against characteristics that were clearly part of her style: It is the power to create an austere drama from America as it is that gives to Evans’ work its unique character. There is no trick about his photographs. He never exaggerates by angle shot or unusual perspective. He never “sentimentalizes” the beauty of the industrial machine, and he respects the industrial worker too much to exploit his pathos. He abhors such easy camera melodrama.12

Mabry commissioned Kirstein to write the essay for Evans’s exhibition catalogue, which further consolidated the distinctive values characterizing Evans’s “‘straight’ photography” and with clear digs at photographers like Bourke-White: “Most industrial photographers sing a Wagnerian hymn to the vision of machines as deities. Evans is less concerned with the majesty of machinery than with the psychology, manners, and looks of the men who make the work.”13 Bourke-White’s Faces marks a significant shift to the human subject in her photography. She began as an industrial photographer. She recounts in her autobiography how, in order to picture the pouring of metal in steel factories in Cleveland, she used magnesium flares that were provided by a salesman who was on his way to Hollywood to demonstrate them for the movies. The Hollywood connection is appropriate and fits with her romantic and dramatic celebration of the power of the steel mills. It was her Cleveland pictures that brought her to the attention of Henry Robinson Luce, publisher of Time magazine, who invited her to New York to be the photographer for his new lavish business magazine, Fortune, characterized by its beautifully printed photographic essays, extolling industry, capitalism, and corporate development. She was hired as the chief photographer for Fortune in May 1929 and the first issue came out in February 1930. She refused a full-time contract so she could continue her lucrative advertising work. Her personal gross income in 1929 was over $20,000.14 Her fascination and awe with modernity led her to have a studio in the newly constructed Chrysler Building, a structure that on a number of occasions became her photographic subject, as well as the Empire State Building. In May 1930, Bourke-White made her credo clear about the relationship between modernity and photography, claiming: Any great art which might be developed in this industrial age will come from industrial subjects, which are so powerful and sincere and so close to the heart of life. It seems to me that huge machinery, steel girders locomotives, etc., are so extremely beautiful because they were never meant to be beautiful. .  .  . They are powerful because the industrial age which has created them is powerful and art, to be of any importance as a reflection of these times, must hold the germ of that power.15

Bourke-White celebrated the newly popular medium of radio in the photomural she designed for the rotunda of the Rockefeller Center in late 1933 (removed and probably destroyed in 1953 or 1954). The very scale of this ten-foot high photomural, covering



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a rotunda of 160 feet, allowed her to reiterate further the power and beauty of this new technology. She made many murals, including one for the Aluminum Company of America, which was installed in the Ford pavilion at the Chicago’s World Fair in 1934, and in the same year a mural of Magnitogorsk for the Soviet Embassy in New York.16 As Sharon Corwin has noted, photography was the perfect medium to give form to the ideals of capitalism: “Repetition, standardization, precision.”17 Much of her commercial imagery employed “the tightly framed repetition of objects, often viewed across a diagonally receding line with no discernible termination.” Bourke-White pictured “not only the subjects (or products) of mass production but also its systems and values”—her depiction of objects, “as if caught in an infinite recession” spoke of “capitalist abundance.”18 It is the tension or rather conflict between commercial and corporate photography and Bourke-White’s photography of the social scene that marks and affects her early documentary work. Since she turned to documentary from advertising she hyped up the real—the rhetorical form of one approach carried over and influenced the other. Melissa A. McEuen has described how “the advertising veteran used her camera to manipulate and highlight certain features of her subjects, just as she had done with LaSalle headlights, Chesterfield cigars, and Goodyear tires.”19 Bourke-White was also aware of the possibility that her very advertising work might be among the newspapers and magazines used to insulate and decorate the homes of some of her subjects in Faces, a collision and contradiction evident in some of her photographs. Evans was attentive to commercial images too, only with his isolation of a torn movie poster, from 1930, the detail rebounds back on questions to do with the picture itself—making a point about ephemerality and mortality, as the tear cuts between the man and woman it depicts. Similarly, in Evans’s 1936 picture showing movie posters on billboards beneath frame houses, the photograph reflects upon vision and sight, revealing a fascination with the film stars’ faces, especially the striking detail of the blackened eye of one of the young female stars staring back at us, a subtle reminder of the monocular vision of the camera itself. In her autobiography, Bourke-White gives an extraordinary account of her preoccupation with the formal demands of a commercial commission and her obliviousness to the dramatic historical events taking place. Photographing a Boston bank at night, in the last week of October 1929, having set up strings of 1,000 watt lights and using long exposures, she was surprised and irritated to find it “full of vicepresidents and other bank officials running about.” The stock market had crashed. As she later put it, “History was pushing her face into the camera, and here was I, turning my lens the other way.”20 A shift toward documentary concerns began during her first trip to Russia in 1930, evident in the number of portraits of laborers, both men and women—cement workers, iron puddlers, kiln tenders, textile workers—included in the resulting 1931 book Eyes on Russia. A portfolio of Bourke-White’s photographs of Russia, which included her full figure portrait of an iron puddler, was published in Fortune magazine in February 1931. While Fortune certainly celebrated business in its pages, it also developed what Michael Augspurger has referred to as a “documentary style.”21 Between 1935 and 1939,

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Fortune commissioned a series of stories on individual workers and farmers entitled “Life and Circumstances.” As one essay noted, “It is just as impossible to describe an average farm as it is to describe every one of the 6,500,000. But it is possible to tell a good deal about one farm—a farm.”22 It was a “Life and Circumstances” commission that was to lead to Agee and Evans’s book Praise. And it was a Fortune commission to cover a drought extending from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas in the summer of 1934 that radically impacted upon Bourke-White. In her autobiography, she recounts its origin: This was the beginning of my awareness of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subjects for the camera and photographed against a wider canvas than I had perceived before. During the rapturous period when I was discovering the beauty of industrial shapes, people were only incidental to me, and in retrospect I had not much feeling for them in my earlier work. But suddenly it was the people who counted.23

Her feature, “The Drought: A Post-Mortem in Pictures,” showed its ruinous effects by rhyming the sandy ridges in her photograph of the arid land of the now inaptly named Rosebud Valley, South Dakota, with a photograph of the skeletal backs of cattle, as well as including documents of the skinned flanks of dead livestock. The 1934 feature was accompanied by an article by Agee, who thought it the “height of liberal folly” that it should be Bourke-White who took the photographs.24 He also must have been upset by the fact that while his name was not added to the article, her name accompanied the portfolio. It was the experience of the drought that led to the epiphany, recounted in her autobiography, in which she repudiates the world of advertising. She writes about how hard it was to return to advertising where she was working on a tire ad in her penthouse, how she “could no longer summon up enthusiasm over the imprint of an idealized tire on a road of putty” when her mind “was on another road clogged with fine-blown topsoil and imprinted by the wind.”25 She goes on to describe a dream in which the Buick cars she had been photographing as part of her commercial work were “rushing towards me, threatening to crush me down.”26 This led her to decide from then on to only undertake photographic assignments which she felt could be done “in a creative and constructive way,” a decision which she said led her to refuse an advertising job for color photographs that was offered her the very day after her dream, and one for which she would have been paid $1,000 a picture. According to her autobiography, it was at this point when she was invited to photograph the South for the book with Erskine Caldwell.27 The design of Faces involves a dynamic layout; picture size varies, as do points of view. Sometimes photographs are set within white pages, and at other times run to its edges. Paul Hansom speaks of our physical relation to some of the pictures—“where the image is bled out to the edge of the page, the photograph actually touches us, our fingers, our laps, and gives a sense of leaving the frame.”28 One should compare this with the more sober layout of Evans’s photographs in Praise, all of which are framed



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with white borders. And Praise is half its size, at eight and a quarter inches by five and a half. Lighting was often set up and Bourke-White stage-managed scenes like a movie director.29 She also used sunlight to create a dramatic and often unflattering chiaroscuro, as in her portrait of a young boy in a straw hat, in which the raking light picks out the crooked teeth, while the rest of his face is in shade. We also see physical deformities, the alarming goiter that projects from an old woman’s neck and skews the conventions of the family group portrait. Jeff Allred has suggested that such a detail shatters the sentimentality of Bourke-White’s pictures. The image showing the huge goiter, probably the result of malnutrition, making it difficult to breath and swallow, at a more self-reflexive level “underscores both the inability of these subjects to represent themselves in their own voices and the problems inherent in readers’ swallowing of such images whole, imagining their own knowledge of the subjects’ circumstances to be adequate.”30 Bourke-White’s photographs often work through a dynamic of contrasts. In one of her versions of the familiar Depression-era documentary icon of mother and child, with its cheery sounding location replete with irony—Happy Hollow, Georgia—a white mother holding her baby is seated on a grubby and torn mattress that has its stuffing spilling out. (The detail of the mattress is not insignificant; it adds to the sense of what documentary does throughout Bourke-White’s book with its uncomfortable disclosure and unraveling of the lives of her subjects.) The woman remains relatively impassive in such wretched circumstances; her look conveys a sense of endurance, of managing to put up with what she has, rather than despair. The life and vivacity of her baby markedly stands out. In the book, Happy Hollow is paired with a picture from Hull, Georgia, showing a wooden hand-painted sign directing us away from the picture of the mother and child: it bears the words “LOOK,” then the silhouette of a pointing hand and the declaration “NOW IS THE DAY OF SALVATION.” Its message of faith is cruelly belied by the mother’s plight. The detail of a Revival Joy book on her mattress adds to the pathos; faith one assumes is there to ease the pain, just like the packet of medicine next to it. By the time we get to these pictures in the book we have already seen Bourke-White’s photographs of a “firey [sic] sermon” (as she describes it) in the church of black worshippers and also its white counterpart in a “Holiness” church in South Carolina. Caldwell notes in his text in the book how the church feared landlords and ministers, how it did not dare “preach a sermon pointing out the equality of man.” As a result, it has become “a burlesque religion,” with churches being places where men and women elevate themselves into states of ecstasy to forget their troubles, “intoxicate themselves with a primitive form of religious frenzy that has its closest counterpart in alcoholic drunkenness.”31 Evans valorizes the amateur family photograph; it is a cue to his way of depicting his subjects. He even goes up close and frames two worn snapshots in one picture in Praise to show both their importance and their relation to his own way of picturing. BourkeWhite uses family photographs as an element of contrast, notably in Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia. Her portrait, which shows the downcast gaze of a white mother as she breastfeeds her child, and with worry-lines on her brow clearly visible, contrasts with the elegant oval photographic portrait from another era depicting a round-faced

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white woman looking to camera. This formal picture from the past survives only as a fragment, cut up by the jagged edges of the broken mirror it is wedged behind. We assume this is a family portrait and understand Bourke-White’s dramatic picture as being about the gulf between the generations. The visual effect creates a sense of a violent severance and disruption between the worlds of the two women, the mother’s plight in the present is far from the comfort and grace we associate with the fragment of a portrait behind her. In her two depictions of black women beside a hearth, Bourke-White also includes the bricolage decorations adorning the fireplaces in the background. Faces of stars and celebrities cut from magazines stand out from amidst the clutter. Above the mantel in one of the photographs is a framed formal portrait of a young black woman, the elegance of which contrasts with the portrayal of the woman bending to bake cornbread. Bourke-White chose to end her book with two up-close face-on portraits. The first shows an old woman, her face heavily wrinkled and her mouth closed. The portrait is not over emotional, but the woman’s eyes are watery, suggestive of something being held back. She looks as though she may be about to cry or has cried. The accompanying words, presented as if a quotation from her, “I’ve done the best I knew how all my life, but it didn’t amount to much in the end,” attaches the portrait to a sense of despair and hopelessness. The book’s final photograph is of a younger man (who had earlier been pictured together with his wife), staring at the camera and with the lighting now more dramatic, bringing one-half of his face in shadow. The caption gives him a voice: “It ain’t hardly worth the trouble to go on living.” The quote again gives to the portrait a sense of futility—it dramatizes and embellishes the look, invites us to see in his stare a sense of desperation. Gleaned from conversations that they heard, all the quotes that accompany her pictures in the book were written by Caldwell and Bourke-White and were not spoken by her subjects. In a betrayal of traditional documentary expectation and in keeping with the theatrical and fictional attributes of her photography, they spoke for their subjects. Bourke-White’s pictures are not outside commerce, however. Consumer culture is visible in her pictures of shacks covered with signs and billboard posters or the interior walls that are covered with newspapers and magazines. In her autobiography she wrote: I was struck by the frequent reminders I found of the advertising world I thought I had left behind. Here the people really used the ads. They plastered them directly on their houses to keep the wind out. Some sharecropper houses were wrapped so snugly in huge billboard posters advertising magic pain-killers and Buttercup Snuff that the home itself disappeared from sight. The effect was bizarre.32

In her account of the interiors, in which “the walls from floor to ceiling were papered in old newspapers and colorful advertising pages torn from magazines,” she recalls, I remember a little girl named Begonia ... [who] went to school [with her twin sister] on alternate days, so as to share their single nondescript coat and their one



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pair of shoes. And here, right behind Begonia’s wistful little face as she told me this, was this spectacular and improbable background showing all the world’s goods. Begonia and her sister could look their walls over and find a complete range of shoes, jackets and coats. But never would they find that real coat and real pair of shoes which would take the second twin to school.33

The irony of the juxtaposition points to the fundamental deprivation and lack in the lives of her subjects and a reality that remains forever unattainable. The use of commercial signage was a recurrent element within documentary and was often used as a form of jarring irony. This was powerfully brought out in Marion Post Wolcott’s 1939 depiction of a scene in Belzoni, Mississippi, Negro Man Entering a Movie Theatre by “Colored” Entrance in which the cheery sign of “Dr Pepper GOOD FOR LIFE” collides with the visible signs of segregation in the picture, a division further reiterated, as Nicholas Natanson has pointed out, by the doubling created by the long afternoon shadows.34 Faces is of interest in terms of the contradictions and collisions between commercial and documentary modes of photography, not only in terms of the way she includes reminders of the advertising world she thought she had left behind but in the general dramaturgy of her photographic style. Evans’s photography, positioned and promoted as distant from the tricks and gimmicks and melodrama of commercial photography, still nevertheless involved pictures of advertisements, but remained deadpan in its register of them, fascinated instead, for example, in their material state, as in his detail of a torn movie poster. His aesthetic remained apart from the clarity of consumer images. As John Tagg has argued, “For the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, the world is rhetorical . . . constituted as a series of messages whose tropes are present in the world.”35 In contrast, for Evans “meaning is held back” and his work signals “a resistance amidst all the recruitment calls of the 1930s.”36 Allying his work with “a melancholic realism,” Tagg responds to an unpublished draft statement, written in the third person, that Evans made about his work, about how “Evans was and is interested in what the present would look like as the past.”37 Tagg argues, “His interest was not in rescuing the present but in seeing it gone, set at a distance as the past. His camera, therefore, is not a means of fixing the ephemeral in the present tense but a machine out of time that robs us of the present. It does not offer recognition. It does not appeal for identification.” Evans “sees the present as already an abandoned ruin.”38 Evans was to produce the largest single body of work of his career for Fortune magazine, working there for twenty years. He became its staff photographer in 1945 and three years later had been made its Special Photography Editor, which allowed him to assign and direct photographers, compose layouts and write his own copy. He had got this position by arguing in a letter to the managing editor Ralph Paine Jr. against “a weak and expected Fortune style [associated with Bourke-White] which when used over and over slackens your reader’s minds.” Instead he advocated that the magazine prints pictures that “take a long look at a subject, get into it, and without shouting tell a lot about it”; pictures that were “quiet and true.”39 While many of the portfolios he produced might have used what was then the modern and expensive medium of color

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photography, they involved a distinctive aesthetic that was out of step with postwar America, creating “a counter-narrative to Fortune’s celebration of industry.”40 His portfolio, The Wreckers, from May 1951, for example, drew attention to the “spectacles of demolition” in New York, all photographed when “the crowbar work is about half way through,” when “the torn flower-designs, the wounded beams, the indecent laths, and the entrails of iron weave their most complex spell.” Other portfolios drew attention to the simple hand tool, each one given a full page, auto graveyards, small town railroad stations, American masonry. His portfolio on the insignia of freight cars preserves these signs and messages “Before They Disappear,” when, as he put it, “the fell hand of the commercial designer is lurking near, T-Square poised.”41 In many respects, Evans can be seen to have taken over from Bourke-White at Fortune and managed to oppose the pro-industrial aesthetic that had been very much established by her. From 1936, she was photographing for Life magazine. She contributed the cover image and lead photo essay for its first issue on November 23, 1936. Showing tiny figures dwarfed by the massive art deco towers of the Fort Peck Dam, the cover photograph continued her earlier paean to modernity, while the photo essay inside tempered this with its feature on the everyday life of the workers. The print order for the first issue of Life was 466,000 and production numbers increased with each subsequent issue, breaking one million before April 1937.42 Sales of Fortune also exceeded Luce’s expectations, despite its launch three months after the stock market crash; by 1935 there were more than 100,000 subscribers.43 Luce’s ambition for Life was for it to be “the best magazine for look-through purposes,” with a mission “to see, and to show.”44 Life played an important role in the success of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s book Faces. Two weeks after the book’s publication, Life promoted it in a spread that reproduced nine of the photographs.45 When the photographs were printed in this new context, they took on new connections and meanings. For instance, in the Life feature, the photograph from Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia, showing a black woman preparing corn bread at a run-down hearth, has an especially awkward relation to the full-page color advertisement that is printed beside the photograph in the Life essay, which depicts white celebrities endorsing Camel cigarettes. The walls plastered with pages from newspapers and magazines in the photograph connects with the adjacent advertisement in Life. This photograph was also published in Life at a larger scale than it was in Faces. In the photograph, the framed portrait of a young black woman contrasts with the image of a white actress on the curling, torn scrap of card pinned next to the framed portrait, while simultaneously connecting with the Camel advertisement. Bourke-White’s remarkable lead photograph for a Life story on the Louisville flood in the February 15, 1937, issue used an advertisement to set up a pictorial joke that resonated beyond the frame and the dominant rhetorical form of documentary itself. The photograph shows African American men, women, and children waiting in a long line below a National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) campaign advertisement depicting a smiling, white, middle-class family (and their dog) in a car. The bold headline reads, “WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING” (Figure 3.1). Over the landscape beside the car in cursive script are the words “There’s no way like the



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Figure 3.1  Margaret Bourke-White, At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937. Gelatin silver print, 9 ¾ × 13 ⅛ inches. Gift of the photographer. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo by Margaret BourkeWhite/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. American way.” The billboard’s message accords with that of the advertisements abundant in Life magazine—but at the same time its fakery is exposed when juxtaposed with the group that stands before it. The title of the Life article, which was printed beneath Bourke-White’s photograph—THE FLOOD LEAVES ITS VICTIMS ON THE BREAD LINE—brings clarification to what is being shown us in the photograph and further distances us from the propaganda of the cheery NAM billboard.46 Bourke-White’s photograph is printed at nearly full-page size (beneath the standard LIFE header with information about the volume, issue number, and date) on the right side of the magazine spread. On the left side of the spread, opposite Bourke-White’s photograph, is an actual full-page advertisement for Heinz. Titled “The Good Green Earth,” the advertisement is composed of multiple black-and-white documentary-like photographs depicting the natural process of growing the “perfect” tomatoes used in its bottled and tinned produce. To iron out any pictorial ambiguity between the two sides of the spread, Life printed the word “Advertisement” twice above the Heinz ad. In picturing the NAM advertisement, Bourke-White’s photograph is given a meta-position, elevating and distinguishing its documentary content and message, brought about through the predominantly candid, unposed gestures of the people standing before the billboard. In the Louisville flood picture she sets the two pictorial forms of commercial and documentary photography against one another. The NAM advertisement allowed her to show the naturalness of the subjects standing in front of it. In the context of the advertisements in Life, it helps distinguish the real of documentary. The distinction and collision within this picture mirrors the context of

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documentary photographs in the magazine itself as they are set among and have to compete with advertising images, which, in the case of the Heinz advertisement, are already beginning to look like documentary photographs. The Louisville photograph extends the dialectic of some of her pictures in Faces, in which the life of her subjects was set against walls covered in magazines and newspaper advertisements, where an observed social reality collided with a collaged backdrop drawn from the commercial image world. Despite this, the response to her photographs was to see them as unnatural, as exaggerated, like her advertising and industrial photography. With the Louisville photograph, Bourke-White captured a particular moment of everyday life. The billboard’s absurdity and artifice served to accent the realist impact of the depiction of the people who wait in line before it. In John Tagg’s rich analysis of this photograph by Bourke-White, he goes so far as to suggest it is not a documentary image in that “it does not demand the enactment of the viewpoint as a psychic space, a point of identification in which the viewer is interpellated into the dramaturgy of the image.”47 The picture’s “friezelike layering of shallow planes work against the privileging of the center,” creating an “oddly detached effect.”48 The photograph lacks the emotional realism of many of the photographs in Faces, but nevertheless is rhetorically constructed to assert a distinction between the representation of the billboard and the real of the bread line it is inadequate to. For Bourke-White to reframe this advertisement entailed a pointed collision of cultures and worldviews. She knew the world of advertising only too well. In this respect the Louisville picture—especially as it was published in the pages of Life—is a brilliant and succinct declaration of her documentary allegiance and a clear farewell to the unreal world of commercial photography. At the same time it signals a certain shift in her mode of documentary, since the subjects in the bread line are not theatricalized in their presentation. The real is not embellished. As Tagg notes, often Bourke-White “was unprepared to work with available illumination” and “sought greater plasticity and contrast” by “using multiple artificial light sources.”49 Instead, her subjects in the Louisville photograph are portrayed in the “general gloom” of “dour light from the rainfilled sky.”50 It is as if all exaggeration is played out and exhausted in the excesses of the advertisement and Bourke-White has now found a truth and honesty in the mostly unguarded and candid gestures and expressions of the people standing in the bread line.

Notes 1 William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 270. 2 This is from the blurb on the inside jacket of the first paperback edition of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, Inc., 1937). 3 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 451.



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4 The figures are given in David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2014), 23. 5 Stott, Documentary Expression, 222. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ibid., 281. 8 John Szarkowski, Walker Evans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 10. 9 Stott, Documentary Expression, 270. 10 Vicki Goldberg, Bourke-White (New York: International Center of Photography, 1988). 11 John R. Stomberg, “A Genealogy of Orthodox Documentary,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 37–56. 12 Stomberg, “A Genealogy of Orthodox Documentary,” 48. 13 Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 196. 14 Jonathan Silverman, For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White (New York: The Viking Press, 1983), 11. 15 Quoted in John R. Stomberg, Power and Paper: Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1998), 14. 16 Silverman, For the World to See, 72. 17 Sharon Corwin, “Constructed Documentary: Margaret Bourke-White from the Steel Mill to the South,” in American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White, ed. Sharon Corwin, Jessica May, and Terri Weisman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 113. 18 Corwin, “Constructed Documentary.” 19 Melissa A. McEuen, Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 238. 20 Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 72. 21 Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 137. 22 Quoted in Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty, 138. 23 Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 110. 24 Laurence Bergreen, James Agee: A Life (New York: Penguin, 1984), 145. 25 Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 112. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Paul Hansom, “You Have Seen Their Faces, of Course: The American South as Modernist Space,” in Literary Modernism and Photography, ed. Paul Hansom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 67. 29 Sharon Corwin, “Constructed Documentary.” 30 Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 88. 31 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, Inc., 1937), 40. 32 Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 127. 33 Ibid., 128. 34 Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

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35 John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 170. 36 Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, 173–74. 37 Ibid., 324. 38 Ibid., 325. 39 Quoted in Robert Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 294. 40 Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated, 290. 41 All portfolios are reproduced in Campany, 2014. 42 Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, 98. 43 Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated, 87. 44 Quoted in Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, 99, 101. 45 “The South of Erskine Caldwell Is Photographed by Margaret Bourke-White,” Life, November 22, 1937, 48–52. 46 “The Flood Leaves Its Victims on the Bread Line,” Life, February 15, 1937, 9. The Heinz advertisement is on p. 8. 47 Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame, 110. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 111. 50 Ibid.

4

Incorporated Philanthropy: The General Education Board, Abraham Flexner, and the Architecture of American Medical Schools Katherine L. Carroll

In 1903, John D. Rockefeller Sr. founded the General Education Board (GEB). Entirely separate from Rockefeller’s business undertakings at Standard Oil, the GEB represented a corporate philanthropy, a philanthropic foundation that modeled its organization after a corporate structure. As a corporate philanthropy, the GEB functioned under the direction of a board of trustees that depended upon a group of officers to promote its educational initiatives and to run its various programs. The GEB worked to improve American education at all levels, and Abraham Flexner led the GEB’s program for medical education. While scholars have documented many of the ways that Flexner and the GEB impacted medical education reform, none has investigated their influence on medical school architecture.1 From the beginning of his involvement in medical education, Flexner recognized the role of architecture in medical training and favored specific design principles. When the GEB provided funds for the construction campaigns of fifteen new medical schools, Flexner used this patronage as an opportunity to encourage particular architectural ideas. Flexner supported the abandonment of the institute design, wherein medical colleges divided their campuses into separate buildings, in favor of unified plans, which combined all of the laboratory—and sometimes also the clinical—facilities under a single roof.2 In the end, these design choices shaped how physicians learned, how they conceptualized medical science, and how they practiced medicine. The GEB typifies the general-purpose foundation invented in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. The generosity and egotism of wealthy Americans coalesced in the development of foundations intended both to distribute fortunes efficiently and to shape the nation’s society. The foundations collaborated with reformers as they worked toward such broadly conceived goals as the “well-being of mankind.” To this end, these ambitious undertakings often focused their efforts on science, education, and public health. By 1915, twenty-seven foundations existed; their number swelled to over 200 by 1930. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller became leading figures among the benefactors behind these foundations. While management

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methods varied, Rockefeller and others worked to apply the lessons they had learned in business to the organization of their philanthropic foundations.3 Unlike the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropy formed in 1911 whose name referenced both its famous creator and the corporate identity of the foundation, the GEB’s name did not suggest either Rockefeller’s involvement or the philanthropy’s corporate organizational model. The GEB’s designation as a board expanded the ambiguity of its name, suggesting a municipal entity as much as a corporate or philanthropic one. With its generic title, the GEB has been confused since its inception with other foundations and boards.4 Although the GEB failed to present a clearly corporate identity to the public, its organizational structure designated it a corporate philanthropy.5 When the GEB began providing financial support for the construction of medical schools, it became a type of corporate patron. The lack of documentation of Flexner’s architectural ideas has largely obscured from the historical record the systematic nature of the GEB’s architectural patronage. Flexner never wrote an official architectural program for the GEB; he never generated a formal set of architectural guidelines for recipients of GEB aid; and the contracts between the GEB and the medical schools it assisted included no architectural provisos. As a result, Flexner’s architectural interests remained outside of the official record.6 Scholars’ tendency to overlook medical school buildings has compounded the absence of formal documents related to Flexner’s architectural ideas. Architectural historians have generally limited their research on medical facilities to spaces for patient care rather than for medical training. At the same time, historians of medicine have not investigated medical school buildings because they largely have not recognized the significant role that the buildings themselves play in medical education. Drawing together the histories of philanthropy, architecture, and medicine, this chapter demonstrates that the GEB’s patronage influenced the architecture of American medical schools. In so doing, it underscores the architectural impact made possible by the work of corporate philanthropies, including those without formally codified architectural programs.

Changes in philanthropy and medical education Around the turn of the twentieth century, dramatic shifts took place in American charitable giving and medical education. Within the former, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller Sr., and others began to establish philanthropic foundations that based their organization on the corporate model developed so successfully by these men in the industrial arena. In creating corporate philanthropies, donors turned away from making personal financial contributions to the causes of their choice and instead primarily gave large sums of money to their foundations. To the boards of trustees of these foundations fell the task of effectively and efficiently distributing the donor’s money through clearly defined programs. The boards entrusted the management of this task to the new group of “philanthropoids,” a term coined to describe the professionals



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who administered the philanthropic bequests of others. The boards of trustees and the philanthropoids had at their disposal enough money to develop national and even international programs designed to create sweeping change on an unprecedented scale in areas such as education and public health.7 For John D. Rockefeller Sr., several factors motivated him to create corporate philanthropies. Rockefeller was a devout Baptist, and his faith had compelled him to make charitable contributions beginning at a young age. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, Rockefeller found himself not only with a rapidly growing fortune but also with supplicants hounding him for aid. Corporate philanthropy allowed Rockefeller to make gifts on a larger scale and manage his philanthropic work more efficiently. At the same time, Rockefeller faced growing public criticism and governmental scrutiny for his work at Standard Oil.8 Rockefeller’s philanthropies also became a way for Rockefeller to create an alternate image of himself as he attempted to demonstrate that wealthy businessmen could successfully invest their money for the common good.9 In 1903, the US Congress incorporated Rockefeller’s GEB, a corporate philanthropy that, although initially focused on the American South, adopted as its agenda, “the promotion of education within the United States without distinction of race, sex, or creed.”10 While it worked toward this goal in a variety of venues, medical education—including the construction of medical schools—became one of its major initiatives in the 1910s.11 The GEB formed as a new system of medical education was spreading across the United States. A half century earlier, American medical education relied nearly entirely on lectures and required almost no specialized architecture. A physician’s education consisted of two identical four-month terms at one of the nation’s “proprietary” schools. The proprietary schools functioned largely as commercial ventures in which professors generated profits from student fees, a system that encouraged lax educational standards. Although some of the better schools included dissection in their programs, proprietary schools generally offered no laboratory or practical clinical experience.12 With the lecture dominating instruction, medical schools typically needed little more than a room for the faculty to meet their students. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the educational system began to change. Young American physicians had started traveling to Germany, the world’s premier location for medical training, in search of opportunities unavailable in the United States. Most who went abroad studied the clinical specialties, but a subgroup explored the new German laboratory approach to the basic medical sciences, such as physiology and bacteriology. A number of the doctors with German laboratory experience returned home and joined the faculties of the American medical schools that would lead the transformation of this nation’s system of medical education and its architecture.13 In 1893, the Johns Hopkins Medical School inaugurated the full expression of the new American medical program and put in place the overall system still used in this country today. Rigorous admission requirements led to two years of instruction in the basic medical sciences with significant laboratory experience followed by two years of hands-on clinical training. A stimulating university environment encouraged

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original research. With the emergence of the reformed university medical school, the new educational ideals swept the country; proprietary schools either adopted the new pedagogy or closed.14

The architecture of early-twentieth-century medical schools Dramatic changes in the architecture of medical schools accompanied the transition in American medical education. Now schools needed more than a lecture hall. The new pedagogy required extensive laboratories for teaching and research, libraries, spaces for embalming and storing cadavers, and housing for research animals, not to mention clinical facilities. In order to keep their doors open in the new era of medical education, medical schools across the country had to rebuild or substantially renovate. These construction efforts underwent careful development. Not only were the new buildings expensive, but those involved in planning the projects believed that the design of a medical school helped to formulate how students learned and practiced medicine. American medical schools in the early twentieth century experimented with three building types. The most common medical school type consisted of a single building that contained all of the facilities for the students’ two years of laboratory training. Often the building sat near to (and sometimes connected by a corridor with) a teaching hospital used for clinical instruction in the subsequent two years. This basic form had a long history in the United States and even predated medical education reform at the stronger schools, although the interiors changed significantly in the reform period with the addition of extensive laboratory space and other elements of modern training. Syracuse University chose this type for its 1937 medical school designed by Dwight James Baum and John Russell Pope. A number of affiliated hospitals stood in the immediate area (Figure 4.1). Between 1893 and 1920, a handful of schools constructed institute designs. The institute type found its most comprehensive realization in the United States in Harvard Medical School’s 1906 quadrangle designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. In keeping with German medical schools, the quadrangle contained separate buildings for the various subjects undertaken during the students’ laboratory training (Figure 4.2). For students’ two years of clinical instruction, they relocated to the hospital, which was only a few steps away once the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital opened behind the quadrangle in 1913. The third option provided a fully integrated space, which I refer to as the “medical school-hospital.” This new type originated with the dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, G. Canby Robinson, who conceived of the idea while planning Vanderbilt’s 1925 medical facility designed by the Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge successor firm of Coolidge and Shattuck. The new building united both the medical school and the hospital under a single roof. The axial design of the facility allowed occupants to travel uninterruptedly from the laboratory to the bedside along a single hallway (Figure 4.3). Within a decade seven additional schools would choose this type.



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Figure 4.1  Dwight James Baum and John Russell Pope, Syracuse University College of Medicine, Syracuse, 1937, with the nearby Syracuse Memorial Hospital at far right. Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho; Syracuse University Photograph Collection, RG 50, Box 27836, Folder “B+G/Medicine, College of/Exterior—3rd building,” University Archives, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, New York.

Figure 4.2  Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 1906. Photo by Elmer Chickering; Record Group M-CL02, Series 00097, Image 97.488, Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Figure 4.3  Coolidge and Shattuck, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Hospital, Nashville, 1925. “Vanderbilt University, Medical School, Nurses Home and Power House, Nashville, TN #028, 1926” files. Courtesy of Archives of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, Boston, Massachusetts. In unifying their facilities in part or in whole, the single medical school building with nearby hospital and the medical school-hospital represent subsets of the same conceptual theme. The dean during the construction of Duke University’s medical school-hospital in the late 1920s discussed the philosophical basis for this type. He explained that the medical school-hospital “enable[d] [students] from their first day to observe medicine as a whole,” and he emphasized the direct contrast between this plan and the “isolated” buildings of the institute design.15 While the institute design presented modern medicine through a series of physically discrete departments and compartmentalized the various components of the human body, the schools that created one of the two integrated plants defined modern medicine as a composite of indivisible subjects and advocated the body’s inseparability. What differentiated the medical school-hospital from the single medical school building adjacent to the hospital was the medical school-hospital’s extension of the idea of unification to both the laboratory and the clinical realms. In the first decades of the twentieth century, medical schools abandoned the institute design. As a result, most American physicians were inculcated in the unified understanding of modern medicine.16 Abraham Flexner and the GEB contributed to the prevalence of the integrated designs and in particular to the development of the medical school-hospital. For medical schools in the early twentieth century, the construction of new buildings represented one component of the burgeoning cost of medical education. Financial support for modern medical training came from a handful of sources. States provided aid to medical schools affiliated with public universities, and individuals often made the local medical college the object of their beneficence. The federal government



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provided no national program to fund medical education and offered only limited financial support for the construction of medical schools. Philanthropic foundations, particularly the GEB, represented another funding option.17 Among these four groups, only the GEB, with its enormous fiscal resources, corporate organizational model, and national agenda for medical education, generated a system of patronage that would shape medical school architecture around the country.

The General Education Board and medical education The GEB chose Abraham Flexner to lead its program in medical education. After primarily working as a secondary school teacher and principal, Flexner became involved in medical education in 1908 when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hired Flexner to examine every American and Canadian medical school. The project resulted in the famous 1910 survey known colloquially as the “Flexner Report.” Part manifesto and part caustic review, the report began by describing and celebrating the new medical pedagogy epitomized by Johns Hopkins Medical School and concluded by listing the assets and deficits of each medical college. Ultimately, it codified the medical reform movement already underway and served as the impetus for significant change in medical education.18 In 1913, Flexner began a long tenure at the GEB. Over the next fifteen years, he served as an assistant secretary, secretary, and division director, in addition to joining the board of trustees. Flexner became synonymous with the GEB’s new program in medical education, a program that the board quickly made a priority. Several factors spurred the GEB’s involvement in medical education. Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s trusted advisor who helped to oversee Rockefeller’s business investments and philanthropic agenda, encouraged this direction for the GEB. Gates’s dedication to medical education stemmed from an economic understanding of illness, whereby he believed that illness financially hurt the worker, the corporation, and the nation, and a deep personal commitment to the new scientific approach to medicine taught in modern medical schools. Medical education also fit well with the philanthropic principle popular at the GEB and elsewhere of targeting the roots of society’s ills, rather than providing charity to improve surface conditions.19 Moreover, medicine and education already represented the Rockefeller philanthropies’ top two priorities when the GEB decided to begin funding medical education, making this new initiative a convergence of established interests.20 Additionally, Paul Starr has argued that, in this era in which society increasingly celebrated science, funding medical education and research supported philanthropists’ efforts to “legitim[ize] their wealth and power by publicly demonstrating their good works.”21 Recent developments in medicine also encouraged the GEB’s support of medical training. By 1910 medical education could present itself as a sound philanthropic investment. Educational reforms had improved American medical education overall, and the research agendas at the top schools had begun to bear fruit. In broader terms, modern medicine had demonstrated that it could yield substantive results. During the

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early decades of the twentieth century, germ theory, specific vaccines, improvements in surgery, and advances in public health received wide acclaim with even greater medical achievements expected in the future.22 In the end, Rockefeller gave the GEB $45 million for aid to US medical schools between 1919 and 1921, and Flexner’s program expanded dramatically.23 Flexner remained in charge of the board’s work in medical education until the GEB terminated his position in 1928 in the midst of a major reorganization of the Rockefeller philanthropies. The Rockefeller Foundation, another Rockefeller corporate philanthropy, which was founded in 1913, took over all areas of medical education support and decided to focus its efforts on research grants rather than institution building.24 As GEB chairman and then president Raymond B. Fosdick would later write, “During this period from 1928 to 1960 no new [medical] schools were added to the [General Education] Board’s list; the additional sums constituted further grants to institutions which had figured in Flexner’s plan.”25 Even after Flexner’s tenure at the GEB, the impact of his agenda continued. Charged with wisely investing Rockefeller’s resources, the officers at the GEB engaged in “scientific philanthropy,” whereby they systematized their practices and carefully screened applicants. In its review of medical colleges, the GEB considered the school’s educational standards, investigated its fiscal strength, examined the quality of its leadership, and explored other potential benefactors beyond the GEB. Within the GEB’s corporate hierarchy, officers, including Flexner, wielded significant power when they reviewed applicants and decided whether to recommend them to the board of trustees for support. Although the GEB’s officers always kept institutional goals in mind, on a daily basis they worked independently. At least through 1923, the GEB’s board of trustees did not decline a single recommendation of the officers.26 During his tenure at the GEB, Flexner spent a decade and a half methodically putting in place the vision for medical education that he began articulating in his 1910 report. From the start, Flexner made Hopkins his conceptual model and strove to recreate elsewhere its extensive laboratory and clinical experience, university affiliation, and emphasis on research.27 Flexner focused specific attention in his report on the education of women and African Americans. Citing the weaknesses of the schools for women and the availability of coeducational training, Flexner saw no need to help the singlesex medical colleges. For the instruction of African Americans, Flexner proposed investing in Meharry Medical College and Howard University’s medical school, while allowing the other five schools for African Americans to close.28 Flexner followed these prescriptions when he formulated how the GEB would distribute its resources.29 At the same time, Flexner worked to create a national system of modern medical schools that would act as standard-bearers for the new pedagogy in each section of the country. For example, he singled out Vanderbilt University for substantial GEB aid in order to bring medical education reform to the South.30 Furthermore, in direct conflict with others at the GEB, Flexner insisted on making GEB money available to state medical schools rather than reserving GEB gifts for private medical colleges, a shift designed to extend his program in the South and West.31 In the end, although the GEB funded only about one-third of the medical colleges that survived the modernization of medical training,



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the board had a powerful influence on schools across the country through its creation of strategically placed pedagogical—and architectural—models of medical education. When Flexner formulated his 1910 report, he met with medical educators, examined the available educational methods, and threw his weight, and that of the foundation sponsoring the report, behind the academic system embodied most fully by Johns Hopkins. Later, as a foundation officer, he maintained a similar relationship with medical educators. Flexner depended on educators for the ideas that fueled the GEB’s programs. In choosing which initiatives to support, Flexner impacted the direction of medical education. Simultaneously, however, medical educators courted Flexner as their access point to the GEB’s corporate hierarchy and the money it controlled. One of the most frequently cited examples of the way that Flexner shaped medical education was his dedication to the implementation of full-time clinical faculty whereby clinicians focused on teaching and research rather than on maintaining a private practice. The concept originated with medical educators, but once Flexner embraced the idea, the GEB actively encouraged it by funding this change at several prominent schools. Moreover, through the mid-1920s, the board would only aid those schools willing to adopt a particular definition of full-time clinical status.32 Much of the scholarship on Flexner and the GEB has investigated the promotion of full-time clinical faculty, but Flexner and the board’s influence on medical education also extended to architecture.

The impact of the General Education Board on the architecture of American medical schools Flexner recognized the relationship between architecture and medical education as early as the 1910 Flexner Report. In his report, Flexner established six categories for assessing each school. Laboratory and clinical facilities represented two of these categories. Although typically quite brief, Flexner’s remarks illustrated his architectural preferences. For example, the St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons, like many others, earned Flexner’s scorn. Flexner reported: “The school occupies a badly kept building, the inner walls covered with huge advertisements. . . . Anatomy was ‘over’— only empty tables were found in the dissecting-room, the sole access to which is by way of a fire-escape.”33 Conversely, the University of Michigan earned praise: “Excellently equipped laboratories are provided for all the fundamental branches. .  .  . There is a large library, a good museum, and other necessary teaching aids.”34 When pieced together, Flexner’s comments indicate that he celebrated clean, well-organized plants with ample laboratory space and affiliated hospitals that housed plenty of patients. Moreover, when discussing the broad principles of reformed medical education, Flexner advocated placing the laboratory and hospital in close physical proximity to one another. Locating the two components of medical education—laboratories and hospitals—in the same city was not enough; they should share a campus.35 From the beginning, architecture formed a central part of Flexner’s archetype for the modern American medical school.36

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Flexner’s position at the GEB provided him with the opportunity to shape the architecture of the nation’s medical schools. Because the GEB had no formal architectural requirements for recipients of its resources, Flexner’s architectural influence took place outside of the official resolutions of the GEB. He examined school’s proposals, encouraged particular requests for financial support, and remained involved in projects even after they received GEB funds.37 A handful of historical circumstances, however, complicates an investigation of Flexner’s architectural ideas. First, the GEB typically did not keep rejected applications for aid. As a result, the archives contains only a partial record of the communication that took place between the medical schools and the corporate philanthropy. Additionally, Flexner committed very few of his ideas about architecture to writing, and his correspondence includes only traces of his thoughts on this subject.38 Fortunately, one significant record remains: the fifteen medical school buildings constructed with GEB support.39 The buildings that the GEB helped fund demonstrate that Flexner ultimately favored not the institute design, but rather the two unified building types: the singlebuilding medical school with nearby hospital and the medical school-hospital. At first Flexner had lauded the institute design, praising Harvard Medical School’s laboratory facilities in his 1910 report (Figure 4.2).40 Flexner also used GEB funds to support the reorganization of the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis in the mid1910s. Although the GEB contributed to the endowment for the new school rather than the construction effort specifically, Flexner’s channeling of GEB aid to the overall project implies his acceptance of the institute design built by the medical college.41 Moreover, Flexner shepherded significant aid to Johns Hopkins Medical School in the 1920s that expanded its existing institute design. Flexner and the GEB moved away from supporting the institute type, however. Between 1920 and 1935, the GEB contributed to ten fundraising campaigns for complete, new medical schools. All of these schools constructed either single-building medical schools with nearby hospital or fully integrated medical school-hospitals. More specifically, the GEB funded in large part the prototypical medical school-hospital at Vanderbilt University and helped to ensure its rapid proliferation (Figure 4.3). Seven of the eight medical school-hospitals constructed in the United States before 1935 received GEB funding during their campaigns for new quarters, and the medical school-hospital became a central legacy of the GEB’s medical education program.42 Far from independent in their efforts, Flexner and the GEB represented one of several forces that contributed to the dominance of the unified plans and particularly the medical school-hospital in the 1920s. Medical journals and other publications, including Methods and Problems of Medical Education (discussed shortly), disseminated information about the new facilities at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere, and architectural firms helped to move ideas between schools. Flexner recognized the impact of this network on architectural design, and he personally facilitated the transfer of people and ideas from one school to another. Flexner’s involvement in the development of the new medical school at Vanderbilt University illustrates the ways in which he would encourage the participation of



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specific people and shape the architectural evolution of a project. In November 1919, a few days before the announcement of the first GEB gift to the medical school, Vanderbilt chancellor James H. Kirkland contacted Flexner about an architectural firm for the new facility, for which only a sketch of a plot plan had been submitted to the GEB in advance of the grant. Kirkland asked Flexner if he and GEB president Wallace Buttrick “approve” the choice of Coolidge and Shattuck.43 Flexner responded positively on behalf of himself and Buttrick, calling architect Charles Coolidge “probably the best person in the country.” Flexner went on to propose that Coolidge, Kirkland, and hospital consultant Winford Smith have a conference in the GEB offices in New York later in the month.44 Vanderbilt retained the architectural firm. Flexner also offered advice on the buildings themselves. A year later, Kirkland described how Flexner’s input had resulted in Coolidge using less expensive materials for the facility in order to reduce costs. Kirkland went on to underscore the impact of Flexner’s opinions, writing: “As you are well aware we have regarded your suggestions as having practically the force of orders. We have so far in every way worked under the consciousness of full agreement with your office.”45 Flexner utilized the power of his GEB position at more schools than Vanderbilt. He quickly became a proponent of the medical school-hospital developed at Vanderbilt and helped move the new design and the people who could implement it to other schools. At the same time that the Vanderbilt plans were taking shape, the GEB extended $5 million to the University of Rochester for the creation of a new medical school. Intimately involved in both projects, Flexner likely facilitated the communication between the architects for the University of Rochester medical school, Gordon and Kaelber, and the architects of the Vanderbilt building. In the end, Gordon and Kaelber created a medical school-hospital modeled on Vanderbilt’s design.46 Shortly after the completion of the University of Rochester medical facility, Flexner asked that university’s president for assistance in determining whether Gordon and Kaelber would be interested in travelling confidentially to Nashville for early planning of the new Meharry Medical College.47 Gordon and Kaelber subsequently became the architects for the new Meharry, for which they designed another medical school-hospital with a footprint similar to that of Vanderbilt and Rochester. The medical school-hospital, as well as the single laboratory building near to the hospital, likely appealed to Flexner and the GEB for at least two reasons. First, they were economical. They reduced the duplications of space found in campuses with multiple laboratory buildings. For corporate philanthropies, financial support constituted an investment, and Flexner wanted to ensure that the GEB got the most out of the investments he called upon the board to make.48 Second, Flexner approved of these designs because he favored the physical, pedagogical, and intellectual coordination of medical school departments. As early as his 1910 report, Flexner lauded schools with departments “in intimate communication with each other.”49 When comparing the single medical school building with adjacent hospital and the medical school-hospital, reduction of costs and coordination of departments only increased when applied to the latter with its complete integration of both laboratory and clinical facilities.50 Flexner’s program at the GEB centered on creating model medical schools. Flexner

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encouraged the building types that best advanced his understanding of reformed medical education. For medical schools, GEB aid proved particularly critical for the construction of the medical school-hospital. With the institute design, schools could add structures over time when funds became available, as Johns Hopkins University did when developing its medical campus. With the single-building medical school separate from the hospital, medical colleges could also stagger construction, as happened at the University of Nebraska when it opened a new medical school in 1913 and the nearby hospital in 1917. The medical school-hospital, however, required the completion of all of the laboratory and clinical facilities at once. While a school, such as Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, could build a very modest medical school-hospital, medical school-hospitals inevitably cost more to erect than any one of their constituent parts. The GEB’s particular form of patronage could help guarantee the substantial sums required at one time to construct a medical school-hospital, for the GEB often augmented its gifts by calling on schools to obtain significant matching funds in order to secure GEB support. In addition, with Flexner in the lead, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation cooperated with the GEB on large medical school projects, such as the medical school-hospitals erected at Vanderbilt University in 1925 and at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in 1928.51 Since his earliest involvement in medical education, Flexner understood a relationship between pedagogy and architecture. Once at the GEB, he shaped the development of American medical school design by encouraging the unified plans and particularly the new medical school-hospital. Another Rockefeller-funded project also promoted the architectural ideas embraced by Flexner.

Methods and Problems of Medical Education The Rockefeller Foundation published a journal, Methods and Problems of Medical Education, at irregular intervals between 1924 and 1932. The journal frequently investigated the architecture of medical schools and developed out of the recognition that recent architectural plans and descriptions of new pedagogical methods were not widely available. The series put forth collections of articles on subjects drawn from around the world, and the Rockefeller Foundation hoped that the resource would prove useful to those involved in constructing new buildings and teaching. To this end, broad dissemination was the goal. The Rockefeller Foundation published the articles without copyright restrictions, and reprints required no authorization.52 The Rockefeller Foundation sent the journal free of charge to all medical schools, both national and international, as well as to other interested parties.53 In 1925, fulfillment of the medical school component of this distribution list meant that the foundation provided the publication to 460 institutions.54 Two years later the Rockefeller Foundation reported “an unexpectedly large demand for [Methods and Problems of Medical Education] on the part of libraries, architects, teachers, and editors of medical publications.”55 More specifically, while at work designing Syracuse University’s 1937 medical school



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(Figure 4.1), the offices of architects Dwight James Baum and John Russell Pope received three volumes related to the new facilities at Vanderbilt University, University of Chicago, and University of Rochester.56 The Rockefeller Foundation solicited articles for Methods and Problems of Medical Education with a preference for new buildings, although the publication did occasionally include “ideal” historical structures.57 An investigation of the articles related to American schools provides insight into the journal’s content. Faculty members at the medical colleges wrote the articles, which followed a fairly consistent format, suggesting either that the authors received clear guidelines from the Rockefeller Foundation or that the foundation heavily edited submissions. Articles usually focused on a particular preclinical laboratory department, such as anatomy, or on a specific clinical department, such as pediatrics. By the time of the journal’s termination, it had distributed 448 articles with over 3,000 illustrations.58 With many of these illustrations containing pictures of buildings and reproductions of architectural plans, Methods and Problems of Medical Education offers the only comprehensive compilation of images and plans of early-twentieth-century American medical schools. Through this publication, the Rockefeller corporate philanthropies further shaped the discussion of the architecture of medical schools. Methods and Problems of Medical Education supported Flexner’s architectural vision for American medical colleges. Of the twenty-one series, four dedicated the entire publication to one medical school.59 Each of these four schools, University of Rochester, Vanderbilt University, University of Chicago, and Albany Medical College, received some level of GEB support, and all of them displayed one of the unified plans encouraged by Flexner. Two detailed the new medical school-hospital. Ultimately, the series highlighted the schools that the GEB aided financially and promoted the architectural innovations in which the GEB had the greatest interest.60 Far from the neutral source the Rockefeller Foundation claimed it to be, the journal functioned as an extension of the GEB program for medical education.61 Other publications examined the medical schools funded by the GEB as well. While the GEB at times received criticism from those who questioned the intentions of the Rockefeller foundations and asserted that the GEB wielded too much control over both individual medical colleges and the general direction of medical education,62 the building projects earned widespread approval. Complimentary articles appeared in journals directed toward members of the medical field. For example, the medical school dean, the architects, and the hospital consultant for the Vanderbilt project wrote articles endorsing the medical school-hospital in medical and hospital journals.63 Newspapers also reported on the schools, and they typically provided celebratory descriptions of the new structures. For instance, the New York Times praised the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and called the facility the “largest and most modern in the world” and a “great scientific project.” The article also mentioned the financial support that made the construction effort possible, including that of the GEB.64 The GEB’s architectural patronage provided largely positive associations with the board and, when the connection was recognized, with Rockefeller. During his tenure at the GEB, Abraham Flexner oversaw the board’s contributions to fifteen medical school building campaigns. Far from a passive patron, the GEB

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encouraged the proliferation of the unified medical school types, particularly the medical school-hospital, and participated in the movement away from the institute design in the early twentieth century. This architectural, pedagogical, and conceptual shift shaped how students learned and how they practiced medicine. By revealing the GEB’s role in the development of American medical school design, this chapter offers a new way to understand the GEB’s influence on medical education. At the same time, it demonstrates the architectural impact made possible by the patronage of corporate philanthropies.

Notes

I am grateful to Melissa Renn, Monica E. Jovanovich, and Douglas Klahr for their thoughtful comments on this chapter; the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback; and Keith N. Morgan for reading an early draft. Research support came from a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art; a Francis A. Countway Library Fellowship in the History of Medicine; a Grant-in-Aid from the Rockefeller Archive Center; and a Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund Scholarship from The Pittsburgh Foundation.

1 Examples include Steven C. Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy: Abraham Flexner and Medical Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 83–107; Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 193–94, 207–13; Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 121–23; E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 156–76. 2 Medical school fundraising campaigns typically raised money simultaneously for construction, equipment, and endowment of the new building and its educational programs. I do not differentiate gifts based on whether they were earmarked for a particular use and what that use may have been. 3 Olivier Zunz, “For the Improvement of Mankind,” chap. 1 in Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See p. 22 for quotation. 4 This anonymous title in an era when philanthropic foundations often contained the name of their creator grew out of the expectation that others besides Rockefeller would fund the GEB. In the end, however, Rockefeller remained the sole benefactor. See Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 9. Fosdick also mentions the tendency to confuse the GEB with other organizations. See Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 1. 5 While the phrase “corporate philanthropy” is not always applied to early-twentiethcentury foundations that based their organization on a corporate concept, this use is not without precedent. See, for example, Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 34, and Gerald Jonas, The Circuit Riders: Rockefeller Money and the Rise of Modern Science (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 78. Frederick T. Gates also used the phrase in this way at least as early as 1905. See Frederick Taylor Gates, Chapters in My Life (New York: Free Press, 1977), 208, also quoted in Jonas, The Circuit Riders, 76.



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6 In contrast, some general guidance regarding design was provided during Andrew Carnegie’s library construction campaign of 1886–1919. In 1904, Carnegie’s personal secretary began to review the designs submitted by communities that were applying for a library construction grant, and in 1908 he formalized his general guidelines into a brochure. The brochure did not dictate architectural style, but it did advocate for an efficient floor plan and a minimum of excessive ornamentation. When the Carnegie Corporation was created in 1911 to formalize Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy, it continued to distribute the brochure, although it shortly thereafter shifted its focus to aspects of education other than library construction. For more on Carnegie libraries, see Douglas Klahr’s chapter in this volume. See also Van Slyck, “Giving: The Reform of American Library Philanthropy,” chap. 1 in Free to All, especially 33–40. 7 This shift has been widely studied, including Zunz, “For the Improvement of Mankind”; Robert H. Bremner, “Benevolent Trusts and Distrusts,” chap. 7 in American Philanthropy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 236–70, doi:10.1007/BF01096567; and Merle Curti and Roderick Nash, “Foundation Millions,” chap. 10 in Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965). 8 Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men, 32–43, 48–50. 9 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 468. 10 Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 8–9. For quotation, see p. 8. 11 Rockefeller’s funding of art and architecture extended beyond the GEB’s use of Rockefeller money for the construction of medical schools. Rockefeller also patronized the arts through the commissions of his company, Standard Oil. Scholarship on the patronage of Standard Oil includes Ross Barrett, “Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the United States,” chap. 3 in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Oil: Documentary Paintings from the Collection of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) at the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996); and Maren Stange, “‘A Good, Honest Photograph’: Steichen, Stryker, and the Standard Oil of New Jersey Project,” Aperture, no. 112 (Fall 1988): 2–13, 80, jstor.org/stable/24472170. 12 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 11–15. 13 For a discussion of this educational shift, see ibid., 30–33. 14 Ibid., 57–58, 72–73. 15 Wilburt C. Davison, The Duke University Medical Center (1892–1960): Reminiscences of W. C. Davison, Dean of the Duke University Medical School, 1927–1960 ([Durham?], [1966?]), 17. 16 For a more thorough investigation of the architectural development of the three medical school types and their pedagogical and conceptual significance, see Katherine L. Carroll, “Creating the Modern Physician: The Architecture of American Medical Schools in the Era of Medical Education Reform,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 1 (March 2016): 48–73.

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17 For discussions of the growing cost of medical education and of state, individual, and foundation support, see Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 140–46 and 191–99. 18 Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1910; repr., n.p.: Wm. F. Fell, 1972), archi​ve.ca​rnegi​efoun​datio​n.org​/pdfs​/elib​rary/​Carne​gie_F​lexne​r_Rep​ort. p​df. For an expanded analysis of the Flexner Report, see Ludmerer, “The Flexner Report,” chap. 9 in Learning to Heal. 19 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 200–02. 20 Chernow, Titan, 491. 21 Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 122. 22 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 151, 201–03. 23 All told, the philanthropy contributed just over $94 million to the nation’s medical schools by the time it dissolved in 1960. Often GEB aid required the recipient to obtain a greater amount of money from other sources. These conditional gifts yielded a total influx of approximately $600 million, including the funds from the GEB, to medical education. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 161, 172–73. 24 Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy, 162, 168. 25 Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 172. 26 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 193–94, 197. For additional discussion of scientific philanthropy, see John R. Thelin and Richard W. Trollinger, Philanthropy and American Higher Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 68–69. 27 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 172–73, 178. 28 Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 178–81. 29 For a list of the medical schools supported by the GEB, see Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 328. 30 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 193–94. 31 Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy, 99–106. 32 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 172–73, 205, 210–13; Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy, 62, 69–82, 86, 153. 33 Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 256. 34 Ibid., 243. 35 Ibid., 119. 36 Wheatley and Ludmerer recognize an architectural component to Flexner’s ideal medical school. See Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy, 86, and Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 177. 37 Medical schools would also seek and then implement Flexner’s advice—architectural and otherwise—in the hope that making changes he supported would result in GEB aid in the future. For more, see Katherine L. Carroll, “Modernizing the American Medical School, 1893–1940: Architecture, Pedagogy, Professionalization, and Philanthropy” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2012), 205. 38 Flexner and others at the GEB relied heavily on oral, confidential communication in order to avoid leaving a written record that could implicate them in influencing universities’ internal affairs. For example, Flexner wrote to Vanderbilt’s chancellor about possible GEB and Carnegie aid for the university’s medical school and concluded: “Should you be passing through New York as you go to Canada, come in and we will talk the thing over somewhat more freely than we can write about it.” See Abraham Flexner to James H. Kirkland, June 20, 1919, General Education Board Archives, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 152, Folder 1406, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter RAC). See also Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men, 173–74.



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39 These gifts supported construction, equipment, and/or endowment and operation of new facilities at Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, Meharry Medical College, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University. 40 Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 240. John D. Rockefeller Sr. personally gave $1 million to Harvard Medical School’s new institute design in February 1902, but this benefaction took place before the GEB’s incorporation and does not represent part of the GEB’s program in medical education. 41 For an overview of the reorganization, see Candace O’Connor, Beginning a Great Work: Washington University in St. Louis, 1853–2003 ([St. Louis?]: Washington University in St. Louis, 2003), 106–19. 42 See Appendix C in Carroll, “Modernizing the American Medical School,” 282–85, for an architectural description of each of the medical schools to which the GEB contributed. The eight institutions that erected medical school-hospitals before 1935 are Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, University of Colorado, University of Rochester, Meharry Medical College, Cornell University, Duke University, and Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. All but the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania received support from the GEB at the time that they constructed their new plants. 43 For the letter, see James H. Kirkland to Abraham Flexner, November 4, 1919. See also unsigned and undated sketch attached to James H. Kirkland to Wallace Buttrick, October 13, 1919; for the announcement of the GEB gift, see “Memorandum,” November 7, 1919. All three documents located in General Education Board Archives, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 152, Folder 1406, RAC. 44 Abraham Flexner to James H. Kirkland, November 7, 1919, General Education Board Archives, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 152, Folder 1406, RAC. 45 James H. Kirkland to Abraham Flexner, November 4, 1920, General Education Board Archives, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 152, Folder 1407, RAC. 46 For discussion of the relationship between the two plants, see G. Canby Robinson, “Vanderbilt University School of Medicine: History and General Description,” Methods and Problems of Medical Education, 13th ser. (1929): 8. 47 Rush Rhees to Abraham Flexner, November 6, 1926, General Education Board Archives, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 133, Folder 1231, RAC. 48 Bremner describes Flexner’s understanding of GEB gifts as “hardheaded investments.” See Bremner, American Philanthropy, 130. 49 Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, 71. 50 Timothy Jacobson examines the appeal of coordination in Vanderbilt’s medical school-hospital to Flexner. See Timothy C. Jacobson, Making Medical Doctors: Science and Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 110–11. 51 For the coordination of GEB, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation gifts, see Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy, 84–85, 112–13, and Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), 96, 105. The GEB contributed $5.5 million and the Carnegie Corporation $1.5 million toward Vanderbilt’s medical school-hospital, and the GEB, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation each gave $1 million

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toward Columbia’s medical school constructed as part of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. These examples indicate that the GEB did not always support both the medical school and the hospital. While at Vanderbilt GEB funds went to one campaign that benefitted both the medical school as well as the university-owned hospital, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center the GEB contributed to the medical school but not to the administratively and financially separate hospital. 52 Richard M. Pearce, “Prefatory Note,” Methods and Problems of Medical Education, 1st ser. (1924): 3. 53 George E. Vincent, “President’s Review,” in The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report, 1926 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, [1927?]), 52, https​://as​sets.​rocke​ felle​rfoun​datio​n.org​/app/​uploa​ds/20​15053​01221​04/An​nual-​Repor​t-192​6.pdf​. 54 George E. Vincent, “President’s Review,” in The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report, 1925 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, [1926?]), 61, https​://as​sets.​rocke​ felle​rfoun​datio​n.org​/app/​uploa​ds/20​15053​01221​02/An​nual-​Repor​t-192​5.pdf​. 55 Rockefeller Foundation Minutes, November 4, 1927, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 3.1, Series 906, Box 1, Folder 10, RAC. Tom Rosenbaum at the RAC provided valuable assistance in locating documents related to Methods and Problems of Medical Education. 56 Offices of Dwight James Baum and John Russell Pope to Robert A. Lambert, November 14, 1935, RG 44, Box 15410, Folder “Medical College,” University Archives, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, New York. 57 Rockefeller Foundation Inter-Office Correspondence, September 11, 1931, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 3.1, Series 906, Box 1, Folder 10, RAC, and Rockefeller Foundation Minutes, November 4, 1927. See latter for quotation. 58 For these numbers, see [Alan Gregg?], “The Medical Sciences,” in The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report, 1932 (New York: [Rockefeller Foundation?], [1933?]), 210, https​://as​sets.​rocke​felle​rfoun​datio​n.org​/app/​uploa​ds/20​15053​01221​17/An​nual-​ Repor​t-193​2.pdf​. 59 The journal was divided into series rather than volumes or numbers. See Methods and Problems of Medical Education, series seven (1927) on Rochester; series thirteen (1929) on Vanderbilt; series fifteen (1929) on Albany; and series nineteen (1931) on Chicago. 60 Personal connections likely played a role as well. Albany Medical College received a fraction of the GEB aid extended to Rochester, Vanderbilt, and Chicago, but Richard M. Pearce, who directed the division of the Rockfeller Foundation that oversaw the journal, had previously worked at Albany Medical College. This connection may have resulted in the extended coverage given to Albany by the journal. Jeffrey D. Hubbard pointed out to me the relationship between Pearce and Albany Medical College and first proposed the potential impact of this relationship on the journal coverage. 61 For the foundation’s affirmation of neutrality, see George E. Vincent, “President’s Review,” in The Rockefeller Foundation: Annual Report, 1924 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, [1925?]), 15–16, https​://as​sets.​rocke​felle​rfoun​datio​n.org​/app/​uploa​ds/20​ 15053​01221​00/An​nual-​Repor​t-192​4.pdf​. 62 Ludmerer, Learning to Heal, 195–97, and Curti and Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education, 221–22.



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63 G. Canby Robinson, “The Relation of Medical Education to the Medical Plant,” Journal of the American Medical Association 81, no. 4 (July 28, 1923): 321–23; Coolidge and Shattuck, Winford H. Smith, and G. Canby Robinson, “The New Plant of the Vanderbilt University Medical School and Hospital,” Modern Hospital 20, no. 2 (February 1923): 109–18; Henry R. Shepley, “Considerations in Planning a Teaching Hospital,” Modern Hospital Year Book, 6th ed. (1926): 91–96. 64 “3,000 at Dedication of Medical Centre,” New York Times, October 13, 1928.

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The Corporate Person as Art Collector: Andrew Mellon’s Capital and the Origins of the National Gallery of Art Seth Feman

Andrew Mellon, the National Gallery’s founding benefactor, kept his eyes on the economy. A Gilded Age banker and financier, he was deeply invested in alloy production, applied sciences, capital stocks, debt securities, derivative contracts, and natural resources. In 1921, when he became secretary of the US Treasury, a few days shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, he focused his attention more closely on tax and tariff, making adjustments that would amplify and extend the “age of surplus,” the apogee of corporate capitalism, which he had been cultivating most of his life.1 Yet upon his appointment, Mellon claimed this life had come to an end. He said he had withdrawn from business “as if I had died.”2 In fact, when Mellon arrived in Washington, he continued business as usual, even having a phone installed in his office that linked directly to his brother’s line at the Mellon National Bank in Pittsburgh. Well-connected, he remained instrumental to Pennsylvania machine politics and implemented tax cuts favorable to his business interests.3 All the while, his international networks enabled him to acquire remarkable works of art, forming the collection that would establish the National Gallery of Art in 1937, just a few months before he actually expired. Although Mellon was connected, in a certain sense he was already long gone. For as numerous commentators observed in the early twentieth century, the rise of corporate capitalism had brought about the death of the possessive individual whose personhood relied on property ownership. The influential media critic and political pundit Walter Lippmann argued that this occurred because corporate capitalism was “sucking the life out of private property,” transforming it into an intangible investment that could no longer be touched, much less seen.4 Since capital had become “impersonal, ‘liquid,’ ‘mobile,’” wrote Lippmann, an investor “may never see his property. He may not know where his property is situated. He is not consulted as to its management. . . . Contact with his property is limited to reading in the newspapers what it is worth each day.”5 With only an “abstract relation to the thing . . . owned,” the modern property owner “as a person is of no account whatever.”6 Yet, as corporate capitalism was “sucking the life out of private property,” signaling the death of the

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possessive individual, it was also breathing life into an entirely new being, a fictionmade human, the corporate body.7 A corporation possessed a body? On this identity, new laws now left no doubt.8 Indeed, by the first years of the twentieth century, one could speak of a corporate person endowed not only with certain rights but also with visions, desires, and even dreams. As Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell asserted in 1913, “The last century has certainly been marked by an apparent increase in the power of corporate, as compared with personal, motives . . . cooperative interests have in some measure replaced personal ones.” Generally optimistic about corporate enterprise, Lowell was also leery: “While the change is for the better, because it means greater devotion to something higher than purely personal objects, that very fact, whether the body be a bank, a railroad company or a trade union, may cover with a gilding of altruism what is after all only cooperative selfishness.”9 Traditionally art historians have not considered this haunting life form, perhaps because a corporate body is a subject that can hardly be seen.10 Instead, we typically approach questions of taste and institution building by focusing on flesh-and-blood collectors, “proud possessors” all.11 For example, a number of accounts have used this photograph of Mellon from around 1930 to illustrate the National Gallery’s origins (Figure 5.1). Earlier, they explain, Mellon had a “rather naive” taste for “overvalued Barbizon painters”12—“horrid early mistakes” he would not repeat once the gallery idea began turning over in his mind.13 Thus, by the time of the picture, Mellon desired only the Old Master paintings that seemed to befit a great national collection, like the Hobbema landscape hanging above the mantel. As he attained this “high standard of quality,” Mellon would set the bar for the National Gallery, too; in 1937, his counsel included this measure of taste in the institution’s founding mandate: “No work of art shall be included in the permanent collection . . . unless it be of similar high standard of quality to those in the collection acquired from the [founding] donor.”14 In fact, this standard was not exactly Mellon’s to claim. Although the photograph depicts Mellon proudly standing before the Hobbema landscape he acquired in 1924, the painting soon would be deeded to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, a corporate body that would come to control Mellon’s art collection and drive its growth before establishing the National Gallery (which would not open until 1941, after Mellon’s death). Mellon’s corporate body, rather than the individual collector, would call the shots, and yet it remains difficult to see the institution apart from the man posing for this photograph. As the Gallery’s official history asserts, “For as surely as Zeus birthed Athena from his brow . . . . Mellon created the National Gallery of Art. He made it from scratch . . . observe the creator to see what was created.”15 And if instead we observe Mellon’s corporate persona? Then, appropriately, the art collection will no longer be seen exclusively as the outgrowth of Mellon’s personal tastes, since the individual’s relationship to property, even Mellon as an individual, hardly seemed to matter in the “age of surplus.” Rather, if we focus on Mellon’s corporate body and its privileged form of perception—what I call Mellon’s corporate vision— then connections begin to appear between the death of the “proud possessor,” the dematerialization of its financial assets, and the rise of corporate art collections. Or at



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Figure 5.1  Andrew W. Mellon in his apartment at 1785 Massachusetts Avenue NW, with A View on a High Road by Meindert Hobbema hanging above the fireplace mantel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gallery Archives. least we can begin to engage previously unasked questions about corporate patronage and tastes: How did a corporate patron envision art? Why did a corporation desire an art collection? What can we learn about a public gallery founded on corporate tastes?

Corporate vision Answers begin to take shape by considering the way Mellon’s corporate body saw the economy. In short, Mellon’s corporate body saw the economy as a landscape laid out before it, not unlike the one painted by Hobbema. Caricatures like Joseph Keppler Jr.’s illustration for Puck (Color Plate 6) of Mellon’s contemporary J. P. Morgan drawing the world’s riches toward him while sprawled across the globe had long mocked the notion that corporate elites were leviathan-like creatures that see the global economy as their dominion, but this was no longer a metaphor. For Mellon treated the economy as if it were natural, and as nature he believed it was governed by “natural laws,” which

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the “science” of economics could reveal. Thus Mellon viewed the economy’s surges and slumps as an inevitable process of “growth” and “decay,” and he saw an economic panic as merely “natural selection” at work.16 As Mellon reportedly said of the Depression, “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. . . . People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”17 As the Depression worsened, Mellon’s dispassionate view would seem hopelessly aloof. For example, in 1935, he told reporters, “America is going through a bad quarter of an hour, but present conditions, however distressing, especially in terms of human suffering, reflect only a passing phase in our history.”18 Such a detached view would eventually lead to Mellon’s impeachment hearings and the growing belief that his policies had caused the Depression, all of which precipitated his inglorious resignation from the Treasury in 1932. Yet when Mellon first arrived in Washington, his naturalizing vision was considered an asset. Thus in 1922, when The New York Times assessed Mellon’s earliest policies, it favorably characterized him as “a doctor content to let nature do its work.”19 The Chicago Daily Tribune went further, publishing a cartoon that pictured Mellon as a farmer reaping nature’s bounty—the materialization of the thriving economy. In the picture, a sturdy, broad-chested Mellon effortlessly carries a basket packed with swollen fruit—moneybags full of “Treasury surplus”—while Uncle Sam leans over a fence toward a barren orchard and explains to “Europe” that the secret to America’s economic success is Mellon himself, as if his own natural qualities had drawn out nature’s abundance. The drawing even suggested that Mellon’s special vision was one of these qualities. The artist drew Mellon’s heavily lidded eyes as if focusing softly on a distant horizon, a mode of perception distinct from “Europe’s” apparent blindness, as suggested by its vacant, pupil-less eyes. Uncle Sam’s words emphasize the differences in their perspectives: “You look around till you find somebody like Andy Mellon—see?” The question mark above “Europe’s” head indicates he does not.20 In 1924, Mellon detailed this corporate vision in his book Taxation: The People’s Business. The book outlined Mellon’s proposed tax policies and claimed they were nonpartisan because “scientific,” and thus capable of “restoring all securities to natural conditions.”21 In fact deeply partisan, Mellon’s policies not only reduced tax rates for the richest Americans and accelerated the turn from industrial to finance capitalism, but they also worked to popularize the ongoing belief, as mythical then as it is now, that capitalism was itself natural and rational.22 The book’s reviewers supported this conviction by explaining the “scientific method” Mellon used to make the economy visible. For example, David Finley, Mellon’s legal aide at the Treasury, argued that the Treasury’s “scientific taxation” revealed what most Americans could not see themselves. He wrote, “We have a blind faith in this country. . . . [We] shut our eyes to the fact[s] . . . To the average man [the old tax code] seems fair enough,” but Mellon’s totalizing vision pointed up what had gone largely undetected: “We debate and dispute about the minutiae of rates, when the question is the honesty or integrity—and hence the real life—of the . . . tax.”23 Another reviewer explained that Mellon could “see clearly” because he had assembled all the facts—“technical changes,” “the detail of rates,” “fundamentals,” “underlying principles,” “general policies,” “valuable statistics,” and



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“essential data”—into a totalizing vision of the economic landscape, which he now “lay before Congress and the people” like a map.24 The reviewer was especially impressed by this map’s aesthetic quality. Because Mellon could “see with sincerity and without affectation,” the image he created is “pure simplicity.”25 Mellon’s book and its friendly reviews took pains to preserve the notion that Mellon, the individual, was at the helm. Yet they were nonetheless participating in, and working to advance, the very process of incorporation that had helped shape Mellon’s corporate body and establish its visionary powers. Walter Lippmann himself had recently put his faith in Mellon’s corporate mode of vision since he believed it could produce a total picture that the public could not see on its own.26 As Lippmann observed, the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Moreover, although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.27

Certain bureaucratic entities could provide such maps, Lippmann argued, because they possessed a “machinery of knowledge” that enabled them to produce a “true picture of all the outer world,” one which those acting within the world simply could not grasp.28 Thus Lippmann called for “expert organizations,” much like Mellon’s Treasury, that had the special ability to make “unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.”29 Lippmann’s notion of truth as a visible “map” or “picture” of the world was precisely what Mellon’s corporate body desired. For possessing this knowledge, rather than possessing wealth alone, would be its source of power, not least of all because this marked a distinction between those capable of acquiring such knowledge and those who were not—a new mode of class distinction for the “age of surplus,” when property ownership itself no longer seemed to secure social distinction, or even denote personhood. Thus, even as Mellon’s corporations made him extraordinarily rich, he was never very interested in hoarding money itself. For him, it was less a matter to accumulate than to quantify surplus, losses, and returns—a means of mapping out, and thereby seizing hold of, the economy’s “natural” forces. He applied this corporate vision most clearly at the Treasury. For example, to call in lingering World War I debts—a staggering $22-billion owed—Mellon demanded countries pay the Treasury in what Lippmann called “phantom dollars”—for example, 1.5 million British labor hours every day until the end of the century, paid out not in currency but in goods, which were all but barred from importation due to Mellon’s protectionist tariffs.30 In fact, payments only trickled into the Treasury, but then stockpiling cash was never the primary objective. Rather, Mellon sought to move these “phantom dollars” through a series of transactions, each one always tied to another, each diverting one circuit of capital to feed new ones. By managing these transactions, rather than collecting payments per se, Mellon would plot the invisible economy as a perceptible and actionable terrain, which allowed him to secure economic power in

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the United States during most of his tenure at the Treasury. Or at least this vision would help Mellon’s corporate form attain its greatest desire: to observe the global economy objectively and seemingly in toto, which allowed it to maintain a sense of power, even when the economy proved far too wild for any one person, corporation, or nation to fully control.31

Plotting the capital Mellon’s corporate vision became concrete in Washington, for it was there that the Treasury began laying plans for Federal Triangle—a massive urban renewal project that in many ways culminated with the construction of the National Gallery.32 Not merely an effort to beautify the city, the building project would also help rationalize government operations while incorporating state and business imperatives, itself a necessary precondition for establishing a national art institution.33 Mellon’s involvement in this process began in 1926, when Congress appropriated funds for new federal offices and placed responsibility with Mellon’s Treasury. Frustrated by the government’s wasteful and disorganized use of rented offices, Mellon set out to concentrate the scattered bureaucracy in massive new buildings near the National Mall, one strategy for realizing the economic imperatives he outlined in his book Taxation.34 Mellon’s push to streamline government work went hand in hand with the state’s efforts to assert its global leadership by aestheticizing the capital city. As The Washington Post editorialized that year, “the people of the whole country desire that their Capital shall rank in architectural beauty with the best in the world.” The editors advocated “bringing that dream to reality.”35 In fact, dreams of a monumental capital city had been growing since at least 1901, when the Senate Park Commission created the McMillan Plan. This plan offered something strikingly new—a modern “system” that would plow under the city that had cropped up piecemeal since Pierre Charles L’Enfant first designed Washington in 1791.36 Since the plan’s architectural forms were drawn from classical models, it may now be difficult to see it as modern. Critics at the time, however, believed the plan’s regularity and rationality would sap the city of its age-old, natural beauty. As art historian Kirk Savage has observed, critics opposed the plan not only because it required tree removal, housing demolition, massive landfilling, and miles of new roads but also because it demanded a substantial, and at that date insurmountable, cognitive shift. It threatened to displace inhabitants’ direct experience of the city’s “public grounds” by envisioning Washington as a totalizing abstraction, what one critic later referred to as an uninhabitable “formal relation,” “a flow of space.”37 Supporters found much to celebrate in the plan nonetheless. As one claimed, “[The critics] have their noses so close to the ground that their horizon is a circle not more than three feet in diameter.”38 The planners, on the other hand, possessed far-ranging vision, which allowed them to see beyond time itself: “[They] are broad-minded enough to see the grand future of this city, and to plan for it.”39



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Facing controversy and cost, Congress initially declined to foot the bill and so the McMillan Plan more or less stalled. Only with Mellon’s involvement would the Triangle portion get going again. However, the Triangle was never Mellon’s work alone. Implementing the plans required Mellon’s corporate persona to surmount the political, financial, and bureaucratic divisions that had previously impeded them. This was only possible because Mellon’s corporate body produced a totalizing vision capable of incorporating nearly all others—a hegemonic view of a terrain in which economic rationalization and beautification seemed to march in step. This vision emerged once Mellon assembled a corporate body. He began by surrounding himself with trusted experts, hiring Edward Bennett, a Beaux-Arts-trained architect, as the Triangle’s designer, and appointing a committee of managers, in effect a corporate board.40 The decision to hire Bennett without calling for competing bids or holding a competition signaled the reach of Mellon’s corporate vision and how it would inform the entire project. Rather than simply sidestepping statutory committees and executive departments, Mellon employed a process of incorporation to integrate them all—as will be seen, a process his corporate body would repeat when laying plans for the National Gallery. For example, when the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) rejected Bennett’s early designs, Mellon responded by appointing additional allies to powerful managerial roles, in particular two lawyers who would prove vital to the Triangle, and later Gallery, development: David Finley, Mellon’s aide who would become the Gallery’s first director, and Donald D. Shepard, Mellon’s personal lawyer who would become the Gallery’s general counsel and a trustee. Mellon also appointed a committee of architectural advisors, called the Board of Architectural Consultants, which eventually included John Russell Pope, the Gallery’s architect. Disregarding the stipulation that federal buildings had to be designed by government employees, Mellon hired the architects from the private sector and ensured them that they would each be allowed to design one building in the Triangle in return for advising the overall project. Typically explained as a conciliatory gesture to appease the CFA, Mellon in fact shored up authority by subsuming CFA-approved architects into his corporate body and repositioning Bennett as the group’s Chairman. Perhaps this was strategic—a way of overcoming the wrangling that had bedeviled the project to date. But it was more precisely an instance of Mellon’s tried-and-true practice of incorporation, a process that not only overcame opposition by establishing a powerful corporate body but also freed this body to organize the terrain according to its singular vision.41 The efficacy of Mellon’s corporate vision became clear when he convinced Congress to purchase all the private land in the area at once, arguing that “an attempt to buy the property piecemeal . . . would make the total cost much higher.”42 This decision was not just “good business,” as the press approvingly claimed, but it was also a vital step toward envisioning the Triangle as a comprehensive space since it compelled everyone to speak of the Triangle as a single structure rather than as a series of discrete blocks or buildings. By that point, even the CFA’s critique of the Triangle designs had come in line. No longer quite as concerned about the particulars of each building, the commissioners instead worried that the separate buildings were too disjointed, and they demanded designs that would treat the Triangle as a massive form. Only

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a comprehensive plan, they argued, would give the Triangle a sense of timelessness. Here timelessness did not simply refer to the putative “timelessness” of the Triangle’s neoclassical forms. Rather, as the commissioners argued, by seamlessly integrating the entire system, the forms would remove the Triangle from the modern city, and thus from time itself. Thus, the commissioners suggested using France’s Louvre-Tuileries as a guide, but not exactly to reproduce the look of the Ancien Régime. Instead, they argued that its colonnades, courtyards, and arches would create a continuous façade to unify the Triangle, giving it a sense of monumentality and permanence by distinguishing it from the rest of the modern city, bustling with cars, tourists, and workers. By masking everyday Washington behind a totalizing abstraction, they now all began to call their imagined city “a work of art.”43 Lingering critics recognized that this notion of art was a ruse, that it would inscribe age-old class lines onto the modern city. As one argued, “The New Washington” would be “a permanent monument to unlearned lessons,” for not only had “modern transportation [made] concentration .  .  . wasteful and .  .  . unnecessary,” but it was also patronizing, even imperialistic: “A hundred thousand men and women must pour in every morning . . . and jam themselves into twenty squares in the heart of Washington. .  .  . As compensation, the clerks will have the pleasing thought that the President can take a visiting maharaja to his window and say to him, ‘Servants’ quarters—very convenient.’”44 Mellon himself may have looked down on the Triangle from the Treasury this way. Yet his corporate view—his corporate body’s totalizing vision—never saw the world in such plainly possessive or classist terms.45 For Mellon’s corporate body was always focused on a process of modernization, which was never simply time passing, but more precisely the matter of knowledge passing. His corporate vision would recognize modern, lived experience—even human life itself—as only one of nature’s measurable variables, a quantifiable detail that helped reveal a total picture. Mellon formally presented this vision to the public in April 1929, when he organized a conference to gather support for the Triangle project. The speeches delivered by various building commissioners asserted that the plan was itself the product, even the materialization, of a corporate-state democracy. As one speaker claimed, the plan bears “the same relation to the development of its separate elements that a constitution . . . bears to the development of .  .  . its people.”46 This required “large and farseeing planning” committed to a “grand purpose,” which he described as a total picture. He said, “The great economies that result .  .  . from orderly arrangement of related interests . . . gradually but consistently leads in the direction of . . . true simplicity.”47 To display this simplified vision, Mellon commissioned two works for the conference: a three-dimensional scale model and a short film. The model was based on drawings Mellon had ordered in late 1927. Although in many ways conventional, the drawings were unique because they incorporated sketches by the contributing architects well before they agreed on how to harmonize their separate designs. The artist enhanced this effect by depicting the surrounding areas as little more than a vacant grid, removing all human context from view. Put into three dimensions, the model went further. Not only was it displayed as a detached object, floating, and disconnected, but the model



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Figure 5.2  Harris & Ewing, photographer, “Secretary of Treasury Mellon and model of showing new buildings Uncle Sam will erect,” April 27, 1929. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. also stripped away all references to the city at the Triangle’s edges, as if its buildings, streets, and people simply did not exist. Promotional photographs of Mellon standing beside the model reinforced this view by showing him standing like a colossus above the landscape (Figure 5.2). The film added the dimension of time. Written and produced by David Finley with support from General Electric, it provided a narrative history of Washington’s architectural development from the L’Enfant Plan, through the McMillan Plan, and up through what it named the Mellon Plan, at that point a vision of the future. The movie then turned back in time to focus on current Triangle conditions, which it characterized as dilapidated and therefore worthy of demolition. Clear the way for the Triangle, it suggested, and a totalizing vision would appear. By presenting history as a linear progression from one plan to the next—each presented as a “masterpiece” that paved the way toward a perfect future—the film made visible the same notion of artistic progress that would shape the National Gallery’s collection. Indeed, when Finley became the Gallery’s director a few years later, he had the permanent collection installed according to this notion of progress. Organizing the art by national style and chronology, it would seem as if one masterpiece led inevitably to the next, as if visiting the Gallery would enact a march through time. Mellon’s allies at the Washington Board of Trade used these same ideas to muster additional support for the Triangle project. Although the Board of Trade worked to advance the particular interests of the corporate-state elite, its members fashioned the Board as a democratic organization and claimed their efforts always served the

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public—a claim that the Treasury, with the onset of the Depression, could no longer so easily make. As they wrote in the 1930 edition of the Board’s annual, “Because of the fact that the citizens of the District of Columbia have no direct voice in the government . . . the Board of Trade acts in the capacity of unofficial . . . representative for the people.”48 Specifically, the members claimed to serve the public interest by evoking the ideas that Lippmann had recently advocated and that Mellon’s corporate body had put into practice; they suggested that the business elite, because they possessed a totalizing vision, would enact democratic principles by developing the city into a work of art. Thus, in an article from that edition of the annual, CFA Chairman Charles Moore portrayed Washington as a “dream city” because “it is like living in a picture,” specifically: A Canaletto . . . where stately marble palaces border busy wharves with their worldtrading ships; and the sky is serene, the surrounding hills are inviting. The little men bustling about, unloading the cargoes, and the lovers enjoying the shade . . . are necessary to the picture . . . but the picture is the important thing . . . . The lord of the castle, the captains of the ships, the merchants on their counting-room steps, the blue and gold soldiers, and the omnipresent ladies in spreading silks. . . . All are necessary to give a sense of life and reality; but they are quite unimportant as permanent personalities. They come and go; but the great picture—the ideal conception in the mind of the artist—is the thing that is important.49

He concluded, “The opportunity . . . will be lost if we busy ourselves . . . . Rather we should climb the hill. . . . From that vantage . . . we may look . . . at the future of the Capital City . . . beyond the horizon.”50 By figuring the city as an Old Master painting, like a Canaletto or like the Hobbema landscape Mellon had collected, Washington’s corporate elites projected a vision that seemed to transcend material realities and bring the city into view as a timeless “dream city.” Or at least this was the dreamwork of Mellon’s corporate body, a modernizing dream in which the Old Masters, and the spirit of art they were believed to represent, had particular business to do. It should be noted, however, that within the landscape, modern time would prove inescapable. As The Washington Post reported in 1930, when the Internal Revenue Service Building, the first building to go up, was unveiled, those on the ground were bewildered by “an Arabian night dream of palatial office buildings.” It said, “It is more than the average person can be expected to comprehend,” because within the Triangle it was impossible to envision the total plan: “The most severe pressure on the imagination can barely evoke a real picture of what is to arise in this space.” Indeed, the building’s purpose—to facilitate government business—was irreconcilable with the overall picture. Although one might glimpse “poetical flights of fancy .  .  . an atmosphere of tranquility and serene beauty,” one could never fully detach from “the hum of typewriters and the clatter of punching machines . . . from the material phases of Uncle Sam’s new headquarters.”51 The back and forth was unnerving and irreconcilable, it concluded—an odd combination, “Materialistic but Magical.”



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The corporate collector Magic materialized—this contradiction would characterize the development of Mellon’s art collection, and as plans for the National Gallery emerged from the Federal Triangle project, Mellon’s corporate form would inscribe it onto the new institution as well. For Mellon the individual and Mellon’s corporate body were equipped with two distinct and irreconcilable modes of vision—one seeing artworks as “magical” objects to be possessed, the other treating art as an abstract “material” at work within the economy. Mellon’s famous acquisition of art from the Hermitage in 1930 and 1931 explains how these tensions came to a head. Since the early 1920s, rumors had circulated that the Soviets were planning to sell paintings from the Hermitage, and stories emerged of the failed attempts to buy works by Armand Hammer, the future director of Occidental Petroleum, and of a few successful purchases, largely of jewelry, by Calouste Gulbenkian of Iraq Petroleum. Mellon’s corporate body afforded a rather different, and more auspicious, position than that of these individual collectors. At the Treasury, Mellon had overseen trade negotiations with the Soviets since the early 1920s, positioning US companies advantageously, especially when Joseph Stalin’s new command economy launched efforts to finance an industrialization program by dumping natural resources onto the commodities exchange below market value. This knowledge should have posed Mellon with a conflict: as Treasury secretary, he understood the trade imbalance could have devastating effects, yet as an industrial investor, he stood to benefit from the Soviets’ cheap resources. Mellon’s corporate body, however, saw little conflict; Mellon’s Treasury would issue embargoes on Russian resources, save for those that benefited Mellon’s personal business interests.52 To purchase the Hermitage works, Mellon established a corporate structure in which multiple intermediaries handled the negotiations, each operating semiautonomously and without full awareness of the other groups’ operations. Although Mellon would make final decisions about what to buy, the arrangement allowed the process to take place largely without his own direct involvement or awareness. Like all of his business organizations, the structure was complex: the Antiquariat, an organization set up by the Soviets to sell art abroad, would tell a representative of Mattheisen Gallery in Germany which works were available. The representative would relay the information to the gallery owner, Francis Zatzenstein, who would talk to representatives at the Colnaghi Gallery in London, and they would talk to Carmen Messmore of Knoedler’s in New York in turn. Messmore would assemble photographic reproductions of the works, which he would send to Mellon in Washington. Mellon then set a maximum price, which was relayed to the German dealers, who would negotiate with the Antiquariat. When a price was set, the total was wired by Messmore to Zatzenstein, who sent 10 percent as a deposit to his agent in the Soviet Union. The Antiquariat would then send orders to the Hermitage staff, instructing them to remove and package the painting and to rearrange the surrounding works to make its absence less obvious. After the art was delivered to Germany, Zatzenstein would pay the balance, and the painting would be shipped to New York, where Knoedler’s agents would clean and deliver it to Mellon in Washington.53

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After the works arrived in Washington, ownership passed to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, even if the works often remained in Mellon’s personal possession. The trust began when Mellon gave it $10,000 and Raphael’s Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (1508), though it would soon command major assets. In the summer of 1931, for example, Mellon shifted some of his Hermitage purchases to the trust, including Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi (c. 1478–82), Perugino’s The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1482–85), Raphael’s The Alba Madonna (c. 1510), Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555), and Van Eyck’s The Annunciation (c. 1434–36), which were collectively valued at $3.24 million. The next year he transferred another nineteen paintings worth $5.9 million and in 1934 he transferred forty-five paintings valued at about $9 million.54 Mellon organized the trust like any of his corporate bodies, placing loyal allies on the board including his personal lawyer Donald Shepard, his son Paul, and later his son-in-law David Bruce. With such resources and authority, the trust would exert considerable control over the planning of the National Gallery, even before the project had been announced publicly. For instance, the trust worked to ensure that the Gallery, although a federal institution, would be led by its own appointees. An existing National Gallery of Art had been established as part of a Smithsonian bureau in 1906, and it had become its own entity in 1920 with anthropologist-artist W. H. Holmes serving as director. To facilitate the creation of a new National Gallery, the trust wanted to take over the existing one and name its own director, but Holmes was obliged to vacate the federal position in 1930 when the trust was still in its infancy and before its collection had been announced. Mellon’s money kept Holmes on the payroll even after his retirement, ensuring the position would be held for the trust’s appointee. When Holmes passed away in 1933, Mellon’s agents persuaded Secretary of the Smithsonian Charles Abbot to hold the position in limbo until they were prepared to announce their new Gallery, establish it as an independent bureau of the Smithsonian, and appoint Mellon’s assistant David Finley to the director position.55 Indeed, after a lengthy meeting with Mellon to inquire about his intentions to establish a gallery, Secretary Abbot was informed that all decisions would be made by the trust. As Abbot learned, if a gallery were to be “built by the Trust,” it would “be held by the Smithsonian Institution for the National Government,” but “managed and controlled by an independent Board of Trustees.”56 The trust would have its way, resulting in an unprecedented situation: the federal government would come to be responsible for maintaining the museum building, site, and contents, while authority over its property, operations, and governance would be held by a self-perpetuating and independent board. In short, Mellon’s corporate body would have power over government property and resources in perpetuity, even after Mellon passed away.57 Mellon’s corporate body was ascendant, and yet during the Hermitage negotiations Mellon himself would get caught up in the contradictions between his individual and corporate personas, between his control over and subjection to the modern world. This became clear in the winter of 1929, when reporter Walter Davenport spent a day profiling Mellon for Collier’s. Davenport was impressed with Mellon’s deliberateness, describing him as “immaculate, unhurried, sure, and completely in command of



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himself and the situation.”58 These qualities could be seen as Mellon made his daily walk from his apartment to the Treasury, unfazed by a blizzard-like storm and the piercing cold. And they could be seen as he read through the day’s newspapers, from which “he knows . . . what he wants to know, what is necessary for him to know. . . . His reading is apt to be utilitarian rather than literary.”59 As Davenport explained, it was these business-like qualities that made Mellon so impenetrable: With the same gentle firmness with which he addresses himself to his job, he has refused all . . . importunities to display the private life of Andrew Mellon. He has not even considered the advisability of talking about himself. It’s not a question of inexpediency, of temperamental aversion or aloofness. It is simply that he could no more make public his own private life than he could ask you personal questions. Utterly impossible for the man.60

These qualities—the outward projection, I believe, of Mellon’s corporate body—were especially evident when Mellon was at work in his office: “Aside from the concentration that is one of his most readily observed characteristics, he rarely, if ever, is obviously busy. He accomplishes an enormous amount of work, with practiced ease. There is nothing casual in these decisions. There is no switching at the last moment.” So impressed by Mellon’s inability to be disturbed, Davenport mentioned this quality time and time again. He wrote, “Whether he is speaking to a senator, to one of the Treasury officials or to a visitor he is pretty much the same. There is always that slow selection of words—a careful choice. .  .  . It amounts to a beautiful confidence in himself—a confidence which is never shaken.”61 Despite this “beautiful confidence,” Mellon’s experience of art would indeed “shake” him, perhaps because Mellon the “proud possessor” never treated art only as a commodity. Evidence of this emerged the following fall, when the dealer Joseph Duveen attempted to get in on the Hermitage sales. Duveen had sent an assistant to Washington with a phony telegram suggesting he had plans to purchase nine key paintings from the Soviets that he suspected Mellon wanted to acquire. The assistant was to deliver the letter and then ask if Mellon thought there would be any conflict. Duveen thought the ruse might crack Mellon about his network of rival dealers and enable him to work his way into the negotiations. Duveen’s plot ultimately failed, but the note he received from his assistant offers a revealing account of how Mellon reacted when art thrust his personal and corporate vision into conflict. The assistant’s letter begins with a detailed account of his trip from New York, one noticeably preoccupied with tracking time: “I caught the 9 o’clock train. . . . I did not arrive at Washington until 2:30. . . . I went direct to the house but missed Mr. Mellon by three minutes.”62 He then snoops around Mellon’s apartment to look at his art, but loses track of time, as if the “timeless” works of art held him in their thrall. Thus he writes of the “full-length Van Dyck with our Titian ‘Woman’ on the right” and of the “Luini Portrait of a Lady [that] is in the cupboard” as if they had caused time itself to stop. The timeline picks back up as he rushes over to the Treasury, hoping to catch Mellon in his office. When he finds Mellon and gives him

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the bogus telegram, time halts again, but now for Mellon as he contemplates the art it describes. As the assistant writes, Mellon kept him waiting for “about half an hour” while sitting “absolutely alone in his office,” contemplating the message from Duveen. “After about half an hour,” he repeats, “he sent for me, and from his manner he seemed quite disturbed,” ultimately admitting that Duveen’s plans to purchase the Hermitage works would pose a conflict. Of interest is how the idea of art, by captivating Mellon, “disturbed” his relation to time. The assistant writes, Before I entered the room, there was a meeting of prominent bankers assembled in an adjoining room waiting to meet Mr. Mellon for a very important meeting and the secretaries came in several times [during our conversation] to remind Mr. Mellon that the meeting had been waiting for him since 3 o’clock, and it was now 3:30, but he kept them waiting still reading the telegram over and over again and hesitating what to do.63

Even after their conversation, the disruption continued: “I left the room and watched him through a crack in the door and he was still standing with the telegram in his hand in deep thought ignoring the assembled bankers in the next room.”64 Mellon’s encounter with art—in fact, with only the idea of art—captured him between his corporate body’s efforts to envision art as part of a total economic system and his personal desire to seize hold of specific works. Writing just a few years earlier, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard had attributed this very contradiction to the rise of scientific knowledge, like that produced by the new science of economics. Observing the way scientific thinking had separated the world into small details and then used these details to reconstitute a coherent picture of the world, he argued that science was a means for envisioning “natural” phenomena that refused easy conceptualization. When successful, Bachelard observed, the subject who does this work would achieve nothing short of transcendence—what Henri Bergson called “the perception of ease in motion [that] passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present.”65 This is the mastery that Davenport found in Mellon, the mastery his corporate body seemed to possess due to a totalizing vision in which all social relations were plotted as objective, calculable things, as if on a map. As Bachelard noted, however, this way of thinking also could have devastating effects because the back-and-forth movement between beholding a particular detail and trying to envision it within a total picture could induce a violent division of subjectivity. For this scientific knowledge required the splitting of visual apparatuses—the parallactic effect of taking in the natural world comprehensively while also existing in that world. “Nothing,” Bachelard wrote, “is harder to analyze than a phenomenon that can be known in two different orders of magnitude.” This division could cause the splitting of the observing subject itself, resulting in its “tearing-topieces.” For as one approaches the object of knowledge, he argued, one must adopt another mode of vision, which is in fact another order of thought altogether. If one fails to make that transition, he wrote, all thought collapses.66



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Mellon did not collapse under the burden of his double vision, yet the experience temporarily held him transfixed. For the art had driven a wedge between the two different Mellons: the natural and the artificial, the flesh and the phantom, the proud possessor and the corporate form. Or at least the art revealed that Mellon embodied contradictory forms; by interrupting the business at hand, it had obscured Mellon’s corporate vision, grounding him in the material realities created by his corporate form. Or, to pose this from a different perspective, the incident demonstrates the corporate patron’s effect, not only on the material conditions for creating, collecting, and displaying works of art but also on how its collection would encode certain contradictions, at once magic and material, “timeless” and present, a comprehensive picture that fragments.

Notes 1 James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850– 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 66–77. See also Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); and Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 365, fn. 30. 3 Cannadine, Mellon, 294–97, 323, 341–43, 364–66, 393–94; Lawrence L. Murray, “The Mellons, Their Money, and the Mythical Machine: Organizational Politics in the Republican Twenties,” Pennsylvania History 42, no. 3 (July 1975): 220–41. Although Mellon resigned from more than fifty corporate boards when he moved to Washington, Congressional hearings were called in 1925 to investigate his ongoing involvement. For the claims against Mellon, see Harvey O’Connor, Mellon’s Millions: The Biography of a Fortune (New York: John Day Co., 1933). 4 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 50. 5 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 51, 56. 6 Ibid., 52, 56. 7 Ibid., 35–37, 55–56, and see Livingston, Pragmatism, especially 66–77. 8 While a series of legal decisions established corporate personhood, there was significant debate about it. See George F. Canfield, “The Scope and Limits of the Corporate Entity Theory,” Columbia Law Review 17, no. 2 (February 1917): 128–43; Arthur W. Machen, Jr., “Corporate Personality,” Harvard Law Review 24, no. 4 (February 1911): 253–67; I. Maurice Wormser, “Piercing the Veil of Corporate Entity,” Columbia Law Review 12, no. 6 (June 1912): 496–518; and John Dewey, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” The Yale Law Journal 35, no. 6 (April 1926): 655–73. Also see Morton J. Horwitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,” West Virginia Law Review 88 (1986): 173–24 and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 84–86.

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9 A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), 39–40. Also see John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1930). 10 Work on the corporate form by literary scholars, however, has been instructive. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chapter 6. For an example of the renewed art historical interest in this theme, see Peter John Brownlee, “Francis Edmonds and the Speculative Economy of Painting,” American Art 21, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 30–53. 11 “Proud possessors” refers to Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (New York: Random House, 1958). As Flaminia Gennari Santori has argued, in books like Saarinen’s the history of art collecting in America is “treated as a succession of single larger than life figures, the collectors.” These histories, she argues, “reproduce, more or less, the public representation of art collecting . . . without examining the phenomenon per se.” Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–1914 (Milan: 5 continents, 2003), 23. 12 John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collector (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974), 68–70. 13 Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 305. 14 Walker, Self-Portrait, 139–40; David A. Doheny, David Finley: Quiet Force for America’s Arts (Washington, DC: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2006), 48. Also see House Joint Resolution 217, 1937, as quoted in the Report of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Financial Report of the Executive Committee of the Board of Regents (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1937), 8; and the 1937 trust indenture agreement signed by the A. W. Mellon Education and Charitable Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Gallery; 20 U.S.C. § 75: US Code–Section 75: Authority and functions of the board; and “General Information and Lists of Paintings and Sculpture” National Gallery of Art, US Government Printing Office, 1941. 15 Philip Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 39. 16 On this shift in economic thinking, see Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), 43–47; and Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 434–67. Also see Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 17–20. 17 Quoted by Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 30. 18 “Special to the New York Times,” The New York Times, March 24, 1935, 3; and “80th Birthday to Find Mellon and Son United,” The Washington Post, March 24, 1935, 9. 19 “The Treasury and Business,” The New York Times, December 8, 1922, 16. 20 Emphasis added. Carey Orr, “Why Not Tell Europe the Secret of Our Success?” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 9, 1926, 5. 21 Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (New York: Macmillan, 1924). See also, M. Susan Murnane, “Selling Scientific Taxation: The Treasury Departments Campaign for Tax Reform in the 1920s,” Law & Social Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 819–56.



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22 For a recent effort to revive this notion through the figure of Mellon, see Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 23 David E. Finley, “Taxation Problems I: Tax Reduction vs. Tax Reform,” The North American Review 222, no. 828 (September–November 1925): 2. 24 Thomas S. Adams, “Secretary Mellon Pleads for Tax Laws Which Work,” The New York Times, May 18, 1924, BR3. 25 Adams, “Secretary Mellon,” BR3. 26 Walter Lippmann, “The Greatness of Mr. Mellon,” Men of Destiny (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003 [Macmillan, 1927]), 184–95. 27 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), 16. 28 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 230, 365. 29 Ibid., 31. Lippmann’s model would not go uncontested. See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927); and Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 9. 30 Lippmann, “The Greatness of Mr. Mellon.” 31 That is, Mellon mastered what Marx described in the Grundrisse as a central aspect of advanced capitalism: “the creation of surplus value at another point,” that is, the credit system or “fictitious capital”—what David Harvey has called “money that is thrown into circulation of capital without any material basis in commodities of productive activity.” David Harvey, Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006), 95. 32 See Cannadine, Mellon, 375; Lois Marie Fink, A History of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), chapter 3; and Ada Rainey, “Art Worlds Plans Aided by Congress,” The Washington Post, December 26, 1926, F2. 33 On the prerequisite conditions for establishing national art galleries in the United States, see Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 9–37. 34 Lawrence L. Murray, “Bureaucracy and Bi-Partisanship in Taxation: The Mellon Plan Revisited,” The Business History Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 200–25. 35 “Developing the Capital,” The Washington Post, December 18, 1926, 6. 36 Charles Moore, ed., The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902). 37 Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 147; and Elbert Peets, “On the Plans for Washington,” in On the Art of Designing Cities: Selected Essays of Elbert Peets, ed. Paul D. Spreiregen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 67. 38 Letter from Edward Wilton Donn, Jr., Washington Star, October 18, 1907, 4. 39 Ibid. 40 See Sally Kress Tompkins, A Quest for Grandeur: Charles Moore and the Federal Triangle (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) and George Gurney, Sculpture and the Federal Triangle (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985). 41 Tompkins, Quest, 43; Ferry K. Heath, “The Federal Building Program,” Architectural Forum 50, no. 3 (September 1931): 349–50; and Gurney, Sculpture, 55–57. 42 Mellon, as quoted in “Commission Says Building Program Will Go Forward,” The Washington Post (November 19, 1926), 20. 43 See “Mellon Indorses Building Program of Classic Style,” The Washington Post, December 11, 1927, 18; “Building Body to Study Commerce Structure,” The

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Washington Post, September 22, 1926, 9; and “Speech of Honorable A. W. Mellon Secretary of the Treasury at the Annual Founder’s Day Exercises of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, October 18, 1928,” Duveen Papers, box 488, folder 2, reel 343 (pp. 10–11, 14, 15), Getty Research Institute, Research Library. 44 Elbert Peets, “The New Washington,” The American Mercury 8, no. 32 (August 1926): 449–52. 45 To get a sense of Mellon’s personal attitudes, see Cannadine, Mellon, 108–09, 288–99. 46 Milton B. Medary, “Making a Capital City,” in Development of the United States Capital, Addresses Delivered in the Auditorium of the United States Chamber of Commerce Building, Washington, DC, at Meetings Held to Discuss the Development of the National Capital, April 25–26, 1929, House Document No. 35 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), 39. 47 Medary, Development, 39. 48 Robert J. Cottrell, “The Washington Board of Trade,” in The Book of Washington (Washington, DC: Cleland C. McDevitt, 1930), 6–7. 49 Charles Moore, “The Future Washington,” in The Book of Washington, op. cit., 29–30. 50 Moore, “The Future Washington.” 51 “New Revenue Edifice Startles Imagination in Its Appointments,” The Washington Post, June 8, 1930, R9. See also, “Revenue Building Cornerstone Laid by Mellon in Rain,” The Washington Post, May 21, 1929, 22. 52 See Secrest, Duveen, 314–15; Walker, Self-Portrait, 108–09; Robert Paul Browder, The Origins of Soviet-American Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 29, 44; and Robert Chadwell Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 167–75. Also see Duveen to Mellon, April 21, 1925, Duveen Brothers Records, box 487, folder 4, reel 342, Getty Research Institute, Research Library. 53 Cannadine, Mellon, 420; Joanna Pitman, The Dragon’s Trail: The Biography of Raphael’s Masterpiece (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 264; and Williams, Russian Art, 167–75. 54 Cannadine, Mellon, 426–27, 454. 55 Ibid., 414. 56 Abbot quoted by Fink, A History of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 80. 57 Ibid., 81. 58 Walter Davenport, “A Day with Andrew Mellon,” Collier’s 85, no. 3 (March 29, 1930), 13. 59 Davenport, “A Day with Andrew Mellon,” 56. 60 Ibid., 13. 61 Ibid., 13, 56. 62 Bertram Boggis to Joseph Duveen, Sept 17, 1930, Duveen Brothers Records, Box 487, reel 342, Getty Research Institute, Research Library. Also see: Secrest, Duveen, 317–18. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Gaston Bachelard, “Essai Sur La Connaissance Approchée,” (Paris: Vrin, 1927); and Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: G. Allen & Company, 1913), 12. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 232–33. 66 Bachelard, “Essai Sur La Connaissance Approchée.

6

“To Live Is to Look and Move Forward”: Lord and Taylor’s 1928 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art1 Elizabeth McGoey

In the late 1920s, American department stores took center stage in the exhibition, popularization, and dissemination of modern design. Earlier in the century, a new language of abstraction had emerged in the world of fine art, sparking an aesthetic shift that shocked the American public with its sharply fragmented forms and dissolution of recognizable representation. These new forms eventually began to move off the walls of museums and galleries and into living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens—domestic interpretations of modernism put on the international stage at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, which was an exhibition of modern art for the home that featured over 150 fully furnished ensemble displays by European designers. In a quest to capitalize on the cultural ascendancy of avant-garde aestheticism generated by the novel installations at the Paris exposition, American corporate executives from department stores across the country took their cues from, and adopted, the practice of exhibiting fully furnished interior displays.2 Despite a controversial decision made by the US government not to exhibit at the 1925 Paris exposition, a delegation of merchandisers and specialists in decorative and industrial arts was sent to the fair and afterward issued a lengthy and widely circulated report on the important contribution it offered to the development of modern life.3 New York department stores were the first to respond to the event, and, by 1927, companies such as Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, Abraham & Straus, and Frederick Loeser & Co. had all staged exhibitions inspired by the widely praised Parisian ensembles and looked for inventive and noteworthy ways to wed modern art and industry for an American audience.4 These displays were largely composed of material loaned from European designers and manufacturers, featuring just a few samples of objects designed and produced in the United States. The most sweeping of the early store displays of modern interiors, Lord and Taylor’s 1928 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art (Color Plate 7), was heralded in

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its time as novel examples of what domesticity should look like. “To live is to look and move forward” was the conviction, according to one critic, underlying Lord and Taylor’s 1928 exhibition and the most important idea that viewers were to take away from the staged domestic interiors.5 Held at Lord and Taylor headquarters on Fifth Avenue, the show featured displays of French decorative arts: nine furnished spaces by famous French designers Jacques Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand, Vera Choukhaeff, Pierre Chareau, Frances Jourdain, and the firms of Süe et Mare and D.I.M., as well as five rooms designed by an in-house team. The exhibition ran just over one month and more than 300,000 people passed through the series of ensembles, viewing models of modernity for a new era in the American home.6 The organizers of the exhibition, Lord and Taylor executive Dorothy Shaver, with support from company president Samuel Rayburn, presented an immersive environment that would excite and appeal to not only visitors to the store, but as their impressive press campaign suggests, also the public at large. They recognized that in order for American department stores to tap into the potential commercial value of modernist home furnishings and objects of home décor, manufacturers would have to be on board to produce such objects. And before these manufacturers would start to produce modernist furnishings for American consumers, they needed to gauge that there would be a market for the goods. Thus the fictional narrative woven by the integration of art, decorative arts, and furnishings in the Lord and Taylor display was meant to entice the American public to imagine these lovely things in their own homes, to extoll the nationalist potential for modernism, and to induce a yearning to own the goods that comprise a modern lifestyle.7 Notwithstanding their importance, corporate-sponsored displays of modern interiors like Lord and Taylor’s 1928 exhibition have been pushed to the periphery of scholarly inquiry because of their complex position at the junction of fine art, decorative art and design, popular culture, and commercialism, and warrant new critical assessment. How did these interpretations of staged holistic interiors differ from European precedents and attempt to become symbolic of American democracy? What kinds of intersections and interactions among designers, artists, craftspeople, and the viewing public occurred in these rooms? How and why does avant-garde art function as a signifier of cultural desirability in these interiors? The industrial environment both embraced, and was embraced by, the world of art during the interwar period, blurring the lines between art and commerce by utilizing modernist forms to commercial and cultural ends. The present study addresses this confluence by examining the co-production and intentional harmonizing of modern fine arts, decorative arts, and furnishings for a viewing— and, it was hoped—a consuming audience at one of the preeminent New York department stores. The exhibition represents Shaver and Lord and Taylor’s campaign to set the terms and definitions of domestic modernism for a new age. In doing so, the company sparked debates about the state of contemporary design and ignited opinions from critics and the viewing public as to what the vision of modernism should be in the United States.



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Modern design on the rise Signs of a ballooning consumer society interested in contemporary goods were abundant in the halcyon days of the 1920s. The stock market soared, as did the American gross domestic product. The rise in sales of the Model T, the first commercially available radios, and technologically advanced home appliances all signaled Americans’ interest in outfitting their lives with the newest products. In the preface of a governmental study of economic trends, authors addressed the new attitudes toward novelty at play during this era by consumers, retailers, and manufacturers: In the past, the novelty has often been held at a high price for years, and only gradually reduced to a level at which the masses of wage earners could afford to buy. Recently this process has been telescoped. Men who believed they had a novelty with a wide appeal often tried from the start to bring their article within the reach of as many consumers as possible, and hoped that they might realize the profits yielded by small margins multiplied by millions of sales.8

Consumption came into alignment with national identity as democracy itself came to be defined as the ability of the masses to engage in the large-scale purchase of available goods.9 The world of art and home furnishings seeped into this growing market. Enjoyment of the fine arts was purportedly more widespread to include “artistic appreciation, both as to color and design, of the common objects which surround us in our daily lives.”10 Approaching the cultivation of a consumer ethos in tandem with an education in taste, department store managers, merchandisers, and sales associates at stores across the country began to promote a domestic aesthetic representative of advances in contemporary daily life. Shaver and Rayburn, in particular, were interested in defining taste and promoting consumption, laying out a plan for these objects that included not only which ones to buy but also how to live with them. Their efforts, coming on the heels of the Paris fair, would lead the way to a general shift in the merchandising approach taken in many department stores from single object oriented displays to ensembles in which setting produced meaning through depictions of inhabitable space.11 Shaver was interested in new approaches to store display even before opening the major exhibition of decorative art in 1928. A Lord and Taylor ensemble display installed about a year prior, for example, placed domestic furniture and accessories in a relational setting with added accents that suggested an inhabited home (Figure 6.1). A photograph of the space shows a small vase filled with flowers resting on a console table between two armchairs. Decorative bowls were placed on a bookcase stocked with books, and the wall and doorways of the room were decorated harmoniously in stylized floral and animal motifs. One store executive asserted in a New York Times article that this shift to fully furnished vignettes was necessary for the domestic industry to grow and for American taste to evolve. These goals were not going to be reached simply by selling a piece of modern furniture, nor by telling the customer

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Figure 6.1  Ensemble by Lord and Taylor, circa 1927. Reproduced in Edwin Avery Park, New Backgrounds for a New Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927). how that piece of furniture could harmonize with a specific accessory. Information about the new aesthetic movement in the home was “best given by illustration in the form on ensemble displays,” showing “complete set-ups of rooms,” including floor coverings, draperies, table coverings, light fixtures, and all the accessorizing furnishings.12 Those devoted to seeing modern design succeed in the United States emphasized the educational aspects of marketing and merchandising by home furnishing designers and merchandisers as the key stimulant for commercial success via domestic manufacturing. As a writer for Art-In-Trade asserted, “What is necessary is that the advocates of the new art do everything within their power to disseminate a thorough knowledge of the movement to everyone with whom they come in contact, and that every effort should be directed a more efficient infiltration of the instruction in the matter of the general buying public.”13 The relational aspect of the fine art and furnishings in the rooms was the key to the enticement, education, and commercial persuasion of the viewing customer. As prominent interior designer Paul T. Frankl noted at the time, “The successful modern decorator is first and foremost a master of relativity: he brings out values and beauties of texture, pattern, and color by realizing the full potentialities of their relationships. In this mastery lies the secret of his



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art—for that is how he paints his picture.”14 Frankl was a forerunner of modernist interior decoration in the United States. Born in Vienna, Frankl immigrated to the United States during World War I, and was one of the first designers to open his own showroom for modern furniture in New York in the late 1920s.15 Frankl’s showroom, like Lord and Taylor’s display, suggested a lived-in space—where objects of use and decoration were arranged in and on the furniture pieces.16 Harnessing the power of suggestion through their carefully crafted modern harmonies, interiors such as Lord and Taylor’s early ensemble room and Frankl’s showroom provided a space in which consumers could project themselves into a complete domestic reality in which modernism reigned supreme. Ensemble interiors presented a new, holistic vision of modernity to an American public that articulated, and in short order, naturalized, the link between modern daily life and a modernist aesthetic. As Kristina Wilson has deftly argued, the “totalizing vision of the vignette” consumed the viewers’ senses and their imaginations, encouraging “escapist fantasies,” and embedding itself into the viewers’ psyche as a compelling portrait of an attainable life.17 Merchandisers conjured new narratives of contemporary domesticity intended to elicit the consumers’ covetous gaze. Writing about modern advances in art at the time, Princeton art and architecture professor, Edwin Avery Park, lauded department stores as “prime movers in sponsoring modernism” for the inventiveness of these new displays and their promotion of new styles for the American home. For Park, the natural development of modern art lay in a connection to items of everyday usage within the home. He believed that exhibiting modern ensembles allowed the public to absorb the relationship of art and industry through imagined domestic settings, thereby energizing possibilities for interior decoration to become a means of expressing the new modern spirit. Before long, the American public was going to “wake up to find themselves converted to modernism.” Something was going to “click in the brain overnight,” and the desire to “surround oneself with modern things in a modern way” would take hold.18 The Austrian-born architect and designer Frederick Kiesler, who also worked as store window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue in the late 1920s, addressed this same imperative in his 1929 book, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display. In it, he asserted that the modern art of the “Old World” had begun to take possession of the “New World.” Kiesler believed that American business was discovering the ways in which contemporary art and design could be wielded as an immense selling force. In the United States, the mass-market production and consumption of modern domestic designs had the potential to cross socioeconomic strata. As Kiesler explained, Through the war Europe has lost its leadership in practically everything except art. America had gained leadership in everything except art. America, which does not concern itself with personal experiments in art so much as Europe does, could not experiment with the new art form as l’art pour l’art. For America’s industrial arts are based on mass appeal and there was no demand from the masses for products designed in the new manner.19

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According to Kiesler, the domestic department store was the primary conduit between modernism and the public at large, utilizing contemporary art for American commerce and stimulating a new direction for the American home. Department stores, he argues, pushed for an acceptance of modernism “not through slow fostering of its theories and principles,” instead simply “planting its creation down in the commercial marts.”20 Staged exhibitions of modern domesticity offered customers a complete concrete realization of what their homes could be. By finally entering the home through these displays of interior decoration, “by making the store interior a show room instead of a stock room,” modernist furnishings became emblems of a new outlook on life.21

Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art Lord and Taylor presented a physical model of modern domesticity grounded in the aesthetic unification of the home by tapping into the public fascination with the French ensembles of the 1925 exposition. Be they French or American, the abstract work on the walls, the smooth wood and metallic finishes of the furniture, and the adaptability of each ensemble for homes and apartments of varying sizes were intended to usher the American public into a new way of life reflective of progress. New Yorkers had their palates whetted by other shows assembled and combined in an ensemble fashion, but the size and scale of Lord and Taylor’s effort garnered extraordinary media attention.22 “Ambitious in scope, imposing in execution, and authoritative to the last detail,” the exhibition spanned almost the entirety of the department store’s seventh floor.23 In addition to eight French design firms, and Lord and Taylor’s own in-house designers, the show also included separate exhibitions of art objects and home furnishing accessories.24 These efforts, while bringing the modern movement into focus, also paved the way for homegrown advances in the arena of interior design. Dorothy Shaver conceived of, and executed, the blockbuster exhibition. A rising star in the New York mercantile world, Shaver had shown a flair for retailing early in life. She moved to New York from Arkansas with her sister in 1920, where the president of Lord and Taylor hired her after she successfully marketed a line of her sister’s dolls to the company. She was brought in as a comparison shopper to measure Lord and Taylor’s products, display practices, and sales against other metropolitan stores. However, after just a short time in this position, Shaver wrote a report to her managers about a new approach to merchandising. Rather than competing with the prices, products, and store layouts of other businesses, she reframed Lord and Taylor’s business model as a highly individualized, creative enterprise. In doing so, she effectively eliminated the comparison-shopping department altogether and headed up a new department: The Bureau of Fashion and Interior Decoration.25 This department oversaw the entire display end of the business, working with the store designers and sales teams so that all efforts were coordinated to awaken a fashion consciousness, for the merchandisers, buyers, and customers. This consciousness, as Shaver conceived it, would be the result of the specialization of store employees



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and the transfer of their knowledge and enthusiasm to shoppers. Writing about her approach for an Executive Training course in 1928, Shaver noted that the first step in revolutionizing the Lord and Taylor business model required educating the department stores’ buyers who selected the objects to be sold on the floor. “We try to awaken in these people greater appreciation for fashion, knowing that if they are more enthusiastic, if they become more familiar with the fashion in their merchandise, and if their appreciation for the fashion and style in that merchandise becomes broader, enthusiasm will seep from them down through the rest of the division.” Once given this knowledge, the buyers would bring fashionable products into the stores, “but, the Bureau of Fashion and Decoration cannot stop its work when it establishes more fashion in our merchandise, because we must sell that fashion element to the public.”26 This required training the salespeople in each department about the aesthetic value and cultural context of the objects for sale, and more importantly, finding the proper presentation of this “fashion element” to the customer. Shaver noted the parallels between a successful clothing department and that of home furnishings; in each case, she found it necessary to guard the standard of the merchandise from a fashion standpoint, and continue to raise that standard into the future. This necessitated keeping “in touch with all the sources from which we can get information concerning new trends in fashion,” as well as being constantly “on the watch for new things.”27 Ensemble merchandise displays played an important role in the successful implementation of Shaver’s new merchandising model—serving as sites for customer taste education and as theatrical sales lures. Shaver traveled domestically and internationally to monitor what was going on in the retailing world, and after a trip to Paris where she immersed herself in the French approach to commercial domestic displays, she returned convinced that European modernism had a definitive place in the American home. Despite the United States’ lack of participation in the Paris exposition, Shaver believed that America only needed a jumpstart to encourage a nationalist creative impulse and surpass the contributions of the French. Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art would provide that spark as an educational opportunity for all involved—store proprietors, manufacturers, artists, designers, and of course, the viewer/consumer. Writing about Shaver’s success for Vogue magazine in the 1940s, Allene Talmey attests that Shaver’s vision brought Lord and Taylor into the twentieth-century limelight, shedding its “bland soapstone Gothic” atmosphere for something “vibrant” and “gay.”28 Shaver rose to the top of the business world, and brought the entire department store with her, by working “double cords of a pulley .  .  . one cord was her business brain; the other was her crusading citizenship looking beyond the store to the country.”29 If modernism was going to succeed in the United States, it would need to be rooted in the American consciousness as synonymous with the American character. Toward this end, Shaver presented an exhibition of avant-garde interiors that, despite their largely French provenance, were meant to embody the American nationalist ideals of progress and democracy. Unlike many of the exhibitions held before it, the driving force of the Lord and Taylor exhibition in 1928 was that American designers should not just catch up to, or parallel

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what had been exhibited in Paris, but surpass it. Writing in the catalogue for the 1928 show, Shaver argues that while France’s contribution was to be respected, “In exhibiting this collection we recognize a movement which is becoming increasingly strong, not only in Europe but also in America. We believe that this movement is but the beginning of an expression of the time in which we live—the twentieth century.”30 Motivated not only by commercial impulses but also by a commitment to cultural advances in the field of modern art in the United States, Shaver continues, “This movement is especially significant for Americans because by its very simplicity, frankness and directness, it expresses those qualities which are most characteristic of America.”31

The enticing ensembles Highlighting the featured designers’ penchant for rationality and respect for traditionalism within their modernist experiments, Shaver assembled a group of French designers whose work she believed offered the most potential for American artists, designers, and customers based on their formal qualities—strong lines, simplified forms, and emphasis on materials. Not to be misunderstood as anti-modern, the “traditionalists” in the main exhibition space—Jacques Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand, Vera Choukhaeff, and Süe et Mare—were referred to as such due to their affinity for the hand-crafted legacy of French ébénistes, visible in their extensive use of striking wood veneers, inlays, and simple lines.32 Jacques Rulmann’s “Elements of a Dining Room” included a dramatic ebony sideboard with ivory inlay showing a sleek Grecian charioteer in profile. The dark finish of the sideboard carried into the chairs, also in ebony, and into the wool velour upholstery. Accenting the black finishes of the furniture were sharp accents of metal and crystal in the large lighting fixtures on either side of the ensemble as well as the small silver chest atop the sideboard. Ruhlmann pulled color into his ensemble through a schematic design of a gray and maroon damask wall hanging. In another alcove was a boudoir designed by Vera Choukhaeff featuring hand-painted panels on the wall and floor and silver accents throughout. In the larger panel above a vanity, Choukhaeff created a window to an imagined world rendered in cubist idiom of overlapping, simplified shapes in shallow perspective. Below this fragmented landscape, silver accessories glistened against the mirrored cabinet and small, mirrored vanity. The shine of these objects carried into the gleaming velour upholstery of the low-backed chairs that were designed by Ruhlmann. Alongside the boudoir, Jean Dunand’s seating area also incorporated extensive use of glistening finishes and abstract designs in his lacquered portrait, screens, and furniture. In Süe et Mare’s “A Woman’s Bedroom,” the dynamic lines of ebony furniture stood out against graphic floral print wall coverings. Complementing these structured, simplified curves, the bed coverings, and the rug in the bedroom showed angular patterns in contrasting tones of pink and black. Silver embroidery and silver lamé accents added metallic touches and echoed the gilt frames of a wall mirror and shiny crystal sconces in the interior.



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Across the exhibition hall were the “rationalists,” whose designs drew heavily on the formal aesthetics of the machine. Rugs by Madame Cuttoli of Myrbor adorned the center alcove, their fields of jagged angles and asymmetrical shapes complementing the strict geometric forms of the corresponding light fixtures and furniture pieces. Jourdain’s “A Man’s Bedroom” evinced his belief that form must follow function when it came to interior decoration in both the aesthetic design of individual objects and the interrelationship of these objects within his spaces. In his interior, an occasional table functioned dually as a bookcase, and a bed featured a rolling table that could slide to the end of the bed to function as a desk. Other elements of the room were versatile—a nightstand attached to the bed but was movable, as was a lamp by the headboard, and an armchair featured an adjustable back. Expressing the philosophy that traditional designs necessitated reimagination in the new era, Pierre Chareau also created a study that could double as a sleeping room (Figure 6.2). The space included a slim, multilevel wooden desk at the center of the room as well as a daybed suspended from the ceiling with adjustable wrought iron rods adorned with plush tan cushions. Also of wrought iron were a geometric plant hanger on the wall and the brackets for electric lights. Chareau complimented his geometric furniture designs with avant-garde art objects throughout his interior, including a hexagonal sculpture with geometric fish by Jacques Lipchitz, highly fragmented paintings by Fernand Léger, and an abstract figurative drawing by Pablo Picasso. Lord and Taylor put these ensemble choices forth as having a decided influence on contemporary design trends.

Figure 6.2  Sigurd Fischer, photographer, “View of Chareau study at Lord & Taylor,” 1928. Sigurd Fischer Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

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The show did not stop at lauding the potential of the elaborate French interiors for a yet-to-be-determined American permutation of modernism. Rather, Lord and Taylor chose this exhibition as an opportunity to launch formally their new Department of Modern Decoration. Writing about this development in a trade magazine, Shaver remarked on the rapidity with which new expressions in the fine arts of painting and sculpture were adopted into the field of applied arts. This phenomenon was evinced, she claimed, by the mounting enthusiasm for modernism in the home and the overall demand for aestheticism in the objects that make for material comfort.33 Indeed, the acceptance of avant-garde aesthetics, noted by one critic in 1925 as a step toward “national freedom in art,” had gained momentum in the United States as a legitimate direction for domestic design whereby “on a constantly broadening scale, the environment of contemporary life is being animated by new movements in art and craft.”34 To meet that demand, the department store charged its own team of designers to execute five additional rooms in the modern vein.35 The furnishings included in the Lord and Taylor rooms were designed and manufactured in New York, and significantly less expensive than the French designs.36 In the dining room, wood was transformed to shine like metal in a lacquered dining table and console. Experimentation with materials in order to capture the essence of the machine age was also visible in a reflective mirrored tabletop, ribbed panels on the wall, and the metallic-accents of angular light fixtures throughout the ensemble (Figure 6.3). These same aesthetic qualities carry into Lord and Taylor’s version of a

Figure 6.3  Sigurd Fischer, photographer, “View of American dining room at Lord & Taylor,” 1928. Sigurd Fischer Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.



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smoking room, through the textured sheen of the walls and highly polished wood finishes. The exhibition featured two American living rooms, one distinct for its mirrors and mirrored surfaces, the other for its largely beige tones with colorful accents. In another ensemble bedroom, a large bed filled the space, sitting atop a thick, grid-like rug. Overlapping tiers of wood and pewter formed the head and footboard, and versatile cabinets attached at the top, providing multiple surfaces for light fixtures, books, and decorative accessories. The furnishings throughout the Lord and Taylor interiors were often multi-purpose: tables doubled as bookcases, shelves attached to the sides of chairs, and hidden compartments were incorporated into cabinetry. The fine art and textiles throughout the rooms all reflected avant-garde qualities of geometric simplification and abstractions, including densely patterned floral curtains in the dining room; unornamented, linear sculptures on the bookcase in the smoking room; and a flattened, geometric still life hanging on a wall. Shaver believed these spaces provided “the quickest and most effective means for achieving [Lord and Taylor’s] goal” of providing correct and suitable modern interiors to customers.37 Distinct colors and color combinations were of central importance to designers included in the exhibition, and key to enticing customers. As only black and white pictures of these exhibitions exist, the dynamic appearance of the Lord and Taylor rooms require some elaboration of this key formal element lost in the visual documentation. Notes of citrine, tangerine, chartreuse, pink, orange, deep blue, and “parti-colored” ornament popped from room to room.38 Metallic surfaces dominated the interiors through gleaming inlays of gold and pewter as well as sparkling silver accents across painted surfaces and textiles.39 Critics praised the rugs, in particular, for their “unusual arrangement of color.”40 Critic Lewis Mumford, embracing of the new forms and new feelings he found in the Lord and Taylor exhibition, identified color as one of the most important aspects of the overall display and the formal element that would offer the best way for American designers to surpass the French. Likening the grays, yellow-greens, pinks, browns, and silvers that pervaded the show to the “mood” of French artists such as Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, and Maurice de Vlaminck, Mumford describes the French palette as referencing the Parisian landscape: “Picture and decorative background and the city itself have a unity.” Not only this connection between color and place is important, Mumford asserts but also what makes the aesthetic cold, foreign, and remote to a New Yorker. In contrast, the American designs are more “high and intense.” Referencing the work of American painters John Marin, Charles Sheeler, Maurice Prendergast, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Maurer, and Walter Pach as representative of “the dominant American feeling,” he locates the source for a more high-key palette in “our brilliant sunlight, our clear air, the sharp forms of mountain and building, and the equally sharp shadows they cast.” According to Mumford, these qualities, “to say nothing of our buoyant, energetic temperament,” are what would ultimately distinguish American efforts from European precedent. The intangible American spirit was thought to be located in color.41

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Mumford’s review also questioned the future of American modernism emerging from the “breadth, sweep and élan” of Lord and Taylor’s ensembles. From the vantage point of the female viewer, Mumford writes, They come: they look: they handle: they purr: they admire: they are shocked: they are delighted. One notes the women putting themselves in the midst of these rooms and wondering if they could live in them. They have become accustomed to a modern note in shops and smart restaurants; their men have accepted, with confused tolerance, the same sort of thing in their office building. But now these new designs threaten the home. The ladies pause!

Mumford contextualizes this pause, along with his own cautious praise, in terms of a necessary critical eye. Rather than swallowing the French model whole, Mumford insists that American adaptation is essential. The collaboration with American manufacturers, experimentation with color, and the wedding of form and function visible in the displays were the first steps in establishing a truly new national “feeling.”42 In her various commentaries on the exhibition, Dorothy Shaver repeatedly referred to an ideological “spirit” present in the exhibition, finding it to be equally impressive as the modern forms themselves and key to the progressive and democratic potential of the modern movement. The collaborative nature of these rooms—the alliance of artists across media, the wedding of artists and producers, the combining of forces with the end result of greater creativity—was what would reach a greater American population and help them define themselves in modern terms. Lord and Taylor’s savvy melding of European aesthetic models into an American adaptation of domestic modernism tapped into what Shaver called “the psychological moment” in the United States, proven, she said, by an overwhelmingly positive response to the show in the press. The marketing firm Blackwell called it “the most significant venture in appraising the public sympathy with Modern Art in America.” Shaver’s colleague, V. E. Scott, Director of Publicity, praised its impact. In the wake of the exhibition, he was asked to speak to the importance of the modern movement in the United States, responding: “I have been on the contact or ‘firing line’ of the Exposition for more than three months. . . . I have no hesitation in stating that the modern movement is sweeping America and that it is being adopted everywhere.”43

The critical and public response The exhibition did more than just acclimate Americans to European modernism; it also had a nationalist democratic message, as was noted in many of the reviews. For example, art critic Helen Appleton Read wrote that the Lord and Taylor exhibition represented more than an appreciation of European trends in art and design, and held definite promise for national growth. According to Read, the present exhibition was not an imposition of a French interpretation of the modern movement upon the American public but an adaptation of avant-garde style compatible with American



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taste and standards of living. One rooted in the economic, social, and spiritual conditions of the country, rather than in a simple adoption of a faddish aesthetic language.44 Similarly, the Nation Business Review focused on the exhibition’s efforts to forward American growth and enterprise through the development of modern aestheticism in the home. Rather than perpetuating unfavorable comparisons to Europe, the review suggested that the Lord and Taylor exhibition would help the country “assume [its] rightful position among the other nations of the world in the production of lasting and important art” by providing a “proper conception of [its] potentialities” and “giving those potentialities proper development.”45 One New York Times critic also found this to be the most important aspect of the exhibition, and hailed the installation as an “opportunity to show the invention, the talent, the taste of America [sic] in a way to penetrate the consciousness of every citizen.”46 Another review from the New York Times struck a corresponding note, positing that Lord and Taylor provided an opportunity for Americans “to live, look, and move forward” on their own terms that were quite different from the French but equally avant-garde, and calling the spacesaving, labor-saving qualities of the ensembles “Yankee notions.”47 Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, critic Helen Johnson Keyes articulated specifically democratic currents within Lord and Taylor’s exhibition that she found both “pleasant” and “thought-provoking.” Focusing on the egalitarian spirit of the age, Keyes believed everyone could find these ensembles livable. Modernism, as she understood it embodied in the exhibition, had the potential to reach young people by speaking to them “in the language of the world they are experiencing.” Generations of parents and children could abide “in sympathy and mirth” within such artistic environments. Most importantly, “at a time when the democratic experiment is under particular scrutiny,” the exhibition concerned the “pleasure of all classes” by providing a new direction for American home furnishings manufacturing and affordability.48 Public responses to the exhibition recapitulated Lord and Taylor’s alignment of nationalist sentiments with the modern movement. Letters to Lord and Taylor organizers in the wake of the exhibition praise the stylistic qualities of the show and express enthusiasm for an ideologically homegrown modernism they saw in the galleries. In one letter to Dorothy Shaver, visitor S. R. McCandless praised Lord and Taylor’s “courage” in their display of modern decoration, addressing its potential to quell American indifference toward contemporary expression. “It certainly is a stunning exhibition and proof that beauty does not necessarily reside solely in old forms.”49 Visitor Dorothy Mines Waters could not contain her excitement over the ensembles, writing at length to Shaver: When I met you this afternoon at the exhibit, I was too excited to be at all coherent—and it wasn’t until I had set there for awhile and gotten my foot back on the ground that I realized how utterly inadequate and futile my comments to you had been. As a matter of fact I think Lord and Taylor and Miss Shaver have done a perfectly tremendous thing of national importance, and what is better,

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have done it to its utmost perfection. Nothing I’ve seen here or abroad has been so well exhibited, conducted, or so pleasing. Rita Male tells me that the small rooms that thrilled and stimulated me the most, were done by Lord & Taylor. I’m not surprised at this, because in spite of all that the old world says about the gaucherie [sic] and youth of America, in my opinion, when this country adopts and adapts something from the art of decadent civilizations, it impregnates it with bouyency [sic] and life that is always an improvement, within bounds, of course. I think your vision has been most inspiring, and I’m so glad it was Lord & Taylor who did it first.50

The dialogue surrounding the show—from Shaver’s claims to the press’s reaction and the public’s response—epitomizes an early moment in defining the terms of modernity in the United States. By shifting the rhetoric of modernism within these interiors from a cacophony of foreign forms from Europe to a cohesive aesthetic lifestyle exploiting American ingenuity and validating American progress, the exhibition at Lord and Taylor effectively helped chart a new course for modernism in the home.51 The Lord and Taylor exhibition brought new art into the lives of the expanding consumer class, and played a pivotal role in the public demand for contemporary design. Reflecting on it at the end of the decade, Frederick Kiesler emphasized the significance of the Lord and Taylor exhibition as a bellwether of taste in the modern American home, and as a defining moment in the direction of American mass manufacturing of domestic furnishings: “Unprecedented though it may be in the annals of art, a main channel through which the new style will approach popularization is the store. Here is where a new art can come into closest contact with the stream of the mass, by employing the quickest working faculty: the eye.”52 As Kiesler’s assessment of the exhibition suggests, Lord and Taylor’s show presaged the widespread acceptance of modernism within the home through the interwar period, catering to consumers’ pocketbooks as well as viewers’ cultural aspirations for a nationalist modern aesthetic.

Shaping the consumer citizen In the 1920s, a new mentality focused on satisfying consumers’ desires steered commercial developments and nourished an understanding of American democracy founded on consumption.53 Economic prosperity advanced as the preeminent national objective, thereby casting optimism, idealism, and progress in material terms. As economic historian Andrew Yarrow has described, this period was one where “the language of growth, prosperity, free enterprise, and consumption increasingly replaced the language of political liberalism and religion as the vernacular for talking about the nation.”54 Economic citizenship emerged as a way to unify the population through “a secular, lowest-common-denominator national identity and agenda,” to instill patriotism and a popular commitment to the nation, and to conceptualize the United States as different from the rest of the world.55 Within this framework, the



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home—emblem of the American dream—also came to be the repository and the embodiment of materialism. In contrast to the American designers, the French approach to modern interior design was, at the time, grounded in luxury materials and artisan traditions—two characteristics that, when it came to accessibility, reinforced strictly demarcated class lines.56 Criticisms about the excess luxury of French decorative art therefore trickled into most of the commentary surrounding the Lord and Taylor exhibition. Exciting as the new forms, colors, and special relationships in the French interiors were, for American designers they were a source to be adapted and modified. As Lewis Mumford put it, Modern decorative art is a synthesis of two things: new forms produced by mechanical methods of production or suggested by other mechanical objects, and new feelings. On the side of form, a certain severity and rigor is essential to modern art: but this does not hold true of feeling, for the organic opposition, which leads the office worker to spend his evenings in the abandonments of jazz, may also have its counterpart in decoration. On the formal side, then, we can learn lessons from the French artists: but we must discover our own feelings, our own appropriate colors and patterns in our own way.57

In the Lord and Taylor exhibition, French moderne became the foil for an American permutation of modernism. It provided a formal blueprint to work from, but when it came to developing an ideology of modernism “our own way,” the essence and spirit of the new aesthetic movement in the United States would be more egalitarian. It would cater to cultural desires and economic accessibility in order to offer a higher standard of living for consumers. By drawing on the European precedent set at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, and adapting it for an American public, Dorothy Shaver’s Lord and Taylor exhibition of ensemble interiors shaped the course of modernism in the United States from something visually reliant on European influence to a simplified aesthetic ideologically grounded in the American commercial and social order. Lord and Taylor and others’ corporate patronage of contemporary art and design promoted a familiarity with, acceptance of, and desire for, avant-garde aesthetics. When presented together, the forms of variant modern styles were easily packaged as unified and coherent emblems of American industrial and commercial advancement. These efforts paid off, literally and figuratively, as modernism seeped into the nation’s consciousness and as sales of modern home furnishings rose. Even in the decade that would follow, during the Great Depression years, when the idiom of consumer prosperity did not align with the economic reality of the American public, modernist interior designs staged for the public promised forward movement and progress and continued to move merchandise.58 Writing about the spread of ensemble merchandising throughout the Midwest some years later, Arts and Decoration declared, “From all this activity and interest, one thing is certain. With even department stores making the way easy, there is no excuse for not ‘going modern’ if we really want to.”59

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This statement has proved to be prescient. The subsequent flourishing of modernism— on the store floor and in the home—is the result of the unique integration of art and commerce now ubiquitous in America.

Notes 1 “Looking Ahead,” New York Times, March 5, 1928, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 39, Dorothy Shaver Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Hereafter referred to as DSP. 2 Officially organized under the auspices of the Ministry of Commerce, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes ran from April through October of 1925, occupying over seventy acres of land along the banks of the Seine in the center of Paris. For a complete account of the fair, see the twelve-volume Encyclopédie des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes au XXème (Reprint; New York: Garland, 1977). See also Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 3 The United States was invited to participate in the exposition by the French government in May 1923. Despite strong support in favor of United States involvement by prominent figures in the decorative arts and industrial design field, the government declined the invitation in May 1924 on the grounds that there was not enough interest on the part of American manufacturers. Elizabeth McGoey, “Staging Modern Domesticity: Art and Constructed Interior Displays in America, 1925–1940” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013), 41. 4 For a list of exhibitions of modern design, see the appendix in Alastair Duncan, American Art Deco (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), n.p. Marilyn Friedman’s Selling Good Design: Promoting the Modern Interior (New York: Rizzoli, 2003) provides a perceptive look at this trend in New York department stores. I thank her for her insights on the subject. 5 “Looking Ahead.” 6 The exhibition opened to the public on February 29, 1928, and ran for about a month. Unmarked newspaper clipping, DSP, Series 2, Box 15. 7 The publicity and promotional materials for Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art are well documented in the Dorothy Shaver Papers. Further research into the archival records of the company proved difficult, however, as there is no single repository for historical documents. John Joy, director of Imaging and QC at Lord and Taylor, allowed me to look at a small group of extant letters and photographs in May 2011. One of these letters revealed a fire in 1932, which, according to a Lord and Taylor public relations employee, destroyed all of the company’s records. Marion Fenelly to Earle Hill Kincaid, Commander U.S.N., August 19, 1948, Lord and Taylor Department Store, New York City. 8 United States, President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1933), 1: xxxvii. Available online at http:​//www​.arch​ive.o​rg/de​tails​/rece​ntsoc​ialtr​en01u​nitri​ch/pa​ge/n0​. Citations are to the online version. 9 Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 10 Recent Social Trends, 1: liii.



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11 See Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 59. 12 “New Art in Furniture May Change Industry,” New York Times, January 15, 1928. 13 Bernard Steele, “Art Moderne and Its Relation to the American Market,” Art-InTrade 2, no. 2 (February 1929), 9. 14 Paul T. Frankl, “Logic in Modernistic Decoration,” Arts and Decoration 29, no. 3 (July 1928), 55. 15 For a thorough understanding of Frankl’s biography and designs, see Christopher Long, Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 16 Paul T. Frankl, New Dimensions: The Decorative Arts of Today in Words & Pictures (New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1928; New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1975), 38. Citations are to the Da Capo Press edition. 17 Kristina Wilson, “Style and Lifestyle in the Machine Age: The Modernist Period Rooms of the ‘Architect and the Industrial Arts’,” Visual Resources 21 (2005): 3. Wilson returns to this subject and expands her discussion of exhibitions of modern art in The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 18 Edwin Avery Park, New Backgrounds for a New Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927), 169–70, 195. 19 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930). 20 Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 66. 21 Ibid., 85. 22 Press response is well documented in the Dorothy Shaver Papers, including Modern Art in Industry: An Attempt to Find Out Whether We Should Point with Pride or View with Alarm, 5, DSP, Series 2, Box 7, Folder 4. 23 “‘Modern Art’ Gaines Ground in Retaildom—Lord & Taylor’s Exposition of French Art,” unmarked newspaper clipping, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 60. 24 A complete list of participants can be found in the exhibition pamphlet. DSP, Series 2, Box 15. 25 DSP, Series 2, Box 3, Folder 4. Shaver became the first female president of Lord and Taylor in 1956, crediting the success of her efforts with the merchandising department and with the 1928 exhibition in particular. See Barbara E. Scott Fisher, “‘What New Ideas Are Ahead’—The Question, with Miss Shaver at the Helm,” Christian Science Monitor, Boston, February 9, 1946, DSP, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 3. 26 Fashion and Decoration for Executive Training Course, 4–5, DSP, Series 2, Box 3, Folder 22. 27 Fashion and Decoration for Executive Training Course (February 3, 1928), 4–6, DSP, Series 2, Box 3, Folder 22. See also Benson, Counter Cultures, 109. 28 Allene Talmey, “No Progress, No Fun: Dorothy Shaver of Lord and Taylor— Unorthodox Store Strategist,” Vogue 107 (February 1946), 159. 29 Talmey, “No Progress, No Fun.” 30 An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art (New York: Lord and Taylor, 1928), DSP, Series 2, Box 15, p. 7. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. The description of the rooms is drawn from comparisons of the catalogue of the exhibition to images in Dorothy Shaver’s scrapbooks. DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 11.

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33 Dorothy Shaver, “Principles and Practice in the Decorating Services of a Retailer,” House and Garden (February 1928), 7, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 45. 34 “The World of Art,” New York Times, May 3, 1925 and E.A.J. “Modernism in the Home,” New York Times, November 20, 1927. See also McGoey, Staging Modern Domesticity. 35 Shaver, “Principles and Practice.” 36 This was the claim made by Lord and Taylor, although their catalog provides no prices. An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art, 32. 37 Shaver, “Principles and Practice.” 38 “Many Thrills in Modernistic Furniture,” The New York Sun, March 6, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 47. 39 “Lord & Taylor Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art,” unmarked newspaper clipping, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 41. 40 A number of clippings in the Shaver scrapbook address the rugs. For example, see “Art Finds Expression in Furnishings in Exhibit of French Masters’ Work,” The World, February 26, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 42. 41 Lewis Mumford, “Modernist Furniture,” The New Republic, March 21, 1928, 154, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 74. Available online at https​://ne​wrepu​blic.​com/ a​rticl​e/772​70/mo​derni​st-fu​rnitu​re. Citations are to the online version. 42 Lewis Mumford, “Modernist Furniture.” 43 Modern Art in Industry: An Attempt to Find Out Whether We Should Point with Pride or View with Alarm. 44 Helen Appleton Read, An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art, n.d., DSP, Series 2, Box 15. 45 “French Decorative Art Shown by Lord & Taylor,” National Business Review, February 15, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 51. 46 “French Decorative Modes and a Long Art Perspective,” New York Times, March 4, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 44. 47 Although the author does not offer specifics of these qualities, “space-saving” likely refers to the many multi-purpose pieces of furniture and “labor-saving” to the promise of mass-manufacturing modern home furnishings. “Looking Ahead.” 48 Helen Johnson Keyes, “Decorative Art at the Lord and Taylor Exhibition—Jean Dunand,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 30. Keyes also notes, “The oft-repeated remark, ‘yes, but I couldn’t live with it,’ would sound shallow if heard among the quiet harmonies on the seventh floor.” 49 Letter from S. R. McCandless to Dorothy Shaver, March 3, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, p. 57. 50 Letter from Dorothy Mines Waters to Dorothy Shaver, February 29, 1928, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 63. 51 The success of the exhibit, while evident in critical responses, was also measured in more tangible ways through the resulting sales. Just two weeks into the show, Lord and Taylor reported selling over $50,000 worth of the in-house furnishings designed and manufactured in the United States. “Lord & Taylor Exhibit Sells 50,000 American-made Modern Furniture,” unmarked newspaper clipping, DSP, Series 2, Box 15, scrapbook, p. 54. 52 Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, 68.



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53 For an extensive historical analysis of the American consumer movement, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). 54 Andrew L. Yarrow, Measuring America: How Economic Growth Came to Define American Greatness in the Late Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 5. 55 Yarrow, Measuring America, 8. 56 Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France. For an insightful look at how the American permeation of modern domestic design influenced France in the decades to follow, see Ellen Furlough, “Selling the American Way in Interwar France: Prix Uniques and the Salons des Arts Menagers,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 491–519. 57 Mumford, “Modernist Furniture.” 58 By the mid-1930s, modern designs in varying price brackets flourished. See “Modern Home Furnishings Found to Be Consistently Improving in Sales,” Retailing: Home Furnishings Edition 5, no. 36 (September 4, 1933), 3 and “The Fall Fashion Picture at a Glance,” Retailing: Home Furnishings Edition 8, no. 31 (August 3, 1936), 10. 59 “The Modern Sweeps the Corn Belt,” Arts and Decoration 41, no. 1 (May 1934), 53.

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Merchants, Manufacturers, and Museums: The Patronage Networks of Modern Design in the United States, 1930s–50s Margaret Maile Petty

Prior to the twentieth century, patronage in the broadest sense involved a relationship of obligatory reciprocity between a patron and a client maintained largely through bonds of loyalty.1 The simplicity of this agreement allowed for it to be adapted to any number of situations. Accordingly, the context, conditions, and agencies of pre-twentieth-century patronage relationships varied widely in relation to an array of localized factors and were described with terms reflecting these differences. More recently, however, the complexity and variety of such relationships, and the social, cultural, and economic implications of patronage networks have been obscured by the generic use of the term in contemporary English. As Sharon Kettering has suggested the term “patronage” is used without differentiation today to label individual relationships, multiple relationships organized into networks, and larger systems based on such ties and networks.2 This study, which addresses the largely opaque social, cultural, and economic patronage systems typical in the United States during the twentieth century, requires such a granular understanding of patronage. In particular, it is concerned with the role of commercial networks and cultural alliances in the promotion, dissemination, and popularization of modern design in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, key cultural institutions and individuals partnered with major American manufacturers and retail agents in order to bolster the creative production of the nation’s industries, encouraging and supporting what came to be known as “good design.” This was achieved through individual and collective efforts at public education and outreach, which took place in a variety of contexts, including department stores, window shop displays, manufacturers’ showrooms, galleries, and museums. How and where these messages were delivered, and the impact of these patronage networks on the production of consumer goods in the United States during the mid-twentieth century forms the focus of this study. I argue that the successful reception of modern design in the United States owes much to the powerful infrastructure of market-focused patronage. In this period, strong networks and



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alliances developed from shared interests in promoting modern design, which were reinforced through a variety of mechanisms including jointly sponsored exhibitions, commercially oriented competitions, and partnership agreements between designers and manufacturers, and media agents. This chapter maps some of these alliances, exploring their cultural and commercial context, and revealing the crucial role of such patronage systems in the promotion and popularization of modern design in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.

Art and the machine: The cultural repositioning of industrial design In the United States during the later 1920s and early 1930s, the nation’s leading art and cultural critics demonstrated increasing interest in the emergence of a “machine age” aesthetic, particularly as evidence of inherent modernity of American pragmatism. While this period was characterized by an inherent stylistic pluralism, as have all periods in modern American art and design history, in terms of commercial, popular design discourse the functional and anti-ornamental quality of the machine came to popular and critical prominence during the interwar period. Among its clear distinguishing properties, this new “machine” aesthetic rejected the historically derivative ornamental styles of the Victorian period, positioning it an accessible, nonrepresentational aesthetic typology that could provide a foundation for modernism in the United States.3 While the jettisoning of applied decoration and striving toward ever more simplified forms and geometries was characteristic across the various factions of European and American modernism, within the popular press in the United States there was a concerted effort to claim the machine as the progenitor of a new and distinctly modern American style. New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell suggested in 1934 that the seeds of a “national style” could be identified in the products of American industry.4 Reviewing two contemporary exhibitions, the National Alliance of Art and Industry’s 1934 Industrial Arts Exposition and the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition of the same year, Jewell underscored the common interest in both shows in defining a national style informed by the inherent qualities of American commercial and industrial design. Alon Bement, director of the National Alliance of Art and Industry and curator of exhibition, explained the exposition’s objectives to Jewell: “To create in commerce and industry the realization of the importance of design; to demonstrate that beauty and sales value are complementary to our civilization; [and] to emphasize visually that there is a definite trend toward a national style.”5 Such attitudes read against the backdrop of the severe economic and social conditions of the Depression during the 1930s that framed the urgent context for both identifying and elevating an indigenous style stemming from the nation’s industry.6 A month later Jewell reviewed MoMA’s Machine Art exhibition in a separate article, hailing it as one of the “most engrossing ever held” at the Museum. Suggesting the unexpected scope of the items industrial objects on display, Jewell wrote, “I am inclined

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profligately to open my heart to all of the pots and pans and mixing bowls as well, and while the opulent mood endures, to that pair of fascinating refractometers and to at least two of the microscopes, leaving unsung in fact, because of rank prejudice, only the dental instruments.”7 MoMA’s director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. took a much loftier tone, appropriating the words of the English philosopher and critic of the machine age, L. P. Jacks, to provide an intellectual framework for the exhibition. He wrote, if “we are to ‘end the divorce’ between our industry and our culture we must assimilate the machine aesthetically as well as economically. Not only must we bind Frankenstein—but we must make him beautiful.”8 Accordingly, Machine Art set out to claim the products of industrial production as pure expressions of an unadulterated modern aesthetic. Philip Johnson, who curated and designed the exhibition for MoMA, carefully staged select industrial and industrially manufactured objects to enhance their “pure” machine qualities— glamorizing propellers and chemistry beakers with dramatic lighting, clever groupings, and novel materials employed in the exhibition design—such as velvet, sheet copper, molded plastic, and painted colored panels (Figure 7.1).9 Johnson’s Machine Art exhibition, a pivotal moment in the recognition of commercial design within a museum context, was greeted in the press with both surprise and admiration.10 While the many museumgoers perhaps were not prepared for such a display of industrial objects, certainly they were able to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of these objects within the context of an exhibition of modern

Figure 7.1  Installation view of the exhibition “Machine Art”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 5, 1934–April 29, 1934. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. Copyright: unknown. Acc. NO.: IN34.5 © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence.



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design. The receptivity of popular critics and the general public to the cultural and aesthetic elevation of modern industrial design was carefully prompted by Barr, who called upon the philosophers of antiquity to provide a mechanism for understanding the relevance of the objects on display. He wrote, “The beauty of machine art is in part the abstract beauty of ‘straight lines and circles’ made into tangible ‘surfaces and solids’ by means of tools, ‘lathes and rulers and squares.’”11 The passage referred to the catalogue’s opening quote from Plato’s Philebus, in which the philosopher describes the “beauty of shapes” as non-representational and comprised of pure geometries made possible only through the tools of measurement and engineering.12 While such a Neoplatonic framework suited Johnson and Barr’s aims, the weight of Plato’s argument seemed somewhat out of scale with the reality of the toasters, kitchen pots, and cash registers exhibited. As some reviewers noted, Johnson’s installation had more in common with a department store showroom than a contemporary art exhibition.13 Given his expertise as a scholar and patron of the arts, Johnson validated the inclusion of these commercial objects in a museum setting. Unlike Barr, who attempted to distance the objects on display from their commercial context by invoking the platonic discourse of “sensuous beauty,” Johnson more pragmatically translated that beauty into a vehicle for consumer desire, thereby also commercializing the cultural realm.14 The catalogue, in addition to putting forward Barr’s theoretical justification of machine art, also included the name, manufacturer, designer, and price for each object on display. The publication also reminded museumgoers that “unless otherwise specified the object may be purchased from the manufacturer.”15

Window-shopping: Modern art for the masses Modern design, as defined in relationship and response to commercial viability, not surprisingly also found support within the nation’s major department stores and retailers during the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, differences between museum galleries and department store displays became increasingly blurred. In addition to featuring modern design and design elements in prominent display windows, the nation’s leading department stores also hosted more sustained presentations of modern design to the public in a number of well-publicized and popular exhibitions. In New York City, Macy’s held the first major retail exhibition of modern design, Art in Trade, in the spring of 1927, and again in May 1928, the department store hosted an exhibition of modern American and European design. Similarly, Lord and Taylor staged an Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art in February 1928.16 The John Wanamaker Store, Abraham & Straus, Frederick Loeser & Co., and B. Altman & Co. likewise all held similar exhibitions in this period.17 Precocious, if occasionally perplexing in his predictions, the Austrian émigré Frederick Kiesler saw much greater potential however in the design of department store displays, not for such traditional exhibitions, but for artistic expression and communication. His eclectic and occasionally rambling 1929 work on the subject, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display was inscribed with the aim of

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forging “a sound cooperation between public, artist, and industry.”18 Throughout the book Kiesler reiterated this trinity as the foundation of modern art, setting forth his theories on contemporary retail display and proposing display design as a versatile and effective medium for synthesizing modern art, technology, and stagecraft within a consumer context. Indeed, the consumer was the primary focus this new art according to Kiesler, and the retail environment offered the most direct, efficient, and profitable means of engaging the public with modern art. He suggested, “In 1928, a new era began in American retail and manufacturing life. The modern art of the Old World started to take possession of the New World. American business discovered it in an art not only new in itself, but also new in its application as an immense selling force.”19 Kiesler held that the consumer was the ideal patron of modern art (as he defined it) and that shop windows and department stores therefore were a much more direct and appropriate medium than traditional galleries and museums. With narrative flair, he argued, “The department store at home was the true introducer of modernism to the public at large. It revealed contemporary art to American commerce. .  .  . Here was an art gaining acceptance not through slow fostering of its theories and principles in academies and art schools, but simply by planting its creations down in the commercial marts.”20 Kiesler’s embrace of the retail environment as a means of both familiarizing and educating the public about modern art and design was likely informed by his experience designing a series of window displays for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. Prime pedestrian real estate, the Saks window displays provided Kiesler with a medium and means of exploring and promoting his ideas about design.21 His strikingly modern window displays were reported on by the press and received close attention in Architectural Record, which published five-page photo essay of his designs for Saks in September of 1930. The image heavy article contained only photographic credits and the following text: “Window display contributes to the selling of merchandise. Goods and the architectural setting are coordinated, illustrating the close tie-up between selling and display.”22 Furthermore, one might argue that in Kiesler’s window displays, not only was there a close connection between “selling and display” but also between window display and the creation of a popular space and audience for modern art and design. The department store, Saks Fifth Avenue in this case, also served as a patron, commissioning the young, recently emigrated artist to design its window displays. Kiesler’s sustained consideration of display design and his embrace of the commercial context are apparent throughout Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display. Framing the shop window as a way to communicate commercial messages to consumers, he likened the show window to “a silent loud speaker,” able to speak in a language that “appeals to everybody” and that could be “the most successful Esperanto for promoting merchandise.”23 Such a commercial orientation he argued did not estrange display design from artistic practice. Kiesler reasoned that “it may seem a profanation to those to whom ‘Art’ is something outside of life, a balloon filled with sentimentality; but careful consideration will show that the ‘applied’ arts are the link between daily life and the fine arts.”24 Kiesler’s extraordinary synthesis of avant-garde theories and practices set his efforts apart from other advocates of modern window display design. Proudly engaging the



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retail context, he never wavered in his conviction of the potential of the show window for artistic expression and of the retail environment as a vibrant, new center of culture. As he suggested, “The store’s role is expanding. It is no longer a limited commercial factor in the life of the community. It is beginning to exercise a social and cultural influence. Department stores are rapidly becoming social centers; and there are signs that their cultural force will become stronger.”25 In this prediction Kiesler’s instinct were proven quite correct. Over the next two decades department stores and other commercial and retail agents would become increasingly involved in American cultural production and discourse.

Art and commerce: Useful Objects and Good Design at the Museum of Modern Art While Kiesler was bringing art to the masses through the department store show window, MoMA was bringing window-shopping into its galleries. Unlike Kiesler’s aim to grow appreciation for modern art through the co-option of the popular medium of the retail window display, MoMA and a number of other influential museums, galleries, and artist guilds in the United States utilized their own cultural authority to support and encourage public reception of modern design. Building upon their initial endorsement of industrial design with the Machine Art exhibition, MoMA demonstrated its commitment with the hosting of the first Useful Objects exhibition in 1938. Showcasing approximately one hundred household items selected on the basis of their “good modern design,” “availability at retail stores” and retail price of five dollars or less, the exhibition aimed to demonstrate that “it is possible to purchase everyday articles of excellent design at reasonable prices.”26 Unlike Johnson’s rarified exhibition that emphasized the platonic aesthetic qualities of industrially produced goods, Useful Objects sought to educate the consumer on how to identify affordable, well-designed household goods. Conceived as a traveling show, the exhibition was featured in MoMA’s galleries from late September until the end of October, after which the exhibition traveled to venues across the country, from Sarasota Springs, New York, to Los Angeles, California. In a press release, MoMA’s Executive Director Thomas D. Mabry Jr. noted the ambitious scope of the Museum’s traveling exhibitions in the later 1930s, many of which, like Useful Objects, were shown in small museums, colleges, libraries, schools, women’s clubs, and department stores.27 After its inaugural showing, the annual Useful Objects exhibition opened in November and remained in MoMA’s galleries throughout the Christmas shopping season. The focus of the displays remained largely on household items and the criteria held fast to the principles of good design as set forth by the museum—“a design suitable to the specific use; a material adequate to that use and respectfully handled; a concept congruous with the necessary method of production; and an imaginative rendering.”28 Additionally, selected items had to be readily available in retail outlets

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with a price under the maximum dollar amount allowed for an entry. In 1938 this was five dollars, but by 1940 the limit was raised to ten dollars and in 1946, it skyrocketed to twenty-five dollars. More than simply demonstrating the principles of good design, the exhibitions facilitated the consumption of these items. Exhibition goers could purchase for a nominal sum (five cents in 1940) a Useful Objects catalogue, which identified the manufacturers, retail outlets, and prices for each piece in the show. Where available, designers’ names also were listed alongside the retail information. The consumer-friendly shows were very popular, so much so that MoMA continued the yearly exhibitions throughout the war, featuring household objects made of nonpriority materials, objects requested by men and women in the Army and Navy, and supplies necessary for civilian defense.29 That MoMA would develop a long-term strategy to educate museumgoers on the principles of good design through the display of readily available household items might seem slightly unusual upon first analysis, but in tracing the origins of this exhibition, much is revealed in its paternity. It is here, with Edgar Kaufmann Jr., scion of one of the more prominent families actively supporting the modern art in the United States, that MoMA’s role as a patron of American industry and commerce was formalized. Kaufmann Jr., son of Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a Pittsburgh merchant who founded one of the city’s largest department stores, grew up in close proximity to the retail marketplace—but one that actively encouraged and supported the arts.30 Kaufmann Sr. believed that the department store had a responsibility to contribute to “the cultural life of the community” while maintaining good business practices.31 Kaufmann publicly promoted this philosophy, producing an advertisement for the expansion of his department store in 1925 that stated, “Our destiny as a creative nation which sponsors and encourages artistry is assured providing our power to appreciate continues to grow.  .  . . No modern organization is in a better position to observe this artistic evolution than a large department store.”32 Making good on such pronouncements, the show windows of Kaufmann’s Department were employed annually for an exhibition celebrating important cultural events from the preceding year, and its sales floors were utilized from time to time to host traveling art exhibitions, including some organized by MoMA.33 It is possible Kaufmann Jr.’s own pursuit of such aims in his work with MoMA was inspired by his father’s convictions. Both Sr. and Jr. recognized and advocated for the important role of commerce in encouraging knowledge of and appreciation for modern art and design among the public. However unlike his father, Jr. developed his own model of patronage not from within the department store, but from without—by bringing the museum into the retail market. Kaufmann Jr.’s entry into the museum came after a lengthy connoisseurial apprenticeship, involving a period in New York studying painting, travel to Europe in the 1930s, and finally a fellowship at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation. Leaving Taliesin in 1935, he joined the family business as merchandise manager for the home furnishings department. Then, in the later 1930s, Kaufmann approached MoMA with the proposition to organize and curate the museum’s first exhibition of Useful Objects.34 Building on the success of these retail-friendly exhibitions, Kaufmann wrote to Barr in 1940 on behalf of the Kaufmann Department store suggesting the museum sponsor



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a design competition in order to honor the best designs in modern home furnishings. The aims of the competition, as stated in MoMA’s press release, were to identify “a group of designers capable of creating a useful and beautiful environment for today’s living, in terms of furniture, fabrics, and lighting,” and importantly, to “bring the best designs on the market.”35 To achieve this latter aim, the museum partnered with both manufacturers and a number of the nation’s leading department stores to ensure the production and retail availability of winning designs. The Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition, as it became known, was overseen by Eliot Noyes, Director of MoMA’s Department of Industrial Design, in consultation with Kaufmann.36 Noyes, like Kaufmann, believed that such partnerships with industry and commerce allowed the Museum to have an impact on the production and consumption of modern design in the United States. He wrote, [The] production of merchandise is a chain in which the designer depends on the manufacturer and the manufacturer depends on the retailer, who is the final control on what sort of design is presented to the public. . . . As we struggle with the problem of getting better design on the market, we can conjure up a pleasant picture of how it all might work. . . . In this idle dream we picture the retailer as someone with a great sense of his social responsibility and an understanding of the absolutely fundamental importance of good design in relation to his own good business. In this picture, it is the retailer who is the patron of design progress and forward thinking, in order that he may provide better ways of living through what he sells.37

With the Organic Design competition MoMA carefully targeted and nurtured the relationships comprising the designer-manufacturer-retailer network. However, the outbreak of World War II delayed the realization of one of the primary aims of the competition, with the winning designs remaining prototypes rather than becoming mass produced and widely available home furnishings.38 Joining the war effort, Kaufmann left MoMA in 1942 and served with the U. S. Air Force Intelligence until 1946. Returning to the museum after his service, he was appointed Head of the Department of Industrial Design. Returning to his prewar efforts to engage the marketplace in the promotion of modern design, in his new role and capacity at MoMA Kaufmann launched the Good Design program—the most ambitious commercial collaboration the museum had yet realized. Formally announced on November 10, 1949, the joint program brought together the Museum of Modern Art and Chicago’s behemoth wholesale marketplace, The Merchandise Mart, in the creation of an exhibition series identifying and branding objects and furnishings of “Good Design.” The not-insubstantial aims of this program were announced jointly by Rene d’Harnoncourt, MoMA’s director and Wallace O. Ollman, General Manager for the Mart: It is the first time an art museum and wholesale merchandising center have co-operated to present the best examples of modern design in home furnishings. Now, at the mid-point of the century, these two national institutions, whose very

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different careers began just 20 years ago, believe and hope that in combining their resources they are stimulating the appreciation and creation of the best design among manufacturers, designers and retailers for good living in the American home.39

The exhibition program was comprised of three annual shows and was disseminated through publications, symposia, advertising and branding, consumer opinion polls, and a host of public programs. The first two of the annual shows were timed to coincide with the winter and summer home furnishings markets at The Merchandise Mart, while the third and final exhibition was held at MoMA in New York City and featured a selection of objects exhibited earlier in the year. The inaugural Good Design exhibition opened on January 16, 1950, at the Merchandise Mart—the second Monday of the winter home furnishings market. It is significant that the first exhibition would be at the Mart, rather than MoMA, which historically opened traveling exhibitions in the New York galleries before releasing them to be shown elsewhere. In launching the Good Design exhibition series at the Mart, the primacy of the commercial setting was acknowledged as well as the essential role of the retail marketplace in the survival of modern design. As Terence Riley and Edward Eigen have suggested in their study of the program, the principal objective of the Good Design exhibitions was to “inform customers and manufacturers about modern design products and to insure that these products were made widely available through retail markets.” In partnering with the Mart, MoMA gained direct access to manufacturers, wholesale merchants, and consumers, realizing Kaufmann’s and Noyes’s prewar attempt to bring the influence of the museum to bear on the whole of the design, production, and consumption cycle.40 The successful program ran from 1950 to 1955.

For modern living: Culture and commerce on display While more limited in scope and longevity than MoMA’s Good Design program, For Modern Living, an exhibition held at the Detroit Institute of Arts in September of 1949, similarly focused its efforts to support modern design and designers within the context of the American marketplace. Preceding the first Good Design exhibition by a year, the For Modern Living was one of the first comprehensive demonstrations of modern American home furnishings and interior design following the war. Curated by Alexander Girard, the exhibition included traditional object displays as well as a variety of room settings, demonstrating “a new ideal of beauty” in the design of “homes and the other things we live with.”41 As had become common with MoMA’s design exhibitions, the accompanying catalogue included product photographs and information on designers and manufacturers. Like Johnson’s Machine Art catalogue, For Modern Living also had scholarly essays, including one by John A. Kouwenhoven, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, which charted the historical development of design in the United States, and a shorter contribution from Edgar Kaufmann Jr. In his essay, Kouwenhoven



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applied an exceptionalist framework, arguing for the recognition of the United States as the progenitor of modern design, noting the intrinsic modernity of the national character and vernacular traditions. Blaming unwarranted reverence for all things European for the widespread dismissal of domestic design, Kouwenhoven suggested most Americans believed “art” was “something Europe knew more about.”42 Seeking to debunk this myth, he identified the origins of a number of celebrated European furniture designs in much earlier American precedents. For example, he proposed Mart Stam’s acclaimed cantilevered chair of 1926 was simply a refinement of solutions found in American agricultural equipment, pointing to the spring steel cantilevered seat designed for the R. L. Howard mower in 1857. Illustrating a number of other such cases, Kouwenhoven asserted, “in spite of the rather widespread feeling among some Americans that ‘modern’ furniture, like modern painting or modern architecture, is somehow foreign, many of its fundamental techniques and forms are thoroughly indigenous to the United States.” Encouraging consumers to embrace modern design, Kouwenhoven reminded readers that on “historical grounds” Americans “might well feel more at home with a bent plywood cantilevered chair . . . than with the Grand Rapids Chippendale designs which most of us still think are more home-like.”43 Kouwenhoven’s criticism of the typical output of Grand Rapids furniture manufacturers and its continued popularity with American consumers was reiterated by Kaufmann, who in addition to contributing an essay himself, also served on the exhibition’s Committee of Advisors. In his essay Kaufmann suggested that the exhibition had the potential to do “great good as an exceptional and magnificent recommendation of the best of current design.” But that was not all, according to Kaufmann, the exhibition promised to “help build a stronger, happier, healthier community,” if only “manufacturers, designers, retailers, shopmen, technicians, salesmen” would “look and think about what they see.” Kaufmann proposed that the best and most likely successful pathway to the development and growth of good design was by focusing on the ways in which modern design was “commissioned, produced, advertised, and sold.”44 While Kaufmann’s criticisms were directed primarily at the sluggishly traditional American home furnishings industry, in this period a number of small manufacturers began to adopt design-led strategies and corporate identities closely tied to the promotion of modern design. Among the earliest and most prominent of these companies were Herman Miller and Knoll Associates. Hardly surprising, senior leaders from both companies were involved in the Good Design program as well as the For Modern Living exhibition. D. J. De Pree, president of Herman Miller, and Florence Knoll, director of the Knoll Planning Unit for Knoll Associates, served on the For Modern Living Committee of Advisors and designers associated with both companies participated in the exhibition. Florence Knoll, George Nelson, and Charles Eames were each given individual exhibition rooms in which to demonstrate an approach to the incorporation of good design within a modern lifestyle. In addition to being assigned prominent model room displays, Knoll, Nelson, and Eames all served on the exhibition’s Committee of Designers. Such comprehensive and extensive involvement

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was carried over to MoMA’s Good Design program: Charles and Ray Eames designed the first Good Design exhibition held at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in January 1950; Alexander Girard, who joined Herman Miller in 1952, designed two subsequent Good Design exhibitions also at the Mart in 1953 and 1954; in 1953, Herman Miller’s D. J. De Pree served on the January Good Design selection committee; Florence Knoll served on the selection committee for the June exhibition in 1953; and throughout the course of the program Herman Miller and Knoll products were regularly featured in the exhibitions. The For Modern Living exhibition and the Good Design program, as well as the many lesser known and remembered modern design exhibitions from this period were largely focused on educating the public and retail buyers about the principles and merits of modern design. However the popularization of modern design, and indeed the integration of these products and principles into the American lifestyle required more than just educational outreach. Ultimately the success of these campaigns, and modern design, rested upon manufacturers and retailers—as Kaufmann, Noyes, and others argued. The increasing prominence and popularity of modern design in the postwar period would not have been possible without the efforts of a number of key manufacturers who patronized the work of influential designers, and furthermore who promoted, marketed, and retailed their work. A key site of such commercial patronage was the manufacturer’s furniture showroom.

Furniture showrooms Not unlike the efforts described above which situated commercial design within the framework of a cultural exhibition, in the postwar period the wholesale furniture showroom similarly served as an important medium in the promotion of modern design. Employing similar exhibition strategies and rhetoric, manufacturers like Herman Miller and Knoll Associates relied upon their wholesale showrooms to directly engage with and educate their clients about modern design and its role in a modern lifestyle. Indeed the very emergence and expansion of the manufacturer’s showroom was a direct result of the desire among such progressive companies to circumnavigate and destabilize the powerful control of retail buyers. Gilbert Rohde, an outspoken advocate of American modernism and design director for Herman Miller in the early 1930s, criticized prevailing practice within the home furnishings industry as ethically and financially untenable.45 Modernizing the design, materials, and manufacturing processes of American home furnishings was the first step, according to Rohde, but one that would have limited effect if the industry’s powerful and inhospitable distribution channels were allowed to continue. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, manufacturers’ goods were represented at seasonal wholesale furniture markets by commissioned salesmen; buyers from large retail concerns would travel to the markets, review the lines on offer, and place orders with these salesmen. This system afforded the retail buyers great influence and control of what products retail customers would see.46 Herman Miller’s sales manager, Jim Eppinger, considering this situation, proposed the introduction of an independently



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Figure 7.2 Herman Miller showroom, Chicago Merchandise Mart, circa 1939, designed by Gilbert Rohde. Courtesy of the Herman Miller Archives. run manufacturer’s showroom.47 De Pree and Rohde supported this position, agreeing that company run showrooms would provide Herman Miller with greater agency over the presentation of their products and would provide a means of sustained contact with their customers. Herman Miller opened its first independent showroom in The Merchandise Mart in 1939, followed by a second in early 1941 located at One Park Avenue in New York City (Figure 7.2). Both were designed and styled by Rohde to demonstrate the modern home furnishings he designed for Herman Miller in a didactic life-like setting. Following Rohde’s unexpected death in 1944, De Pree brokered an agreement with George Nelson in August of 1945 to provide continued design direction for Herman Miller. Like Rohde before him, Nelson criticized the staid practices of the industry, arguing that they continued to have a crippling effect on both manufacturing and stylistic innovations.48 Noting in particular the importance of driving representation in the marketplace, Nelson wrote, “The retailer is the man who stands between the progressive manufacturer and the public. . . . Most buyers are not sympathetic to new ideas. The manufacturer knows it and generally conforms.”49 Over the next five years Nelson endeavored to overcome such problematic industry-wide practices, illustrating how a manufacturer could successfully produce, market, and sell modern design in the United States. To achieve this aim, Nelson oversaw a number of key changes at Herman Miller: he contracted a number of young talented designers—including Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and Paul Lazlo—to produce new, technically and aesthetically innovative designs for the company, developed a modern graphic program for the brand, and redesign and expand the company’s showrooms (Figure 7.3).

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Figure 7.3  Herman Miller showroom, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1949. Courtesy of the Herman Miller Archives. At roughly the same time Knoll Associates also launched a staged and ambitious program to grow its market through flagship showrooms. Beginning with the opening of 601 Madison Avenue in 1948, the expansion of the Knoll showroom empire grew at a feverish pace, with a showrooms opening rapidly over the next year and a half in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Boston, culminating in the opening of the new company headquarters on the twenty-second floor of 575 Madison Avenue in New York City.50 Florence Knoll described the role of the company’s showrooms in establishing and selling the Knoll look: “The [showrooms] were important because we had to do a lot of convincing. At the time there were very few clients who were interested in these ideas. They thought they had to have traditional furniture from Grand Rapids [Michigan]. These showrooms were what really convinced them.”51 Throughout the 1950s both Herman Miller and Knoll Associates utilized their many showrooms to articulate a modern brand identity as well as to convince their clients of the suitability of modern design to the American lifestyle. Synthetizing industrial, interior, and display design within a modern architectural environment, these furniture showrooms contextualized modern home furnishings as elements in



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an abstracted, spatially integrated art form. Utilizing open-plan arrangements, flexible partitioning systems, dramatic lighting, and judicious styling, such manufacturer’s showrooms aesthetically elevated the furniture on display, framing these pieces as significant cultural objects available for purchase.

Conclusion While promoting a number of variations on the theme of modernism and the role of the applied arts in daily life, a host of individuals and organizations—cultural and commercial—contributed to the creation of a substantial patronage network centered on the popular success of modern design. From Johnson’s aesthetically oriented Machine Art exhibition to the ambitious and far-reaching Good Design program, the overlap of commercial interest and cultural objectives collectively provided a significant infrastructure in which modern design could, and did thrive. Both the businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and the artist and architect Frederick Kiesler believed that department store was a center of culture, uniquely suited to the promotion of modern applied art and the communication of its principles and values. Eliot Noyes and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. joined forces under the auspices of MoMA to raise awareness of modern design within the context of the American consumer marketplace, beginning with the Useful Objects exhibition series and continuing with the Organic Design competition. Similar marketplace engagement characterized the efforts of companies like Herman Miller and Knoll, which pioneered a manufacturer-friendly distribution model through the creation of independently run wholesale furniture showrooms. A diversity of programs aimed at educating manufacturers, retailers, design professionals, and the public about modern design took place in parallel in a variety of contexts—from department stores to museum galleries to manufacturers showrooms—and were informed by the objectives of the nation’s leading cultural and commercial organizations. Indeed, MoMA’s 1929 charter stated that it would “encourage and develop the study of the modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life.”52 Certainly such aims, grounded in a shared belief in the overwhelming force and potential of the marketplace, were common among supporters of modern design. As Kaufmann Jr. described, “In practical life, the agencies of production and distribution are so established that a single design may well become part of the surroundings or equipment of hundreds of thousands of people. Never before has design been so influential, its study so complex, or its evaluation more necessary.”53 The marketplace, when supported by retailers appreciative of the value of modern design and supplied by manufacturers knowledgeable in the principles of good design, had the capacity to achieve exponential positive effect among American consumers. Not solely focused on the economic potential of the design-productionconsumption cycle, many patrons of modern design, like Kaufmann Jr. and D. J. De Pree believed that social and cultural gains were possible as a cumulative outcome of good design. Kaufmann Jr. proposed that “modern industrial design springs from

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an application of the principles of modern design to the needs of an industrialized community.”54 Similarly, De Pree emphasized the progressive role of design in the community, suggesting the company should: “Do our share to a) build economic wealth of the community, b) contribute to moral and cultural betterment of community, c)  improve the living standard of our own people, d) bring the satisfactions that people need today.”55 The patronage networks for modern design that emerged in the 1930s and developed throughout the 1940s and 1950s were both complex and diverse in their mechanisms and orientations, but were largely unified in their objectives. Modern design was promoted as a means of stimulating the nation’s economy, while also proving a higher quality of life, which included both the moral and cultural life of the American public. The networks of patronage that supported and encouraged modern design in the United States did so with the intention of not only improving the products of American industry, but also better educating the public of the social, cultural, and economic benefits of good design. Whether or not one agrees with such claims, or even if such benefits could ever be demonstrated, the close knit of these patronage networks have largely shaped our understanding of “good design,” determining which designers history remembered, and the continuing market relevance of much of the modern design from this period.

Notes 1 Sharon Kettering, “Patronage in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 839–62. 2 Kettering, 839. 3 The term “machine age” is used here in reference to a period roughly bookended by World Wars I and II, during which the machine, its manifestations, its products, and its promise served as a defining force in American culture. Richard Guy Wilson, The Machine Age in America: 1918–1941 (New York: Harry N. Abrams/Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2001), 16. 4 Edward Alden Jewell, “Art Scans Its Niche in Industrial Plan,” New York Times, February 26, 1934, 22. 5 The Industrial Arts Exposition was organized and directed by designers and was sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry. See Jewell, “Art Scans Its Niche in Industrial Plan,” 22. 6 Nicholas P. Maffei argues that the discourse addressing design and industry in the 1930s posited that modern design methods and aesthetics had the capacity to “streamline consumption, wed beauty to industry and reverse the country’s financial and societal woes.” Nicholas P. Maffei, “Both Natural and Mechanical: The Streamlined Designs of Norman Bel Geddes,” The Journal of Transport History 30, no. 2 (December 2009): 141–67, quote on 141. 7 Edward Alden Jewell, “The Realm of Art: the machine and abstract beauty,” New York Times, March 11, 1934, X12. 8 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Forward,” Machine Art (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Museum of Modern Art, 1994 [Sixtieth-Anniversary ed.]).



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9 For period accounts, see Walter Rendell Storey, “Machine Art Enters the Museum Stage,” New York Times, March 4, 1934, SM12 and Edward Alden Jewell, “Machine Art Seen in Unique Exhibit,” New York Times, March 6, 1934, 21. See also Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 152–60. 10 However, Johnson’s MoMA exhibition was not the first to celebrate the new style. Six years earlier Jane Heap, editor of avant-garde art journal The Little Review, curated the Machine Age Exposition in New York City. See Susan Noyes Platt, “Mysticism in the Machine Age: Jane Heap and The Little Review,” Twenty/One, Art and Culture 1, no. 1 (1990): 18–44. 11 Barr, Jr., “Forward,” Machine Art. 12 Plato, as translated by Johnson in the opening pages of the catalogue: “These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely.” Philip Johnson, “History of Machine Art,” Machine Art. 13 A critic from The New Yorker described with some irony, “The place itself looks, more than anything else, like a very elaborate hardware store.” Appearing in Talk of the Town, “Machine Art,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1934, 18. 14 Barr, Jr., “Forward,” Machine Art. 15 Ibid. 16 For more on Lord and Taylor, see Elizabeth McGoey’s chapter in this volume. 17 Marilyn Friedman, Selling Good Design: Promoting the Early Modern Interior (New York: Rizzoli, 2003). 18 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930). 19 Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 66–67. 20 Ibid., 66. In the 1920s and 1930s show window display was rapidly developing as a unique design discipline, with a number of designers becoming well known for their displays. See, for example, “Staging Plays for Window Shoppers,” Nations Business 24, no. 8 (August 1936): 18–20 and “The Art of Display,” Interiors 105, no. 9 (April 1946): 89–113. 21 On Kiesler, see Laura M. McGuire, “A Movie House in Space and Time: Frederick Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema, New York, 1929,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2007): 45–78, quotation on 72–73. 22 “Shop Window Displays: Saks and Company, New York City,” Architectural Record (September 1930): 215–19. 23 Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 9. 24 Ibid., 14. 25 Ibid., 74. 26 Press release no. 38831–23, The Museum of Modern Art, August 31, 1938, https​://ww​w.mom​a.org​/rese​arch-​and-l​earni​ng/re​searc​h-res​ource​s/pre​ss_ar​chive​s/193​ 0s/19​38/1 (accessed October 28, 2017). See also “Beauty Begins in the Kitchen,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 29, 1938, 6. 27 Press release no. 381013–27, The Museum of Modern Art, October 13, 1938, https​:// ww​w.mom​a.org​/moma​org/s​hared​/pdfs​/docs​/pres​s_arc​hives​/460/​relea​ses/M​OMA_1​ 938_0​040_1938-10-13_381013-27.pdf?2010 (accessed October 28, 2017). 28 Helen Johnson Keyes, “Good Design in Useful Objects,” The Christian Science Monitor, December 17, 1940, 8.

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29 Harvey A. Anderson and Alice M. Carson, “Useful Objects in Wartime: Fifth Annual Exhibition of Useful Objects under $10.00,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 2 (December 1942–January 1943): 3–21. 30 Kevin Gray, “Modern Gothic,” New York Times Magazine, September 23, 2001, http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​01/09​/23/m​agazi​ne/mo​dern-​gothi​c.htm​l?pag​ewant​ed=al​ l (accessed October 28, 2017). 31 Terence Riley and Edward Eigen, “Between the Museum and the Marketplace: Selling Good Design,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, Studies in Modern Art, vol. 4 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 150–75. 32 As quoted in Riley and Eigen, 153. 33 Ibid., 153. 34 Press release no. 1488, “Biographical Notes on Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and Finn Juhl,” The Museum of Modern Art and The Merchandise Mart, 1951 https​://ww​w.mom​ a.org​/moma​org/s​hared​/pdfs​/docs​/pres​s_arc​hives​/1488​/rele​ases/​MOMA_​1951_​ 0006. pdf?2010 (accessed October 28, 2017). 35 Press release no. 40916–54, “The Museum of Modern Art Announces Terms of Two Design Competitions for Home Furnishings,” The Museum of Modern Art, September 30, 1940, https​://ww​w.mom​a.org​/moma​org/s​hared​/pdfs​/docs​/pres​s_arc​ hives​/630/​relea​ses/M​OMA_1​940_0​ 061_1940-09-16_40916-54.pdf?2010 (accessed October 28, 2017). 36 While not formally a member of the department at this time, Kaufmann had been appointed Chair of the Museum’s Industrial Design Advisory Committee by Barr, and in this capacity was able to provide much support for Noyes and in particular with the Museum’s trustee committees. See Gordon Bruce, Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2006), 58–59. 37 Eliot Noyes, report on the department of industrial design, MoMA, NY, June 16, 1941; as quoted in Bruce, 67, note 35. 38 Even so, the Organic Design competition did foster the career of at least one of the winning designers, Charles Eames. The first-prize awarded molded plywood chair designed by Eames and Eero Saarinen was further refined and developed by Eames during the war, and was eventually brought to the marketplace through partnerships with the Evans Product Company and Herman Miller. Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 201–17. 39 Press release 491109–78, November 9, 1949, “Museum of Modern Art and the Merchandise Mart Announce Continuing Series of Exhibitions in a Joint Program: ‘Good Design’” The Museum of Modern Art and The Merchandise Mart, https​:// ww​w.mom​a.org​/moma​org/s​hared​/pdfs​/docs​/pres​s_arc​hives​/1371​/rele​ases/​MOMA_​ 1949_​0085_1949-11-09_491109-78.pdf?2010 (accessed October 28, 2017). 40 Riley and Eigen call attention to the unusual character and objectives of the program, writing, “Good Design was unique in seeking to expand and transform the commercial design field in the United States,” 152. 41 E. P. Richardson, “Introduction,” in An Exhibition for Modern Living, The Detroit Institute of Arts, ed. Alexander Girard and W. D. Laurie, Jr. (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts; J. L. Hudson Company, 1949), 7–8. 42 He wrote, “Americans have long been adept at inventing things to meet specific needs of people living in a democratic society, and at designing them in ways appropriate to modern technology. The nature of our political and social institutions, and our



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relative unfamiliarity with traditional form and techniques, has encouraged such invention and design. But, so great was the prestige of the older modes of expression among cultured people, that we could not easily believe things made in the new modes were in any sense ‘art.’” John A. Kouwenhoven, “The Background of Modern Design,” in An Exhibition for Modern Living, The Detroit Institute of Arts, 11. 43 Kouwenhoven, “The Background of Modern Design,” 14. 44 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “Modern Design in America Now,” in An Exhibition for Modern Living, The Detroit Institute of Arts, 27. 45 Gilbert Rohde, “Does the Furniture Industry Continue to Live in a World of Long Ago?” Furniture Retailing, Home Furnishings Edition, May 14, 1934. On the early history of the Herman Miller Furniture Company, see Marilyn Neuhart and John Neuhart, The Story of Eames Furniture, Book 2 (Berlin, Germany: Gestalten, 2010), 451–89. 46 Rohde, “Does the Furniture Industry Continue to Live in a World of Long Ago?” D. J. De Pree explained the challenges of this system: “The pressure of the buyers was transmitted through the salesmen to the factories and virtually reduced them to mere fabricators with very little control of what they wanted to make and almost no control of the sale of their product to the people who were going to be long time users of it. This semi-annual and sometimes quarterly change of designs resulted in a short life for each design, many closeouts sold at damaging discounts, and almost constant sample making for new lines.” As quoted in The Story of Eames Furniture, Book 2, 464. 47 Marilyn Neuhart and John Neuhart suggest that the idea to pursue independently run company showrooms largely belonged to Herman Miller’s sales manager, Jim Eppinger, The Story of Eames Furniture, Book 2, 477–79. 48 George Nelson, “The Furniture Industry: Its Geography, Anatomy, Physiognomy, Product,” Fortune, January 1947, 106–11; 171–72; 174, 176, 178, 181–82. Secondary sources addressing Nelson’s Fortune article include Stanley Abercrombie, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 84–90; and The Story of Eames Furniture, Book 2, 501–04. 49 Nelson, “The Furniture Industry,” 174. 50 On 601 Madison, see “Knoll Associates Achieve Intimacy and Openness in a Colorful Plan,” Interiors 108, no. 3 (October 1948): 108–11; “Spacious but intimate, simple but subtle showroom for Knoll Associates, Inc., New York,” Architectural Record 104 (November 1948): 92–99. For 575 Madison, see “Walls of Air, Color, Light and Water,” Architectural Forum 94, no. 5 (May 1951): 138–43. 51 Paul Makovsky, “Florence Knoll Bassett: The Conversation,” Metropolis 20, no. 11 (July 2001): 11. Furthermore, in the opening pages of the small chronological guidebook that Florence Knoll compiled to accompany the papers she donated to the Archives of American Art in 2000, she describes showroom design as one of the principle concerns during her years heading the Knoll Planning Unit. Box 1, Folder 1, Florence Knoll Bassett papers, 1932–2000. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 52 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “The Department of Industrial Design,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1946), 2–14. 53 Kaufmann, Jr., “The Department of Industrial Design,” 2. 54 Ibid., 3. 55 D. J. De Pree, Report to the Members of the Executive Committee, January 5, 1957; Herman Miller Archives, acc. no. 10, box 12.

8

Marketing Hawaii: Eugene F. Savage and the Matson Murals (1938–40) Elizabeth B. Heuer

In 1938, Lloyd B. Myers, Art Director at the San Francisco-based advertising firm Bowman, Deute, Cummings, commissioned American artist Eugene F. Savage to produce a series of six paintings to be reproduced as menu covers for the SS Lurline, the Matson Navigation Company’s newest luxury ocean liner. Envisioning the project “in the mood of fine art,” Myers chose the artist for his distinguished reputation as a muralist of regional themes in an art deco style.1 Savage developed the project as a series of large panels, each eight-by-four feet, painted in oil on canvas.2 Each mural features a celebratory vision of Hawaiian culture. By the time Savage’s murals were delivered to Matson’s San Francisco office in 1940, war in the Pacific was imminent. As a result, the paintings were immediately placed in storage as Matson’s fleet of luxury ocean liners were entered into war service. After the war, Savage’s series of paintings were displayed individually or in sets at the Royal Hawaiian hotel as well as the Matson’s corporate offices in San Francisco and New York. In 1947, Matson had the paintings reproduced as twelve inch by twenty-one inch lithographs and distributed as menu covers for passengers aboard Matson’s “white ship” fleet. This chapter examines how Savage’s Hawaiian paintings represent a complex negotiation among a corporation, advertising agency, and artist. Indeed, throughout the early twentieth century American corporations and advertising agencies enlisted fine art to create an aura of prestige around a company or product, while artists, in turn, created art for corporate advertising in order to broaden their audience.3 While being decorative, the works reflect Matson’s desired marketing strategy for packaging Hawaii for tourist consumers. Generally, tourist images tend to be shaped by the expectations of the tourist market that will consume them, thus creating a closed, self-perpetuating system of illusion.4 Indeed, as Dean MacCannell demonstrates in his classical study The Tourist: The New Theory of the Leisure Class, tourism is an “empirical relationship between a tourist, a site, and a marker.”5 While constructing and perpetuating celebratory visions of Hawaii for the tourist gaze, these images simultaneously engage Matson’s corporate philosophy and motto Imua! (the Hawaiian word for progress). Savage’s commission was part of the Matson Corporation’s calculated effort to define, organize, and control the popular perception of the Islands. Enlisting common



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markers of Hawaiiana made popular by the Matson Corporation, Savage’s large multifigurative compositions offer a constructed vision of not only ancient Hawaiian culture but also modern Hawaiian history. In this regard, these images must be read in relation to concerns over Hawaii’s racial tensions as well as debates concerning the Islands’ suitability for statehood. Furthermore, this chapter explores whether the works reflect Savage’s engagement with the ideologies of modern primitivism as well as his disdain for modern progress. Established in 1882 by Captain William Matson, the Matson Navigation Company of San Francisco served as the principle carrier of food, supplies, and merchandise to the Hawaiian Islands. Affiliated with Hawaii’s “Big Five,” a name given to a group of landholding corporations who controlled the Islands’ plantation-based economy, Matson soon established a shipping monopoly that controlled all routes between Hawaii and North America.6 By the late 1920s, the Matson Company underwent an expansion of its operations that would capitalize on increased interest in Hawaii as a tourist destination. Introducing a fleet of deluxe passenger ocean liners known as the “white ships,” Matson provided modern luxury service from the West Coast to Honolulu. During the five-day journey, passengers on the “white ships” enjoyed richly appointed accommodations in the manner of a grand tropical resort. Public rooms, such as lounges, reading rooms, dining salons, and dance pavilions, featured the finest furnishings and tropical décor. In addition to displaying paintings of seascapes, island views, and tropical botanicals, Matson’s sunset colored walls and ceilings were decorated with fanciful chinoiserie featuring garden and sea motifs. Matson did not leave the tourist experience of Hawaii to chance. In order to shape mainland island fantasies, the company organized a series of staged spectacles. Recalling the royal Hawaiian greeting British Captain James Cook allegedly received when he was welcomed to the Island as a god, Matson’s “white ships” pulled into Honolulu Harbor and were met by outrigger canoes carrying native entertainers dressed as Kamehama I and his retinue. Disembarking tourists or malihinis were welcomed with aloha greetings and draped with fragrant flowers by Matson’s lei girls while hula dancers swayed to the music of the Royal Hawaiian band. While fulfilling tourists’ expectations of Hawaii as an island paradise, Matson posited the tourist as the Islands’ new imagined aristocracy. Indeed, these staged spectacles permitted wealthy tourists to act out fantasies of royalty while affirming the hierarchies that sustained white colonial power.7 Laden with leis and clutching Matson travel guides, tourists were whisked away by cab to Matson’s Royal Hawaiian hotel on Waikiki beach. Opening in 1927, the hotel offered accommodations fit for a king or queen. Nicknamed the “Pink Palace,” it was designed to match the opulence and grandeur of the “white ships.” Built on ancient royal Hawaiian grounds, the hotel featured British colonialist décor and white glove service. While wealthy guests spent days playing golf and sunbathing, they were entertained nightly with lavish lu’au feasts and hula performances as well as pageants recalling Hawaiian history.8 After the requisite week ashore, sun-bronzed tourists clad in newly acquired aloha shirts, muumuus, and leis returned to the ship and congregated deck-side for the

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Matson tradition of tossing leis into the ocean to ensure visitors return to the island in the future. This event was often accompanied by the Royal Hawaiian band performing the song “Aloha ‘Oe” (Farewell to Thee), written by Queen Liliuokalani in 1877.9 Despite the devastating economic effects of the Great Depression that were being felt across the country, Matson’s “white ships” were steadily booked as affluent Americans vacationed in the Islands in ever-increasing numbers. In the mid-1930s, Matson’s packaged experience for a two-week trip to Hawaii averaged nearly $300 per person.10 Behind sugar and pineapple, tourism emerged as the third largest industry in Hawaii. In 1938, Matson tasked advertising executive Lloyd Myers with developing new promotional materials for their newest “white ship,” the SS Lurline. According to Myers, “First considerations on the Lurline menu covers were a desire for an impressive cover that would be very different from those previously used and to make it so attractive that everyone who saw one would want it for keeps.”11 Deciding on the theme of the “pageantry of Hawaii,” Myers selected Savage, rather than a commercial illustrator, in order to produce imagery that would appeal to the refined tastes of Matson’s affluent passengers.12 The William Leffingwell Professor of Painting at Yale University from 1928 to 1958 and an Academician of the National Academy of Design, Savage also served on the National Commission of Fine Arts from 1933 to 1941. Earning numerous accolades and appointments throughout his career, he produced a variety of notable murals across the United States, including those for the Elks Veterans Memorial, Chicago (1926) and the Butler Library at Columbia University (1933). In addition to courthouse and post office murals in New York and Washington, DC, Savage also created an extensive mural program that commemorated the first one hundred years of Texas history for the Hall of State in Dallas in 1935. Later, he also created mosaic murals such as those at the Epinal War Memorial, France (1952), the Queens County Courthouse, New York (1960), and the First National City Bank, New York (1962).13 According to Myers, Savage was attracted to the Matson project because it provided him an opportunity to represent indigenous Hawaiian culture.14 Following the ideology of modern primitivism, Savage regarded “primitive” societies as both morally and culturally superior to industrialized civilizations.15 In this regard, he drew inspiration from Native cultures. Prior to his Hawaiian murals, Savage began a three-decade study of the Seminoles of south Florida. Resulting in over three-dozen paintings, his pictorial responses to the Seminoles in the Everglades characterize his concern for the plight of Native culture as tourism, land development, and environmentalist debates threatened their traditional way of life. Reflecting on the Seminoles’s connection with the natural world, Savage stated, The white man’s civilization has been their ruin. They exploit nothing and are ruled by their chief and medicine man. They live off nature, but instead of going out and shooting several deer and catching a mess of fish, they shoot or catch one and leave the rest. That is the way they conserve their resources. White man could learn a lesson from them.16



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Savage’s ideas concerning “primitivism” and human progress were influenced, in part, by the writings of eighteenth-century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico. First translated into English by R. G. Collingwood in 1913, Vico’s 1725 text The New Science outlines a cyclical theory of human development and progress.17 According to Vico, humans pass through successive stages of birth, development, decay, and death. The first stage called the “Age of Gods” refers to a bestial condition in which humans are ruled by supernatural powers. At this primitive stage religion and mythology are developed. In Vico’s second stage of progress called “Age of Heroes,” select families rise up to rule a society. Within these oligarchies patricians rule over plebeians and slaves. During the final stage, the “Age of Man,” legal systems develop and lower classes demand equal rights. As new technologies emerge, traditional customs fade. Corruption and dissolution also marks the “Age of Man.” The cycle ends with conquest, as civilization reverts back to barbarianism and the cycle repeats.18 In his unpublished essay titled “The Triumph of Conation,” Savage references Vico’s cyclical theory of history and applies it to his critique of modern society. He notes, “To know the form and pattern of change in human affairs is to know History; not to know it is to relive its disasters and pay for them.”19 Critical of society’s unbalanced preoccupation with science and technology, Savage stated, “we have gone on an intellectual and scientific spree. When rationalism appears on the scene, culture dies.”20 He later reiterates his point stating, “Rationalism is an ever present and deadly accompaniment of decline, leading to ruin unless sources of rejuvenation are found and put in force.”21 While admiring Native lifeways, Savage also venerated “primitive” art forms and the modes of creation that lay behind them. Noting that modern art had fallen victim to intellectualism and science, he stated that “‘primitive’ artists did not record what they saw, but rather what they felt in the forces of nature.”22 In May 1938, Savage travelled from New York to San Francisco where he boarded a Hawaii bound “white ship.” The Matson Corporation provided him with lodgings at the Royal Hawaiian hotel, which included a small studio space.23 While collecting postcards and photographs of Hawaii as source material for his murals, Savage also painted en plein air, creating dozens of small oil studies depicting tropical plants as well as landscape views.24 Among the locations he visited are notable historical sites such as Opaikoa Falls near the ancient temple poli’ahu Heiau, the ancient royal sanctuary at Kualoa Valley, the landing site of Kamehama I at Kailua beach as well as the landing site of Captain Cook at Kealakekua Bay. Savage viewed Hawaii as one of the finest laboratories in the world. Speaking of the landscape in general he said, “Its coloring was almost unbelievable, but that the element of form, line, and pattern surpassed even the coloring of the landscape.”25 A family run commercial village, the Lalani Village provided Savage with a detailed, albeit staged, vision of traditional island life. Adjacent to the grounds of the Royal Hawaiian hotel, the Lalani Village opened in 1931 as a living museum, archive, school, and tourist entertainment center.26 Here tourists could observe taro root being prepared, sample poi, and watch the hand production of bark cloth and

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flower leis. Dedicated to the preservation and education of fading Hawaiian lore, the Village also offered lectures on Island history and classes in language, hula, music, food preparation, surfing, and fishing. Savage believed that “ancient Hawaiian life .  .  . yielded a more balanced and harmonious existence than our present mode of living does.”27 It was his impression that Hawaiians incorporated their religion into every occupation of the day and thus lifted commonplace employment to an inspired plane. He viewed Hawaiian chants as “literature in a high form” and thought that their sculpture “perhaps surpasses some of the finest examples of modern sculpture.”28 For three months, the artist travelled around the islands sketching, making color notes, and gathering historical information to use in his paintings before returning to his studio in Ossining, New York, where he spent the next two years developing the murals. Savage’s multi-figurative narrative paintings flow together in a general chronological history of Hawaii old and new. The first in the series, Aloha . . . A Universal Word (Color Plate 8) presents Hawaii as a place known for hospitality: the painting depicts a visiting chief in a double-hulled canoe being welcomed to the island with a presentation of hula, festoons of colorful flower leis, and a bounty of island fruits. The next three panels in the series, Festival of the Sea (Color Plate 9), Island Feast (Color Plate 10), and Pomp and Circumstance (Color Plate 11) celebrate the spirit of Hawaiian ho’okipa (hospitality) with depictions of traditional Island life and culture. As seen in Island Feast jovial natives gather for a traditional lu’au. On the left, men pound taro root into poi while tending a cooking pit (or imu) to prepare kalua pig. Presiding over the imu is a carved wooden figure of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. On the lower right, Islanders are pictured gathering around a King, who wears a feather cloak and is surrounded by red and yellow royal feather standards called kahili. He receives offerings and praise from his faithful subjects while hula dancers and musicians provide festive entertainment. While the first four paintings in the series work together to promote a vision of ancient Hawaii, the last two paintings, A God Appears (Color Plate 12) and Hawaii’s Decisive Hour (Color Plate 13), represent the Islands’ transition from precolonial to postcolonial rule. In A God Appears, Savage paints the arrival of Captain Cook to Waimea Bay in 1778 during the Makahiki harvest festival, whereupon Cook was supposedly mistaken for the god Lono. Here, King Kalaniopuu greets Cook with floral lei. This scene of visitors to the Islands being greeted without resistance reinforces the staged welcome orchestrated by Matson for tourists and contributed to the construction of the trope of “aloha spirit.” Savage’s sixth and final image in the series, which he titled Hawaii’s Decisive Hour, portrays the Annexation Ceremony of August 12, 1898. On the steps of the ‘Iolani Palace, the former royal palace of Hawaii, US Minister Harold M. Sewall swears in Sanford B. Dole as first territorial governor, and American businessmen and plantation owners are shown celebrating their victory over the Hawaiian monarchy as the Hawaiian flag is lowered and the American flag is raised over the palace. Despite his attraction to the Islands’ tropical vegetation and striking geography, Savage reduced Hawaii’s lush landscape down to a stylized backdrop for his colorful



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and festive representations of sensual hula girls and athletic, bare-chested beach boys, and other markers of Hawaiiana. Although offering tourists a vision of Native pageantry, Savage does not represent full-blooded Native Hawaiians; rather, he depicts coquettish hapa-haoles (half-Caucasian and half-Native). His slender figures, with tawny complexions and black hair, have both Polynesian and European facial features. This hapa-haole look identified neither Hawaiians as racially “other,” nor black or Asian. As such, the hapa-haole represented the ideal native. This semi-exotic racial type also matched the appearance of hapa-haoles employed as Native entertainers by the Royal Hawaiian hotel as well as the Lalani Village.29 In the 1930s, Hawaii’s burgeoning tourist economy began to rely heavily on the image of the hapa-haole because of growing racial tensions in the Islands. Hawaii’s diverse racial population resulted from the emergence of a plantation-based economy in the nineteenth century. Early white settlers saw unlimited potential in their rich new environment. Wealthy white or haole landholders, who established sugarcane and pineapple plantations, relied on a plentiful, cheap, and controlled labor force.30 As the Native population resisted being subjugated as convenient agricultural labor, planters imported workers.31 By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of immigrants were brought to Hawaii to work in the plantation system. Immigrants from Portugal, Puerto Rico, China, Japan, and the Philippines soon outnumbered whites and Native Hawaiians. Regarded as racially undesirable, Hawaii’s Asian immigrant population was deemed potentially threatening to the white minority.32 Racial tensions increased in 1931 when Thalia Massie, a twenty-year-old Navy lieutenant’s wife and the daughter of a wealthy and politically powerful Washington, DC, family, alleged that five working class “men of color” kidnapped and raped her as she left a Waikiki nightclub alone.33 That night, police arrested five locals for their role in an unrelated traffic accident. Despite the lack of evidence connecting them to the Massie attack, all five men were charged with rape. Presumed guilty, the men were characterized by the Honolulu press as “thugs” and “degenerates” who savaged an innocent, cultured white woman.34 The defendants were released after a jury mistrial was declared due to a lack of sufficient evidence to convict. As an act of vigilante justice, Massie’s husband, her mother and two others participated in the kidnapping and murder of one of the accused, Joseph Kahahawai. Caught by police transporting Kahahawai’s body, they were arrested and charged with murder. The four were tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to ten years hard labor. Following the conviction, outrage erupted in the mainland press. Deeming Kahahawai’s murder an acceptable honor killing, the national media published racially inflammatory articles and declared Hawaii to be “unsafe for white women and not a very good place for self-respecting civilized men.”35 Exposing the depth of racial tension on the Islands, New York papers warned potential tourists that Hawaii was on the verge of an impending race war.36 The Islands’ paradisiacal image was further threatened by growing labor strife as discontent grew among Hawaii’s immigrant workforce. Non-haole had little opportunity for upward mobility and plantation labor was organized according to a racial hierarchy with Portuguese at the top and Japanese and Filipinos at the bottom.37

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Hawaii’s labor force provided fertile soil for the implementation of radical ideas.38 Japanese immigrants were among the first to introduce socialism to the Islands. Small, short-lived publications such as Yoen jiho and Jiryu circulated articles on socialism and Marxism among Hawaii’s Japanese community. According to Gerald Horne, the Japanese were instrumental in organizing the Communist party in Hawaii.39 Throughout the 1920s, Japanese and Filipino sugarcane workers organized small strikes to protest harsh working conditions and unfair wages.40 However, tensions quickly escalated as plantation owners refused to recognize or bargain with striking workers. In 1924, the Hanapepe strike at the Castle and Cooke sugarcane plantation left sixteen Filipinos dead as well as four policemen.41 Labor strife was not limited to Hawaii’s plantations. Trade labor unions, such as longshoremen and cannery employees also rebelled against the haole elite. In 1938, a violent clash known as the “Hilo Massacre” began when seventy police officers tried to break up a dockside rally of multiethnic protestors. Members of the “Big Five,” in particular the Matson Corporation, colluded with the local police to suppress the strike. Responding with tear gas and bullets, police wounded fifty people, including women and children.42 As labor unrest provided an immediate challenge to economic and political order, on the eve of World War II other pressures surfaced. Growing tensions in the Pacific between the United States and Japan made Americans even more concerned about Hawaii’s large Japanese populace. By the late 1930s, the Japanese comprised nearly 30 percent of the Islands’ population.43 Negative publicity from the mainland press concerning Hawaii’s race and labor tensions threatened the Islands’ growing tourist industry. In response, Matson sought to control the popular perception of Hawaii by shaping the “destination image” and controlling tourist experiences.44 Indeed, whoever brokered the presentation of Hawaiian culture would determine the development of tourism in Hawaii. Matson’s advertising and promotional strategies initially focused on depictions of shipboard pleasures, such as glamorous nightlife, luxurious accommodations, decadent meals, and outdoor-deck activities. However, the marketing of Hawaii in the 1930s would depend increasingly on an image of the islands populated by Native Hawaiians and sustained by Hawaiian practices.45 As such, the tourist industry commodified Hawaiian cultural practice in order to perpetuate a primitivist fantasy of Native Hawaiians living in the past as romantic savages. To this end, Matson packaged Hawaiian topoi for the tourist gaze. As John Urry argues in The Tourist Gaze, “People have to learn how, when, and where to gaze.”46 Obscuring the Islands’ Asian population from the tourist gaze, Matson employed Native Hawaiians as well as hapa-haoles as entertainers and performers.47 Although the Japanese were the single largest segment of Hawaii’s population in 1930, tourist industries were careful to obscure their presence. Asians employed in the tourist industry generally worked behind the scenes as cooks or in maintenance services. To promote the Matson experience and, in turn, repair the Islands’ tarnished image on the mainland, in 1934 the company teamed with the Hawaiian Tourist



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Bureau to hire the San Francisco advertising firm Bowman, Deute, Cummings.48 As part of a comprehensive campaign, the firm organized courtesy vacations to Hawaii aboard Matson’s “white ships” for feature writers and editors from mainland papers and journals, such as Vogue, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.49 This strategy resulted in nationwide publicity in the form of editorials and articles that presented Hawaii in a favorable light. As part of this coordinated media blitz, Bowman launched a weekly radio show called “Hawaii Calls,” which broadcasted an audio postcard of Hawaiian music and songs to the mainland. Taking advantage of a captive onboard audience, Matson used the ocean voyage to reinforce tourist experience. Vacationers received informational pamphlets that offered insights into Hawaiian history, language, legends, and customs. In addition, shipboard theaters exhibited films not only to entertain travelers during the ocean voyage but also to instruct and prepare tourists for what they should see and experience during their visit.50 Passengers could view short documentary-style promotional films featuring notable sites in Honolulu, the Island’s pineapple plantations, volcanoes, as well as scenic views of Oahu’s beaches, mountains, and tropical gardens.51 The theater also screened commercial Hollywood films, such as Waikiki Wedding (1937) and Honolulu (1939), which featured storylines built around island romance between natives and mainlanders. Bowman also recruited illustrators and photographers to craft promotional images that would make Matson synonymous with the island paradise. This desire to associate Hawaii with Matson is clearly evidenced by their new advertising slogan, “The Lurline is Hawaii.”52 In 1934, Bowman hired San Francisco illustrator Frank McIntosh to design new corporate ephemera. His colorful and stylized images of hula girls as well as Hawaiian feasts, surf boys, and tropical flora were featured on travel brochures, posters, and ticket covers as well as shipboard souvenirs, such as playing cards and menu covers.53 Later in 1938 Matson also commissioned photographer Edward Steichen to produce photographs for advertisements that featured a smiling hula girl, dubbed the “Matson girl,” whose image appeared in popular publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Fortune magazines.54 The characterization of Hawaii as feminine dates back to the earliest arrival of European colonists to the Islands.55 According to Judith Williamson, images of exotic women remind us that our own “naturalness” has been corrupted by modern civilization.56 In the late nineteenth century, the dissemination of ethnographic photographs featuring bare-chested Native Hawaiian women donning flower leis and ti-leaf skirts perpetuated the codified vision of Hawaii as feminine, embodied, and sensual. Unlike the depiction of Natives in ethnographic photographs, Matson’s tourist images promoted a vision of slender hapa-haoles.57 As Jane C. Desmond argues in Staging Tourism, the “hula girl” as the ubiquitous symbol of Hawaiian culture was firmly entrenched by the mid-1930s. The beach boy, the male counterpart to the hula girl, also fulfilled mainlanders’ island fantasies. Tan, athletic, and jovial, beach boys represented a carefree life that stood counter to workaday life on the mainland. As Desmond points out, “In tourist discourse there were rarely any competing representations of Native Hawaiian men, no Natives in suits, no Natives working, or working at anything

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recognizable by visitors as work.”58 The beach boy was also a desirable alternative to the media’s characterization of Islanders as “thugs” and “degenerates.” In his murals, Savage makes visible Matson’s ideal portrayal of Hawaiians as soft primitive, happy, healthy, attractive, and living with abundance of nature, but not slothful or war-like. In the panels Aloha . . . A Universal Word, Festival of the Sea, Island Feast, and Pomp and Circumstance natives are presented as active and productive. Obscuring modern labor and its struggles, Savage shows Islanders dancing, singing, feasting, fishing, and cooking. While this idyllic image of Hawaii was designed to satisfy tourist expectations, it also served to counter negative publicity stirred by race and labor tensions in the Islands. In the Matson murals, Savage also highlights ancient Hawaii’s rich artistic tradition by featuring rattle-gourds, feather capes, plaited mats, island architecture, crested helmets, feather standards, carved wooden gods, feather gods, hula drums, and stamped bark cloth. The examples he includes are not tourist replicas, but are based on ancient artifacts that were on display at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu. A repository for Polynesian art and artifacts, the museum was under the directorship of Te Rangi Hīroa, also known by his English name Sir Peter Henry Buck.59 A Maori and political activist for the preservation of Polynesian culture, Te Rangi Hīroa also taught at Yale University.60 His 1957 The Arts and Crafts of Hawai’i was the definitive study on Hawaiian material culture. The book included objects from the Bishop Museum as well as artifacts held by other museums in both the United States and Europe, and provided Savage with an invaluable resource for his research of Hawaiian culture. In the spring of 1939, Te Rangi Hīroa delivered three lectures for the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University. Attended by fellow faculty and students, the lectures were published under the title Anthropology and Religion. Based on a cyclical theory of history, the lectures, titled “Man Creates his Gods,” “The Gods Create Man,” and “The Death of the Gods,” trace the birth, growth, and decay of Polynesia.61 Te Rangi Hīroa recounted how the arrival of colonists and the introduction of Christian missionaries eroded Native religion and resulted in a profound decline in society and ultimately the loss of traditional Island arts and crafts. Savage’s understanding of Hawaiian history traces a similar cyclical path. He stated, “Old Hawaiian culture developed to an extremely high level, but has been overwhelmed by the culture of white-man, which wallows in rationalism.”62 In the Matson murals, this decline is apparent in the final two works. In A God Appears, as Cook’s HMS Resolution appears to the right, the British colonial flag looms over the scene signifying a threat to royal Hawaiian authority. Indeed, the arrival of Cook marks the beginning of colonization. The relegation of Hawaiian culture to the left edge of the painting further suggests its impending demise under foreign pressure. Indeed, the presentation of the lei to Cook also symbolizes this shift in power. While Savage depicts a gracious “aloha” welcome, a closer inspection reveals expressions of concern and mistrust on the faces of Islanders, perhaps foreshadowing the cultural tensions that will result in a violent rebellion and the death of Cook in 1779.



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Hawaii’s Decisive Hour shows the transformation of Hawaiian culture. It is likely that Savage based his scene on photographs and newspaper reports from the event.63 Although the occasion was marred by rain, Savage’s bright color palette and festive staging gives the image a celebratory air. However, he belies the notion of “progress” by calling attention to the de-culturation of Hawaii. Here, the US Navy, horse-drawn carriages, and iron street lamps replace hula, barkcloth, carved wooden gods, and royal feather regalia. In the foreground, the crowd of onlookers is largely comprised of white settlers and light skinned hapa-haole women with fine European features and Western-style clothes. Flower leis and hibiscuses in their hair are the only visual markers of Native roots. Noticeably missing within the crowd are Native Hawaiians, in particular males. According to newspaper accounts, Natives boycotted the event in protest. As reported by the San Francisco Call, “All white Honolulu came to see the American flag above the Hawaiian flag. All Hawaii wept in its mournful homes or went to lie weeping on the graves of its dead while its national colors were lowered to the ground.”64 Although Queen Liliuokalani was absent from the ceremony in protest of annexation, Savage includes a depiction of the deposed Queen enthroned under the arch of ‘Iolani Palace. Her image serves as a symbol of Hawaiian sovereignty and resistance against American governance. Donning a black mourning dress, she is shown turning away from the swearing in ceremony as the Hawaiian flag is lowered. This moment of conquest marks the ultimate dispossession. While Savage’s murals reflect the artist’s concern for the pitfalls of “progress,” they simultaneously promote Matson’s economic and political agenda.65 The depiction of specific historic events in Hawaiian history such as the 1778 arrival of Captain Cook and the 1898 annexation by the United States are a departure from conventional tourist portrayals of pre-contact Hawaii. In his rendering of colonial contact, Savage obscures the facts regarding Cook’s violent demise at the hands of Hawaiians as well as the truth concerning colonialist violence and oppression.66 Further, his narratives also elide Hawaiian opposition to US imperialism.67 Instead, Savage depicts Islanders as not historically aware, even willing participants in Hawaii’s transformation. Implicit in these works is Hawaii’s progress toward statehood. Indeed, Matson’s growing interest in shaping America’s perception of Hawaii coincided with renewed efforts to secure statehood for the Islands. In a move to protect mainland sugar interests, the US Congress approved the Jones-Costigan Act in 1934. This Act restricted the amount of sugar that foreign countries and territories, including Hawaii, could export to the mainland tariff-free. The economic pinch of this Sugar Act compelled Matson and Hawaii’s “Big Five” corporations to lobby Congress for statehood.68 Previous efforts for statehood had been complicated by unflattering publicity over ongoing social tensions. For example, a bid for statehood was denied three days after a mistrial was declared in the Massie rape case.69 With growing tensions in the Pacific and concerns over national security, Congress as well as the mainland press questioned the sincerity of Hawaii’s loyalty to the United States. In this context, Savage’s paintings were intended not only to serve as a strategy to attract visitors but also to promote the Islands’ suitability for statehood.

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Playing a pivotal role in shaping the American notion of Island culture, Matson continued to campaign for Hawaiian statehood over the next decade. Their promotional strategies took the form of advertisements, fine art displays, and staged spectacles that combined to construct, reinforce, and fulfill a destination image of Hawaiian progress. Savage reinforced the promotion of American and Hawaiian unification in later illustrations for Matson. Shortly after completing the murals the artist was called on once again to design an illustration commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Appearing in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1942, the image portrays female personifications of America and Hawaii united in defense against Pacific threats and foreign invaders.70 While Savage completed the Matson murals in 1941, his appreciation of Hawaii did not dissipate as evidenced by a series of easel paintings exhibited in New York in 1945 and 1968. In these works he focused on Hawaii’s natural beauty. Filled with lush tropical flora and fauna his dramatic mountain and ocean views are sparsely populated. Partially clothed figures run freely across the landscape unencumbered by burden of modern civilization. These works are far from the theatrically commercial depictions of the Matson murals. Akin to his images of the Florida Seminoles, these primitivist visions promote Hawaii’s natural state. Viewed as an extension of the Matson murals, these images represent a return to the “Age of Gods,” thus beginning the cycle again. After World War II the Matson fleet of “white ships” were returned to service. As a result of the growing prosperity of the American middle class in the decade following the war, Matson’s “white ships” experienced their highest occupancy rates. To commemorate the maiden voyage of the Lurline in 1946 Matson brought Savage’s paintings out of storage and transformed them into small-scale paper replicas, which were given, and later sold, to passengers. These tourist objects are not merely intended to serve as souvenirs for the privatization and nostalgic memory of a tourist’s romp to the Islands, but rather these objects play a more significant role in functioning as a medium of cultural propaganda, which holds the potential to influence or bend popular feeling in a particular direction.71 As mass reproductions, Matson enlisted these works to revive tourism to Hawaii as well as drive renewed efforts for Hawaiian statehood following the war. The lithographic reproduction of Savage’s paintings were recognized in 1950 at the Printing for Commerce exhibition at The American Institute of Graphic Arts with a Certificate of Excellence. By 1952, nearly a quarter of a million sets had been dispersed to Matson’s passengers. Due to their mass replication and longstanding popularity with collectors of tourist Hawaiiana, art historians have generally overlooked these works. A corporate commission for Hawaii’s tourist industry, the Matson murals offer rich ground on which to explore the interaction between fine art and corporate patronage, tourist industries, and imperialist politics. An examination of the Matson murals also provides an opportunity to bring critical attention to the career of one of America’s great muralists. Promoting Matson’s investment in the Islands’ growing tourist industry, these paintings reflected the corporation’s economic interests in Hawaiian statehood. Reproduced and mass distributed as travel souvenirs, Savage’s murals for the Matson Navigation Company also fulfilled tourist expectations by celebrating Hawaiian history



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and culture. Savage’s concern for the declining influence of Hawaiian culture and the Americanization of the Islands also resonated with many tourists who shared his primitivist fantasy and lamented the encroachment of modern life in Hawaii. While offering Americans an image of Hawaii as an island paradise, rich with ancient Native tradition and free from cultural and social tensions, Savage also presents the modern native—who is able and willing to assimilate. However, underlying this celebratory vision of Imua! is a cautionary warning about the consequence of modern “progress” on Native culture.

Notes 1 Lloyd Myers quoted in press release, 1954. Crawford Family Papers, Private Collection. 2 According to the artist’s descendants, Savage initially believed he was being commissioned to create large murals for display on Matson’s SS Lurline. Only after he had begun the project did he realize his work would be reproduced as menu covers. While he was very disappointed to learn his murals would not be featured together on the Lurline, he was pleased that his work would reach a wider audience. Julie Crawford, email message to author, July 29, 2016. 3 For more information regarding the role of fine arts in American advertising, see Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 4 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 135–50. 5 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 41. 6 “The Big Five” was a name given to a group of five companies, Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors, and Theo H. Davies & Co., that controlled Hawaii’s sugar industry and associated businesses. Castle & Cooke, C. Brewer & Co., and American Factors held controlling interest in the Matson Navigation Company. Lynn Blocker Krantz, Nick Krantz, and Mary Thiele Fobian, To Honolulu in Five Days: Cruising Aboard the Matson’s S.S. Lurline (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001); William Worden, Cargoes: Matson’s First Century in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980); and Duncan O’Brien, The White Ships: A Tribute to Matson’s Luxury Liners 1927–1978 (Victoria, British Columbia: Pier 10 Media, 2008). 7 Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 88. 8 Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise, 92–111. 9 Blocker Krantz, Krantz, and Fobian, To Honolulu in Five Days, 120–33. 10 Ibid. 11 Lloyd Myers quoted in press release, 1954. Crawford Family papers, Private Collection.

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12 From the late nineteenth century, ocean liners were decorated public spaces with elegant and often extravagant décor. For discussion of ocean liner décor, see John Malcolm Brinnin, “The Decoration of Ocean Liners: Rules and Exceptions,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 15 (1990): 38–47. 13 For biographical information on Savage, see Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Eugene F. Savage: The Seminole Paintings, exh. cat., text by Elizabeth B. Heuer (London: Giles, Ltd., 2011), 8–21; Royal Cortissoz, “The Field of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine 82 (1927): 123; Jean C. Sapin, “Eugene Francis Savage: American Muralist” (MA thesis, California State University, Northridge, 1979); G. Neikirk, “Eugene Francis Savage,” biographical article, Eugene Francis Savage papers, Fountain County Court House, Covington, Indiana, 1940–1965 file; and Eugene F. Savage Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 14 Lloyd Myers quoted in press release, 1954. Crawford Family papers, Private Collection. 15 Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 4–54. 16 Eugene Savage quoted in “Seminole Indians Are Subject of Exhibit by Eugene Savage,” The Citizen Register, January 21, 1936. 17 Giambattista Vico, The New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin Press, 1999). 18 Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) influenced Savage’s interest in the morphology of history and is referenced several times in Savage’s essay, “Triumph of Conation.” Similar to Vico, Spengler perceived history as series of cultural rises and declines. This cyclical view of history was largely based on the rise and fall of Rome. 19 Savage, “Triumph of Conation,” n.d., Crawford Family Papers, Private Collection. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Julie Crawford, e-mail message to author, July 29, 2016. 24 Examples of Savage’s studies can be found in Don Severson and Carol Anne Dickson, Finding Paradise: Island Art in Private Collections (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). Additional examples of Savage’s studies of Hawaii remain in the possession of the artist’s descendants. 25 The Honolulu Advertiser, “Old Hawaiian Culture Passing, Says Artist,” February 1941. 26 Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 112–14. See also Adria L. Imada, “Hawaiians on Tour: Hula Circuits through the American Empire,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 119–23. 27 The Honolulu Advertiser, “Old Hawaiian Culture Passing, Says Artist,” February 1941. Microfilm. 28 Ibid. 29 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 104. 30 Roger Bell, Last among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 9. 31 Bell, Last among Equals, 10. 32 Gerald Horne, Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 19–22.



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33 David E. Stannard, Honor Killing: How the Infamous Massie Affair Transformed Hawaii (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 2002) and T. Leon Wright, Rape in Paradise (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966). 34 Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise, 131–33. 35 New York Sunday Review and Hearst papers cited in Stannard, Honor Killings, 264, 267. 36 Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise, 132–33. 37 Bell, Last among Equals, 9–10. 38 Horne, Fighting in Paradise, 20. 39 Ibid., 21. 40 Bell, Last among Equals, 53. 41 Ibid. 42 Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 265–66. 43 Bell, Last among Equals, 48. 44 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 13–17. 45 Ibid., 98–121. 46 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 9. 47 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 89. 48 Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise, 142. Matson was not the only company to hire artists to promote its products. For example, Hawaiian Pineapple Company and Dole commissioned Georgia O’Keeffe to paint pictures for its national advertising campaign. 49 Ibid. 50 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 111. 51 Ibid., 294, n. 44. 52 For an example, see Blocker Krantz, Krantz, and Fobian, To Honolulu in Five Days, viii. 53 Desoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls: Selling Romance to America (Honolulu: Honolulu Editions, Ltd., 1982) and Desoto Brown, “Beautiful, Romantic Hawaii: How the Fantasy Image Came to Be,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 20 (1994): 252–71. 54 Examples of Steichen’s photographs for Matson can be found in issues such as Vogue, January 15, 1940, inside cover; Harper’s Bazaar, March 1941, inside back cover; and Fortune (December 1940). Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 248–54. 55 For a study on the pre-photographic depictions of Islanders, see Bernard W. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 56 Judith Williamson, “Woman Is an Island: Femininity and Colonialization,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 112. 57 Desmond, Staging Tourism, 129. 58 Ibid., 125. 59 John B. Condliffe, Te Rangi Hīroa: The Life of Sir Peter Buck (Christchurch, New Zealand: Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd., 1971). 60 In 1932 Te Rangi Hīroa was appointed as Bishop Museum Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. In 1936 he was appointed Director of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, a position he held until his death in 1951. Condliffe, Te Rangi Hīroa, 177.

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61 Recalling Vico’s morphology of history, Te Rangi Hīroa identified parallels between the loss of spirituality and religion in modern society and the stated, “Our present civilization is sick and fast losing its right to be called ‘civilization.’ . . . Our civilization stands on the verge of a relapse, not into barbarism, but into sheer savagery.” 95–96. 62 The Honolulu Advertiser, “Old Hawaiian Culture Passing, Says Artist,” February 1941. Microfilm. 63 “People and Places Connected with Annexation of Hawaii,” in Hawaiian Collection at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Library. www.libweb.hawaii.edu. 64 “Little Republic of the Pacific is of the Past,” The San Francisco Call, August 23, 1898, 7. 65 Eugene F. Savage “Triumph of Conation,” n.d., Crawford Family Papers, Private Collection. 66 Tourist imagery obscures the truth about colonialism by projecting a timeless vision of Hawaiian culture. As Desmond points out, colonialism dramatically altered society by banning Hawaiian language, diminishing the Native population, and caused demographic shifts due to the introduction of plantation agriculture. Desmond, Staging Tourism, 84–85. 67 To view Anti-Annexation Petitions, see “Anti-Annexation Petitions 1897–1898” in Hawaiian Annexation Documents in Special Collections at University of Hawaii, Manoa Library. www.libweb.hawaii.edu. 68 Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise, 140–41. 69 Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), 317–27, 333–38. 70 Matson Navigation Corporation, November 28, 1942, Advertisement. Saturday Evening Post, 45. 71 Stewart, On Longing, 135–50.

Part Three

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Civic Space and an Iconic Brand: Paradoxes of Corporate Patronage in the Carnegie Library Phenomenon Douglas Klahr

From 1886 until 1917, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie financed the construction of 1,689 public libraries throughout the United States, establishing a breadth of corporate architectural patronage that was unsurpassed in its day. Carnegie libraries became architectural manifestations of a locality’s material and societal progress, appearing in every size of municipality, from the nation’s largest cities to small towns. Two paradoxes underscored this seismic shift in American libraries. First, the public library joined the courthouse and town hall to become an iconic civic—and not merely public—space within American life, wherein an individual’s identity as a citizen was in the foreground, as opposed to identities of consumer, resident, worker, or worshipper. Second, although it was not Carnegie’s intent, the Carnegie library became a brand: a distinctive architectural entity that was instantly recognizable to most Americans during the first half of the twentieth century, even though no consistent architectural style identified it. Several aspects of design differentiated Carnegie libraries not only from other public buildings within a municipality, but also from libraries that preceded them, especially those designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque manner that was so popular in the quarter-century before Carnegie libraries began to appear. A prominent central entrance, lampposts signifying the illuminating effect of knowledge, and often bilateral symmetry were major features that identified most Carnegie libraries, but above all were the large windows that indicated the reading rooms within.1 A Carnegie library possessed a cachet that was brand-specific, and even towns with preexisting libraries sought to construct a Carnegie one. Yet, this brand was strikingly independent from form, signage, and advertising, endowing it with a fluidity and mutability that remains noteworthy to this day. The notion of a brand, which usually is the engine of a corporate profit center, inadvertently was turned on its head. Instead there arose a nationwide, unintended, noncommercial

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brand that functioned as a civic space: a blurring and transgression of boundaries that challenges assumptions about all these definitions. This chapter examines the Carnegie library brand, heretofore unacknowledged by scholars, as a civic space produced by corporate patronage. Before Andrew Carnegie’s program, public libraries varied greatly in quality and distribution by region, sometimes housed in substantial structures devoted to their use, but most often placed in leftover spaces within existing structures, denoting public libraries’ tenuous position within the majority of American communities. Thomas Augst sets the stage for the public library as it emerged under Andrew Carnegie’s corporate patronage. He acknowledges that social libraries, whose access often was limited by class, gender, and/or profession, began appearing in the eighteenth century, noting that by 1876, “over 3,000 social libraries had been founded, largely in the northeast United States. Many were small and short-lived and did not survive the initial enthusiasm of their founders.”2 Augst continues, mentioning the philanthropic endeavors of John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie regarding this transformation of the library in American life, as well as the efforts of librarians and citizens.3 He then summarizes the scope of a decades-long national program, which commenced with the founding of the American Library Association in 1876 and largely reached completion in the 1920s. Augst writes, The brilliant strategy of the advocates of public libraries was to redefine the agency of culture in terms of progress and abundance. .  .  . Libraries should be seen as part of the physical infrastructure and capital improvements by which a society invests in its future. . . . The existence of thousands of libraries in towns and cities across nineteenth-century America—in common with Sunday schools, lyceums, hospitals, and prisons—was not enough. Libraries had to become permanent fixtures in the civic landscape.4

Thomas Augst has described some of the components that comprised America’s civic infrastructure, but unlike the principal civic spaces of courthouses and town halls, public libraries built by Andrew Carnegie welcomed citizens of all ages, and they also were available to citizens for more hours on a daily basis. Peter Mickelson offered a succinct assessment of this: “The public library fit neatly into Carnegie’s social thought. He frequently characterized it as a democratic and democratizing institution. Within its walls as within the American republic there were to be no artificial restrictions, no ranks, no privileges, no classes; here everyone was welcome and all were free and equal.”5 In essence, the paradox was that corporate patronage—sponsored by a steel tycoon of America’s so-called Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century—established this most democratic of civic spaces. The idealism expressed by Andrew Carnegie often was not fulfilled after Carnegie libraries were constructed, for their operation often was compromised by failures in municipal commitment to continue funding, professional staff training, and/or spatial constraints of the buildings. Connected with these was the questionable record of whether Carnegie libraries actually attracted a broad segment of the working class



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and inspired them to improve their socioeconomic standing through reading and selfeducation. Once again, Peter Mickelson offers a sound appraisal of Carnegie’s vision and its ultimate outcome: Although the library was to promote progress by witnessing the rise of selfmade men and the ultimate redemption of poor people, Carnegie realized that most Americans were neither rising entrepreneurs nor groveling bums. They were hardworking laborers. Consequently he dedicated his libraries to them. . . . Carnegie tended to become enthralled by visions of libraries leading America toward utopia. .  .  . Very obviously, the library failed in its mission to solve the problems of poverty and crime by making everyone respectably middle class.6

Issues of social control underscored such intensions, as they did many social, cultural, and educational endeavors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a rapidly expanding middle class anxious to see its values adopted by the working class. It is within this framework of middle-class respectability that the library as a civic space is best explained, for middle-class expectations of behavior underscored the singular characteristic of a library: its behavioral code of silence. In other words, without this context of late-nineteenth-century middle-class behavioral expectations, the claim of the public library being a civic space might appeared to be undermined by its insistence upon quiet, for civic spaces usually are regarded as environments in which conversation is encouraged.

A different type of civic space In an essay about the reading room at the New York Public Library, Ari Kelman addressed the issue of quiet. Although he focused upon a massive public library in the nation’s largest city, Kelman’s observations about the building’s main reading room apply to libraries in general, especially whether a largely silent space can realistically function as a public or civic space. Kelman began by noting that noisy interchanges— of which conversations are a subset—are part of the public sphere, especially in urban settings. He writes, “The publicity of the exchange and the publicity of the noise it produced, in turn, produce a public that is involved in its social and spatial environment.”7 A library’s largely silent environment therefore would suggest that it would not be a good civic space. Kelman explains, As a public institution that attempts to foster private interactions between people and texts, it is simultaneously concerned with the public at large and the individuals who have come to read. Whether or not it is successful in producing these relationships relies on its ability to keep conversation between patrons to a minimum. In other words, the success of the library relies on the silence of its patrons. The success of its texts depends on their silent consumption. The success

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of the civic, however, relies on their noise. The library provides information but it cannot facilitate congregation or conversation—at least not within its walls.8

The matter would seem to rest here, but Kelman delves further into the essence of a public library, noting that the space within a library is involved in the production of knowledge: the production of a civilized citizenry that could read quietly. Significantly, he observes that as an information machine, the library equipped people with skills and practices—a specific kind of reading in collective silence—that would produce public discourses.9 Kelman’s argument expands the notion of a civic space beyond the oftstated sine qua non of conversation, and perhaps the most important and perceptive piece of Kelman’s argument is a slyly ironic observation: the production of silence was a “rather noisy business.” He notes that although a library was supposed to be silent, it was not mute, and he offers a tally of the noises that one actually hears within a library: walking, typing, writing, and the sounds of patrons’ belongings being stowed. The architectural environments of early-twentieth-century libraries, with their stone floors and high ceilings, tended to amplify such sounds, and this brings Kelman back to the issue of civic space: Indeed, these are the sounds of the civic at work in this space. People walking, writing, typing are all involved in the performance and the production of the civic. . . . Were it too silent—no footsteps, no pages turning, no pencils scraping— we could not be certain that the machine was working. .  .  . The noise of civics thus becomes the meta-narrative. . . . Participating in the production of the space becomes a civic duty, one that is conducted between the individual subject and the city.10

The library therefore can be seen as a civic space that had its own distinctive permutation of discourse whose “noise” was different from that which usually characterized such spaces. The halls and rooms of public libraries may have been quiet, but a vibrant civic discourse was occurring, albeit sotto voce. Moreover, the “production of silence” that Ari Kelman has identified can be further contextualized within the Carnegie era: the subject of noise abatement. This has been addressed by several scholars, notably by Emily Thompson in her study, The Soundscape of Modernity. In the introduction, Thompson writes, “The American soundscape underwent a particularly dramatic transformation in the years after 1900. . . . The sounds were increasingly the result of technological mediation. . . . Some of the sounds that resulted from these mediations were objects of scientific scrutiny; other were the unintended consequences—the noises—of an ever-more mechanized society.”11 Thompson notes that some sounds would have been considered “good sound.” The library sounds that Ari Kelman identified would have been part of this “good sound” category within the context of middle-class behavioral expectations. This socioeconomic subtext that underscored such judgments about noise was also discussed in Karin Bijsterveld’s essay about Theodor Lessing, the German anti-noise crusader of the same era. She explains Lessing’s views:



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Noise was the most primitive and most widely applied means to deafen consciousness. In fact, noise was the “vengeance” of the laborer working with his hands against the brain-worker who laid down the law to the former. Silence, on the other hand, was the sign of wisdom and justice. “Culture,” Lessing stressed, “embodied the genesis of keeping Silent.”12

Lessing’s duality of laborer versus brain-worker was mirrored in the distance between so-called high and low cultural spheres of the fin-de-siè cle, an area of public life that also saw efforts by members of the middle class to cultivate a level of decorum that valued silence. Lawrence Levine examined this in his study, noting that by the end of the nineteenth century, “audiences in America had become less interactive, less of a public and more of a group of mute receptors.”13 This shift chronologically dovetailed with the popularization of the public library through Andrew Carnegie’s program: during these decades, one’s behavior in public institutions of culture—whether museums or concert halls—had changed since the first half of the nineteenth century. In that earlier period, as Levine noted, “cultural lines were more fluid, cultural spaces less rigidly subdivided, than they were to become.”14 Public libraries, however, were distinct from the cultural venues about which Lawrence Levine wrote, for although users were on the receiving end of what books and periodicals the library staff ordered—ostensibly being “mute receptors”—the situation was more complex, resonating with conflicting desires and demands within both the profession and the public. Not only were libraries’ “audiences” far from passive, frequently expressing their desires, but the professionals “delivering” the product and service also held widely disparate notions. An entire realm of scholarly research has examined some of the issues that sparked vigorous debate among librarians during the era of Carnegie’s building campaign: the worthiness of contemporary novels versus literature, books versus periodicals, open versus closed stacks, hours of operation, and how purpose-specific spaces were arranged within a library. Such contentions were analogous to concurrent debates within broader American society, ranging from the gendered space of the department store to appropriate behavior at performing arts events. Yet library issues were distinctive, due to the lack of any routine financial transaction between the user and the institution, with the exception of the occasional overdue fee. As Nancy Kalikow Maxwell observed in her study, Sacred Stacks, “Rare in our consumer-based society, the library is open to all regardless of income. .  .  . No other institution in American society exists for this purpose.”15 The noncommercial nature of the institution is without dispute, and the contemporary American public libraries about which Maxwell wrote truly have unrestricted access. However access during the Carnegie era in some areas of the nation was restricted not by income, but rather by race: racial segregation was the norm for the 132 libraries in the South that Andrew Carnegie helped finance. In his book, Carnegie Libraries, George S. Bobinski summarizes the situation: Although Carnegie was pleased when provisions were made for Negroes, he never attempted to foster integration with his donations. . . . When Tampa, Florida, did

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not provide separate library service to Negroes, as it had implied it would be, the NAACP wrote a letter of protest to Andrew Carnegie. In reply, the Carnegie Corporation of New York stated that it did not interfere in such local matters; it was always willing, however, to consider applications from communities for Negro branches.16

Bobinski noted that negotiations regarding such applications could take years, providing the example of African Americans in Atlanta receiving a branch of their own nineteen years after the city’s Carnegie library was completed in 1902. Most twenty-first-century readers will react with dismay and disappointment regarding the acquiescence of Andrew Carnegie to the racial segregation policies of the era, but if his stance is placed within the context of his times, perhaps a more nuanced assessment may emerge within the reader. Despite this aspect of restricted access to public libraries until the second half of the twentieth century, the institution’s noncommercial quintessence did—and still does—differentiate it from retail, sports, performing arts, and even religious venues. While this distinctive characteristic does not define a civic space, it enhances the civic nature of public libraries, for to be free of any financial transaction within a public space was—and remains—a rare instance in American life. In a public library one can relinquish—if not abandon with glee—the role of the consumer and exist for a few hours primarily as a citizen. As Ari Kelman has observed, in a library, “Participating in the production of the space becomes a civic duty.” What transformed these public spaces into civic ones was the process of mutual accommodation reached between librarians and library users, adults and children alike: one gradually relinquished one’s public, street-side behavior to function within the quiet albeit not mute environment. The library staff then attempted to meet one’s needs. The prohibition against holding conversations in reading rooms did not preclude libraries from being civic spaces; rather they underscored the nuanced reality that civic interaction does not necessarily require conversation. The role of conversation in civic interaction was acknowledged, however, by the fact that groups could reserve at no cost separate meeting rooms, differentiating this purposeful activity from the idle chatter that would have disturbed the peace of the reading room. Even within their special reading rooms, children were expected to speak in low tones. As Derek Vaillant noted about this period, “Along with the command over bodily functions and gestures, control over sound constituted an important domain of refined public and private behavior in the view of the bourgeoisie.”17 Whatever the case, the goal was the same: for users to discover self-betterment through reading, which implicitly suggested than an improved standard of living in the future might result from such an endeavor. The premise, of course, arose from a middle-class belief in such a linear trajectory and how it might transform members of the working class into citizens that conformed more to middle-class expectations regarding behavior, education, and work ethic. Whether or not public libraries during the Carnegie era incorporated members of the working class into this vision was, and remains, a source of debate today.18



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The process and the role of women In many municipalities that approached the Carnegie Foundation for a grant, local opposition necessitated holding a vote among the citizenry. Opposition to applying for a grant usually occurred on account of one of three reasons. A small minority of communities viewed Carnegie funds as being “tainted” by the steel tycoon’s rough handling of the Homestead Strike of 1882, but a greater source of opposition was the view that taking “charity” would be a mark of shame upon a community, a tacit acknowledgment that a town’s citizens had neither the fortitude nor means to provide a library by themselves. However the most prevalent reason for hesitation about applying for a Carnegie Library grant arose from the principal condition that Carnegie attached to awarding a grant: a municipality had to demonstrate that sufficient funds had been secured to operate the library for the first year of operation following construction and also pledge that funding would continue in perpetuity. Perhaps the most resoundingly civic aspect of a Carnegie library arose from the vote that often was necessary to overcome this third ground for opposition. In his study, Carnegie Libraries across America: A Public Legacy, Theodore Jones noted that “these community votes were also significant because women were allowed to participate, casting their first civic votes two decades prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. This exception was made because the library issue was widely viewed as one of particular interest to women and because they were instrumental in generating the Carnegie grant campaign.”19 Numerous scholars have documented the pivotal role that women played in the advocating, founding, and operating of libraries throughout America in the pre-Carnegie era, but the gender aspect that Jones describes is more specific, for it focuses upon civic demands that Andrew Carnegie placed upon a municipality before funds were granted. Evidence of post-construction operating funds usually meant that a municipality needed to vote upon a tax bond and present the successful vote to Carnegie. Although male municipal officials usually were the actual letter writers who sought Carnegie funds, women were the primary movers who campaigned for such letters to be written. In an essay about Carnegie libraries in Montana, Daniel F. Ring summarized what was a general sequence of events nationwide. He writes, When the Carnegie libraries came on the scene, it was usually women’s clubs that alerted the city’s power structure to the idea of obtaining a grant or, acting on their own, petitioned [Andrew Carnegie’s secretary James] Bertram for a library years before the city officials did. These petitions were usually ignored by Bertram; but once the city officials took up the Carnegie proposal, the library was no longer a woman’s issue. It became a civic virtue, and men embraced it with a passion.20

This appropriation of what had been a women’s initiative by the male power brokers in a town may be disheartening albeit not surprising to contemporary readers, but what occurred after the initial request had been made to Andrew Carnegie was extraordinary. When the time came for a town to vote upon a tax bond to ensure a Carnegie

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library’s post-construction operation, in the vast majority of instances women were allowed to cast votes, years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. In essence, the genesis of a civic space occurred via a civic procedure that was an exception to the norm of the time. This endowed Carnegie libraries across the nation with a singular confluence of civic parameters that was absent from the decision-making processes regarding the construction of the other two iconic civic structures within American life: city halls and courthouses. As an example, Carnegie libraries in Oklahoma followed the general pattern of women playing major roles, as Paula D. Watson examined in an essay: “Since women’s clubs were frequently responsible for the formation and support of town libraries, it was often the club that thought of turning to Carnegie for building funds. . . . Twentyfour of the twenty-six Carnegie grants in Oklahoma, for example, went to towns where women had founded the library.”21 The Carnegie library at Guthrie was one of these twenty-four. When the library opened in 1902, Guthrie was the capital of the territory of Oklahoma and had a population of 18,000 in comparison to Oklahoma City, which had a population of only 11,000 and had opened its Carnegie library three years earlier.22 The Guthrie Carnegie Library, however, is distinctive, for it provides perhaps the most compelling case in the entire nation of a Carnegie library functioning at the highest and most memorable level of a civic space. On January 16, 1906, the inauguration of the last governor of the territory of Oklahoma, Frank Frantz, occurred not at Guthrie’s impressive city hall, constructed the same year as its Carnegie library, but rather at the library. In a history of Guthrie, Glen V. McIntyre notes that the building also served as the site of the inauguration of Oklahoma’s first state governor, Charles Haskell, on November 16, 1907.23 It is significant that both inaugurations occurred not at Guthrie’s city hall—the most important government building within the territory and subsequent state—but rather at the Carnegie library. Perhaps differences in access played a role in terms of accommodating large outdoor crowds, but these two moments are worth noting, for they provide two instances of a public library acting as the prime civic space in two momentous occasions when an equally impressive civic structure was available. Moreover, these events are reminders of the unusually broad civic role—including voting—that women played: unlike the male-only corridors of power that produced Guthrie’s nearby city hall, the women of Guthrie were largely responsible for the library’s existence, which then served in 1906 and 1907 as the site for confirmation of male political power at the highest level. This civic-gender aspect is revealed in a postcard of a far more modest structure, the library in Carroll, Iowa, that was dedicated on September 2, 1905 (Figure 9.1). In the postcard, the library is still under construction, yet the citizens of Carroll apparently did not want to wait until completion before producing a postcard. The view shows two women on the sidewalk looking at a third who has crossed the patch of dirt between the sidewalk and library steps to examine the front door. One gets a sense of a small community’s impatience to announce its ascension into the ranks of Carnegie library members, and there were historical reasons for this. In Iowa, nineteen Carnegie libraries of an eventual 102 were constructed over a ten-year period from 1892 to 1902. In 1903, however, the pace exploded: twenty-one



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Figure 9.1  1845 Carnegie Library, Carrol [sic.], Ia. Postcard, 1905. Collection of Douglas Klahr. Carnegie grants for libraries in Iowa were awarded that year, a level not equaled at any other time during the program. In 1905, the majority of those twenty-one municipalities who had received grants two years earlier were completing their buildings, and this hastily produced postcard suggests that perhaps a race between municipalities was occurring. Underscoring what evidently was perceived as an urgent need to produce a postcard introduces the second part of the essay: the desirability of the Carnegie library as a brand.

A civic space as a brand There are innumerable modern studies about what constitutes a brand, but most are cluttered with advertising and marketing jargon of the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting the mature state of corporate branding that occurred decades after Andrew Carnegie had given his last library grant. One of the key studies that explores the quintessence of a brand’s nature is Alycia Perry and David Wisnom III’s Before the Brand: Creating the Unique DNA of an Enduring Brand Identity.24 Although the authors do not mention Andrew Carnegie, the salient characteristics of a successful brand, as they define it, certainly apply to the Carnegie libraries. Perry and Wisnom describe three components—summarized below: 1. A brand is relevant to target audiences and different from the competition. 2. Brand identity is composed of the controllable elements of a company, product, or service brand, such as core essence, positioning, brand name, tag line, logo, and messaging.

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3. If identity is the fundamental state of being, then image is the state of perception. Without a strong identity, image is nothing. Brand image is a collection of largely uncontrollable perceptions of strengths and weaknesses gained through direct and indirect experience. An audience’s perceptions solidify the brand’s image.25 The first element not only qualifies Carnegie libraries as a brand but also distinguishes them from other brands: Carnegie libraries were relevant to their target audiences, for those audiences were the community members who initiated and advocated a town’s application for a Carnegie grant. The civic discourse that resulted through balloting and voting upon tax measures differentiated a municipality’s Carnegie library from any preexisting libraries, whether they were established through the largesse of a single patron, a professional society, or the fundraising endeavors of civic societies. To interact with the Carnegie Foundation meant involvement of all tax-paying citizens, a broad-based civic initiative that not only differentiated the Carnegie brand but also established a strong context for the library as a civic space even before the laying of a cornerstone. Furthermore, this self-initiated action by the audience produced the brand’s relevance, a dramatic contrast to the relentless advertising necessary for other brands to establish audience relevance. This contrast is important, for the citizeninitiated relevance and differentiation of the Carnegie brand from the competition identifies it as a singular instance among brands; one that confirms and yet challenges what defines a brand. Moving to brand identity, Perry and Wisnom explain: “The core essence is defined as the intrinsic and indispensable properties that characterize the brand. The core essence defines what your brand stands for in one or two words.”26 If we take up the challenge to define the Carnegie library brand’s essence in two words, perhaps the best distillation simply would be “progressive municipality.” Every other aspect of a Carnegie library is encompassed within these words, and a list of such aspects might look like this: 1. A decision is made to solicit a Carnegie grant, prompting the civic processes that accompanied such a decision to occur. 2. The completed library is an architectural manifestation of a municipality’s or neighborhood’s priorities and desired stature within local, state, and/or national contexts. 3. The civic space that the library created offered greater access to more citizens than other civic structures. 4. The hoped-for enlightenment and betterment of citizens through reading and selfeducation continued to be a goal, whether realized or not. Municipalities positioned a Carnegie library not only as a building of prestige but also as one that suggested permanence, a value not to be underestimated, especially in Western towns whose survival often was uncertain, due to dependence upon natural resources—such as copper—that had fueled many towns’ establishment and growth. In



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his essay about Carnegie libraries in Montana, Daniel F. Ring observed that “Carnegie libraries were also a symbol of permanence. In some instances, permanence was boldly touted.” Ring continues, noting that not only were Carnegie libraries “a symbol of community pride,” they also were “a symbol of social bonding. The dedications of libraries were one way of articulating a sense of community.”27 The question of whether Carnegie libraries continued to foster a sense of community after their dedications arises, as well as whether that sense of community included all citizens, and the results varied across the nation. Daniel Ring commented upon this: “Back east” a Carnegie library was more likely to symbolize the intellectual nerve center of the town. But beyond the middle border, on the high northern plains, a Carnegie library was a symbol of social dislocation and economic upheaval. The towns’ power elites acted expeditiously to preserve social order and to develop a sense of community while boosting future growth and testifying to the pride and permanency of their cities on the prairie.28

Ring was referring to many towns in the mid-section of the nation where a Carnegie library remained largely the preserve of the middle class and often served as a bulwark to reassure this element of continuity during times of population growth when influxes of working-class newcomers could occur quite suddenly. A dramatic example of this is seen in Figure 9.2, a view of the Carnegie library in Green River, Wyoming. Although dwarfed by the towering formation of Castle

Figure 9.2  No. 384. Carnegie Library, Green River, Wyo. Postcard, 1906. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

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Rock behind it, the library holds its own as a manifestation of middle-class civilizing aspirations, set apart from nature and the rest of the town by its three flights of cascading stairs. Moreover, Daniel Ring’s comments about permanence come to mind. When the Union Pacific Railroad decided to locate a division point twelve miles west in Bryan in 1868, Green River’s population declined from close to 2,000 to 101 persons, only beginning to rebound when the railroad moved the division point to Green River four years later. Four decades later, when the library was completed in 1906, the town’s population of 1,300 was still below that of 1868, so the permanence suggested by the investment in a Carnegie library resonated especially strongly in Green River.29 Brand name is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Carnegie libraries, due to Andrew Carnegie’s rejection of any requirement that his name be displayed upon or within the building, as well as his extreme reluctance to attend opening ceremonies. There never was any requirement that a library be identified as a “Carnegie Library,” and quite often the signage that municipalities used on the exterior identified the building merely as a “free” or “public” library. Yet regardless of signage, citizens regarded the building constructed through a Carnegie grant as a “Carnegie Library.” Once again, the audience was the determining factor: after it determined the brand’s relevance and difference from the competition, it determined its name. This, in addition to the lack of any logo, further differentiated Carnegie libraries from other brands: it is hard to imagine a brand in the twenty-first century being determined in the same manner. There is another aspect of Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy regarding the libraries that he funded, as Ellen Condliffe Lagemann observed: Carnegie relied upon criteria for giving that were notable for what they did not include—standards for discriminating between types of knowledge and for establishing priorities concerning the kinds of knowledge that should be advanced and diffused. . . . By building the “bookless” public libraries for which he would be famed, he limited the domain in which he would make decisions, judgments concerning book selection being left to localities. . . . No one, not even he, should attempt to determine what knowledge would best serve and most likely spark the initiative of others.30

This policy continued until Carnegie’s death in 1919, but in 1920, the Carnegie Corporation’s trustees decided that they “should concern themselves specifically and directly with nationally urgent knowledge, knowledge that, in the opinion of ‘men of discriminating judgment’, ‘the people’ needed have,” as Lagemann writes. The handsoff stance of Andrew Carnegie, which had driven his library-building program, defined even this change in policy: “In the simplified spelling that he sometimes used, Andrew Carnegie had told the trustees: ‘Conditions upon the erth inevitably change; hence no wise man will bind Trustees forever to certain paths, causes or institutions. I disclaim any intention of doing so.’ In establishing the Corporation, he had therefore left room for the initiation of the new grant priorities.”31 Lagemann’s analysis underscores a salient characteristic of Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Corporation, and the libraries that were funded: it was the intentionality of Carnegie’s personhood that defined



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this decades-long example of corporate patronage, not literally the person himself, underscored not only by Carnegie’s lack of library signage requirements but also by his extreme reluctance to attend Carnegie library dedications. This imbued the endeavor with a fluidity that enabled it to, unintentionally, become a singular brand.

From brand image to brand identity to brand icon Regarding Carnegie libraries, brand identity begins to blur into brand image when the aspect of messaging is examined. The messaging began with the campaign to establish a Carnegie library and continued through the medium of local newspapers through the dedication. At some point along this process, however, the medium of the postcard assumed central stage, and it is here where the line into brand image was crossed, image being the state of perception as defined by Perry and Wisnom. The heightened pace of Carnegie library construction after 1900 coincided with another development, as discussed by Bernadette A. Lear in an essay. She writes, From about 1905 to the beginning of World War I, collecting postcards was a national obsession. . . . Americans mailed more than six hundred million postcards in the 1907–8 fiscal year. Within a few years they were sending nearly a billion cards annually. .  .  . The highpoint of the postcard-collecting fad (roughly 1893 to 1918) correlates with Carnegie’s giving program and the beginnings of many public libraries.32

The messaging of the Carnegie library brand through this massive postcard culture sat astride the boundary between brand identity and brand image, for as Perry and Wisnom observed, identity consists of controllable aspects, whereas as image is a collection of largely uncontrollable perceptions of strengths and weaknesses gained through direct and indirect experience. The image on the postcard was controlled by the municipality that produced it, but what the sender wrote was out of anyone’s control, as with any postcard. In fact, only a small minority of messages written on postcards of American libraries during this period—including those not built by Carnegie—were about the buildings themselves. In her collection of over 1,000 postcards, Bernadette Lear points out that only thirty-four “include any comments about libraries. .  .  . Unfortunately, postcards seem to give no answer to what is arguably the most important question of all—what did library users do and think?”33 In his collection of 3,164 library postcards, Billy R. Wilkinson notes that only 127 were identified as having “a message which referred to the library pictured on the card . . . . The messages fall into four categories: 1) comments on the architecture; 2) comments on the book collection; 3) chauvinistic messages . . .; 4) a great variety of miscellaneous messages.”34 So-called chauvinistic messages made claims of a library’s superiority over another one, whether the superior facility was the one depicted in the postcard or another library known to the sender and/or recipient. Thus, although the vast majority of Carnegie library postcard senders used the medium to discuss things other than the building, there was an unwritten message

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that coursed underneath this postcard culture: “How does this library compare with your [Carnegie] library?” To place this in historical context, when a massive trade in Carnegie library postcards occurred in the early twentieth century, it constituted a visual manifestation of the first nationwide building brand, preceding hotel chains and gas stations. Although no two Carnegie libraries looked precisely alike, the image was based upon direct experience—when one had been to an actual Carnegie library—and the indirect experience offered through postcard views. Once again, the groundbreaking and singular nature of the brand comes to the fore. Carnegie library postcards therefore embodied a distinctive difference from other postcards: their use was an uncontrollable element that molded the image of brand that featured no consistent form, no advertising, and no logo. In a sense, this unusual pattern presaged by a century the phenomenon of viral brand image-building through social networks that is occurring today. In fact, one could argue that no contemporary example of brand image can approach that achieved by Carnegie libraries, for to do so would entail a firm having no advertising, no logo, and no consistent product form. Apple Computer products, for instance, would fail on all three accounts, for the brand’s image is dependent upon these three factors. Word of mouth certainly constitutes another aspect of indirect experience regarding Apple products, and Carnegie libraries also possessed this factor. The desirability of the Carnegie library brand motivated the citizens of Carroll, Iowa, to publish the postcard of their library while it was still under construction. The strength of the brand, however, perhaps resonates most clearly in a rare instance when a municipality did not trumpet its Carnegie library in a postcard. In a 1905 example, Bayonne, New Jersey, decided to list the library by its actual name, “Free Library” on the postcard it produced. This reflects the freedom that Carnegie-funded libraries had, selecting between “free/public” and “Carnegie.” Yet in this instance, the writer in Bayonne took care to note the library’s genesis: “This is the Carnegie Library which is very pretty inside, have you seen it, it was only finished last spring.” Sent to a cousin in Tennessee, the postcard’s message clearly demonstrated that a Carnegie library was relevant to its target audience, was different from the competition, had an identity that was controlled by its users and visitors, and possessed an image that was solidified by the audience’s perceptions—all components that constitute a brand. The aspect of direct experience often changed as the decades passed and numerous Carnegie libraries came under criticism for deterioration due to lack of maintenance, as well as the difficulty of expanding the buildings when more space was needed. The messaging, which continued to be determined by its users, often shifted to encompass feelings of frustration but not disdain regarding the aging buildings, and many writers have commented upon the almost mystical aura that Carnegie libraries continued to hold for many people. In 1996, August Kleinzahler reflected upon the new library that supplanted San Francisco’s “Old Main” Carnegie: It doesn’t delight me the way the doughty old Andrew Carnegie libraries did and do. I can’t imagine Jack London reading through the shelves at the new library. I can certainly imagine Dashiell Hammett reading through the Police Gazettes at



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the Old Main on a rainy afternoon, coughing into his handkerchief. But the new library isn’t about daydreaming or reading or sanctuary. It’s about commodity.35

The element that continued to shine through the aging old library was not mere nostalgia for a bygone era. In a book entitled Brand Meaning, Mark Batey’s words mirror what Kleinzahler expressed: A product becomes a brand when the physical product is augmented by something else—images, symbols, perceptions, feelings—to produce an integral idea greater than the sum of its parts. .  .  . At its core there remains a soul, a distinctive identity and image that resonates with its consumers and transcends its physical representation in terms of product format.36

The soul to which Mark Batey refers returns us to what I view as the core essence of a Carnegie library: “progressive municipality.” The longevity of the core essence— what community does not want to be considered progressive?—suggests that Carnegie libraries constituted not merely a brand, but an iconic one as well. The words of Mark Batey provide a suitable introduction to this chapter’s final consideration. He writes, “Brands that become truly iconic share certain characteristics. They evoke distinct experiences and feelings in people. The come to represent ideals and deep-seated convictions. They are connected to a culture and asset of values.”37 What further constitutes an iconic brand? Martin Kemp’s study of iconic images provides some signposts that are relevant to the Carnegie library brand. Kemp writes, If I have to give a definition of a visual icon, let me suggest the following. An iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognizability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people over time and cultures, such that it has to a greater or lesser degree transgressed the parameters of its initial making, function, context and meaning.38

As elastic as Kemp’s definition is, the image of a Carnegie Library challenges it, for it had a mutability surpassing some of Kemp’s case studies, such as the Mona Lisa. A specific architectural style, which usually determines most of a building’s image, was not the dominant factor. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the general features of a prominent central entrance, tall windows, lampposts, and often bilateral symmetry made it easy for early and mid-twentieth century Americans to identify the structure not merely as a library, but as a Carnegie library. These few factors permitted great variability in design, blurring the boundaries between the image of a Carnegie library and the notion of a Carnegie library. Once again, Martin Kemp’s musings on iconic images provide some clarification. Included in his study are what he terms generic and specific images, the cross as an instance of the former and Alberto Korda’s photograph of Che Guevara—featured on countless T-shirts and college dorm posters—as an example of the latter. Writing about these two

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types, Kemp states, “But the categories are not watertight. The generic becomes specific as soon as it is materialized in a given context, and the individual comes to stand for something general enough if it is to achieve its very wide reach.”39 The transformative processes that Kemp suggests apply particularly well to Carnegie libraries: an individual’s experience with her/his local institution transformed into a broader, less specific notion so that when traveling, the individual recognized a structure in a different architectural style as being part of that notion. Generic and specific therefore constantly interfaced, producing an extraordinarily resilient and elastic image—and an extraordinarily resilient and elastic brand. A late example of this is seen in a 1953 postcard with the caption “Crescent Hotel, Catholic Church and Carnegie Library. View from East Mountain, Eureka Springs, Ark” (Figure 9.3). The Crescent Hotel is easy to spot, for it dominates the crest of the hill. Three churches are visible: one immediately below and to the left of the hotel and two on the far right of the card, lower down in the landscape. There is no doubt which building is the Carnegie Library. It is the bilaterally symmetric building with the hipped roof below the hotel, almost in the center of the card. Viewers understood that a Carnegie library would be perhaps the most “formal” building in a town, and it was assumed that they would recognize this brand, even in a distant scene of rather poor graphic quality such as this one. A person’s local Carnegie library might have differed in style from Eureka Springs’s, but the brand’s image drew its strength from both its mutability and the underlying philosophy of Andrew Carnegie’s endeavor.

Figure 9.3 Crescent Hotel, Catholic Church and Carnegie Library. View from East Mountain, Eureka Springs, Ark. Postcard, 1953. Collection of Douglas Klahr.



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Indeed, the most fleeting type of ephemera—a 1930s’ matchbook created by Atlanta’s Arcade Restaurant—underscores this point (Color Plate 14). The front of the matchbook first identified the restaurant’s major claim, “Atlanta’s Oldest and Finest.” Yet instead of printing its street address, which appeared on the back of the matchbook, it simply stated “Next Door to Carnegie Library.” The underlying assumption was that the person in possession of the matchbook would know where the Carnegie library was located or at least would be able to identify it visually. Making such an assumption in a small city or town would be understandable, given the relatively low number of public buildings one would have encountered. However using a Carnegie library as an address locator within a city as large as Atlanta, which featured buildings far larger and more prominent than the library, pointedly underscores the potency and ubiquity of the brand. The image of the Carnegie brand, therefore, was extremely variable yet the notion was instantly recognizable to large segments of Americans, remaining constant. This core essence brings us back to the opening claim of this chapter: a Carnegie library constituted a type of civic space different from others in American culture at the time. Core essence and civic space oscillated in a reciprocal manner, each one reverberating off the other: to partake of the brand and its core essence, a distinctive civic mechanism was required to realize a Carnegie library, yet the iconic stature of the brand reinforced the aura of its civic space, even when Carnegie libraries fell into decay after decades of insufficient maintenance. These are the intertwined paradoxes. As George Bobinski wrote, “Carnegie libraries have become part of Americana. Built largely in small towns across the nation, they are often loved and idolized by their communities.”40 This sentiment initially might be dismissed as mere nostalgia that fixates upon an architectural manifestation of a bygone era, but that misses the deeper point. It is the juxtaposition of a singular civic space with an iconic brand that underscores such a statement. This duality is the crux of the matter, and it continues to characterize the notion of Carnegie libraries. A nationwide, unintended, noncommercial brand become iconic while creating civic spaces via corporate patronage: a chapter in American history that stands alone.

Notes 1 The most complete study of the plethora of styles in which Carnegie libraries were constructed is by Theodore Jones, Carnegie Libraries across America: A Public Legacy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). Jones conducted an architectural survey that encompassed 1,007 of the 1,689 Carnegie libraries and grouped the buildings into eight stylistic categories: Spanish Revival/California Mission (47), Prairie (31), Tudor Revival (19), Miscellaneous (117), Italian Renaissance (113), Beaux-Arts (183), Classical Revival (247), and Carnegie Classical (250). Regarding Carnegie Classical, Jones defined it as a reduction in size and detail of Classical Revival. Departures from bilateral symmetry were seen in some of the Spanish Revival/California

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Mission and Tudor Revival examples, but large windows signifying reading rooms remained the dominant architectural feature. 2 Thomas Augst, “Introduction: American Libraries and Agencies of Culture,” American Studies 42, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 8–9. 3 Augst notes that John Jacob Astor left $400,000 to establish a library in New York City, but greater details are provided by Phyllis Dain in a 1996 essay. She writes: “The Astor, dating to 1848, was the first privately endowed, and prototypical, free public reference library. . . . True, the Astor had an elitist atmosphere and short opening hours. It was nevertheless free and open to the public and thus served as a model for democratic access to a large, comprehensive collection at a time when few substantial libraries existed anywhere in North America.” Phyllis Dain, “American Public Libraries and the Third Sector: Historical Reflections and Implications,” Libraries & Culture 31, no. 1 (Winter 1996), 58–59. 4 Thomas Augst, “Introduction,” 10. 5 Peter Mickelson, “American Society and the Public Library in the Thought of Andrew Carnegie,” The Journal of Library History 10, no. 2 (April 1975), 121. 6 Mickelson, “American Society and the Public Library,” 125, 134. 7 Ari Kelman, “The Sound of the Civic: Reading Noise at the New York Public Library,” American Studies 42, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 26–27. 8 Kelman, “The Sound of the Civic,” 28. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 38. 11 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 2. 12 Karin Bijsterveld, “The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900–40,” Social Studies of Science, 31, no. 1 (February 2001), 46. 13 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 195. 14 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 233–34. 15 Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006), 108. 16 George S. Bobinski, Carnegie Libraries: Their History and Impact on American Public Library Development (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969), 80–81. 17 Derek Vaillant, “Peddling Noise: Contesting the Civic Soundscape of Chicago, 1890–1913,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 96, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 260. 18 For accounts of how children and the working class in different parts of the nation regarded Carnegie libraries, see Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 205–06; Mary B. Dierickx, The Architecture of Literacy: The Carnegie Libraries of New York City (New York: Urban Center Books, 1996), 41; and David I. Macleod, Carnegie Libraries in Wisconsin (Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1968), 51, 85. 19 Theodore Jones, Carnegie Libraries across America, 52. 20 Daniel F. Ring, “Carnegie Libraries as Symbols for an Age: Montana as a Test Case,” Libraries & Culture 27, no. 1 (Winter 1992), 15. 21 Paula D. Watson, “Carnegie Ladies, Lady Carnegies: Women and the Building of Libraries,” Libraries & Culture 31, no. 1 (Winter 1996), 164.



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22 Oklahoma Libraries 1900–1937: A History and a Handbook (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Library Commission, 1937), 48, 73. 23 Glen V. McIntyre, Guthrie and Logan County, Images of America Series (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2011), 35–36. 24 Alycia Perry and David Wisnom III, Before the Brand: Creating the Unique DNA of an Enduring Brand Identity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). 25 Perry and Wisnom III, Before the Brand, 3–7. 26 Ibid., 49. 27 Ring, “Carnegie Libraries as Symbols for an Age,” 11–12. 28 Ring, “Carnegie Libraries,” 16. 29 Terry A. Del Bene, “Green River, Wyoming,” http:​//www​.wyoh​istor​y.org​/ency​clope​ dia/g​reen-​river​-wyom​ing (accessed October 28, 2017) and https​://en​.wiki​pedia​.org/​ ?titl​e=Gre​en_Ri​ver, Wyoming (accessed October 28, 2017). 30 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy,” History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 211. 31 Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 212–13. 32 Bernadette A. Lear, “Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 43, no. 1 (2008): 78, 94. 33 Lear, “Wishing They Were There,” 96–97. 34 Billy R. Wilkinson, “Library Postcards—The Messages,” in A Guide to Collecting Librariana, ed. Norman D. Stevens (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 69. 35 August Kleinzahler, “At the Library,” The Threepenny Review 67 (Autumn 1996), 31. 36 Mark Batey, Brand Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3–4. 37 Batey, Brand Meaning, 196–97. 38 Martin Kemp, From Christ to Coke: How Image becomes Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 39 Kemp, From Christ to Coke, 4. 40 George S. Bobinski, “Carnegies,” American Libraries 21, no. 4 (April 1990): 296.

10

Banking with Family in Postwar California: Howard Ahmanson, the Millard Sheets Studio, and the Home Savings and Loan Commissions, 1953–91 Adam Arenson

In 1953, Millard Sheets received a letter from Howard Ahmanson, president of the Los Angeles-based Home Savings and Loan: “Have traveled Wilshire Boulevard for twenty-five years. Know name of architect and year every building was built. Bored.” Ahmanson continued in his characteristic staccato: “Have two valuable pieces of property Wilshire Boulevard. Need buildings designed .  .  . . If interested call this number.” Sheets, already a well-known and versatile artist, was clearly intrigued by the inquiry, and called Ahmanson to learn more about the project. The financier outlined his aims for the project: “I want buildings that will be exciting seventy-five years from now.”1 Sheets accepted the commission. His first assignment was a building for Ahmanson’s fire insurance firm, completed in 1954. His second was for the Beverly Hills branch of Home Savings and Loan, completed in 1956.2 Although Sheets was not an architect by training, he oversaw all aspects of the project, and collaborated with studio artists as well as licensed architects for the commission.3 For the project, Sheets clearly wanted his work to engage with the mid-century modern architecture popular in Southern California at the time.4 Clad in stark white travertine, the building’s windowless street façade opened into a dark, hushed interior, with a rear exit lit by stained-glass windows. Sheets not only worked with the architects on the building itself but also designed the art for the interior and exterior spaces, including, as he described, “a lot of sculpture and a big mosaic over the main entrance.”5 When the savings-and-loan building was finished, it featured a vivid four-panel mosaic over the door; stainedglass windows depicting the history of finance; gold “HS&L” (for Home Savings and Loan) tiles adorning much of the exterior; and a pair of familial sculptures (one of mother and daughter, the other of a father and son) flanking the entrance. On their first walkthrough of the completed space, Ahmanson could hardly contain his glee. As Sheets recounted, Ahmanson stated, “Millard, you know, I thought a lot of times when the bills came in on this building that I was a little whimsical when I said, ‘Do it the way



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you want to do it for yourself.” Ahmanson continued, “I am so crazy about it, but that is only half of it. . . . This is going to make money, which I didn’t plan.”6 Ahmanson was not the only one who was pleased with the result of the commission. The public also responded positively. As Sheets recalled, “They stood in line on Wilshire Boulevard a block and a half long waiting to put money in, in the savings and loan. . . . It paid for itself in the first ten days. It paid for the land, it paid for the building, it paid for the furnishings, landscaping. Everything.”7 To understand better what it was that appealed to current and potential customers, the company sent out questionnaires that asked: “Why did you choose Home Savings?” The most common response was, “We like to be associated with something beautiful.”8 Given the project’s success, Ahmanson would go on to employ Sheets and his studio of artists on a series of Home Savings and Loan buildings throughout California. Each building would be decorated with mosaics, murals, stained glass, and sculptures. The collaboration resulted in more than forty buildings designed and built between the completion of the first and Howard Ahmanson’s death in 1968, as well as more than eighty created by Sheets or his assistants before the Home Savings company was sold to Washington Mutual in 1998. (Many of these buildings currently hold branches for JP Morgan Chase.)9 While the works commissioned by Home Savings may be familiar to those in Southern California, they have been overlooked in art historical and architectural literature. Not only are these commissions a fascinating case study of corporate patronage, they were also an ongoing partnership between an artist, his studio, and a patron, over decades, a relationship that created not just one building but dozens. This chapter is drawn from my larger project that places the art and architecture of the Home Savings and Loan branch within the context of urban, business, and art history scholarship, and that documents the Sheets Studio work process, the sources for their designs, as well as the work’s reception, and the preservation issues surrounding the buildings and their art.10 While the larger project chronicles this corporate investment in public memory and looks at how the interplay of community banking and art for the public fostered an image of community in California’s notoriously spread-out suburbs, this chapter focuses on the evocation of family in the various commissions for each branch. I argue that such family imagery was central to the marketing plans of Home Savings and examine both Sheets’s and Ahmanson’s assumptions about family, homes, stability, and wealth through a detailed analysis of these commissions. While Home Savings eventually added artwork depicting local community history, the family imagery remained an essential part of these commissions throughout. As other chapters in this volume have shown, the art and architecture resulting from corporate patronage has been neglected in the field of art history. Similarly, business historians have been overall less concerned with the visual and cultural rhetoric of business and have focused more on the social, racial, and gender history of enterprise.11 While government-sponsored art programs, especially those from the era of the Works Progress Administration, have a long historiography, projects such as the Home Savings commissions have gone almost unnoticed, despite the extensive history of financial institutions owning art, for display, as an investment, or both. One reason

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for this may be that Sheets, unlike his avant-garde peers practicing in the area, did not design International Style spaces or incorporate abstract art into his interiors. Rather he chose to create representational art using traditional media, such as mosaics, and figurative sculptures. In so doing, the Sheets Studio distanced, and distinguished itself from the trends of the day.

Millard Sheets, California artist Born in Pomona in 1907, Millard Sheets first gained national recognition for his artwork as a teenager, when his watercolors were heralded as a bold innovation within California regional painting.12 In the 1920s and 1930s, his paintings of tenements on Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill were praised for their unusual choice of perspective, and for their interplay of line and color.13 In those decades Sheets received his first corporate commissions, including the Bullocks department store on Wilshire Boulevard and the Guaranty Building and Loan building near Pershing Square. Sheets assisted David Alfaro Siqueiros and he saw contemporaneous work from José Clemente Orozco and the American muralist Hugo Ballin; when Sheets was commissioned to do a series of murals for the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, Diego Rivera was working in the next building.14 During World War II, he served as an artist-correspondent for Life magazine and was hired to document events in India and Burma.15 The opportunities presented by these early and wide-ranging commissions led him to pursue similar corporate projects in the postwar period. After the war, Sheets began teaching at Scripps College in Claremont, California, where he taught fine-art techniques but never shied away from applying them to commercial contexts and the needs of business clients. “I think an industrial designer should have the broadest-gauged background in fine arts,” Sheets told an interviewer, “because this is what so much of industrial design lacks. I think that the broader the base, the higher the aspiration, the more exciting the opportunities will become.”16 Sheets urged students at Scripps, and later at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (today the Otis College of Art and Design), to welcome rather than shun corporate commissions. Sheets’s two most well-known works are commissions: The Word of Life granite mural at the University of Notre Dame (1964), known by its nickname “Touchdown Jesus,” and the twin Rainbow Tower ceramic-tile murals for the Honolulu Hilton (1968).17 Unlike many of his contemporaries in the American art world, who were experimenting with new media and methods, Millard Sheets and his studio preferred to work with more traditional materials. The Scripps College faculty’s approach was “all representational,” Sheets claimed. “We taught the structure behind everything. That’s basically where abstract art comes from. It’s the sense of what lies behind the surface,” Sheets argued. Yet, as Sheets recalled, they still had an interest in abstraction, as well as form and color, and “were all tremendously concerned with the basic design, the basic abstract arrangement: colorwise, shapewise, movement.”18



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In the postwar period, Sheets not only took on the Ahmanson commissions, he also directed the Los Angeles County Fair’s art pavilion. The 1954 exhibition, The Arts of Daily Living, co-curated with the House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon, featured the work of many of Sheets’s students, including Betty Davenport Ford, Sam Maloof, Harrison McIntosh, and John Svenson, and the opportunity launched their careers.19 Sheets’s designs, as well as those of his Claremont colleagues and students, shaped a generation of artists on the West Coast working in paint, fabric, ceramics, wood, and even those working in celluloid at the Disney Studios.20

Howard Ahmanson, patron Howard Ahmanson was born in Nebraska in 1906, and he moved to Los Angeles in 1925, founding a company that created fire insurance policies for foreclosed properties. Ahmanson recruited officers of building and loan associations to scout out insurance opportunities for him. Paying his employees commissions as well as offering them exquisite Christmas gifts for their children, along with other tokens of his appreciation, Howard Ahmanson demonstrated his commitment to a generous, personable style in creating a memorable—and profitable—company.21 In 1947, Ahmanson purchased control of the Home Savings and Loan Association, buying out the original mutualassociation owners.22 Through a rapid set of mergers and acquisitions, Home Savings became the largest savings-and-loan in the country, as measured by assets, depositors, loans, or branches—all leadership positions that Ahmanson worked to maintain no matter what.23 Sheets and Ahmanson were acquainted in the years before the commission: both were members of the Economic Round Table, a weekly breakfast-and-policy group, and their wives had been sorority sisters together at the University of California, Los Angeles. Because of the successful commission in 1953, Sheets additionally became a key advisor and confidante to Ahmanson, even offering him advice about his personal collection of European art.24 New deposits were essential to the growth of his business, and so Ahmanson looked to Sheets to help create a visual brand for Home Savings. Throughout California, Sheets consistently incorporated iconography that stressed the familial and communicated stability to the customers of Home Savings. Ahmanson spoke of the “pride and a symbolism involved in Home Savings’ approach.”25 For Ahmanson, however, these commissions were about much more than mere branding; they reflected Ahmanson’s desire to build an altruistic legacy beyond the account books.26 In these years Ahmanson would also expand his philanthropic portfolio to include supporting medical research at the University of Southern California; offering the largest gift to the newly separate Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in 1958; giving a naming gift to the Ahmanson Theater in downtown Los Angeles; and serving as a board member for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.27 Ahmanson’s involvement in sponsoring these beautiful savings-and-loans seem to have opened him

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up to the good publicity that art sponsorships could offer—but Ahmanson remained convinced even these art and architecture expenses had to serve business interests first. Home Savings and Loan’s target audience were the upwardly mobile, mostly white families in Los Angeles’s Westside communities, as well as those in the rapidly growing areas of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. The thrift benefited from federal loan guarantees and housing subsidies, profiting from the terms of the G. I. Bill, the Federal Housing Administration guidelines, and the Veterans Administration loan practices. New postwar projects embodied a certain politics of the city and of daily life, one skewed toward detached single-family houses in increasingly suburban settings.28 For the first building commission for Home Savings, Sheets had no precedent to reference. Sheets had to come up with an architectural and artistic program that would both reflect the aims of his patron and be distinct stylistically from the surrounding buildings. Streamline Moderne and other modern styles relied on steel, glass, and neon, resplendent in their picture windows and shiny surfaces; the Home Savings structures were windowless boxes clad in millennia-old materials. The Home Savings buildings were generally no more than two stories tall, and thus remained approachable. The choice of family subjects to decorate the buildings additionally played a key role in maintaining that sense of accessibility. What I term the “Home Savings Style” emerged from the collaboration of artist and client. Millard Sheets, Howard Ahmanson, and members of both their offices offered input, driven by marketing, finance, construction, and artistic concerns. The conservative parameters of the Home Savings Style applied as much to the subjects depicted as to the media used. Although Sheets’s own artwork tended to feature individuals as well as horses in vast landscapes, for the Home Savings commissions he focused on images of family. Sheets viewed families as an accessible, comforting, and even universal subject; he told an interviewer that “I think that the idea of Home Savings suggest[s] family and the security of the family, the idea of permanence.”29 Indeed, the majority of his Home Savings designs were paeans to family, tributes to noble laborers, and allegories of investment through scenes of leisure and repose. Yet it is important to note that the type of family that Sheets and Home Savings chose to highlight was the “nuclear family” of the suburbs, often with one boy and one girl to pair with heterosexual parents. As art historian Barbara Melosh has shown in her study of New Deal artwork, even the poses and settings for these family scenes are coded in class and racial terms, and often represent a narrow definition of family.30 At the first Sheets-designed Home Savings branch in Beverly Hills (1956), family was just one of the many themes explored. There was a ceramic shield advertising “Peace of Mind since 1889” and a large mosaic which depicted (in the words of the opening brochure) “four panels symboliz[ing] man’s fulfillment of his needs and dreams in his produce from the sea, from the soil, from industry, and his eternal spiritual and mental ‘reaching for the stars.’”31 Other subjects included bathers, a lion, and a global history of finance. The family theme was seen most predominately in the sculptures at the entrance, designed by Sheets’s colleague Renzo Fenci (Figure 10.1).32 As in many of the other



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Figure 10.1  Renzo Fenci sculptures flanking entrance to Home Savings Beverly Hills branch, 9245 Wilshire Boulevard, completed 1956. The Ahmanson Foundation Archives. Home Savings to follow, the sculptures show a family embracing. The figures not only frame the door but also structure a narrative emphasizing the solidity of the institution. Fenci’s depiction of the family was so well received that Sheets and Ahmanson ordered similar groups for other Home Savings sites.33 Sheets always served as his studio’s public face—the impresario who attracted business, managed its affairs, and, often, drew the initial sketches and presented them to clients, whether individuals decorating their homes, or ongoing business contracts like that from Ahmanson. Yet Sheets hired his former student Susan Lautmann Hertel even before constructing a studio space for the team to work in.34 (She later married Carl Hertel and took his surname.)35 Hertel was a natural choice for the project as she understood of Sheets’s style and had a passion for painting families. Indeed, she often painted her own children and animals from her farmstead in Glendora. As one close friend recalled, there were “cats and dogs in the house, chickens wandering and clucking outside, ducks and rabbits in their pens, Nubian goats . . . a crew of horses and ponies” and all of these made their way into art for Home Savings.36

The Home Savings tower In 1962, Sheets took on a new project: the first multi-story Home Savings tower, in his hometown of Pomona, as an anchor for a new downtown pedestrian mall.37 There, Sheets depicted family groups wearing classical garb in order to reinforce the savingsand-loan’s desired image as a place of timelessness and stability. The Sheets Studio

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mosaic for the front of the tower features a family at play. While the mother wears a dress with a classicized design, the other family members wear clothes that are distinctly modern. The combination of classical elements with modern details results in a work that transcends a particular period or location. The mosaic also highlights the intimate and emotional connection among family members, with the aim of encouraging customers, both current and potential, to place their deposits with Home Savings. This emphasis on the personal connections between families and the financial institution was also replicated in Home Savings advertisements.38 One of the most striking, from 1962, reproduced the Fenci sculpture from the first commission with a personal statement from Ahmanson (Figure 10.2). Under the headline “The

Figure 10.2 Home Savings advertisement featuring Renzo Fenci sculpture and Howard Ahmanson signature, 1962. Courtesy of Fieldstead Archives.



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Future For Your Family And You,” the advertisement emphasized how “no one has ever lost a penny at Home Savings,” and reaffirmed the company’s commitment to “sound, old-fashioned business principles” that would keep Home “the safest and most profitable place for your savings.”39 The presence of families in advertising is, of course, commonplace. Indeed many commercials—such as those for toothpaste, pasta, baking supplies, cereal, detergents, home alarms, or amusement parks—make the safety, security, and enjoyment of family, and even the labor-saving possibilities for parents, their central theme.40 But by highlighting this sculpture of a family in an advertisement, the company was able to utilize its commission across multiple media, not only on the entrance to its buildings to invite customers in but also to reiterate the message of how family connections were an essential component of the Home Savings vision. In 1964, Sheets and Ahmanson expanded on the theme of family for its new branch in Burbank. Albert Stewart, Sheets’s colleague from the Claremont Colleges, produced a sculpture with a familiar family group, this time hung above the door. In the mosaics designed by Sheets and Hertel, two barefoot children ride horses through the trees, with no parents in sight. What could be more secure, the art implies, than children safely playing alone? What better place to invest your money than with an institution that can safeguard your assets as you would your own children? The message is clear: the Home Savings offers you peace of mind. Images of children playing alone would also be employed on the facades of branches in Santa Ana and Highland Park, among others.41 Ahmanson clearly understood the importance of images in creating a brand, and when an image worked, he was cautious about changing or modifying it. As Sheets recalled Ahmanson saying: “You can always have latitude. . . . But I just know that it’s foolish for us to get off of something that we know is right. The image is established.”42 Not all who visited the branches saw them as worth celebrating. One critic viewed them as “gold and white temples to all-American values like family, industry and, most especially, savings,” and ideal “for the Silent Majority,” using Richard Nixon’s name for supporters of the Vietnam War to define the customer base.43 Yet despite the critics, and the changing and turbulent years of the 1960s, Home Savings continued to commission Millard Sheets to produce almost the same building, sited almost the same way, in reliably prosperous communities throughout Southern California. “We try, when we open a building, to make it look like it’s been there for fifteen or twenty years,” Sheets emphasized. “We buy beautiful, big trees and spend a great deal of time and a great deal of money moving them,” so that “we bring them into the community as though they’ve really been established for a long time.” Sheets added, “People appreciate this very much.” Home Savings stood for stability, bragging about its “tradition of conservative investing.”44 This was at once a business and a political statement, which Home Savings hoped would attract what it viewed as the right kind of customer. Some of the Home Savings commissions only had family imagery in its décor. But, beginning in the early 1960s, some branch artwork also depicted the history and attractions of the local communities. At the Pasadena branch (1963), a family group by artist Albert Stewart adorned the corner of the entrance, literally and figuratively symbolizing that the family is the cornerstone of the home. Inside, Millard Sheets designed a wood-panel mural depicting the famous Pasadena Tournament of Roses

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parade. In 1965, Howard Ahmanson ordered ten identical copies of the family sculptures that Albert Stewart and Renzo Fenci had created for Home Savings, and he placed them in Compton, Arcadia, Encino, downtown Los Angeles, and Victorville, among other branches.45 At the new Santa Ana branch (1966–67), the theme of unaccompanied children appears again as they are seen playing in colorful jumpers play in the stained-glass windows; in the mosaic, a family stands, embracing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the balance between family and history imagery began to shift, at new Home Savings locations in Hollywood (1969), Studio City (1969), and Rialto (1970). These branches aimed at a more commercial clientele, emphasizing the movie industry, orange groves, and television studios. To create these designs, the artists at the Sheets Studios consulted popular histories, postcards, and local promotional brochures as sources.46 But the family theme was still present at these branches as well. In the Studio City branch, for example, the Sheets Studio designed brightly colored stained-glass windows depicting horses at the corral, young men and women on horseback, and children riding in a carriage, led by a woman at the reins (Color Plate 15).47 Ahmanson’s comments in the opening-day brochure for the Hollywood branch also stressed the importance of Home Savings’ art as a public good. “Civic leaders have expressed Hollywood’s need for such a monument,” Ahmanson said, and “by providing such a landmark, with no cost to the taxpayer, we can show our gratitude to a wonderful community which has been so nice to Home Savings.”48 Home Savings embraced history and stability in its design and its advertising, and used the popular history of the community to attach their imagery to foundation myths told in town pageants and local histories. Even though Ahmanson died of a heart attack in 1968, his corporate patronage continued to define Home Savings’ public image long after. Throughout the 1970s, William and Robert Ahmanson, Howard’s nephews, oversaw the commissions as Home Savings expanded into new markets and regions.49 Home Savings’ in-house marketing team, led by George Underwood, began using branch artwork, especially those featuring family scenes, in full-color reproductions in their illustrated calendars given away at the branches.50 The first new northern California branch opened in San Jose on New Year’s Day 1973. While the architectural style had changed with this branch, the themes remained consistent: four façade mosaics depicted families variously flying kites, sailing toy boats, riding horses, and sitting in a tree house, and a sculpture of a mother and child. The family theme was used by Home Savings not only to reassure and emphasize their commitment to their customers but also to couch new financial ventures in familiar terms. In 1972, Home Savings established a new branch at the corner of Vermont and Slauson in Los Angeles, in the heart of the predominantly African American community then known as South Central. For this project, African American artists created a façade mosaic that showed the state of California and orange trees alongside African symbols. The sculpture commission went to Vertis Hayes, an African American artist who had created a set of murals for the Harlem Hospital in the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and who had moved to Los Angeles in 1951. For the Home Savings commission,



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Figure 10.3  Photograph of Vertis Hayes’s sculpture for Vermont-Slauson branch, Los Angeles, completed in 1972, as reproduced in 1978 Home Savings calendar. Hayes sculpted a family of African descent, each figure wearing traditional African clothing or accessories (Figure 10.3).51 As with the Sheets Studio sculptures, Hayes’s work expressed the subject of the family in a register that Home Savings thought best for this community. Similarly, at the West Portal branch in San Francisco (1977), the Sheets Studio designed a mosaic with the theme of a “Gateway to the Pacific.”52 In this mosaic, five couples represent cultures from around the Pacific Rim: the Mexican couple carries calla lilies; the South Pacific pair holds a fishnet and fruit; the two Californians harvest wheat; the Australian couple cares for sheep; and the Japanese pair carry grain bushels. By using the familiar mosaic medium, and drawing upon the theme of family once again, Sheets effectively introduces the idea of Pacific Rim trade for Home Savings investors without it seeming so foreign.53 Even after Millard Sheets moved to Gualala, in northern California, to focus on his own work, the Home Savings commissions continued with his former assistants, and the artwork continued to emphasize family groups.54 Susan Hertel was the longestserving Sheets Studio artist, maintaining a partnership with chief mosaicist Denis O’Connor that continued to produce artwork for Home Savings until 1991. In the end, the hundred or so Home Savings locations installed with art in California were joined by close to fifty decorated branches of Savings of America (Home Savings’ name outside California) in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.55 The artwork for these locations continued the well-established pattern of using local-history and family

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scenes to endear the savings-and-loan to its communities. Home Savings utilized family imagery in their advertisements and art commissions until it was purchased by Washington Mutual in 1998. In the twenty-first century, bank architecture and design is largely uniform, abstract logos, and colors leading safe corporate branding. In contrast, the Home Savings and Loan buildings built in Southern California in the second half of the twentieth century were regionally specific and unique, and they distinguished Home Savings from its peers. Combining private investment and fine art methods, championing family and local history themes in a moment of dramatic cultural and political change, the Home Savings and Loan buildings are a landmark of corporate sponsorship, a signal moment in the relationship between business and art, and a symbol of the innovative environment found in postwar southern California cities. Whether showing children at play or parents and children wrapped in an embrace, the art commissioned by Home Savings and Loan from the Millard Sheets Studio used images of families to stress the importance of investing for both today and the future. The imagery also reinforced the company’s family-friendly reputation—all with the goal of increasing deposits and growing the business. Public relations, especially with the local community, still pose challenges for the modern corporation, especially in the face of shareholder imperatives and the unpredictable world of social media. Corporations often feature families in their advertisements, but can be reluctant to commit to large, permanent, figurative art, even if such art celebrates the family life and leisure. Home Savings took a gamble: managing their reputation and community relations not through rapidly changing slogans but rather through the permanent and prominent placement of art in each of its branches. Though the Home Savings corporation itself is gone, their commissioned art depicting local history, community, and families remains—and its appeal has stood the test of time.

Notes

Research for the chapter in this volume was supported by funding from the Haynes Foundation, The Huntington Library, and the Ahmanson Foundation.

1 Oral history interview with Millard Sheets, October 1986–July 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed online at http:​//www​.aaa.​si.ed​u/col​ lecti​ons/o​ralhi​stori​es/tr​anscr​ipts/​sheet​s86.h​tm, Tape 8, side A, July 15, 1988. 2 National American Fire Insurance was at 3731 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles; it has since been demolished. The first Home Savings branch remains at 9245 Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, California. See also Eric John Abrahamson, Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), especially chapter 11. 3 The primary architect in the studio in the first years was S. David Underwood; Rufus Turner was among the many architects who also collaborated with Sheets. After 1973, the Home Savings-Sheets Studio commissions were almost exclusively buildings with Frank Homolka Jr. as architect.



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4 See, for example, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Esther McCoy, and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998); and Alan Hess and Andrew Danish, Palm Springs Weekend: The Architecture and Design of a Mid-Century Oasis (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001). 5 Oral history interview with Millard Sheets, October 1986–July 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Tape 8, side A, July 15, 1988. 6 Millard Sheets, interview conducted in 1976 by George M. Goodwin, Center for Oral History Research, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Audio recording, Tape no. 8, side 2, January 6, 1977. Accessible online at http:​//arc​ hive.​org/d​etail​s/mil​lards​heets​ora01​shee.​ 7 Oral history interview with Millard Sheets, October 1986–July 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed online at http:​//www​.aaa.​si.ed​u/col​ lecti​ons/o​ralhi​stori​es/tr​anscr​ipts/​sheet​s86.h​tm, Tape 8, side B, July 15, 1988. 8 Ibid. 9 The quick transition initially led to questions about the fate of this art and architecture; for my first writing on this transition and the origins of the project, see Adam Arenson, “Saving the Bank’s Artistic Assets,” Edge of the American West, April 24, 2009, http:​//edg​eofth​ewest​.word​press​.com/​2009/​04/24​/savi​ng-th​e-ban​ks’-a​rtist​ ic-as​sets/.​ 10 Adam Arenson, Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2018). 11 For a focus on businesses rather than their built environment, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jon C. Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Ruth McManus and Philip J. Ethington, “Suburbs in Transition: New Approaches to Suburban History,” Urban History 34, Part 2 (2007): 317–37; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Michan Andrew Connor, “Creating Cities and Citizens: Municipal Boundaries, Place Entrepreneurs, and the Production of Race in Los Angeles County, 1926–1978” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2008); Elisabeth Orr, “Living along the Fault Line: Community, Suburbia and Multi-Ethnicity in Garden Grove and Westminster, CA 1900–1995” (PhD diss., Indiana University, December 1999); and D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996). For attention to the built environment, see Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1997). 12 For Sheets’s early work, see Arthur Millier, Merle Armitage, and Hartley Burr Alexander, Millard Sheets (Los Angeles: Dalzell Hatfield, 1935) and Gordon McClelland, Millard Sheets: The Early Years (1926–1944) (Newport Beach: California Regionalist Art Information Center, 2010).

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13 Sheets’s most famous paintings from these years are Angel’s Flight (1931), held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Tenement Flats (1933–34), once displayed in the White House and now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 14 For more on these commissions, see Stephen Gee, Iconic Vision: John Parkinson, Architect of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2013) and Monica E. Jovanovich, “Power and Patronage: Public Art and Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles, 1928–1936” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2016). See also Monica Jovanovich-Kelley “The Apotheosis of Power: Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Public Art Dialogue (Spring 2014): 42–70. 15 For more on Life’s wartime commissions, see Melissa Renn, “From Life: Tom Lea and the World War II Art of Life Magazine,” in Adair Margo and Renn, Tom Lea, Life Magazine, and World War II (El Paso: Tom Lea Institute, 2016). 16 Millard Sheets, interview conducted in 1976 by George M. Goodwin, Center for Oral History Research, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Audio recording, tape no. 2, side 2, November 30, 1976, p. 85. Accessible online at http:​//arc​hive.​org/d​etail​s/mil​lards​heets​ora01​shee.​ See also Millard Sheets, American Culture 1958: The Beginning or The End? (Claremont, CA: Friends of the Colleges at Claremont, 1959). 17 See Christy Johnson, ed., Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California, 1945–1975 (Pomona, CA: American Museum of Ceramic Art, 2012), especially the essays by Hal Nelson and James Elliot-Bishop. 18 Sheets, interviewed by Goodwin, December 4, 1976, UCLA oral history. 19 Design for Modern Living: Millard Sheets and the Claremont Art Community, DVD, directed by Paul Bockhorst ([Monrovia, CA]: Paul Bockhorst, [2014]). See also Wendy Kaplan et al., California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). For an important racial critique of such style-setting, see Dianne Suzette Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 20 See Common Ground; Harold B. Nelson and Tia Vasilou, “Artists’ Biographies,” in The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1985, ed. Harold B. Nelson (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2011), 101–87; “Claremont Modern: The Artists of the GI Bill,” Claremont Heritage, February 17–26, 2012, http:​//cla​remon​tmuse​um.or​g/cla​remon​ t-mod​ern-a​rtist​s-gi-​bill-​02/ (accessed October 28, 2017); Janice Lovoos and Edmund F. Penney, Millard Sheets: One-Man Renaissance (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1984), 50–52; and Design for Modern Living: Millard Sheets and the Claremont Art Community, DVD, directed by Paul Bockhorst ([Monrovia, CA]: Paul Bockhorst, [2014]). 21 Abrahamson, Building Home, 33–37; quotation from page 37. 22 Ibid., 83 and 93–94. 23 Ibid., 87 and 93–95. 24 Millard Sheets, interview for Home Savings conducted by George Underwood and others, August 11, 1987, transcript titled “Millard Sheets on Home Savings and Art,” Denison Library Archives Folio XS14, transcript (and accompanying video), Scripps College; Millard Sheets, interviewed by Joe Taylor, Tile Heritage Foundation, 1988. Audio provided by Joe Taylor; Carolyn Sheets Owen-Towle, Damngorgeous: A



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Daughter’s Memoir of Millard Owen Sheets (Oceanside, CA: Oceanside Museum of Art, [2008]), 95. 25 Oral history interview with Millard Sheets, October 1986–July 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed online at http:​//www​.aaa.​si.ed​u/col​ lecti​ons/o​ralhi​stori​es/tr​anscr​ipts/​sheet​s86.h​tm, Tape 8, side B, July 15, 1988. 26 Ahmanson’s first heart attack, in 1956, may have also led him to seek large-scale cultural projects as a way to preserve his legacy in the community. See Abrahamson, Building Home, 140–42, and chap. 11. 27 These arguments have emerged from conversations with Eric Abrahamson; see Abrahamson, Building Home, chap. 11. 28 Abrahamson, Building Home, 86, 89, 107, 124–28. For nuclear families and the suburbs, see Kevin Michael Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and the other work of its contributors, especially Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven; also Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Orr, “Living along the Fault Line” (1999). 29 Millard Sheets, interview for Home Savings, August 11, 1987, “Millard Sheets on Home Savings and Art” transcript, p. 15, Denison Library Archives Folio XS14, Scripps College; misspellings in original transcript silently corrected. See also Tony Sheets, “Millard Sheets: A Man of Great Diversity,” in Tony Sheets and Janet Blake, A Tapestry of Life: The World of Millard Sheets ([Pomona, CA]: Millard Sheets Center for the Arts at Fairplex, 2007), 65. 30 Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 190–94. 31 “Home’s New Home in Beverly Hills,” branch opening brochure, 1956. 32 Millard Sheets Papers, 1907–1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, file for Home Savings—Beverly Hills branch. 33 Home Savings and Loan, “Home’s New Home in Beverly Hills,” branch opening brochure, 1956; “Beverly Hills, 1966–1977” and “Santa Ana, 1965–1967” folders, Sheets Papers, Archives of American Art. Another family group was commissioned for the Whittier branch in 1960 from Antonio Ballester Vilaseca, a Spanish sculptor who had come to Los Angeles to work with the film studios. Interview for Home Savings, August 11, 1987, “Millard Sheets on Home Savings and Art” transcript, p. 15, Scripps College. 34 Like Sheets, Hertel loved horses. Mary Davis MacNaughton, Susan Hertel, A Retrospective (Claremont, CA: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College via the University of Washington Press, 1998), especially pp. 16, 22. 35 Many other Pomona Valley artists also received commissions through the Sheets Studio. Ceramic artists such as Harrison McIntosh, Betty Davenport Ford, and Helen Watson did work for Home Savings. Other artists, including Sam Maloof and Martha Menke Underwood, used gigs at the studio as a way to support themselves financially while pursuing their own work. See Harold B. Nelson, “Millard Sheets and Postwar Ceramics in Southern California: From Scripps College to the Los Angeles County Fair,” in Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California, 1945–1975, ed. Christy Johnson (Pomona, CA: American Museum of Ceramic Art, 2012), 29–30; Jeremy Adamson, “The Furniture That Sam Built,” in The House that

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Sam Built, 39–41; Design for Modern Living: Millard Sheets and the Claremont Art Community, DVD, directed by Paul Bockhorst ([Monrovia, CA]: Paul Bockhorst, [2014]). 36 Kate Barnes, as quoted in MacNaughton, Susan Hertel, 16, and author’s interview with Katy Hertel, November 5, 2010. 37 “Artist Commissioned,” Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, October 8, 1961, clipping, “Buffums’ Department Store, Pomona branch, Pomona, CA, 1961–1963” folder, Sheets Papers. This building was a departure from the typical two or three story buildings that were common to Home Savings buildings in the 1950s. 38 To see such advertisements, see the Fieldstead Archives and the George Underwood collection. 39 “The Future for Your Family and You” advertisement, n.d., Fieldstead Archives. 40 See, for example, Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 41 See Adam Arenson, “The Hidden LA Zoo Painting in Burbank,” December 31, 2010, Cultural Civil War blog, http:​//ada​maren​son.c​om/20​10/12​/the-​hidde​n-la-​zoo-p​ainti​ ng-in​-burb​ank/. 42 Sheets, interviewed by Goodwin, January 11, 1977, UCLA oral history; Howard Ahmanson to Kass Lunt, memo #35, October 17, 1963, George Underwood collection. See also Abrahamson, Building Home, 168. 43 Aaron Betsky, “Marble Palaces of Home Savings Remind Us What the Money’s for,” Los Angeles Times August 29, 1991, accessed at https://perma.cc/T3SZ-G888. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” label is first used in 1969, but the constituency is evident in this period; see Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 243–68; Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008). 44 Sheets, interviewed by Goodwin, January 11, 1977, UCLA oral history. For “conservative investing,” Adam Arenson, “Home Savings in New York–the TV Commercial,” The Cultural Civil War blog, April 25, 2012, http://perma.cc/EEN6-4AHF. 45 Renzo Fenci to Millard Sheets, November 26, 1965; Millard Sheets to Howard Ahmanson, November 30, 1965; Milton Holmes to Raymond Erno, Kristiania Kunst og Metallstøberi, February 7, 1966; Kristiania Kunst og Metallstøberi, Oslo, Norway, to Millard Sheets Designs, February 18, 1966 and May 13, 1966; all in “Santa Ana, 1965–1967” folder, Sheets Papers; and author’s interview with John Edward Svenson, January 23, 2012. 46 This research process is evident in the Sheets Papers. For descriptions of vernacular historical commemoration, see John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 47 Adam Arenson, “Image of the Week: Stained Glass at Laurel Canyon,” September 10, 2010, http:​//ada​maren​son.c​om/20​10/09​/imag​e-of-​the-w​eek-s​taine​d-gla​ss-at​-laur​el-ca​ nyon/.​ 48 Home Savings and Loan Association, “From Oranges to Oscars” opening brochure, 1968. 49 Abrahamson, Building Home, 97, 258–60, 263–64. On the continuation of Sheets Studio work, see, for example, Sheets to Raymond Petucek, June 21, 1968, “Hollywood, Correspondence, 1966–1968” folder, Sheets Papers.



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50 Author’s interview with George Underwood, May 2, 2012. 51 Adam Arenson, “Home Savings in South Central,” July 13, 2012 Cultural Civil War blog, http:​//ada​maren​son.c​om/20​12/07​/home​-savi​ngs-i​n-sou​th-ce​ntral​/. Sources include Ed Fuentes, “Monthly Mural Wrap: A Dozen Tags for September 2012,” KCET Columns: Writing on the Wall blog, October 1, 2012, http://perma.cc/VLK2243U; and Corita Kent interviewed by Bernard Galm, “Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait,” Oral History Program, University of California Los Angeles, 1977, https​://ar​chive​.org/​detai​ls/co​ritak​entor​alhi0​0cori​. 52 The 1970s saw the rise of the Pacific Rim, with President Nixon’s visit to China, a boom in the Japanese economy, the start of the “Asian tigers” economic phenomenon, and a flood of goods made in Japan, Taiwan, or Hong Kong into the United States. See Louis W. Pauly, Opening Financial Markets: Banking Politics on the Pacific Rim (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 53 Adam Arenson, “Millard Sheets’s Gateway to the Pacific and the Home Savings Style,” February 4, 2011, http:​//ada​maren​son.c​om/20​11/02​/mill​ard-s​heets​s-gat​eway-​ to-th​e-pac​ific-​and-t​he-ho​me-sa​vings​-styl​e/. 54 For the changes of this later era under O’Connor and Hertel without Sheets, see Adam Arenson, “Paying Dividends: How Home Savings & Loan Perfected the Art of Banking in Southern California,” Huntington Frontiers (Fall/Winter 2011–12), 18–24, http:​//hun​tingt​onfro​ntier​s.org​/feat​ures/​payin​g-div​idend​s/. 55 For my best estimation of a complete list, see http:​//ada​maren​son.c​om/ho​mesav​ingsb​ ankar​t/the​list.

11

Rusting Giant: U.S. Steel and the Promotional Material of Sculpture Alex J. Taylor

In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), entrepreneur Hank Rearden invents a revolutionary new alloy that will “outlast any metal in existence.”1 Stronger and lighter than steel, his innovation promises a “second Renaissance—not of oil paintings and cathedrals—but of oil derricks, power plants and motors made of Rearden Metal.”2 The fictional invention as much reflects Rand’s Promethean belief in the central role of individual initiative in human history as it echoes the commitment of midcentury corporate enterprise to progress through research and development. For the beleaguered American steel industry, the possibilities of such a miraculous material were, of course, little more than a dream. But at U.S. Steel, they did identify an alternative: using a little-known alloy to project the image of industrial renaissance the company so desperately required. Far from the gleaming green-blue shine of Rearden Metal, the material to which U.S. Steel’s spin doctors turned was Cor-Ten, an industrial alloy specifically that developed an outer layer of corrosion when exposed to the elements. Given that rust was the preeminent visual signifier of steel’s inferiority, it was an unlikely candidate for promotional use. For U.S. Steel, the replacement of rusty steel might have comprised some 40 percent of their sales, but its consumer visibility made it a serious public relations problem.3 Since the late 1950s, consumers had watched on in horror as their appliances and automobiles were infected by an onslaught of corrosion eating away at the gleaming duco and chromium plate that had so seduced them in the showroom. By 1960, it was reported that the national epidemic of corrosion cost the United States an estimated $8 billion in the previous year.4 The distress was fanned by the revelation in Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, that cars were indeed “designed to rust instead of last.”5 Durable goods were proving to be anything but, and as a result, many of steel’s customers were turning instead to aluminum and plastics, whose manufacturers repeatedly pointed to steel’s failings in their own sales promotions. Rust was only the most visible symptom of many more serious ailments. It may have been several decades before the industrial decay of the Midwest would earn the “rust belt” epithet, but the signs of decline were clear enough. After World War II, the



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United States produced 57 percent of the world’s steel. By 1960, this had dropped to 26 percent.6 In 1959, the American steel industry had all but ground the sector to a halt in what became the longest strike in American history, allowing overseas steel producers to gain a valuable foothold in the domestic market. In the early 1960s, European and Japanese manufacturers were fast overtaking the American industry, strengthened by state support, lower labor costs, and, above all, the new and more efficient steelmaking technologies installed during postwar reconstruction.7 U.S. Steel was the industry’s rusting giant, its bloated and inefficient operations appearing—in Ayn Rand’s terms—less like the pioneering Rearden Steel, and more like their wasteful adversary Associated Steel. But while Rearden’s corrupt competitor thrived through its Washington connections, U.S. Steel’s relations with government were famously troubled. In 1962, just days after President John F. Kennedy had negotiated an anti-inflationary pact between big steel and the labor unions, U.S. Steel president Roger Blough announced price increases, a move quickly followed by other manufacturers. Kennedy was furious: “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” he famously said, “but I never believed it until now.”8 Charging U.S. Steel with “utter contempt” of the public interest, Kennedy cancelled government contracts and launched anti-trust investigations, alleging that the company “so dominated the industry that it controls prices and should be broken up.”9 For readers of Ayn Rand’s recent novel, the plot of these ideological battles between must have seemed all too familiar. “This is a sustained attack on the free enterprise system,” one steel executive exclaimed, “It may be all out war.”10 U.S. Steel was forced to withdraw the price increases, and, by the mid-1960s, the iron fist of such public confrontations had been replaced with the velvet glove of public relations—and the use of Cor-Ten in art and architecture was an integral tool in U.S. Steel’s efforts to secure government and community favor. In the late 1960s, Cor-Ten became a favored material among contemporary sculptors, but its rise was no accident of artistic taste, rather, it was the result of the aggressive promotional strategy of its manufacturer. More than merely growing new markets for steel, the use of the remarkable alloy in public sculpture served as a highly visible and seemingly impartial rejoinder to those who condemned the industry’s failure to move with the times. In modern art, at least, U.S. Steel might shake its reputation as the “epitome of corporate conservatism.”11 Through its promotion of Cor-Ten, contemporary art became a powerful vehicle to visualize industrial innovation and to demonstrate the social commitments of one the nation’s largest corporations. “Cor-Ten” is not a metallurgical term: it is a patented alloy licensed and marketed by the United States Steel Corporation. The brand-name neologism combines the material’s corrosion resistance and high-tensile qualities, respectively the “cor” and “ten” in its name. Launched in 1933 for industrial uses, the alloy was one of countless material trademarks owned by the company.12 Such specialist products acquired new value for U.S. Steel by the 1960s, their apparent technical “innovation” serving as a useful riposte to those who thought that “U.S. Steel was an ailing giant leading a sickening industry.”13 When the company launched a range of new profiles and thicknesses of Cor-Ten in 1961, it was more than just new sales that were sought.14 The

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representation of the material as a new development, even if it was actually some thirty years old, served U.S. Steel’s broader needs to communicate innovation and progress. But at this point, the aesthetic value of Cor-Ten remained untapped. It was promoted instead as providing “outstanding cost and weight savings to the construction industries.”15 When steel companies did turn to art to showcase their product, they usually chose stainless steel. Sculptor José de Rivera, for instance, was chosen for a 1961 U.S. Steel exhibition designed to profile steel as the top design material, and again in 1965, he was commissioned by industry lobby group the American Iron and Steel Institute to produce Steel Century II, a sculpture marking the industry’s centenary, mounted on a steel plinth made from steel from one hundred furnesses around the country. The sparkling, swooping work was donated to the Museum of Modern Art and installed in its courtyard.16 Such objects used sensuous reflective surfaces and a high level of finish to speak of a similarly slick and futuristic vision of U.S. Steel. The initial revaluation of the wholly contrary aesthetic of Cor-Ten was the result of the initiative of architectural firm Eero Saarinen and Associates, and its architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkerloo. When they approached U.S. Steel for samples of the material for the John Deere and Company Administrative Center, in Moline, Illinois, U.S. Steel had been initially “reluctant” to supply the materials for a building that was guaranteed to rust.17 “The hardest part of our job,” architect John Dinkerloo later told the American Institute of Steel Construction, “was selling the owner and the steel industry on liking corrosion, since we were dealing with people who have been fighting corrosion at great expense for many years.”18 But once the building was completed in 1964, its use of the material was widely acclaimed. Capitalizing on the success, U.S. Steel began to promote aggressively Cor-Ten for architectural uses, publishing a color chart that illustrated the gradual formation of the oxidized coating so as to encourage architects to use the material.19 As a result, a flurry of Cor-Ten buildings in America and abroad appeared in the late 1960s. Roche and Dinkerloo used Cor-Ten in several buildings after Saarinen’s death, including the Ford Foundation (1963–67), the Cummins Engine Factory (1964–65), and the New Haven Coliseum (1968–72). When U.S. Steel announced that it was building its own new headquarters in Pittsburgh, company president Leslie B. Worthington told the press that it would use it “as a construction marketing tool to dramatize to architects, engineers and others the advancements in design and steel technology.”20 Although the building would be constructed from their “full range of grades and types of steel,” it was the use of Cor-Ten that took pride of place: “This is in keeping with the growing trend toward the use of exposed steel in highrise buildings,” he explained. “These columns, as well as the exterior wall, will be made of U.S. Steel’s COR-TEN, one of the fastest growing constructional steels, which weathers to a deep russet color and never requires painting.”21

No longer the blight of an industry, it was the skin of rust that gave Cor-Ten its beauty. Miraculously, Cor-Ten turned the scourge of the industry—the target of countless



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aluminum trade promotions boasting of its own anti-corrosion qualities—into a product benefit, allowing rust to be repositioned as a sign of steel’s durability, a kind of timeless patina. The spin was a counterintuitive, perhaps even desperate, move for a company for whom rust had been such a public relations headache. For U.S. Steel, the benefits of Cor-Ten’s new public uses were not just aesthetic. The use of Cor-Ten as a decorative finish required more steel than when the material was limited to structural uses, hidden beneath aluminum, glass, or concrete facings. Moreover, it could be sold at a higher profit margin than standard construction-grade carbon steel; Cor-Ten cost more upfront, but promised to save its customers painting costs. Among the high-profile buildings to use Cor-Ten was Chicago’s new Civic Center, a thirty-one-story Miesian skyscraper completed in 1965 to house city offices and the county court. Leading a team of local architects working on the project, Jacques Brownson had visited Saarinen’s building to confirm his choice of the material.22 U.S. Steel won the $13 million contract to supply the Cor-Ten, beating a competing brand of weathering steel launched by Bethlehem Steel under the brand name of Mayari-R—one of several roughly equivalent alloys available before Cor-Ten became the generic nomenclature for the alloy.23 Brownson remembers that U.S. Steel executives took advantage of the use of Cor-Ten in the project, actively “touting” its use and the company’s involvement in the project throughout during the building’s construction.24 Once the Civic Center was completed, U.S. Steel could turn its attention to an even more powerful aesthetic application—the sculpture planned for the building’s forecourt. Led by William Hartmann, from the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and assisted by the artist Roland Penrose, Pablo Picasso had been persuaded to design a sculpture for the site.25 The resulting work was unveiled in 1967 and, like the building it fronts, was made of Cor-Ten steel. Despite the prominence of the work, and its landmark status in the history of monumental sculpture, scholars have not pointed out that this was the first prominent use Cor-Ten in public art.26 This is not insignificant, for as with the Civic Center building, U.S. Steel played an active role in the production and promotion of the artwork. As American corporations pursued multinational strategies for growth in the 1960s, their patronage also expanded beyond national interests towards the increasingly global networks of the postwar art world. For U.S. Steel, no less than for Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, or indeed for Chicago itself, Picasso’s name represented powerful sign of international preeminence—even if, in U.S. Steel’s case, it was never less secure. William Hartmann and his colleagues had their first meeting at Picasso’s villa in Mougins in May 1963, taking with them a scale model of the site that dramatized the color of the Civic Center’s design, with the new building painted the rusty hue of CorTen while all other surrounding buildings rendered in white. Initial discussions had danced around “all sorts of possibilities” for the material of the work.27 Sandblasted concrete, bronze and painted iron were all mooted in initial meetings, and Picasso even showed some “samples of new plastic materials” he had been given—“very flashy, with inset colours,” recorded Penrose.28 Ultimately, though, Picasso avoided committing to a particular material, telling the architects that “the idea of a sculpture in iron seems

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good to me, but that’s just what I think today. Tomorrow I may think differently. We’ll have to see.”29 Picasso was not someone to be dictated to, and perhaps knowing that disagreements over materials had caused the artist to abandon his last public commission in Marseilles, Hartmann was smart enough not to try.30 In July, he sent Picasso samples of the various materials used on the site.31 When it seemed as though Picasso might suggest a work in concrete, Hartmann apparently stated his preference for a work in bronze. Early renderings of the site demonstrate that the architects had considered a Henry Moore-style bronze for the forecourt.32 However, Hartmann’s later recollections are unequivocal as to what material he desired. “It was obvious that it ought to be in steel, and it ought to be like the building itself,” Hartmann told an interviewer: This was an integrated project—one of the few times a sculpture had been done that way, I think, where it is one project. [It] isn’t something separated by fifty years, and you have another material that’s popular fifty years after the building’s built.33

The Civic Center and its monumental sculpture were to be a total work of art, bound together by the material they would help popularize. The choice may have been aesthetic, but it was probably also practical, given the significant cost savings of steel over bronze. Hartmann sought Picasso’s approval of material samples and engineering drawings on his next visit to the studio. “Picasso didn’t object to anything,” Hartmann later recalled.34 The sole quote for the fabrication of the sculpture was sought from the American Bridge Company, a division of U.S. Steel based in Gary, Indiana. American Bridge quoted $300,000 to fabricate the sculpture, a cost that Hartmann raised from private donors, with Mayor Richard J. Daley unwilling to risk public criticism by contributing to the costs from city coffers.35 But the company also quickly recognized the communications potential of the project. The project was quickly elevated to staff in their Pittsburgh headquarters. U.S. Steel’s Vice President Edward Logelin was invited to sit on the committee for the project, and the staff of their public relations department “donated the services of their office.”36 The contribution was of modest in-kind value, but it offered immense publicity possibilities. As one journalist later described, it “guaranteed Cor-Ten (a trademarked product) a colossal visual plug which must have resulted in at least a three-day fiesta at United States Steel Corp. headquarters in Pittsburgh.”37 U.S. Steel had already witnessed the public relations potential of large-scale aesthetic objects made from steel. For the New York World’s Fair in 1964–65, the company had contributed the Unisphere (Figure 11.1)—an enormous steel globe that became the symbol for the event.38 Its space-age design reflected as much on the apparently futurefocused U.S. Steel as it did on the spectacle of progress that was the fair as a whole; as the fair’s historian has described, it was not only built by U.S. Steel but also “officially sponsored by the company, a public monument to its status as an icon of American muscle and know-how.”39 Made of stainless steel with a base in Cor-Ten, the Unisphere



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Figure 11.1 Unisphere, New York World’s Fair, 1963. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “[Completed structure]” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 9, 2018. http:​//dig​italc​ollec​tions​.nypl​.org/​ items​/eb59​bf20-​16aa-​0132-​da17-​58d38​5a7b9​28. was at the center of a global flood of publicity that one journalist estimated “will receive 1,000,000,000 impressions in every conceivable type of advertising medium” making it “one of the greatest promotional undertakings in the nation’s history.”40 A mandatory credit line ensured that U.S. Steel’s involvement was widely profiled.41 U.S. Steel’s public relations staff engineered no less than three press events before the sculpture was even installed. In September 1966, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted journalists to announce the commission and display Picasso’s three-and-a-half foot high maquette.42 The second event occurred in December, and ensured a focus on the contribution of U.S. Steel. Inviting the press to the factory of its subsidiary American

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Bridge Company in Gary, Indiana, where the Unisphere had been constructed two years earlier, it exhibited an aluminum model that modified the design of Picasso’s sculpture, alongside the twelve-foot high plywood version that they had constructed.43 In one photograph (Figure 11.2), the two models are shielded from their industrial context by a white plinth and backdrop. Workers from American Bridge proudly inspect the enlargement, while a small silhouetted figure stages the eventual scale of the monumental object. The industrial context of the display inevitably informed the reception of the work. “Steel is the muscle and sinew of this factory city,” wrote journalist Harold Haydon, “What more fitting material for both civic design and civic art.”44

Figure 11.2  Scale models of Chicago Picasso sculpture in warehouse, HB-29086-F2, Chicago History Museum, Hedrich-Blessing Collection.



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Picasso’s refusal to “explain” the sculpture allowed the choice of material to dominate how the work was interpreted. “Today’s steel towers call for steel sculpture,” wrote Haydon, describing the work as “a modern steel goddess, representing power and imagination.”45 Such representations of steel no doubt delighted the corporation, which was increasingly dealing with less positive associations for the material. As with the Unisphere, the work was routinely rendered in statistics, with articles detailing its weight and size. One article noted that U.S. Steel used a computer for the more “abstruse calculations” required to realize the work, and that the degrees of curvature required trigonometric logarithms to ensure exactitude.46 Sounding more like a civil engineering project than a sculpture, such technical reports became a dominant thread in the work’s media representations, reinforcing the central role of U.S. Steel’s technical experts in its realization. Lacking access to the artist, the press was given Anatol Rychalski, an engineer employed by U.S. Steel. He was billed as an “accomplished sculptor” and “follower of Picasso’s works” who “also does professional-quality oil paintings of retiring company executives.”47 With U.S. Steel publicist Thomas Ward, Rychalski was advertised to community groups for a “free color slide presentation and lecture on the Picasso sculpture” which, in a remarkably bold attempt to claim the corporate origins of the work, “trace its history from its beginning in a Gary mill thru its dedication in the Civic center.”48 Reporters lavished their prose on the aesthetic distinction and extraordinary colors of Cor-Ten. No less than the technical feat of the work’s fifty-foot scale, its CorTen surface served to demonstrate the innovation of U.S. Steel. As one newspaper reported, one suspects closely following a press release: Cor-Ten steel, a new high strength alloy which can be used for any structural purpose, was used in the construction. Upon exposure to the elements, its surface begins to oxidize and harden, forming a molecular bond which in turn prevents further oxidation. It feels like stone, initially turning a bright rust color, but later turning dark. “For centuries builders have been fighting rust,” said Rychalski, “but the steel used in the Picasso giant will last indefinitely.”49

According to such spin, U.S. Steel had tamed nothing less than rust itself— transforming the toxic scourge of its material into not just a demonstration of strength and durability, but of the aesthetic valuation of its product in modern art’s highest quarters. In May 1966, a final event was held on the site of the sculpture, to mark the “ground broken” for the work, at which Hartmann on “a fork-lift truck . . . raised the first block of granite from the plaza’s pavement.”50 As with the earlier public relations events, the involvement of U.S. Steel as both the work’s fabricator, and the source for its material, was consistently featured. Pre-rusted before it was installed, the work was finally unveiled to a crowd of some 50,000 on August 15, 1967, declared “Picasso Day” by Mayor Daley and the committee (Figure 11.3).51 The resulting event was pure spectacle: the fifty-foot high work was theatrically unveiled from beneath a giant veil of blue fabric. Classical music and dedicatory poems were performed. Along with speeches by officials and religious leaders, and a telegram of congratulations was read from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

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Figure 11.3  Unveiling of Chicago Picasso sculpture, unknown photographer, 1967. Collection of Alex J. Taylor. Photographs of what quickly became known as “the Chicago Picasso” distributed by the press office of U.S. Steel ensured the continued presence of the corporation in coverage of the work. In one spread in Life magazine, for instance, the sculpture was recolored to intensify its rusty hue, while construction photographs on the following page emphasize the technical achievement inscribed in the headline—that this Picasso masterpiece was “Built to stand against the wind.”52 With such an emphasis on the technical qualities and requirements of the sculpture, it is little wonder that art critic John Canaday’s equivocal review of the work presented it, first and foremost, as “a satisfyingly firm piece of engineering that harmonizes with the new Civic Center.”53 Another critic wrote that “producing the Picasso sculpture in the same steel as that of



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the building behind it, somehow brought out in the piece all of its brute side . . . . Yet ironically the sculpture converts even the plate steel into airy and human material.”54 It is hard to know what Picasso would have made of such reviews: but one suspects that U.S. Steel’s publicists must have been satisfied with their efforts. The Chicago Picasso also provided an immediate vehicle for Roger Blough to counter the innovations of foreign steel manufacturers. While foreign steel companies were investing in “process improvement,” Blough claimed in a 1967 speech, American steel had been pioneering the research and development of new products at “an average of one a week.” His first example was Cor-Ten, ignoring the fact that this invention was decades old. “Known as the steel that paints itself because after a period of weathering,” he explained, “it develops a tight oxide coating of a deep russet color which does not chip or peel and which inhibits further oxidation.” As evidence of its modernity and originality, the audience of Indiana manufacturers was told that it had been used “even for the Picasso sculpture that we erected this year at Chicago’s Civic Center.”55 With the Chicago Picasso as a kind of billboard for the material innovation and technical capacity of the corporation, U.S. Steel’s use of the project extended beyond its drive to secure positive press coverage. The company had commissioned a documentary crew to follow the construction of the sculpture, and sponsored the screening of the film on national television. Like Lewis Hine’s famous photographs of the Empire State Building in construction, the film turns the sculpture into the locus for the heroic masculine labor of modern construction. Almost an hour long, more than half of the program depicted the construction of the work: including shots of the U.S. Steel logo on plans, hardhats, and cranes, yet more effusive descriptions of the “magnificent” Cor-Ten and an exhaustive technical details of the “162-tons of fine art” with a “total surface area of 6700 square feet” that comprised the object.56 The Chicago Picasso was also used in several U.S. Steel print advertisements. A 1968 advertisement juxtaposed the Chicago Picasso with pre-fabricated housing and drainage pipes as evidence of the diverse uses of U.S. Steel products. A 1970 campaign continued to focus on the sculpture. “What is U.S. Steel doing about art and architecture?” it asked, posing a question that one doubts had ever been asked before. The copy answered: USS COR-TEN Steel is one of the things we’re doing. Add the imagination of architects and this steel becomes a handsome enduring building. .  .  . Add the genius of Picasso and this handsome material becomes a sculpture. . . . USS CORTEN is a high strength steel developed and pioneered by United States Steel. It’s as natural looking as wood and as permanent as stone. Artists use it. Architects use it. The secret of its beauty, as well as its durability, is the rich, russet brown coating its forms to protect itself from corrosion. It doesn’t need painting. And with age, it only grows more handsome. Because there’s a need for the pleasing as well as the practical, we produce steel that is both.57

But the corporate alignment with art was not simply about asserting the aesthetic value of a product. As another advertisement in the series featuring the Chicago Picasso

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noted, “Housing, transportation, highway safety, research, art and architecture and medicine are just a few of the areas in which the people at U.S. Steel are contributing to a better life.”58 Continuing the theme of community engagement, the slogan of these advertisements was “We’re Involved.” The application of U.S. Steel’s products to art, as well as to more practical concerns, provided a persuasive statement of the civic value of the business, and a valuable political lobbying tool. This was far from corporate benevolence: by 1969, the new protectionist stance of big steel imposed import quotas on European and Japanese producers, even if such “voluntary” restrictions neither satisfied domestic producers, nor stemmed their continued decline.59 The involvement of U.S. Steel in the project provided powerful evidence of the company’s commitment to civic life. This was a major shift for the company. When asked what he was doing about racial tensions at U.S. Steel’s plants in 1963, U.S. Steel’s president Roger Blough had asserted that “for a corporation to achieve a particular end in the social area seems to me to be quite beyond what a corporation should do.”60 By the end of the decade, by contrast, Blough would declare that Americans “look to big business to discharge fully its obligations as a corporate citizen of the community.” “Beyond the heavy burden of taxation that it bears,” he said, never missing a chance to push corporate priorities, “they expect it to contribute both time and money to civic improvements, charity drives, hospitals, schools and recreation facilities.”61 (Here, Roger Blough sounds distinctly like Orren Boyle, head of Associated Steel in Atlas Shrugged, who argues that unless free enterprise “proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people wont [sic] stand for it .  .  . the only justification of private property .  .  . is public service.”62) Such beliefs might be underpinned by enlightened self-interest, but they represented a significant ideological shift. Public sculpture played its part in the nexus of corporate social responsibility and corporate personhood that would become so central to the defense of big business in the years ahead. The image of civic harmony that the unveiling of the Chicago Picasso provided was equally valuable for Mayor Daley. Tom Finkelpearl has linked the sculpture’s installation to the social upheaval of inner city America in the late 1960s. “Urban planners, architects and public official were looking for ways to revitalize and renew American cities,” he writes, and “artists were enlisted in the effort to attract people back to downtown areas.”63 Not only did large-scale metal sculpture help showcase the technical virtuosity of the industrial companies who frequently sponsored its creation, providing material form to their social responsibilities, but its dramatic forms served to fill the plazas often left empty by urban renewal projects.64 Eventually, the sheer ubiquity of public sculpture would diminish its capacity to stand for (or, at least, stand in for) a vital civil society, but such democratic promises were central to many of its early landmarks of the mid-to-late 1960s.65 As the public spaces of downtown America were increasingly likely to be occupied by protesting crowds, monumental sculpture provided a visual (and physical) presence with considerable political relevance.66 In the case of the Chicago Picasso, artists and critics were not, however, blinded to the corporate power interests served by its presence. In an “Open Letter to Picasso,” Art



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in America reproduced photo-montages of blown-up Picasso sculptures themed to the branding of other American cities, designed “to save you and your prospective sponsors a bit of time and effort.”67 Claes Oldenberg’s parodies of the Chicago Picasso—“soft” versions that appear to have collapsed, and a later drawing of the sculpture as executive cufflinks—directly lampoon its function as an inflated symbol of power.68 More obliquely, Barnett Newman chose Cor-Ten steel for his Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (1968), with its barbed wire field marked with splashes of red paint, produced for an exhibition protesting Daley’s infamous “shoot to kill” order against demonstrators at the Democratic Convention in August 1968.69 Especially in Chicago, public sculpture such as the Chicago Picasso was unavoidably entangled in the social upheavals and urban conflicts of the 1960s, but while state involvement in such projects was carefully monitored, their implication in the sphere of corporate public relations attracted less critical attention.70 But the use of Cor-Ten in even such critical contexts helped confirm its status as a prestige sculptural material. The growing prominence of Cor-Ten saw U.S. Steel license the brand name to other steel companies, including Inland Steel, which took advantage of the local publicity opportunities availed by the unveiling of the Chicago Picasso. In 1967, for instance, 300 pounds of Cor-Ten was donated to the art school at the University of Illinois’s main campus in Urbana-Champaign.71 Dutifully, a journalist for the Chicago Tribune rhapsodized that the “special steel” would “revolutionize metal sculpture.”72 Such efforts secured valuable third-party praise for the material. “CorTen’s champion is a young sculpture [sic] Jerald Jackard, Assistant Professor of Art” who told the journal Progressive Architecture that Cor-Ten had the “strength of steel and the permanence of bronze,” proclaiming that it was “the first time in history that man has had this natural color in sculpture.”73 In 1968, Inland Steel gave even more Cor-Ten to the art school at Southern Illinois University, which was told that the stock would be replaced as it was used by students. “All they asked of us in return,” Professor Thomas Walsh told the local newspaper blithely, was “photographs of the students’ work which can be used in their company magazine.”74 The dissemination of such stories, which linked big steel with art and education, while still managing to weave in sales-oriented product messages, supported corporate efforts to demonstrate their commitment to community goals. It is not by accident that these donations occurred in regions heavily involved not in the arts, but in the steel industry, and thus embroiled in all of the economic and social troubles facing the sector. But the art world establishment was hardly immune from these tactics. A particularly enthusiastic promoter of Cor-Ten was Lippincott Inc., the firm that was fast becoming America’s leading fabricator of monumental sculpture. Here too, U.S. Steel seems to have seen a promotional opportunity. As a 1967 article stated, “U.S. Steel supplied Lippincott with its new Cor-Ten steel . . . at a generous saving.”75 In fact, Don Lippincott, who founded the company in 1966, was the son of J. Gordon Lippincott, a partner of the leading “corporate identity” consultancy whose clients included U.S. Steel. A recent account confirms the relevance of the relationship: “Gordon’s connections paid off for his son’s new company when one of Lippincott and Marguiles’s

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clients, U.S. Steel, generously shipped some its new weathering steel-plate product, trademarked as Cor-Ten, to Don.”76 By 1970, major works by Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, and others, all fabricated by Lippincott, were installed in cities across the country. If it was perceptions, rather than direct sales, that caused U.S. Steel to promote Cor-Ten for use in sculpture, the market that resulted was—at least for a specialist product—not to be ignored. Works by David Smith, John Chamberlain, and others had embraced corroded surfaces, and others had tried to speed up the process: Alexander Liberman had experimented with acids, while Barnett Newman had apparently tried orange juice.77 But only a handful of artists used Cor-Ten before the Chicago Picasso. Beverly Pepper’s Cor-Ten Viewpoint (1965) and Barnett Newman’s Here II (1965) and Here II (1965–66) are among the earliest examples.78 Another early adopter, sculptor Robert Murray, names Australian-born sculptor Clement Meadmore as the first sculptor he knew to be using the material.79 Of more than 160 sculptures in Maurice Tuchman’s American Sculpture of the Sixties survey exhibition, opened in April 1967, none list Cor-Ten among their materials. By the Sculpture in the Environment exhibition later in the year, both Bernard Rosenthal’s Alamo (1967) and Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963–67) showcased Cor-Ten on the streets of New York. By the end of the decade, art critic Hilton Kramer would write that Cor-Ten was “now widely used” for large-scale sculpture, and within five years there would be more than 300 works of Cor-Ten sculpture installed in public locations across America.80 The burgeoning popularity of Cor-Ten, no doubt, also followed more general shifts in taste, from so-called finish fetish sculpture of the mid-1960s, to the more natural palette and more expressive textures that characterized much late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ practice. As with metal sculpture more generally, the rugged industrial aesthetic of Cor-Ten certainly suited the masculinist self-fashioning of many of the abstract sculptors who used it. As much as it highlighted the “never requires painting” spin of U.S. Steel, Cor-Ten, in a sense, did paint itself—following the truth to materials dictum, and avoiding the low regard in which coated sculpture has long been held.81 Such rhetoric was certainly important for artists such as Richard Serra and Anthony Caro, who both turned to Cor-Ten at the height of its fashion in 1970. Cor-Ten sculptures from the 1960s have come to be less than impressive advertisements. Their deterioration provides telling evidence that it was, first and foremost, U.S. Steel’s own interests that were served by the promotion of the material to artists. Far from the promotional claims that the material was maintenance free and long-lasting, it is now clear that Cor-Ten can be problematic for use in outdoor sculpture, and is only successful within rigid technical boundaries and formal constraints. Two issues were already considered by John Dinkerloo in the planning of the Deere building, but their short-term tests concluded that the material “heals readily” and that “staining at ground level will not be a problem.”82 Conservators now know the reverse to be true.83



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At least one sculptor tried publicly blamed U.S. Steel for these problems. William Tarr’s work was featured alongside the Chicago Picasso in the company’s 1970 advertisement. But by the mid-1980s, his work was falling apart. “It’s unfortunate,” a spokesman from USX (the new name for a diversified U.S. Steel) told the New York Magazine, “but we have no responsibility.”84 In a later interview, Tarr was clear where he thought the blame lay: “The steel companies are the villains in this piece,” he told the New York Times in 1991. “They have been guilty of flagrant misrepresentation about what they characterized as the enduring qualities of weathering steel.”85 The PR sheen of art had, no doubt, worn off for U.S. Steel, and when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum asked them to sponsor Picasso and the Age of Iron (1993), the company refused.86 Not even Picasso could stem the declining American steel industry, and the flagging reputation of the product they produced. By the time Richard Serra used weathering steel for his controversially removed Tilted Arc (1981), its rusted surface was again taken as a signifier of destruction and decay. As one witness commented during the trial, “The spirit of his work is exemplified by rust. If there is anything we don’t need here it is something that symbolizes the destruction and decay that is prevalent in the city.” Another worker in the building wondered if there were “any kind of treatment that could refinish it and rust proof it.” Judge Gregory W. Carman complained of the “rusted condition” of Serra’s sculpture, as though its corroded surface was a sign of decay and deterioration.87 U.S. Steel’s once omnipresent spin about the beauty of rust had been as forgotten as quickly it had been forged. Even before Cor-Ten began to crumble, Sol LeWitt suspected that “New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art.” What made them so dangerous, he argued in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, was their tendency to make “the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work.”88 LeWitt could have as easily been thinking about Cor-Ten as any of the other slick synthetic materials and finishes favored by minimalist sculptors. For corporations, it was the very possibility that a material could dominate a work’s meaning that made sculpture so appealing—and why, like the steel industry, so many manufacturers of metals, plastics, glass, and other industrial materials developed sculpture prizes, commissions, and collaborations as part of their 1960s public relations activities. In the case of Cor-Ten, it only took a few years for U.S. Steel to catapult its branded alloy from trade catalogues into the glossier pages of art magazines, and so into the consciousness of America’s cultural elite. “A new and very strong alloy,” hailed Lucy Lippard in Art International in 1968.89 In ARTNews, Thomas Hess waxed poetic for U.S. Steel’s invention, writing how the “Cor-ten sheet steel has a velvet rust surface, the tawny color of a lion or of a classic Parian marble which has been exposed to the rain and ferrous oil of the Cyclades.”90 With the assistance of artists—from art school students to Picasso himself—Cor-Ten was transformed from one of the company’s least appealing industrial materials, characterized by the rust that so plagued the industry, into the height of avant-garde taste. Basking in the reflected glow of its russet hues, the beleaguered U.S. Steel secured, however superficially, the illusion of progress it so desperately required.

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Notes The author would like to thank Geraldine Johnson, Patricia Johnston, Erika Doss, and his anonymous readers for their comments on this work, and the Hagley Museum and Library for their support to conduct archival research with their American Iron and Steel Institute collections. 1 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Dutton, 1992), 27. 2 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 234. 3 “New Ways to Fight Corrosion,” Steel, August 27, 1957, 68. 4 David Talbott, “Rust Damage Far Exceeds That Done by Fire,” Coshocton Tribune, March 27, 1960, 23. 5 Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961), 63. 6 William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, vol. 5 (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971), 113. 7 The latter factor in the decline of the U.S. Steel industry was, ironically, funded by the United States itself under Marshall Plan policies. See, for instance, Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 205. 8 Wallace Carroll, “Steel: a 72-Hour Drama with an All-Star Cast,” New York Times, April 23, 1962, 25. 9 Lawrence Burd, “U.S. Begins Steel Probe,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1962, 1. 10 Quoted in Roy Hoopes, The Steel Crisis (New York: John Day Co., 1963), 229. 11 “American Steel–The Dinosaur Moves,” The Economist, August 3, 1968, 63. 12 D. T Llewellyn and Roger C. Hudd, Steels: Metallurgy and Applications (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), 158. 13 Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation 1901–2001 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 241. 14 “Says New Steel Process to Cut Machinery Cost,” Youngstown Vindicator, December 17, 1961, 17. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 “Sculpture in Stainless Steel,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 16, 1961; Museum of Modern Art, [Press Release, Gift of José de Rivera sculpture by the American Iron and Steel Institute], 1965, New York. 17 As unlikely as the material might initially seem in the context of Saarinen’s other work, the suitability of Cor-Ten for a maker of farm machinery was no less fitting than the swooping white forms of the TWA Terminal were for an airline. 18 John Dinkeloo, “The Steel Will Weather Naturally,” Architectural Record 132, no. 8 (August 1962): 148–50. 19 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, eds., Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 73. There seems to have been some early confusion over exactly what color Cor-Ten would become. In 1964, Architectural Design reported that it “eventually turns olive green/grey.” “World News,” Architectural Design, July 1964, 315. 20 “U.S. Steel to Erect a Huge New Building at Pittsburgh,” The Morning Herald, March 2, 1967, 16. Aluminum had already successfully used this strategy since the 1950s. Alcoa, Reynolds Metal Company, and Kaiser Industries all used their headquarters to showcase the material. See Thomas W. Ennis, “Company Edifices ‘Sell’ Products,” New York Times, August 7, 1960, 6.



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21 Ennis, “Company Edifices ‘Sell’ Products,” 16. 22 Jacques Calman Brownson, transcript of interview conducted by Betty J. Blum, 1994. Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Art Institute of Chicago. 183. The project’s supervising architect was C. F. Murphy Associates, with Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and also Loebl, Schlossman, Bennett, and Dart as associate architects. 23 Ibid., 185. 24 Ibid., 188. 25 Penrose’s involvement was at the suggestion of Alfred Barr. See Patricia Stratton, “Chicago Picasso” (MA thesis, Northwestern University, 1982), 47. 26 See, for example, Harriet F. Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 93–95; Tom Finkelpearl, Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 21–23. 27 Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 253. 28 Cowling, Visiting Picasso, 253–54. 29 Ibid., 254. 30 Ibid., 290, note 76. 31 Stratton, “Chicago Picasso,” 53. 32 Ibid., 18. Alberto Giacometti was also mooted at this stage. See “Sculpture by Picasso or Giacometti May Adorn Civic Center Plaza,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 12, 1964, 41. 33 William Hartmann, transcript of interview conducted by Betty J. Blum, 1989. Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Art Institute of Chicago, 148. 34 William Hartmann quoted in Stratton, “Chicago Picasso,” 118. 35 The funders were the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, The Field Foundation of Illinois, and the Woods Charitable Trust. An increased final cost from American Bridge was met by the city. 36 Stratton, “Chicago Picasso,” 122. 37 Paul Gapp, “‘Old Rustyside’: A Monumental Success Story,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1975, E12. 38 The structure was built on the foundations of the Perisphere, the globe at the 1939 World’s Fair, which along with the Trylon, had also been framed with U.S. Steel product. On the design of the Unisphere, see Rachel Delphia, “The Unisphere,” in Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk, ed. Rachel Delphia and Jewel Stern (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2015), 144–47. 39 Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York’s World’s Fair (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 18. 40 Myron Kandel, “Advertising: World’s Fair Promotion Cost Is Estimated,” New York Times, July 25, 1962, 50. 41 The credit line was “presented by U.S. Steel.” See John M. Lee, “Business at Fair Seeking Prestige,” New York Times, April 18, 1964, 16. 42 Sanka Knox, “Chicago to Get a 5-Story Picasso,” New York Times, September 15, 1966, 52. 43 Harold Haydon, “Picasso Sculpture Slowly Takes Form,” The Washington Post, December 23, 1966, C8. 44 Harold Haydon, “12 1/2 Foot Model Puts Our Picasso at Second Stage,” Chicago SunTimes, December 22, 1966, 4. 45 Harold Haydon, “Picasso Sculpture Slowly Takes Form,” The Washington Post, December 23, 1966, C8.

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46 Edward Barry, “Build 12 1/2 Ft. Model of Chicago’s Picasso,” Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1966, 19. 47 Van Sauter, “Picasso’s Bird Taking Shape,” Corpus Christi Times, April 17, 1967, 8B. 48 “Notes and Exhibits,” Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1968, E2. Rychalski was later responsible for his own abstract sculptures of sorts—in the form of mushroom-form totems he made from waste products at U.S. Steel’s slug dump in West Mifflin, PA. See Vernon Gay and Marilyn Evert, Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 353. 49 Richard Busse, “Describes Giant’s Creation,” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1967, A3. 50 See, for instance, Edward Barry, “Break Ground for Big Statue in Civic Center,” Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1967, C21. 51 Newly corroded Cor-Ten has a brighter color that darkens over time and according to environmental factors. For technical details of such properties, refer to note 83. 52 John Canaday, “Picasso in the Wilderness,” New York Times, August 27, 1967, D23. 53 “Chicago’s Picasso,” Life, August 24, 1967, 85–86. 54 Joshua Kind, “The Dragon’s Necessity,” Inland Architect, December 1967, 8. 55 Roger Blough, “Progress Is Not Our Most Imported Product,” speech delivered to the Annual Meeting, Indiana Manufacturers Association, Indianapolis, Indiana, November 16, 1967, unpaginated. American Iron and Steel Collection, Hagley Museum and Library. 56 The Chicago Picasso, Dir. Mallory Slate, National Education Television Network, circa 1968, fifty minutes. The film concludes with the credit line “This program was made possible in part by a contribution from U.S. Steel.” 57 “What Is U.S. Steel Doing about Art and Architecture?” advertisement, ChronicleTelegram, June 16, 1970, 5. 58 “What Is U.S. Steel Doing to Contribute to a Better Life?” advertisement, Chicago Daily Defender, January 2, 1971, 13. 59 See, for instance, “Imports Curbs Rushed for Congress,” The Washington Post, December 23, 1968, D6. 60 Andrew Hacker, “Do Corporations Have a Social Duty?” New York Times Magazine, November 17, 1963, 21. 61 David Finn, The Corporate Oligarch (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 237. 62 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 49. 63 Tom Finkelpearl in The American Century: Art and Culture 1950–2000, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999), 200–01. 64 On the role of urban renewal for the rise of public sculpture, see also Amanda Douberley, “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture and the American City 1946–1975” (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2015). 65 Scholars of public art have often turned to Jurgen Habermas’s idea of the “public sphere” to understand such dynamics. See, for example, Erika L. Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 66 The Chicago Picasso was itself the site for “Black Monday” protests in Chicago. See Ed Hotaling, “Rally Round the Picasso,” ARTNews, January 1970, 46–47, 72–73. 67 While the text is signed “The Editor,” the images are unattributed. “Open Letter to Picasso,” Art in America (September–October 1968): 122–24. 68 Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 85–86.



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69 For more on this context, see Patricia Kelly, 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago (Chicago: De Paul University Art Museum, 2008), 12–25. 70 For more on the legal and political contexts of the Chicago Picasso, see Rebecca Zorach, “Fireplug, Flower, Baboon: The Democratic Thing in Late 1960s Chicago,” Kritische Berichte 3 (2011): 46–60. 71 Joan Pinkerton, “Explore New Art Technique: Rust Proof Steel Sculpturing,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1967, F4. 72 Pinkerton, “Explore New Art Technique,” F4. 73 “‘Blue Cinnamon’ Used in Sculpture,” Progressive Architecture (September 1969): 42. 74 The article also notes donations of material from Dow Chemical and Alcoa. “Companies aid SIU sculptors,” Southern Illinoisian, September 1, 1968, 14. 75 “Master of the Monumentalists,” Time, October 13, 1967, 44. 76 Jonathan Lippincott, Large Scale: Fabricating Large Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 14. 77 Jeanne Siegel, “Around Barnett Newman,” ARTNews, October 1971, 62. 78 In other examples, dating ambiguities increase the confusion. Cor-Ten was used for Naum Gabo’s Cor-Ten enlarged reconstruction of Head No. 2 (1914), currently dated as 1964 by the Tate catalogue, and 1966 in Christina Lodder, “Naum Gabo and the Quandries of the Replica,” Tate Papers 8 (Autumn 2007), http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/re​ searc​h/pub​licat​ions/​tate-​paper​s/08/​naum-​gabo-​and-t​he-qu​andar​ies-o​f-the​-repl​ica (accessed October 28, 2017). 79 Robert Murray, “Robert Murray in Conversation with Marion Barclay,” in Robert Murray: The Factory as Studio, ed. Denise Leclerc (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1999), 146. 80 Hilton Kramer, “An Unlikely Gamble,” New York Times, December 21, 1969, D33. The Save Outdoor Sculpture records compiled by the Smithsonian Institution lists Cor-Ten as the material for about 350 works dated before 1975. They are installed in almost every state across America. The spread of Cor-Ten was international too: in Australia, Clement Meadmore’s Awakening (1968) was installed in central Melbourne and Aristides Demetrios’s Flame of Freedom (1968) in the Philippines. 81 For another example in which colored sculpture managed to dodge such anxieties, see the case of John Chamberlain as recounted in David J. Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 104–08. The most infamous impact of the formalist fear of painted sculpture was Clement Greenberg’s decision to strip paint from works by David Smith, and its subsequent expose by Rosalind Krauss. On the central position of color in these conflicts, see Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 127–33. 82 John Dinkeloo, “The Steel Will Weather Naturally,” Architectural Record 132, no. 8 (August 1962): 150. 83 The oxidized layer of Cor-Ten is “easily scratched and the scratches are relatively permanent, remaining a different colour from their surroundings as the surface hue changes over time.” Further, “the corrosion resistance of weathering steel depends significantly on the design of the sculpture as well as on its environment” and “pockets which collect moisture will cause the surface of the steel to corrode rapidly.” Fiona Graham, “Selected Technical Glossary,” in Robert Murray, 168–69. For more recent research on weathering steels, see W. Patrick Gallagher, “The Performance of Weathering Steel in Sculpture,” Corrosion (March 2000): 26–31; and P. Decker,

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S. Bruggerhoff and G. Eggert, “To coat or not to coat? The maintenance of Cor-Ten sculptures,” Materials and Corrosion 59, no. 3 (2008): 239–47. On the conservation issues of Newman’s Broken Obelisk, see Armin Zweite, Barnett Newman: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1999), 278, and on the conservation problems of Gabo’s Head No. 2, see Steven A. Nash and Jörn Merkert, eds., Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985), 221. 84 Diane Ketcham, “Monumental Woes,” New York Magazine, October 20, 1986, 30. 85 Grace Glueck, “Sculptor’s Ordeal with Steel: It’s Pretty but Temperamental,” New York Times, August 22, 1991, C13. 86 James B. Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 218. 87 All quotes from Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 46–47. 88 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 82. 89 Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International, January 1968, 42. 90 Thomas B. Hess, “Editorial: New Man in Town,” ARTNews, November 1967, 27.

12

From Bank Lobbies to Sportswear: Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley, and the Shift in Corporate Patronage in the Twenty-First Century Daniel Haxall

In the fall of 2010, the banking firm Lehman Brothers sold their art collection at auctions in New York, Philadelphia, and London. Through these sales, Lehman Brothers and their creditors hoped to recover some of their $613 billion in debts from the 2008 global market collapse. Despite making a profit of $2.6 million at the auctions, including the sale of Julie Mehretu’s Untitled (2001) for over $1 million, the firm could not escape insolvency. The liquidation of the Lehman Brothers collection signals a major shift in the way corporations employ art in the twenty-first century. Historically, businesses amassed private collections to be, as sociologist Rosanne Martorella has written, “an effective vehicle for cultural achievement, visibility, and prestige,” but now they also treat them as assets and investments that can be liquidated as needed.1 In addition, corporations have increasingly used their art collections to improve their public image, sponsoring civic works and other charitable programs—especially in response to recent protest movements over bailouts—to counter images of corporate greed and excess. Indeed, the collecting boom that dominated corporate art activity in the 1970s and 1980s has now been replaced by arts initiatives that use public outreach and “cause-related marketing” as essential components of their advertising and patronage programs.2 Two recent commissions—Julie Mehretu’s Mural for Goldman Sachs and PUMA’s sponsorship of Kehinde Wiley—exemplify the evolution of today’s corporate patron to one that promotes diversity and social commitment through their art programs. While many aspects of traditional patronage remain in place, these two examples illustrate how new strategies for access, outreach, and visibility allow corporations to reframe their art acquisitions and commissions as philanthropic. As this chapter will show, Goldman Sachs marketed Mehretu’s Mural as a publicly accessible addition to their collection, sponsoring a range of educational programming around the commission while publicizing their support of the arts. PUMA took another approach, hiring a

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prominent African American artist, Kehinde Wiley, to design a sportswear line and create portraits that would double as advertisements, with an accompanying marketing platform advocating racial unity, biodiversity, and African history. In both instances, the companies worked with professional curators to select not only stars of the contemporary art world but also people of color from LGBTQ communities to establish progressive, contemporary values. Each corporation, albeit in different ways, intended the commissions to create a positive corporate image, one that projected a commitment to both social issues and avant-garde art, while further presenting each company as inclusive and diverse. In addition to promoting the patrons, the commissions benefitted each artist in ways beyond their respective fees. Mehretu’s project was publicized through documentary films and art journalism, gaining attention for the scale, cost, and caliber of her Mural. Wiley, on the other hand, applied his aesthetic brand to a series of portraits and line of sportswear, traversing the boundaries that traditionally distinguished fine art from mass culture. Ironically, both artists critiqued the systems of globalization that sustain investment banks and clothing manufacturers through these projects, thereby demonstrating the contradictions facing artists who accept, and capitalize on, such commissions. In the end, neither project fulfilled the patron’s goals, in terms of either changing public perceptions or increasing product sales. As such, these two case studies reveal the challenges of corporate patronage in the early twenty-first century, especially during an economic recession and polarized political climate.

Goldman Sachs, “Public” art, and Julie Mehretu’s Mural In 2007, investment bank Goldman Sachs hired Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu (Figure 12.1) and German artist Franz Ackermann to complete murals for the lobby of their new office building in lower Manhattan. Designed by architect Henry N. Cobb of Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners at a cost of $2.1 billion, the tower opened in 2009. A competition was held for the commission, for which six finalists were selected by a jury that included, among others, gallerist and curator Jeffrey Deitch, as well as Vicente Todoli, the former director of the Tate Modern. Ultimately, Mehretu was chosen to

Figure 12.1  Julie Mehretu, Mural, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 262 × 960 inches. © Julie Mehretu. Courtesy of the artist and Goldman Sachs. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.



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design a mural for the front entrance, which has a long multiple-story promenade with huge windows facing West Street, and Ackermann created a three-sided painting for the rear entry accessed by the pedestrian alley North End Way. Titled The Windmill, The Water, and The Grain, Ackermann’s abstracted wall panels include flat, vivid colors, geometric forms, and swirling shapes. The acrylic mural surrounds the rear entry vestibule, measuring over 132-feet-wide by nearly 22-feettall. A brochure published by Goldman Sachs, and distributed to answer inquiries about the lobby art, notes: [The painting] is conceived to correspond to the movement of people entering the building in the morning and leaving in the evening. . . . Upon entering the west lobby from the pedestrian walkway and proceeding toward the elevators, people will encounter Ackermann’s abstraction of a sunrise rendered in fresh cold colors. When leaving the building in the evening, people will walk toward the warm colors of a sunset.3

A number of sunbursts adorn the walls, some emerging from rectilinear cubes suggestive of buildings. Inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt, which adorns the adjacent Conrad Hotel, Ackermann’s immersive abstraction contains urban references appropriate for a Manhattan skyscraper and evocations of “natural forces like wind, water and light that surround the city.”4 Where Ackermann’s work depicted the fusion of natural and urban environments, Mehretu’s project aimed, in her words, to be “a picture that, in some way, maps and gives a picture of this history of the development of capitalist economic systems.”5 For this commission, Mehretu reportedly retained “complete artistic freedom,” as Goldman Sachs “imposed no restrictions.”6 Architectural historian Lawrence Chua and architect Beth Stryker collaborated with her on the proposal, which utilized Fernand Braudel’s study, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, as its conceptual root. Mehretu has described this project as “an exploration of the space-time of globalization, mapping the cohesive histories where culture and economy overlap. [The goal was to] draw out the layered confluences and contradictions of the world economy in a mural.”7 For two years, Mehretu, and nearly thirty assistants, labored on Mural, which now occupies a wall 85-feet-long by 23-feet-high within the front entrance of the Goldman Sachs building (Color Plate 16). Approximately 80 percent of the fee for Mural was spent on materials and wages for Mehretu’s assistants, who executed the work in a former Luger pistol factory in Berlin, Germany. Finishing touches were applied in situ after Mural was installed in New York in 2009, allowing Mehretu to respond directly to the painting’s environment. Five canvas panels comprise the monumental work, with several layers of acrylic paint producing a stratified surface and spatial dynamic. Mehretu and her assistants worked in distinct phases, and each layer has its own reference resulting in a complex system of painterly gestures and detailed renderings. They began with “exchanges between nations and flows within networks,” a series of abstractions based on trade maps from the past, including the Silk Road, Saharan passage, and other historic routes.8

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This initial layer also honors the history of modern art, with abstract shapes referencing the work of Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, among others. After sanding an acrylic spray, an act of semi-erasure Mehretu employed to suggest a fossilized past, the next layer consists of architectural drawings of financial institutions from antiquity to the present: market gates from ancient Greece, eighteenth-century British livestock fairs, a colonial Massachusetts bank, cotton markets in New Orleans, and the New York stock exchange. The next layer is composed of freehand drawings and calligraphic markings meant to evoke immigration, transportation, urbanization, and war, among other themes. The final layer depicts “the abstract color signage of the players of this world,” such as logos, advertisements, and other forms of contemporary commercial visual culture.9 In all, 215 distinct colors went into Mural. For Mehretu, these colors function as a “cultural code,” a descriptive language linked to social, aesthetic, and historic issues.10 Some colors were selected specifically to reference prominent public artworks and corporate commissions. As Mehretu has described, Those blue shapes are from the stained-glass window in the old American terminal at J.F.K. . . . I was thinking back to the modernist tradition of painting as part of architecture, and I was also thinking about the narrative of lower Manhattan, how this was the source of the city and the core of how New York became what it is. All these many layers.11

The site itself remains significant to the artist: Goldman Sachs built their headquarters not only adjacent to Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but also near the African Burial Ground National Monument, a 6.6-acre plot in Lower Manhattan where African slaves were interred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 As Mehretu explained, Those are the reasons I was interested in that wall, what its function is to the building as a fortified blast wall, how it goes along West Street, how it runs across and turns slightly away from the tragic Trade Center site, the Burial Ground nearby there. It’s kind of an intense spot, it’s also interesting as a place where the grid and the water interact, and that’s part of the history of the city, the grids of Manhattan merge at that point. You have all these different underlying moments that make it a really charged place. I was interested in participating in all of that.13

As Sarah Lewis has observed, Mehretu represents this dynamic history through the interconnected references to capital, art, and other forms of human activity that converge in Mural.14 The lobby murals by Mehretu and Ackermann marked the first time Goldman Sachs had commissioned new works of art in addition to their collecting, and they wanted to share these works with the public. While many other corporate art collections remain inaccessible to the public, the firm marketed these commissions as publicly available, particularly Mehretu’s work, which received far more media



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attention than Ackermann’s project due to her stature in the art world. The bank developed four ways to grant public access to the paintings. First, each work is literally visible through enormous windows along West Street and North End Way respectively, allowing anyone to see Mehretu’s front-entry painting and Ackermann’s exit-door cycle from outside the building.15 This aspect in particular initially drew Mehretu to the commission: It took me a long time—six months or so—to decide I wanted to do this. What would be the reason to make a painting for a financial institution? Why would that be interesting? One reason was this wall, which is so clearly visible from outside the building. It’s not so often that a painting in that manner has a chance to be public art. I was thinking about that and how rare the opportunity it is to make a painting on this scale.16

The immense glass panes of the Goldman Sachs lobby make Mural clearly visible from the street, rendering the work somewhat “public” in its availability. However, the lobby is not open to the general public, meaning that with the exception of the building’s employees, few outsiders get to see the painting up close. Despite its location within a private space, Mehretu appreciated how her mural would be seen by two distinct audiences: passersby on the street as well as the approximately 10,000 people working at 200 West Street, a group that ranges from high-level bank executives to those in the service industry. The diversity of her viewers, and their wide-ranging relationships to the corporation, thus challenged Mehretu to negotiate the dichotomies of public and private, contradictions she found compelling. The artist carefully considered the visibility of the piece as she designed the work, and, with the help of her assistants, she moved shapes and adjusted hues on site. Mehretu hoped to provide different experiences for viewers, one up close and the other from far away, while she embraced the variables that would determine the appearance of Mural: the lighting of the lobby at different times of day, seasonal variations of the landscaping in the front plaza, and the reflections of traffic, weather, and other atmospheric conditions on the window panes. Thus, like many examples of public art, the setting and surrounding of the environment shape the viewers’ experience of the mural. While the lobby is open only to employees, Goldman Sachs planned to make both commissions available to the public through free tours offered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). A nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting art and culture in the surrounding area, the LMCC is also sponsored by Goldman Sachs, reflecting the company’s investment in the community and how their corporate philanthropy potentially yields self-promotion. Ariel Phillips, the coordinator of the project for the LMCC, explained that these visits would be offered when a large enough audience was secured.17 I waited nearly a year for such a tour, joining the first public group in June 2013 for a forty-five-minute guided walk through the Goldman Sachs lobbies and adjacent Conrad Hotel to see the murals by Mehretu, Ackermann, and LeWitt. Just four others, including my wife and two friends, were on this first tour.

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The tour included no other works from the corporation’s art collection; it was focused solely on the large examples of “public” art. Perhaps due to the low turnout on such tours, they are not currently being offered or advertised. However, the LMCC website does offer a guide for a walking tour of Lower Manhattan art and architecture, with a feature on Mehretu’s Mural that notes how the work is “viewable to the public through windows on the corner of Vesey Street and West Street.”18 Mehretu’s Mural can also be “seen” on film through the documentary Art 21, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series that profiles contemporary artists and their recent work. Perhaps due to her greater popularity and critical acclaim as an artist, Mehretu, rather than Ackermann, featured in the documentary. She appeared in the episode “Systems” that debuted in October 2009 and chronicled the development of Mural. Filmmakers visited her studio, providing viewers with a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the artist’s working methods, while supplemental videos posted to Art 21’s website include the installation and completion of the mural project. Goldman Sachs is also an underwriter for Art 21 and therefore patronized not only the artist but also the vessels through which her work was documented and promoted. In this way, their support of Art 21 doubly functions as a component of their corporate philanthropy and support for the arts while surreptitiously marketing Mehretu’s Mural. In addition to the films, Goldman Sachs produced publications about the commissions, including two small brochures dedicated to Mehretu and Ackermann respectively. The text of the pamphlets explains the inspiration and concepts for each work, and include color photographs of the artists at work on their commissions as well as images of the finished installations. Both guides explain how the paintings were “conceived to complement the building’s architecture,” framing Mehretu’s “remarkable painting” as evocative of financial systems through its ordered compositional scheme and “dynamic” sense of “movement.”19 Ackermann’s work is described as “an immersive spatial experience,” and the language employed in each pamphlet remains descriptive and free from academic jargon.20 These free brochures have reached a much wider audience than the hardbound book about Mehretu’s Mural published by Goldman Sachs with Deitch Projects in 2013. The volume includes multiple color foldouts documenting the painting process and an extensive scholarly essay by art historian Richard Shiff; however it is not available for sale and was distributed only by Goldman Sachs internally. While both parties planned on publishing a new edition of the book with an outside imprint to share Mehretu’s work with a wider audience, it has not yet come to fruition.21 Due to the Great Recession of 2008, Mehretu feared the commission would be cancelled. “Just as we were deeply immersed in the work Lehman Brothers disappeared, AIG was on the verge, the entire global economic system fell apart and many people suffered,” she said. “We were in Berlin working on the painting while the financial world was in freefall. One of the people from Goldman came to meet us and I thought he was coming to tell us the project was over.”22 Goldman Sachs survived the crash and Mehretu was able to complete Mural, but that did not spare the company from vilification in the press. Rolling Stone magazine likened the company to a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson



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referred to their executives as “cold-blooded bastards,” and a former Goldman director resigned because he found the bank “morally bankrupt.”23 This negative publicity might explain why corporate executives downplayed the fruits of their patronage. The Goldman Sachs name is nowhere to be found on the informational brochures available in the lobby, and in the hardcover book on Mural, Goldman Sachs is only mentioned in Shiff ’s essay, copyright credits, and artist acknowledgments.24 No corporate logos command visual attention in these materials. Such acts of discretion were clearly designed to separate Goldman’s reputation from the building and its art, something critics noted in the press. Paul Goldberger, writing in The New Yorker, described the new headquarters as a “shadow building,” suggesting that the glass façade “appears to have been designed in the hope of rendering the company invisible.”25 Indeed, the Goldman Sachs name is not on the building’s facade or in Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ promotional materials; instead, the structure is identified solely by its address: 200 West Street. Bank executive Timur Galen acknowledged the company’s concerns that their public image might taint the reception of its commissions, explaining, “We would really like the work of people like Julie [Mehretu], and Franz [Ackermann], and Harry Cobb to be judged on its own merits.”26 Despite committing substantial sums to support the arts and public television, Goldman Sachs failed to generate a positive brand through their corporate patronage. Many were critical of the millions spent on the lobby paintings—Mehretu’s fee for Mural was $5 million—viewing the price tag as exemplifying the excesses of Wall Street, something unthinkable during an age of bailouts, unemployment, and financial crisis.27 Some claimed that Goldman Sachs employees “hate” the murals, while others criticized the commissions for adopting the veneer of public art while being available only to Goldman Sachs employees and not the general public.28 For example, in reference to Mehretu’s work, art historian David Carrier argued, “By inviting a young, high profile biracial lesbian . . . to do an expensive permanent work for their lobby, Goldman Sachs sought to buy good publicity. But since Mural doesn’t function effectively as a public work of art, they failed.”29 Indeed, the amount of good will fostered by a private corporation’s art collection remains debatable. If anything, offering partial access to Mural through Art 21 videos and glimpses of the painting through windows only reinforces its restricted availability, limiting the marketing potential of the commission. Today, nearly ten years after its completion, Mural features on the Goldman Sachs website in a photograph of well-dressed bankers walking across the lobby. This image accompanies a section of the website explaining, “What We Do,” an overview of the services provided by the corporation. “We aspire to be the leading trusted advisor and financier to our clients,” the company proclaims, using the language of service, security, and community engagement to market themselves.30 In fact, the website also includes a statement establishing diversity and inclusion as corporate values, aspects of Mehretu’s background that possibly furthered her appeal as the commissioned artist.31 Yet curiously, the only mention of the artist on the bank’s website appears in the 2013 annual report through a portrait of top executives photographed in front of Mural.32

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Mehretu’s reputation continues to soar after acclaimed gallery shows and a major commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, yet Goldman Sachs failed to capitalize fully on their patronage, unable to escape their connection to the 2008 economic recession. Despite calling Mural, “one of the largest and most successful public artworks in recent times,” a Vogue essay on Mehretu noted Goldman Sachs’s tainted reputation.33 Similarly, a New York Times feature opined that her Goldman Sachs commission “could have been viewed as cozying up to the one percent,” yet the article defended the decision by Mehretu, noting how “she chose the opportunity to work at a scale unprecedented for her and on a wall visible to a broad public.”34 Ultimately, visibility and access do not fully correspond where Mural is concerned, one of many paradoxes within the commission. The artist explained that security policies developed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan governs access restrictions more than any other factor. “I think the work kind of gets hijacked by the security issues,” Mehretu commented, noting how Mural actually hangs on a “blast wall” designed to protect the building and its service areas.35 As such, the juxtaposition of the building’s transparent glass windows with fortified walls adorned by an elaborate cycle of murals is, in the artist’s words, “an inherent part of the contradiction in that work.”36 Contradiction characterizes the very nature of corporate commissions according to Mehretu, because the “complications” in making art can neither be divorced from the context of its age nor its material realities. Art is never just a thing; it is a really vital and essential part of who we are. At the same time, there are other systems we participate in too, for example the neoliberal capitalist geopolitical system we live in. . . . I wouldn’t be able to make a painting like that, in that context, and have these conversations otherwise.37

Indeed, the necessities of making art remain tethered to capital, and when asked if she would accept the Goldman Sachs commission with the benefit of hindsight into the bank’s reputation and roles they played in the economic crisis, Mehretu had no reservations. “Yes, I would do it again, but it’s very complicated. I don’t take it lightly, painting or the context.”38

Kehinde Wiley, PUMA, and the corporate artist While Julie Mehretu rarely accepts corporate commissions (her Mural being a unique instance), Kehinde Wiley eagerly takes on such projects and has become one of the corporate world’s favorite artists. Wiley painted rap stars Ice T and L. L. Cool J for the television network VH-1 (2005), appeared in a series of advertisements for Infiniti automobiles (2005), participated in Nike’s billboard project (2006), and created photographic portraits of Spike Lee, Carmelo Anthony, and Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz) for Grey Goose Vodka (2014). However, Wiley’s work for PUMA offers a strikingly different example of twenty-first-century corporate patronage from Mehretu’s Goldman Sachs Mural in the nature and scope of its commission.



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In 2009, Wiley embarked on his most elaborate corporate project to date when German sportswear manufacturer PUMA hired him to market their brand for the 2010 FIFA men’s soccer World Cup. The company identified Wiley as a “half Nigerian American-born painter” in promotional materials,39 an important distinction for PUMA because that edition of the World Cup was staged in South Africa—the first time the event had ever been hosted on African soil. PUMA launched their “Modern Africa Collection” to honor the occasion, hoping to capitalize on the continent’s rich aesthetic legacy with a line of products inspired by Wiley’s work. He designed sportswear including soccer cleats, shoelaces, t-shirts, and jackets, and also created portraits of African soccer players sponsored by PUMA: Emmanuel Eboué, Samuel Eto’o, and John Mensah. Three 5-feet-by-6-feet paintings represented each player individually (Figure 12.2) and a fourth work, Unity (2010, Color Plate 17), portrayed them together in a monumental 9-feet-by-12-feet canvas. To create the portraits, Wiley traveled to Africa, spending time with each player in his respective hometown: Abidjan, Ivory Coast for Eboué; Yaoundé, Cameroon for Eto’o; and Accra, Ghana for Mensah. Wiley also visited local markets to gather source materials, and attended soccer matches in order to understand better the game and its fan culture. The commission led to a shift in his subject matter as Wiley previously painted anonymous subjects, “streetcasting” in urban settings while painting everyday

Figure 12.2  Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto’o, 2010. Oil on canvas, 72 × 60 inches. © 2010 Kehinde Wiley. Used with permission.

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people in poses inspired by Western Art History. However, for this project, he depicted international soccer stars, basing the portraits on African culture. As Wiley stated, “I wanted the history of African art to be the fulcrum point through which we see these athletes.”40 Thus, he replicated local textile designs for the patterned background of each painting, and modeled the athletes’ poses on precolonial African sculptures.41 In this way, Wiley continued the methods of his “World Stage” project, a series of works created across the globe including China (2006), Nigeria and Senegal (2007–08), Brazil (2008–09), India and Sri Lanka (2010), Israel (2011), France (2012), Jamaica (2013), and Haiti (2014). For this series, the artist established studios in each location of the “World Stage,” combining local traditions and subjects with Western references to interrogate histories of power and privilege in colonial networks. When it came to the PUMA commission, Wiley was already well versed in the impact of globalization and had previously spent considerable time in Africa.42 In many ways, the PUMA commission was no different from Wiley’s previous work because it enabled him to graft notions of race and prestige onto the black male body. Much of this endeavor forced him to confront the role of capital and commodity in generating status. For example, the detailed rendering of flesh and fabric throughout his portraits privileges these entities as fetishized objects, a conceptual approach to haptic properties that art historian Krista Thompson considered within a history of “surface and shine” spanning from Hans Holbein to contemporary hip-hop. She describes how Wiley confronts visual codes of power by “refashioning status and prestige through shiny jewels, tactile surfaces, and sumptuous goods.”43 The materialism and high finish of Wiley’s art, particularly its glossy sheen, generates “perfect” commodities, in which visual effects bestow a sense of opulence. Derek Conrad Murray similarly noted the “aesthetic glamour” of Wiley’s paintings, and while he found them lacking the “surface complexity and dense layering of the masterworks they seek to emulate,” Murray considered this a “strategy that self-consciously employs the visual language of consumer culture.”44 For both Thompson and Murray, Wiley employs artistic conventions to recreate the ocular codes of consumption. When applied in the service of marketing, this approach proves remarkably effective. The brightly illuminated and boldly colored soccer jerseys of Unity certainly attract our eyes as consumers, particularly as the idealized and lustrous bodies of Eboué, Eto’o, and Mensah wear them. In each of the four paintings the athletes wear the PUMA “Unity” kit, an Africaninspired jersey that would serve as an alternate uniform for the twelve African national teams sponsored by PUMA. The company’s logo appears six times throughout Unity, yet beyond advertising the PUMA brand, Wiley’s painting and the jersey both promote an ideal of togetherness, linking African nations. Rather than competing against each other for their respective countries, the three athletes represent a continent through their matching shirts, symbolically aligning as a diasporic team. To represent this shared heritage, PUMA based their soccer uniform on African sources, deriving the orange-brown pigment of the shorts from soil samples in Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Mozambique, while the transition from brown to blue within the jersey represents the African sky.45 A badge flanks the PUMA logo on the chest of the shirt,



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featuring an outline of the continent surmounted by interlocking hands in a gesture of greeting or friendship. Symbolically positioned over the heart, this badge replaces the national flags or club crests that normally serve to identify regional allegiances; instead, pan-African ideals emerge through sport and consumerism.46 In Unity, the association of PUMA with soccer greatness is implicit in the players’ larger-than-life personae and what Wiley calls the “super-rapturous light” illuminating his sitters.47 The commanding presence of the figures causes them to appear god-like, equating footballing divinity with the selection of sportswear. In fact, Wiley based the athletes’ poses for Unity on sculptures of the Oba, or ruler, from the Kingdom of Benin, and these men might be considered African footballing royalty for their international successes. Upon watching Eto’o play in a soccer match, Wiley remarked, “Eto’o went from being a human being to being a god.”48 While the monumentality of these portraits references divine imagery, the reflective properties of the painted surfaces of their skin allude to the African slave trade, as many traders would lather oil onto slaves to hide scars and beautify their physiques, employing bodily shine as a means of objectifying the human body.49 By applying bodily shine to the footballers through his studio lighting and painterly treatment of skin, Wiley potentially transforms the African body from a fetishized commodity into an otherworldly fetish. Desire, then, stems not from an impulse to occupy the African body, but from aspirations to attain its beauty, power, and status. Once the site of commodity, the African form now, ironically, generates commodity fetishism. Wiley toured the world with his Unity series, displaying the portraits at elaborate PUMA receptions in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Beijing, and Milan. The portraits were also featured in traveling exhibitions such as the Global Africa Project at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (2010–11). Thus, through Wiley PUMA was able to access new markets, namely the art establishment, and continues, even today, to afford exposure beyond the limits of the original marketing agreement with each subsequent exhibition of the paintings. Independent of this benefit, PUMA shrewdly associated with the popular Wiley marque. As Mark Rectanus has argued in his study of patronage, the value of marketing affiliations, such as that between artist and private company, stems from linking one’s “brand” to the other. Collaboration reads to the public as an endorsement of said brand regardless of the financial arrangement that created this relationship.50 In the case of PUMA, they linked their image to an artist conversant with consumer desire and one whose work satisfies a corporate demand for representational art, patterned ornamentation, and bold colors.51 Certainly, Wiley himself has become “a multinational brand,” with much of his studio practice “outsourced” to China among nearly a dozen assistants employed in a manner akin to Andy Warhol’s “Factory.”52 Even prior to the PUMA commission, Wiley’s work engaged with the market, with his African American male subjects wearing consumer labels such as Nike or Adidas, and embodying, according to art historian Derek Conrad Murray, “branded iconic symbols with extreme marketing potential.”53 This aspect of Wiley’s work remains problematic for Murray. In the same article, he goes on to characterize Wiley as “a region of contradictions where hip-hop’s street nigger archetype is the ‘new Nike Swoosh’—a sphere where the black

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male becomes a brand—and is indeed marketing gold—trapped within the panoptic house of mirrors that is multinational capitalism.”54 While Wiley’s paintings gained currency through their racially loaded stylings, his sportswear for PUMA appropriated the decorative arts of Africa for a German company, which, in turn, manufactured them in China, further adding a neocolonial bent to the networks of globalization. Wiley himself admits to the ambiguities of such practices, citing the Nigerian trickster Eshu-Elegba, while saying, “you have to be at once critical and complicit” of the system, particularly when marketing impacts how one self-identifies.55 As Wiley stated, Today we see people mark their bodies with brands—Puma, Phat Farm, Adidas, Nike. And you see that in my paintings. The people who are wearing those clothes are at once victims of a type of corporate desire for presence in the world, but they’re also fashioning their own identity, predicated upon each corporation having their own institutional set of aesthetic principles or unifying features.56

Understanding how consumer desire often hinges upon corporate identity, PUMA frequently hires designers such as Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan to create “lifestyle” attire, touting McQueen’s “nonconformist yet reverent” ethos and Chalayan’s products “for a life lived swift.”57 With Wiley’s cosmopolitanism, and ability to capture the aspirations of his subjects, he remains the perfect artist for this type of lifestyle marketing.58 For Wiley, the PUMA commission introduced his work to a more diverse audience while expanding his repertoire. “There’s something very alluring about broadening a studio practice beyond making paintings that sit on a wall,” he said. “To make work that not only responds to popular culture but also contributes to its broader evolution is at once an exciting opportunity but also completely new territory.”59 Indeed, Wiley played a different role as the corporate artist: one who literally designs merchandise for their employer. Where sportswear stylists often remain anonymous in deference to the company brand, the Wiley “trademark” became an integral part of PUMA’s sales strategies. They created two channels for Wiley’s involvement, commissioning him for portraits in the tradition of fine arts patronage as well as designs for goods that generated sales.60 We have already seen in this volume how art and commercial design overlap frequently throughout history, but PUMA’s model of patronage diverges from corporate art investment strategies in the decades following World War II and signals a return to an earlier moment in the twentieth century, led by merchandisers like Macy’s and Lord and Taylor, to integrate art and commerce.61 Wiley viewed the commission not only as an opportunity to participate directly in the fashion industry but also as a chance to counter the stereotypes and negative images of Africa prevalent in the media. He explained how he hoped to capture the “sense of joy” he found in Africa while working for PUMA: I strongly believe that unity does exist in Africa, so many times what we see about Africa are the negative images, the images of war and discontent. The first time that the World Cup is coming to Africa, I really wanted to be able to show the



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world what I see every day. And there is a type of unity that goes beyond nation, that goes beyond tribe, and it’s important to be able to get those moments down.62

In this commission, Wiley celebrates African culture through his use of textile patterns and historic references, and his paintings honor the accomplishments of African athletes. PUMA’s “Unity” campaign similarly linked civic responsibility with targeted consumption through their Pan-African rhetoric. This fusion of social consciousness with marketing for global corporations has increased over the past few decades. As Alfred Schreiber, a public relations and corporate sponsorship expert, explained, “Corporate philanthropy has been almost entirely replaced by cause-related marketing.”63 In this model, companies espouse shared values with consumers, framing promotional campaigns within charitable programs to fashion a positive brand image and encourage consumer identification. These initiatives might reflect corporate priorities, such as PUMA’s commitment to sustainability, yet due to the sales potential of supporting such causes, they cannot be considered solely altruistic. For instance, in addition to using art as an advertising tool, PUMA created several organizations to foster creativity and promote civic outreach. In 2008, the company launched the PUMA Creative Network, an initiative that sponsored exhibitions at art biennials as well as fashion shows of graduate students. Grants and awards for art and design were established, and PUMA Creative formed a social networking website that served as a directory of shows and artists, library of scholarship and criticism, and forum for dialogue about art and culture. PUMA Creative focused on particular geographic regions, such as Africa or the Caribbean, in a concerted effort to nurture culture in underrepresented areas. Perhaps the best example of this initiative was another PUMA marketing campaign that commissioned African artists to design soccer jerseys for their respective nations. The jerseys were unveiled in November 2011 at the Design Museum of London as part of an exhibition, Interpretations of Africa: Football, Art and Design, that also included preparatory sketches and original artwork by the sponsored artists.64 Ten African nations were represented, and their uniforms were to be worn during the Africa Cup of Nations that followed in the winter of 2012. The commissions indicated how PUMA hoped to fuse lifestyle marketing with philanthropic endeavors, as Mark Coetzee, former Program Director of PUMA Vision and ex-Curator of PUMA Creative, explained: This exhibition, what it does, is it creates a platform because it takes one of PUMA’s biggest investments, football in Africa, and it ties it in with the artists, and it uses football as a global platform for the artists to represent the symbols, the images, and the inspirations of each of their countries. PUMA Vision is an initiative which is across PUMA in totality, it’s really a vision of sustainability and part of that social commitment is also a commitment to support creativity as a whole, and what better way to support creativity than through visual artists.65

These programs paralleled PUMA’s charitable contributions, as proceeds from sales of the Unity jersey were donated to biodiversity funds. But again, these efforts were not

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entirely philanthropic. Instead, the PUMA Creative Network allowed the company to locate up-and-coming designers, ostensibly scouting potential employees, through the guise of corporate benevolence and cultural support. After operating this platform for almost six years, PUMA ended its support of the Creative Network in 2013. The cancellation of the Creative Network coincided with a massive reorganization at PUMA, where Björn Gulden replaced Franz Koch as CEO, and offices located across the globe were closed and consolidated within their headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany.66 PUMA’s profits had dropped during the economic crisis, falling further behind Nike and Adidas in global sportswear sales. While the company attempted to rectify the situation, their programs for artists were not economically viable and muddied the corporate agenda. Gulden stated as much in the 2013 annual report: “PUMA is lacking brand clarity and brand heat. It is not clear to the consumer what the PUMA brand stands for and we need to be more visible and tell PUMA stories which the consumer understands and finds relevant.”67 As a corrective, sponsorships of sailing and rugby were dropped as the company concentrated on their three most lucrative sports: soccer, running, and tennis. Under their current mission statement, “to be the fastest brand in the world,” PUMA signed deals with Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, Formula-1 racing, and several prominent European soccer clubs. They reissued iconic designs from the past for leisure-wear lines and hired celebrities including Rihanna and Solange Knowles as ambassadors and consultants. Ultimately, the bottom line governed PUMA’s decision, and while their partnership with Wiley produced an impressive array of artworks and consumer goods, it fell well short of expectations. Within a year of release, the “limited edition” PUMA-Kehinde Wiley soccer cleats remained in stock and retailers offered them at 40 percent discounts, perhaps indicating PUMA’s misreading of consumer desire and the crossover appeal of Wiley.68

Contested narratives: The complications of corporate patronage In the end, Wiley’s commission potentially implicated his patron, PUMA, in acts of exploitation and commercial colonization. Unity’s reference to artworks from the Kingdom of Benin recalls the nation’s violent plunder by Great Britain in 1897, symbolically embedding PUMA’s business practices within histories of Western Imperialism. Although such criticisms of globalized capitalism are hardly new, the combination of PUMA’s sustainability and cultural initiatives with Wiley’s PanAfrican rhetoric somewhat defuses their application. In a paradoxical way, the artist simultaneously exposes and profits from market desire, reclaiming black agency only to repackage it for consumption. Indeed, his mastery of figural representation, historic references, and colorful aesthetics often mask the potential for critique within his oeuvre, making Wiley one of the corporate world’s most coveted artists. Likewise, Mehretu’s Mural traced the development of commercial exchange, but coded it within abstract and unresolved terms. By obscuring her depiction of



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the monuments of capitalism through gestural markings and geometric shapes, she celebrated her patron while evoking the uncertainty and disorder wrought by a globalized economy. Thus, through their aesthetic and conceptual approaches, each artist somewhat mitigated the politics of their endeavors, utilizing their commissions to created nuanced, multifaceted critiques. And in the end, Mehretu and Wiley each found innovative and subversive ways to contest the networks of power generated by corporate patronage. Despite this similarity, the two commissions diverged in several key ways. For Goldman Sachs, Julie Mehretu produced a singular artwork for the bank’s new corporate headquarters. Visible although not fully accessible to the public, Mural features throughout educational programming and corporate publicity as a means of demonstrating Goldman Sachs’s investment in the arts and diversity. Through Mehretu’s commission, Goldman Sachs positioned itself within a grand history of corporate patronage while fashioning a more positive company image, a different objective from PUMA’s work with Kehinde Wiley. Here, the sportswear manufacturer also hoped to advertise itself as inclusive and avant-garde, however their bottom line remained merchandise sales. Wiley functioned as designer and marketer, creating paintings and sportswear that promoted PUMA and its African-inspired clothing line. His output became available for anyone to buy at stores, or see in traveling exhibitions, and through mass production, the Wiley-PUMA brand reached broader audiences than conventional fine art. Yet despite such differences, these high-profile commissions, by two of the most celebrated artists working today, remain linked by the ways in which the corporations employed art and, subsequently, struggled to capitalize on their investments. Whether situated in a lobby or available as a t-shirt, the work produced through these commissions espoused corporate values, promoted diversity, and connected to contemporary cultural trends. However, economic recession complicated these efforts as the reputation of Goldman Sachs remains tarnished by the financial crisis of 2008 and PUMA failed to sell their products and match their rivals Nike and Adidas. While these commissions might not have fully achieved the objectives of their patrons, the artists benefitted greatly, with each continuing to exhibit at prestigious galleries and museums. Mehretu recently completed a major mural for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), while Wiley received a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2015) and commission to the paint the official portrait of President Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery (2018). Ultimately, as these examples demonstrate, the contested and sometimes competing narratives of patron and artist complicate corporate patronage, resulting in commissions marked by promise and contradiction.

Coda—Corporate patronage today Today, private companies are increasingly the only viable option for realizing largescale artistic and architectural projects. Corporations’ relationships with the arts have also changed since the postwar period. In addition to commissioning new works,

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companies have also amassed collections, with consultants and advisors helping to shape holdings for every type and size of company, and with much of the art acquired remaining private and accessible only by employees.69 In the past few decades in particular corporations have increasingly been motivated by civic responsibility, tax incentives, or redefining their brand image, and now they not only collect and sponsor new art but also subsidize exhibitions, museums, and projects that fuse fine art with advertising or product design. It is not uncommon to find significant contemporary artists in commercial campaigns, such as Takashi Murakami designing handbags for Louis Vuitton, Jeff Koons fabricating oversized balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Whitfield Lovell and Ross Bleckner creating artwork for Absolut Vodka. While these projects certainly blur the distinction between fine art and commodities, they should be distinguished from the sponsorship. Whereas commissions focus on creation of new works of art and architecture, sponsorships enable a company to attach their name to an artist, institution, or event. While at times new works of art might be generated from an arts competition or residency, most sponsorship tends to provide an exhibition platform for preexisting work. For example, fashion designer Hugo Boss underwrites an art prize that includes a solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and British Petroleum has financed the BP Portrait Award at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery for the past twenty-five years. While some are critical of this practice—Wu, for example, considers this “exploitation” and an “increasing appropriation of art museums and galleries as their public relations agencies”70—corporate expenditures on the arts approached $927 million in 2014, with banks the largest industry to support the arts.71 Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Target, and Coca-Cola rank in the top five for corporate sponsorships, which range from donations for particular museums to grants programs for exhibitions and educational programming. As the largest private patron of the arts, Bank of America supports art conservation projects, monthly free admission to museums, grants for arts organizations, and traveling and virtual exhibitions drawn from their private collection.72 The department store Target similarly subsidizes art and cultural development in schools as well as directed funds for the Twin Cities area of Minnesota where the corporate headquarters is located.73 In addition, Target has donated over 22,000 photographic works to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to create the “Target Collection of American Photography.”74 These initiatives diverge slightly from investing in the development of art, thrusting the corporation into the role of connoisseur as well as financial backer. Thus, the types of corporate involvement in the twenty-first century have changed considerably from the patronage of the Renaissance up through the modern era. While private collections continue to be amassed, the curatorial mission of these collections has been expanded in many cases to increase public access. In addition to this revised model of benefactor, perhaps the biggest change in today’s corporate landscape is a shift from a national model, largely based in the United States, to an international, global one. As contemporary art expanded in the postmodern era, major collectors and exhibitions emerged worldwide. American corporations such as Goldman Sachs and



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Bank of America certainly continue the legacy of IBM or Chase, but companies abroad have recently pursued patronage more aggressively, and in many cases, now lead the way. Deutsche Bank of Germany, Abraaj Capital of the United Arab Emirates, and British Airways of the United Kingdom are just a few of the multinational corporations who commission new works of art, either for their headquarters and offices or through art prizes and residencies.75 Partnerships with businesses further support the diffusion of art biennials across the world, linking Art Basel to Swiss bank UBS and tobacconist Davidoff Cigars, or the Bienal de São Paulo with Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco and electric company CTEEP, rendering a ubiquitous corporate presence at art fairs. These efforts continue the legacy of American corporate patronage and, with the current globalized economy and art market, an international Gilded Age of art sponsorship has arrived.

Notes The author would like to thank the following for their assistance with this chapter: Mark Coetzee of PUMA Creative, Harmony Murphy and Sarah Rentz of Julie Mehretu Studio, Amy Gadola of Kehinde Wiley Studio, Melissa Levin and Ariel Phillips of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and most of all, the artists themselves. Research for this chapter was supported by the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Kathryn Spielvogel for her editorial expertise and support, and Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn for organizing the panel on corporate art at SECAC, creating the subsequent volume, and providing editorial assistance. 1 Rosanne Martorella, Corporate Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 13. 2 Alfred L. Schreiber with Barry Lenson, Lifestyle and Event Marketing: Building the New Customer Partnership (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 18. 3 Franz Ackermann (New York: Goldman Sachs, 2010), unpaginated pamphlet. 4 Ibid. 5 Julie Mehretu, as quoted in Art 21: Systems, October 28, 2009, http:​//www​.pbs.​org/a​ rt21/​artis​ts/ju​lie-m​ehret​u/. 6 Calvin Tomkins, “Big Art, Big Money,” The New Yorker 86: 6 (March 29, 2010): 64. 7 Julie Mehretu, as quoted in Julie Mehretu: Mural (New York: Goldman Sachs, 2010), unpaginated pamphlet. 8 Julie Mehretu Studio, “A Mural Project: Proposal for Goldman Sachs,” (2007), unpaginated, as quoted in Richard Shiff, “Our Life in Signs,” e-misférica 11, no. 1 (2014): http:​//hem​i.nyu​.edu/​journ​al/11​.2/me​hretu​/sign​s.htm​l. 9 Julie Mehretu, “A Mural Project.” 10 Julie Mehretu, as quoted in Dagmawi Woubhset, “An Interview with Julie Mehretu,” Callaloo 37, no. 4 (2014): 783. 11 Julie Mehretu, as quoted in Tomkins, “Big Art, Big Money,” 64. 12 https://www.nps.gov/afbg/index.htm. 13 Julie Mehretu, telephone conversation with the author, October 10, 2016. 14 Sarah E. Lewis, “Unhomed Geographies: the Paintings of Julie Mehretu,” Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 221.

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15 Ackermann’s project remains less visible because of its placement along a pedestrian causeway. Viewing angles from the alley are somewhat obscured by revolving doors, while its three-sided layout renders the painting impossible to view in one expanse unlike Mehretu’s singular and more prominent Mural. 16 Mehretu, as quoted in Tomkins, “Big Art, Big Money,” 62. 17 Ariel Phillips, telephone conversation with the author, July 24, 2012. 18 http://lmcc.net/place/julie-mehretu/. 19 Julie Mehretu: Mural (New York: Goldman Sachs, 2010), unpaginated pamphlet. 20 Franz Ackermann (New York: Goldman Sachs, 2010), unpaginated pamphlet. 21 Julie Mehretu, telephone conversation with the author, October 10, 2016. 22 Julie Mehretu, as quoted in Sarah Tutton, “Chasing the Dragon with Julie Mehretu,” Art & Australia 48, no. 1 (September 2010): 72–76. 23 Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone 1082–1083, July 9–23, 2009, http:​//www​.roll​ingst​one.c​om/po​litic​s/new​s/the​-grea​t-ame​rican​-bubb​ le-ma​chine​-2010​0405;​ Charles H. Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 128; Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” New York Times, March 14, 2012, http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​12/03​/14/o​pinio​n/why​-i-am​-leav​ing-g​ oldma​n-sac​hs.ht​ml. 24 The first section of Shiff ’s essay in the Goldman Sachs book appears freely online: Richard Shiff, “Our Life in Signs,” e-misférica 11, no. 1 (2014): http:​//hem​i.nyu​.edu/​ journ​al/11​.2/me​hretu​/sign​s.htm​l. 25 Paul Goldberger, “The Shadow Building: The House That Goldman Built,” The New Yorker, May 17, 2010, http:​//www​.newy​orker​.com/​arts/​criti​cs/sk​yline​/2010​/05/1​ 7/100​517cr​sk_sk​yline​_gold​berge​r. 26 Timur Galen, as quoted in Tomkins, “Big Art, Big Money,” 69. 27 Kerima Greene, “Lloyd Blankfein: The Next de’ Medici?” NetNet with John Carney, December 15, 2010, http://www.cnbc.com/id/40677336. 28 While neither substantiated with direct quotes or empirical data, Courtney Comstock claimed the lobby murals are unpopular among Goldman Sachs employees in two brief entries for Business Insider: Courtney Comstock, “Goldman Paid $10 Million for a Mural That All the Employees Hate,” Business Insider, December 7, 2009, http:​//www​.busi​nessi​nside​r.com​/nobo​dy-li​kes-g​oldma​ns-ne​w-10-​ milli​on-mu​ral-2​009-1​2; Courtney Comstock, “More Bad News about Goldman’s New Art,” Business Insider, December 7, 2009, http:​//www​.busi​nessi​nside​r.com​/more​ -bad-​news-​about​-gold​mans-​new-a​rt-20​09-12​. 29 David Carrier, “Public Art and Its Discontents: Julie Mehretu at Goldman Sachs,” Artcritical: The Online Magazine of Art and Ideas, November 7, 2010, http:​//art​criti​ cal.c​om/20​10/11​/07/p​ublic​-art-​julie​-mehr​etu/.​ 30 http:​//www​.gold​mansa​chs.c​om/wh​at-we​-do/i​ndex.​html.​ 31 http:​//www​.gold​mansa​chs.c​om/wh​o-we-​are/d​ivers​ity-a​nd-in​clusi​on/in​dex.h​tml. 32 Lloyd C. Blankfein and Gary D. Cohn, Goldman Sachs 2013 Annual Report, GoldmanSachs.com: http:​//www​.gold​mansa​chs.c​om/s/​2013a​nnual​repor​t/sha​rehol​ der-l​etter​/. 33 Dodie Kazanjian, “Julie Mehretu Started Her Majestic New Paintings Right after the Election,” Vogue (September 4, 2017): https​://ww​w.vog​ue.co​m/art​icle/​julie​-mehr​etu-s​ fmoma​-howl​-comm​issio​n-har​lem.



From Bank Lobbies to Sportswear

243

34 Hilarie M. Sheets, “In an Unused Harlem Church, a Towering Work of a ‘Genius’,” New York Times (August 3, 2017): https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​017/0​8/03/​arts/​desig​n/ jul​ie-me​hretu​-san-​franc​isco-​museu​m-of-​moder​n-art​.html​. 35 Julie Mehretu, telephone conversation with the author, October 10, 2016. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 PUMA Annual Report 2009 (Herzogenaurach, Germany: PUMA AG, 2009), 58. 40 Kehinde Wiley, as quoted in “Kehinde Wiley CV,” PUMA Press Centre (January 21, 2010): http:​//new​s.pum​a.com​/GLOB​AL/pu​ma-co​mmiss​ions-​conte​mpora​ry-ar​tist-​ kehin​de-wi​ley-f​or-po​rtrai​ts-of​-afri​can-f​ootba​ll-pl​ayers​-to-c​elebr​ate-w​orld-​cup-2​ 010-c​ampai​gn/s/​93185​8a4-5​cb4-4​b20-b​866-4​e32b8​dd9a0​a. 41 For the significance of pattern in Wiley’s African paintings, see Kevin D. Dumouchelle, “Patterned African Textiles,” in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015), 76–79. 42 Wiley had traveled to Nigeria to meet his father in 1997, and later worked in Nigeria and Senegal for his “World Stage.” 43 Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (December 2009): 487. 44 Derek Conrad Murray, Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming AfricanAmerican Identity after Civil Rights (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 84–86. 45 “PUMA Commissions Contemporary Artist Kehinde Wiley for Portraits of African Football Players to Celebrate World Cup 2010 Campaign,” PUMA press release, http:​//www​.puma​footb​allpr​esski​t.com​/en/p​ress-​relea​ses/p​uma-c​ommis​sions​-cont​ empor​ary-a​rtist​-kehi​nde-w​iley-​for-p​ortra​its-o​f-afr​ican-​footb​all-p​layer​s-to-​celeb​rate-​ world​-cup-​2010-​campa​ign/.​ 46 For a reading of Wiley’s work through the lens of Négritude and other African influences, see Daniel Haxall, “In the Spirit of Négritude, or, Kehinde Wiley Goes to Africa,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 41, no. 2 (November 2017), 126–39. 47 Kehinde Wiley, as quoted in Thompson, “The Sound of Light,” 490. 48 PUMA Presents: Of the Same Earth, http:​//www​.yout​ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=1dEC​wcdJM​ Xg&fe​ature​=relm​fu. 49 Thompson, “The Sound of Light,” 488. 50 Mark W. Rectanus, Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 25. 51 For corporate tastes, see Martorella, Corporate Art, 70–83. 52 Eugenie Tsai, Introduction to Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015), 14; Christopher Beam, “Outsource to China, While Riffing on the Western Canon; Kehinde Wiley’s Global Reach,” New York Magazine (April 22, 2012): http:​//nym​ag.co​m/art​s/art​/rule​s/keh​inde-​wiley​-2012​-4/. 53 Derek Conrad Murray, “Kehinde Wiley: Splendid Bodies,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 21 (Fall 2007): 92. 54 Murray, “Kehinde Wiley,” 97. 55 Beam, “Outsource to China,” http:​//nym​ag.co​m/art​s/art​/rule​s/keh​inde-​wiley2012-4/; For more on Wiley and Eshu-Elegba, see Robert Hobbs, “Kehinde Wiley’s Conceptual Realism,” in Kehinde Wiley (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 35–36.

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56 Kehinde Wiley, as quoted in “A Conversation with Kehinde Wiley and Peter Halley,” in Kehinde Wiley, 166. 57 http:​//www​.puma​.com/​black​label​/alex​ander​mcque​en; http:​//www​.puma​.com/​black​ label​/huss​einch​alaya​n. 58 André Carrington recently situated Wiley’s work within discourses of diasporic cosmopolitanism. See: André M. Carrington, “The cultural politics of worldmaking practice: Kehinde Wiley’s cosmopolitanism,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 8, no. 2 (April 2015): 245–57. 59 Kehinde Wiley, as quoted in, “A Conversation with Kehinde Wiley and Peter Halley,” 166. 60 In a reverse example of patronage, Wiley commissioned Riccardo Tisci of French couture line Givenchy to create gowns for the female subjects of An Economy of Grace (2012). For more on this collaboration and the series, see Naomi Beckwith, “An Economy of Grace,” and Deborah Willis, “In Pursuit of Beauty,” in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015), 122–33. 61 See Elizabeth McGoey’s and Margaret Maile Petty’s chapters in this volume for more on this subject. 62 Kehinde Wiley PUMA-Berlin Kick Off Event, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtilOsHbuA. 63 Schreiber, Lifestyle and Event Marketing, 18. 64 The artists selected to design jerseys were Barthélémy Toguo (Cameroon), Zineb Zedira (Algeria), Godfried Donker (Ghana), Saïdou Dicko (Burkina Faso), Ernest Düku (Ivory Coast), Owanto (Gabon), Hentie van der Merwe (Namibia), Samba Fall (Senegal), Hasan and Husain Essop (South Africa), and El Loko (Togo). 65 Mark Coetzee, as quoted in “PUMA Africa Kit Launch Exclusive,” http:​//www​.yout​ ube.c​om/wa​tch?v​=ENh7​rVYkA​d4. 66 PUMA closed offices in England, Switzerland, and Vietnam. 67 Björn Gulden, Foreword, PUMA Annual Report 2013 (Herzogenaurach, Germany: PUMA AG, 2013), 4. 68 The PUMA v1.10 Kehinde Wiley cleats originally sold for $247.99. 69 Indeed, corporate collecting has become “mainstream” and “companies tend more readily to accept that they should have art in their buildings.” See “Appendix: Selected Interviews with Consultants and Artists,” in Charlotte Appleyard and James Salzmann, Corporate Art Collections: A Handbook to Corporate Buying (Farnham, UK: Lund Humphries, in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012), 124–35. 70 Wu, Privatising Culture, 159. 71 “Arts Sponsorship Spending to Total $927 Million in 2014,” IEG Sponsorship Report, May 12, 2014, http:​//www​.spon​sorsh​ip.co​m/ieg​sr/20​14/05​/12/A​rts-S​ponso​rship​-Spen​ ding-​To-To​tal-$​972-M​illio​n-in.​aspx.​ 72 For these initiatives, see http://museums.bankofamerica.com/arts/. 73 https​://co​rpora​te.ta​rget.​com/c​orpor​ate-r​espon​sibil​ity/g​rants​. 74 http:​//www​.mfah​.org/​art/c​ollec​tions​/targ​et-co​llect​ion/.​ 75 For more on these companies and their practices, see Appleyard and Salzmann, Corporate Art Collections, 73–101.

Contributors

Adam Arenson is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Urban Studies program at Manhattan College. He is the author of two award-winning books, Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (2018) and The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (2011); co-editor of Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (2015) and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (2013). He has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and History News Network. He holds degrees in History and Literature from Harvard and History from Yale. More about his research can be found at http://adamarenson.com. Katherine L. Carroll is an architectural historian whose current research examines early-twentieth-century American medical schools and investigates the codification of science, the creation of professional identities, and patronage. Support for her research has included a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, a grant-in-aid from the Rockefeller Archive Center, and a Fellowship in the History of Medicine from the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Her publications include “Creating the Modern Physician: The Architecture of American Medical Schools in the Era of Medical Education Reform,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2016). She earned a PhD in the history of art and architecture from Boston University and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Mary K. Coffey is Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College. As a scholar of Mexican Muralism, she has published on a wide array of topics, from the gender politics of José Clemente Orozco’s Catharsis (1934) to Rufino Tamayo’s postwar mural art to the relationship between both Jackson Pollock’s early painting and the commercial mural art of Walter B. Humphries to Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth College. Her book How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (2012) won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for an especially distinguished book in Art History. Her recent publications concern The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art exhibition, a corporate collection of Mexican folk art that toured the United States between 2001 and 2004 and a forthcoming book, Orozco’s American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race (Duke University Press). Mark Durden, a UK-based writer, artist, and academic, is Professor of Photography at University of South Wales, Cardiff. He has written extensively on photography and contemporary art. Recent publications include the edited anthology, Fifty Key Writers

246 Contributors on Photography (2012), and the monograph Photography Today (2014), which has now been translated into French, Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese. With David Campbell, he co-wrote the book Double Act: Art and Comedy (2016), accompanying their co-curated exhibition of the same name held at both the MAC, Belfast and Bluecoat, Liverpool. As part of the artists’ group Common Culture, he also exhibits regularly, both nationally and internationally. Seth Feman is the Curator of Exhibitions and Curator of Photography at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. He received his MA and PhD in American studies from the College of William and Mary. His dissertation on modernism in Washington, DC, along with his other published work on American art, examines how qualities of affect, mobility, and vision become embedded in museum spaces, the built environment, the language of the media, and specific works of art. His scholarship has received support from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the University of Chicago. In addition to his curatorial work, Feman has been an educator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and has taught at the College of William and Mary and at Lewis and Clark College. Jennifer A. Greenhill is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on American art and visual culture. She is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (2012), and a co-editor of A Companion to American Art (2015). Her current book project explores the experimental efforts of commercial artists, magazine art directors, and advertisers to develop visual strategies of suggestive advertising circa 1900. Daniel Haxall is Professor of Art History at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. A former fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Institute for the Arts and Humanities, he earned his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. He publishes widely on diverse topics in contemporary art, including abstract expressionism, collage, installation art, and the African diaspora. Haxall’s recent research investigates art and sport, including his edited volume, Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art (2018). Elizabeth B. Heuer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American visual and material culture, and her research covers a wide range of themes in modern art. Her previous publications include an essay the postcard collection of French Surrealist Paul Éluard and the practices of American documentary photographer Walker Evans in David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelsohn, eds., Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (2010). She is also the author of the book Eugene Savage: The Seminole Paintings (2012). Monica E. Jovanovich is an art historian whose research examines the intersections of public art, corporate cultural philanthropy, urban memory, and placemaking in the

Contributors  247 United States. Her publications on the corporate patronage of art include “Traveling through Time: The Art and Architecture of the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal,” The Southern Quarterly (Winter 2019) and “The Apotheosis of Power: Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Public Art Dialogue (Spring 2014). Her current research explores the sponsorship of African American artists in the midtwentieth century by corporations and women’s clubs in Los Angeles. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, in 2016 and is currently Instructor of Art History at Golden West College. Previously, she was a Teaching Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Millsaps College from 2014 to 2017 and the Managing Director of the Haudenschild Garage, a contemporary art space and nonprofit art foundation in San Diego, from 2007 to 2014. Douglas Klahr is Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Arlington. Born in Manhattan, he holds degrees in architectural history from the University of Virginia and Brown University. His current research focuses upon how cities were documented photographically, especially stereoscopically. Publications include “Stereoscopic Architectural Photography and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology,” ZARCH 9 (December 2017), “Traveling via Rome through the Stereoscope: Reality, Memory and Virtual Travel,” Architectural Histories 13 (June 2016), “Nazi Stereoscopic Photobooks of Vienna and Prague: Geopolitical Propaganda Collides with a Distinctive Visual Medium” in Paper Cities: Urban Portraits in Photographic Books (2016), “Stereoscopic Photography Encounters the Staircase: Traversing Thresholds, Borders and Passages,” Archimaera 5 (July 2013), and “The Radically Subversive Narrative of Stereoscopic Photography,” Kunsttexte.ed Bild/ Wisse/Technik (April 2013). Elizabeth McGoey is the Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts in the Department of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her MA and PhD in the History of Art from Indiana University with fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York Public Library, and Hagley Museum and Library. She studies the marketing of modernism through exhibitions of domestic interiors, including “America at Home: Crafts and Craftsmanship in the Shelter Exhibits of the New York World’s Fair, 1939 and 1940,” in Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture (2015) and is the editor and co-author of American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Margaret Maile Petty is Professor and Executive Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the University of Technology Sydney (AU). Her research broadly investigates the discourse, production, and representation of consumer culture and consumption practices during the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the formative nature of these forces on modernity and the modern built environment. She has published broadly in academic journals such as JSAH, JDH, Home Cultures, Interiors, W86th, and PLAT and is a co-editor of Cities of Light, Two Centuries of Urban Illumination (2015), and Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (2018).

248 Contributors Melissa Renn is Collections Manager, HBS Art and Artifacts Collection, Harvard Business School. She has published widely on Life magazine, including “Life’s Pioneer Painters: Dorothy Seiberling and American Art in Life Magazine, 1949−1968,” in Rachel Esner and Sandra Kisters, eds., The Mediatization of the Artist (2018); “‘An Enduring Record’: Peter Hurd’s Art for Life Magazine,” in Kirsten M. Jensen, ed. Magical & Real: Henriette Wyeth and Peter Hurd, A Retrospective (2018); and “Life in Color: Life Magazine and the Color Reproduction of Works of Art,” in Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (2017). She is the co-author, with Adair Margo, of Tom Lea, Life Magazine, and World War II (2016). Alex J. Taylor, an Australian-born historian of American art and visual culture, is currently Assistant Professor and Academic Curator in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2014 to 2016, Taylor was the inaugural Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate. Taylor received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where his research concerned corporate art patronage in the 1960s. His work on the sculpture of Alexander Calder has appeared in the Oxford Art Journal and American Art, and he received the Terra Foundation for American Art Essay Prize in 2011.

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Bibliography  251 Christen, Barbara S. “Patronage, Process, and Civic Identity: The Development of Cincinnati’s Union Central Life Insurance Company Building.” Ohio Valley History 9 (Summer 2009): 54–77. Christensen, Jerome. America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Clausen, Meredith L. The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. Coffey, Mary K. “Banking on Folk Art: Banamex-Citigroup and Transnational Cultural Citizenship.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29 (2010): 296–312. Coffey, Mary K. How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Coleman Brawer, Catherine, and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik. The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meiè re. New York: Andrea Monfried Editions, 2014. Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Corn, Wanda M., ed. Cultural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage. Boston: Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997. “Corporate Medicis.” Art Journal 39, no. 2 (1979–1980): 139–40. Cras, Sophie. “Art as an Investment and Artistic Shareholding Experiments in the 1960s.” American Art 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 2–23. Dabakis, Melissa. Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. De Fay, Christopher. “Art, Enterprise, Collaboration: Richard Serra and the Art of Technology Program, 1966–1979.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005. Deusner, Melody Barnett. “A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914.” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2010. Doordan, Dennis P., ed. Design History: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. Doordan, Dennis P. “William Lescaze and CBS: A Case Study in Corporate Modernism.” The Courier 19 (1984): 43–55. Doss, Erika L. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Doss, Erika L. “Catering to Consumerism: Associated American Artists and the Marketing of Modern Art, 1934–1958.” Winterthur Portfolio 26 (1991): 143–67. Doss, Erika L. “Public Art in the Corporate Sphere: Public Relations/Public Seduction.” In Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities, 71–111. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Doss, Erika L. “Regionalists in Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925–1945.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1983. Douberley, Amanda. “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture and the American City, 1946–1975.” PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2015. Fenske, Gail, and Deryck Holdsworth. “Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895–1915.” In The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940, edited by Davis Ward and Olivier Zunz, 129–59. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992. Fox, Richard Wightman and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

252 Bibliography Friedman, Alice. “The Cultured Corporation: Art, Architecture and the Postwar Office Building.” In Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, edited by Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, 233–48. London: Routledge, 2018. Frost, Rosamund. “The Artist-Reporter in Industry.” ARTnews 44, no. 11 (September 1945): 14–19. Garber, Marjorie. Patronizing the Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Gaylord, Kristen. “The Controversy of Peace on Earth: Immaculate Heart College and IBM in 1965.” Thresholds 43 (2015): 46–55, 336–45. Gedeon, Lucinda H. “A Study in Patronage of Afro-American Art 1776–1976.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1990. Gibbons, Joan. Art and Advertising. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005. Gibbs, Josephine. “Artists Recount the Story of Oil.” Art Digest 20, no. 8 (January 15, 1946): 5–7. Gibbs, Josephine. “State Department Sends Business Sponsored Art as U.S. Envoys.” Art Digest 21, no. 4 (November 15, 1946): 8. Gibbs, Kenneth Turney. Business Architectural Imagery in America, 1870–1930. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984. Gingold, Diane J. Business and the Arts: How They Meet the Challenge. Washington, DC: Challenge Grant Program, National Endowment for the Arts, 1984. Gingold, Diane J., Elizabeth A. C. Weil, and Elisa B. Glazer. The Corporate Patron. New York: Fortune, 1991. Gingrich, Arnold. Business and the Arts: An Answer to Tomorrow. New York: Paul S. Eriksson, 1969. Greenhill, Jennifer A. “Domestic Magic: Floating ‘Friendly Thoughts’ of Art and Commerce All the Days of the Year.” In A Date with Art: The Business of Illustrated Calendars, edited by Christine B. Podmaniczky, 7–11. Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2014. Greenhill, Jennifer A. “Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures.” Art History 40, no. 3 (June 2017): 582–611. Guglielmo, Antoniette M. “The Metropolitan Museum as an Adjunct of Factory: Richard F. Bach and the Resolution between Gilman’s Temple and Dana’s Department Store.” Curator: The Museum Journal 55 (2012): 203–14. Hage, Emily. “Reconfiguring Race, Recontextualizing the Media: Romare Bearden’s 1968 Fortune and Time Covers.” Art Journal 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 36–63. Harris, Neil. “Design on Demand: Art and the Modern Corporation.” In Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, 349–78. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Harwood, John. The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945– 1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Helfgott, Isadora A. Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929–1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Henrion, F. H. K., and Alan Parkin. Design Coordination and Corporate Image. London: Reinhold Publishing, 1967. Hewitt, John. “The ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’ of Shell Advertising in the Early 1930s.” Journal of Design History 5 (1992): 121–39. Hill, Jason E. Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

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254 Bibliography Longstreth, Richard. City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997. Longstreth, Richard. The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. Longstreth, Richard. “A Historical Bibliography of Commercial Architecture in the United States.” 2002, revised 2016. http:​//www​.sah.​org/d​ocs/d​efaul​t-sou​rce/b​iblio​graph​ies/b​ iblio​graph​y_com​merci​alarc​hitec​ture_​revis​ed.pd​f ?sfv​rsn=1​0. Lord, Barry, and Gail D. Lord. Artists, Patrons, and the Public: Why Culture Changes. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2010. Lovell, Margaretta M. Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Lynes, Russell. The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste. New York: Dover Publications, 1980. Mack, Walter S., Jr. “Viewpoints: A New Step in Art Patronage.” Magazine of Art 37, no. 6 (October 1977): 228. Macleod, Dianne S. Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Malone, Bobbie. “Arthur Covey’s Kohler Murals: Honoring the ‘Dignity and Nobility’ of Men Who Work.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 93 (2009–10): 28–37. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Marechal, Paul. Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Magazine Work. New York: Prestel, 2014. Margo, Adair, and Melissa Renn. Tom Lea, Life Magazine, and World War II. El Paso: Tom Lea Institute, 2016. Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. McCarthy, Kathleen D. Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. McCausland, Elizabeth, and Walter Baermann, eds. Work for Artists: What? Where? How? New York: American Artists Group, 1947. McGoey, Elizabeth. “Staging Modern Domesticity: Art and Constructed Interior Displays in America, 1925–1940.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013. McGovern, Charles F. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979. Mozingo, Louise A. Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Mulcahy, Kevin V. “Cultural Patronage in the United States.” International Journal of Arts Management 2 (1999): 53–58. Mullenix, Gary L. “Five Corporations: A Study of Corporate Patronage of Art in Denver.” MA Thesis, University of Denver, 1980. “Murals in the Office: Many Painters Compete in Contest Designed to Make American Business Men More Conscious of the Influence of Art.” Literary Digest, January 5, 1935, p. 26.

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Bibliography  259 Art Works: The PaineWebber Collection of Contemporary Masters. Exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1995. The Artist’s Hand: Drawings from the Bankamerica Corporation Art Collection. San Francisco: Bank of America, 1994. Artists of the Santa Fe.” American Heritage: The Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (February 1976): 57–72. Barkin, Ben. “Art at Meta-Mold.” Art in America 44, no. 2 (Spring 1956): 36–39. Baldridge, Melissa, ed. Visions of the West: Art and Artifacts from the Private Collection of J. P. Bryan, Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated, and Others. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1999. Barter, Judith A. “The New Medici: The Rise of Corporate Collecting and Uses of Contemporary Art, 1925–1970.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1991. Batkin, Jonathan, ed. Splendid Heritage: Masterpieces of Native American Art from the Masco Collection. Exh. cat. Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 1995. Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge, 1995. Bellman, David. Drawings by Sculptors: Two Decades of Non-Objective Art in the Seagram Collection. New York: Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., 1984. Bixler, Harry N. Mathematics and Twentieth Century Art: Selections from the McCrory Corporation Collection. Exh. cat. New York: Baruch College Gallery, 1984. BPA’s Native American Art Collection. Portland, OR: Bonneville Power Administration, 2004. Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting As Modernist Practice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Brettell, Richard R. An Impressionist Legacy: The Collection of Sara Lee Corporation. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997. Brettell, Richard R. Monet to Moore: The Millenium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Burrell, Brandon. “Abbott Laboratories: Provisioning a Vision.” PhD diss., Florida State University, 2013. Business Buys American Art. Exh. cat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1960 Cameron, Dan, Toby D. Lewis, and Katherine Solender. Artworks: The Progressive Collection. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007. Carini, Anselmo. The Esmark Collection of Currier & Ives. Chicago: Esmark, 1975. Caspers, Frank. “Gimbel Collection Pictures Pennsylvania Life.” Art Digest 22, no. 3 (November 1, 1974): 17. Catalogue of Paintings in the Portrait of America Exhibition: Conducted by Artists for Victory, Inc. Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1944. Chapman, Luisa W. United American Healthcare Corporation Collection. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. The Chase Manhattan Collects.” Arts 35, no. 10 (September 1961): 59. Chmielewski, Matthew D. “Successful Corporate Art Collections: Two Case Studies.” MA Thesis, University of Akron, Ohio, 2010. CIBA-GEIGY Collects: Aspects of Abstraction. Houston: Sewall Art Gallery, Rice University, 1981. The Cigna Collection: Art at Liberty Place. Philadelphia: Cigna Corporation, 1991. Clark-Langager, Sarah A. Photographs from America: Selections from the Collections of Seafirst Bank, Microsoft Corporation, the Washington Art Consortium. Exh. cat. Bellingham: Western Gallery, Western Washington University, 1996.

260 Bibliography Cohn, Terri. Art in a Corporate Context: Selections from Bay Area Collections. Exh. cat. Santa Clara, CA: de Saisset Museum, 1987. Conrad, Barnaby, III. “PepsiCo’s Art Generation.” Art/World 1, no. 10 (June–July 1977): 3. Conrads, Margaret C., ed. Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection. Exh. cat. Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2010. The Consolidated Freightways, Inc. Collection. Palo Alto: Consolidated Freightways, 1988. Constable, W. G., and Elizabeth Gibson Holahan. Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History. London: Nelson, 1964. Contemplating the American Watercolor: Selections from the Transco Energy Company Collection. Exh. cat. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1985. Contemporary American Art from the Philip Morris Collection. Exh. cat. Knoxville: Knoxville Museum of Art, 1990. Contemporary Art from New York: The Collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Exh. cat. Tokyo: The Yokohama Museum of Art and Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., 1989. Contemporary Art of 79 Countries: The International Business Machines Corporation Collection. New York: IBM Corporation, 1939. Contemporary Art of the United States: Collection of the International Business Machines Corporation. Exh. cat. New York: IBM Corporation, 1940. Contemporary Art of the United States: A Special Loan Exhibition of Paintings from the International Business Machines Corporation. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1940. Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture: American Concepts and Global Visions, Selections from the AT&T Collection. Exh. cat. San Antonio: San Antonio Museum of Art, 2009. Contemporary Pan-American Art: A Special Loan Exhibition of Paintings from the International Business Machines Corporation’s Collection of Art from 79 Countries– Held during Pan-American Week. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1940. Contrasts of Form: Geometric Abstract Art, 1910–1980: from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art including the Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation. Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985. Conzen, Friedrich, Max Hollein, and Olaf Salié , eds. Global Corporate Collections. Cologne, Germany: DAAB Media, 2015. Corporate Collections in Montgomery. Exh. cat. Montgomery: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1976. Corporate Culture: Selections from Southwestern Ohio Corporate Collections. Exh. cat. Dayton: Dayton Art Institute, 1991. Corporations Collect. Exh. cat. Lincoln, MA: The DeCordova Museum, 1974. Corporations Collect: Art in the Business Environment. Exh. cat. Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965. Corporations Collect I. Exh. cat. Morristown, NJ: Morris Museum, 1991. D’Emilio, Sandra, and Suzan Campbell. Visions and Visionaries: The Art & Artists of the Santa Fe Railway. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991. Danilov, Victor J. A Planning Guide for Corporate Museums, Galleries, and Visitor Centers. New York: Greenwood, 1991. Davis, Felice. “Art Collecting and New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank.” Connoisseur 181, no. 73 (December 1972): 265–74.

Bibliography  261 Davis, Felice. “The Art Preferences of Two New York Banks.” Connoisseur 180, no. 723 (May 1972): 36–46. Davis, Keith F. Edward Weston: One Hundred Photographs from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Exh. cat. Kansas City, MO: Rockhill Nelson Trust, 1982. Directory of Fine Art Representatives & Corporations Collecting Art. Renaissance, CA: Directors Guild Publishers, 1990. Dominik, Janet B. The Fieldstone Collection of Early California Art. Newport Beach, CA: The Fieldstone Corporation, 1989. Duncan, Alastair. Modernism: Modernist Design 1880–1940, the Norwest Collection, Norwest Corporation, Minneapolis. Exh. cat. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1998. Edward Jacobson and Terence Pitts, Arizona Photographers: The Snell & Wilmer Collection. Exh. cat. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1990. Erf, Lisa K., and Jamie Dimon. Art at Work: The JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. New York: JP Morgan Chase, 2016. Fabergé , Peter Carl. Fabergé  Fantasies: The Forbes Magazine Collection. Milan: Electa [for] Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1987 Fahlman, Betsy. American Modernism: The Collection of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation. Phoenix: Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, 1989. Fahlman, Betsy, ed. American Images: The SBC Collection of Twentieth-Century American Art. New York: SBC Communications, Inc., 1996. Fitzpatrick, Tracy, and Nicole Bass. When Modern Was Contemporary: The Roy R. Neuberger Collection. Exh. cat. Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, SUNY, in association with American Federation of Arts, 2014. Flam, Jack. D., Monique Beudert, and Jennifer Wells. The PaineWebber Art Collection. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. Fluegel, Jane. Art for the Public: The Collection of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. New York: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 1984. Forbes, Christopher, and Robyn Tromeur-Brenner. Fabergé : The Forbes Collection. Westport, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1999. Fred Harvey Fine Art Collection: An Exhibition Organized by the Heard Museum. Exh. cat. Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1976. Frederick R. Weisman Foundation of Art Collection, Vol. I. Los Angeles: Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, 1984. Frederick R. Weisman Foundation of Art Collection, Vol. II. Los Angeles: Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, 1985. Geigy Art Collection. Ardsley, NY: Geigy Chemical Corporation, 1969. General Mills Art Collection. Exh. cat. Orlando: Loch Haven Art Center, 1981 Gerozissis, Christoph. Modern Masters: The Collection of Sara Lee Corporation. Exh. cat. Lakeland, FL: The Polk Museum of Art, 1995. Great Ideas of Western Man: Fifty-Two Advertisements for 1950–1954. Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1954. The Hallmark Art Award. Annual International Award given in 1949, 1952, 1955, 1957, and 1960. Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, Inc., 1949. Hansen, Trudy V., and Eleanor Heartney. Presswork: The Art of Women Printmakers from the Lang Communications Corporate Collection. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts/Lang Communications, 1991.

262 Bibliography Harris, Neil, and Martina Roudabush Norelli. Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of America–A Gift to the National Museum of American Art. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985. Harris, Peter, and Shirley Reiff Howarth. The Celebration of Corporate Art Programmes Worldwide. Sittingbourne, Kent, England: Wapping Arts Trust, 2013. Harrison, William, Emily Russell, Robert Rosenblum, and Manuel Gonzalez. Art at Work: Forty Years of the JP Morgan Chase Collection. New York: The Chase Manhattan Corporation, 2000. Hecht, Stacey. “Rethinking Corporate Art Programs: A Case for Sustainability in Today’s Society.” MA Thesis, New York University, 2014. Hess, Thomas B. “Big Business Taste: The Johnson Collection.” ARTnews 61, no. 6 (October 1962): 32–33, 55–56. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948. Howarth, Shirley Reiff. ARTnews International Directory of Corporate Art Collections. New York and Largo, FL: ARTnews and International Art Alliance, 1993. Howarth, Shirley Reiff. Directory of Corporate Art Collections. Largo, FL: International Art Alliance, 2013. Howarth, Shirley Reiff, ed. International Directory of Corporate Art Collections: A Global Tour of Art in the Workplace. Belleair Bluffs, FL: International Art Alliance, 2017. Howarth, Shirley Reiff. The Silent Partner: Art in the Workplace. Belleair Bluffs, FL: The Humanities Exchange, 2012. Huneker, James. The Steinway Collection: The Steinway Collection of Paintings by American Artists together with Prose Portraits of the Great Composers. New York: Steinway & Sons, 1919. Hunter, Sam. Art in Business: The Philip Morris Story. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. Hunter, Sam. “Corporate Patronage and the Commodities Corporation Art Collection.” National Art Guide 2, no. 6 (1980): 24–25. Hunter, Sam. New Directions: Contemporary American Art from the Commodities Corporation Collection. Princeton, NJ: Commodities Corporation, 1981. International Finance Corporation Art Collection. Washington, DC: International Finance Corporation, 1997. Jackson, Margaret A., and Rebecca P. Brienen, eds. Visions of Empire: Picturing the Conquest in Colonial Mexico. Exh. cat. Coral Gables, FL: Lowe Art Museum, 2003. Jacobson, Egbert, Katherine Chandler, and Herbert Bayer, eds. Modern Art in Advertising: An Exhibition of Designs for Container Corporation of America. Exh. cat. Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1945. Jacobson, Marjory. Art and Business: New Strategies for Corporate Collecting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Jacobson, Marjory. Art for Work: The New Renaissance in Corporate Collecting. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993. Johnson, Liz Holum, and Amy Fischer. “The Directory of Corporate Archives in the United States and Canada.” Business Archives Section, the Society of American Archivists. Updated May 14, 2018. https​://ww​w2.ar​chivi​sts.o​rg/gr​oups/​busin​ess-a​rchiv​es-se​ction​/dire​ ctory​-of-c​orpor​ate-a​rchiv​es-in​-the-​unite​d-sta​tes-a​nd-ca​nada-​intro​ducti​on. Jolly, Renee. Gathering Threads: The Heart of the Neutrogena Collection. Exh. cat. Santa Fe: Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of New Mexico, 2003.

Bibliography  263 Kahlenberg, Mary H., ed. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Textiles and Objects from the Collections of Lloyd Cotsen and the Neutrogena Corporation: Works in Cloth, Ceramic, Wood, Metal, Straw, and Paper from Cultures throughout the World. Exh. cat. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of New Mexico, 1998. Kay, Judy. Facets of the Collection. San Francisco: Pacific Telesis Group, 1988. Kirsch, Elisabeth. Beauty and the Board Room: Kansas City Businesses Collect Art. Exh. cat. Kansas City: University of Missouri and Kansas City Gallery of Art, 1980. Kottasz, Rita, Roger Bennett, Sharmila Savani, Wendy Mousley, and Rehnuma AliChoudhury. “The Role of the Corporate Art Collection in Corporate Identity Management: The Case of Deutsche Bank.” International Journal of Arts Management 10 (Fall 2007): 19–31. Kuh, Katharine. “First Look at the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection.” Art in America 48, no. 4 (Winter 1960): 68–75. Landsford, Alonzo M. “Miller Collection Presents Art as Step-Mother of Architecture.” Art Digest 22, no. 9 (February 1, 1948): 12, 34. Large Scale Paintings from the Collection of Security Pacific Bank. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Security Pacific Bank, 1977. Lee, Marshall, ed. Art at Work: The Chase Manhattan Collection. New York: E. P. Dutton with the International Archive of Art, 1984. The Levi Strauss Collection. Exh. cat. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1974. Louchheim, Aline B. “Abstraction on the Assembly Line.” ARTnews 46, no. 10 (December 1947): 25–27, 51–53. Lynn, Letitia. “Corporate Collecting.” Art/World (June–July 1977): 8. Mackenzie, DeWitt. Men Without Guns: The Abbott Collection of Paintings of Army Medicine. Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company, 1945. Massey, John, ed. Great Ideas: Container Corporation of America. Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976. Masterworks of California Impressionism: The FFCA, Morton H. Fleischer Collection at the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. Exh. cat. Tulsa: The Gilcrease Museum, 1988. Mather, Christine, ed. Colonial Frontiers: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico, the Fred Harvey Collection. Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983. McLanathan, Richard B. K. American Painters of the 19th Century. Exh. cat. New York: IBM Gallery, 1969. McLanathan, Richard B. K. Portraits from the IBM Collection. Exh. cat. New York: IBM Gallery, 1967. The Mead Corporation Collects: An Exhibition of 44 Contemporary Works of Art. Exh. cat. Dayton: The Mead Corporation, 1967. Meta Mold Aluminum Company: An Exhibition of Contemporary American and French Painting and Sculpture Collected by American Corporations and Their Officers. Exh. cat. Cedarburg, WI: Meta Mold Aluminum Company, 1953. Modern American Painting from the Commerce Trust Company Collection. Exh. cat. Lawrence: University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1967. Modernist Graphic Design: 1880–1940 from the Norwest Corporation. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994.

264 Bibliography Moncrieff, Elspeth. “Smart Art (the Merits of Corporate Collections).” Apollo 133 (1991): 196–99. Money for the Most Exquisite Things: Bankers and Collecting from the Medici to the Rockefellers. The Frick Collection Center for the History of Collecting Symposium, New York, March 1–2, 2013. Neff, John H. Art at Work. Exh. cat. Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1997. The Neuberger Berman Art Collection. New York: Neuberger Berman, 2000. New Art in an Old City: The Virlane Foundation and the K&B Corporation Collections. Exh. cat. New Orleans: K&B Plaza, 1994. New Hampshire Corporations Collect: The Currier Gallery of Art. Exh. cat. Manchester, NH: The Currier Gallery of Art, 1988. New Horizons in American Art: 1985 Exxon National Exhibition. Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1985. Oil, 1940–1945: A Selection of Documentary Paintings from the Collection of Standard Oil Co. Exh. cat. Tulsa: Philbrook Art Center, 1946. Oresman, Janice. Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, Incorporated, Art Collection. New York: Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, 1982. The Owens-Corning Collection. Exh. cat. Toledo: Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation, 1969. Pagano, Grace, ed. Contemporary American Painting: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1945. Pennington, Estill C. Frontier Sublime: Alaskan Art from the Juneau Empire Collection. Exh. cat. Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1997. Pennington, Estill C. A Southern Collection. Augusta, GA: Morris Communications Corporation, 1992. Philip Morris and the Arts. New York: Philip Morris Companies, 1994. Pittsburgh Corporations Collect: Inaugural Exhibition of the Heinz Galleries, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute. Exh. cat. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1976. Principe, Lawrence M., and Lloyd DeWitt. Transmutations: Alchemy in Art–Selected Works from the Eddleman and Fisher Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2002. The Rainier Collection. Seattle, WA: Rainier Bancorporation, 1977. RCA Art Collection. New York: Radio Corporation of America, 1973. The Reader’s Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso. Exh. cat. Auckland, New Zealand: The Auckland City Art Gallery, 1989. The Refco Collection. Chicago: Refco Group, Ltd., 1990. Reist, Inge, ed. British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Rockefeller, David, and Jamie Dimon. In the Company of Art: A Celebration of 50 Years of the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. New York: JP Morgan Chase, 2009. Rotzler, Willy. Constructive Concepts: A History of Constructive Art from Cubism to the Present, McCrory Corporation Collection. Zurich, Switzerland: ABC Edition, 1977. Rotzler, Willy. Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition: Selections from the McCrory Corporation Collection. Exh. cat. Buffalo: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1979. Rubel, Paula, and Abraham Rosman. “The Collecting Passion in America.” Zeitschrift Fü r Ethnologie 126 (2001): 313–30.

Bibliography  265 Santa Fe Collection of Southwestern Art: An Exhibition at Gilcrease Museum. Exh. cat. Chicago: Santa Fe Railway, 1983. Scala, Mark. From Twilight to Dawn: Postmodern Art from the UBS PaineWebber Art Collection. Exh. cat. Nashville: Frist Center for Visual Arts, 2002. Schriever, George. American Masters in the West: Selections from the Anschutz Collection. Exh. cat. El Paso: El Paso Museum of Art, 1976. Schulze, Franz. “The Collection of the First National Bank of Chicago.” Apollo 96 (August 1972): 96–105. The Security Pacific Collection: Twenty Years, 1970–1990. Los Angeles: Security Pacific Corporation, 1990. Seldis, Henry J. “Business Buys Art.” Art in America 52 (February 1964): 131–34. Selections from the Bankamerica Corporation Art Collection. New York: The Bankamerica Corporation, 1984. Selections from the Frederick Weisman Company Collection of California Art. Exh. cat. Long Beach: California State University, Long Beach, 1978. Selections from the Frito-Lay Collection. Dallas: Frito-Lay, Inc., 1987. Selections from the John Deere Art Collection. Moline, IL: Deere & Company, 1978. Selections from the RCA Collection of Art. New York: Radio Corporation of America, 1977. Seligson, Joelle. “Corporate Culture? One Part Education, One Part Sales: This Is the Corporate Museum.” Museum 89 (2010): 34–41. Smith, Elizabeth Bradford. Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940. Exh. cat. University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Standing Rainbows: Railroad Promotion of Art, the West and Its Native People. Exh. cat. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1981. Steelcase Art Collection. Grand Rapids: Steelcase, Inc., 1984. Stivers, David. The Nabisco Brands Collection of Cream of Wheat Advertising Art. San Diego: Collectors’ Showcase, 1986. Strazdes, Diana. In the Watercolor Tradition: British Works on Paper from the Mellon Bank Collection. Exh. cat. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1990. Subjective Realities: Works from the Refco Collection of Contemporary Photography. Chicago: Refco Group, Ltd., 2003. Swiss Poster Art 1906–1990 from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection. Ardsley, NY: The CIBAGEIGY Corporation, 1991. The 57 at the Fair: The Agricultural Building, a Century of Progress Exposition in Which Is Found the Exhibit of Heinz 57 Varieties. Pittsburgh: H. J. Heinz Co., 1933. Troccoli, Joan Carpenter. Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection. Exh. cat. Denver and New Haven: Denver Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2000. Troccoli, Joan Carpenter. Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection, Volume II. Exh. cat. Denver: American Museum of Western Art, 2013. “Upjohn Collection.” Art Digest 20, no. 4 (November 15, 1945): 16–23. van Weeren-Griek, Hans. “The Underwood Experiment.” Art in America 44, no. 2 (Spring 1956): 40–41, 66–68. Wardwell, Allen, and Dirk Bakker. Island Ancestors: Oceanic Art from the Masco Collection. Exh. cat. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994.

266 Bibliography Weisberg, Gabriel P., DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen. Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910. Pittsburgh: Frick Art & Historical Center, 1997. Weissman, George. “Good Art Is Good Business.” Public Relations Journal 25, no. 6 (June 1969): 8–10. Wilkins, David G. Paintings and Sculpture of the Duquesne Club. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Club, 1986. Wilson, John. American Paintings at Procter & Gamble: The Historic Cincinnati Collection. Cincinnati: Procter & Gamble, 1999. Works by Women from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection. Ardsley, NY: The CIBA-GEIGY Corporation, 1974. Works on Paper from the CIBA-GEIGY Collection. Ardsley, NY: The CIBA-GEIGY Corporation, 1976. World at Work, 1930–1955: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Commissioned by Fortune, Presented on the Occasion of the Magazine’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. Exh. cat. New York: Time Inc., 1955. Wortz, Melinda, ed. The Irvine Company Collection. Newport Beach, CA: The Irvine Company, 2000.

Corporate Sponsorship & Philanthropy Adam, Thomas, ed. Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Liberty: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Alexander, Victoria Dean. “From Philanthropy to Funding: The Effects of Corporate and Public Support on Art Museums.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1990. Amariglio, Jack, Joseph W. Childers, and Stephen E. Cullenberg, eds. Sublime Economy: On the Intersection of Art and Economics. London: Routledge, 2009. “Art in a Supermarket.” Art Digest 24, no. 13 (April 1, 1950): 13. Beuerlein, Katharina. Arts Sponsorship in the USA and Germany: A Comparative Analysis. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Publishing, 2007. Brison, Jeffrey D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Burlingame, Dwight, and Dennis R. Young, eds. Corporate Philanthropy at the Crossroads. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Buxton, William, ed. Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropic Support for Culture, Communication, and the Humanities in the Twentieth Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Carroll, Katherine L. “Creating the Modern Physician: The Architecture of American Medical Schools in the Era of Medical Education Reform.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 1 (March 2016): 48–73. Carroll, Katherine L. “Modernizing the American Medical School, 1893–1940: Architecture, Pedagogy, Professionalization, and Philanthropy.” PhD diss., Boston University, 2012. Caspers, Frank. “Patrons at a Profit—Business Discovers Art as a Selling Force.” Art Digest 17, no. 15 (May 1, 1943): 5. Chagy, Gideon, ed. The State of the Arts and Corporate Support. New York: P. S. Eriksson, 1971.

Bibliography  267 Degen, Natasha, ed. The Market: Documents of Contemporary Art. London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/The MIT Press, 2013. Eells, Richard Sedric Fox. The Corporation and the Arts. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967. Finn, David, and Judith A. Jedlicka. The Art of Leadership: Building Business-Arts Alliances. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. Fox, Daniel M. Engines of Culture: Philanthropy and Art Museums. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Dept. of History, University of Wisconsin, 1963. Fremont-Smith, Marion R. Philanthropy and the Business Corporation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972. Gavriel, Anna. “Public Art in Privately Owned Public Space: ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’ or Modernist Mistake?” PhD diss., University of London, 2004. Gent, George. “The Growing Corporate Involvement in the Arts.” ARTnews 72 (January 1973): 21–25. Golden, L. L. L. Only by Public Consent: American Corporations Search for Favorable Opinion. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968. Grampp, William D. Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Economics. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Heald, Morrell. The Social Responsibilities of Business, Company, and Community, 1900– 1960. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970. Heskett, John. Philips: A Study of the Corporate Management of Design. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. Hulst, Titia, ed. A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Joselit, David. “Four Theses on Branding.” Texte zur Kunst (September 2016): 169–72. Klamer, Arjo, ed. The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between Economics and Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Kotter, John P., and James L. Heskett. Corporate Culture and Performance. New York: Free Press, 1992. Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy.” History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 205–20. Lipartito, Kenneth, and David B. Sicilia, eds. Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Loebl, Suzanne. America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy. New York: Harper, 2010. Luger, Jason, and Julie Ren, eds. Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape. London: Routledge, 2017. Lynes, Russell. “Whose Business Is Art?” Art in America 44 (Spring 1956): 11–16, 60–61. Martorella, Rosanne. Art and Business: An International Perspective on Sponsorship. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. Martorella, Rosanne. Corporate Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Maxwell, Richard. Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. McGinness, Ryan, ed. Sponsorship: The Fine Art of Corporate Sponsorship/the Corporate Sponsorship of Fine Art. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2005.

268 Bibliography Miller, Lillian B. Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Neiheisel, Steven R. Corporate Strategy and the Politics of Goodwill: A Political Analysis of Corporate Philanthropy in America. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Nye, David E. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. Osborne, Alan, ed. Patron: Industry Supports the Arts. London: The Connoisseur, 1966. Patner, Andrew. Alternative Futures: Challenging Designs for Arts Philanthropy – A Series of Conference Papers Exploring Arts and Philanthropy in the United States Today. Philadelphia: Grantmakers in the Arts, 1994. Rashad, Violet Ciotti. “From Patrons to Partners: Corporate Sponsorship in Museums.” MA Thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester Business School, 1998. Raucher, Alan R. Public Relations and Business, 1900–1929. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Rectanus, Mark W. Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Reiss, Alvin H. Culture and Company: A Critical Study of an Improbable Alliance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. Robertson, Iain. Understanding International Art Markets and Management. London: Routledge, 2005. Robertson, Iain, and Derrick Chong, eds. The Art Business. London: Routledge, 2008. Rockefeller, David. Culture and the Corporation: An address by David Rockefeller, President, The Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A. at the 50th Anniversary Conference Board, New York City, September 20, 1966. New York: Chase Manhattan Bank, 1966. Rosenbaum, Lee. “Money and Culture.” Horizon 21, no. 5 (May 1978): 24–29. Roy, William G. Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Shell, Marc. Art and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Snyder, Terry, ed. Business History in the United States: A Guide to Archival Collections. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2010. Spaeth, Eloise. “Art and Industry.” Art in America 44 (1956): 2, 8–9. Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Tedlow, Richard S. Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900–1950. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1979. Through Industry: A Forward Movement towards an American Art.” Art Digest 8, no. 10 (February 15, 1934): 31. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Van Slyck, Abigail A. Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Bibliography  269 Wormser, I. Maurice. “Piercing the Veil of Corporate Entity.” Columbia Law Review 12 (1912): 496–518. Wu, Chin-tao. Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s. London: Verso, 2002. Zarobell, John. Art and the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Zdenek, Felix, Beate Hentschel, and Dirk Luckow, eds. Art & Economy. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002. Zorloni, Alessia. “Deepening Business Relationships Through Art.” In Art Wealth Management: Managing Private Art Collections, edited by Alessia Zorloni, 81–94. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2016. Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate, 1870–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures Abbot, Charles  110 ABC  26 Abraaj Capital  241 Abraham & Straus  117, 139 Absolut Vodka  240 Abstract Expressionism  32 n.2 abstraction  29–30, 31 n.2, 37 n.79, 38 n.84, 104, 117, 192, 227 Ackermann, Franz  226–31, 242 n.15 The Windmill, The Water, and The Grain (2009)  227 Adams, Adeline  48, 50 Adidas  235–6, 238, 239 advertisements  3, 23, 39, 41–3, 47, 51, 55, 58 n.32, 71–4, 142, 161, 164, 196–7, 215, 226, 232 ad copy  41 advertisers  40, 53 advertising  41, 44, 66–8, 71, 160, 171, 179–80, 194, 197, 198, 225, 234, 239–40 agencies  154 campaigns  16, 39 imagery  61 n.76 suggestive  43–5 trade manuals  50–1, 55 Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Marchand)  61 n.88 Aeroméxico  22 aesthetics  16, 21, 23–4, 26, 30, 41–2, 50, 53, 55, 61 n.76, 65, 71, 103, 117, 119–23, 125–6, 129–31, 137–8, 141, 150 n.6, 208, 213, 215, 233–4, 238–9 Africa  236 art  234 body  235 culture  234, 237

diaspora  234 sculptures  234 Africa Cup of Nations  237 African Burial Ground National Monument  228 Agee, James  64–5, 68 Ahmanson, Howard  6, 190–1, 193–8, 203 n.26 Ahmanson, Robert  198 Ahmanson, William  198 Ahmanson Theater  193 AIG  230 Albany Medical College  89, 94 n.60 Albers, Josef  2 Alexander, Hartley Burr  21, 25 Allen, L. M.  60 n.68 Allred, Jeff  69 “Aloha ‘Oe” (song)  156 aluminum  206, 209, 212, 220 n.20 Aluminum Company of America  67 American Bridge Company  210–12 American Institute of Graphic Arts  164 American Institute of Steel Construction  208 American Iron and Steel Institute  208 American Library Association  172 American Magazine  49 American Photographs (1938) exhibition  65 American Photographs (Evans)  66 American Sculpture of the Sixties (1967) exhibition  218 American Tobacco  3 Ancien Régime  106 Anderson, Nancy K.  58 n.29 Annexation Ceremony of 1898  158 Anthony, Carmelo  232 Anthropology and Religion (Buck)  162 Antiquariat  109

Index Arcade Restaurant  187 Architectural Record  140 architecture. See also modern architecture of medical schools  77–83, 85–9 patronage  89, 171 Armory Show  7 Arp, Jean  228 art  4, 40, 55. See also murals; paintings; photography; sculpture; prints abstract  29, 53, 109, 124–5, 192, 222 n.48 censorship  15 of Clark Equipment  41–2 collection  4, 6, 100, 109–13, 114 n.11, 225, 228, 230–1, 240 and commerce  132, 141–4, 236 commercial  16, 23, 47–8 communicating with public  24 community banking and  191 contemporary  23, 31, 121–2, 131, 139, 219, 226, 240 corporations’ relationships with  239–41 display of  4, 25–6 federal subsidization  16 fine  117, 119–20, 126–7, 140, 154, 164, 239, 240 government-sponsored  191 history  7 n.1, 228 and industry  41–2, 55, 117, 121 and machine  42, 137–9 market-based patronage  6, 15–16, 22 market-oriented  52, 55 Old Master paintings  100, 108 production  1 public  15, 28, 226–32, 229–30, 231–2 representational  192 support for  2 visual  25, 30, 41 Art Basel  241 Art Digest  2 Art 21 (documentary)  230–1 Art in America  216–17 Art Institute of Chicago  39, 42, 211, 221 n.22 Art International  219 Art-In-Trade  120, 139 artists  28, 55. See also art

271

in advertising campaigns  16 and corporate sponsorship  2–3, 17 (see also corporate sponsorship) employment  3 support for  3–4 ARTNews  219 Arts and Crafts of Hawai’i, The (Buck)  162 Arts and Decoration  131 Arts of Daily Living, The (1954) exhibition  193 Ashton, Dore  4 Associated Press  26 Associated Steel  207 Astor, John Jacob  172, 188 n.3 Atlantic Monthly  41 Atlas Shrugged (Rand)  206 Augspurger, Michael  27, 67 Augst, Thomas  172, 188 n.3 avant-garde  16–17, 30, 33 n.9, 53, 117, 123, 125–8, 131, 140, 192, 226, 239 A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust  100, 110 Bachelard, Gaston  112 Ballin, Hugo  192 B. Altman & Co.  139 Bank of America  240–1 Barnes, Edward Larabee  22 Barr, Alfred H., Jr.  138–9, 152 n.36 Batey, Mark  185 Baum, Dwight James  80, 89 BBVA BANCOMER  31 Bearden, Romare  2, 3 “Beauty the New Business Tool” (Calkins)  41 Before the Brand: Creating the Unique DNA of an Enduring Brand Identity (Perry and Wisnom)  179 Bement, Alon  137 Bennett, Edward  105 Benton, Thomas Hart  3, 10 n.15 Bergson, Henri  112 Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum  162, 167 n.60 Bethlehem Steel  209 Bienal de São Paulo  241 Bierstadt, Albert  43–5

272 Index Donner Lake from the Summit (1873)  43–5 “Big Five”  155, 160, 165 n.6 Bijsterveld, Karin  174 Blackwell  128 Bleckner, Ross  240 Blitzstein, Marc  15, 31 n.2 Bloch, Lucien  20 Blough, Roger  207, 215–16 Blum, Betty J.  221 nn.22, 33 Board of Architectural Consultants  105 Bobinski, George S.  175–6, 187 Bogart, Michele H.  3, 47 Bohm, Max  39 Bok, Edward  47 Bolt, Usain  238 Booth, Franklin  39 Boss, Hugo  240 Boston Globe  49 Botticelli, Sandro  110 Adoration of the Magi, The (c. 1478–82)  110 Bourke-White, Margaret  3, 5, 63–6, 68–70, 72–4 At the Time of the Louisville Flood (1937)  73 Happy Hollow, Georgia (1934)  69 Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia (1937)  69, 72 Bowman, Deute, Cummings  154, 161 BP Portrait Award  240 brand/branding icon  183–7 identity  180, 183–7 image  183–7 name  182 Brand Meaning (Batey)  185 Brangwyn, Frank  33 n.14 Braque, Georges  127 Braudel, Fernand  227 British Airways  241 British Petroleum  240 Broadmoor Hotel  54 Brodsky, Estrellita  29 Brooklyn Museum of Art  239 Brown, Joseph  20 Brown & Bigelow  50, 54 Browne, George Elmer  39

Brownson, Jacques  209, 221 n.22 Bruce, David  110 Bryant, William Cullen  45 Buck, Sir Peter Henry. See Te Rangi Hīroa Bullocks department store  192 Bus Transportation  42 Buttrick, Wallace  87 Calder, Alexander  228 Caldwell, Erskine  63–4, 68–70, 72 Calkins, Earnest Elmo  41, 53 Camel cigarettes  72 Canaday, John  214 Canaletto  108 capitalism  18–19, 26, 67, 102, 115 n.31, 236, 238–9 Carnegie, Andrew  6, 27, 77–8, 91 n.6, 171–3, 175–7, 179, 182 Carnegie Corporation  78, 88, 91 n.6, 93 n.51, 176, 182 Carnegie Foundation  177, 180 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching  83 Carnegie Libraries across America: A Public Legacy (Jones)  177 Carnegie Libraries (Bobinski)  175 Carnegie Library  6, 171–2, 176–8, 179, 180–4, 186–7, 187 n.1 Guthrie  178 Caro, Anthony  218 Carrier, David  231 Carrington, André  244 n.58 Caspers, Frank  2 cause-related marketing  16, 225 CBS  26 censorship  15, 19, 23, 27–9, 33 n.9 Central Pacific Railroad  43 Century Magazine  42 Chalayan, Hussein  236 Chamberlain, John  218 Chareau, Pierre  118, 125 Chase  191, 240, 241 Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation  221 n.35 Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company  3 Chia, Sandro  23 Chicago Daily Tribune, The  102

Index Chicago Tribune  217 Choukhaeff, Vera  118, 124 Christian Science Monitor  129 Chua, Lawrence  227 Cisneros, Patricia Phelps  29–30, 37 n.79 Cisneros Foundation  30 Citigroup-Banamex  22 Civic Center (Chicago)  7, 209–10, 214–15 civic space  172–3, 187 as brand  179–83 type of  173–6 Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (Braudel)  227 Claremont Colleges  197 Clark, Eugene  39, 42 Clark, Ezra  39–42, 47–8, 55, 57 n.22, 58 n.68 Clark Equipment Company  5, 39–44, 47–8, 50, 55, 57 n.12 Clark Material Handling Corporation  55 n.2 Cobb, Henry N.  226, 231 Coca-Cola  240 Cold War  32 n.2 Cole, Thomas  46 Collier’s: The National Weekly  46, 110 Collingwood, R. G.  157 Colnaghi Gallery  109 Colorado Fuel & Iron Company  36 n.51, 37 n.69 Colorado National Guard  36 n.51 Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center  88, 89, 94 n.51 Columbia University Butler Library  156 commerce  26, 43, 46, 122, 132, 137, 140, 141–4, 236 commercialism  118 Commission of Fine Arts (CFA)  105 Communist Left  20 community banking  191 Comstock, Courtney  242 n.28 Conger, J. L.  41 Conrad Hotel  227, 229 Consejo Nacional para Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA)  31 consumption  130, 142–4, 234, 237–8

273

Container Corporation of America (CCA)  1, 8 n.6, 9 n.9 Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (Kiesler)  121, 139–40 contemporary artists  3, 15, 23 contests  3, 42 controversy  19–20, 27, 29, 34 n.25, 105 Cook, Captain James  158, 162–3 Coolidge, Calvin  1 Coolidge, Charles  87 Coolidge and Shattuck  80, 87 Copley Plaza Hotel  42 copyright  42, 47 corporate artist  232–8 corporate body  100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110–12 corporate branding  179 corporate capitalism  99 corporate commissions  1–4, 17, 19–21, 23, 28, 39, 41, 63, 164, 190–3, 226, 228, 230, 232, 240 corporate cooperation  27 corporate culture  21 corporate identity  217, 236 corporate patronage  xi, 1–11, 15–17, 21–23, 27, 31, 32 n.2, 32 n.3, 77–78, 101, 131, 136–37, 146, 149–50, 164, 172, 183, 187, 191–94, 198, 225–26, 231–32, 236, 238–41 corporate person/personhood  100, 105, 110, 113 n.8, 182 corporate philanthropy  77–9, 87, 89–90, 90 n.5, 229, 237 corporate social responsibility  4, 11 n.20, 143, 216 corporate sponsorship  1, 16, 30, 32 n.8, 193–4, 200, 208–10, 215–17, 219, 229, 233–34, 237–8, 240 art  21–2, 241 artists and  2–3 of cultural events  16 modern interiors display  118 corporate vision  100–5, 111, 113 Cor-Ten  6–7, 206–10, 213, 215, 217–19, 220 n.17, 223 nn.78, 80, 223 nn.78, 80, 83 Cortissoz, Royal  49 Corwin, Sharon  67

274 Index Covarrubias, Miguel  3 Cradle Will Rock (1990) film  15 Cradle Will Rock, The (play)  15 Cream of Wheat  3 Crescent Hotel  186 Crescent Hotel, Catholic Church and Carnegie Library. View from East Mountain, Eureka Springs, Ark. (1953)  186, 186 Crowell, Merle  21 CTEEP  241 culture alliances  136 exhibition  146 patronage  2 privatization  15 production  141 programming  31 taste  25 Cummins Engine Factory  208 Curry, John Steuart  3 Curtis Publishing Company  48 Cuttoli, Marie  125 Dain, Phyllis  188 n.3 Daley, Richard J.  210, 213, 216–17 Dartmouth College  19 Davenport, Walter  110–12 Davidoff Cigars  241 Davis, Stuart  3 Dean, Kasseem  232 Death in the Family (Agee)  64 De Beers Consolidated Mines  3 Debevoise, Tom  21 Decline of the West (Spengler)  166 n.18 decorative arts  6, 117, 131, 132 n.3, 236 French  118–19 Deitch, Jeffrey  226 Deitch Projects  230 Democratic Convention  217 department store displays  2, 139 department stores  6, 117–19, 121–3, 141–3 De Pree, D. J.  145–7, 149–50, 153 n.46 Derain, André  127 design American  123, 127, 131 commercial  146, 236

competition  143 history  4, 137 Design Museum (London)  237 Desmond, Jane C.  161, 168 n.66 Detroit Institute of Arts  17, 144 Deutsche Bank  241 d’Harnoncourt, Rene  143 Dickerman, Leah  28 Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (2011) exhibition  28–9 D.I.M.  118 Dinkerloo, John  208, 218 Disney Studios  193 Documentary Expression in Thirties America (Stott)  63 Dole, Sanford B.  158 Dole Pineapple  3. See also Hawaiian Pineapple Co. Ltd. Downs, Linda  35 n.25 Doyle, Thomas J.  42 Dream Days (Grahame)  49 drought  68 du Pont, Pierre Samuel  23 Duke University  82 Dunand, Jean  118, 124 Durand, Asher B.  45 Kindred Spirits (1849)  45 Duveen, Joseph  111–12 Dwight H. Terry Lectureship  162 Eames, Charles  2, 145, 146, 147, 152 n.38 Eames, Ray  2, 146 Eaton, Walter P.  49 Eboué, Emmanuel  233–4 Economic Round Table  193 economics  101–2 Edison Mazda Lamps  41, 56 n.11 educational programming  239–40 educational reforms  83 Eero Saarinen and Associates  208 Eigen, Edward  144 Eisenstein, Sergei  65 Elks Veterans Memorial  156 Empire State Building  215 Epinal War Memorial  156 Eppinger, Jim  146 Equitable Life Assurance  22–3

Index

275

Eshu-Elegba  236 Eto’o, Samuel  233–5 Evans, Walker  3, 63–9, 71–2 Wreckers, The (1951)  72 Evans Product Company  152 n.38 Ewell, James Cady  39–40 exhibitions  3, 22–3, 27–31, 42, 48, 64, 117, 121–3, 125–31, 137, 142, 237, 240 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925)  117, 131, 132 n.2 Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art (1928)  6, 117–18, 122–4, 132 n.7, 139 Eyes on Russia (Bourke-White)  67

Ford, Henry  18 Ford Foundation  208 For Modern Living (1949) exhibition  144–6 Formula-1  238 Fortune  1, 3, 26, 64, 66–8, 71–2, 161 Fosdick, Raymond B.  84 Frankl, Paul T.  120–1 Frantz, Frank  178 Frederick Loeser & Co.  117, 139 “Free Library”  184 funding  3, 16, 29, 31, 31 n.2, 83–6, 89, 91 n.11, 177, 182 fundraising campaigns  86, 90 n.2, 180 furniture designs  125, 145 furniture showrooms  146–9

fashion consciousness  122–3 industry  236 photography  3 Federal Art Project  2, 31 n.2, 198 Federal Housing Administration  194 Federal Theater Project  15, 31 n.2 Federal Triangle  104, 106–9 Fenci, Renzo  194–5, 198 “The Future For Your Family and You”  196–7 Sculptures for Home Savings Beverly Hills Branch (1956)  195 Ferguson, Charles  231 The Field Foundation of Illinois  221 n.35 Fighting in Paradise (Horne)  160 financial crisis (2008)  239 Finkelpearl, Tom  216 Finley, David  102, 105, 107, 110 First National City Bank (New York)  156 Fischer, Sigurd “View of American dining room at Lord & Taylor” (1928)  126 “View of Chareau study at Lord & Taylor” (1928)  125 Fisk Tire Company  3, 44, 51 Flexner, Abraham  5, 77–8, 82–9, 92 nn.37, 38 Flexner Report  83, 85 Ford, Betty Davenport  193, 203 n.35 Ford, Edsel  35 n.25

Gabo, Naum  223 n.78 Galen, Timur  231 Gates, Frederick T.  83 Gellert, Hugo  34 n.22 General Education Board (GEB)  5, 77–9, 82, 89, 90 n.4, 91 n.11, 92 nn.23, 37, 38, 93 n.51, 94 nn.51, 60 impact on American medical schools  85–8 and medical education  83–5 General Electric  41, 50, 56 n.11, 107 General Motors  20, 39 George, Roy  42 German medical schools  80 G. I. Bill  194 Gilded Age  16, 42, 172, 241 Girard, Alexander  144, 146 Givenchy  244 n.60 Glarner, Fritz  2 Global Africa Project (2010–11) exhibition  235 globalization  226, 234, 236 Goldberger, Paul  231 Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco (1939–40)  11 n.18, 35 n.37, 192 Goldman Sachs  7, 225–32, 239, 240, 242 n.28 Good Design (1950) exhibition  143–6, 149 Gordon, Elizabeth  193

276 Index Gordon and Kaelber  87 Grahame, Kenneth  49 Grand Rapids Chippendale  145, 148 Great Depression  2, 27, 69, 102, 108, 131, 137, 156 Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art (2001–04) exhibition  22 Great Recession  226, 230, 232, 239 Grey Goose Vodka  232 Guaranty Building and Loan building  192 Guevara, Che  185 Guiliani, Rudy  32 n.8 Gulbenkian, Calouste  109 Gulden, Björn  238 Hall of State (Dallas, Texas)  156 Hambidge, Jay  50 Hammer, Armand  109 Hammett, Dashiell  184 Hanapepe strike  160 Hansom, Paul  68 hapa-haoles  159–61, 163 Harlem Hospital  198 Harper’s Bazaar  3, 144, 161 Harris, Neil  25, 57 n.23 Hartmann, William  209–10, 213, 221 n.33 Harvard Medical School  80, 81, 86 Harvard University  100 Harvey, David  115 n.31 Haskell, Charles  178 Hawaii  157 ancient  162 culture and history  6, 155–6, 158, 160, 162–3, 165, 168 n.66 as feminine  161 Japanese community  160 labor strife  159–60 landscape  158–9 Native Hawaiians  159–61, 163 paintings  154 progress toward statehood  163–4 racial tensions  159–60 tourism in  6, 159–60, 164 Hawaiian Pineapple Co. Ltd.  167 n.48. See also Dole Hawaiian Tourist Bureau  160–1

“Hawaii Calls” (radio show)  161 Haydon, Harold  212–13 Hayes, Vertis  198–9 Heinrich, R. F.  39 Heinz  73–4 Herman Miller  145–9, 152 n.38 Herman Miller showroom  147–8 Hermitage  109–12 Hertel, Carl  195 Hertel, Susan  195, 197, 199, 205 n.54 Hess, Thomas  219 Hilo Massacre  160 Hine, Lewis  215 HMS Resolution  162 Hobbema, Meindert  100–1, 108 Holbein, Hans  234 Holmes, W. H.  110 home furnishings  118–20, 122–3, 126–7, 129, 142–8 Home Savings and Loan  2, 6, 190–1, 193–4, 195–6, 199 Home Savings tower  195–200 Homestead Strike  177 Honolulu (1939) film  161 Hood, Raymond  17–18, 20 Hoover, Herbert  3, 156 Horne, Gerald  160 Hotel Commodore  42 House Beautiful  193 House of Art  46–7, 50 Howard University  84 Hubbard, Jeffrey D.  94 n.60 hula performances  155 Huntington, Collis P.  43 Hurd, Peter  3 IBM (International Business Machines)  1, 11 n.18, 241 Ice T  232 iconography  17, 20, 27, 30, 55, 193 illustration commercial  41, 51 immigrants  159–60 Incorporation of America, The (Trachtenberg)  16 Indiana, Robert  218 industrial arts  117, 121

Index Industrial Arts Exposition (1934)  137, 150 n.5 industrial design  132 n.3, 137–9, 141 Industrial Design Advisory Committee  152 n.36 industrial objects  138 industrial production  138 Indych-López, Anna  27–8 Infiniti automobiles  232 Inland Steel  217 Insurance Company of North America  9 n.8 Internal Revenue Service Building  108 Interpretations of Africa: Football, Art and Design (2011) exhibition  237 Iraq Petroleum  109 Itaú Unibanco  241 Jackard, Jerald  217 Jacks, L. P.  138 Jacobson, Timothy  93 n.50 James, William  44 Jeffers, Wendy  34 n.18 Jewell, Edward Alden  137 Jiryu  160 John Deere and Company Administrative Center  208, 218 Johns Hopkins Medical School  79, 83–6, 88 Johnson, Lyndon B.  213 Johnson, Philip  138–9, 144, 149 Jones, Theodore  177, 187 n.1 Jones-Costigan Act (1934)  163 José Cuervo  31 Jourdain, Frances  118, 125 JPMorgan Chase  240 Kahahawai, Joseph  159 Kahlo, Frida  17, 38 n.84 Kamehama I  155, 157 Kandinsky, Wassily  228 Karl, Barry  26–7, 37 n.69 Katz, Stanley  26–7, 37 n.69 Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr.,  142–6, 149, 152 n.36 Kaufmann Department  142 Kelman, Ari  173–4, 176 Kemp, Martin  185–6

277

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts  193 Kennedy, John F.  207 Keppler, Joseph, Jr.  101 Kettering, Sharon  136 Keyes, Helen Johnson  129 Kiesler, Frederick  121–2, 130, 139–41, 149 Kirchberg, Volker  23 Kirkland, James H.  87 Kirstein, Lincoln  65–6 Kleinzahler, August  184–5 Knaths, Karl  2 Knoedler Gallery  109 Knoll, Florence  145–6, 148, 153 n.47 Knoll Associates  145–6, 148–9 Knowles, Solange  238 Koch, Franz  238 Koons, Jeff  240 Korda, Alberto  185 Kouwenhoven, John A.  144–5 Kramer, Hilton  218 Kuhn, Walt  7 labor  25 management  24 strife  159–60 unions  24 Lachaise, Gaston  23 Ladies’ Home Journal  39, 47 La Farge, John  41 Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe  182 Lalani Village  157, 159 Lam, Wifredo  37 n.79 landscape  40–1, 43–5, 49–50, 61 n.76 Latin America art  29–31, 37 n.79 economic interests  30 modernism  29 Lawrence, Jacob  3 Lazlo, Paul  147 Lea, Tom  3 Lear, Bernadette A.  183 Lears, Jackson  9 n.11, 44, 58 n.27, 114 n.16, 166 n.15 Lee, Doris  3 Lee, Spike  232 Léger, Fernand  125, 127 LeGrand, Claudius Francis  9 n.8

278 Index Lehman Brothers  225, 230 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles  104 L’Enfant Plan  107 Lenin, V. I.  18–20, 28, 34 n.22 Lessing, Theodor  174 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans)  64–5, 68–9 Levine, Lawrence  175 Lewis, Sarah  228 LeWitt, Sol  23, 219, 227, 229 Leyendecker, Frank  39–40 Liberman, Alexander  218 Lichtenstein, Roy  23, 228 Lie, Jonas  39 Life  1, 3, 72–4, 192, 214 lifestyle marketing  236–7 Liliuokalani (Queen)  156, 163 Lilly, Joseph  20 Lincoln, Abraham  20 Linsley, Robert  26 Lipchitz, Jacques  125 Lippard, Lucy  219 Lippincott, J. Gordon  217 Lippincott Inc.  217–18 Lippmann, Walter  99, 103, 108 L. L. Cool J  232 Logelin, Edward  210 logos  3, 179, 182, 200, 215, 228, 234 London, Jack  184 Lord and Taylor  6, 117–19, 120, 121–8, 130–1, 132 n.7, 133 n.25, 134 n.50, 139, 236 Bureau of Fashion and Interior Decoration  122–3 Department of Modern Decoration  126 Los Angeles County Art Institute  192 Los Angeles County Fair  193 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)  193 Louis Vuitton  240 Lovell, Whitfield  240 Lowell, A. Lawrence  100 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)  229–30 lu’au feasts  155 Luce, Henry Robinson  3, 66, 72 Lucky Strike  3

Ludlow Massacre  24, 27, 36 n.51 “The Lurline is Hawaii”  161 Mabry, Thomas  65–6, 141 McCandless, S. R.  129 MacCannell, Dean  154 McEuen, Melissa A.  67 McGraw-Hill Publishing  26 Machine Art (1934) exhibition  137–8, 138, 141, 144, 149 McIntosh, Frank  161 McIntosh, Harrison  193, 203 n.35 McIntyre, Glen V.  178 McMillan Plan  104–5, 107 McQueen, Alexander  236 Macy’s  117, 139, 236, 240 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade  240 Maffei, Nicholas P.  150 n.6 Maloof, Sam  193, 203 n.35 management theories  25 Manship, Paul  23, 26 Marchand, Roland  61 n.88 Mare, Süe et  118, 124 Marguiles  217 Marin, John  127 Marisol  3 marketing  26–7, 41–2, 120, 179, 235, 237 marquee commission  23 Martorella, Rosanne  225 Marx, Karl  44, 115 n.31 Marxism  17–18, 20, 34 n.18, 160 mass communication  26 Massie, Thalia  159 Matisse, Henri  17, 23 Matson, William  155–6, 160–4, 167 n.48 Matson Navigation Company  6, 154–5, 157, 160, 164 Mattheisen Gallery  109 Maurer, Alfred  127 Maxwell, Nancy Kalikow  175 Mayari-R  209 Meadmore, Clement  218 mechanical reproduction  40, 49, 54 mechanical skills  48 media technologies  26 medical education  77, 80, 82 General Education Board (GEB) and  83–5

Index methods and problems  88–90 and philanthropy  78–80 medical school  92 nn.23, 37 American  85–90 architecture  77–83, 85–9 construction  79 fundraising campaigns  90 n.2 single building  80, 86, 88 type  80, 90 medical school-hospital  80, 82, 86–90 Meharry Medical College  84, 87 Mehretu, Julie  7, 225–32, 238–9 Mural (2009)  7, 225–32, 238–9 Untitled (2001)  225 Mellon, Andrew  5–6, 99–100, 101, 102–13, 115 n.31 Mellon National Bank  99 Mellon Plan  107 Melosh, Barbara  194 Mensah, John  233–4 Merchandise Mart  143–4, 146–7 merchandising  120, 123 Messmore, Carmen  109 Methods and Problems of Medical Education  88–9 Metropolitan Museum of Art  32 n.8, 39 Mexican art  31, 34 n.24 folk  22 from 1930s  29 Mickelson, Peter  172–3 Ministry of Commerce  132 n.2 Ministry of Public Education  17, 34 n.18 Model T  119 “Modern Africa Collection”  233 modern architecture  1, 2, 145, 190 modern art  1, 24, 34 n.18, 37 n.79, 117, 121, 124, 137, 139–42, 141, 157, 207, 213, 228 modern artists  2 modern design  119–22, 137–9, 141, 142–4, 145–7, 146, 148–50, 150 n.6 modern domesticity  122, 128 modern furniture  119, 121 modern interiors  117–18, 121–2, 127, 130–1, 144 modernism  6, 65, 117, 118, 121–3, 126, 128, 129–32, 137, 140, 146, 149

279

modernity  43, 53, 66, 72, 121, 130, 137, 145, 215 modernization  6, 18, 30, 84 modern lifestyle  118, 145–6 modern medical schools  84 modern medicine  82–3 modern movement  128–9 modern primitivism  155–7 moneyed interests  30 Moore, Charles  108 Mora, F. Luis  39 Morgan, J. P.  101 mosaics  2, 21, 24, 190–2, 194, 196–9 façade  198 Mucha, Alphonse  39 Mumford, Lewis  127–8, 131 mural  2, 4, 5–6, 17, 31 n.1, 34 nn.22, 24, 67, 154, 156, 157–8, 162, 163, 164, 197, 198 monumental  23 mosaic  47, 156 photo  66 program  156 Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932) exhibition  28 Murray, Derek Conrad  234–5 Murray, Robert  218 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston  38 n.84, 240 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)  17, 20, 28–9, 31, 37 n.79, 64–5, 137–8, 141–4, 146, 149, 208, 235 Department of Industrial Design  143 Myers, Lloyd B.  154, 156 Natanson, Nicholas  71 National Academy of Design  156 National Alliance of Art and Industry  137, 150 n.5 National American Fire Insurance  200 n.2 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)  72–3 National Commission of Fine Arts  156 National Council for Culture and the Arts. See Consejo Nacional para Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA)

280 Index National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)  16, 31, 32 n.2 National Gallery of Art  5–6, 99–100, 104–5, 107, 109–10 National Mall  104 National Portrait Gallery  239, 240 Nation Business Review  129 Nation’s Business, The  39, 42–3 nature  51–2 NBC  26 Nelson, George  145, 147 Nemerov, Alexander  51 neoliberalism  30 Neuhart, John  153 n.47 Neuhart, Marilyn  153 n.47 Nevelson, Louise  218 New Deal artwork  194. See also Works Progress Administration “New Frontiers” theme  23, 25–6 New Haven Coliseum  208 Newman, Barnett  217, 218 Broken Obelisk (1963–67)  218 Here II (1965–66)  218 Here II (1965)  218 Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (1968)  217 Newman, Stephen  46 New School for Social Research  19 New Science (Vico)  157 New Yorker, The  161, 231 New York Magazine  219 New York Post  64–5 New York Public Library  173 New York School  4 New York Times  34 n.18, 89, 102, 119, 129, 137, 219, 232 New York World-Telegram  20 Nike  232, 235, 236, 238, 239 ‘new Nike Swoosh’  235 Nineteenth Amendment  177–8 Nixon, Richard  197, 205 n.52 Noguchi, Isamu  147 noise and sound  174–5 Noyes, Eliot  143–4, 146, 149, 152 n.36 Obama, Barack  239 obscenity  28, 34 n.25 Occidental Petroleum  109

O’Connor, Denis  199, 205 n.54 O’Keeffe, Georgia  3, 127, 167 n.48 Okrent, Daniel  21, 23–4, 34 n.19, 37 n.73 Oldenberg, Claes  217–18 Ollman, Wallace O.  143 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition  143, 149, 152 n.38 Orozco, José Clemente  19, 37 n.79, 192 Otis College of Art and Design  192. See also Los Angeles County Art Institute Pach, Walter  127 Pacific Rim trade  199, 205 n.52 package design  46–7 Packard, Vance  206 Paine, Frances Flynn  17, 21, 35 n.31 Paine, Ralph, Jr.  71 paintings  3, 40, 42, 44, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 109, 125, 158, 230, 231, 234. See also art abstract  29, 53 easel  164 Hawaiian  154 landscape  43, 45, 51–2 (see also landscape) Palace of Fine Arts (Mexico City, Mexico)  20, 28, 31 n.1, 32 n.2 PanAm  3 Paquette, Catha  17, 24–5, 35 n.35 Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (LeWitt)  219 Park, Edwin Avery  121 Parrish, Maxfield  5, 39–41, 43–55, 56 nn.8, 11, 58 n.32 Dawn (1918)  52 Daybreak (1922)  47, 50, 52 Fisk Tires: The Modern Magic Shoes (1917)  45 “From Maxfield Parrish, Windsor, Vermont”  46 Moonlight (1932)  56 n.11 New Hampshire: The Winter Paradise (1939)  54 Solitude (1932)  52, 52, 54 The Spirit of Transportation  5, 39–44, 47–8, 50, 54–5, 58 n.32

Index Pasadena Tournament of Roses parade  197–8 paternalism  27 patronage networks  136, 149–50 patronage programs  225 patronage relationships  136 Pearce, Richard M.  94 n.60 Pearl Harbor  164 pedagogy  80, 83–4, 88, 90 Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners  226, 231 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts  41 Penrose, Roland  209 Pepper, Beverly  218 Cor-Ten Viewpoint (1965)  218 Pepsi-Cola  1 Pérez-Oramas, Luis  37 n.79 Perisphere  221 n.38 Perry, Alycia  179–80, 183 Perugino, Pietro  110 Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1482–85)  110 Peter Bent Brigham Hospital  80 phantom dollars  103 Phat Farm  236 philanthropic foundation  77–8, 83, 90 n.4 philanthropoids  78–9 philanthropy  21–3, 25, 27, 31, 84, 91 n.6, 92 n.23, 172, 193, 225 and medical education  78–80 private  16, 30 Philebus (Plato)  139 Phillip Morris  32 n.8 Phillips, Coles  39–40 photography commercial  63–4, 67, 71, 73–4 corporate  67 documentary  63–4, 67, 70–4 formal languages  65 industrial  63, 74 modernity and  66 Picasso, Pablo  2, 17, 23, 125, 127, 209–10, 212–13, 215, 217 Chicago Picasso  7, 212, 214–19 Picasso and the Age of Iron (1993) exhibition  219

281

“Picasso Day”  213 Plato  139 Pope, John Russell  80, 89, 105 Portrait of Myself (Bourke-White) 66–8, 70 postcard culture  178–9, 183–4, 186 Prendergast, Maurice  127 print  47 Printing for Commerce (1950) exhibition  164 printing technologies  40 private foundations  16, 31 Progressive Architecture  217 proletarian revolution  17 promotion  4, 23, 30, 39, 42, 107, 136–7, 143, 145, 146, 160, 161, 164 Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, The (Scott)  44 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)  230 publicity  4, 41–2, 161, 163, 173, 239 documents  24–5 negative  27, 231 public libraries  6, 171–6, 178–9, 182 Public Works of Art Project  2 Puck  101 PUMA  225, 232–8–239 PUMA Creative Network  237–8 PUMA Vision  237 Pyle, Howard  51 Queens County Courthouse  156 racial segregation  175–6 racial tensions  159–60, 216 Radio Corporation of America (RCA)  17, 20–1, 26, 33 n.12 Ramirez, Mari Carmen  30, 38 n.84 Rand, Ayn  206–7 Raphael  110 Alba Madonna, The (c. 1510)  110 Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (1508)  110 rationalism  157 Rauschenberg, Robert  3 Rayburn, Samuel  118–20 RCA Victor  3 Read, Helen Appleton  128

282 Index real estate development  16, 22–3, 33 n.12 Rectanus, Mark  235 Red Square  18–19 Reinhardt, Ad  1–2 Reinthal, A. E.  50 retail  3 agents  141 availability  143 display  140 market  142, 144 window display  141 retailing  122–3 Richardsonian Romanesque  171 Rihanna  238 Riley, Terence  144 Ring, Daniel F.  177, 181–2 Rivera, Diego  3, 4, 15–21, 23, 25–7, 29, 31, 31 n.1, 32 n.2, 33 nn.14, 16, 34 n.18, 35 n.31, 35 nn.31, 32, 37, 37 n.79, 38 n.84, 192 Detroit Industry (1931–32)  18 Frozen Assets (1931)  27, 29 “Man, Controller of the Universe” (1934)  31 n.1 Man at the Crossroads (1934)  16 “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision Toward the Choosing of a New and Better Future”  17, 18, 31 n.1 Moscow Sketchbook (1927–28)  29, 34 n.18 murals  15–16, 18–19, 27–9, 31 n.2, 32 n.2, 33 n.14, 34 n.25, 35 n.25 Wall Street Banquet ( 1928)  17 Rivera, José de  208 Steel Century II (1965)  208 “Rivera Perpetuates Scenes of Communist Activity for R. C. A. Walls—And Rockefeller, Jr., Foots the Bill”  20 River Rouge factory  18 R. L. Howard  145 “robber barons”  18, 27–8, 30–1, 42 Robbins, Tim  15, 31 n.2, 32 n.2 Robertson, Hugh  20 Robinson, G. Canby  80 Roche, Kevin  208

Rockefeller, Abby  17, 19, 21, 29, 34 n.18, 35 n.31 Rockefeller, David  28–9, 31 Rockefeller, John D., Jr.  5, 15, 17, 20–9, 31 n.2, 33 n.12, 34 n.18 Rockefeller, John D., Sr.  5, 18, 28, 77–9, 84, 90 n.4, 91 n.11 Rockefeller, Nelson  17, 19–21, 28 Rockefeller Center  4–5, 15–17, 19–26, 28, 31 n.1, 32 n.2, 33 n.12, 66 Rockefeller Foundation  37 n.69, 84, 88–9, 93 n.51, 94 n.60 “Rockefeller Mural”  15–16, 31 n.1. See also Rivera, Diego censorship  21, 27–9 controversies  19–20, 29 description  18–19 “Rockefeller Plan”  24–5 Rockefeller Trust and Corporation  26 Rohde, Gilbert  146–7 Rolling Stone  230 Rosenthal, Bernard  218 Alamo (1967)  218 Royal Hawaiian band  155–6 Royal Hawaiian hotel  154–5, 157, 159 Ruggles, George  48 Ruhlmann, Jacques  118, 124 rust  206, 209 Rychalski, Anatol  213 Saarinen, Aline  114 n.11 Saarinen, Eero  152 n.38, 208, 209, 220 n.17 Sacred Stacks (Maxwell)  175 St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons  85 Saks Fifth Avenue  121, 140 Salinas, Carlos  31 San Francisco Call  163 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art  232, 239 Santori, Flaminia Gennari  114 n.11 Sarnoff, David  21, 26 Saturday Evening Post  49, 164 Savage, Eugene F.  6, 154, 156–9, 162–5, 165 n.2, 166 n.18 Aloha . . . A Universal Word (1941)  158

Index Festival of the Sea (1941)  158 A God Appears (1941)  158, 162 Hawaii’s Decisive Hour (1941)  158, 163 Island Feast (1941)  158 Pomp and Circumstance (1941)  158 Savage, Kirk  104 savings-and-loan  190, 193, 200 Schjeldahl, Peter  29 Schreiber, Alfred  237 scientific philanthropy  84 scientific taxation  102 Scott, V. E.  128 Scott, Walter Dill  44 Scripps College  192 sculpture  126, 190, 194–5, 209, 211–14, 217, 222 n.48 “finish fetish”  218 public  207, 216–17 Sculpture in the Environment (1967) exhibition  218 Seminoles  156, 164 Senate Park Commission  104 Serra, Richard  218–19 Tilted Arc (1981)  219 Sert, José Maria  33 n.14 Sewall, Harold M.  158 Shahn, Ben  20, 35 n.32 Shaver, Dorothy  118–19, 122–4, 127–31, 132 n.7, 133 n.25 Sheeler, Charles  3, 127 Sheets, Millard  6, 190–5, 197, 199, 200 n.1 “Gateway to the Pacific” mosaic  199 “Home Savings Style”  194 Word of Life, The (1964) mural  192 Sheets Studio  195, 198–9, 203 n.35 Shepard, Donald  105, 110 Shepard, Paul  110 Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge  80 Shiff, Richard  230–1 showrooms  121, 136, 139, 146, 153 nn.47, 51, 206. See also furniture showrooms silence  175 Siqueiros, David Alfaro  192 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill  209 Smith, David  218

283

Smith, Winford  87 Smithsonian Institution  110, 223 n.80, 240 socialism  26, 160 social libraries. See public libraries social sciences  26 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum  219, 240 Soundscape of Modernity, The (Thompson)  174 Southern California  190–1, 193, 197, 200 Southern Illinois University  217 Spengler, Oswald  166 n.18 sportswear  2, 7, 226, 233, 235–6, 238, 239 SS Lurline  6, 154, 156, 164, 165 n.2 Staging Tourism (Desmond)  161 Stalin, Joseph  109 Stam, Mart  145 Standard Oil  3, 77, 79, 91 n.11 Starr, Paul  83 Steichen, Edward  3, 161 Steinway  3 Stewart, Albert  197–8 Stomberg, John R.  65 Stott, William  63–5 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  20 Streamline Moderne  194 Stryker, Beth  227 Svenson, John  193 Swizz Beatz. See Dean, Kasseem Syracuse University  80, 81, 88 Szarkowski, John  64 Tagg, John  71, 74 Takashi Murakami  240 Taliesin Foundation  142 Talmey, Allene  123 Target  240 “Target Collection of American Photography”  240 Tarr, William  219 Tate Modern  226 Taxation: The People’s Business (Mellon)  102, 104 tax policies  102 television  25–6

284 Index Tequilas Heradura  22 Te Rangi Hīroa  162, 167 n.60, 168 n.61 Thompson, Emily  174 Thompson, Krista  234 Thomson, Ellen Mazur  60 n.61 Thoreau, Henry David  51 Tiffany, Louis Comfort  47 Time  66 Time Life  26 (see also Life; Time) Tisci, Riccardo  244 n.60 Tisse, Eduard  65 Titian  110 Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555)  110 Todd, John R.  21, 23, 33–4 n.16 Todd, Robertson, and Todd Engineering Corporation  15, 17 Todd & Brown, Inc.  20 Todoli, Vicente  226 “Touchdown Jesus.” See Word of Life, The (1964) tourism  6, 154, 159–61, 164 Tourist: The New Theory of the Leisure Class, The (MacCannell)  154 Tourist Gaze, The (Urry)  160 Trachtenberg, Alan  16 transportation  5, 40, 44–6, 53, 55 Trylon  221 n.38 Tuchman, Maurice  218 Turner, Nat  20 Turner, Rufus  200 n.3 2010 FIFA World Cup  233 UBS  241 Underwood, George  198 Underwood, Martha Menke  203 n.35 Underwood, S. David  200 n.3 union anti-  24–5 trade labor  160 Union Pacific Railroad  182 Unisphere  210, 211, 212, 221 n.38 United Mine Workers of America  36 n.51 United States Industrial Relations Commission  27 University of California, Los Angeles  193

University of Chicago  89 University of Illinois  217 University of Michigan  85 University of Nebraska  88 University of Notre Dame  192 University of Rochester  87, 89 University of Southern California  193 Urry, John  160 US Chamber of Commerce  39 US Congress  79, 105, 163 Useful Objects exhibition  141–2, 149 U.S. Printing and Lithography Company  39 Fine Arts Division  39 U. S. Air Force Intelligence  143 U.S. Steel Corporation  7, 39, 206–11, 213–19, 221 n.38, 222 n.48 US Treasury  99, 102–4, 108–9, 111 Vaillant, Derek  176 Valentiner, William  35 n.25 Vanderbilt University School of Medicine  80, 82, 84, 86–9, 93 nn.50, 51, 94 n.51 Van Eyck, Jan  110 Annunciation, The (c. 1434–36)  110 Vanity Fair  3, 161 Veterans Administration  194 VH-1  232 Vico, Giambattista  157 Vlaminck, Maurice de  127 Vogue  3, 123, 161, 232 von Herkomer, Hubert  49 Waikiki Wedding (1937) film  161 Walsh, Thomas  217 Wanamaker’s Department Store  117, 139 Ward, Thomas  213 Warhol, Andy  228, 235 Warner Communications  26 Washington Board of Trade  107–8 Washington Mutual  191 Washington Post, The  104, 108 Washington University  86 Waste Makers, The (Packard)  206 Waters, Dorothy Mines  129 Watson, Helen  203 n.35

Index Watson, Paula D.  178 Watson, Thomas J.  11 n.18 Wells Fargo  240 “white ships”  155–7, 161, 164 Whitney Museum of American Art  23 Wiley, Kehinde  7, 225–6, 232–9, 244 n.60 Samuel Eto’o (2010)  233 Unity (2010)  233–5, 237–8 “World Stage” project  234 Wilkinson, Billy R.  183 Williamson, Judith  161 Wilson, Kristina  121 window displays  140, 151 n.20 window-shopping  139–41 Wisnom, David, III  179–80, 183 Wolcott, Marion Post  71 Negro Man Entering a Movie Theatre by ‘Colored’ Entrance (1939)  71 Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania  88 women education  84 role in libraries  177–9

285

Wood, Rusling  44 Woods Charitable Trust  221 n.35 Works Progress Administration (WPA)  2, 4, 9 n.7, 191, 198 World’s Fairs  4 Chicago (1933–34)  20, 67 New York (1939–40)  3–4, 11 n.18, 210, 221 n.38 World War I  103, 121, 183 World War II  143, 160, 164, 192, 206, 236 Worthington, Leslie B.  208 Wright, Frank Lloyd  142 Wu, Chin-tao  16, 22, 32 n.8 Wyeth, N. C. (Newell Convers)  51–2 Yale University  156, 162, 167 n.60 Yarrow, Andrew  130 Yoen jiho  160 You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke-White)  63–8, 71–2, 74 Young, William Mark  39 Zatzenstein, Francis  109

286

Plate 1  Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Modern Art in America,” PM, June 2, 1946, M13. Ad Reinhardt papers, 1927–1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Plate 2  Detail of Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934. Fresco. Museum Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. De Agostini Picture Library/M. Seemuller/Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 3  Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets, 1931. Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanizedsteel framework, 94 1/8 × 74 3/16 inches. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico. Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Banco de Mé xico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Plate 4  Maxfield Parrish, The Spirit of Transportation, 1922. 11 ×  7 inches. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Plate 5  Maxfield Parrish, The Spirit of Transportation, November 1920 (altered by The Clark Equipment Company, 1925). Oil on board, 35 ½   ×   27 ½  inches. Courtesy of American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection.

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Plate 6  Udo J. Keppler, “The Magnet” from Puck 69, no. 1790 (June 21, 1911). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Plate 7 Cover of catalogue for Lord and Taylor’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art, 1928. Dorothy Shaver Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

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Plate 8  Eugene F. Savage, Aloha . . . A Universal Word, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 ×   96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 9  Eugene F. Savage, Festival of the Sea, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48  ×   96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 10  Eugene F. Savage, Island Feast, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 ×   96 inches, Matson Archives.

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Plate 11  Eugene F. Savage, Pomp and Circumstance, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48  ×   96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 12  Eugene F. Savage, A God Appears, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 ×  96 inches, Matson Archives.

Plate 13  Eugene F. Savage, Hawaii’s Decisive Hour, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 ×  96 inches, Matson Archives.

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Plate 14  Matchbook, Arcade Restaurant, Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1930. Collection of Douglas Klahr.

Plate 15  Susan Hertel and Millard Sheets Studio, stained-glass windows fabricated by John Wallis and Associates, Home Savings Studio City branch, Los Angeles, completed 1969. Photograph by Hunter Kerhart, 2017.

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Plate 16  Julie Mehretu, installation view of Mural, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 262 ×  960 inches. ©  Julie Mehretu. Courtesy of the artist and Goldman Sachs. Photo credit: Jason Schmidt.

Plate 17  Kehinde Wiley, Unity, 2010. Oil on canvas, 108 ×  114 inches. ©  2010 Kehinde Wiley. Used with permission.

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