Machine Art, 1934 9780226507170

Citation preview

Machine Art, 1934

Machine JENNIFER JANE MARSHALL

Art University of Chicago Press  |  Chicago and London

is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

JENN I F ER JA N E M AR S H AL L

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in China 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50715-6

(cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-50715-7

(cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine art, 1934 / Jennifer Jane Marshall. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.



ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50715-6 (cloth : alkaline paper)



ISBN-10: 0-226-50715-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Machinery

in art—Exhibitions. 2. Modernism (Art)—New York (State)—New York—Exhibitions. 3. Arts and industry—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 4. Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)—History. I. Title. N8222.M27M37 2012 700'.4112—dc23 2011031186 ∞  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Rawson

Babbitt . . . had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. s i n c l a i r l ew i s , Babbitt

Contents

xi Acknowledgments xiii Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism 1 Introduction: Material Formalism

1

Objectification

15

Machine Art’s Photographic Operations

2

In Form We Trust

55

Machine Art’s Neoplatonism at the End of the American Gold Standard

3

The Art of Parts

89

Machine Art’s Alienated Objects and their Rationalized Reassembly

4

Empiricism

127

The Object of Machine Art’s Experience

161 Epilogue: Opening the Circle 165 Notes 191 Bibliography 203 Index

Acknowledgments

Happily, this book is the product of many conversations, correspondences, and friendships. To even begin to acknowledge them properly would exceed the normal protocol (and length) traditionally granted for such things. While the limitations of this book are solely my own, I credit its strengths to a generous circle of interlocutors much wider than is represented here. Special gratitude is owed to Cécile Whiting, for her early and constant support of this project and others, for her unerringly careful readings and on-target proddings, and for the high standards of archival nuance, creative thinking, and clear writing that she always sets in her own work. Likewise, the realization of this book in its present form is unthinkable without the constancy and wisdom of Kate Mondloch, who always pressed me toward greater sophistication and (when she could) concision. Many others also made the way clearer: Beth Allen, Scott Bukatman, Wanda Corn, Jenny Davidson, Carol Duncan, Michael Gaudio, Roger Horowitz, James Housefield, Nancy Luxon, Miwon Kwon, Pam Lee, Sara Levavy, Mark McGurl, Ara Merjian, Angela Miller, Steven Nelson, John Ott, Jason Puskar, Donald Preziosi, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Adair Rounthwaite, Veerle Thielemans, Kristina Wilson, and Bryan Wolf. Audiences at the University of California, Davis; the University of British Columbia; Yale University; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the College Art Association

annual meeting did much to shape the thinking behind this book, as did a series of truly terrific anonymous readers, first under the auspices of the Art Bulletin and later at the University of Chicago Press. At Chicago, editor Susan Bielstein provided considerable support, as well as her trademark intelligence and good humor; the assistance of both Christopher Westcott and Anthony Burton was likewise indispensible. Colleagues and students in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University provided a wellspring of enthusiasm, interest, and intellectual fearlessness during a critical phase of composition. And good fortune smiled again in the continuous sense of homecoming I’ve felt since joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 2009. There, my students have challenged me in all the best ways, colleagues have effortlessly modeled tough thinking and ready wit, and the support and real friendship of department chair Steven Ostrow has been a bulwark. The research and writing of this book was supported by a number of generous and timely grants and fellowships from the University of Minnesota, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Terra Foundation of American Art. In all these cases, financial generosity was exceeded only by superior staffs and administrators. At the Museum of Modern Art, my work was enabled through the professionalism and patience of Paul Galloway, Michelle Harvey, and Pamela A. Popeson. Jeffrey Moy at the Newark Museum, Susan Friedewald at the Scott Nichols Gallery, and the staff at the Archives of American Art also provided invaluable help, as did Anna Chisholm, Paul Fosaaen, and Keith Turausky, a lively triumvirate of editors and research assistants. Finally, the briefest comments intimate the greatest profundity. Without the intelligence and unquestioning good faith of my family and friends—Mom, Dad, Sandy, Louise, Glenn, Cathy, Brooke, and Justine—any value in this work would be moot. And then there is Rawson, storyteller, husband, and friend. It is to him, because of the faith in real meaning he’s inspired in me, that this book is dedicated.

xii xiii

Preface A Particular Brand of Modernism

Imagine a college course: “Ordinary Objects in Interwar American Modernism.” What would a course like this encompass? Let’s indulge this exercise. It would be useful to begin with a unit explaining the material conditions of the interwar period, conditions that enabled and encouraged artistic attention to objects. This unit would cover mass production, consumerism, and the ideologies that went with them, variously called “Fordism,” “Taylorism,” or just “Americanization.” The class could then proceed through a host of different cultural productions in which the ordinary object or “thing” featured prominently. Industrial design and exhibition displays would have to top that list. That way, students would learn not only about the products, styles, and philosophies that people like Raymond Loewy or Walter Dorwin Teague put forth but also something about the primary vehicle by which their names became household: all those “art-in-industry” showcases held nationwide. This would introduce the object world of American modernism literally, as real stuff destined for real places. Then to the “fine arts” proper, where mere stuff is transformed so expediently into metaphor. But where to begin? Literature is a good place: kick things off with William Carlos Williams, preach the gospel of “no ideas but in things,” and put that red wheelbarrow on the table straightaway.1 So much will depend

on it. Round things out with works by the transatlantics Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Then move into film and music. Hold screenings of Ralph Steiner’s Mechanical Principles; behold Pare Lorentz’s plow, dead in its tracks on windblown plains. Have the students close their eyes. Play Antheil. Play Gershwin. Have them count how many sounds seem to come from objects other than instruments. Have them reconsider that word “instrument.” Next up: gallery arts. Photography could take weeks—Steiner again, then Steichen and Stieglitz, Sheeler and Strand. Leave New York. Go to California for Weston and Cunningham. Leave with Weston for Mexico; meet Modotti. Tour the South: Alabama with Evans, Mississippi with Rothstein. The slide lists that week would look something like this: typewriter, match sticks, apple plumbing trap, wire wheel bell pepper, calla lily guitar and gourd tin plate, water pail, pair of shoes

Then on to the other arts. Sculpture brings its ready-mades (Duchamp, Man Ray, Baroness Elsa), its wind-up toys and circuses (Calder). Painting would contribute its portraits—not of personalities, but of things very nearly endowed. O’Keeffe’s girl stuff: flowers and pelvic bones. Murphy’s boy stuff: cigars, razor, watch. Sheeler’s Shaker stuff: chairs, rugs, and bent-wood boxes. Dove’s foraged stuff: collages he called “things.” And Davis’s household stuff: Odol-brand deodorant and eggbeaters. And look at Demuth’s poster portraits in which he conjured friends out of totems: winter squashes, cabaret masks, and a figure five—that last for “Carlo,” with whom we began. At this point in our exercise, it’s becoming harder and harder to tell what distinguishes this imagined course from any other on American modernism as such—except that this one seems too big. (The others would probably obey more circumscribed disciplinary limits: a class each for music, cinema, and the visual arts, at least.) The lesson we learn, then, is this: the role of things in American modernism was significant enough to have accounted for most of it. Put another way, if one were to draw a Venn diagram of modernist things and modernism written large, well . . . the effect would look something like a solar eclipse. So, what was it about things that made them so important for modernism in the United States? Why should objects—whether machine-made, handmade, or natural—have become such an important organizing principle for culture? How did materiality come to serve so handily as the suture point between modernism and modernity? xiv xv

This book offers only partial answers to these questions. But responding to them with anything like a “complete” answer is probably a bad idea, anyway. If modern artists seized upon objects as their subjects—and if they did so as a way to help define art’s relevance to a radically changing world—they were nothing if not uncertain about what kind of attitude to adopt. Steichen’s matchsticks look pretty jazzy. They should. He photographed them as part of a commercial commission. But Modotti’s guitar strikes a different note—a played-out thing serving as foundation for two more-alluring others, a bandolier and sickle. Demuth’s figure five makes things out of language, but Weston’s bell peppers and seashells look as though they’ve run out of words (so recumbent in purity or prurience). The experimental films of Steiner and Lorentz reveal modernity’s inner workings, bursting it open with “the dynamite of the tenth of a second” (to employ Walter Benjamin’s memorable phrase from the same period).2 But Murphy’s still lifes moved slower, glimpsing death and destiny in pen and razor. In the flowers, O’Keeffe saw herself—or others did—as an enigmatic feminine presence. For all the ubiquity of objects in interwar modernism, their presence doesn’t do much by way of supplying an artistic or ideological common denominator. Instead, their presence seems to have been used in each case as an opportunity: an occasion for the artist to pursue different stylistic and philosophical postures relative to the world. Above, I said that any answers as to the question “why” would have to be partial—“partial” in the same sense hinted at by “particular.” In what follows, I describe my subject of inquiry—the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) Machine Art exhibition—as a “particular brand of modernism.” In so doing, I insist that the kind of modernism I’m describing here—one ventured by two young, white American men at a small museum in Manhattan over the course of six weeks in 1934—should not be taken as any definition of modernism as such. Instead, the modernism on offer here is particular, sharing some of its attributes with other modernisms (especially “straight photography” and precisionism in the United States, the Bauhaus in Germany, purism in France, and de Stijl in the Netherlands), but claiming some idiosyncrasies all to itself. As with the other functionalist and idealist projects from which it derived its inspiration, Machine Art was culturally and aesthetically conservative. This feature alone set it apart from many other modernisms, those more-commonly conjured versions that delighted in the tactics of invention, experimentation, or negation. If Machine Art was a modern art exhibition, it was “modern” only in a particular sense. The diversity of interwar modernism is simply a historical fact (perhaps especially in the United States, where no national school held sway), and it overrides any art historical urges toward defining the idea of modernism as such. We’re left with only a Heraclitean option, then: defining modernism not by reference to

Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism

any overarching principle but to its lack thereof—by its diversity rather than its unity. So, “particular” is my four-syllable stand against totalizing narratives of modernism. It is also a way, then, of making common cause with scholars who have insisted upon modernism’s diversity: an insistence that has sought to preserve the indeterminacies and contingencies of its gestures—always made in awkward two-step with that other m-word, “modernity.” In what follows, I preserve the traditional academic distinction between “modernism” (a set of cultural, artistic practices) and “modernity” (the technological and political procedures by which global economies were transformed in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). This is a Marxist, base/superstructure distinction, but it need not be a deterministic one. Insofar as I retain T. J. Clark’s sense of modernism as a renegotiated response to modernity, I also preserve for this definition its principled sense of openness. When Clark maintains that “there are always many modernisms”—and characterizes all of them as “a distinctive patterning of mental and technical possibilities”—he is effectively making good on what historian of science Bruno Latour recommends as the best way to represent the production of knowledge: not as moving toward some foregone conclusion, but as openly receptive to any possible outcome.3 The shift that Latour urges on historians is that we become more process-oriented than product-obsessed. Clark’s history of modernism concurs; his collection of noncongruent case studies explicitly seeks to retain modernism’s experimental ethos—all the better, in Clark’s view, to keep its revolutionary promise alive. The work of many other art historians, independently and in concert, yields this same picture of indeterminacy. Wanda Corn has been influential in this regard, asserting the existence of “modernisms” (plural) instead of “modernism” (singular). In her seminal work on interwar American art, The Great American Thing, she is explicit in her aim to preserve something of what Latour was also getting after: a sense of the art historical past which conveys its lived sense of collaboration, its “let’s-see-what-happens” headiness. For example, she chooses to call her protagonists “moderns.”4 This period jargon gives her a way, first, to avoid the more mandarin descriptors of historical writing, “Dadaist,” “precisionist,” “poet,” or “painter”—terms that narrowly constrain the actions of individuals and groups who were either not privy to such designations (“precisionism” was coined many years after the movement) or who relished in superseding them. But, even given this openness, there are always more horizons to broaden, perhaps especially regarding the particular people who have and have not been included in the literature. Corn’s fellow Americanist, Mary Ann Calo, has drawn attention to this problem, especially as it remains unresolved in The Great American Thing. Calo notes that, for all Corn’s emphasis on modernism’s open, unfolding indeterminacy, her book still fails to take account of the xvi xvii

parallel and overlapping experiments of ethnically marked artistic groups, what Ann Douglas referred to as the “mongrel” aspect of modernism in the United States, particularly in New York City.5 Beyond studies in U.S. modernism, art historical writing on early-twentieth-century and interwar modernism abroad comes to much the same multiheaded conclusion as to its diversity. Work like Nancy Troy’s, which draws careful attention to the considerable overlap between modernism and the marketplace—not just practically speaking, but ideologically, too—defies many of the earlier pieties about modernism, assertions of either its rarefied autonomy or its unerring political radicalism.6 The latter piety is only further diminished by the histories written by Mark Cheetham and Kenneth Silver (both especially influential to this present study), who have drawn our attention to the wide streak of cultural conservativism that ran through the so-called avant-garde. 7 Likewise, Rosalind Krauss’s Picasso Papers also draws attention to the almost schizophrenic nature of modernism, including its flip-flops between radical defiance and conservative retreat—and this all in the career of a single artist, whose claims to modernism can in no way be disputed.8 I am invested in multiplicity and contradiction, too, this time as it may be perceived—as it in fact was perceived—in Machine Art. But let’s get something clear straightaway. To a large extent, it was all of this diversity in early-twentieth-century modernism that Machine Art sought to cure. In fact, by acknowledging not only the diversity of modernism in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s but also its open-ended indeterminacy, I take a stand that runs directly afoul of the stated intentions of my case study. In Machine Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson harbored some serious pretensions to universal absolutism and capital-t Truth: principles they presented as modernism’s common cause. Insisting so compulsively that this exhibit illustrates only a “particular brand of modernism,” then—rather than the universal toward which it so plainly aspired—is a mark of stubbornness on my part. It’s also more than a little bit antagonistic. If I want to strenuously resist the idea that Machine Art articulates the principles of modernism, or even the principles of MOMA, some of this resistance is mounted against the legacies of Barr and Johnson themselves (but especially Barr’s). In fact, given the reputation and real estate that MOMA now commands, my inquiry is staged right in the heart of hegemonic, or “high,” modernism. Saying so has traditionally not been a compliment. In an early examination of MOMA itself as an institution, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach critiqued the museum’s Hegelian presentation of modern art as inevitable, preordained, and directed always toward an artistic good.9 Such a triumphalist march of the “isms” held no allure for these two art historians when they wrote their landmark article in 1980 (for the first issue of Marxist Quarterly); they deemed it totalizing, Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism

exclusionary, and excessively formalist—meaning that they saw the museum’s myopic attention to stylistic and artistic developments to be irresponsibly blinkered. Formalism made MOMA’s galleries flow seamlessly one into the other; but it wrongly prioritized artistic principles above all other considerations, including history and society. By contrast, Duncan and Wallach were keenly attentive to what was historical and social about MOMA’s formalism. Namely, they drew devastating attention to how the museum’s pretensions to artistic purity had an undeniably political byproduct: an almost exclusively male line of modernist inheritance for one thing, a buffeting of American-style capitalism for another. This book is undeniably shaped by Duncan and Wallach’s early example. In fact, it shares some of its antagonism. That is, I am similarly interested in investigating MOMA’s formalism as a set of historical practices—as an intellectual object of creation, promulgated by real historical actors and in real historical time. I am also necessarily indebted to the very starting point of Duncan and Wallach’s article: to the presupposition that MOMA itself is worthy of art historical, historical, and ideological analysis. This maneuver to turn the art museum into a work of art rendered MOMA amenable to art historical methods of investigation (Duncan and Wallach called their investigation “iconographic”). It is also the necessary starting point for the entire field of museum studies, and has especially motivated histories of MOMA—many of which have been more charitable toward the institution than Duncan and Wallach once were. Analyzing the full apparatus of display, including architecture, arrangement, signage, publications, and museum education, Mary Anne Staniszewski’s The Power of Display ultimately leaves the reader doubting Duncan and Wallach’s bottom line—or at least more insistent on the nuances that must attend it.10 Indeed, Staniszewski’s richly detailed study explodes two myths simultaneously, and does so precisely by dint of detail. Given a broader view of MOMA’s practices, including its many and often competing curatorial programs (including those invested in ethnographic arts, political propaganda, and the arts of Western everyday life), the reader can sustain neither the myth of modernist uniformity, nor the idea that MOMA has always and unerringly beat that drum. This is not to say that Staniszewski’s portrayal depicts either a truly schizophrenic museum or a wholly diversified modernism. In her account, she rightly retains the institution’s dogmatic reputation, especially noting its “inability to acknowledge the ideological dimensions of art” and its perennial insistence on “autonomous aesthetics.”11 Nonetheless, by drawing such careful attention to the practices carried out in this museum—looking at the installation designs of different shows, the motivations of different curators and directors, and the various responses of MOMA’s large public audience—The Power of Display shines a spotlight on exactly the intellectual and ideological histories that MOMA itself is rarely good at displaying. xviii xix

Terry Smith, in his landmark book, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (1993), ranges much more widely over interwar American modernism than just the part played in it by MOMA; his study is of a piece both with Staniszewski’s and with the likes of Corn and others discussed above. Moreover, like Duncan and Wallach, Smith’s book is especially attentive to the crossovers between cultural capital and financial capital. Writing about “corporate avantgardists,” Smith demonstrates that the interests of machine-age business and those of machine-age art were frequently identical—especially when it came to glorifying principles of efficiency and utility.12 This line of argument (as Smith develops it across a number of case studies, including Machine Art) is useful to the present study, as is his conceit of the “photomodern”: important to my first chapter and especially lucid on the epistemological fit between photography as a mechanical technique of reproduction and the ideological demands of representing the machine in modernism.13 Making the Modern is also in keeping with the other literature on MOMA in that it not only seeks to examine the visual mechanisms of meaning-making practiced in that museum (Smith is as interested in installation design as is Staniszewski), but it also demonstrates a commitment to examining the institutional and intellectual histories that stood behind them. In Smith’s case, this attention has led him to the same tempering of ideological critique apparent in Staniszewski’s later monograph. Even as Smith sees the interests of big business and high modernism united in MOMA’s early programs, he also sees how the museum’s hard-line functionalism was ultimately at odds with the desirestoking industries of product design and advertising: the larger capitalist complex Smith dubs “Life-style” modernism (after the popular magazine that got its start in this era). More recent publications on MOMA’s early history likewise situate its institutional formation in relation to machine-age consumerism but qualify this term by triangulating it against New Deal–era populism. This three-way relationship is very much at the heart of A. Joan Saab’s For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars. In this volume, both MOMA and Machine Art serve as examples of what Saab views as a broad-based shift toward the “desacralization” of art: its more democratic, if also market-driven, dissemination of culture and good taste.14 What was particularly progressive about MOMA’s early design exhibitions, on Saab’s useful reading, was the attention they paid to both affordability and reliable practicality: values easily relatable to a mass audience and often crucially important in their day-to-day decision making. Again, a more expansive view of MOMA does not obliterate earlier skepticisms; Saab notes that the “populist” tenets of good design at MOMA were always decreed from the top-down.15 Moreover, to the extent that Saab has paid attention to the deeply philosophical conversations about democracy and experience in the Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism

1930s (she gives ample air time to John Dewey, as I do in chapter 4), she also adds new historical texture to the understanding of how and why Machine Art promoted consumer goods as “art.” Consumerism is no longer so simply the ideological beguilement theorized by the Frankfurt school. Kristina Wilson agrees and she, too, takes a broadly cultural and intellectual approach to understanding the operation of museum display during the interwar years. In The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, Wilson is especially keen to understand how new modes of exhibiting new sorts of art helped to coalesce a broad-based “public” for modernism: a strategy that necessitated a fair amount of cross-pollinating between the “high” and the “low.”16 In other words, Wilson is curious about how modernism appropriated democratizing discourses—from Dewey to the department store—for its survival and expansion. Like Staniszewski, Wilson treats exhibition practice itself as a form of art making, and her work is especially useful for contextualizing MOMA’s innovation within the history of American avant-garde display, a tradition that includes both Alfred Stieglitz’s experiments at his so-called Gallery 291 and the Little Review’s radical Machine-Age Exposition, staged in 1927, a clear precedent for Machine Art, and central to my discussion here (particularly in chapter 1). In part, histories of MOMA lend themselves to intellectual history so easily because of the personalities of its principle actors, especially Johnson and Barr. Johnson’s personal biography is particularly rich, since his activities throughout the twentieth century seemed always to track precisely the leading trends of art and architecture, culture and politics. A lovable character with a number of unlovely personal chapters, Johnson became most visible to me through two channels: his own writings (especially the letters penned to his mother during the later 1920s and early ’30s, housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles), and Franz Schulze’s 1994 biography.17 Barr, too, wore his personality on his sleeve in his many writings, including those published in MOMA’s many catalogs and those painstakingly archived in his own personal files (now making up the august Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, much consulted by me and countless other art historians, whether writing on MOMA or not). The best supplement to Barr himself is the careful biography by Sybil Gordon Kantor. This volume serves as an extremely useful and sensitive institutional history in its own right—as viewed from the “intellectual origins” she traces in the life and mind of its first director.18 Again, the ideas that circulated around the broad social space of the Museum of Modern Art permit a more rich understanding of the institution itself, as well as the historical period to which it gave such forceful witness. As is the case with modernism then, MOMA, too, seems to appear only less monolithic the longer one looks at it. Hence, again, “particular.” Late in the project, however—later than I’d like to admit—“particular” came to reveal itself to me as descriptive in another way, too. Not just “particuxx xxi

lar” in the slightly belittling way it means “only one out of many,” but also as it describes something specific: a single phenomenon, an irreducibly unique little thing, an unrepeatable happening—something so singular and nubby and inassimilable as to defy even a Goliath like generalization. David’s rock. In his wonderful book The Crisis of Democratic Theory, the intellectual historian Edward A. Purcell ventured a definition of modernism in interwar American thought that’s kindred to what I’ve been sketching out here. Purcell’s topic was the early-twentieth-century rise of what he called “scientific naturalism”: an epistemological orientation that he also variously named positivism, nominalism, objectivism, physicalism, functionalism, pragmatism, realism, and— yes—particularism.19 Charting the life and influence of this idea in a dizzying variety of fields (politics, social sciences, philosophy, and physics, to name a few), he discerned a unifying belief: “for a concept to be valid and meaningful it had to refer directly to an individual, concrete thing.”20 Hence: particularism. If particularism was an underlying current running through American intellectual life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and Dwight MacDonald, though uncharitably, would agree that it was), it was certainly on spectacular display in Machine Art, where concrete facts and obdurate particulars were made to stand for loftier, more esoteric ideals.21 This book, focused on a single case study, shares in the particularism it investigates. To borrow a line from historian Alan Trachtenberg, I might say that “the subject itself produced the method.”22 In this effort to interpret a particular brand of modernism—and through one of its particulars—this book is also joined to the rich body of scholarly literature that has come to be known collectively as “thing theory.” In 2001, the journal Critical Inquiry published a special issue titled “Things,” edited by the literary scholar and critic Bill Brown.23 The volume remains influential. At the time, it served not only to baptize an academic turn (Brown’s introduction was titled “Thing Theory”), but also as a way to collect the rich and widely varied thinking about the role of materiality in cultural life.24 Thus, Brown’s introduction pointed readers in two useful directions: back into the history of philosophical thingness (Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, William James, Marcel Mauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others), and out into the lively dialogues that had already been taking place all over the humanities (as seen in the work of, for instance, Arjun Appadurai in anthropology, Christina Kiaer in art history, Bruno Latour in sociology, and Michel Serres in philosophy). But, Brown’s Critical Inquiry special issue was by no means alone in venturing a manifesto on materiality. Material culture studies already enjoyed a healthy life in England, especially as nurtured by the Marxist tradition of cultural studies and as led by Daniel Miller. Miller has been prodigious in his contributions; but his Material Culture and Mass Consumption has especially supported my Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism

inquiry, this through its studious attention to the historical emergence of materiality, and by its focus on the economic grounds—or material conditions—of modern thingness.25 Other contributions to the discourse tend to break down more along camp lines: anthropology, archaeology, historical archaeology, and the museological field of the “decorative arts.”26 Of these, the sensitive readings of materiality as it relates to value in anthropological contexts—chiefly issued from the pens of Appadurai, Fred Myers, Christopher Steiner, and Webb Keane—have left the biggest impression on this present study.27 Indeed, my interests in thing theory have resonated most strongly at its point of intersection with the social science traditions of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, who both examined money as an object that exercised its power both through physical presence and symbolic absence—a flickering that structured how Machine Art’s objects worked, too. Talk of doubleness leads me to mention the delicate balance that I’ve tried to strike here: a balance between two, sometimes opposing interests. My first concern is with historical responsibility—acknowledging both that thingness and materiality come into particular view at different times, in different places, for different people, and that the epistemic regimes that mark those views might, ironically, be best known through the paper trail of discourse.28 My second concern is with the matter of stuff, in the most colloquial sense. Brown invokes “the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power” and illustrates materiality’s immediacy with a list of vivid, somatic reminders: “you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut.”29 For Brown, these moments bring us back into a world of things and remind us that we are but one among them. As I handle it here, this kind of thingness—an “excess” and a “latency,” in Brown’s formulation, inassimilable to the surety of discourse, the abstraction of thought, or the objectivity of academic art history—this kind of thingness appears in my text much as it would in the course of everyday life.30 That is to say, everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. Things were everywhere in Machine Art. That is the point—or my point, anyway. The exhibition was a treatise on abstraction carried out through the medium of materiality. As I see it, what was in play was the presentation of physical objects as proof of abstraction—an empirical proof, one might say, the credible guarantee of the thing-right-there-in-front-of-you. And I am interested in the historical production of these objects as guarantees: a historically emergent production that banked upon materiality but doesn’t get us any closer to understanding its infamous philosophical quiddity. That kind of materiality can never really appear here; it will always remain just outside the focus of analytic scrutiny—its invisible wizard, necessarily behind the curtain. Machine Art’s materiality evades reexperience except by description (on my part) and sympaxxii xxiii

thetic imagination (on yours). This drama, especially, is at the heart of the last chapter. It is ultimately also the drama from which modernist aesthetics—and perhaps even modernism, as such—derives its abiding potency. So, when I write of Machine Art’s “particular brand of modernism,” I hope you’ll understand what haunts this phrase: a commitment to modernism’s dynamic and self-contradicting plurality, as well as a commitment to art history as it might rest on particulars. But behind it, most of all, stand these particulars: the more than six hundred objects on view in Barr and Johnson’s show—steel beams, switchboards, kitchen ranges, kitchen sinks, door hinges, motor springs, tea kettles, saucepans, dessert forks, cordial glasses, calipers, slide rules, measured beakers, and more. That Machine Art hoped to turn all of this particularism against itself and into a basis for absolutism—well, that’s the story this book seeks to tell.

Preface: A Particular Brand of Modernism

Figure 1  Façade of original townhouse housing the Museum of Modern Art at 11 West 53rd Street,

showing a Calder mobile displayed during the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, March 2, 1936–April 19, 1936, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

Introduction Material Formalism

On an unusually warm Sunday in March 1934, a number of strollers along Manhattan’s West Fifty-Third Street paused to wonder at the goings-on at number eleven. They were stopped in their tracks by ship parts scattered on the sidewalk, not to mention the loud bumps and bangs issuing from within one of the block’s many five-story townhomes. One of the nautical objects, a massive propeller, had been set into an oversized street-side shadowbox. Paired with a neat row of blocky sans serif letters, the propeller became a sign offering the only clue as to what all the commotion might be about: “MACHINE ART.” 1 Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), then one of New York’s newest cultural institutions, the Machine Art exhibition attracted over thirty-one thousand visitors over the course of its eight-week run.2 Many thousands more saw the show over the next four years as versions of the exhibit toured the country, making stops in Chicago and San Francisco, as well as in smaller venues like Saratoga Springs, New York; Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Memphis, Tennessee.3 Curated by Philip Johnson, the future architect, with the help of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MOMA’s first director, the exhibition attracted comment wherever it went. In response to its Manhattan incarnation, the New York Times dedicated no fewer than five stories and reviews to the show—on top of about twelve smaller announcements that also ran in its pages. The Herald Tribune, Brooklyn

Figure 2  Outdoor signage

Eagle, and New Yorker also issued several articles apiece, and all the most promi-

for the exhibition Machine Art, March 5, 1934–April 29, 1934 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by William O. Lyman. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /  Art Resource, NY.)

nent American art critics weighed in, sometimes more than once. From his desk at the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell wrote the most. He was joined by Henry McBride from the Sun, Helen Appleton Read from the Brooklyn Eagle (she was Johnson’s friend and had attended a National Socialist Party rally with him in Berlin a couple years before), Royal Cortissoz (a famously conservative critic from the Herald Tribune), and Anita Brenner (a politically progressive art writer for the Nation).4 Philadelphia’s Dorothy Grafly, Chicago’s C. J. Bulliet, and Los Angeles’s Arthur Millier also weighed in from afar.5 The original curiosity stirred up that Sunday afternoon persisted, sustaining comment—much of it thoughtful—both during the exhibition’s Manhattan run and throughout the next four years of its touring phase. Machine Art was a sprawling exhibit of ordinary objects—more than six hundred in all—culled from American factories, offices, kitchens, dining rooms, and science laboratories. When installed in MOMA’s Midtown brownstone, the show filled every available gallery on each of the four floors open to the public.

2 3

Figure 3  Installation view of Machine Art. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art

Resource, NY.)

In these rooms, visitors encountered car pistons and airplane propellers; petri dishes and boiling flasks; inkstands and ashtrays; sauté pans, tea kettles, and waffle irons; and more than enough tumblers, flatware, dishes, and serving trays to hold a proper party. Almost all of these items were American designed and American made, a fact to which the curators drew no attention but which was made obvious by the list of manufacturers in the show’s catalog: the American Steel & Wire Company, the Aluminum Company of America, Revere Copper and Brass, Carnegie Steel, Ford. Here were American objects made by American manufacturers for American consumers. Never mind that Americans weren’t doing much consuming in 1934 or that many manufacturers had stalled in the mire of the Great Depression. Times were hard, but these objects were harder: unyielding monuments to the worth Introduction: Material Formalism

Figure 4  Installation view of Machine Art. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art

Resource, NY.)

of strong materials, good engineering, and the timeless frugality of function over fashion. And just as Americans were being counseled to work their way through the crisis of mass unemployment (through home gardening and canning or job programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps), each one of these American objects had a job to do. In the waning months of the winter of 1934, amidst what would come to be known as the “Depths of the Depression,” Machine Art’s objects stood ready and upright on the shelves at MOMA, as though waiting patiently to be drafted again into service. Even the more capricious items—the billiard balls, the martini mixer— served a clear purpose, and from purpose came form. Balls were round so that they might roll; martini mixers were tapered to chill, shake, and pour. These 4 5

Figure 5  Walter Dorwin Teague Jr. Cocktail Glasses (before 1934), exhibited in Machine Art.

Manufactured by Corning Glass Works, Steuben Division. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

shapes, like the shapes of the griddle, the railroad spring, and the laboratory beaker, were perfectly adequate to their appointed functions: no more, no less. The assembled results were strikingly mathematical in effect. The wall display of platters and plates, for example, recalled the blackboard of an exacting geometry teacher, adorned with so many perfect circles. Compasses, calipers, and plumb bobs strengthened the association with mathematics and the drafting table: not only were straight lines and perfect circles on display, but so too were the instruments by which to make and measure them. Machine Art built an altar to Euclidean geometry—in spite of a generation of researchers who had declared its extinction in the wake of Einstein.6 If the shapes of the things were simple, their surfaces were pretty straightforward, too: so smooth and unadorned that a visitor could know the material essence of an item just by looking at it. Dinner plates were nothing more than solid white circles of porcelain; beverage tumblers were thick-bottomed cylinders of clear glass. Indeed, the sure solidity of the materials alone must have constituted one of Machine Art’s richer visual pleasures. For the down-on-theirluck members of MOMA’s audience—unemployed men seeking a diversion, penny-pinching secretaries taking advantage of reduced rates on extended-hour evenings—the uncomplicated presence of Machine Art’s materials and the wideopen smoothness of their surfaces offered unexpected comfort. The eye could roam serenely in these rooms; the mind and body could rest. Introduction: Material Formalism

Once at ease among so many simple things, even the most modestly introspective visitor was likely to feel the stirrings of something elemental. The proliferation of perfect circles seemed to prove the inevitable necessity of that single shape: as elegant a solution for turning gears as for making pancakes. Straight lines came to seem less the hard-won accomplishment of the math student and more the elemental, visible backbone of universal uprightness. Machine Art’s materials whispered other comforts, too. A parade of iron, bronze, steel, and aluminum suggested the inevitable progression of technological ages, with the machine age simply the latest turn of the screw—not, as so many commentators shrieked, the beginning of the end. Like their less precisely crafted precursors, these materials took shape only through and for human activity: before becoming a vase, that glass had been only so much silicon dioxide, that steel beam an undisturbed lode of ore. Machine Art’s objects had no existence prior to their forms: their shape and substance were perfectly simultaneous.7 Shapes as basic as the geometric figures in school primers; surfaces no different from depths; material substance solidified into perfect form . . . the drifter or dilettante could easily have found the mind wandering toward first principles! Machine Art’s vast collection of the elemental and elementary seemed revelatory somehow—as though an essential truth hung there in the balance, strung up on the wall at MOMA just waiting to be grasped. And in fact, visitors often did report something like a conversion to higher vision. One claimed to have seen, as though for the first time, the lyrical beauty of a pot’s circumference; another rhapsodized over the revealed “pathos” of tiny screws, normally consigned to the invisible labor of holding eyeglasses together.8 Critics, too, found a springboard in Machine Art, one that catapulted them into long digressions on the philosophical nature of truth and beauty. Writers across the country used the show’s industrial parts and products as an excuse to engage in more open-ended aesthetic debate than they usually permitted themselves— dropping names like Plato, Morris, Schiller, and Stendhal—to the extent that even readers who couldn’t get to the show in person were easily drawn into its circle of philosophical rumination.9 The drawing and widening of that circle by Machine Art’s curators, critics, and visitors is the topic of this book. How could an impoverished and demoralized American public be persuaded to walk among familiar objects and not only consider them afresh but also be inspired by them to ask questions about the nature of value itself? Museum display was the key to inciting this contemplative and experiential transformation: making familiar objects strange through decontextualization, clever installation, and glass cases. But the enduring importance of Machine Art exceeds the initial shock of coming across “nonart” objects in an art museum—a shock that had already become well rehearsed in American museums by 1934.10 The point of Machine Art was not just to look 6 7

at objects differently but to pare down the very act of looking to the exclusive scrutiny of two evaluative necessities: form and matter, each the extension and justification of the other. With this as its goal, the exhibit transformed the straightforward instrumentality of its pieces (“things for doing with”) into the elevated instrumentality of artistic and philosophical reflection (“things for thinking with”). In situating value between these charged poles—form and matter, meaning and materiality—Machine Art issued a strong statement about the nature of being and worth in the modern era. It was an art show and an industrial show. It was, too, “a somewhat precious and ultra stunt,” as Helen Appleton Read observed.11 But it was also a philosophical treatise offering a modern ontology of value (a theory of its very nature) for the American twentieth century. Put baldly, with Machine Art, Barr and Johnson attempted to demonstrate a strong, even deterministic relationship between the abstract idea of “worth” and the physical containers said to embody it: whether works of art or pieces of household equipment. This history of Machine Art is thus more the intellectual history of a specific set of ideas, namely, that something called “form” holds top priority in the determination of all beauty; that it is primary and essential (not the elaborated invention of some besotted French artiste); and that the value it holds is a condition of material incarnation, rather than mere representation, pictorial or otherwise. This cluster of heady propositions has often been summed up under the shorthand “formalism,” but as with all shorthand, the gain in convenience is offset by a loss in specificity. Part of the purpose of this book is to work against this loss. In telling the story of Machine Art—a particularly revealing concatenation of the aforementioned ideas—I hope to reconstruct some of the intellectual foundations for the historical emergence of American modernist formalism. That’s a big “-ism” if ever there was one, much maligned and frequently spelled with only four letters (M-O-M-A, or maybe B-a-r-r). But if formalism has come to seem the “-ism” by which modern art secured its divorce from contemporary life, finalized its betrayal of political commitment, or beat its cowardly retreat into the material confines of medium, the interpretive act of unraveling formalism’s logic in the example of Machine Art allows us a historical picture of how things might have turned out differently. For even as Machine Art ventured the formalist ideal of artistic purity, it did so on the backs of ordinary, cheaply gotten things. This significantly widened the purview of the show’s social and intellectual impact—just as Barr and Johnson wanted it. By pretending to unveil timeless ideals in the bodies of American-made commodities, the two curators plainly intended that their aesthetic theories should inform modern life and the modern marketplace at least as much as it might explain modern art. Lewis Mumford assumed that the latter was the primary impetus for the Introduction: Material Formalism

show—teaching Americans to like Brancusi by coaching them first in the beauties of ball bearings.12 At this level, the exhibit worked to domesticate modernism by revealing its principles in familiar, everyday objects. But at another level, Machine Art also worked to stabilize abstraction more generally—this literally by solidifying it in the bodies of concrete things, available to proof in presence. In this way, the exhibit drew upon the empirical guarantee of its objects as objects. By presenting real objects as seemingly empirical guarantors of abstract ideas, including (but not limited to) the beauty of nonrepresentational form, Machine Art constructed and relied upon materiality as a self-legitimating sign of truth. Writing in 1972 about the conscription of objects into the “symbolic labor” of social meaning, Jean Baudrillard expounded upon the signifying capacity of brute matter, or what he called the “continual and tangible proof” from which an object derives its semiotic legitimacy.13 At MOMA in 1934, the materiality of Machine Art’s ordinary objects served precisely this function, proving abstract form by embodying and presenting it as reliably real—sitting right there on a pedestal, hanging over there on the wall, or protected just here under glass. If materiality worked as evidence for the kinds of philosophical and aesthetic meanings for which Machine Art’s objects were made to stand, it was allowed to do so only through the activation of materiality via its framing in both museum display and institutional rhetoric. In Barr and Johnson’s show, visitors encountered materiality, yes, but only as it had been carefully orchestrated to appear. After these machine parts and products had been made by engineers, designers, and factory workers, they were remade as material signs of form—“produced,” Baudrillard would say, “as a proof.”14 Of course, Machine Art was not the first time that ordinary objects had been made to serve as pawns in a modernist gambit. A decade or so earlier, in the transatlantic currents of avant-garde irreverence, machine parts, standardized commodity goods, and plumbing fixtures had provided occasions for the skewering of conventional meanings, not platforms for its restoration. In 1915 in New York, Francis Picabia had lovingly redrawn a car engine’s spark plug, renaming it Jeune fille américaine in tribute to the sexual insatiability of the American girl. In the early ’20s, Gerald Murphy had taken an industrial SKF ball bearing, identical to the one that would later grace Machine Art’s catalog cover, and displayed it in his home at the Cap d’Antibes. The ball bearing was far preferable to a Rodin, he said, since it ran no risk of being found out as a fake.15 Before leaving New York for Paris in 1922, Man Ray had unraveled an unremarkable lampshade, letting it dangle drunkenly on a wire as though to signal the end of art’s illuminating duties. In all these acts of repurposing, ordinary objects appeared to be endlessly available to reuse, reappropriation, and resignification—a promiscuity of meaning for materiality that seemed, to some, to augur modern art’s final departure from stability and sanity, to say nothing of good taste. Indeed, 8 9

in the vast literature on the early-twentieth-century “readymade,” writers have typically viewed these riffs on ordinary, industrially produced objects as watershed moments in art’s history: each one just further proof of the gradual, but ineluctable shift toward increasing openness and volatility in artistic meaning and value, or its semiotic underdetermination. But if Marcel Duchamp pissed artistic convention down the drain of his famous Fountain of 1917, Machine Art sought to staunch this loss, even as it used the selfsame medium—ordinary objects, even plumbing—as its barricade. How pots and pans served not only to explain and domesticate MOMA’s particular brand of modernism (its high modernist formalism) but also to prove its very validity against mounting uncertainty: that is the interpretive quarry of this book—a small prize, perhaps, within the vast historiography on modernist formalism, but one that might afford new sympathy for the historical impulses behind formalism’s ahistorical aloofness. After all, even as it handed down so many of its aesthetic lessons as though from on high—formalism by fiat—Machine Art also agitated toward a number of political ends. It struck antagonistically against the superficialities of modern consumer capitalism; it wagered a model of value more bankable than the new calculus of modern money; and perhaps most importantly, it dared to defend notions of real truth and absolute principles, even at a moment when such hard-and-fasts everywhere were under siege. In fact, by the time Machine Art opened to full crowds and good reviews, a broad-based reevaluation of meaning and its foundations had already emerged as the defining hallmark of twentieth-century modernity. Manufacturers had introduced new factors into the arbitration of commodities’ worth, including massive economies of scale, style fads, and planned obsolescence. Thus, no longer could scarcity or uniqueness, properties often viewed as inherent to objects, serve as the primary determinants of their value. Einstein’s theory of relativity and American pragmatism’s experience-based “radical empiricism” both offered intellectual complements to these marketplace transformations. These ideas embraced elasticity in meaning as it might unfold in the dynamic relations between things, rather than stored in things themselves or banked in any overarching, standard-setting ideal. Harvard philosopher Alfred North Whitehead summed up this dawning zeitgeist succinctly in 1929, saying a new “notion of fluent energy” had taken intellectual precedence over the old “notion of static stuff.”16 But materiality lingered. It weighed and dragged, too, especially where the marketplace was concerned. “Overproduction”—mass production taken too far—was a new word in the 1930s. It described a consumer marketplace glutted with too many things, in which surplus goods had driven down demand, prices, and profits and so precipitated economic catastrophe. Such overabundance found devastating illustrations in what would be the Depression’s most Introduction: Material Formalism

curious spectacles: fields of vegetables left to rot or burned purposely where they lay, store shelves piled high with newfangled goods collecting dust. These were highly visible images that turned darkly ironic when juxtaposed alongside breadlines and Hoovervilles, which were overcrowded, too. In this milieu, William Carlos Williams’s self-imposed ethos, “no ideas but in things,” was a redundant reminder; one could not easily escape the anxieties elicited by objects in those years of boom and bust.17 That Einstein preached relativity or Whitehead forecasted fluidity was cold comfort in an era so bereft of anything trustworthy to hang onto. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he was inaugurated one March morning in 1933, offered more soothing symbolic relief. To a national audience beleaguered by value’s volatility, the new president tried to put the nation’s many hardships (“our common difficulties,” he called them) in perspective, saying, “They concern, thank God, only material things.”18 A year later, Machine Art presented a monument to such things: hundreds of mere, mute objects that seemed to stand confidently for their own purposes. In so doing, it offered a path of reconciliation between the higher kinds of meaning Roosevelt preached and the nearer goods of common life.

Machine Art’s Galleries

The curious passersby who did venture into MOMA’s Machine Art show, beckoned by that ship propeller sign, would have entered a space as rational as the objects it housed. Johnson was responsible for designing the installation’s overall layout and individual arrangements; for this reason he is typically credited by historians as the show’s sole curator. (My choice to credit both Barr and Johnson reflects the major role that Barr played in conceiving the show, as well as the lasting philosophical significance of his forceful catalog essay.) For Machine Art’s layout, Johnson imposed a strictly taxonomic scheme. None of the objects appeared in a way that illustrated their use—machine parts appeared singly, dissociated from machines, and the kitchenware just sat on shelving without the benefit of a fully installed mock kitchen display. But Johnson was not inattentive to the objects’ usual functions. For both the physical layout of the show and the catalog, he divided the exhibit into six separate, usedefined sections: first, the Industrial Units section, where the machine parts appeared; second, Household and Office Equipment, where visitors found waffle makers, plumbing fixtures, and a Dictaphone; Kitchenware came third and was popular for its aluminum pots, pans, and oversized bowls, as well as its drinking glasses and cake pans. Progressing further into Machine Art (and up MOMA’s staircases), the audience came to House Furnishings and Accessories fourth, Scientific Instruments fifth, and Laboratory Glass and Porcelain last of all. The order seemed to build, beginning with the primary mechanical parts 10 11

of the Units section and concluding with the elevated and more exotic instruments of scientific inquiry at the end. The more frankly ordinary objects—the tools and hardware of daily living, at home and in the office—peppered the path along the way. Within each of the exhibit’s sections, Johnson arrayed objects before the viewer in attention-grabbing ways. Abstaining from the contextual, how-itmight-look-at-home style of installation popular in other design exhibitions of the period, the aspiring interior designer managed to achieve a compelling, fully realized “look” for Machine Art. He placed objects on the floor, on shelves, on free-standing pedestals and platforms. Exhibit pieces usually appeared either in isolation (affecting a look of sculptural singularity) or in crowded seriality (a striking and unsubtle reminder of the objects’ origins in mass production).

Figure 6  Installation view of the first gallery of Machine Art, from the “Industrial Units” section. (Wurts Brothers, photographers. Digital image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

Johnson was also responsible for Machine Art’s more decorative touches, like wall colors (a palette of pastel grays, blues, and pinks), hardware (exposed plywood and aluminum tubing), and lighting (low-hanging factory-light fixtures with exposed bulbs). Johnson even took control of the shape of the galleries themselves. He installed dropped ceilings throughout: muslin panels that concealed the brownstone’s nineteenth-century crown molding and additional light sources while also transforming each room more neatly into a cube.19 Taken together, all of these details integrated the objects into a striking and fully harmonized installation, one that critics agreed was not only pleasing but a clear affirmation of the merits of modern design. Machine Art’s first gallery set the stage. As the installation’s physical introduction, this room not only set the design tone of the exhibition, it also neatly summed up many of the show’s philosophical effects, if only subtly. Right inside the entrance, visitors came face-to-face with the exhibit’s most memorable icon: the steel self-aligning ball bearing, aloft a pedestal and alone to itself. Beyond this polished machine part, an array of industrial springs lined up against the far wall offered a backdrop for this initial gallery. If Johnson had displayed the ball bearing like an autonomous work of modern sculpture (in isolation), he’d installed these industrial springs more like a bas-relief procession. Some of their lines might even be said to have mimicked drawing—the coils of the springs and their shadows behind them flattened into a near-graphic exchange of flat lines and outlined forms. Indeed, as they moved through the space of the first gallery, visitors witnessed the gradually flattening effects of the exhibit’s installation and also got a hint of the idealizing ambitions of its very conceit. The transition was one from fullness (the ball bearing’s circularity and lubricated, interlocking spheres nicely figuring the roundabout pleasures of its presence), to flatness (here, the springs’ zigzagging lines and whirligig loops animated an eye more than a body). Turning from the springs and preparing to move on, the casual gallerygoer might well have cast a glance backward in the direction of the route already traveled. Looking back toward the entrance from the vantage point of the springs, this visitor would have seen the whole room and all the objects in it reflected in a wall-sized expanse of polished aluminum sheeting.20 The gradual slide from fullness to flatness, and with it the transition from brute materiality to its idealization as pure form in reflection, was complete. That it should have been specifically reflection that brokered this transition is of no small concern. In Johnson’s well-appointed galleries, all of the objects that cast shadows and showed up in reflections were already themselves duplicates: machine-made replications of some original prototype. As such, this room—not exactly a hall of mirrors, but nonetheless boasting its fair share of shadows and copies— serves to illustrate both the peculiar challenges of modernity to which I argue 12 13

Machine Art responded and the aesthetic proposition that the exhibit offered as its response: that all objects incarnate value in their real-world materiality, existing as reflections of value’s more distant, abstract origins. In what follows, I reverse the effects of Machine Art’s first room, moving from flatness to fullness—and so too from the show’s attitude of self-contained, centripetal inwardness to the centrifugal expansiveness of its impact in reception. Four chapters proceed from discussions of value’s objectification in the flat mediums of photography and money to discussions of its complicated intersection with the fullness of the real world—especially in the production, consumption, and embodied experience of Machine Art’s commodity objects. As the book gradually opens from ideality to materiality, Machine Art’s circle of rumination opens, too—from a closed-circuit loop to a spiral pried open by the forces of historical circumstance. In the end, it is this tension between solipsistic timelessness and expansive historicity that drives the interest, method, and argument of this book. It drives its ironies, too, because if Machine Art’s formalism attempted to strengthen materiality’s ties to meaning, construed as absolute and unassailable, this effort was one that responded to the especially strong pressures of the interwar period. In the end, as we’ll see, formalist modernism’s claims to unchanging timeless stability came as timely defense against the encroaching indeterminacy of modernity’s material conditions. Johnson, who had the opportunity to reflect on Machine Art some sixty years after the fact, was right in his later assessments. “I think it was the word,” he said, referring to the show’s compound title, “I think it was the idea . . . that made the show so famous.”21 For a show that focused attention on the real presence of ordinary objects, Machine Art nonetheless trafficked heavily in words, ideas, and other abstractions. If Johnson later admitted to the good “propaganda” of the show’s title, he’d left an early clue as to its importance at the time of the show—left it, in fact, on its front doorstep. M-A-C-H-I-N-E-A-R-T: those ten die-cut letters superimposed over that big maritime propeller—a material sign of the exhibit’s meaning and one that initiated its free traffic between objects and ideas. When, by the end of the week, visitors were allowed inside, they encountered more than six hundred times over more objects that signified ideas, more meanings that gained substance as materials—more signs that always cast shadows.

Introduction: Material Formalism

12

Objectification Machine Art’s Photographic Operations

MOMA pursued a rich publishing life from the very start, issuing exhibition catalogs that brimmed with essays and illustrations. The Machine Art catalog was no exception. In fact, as the most fully illustrated of any of the catalogs that MOMA had produced up to that point (with 118 photographs illustrating 142 objects) Machine Art raised the bar for the museum’s already considerable publishing ambitions.1 The catalog was so rich in images that it drew comment on its own, often recommended as a “profusely illustrated” substitute for seeing the show in person.2 The slender paperbound volume remains an important proxy now, of course, and it’s no stretch to assert that the cultural impact of Machine Art—today as much as in 1934—could scarcely be imagined without the catalog and its photographs.

Chapter One: Objectification

Figure 7  Philip Johnson and Alfred H. Barr Jr., Machine Art catalog cover. Graphic design by Josef

Albers, photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Figure 8  Eugene Dietzgen Co., Adjustable Curves, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth

Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Most of Machine Art’s illustrations are works of art in their own right, perhaps even wearing that mantle more comfortably than the cake pans and electrical insulators displayed in the exhibition. The photographs are both arty and artily arranged on the page: brilliant white spotlights reflect off bowls and vases, which in turn pop out from surfaces of fine-grained wood and matte paper. A pretzel bowl catches light and holds it in its basin, illuminating an otherwise darkened void. A draftsman’s adjustable curve coils up into a sinuous S-shape, as though readying to strike another, which looks stiffened in fear. Silverware appears in suggestive, angular thrusts, arranged across a two-page spread such that forks, spoons, and knives point in, toward to the catalog’s binding. Each page features only one or two photographs (never more), and an abundance of white space surrounds each minimally captioned picture. The fat margins and simple titling alone were enough to cue artistic attention. All that white space was standard practice for gallery and museum publications but was still rare in Chapter One: Objectification

Figure 9  House Furnishings and Accessories, exhibited in Machine Art. Photographs by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum

of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photographs reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

shopping catalogs like the Sears and Roebuck bathroom bibles, which exhibited a kind of horror vacuii by comparison. To see the same commodities normally encountered in mail-order formats in the signature layout of artistic graphic design must have been attention-getting. In fact, one might even venture that Machine Art’s catalog photographs are more interesting than the objects they depict. Without the benefit of photographic presentation or museum display—that is, seen now at MOMA’s off-site vault—many of Machine Art’s pieces aren’t much to look at. Don’t get me wrong, they’re beautiful—enough so to persuade a beholder, even now, that Barr and Johnson were right to call them perfect. But they don’t exactly ensnare attention so much as they relax it. Scrutiny, even when mustered, tends to slacken and slide right off the smooth, regular surfaces. This is especially the case with the more rigorously nondescript serial pieces, like the Corning Glass boiling flasks or the Coors porcelain lab beakers—objects so precisely manufactured and humbly undesigned as to recede from arduous visual investigation. That is, 18 19

Figure 10  Corning Glass Works, Boiling Flasks, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth

Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Figure 11  Coors Porcelain Co., Beakers, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard.

(Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.) 20 21

however closely one looks, one cannot improve upon the most simple geometric lexicon—circle, sphere, straight line, right angle—as descriptive illustration. Not so in the photographs. There, the flasks overlap in repetition, marching out from a table-top horizon—itself an indistinct line that jumps and snags, seen through all that glass. The flasks’ basic sphere and cylinder components become a more visually complicated array of pooled ellipses, black-topped columns, and glinting lens-shaped curves—many more than the eye is able to track at a glance. The milky white beakers, some stacked, some separated, and all shot from above, are also more interesting in the photograph than in real life: lipped circular forms in right-angle abutments to the vertical and horizontal stripes of wood grain, in a compellingly oblique-angle relationship to the eye of the catalog’s audience. Yes, the art enthusiast of 1934 had an art book in front of her, that much was certain—but whether one ought to be looking at the objects or the photographs was unclear. The two seemed, and still seem, inseparable. But this conflation of an object and its representation was precisely the point: a forced intersection that allowed the catalog browser to “read” the images in the first place, seeing them not just as objects, but as signs for objects. In the catalog, Machine Art’s utilitarian goods thus attained a new function; they became legible aids to modern understanding—this by becoming, in the parlance of the period, objectifications of things. My point in considering the difference between the kinds of attention paid to the objects on their own and the objects in the photographs is to begin to make clear that Machine Art, through photographic illustration and museum display, reframed its objects as representations. Every piece was made to stand as a sign of its origins: both proximate (in the material conditions of mechanization) and absolute (in the metaphysical realm of Platonic form). We’ll come to the latter version of origination later (it will preoccupy us in the next chapter). For now, our interest is chiefly in the transformation of modern, machinemade things into signs of their origins in production. This idea gained currency among a number of machine-obsessed artists in the interwar period, when it commonly went by the term objectification. Objectification was the veritable dogma of art photography during the time, a movement based upon the artistic use of machines; and it drew diverse support from the likes of artist Louis Lozowick, photographer Paul Strand, and writer and social critic Lewis Mumford. All are necessary to our discussion here, and all will return us to a common theme. In the modernist project of objectification—in art, in photography, in museum display—the sheer thingness of objects serves handily and persuasively as a common denominator: that is, as the basis on which objects might be relied upon to convey meanings.3 Machine Art’s catalog is our first clue to the exhibit’s efforts in objectification—its maneuvers, in other words, to transmute materiality into a sign of Chapter One: Objectification

itself and, more importantly, a sign of its origins. But, however much these images might in retrospect seem central to Machine Art’s project, at the time they likely felt more like an institutional extravagance. The catalog required a commitment of publishing resources equal to—or even surpassing—those apportioned to shows much more traditionally within the bounds of MOMA’s scope. Moreover, there’s reason to believe that Machine Art was none too popular within the museum’s administrative universe, at least in its initial stages. So, before turning properly to Machine Art’s photographic operations—both in its photo-rich catalog and, as we’ll see, in the quasi-photographic presentation of its objects in display—it’s worth backing up a bit to set the stage and consider the history of Machine Art’s institutional frame.

The Museum of Modern Art and Machine Art’s Precedents

In 1934, ruminations such as those offered by Machine Art were in many ways possible only at MOMA. Although the museum was still in its infancy, an institutional profile had already begun to coalesce around many of the same tactics and ideals that Machine Art would sharpen to a point. The exhibit exemplified MOMA’s appetite for attention-getting spectacle, its rigid endorsement of functionalism in architecture and design, and its firm belief that form and materials alone—rather than poetical references or allegorical figures—were adequate supports for artistic beauty. Even the show’s implicitly metaphysical provocations (which came first, the circle or the ball bearing?) squared with the museum’s sometimes overzealous belief in the relevance of modern art to modern life. In 1934, these tendencies were well on their way to becoming MOMA trademarks, probably because they had already proved their worth in attracting and sustaining attention. By the time pedestrians tripped over ship parts on the Fifty-Third Street sidewalk, MOMA was already in its second building, an entire townhouse rented from the Rockefellers for the exclusive use of the museum. Since its modest start in November 1929 (on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building, cattycorner to the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue), MOMA had quickly developed a reputation as New York society’s most reliable conversation-starter. Efforts to get the word out were decisive to the institution’s survival, which was by no means certain at the onset of the Great Depression. When MOMA’s three original founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—came up with the idea on a steamer trip back from Europe for a museum dedicated solely to modern art, they envisioned an institution at the center of a vital cultural phenomenon. Modern art had steadily been making inroads into American social life since the early 1910s; after the initial shock of the Armory Show in 1913, American artists and collectors quickly awakened to the possibili22 23

ties of experimentation. Whole new avenues of plastic form and personal selfexpression stood open to artists, while collectors, including MOMA’s own Lillie Bliss, recognized the investment opportunity offered by unproven talent. By the 1920s, modernism, in all of its changing stylistic incarnations, had become an increasingly prominent part of the nation’s visual lingua franca. Movie theaters, cigarette packs, women’s haircuts: everything seemed to bear the angular, of-the-moment look of Marcel Duchamp’s once-controversial nude on the staircase. The conditions seemed right for a museum to emerge as the movement’s institutional hub. But if Rockefeller, Bliss, and Sullivan thought they were positioning themselves to ride the crest of a powerful cultural wave, what they got was something quite different. Opening just weeks after Wall Street’s historic crash, the fledgling organization immediately had to contend with tightened budgets and flagging public support. Before long, the run-up to war in Europe would pose a new

Figure 12  Alfred H. Barr Jr. onboard

Bremen, 1931. Margaret Scolari Barr Papers, Scrapbook 1927–1932. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

Chapter One: Objectification

challenge, as the national border tightened against foreign imports—including paintings and ideas. No one felt this changed climate more acutely than Alfred Barr. Barr’s temperament, discipline, and training all predisposed him to the work of diplomacy, and indeed he would do the most at MOMA to offer a principled, philosophical defense of modern art. In the early 1930s, when values of all kinds seemed unreliable if not bankrupt, Barr’s shrewdest move was to position artistic form as an utterly dependable source of pure value. By the time MOMA’s founders approached Barr for the directorial position, he had not only developed considerable expertise in the still-developing field of modern art but he’d also built a good track record for building understanding and enthusiasm for it. He had published an impressive array of articles on such topics as Soviet Constructivism, the functionalist de Stijl movement, and the accidental modernism of American industrial architecture in such workaday buildings as the Necco factory in Cambridge.4 All these were phenomena Barr had studied firsthand: the Necco factory emerged as a favorite field trip with his Wellesley students, and his Soviet and European reports were essentially polished missives from extensive fact-finding travels through those regions in 1927–1928. At Wellesley, Barr had proven a popular and effective teacher; students there had asked him to advise in the preparations for a Cubist-themed prom, signed up in droves for his classes, and entered his “ten-cent store competitions,” arranging five-and-dime trinkets (“made of some strictly modern material such as aluminum”) into visually arresting still lifes.5 If this was his dry run for helming a museum like the one Rockefeller, Bliss, and Quinn proposed, Barr was auguring nothing but success. Moreover, the prom and the five-anddime still-life competitions in particular forecasted how Barr’s talent for teaching would translate to a role as modern art’s ambassador. In his activities at Wellesley, Barr had used the more democratizing aspects of the avant-garde to his pedagogical advantage: first to attract an audience, then to teach to it. A similar impulse lay behind Machine Art. But if MOMA’s founders hired Barr for his innovative techniques (many borrowed, it need be said, from Germany’s esteemed school of modern art and design, the Bauhaus), they did not always relish enacting them in their museum.6 Again, Machine Art is a case in point: a show that the trustees left entirely to Barr and Philip Johnson, offering little of their own enthusiasm or support. It’s impossible to know how much of a problem Machine Art really was to MOMA’s powers that be or if it was much of a problem at all. It was Johnson who later hinted that there might have been some disagreement; he opined that the trustees might have “wished there wasn’t a department” of architecture and design at all.7 Then again, Johnson tended to emphasize the rascally ways of the museum’s younger guard. Once, when asked what his position at MOMA was during these years, he called himself its “drummer and screamer-arounder.”8 But, just as it’s possible, even likely, 24 25

Figure 13  Cow Weathervane,

1852–1880. Possibly by A. L. Jewell & Company and L. W. Cushing & Sons, Waltham, MA. Copper, zinc alloy, and gilt. (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA.)

that Johnson overstated controversy at the moment of Machine Art’s genesis, it’s also true that there’s no record of any pitches, formal or informal, that either Barr or Johnson might have made on the exhibit’s behalf. So, the historian is left to some imagination. Fortunately, the exercise of conjecture here allows us a useful platform for thinking about how the young curators might have defended their exhibition: a thought exercise I’ll use to demonstrate the degree to which Machine Art extended many of MOMA’s existing programs and ambitions. Machine Art wasn’t MOMA’s first exhibit of ordinary objects. This alone would have been advantageous to Barr and Johnson in making their proposal. Two precursors—one major, one minor—had been mounted earlier in 1932 and ’33. Barr had been away when they’d gone up, forced into a leave of absence after the trustees noticed that the thirty-year-old’s duties had become worryingly all-consuming.9 As a result, Barr had missed the chance to oversee the museum’s critical expansion into everyday life. The first, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900, responded to a contemporary vogue for New England and mid-Atlantic homespun. But as curated by Holger Cahill (who would later go on to head Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project), the tone of the exhibition was much more nationalistic and antiquarian than Machine Art’s later Bauhaus-inspired ideal of international functionalism. The second show, Objects: 1900 and Today, held during April 1933, had been Johnson’s: a small, comparative display of decorative arts from the turn of the century and the contemporary moment. This exhibition took up a single gallery and demurred from the kind of hard-line functionalism that characterized Johnson’s other efforts at MOMA during these years—quite different, then, from the sprawling Chapter One: Objectification

26 27

“propaganda” of Machine Art.10 In Objects, Johnson offered no aesthetic value judgments to distinguish between the elegance of Edouard Colonna’s refined art nouveau style and the bent tubular steel forms of Mies van der Rohe. Perhaps this was out of polite deference to the museum’s trustees, many of whom had lent pieces to fill out the “1900” end of the spectrum. Cahill’s folk art show, which also made expedient use of a trustee’s collection (in this case, that of founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller), provided the stronger foundation on which to build Machine Art’s case. More so even than with the Objects exhibition, Machine Art shared a surprising amount of aesthetic terrain with American Folk Art. Cahill’s catalog essay, like Barr and Johnson’s later texts, also defended the artistic worthiness of once-everyday objects on the basis of their utility. The homespun artifacts were initially “intended for . . . use and enjoyment,” and it was to this that they owed their beauty.11 Moreover, Cahill—as well as a number of art critics—noted a similarity between the formal simplicity of folk art and the more contemporary tendency toward pared-down abstraction in modern art.12 So, when Barr and Johnson wanted to claim a formal— and perhaps even a national—basis for establishing kinship between ordinary objects of industry and modern, abstract form, they needed to look no further than to Cahill’s successful show in establishing precedent. And successful it was. At its final attendance tally, American Folk Art had garnered 102,415 visitors during its springtime run, a stunning figure that would not be surpassed until Figure 14 Installation

what might be called MOMA’s first blockbuster exhibition, its Van Gogh show

view of the exhibition Objects: 1900 and Today, April 10, 1933–April 25, 1933. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

of the 1935–1936 season.13 With American Folk Art, then, Barr and Johnson

Figure 15 Installation

view of Objects: 1900 and Today. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

had evidence that “nonart” art shows could be successful crowd-pleasers and PR generators, both of which might have helped the trustees overcome any hesitations regarding the viability of a show built around a ball bearing. Undoubtedly the most important precedent for Machine Art, however, was set with the museum’s successful Modern Architecture show, also of 1932 and now most well-known for codifying and promoting the functionalist ideals of the so-called international style.14 It celebrated the low-slung horizontals, unadorned straight lines, and floor-to-ceiling curtain windows of the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and J. J. P. Oud. Johnson had been in on that exhibition, too—in fact, it had been the original excuse for Barr to involve his younger friend in the activities of the museum. At Barr’s direction, beginning in 1929, Johnson undertook extensive travels in Europe to expose himself to the most up-to-date practices in architectural design. In one of many revealing letters to his mother throughout these travels, he summed up his progress with some self-congratulation: “Well, I have had quite a dose of modern architecture, and I revel in it,” he wrote. “One good sign has already developed. I like the work by the best architects best.”15 To clarify whom he meant as “the best,” he added, “I

Chapter One: Objectification

Figure 16 Installation

mean the ones that Barr and those people said were the greatest.” John McAn-

view of the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, housing section, Bauhaus model. 1932. Department of Circulating Exhibition Records, album A1(1). The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

drew, who would serve as MOMA’s chief curator of architecture and design between 1937 and 1941, was one of “those people”; he accompanied Johnson on this investigative tour before entrusting Johnson’s tutelage to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, another MOMA affiliate and a “somewhat uncouth bearded person,” as Johnson described him in a letter from Paris.16 Touring with Hitchcock would be much more extensive, ultimately resulting in the massive exhibition that would more or less define the course of architecture in succeeding decades. Given its scope and its force, the Modern Architecture exhibit—probably more than any other during MOMA’s first ten years (although Machine Art is a close second)—did the most to solidify what has become the defining hallmark of MOMA history: its dogmatic endorsement of so-called high modernism. This credo was spelled out plainly in the exhibition catalog (a book that, like the catalog for Machine Art, has had a long afterlife as a representative example of MOMA’s most consistently endorsed ideals). As he would for Machine Art, Barr set the tone for this publication, too. In his foreword to the earlier catalog, he explained that the “aesthetic principles” of the international style derived,

28 29

first of all, from certain “technical and utilitarian factors.”17 He went on to list the characteristics of the style that resulted. Reviewing them now makes plain the considerable overlap between Modern Architecture and Machine Art—and, between them, sketches the tenets of MOMA’s high modernism. Barr praised the international style for its obedience to “the nature of modern materials” (as he would later praise the “perfection of surface” and “refinement of modern materials” in Machine Art).18 He exalted the style’s “technically perfect use of materials” (as he would later endorse the “perfection of shape and rhythm” and “perfection of surface” in Machine Art’s objects).19 And—while admitting that modernist architecture’s lack of ornament was “one of the most difficult elements . . . for the layman to accept”—he nonetheless urged it upon his readers, recommending to them the pleasures to be had in “the clean perfection of surface and proportion.”20 This was the dogma of Machine Art as well, where “geometrical beauty” could be found in simple machine-made products, “devoid as [they] should be of surface ornament.”21 Barr made his high modernist scorn for ornament explicit in Modern Architecture. He railed against the “backwardness” of “modernistic” design near the start of his comments, condemning “zig-zags and chevrons” as a blight upon the American scene, “both commercially and architecturally.”22 That word “commercially,” we might now realize, all but foretold Machine Art, some version of which Barr likely had in mind since accepting the MOMA job in ’29. Also at the start of his Modern Architecture foreword, Barr emphasized—tellingly—the major role that “expositions and exhibitions” had played in “chang[ing] the character of American architecture,” citing the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 as his inaugural example.23 He plainly hoped that exhibitions at MOMA would have the same far-reaching effects—not just making an impact on the art world but expanding influence to national conversations on planning, housing, and design. Because it was to these fields that Modern Architecture made its appeals, it thus made good on one of Barr’s dearest hopes for the new institution: that it might have an impact on the applied arts of everyday life. All of this taken together makes it more than fair to imagine that Barr and Johnson conceived Machine Art as the follow-up to Modern Architecture: a sequel show that would do for commercial products what the first had done for architectural design.

The Machine-Age Exposition and Objectification

A last precedent that we might imagine Barr having invoked in his pitch for Machine Art happened two years before MOMA opened. It is also the precedent that delivers us, at long last, back to the main event of this chapter: the related issues of photography and “objectification” as they were played out in Barr and Johnson’s 1934 show. Chapter One: Objectification

In 1927, under the leadership of Jane Heap, the little magazine known as the Little Review sponsored the Machine-Age Exposition; it was the only precursor that either Barr or Johnson ever credited as inspiration for Machine Art.24 In it, anonymous photographs of grain elevators appeared alongside Walter Gropius’s architectural plans, laboratory glassware stood in front of Charles Demuth’s precisionist paintings, and U.S. Army machine guns faced down Alexander Archipenko’s pockmarked standing figures.25 Barr provided his own description in a footnote to his Machine Art essay: the earlier show had included “fantastic drawings of the city of the future, ‘modernistic’ skyscrapers, constructivists, robot costumes, theatre settings, and factories, together with some excellent machines and photographs of machinery.”26 This was an “important pioneer effort,” as far as Barr was concerned, one that made clear the relationship of the machine to art production. He’d even taken the show’s catalog with him on his study trip abroad in 1927–1928, actively using it as a guide to avant-garde art and architecture. (Like Machine Art’s catalog seven years later, it featured a ball bearing on the cover, albeit one rather

Figure 17  Fernand Léger, cover

of special issue of the Little Review. Machine-Age Exposition, May 16, 1927–May 28, 1927. (© Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

30 31

vigorously reimagined by French painter Fernand Léger.) Barr used the catalog as a conversation piece in meetings otherwise stymied by language barriers. In his diary from the trip, Barr mentions a meeting with the Russian architect Andrei Burov, whom he recalls as having been “delighted” to see one of his works reproduced in the catalog from a show in New York.27 But the Little Review’s catalog might have served yet another function for Barr as a polemical introduction to the aesthetic discourse of objectification. Contextualizing Machine Art in this rhetorical milieu might also explain why Barr and Johnson did not elect to take the path that Heap had taken for the Machine-Age show—why, in other words, they opted against artistic reworkings of the machine as theme and focused instead on its value as form. Objectification, an artistic approach to the modern world that sought to understand it through vaguely defined techniques like “penetrating” vision and the “organization” of underlying parts, offered a route toward the aesthetic assimilation of the almighty machine.28 Naturally, this would have recommended itself instantly to the interests of Barr and Johnson as they planned their show. But, where the Machine-Age Exposition objectified mechanization through its translation into other media (painting, sculpture, or architecture), MOMA’s Machine Art went one better by objectifying this same epochal transformation in the very byproducts of its processes, in the mass-produced objects themselves. One essay in the Machine-Age Exposition catalog, written by Russian émigré artist Louis Lozowick, spells out the social role of the artist under the condition of machine-based mass production. “The true artist,” he wrote, “will . . . objectify the dominant experience of our epoch.”29 This pressing social responsibility served two imperatives: first, the need to discern the conditions of modernity (to be recognized in the truths of its constitutive structures and materials), and second, the need to reveal and clarify these conditions through the medium of art (a creative disclosure and reorganization of modern materials to reveal modern truths). All of this could be classed, in Lozowick’s view, as “objectification.” The artist’s special skill—nay, calling—was to see through the “apparent chaos and confusion” of modernization and recognize instead its underlying “order and organization.”30 In this way, the artist fulfilled his duty to render modern life not just comprehensible, but also negotiable as a space for social action.31 Lozowick titled his call to arms “The Americanization of Art,” a nod to his adopted country’s rampant efforts at modernization. His frequent use of words like “arrange” and “organize,” which he meant to describe the correct compositional strategies of objectification, also invoke this fervor. One can easily imagine the country’s most avid theorists of industrial mechanization—both titans of capitalism and their labor-leader foes—articulating their passions in much the same terms. Moreover, throughout these instructional passages—“arrange Chapter One: Objectification

color and light,” “organize line, plane and volume”—it also becomes clear that the artist’s role in Lozowick’s Americanization is not a creative one, in the sense of imaginative originality.32 Instead, it’s a revelatory and managerial one, premised first on penetrating research then carried through by clarifying complex structures into stripped-down fundamentals—all in the name of making the visual comprehension of modernity easier and more expedient, even for the most unskilled viewers. The terrain Machine Art shared with the Machine-Age Exposition, then, was not just subject matter, and not just a ball bearing. Between them, they also had in common a particular attitude toward the function of art in the machine age. Both presumed to advance social work, specifically as fulfilled in the labors of objectifying clarification. The intended target of Lozowick’s essay is what distinguishes it from Barr and Johnson’s show—a distinction that the divergent treatment of the ball bearing also intimates. Focused on assimilating the logic of mass production and mechanization within the graphic work of painting and drawing, Lozowick targeted the modern artist as his intended audience. It was the artist whom Lozowick assumed would seize the “raw . . . material” of mechanization and transform it into artworks that would help clarify the modern world.33 In keeping with this artistically transformative ethos, the Machine-Age Exposition included the machine both as raw material and as repackaged art. In striking contrast, Machine Art didn’t include any such artworks (although Barr emphasized their importance in his essay), and the ball bearing on Machine Art’s cover appeared just to float there, as though innocent of all artistic intervention—an affected appearance of purity that’s especially easy to maintain if the MOMA cover is kept in steady comparison with Léger’s.34 If Lozowick’s gestures of objectification were meant to be carried out within the conscious field of artistic transformation (as in the Léger piece), Machine Art appeared to achieve many of Lozowick’s goals without that extra effort (as on the MOMA cover, designed by Bauhaus refugee Josef Albers). It was as though the artistic and cognitive assimilations of a machine and its technical origins could be had through sight alone: raw materials untransformed and only given directly to a sympathetic eye. Objects themselves objectified.

Machine Art and Modern Photography

In this effort to minimize the steps of objectification and achieve its effects in the straightforward regard of objects on their own, Machine Art was much closer in temperament to modern photography than it was to the wider spectrum of visual arts represented in the Machine-Age Exposition. Modern photography, especially as practiced in the United States under the banner of “straight photography” during the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, embraced precisely Lozowick’s 32 33

objectivist goal: to reveal the modern, material world on its own terms. But photography again seemed to go one better, pretending to offer a more direct means to this end. It dispensed with Lozowick’s pencils and lithograph crayons entirely and used the machine as a means toward producing an unmediated, or “straight,” disclosure of the world as it is. Straight photography was a style (or ersatz “nonstyle”) that had dominated art photography in this country since Alfred Stieglitz began to promote it around 1907. Straight photography was unfussy. Its views appeared unmanipulated and to the point, little more than the opening of a shutter and the capture of the world as arrayed before the camera—just the “honest job,” as one enthusiastic writer put it, “of recording what the light impresses on [the camera’s] emulsion-coated plate.”35 Moreover, for Stieglitz, straight photography was an opportunity for the medium to define its own unique terrain. Marking a break with the earlier, Arts and Crafts–inspired style of pictorialism (which employed hand retouching and atmospheric effects to make photographs look like paintings), straight photography made a value out of what had long been photography’s Achilles’ heel: it did no more than mechanically reproduce the effects of sight. For Stieglitz and his interwar-era compatriots, this operation was not a limitation, but an opportunity: the chance to seize the machine as a means of reviewing the world under modernity. Selecting, focusing, and framing the “raw” visual data of everyday experience into meaningful—even artistic—pictures: this was what advocates claimed was the unique province of the art photographer. Not inventing a new world or expressing an interior one, the job of the photographer-artist was to strip away the real world’s chaotic happenstance and reveal beneath it the orderliness of significant form. (This term, highly influential in early-twentieth-century art criticism—especially as it regarded photography—is Clive Bell’s.36) Stieglitz’s reasons for embracing straight photography were thus in lockstep with Lozowick’s rationale for objectification; both would clarify understanding of the modern world by reproducing its foundations as artistic form. If the artistic reproductions looked only minimally done over, or “straight,” all the better. The point was to reveal the substrate of modernity, not to elaborate on its superficial effects. The generation of American photographers who came of professional age during the interwar period—a generation that included Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston—fully advanced this view of their medium. They strove for the “absolute impersonal” (Weston) and presented the world as ever more “detached . . . from everything else” (Strand).37 Claiming to have renounced all artistic contrivances, they often recounted their arrival at straight photography in pious conversion tales. Although by the 1920s Steiner was photographing ordinary objects like typewriters—plainly and on their own terms, in what one writer described as his “esthetic asceticism”—he confided that he Chapter One: Objectification

had experimented with artsy-ness early on in his career as a student at the Clarence H. White School of Photography.38 Under the tutelage of this eminent pictorialist photographer (whose friendship with Stieglitz ended when the latter went “straight”), Steiner admitted to having once embraced his teacher’s favorite artistic principle. “Don’t go out and photograph things,” he recalled White as having said, but “photograph the in-betweenness of things.”39 In his later maturity, Steiner was proud to have inverted this maxim, to have hit upon the greater artistic merits of focusing just on things themselves, without the compositional crutch of whatever negative space surrounded them. Indeed, he even looked upon his more serious and sober mature work as just so much penance for the “sin of having stood on his head.”40 Strand told a similar story. Although he’d initiated his early experiments in modern photography with some self-conscious attempts at artistry, he Figure 18  Paul Strand,

later said he regretted it. Works like Bowls and Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecti-

Bowls, 1916. (© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.)

terns of stacked dishes and the crisscrossing of eventide shadows. But Strand

cut, both from 1916, reveal a playful Strand, capable of delighting in the patlater viewed these works as puerile attempts to understand cubism: a young photographer’s unfortunate backsliding into trying to achieve painting’s effects in a photographic print.41 By the 1920s, he, like Steiner, consciously retreated from a field of “in-betweenness” and into beauty and meaning only as it was to be found in the object itself objectified—sturdy and autonomous, and seemingly “aloof . . . to the pressure of our desires,” in the evocative description of one of Strand’s fans.42 This repeatedly manufactured narrative about photography as a means of plain-spoken, world-revealing truth telling relied upon the recuperation of what might otherwise have been seen as a fatal paradox at the heart of straight photography. Strand himself did the most to explain why the camera—a machine!— was the best tool by which to clarify, and so humanize, the machine age. Like Stieglitz, Strand was no fan of mechanization. He viewed it as the very apotheosis of American materialism: the foremost term in what he called “a new Trinity: God the Machine, Materialistic Empiricism the Son, and Science the Holy Ghost.”43 This secular religion would leave no place for artists, Strand warned; it

34 35

would render even the humble calling of “the vita contemplativa” a modern form of apostasy.44 Of course, for Strand, it was only through art that humanity could be spared this dismal fate. Calling upon the “vision of the artist,” he beseeched photographers to seize “upon the mechanism and materials of a machine,” that is, the camera, so that mechanization itself might come under the guiding yoke of “conscious creative control.”45 Finally, he put it to his fellow photographers as a simple choice, the kind of choice that isn’t one at all: either be “quickly ground to pieces under the heel of the new God” or assume the “tremendous task of controlling the heel.”46 As a machine, the camera was the most “logical instrument for the perfecting of ‘machine age’ art.”47 More to the point, and as expressed in Paris by Walter Benjamin (one of the era’s most prodigious theorists of the medium), photography not only enabled an artistic disclosure of the world’s material conditions, it did so by taking an active “position in” those conditions.48 Using the machine as a means to understand the machine age, to objectify it as a way to humanize it . . . well, there was an elegance to this. Lewis Mumford, the architectural critic and cultural observer, understood this elegance well; he also endorsed the camera-machine as a useful tool for social work. Indeed, he heralded art photography as nothing short of a victory for the soul of mankind—a soul he believed was imperiled (he agreed with friends Stieglitz and Strand) by that mixed blessing, mechanization. Once paired with an artist’s guiding eye, the camera was an example of a machine that could become “subordinate to . . . human direction”—not just a crutch or convenience, but “part of man’s organic equipment.”49 Seen this way, the modern art photographer (Stieglitz was Mumford’s example) emerged as a modern hero: a model for how to “reconquer” technology for the spiritual and cultural ends of civilization. No more must mankind weary under the “one-sided triumph of the machine,” Mumford wrote.50 In light of his especially high regard for the medium, it’s no surprise that Mumford positioned photography prominently in his Technics and Civilization, a widely read opus of 1934 that reflected sensitively on the future of culture under mass production. In it, he wrote: “The mission of the photograph is to clarify the object. This objectification, this clarification, are important developments in the mind itself: it is perhaps the prime psychological fact that emerges with our rational assimilation of the machine.”51 Mumford, whose life’s work, patterned partially after his hero, Stieglitz, was to find adaptive culture to save civilization from its own unthinking drive toward progress, agreed that photography was optimally suited to the task. Mumford’s admiration for Stieglitz developed as admiration for Stieglitz so often did: in the form of friendship. The writer’s social circle was large, however, considerably larger than the tightly drawn orbit of the so-called Stieglitz Circle. Mumford was friendly with many of the group around the Museum of Modern Chapter One: Objectification

Art, including Johnson, whom he’d gotten to know while contributing materials to the Modern Architecture show. It was through this affiliation that Mumford came to reprint four of Machine Art’s catalog photographs in Technics and Civilization, where they appeared as exemplary efforts in the “rational assimilation of the machine.”52 We turn now to the production of these photographic assimilations.

Ruth Bernhard’s Machine Art Photographs

In his correspondence with Machine Art’s contributing manufacturers, Johnson also requested that they send “good photographs.” If the company had none, Johnson asked if MOMA might “borrow the instrument to have it photographed by our photographer?”53 In the majority of cases, the companies just sent the objects; they would have to anyway for the show. Some did send commercially produced images, and Johnson used at least a few of these, such as those for the Standard Oil gasoline pumps, for example, and the Electrol-Kewanee heating unit. These were objects that were too cumbersome for transport to and from a studio setting. Sometimes, Johnson discarded the images sent in. For example, the Hoffman & Billings Manufacturing Company submitted a photograph of exhibit #61, a sink faucet of the “mixer” variety, offering hot or cold water from a single tap. The company photo showed the faucet installed in a bathroom and at an angle that revealed all the words inscribed on its top: “HOT,” “COLD,” and the model’s patented name. But Johnson rejected it. Instead, the catalog illustrated the faucet in a stripped-down, head-on view: no sink, no bathroom, no words, no company branding. The choice suggests that Johnson explicitly opted against showing pieces in a way that would betray too much of their corporate or domestic habitats. Mitigating against this kind of view and ensuring focus on the objects themselves, Johnson went to the trouble of having these and most other Machine Art pieces rephotographed, hiring a budding young professional for the job. Machine Art’s photo illustrations were not anonymously produced, like most catalog images (and most cake pans). Instead, a byline in the catalog credited “Miss Ruth Bernhard,” a woman who would later be eulogized as one of the twentieth century’s most important American photographers.54 Admittedly, Bernhard was still a novice in 1934, but she had already begun to develop a strong body of work: straight photographs that also tended to monumentalize the trivial things of everyday life. Bernhard’s entrée into this object-focused field was doubly secured. Her first professional mentor in Manhattan was none other than Ralph Steiner, and her own father, Lucian Bernhard, had been an important forerunner to the object-focused aesthetic in his commercial poster work in Germany.55 One might even conjecture that the daughter paid tribute 36 37

Figure 19  Lucian Bernhard,

poster design for Kaffee Hag, 1914. (Courtesy of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.)

to the father in her photograph of the adjustable curve, which bears a striking resemblance to the elder Bernhard’s Kaffee Hag poster, said to be her favorite.56 Bernhard later recalled having no contact with Johnson during the work she did for Machine Art. He was too much of a “big shot,” she remembered.57 However, in 1933, Bernhard did live in the same apartment building as one Jan Ruhtenberg, and this provided the occasion for the commission. 58 Ruhtenberg and Bernhard were both German émigrés—Ruhtenberg more recently so, having come to the United States in 1934 at Johnson’s urging. The two men had become friends and working associates in Berlin, where they’d dedicated themselves to applying the lessons of functionalist architecture to interior design. When it came time to renovate MOMA for Machine Art, Johnson naturally wanted Ruhtenberg’s help. (In a winking nod to the exhibition’s Bauhaus roots—and one not innocent of xenophobic overtones—the New York Herald Tribune reported that German could be heard in the galleries during installation.59) Ruhtenberg was also influential in the production of the catalog. When it came time to hire a photographer, it was he, Bernhard’s neighbor and fellow Berliner, who made the connection between Machine Art and Bernhard’s current project: a series of experimental close-ups of ordinary things. Later, Bernhard supposed that the invitation came “perhaps out of convenience,” but she knew it offered a “wonderful opportunity” to push her work further.60 Over the course of the previous five years, Bernhard had been getting a lot of practice in the modernist style of object-based photography; her first paying position after arriving in New York in 1929 was as Steiner’s darkChapter One: Objectification

room assistant.61 The job would not last more than six months (Bernhard bored quickly of long hours at the developing trays), but the experience initiated a period of fervent photographic experimentation—partially inspired by Steiner’s monumentalizing photographic style and fully enlivened by Bernhard’s imaginative dialog with objects. Her self-described goal during these years was “to make photographs that would breathe and live.”62 Trusting the medium itself to serve as a better mentor than Steiner, Bernhard worked assiduously with her eight-by-ten camera and tripod. She photographed mainly during the quietest hours of the night, at least on those nights not spent making the Greenwich Village scene with Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland or going uptown to the Cotton Club with the boys from MOMA.63 Bernhard took up several samesex love affairs during these years and found ready support (and flirtations) within both of these milieus. She recalled that Abbott’s serious commitment to photography had given her professional courage, but she might, too, have derived some personal courage from Abbott’s devotion to McCausland. The trips to Harlem, themselves an exercise in boundary-crossing, would likewise have been conducive to Bernhard’s sexual experimentation. Moreover, while Bernhard didn’t specify who among the MOMA “crowd” she ran with in those days, her proximity to its social circle—and perhaps even her proximity to New York’s queer intelligentsia—certainly served as credentials in the eyes of Johnson and Ruhtenberg. Bernhard balanced her nightlife with an avid shopping habit during the day. In 1930, she began to make reverential trips to Woolworth’s, much in “the way others would go to the opera” (and precisely the way Barr encouraged among his Wellesley students).64 The store offered endless opportunities for the maturing photographer, who picked up packs of paper clips, sewing notions, drinking straws, and other miscellany for use in her nighttime photo shoots. She arranged these things in patterns across her table, then went on to tinker with the lights—aiming them from oblique angles, reflecting them off white cloth—in an effort to achieve photographic drama all out of proportion to the simplicity of her subjects. Her early experiments met success with a few rolls of Lifesavers, a Woolworth’s find that gave Bernhard what she called her “first real photograph.”65 For the candy study, Bernhard stood about thirty Lifesavers on their sides. Some of these she set up so their faces stood parallel to the sides of the print; others ran parallel to the top and bottom. The orientations of all the candies thus aligned with an imagined grid. But our perspective on them is oblique; rectilinearity is interrupted by the inscription of experience—that is to say, by the photographic fixity of Bernhard’s angled view. Because Bernhard so provocatively combined the surety of the grid with the shifting angularity of kinetic vision (we can almost imagine the sensations of the arched body bent over 38 39

Figure 20  Ruth Bernhard, Lifesavers, 1930. (Reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University. Photo credit: Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, CA.)

kitchen table), we’re moved to notice something else about the arrangement: it must have been hard to get right. Surely, Bernhard spent some time fighting candies that rolled away, wobbled sideways, and tipped easily at the slightest intrusion of nubby fingers. The ordered composition at last put into place, Bernhard snapped the picture: a bit imprecise in all its perpendicular abutments, but a success nonetheless, and one—given her work habits—likely heralded by the first birdcalls of morning. The result is a dash-dot composition of Morse code simplicity, an organized artistic vision to which the physical particularities of Lifesavers had to be skillfully adapted: a record, then, of objectification. We can easily imagine Bernhard struggling against the material conditions of her objects, and the intimacy of this struggle enlivens the work. The Chapter One: Objectification

chalky white rings beckon the viewer to take hold: a gesture of invitation equally appropriate to the purse-sized candies and the ring-shaped buoys for which they are named. Moreover, as the eye allows the two-dimensional pattern to pop into three-dimensional relief, various idiosyncrasies of surface begin to appear. One Lifesaver, in particular, shows a little wear and tear in a pair of nicks at the twelve o’clock position. The right angles don’t all line up. A few disks teeter slightly off their orthogonals, and the candy in the bottom left corner has a blemish on its face, a ragged edge left unsmoothed by the candy manufacturer. In all these potent revelations of materiality, Lifesavers dramatizes reconciliation between the fullness of a physical world and the necessary abstractions of a visual code—necessary adjustments in the practice of photography, and necessary as well to all modern operations of objectification. Such adjustments are inherent to photography, which must always negotiate between the three-dimensional world and the two-dimensional print. The process of adjustment itself is aesthetically generative, deriving its potency from what might be called semiotic thingness. When objects are made to act as signs—when they are objectified—their meanings draw from two intertwined and mutually dependent sources: the abstractions of cultural convention and the concrete presence of the objects themselves. Photography derives meaning from materiality by flattening it into a pictorial code, reducing objects to visual signs and organizing them within the confines of the print. However, the peculiar strength of photography is its fundamental incompatibility with pure abstraction—it’s a medium that is beholden to the world, because of its unqualified “objectivity,” to quote Strand.66 In the signifying economy of photography, materiality—both as a set of physical particulars (those white, irregular disks) and as a generally indefinable category of existence (“Lifesaver-ness”)—lends credence and reliability to the abstract meanings things are made to convey (Bernhard’s Morse code pattern of dots and dashes). As a photograph, Lifesavers dramatizes the necessary adjustments between the fullness of a physical world and the abstract limitations of a visual code. In the process, it also demonstrates how the conventional patterns of that code draw meaning from the hiccups of visual static; how the interference of surface blemishes and imperfections—materiality itself—becomes a necessary part of signification, its guarantee. This, I argue, was the fundamental operation of Machine Art and its photographs— or, better, the operation Machine Art modeled first in its photographs and then extended to the objects themselves. Machine Art rendered things as signs, as explanations of modernity and as tokens of a formal ideal, banked on the persuasiveness of three-dimensional presence. Much of this discussion will unfold in the next chapter, but for now, it’s worth considering the semiotic activation of objects in the first place. 40 41

Adjustment, Lag, and Indexical Objects

To think of photography as performing an “adjustment” between the three-dimensional world and its two-dimensional representation is to call into service a word that had tremendous currency during the interwar period.67 “Adjustment” might fairly be called a buzzword of the 1920s and ’30s, when it appeared most frequently as a prescription—a controlled and seemingly simple solution to grand problems like racial inequality or capitalism’s collapse. In 1933, it achieved perhaps its most prominent placement: a spot in Roosevelt’s Alphabet Soup as the middle term in the controversial AAA, or the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.68 The currency of the “adjustment” concept proceeded from the fundamental presupposition that the modern day was plagued instead by maladjustment. The nickname given this social disease was cultural lag and, crucially for our purposes, its primary symptom was a failure to accommodate new technologies, new things. As a phrase, cultural lag is now familiar, but it was new to the machine age and invented just for it, coined by the sociologist William Fielding Ogburn in 1922. His theory, a “Hypothesis of Cultural Lag,” first appeared in Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, an influential book that was in its seventh edition by the time of the Machine Art show.69 The hypothesis Ogburn ventured was this: nonmaterial aspects of human cultures—religious beliefs, familial relations, moral norms, societal organizations, and so on—change at a slower rate than technology, the rate of which was knowable primarily through the “material culture changes” it produced—its physical byproducts. Ogburn’s purpose was not merely descriptive. Within the field of sociology, Ogburn himself was on a leading edge. He worked to push the discipline away from its old academic abstractions and toward the responsibility of what was coming to be called “social work”: an applied form of sociology still classed as a new “vogue” in primers of the early 1930s.70 In keeping with his practical aims, Ogburn concluded his “Hypothesis of Cultural Lag” with both a warning and a call to action. The warning: while technological and material cultures had always run ahead of man’s adaptive cultural strategies, Ogburn believed that the lag of the current moment was widening at an alarming rate. “Maladjustment” proliferated in the gap. Adultery, disease, unemployment, alcoholism, homosexuality, and madness were all evidence of man’s cultural inability to assimilate machine-age technology. The call to action: unless the United States undertook a more studied approach to the problem—a broadly organized effort to “adjust,” in other words, through self-conscious applications of “adaptive culture”—Ogburn predicted that nothing but social cataclysm would result.71 Make no mistake: his motivation was a culturally conservative one. Much in the manner of Strand and Mumford, the sociologist couched his efforts as a valiant defense— Chapter One: Objectification

an attempt to tame technology’s revolutionary potential and reharness it to the cause of civilization. Ogburn’s adaptive culture was meant to save modern society from a series of predicted cataclysmic social-political transformations that many observers believed were the unavoidable consequence of mechanization. This was more than just sociological forecasting; it was a discourse that tilted decidedly toward millenarianism. It infused the writings of his colleagues in academic history departments, too, where efforts toward a “new history” were sympathetic to Ogburn’s new sociology in their shared emphasis on social practice. Massive multivolume histories with broad popular appeal offered American readers comprehensive narratives on the history of Western civilization. These books always ended with a proportionately oversized and highly provisional final chapter dedicated to the current moment and full of warnings of the consequences of a continued failure to adjust to modernization. Harry Elmer Barnes and James Harvey Robinson were the most well-known authors of this breed of cautionary historiography; their works took readers all the way “from prehistory” up “to the cultural lag and the morning’s milk,” in the words of one reviewer.72 Echoing Ogburn’s diagnosis of maladjustment, Barnes warned his fellow Americans, “Our minds are not yet fitted to master and enjoy the machine age.”73 Robinson echoed this need to train a new cultural “dexterity” to adjust to rapid technological transformation. Employing a musical metaphor, Robinson wrote: “The tempo of the overture has increased from largo to presto and pretty soon, the nimblest fingers will not be able to keep up with the score.”74 These academic works only verified the vision popular commentators had already sketched out: a machine age in which technology and material culture had outrun the assimilating capacities of both culture and cognition. Evoking this struggle, newspaper pundits turned to literature as a way to animate these warring tendencies, casting Frankenstein’s monster in the role of technology and Rip van Winkle in the role of man. A terrifying symbol of invention and progress, Frankenstein’s monster ran amok in the era’s opinion columns and academic treatises, where he appeared imperiling the very society which had built him.75 By contrast, Rip van Winkle slumbered in countless other essays, only to awaken with the dust of a century in his eye, too stiffened with age to adapt to the new world of airplanes, automats, and radios.76 Neither Frankenstein’s monster nor Rip van Winkle was particularly agile in gait, and so the machine age’s central conflict, as evoked in the cultural criticism of the day, was a lurching, uncoordinated battle—technology staggering stupidly forward and culture limping desperately behind. The significance of this theatrical pas de deux had everything to do with the unsynchronized movements of its players, each moving forward in different times and rhythms. In fact, the metronome fairly haunted machine-age cultural criticism, as writers obsessively gauged the 42 43

“tempo” of the current moment. It was also called the Jazz Age, after all, as these analogies of uneven beats remind. But if some moderns reveled in the era’s liberatory lurches (as in the explosive Lindy Hop, which commemorated Charles Lindbergh’s aerial celebrity with dance moves equally defiant of gravity’s laws), others tried diligently to smooth them over. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s famous time-and-motion studies stand out as exemplary in this regard: an effort to measure and quantify the activities of manual labor so as to reduce its inefficiencies and coordinate a built environment to suit its needs. (It’s no surprise that when the Gilbreths’ son was called upon to review a show patterned after Machine Art, he extolled its aesthetic merits on the basis of the “sleek-looking” forms, which displayed exactly the “correct complexity”—an adjusted balance of simplicity and intricacy.77) Indeed, from the standpoint of sociologists, historians, and newspaper writers, the overwhelming consensus expressed a need to achieve harmony between technology and culture. Harmony, balance, and adjustment would save American civilization from “fatally” succumbing to the overwhelming “instability of things,” in Barnes’s pointed summation.78 What is curious about Ogburn’s “Hypothesis of Cultural Lag,” and what makes it especially relevant to understanding the social work performed by Johnson’s installations for Machine Art, is the degree to which it depended on objects as a way of measuring—and mastering—the sweeping technological transformations of the machine age. Significantly, Ogburn didn’t study technology itself so much as the artifactual record of its progress. In his sociological practice, he focused primarily on all the many “material-culture changes” that swiftly evolving technology had left in its wake.79 And he really did attempt to examine all of them, most audaciously within the context of President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, for which he served as director of research. The result of this attempt was a two-volume record of all aspects of life in the United States: the number of new inventions introduced each year, the changing attitudes toward Christianity as expressed in magazines as opposed to movies, and all manner of other data. When Recent Social Trends appeared, newspapers hailed it as the “first serious undertaking” to assess the causes and effects of the cultural lag.80 Studying America’s material culture and organizing it into categories, tables, and graphs amounted to an exercise in adjustment, a way to bring technology and civilization into healthy equilibrium. This was Ogburn’s social work. It was an effort, however, that relied on sympathetic magic, on the belief that mass-produced objects represented mass-production—that they became its sign—and that attention to the former would bring control over the latter. The evidentiary capacity of objects is taken so much for granted in modern epistemologies that it’s hard to grasp its significance in this historical context.81 Chapter One: Objectification

Sociology, science, history: modern academic study routinely looks at objects in order to understand the people, conditions, and ideas with which they once had contact, under the assumption that contiguity allows for the transfer of information—that objects objectify their origins. But objects don’t necessarily have to be viewed as signs of meaning or as aids to the production of knowledge. In fact, German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in precisely these years, surmised that this approach was a peculiarly modern habit of mind, a practice of seeing the world from the investigative posture of “research” and a way of understanding it as a kind of double of itself—the material world as a representation of truth. In his “The Age of the World Picture,” originally a lecture delivered in 1938, Heidegger argued that modern science, technology, and art all rest upon a specifically modern brand of metaphysics.82 The ground plan of modernity—its metaphysics and its ontology—posits the world always as a representation and as a source of information, just as it assumes a subject who experiences the world as so many signs pointing toward truth. Although modern epistemology (best illustrated by Heidegger’s example of modern science) emphasizes unbiased research as a foundation for knowledge production, Heidegger stresses that this neutral “objectivity” is a set up—premised upon a priori assumptions established in advance to prepare the ground for investigation. In other words, it’s only a highly controlled idea of “experiment,” conditioned by scientific laws, principles, categories, disciplines, and hypotheses, which serves as the foundation for modern investigation—a very different starting point than undirected experience. This distinction is important for Heidegger (and for Ogburn, and for Machine Art) because it shows that while material phenomena are the focus of modern investigation and experiment, their meanings are constrained from the outset by the way they are prepared, or presented, for study. This preparation—a “constant activity,” Heidegger tells us—is the necessary work of objectification (and this is his word for it, too). He writes that the experience of the world as a picture, as a three-dimensional field of representations, always depends on the intermediating gesture of presentation, a cue to visual attention that Heidegger says effectively “objectifies” the world into evidence. The epistemological assumptions described by Heidegger in 1938—and summed up under the cover of “objectification” by writers like Lozowick—were taken for granted in Ogburn’s practice and seemingly vindicated in his findings. The social scientist’s efforts to collect and quantify all the “material-culture changes” of the machine age, plus the voluminous research he directed for the 1,500-plus page report, Recent Social Trends, certainly qualify as case studies in Heidegger’s idea of “constant activity.” And, by studying mechanization’s byproducts as indicative of modernity’s forward course, Ogburn also assigned a representational capacity to material culture, such that he could discern and 44 45

predict sociological changes by tracking things like “inside frosted” light bulbs, “tabulating machines,” “letter addressing machines,” and tin cans.83 Bearing the trace of their industrial origins, machine-made things operated like snapshots of modern technology: indexical signs, in the sense Charles Sanders Peirce meant it, signs because of physical contiguity to their referents in the manner of rabbit prints in the snow. Although many perceived the changes of the machine age as overwhelming and dangerously incomprehensible, sociological studies like Ogburn’s suggested that all the evidence needed to understand, tame, and assimilate these changes was already readily available—in the material byproducts of the machine itself. The trick was only to present these byproducts clearly to investigative scrutiny. Ogburn’s presentational style was definitively statistical, but another approach was on offer in the period. Photography, particularly as it increasingly focused on everyday, mass-produced objects, could offer a cognitively beneficial snapshot of modern technology, one that would seem only to redouble and sharpen the revelatory capacity of indexical objects. Modern American photography very much shared Ogburn’s objectifying assumptions. And both also operated in precisely the way Heidegger described: as a technique of “knowing [that first] establishes itself as a procedure” and then “secures for itself . . . its sphere of objects.”84

Machine Art’s Gallery Cameras

By the time Bernhard received the Machine Art commission, modern photography’s “dominating reverence for the external fact,” as one American writer put it, had so thoroughly permeated the international scene as to have become the very “hall-mark of chic.”85 The high-water mark of this movement had crested a full five years before. In 1929, the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart—or FIFO, as it was known— offered a dizzyingly comprehensive survey of contemporary photography, representing its newest trends on either side of the Atlantic. Especially, it commingled two somewhat divergent aspects of modern, straight photography. One, very much in the vein tapped by Americans like Strand and Stieglitz (and also Weston, who assembled the show’s U.S. contingent) aimed mostly toward formal ends, hoping that doing so would edify the world—but through artistic example rather than overtly political agitation. By contrast, another cadre of straight photographers, mainly in Europe and the Soviet Union, seized the camera explicitly as a tool of radical politics. Sometimes called the “New Vision,” this movement sought precisely that: photographic images that would present the world from a new and, one hoped, destabilizing perspective. Philip Johnson was in Stuttgart in the summer of 1929, and he took in the show.86 After seeing it, he confessed to his family that he had little taste for Chapter One: Objectification

those works that were entirely abstract. Here, Johnson was almost certainly referring to photographs of the New Vision: perhaps pieces by László MoholyNagy, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitzsky that tended much more toward the subversive capacities of cubism, collage, and constructivism, and looked much, much different from the worldly formalism of Weston’s bell peppers, for example. Turned off by experimentation, Johnson preferred the more straightforward views of this “new simple realistic type.” Works in this camp, he announced, “thrill me like paintings.”87 His taste for modern photography was then somewhat conservative. In fact, his comments on the matter corroborate a self-reflective insight he’d once confessed to his mother. Complaining about “lawlessness” on European roads and the inefficiency of foreign infrastructure, Johnson found himself missing the standardized comforts of home: “America is really a wonderful country,” he sighed.88 Quickly apologizing for the oozing nationalism of the sentiment (and referring to Sinclair Lewis’s well-known 1922 send-up of American conformity), Johnson admitted he could “get quite Babbitty” during his long stays abroad. It’s a more telling aside than Johnson wished—one that might account for his preference for the more straightforward photographs among FIFO’s many offerings. In 1934, Johnson could even be said to have paid homage to these straightforward, standardized views in his installation design for Machine Art. Exhibiting ordinary objects such that they were held still and isolated in front of nondescript backgrounds—bracketed, we might say, from their ordinary relationships to use, touch, and even the flow of time—Johnson’s installations approximated the effects and ideals of straight photography. Johnson even lit the objects like a modern photographer, using a combination of diffused overhead lighting and low-hanging spotlights. In this way, the galleries at MOMA were transformed into a photographer’s studio, with care taken to achieve both general illumination and moments of spotlit brilliance. In fact, the exhibitions spaces were probably not unlike Bernhard’s late-night home version, with all its carefully aimed artificial lights. On this point, it’s worth noting that the arrangement of the photo studio, perhaps especially its high-power lighting equipment, was a source of popular curiosity in these days. In fact, the photographic studio was enough a subject of representation that photographer and painter Charles Sheeler (who himself might be considered the high priest of modernist objectification) commemorated his own home photo studio, standing spotlights and all, in his emblematic self-portrait of 1931, View of New York.89 The photo studio—the very sphere of photography’s objectifications, preparations, and adjustments—was a likely point of reference for Machine Art itself. The photographic analogy that ran throughout Johnson’s display choices also spilled over into the show’s lofty epistemological ambitions, which had everything in common with Steiner’s “esthetic asceticism,” and the “aloof” appeal 46 47

of Strand’s straight photograph.90 Moreover, Johnson’s many acts of decontextualization in Machine Art—from use, touch, and time—served as an opportunity for adjustment, very much along the lines prescribed by Ogburn. The exhibit, in short, was a form of “adaptive culture,” in the sociologist’s sense, and it was on this merit that so many critics rushed to embrace the show. In San Francisco, the prominent critic Alfred Frankenstein noted that, in their normal contexts, Machine Art’s useful objects tended to “disappear altogether from view.”91 Use, for Frankenstein, was an impediment to the sort of intuitive, sympathetic visions that a show like Johnson’s cultivated. In fact, when everyday tools are “purposely employed,” he wrote, “they drop out of sight” and become invisible. Decontextualization was thus a necessary precondition, not just for visual appraisal and cognitive assimilation, but also for vision as such. So it was for other writers, who viewed the exhibition as a much-needed reminder to “open your eyes” and see the beauty of the modern material world newly “disclosed.”92 Photography had made the same promise, and Johnson’s display techniques rehearsed the formal and epistemological effects of that premier machine-age medium at many levels—chief among them was the act of decontextualization that Frankenstein so prized. In snatching utilitarian objects from their ordinary places in daily life, for the purposes of visual scrutiny and artistic contemplation, Johnson “captured” an object from the course of normal experience. The analogy to photography is easily drawn. Adding to the effect, Johnson’s installation aggressively enforced the objects’ removal from ordinary life with the imposition of raised platforms, glass vitrines, aluminum-tube barriers, and prominently displayed signs that reminded museumgoers, “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.” These cues had their schoolmarm’s purpose, but they also drew attention to how thin the line was between an object and its aesthetic objectification, between the tactile embrace of everyday life and the special kind of vision used in museum-style observation. Perhaps because of the fragility of Machine Art’s particular museological illusion, Johnson worked hard on his installation—conspicuously so, in fact— hoping it would set new standards for avant-garde exhibition display in the United States. Part of this work entailed remaking MOMA’s galleries into spaces more suitable for the veneration of the machine. He faced many of the walls in aluminum. He built giant exhibition platforms and tables in plywood (painted or varnished) and hung industrial spotlights. The biggest change to the galleries, however, was overhead: Johnson installed dropped muslin ceilings to conceal the townhouse’s decorative crown molding.93 This move effectively remade the high-ceilinged rooms (“it was a house, after all,” he later explained) into so many square boxes.94 Capturing everyday objects in these rooms, Johnson’s curatorial practice emulated photography in this way, too—as though the galleries Chapter One: Objectification

Figure 21 Installation

themselves were the internal chambers of a camera, a sealed-off space capable

view of Machine Art. Signs at each end of table read: “DO NOT TOUCH.” (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

of reproducing objects as representations of themselves. Finally, in the use of reflective sheeting and the presentation of objects in serial groupings, the galleries really did produce multiples of objects—objectifying these many items in reiterated repetition. In the presence of the machine, its byproducts, and its reiterations, MOMA’s visitors could take up the cause that Strand feared the machine age was making obsolete—that of the vita contemplativa—and, in so doing, they could also attempt to come to some kind of intuitive understanding of mechanization. Late in Machine Art’s travelling schedule, when it was broken into smaller units and distributed to more modest venues, a version of it landed in the Art Department of Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky. There, again, the coverage focused on the benefits afforded by Machine Art’s objectifying vision. Student Ella Mae Corn, a home economics major, summed it up nicely:

48 49

Figure 22  Philip Johnson (second from left), director of the Department of Architecture, preparing

for the installation of Machine Art. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

It isn’t often that most of us take the time to see the beauty and loveliness in the things we use in everyday life. Yes, I had been aware of the shapes of pots and pans in relation to their usefulness, but not as individual designs. Getting them out of their accustomed environment makes them new objects.95

Corn thus rehearsed the same logic by which progressive American critics also made apologia for photography: a technology that shared with museum display the capacity to make “new objects” out of old ones. In all cases, the endorsements of Machine Art’s reeducation of vision assumed that the intimacy of hands-on use and the fast pace of modern life were at odds with the sort of studious vision that true understanding demanded. Time and touch, apparently the enemies of comprehension, had to be bracketed out in order for vision and the work of understanding to begin. In this way, Machine Art accrued its accolades on the same merits as did photography. Transforming the museum into a camera (recalling, indeed, the spatial and architectural origin of that word), Machine Art also appropriated the camera’s many objectifying functions, especially as they had come to be understood and used during the American machine age.96

Objectifying Objects

Art historian Terry Smith contends that machine-age photography served expediently as a means by which to convey, celebrate, and explain mechanical modernism in the 1930s, a tendency he calls the “photomodern.” In Making the Modern, he argues that the practice of modern architects—their “paradoxically subtle plays with standardized shapes and unvarying materials”—not only invited but necessitated translation via photography: a medium touted for its capacity to “reveal . . . the ‘objective’ regularities and the unexpected occurrences in the photographed world.”97 The naturalness of the match between photography and architecture was apparent to machine-age moderns, Smith writes, a happy marriage of interests when “the machine for seeing meets the machine for living.”98 A similar case might be made for modern industrial design. If the camera was the ideal way by which to reveal the spatial possibilities of the new architecture, why not also the new material forms made real by mass production? Smith himself argues this case throughout Making the Modern, and the visual record bears it out: modern photographers effectively partnered with machineinspired modernism as a way of clarifying its terms. True to form, Machine Art’s catalog kept in lockstep with these trends, and so too with the arguments offered by Smith and by myself. Johnson’s Machine Art installations again repeat the logic of the photomodern, mimicking the techniques of the camera itself as 50 51

a gesture specifically in support of understanding. So far, so good. But there’s a hitch. For a show otherwise so kindred to the means and effects of photographs, Machine Art didn’t exhibit a single one. While photography dominated the show’s catalog and provided a guiding metaphor for its installation, the exhibition as staged was a strictly photo-free zone. Objects appeared frozen under bright lights (and often under plate glass), as though in photographs, and visitors were invited to scrutinize them as indexical traces of industrial change, making use of the representational operations long associated with photography. Machine Art’s objects were photographed, and in so many ways they behaved like photographs. But the clarifying benefits of these photographic objects—the insights they lent to intuition—were to come in the experience of three dimensions. Johnson displayed only three-dimensional things in all of the galleries of MOMA’s four-story building. He explicitly left out any additional illustrative material that might have helped visitors learn more about the industrial or design procedures that had shaped the look of contemporary “machine art.” In this choice, Johnson rejected the conventions of other machine-themed exhibits, which usually encompassed a wide array of didactic materials, including models and working machines. Even leaving aside his decision to omit painting and sculpture (which had nicely rounded out the Little Review’s Machine-Age Exposition), Johnson’s choice to exclude any models, plans, or mural-sized photos of American mass production certainly limited Machine Art’s scope. It is fair to assume that the absence of models and photo-illustrations in Machine Art was the result of a self-conscious decision on Johnson’s part. It’s not simply that he didn’t think of it as an option—he must have. Not only were these display practices common in contemporary trade shows, world’s fairs, and art-in-industry exhibitions, but such didactic aids had already played important functions in MOMA exhibitions. Johnson himself had used them in his Modern Architecture show of ’32. There, models helped visitors come to terms with some of the more outsized design phenomena of the day, even bringing skyscrapers to a smaller, more comprehensible scale. Making the pedagogical nature of these models clear, Johnson was shown posing with one for a Popular Science story; kneeling down next to a miniaturized steel-and-glass tower and pointing out its features with a teacher’s baton. Another MOMA show, a vanguard exhibition of mural decoration also held in 1932, had proven the visual appeal of wall-sized photography. Charles Sheeler’s photographic triptych of Ford’s Highland Park plant was the show-stopper in that case. As a precedent, the mural show (which followed on the heels of Modern Architecture and yet defied its ideals in a patently eclectic offering) also could have inspired Barr and Johnson to go after similar wallpapering for Machine Art—but it didn’t. Photo-murals Chapter One: Objectification

Figure 23  Philip Johnson

posing with a model built for the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture. (“How Our Skyscrapers Evolved,” Popular Science Monthly, April 1933, 23.)

would reappear at MOMA throughout the ’30s, as in Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Herbert Bayer’s Bauhaus: 1919–1929 (1938–1939). Certainly, such demonstrative techniques would have allowed Johnson a way to illustrate the more sublime, over-life-sized aspects of the American machine age: those assembly lines, smokestacks, and grain elevators to which his hero Le Corbusier had paid homage in his treatise, Towards a New Architecture of 1927.99 All of these precedents make Machine Art’s avoidance of photographs in display all the more striking. While it makes sense that Barr and Johnson would have preferred to set their art-in-industry show apart from all the others, it’s conspicuous and, I think, significant that they took the path they did; the one that led away from some of MOMA’s more inventive display techniques and away from those heroes of International Style functionalism whom Johnson otherwise emulated so readily. One of the many critics who credited the stillness of Machine Art for its ability to reveal beauty in ordinary things described that beauty as “palpable.”100 In connecting stillness to “palpable” beauty, the review seemed to suggest that by slowing the things to a standstill, Johnson had endowed them with the sort of material presence that was otherwise disallowed by the usual movements of use in normal time. The critic’s reference to “palpable” beauty was ironic, of course; willfully ignoring the show’s many prohibitions on touch. But the visual sensation of availability-to-touch was still operative. It served as an important, if only theoretical, anchoring for the sort of revelations they were said to al52 53

low. As with photography—which also derived grand, artistic meanings from the humble self-evidence of things—Machine Art also used real materiality as a seemingly unimpeachable support for its abstract, philosophical messages. It also, like photography, called upon substance as a support while always holding this support off limits in reserve. The uncanny stillness of Johnson’s gallerycameras translated three-dimensional fullness into a purely visual code. Real materiality—presented in person, but just out of reach—seemed to ground all the insights into machine-age technology that the show promised to unveil, beautify, and tame. Like the photographs that Bernhard took for the catalog, Johnson’s gallery installations also transformed the fullness of concrete presence into the abstract flatness of signs: signs not just for machine-age efficiency and order, but signs also for the potential for beauty within it—for harmony, balance, and well-adjusted organization. In his discussion of modernity as a thoroughly visual, thoroughly representational epistemological regime, Heidegger doesn’t once bring up photography. It’s a curious omission in some sense. As it would have been for Machine Art, photography would also have been an especially useful illustration for the philosopher. He might easily have gestured to the growing field of photographic representation as a “constant activity,” by which the world is continuously presented to its inhabitants as pictures. And when Heidegger makes statements to the effect that “no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism,” he practically begs the reader to fill in the blanks with reference to the photogravure page. The reader waits for the writer to make the connection himself. But it doesn’t happen. “Initially,” Heidegger knows what we’re thinking, “the word ‘picture’ makes one think of a copy of something.” A photograph, perhaps? No, it’s “more than this,” he counsels—still never naming the most obvious means of pictorial copying. Not just the chimerical, two-dimensional likenesses found in books, splayed across glossy sheets of paper, the “picture” of the modern mind is nothing less than “the world itself.” Things themselves, absent even their photomechanical transformation into flat images, flatten themselves into representation, such that they become their own “standard-giving” origins. They stand as signs of essence, presented before man-as-researcher as tokens of what Heidegger summed up as “being.” Three-dimensional things appeared this way in Machine Art, as pictures, as tokens, as objectifications.

Chapter One: Objectification

2

In Form We Trust

Machine Art’s Neoplatonism at the End of the American Gold Standard

By beauty of shapes I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the beauty of living figures or of pictures, but, to make my point clear, I mean straight lines and circles, and shapes, plane or solid, made from them by lathe, ruler and square. These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely. p l ato , Philebus

An earlier version of this chapter was published by the College Art Association in the December 2008 issue of the Art Bulletin (Jennifer Jane Marshall, “In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art Show,” Art Bulletin 90 [December 2008]: 597–615).

Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

Plato posited that abstract but perfect forms served as the master prototypes for the material world. These forms, are perfect, precise, stable, and as such, also beautiful—beautiful “not . . . relatively, but always and absolutely.” The material world, however, Plato held in less esteem. He viewed it as an inferior knockoff of the ideal: degraded in value because it merely represented truth, or reproduced it, when the goal of human thought should be to grasp ideality in its abstract, conceptual purity. Throughout his work, from book 10 of the Republic to his well-known allegory of the cave to the Philebus, Plato maintains a hierarchical—and mimetic—theory of ontology. That is to say, his understanding of all existence, including the existence of truth, hinges upon a series of imitations that he believed to be inherently corrupting. When the Real imitates the Ideal, some of its truth-value is lost, obscured. And, when Art imitates the Real . . . well, that’s even worse. Even more deceitful and misleading than the dancing shadows that preoccupy Plato’s cave-dwellers, Art is banished from Plato’s imagined republic on the basis that it is “thrice removed” from truth— just a copy of the world-as-copy, and a distraction from the proper, that is to say, the philosophical, job of discerning truth in the life of the mind.1 It’s striking how suitable Plato’s ontology of mimesis—his view of the world-as-copy, advanced in the fourth century BCE—is to discussions of the socalled machine age. When, to adapt Sigfried Giedion’s colorful phrase, mechanization took command of the U.S. economy following World War I, the American marketplace, home, and office increasingly did resemble Plato’s worldview—in fact, as well as in metaphor.2 Mass-produced commodities were, each one of them, actually copies of distant, unseen prototypes: identical imitations of some engineer’s draftsman-table design, but claiming among them no priority of “first-ness” or authenticity. The machine age’s apparent adherence to Platonic thought at least partially accounts for the renewed interest in the philosopher during the period. The philosopher Martin Heidegger made the connection; his writings on modernization drew attention to its Platonic suggestions. In his influential essay of 1938, “Age of the World Picture,” the German philosopher nodded to Plato’s idealism as a necessary precedent to the modern condition of omnipresent objectification. More than that, he said that Plato’s theory of the forms “predestined the world’s having to become a picture.”3 But having to become is not the same thing as becoming, and Heidegger was sure to emphasize that the metaphysics of the ancient world were at the time insufficient to the emergence of a fully representational world order: one in which simulation could handily substitute for reality. It would take modernity and its mass reproductions—what Heidegger allowed might also be called “Americanism”—to prepare the way for Plato’s representational ontology to take root as a more ubiquitous metaphysics, one capable of transforming the world into a self-legitimating picture of itself.4 56 57

Barr would argue the same in Machine Art. In his foreword to the catalog, he put forth the most forceful articulation of the show’s aesthetic philosophy; it is in fact because of this piece that Barr may be considered the co-curator of the exhibit (in spite of Johnson’s control over selection and arrangement of the objects). As much as Ruth Bernhard’s catalog photographs gave Machine Art its lasting visual appeal, Barr’s essay ensured its lasting intellectual interest, signaling that Machine Art was not just a show, but a treatise. In the very first paragraph of his essay, Barr claimed that the exhibit’s American-made, massproduced objects incarnated—for the first time in human history—Plato’s ideal of the form. He praised the perfection of the exhibit pieces, noting especially their geometrical precision, their material purity, and the organized elegance of their composite parts. He compared these aesthetic virtues to the “pure shapes” extolled by Plato and noted that these “first of the ‘pure pleasures’” could not have been realized in Plato’s day, when all the lowly carpenter had to work with were “simple handworker’s implements.”5 “But today,” Barr wagered, “modern materials and the precision of modern instruments” meant that Plato’s imagined ideals could finally be made real. By suggesting that machine technology made it possible to manifest Platonic form, Barr implied a radical revision to the ancient philosopher’s strict divisions between the real and the ideal. He also participated in a longstanding philosophical tradition: the attempt to overcome Plato’s famous hostility to the arts, so that the philosopher’s definition of beauty might be used for the arts.6 Under the banner of Neoplatonism, and beginning with the writings of the third-century Roman philosopher Plotinus, aesthetes had long entertained the possibility that the ideal could commingle with the real. Art itself, many maintained, was less a distraction from absolute truths or a duplicitous stand-in for them (Plato’s concerns), than it was their propitious revelation. Machine Art, in its culturally conservative presentation of Platonic ideals—perfectly adjusted to concrete objects—was thus fully in keeping with Neoplatonism. In this way, it could trace its intellectual lineage to at least the Italian Renaissance, when Neoplatonism had become a fashionable way by which to reconcile the ideals of Platonic formalism with the material productions of the arts. In a college term paper written at Syracuse University in 1930, a young Clement Greenberg commented disparagingly on this fashion. He characterized the Neoplatonism of fifteenth-century Florence as the soft-minded byproduct of a generalized yearning: artists, philosophers, and patrons looking for spirituality in the midst of humanism’s secularizing advance.7 To this extent, Greenberg dismissed it. But to the extent that Neoplatonism might have something to offer aesthetics . . . well, Greenberg saw promise in that. Perhaps the transcendental potential of Platonic idealism could be reconciled with art’s resolutely material presence. Greenberg’s charitable outlook on Neoplatonism Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

(a sympathy he allowed but did not detail) anticipates his own later critical stance in the 1940s and ’50s vis-à-vis abstract expressionism. His midcentury formalism—a simultaneous commitment to transcendence and presence—is thus cut from the same cloth as Machine Art. Barr and Johnson’s show, mounted four years after Greenberg’s senior-year term paper, ventured precisely the kind of Neoplatonic aesthetic ideology in which the student detected his possible theoretical beginning. Machine Art leaned heavily on Plato; Barr and Johnson selected a quotation from the Philebus as the opening epithet for both the show and the catalog; and the museum’s official literature repeatedly promoted the machine parts and products as so many instances of the Platonic ideal made real. Like Greenberg’s scorned Renaissance thinkers, we’ll see that Barr and Johnson also relied on the inheritance of Plotinus in order to square Plato with the arts. Moreover, although Greenberg wanted to eschew the metaphysical or, worse, self-help implications of Neoplatonism, Machine Art freely commingled aesthetic pronouncements with ideas about truth and value in everyday life. In its efforts to make universal absolutes accessible and palpable in the here and now, Machine Art’s aesthetic Neoplatonism had something else in common with contemporary popular sentiment. Many Americans attempted a parallel move to Machine Art during these years; protesting against President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s repeal of the gold standard in 1933, Americans hoarded gold as an act of faith that real objects could possess abstract value. Indeed, in addition to consumer goods and contemporary art, which both suffered criticism for an apparent drift away from principles (and were both very much at issue in Machine Art), money also became a frequent topic for anxious conversation in the 1930s, and for the same reason. Money, according to Georg Simmel’s treatise on the subject in 1900, serves as an especially sophisticated solution to the age-old philosophical problem about which Plato himself went round and round. As an instrument of representation and exchange, it serves as a means by which to reckon the one against the many; and, in terms more gracious than Plato’s, it adjudicates concrete particulars to abstract universals. Because of this, Simmel, whose influence was keenly felt in early-twentieth-century American thought, called money a “triumph . . . [o]ne of the great accomplishments of the mind.”8 If money can be taken as a model for negotiating between meaning and materiality, the end of the American gold standard in 1934 can be seen as perhaps the most telling example of modern value’s dissociation from any material substrate. A year almost to the day before Machine Art opened, a writer for the Wall Street Journal observed, “There is something about ‘money’ nowadays which resembles time and space, at least in the matter of its elusiveness as a concept.”9 Like time and space, particularly after Einstein, money seemed more and more like an indecipherable abstrac58 59

tion, well beyond the comprehension of most people living under its spell. Some moderns, including Georges Bataille in Paris and Marcel Duchamp in New York, took notice of money’s new semiotic openness and pulled further at this loose thread. Others, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, leavened their modernism with the conservative monetary analogies of the American Social Credit movement, upholding faith in currency and rejecting the abstractions of usury and debt.10 In our own time, the literary critics and art historians who have examined interwar modernism’s productive analogy between art and money have tended to take their cues from Bataille and Duchamp, viewing the end of the gold standard as a bellwether for empty signifiers and token abstraction.11 However, another analogy presents itself, this one more germane to the particular context of American interwar modernism: not in the end of the gold standard but in the popular reaction against it (and another of Simmel’s favorite tropes): in the act of hoarding gold. Machine Art offered an aesthetic philosophy of meaning matched perfectly to materiality and so shared the motivating assumptions of the rash of gold hoarding that was historically coincident with its staging. Turning to Platonic form as both the origin and standard of all artistic value—a conceit underscored both in Barr’s text for the show and in Johnson’s installation—the two men advanced a model of artistic beauty as guaranteed by timeless ideals. Raphael Demos, an interpreter of Plato during these years (and a mentor to Johnson at Harvard), wrote that “universals may be called abstractions, if the word abstraction be used neutrally, without derogation as to realness.”12 Machine Art retained responsibility, above all, to the stabilizing force of this kind of realness, doubly conceived not just as Demos’s Platonic ideal (which he called the “really real”13), but also, convincingly, as incarnate in the palpable stuff of modern life. Those who put their stock in gold assumed the same ontology of value: at once real as so many coins, and “really real” as an ideal and universal standard—an amendment also to Plato, as Greenberg had intuited and as Machine Art would obsessively insist.

Interwar Neoplatonism

Materiality has long been central to modernism’s interpretation, from cubism’s investigative dissections of café-table still lifes to abstract expressionism’s frank presentations of pure paint and canvas. By and large, however, the philosophical content of materiality itself has been less well considered. In the case of Machine Art, an idealist model of materiality was in play, one made possible in the show through explicit and repeated reference to Plato. However, the Plato of Machine Art was a very particular version of Plato. Machine Art’s Plato belonged to the Neoplatonic tradition heralded by Plotinus in the third century Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

and extending into the twentieth. In the moment of Machine Art, Neoplatonists could count among them both daring advocates of the cultural avant-garde and conservative philosophers, the latter seeking an alternative to the growing dominance of American pragmatism (well known for its relativist rejection of ideals). In its presentation of household objects as ideal forms, Machine Art implicitly advanced a Neoplatonic interpretation that emphasized the mysticism of “participation” over the more conventional (and more hierarchical) emphasis on “mimesis.” That is to say, instead of regarding the world as a degraded imitation of ideality, the Neoplatonic angle allowed Machine Art to enshrine its physical wares as portions of it. Like the Puritan idealists and New England transcendentalists who had discerned in Plato a kindred approach to viewing the sensible world as coextensive with the divine absolute, Machine Art suggested what we might call a “participatory ontology of value.” In this metaphysical economy, worth was guaranteed from above, even as it could also be grasped and held onto from below—in particular objects that participated in the ideal as portions of it. Proximate, tangible, and real, the particular item was imagined to be irrevocably tethered to a universal standard of value—ideality as an absolute guarantee, for all of its many, worldly parts. In all of this, the show followed in Neoplatonism’s long attempt to reconcile aesthetics with Plato’s theory of forms, and this notwithstanding the ancient philosopher’s famous indictments of the fine arts.14

Figure 24  Epigraph from the Machine Art catalog quoting Plato. (Digital image © The Museum of

Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.) 60 61

Plato was clearly Machine Art’s philosophical mascot. He showed up repeatedly in the form of a single quotation—the same quotation that appears as the epigraph for this chapter. This was emblazoned on the wall of the first gallery, reprinted in the show’s catalog (after a list of corporate lenders), and included in the publicity materials that MOMA distributed nationwide to art journals, popular magazines, and local newspapers.15 All of this ensured that, while two other quotations appeared at the beginning of the catalog, it was the short passage from Plato’s Philebus that gave the show its most strident epistemological banner. (The other quotes were taken from St. Thomas Aquinas’s thirteenthcentury Summa Theologica and Lawrence Pearsall Jacks’s contemporary cultural criticism of 1925, Responsibility and Culture.) Most writers recognized the excerpt as a didactic device used to justify the museum’s high esteem for ordinary objects. As critic Malcolm Vaughan put it, the quotation appeared as a “way of relating, for the average visitor, the beauty of a saucepan or a waffle iron to the lofty ideals of art.”16 There were some writers who objected to the attempt to square Plato with the cause of art. In the pages of Parnassus, art historian A. Philip McMahon declared that the exhibition’s use of that snippet of Philebus was “not appropriate.” First off, Plato had devoted that dialogue to ethics, not to aesthetics. Secondly, McMahon pointed out that any hope for a specifically Platonic redemption of the fine arts was foolhardy. An art writer after Greenberg’s younger heart, he asserted that Machine Art’s quasi-philosophical project was doomed, retracing (as he believed it did) the mistakes of “Plato [as] revised and interpreted by the Neoplatonists,” especially Plotinus.17 However, and in spite of McMahon’s opinion (which Barr himself had urged toward publication after receiving the essay as a personal letter), there existed a strong case in favor of Plotinus and Neoplatonism in contemporary readings of Plato. By 1934, contemporary art and philosophy had already made claims to the ontological possibility of Plato’s forms made manifest. A rhetorical attempt to square ideal abstractions with concrete particulars, the revival of Neoplatonism in the early twentieth century effectively made an end run around the most pressing critiques and challenges of abstraction itself. If some viewed abstraction as an ineluctable drift away from first principles, modern writers and artists drafted Plato to their cause, using his defense of universal absolutes as a way to remake abstraction over into a revelation—and not a corruption—of natural truths. Nearly sixty years after the fact, Johnson remembered that the idea of bringing Plato into the mix had been Barr’s, but he claimed that he had been the one responsible for picking the exact quotation. In an interview conducted during the winter months of 1990 and 1991 for the museum’s oral history project, Johnson recounted, “[Barr] was very big on Plato. So I looked up the Plato for Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

him . . . that kind of purity was Alfred’s big meat.”18 Johnson certainly had the background for acting as Barr’s philosophical counsel. As a philosophy major at Harvard during the 1920s, Johnson had cultivated a special focus on ancient classical thought, developing both reading fluency in ancient Greek and Latin and a deeply personal relationship with his mentor, Raphael Demos, an authority on Plato. One might even say that Johnson’s passion for philosophy, and for Plato, was hard to distinguish from his passion for his professor. When Johnson introduced Demos to a friend as the man who had inspired him to concentrate in ancient philosophy, his mentor—identifying the fickle fanaticism that would become Johnson’s trademark—joked, “Just now he is concentrating in Demos, next year in something else I suppose.”19 Johnson and Demos frequently dined and attended cultural events together, and it was through Demos that Johnson also gained social acquaintance with one of the department’s most distinguished personalities, Alfred North Whitehead.20 Johnson quickly became a repeat visitor to the Whitehead residence in Cambridge. The professor’s wife in particular took a liking to Johnson. She made sure he was invited to family events and took him on as a personal interlocutor, too, giving him a copy of War and Peace to discuss (although at first he thought it looked rather too long, Johnson eventually declared it “more thrilling every day”21). During 1926, Johnson obsessively committed himself to succeeding in the social life of Harvard’s philosophical elite, studying Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita, picking up George Santayana, and spending every spare moment with Demos, even accompanying him to see the African American tenor Roland Hayes sing one of his famous performances at Boston’s Symphony Hall.22 In spite of Johnson’s extracurricular commitments, Whitehead, the man Johnson described as “the greatest philosopher we have today,” would eventually dissuade him from pursuing his philosophical ambitions.23 In a later recollection, Johnson shortened this conversation to a single, comic blow, belying the considerable psychological anguish he suffered during these tender years. “I have two types of students,” he recalled Whitehead as having said, “A students and B students. . . . Philip, you’re a B student.”24 Although Whitehead himself did not take Johnson under his wing, the young student still imbibed the philosopher’s brand of “process philosophy”—through his exchanges with Demos, who was a far more encouraging mentor.25 Demos, too, greatly admired Whitehead. He extended both professional and intellectual gratitude when he dedicated thanks to the older scholar at the start of his 1939 volume, The Philosophy of Plato. Passively from Whitehead, then, and more directly through Demos, Johnson’s Harvard tutelage in Platonism was decidedly inflected by a particular breed of interwar Neoplatonism. Whitehead consistently credited Plato as the basis for his thought (and for philosophy as a whole), but his reading of Plato dramatically departed from the 62 63

modern era’s caricature of Plato as a strict dualist. David Rodier has recently argued that Whitehead derived inspiration from a version of Plato that more closely resembled the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus and the seventeenthcentury Cambridge Platonists than the “secularized Platonism” that had gained dominance at the turn of the twentieth century (largely through the impact of Benjamin Jowett, whose translation of Plato’s dialogues remains definitive).26 Distinct from the hierarchical dualism of Jowett’s Platonism, in which the ideal is always kept separate from the phenomenal, Whitehead’s thought advances a more continuous ontology of participation, one in which, in Whitehead’s words, “some eternal greatness [is] incarnate in the passage of temporal fact.”27 Demos maintained his colleague’s Neoplatonic notion of continuity in interpreting Plato for American readers. When the New York Times ran a review of The Philosophy of Plato, the reviewer (then-aspiring poet Howard Nemerov) commended it as an important interpretation over and above the household Jowett, and this likely because of its amendments to dualism.28 Although explaining that Plato’s dialogues vacillate between dualism (irreconcilability between the real and the ideal) and participation (a coextension of the two), Demos himself always seemed to settle on the latter, characterizing Plato’s statements in favor of “connectedness” as typical of the philosopher’s “maturer [sic] and more emancipated period.”29 Taking up Whitehead’s cause of anti-dualism (while also self-consciously positioning himself against pragmatism’s encroaching dominance), Demos advanced the idea that Plato’s forms are “both absolute and relative,” and, as such, the physical world should properly be viewed, not as an unfortunate corruption of perfection, but as the harmonious commingling of “essence and instance.” 30 This view lent itself naturally to a Platonic apology for the arts, which Johnson, for one, had always felt was implicit in the dialogues. In a letter written home to his mother during his Harvard days, Johnson expressed a yearning to reconcile his beloved Plato with the cause of art. “We must not forget,” he wrote, “that Plato loved poetry even though he wished to banish it. . . . It was a rather poetic idea of his . . . in theory.”31 In the later oral history interview, Johnson did not indicate how he had decided on the Philebus excerpt for use in Machine Art, but in truth, it probably did not depend on his association with the philosophical elite of Harvard. By 1934, the excerpt from Plato’s last dialogue was already in fairly regular rotation among the international avant-garde, usually put to rhetorical work in defense of pictorial abstraction. Privileging nonfigurative shapes over “living figures or . . . pictures,” the quotation provided felicitous support for modernism’s swing away from naturalistic representation. Alfred Stieglitz used it for precisely this purpose in the October 1911 issue of Camera Work, where he printed it alongside an abstract charcoal sketch by Pablo Picasso titled Standing Female Nude.32 According to the art historian George Hamilton Heard, in an article published in Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

1952, this was “the first time, in America at least, that this now-familiar statement was used to justify abstract painting.”33 The quotation popped up in the United States two years later, again under Stieglitz’s direction. On the heels of the Armory Show’s sensational success, Stieglitz mounted a solo show of cubist works by Francis Picabia, recently made famous as one of the more brazenly abstract exhibitors at the Armory.34 A brief catalog accompanied this exhibit, and it was there that the Philebus excerpt appeared again, once more exalting the Platonic virtue of nonfigurative abstraction. In later interviews in the 1960s and 1990s, Johnson made no mention of these earlier American precedents. The Stieglitz usage was not likely to have been his source material, as the quotation printed in Camera Work differs noticeably from that in the Machine Art catalog, which may well have been Johnson’s own translation.35 In any event, these avant-garde appropriations of Plato all work to reposition abstraction as an adequate solution to the problem posed by Plato’s outward hostility toward the arts. After all, as Mark Cheetham has pointed out, when modernism turned its back on naturalistic representation, in favor of pure, abstract form, it sided (often self-consciously so) with Plato’s hierarchy of form over its imitation.36 Contradicting Johnson’s claims to have picked the Plato quotation for Machine Art, Sybil Gordon Kantor, Barr’s most recent biographer, credits MOMA’s director with the selection. She’s right in noticing that all signs point to Barr’s comparatively greater interest in Plato at the time of the show. By the late 1920s, and in line with Demos’s prediction, Johnson had largely retired his interest in Plato in favor of a new affection for the decidedly anti-Platonist thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. Moreover, Johnson himself cited Barr’s inclination toward “purity” as the main reason for Plato’s inclusion.37 Barr’s apparent preference during this time for the “intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear and classical” in modern art (as he put it in his essay for Cubism and Abstract Art) is in keeping with Johnson’s recollection, as is the young director’s sense of himself as tending toward “objectivity instinctively,” and his “feeling that . . . emotions were too ephemeral to be indulged.”38 Nonetheless, as Kantor rightly notes, the degree to which Barr may have been personally attracted to Neoplatonic philosophies was likely subordinate to his scholarly sensitivity to Plato’s increasing currency among the transatlantic avant-garde.39 Neoplatonism, and its defense through recourse to the Philebus quotation, enjoyed renewed popularity among European modernists during the early twentieth century. Its mystical intermingling of spirit and substance attracted the interest of the likes of Giorgio de Chirico (whose avid reading of Arthur Schopenhauer would have exposed him to aesthetic Neoplatonism) and Piet Mondrian (whose tutelage in theosophy came courtesy of M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, who included the Philebus excerpt in his writings of the 1910s).40 Cheetham’s history 64 65

of modernist Neoplatonism examines its currency in the work and reception of Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and the de Stijl artists, including Mondrian—all artists to whom Barr attended closely in his scholarship of the 1920s and ’30s. Yet, while Cheetham’s stated interest in nonmimetic formalism precludes his examination of French purism, it was this movement’s appropriation of Plato that was perhaps closer to Machine Art’s, in that it adjusted Platonic idealism to the material world of manufactured form. Barr and Johnson both closely followed French purism, or l’Esprit Nouveau, and Kantor identifies this influence as the most likely source of Barr’s interest in Plato and the Philebus quotation in particular. Developed during the years surrounding World War I by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (then CharlesEdouard Jeanneret), purism advanced a coolly rational version of modernism, one based on “the object, the type, the Platonic, mechanistic and geometric,” as Reyner Banham later characterized the movement’s central preoccupations.41 The Philebus quotation so nicely articulated purism’s brand of modernist neoclassicism that Ozenfant included it in the March 1916 issue of L’Élan, shortly after having been introduced to it by the Parisian art dealer Léonce Rosenburg.42

Figure 25  Amédée Ozenfant, Fugue, 1922. Oil on canvas. (© 2011 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of Robert Allerton through the Friends of the Academy, 1945 [3478.1]).

Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

Figure 26  Charlotte Perriand,

Ball Bearing Necklace, 1927. Photograph by Julian Clobus. (© 2011 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Copyright 2010 Archives Charlotte Perriand.)

In its work to adjust the formal experiments of the French avant-garde to the neoclassical ideals of Western civilization, purism offered a conservative and highly nationalist defense of modernism, and it did so at a moment of cultural and political crisis. Kenneth Silver has described the movement as part of “an important cultural transformation” of the avant-garde, shifting it away from the iconoclastic posture of “disrupt[ion]” and toward a modernism that valued cultural accommodation.43 Later, in the context of the Depression, Machine Art filled much the same role in the United States. Conservative, nationalist, and reactionary, Barr and Johnson’s display of American-made machine products might be said to amount to this country’s version of the French l’Esprit Nouveau. The parallel is unsurprising, given Johnson’s well-known affection for Le Corbusier and Machine Art’s de facto status as the industrial design sequel to the so-called international style exhibition Modern Architecture, staged by Johnson with Henry-Russell Hitchcock at MOMA two years prior. As it had been in that earlier show, Le Corbusier’s presence was strongly registered in Machine Art—in the chair he designed for Thonet Brothers, in the aluminum tubing accents, and in the ball bearing itself, which Charlotte Perriand, the architect’s design assistant, had only recently reconceived as a necklace in 1927. Even the choice of 66 67

wall color for Machine Art—a pastel array of purism’s preferred pinks, blues, and grays—reflected Johnson’s affectionate familiarity with how European neoclassical functionalism might be adapted to the work of interior design. Machine Art also shared purism’s putative goal to find reconciliation between the apparent disruptions of modernism—abstraction in particular—and the established values of classical art and philosophy. Such conciliatory gestures were perhaps necessary for Barr in 1934, when mounting calls for a “swing back to sanity” and a “forced readjustment” of values had come to characterize the popular response to an increasingly uncomfortable era of abstraction.

Interwar Indeterminacy

When MOMA opened its doors in November 1929, public debate had lately begun to escalate regarding the artistic, intellectual, and moral worthiness of modern art. This controversy, even a few years prior, would have seemed passé. In the decade after the outrage inspired by the Armory Show of 1913, the modern movement had gained in prominence and position. Although perhaps not a settled matter, modernism was no longer shocking by 1929; or it shouldn’t have been. But a shift had occurred, along the lines of a retrenchment. Art critics of the 1930s retreated to skeptical posturing and exhorted readers to be on the defense against “hocus pocus” and “tommy-rot.”44 Among all the condemnations, a certain tendency emerged: distrust of modernism’s apparent independence from normative standards of value, its apparent autonomy. No longer responsible to the external governing norms of naturalistic representation (or any other greater guiding principle), the most recent experiments of the avant-garde seemed to pursue only the most fleeting and idiosyncratic sort of aesthetic values: self-expression, subjective experience, and intellectual and stylistic trends. Further, and to the vociferous dismay of many American critics, the unmooring of art from any general standards opened it up to unchecked and directionless proliferation. Such criticisms closely paralleled contemporary concerns about the modernized American marketplace. Critics of both modern art and modern commerce resorted to the same set of complaints: both were called too arbitrary, too irrational, too premised on self-indulgence, too deceitful, and too favorably inclined toward excess. At times, these twinned sets of incriminations braided together. The artist George J. Cox made this association in an article for The American Magazine of Art in 1932. Arguing that contemporary modern art had fallen prey to “facile eclecticism” in its growing diversification, Cox threw up his hands in the face of a field “almost as subject to change as the style of ladies’ hats.”45 Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Millier worried that the younger followers of modernism had gotten carried away in their zeal, resulting in a “market Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

[now] . . . flooded with offerings.”46 Millier then went on to quote a bit of contemporary criticism from Paris, which suggested that even in that most famously hospitable environment for modernism, critics had grown unreceptive to artistic volatility. Millier excerpted a review written by the critic Camille Mauclair, in which the Frenchman compared the continually regenerating avant-garde, and the galleries and dealers that fed off it, to “the worst practices of the stock market”—betting on trends, artificially inflating values through imposed scarcity of styles (as quickly dropped as they were adopted), and generally stoking volatility for the purposes of profit.47 The conceivable similarity between modernism’s rapidly reproducing “isms” and modernity’s rapidly reproducing commodities did not escape MOMA’s director. Addressing readers of the Park Avenue Social Review in 1933 (and recalling Cox’s criticism of the prior year), even Barr expressed dismay that modern art’s rapidly changing developments were “as confusing as . . . modern fashions for ladies.”48 In this resurgence of bewilderment, then, latter-day skeptics distrusted modernism less for its departure from academic traditions (after all, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh were then widely accepted as modern masters among American audiences) than for its aimless pursuit of excess—pursuing innovation just for innovation’s sake, without any fundamental principles to guide its course. It was to this perception of modern art that Barr addressed his work at MOMA, seeking to present an interpretation of modernism that would preserve faith in art’s tempering responsibility to an external cause. Depression-era anxieties about modern art paralleled contemporary worries about modern commerce, because value had become especially indecipherable and unpredictable in both spheres. In the marketplace, this was perceived as a fundamental dissociation between things and their values. As the number and types of things multiplied more rapidly under mass production, their values rose and fell according not only to supply and demand but also to the manipulations of early-twentieth-century capitalism, including planned obsolescence, mass advertising, and industrial design’s efforts in product “styling.” After the collapse of the stock market, commentators tended to identify market unpredictability itself as a source of continued economic trouble, blaming it for declining consumer confidence and, therefore, a perpetuation of low prices and profits.49 The contemporary art world had similarly been rocked by trends that struck its critics as increasingly arbitrary, superficial, and short-lived. In both spheres, materiality did not appear to limit or even necessarily guide evaluation. The degree to which objects were just convenient signs of shifting abstract value, rather than its reliably concrete incarnation, was now plain—and also, in both cases, deeply uncomfortable. In his first inaugural address in early March 1933, President Roosevelt cautioned the nation against “fear itself.” Speaking of the era’s many hardships, this 68 69

was also the speech in which he extended the note of consolation so apt to our discussion of Machine Art: “They concern, thank God, only material things.”50 To roaring applause, the new president had articulated what had come to be a common sentiment among Depression-weary Americans. Real meaning had nothing to do with material wealth, and true value was an abstract intangible, never to be found on any store shelf or mail-order catalog. Religious and spiritual sentimentalism pervaded Roosevelt’s gesture of reassurance. His speech suggested that Americans would find succor in the comfort of life’s intangibles—one’s family, one’s faith—and that these values should be the ones to which Americans might turn in the face of catastrophe. Or finally return, one might say. The moralizing tenor of Roosevelt’s inaugural address tapped deeply into a commonly felt sense that the Depression itself was a moral reckoning: a forced return to “real” values after a period of wanton extravagance. In this, Roosevelt’s voice was just one in a chorus of contemporary cultural observers. On New Year’s Day just a few months prior, a New York Times Magazine article urged Americans to return attention to the deeper “goods of life,” and none other than Henry Ford had voiced this same anticonsumerist sentiment the year before, hoping that the country would learn to look beyond “material objects . . . to discover what life is about.”51 Such Depression-era moralizing—hokeyness and all—promoted a model of value not unlike that ventured in Machine Art. In both contexts, “real” value was timeless and absolute, unassailable and transcendent, perfectly moral, and well beyond (but not irrelevant to) the crass world of mere objects. Perhaps these higher, immaterial values could bring America’s economic life back into balance, endowing secular values with an inflexible standard of meaningful measure. “We used to talk about ‘moral values’ and ‘material values’ as though they were two different and contradictory things,” wrote Bruce Barton in 1932, but the advertising guru, not surprisingly, had come to believe otherwise. It was not so much that Americans should forsake the marketplace for the more exalted “goods” of faith and family as that they should learn to reckon the former in light of the latter. Preaching to the readers of American Magazine, Barton wagered, “This depression must have taught us that they are the same thing, that without moral values there can be no material values.”52 Real meaning, in Barton’s Christian and consumer-friendly sermonizing, was simultaneously in the world and beyond it. Appealing to an implicitly religious high ground, Roosevelt, Ford, and others assumed an essentially Platonic ontology of value, one in which meaninggiving standards of value exist outside the secular world of daily life. Barton was more explicit about how these realms interacted. “Moral values” and “material values” were “the same thing,” a commingling of transcendence and immanence that had long been part of the Anglo-American theological tradition—not just in the figure of Christ as God made man, but also more specifically in the New Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

England tradition of puritanical thought. This spiritual tradition—with roots on the same campus where Philip Johnson would later page through his copy of Plato in the original Greek—championed the same model of value that Johnson learned from Demos: essence could be grasped in instance. Absolute value and reliable worth, the spiritual and the concrete—these were also the poles of one of the most conspicuous of the era’s many debates concerning meaning and materiality, namely the debate over the gold standard. This monetary policy, which tethered both currency and exchange to a (theoretically) absolute measure of worth, was itself a paradigm of the sort of value compromises that Machine Art tried to strike in its Neoplatonic formalism. By 1933, it was also a monetary policy that was no longer in effect in the United States. In the year leading up to Machine Art’s debut—a year in which Johnson was scouring factory showrooms and department stores for ideal objects—a national conversation was implicitly taking place over the same Neoplatonic model that became so central to the exhibition: the physical incarnation of absolute value.

End of the American Gold Standard

In late February 1933, the New York Times reported on a sermon that compared the international gold standard to the Christian ethic of the Golden Rule. Both, warned the Reverend Dr. Frank Wade Smith, had a tendency to be abandoned during times of great stress.53 The year 1933 obviously fell into such a category—and sure enough, President Roosevelt soon set into motion a series of legislative measures to end the gold standard in the United States. This move was protested by a host of critics who tended, like Smith, to view any tampering with the gold standard as a flirtation with “evil.”54 Called “probably the best monetary standard that the world has yet devised,” gold was eulogized as an inviolable standard of economic value and stability, rooted in an “established tradition” of Western civilization since “olden times.”55 In fact, the American gold standard was not so deeply rooted, even in the history of U.S. fiduciary policy. The nation had only somewhat recently returned to a system of convertible currency, halfheartedly reinstating it in 1879 after a period of “greenback” circulation during and after the Civil War. Nor had the policy well served its vaunted purpose of ensuring stability. The “money question,” long one of the most divisive issues in American politics (beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s quarrel with Alexander Hamilton on the subject), raged during the late nineteenth century and reached an apogee in 1896 with William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech. What’s more—and as Bryan’s fearful visions of rural farmers crucified to a centralized economy of unary value would suggest—the gold standard itself had once been characterized as evil, and not that long ago. This ongoing national fight over credit and currency faded only 70 71

after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913, which, although controversial, ultimately owed its passage to a stated commitment to maintain gold as a standard. This commitment was largely rhetorical, however. Gold would back currency, yes, but as a yardstick gold had been redefined as flexible: a unit of measurement that would fluctuate right alongside changing rates of credit and interest.56 Just as painted representations beat a conspicuous retreat from the physical world, so, too, was currency taking leave of its material foundations. After 1913, money would be only so much paper, backed by obscure theorems beyond the ken of all but a select few.57 Although never a rigidly fixed system of fiduciary management, the international gold standard had nonetheless operated according to certain general principles during its global expansion in the nineteenth century. Fixed at a universal price per pound, gold acted as the ultimate commodity against which all others could be measured. This representational economy of exchange derived from the early-nineteenth-century theories of David Ricardo, who advanced gold as an expedient standard because it partakes equally of the same qualities it is used to measure: value and materiality. As such, gold models an ontology of value that nicely corresponds to the Neoplatonic notion of participation: a gold coin embodies worth (it’s valuable in and of itself) but also derives its worth synecdochically (as a token that stands in handily for the whole). Gold’s synecdochical economy of representational value promised the kind of security that many Americans craved during a period of severe economic unpredictability. Groping toward an understanding of money’s real or imagined value, writers in the early 1930s turned again and again to gold’s material participation in an abstract ideal. Defending the need for the gold standard, one writer for the Wall Street Journal asserted that money could never succeed as just paper, backed only by mathematical, statistical, or probabilistic analyses. Instead, money needed a sturdier material foundation, “something that is real, tangible and desirable.”58 No wonder, then, that in the midst of rapid and unpredictable fluctuations in the dollar, many Americans in the early 1930s sought not just gold-backed currency but gold itself for comfort and security. The collapse of the British gold standard in late 1931 set off an international wave of gold hoarding. By March 1933, the League of Nations estimated that nearly a billion dollars’ worth of gold had been withdrawn from banks and treasuries worldwide.59 For their part, Americans squirreled away hundreds of millions of dollars of the metal, tucking it into “safe-deposit drawers . . . coalbins and mattresses,” “buried cans and bureau drawers,” all in a “panic loss of confidence.”60 Yearning to hold onto value in itself rather than surrender to the relative values of dollars or commodities, hoarders put their faith in gold’s potent incarnation of absolute value. In response to the rush of withdrawals, and only days after his inauguration, Roosevelt issued a set of emergency meaChapter Two: In Form We Trust

sures. Famously, these included a “bank holiday,” which enforced a temporary cessation of all financial transactions in the country; they also included prohibitions on any trade or dealing of gold itself, and steep fines and prison terms for those who failed to return their private stockpiles of gold to banks and treasuries.61 The last decree resulted in a “gold rush in reverse,” but in spite of all the highly publicized returns, more than $700 million in gold still remained unclaimed by the government in May, and the problem continued to dog Roosevelt through the beginning of 1934.62 As a result, on January 30, Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act, legislation that effectively spelled the end of the American gold standard. Its replacement, the “managed international gold bullion reserve standard” (a revised gold standard as qualified and changeable as it was a mouthful), altered public perceptions of money’s representational reliability. Called the whim dollar or the Roosevelt dollar, American currency after the Gold Reserve Act obeyed the transitory needs of marketplace exchange rather than the unchanging anchor of $20.67 per ounce of gold. Like fashions for ladies, money had now become seasonal. In explaining the Gold Reserve Act at its official unveiling, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. called the new system “the 1934 model gold bullion standard.” Getting the joke, one witty journalist requested a single point of clarification: “Streamlined?”63

Participatory Idealism

A number of scholars of both art history and literary criticism (including Alec Marsh, Walter Benn Michaels, and Marc Shell) have seized upon the analogy between art and money in the American context.64 A number of others (such as Rosalind Krauss and George Baker) have paid special attention to how this analogy plays out in European modernism given the historical concurrence of the end of the gold standard and the rise of abstraction in the early twentieth century.65 Starting from this coincidence, these writers have advanced a view of modernism as a semiotic economy of “token” signs: a representational regime in which meaning lacks guarantee, is negotiated locally, and may slip freely between registers and degrees of value, according to the whims of chance or the fiats of the state. Much of this commentary derives its potency from literary critic Jean-Joseph Goux’s theories, especially as elaborated upon in The Coiners of Language, where he exploits the ready comparison between the end of the gold standard and the era’s dramatic transformations in literature and linguistics. 66 Goux positions the gold standard as another in a series of general equivalents, like one-point perspective in painting, the logos in language, or the phallus in psychoanalysis: a baseline for exchange that guides the adjudication of particulars to universals. The gradual extinction of these standards in the decades follow72 73

ing World War I, along with the emergence of increasingly relative processes of evaluation, posed a crisis of representation—one that drew decidedly mixed reactions from artists and writers. The signpost at this junction, as Goux would have it, pointed in two directions: either to the nihilistic attitude of what he calls the “tragic-destructive approach” or to the idealist reifications of an effectively “constructivist” tactic.67 Against the threats to meaning posed by cubism, Dadaism, and other provocations of the historical avant-garde (and not at all associated with the Soviet project of constructivism), Goux’s constructivist forces sought “to counter . . . devaluation and discreditation” with “eternity and solidity.”68 Such an anxious defense of stable meaning can be witnessed both in gold hoarding and in the Machine Art show—yet this tendency to preserve value has captured far less art historical attention than the opposing reaction to the same condition, namely the avant-garde’s exuberant embrace of value’s dissolution. Drawing heavily on Goux, Krauss has marshaled his theory of the “tragic-destructive approach” to art-historical ends, taking notice of the “strange chronological convergence” between monetary abstraction and a modernist aesthetics of the same.69 Krauss takes Picasso as a demonstrative case, arguing that, in effect, the artist presaged the end of the “gold standard” model of representational stability by devising cubism’s visual economy of open, relational meaning—only to then fake “a return to the gold standard of visual representation” in his postwar neoclassicism (a version of purism’s return to stability, which Krauss deems counterfeit by dint of its highly attenuated mode of quotation and pastiche).70 Goux’s monetary semiotics of abstraction has also proved useful to Baker, specifically in his recent reevaluation of Picabia’s involvement with international Dada in the 1910s and 1920s. In contrast to Picasso’s post–gold standard send-up of semiotic guarantees, Baker considers how Dada sought to “exacerbate” modern value’s slide into nomadism, deterritorialization, and Bataille’s theorized economy of profligate wastefulness.71 If Baker is right in asserting that Dada perpetuated “a never-ending semiotic voyage”—most especially in its ironic use of ready-made materials as a means to further destabilize meaning—then Machine Art worked to opposite effect, and through nearly identical means. Not only did the exhibit repeat the move to reclassify ordinary objects as works of art, but Machine Art even used a number of the same objects that had been featured in earlier Dadaist incursions. These included both the aluminum outboard propeller, which Picabia had featured (with the unflattering title Âne, or Ass) on the cover of 391 in 1917, and the ball bearing itself, which Man Ray had disassembled, bottled up, and titled Export Commodity in 1920. Picabia’s version of the outboard propeller is, in some ways, not dissimilar from Ruth Bernhard’s photograph in the Machine Art catalog. Picabia also situates the object in the aestheticizing isolation of the void. Moreover, since he Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

Figure 27  Catalog illustration of exhibit #41, Aluminum Company of America, Outboard Propeller.

Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Figure 28  Francis Picabia,

Âne, 1917. Cover of 391 magazine, June 1917. (© 2011 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.)

pairs the propeller with a word—ÂNE appears in three capital letters just below the drawing—Picabia might even be said to have drawn upon the same objectglorifying tradition that Bernhard’s father, Lucian, had popularized in his advertising posters in Germany. Indeed, Picabia’s interest in the commercial aspect of his object is crucial; he drew on the visual language of both engineering and advertising throughout his period of Dada experimentation. But here, the pairing of ÂNE with the drawn outboard propeller obscures more than it clarifies: a drift in meaning perhaps at odds with the heavily determined messages of Picabia’s reference points (blueprints and ads), but fully squaring with capitalism’s deeper self-interest: that values be manipulable and available to trade. Some further thoughts on Picabia’s titling: a punchy, one-syllable word, written in three block letters, ÂNE partakes of the logic that also governed AmeriChapter Two: In Form We Trust

can branding culture at the time. (Man Ray was certainly conscious of its conventions, at least to the extent of picking his own catchy pseudonym.) But the “brand name” Picabia assigned here is impolite: either a word for “donkey,” which makes no apparent sense given the image, or slang for “fool” or “ass,” which starts to. Who is the fool in this image? Picabia as jester or the viewer for taking his bait? And what about the ass? Returning to the propeller itself for answers, the viewer is embarrassed to find some: the propeller’s flapping wings might serve as buttocks, its ballooning lower blade hangs like scrotum, and, well, there’s even a hole. Foolish, for sure. Machine Art depended on text, too, but never this way. Its catalog ushered objects into an edifying associative realm, highly controlled by a rhetoric that lead to Platonic reflection and value-laden piety. But Picabia’s gesture shows language to be a problem for Machine Art. If Machine Art required explanation so that viewers might understand its high, formalist meanings, then could the objects really be said to have embodied those meanings independently? Picabia’s drawing, emblazoned on the cover of a little magazine (housing more words and more images), draws attention precisely to what Barr and Johnson’s show sought to supFigure 29  Man Ray, New

press: that it is in the open field of discourse and association where meanings

York or Export Commodity, 1920. (© 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY / ADAGP, Paris. © Telimage–2010.)

reside, meanings that can be as crass as they are contingent.72 Man Ray played with many of the same ideas in Export Commodity. He constructed the piece simply: a handful or so of loose ball bearings plunked into a glass olive jar and labeled “NEW YORK” at its lip.73 In this, as art historian Amelia Jones has suggested, it was as though Man Ray had bottled up the very idea of America for transatlantic export—much in the way his friend Marcel Duchamp had done with Paris (bottling its air for the American collector, Walter Arensberg).74 The work, then, operates with ready-made associations as much as with ready-made objects, depending upon the viewer to correlate the sleek, precisely made ball bearings with the smooth-running efficiency of American industry. In packaging this conceit, however, Man Ray interrupts the smoothness of that association in the first place, stymieing its realization and unleashing a few more unruly associations in turn. Dislodged from their intended steel

76 77

encasement, the ball bearings no longer make machines (or meanings) run efficiently. Instead, the impression they yield now is rather more of congestion or clogging, imparting to the viewer an indeterminate number of imagined, sympathetic experiences: pressed with identical passengers against the windows of a crowded New York subway, cringing at the screeching sound of metal against glass, or choking on an esophagus-sized ball of steel, placed wickedly where olives are supposed to be. Again, the contrast with Machine Art is apparent. Barr and Johnson, in their catalog and their exhibition, labored to contain the contingency of free associations and determine the absolute value of the show’s objects. Export Commodity contains objects—uncomfortably—but its genius lies in its released hold on meaning. Counter to Dada’s appropriations, then, which preyed upon commercial objects as pawns in a game of endless free association, Machine Art appropriated its commercial objects as a way to stabilize evaluation, as much for artworks as for commodities. Not idiosyncratic particulars but each object a reflection of an external, ideal norm, Machine Art’s objects shared patterns, repeated forms, and literally reflected one another, amounting to a visual illustration of how singular objects partake in universal ideals. “There have been philosophies which have divorced value from being,” Demos wrote in The Philosophy of Plato, philosophies that “conceiv[ed] standards as ineffective in nature. . . . But for Plato this bifurcation does not exist.”75 As we have seen, Johnson’s mentor advanced a particular interpretation of Plato, seeking to revise the increasingly canonical view of Plato as a strict dualist. Insisting that Plato equally “resorts to both notions of participation and imitation,” Demos made room for an alternate Platonic ontology: one that imagines the ideal not as distant archetype and standard but as what Goux would call “the embodied general equivalent,” immanent in the very things to which it gives rise and governs.76 For Demos, this extension of the ideal into the actual is a necessary precondition for the practice of philosophy. “From the observation of beauty in concrete things,” he promises, “we are led to beauty in the forms.”77 This maxim serves nicely as an explanation of Machine Art’s project, which took functional objects of ordinary life and turned them into useful object lessons in form and value. For a museum tasked with explaining modernist experimentation to an increasingly skeptical public, the implied payoff of this Platonic approach was considerable. Once abstract values could be located in the familiar physical world, modern art’s apparently meaningless abstractions instead became clear-sighted meditations on what Demos termed the “really real”: those abstract forms from which actual objects derived their value and very being. In the first sentence of his Machine Art catalog essay, Barr underscored the exhibit’s allegiance to Plato, but he did so in language that evoked a Neoplatonic intermingling of abstract ideals and concrete particulars. The result of this Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

intermingling, Barr explained, was beauty. “The beauty of machine art is in part the abstract beauty of ‘straight lines and circles’ made into actual tangible ‘surfaces and solids.’” 78 Barr’s passive verb construction leaves the means of production up to speculation. What is clear (besides complicity with the alienation of industrial labor, to be explored in the next chapter) is form’s priority as the prototype for all things, though not in a manner that would necessarily lead to its corruption in the physical world. Asserting that the “abstract” can be “made . . . tangible,” Barr thus implies a much different relationship between the ideal and the manmade than the one presented by Plato’s best-known diatribe against the arts. In book 10 of the Republic, Plato describes a mimetic chain of increasingly degraded value: God creating ideal forms, the carpenter imperfectly imitating them, and the artist then imperfectly imitating these imperfect imitations. Art is thus left in the unfortunate position of being “thrice removed” from the absolute value of pure form. In his Machine Art essay, Barr rejects this mimetic ontology in favor of one in which the absolute is in fact made real in the sensible world, not as representation but as presence itself. This was Barr’s Neoplatonic end run around Plato’s condemnation of the arts. It also made for a convincing defense against the clamoring of the more conservative art critics, who still faulted abstract art because it failed to imitate the natural world faithfully. To this attack, Machine Art’s Neoplatonism countered that in such failure lay modernism’s philosophical success. Abstraction’s retreat from the traditional project of naturalistic imitation—its foursquare rejection of mimesis—became the triumphant overcoming of exactly that aspect of art that Plato had found so troublesome. Rejecting representation in favor of incarnation, formalist abstraction afforded a solution to art’s degraded status in the Republic’s representational economy of aesthetic value. In distinction to abstraction’s slide into valueless indeterminacy—this to the applause of the Dadaists and the handwringing of art critics—Machine Art instead recuperated abstraction as a stable and stabilizing ideal. Both immanent presence and an absolute guarantee, the abstract was now the “really real,” flowing freely between the general to the particular. Plotinus, that founding father of Neoplatonism, explained his understanding of participatory ontology: “There can be no representation of [the ideal], except in the sense that we represent gold by some portion of gold.”79 Whether in coins, bullion, or treasury reserves, gold both is and refers to value. As the embodiment of pure value, gold currency takes for granted the immediacy of its representational capacity. Certainly, this was gold’s attraction to Depression-era hoarders eager to hang onto some type of palpable intrinsic wealth. A material form of currency perfectly adjusted to unquestionable worth, gold felt like the perfect legal tender: solid, immediate, and real. Thus, if the participatory ontol78 79

Figure 30  Machine Art

ogy at work in Machine Art was in keeping with the Neoplatonic tendencies of

catalog illustration of exhibit #2, American Steel & Wire Co., Section of Spring. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Johnson’s mentors at Harvard, it also ran parallel to hoarding as a response to the end of the gold standard. With its representational economy, Machine Art was not approximating an aesthetic version of the gold standard, which is effectively a mimetic system in which currency imitates gold in its function of exchange. Machine Art asserted more than just an abstract guarantee for its machine parts and household goods, and something even more bankable than convertibility: Barr and Johnson’s exhibit effectively ventured an aesthetic economy homologous to gold coin currency. No mere promissory notes, the steel springs and kitchen sinks themselves embodied value, made it physically incarnate. This was the most powerful aspect of Machine Art’s participatory ontology of value. As perfect manifestations of ideal form, the objects derived their value from an absolute, participating in it. But the guaranteeing effect ran in both directions. As physical objects, the show pieces also seemed to prove the existence of the perfect, mathematical forms in the first place—as though offering empirical proof of those shadowy forms that Plato once only dreamed about. Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

In a publicity stunt staged a couple days before Machine Art opened, a panel of judges selected the three most beautiful objects in Barr and Johnson’s show.80 Best in show went to a single coil section of thick steel spring, or exhibit item #2: Section of Spring, manufactured by the American Steel & Wire Company in Worcester, Massachusetts. The spring was a good choice, perfectly living up to the ideals of beauty laid out by the show’s brief excerpt from the Philebus. One of Plato’s preferred shapes, the circle is made manifest (to borrow Barr’s revealing verb tense) in the piece of rolled and coiled steel. The spring has neither a “japanned” nor a “black temper” finish, surface treatments made available by the American Steel & Wire Company though its 1934 catalog warned against them as a friction-causing impediment to functional efficiency.81 The aesthetic effect of the plain finish is twofold. First, the spring seems honestly to disclose its material substance, which appears absolutely coextensive with its form; in this way, it fulfills modern design’s often moralistic rebuke of ornament at the same time it nicely illustrates Demos’s definition of the Platonic ideal as “initselfness.”82 Second, the lack of applied finish, given also the coil’s curvature and breadth (rolled into a rectangular shape about two inches thick), allows the spring a chance for material self-reflexivity: inside its inner loop, the spring reflects itself. The spring both is and refers to ideal form, perfectly adjusting instance to essence. A circle indeed. As Plotinus knew, the value of any quantity of gold is both proximate and deferred, immanent and transcendent, since it embodies a part of the collective ideal from which it derives its worth (i.e., gold in general). Gold’s shininess is in some ways a sign of this very duality, indicating at once the metal’s substance and the mirroring way by which it reflects an external absolute. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, literary critic Walter Benn Michaels makes the case that, besides its ability to catch the eye, gold’s reflective surface acts as a physical iteration of the metal’s representational function as money. He writes, “It is as if the gold reflects itself and so really is its own reflection, an object that becomes what it is by representing itself.”83 Shine, reflection, representation: these are congruent terms in Michaels’s argument. They also figured prominently in Johnson’s objectifying displays. Reflectivity played a major role in the selection and display of Machine Art’s many objects. The overwhelming majority were composed of high-polish metals or uncut glass, and those that were not—the more uncommon wood or porcelain pieces—had also been burnished to a nice gloss. In fact, elbow grease had played a role in the success of the aforementioned steel spring, as noted in the April 29, 1934, edition of the Worcester Telegram, which proudly announced that the regionally made product had been prominently featured in an art show in Manhattan.84 Clifford F. Hood, the district manager of the American Steel & Wire Company, recounted how the spring had been just one of many samples 80 81

Figure 31 Installation

lying around in the warehouse when “the museum’s representative” paid a vis-

view Machine Art, including laboratory glass display. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

it. The scout, almost certainly Johnson himself, saw potential; the piece “was buffed until it glistened” and promptly carted off to its debut at the Modern. Johnson also took great care in lighting all the objects. We’ve seen how this produced a photographic effect in the installation, and how Johnson’s use of lights might have recalled for viewers the photographic studio. This practice also maximized the reflective surfaces of Machine Art’s objects, especially so in his theatrical display of laboratory glassware. On tabletops covered with black velvet, Johnson arranged Pyrex vessels according to type and size and in serial gradation, formally echoing one another in a series of identical shapes. By illuminating the groupings with bright, low-hanging spotlights, Johnson brought out the surface brilliance of even these most transparent things. The reflective Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

Figure 32  Illustration from Corning

Glass Works, Pyrex Laboratory Glassware (New York, 1933, 30; courtesy of Corning Incorporated. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.)

glare from the lights lent the glassware substance, and reflection itself appeared as the primary content of material form. This was also the strategy of the Pyrex company itself, which solved the tricky problem of how to illustrate their perfectly transparent products by using surface reflection as a sign of material presence. In their catalogs of the period, patches of white light—both hand-drawn illustrations and heavily retouched photographs—indicate the phenomenal presence of the otherwise “invisible” items. In these catalogs, as in Johnson’s installation, reflective glare lent substance to glassware. The squeaky-clean surfaces of the show’s objects advertised the sort of material honesty that Barr and Johnson advocated in their catalog essays. Barr endorsed the self-declarative and “sensuous beauty of porcelain, enamel, celluloid, glass of all colors, copper, aluminum, brass and steel,” while Johnson touted “smoothness” and “polished metal” as the virtues of machine design. “Mak[ing] a clean sweep of inherited bric-a-brac,” as one critic put it, the exhibit’s straightforward objects displayed their substance as forthrightly as their shape, hiding 82 83

Figure 33  Machine Art catalog illustration of exhibit #142, Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co., Wear-

Ever Griddle. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

behind no frumpy patterning or ornate design.85 This, many believed, was one of the show’s best features. In fact, critics were so enthusiastic in supporting Machine Art’s celebration of material self-expression that some took Johnson to task for not staying even truer to his own ethic. Baltimore critic Jerome Klein contended that objects like electric toasters, carpet sweepers, and heating units were really too complex to fit the show’s aesthetic mandate. Klein praised the “grandeur of the mighty hotel sauce pans,” but maintained that the contraptions with “neatly painted or brightly surfaced casing[s]” had no rightful place in a show like Machine Art.86 Klein held material honesty paramount and, indeed, such self-disclosure was more in keeping with the show’s stated Platonic aims. After all, unobstructed engagement with the concrete was meant as a means of communion with the ideal. Johnson divulged his mania for shiny, self-disclosing surfaces in print, too, in his lengthy correspondence with the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) in the months leading up to Machine Art’s opening. The Pennsylvania Chapter Two: In Form We Trust

outfit supplied Johnson with large panels of shiny aluminum sheeting for use as display accents but expressed doubt that the material could uniformly attain the high level of finish that he had explicitly requested.87 About a month later, the exacting curator wrote again. Apparently now satisfied by the panels, Johnson’s complaint this time was with the poor surface quality of exhibition #142, the Wear-Ever Griddle, lent by the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company, a subsidiary of Alcoa. In response, the kitchenware manufacturer instructed Johnson to use “a pad of #00 steel wool . . . [and] rub the surface . . . with circular motions.”88 Ironically, although the show’s official rhetoric insisted that Machine Art’s beauty was automatic, natural, and “unconscious,” Johnson missed no opportunity to buff, primp, and polish—and his efforts paid off. Art critics roundly embraced Johnson’s work as a masterpiece of installation, and many slyly wondered if the displays weren’t in fact the only “art” in Machine Art.89 More deeply, however, the thoroughgoing shimmer and gloss amounted to a visual iteration of the exhibit’s Neoplatonic aesthetic of formal participation. Johnson’s highly reflective objects gave material figuration to Barr’s idealist notion of materiality, by simultaneously disclosing the physical essence of the thing itself and performing deference to an external absolute.

Neoplatonic Participation and Modernist Formalism

“If you like ball bearings and springs,” wrote Lewis Mumford in his review of Machine Art, “you are prepared for Brancusi, Moholy-Nagy, Jacques Villon, and Kandinsky.”90 Barr and Johnson’s show contained no works of modern art (neither actual nor illustrated), but it seemed a given that the exhibition must contain some sort of thesis on modern art, staged as it was at an institution casually known as the Modern. While it was impossible to compare ball bearings directly against works by Constantin Brancusi, the show’s dogged insistence on the absolute primacy of Platonic form established a foundation on which to build an appreciation for modern art. Seeming to reveal ideal form made manifest in ordinary things, Machine Art asserted a realm of the “really real,” at once abstract and proximate, to which the apparently groundless abstractions of modern artists could now be seen to refer. Retethered to an external absolute, all those cubist squares and sculptural ovoids could now be viewed more charitably as efforts to reveal value in materiality rather than to further the dissociation between the two. In the idealist model of formalism it advanced, Machine Art renounced abstraction—at least “abstraction” as many American critics then understood it, as the rejection of natural external principles. In this respect, the exhibit closely corresponded to Barr’s thinking at the time. In other writings, he tended to cast modernism’s stylistic diversity not as an unfortunate lack of purpose but 84 85

as goal-oriented research into fundamentals. In his catalog essay for MOMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art show of 1936, Barr explained how modernism’s many “isms” could be grasped more easily once broken into “two main traditions.”91 He described the first through a chain of hard-nosed equivalents: “intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear and classical.” The second, accordingly, is much softer, and Barr’s more florid prose on this side reflects it: “intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual; organic or biomorphic rather than geometrical in its forms; curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural, and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational.”92 Although Barr appeared to prefer the first of the two traditions, he believed that the second would soon overtake it in influence and importance: a forecast fully in agreement with Whitehead’s perceived trend toward “fluent energy” and away from “static stuff.” Nonetheless, and as was typical of the majority of his writing in that period, Barr was nothing if not evenhanded in his treatment of the two tendencies, and he certainly didn’t cast the latter in terms that would be familiar to Goux. Those artists in Barr’s romantic category were not “tragic-destructivists” bent on destabilizing meaning, but simply artists working toward form through other means. He even offers Plotinus as a source of influence for the second tradition, indicating that Machine Art’s idealism extended beyond neoclassicism to include also romanticism. Perhaps tellingly, it is not Plato named among the heroes of the first tradition but Pythagoras, indicating that the Plato of Machine Art could not take sides between the two tendencies and instead gave cover to both. Whether geometric or organic, then, classical or romantic, all varieties of modern art in Barr’s pantheon participated equally in the material expression of value. This attitude reflects something of the views of Whitehead, who saw variance in contemporary thought as a productive force, operating in the interests of progress. Musing in 1925 on the apparent impasse between modern science and religion, Whitehead urged optimism: “In formal logic a contradiction is the sign of a defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.”93 The article, which recommended “the utmost tolerance of variety of opinion,” was one Johnson singled out for special mention in one of his many missives to his mother in these years, and it nicely expresses Barr’s ethic of practiced magnanimity in the face of artistic undecidability.94 “We should wait,” Whitehead preached, cautioning patience with science’s multiple paths toward discovery.95 Likewise, Barr preferred to see artistic diversification as a form of research, wherein the discovery of true principles was always at stake. In the Park Avenue Social Review piece where he admitted that modern art might be as confusing as “modern fashions for ladies,” Barr politely suggestChapter Two: In Form We Trust

ed an alternative analogy that suggested truth-seeking rigor instead of fickle indeterminacy: one might more fruitfully compare contemporary art’s rapid transformations to scientific research. How could it be, Barr wondered, that the public could stand “in awe before the mysteries of modern physics and biology,” while at the same time “resent the fact that modern painting is also a complex affair”?96 Both were difficult and obscure at times, but both were also directed toward the pursuit of truth. For Barr, as for Whitehead, contemporary diversification was not at odds with greater historical purpose, nor even with the evaluative structure of ideal absolutes, as in Whitehead’s comforting claim that “some eternal greatness [is] incarnate in the passage of temporal fact.”97 To the contrary, the split in interwar modernism that Barr described was not a real quarrel, nor did it admit to the specter of modern indeterminacy or valuelessness. Instead, and in keeping with Whitehead’s brand of Neoplatonism, Machine Art offered up its exigencies of the particular as though each of them were ever and always bound up in eternal absolutes.

86 87

12 34

The Art of Parts Machine Art’s Alienated Objects and their Rationalized Reassembly

The move toward mechanization in manufacturing is often thought of as a trend toward de-skilling, but it’s more accurately described as a redistribution of skills from manual craft toward managerial acumen. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor formalized the new direction in his book Principles of Scientific Management. In it, he argued for the necessity of quantifying worker activities, promising that doing so would eliminate drags on productivity and so maximize the economic value extracted from work.1 Urging managers to view human effort as a precious resource—one worthy of saving—Taylor’s theories led to a radical restructuring of the factory, first in the United States and then in industrial centers around the world that were inspired by the transformations of so-called Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

Americanization. Noting the time it might take for one worker to move back and forth ferrying parts and tools between different workbenches, the wise manager under “Taylorism” would shorten that distance or, better, remove it altogether, delivering parts to the worker through mechanized conveyances. These transformative strategies of industrial management marked a phase of twentieth-century modernization that has come to be described broadly as rationalization: the reorganization of human and material resources specifically around principles established in advance through measurement, calculation, and direct observation (hence the “scientific” in “scientific management”).2 A similar narrative could be retold for Barr and Johnson’s exhibition, which likewise favored headwork over handiwork. Nowhere in Machine Art could visitors learn about the many individuals who had designed or made the objects. As the show’s press release made clear, the beauty of the exhibit pieces had nothing to do with industrial workers at any level, but instead derived exclusively from the “unconscious result of the efficiency compelled by mass production.”3 In those rare cases where an object was attributed to a specific industrial designer, the press release assured readers that the designer’s efforts were nothing more than “a conscious application of machine principles.”4 Portrayed as a blind, almost natural, process of reproduction, mechanization appeared in Machine Art as a reliable—and reliably disinterested—source of formal perfection. This patronizing dismissal of human effort and creativity in industrial manufacturing systematically expunged any conscious intention on the part of industrial managers, engineers, designers, or assembly-line workers. It was also necessary to the success of Machine Art’s Neoplatonism. In order to sustain belief in pure, timeless form, production had to be reconfigured into acts of skilled revelation, not creative invention. Given form’s dominance at Machine Art, in other words, all labor could only but be in deference to it. The success of Barr and Johnson’s aesthetic discourse thus relied upon the alienation of creative labors. Once this was achieved, not only could the illusion of form’s unworldly absolutism be maintained, but the way could be made clear for a distinctly modern model of artistry.5 In the context of the early twentieth century, and on the occasion of a show meant to venerate industrial standardization, Barr and Johnson’s formalist idealism effectively suggested Taylor’s scientific manager as the paragon of the re-skilled modern artist. Johnson, for one, overtly embraced this administrative style, modeling it to a tee in his well-publicized actions as the exhibit’s primary curator. First, he alienated objects from their origins in manual production (a gesture of deskilling that relied upon a “quasi-primitivist” discourse of unconsciousness, as we’ll see). Then, he furthered this alienation by pretending to discover and reveal form as though it lay naturally nascent in industrial products (a selfaggrandizing act of re-skilling that positioned the discerning curator as form’s 90 91

partner in revelation). Finally, he arranged his irreducible units of prefab form into several new combinations (both in MOMA’s galleries and, as we’ll learn, in his own home). These acts of reassembly were not meant to interrupt the inherent values of each individual object-form but instead to illustrate the rationalized ease of their efficient reassembly. Depending upon the alienation of commodity values from their origins in manual work—precisely by mystifying these values as “form”—Johnson’s claims to curatorial artistry piggybacked on the suppression of the skills that went into the manufacturing of Machine Art objects. If Machine Art alienated human acts of creative production in its discourse of Platonic, prefab form, it wasn’t always supposed to be that way; early in the show’s conception, Johnson envisioned an exhibition that would have made many more concessions to the lively and messy world of factory work. Indeed,

Figure 34  Aluminum Company of America, “Drawing Seamless Tubing,” in Alcoa Aluminum and its Alloys (Pittsburgh, PA, 1937, 10; courtesy of Alcoa, Inc. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.) Figure 35  Aluminum Company of America, “Forging a Propeller Blade,” in Alcoa Aluminum and its Alloys (Pittsburgh, PA, 1937, 30; courtesy of Alcoa, Inc. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.)

as he began to solicit manufacturers for help, he pitched Machine Art as “the first exhibition of industrial art in this country assembled from the point of view of the industrial process itself as well as from that of design.”6 One of Johnson’s early letters is particularly striking for the very different kind of Machine Art show it imagines. In November 1933, Johnson wrote to the senior vice president of the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company (an Alcoa subsidiary) to spell out an elaborate idea he had for a smaller display within the larger show. “I should like to start this display,” Johnson wrote, “with the elements which go into making aluminum, such as bauxite and amblygonite, and carry it on through the metal powder, foil and metal sheet, then carry it farther to include extruded shapes, tubing, structural units, pots, pans and perhaps pistons.”7 This step-by-step narration of the aluminum manufacturing process followed almost to the letter Alcoa’s own institutional pamphlets of the period. These booklets (which Johnson may have received as an Alcoa stockholder) came replete with photographs of men busy and blurry with the work of combining minerals, rolling sheets, and extruding tubes.8 As it turned out, however, these were exactly the labors that would be invisible in Machine Art. It’s impossible to know how much Johnson really intended to display industrial processes and how much he proposed it as a calculated gesture of goodwill to corporate higher-ups at Alcoa and elsewhere. But, whatever his reasons, the decision to scrap any demonstration of production in favor of out-and-out tribute to form amounted to a gesture of near-total worker alienation. The scant credit that Machine Art and its reception did grant to wage laborers, designers, and businessmen was generally dismissive and ironic in tone. The human partners to machine production frequently took their turn in the criticism as oblivious fabricators of accidental art, usually shocked and naïvely skeptical of the news of their “discovery” by an art museum. Johnson got the ball rolling with this kind of smirking reportage. To a journalist who paid a visit to MOMA while the curator was in the last throes of installation, he confided that “some of the makers were a little astonished to hear that their products were art.” He then added, dismissively, “I suppose they thought art was painted lamp shades and bronze statuettes.”9 In this conversation, we see Johnson being rather unkind to the men he’d met in assembling the show, assuming them to be too dumb to recognize the value of their own creations. The unfortunate caricature stuck, even making a surprising appearance in a trade magazine for hardware manufacturers and metal distributors. In the pages of Iron Age, a commentator noted, “springmakers will be flabbergasted to learn that they turn out objets d’art.”10 Two New Yorker cartoons extended this line of humor. One showed an inactive laborer in front of an unfunctioning machine. Explaining the work stoppage to his boss, he apologized, “I’m sorry sir, but we ain’t been able to turn 92 93

Figure 36  Alan Dunn, cartoon,

New Yorker, April 7, 1934, 30. The caption reads, “I’m sorry, sir, but we ain’t been able to turn a wheel since our differential bearing went on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.” (© Alan Dunn / The New Yorker Collection / www. cartoonbank.com.)

Figure 37  Alain, cartoon, New Yorker, April 14, 1934, 41. The caption reads, “Recognition at last! The Museum of Modern Art wants to give me a oneman show.” (© Alain / The New Yorker Collection / www. cartoonbank.com.)

a wheel since our differential bearing went on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.”11 A later cartoon returned to the subject—and to the surprisedworker theme—but with a slight amendment to the punch line. The emphasis now was on an industrial executive instead of a floor worker—a tweak that also hinted at the reallocation of skills in the labors of manufacturing. In the executive office of the fictitious “Acme Faucet Co.,” its tiled walls indicated by a simply drawn grid and punctuated by a selection of faucet fixtures, the company’s head honcho waves a letter in front of a smiling, bespectacled yes-man, bragging, “Recognition at last! The Museum of Modern Art wants to give me a one-man show!”12 Significantly and unsurprisingly, the manager comes off better than his underlings did in the earlier versions of the same joke (shocked and shrugging); he’s the one with the “one-man show,” after all, and is evidently conscious of the “real” (read: artistic) value of his work.

Commodity Fetishism

Unlike other modern movements to valorize the so-called applied arts, Machine Art did not seek to repair the eroding connection between manual labor and commercial production. As one anonymous writer observed, comparing MOMA’s new show with the earlier Arts and Crafts movement, “William Morris would turn in his grave.”13 Unlike Morris’s efforts to overcome mechanization by balancing it out with artistry based defiantly on manual craftsmanship, Barr and Johnson’s show built upon modern alienation’s deepening chasm and turned it into a value: a source of “unconscious” beauty and proof of its numinous origins.14 This was a sore spot for many of Machine Art’s observers. While taking it seriously as an invitation to careful, philosophical rumination, a less sympathetic contingent of writers strongly objected to how thoroughly Johnson’s display had divorced modern-day objects from their intended contexts in productive labor.15 Margaret Breuning of the New York Post advised that her readers skip Machine Art and “go snooping about and prying into the . . . fascinating inventions” at a proper industrial exhibition—one that would teach its audience how and why its exhibit pieces did what they did.16 Dorothy Grafly from Philadelphia expressed a similar desire, hoping to escape MOMA’s frozen functionalism and slink into a working factory, where she might spy the more thrilling world of work. “Personally, I can find more real beauty in a great tandem of dynamos doing their stuff in a basement,” she confessed, “than in Machine Art’s rows of carefully graduated bottles or jars.”17 But “alienation” was not the word these writers used when trying to put their finger on what it was that troubled them. Their shared term to describe Machine Art’s offense also returns us to the ontological status that Barr and Johnson ventured for these things: objects said to represent the ideal by in carnating some portion of it. The term? Idolatry. 94 95

Breuning had seen Machine Art before it opened at a special preview staged for invited guests and members of the museum. After viewing it, she returned to her office to pen a response. What she issued was less a review than a strongly issued admonition. “If . . . we prostrate ourselves before the machine, itself, in adoration,” she wrote, “we have evoked a veritable Frankenstein that may devour our remnant of civilization.”18 Another critic at the preview, Albert Franz Cochrane of Boston, also found the display unsettling. In the moralizing review that resulted, “Gyration About a Ball-Bearing,” Cochrane urged readers to resist MOMA’s invitation to kneel before the machine. Those who did, he warned, were not unlike the idolatrous Israelites of the Old Testament, those “sacrificial victims at the Shrine of Moloch” to whom Moses addressed his divine prohibition against false idols. Cochrane was not one to mince words, and he went further. “We are in danger if, burning the frankincense of adulation, we fall down and worship at the feet of our man-made Frankenstein.”19 Both of these early commentators articulated what would prove to be a minor but repeating motif of Machine Art’s reception. When the show travelled to Milwaukee, the local press reported on the sight of “a gas stove [that] stands like an altar in a niche.”20 And on the radio in New York, the artist E. M. Benson spoke with conspiratorial confidence to his listening audience, saying (according to the transcript): “I certainly would never build an alter [sic] to a ball-bearing, and I don’t think you would either.”21 Charges of wrongheaded machine worship would have struck a chord. Mechanized industry, once celebrated as a means to save labor and increase productivity, had by 1934 come under scrutiny as an evident cause of worker displacement. Widely reported statistics counted the numbers of jobs lost to machines—machines described, in a cruel bit of irony, as “labor-saving devices.” Any boastful optimism that might have laced these statistics in an earlier moment vanished into dread and resentment during the Depression. The phenomenon gained a shorthand: anyone who had lost a job to a machine came to be called the victim of “technological unemployment.” This particularly dehumanizing form of job loss was illustrated unambiguously in a booklet written by William Fielding Ogburn (our adjustment-obsessed sociologist) and published by the American Council on Education in 1934. Titled You and Machines, the small guide was so dismally sober about the American worker’s ability to compete with mechanization that the head of the Civilian Conservation Corps had it banned from work camps so as to preserve the fragile confidence of young men. Machines, as the cartoons in the pamphlet made clear, stripped the worker of his control over his tools, drove him mad with punishing standardization, and eliminated any spark of his individuality from the final product. One cartoon showed a tin man pushing a fit, white worker away from “The Job,” while in another drawing, the same white figure mimed outrage at a government Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

Figure 38  F. G. Cooper, cartoon for William Fielding Ogburn, You and Machines (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1934, 6; reproduced with permission from the American Council on Education.) Figure 39  F. G. Cooper, cartoon for William Fielding Ogburn, You and Machines (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1934, 9; reproduced with permission from the American Council on Education.)

that would impose quotas on immigrant workers but was unwilling to regulate mechanization.22 Ogburn’s message—“Before we had machines there was no unemployment such as we know now”—only reinforced the widespread belief that mechanization was the single biggest threat to the American employee.23 For socially minded observers like Benson on the radio (an active participant in artists’ unions in the 1930s), blind adoration of the machine was a grave political error. It amounted to an irresponsible disregard for the socially deleterious side effects of worker disenfranchisement and displacement. In this strong reaction against Machine Art, idolatry was a useful—and telling—buzzword for expressing the offense taken at the show’s alienating effects. Idolatry is defined as the worship of an object or image as though it were the divine rather than merely its representation. Of course, this was exactly the logic that Machine Art upheld and even promoted; its objects, like gold coins, were to be apprehended as incarnations or portions of a formal absolute, not its inferior representation. So the critics were dead-on in their reading of the exhibit, they just weren’t in support of its implications. Another term they might have used, especially in order to extend the inherently social interest of their critique, would have been “commodity fetishism”: a term favored by Karl Marx and one that makes the significance of Machine Art’s idolatry to industrial consumerism clearer. Commodity fetishism is defined as the mistaken perception of spirit in commodities, seeing them as practically animate objects endowed with human meaning and value. Marx postulated that the consumer’s tendency to anthropomorphize his purchases—enough to love and live with them—stemmed from a 96 97

failure to recognize commodities as representations of human labor. Marx, like Machine Art’s iconoclasts, wanted to shake the worshippers from their stupefied thrall, and awaken them to conscious awareness of the real spirits that toiled behind them: human workers.24 Marx was making a calculated rhetorical choice in using the term “fetishism” to describe capitalism’s mystifications. With it, he meant to force recognition that the motivating desires behind “modern” industrial capitalism were not so different from the worship of fetishes in “primitive” ethnographic contexts. Given Marx’s eagerness to point out the homologies between “modern” and “primitive” feelings toward objects as containers for spirits (homologies that have led some, notably William Pietz, to observe that Western ethnographies of fetishism were at least partially a case of cross-cultural projection), it’s useful to consider Machine Art’s machine-age fetishes alongside some others exhibited at MOMA the very next year.25 This later show again delved into the territory of “unconscious” art production, again presumed to remove objects from their

Figure 40  African Negro Art

catalog illustration of exhibit #81, Polychrome Mask With Horns, Ivory Coast. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

original contexts of production and use, and again reobjectified these decontextualized artifacts under the banner of abstract formal beauty. In this later case, James Johnson Sweeney’s African Negro Art, the idols were rough-hewn and patined instead of metallic and buffed clean, but the discursive ground of formalism’s alienation would remain largely the same—“the same pattern, only a different shade,” to appropriate a slogan from the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, a frequent commenter on African art and primitivism in these years.26 In African Negro Art, as in Machine Art, the ascent to the pedestal was a path marked by alienation. Sweeney’s show participated in the same exercise of aestheticizing decontextualization that had underwritten Johnson’s efforts for Machine Art. He made use of the same formalist rhetoric, too, maintaining that the show’s central significance lay in its artistic values, not its functional interests (though “ethnographic” generally substituted for “function” in the literature).27 And, like Johnson, Sweeney also opted for a sculptural model of display over the contextualizing installations of ethnographic dioramas, or “life groups,” even though the latter had risen to prominence since the turn of the century, owing to the influence of Franz Boas’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.28 Sweeney said he wanted to overcome the “clutter” of “ethnographical museums,” where the “esthetic character” of the artifacts “was of no interest.”29 African Negro Art’s sculptural installation thus promised to elevate its objects out of two prior contexts of utility: the objects’ original, ethnographic uses and their secondary, scholarly function in museums and universities. A third function, Sweeney’s writing suggested, was thus allowed to emerge: the function of aesthetic contemplation. Triumphing over applied use had been Sweeney’s objective, and he encouraged MOMA visitors to attempt the same. He finished his catalog essay, which otherwise gained abundant praise for its attention to cultural and historical specificity, with a paradoxical admonition that such interests ought to be bracketed when viewing the works—only then could the artifacts’ real artistic values be revealed. Sounding very much like Barr (who reassured Machine Art visitors that one need not be an expert in engineering in order to excel at aesthetic appreciation), Sweeney wrote, “In the end . . . historical and ethnographic considerations have a tendency to blind us to [African art’s] true worth.”30 Instead, to identify the “true worth” of the objects he’d assembled, Sweeney pointed to attributes quite like those trumpeted in Machine Art: formal “simplification,” “three-dimensional organization,” an “uncompromising truth to material,” and the “abstract principles of sculpture.”31 Aesthetic revelation again entailed a transformation of things used for doing into things used for thinking. Ostensibly on opposite sides of the dividing line of modernity, Machine Art and African Negro Art both played a constitutive role in MOMA’s ideal formalism. This was made explicit the year after Sweeney’s show, when Barr drafted 98 99

Figure 41  Alfred H. Barr Jr., cover

of the exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art (1936). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3.C.4. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (MA208). (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

his well-known flowchart of modernism’s historical development, a family tree in which both machines and African artifacts make a significant appearance. Drafted as a didactic aid for the museum’s ambitious 1936 historical survey show, Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr’s chart diagrams the genealogical descent of modern art from 1890 to the 1930s. Influence, reconfigured to resemble inheritance, is indicated pictorially through the use of arrows. Straight or bending, these pointed lines show neoimpressionism as the progenitor of both fauvism and cubism, and the Bauhaus as the offspring of a union between expressionism and constructivism. The black lines all flow downward with the march of time, which is indicated in the twinned columns of dates down the sides.32 Situated among all the modern movements are four red boxes, each one generating crimChapter Three: The Art of Parts

son arrows of influence but not receiving any—closed to art’s evolution by the hard edges of their rectangular limits. These four interruptions to the chart’s flow all indicate sources of artistic influence hailing from outside Western art’s family tree, but whose blood seems somehow to have gotten into the mix. Most of the boxes refer to non-Western materials—“Japanese Prints,” “Near-Eastern Art,” and “Negro Sculpture”—but the fourth, “Machine Esthetic,” refers to a distinctly modern and Western source of artistic inspiration. The “otherness” of these red boxes has been duly noted in the art historical literature, but precisely the operative content of this difference has not been fully considered.33 Racial, national, and geographic differences offer themselves readily as explanations as to why Japanese prints, Near Eastern art, and Negro sculpture are graphically set apart, but what of the fourth box? What does the inclusion of the machine esthetic imply for the chart’s racially coded primitivism? Barr’s inclusion of the machine—a force germane to modern science and technology—disrupts any pat understanding of primitivism as simply a nonWestern alternative to Western modernization. The posed dichotomy between racial difference and modernity seems an incomplete account of what is at work in Barr’s influential visual aid. Unconscious production—or, better, artistic deference to formal priorities—was as significant to Barr’s chart as racial otherness. It was the backbone of his aesthetic theory. Few critics noticed the similarities between the two discourses of formalist primitivism, but some did. When Machine Art showed in Minneapolis in the fall of 1936 (well after MOMA had circulated African Negro Art to the same region), a local critic offered a suggestion as to how to approach the show. In order to maximize the kind of artistic appreciation that MOMA had in mind, this Minnesotan found it helpful to regard the ball bearings and airplane propellers in the same way he viewed “the unconsciously creative efforts of African Negro artists.” “The only difference,” he explained, “is the kind of use. In our case, it is utilitarian; in theirs, religious.”34 Laurie Eglington, editor of Art News in New York, also saw parallels between the arts of Africa and the arts of the machine. Or, more to the point, she saw parallels between how the two had been fetishized by MOMA’s displays. She made the connection in the context of reviewing African Negro Art, in a forceful piece of writing that turned out to be one of the very few unfavorable reviews Sweeney received for the show. Where most critics had applauded his tastefully spare installation, Eglington proclaimed in her article’s very headline that the show’s spaciousness did the artifacts a disservice: “Magnificent Examples Suffer in the Alien Setting of Austere White Walls.”35 In what followed, she offered an excoriating critique of MOMA’s formalist rhetoric of revelation, transforming the museum’s dramatic disclosure of beauty into an expulsion from paradise scene—mixed with allusions to the manumission of labor at the hands of the slave trade. “Hundreds upon hundreds of little fig100 101

ures,” she began, “wrenched from the warm soil of native Africa, seem for the first time aware of their nakedness.” Useful objects, innocent in the intimate embrace of unselfconscious daily habit, had unfortunately been forced into the glare of artistic reflection. Moreover, the “bare whitewashed walls” of the galleries only further embarrassed the objects; MOMA’s contrived “atmosphere of the scientific laboratory” snuffed out all “the turgid warmth of Negro art.” With this criticism, Eglington had a recollection: “Memories of the recent show of industrial art . . . seem to haunt one in viewing the present exhibition.” As she reflected on that earlier exhibition (which she left unnamed), Eglington remembered that she’d been anguished then, too—pained by the sight of all those “dismembered parts of machines . . . displayed with similar cold objectivity.”

Rationalizing Machine Art

Dismembered things, objects “wrenched” from daily life and forced into the cold, hermetic atmosphere of an art museum-turned-laboratory: Eglington regretted the alienation of artistic labor in MOMA’s exhibits of unconventional objects—artifacts of Africa and the machine age. But such alienation was the necessary byproduct of MOMA’s idealist formalism. In order for form to be ideal, to be timeless, it could not be the product of human ingenuity or effort; it had to preexist any historical moments of imagination and emergence. That is why its physical facture could only but be “unconscious” or “primitive.” However, even as Machine Art problematically took worker alienation as a point of departure—rather than a rupture to repair, as Morris might have done—the exhibit was not uniformly aligned with the ideology and interests of consumer capitalism. By adapting managerial re-skilling to the context of artistic discernment and rearrangement, Johnson modeled not just a mode of artistry appropriate to the twentieth century but also an alternative mode of consumerism—one that would be re-skilled after the pattern of the factory boss, but, as we’ll see, not entirely to the boss’s liking. Where skill did come into Machine Art’s Neoplatonic formalism was in acts of discovery, revelation, and recombination. Johnson performed the first of these tasks in his much-reported scouting trip to find objects for the show. Spending over half a year visiting industrial factory showrooms and tradeshow exhibitions in and around New York City, Johnson’s search was a highly publicized exercise in discovery, discussed frequently in the show’s early promotional coverage (in spite of the fact that curatorial research often elapses over equal or longer periods of time).36 Later, the jokes about “flabbergasted springmakers” portrayed these forays as relatively solitary affairs, quests into a wilderness of unconsciously moving machines and machine-workers—none of them gifted with the discerning expertise of Johnson. Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

Besides his efforts at out-and-out discovery, Johnson also engaged in the more active work of skilled revelation. Reducing larger mechanical apparatuses down to even more elegant units of perfect formal design, Johnson winnowed the field of industrial design to an even smaller pool: a small selection of industrial units, housed together at the very start of Machine Art’s installation. Like an assembly line in reverse, these first galleries contained fragments of industrial machinery, all parsed into elegant but oddly idle parts: motor springs, propellers, insulators, and metal screws removed from their rightful places in automobiles, motorboats, and machines.

Figure 42  American Steel & Wire Co., Section of Wire Rope 3 ½ in. diameter. Photograph by Ruth

Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.) 102 103

One piece in this elite section of irreducible parts served particularly nicely as an illustration of Johnson’s skilled efforts at discovery and revelation. Exhibit #26 was a cross-section of wire rope, its interior exposed as a series of concentrically arranged circles of varying size. Johnson had found it in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the American Steel & Wire Company. While this major lender to the exhibition was represented by more than twenty other pieces, numerous critics expressed particular delight in this cross-section, which they likened to the natural geometry of the snowflake. “Note the feeling of snow crystals,” encouraged the critic from the Boston Post, alongside a reproduction of the catalog photograph so readers could do just that.37 Few pairings could have been more implausible; in fact, the three-and-a-half-inch wide rope had none of the delicate, short-lived fragility of a snowflake. The cross-section had been cut from a length of American Steel & Wire’s 6 × 37—Type S variety of cable, named in trade catalogs as special flexible hoisting rope, or crane rope, and promoted as having “the highest reserve strength” available.38 The basic type was among the thickest and strongest the company sold at the time, and the one on view in Machine Art was stronger still, boasting supplementary reinforcements of extra wire ropes at its core. Composed of wire upon wire, coiled and twisted around one another, the original cable would have had extraordinary lifting power. Of course, once reduced to a slice, the rope could no longer serve its hoisting or heaving purposes. In fact, the cross-section illustrates the specific functional capacities of special flexible hoisting rope only by virtue of having rendered the rope useless—an alienation of function from form (and an elevation of conceptual knowledge over practical use) that mirrors Machine Art’s alienation of labor from beauty. Thus, in exhibit #26, Johnson found an object that rather precisely illustrates the show’s priorities. It is a figure of purposeful non-functioning, its value null to the unreflective eye. In truth, Johnson was probably not responsible for the particular revelations of this thin slice of cable. Precisely because of their revelatory power, the American Steel & Wire Company routinely used cross-sections to advertise its product, whether as hand-drawn illustrations in its trade catalogs or displayed in the exhibition spaces of its factory showrooms. This industrial unit had come pre-alienated. For the company’s usual audience, industrial buyers and engineers, these cross-sections were legible and informative; the same visual details that led newspaper critics to their snowflake analogies would have whispered “extraordinary tensile strength” to a bridge builder able to read functional application in that idiosyncratic arrangement of circles. Significantly, then, exhibit #26 suggested that sight alone wasn’t enough to recognize, much less read, the message encoded in that radial pattern of steel discs. Discovery and revelation of meaning in this case depended on special skills above and beyond normal looking. Perhaps acknowledging this, one writer made an important qualificaChapter Three: The Art of Parts

Figure 43  Cross sections of

wire rope. Note the bottom left example: “6 × 37—Type S.” (American Steel & Wire Co. and Columbia Steel Company, American Tiger Brand Wire Rope Engineering Handbook [New Jersey, 1940, 6]. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.)

tion to the snowflake comparison. Exhibit #26 didn’t look so much like falling snow as it resembled “snowflakes seen under a microscope”—snowflakes, that is, hermetically isolated from the flux of their meteorological origin and offered up for the inspection of the expert eye.39 The comparison between the steel cable and the snowflake was just one of many natural—and so also naturalizing—analogies that swirled around Machine Art. All of them spoke to the visual charms awaiting the visually attentive; likewise, all positioned beauty as something to discover and recognize rather than to invent and make, only reinforcing the alienating effects necessitated by idealist formalism. Reporting on the Chicago installation of Machine Art, a local reviewer poetically compared a dental instrument to “the rapacious line of a 104 105

cormorant.”40 When it travelled later to Milwaukee, the press there picked up this catchy aviary theme, directing visitors’ attention to “aluminum tubes . . . arranged on the wall like the flight of a covey of birds,” and the “gorgeous outboard propeller . . . poised on the wall like the emperor of all the butterflies.”41 Barr may well have been the inspiration for these naturalizing analogies. Several of them showed up in his catalog essay, the theoretical heart of the exhibition, where he unspooled a string of parenthetical comparisons between: “the helix of a snail’s shell (and a steel coil), the graduated feathering of a bird’s wing (and the leaves of a laminated spring), the rabbit’s footprints in the snow (and the track of non-skid tires), the elegance of fruit (and of incandescent bulbs).”42 Barr’s charming pastoral did not compare steel cables to snowflakes, but he shared the critics’ apparent preference for nature’s simple pleasures over awe-inspiring scenes, naturalizing mass production and bringing it down to a pleasing and manageable size. An avid birdwatcher throughout his adult life, Barr was well acquainted with the small and simple pleasures available only to the observant outdoorsman. He’d gained this patience for visual attentiveness early in life in naturalist walks with his parents.43 Even while mired in the demands and politics of MOMA, Barr practiced his hobby whenever he could. The Ramble in Central Park was a favorite place. Donning his iconic overcoat (a constant companion that Johnson later commemorated for its “utility and beauty and fitness”), Barr could stroll this semisecluded urban retreat and exercise his knack for identifying examples of different ornithological types.44 He kept a file of notes on his different sightings and kept abreast of taxonomies as a reader of both the American Museum of Natural History’s Linnaean News-letter and the regional birdwatchers’ digest, the Oriole.45 All this serves to indicate how deeply committed Barr was to perfecting his own expertise at visual discernment, and how thoroughly he associated this skill with the recognition of formal types. In his catalog essay, Barr admitted that the “entirely unintentional” beauty of industrial objects might seem to some only “a meager and even trivial kind of beauty,” but he quickly sought to banish the thought.46 “The beauty of all natural objects is also a by-product,” he somewhat chidingly reminded, a function purely of evolutionary selection in favor of biological, practical utility. The skill was in knowing how to see it.

The “Only Art” in Machine Art

Patient discovery and judicious revelation: these labors characterized Johnson in factories and stores as much as Barr in Central Park. It’s no surprise, then, that Johnson, the individual most responsible for the acts of discovery and revelation behind Machine Art, received the most recognition for the exhibit’s myriad delights. Moreover, the praise laid at the curator’s feet signaled that Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

these two efforts alone were insufficient to artistry. To fill in the gap, reassembly emerged as the necessary third term in Johnson’s tripartite creative activity. Henry McBride, a New York art critic well liked by the folks at MOMA (they affectionately called him “Dooby Dooby”) wrote of Machine Art: “The only art in the present show is that contributed by Philip Johnson.”47 Likewise, Lewis Mumford (another friend of the museum) devoted a fair portion of his commentary to the show’s design, which he averred was on its own “perhaps the very best example of Machine Art” on view.48 Johnson himself was inclined to take the credit. Deploying the art world jargon of subsequent generations, Johnson would later reminisce in 1991 that, more than just an art exhibit, Machine Art “really was an installation.”49 That the real art in Machine Art was not the objects but their arrangement was a common refrain, and this backhanded accolade tacitly corroborated the exhibit’s alienation of productive labor even as it undercut arguments on behalf of the objects’ pure, self-contained beauty. McBride, if he felt pressure to find an artist for Machine Art, might have nominated the engineers at American Steel & Wire, the factory workers at SKF Industries (up to their armpits in ball bearings), or the industrial designers who’d done so much to improve the profit margins of the likes of Steuben Glass or American Radiator and Standard Sanitary. Instead, by focusing on Johnson as Machine Art’s sole artist, McBride and the other critics tacitly supported Machine Art’s model of managerial modern artistry: a model that ennobled the artist who discovers, the artist who reveals, and (these writers completed the formula) the artist who rearranges. This was no longer the artist who makes. Johnson’s display might not have been an “installation” in the sense typically meant by that term in contemporary art history; its untroubled embrace of both its objects and its institutional home distinguishes it from that later, more critical movement. But it’s true that Machine Art added up to something more than the sum of its parts. It testified to the merits of creative reassembly, of putting formal essences back together into a new and artistic whole. A “skillfully manipulated still-life,” one writer called the display.50 Likewise, Arts and Decoration magazine applauded the young curator for using “his artist’s eye in both selection and arrangement.”51 The latter review was especially gratifying to Machine Art’s project, not just because it validated the artistic model of judicious discovery and imaginative recombination but because of where it appeared. Arts and Decoration was the contemporary publication that went furthest in drawing connections between the fine arts and the arts of interior design—precisely the crossover that Machine Art’s market-oriented ambitions hoped to effect. In fact, if we’ve already considered how Machine Art amounted to a photography exhibition, we must also consider how it served as the culmination of some five years of Johnson’s self-tutelage in interior decoration, and so served as an exhibition of that artistic practice as well.52 106 107

On the occasion of Machine Art’s closing, the New York World-Telegram ran a human-interest story on Philip Johnson, proclaiming, “Johnson proves it.”53 The piece profiled the curator’s newly redecorated Midtown apartment, using it as evidence that the spare functionalism peddled at MOMA could translate into the warmth and intimacy of domestic spaces. Shown in a half-page spread of photo illustrations, Johnson’s “congenial” living quarters included a set of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona furniture, a potted plant, floor-to-ceiling drapes, and Oskar Schlemmer’s long vertical oil painting, Bauhaus Stairway (1932), a memento from Germany that Johnson would donate to MOMA some ten years later. One of the photographs also shows a pair of long, horizontal shelves, hung low and parallel to one another. On the shelves, Johnson had arranged some regular household goods (jars, bottles, a box), grouping them together in like shapes and types. Next to this functional display, he positioned a piece of tubular steel furniture; above it, he affixed a long, flat, horizontally-oriented mirror, minus any frame. These details quoted directly from Machine Art itself (or perhaps vice versa). Part of what Johnson proved, then, was that elements of modern design were themselves interchangeable parts: available to easy and endless reassembly in the practices of domestic life.

Figure 44  Theodate and Philip Johnson. Photograph by Jerome Zerbe. (Originally appeared in Town

& Country [April 1, 1934, 25], a division of Hearst Communications, Inc.) Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

The World-Telegram featured Johnson’s apartment as a demonstration of how “functional modernism” could “be comfortably and effectively applied within the four walls of one’s home.” Another photo, a portrait of Johnson with his sister (taken by society photographer and fellow Ohioan, Jerome Zerbe), ran in Town & Country in the same month. This image extended the point and illustrated something else: that functionalism need not be strictly stuffy. Philip and Theodate hung their heads upside-down off the edge of the van der Rohe daybed. In so doing, they upended the usual expectations of functionalist modernism; in their presence, it became a comfortable platform for play, not a prescriptive or dogmatic formula for living. Johnson’s 1934 townhome might then be seen as at odds with its counterpart display at MOMA, where prescriptions and dogmas ruled the day. In his view, Johnson might have seen it less as a matter of opposition, however, than as one of application—or even fulfillment. In fact, there’s ample reason to believe that Johnson viewed his act of private home decoration as the ultimate apotheosis of Machine Art’s various aesthetic lessons. Johnson had employed two assistants in the design and installation of the exhibit. One hailed from the field of museum practice; Ernestine Fantl was a veteran of Barr’s modern art classes at Wellesley, where she may well have participated in Barr’s five-anddime still-life competitions. She was brought onboard at MOMA as an assistant to Johnson, who paid her salary himself (he worked at MOMA without pay).54 Johnson’s choice for his second assistant gets closer to hinting at how important the curator felt Machine Art should be for interior design. Jan Ruhtenberg (Ruth Bernhard’s neighbor in 1933, you’ll recall) had been an aspiring German architect living in Berlin during the fall of 1929; it was then and there that he befriended Johnson. It is unclear how the two men met, but their fast friendship provided Johnson with one of his most kindred traveling partners when abroad. He adopted himself into Ruhtenberg’s extended family, growing so close that the younger children took to calling him “Onkel Philip”—probably a teasing reference, Johnson guessed, to the German children’s story “The Story of Fidgety Philip.”55 Johnson’s friendship with Ruhtenberg strengthened as the two began to collaborate on an imagined redesign of a room in the Johnson family vacation home at Pinehurst, the North Carolina golf resort. Together, they continually tinkered with their plans for the interior, using it as an exercise for their ongoing tutelage in modern architecture and design. Johnson made frequent entreaties to his mother to approve the redecoration and promised to stick simply to decoration, not renovation, assuring his father he had “no more intention of doing any building at this my youthful age.”56 The project informed the conversations Johnson and Ruhtenberg had with their many heroes on pilgrimages throughout Western Europe in 1929–1930. They consulted with Marcel 108 109

Breuer on it, got loads of ideas from Oud, drew up plans for original upholstered chairs, and went on a “furniture buying orgy,” picking up pieces by Mies van der Rohe for the Pinehurst room.57 Parental approval was an ongoing concern, but Johnson worried that something else might get in the way of this undertaking based on some recent alarm in the newspapers. “I hope you won’t throw it all out, because of the Stock Exchange or something,” he wrote to his mother in early November of ’29. “I heard something disquieting about a new ‘bottom’ or something. I hope it isn’t true.”58 But of course it was true, and so Philip and Jan’s luxe interior—with its pastel-hued walls, chrome-plated detailing, and Bauhaus-style furniture—was stillborn in the Johnsons’ summer home. Instead, the pair waited a few years and effectively resurrected the scheme for Machine Art, where the spare functionalism of the international style appeared perfectly suited to the times. In this deferred realization of their plans, the two students of Western European functionalism were able to bring their lessons in interior design to an American buying public. Conspicuously, for their displays in Machine Art, Johnson and Ruhtenberg didn’t assemble their rationalized ingredients of good design into domestic arrangements. Instead, they presented them in artistically successful tableaux, sculptural groupings that managed both to emphasize the objects’ availability to recombination and to suggest limitless possibilities for foolproof rearrangement. “It was a very easy show to install,” Johnson recalled many years later, “because the things installed themselves.”59 With ideal forms such as those Johnson had found, how could the ordinary consumer go wrong?

Rationalizing Consumption

There’s no denying it: Machine Art was a show for shoppers. All the objects on view were commodities of some sort or another. They were attractive things— seductive, too, many of them. Brilliant steel spheres (balls from ball bearings) gleamed in velvet-lined vitrines, earning comparisons to jewelry; one critic reported seeing a young woman in paroxysms over a Monel metal sink.60 Connoisseurs of American design had plenty more to sustain them as they wandered Johnson’s galleries. A series of smooth wooden bowls would have been a nice discovery, the work of an emerging young talent named Russel Wright (new to the scene and only recently rechristened by the indignity of a spelling error).61 Walter Dorwin Teague’s well-known work for Steuben Glass was also on view, as were Walter Von Nessen’s high-shine metal trays and bowls, produced for the Chase Brass & Copper Company. Johnson also included George Sakier’s prefabricated lavatory panel, a vertical wall unit that integrated all the necessary components: medicine cabinet, sink, tubular legs, spherical knobs, and plumbing attachments. The prefab unit, a shot in the arm for so-called Fordized Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

Figure 45  Gustav Jensen, Streamline Monel Metal Sink, exhibited in Machine Art. Manufactured by the International Nickel Co., Inc. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.) Figure 46  Russel Wright, Wood Salad Bowl, Berry Bowl and Small Berry Bowls, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

housing, had lately been the focus of a number of newspaper and magazine articles, doing publicized wonders for the profit margin of the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation.62 So it, like the new pieces by Wright and the status commodities of Steuben Glass and Chase Brass & Copper, had already gratified the interests of particularly attentive followers of the market in home design. Aside from its smorgasbord of tasteful specimens, Machine Art encouraged (and satisfied) cross-reference to the marketplace in other ways. For one, the exhibit’s installation unfolded in space much like a department store. To aid navigation through the six-hundred-plus objects available for scrutiny, Johnson organized the show into a series of thematic sections. The sections were ordered, in space and in print, as follows: (1) Industrial Units, (2) Household and Office Equipment (3) Kitchenware, (4) House Furnishings and Accesso110 111

Figure 47  Walter von Nessen, Serving Tray, Chromium, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

Figure 48  George Sakier, Lavatory Panel of the Arco Panel Unit System, exhibited in Machine Art. Photograph by Ruth Bernhard. (Digital mage © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University.)

ries, (5) Scientific Instruments, and (6) Laboratory Glass and Porcelain. In his how-to guide of 1935, Retailing, sales expert Norris Brisco explained the many benefits of an “intelligently planned” department store to maximizing profits. Not surprisingly, Brisco vigorously urged clear divisions, like Johnson’s, between types of goods. This would promote efficiency and clarity (dearly held values in the machine age), and smooth the labors of shoppers, stockers, and salespeople alike. But besides the importance of “departments” for department stores, Brisco also emphasized that there was a right way to orient these units in the vertical space of the building. The wise retailer, he counseled, placed those goods that shoppers already know they want on the upper floors (men’s goods and furniture), and display the “impulse” goods on the ground floor (pitched toward the female consumer). The same went for Machine Art; the more feminine, impulse-tickling delights greeted the visitor upon entry floor (those BB Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

baubles), while the “men’s goods” (laboratory equipment and office chairs) were kept on the upper stories.63 Johnson’s Machine Art installation followed Brisco’s formula almost to the letter. In fact, the show perhaps owed more to the department store’s sprawling browse-and-buy retail areas than to the fully assembled, diorama-style industrial design showcases of the day. The latter—crowd-pleasing spectacles that were common in New York during the 1920s and ’30s—were often staged in department stores themselves, but only in grand exhibition spaces kept separate from ordinary retail. The most influential of these was a series of industrial arts shows staged in partnership between Macy’s and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.64 One of these, a springtime exhibition held in 1928, hosted regular speakers and exhibited examples of modernist painting and sculpture to show the crossovers between the “fine” and “applied” arts.65 Although open at Macy’s for only two weeks, the exposition was hugely successful, attracting fifteen thousand visitors—about half Machine Art’s total numbers, but in far less time. These shows grew to an even more elaborate scale at the Met itself. There, under the auspices of Richard Bach, luxurious exhibitions showcased the work of brand-name designers in sumptuous displays of completely furnished rooms—dioramas decked out in the best examples of the most au courant design trends. Mounted like glamorous Hollywood stage sets, as art historian Kristina Wilson has observed, these put-together ensembles subordinated each object in them to an overall, integrated “look” that was prescribed in advance according to fad and season.66 In Ely Jacques Kahn’s display at the Met’s Architect and Industrial Arts exhibition in 1929, for instance, hand towels hung on rails, a dressing gown was draped casually over the back of a plush velvet chaise longue, and two high-heeled slippers appeared to be only recently stepped out of. Besides showcasing the latest in dressing room appointments, the Met installations insinuated whole lifestyles and the attitudes to match. In popular expos like these (at the Met and elsewhere), Sakier’s bathroom fixtures would have appeared sunk into artificial walls, not freestanding in front of them. The alternative (it should now go without saying) was the sculptural presentation that Johnson favored for Machine Art. Even when he did place objects together in clever, visually arresting juxtapositions, Johnson steered clear of lifestyle arrangements and swung closer to other points of reference. Johnson’s installation style, in which objects either stood alone or in unmingled serial repetition, recalled the avant-garde tactics of design promotion in his beloved Germany, resembling the thing-in-space austerity of Lucian Bernhard’s posters and Herbert Bayer and Walter Gropius’s installations of industrial design. Of at least equal importance were Johnson’s references to sculpture exhibitions. In keeping with the going conventions of 112 113

Figure 49  Installation view of Wing

D, Gallery 6, Bath and Dressing Room, designed by Ely Jacques Kahn, from the Eleventh Exhibition of American Industrial Art, The Architect and the Industrial Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 11, 1929–September 2, 1929. (Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.)

Figure 50  Installation view of

Apartment House Communal Rooms, Utensils Display, ca. 1930, from the Werkbund Exhibition, Paris, 1930: (Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Ise Gropius, BRGA.45.11. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

displaying three-dimensional works, Johnson positioned his industrial artifacts atop monolithic pedestals, on the wall in bas-relief processions, on the floor on low risers, and overall into a field of energetic overlap. Art writers vindicated the quotation, too, routinely invoking the names of Praxiteles and Phideas to proclaim the sculptural charms of so much plumbing. Where the sculpture halls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century boasted swags of greenery, Machine Art sported aluminum tubing (and at least one potted plant), but otherwise, the exhibition programs shared more in common than the differences between their respective content might suggest. More than anything else, Machine Art shared with sculpture displays a common challenge: to present individually beautiful objects in the same space while avoiding either codependency in combination or overcrowding in competition. As in the sculpture show, objects alone were the point of Johnson’s installation: self-contained, alienated, objectified, what have you—but autonomous and, as such, available to endless and reliable reassembly. Because of all this, it has been primarily Machine Art’s intention toward the marketplace that has most fascinated latter-day commentators, who have also tended to take for granted its success on these terms. Historians have been guided in their analyses by Johnson’s retail-like flourishes (stunned, most of all, by the inclusion of prices—prices!—in the catalog) and have collectively settled on a verdict of “taste-making” for both the exhibition’s motivations and its long-term social impact.67 Whether it’s been positioned as prehistory to MOMA’s late capitalist rituals or as a populist anticipation of later-century hopes for consumerist empowerment, the exhibition has consistently been interpreted more or less as a shopping lesson—an interpretation that follows nicely from the recognition of the show’s thoroughgoing alienation of productive labor. But if Machine Art has succeeded at taste-making (and it has, if MOMA’s own gift store and shopping catalogs are any measure), this success comes at the failure of what I believe were Barr and Johnson’s real hopes for the show’s legacy. Substantial evidence supports reading Machine Art as an effort in social and economic activism; the goal, I think, was to forge a version of modern consumerism on the same anvil as the one that had so definitively remade modern business and industry. This necessitated and participated in the alienation of productive labor, yes. But it also held out hope for an authentically skillful and conscious practice of consumption, vigorous enough that it might counterbalance the predatory manipulations of the marketplace—an idea, as we’ll later see, that held popular sway in the era’s vibrant consumers’ union movement. With its pronouncements of formal finality—a sort of activism of a prioris—Machine Art stood ready to arm consumers with the same self-protective ideologies that had lately come to bulwark business: a conservative and risk-averse ethos of durability, reliability, efficiency, and thriftiness. 114 115

While the status of consumerism shifts throughout the literature on MOMA’s early history, especially as regards the museum’s so-called taste-making efforts, all historians agree that the institution has embraced its supporting role for consumer capitalism. In this historiographic conversation, Machine Art frequently appears as “exhibit A.” Although the tone of the verdict changes slightly every time it’s handed down, the broad consensus is that Barr and Johnson’s show operated primarily to teach Americans how to like (and buy) modern functionalist design, especially as it appeared in products made in American factories. Sidney Lawrence said this early on in one of the very few treatments of the show to appear before the 1990s, “Clean Machines at the Modern.”68 More recently, studies of interwar American museum display, like A. Joan Saab’s and Kristina Wilson’s, have emphasized the democratizing effects of MOMA’s early exhibition practices, venturing its design shows as a means of brokering the divide between high modernism and the middlebrow, precisely through the fluid exchange between lessons in art appreciation and tutelage in good taste.69 Long before any of this, Russell Lynes had set the tone for this museum-to-market brand of institutional history in The Tastemakers, first published in 1949. Noting that “a special social cachet” had hung around MOMA since “it first opened its doors,” Lynes was willing even to wager that, when compared with any other American art museum, the Modern alone “has had the greatest influence on taste.”70 Not only did MOMA make modern art “chic,” Lynes wrote, but with Machine Art and shows like it, the Museum facilitated modernism’s encroachment into all the “nooks and crannies of life.”71 Nor would any of this have offended or surprised Barr himself, who put the intention baldly in a memo to the Trustees written in 1933: “Basically, the Museum ‘produces’ art knowledge, criticism, scholarship, understanding”—and, not to be left out—“taste.”72 So, there’s little disagreement about either Machine Art’s status as a consumer-friendly show or about MOMA’s thoroughgoing complicity with the reconciliation between modernism and the market. Where interpretive differences emerge, they are softly political in nature: low-register debates over how ideologically coercive taste-making was in MOMA’s early history (as a support to twentieth-century manufacturers and retailers), or, on the other hand, how democratic the museum might have been in its effort to spread modernism to the masses (as a support to Holder Cahill’s Federal Art Program, under the New Deal). When Terry Smith included a discussion on Machine Art in his Making the Modern, Barr and Johnson’s show appeared as an extension of the “total rationality” that characterized the era’s business ethos. 73 Indeed, Smith—drawing attention to Machine Art’s curious mix of modernist rebellion (as a “nonart” art show) and cultural conservativism (in its Platonic pieties)—classes MOMA with what he calls the “corporate avant-gardists”: cultural producers whose modernism was in lock-step with capitalist modernity.74 With this, Smith followed up Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

on the critique levied at MOMA by Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach in 1978 (though not without revision, as we’ll see below). These two writers put it most baldly: “MOMA belongs to the age of corporate capitalism,” they write—a temple to both alienated individualism and progress as achieved through continual change and competition.75 More recently, a “second wave” of MOMA scholarship has revisited the museum’s market-friendly practices and discerned within them more politically palatable motivations, especially populism. Disseminating artistic taste to a broader swath of the populace, these historians argue, is effectively a redistribution of elite cultural capital (in the sense meant by Pierre Bourdieu) and so an institutional swipe at traditional class boundaries.76 While there are different interpretations of what taste-making meant at MOMA during its early years, much less how it might operate there now, historians have scarcely considered the possibility that the museum’s crossover efforts into the “arts of everyday life” could have been waged in agonistic opposition to the capitalist, consumer marketplace and its trend-conscious manufacturers—to the Depression-era imperative of boosterish taste-making as such. I would like to. Because if it’s true that the museum promoted the Taylorist values of objectivity, rationalism, and efficiency in ways that fully cooperate with the capitalist ideologies of the machine age, it’s also true that this objectivity, rationalism, and efficiency—simultaneously objectified and idealized in Machine Art—struck a thorn in the side of machine-age corporate capitalism. Smith comes closest to this point. Acknowledging Barr and Johnson’s antistreamlining stance and rightly making much of the naturalized anonymity of “pure” functionalism in Machine Art, Smith concludes that the museum’s position on design in the 1930s cannot so simply be lumped into “the expansive, allinclusive Life-style imagery of modernity,” which he otherwise claims to be “the most productive regime operative from the mid-1930s.”77 He’s right. In every way, Machine Art resists the consumption-inducing company that critics then and now have so often wanted it to keep. Instead, by installing efficiency and durability as cornerstones of good taste, and seeking to re-skill the consumer after the pattern of the scientific manager, the exhibit squarely took aim at what Barr ruefully called industrial design’s “blind concern with fashion.”78 Overturning fashion for timelessness: this strategy depended on alienation, true, but more progressively, it also threatened to put a halt to modernity’s tireless quest for the production of insatiable demand.

Manufactured Demand

In his Machine Art catalog essay, Johnson advanced the show’s spartan utilitarianism against contemporary fads for modernistic “styling.” Superficial embellishments, he admitted, could serve a purpose—just not a traditionally practical 116 117

one. He explained that the recent American trend toward styling could be traced to business objectives: to give commodities “more ‘eye-appeal’ and therefore [help] sales.”79 This is what “taste-making” meant to those in the halls of industry. Norris Brisco summed up the imperative toward styling in the form of an aphorism: “Not only the goods but the demand must be created.”80 If the effort to stimulate profits by stimulating demand had long been a feature of the free market, this tactic took on new urgency in the context of the Great Depression, as the leaders of industry frequently impressed upon its managers. As framed by businessmen as the recession wore on, taste-making was a critical effort for curing Americans of a widespread crisis of consuming confidence: a malady that many businessmen cited as a cause of the economy’s worsening state. In 1932, the president of the Advertising Federation of America reported an inauspicious trend among consumers; they were, apparently, “postponing the purchase of necessaries and luxuries.”81 He made sure to iterate: the drop-off in sales could not so simply be pinned on unemployment or wage decreases. It was “fear rather than lack of means” that had inspired such widespread tight-fistedness: a pandemic “lack of confidence,” the New York Times chimed in, that could be blamed for an economy-wrecking “surplus stocks of materials . . . all over the world.”82 Thus it came to pass that, even as incomes declined drastically, many experts appeared in print and on the radio, urging Americans to shop their way back to national economic prosperity. In business strategies of the 1930s, three tactics emerged as favorites in the fight against so-called underconsumption: advertising, planned obsolescence, and design (or better, “redesign”). Modern advertising, a sophisticated and psychological affair grown more persuasive under the influence of leaders like Edward Bernays (related by marriage to Sigmund Freud), was the most obvious tool by which manufacturers and retailers could stoke consumer desire. “Planned obsolescence,” a term just recently minted in the 1930s, allowed manufacturers to maintain low costs and refresh consumption at a regular rate, effectively putting time limits on ownership. Commodities would predictably become outdated under the strategy, which ensured a short lifespan for products, whether through the use of flimsy materials or by rationing out incremental improvements in technology. The retailer Louis E. Kirstein was among the proponents of this solution; he called planned obsolescence “a prime necessity if we are to avoid stagnation in depression like that through which we are passing.”83 Design was another way for industrialists to advertise their products—or guarantee their turnover. Like branding on the very surface of the thing to be sold (an instance of product self-promotion), styling also “dated” the products it adorned, thus hastening market rejuvenation (an instance of product self-obsolescence). In the April 1934 issue of the New Outlook, Donald Wilhelm wrote about the increasing importance of design to commercial success.84 In discussing Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

the few bright spots in the economic landscape, he credited the contributions of designers like Teague, Sakier, and Gustav Jensen (who, like the other two, was represented in Machine Art, responsible for that rapture-inducing Monel metal sink). But Wilhelm, who worked alongside Herbert Hoover in the Commerce Department during the 1920s, insisted that design alone was not the secret to market success. It must also be followed by “redesign,” a superficial revision of style that could turn even big-ticket items into commercial fountains of youth. To illustrate, Wilhelm noted recently successful redesigns of refrigerators and automobiles—products that might normally frustrate regular consumption because of their size, expense, and relative reliability, but that had managed to attract new and even repeat customers simply with a few tweaks in surface design. The British retailing journal Shelf Appeal underscored the importance of redesign in its January 1935 issue; something as simple as making-over a single object in pink plastic, it promised, could increase its sales by 120 percent. Echoing Brisco’s maxim that demand must be “produced,” the article further suggested hiring an industrial designer for help in the work of “Consumer Engineering.” The industrial designer portrayed here was not an artist but a tough-minded partner in the rational engineering of demand. “They do not talk aesthetics to you, unless you ask for it,” Shelf Appeal assured businessmen (lest they fear any fey chatter about style). “They talk sales increase.”85 The effects of these efforts on consumerism were dramatically different from the effects of Taylorism on production. Where industry’s application of scientific principles had reduced waste, boosted profits, and maximized efficiency, the calculated strategies of advertising, planned obsolescence, and redesign had shaped consumerism around wastefulness and inefficiency. It might have served the manufacturer to use durable machinery on his factory floor, but it was in his best interests that the consumer should make purchases according to different objectives: keeping up with changing trends, for instance, or updating appliances according to rationed changes in technology. Nowhere, perhaps, was this opposition of interests more obvious than in the marked visual differences between the products made for factory use, and the products that factories sent to market. The factory’s gears, flywheels, bushings, and bearings had been built to work well and last long, not to please or delight—not even necessarily to be seen at all. This was in striking contrast to the fashionable items turned out by those same unfashionable apparatuses: retail-ready goods that were both visually beguiling and ultimately expendable—both by design. Machine Art was aggressively against this sort of design. In every room, its industrial objects protested against the effects of modern styling, standing in silent, puritanical tribute to the managerial values of increased efficiency and minimized waste. It was no accident that Barr and Johnson chose to feature bushings and bearings instead of industry’s fashion-stamped derivatives. Even 118 119

the showier, more upmarket pieces—those with imprimaturs like Wright, Teague, Von Nessen, and Sakier—were hardly representative of anything like a designer’s trademark hand. The Wright bowls were little more than hollowedout cherry-wood half spheres; the Teague and Von Nessen glassware, essentially a collection of sawed-off cylinders, also looked more manufactured than designed; and Sakier’s lavatory panel stood in monolithic tribute more to the predetermined dictates of Fordized building than to the flourishes of individual taste. Moreover, the men behind these designs—representatives of a profession elsewhere heralded as the salvation to modern industry—were curiously kept out of the limelight in Barr and Johnson’s show. Machine Art featured only eighteen named designers, accounting for a mere fifty-three exhibit pieces. Johnson later claimed that he had made a sincere effort “to find objects that were designed by names, [but] there hardly were any names.”86 This claim was frankly misleading, one that feigned ignorance even about the number of well-known figures represented in Machine Art. The names included not only Wright, Teague, Von Nessen, and Sakier, but also Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer—names lionized at MOMA under other cover in these years, as in the Modern Architecture show of ’32 and the Bauhaus exhibition in ’38, curated by Johnson and Barr, respectively. Instead, Johnson intentionally downplayed the individual roles played by the show’s many designers. In so doing, he effectively furthered Machine Art’s implicit stance against a fashion-driven marketplace. It’s almost laughable to propose any radicalism on behalf of Machine Art, what with its neoclassical pieties and its devotion to beauty’s timeless uniformity. But Machine Art’s patent cultural conservativism was antagonistic, an obstructionist stick-in-the-mud in oppositional tension with a marketplace which it quoted, but hoped not to follow. Re-skilling consumerism so that it was oriented around durability and longevity (the kinds of values the industrialmanagerial elite prized in their factory equipment, if not in the goods made by it), Machine Art attempted to reform the marketplace by empowering one of its chief actors: the consumer. This kind of taste-making—rationalized taste-making that might better qualify as taste-training—positioned Machine Art squarely on the side of the era’s home economics and consumers’ union movements. At the American Home Economics Association meeting in New York during the summer of 1934, the sociologist (and committed anticapitalist) Hornell Hart delivered a call to action, arguing for the necessity of an advocacy on behalf of the average American shopper.87 In a paper titled “Wanted: A New Deal for the Consumer,” Hart alleged that recent legislation passed in the name of economic renewal (most especially the National Industrial Recovery Act) would spell only trouble for the average American buyer. Hart complained, “the Roosevelt administration starts Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

its economic planning with the manufacturer, the miner, and the farmer,” but never attends directly to “consumer needs.”88 Calling instead for “consumer-centered economic planning,” Hart added his voice to the dominant opinion of the conference, which amounted to an angry referendum on Roosevelt’s businesscentered attempts at recovery. Paul Douglas, University of Chicago sociologist and an expert on technological unemployment, even went so far as to predict that the New Deal would lead to a “concentrated power of capital . . . [ultimately] not . . . greatly dissimilar from fascism,” given the combined strength of federal and corporate centralization.89 From the perspective of these home economics specialists, any manipulative marketplace coercion (like advertising, or planned obsolescence, or industrial redesign) was a tool in service of this dreaded corporate totalitarianism. The only chance the consumer had against this was education—re-skilling the labors of taste, choice, and use, in order to countermand the highly skilled practice of its manipulation. As the proceedings from this meeting insinuate, by the 1930s, home economics had assumed a strongly political cast. The Good Housekeeping Institute and Consumers’ Research, Inc., were the two most well-known organizations driving the effort.90 The latter conducted extensive product testing, which it called “scientific and practical”; results were disseminated through its Good Housekeeping magazine or by the endorsement of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.91 Established in 1927 in White Plains, New York, Consumers’ Research, Inc., also engaged in extensive testing, publishing its studied evaluations of commercial products in the Consumers’ Research Bulletin, which boasted forty-two thousand paid subscribers in 1932.92 Trying to even the playing field, the consumer movement borrowed liberally from the expert-obsessed culture of Taylorism. Kitchens could be rationalized like factory floors, once the appropriate scientific and managerial expertise had been brought to bear; bread could be baked more reliably, with the introduction of standardized recipes and measuring equipment; vegetables could be canned with lessened risk of contamination, thanks to scientifically proven methods and government-provided training. Consumers, in short, could be re-skilled to maximize, in the home, the same bottom line–friendly values that had proven so profitable to business. Many of Machine Art’s observers believed the exhibit had succeeded at precisely these efforts. They expressed hope that it, and other shows like it, would help home buyers be informed and empowered enough to take the upper hand in twentieth-century capitalism. In a review of the Chicago installation of Machine Art (held in the city’s Museum of Science and Industry), an anonymous critic asserted that the show offered a “true education of the eye” in its revelation of beauty in practical and durable things.93 This sort of education, the critic continued, would not only yield a “public grown more attentive to . . . beauty,” but, in so doing, would also force manufacturers to recognize that real aesthetic 120 121

value—as defined under Machine Art as rational, timeless, and stable—could itself be a source of “commercial value.” The overall quality of commodities would then only improve. Another review spelled it out more directly: if Machine Art succeeded in teaching the public how to discern beauty in ordinary things, “beauty will increase, for manufacturers will recognize its value and seek it.”94 Both writers maintained the argument that educating the buying public would ultimately have consequences for commercial manufacturing. Once tastes had turned, then business would be compelled to follow the public’s lead. The first half of this equation, anyway, had been the verdict of a study conducted by the London Board of Trade during the 1930s. Concluding that the spread of art education had yielded measurable changes in consumer taste, the study forecast that “products offered for sale in the future will be obliged to meet [the] high standards” of an increasingly art-aware public.95 When MOMA circulated Machine Art to Milwaukee in 1935, the local press profiled the exhibit as proof of the London study’s “prophecy.” Improved taste would improve the marketplace—and if Machine Art could improve taste, an institution like MOMA could exert influence over commercial manufacturing and exchange. When Johnson reflected back on the criteria he had used in 1933 and ’34 to select objects for Machine Art, he described his guidelines as “extremely simple and . . . easy”—precisely the kind of fundamentals anyone might be able to learn and adopt in developing a practice of re-skilled consumerism.96 The Iron Age write-up on the show comically spelled out what the author had discerned as two chief principles to be learned in the exhibition: “Don’t Make ’Em Eggshaped” (the lesson, perhaps, for designers) and “Anything but round would have been wrong” (the lesson to be gleaned by consumers).97 Yet the Iron Age writer was winking to his readers. As his audience was surely aware, “eggshaped” things had lately become very popular in American commercial design, advertised and embraced under the banner of streamlining. Especially associated with Raymond Loewy, for whom the teardrop shape was a trademark, streamlined design appeared in the 1930s as a godsend to business, dramatically boosting consumer demand and so also profitability. But if the oblong oval can be considered the essence of streamlined design, then by comparison, Machine Art’s hundreds of perfect circles—Plato’s most cherished shape—seem a shrieking chorus of opposition. This was no accident; in fact, Machine Art was just the beginning of MOMA’s long institutional standoff with streamlining. While acknowledging that streamlining’s sleek, tapered shapes might indeed promise aerodynamic efficiency (a claim that tests repeatedly proved wildly overstated), Johnson warned that this “principle” had nonetheless been employed “out of all proportion” to any application it might have in daily life.98 Surely, Johnson meant to cast a rolling eye in Loewy’s direction. That pencil sharpener might have looked smoothly Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

aerodynamic, but when was the last time a pencil sharpener had to glide quickly through space? In fact, totally to the contrary, pencil sharpeners function most efficiently when they are solidly anchored to the desk. Here, the streamlined shape was a metal casing put over an old-fashioned machine, not only obscuring the turning, spiraled blades of its working interior, but pretending to a “look” of functionalism at cross purposes with function! Sheathing machines with an encasement of pseudo-utilitarian design… well, few things boiled Barr and Johnson’s blood more than this. As a sign of their disrespect, they accorded this style the nastiest epithet in the MOMA lexicon: “modernistic”—that little “-istic” at the end signaling a pretension to, but failure to achieve, modernism’s authentically arrived-at forms. Up to the present day, MOMA has maintained its steadfast antagonism to streamlined design. Loewy, one of the best-known American designers of the golden age of industrial artistry, remains hardly represented in the museum’s permanent collection; in fact, he is only represented by one object. What’s more, that single piece (a blocky and unremarkable radio communications receiver) is so far from the designer’s renowned style that Barr and Johnson’s early hostility to the tapered encasements of streamlined design is only reinforced—as though the museum’s longstanding ban on the designer was lifted only long enough to let in one of his least-streamlined contraptions.99 The perfect circle—enshrined on the catalog cover in the circular totem of the self-aligning ball bearing—was clearly Machine Art’s answer to the streamlined oval and everything for which it stood: faddish redesign, stylized encasements, manufactured desire, and the encouragement of unskilled consumerism.

The Art of Parts

Barr and Johnson’s exhibit, with all its easily graspable, arrangeable, and maintainable geometric formalism, thus rationalized consumption. It did this especially through the reification of the part: the fundamental unit of foolproof reassembly. The catalog images presented their objects as interchangeable parts, ready for reassembly—as at least one newspaper layout team actually did, rearranging Bernhard’s upright catalog images into a kaleidoscopic fan of appealing household goods.100 But when Parnassus reviewed Machine Art’s catalog, it averred that many “shops along Fifth and Madison Avenues in New York . . . issue more persuasive and better illustrated catalogues of their merchandise.”101 This criticism was aimed at the simplicity of the layout and the stubborn resistance to depicting the objects in domestic ensembles. Instead, Bernhard’s objectifying photographs reduced the exhibit pieces to individual units. While this might not have been “persuasive” from the point of consumerist taste-making (for which the fully installed dioramas at the Met were perhaps better suited), it was, again, more useful from the standpoint of taste-training. 122 123

Figure 51 Cover, Westinghouse Industrial Lighting Equipment Catalog 219-A, July 1932. (Courtesy of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.)

Figure 52  Westinghouse Industrial

Lighting publicity photograph from their July 1932 Catalog 219-A. (Courtesy of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.) Figure 53 Cover, Westinghouse Commercial Lighting Equipment Catalog 219-B, July 1932. (Courtesy of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library.)

Ruhtenberg and Johnson’s installation also highlighted interchangeability. In the instances where they used shelves instead of pedestals, they tended to illuminate the pieces with low-hanging industrial-grade fixtures. Specifically, they used a “deep-bowl reflector type lamp” designed by Westinghouse explicitly to improve factory work by directing “an intensified light upon the . . . working plane immediately beneath it.”102 These lamps, helpful to the close visual labor of putting together small machine-made parts, differed markedly from Westinghouse’s commercial lighting line, which tastefully refracted light through frosted glass or inverted shades. Johnson’s interest was not to mimic the lighting conditions of the domestic interior, but rather to train the spectator’s awareness on each individual thing. While this intention worked in tandem with the exhibit’s sculptural ambitions, by using lighting fixtures appropriate to the factory, Johnson also drew an implicit parallel between aesthetic scrutiny— the prescribed mode of address in Machine Art—and the work of rationalized assembly. Perhaps because of this, it was very often the hardware store, not the department store, that sprang to mind for critics of the show. Anita Brenner likened Machine Art to a “hardware window-display” in the Nation, and progressive social critic Catherine Bauer was reminded of a “French hardware store, where copper utensils of time-honored shape were hung around the walls, each in its graduated series.”103 The metaphor spoke directly to Machine Art’s rationalized aesthetics of expert vision and reliable reassembly. Unlike the diorama-style installations—like those at Macy’s and the Met, where furniture pieces and objets d’art had been set up in enticing displays—hardware store displays are relentlessly atomized in the dispersal of serial parts, requiring expertise in navigation and selection. Comparing Machine Art to the hardware store, critics communicated to readers that MOMA’s exhibit would not reward casual browsing. Much like exhibit #26, that cross-section of steel cable, Machine Art, too, would only reveal its delights to a skillful viewer, one capable of discerning the formal virtues of the objects put before her, and thus free to select and rearrange them— confident in the stability of each constitutive part. In his catalog essay, Barr wrote that the “artist in machine art” is someone who “refines, simplifies and perfects.”104 Couched as the work of revelation and discovery, the subtractive procedures Barr described are not generative but restorative in nature: work done in the service of bringing out pure forms presumed to have been there all along. This was an expertise of discernment, of knowing how to look for form and recognize it when it emerged, of being patient enough to exercise the labors of form’s revelation. But the reductive gestures that Barr had celebrated in his essay—refining, simplifying, and perfecting—were only a prelude to Johnson’s acts of rationalized reassembly. In the end, Machine Art’s planning, installation, and reception all pointed toward 124 125

a new ideal of artistic labor, one that borrowed liberally from the model of scientific management, and one that sought to reform not just consumerism, but also artistic production and evaluation, in its image. In positioning its objects as interchangeable units of artistic reassembly, performed by Johnson but possibly imagined by museumgoers, the exhibit suggested that beauty was like a machine—that it could be predictably and reliably boiled down to a limited array of composite fundamentals. Here was where Machine Art’s lessons for shoppers might also have been heeded by modern painters and sculptors, too. This was not only an appropriate enough lesson for a show called Machine Art to teach, it was also in keeping with Barr’s directorial philosophy. The museum, he firmly believed, should be tireless in its attempts to teach the American public how to see and understand the sometimes inscrutable artworks of the modern movement. For this duty, Barr employed rationalized formalism as a teaching tool, one especially useful for explaining cubism, which he routinely and—approvingly—described throughout the mid-1930s as “intellectual,” “classical,” and dependent “upon logic and calculation.”105 Barr had also imagined the artistic processes of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in terms not far removed from Machine Art’s model of artistry. They must have begun with a kind of “analytical research,” Barr reasoned, in order to first “reduce landscapes or figures to block-like forms.” But, as in Machine Art, the research phase was just the beginning. For cubism, Barr explained that the initial “process of disintegration” was always followed by the skilled artistic work of “re-integration.”106 This one-two punch recurs throughout Barr’s writing during the period. Reducing the natural world to forms, the labors of the modern artist began with discovery and revelation, only then to follow through with the “invention” of recombination.107 Art had become rationalized. Apparently, some visitors did come away from Machine Art feeling like they’d learned this lesson of beauty’s rational organization. The Chicago press reported on one “silver-haired businessman” who claimed the display of industrial units had finally helped him understand modern art, particularly abstraction. Abstract painting and sculpture, the gentleman reckoned, was not unlike a “well-designed machine,” with “every part [having] . . . a job to do.”108

Chapter Three: The Art of Parts

2 4

Empiricism The Object of Machine Art’s Experience

In a profile piece on Philip Johnson that ran in the New York Times Magazine in 1998, the ninety-two-year-old architect reflected on just how drastically his opinions about architecture and design had changed over the course of his long career.1 It had been decades since he had clung dogmatically to anything like the principled formalism of Machine Art or the strict “international style” functionalism of his Modern Architecture show before it. Instead, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, Johnson had come to prefer formal innovation over formal perfection, creative freedom to prefab ideals, and eyepleasing novelties to puritanical utilitarianism. The magazine story was timed to coincide with Johnson’s donation of several objects to MOMA’s Architecture Chapter Four: Empiricism

and Design Collection, including Philippe Starck’s spiky, alien-inspired juicer: a bug-like novelty that looked liable to up and walk away. Johnson effused guiltlessly over the object, which he acknowledged had “nothing to do with function.” In fact, Starck’s success augured precisely—and quite happily, in Johnson’s view—the “triumph of art over function.”2 This opinion, in 1998, would not have shocked anyone who’d been following Johnson’s career. In his own architectural practice since the 1970s, Johnson had come to embrace eclecticism as his only guiding principle—a widely known and love-it-or-hate-it trademark of heterogeneity that had led to projects as internally eclectic as the AT&T building in Manhattan (now known as Sony Tower); as showy as the faceted, mirrored-glass Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California; and as baldly impractical as his own private study in New Canaan, a freestanding structure for which he purposely declined to build a bathroom—a strange choice, but one fully in keeping with the Glass House that stood nearby (the private dwelling completed in 1949 that had made Johnson famous and for which he’d eschewed solid exterior walls). “A toilet’s just obstructive,” he explained in 1979, chatting up his new study, adding that he’d rather spend his time and money concocting “sheer nonsense” than dealing with “anything practical like plumbing.”3 Still ever the classicist, Johnson explained this transformation in his personal tastes as a shift in allegiance from Plato to Heraclitus, from a philosophy bent on a priori absolutes (one that cared deeply for plumbing’s practicality) to one that embraced newness and flux as life’s only possible constant.4 As such, the greater part of Johnson’s influential career as an American tastemaker was spent reversing the formalist idealism he had, once upon a time, so confidently authored in Machine Art. In his comments in the New York Times, Johnson even abdicated his former aficionado responsibilities, urging readers to understand that no one could itemize rules for material beauty or translate design success into a code. Either you liked something or you didn’t; either a thing held its aesthetic value or it didn’t. It was all up to individual opinion, and it was all subject to change. If Machine Art had been obsessed with spelling out the pillars of stable aesthetic criteria, the older, less restrictive Johnson—by then enshrined as one of postmodernism’s pioneers—committed not one word to issues of geometry, balance, color, or composition. Moreover, if Machine Art’s timeless standards had once served as quiet protest against a volatile and manipulative commercial sphere, Johnson now celebrated marketplace dynamism precisely for its shape-shifting diversity: a “more relativist” climate in which he seemed more at home. As for function, Johnson now felt free to shrug it off entirely: “One does not use beauty.”5 So far in this book, I have assumed the task of historicizing MOMA’s ahistorical understanding of form, beauty, and value. Along the way, I have included some of the objections raised by critics wary of Machine Art’s loftier pronounce128 129

ments. In this chapter, dissent is given a more generous platform. Keeping an eye trained squarely on Johnson’s later change of heart and acknowledging formalism’s later dismal fate (now commonly avoided as modernism’s most humorless “-ism,” autocratically handed down from the desks of Clement Greenberg and, yes, Alfred Barr), I move now to re-view Machine Art as the failed bellwether that it was. As you might already suspect, this story is a tragedy. The heroes fail their purpose (one abandons it altogether). Volatility is not reigned in. Values are not fixed. Immaterial truths are not solidified, and perfect form is not preserved through its incarnations in things. By late 1937, the ball bearing had fallen victim to rust and, according to paperwork in MOMA’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions, “half of the balls were missing” when it returned to the museum after a show.6 In December 1934, Johnson broke with Barr, packed a suitcase full of Nietzsche, and embarked on a political odyssey, outwardly condemning obedience to all principles. And even before all that—on March 6, 1934, the very day that Machine Art opened to the public—the jig was already up. In fact, we might say that the meanings of Machine Art’s materiality had changed the very instant all those curious passersby, newspaper readers, and catalog browsers finally had the chance to enter the galleries—changed radically, in fact, and by dint of the factor of embodied empiricism. Because if the passage of time drained from Machine Art its permanence (the rusted ball bearings, the fallen favor of formalism), the inevitability of this loss was presaged by the experience of the show itself. Let me underline this point. The choice to solidify modernism by solidifying abstract form had some unintended consequences for Barr and Johnson’s idealist rhetoric. Witnessing the objects in the round and in the flesh—circumambulating them, touching them, seeing one’s face reflected on them—all of this afforded a view of these ordinary things as ordinary, as worldly, as simply objects, still entangled in the world and bound to all the uncertainties therein. The act of experiencing the exhibition was thus enough to undermine it. What follows is somewhat different from a traditional conclusion, then, since in it I seek interpretive closure by looking to the rhetorical and philosophical opposites of the aesthetic program that I have up until now taken pains to argue and explain (if not always defend)—closure, ironically, by way of an opening. In order to come to some final terms with Machine Art, I turn to its antagonists, those interwar-era art critics and museumgoers who were the defenders and practitioners of Machine Art’s sworn enemies: contingency, unpredictability, and impermanence. In so doing, these antagonists effectively anticipated Johnson’s own direction, as well as those of later-twentieth-century art and design. By ending my discussion of Machine Art this way, I’m implicitly taking the antagonists’ side—not just because I’m giving them the last word, Chapter Four: Empiricism

but also because I’m admitting dialogue and uncertain debate into Johnson’s perfectly appointed machine-age display. The work of this chapter is to heed history’s eruptions of indeterminacy and, in so doing, to consider how these moments might constitute the underpinnings of an alternative ontology for meaning and materiality under modernism: a view of things less inclined to see them as participants in distant ideals or prototypes, than to grab hold of them as opportunities for participation.

The Beauty Contest

Right from its inception, the Museum of Modern Art mixed obscure artistic ideas freely with public spectacle. This approach was the result of differing administrative interests, especially as filtered through a young, itinerant, and often unpaid staff. As director, Barr balanced his scholarly needs against the trustees’ more business-like interests and gained energy and direction from the fresh outlook of the newest generation of tastemakers—young men like Johnson, Lincoln Kirstein, and Alan Blackburn who breezed through MOMA’s offices during these years, fresh out of Harvard and eager to expand their passion for contemporary art on the national scene.7 Regardless of their various points of view, all members of MOMA’s early community were keen to build a big audience for the new museum. Together, they aggressively pursued a public reputation as the nation’s foremost inter-

Figure 54  Portrait of Sarah Newmeyer at

her desk. Photograph by Larry Keighley. (The Saturday Evening Post Magazine © 1947. Saturday Evening Post Society.)

130 131

preter of the avant-garde. Soon enough, this goal was formalized as a budget item. In 1931, MOMA retained the services of a public relations firm, and in 1933, it made an even stronger commitment to self-promotion, hiring a fulltime director of publicity, Sarah Newmeyer. Brought onboard in the dog days of summer (she was said to have arrived “redheaded and exploding with ideas”), Newmeyer remained in the position until 1948.8 Her tenure at MOMA thus fully overlapped with Barr’s run as director (which ended in 1943), and so too with the period that historians of the museum have typically considered its most influential. Her work on the Machine Art campaign was vigorous and inventive. Importantly, it also included an ingenious PR device that now provides a useful context for considering how the exhibit’s objects served as starting points for judgment. A few days before the show opened, three public notables toured the galleries. Hosted by Newmeyer’s publicity department, their job was to select Machine Art’s most successful pieces, at least as adjudicated according to the formal parameters of Neoplatonism. This was the first event in what would come to be called Machine Art’s “beauty contest,” and it was fully in keeping with nineteenth-century traditions of display. It mimicked the academic tradition of salon prizes, for one, and also closely paralleled the competitive modus operandi of industrial trade fairs: both practices that positioned exhibitions as cumulative processes of evaluation from juried selection to hierarchical installation to the final conferral of prizes. As reported by Iron Age (accustomed to reporting ribbon-winners from trade fairs), the honor roll read as follows: “A section of steel spring (American Steel & Wire) took first prize, an airplane propeller (Aluminum Co.) second, and a heap of ball bearings (SKF) took third.”9 These results appeared again and again in the early reporting on Machine Art, often accompanied by a photograph. Circulated by Newmeyer’s PR staff, the image showed the illustrious panel, each member holding one of the prizewinning objects, first through third place arranged left to right. We begin at the right side of the photograph with the bearer of the thirdplace winner, Charles R. Richards. Then, as now, the least recognizable figure on the panel, Richards was nonetheless probably the best suited to its goals. He was a prominent museum professional (formerly chair of the American Association of Museums) and an expert on modern industrial design. In 1925, at the behest of then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, Richards chaired an official delegation to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (the show that popularized, and later gave its name to, the art deco style). Hoover, feeling that the United States lagged too far behind the world in matters of taste, had banned American participation, sending his fact-finding panel instead. Richards’s assignment was to visit the show, buy representative samples from it, and assemble a circulating exhibit for domestic audiences.10 The show proved to be a Chapter Four: Empiricism

Figure 55  Machine Art judges Amelia Earhart, John Dewey, and Charles R. Richards holding first, second, and third

prizes, respectively. Photograph by Paul Parker. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

major force behind the start of the art-in-industry movement and so helped to begin the fad for design exhibitions of which Machine Art was at least nominally a part. Richards was also the author of The Industrial Museum, a specialized survey that investigated how European museums had solved the problem of exhibiting technology and the applied arts. It was a polemical book, one that advocated a far different course from the one taken by Barr and Johnson in Machine Art. The modern industrial museum, in Richards’s view, would be most socially valuable if it were to make processes, not products, the main focus its display.11 Richards believed that the museum had a responsibility to keep historical modes of crafting, like potting and spinning, available to the public eye. If handicraft remained visible, he felt, it could also remain a productive counterbalance to the alienation and drudgery of modern work. Richards’s background certainly 132 133

qualified him to serve as a juror for Machine Art, even as it might also explain why he looks a little less than comfortable in the photograph. That rigid spine and tight-lipped smile seem to let slip some personal chagrin, or at least uneasiness. Paired with the ball bearing—that foundational enabler of alienated, assembly-line production, here so fully divorced from any apparatus of production—Richards is caught in a somewhat embarrassing embrace, entangled with an iconic figure of alienation after making a career of explaining the museum’s duty to rise above it. In the early 1900s, Richards had been a professor of manual instruction at Columbia’s Teachers’ College, where he had been a vigorous advocate of the sort of hands-on pedagogy made famous by the man who stands to his right in the photograph (and who was once a colleague at Columbia), John Dewey. Placed in the middle of the group, Dewey shows off second place: an aluminum outboard propeller, rhythmic in its undulating blades of polished aluminum. (The Aluminum News-Letter cited these as the reason for the object’s edge in the much-touted “beauty contest.” Tongue-in-cheek, it explained: “Its Curves Won.”12) Bespectacled, mustachioed, and with the rumpled and hunched demeanor of the book-learned, Dewey certainly looked the professorial part in the publicity photo. While ordinary newspaper readers would not likely have recognized Richards, they would have picked Dewey out at once. He was by far the most famous living American philosopher at the time; his theoretical treatises were advertised and reviewed in the popular press, and he was quite active in New York’s cultural circuit. It was not at all unusual for Dewey to participate in public events. More to the point, it was quite typical for him to be invited to give his opinion on any number of issues from tax hikes to parenting and from presidential candidates to “the Negro problem.” In an era still accustomed to the celebrity of the public intellectual, Dewey’s appearance at Machine Art would have been no cause for surprise—all the less so given the timing. Dewey’s newest book, Art as Experience, had just hit bookstores. This was the philosopher’s first major foray into aesthetics, an expansion many reviewers deemed especially timely at a moment of increased national attention to the arts (these writers cited Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Project and the widespread popularity of American Scene painting as proof).13 But in fact, Dewey’s attention was not particularly focused on traditionally “artistic” instances of beauty. He only modestly seasoned the text with references to artists, and there he played conservatively, dropping uncontroversial names like Tintoretto, Poussin, Cézanne, and Matisse. As such, he restricted his comment on the visual arts mostly to settled matters. Dewey’s choices, however modest, reflected the most immersive experience the philosopher had had with art history, through time spent viewing the private collection of his friend Albert Barnes (whose influence inspired Art as Experience and to whom the book was Chapter Four: Empiricism

dedicated). Not much of an art book per se, Dewey’s discussion instead ranged mostly outside museum (or art collectors’) walls. The move was a purposeful one, allowing him to argue that “art” is more properly a category of experience than of objects, a quality of attention to be defined relationally and through direct engagement with images and objects (whether anyone called them “artworks” or not). Although it promised well-timed relevance, Dewey’s treatise wasn’t about to make much difference in the renewed debates over modern abstraction in the 1930s; in fact, both sides viewed it as friendly to their cause. Dewey preached the values of contemporaneity and expression, over habit and imitation— a preference that modernists could count as a win for their side. At the same time, Dewey’s outward scorn for rarefied aesthetes who reserved for art only “religious, metaphysical or transcendental sanction” was ballast for reviewers who had tired of modernism’s apparent parochialism.14 A writer at the Chicago Tribune was one such wearied journalist; he welcomed Dewey’s book as a change of pace from modern art’s “most rabid defenders.”15 Nor was the book likely to change much about American pragmatism. One less charitable critic summed up the effort as a rebottling of “Old Tenets in [a] New Book,” and those familiar with Dewey’s work would quickly have seen how conjoining “art” to “experience” was an advantageous opportunity to vindicate his all-encompassing theory of experience, now adding “beauty” to the many laurels he’d already heaped upon that term. But the book was useful for thinking about aesthetic values as they might occur outside the normal realm of art. In this way, Art as Experience was tailor-made for Machine Art. The trouble was that where Barr and Johnson used ordinary objects as material proofs of formal ideals, Dewey’s book urged that the same things afforded only experiences, the value of which was their fundamental incompatibility with formulae. Experience was the cornerstone of Dewey’s pragmatism. He liked the word and used it often, favoring it for its commonsense intuitiveness (Dewey prized plain speech as an ethical imperative, seeing philosophy as an important form of social work). As the central concept unifying all his thought, “experience” amounted to a one-word motto for Dewey’s most cherished conceit: that man knows more by doing than by thinking, more by acting than reflecting. This model, he argued, was vastly preferable to the one he felt had too long reigned over Western philosophy: the model of the passive observer, or what Dewey’s student Morton White later called the “spectator theory of knowledge.”16 Moreover, experience was not just the means by which people gained knowledge; it was the point of origin for the very production of knowledge. As one interwar writer summarized it, for Dewey, “reality exists only in experience” and could not be reckoned against any imagined ideal of supererogatory truth.17 In other words, Dewey’s was a proudly a posteriori theory of reckoning, one he waged 134 135

explicitly against the bogeyman of “apriorism” (a neologism he ventured in a failed attempt at folksiness). As all this makes painfully evident, Dewey’s philosophy was foursquare opposed to Machine Art’s. Moreover—as if the divisions between formalism’s “apriorism” and pragmatism’s, shall we say, “aposteriorism” were not enough— the irony of Dewey’s appearance at MOMA grows even more striking in light of the American professor’s special distaste for Plato. Discussing Plato in his Reconstruction of Philosophy (1920), Dewey granted that Platonic idealism once had benefits in its historical moment, when it acted as a kind of recalibrating counterweight to a sociohistorical moment of political instability, religious transformations, and generally heightened unpredictability (much the tenor of the times in which Machine Art made its own case for Neoplatonism).18 But apt intellectual opportunism was not something on which to hang philosophy’s hat, Dewey argued, and he had little respect for the latter-day Platonists who had elevated the insights afforded by centuries-old historical circumstance to the stations of “truth” and “tradition.” In fact, if Barr or Johnson could have read Art as Experience before mounting their show, they would have seen that Dewey had used that platform to take new shots at Plato, whose moralizing rejection of “sense and phenomena” in favor “purely rational essences” Dewey called “a ghostly metaphysics irrelevant to actual esthetic experience.”19 So much for using Plato as a way to appreciate pots and pans. So, Dewey disagreed vehemently with the Platonism that served as Machine Art’s legitimating rhetoric—a disagreement that PR manager Sarah Newmeyer either didn’t know about or knew about and didn’t care. But Dewey ostensibly did agree with the show’s deliberate positioning of material objects as a basis for aesthetics. This is where things get tricky (if you’ll indulge the pun), since it is the disagreement over things in the practice of inquiry and judgment that constitutes the major disagreement between Dewey and Machine Art. It is also, I maintain, a disagreement that delimits the major difference between two competing ontologies of value in the context of machine-age mass-market capitalism. In fact, it may well have been Dewey’s enthusiasm for “the meaning of things” as fully “present in immediate experience” that had led to his invitation in the first place. Barr and Johnson had offered their objects as incarnations of meaning, too, after all: pure form made immediately available in three dimensions. Both Dewey’s pragmatism and Machine Art’s formalism depended on objects for meaning. But as Barr and Johnson had worked it out, meaning required revelation in objects through careful discernment: a skilled perception of value-as-such as it preceded and informed its particulars, themselves present in the world only by grace of a Neoplatonic logic of participatory ontology—a definition of meaning as simultaneously prior to and embodied by materiality. Chapter Four: Empiricism

This is not at all what Dewey had in mind. He thought meaning was only present in immediate experience—that it did not precede or predetermine one’s interactions with the world, and that it did not persist beyond the conditions of its usefulness. This was exactly the clever logic that had allowed Dewey to respect Plato but scoff at the Neoplatonists: for Dewey, the truth-value of Plato’s idealism was relative (ironically) to its use-value vis-à-vis the political realities of ancient Greece. Nothing defangs apriorism like complimenting it for its timeliness. If Newmeyer knew enough to realize Dewey preferred objects as starting points to knowledge, she could be forgiven for having overlooked the difference between the pragmatist’s view of objects as the inaugurators of meaning and her bosses’ view of objects as its containers. Any confusion over precisely how material objects might present meaning in experience is understandable. It’s precisely the confusion that Dewey himself meant to clear up when he explained his object-based epistemology as “empirical empiricism” in 1917, and that William James (Dewey’s predecessor in pragmatism) had attempted to dispel in his vocal allegiance to “radical empiricism” beginning in 1904. With their various emendations to the word “empiricism”—an etymological cousin to “experience” and so by all rights the property of pragmatism—both Dewey and James attempted a bit of course correction. They worried that empiricism had lost its way, corrupted by the temptations of apriorism, and that it had wrongly stifled experience-based inquiry in a prison of formal rules, preset methods, and controlled conditions. To confirm their fears, the pragmatists needed look no further than the modern scientific method, especially as practiced in American university laboratories (a field to which we’ll return later). Proud of its allegiance to direct observation and concrete facts, the scientific method was, and is, often held up as an example of empirical knowledge production. But, driven by the goal of discovering truth and revealing universal laws—and obeying a number of ground rules set up in advance (controlled testing, sanitized surfaces, etc.)—this method of inquiry sealed itself off in the vacuum of laboratory hermeticism. A practice of experience-based testing cordoned off by formal a prioris, the compromised empiricism of the scientific method qualifies as “quasi-idealism.” Intellectual historians provide another shorthand, “British empiricism,” acknowledging the influence of its leading lights: George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Locke. By contrast, pragmatism’s defiantly experiential brand of empiricism sought to take its cues only from the particularity of phenomena: in real experience, in the real world, and in real time—engaged without pretense or presupposition. Even more significantly, Dewey’s pragmatism sought to restore to empiricism the radical notion that knowledge was forged in the process of direct experience rather than revealed in the more removed effort of contemplative observation. 136 137

Meaning came in and through encounters with materiality—however it should present itself. While it’s uncertain whether Barr or Johnson ever engaged the writings of Dewey with any particular depth, the philosophers they installed as forebears to Machine Art’s immanent brand of idealism hint at some strong differences of opinion. Not just Plato, the curators also called on the blessing of Thomas Aquinas, whose writings had lately become popular in the United States, courtesy of the translations and interpretations of the French Catholic writer Jacques Maritain. Barr and Johnson had consulted Maritain’s translation of Art and Scholasticism to supply an epigraph for their show. (They chose a quote that itemized criteria for beauty similar to Plato’s: namely, “integrity or perfection” and “due proportion or harmony.”20) Moreover, Barr found Maritain’s commentary on Aquinas compelling enough to complain to MOMA’s trustees, some ten years later, that his excessive curatorial duties had kept him from important scholarly work, including reading Maritain more closely. It’s important to acknowledge the presence of Aquinas (via Maritain) in Machine Art’s intellectual inheritance, even if most art writers at the time overlooked it. If Barr and Johnson were interested in Thomistic aesthetics in this period, it is likely because this body of thought offered them high moral ground for advancing a revised notion of utility, one that would have less to do with the hands-on practicality of Dewey’s version. Directing readers to Thomas’s Summa contra Gentiles, Maritain focused his discussion on the medieval philosopher’s observation that all “human operations seem to be ordered, as to an end.”21 Medicine, law, politics, religion, the schools: all of these institutions were organized to serve bigger objectives, over and above their respective day-to-day functions. When operating correctly, Maritain explained, these institutions worked together to protect the higher goals of “tranquility” and “peace”: important aims chiefly because they safeguarded the pursuit of humanity’s common purpose, its ultimate end, “contemplation.”22 For Aquinas, even art, which might appear an unnecessary—even unseemly—luxury, had to be counted among the human occupations dedicated to serving this larger purpose. “There cannot in fact,” Maritain summarized, “be any absolutely ‘gratuitous’ work of art.”23 In fact, art’s apparent uselessness might be its best attribute, what made it most useful to the higher aims of contemplation. This line of thought would have been a good enough reason for Barr to keep that copy of Maritain on his desk well after Machine Art had closed, even if the volume mostly gathered dust. The objection that modern art was too selfinvolved and self-indulgent—too useless—was one that Barr had found particularly difficult to shake during MOMA’s early years, when the Depression forced a retreat from all extravagances.24 But if modernism only deepened the risk of detachment and pure self-reference that Aquinas admitted might seem to be Chapter Four: Empiricism

art’s liability, it had also come leavened with its best possible defense. So long as it insisted on the centrality of abstract form, modern art offered very little by way of worldly distractions. Indeed, the more modernism retreated from the world—even in an exhibition of mundane things—the better suited it was toward the greater good of contemplation. Thinking, meditating, philosophizing: these were the new use-values of Machine Art’s utilitarian things. Perhaps even Dewey would have respected this logic. At least he would have had to admit its pragmatic cunningness. In the end, any apparent sympathies between Dewey’s philosophy and Machine Art were only superficial. The two were allies in promotional purposes only. “I don’t know just how I can put it,” Dewey said at MOMA, when his work of judging was through, “but I think it somewhat extraordinary that modern machine production . . . should illustrate as well as it does the statement of Plato regarding the abstract beauty of geometric forms.”25 In this statement, he consented to the use of modern objects as demonstrations of Plato’s ideal forms. He left his vigorous objection to Plato—particularly as a starting point for aesthetic experience—politely unmentioned. Returning to the photo, we finally encounter the contest’s first-prize winner and its picture-perfect companion. Standing at the left end of the row of judges, Amelia Earhart cuts a striking figure—so much so, in fact, that newspaper editors often chose to crop out the men and run the photograph only of the lovely pair: a famous aviatrix and a single coil of Worcester-made spring. Arriving fashionably late, Earhart brought both popular celebrity and style to the event. With her bobbed hair and smart hat, “exact reproductions” of which were offered at Bonwit Teller during those years, she looked every bit the fashionable “New Woman.”26 Earhart had even made her own contribution to modern design just recently, having debuted a line of industrially inspired fashion accessories at Macy’s during the prior Christmas season. MOMA’s press release played up this connection, noting that the famous pilot designed women’s apparel that was “both beautiful and appropriate to the age we live in.”27 “Feminine to her fingertips,” as the New York Times once described her, Earhart held the first-place-winning spring in those ladylike hands.28 The single steel coil of thickly rolled spring looked as though it could be slipped over Earhart’s wrist like an avant-garde bracelet, and indeed, it could easily have been one of her own accessories; her line at Macy’s, as the MOMA press release crowed, included a ball-bearing belt buckle. Earhart did not supply the only feminine perspective on the panel, but the other female judge was too busy with her professional duties to attend in person. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, was the fourth and final expert consulted. The first woman to hold a cabinet position, Perkins had been head of the New York Consumers’ League before being tapped by Roosevelt for 138 139

national service; her background, thus, was squarely in line with the rationalizing rhetoric of the consumers’ union movement. Unable to see Machine Art in person, she chose her favorites from her office in D.C. using only Bernhard’s catalog photos as her guide. Like the other members of the panel, Perkins selected pieces that most closely demonstrated the Platonic principles of beauty laid out in the Philebus: a brass plumb bob, a squat steel spring, and the same outboard propeller that won second place. Perkins’ expert judgment, then, was in lockstep with what the curators of the show had already argued. Such agreement between curators and jurors was not felicitous. Richards, Dewey, Earhart, and Perkins received explicit instructions to judge the pieces according to the criteria that Barr and Johnson had established—not, in other words, according to the whims of personal preference. There’s evidence that Dewey did like a lot of what he saw at MOMA that day, despite his personal aversion to Platonic idealism; he made some faint checkmarks and circles in his copy of the Machine Art catalog as he toured the galleries.29 But these private notations indicate an idiosyncratic practice of discernment, at variance with the panel’s official, expert findings. Within the context of the first phase of Machine Art’s evaluation, there was only one right way to judge the objects—strictly according to ancient, impersonal, and absolute dictates of classical philosophy and Euclidean geometry, as known and understood by experts, personal tastes be damned. We can get a sense of what kind of experience Earhart, Richards, and Dewey had at Machine Art by looking at the installation shots Newmeyer ordered on the day of their jury duty. These photos are the only ones that exist of the show’s installation in 1934, so they are already well known to us. Looking back over them now, the conspicuously unpopulated photographs suggest precisely the sort of unobstructed vision prized in Machine Art—a manner of looking and evaluating in keeping with the quasi-idealism of the British school of empiricism. They are—perhaps unintentionally—perfect portraits of the sort of “spectator theory of knowledge” that MOMA imposed on the panel, and against which Dewey elsewhere made vigorous opposition. Hermetically sealed off from the outside world—no dust motes, no sunlight, no people—the galleries shown in these photographs offer the ideal setting for close objective scrutiny. Soon, however, the doors would open. Gloved ladies, skulking students, squinty-eyed critics all would roam the galleries, complicating the ideals of beauty, form, and use with the exercise of judgment and the contingency of experience.

Machine Art’s Popular Ballot

When the exhibit opened on March 6, Newmeyer set into motion the second act in her PR play. Upon entering MOMA, Machine Art’s visitors could pick up a Chapter Four: Empiricism

small, ivory-colored ballot, at the top of which appeared the following prompt: I consider the most beautiful object in the Exhibition to be: _____________________________________________

On the long line that extended beneath this sentence, visitors were to write the exhibit number of their favorite piece.30 MOMA collected nearly 2,400 votes from this ballot over a period of about five weeks. A press release announced the results toward the end of Machine Art’s New York run (it had been extended later into April than originally planned, due to its popularity). As it turned out, the public’s decisions drastically differed from those of the experts. Newmeyer must have been delighted; the difference of opinion introduced conflict into the coverage, and so, in the last weeks of its run, Machine Art was again in the press. Where the judges had preferred machine parts, the public tended to select fully assembled household goods. Where the judges selected geometrically simple things flat enough to photograph well, the public selected more complicated, fully three-dimensional objects, some of which had not been photographed for the catalog at all. The former third-place winner, SKF’s ball bearing, slipped to fourth place by the public’s count; the second-place outboard propeller came in eighth; and the top-winning steel spring did worse than either of them, receiving what one report called “only scattering votes.”31 Instead, the collective favorite of the voting public was a three-sided, prism-shaped signal mirror. Made by the German optics outfit Carl Zeiss, Inc., and intended for use in nautical navigation, the piece boasted jewel-cut angularity and a visual light show of refractions and reflections. The museumgoers, like the celebrity judges before them, also picked a boat propeller for second place. But where the experts picked an aluminum one (maintaining allegiance to Johnson’s silvery surfaces), the public preferred another. Made of bronze, the public’s boat propeller seemed “artier” than some of the other pieces, given the material’s association with domestic ornamental sculpture. Neither this nor the signal mirror had merited any mention from the judges, nor were these public favorites illustrated in the catalog. Further, while Johnson dutifully sent a letter of congratulations to the folks at Carl Zeiss commending them on their mirror’s win, he did not seek to retain the object for MOMA’s permanent collection.32 By contrast, all three of the experts’ picks were acquired for the museum, where they remain in the collection and are still frequently on display.33 The gulf between expert judgment and popular opinion afforded contemporary commentators a fertile study in contrasts—one with endless opportunities for humor and winking asides. The fact that more women voted for the mirror than men, for example, did not escape reporters’ attention. In fact, while nearly as many men as women reportedly visited Machine Art and voted in its ballot, 140 141

female voters overwhelmingly decided the top winners.34 The male vote commanded less sway, because it was split among a number of almost equally popular objects: a two-bladed aluminum airplane propeller, a binocular microscope, a handful of steel ball bearings, a porcelain wall bushing, and the SKF ball bearing—all choices dubbed “overwhelmingly masculine” by the New York Times.35 The female vote gave the win to the triple-sided mirror and was also responsible for the bronze outboard propeller’s second-place nod. Both called to mind a kind of passé, Victorian taste for mirrors and bronze statuettes that Johnson had explicitly hoped to counter with a functionalist aesthetic meant finally to expunge “gimcracks” from the home.36 Feminine taste (and its conventional associations with both consumerism and flightiness) thus came to occupy center stage in Machine Art’s drama of decision, a show in which women played the role of unwitting comediennes. The New Yorker smirked at an apparent “confrontation” between “one very soignée lady” and “a huge and rather grim-looking porcelain insulator”—adding that the victor in this showdown between fashionable refinement and gruff indifference was still uncertain at press time. 37 If Machine Art’s more well-established female visitors were unconvinced by the functionalist curiosities arrayed before them, younger women showed up in press reports as a giddily envious demographic. Jane Schwartz, writing for the Art News, spied an “engaging young girl” at the show who “fluttered and giggled” in the galleries, flirting with her male companion but also “lavish[ing] feminine rapture upon the wonders of the streamline monel [sic] metal sinks.”38 The “somewhat recalcitrant boyfriend,” on the other hand, was “exasperated almost to the point of matrimony”—exactly, Schwartz suggests, what “the scheming female” had in mind.39 In Cleveland, art critic Grace V. Kelly also sensed something afoot, but she cast her suspicious eye in the direction of those “wily males” at the drafting tables and in the boardrooms of modern industry, eager “to lure women back into the kitchen.” “The monel [sic] metal sink alone,” Kelly quipped, “might effect social back-tracking.”40 It should be noted that Barr himself frequently made use of gender stereotypes in his interwar-era writings on design, usually maintaining the idea that functionalism was a style that would appeal to men, while female shoppers were less capable of appreciating its virtues. In a short advice piece he wrote for Marshall Field’s Fashions of the Hour magazine in 1930 (apparently never published), Barr acknowledged two tendencies in modern design that sound very much like the “two main traditions” he would later track in his Cubism and Abstract Art essay and flowchart. Contemporary modern design, he wrote, was split between the “decorative, which is passing” and the “constructional, which is gaining an increasing foothold.”41 Imagining how tastes might differ between married couples, Barr wrote that “women perhaps will prefer the former,” because “their eyes are trained in the judgment of pattern and color.”42 Men, on the other Chapter Four: Empiricism

hand, because they were more “highly developed” in appraising the market for mechanical goods, would naturally be predisposed toward “constructional,” or functionalist, pieces. Thus, Barr offered a peace-keeping solution: “Let his wife buy the curtains; let him buy the chairs!”43 At root of the humor that laced Machine Art’s criticism (and Barr’s own comments on taste) was a general sense that the everyday evaluations made in the course of shopping—by women—were inadequate to either the design principles of functionalism or the higher arena of modern artistic discernment (which Machine Art argued functionalism entailed). A collateral casualty of this kind of ribbing was any progressive hope for consumer re-skilling or reform that either party might have held. After all, even as women repeatedly appeared coveting Machine Art’s objects, the critics were almost unanimous in their assumption that the female museumgoers were blind to the show’s higher purpose. They were shown in the press to be unteachable, mistakenly trying to buy (or, in at least one case, steal) the things on view and failing to settle calmly into the higher contemplative work of aesthetic meditation, much less the rationalizing principles of efficiency- and utility-based consumerism.44 But if the press deemed most of their behaviors “silly,” the women portrayed in the reports nonetheless implemented exactly the tactics of evaluation that Dewey upheld as the most evolved and useful routes to judgment, both in Art and Experience and throughout his pragmatist philosophy.45 In his frequent insistence that knowledge emerged only through “immediate experience,” Dewey was careful to qualify what counted as experience. Not only did his definition square more with the engaged, self-directed researches of Machine Art’s voting public, but it also explicitly decried purely visual modes of observation—such as the one demanded by MOMA’s strict hands-off policy— as experientially insufficient. Such anemic encounters with “the bare presence of the thing (say, as optical stimulus),” offered only “a low-grade or confused” form of knowledge, according to an essay Dewey published in 1917.46 Instead, the subject had to engage with the world, physically and mentally testing the limits and potential effects of its phenomena, before he or she could even begin to use its objects as a basis for knowledge. Indeed, to say that Dewey positioned objects as central to experience, and thus to knowledge production, is to miss a crucial aspect of his philosophy: that objects, too, are in some sense the products of experience. This gets us closer to the heart of Dewey’s explanation of “experience.” Dewey explained that experience of an object could yield knowledge only once that experience met three conditions. The first two, that experience should involve the subject both using an object and being affected by it, were necessary but insufficient grounds. Simply drinking water or drowning in it (Dewey’s examples) did not provide adequate experience for knowing water. They were real experiences, yes, and 142 143

experiences that showed the swinging door of influence between subjects and objects, each equally capable of acting upon the other (another important aspect of Dewey’s philosophy). But they did not yet join subject to object in the full experience of action and participation, those origin points of meaning-making. It is only when one realizes that water has reliably useful properties and can prognosticate from them—knowing confidently that water “is wet, fluid, satisfies thirst, allays uneasiness, etc.”—that it comes to “acquire meaning” and “be known.” More than that, it is only by being known in this way, within the encounter of experience, that water can even “be an object” at all.47 Dewey referred to this as the process of “thought constructing its own object”: an object used, responded to, and adopted as an extension of thought (its natural partner) by means of action.48 Women at Machine Art—at least as they appeared in the press, where they were mocked for improper viewing habits—nicely illustrated Dewey’s practice of sound experiential inquiry. They walked around Machine Art’s objects, moving beyond merely spectatorial experience into an ambulatory form of vision, dynamically unfolding according to directed action. They sized up objects relative to their own corporeal projections (think of the “soignée lady” confronted by that porcelain insulator). They touched the exhibit pieces, too—they couldn’t stop touching them, in fact, to the point that “many objects had to be washed repeatedly” each day to get rid of fingerprints.49 The women even occasionally tested out Machine Art’s displays, using them right there in the gallery. In their interactions with objects, using them and being affected by them, Dewey’s first two conditions for experience were satisfied. Lastly, as we know from reports of distaff daydreams about lives transformed (by sinks especially), women projected Machine Art’s objects into future conditions of use and enjoyment. In this way, the women were able, finally and fully, to translate the brute experience of physical encounter into real, qualitative knowledge—to construct their own objects—at least if scored against all of the guidelines of Dewey’s philosophy.

Inductive Modernity

Pitting experts against laypeople, the two parts of Machine Art’s beauty contest amounted to a competitive experiment in the exercise of evaluation. Initially staged by MOMA in order to publicize an offbeat show, by the time the judging and voting were finished—the results tallied, reported, then lampooned—the two events came to seem as broadly indicative of the fault lines that ran through modern judgment, registering the tension long building between two styles of empiricism. The deductive style of the experts, mediating their encounter with Machine Art’s objects through fixed, ostensibly disinterested principles, could Chapter Four: Empiricism

not have been more different from the inductive, a posteriori style of the laymen—or, really, the laywomen, what with their snap judgments, hands-on approach, and self-interest for future use. This competition between two ways of knowing the world, played out almost parodically in the beauty contest, serves as a handy dividing line in the intellectual history of modernity. It is even the significance of this difference that has legitimized histories of modernisms and modernities: defiant plural forms meant to underscore the heterogeneities of these approaches. To cite again the most flagrant example: the modernism of the New York Dadaists (who, in true Dada fashion, began their experiments in advance of the coinage of the term in Switzerland) followed the invitations of induction. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia gravitated toward the same kind of materials as did Barr and Johnson for Machine Art, but when they looked at boat propellers, ball bearings, and bathroom fixtures, they saw an opportunity to undo stable meaning. Their industrial artifacts were object-occasions for the controversial complication of value— even to the nihilistic end of refusing it altogether. What a contrast with Machine Art’s deductive empiricism, where boat propellers, ball bearings, and bathroom fixtures sat ennobled as object-guarantees for the endurance, even solidity, of value’s reliability. One might also notice a similar distinction between the early twentieth century’s competing economic modernities, between managerial rationalization in the factories and the practices of irrational, unskilled consumerism (a conflict in which we’ve seen Machine Art to have attempted intervention). And if deductive absolutism and inductive relativism could be cast, even crudely, as the two poles between which artistic and economic practices pulled in the early twentieth century, it would be fair enough to include scientific and political sentiments in this tug-of-war, too. The competition between deductive and inductive models of inquiry took hold of American science in the early twentieth century, seeming to stand as yet one more sign of modernity’s epistemological sea change. The shift seemed to have taken place over the course of a generation, moving science away from the deductive model of classic British empiricism toward a decidedly more inductive and goal-driven practice of inquiry. Public attention focused on the change as a competition between laboratories: between the corporation’s research and development laboratories and those of the academic university. The R&D lab was a newly implemented and profit-motivated arena for scientific research, one that had grown to unprecedented prominence during the interwar period. Supplanting the university model of “pure” science (and siphoning talent away from academic labs with the allure of higher salaries and bigger budgets), corporate science marked a shift toward more relativistic and goal-oriented practices of knowledge production. Although perhaps not as radically inductive in its methods as the pragmatists might have hoped, R&D labs were still governed more 144 145

by timely interests of the moment than by a dedication to the production of universal laws of knowledge for its own sake. All of this is worth considering, because both Dewey and Barr commonly used the laboratory as a metaphor for their efforts during this period. Dewey’s famous laboratory schools were constitutionally more in line with the logic of R&D; they encouraged learning through experience and experimentation and channeled knowledge production fruitfully toward useful application. At MOMA, the model played more ambivalently, embodying many of the paradoxes that the “beauty contest” had also revealed—split between deductive and inductive modes of judgment. Barr resorted to the laboratory metaphor early on, in a memo to MOMA’s trustees, where he used it to explain how “the Museum ‘produces’ art knowledge, criticism, scholarship, understanding, taste.”50 In the many plans and diagrams in which he charted MOMA’s mission, Barr consistently imagined the institution as a laboratory, an inductively experimental place in which critics and museumgoers could encounter and evaluate all sorts of artistic practices and ideas as yet unproven. Nationally syndicated art critic Malcolm Vaughan evoked the metaphor in his praise of the museum as “a testing ground, a kind of open forum, where the public might study the latest works of new or unconventional geniuses.”51 But if Barr allowed for an inductive style of experimental practice— a “productive” model parallel to the R&D lab wherein what was invented was not dishwashers but “art knowledge,” “understanding,” and “taste”—he also sought to house a more classically academic laboratory under MOMA’s roof, in the libraries and permanent collections, and in his own curatorial quarters. Operating from these bases, Barr attempted to dissect and understand the principles of the avant-garde and then to instruct the public in its meanings through highly didactic forms of educational outreach (i.e., the museum’s richly illustrated and annotated publications, its formidable efforts in art education, and its gallery space, constructed to provide an exceptional place of quiet reflection and unimpeded examination). The ambivalence of the laboratory model at MOMA was perhaps its diplomatic strength. As a “testing ground,” the museum could cater to experimental types and shake some of the stodginess that art museums had lately accrued; as an academic laboratory, it could be a place of instruction to more conservative art lovers who were still willing to learn the logic behind new art practices, provided such logic could be demonstrated. By dint of the latter posture, MOMA was protected against the criticisms that Dewey himself faced in the 1930s, chief among them the sin of unbridled relativism. Although well known, Dewey was not a uniformly popular figure, and those who found fault with his philosophy did so in terms exactly parallel to the concerns raised over the results of the popular ballot at Machine Art. In its review Chapter Four: Empiricism

of Art as Experience, the New York Times noted that the philosopher’s ideas had recently come under attack for “being too loose in method.”52 Defiantly casting off any controlling limitations (such as those provided by a priori principles or timeless ideals), the knowledge gleaned from pragmatist experience was so local, so proximate, and so wedded to the moment as to become meaningless outside the particularities of its own unfolding. Increasingly, this catch-ascatch-can style of epistemological reckoning came to seem too weak-kneed for such a volatile historical moment: one that seemed instead to demand steely resolve and principled convictions. Such an imperative was felt nowhere more deeply than in the field of politics, another terrain in which debates over judgment—as variously enacted by both specialists and common folk—were at a fever pitch. In fact, the interwar period in the United States witnessed a widespread resurgence of doubt over the continued viability of democracy under mass modernization, a skepticism that centered specifically on the problem of judgment. If the modern, mechanized world had been transformed by geniuses in boardrooms and at drafting tables, many believed that governing this new world would require similarly high levels of expertise.53 President Roosevelt shared this view, at least to the point of appointing a series of Kitchen Cabinets, groups of expert advisors to administrative policy and decision-making whom Roosevelt kept close and trusted implicitly. In essence, this move toward governance-byexperts proceeded under the assumption that the electorate, and even elected officials, should not be tasked with adjudicating on issues in which they weren’t fully trained. The modern world was simply too complex for that. Instead, governance ought to proceed according to tested principles that could be applied rationally and without the disastrous inefficiencies or inaccuracies risked by a more experimental, intuitive approach. However, at the same time that such technocratic models of top-down leadership gained adherents, populist models of democratic decentralization rose up in opposition, as a counter-solution to the problem of mass modernization. These populist movements, swinging variously right and left of Roosevelt’s political center, reckoned that modern challenges of governance could best be solved on a case-by-case, county-bycounty basis by the raised and wetted finger of common sense. In this, populists were buoyed by the folk logic that the “wearer knows best where his own shoe pinches”—a favorite aphorism, it must be said, of John Dewey’s (whose political pendulum swung left), and one that made a political philosophy out of the tenaciously local and relativistic inquiries of induction. Talking politics risks impoliteness. It also takes us far away from our primary concern with the role of specifically material objects as a springboard for knowledge, whether as happenstance or guarantee. However, for an exhibition like Machine Art, which has so variously been conscripted into histories of both 146 147

high modernist hegemony and Depression-era populism, politics is unavoidable. Barr and Johnson certainly didn’t escape the problem in 1934. Perhaps too indecorous a topic for discussion in their cab rides uptown to Harlem or over dinner at one another’s apartments (located strategically close to one another, out of loyalty to their friendship), politics was nevertheless precisely the issue that would instigate a break between the men just months after the Machine Art show. In the end, Barr would cling to deductive absolutes, preaching a universal standard of cultural democracy in which individual liberties were paramount and artistic beauty knew no borders—even if these values had to be impressed upon the public with didactic force. Johnson, meanwhile, would veer toward relativism, promiscuously following a number of different grassroots 1930s autocrats whose power derived from the whim of popular opinion. Looking back on their first introduction at Wellesley in 1929 (Johnson’s sister had been a student and Barr a teacher), the two men recalled liking each

Figure 56  Alfred Barr Jr. (right)

and Philip Johnson (left) on Lake Maggiore, April 1933. (Margaret Scolari Barr Papers, Scrapbook 1933–1934, MSB and AHB’s sabbatical year 1933: incl. Easter. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

Chapter Four: Empiricism

other at once.54 Four years Johnson’s senior, and even more advanced than that in professional experience, Barr naturally assumed the mentor’s role in their friendship. This responsibility extended to Johnson’s political development, too, or at least so Barr had intended. Touring Europe separately in 1933, the two men met up at Alfred and Margaret Barr’s flat in Switzerland to compare notes on their various cultural discoveries.55 The topic of Germany’s changing political climate arose, and the two men found themselves in a rare instance of disagreement. Both had attended National Socialist rallies—Barr at Stuttgart, Johnson at Potsdam—but they had come away from the experiences with very different impressions. Barr was outraged by what he’d seen, and voiced his intention to mobilize against it. Johnson, by contrast, was electrified, moved by the spectacle of mass politics and convinced enough of its value to argue the point—even with his dearest intellectual mentor, the one man whose association he had just recently coveted more “than anything [he] could think of.”56 Barr’s strongest point of contention in ’33 was the Nazis’ excessively nationalist approach to cultural and artistic patrimony. In the pamphlet distributed to the crowd, Barr followed along as one official read from a list of “articles of politico-cultural faith” (as Barr called them). With the markings of an angry pencil in the margins, he singled one out for special notice: a call to defend “German academic freedom” against “insidious foreign influences.”57 This bold expression of the state’s intention to intervene in the cultural sphere alarmed Barr, who saw the danger this posed to Germany’s avant-garde artists, especially those of foreign or Jewish descent. Barr’s early awareness of the threat later led MOMA to serve as an institutional sponsor for the immigration of many prominent German modern artists (including the Bauhaus’s Josef Albers, who designed Machine Art’s catalog cover). It was the rhetoric of Kulturminister Christian Mergenthaler’s bombast that stuck most in Barr’s mind after attending the gathering of the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German Culture).58 “Art is not international,” Mergenthaler had pronounced. “Nor is there any such thing as international science. What are for the German people the deepest questions and greatest secrets of Nature, are perhaps for a foreign race unimportant.” Ever on the side of universal truths—especially where “Art” and “Nature” were concerned—Barr could not have been more distressed by this. The parochialism of the Nazi’s nationalism was so extreme as to risk relativism, so obstructionist as to impede modernism’s progressive trajectory toward collective internationalism. More to the point, it was just plain wrong. With dark delight, Barr itemized the ironies that shot through all the pomp and circumstance. An orchestra had played Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto at the start of the meeting and, when Mergenthaler left the stage, the instruments swelled the room again, this time to the tune of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. “The choice of music by Bach 148 149

and Mozart is somewhat curious,” Barr observed, “in view of the remarkably international character of 18th century music.” This “international character,” in Barr’s view, is what had secured the aesthetic worth of these compositions, and it secured the worth of modern art and science, too. Any attempt to cordon off these human pursuits of knowledge—to claim any area of it as the particular province of a single people—was for Barr an act of theft and tantamount to international aggression. In response, then, Barr took up the weapon with which he was most practiced: the pen. After leaving the gathering at Stuttgart, he sat down and described the event at length. From there, he wrote four additional pieces: one each on the ruinous effects of Nazism on painting, architecture, theater and music, and film. The last piece appeared in Hound and Horn. None of the others were published—but not for lack of trying. Barr’s personal files, assiduously organized and maintained, include draft after draft of his essays on the topic, in several different formats and versions. Included, too, are rejection letters, followed by another sort of paper trail: correspondence from friends and colleagues to whom Barr sent the unpublished manuscript on his own, effectively self-publishing and self-distributing his own broadside in an effort to get the word out.59 By 1941, just months before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Barr was able to place an article in the Popular Front publication PM. Although not about his experiences in Stuttgart, this essay clearly derives its convictions from them, advocating for the usefulness of art in wartime and for the imperative of protecting modern art as a fundamental and international human liberty. Building on the notion of freedom as a just cause for war, Barr brought the message back to modernism: “in no way is freedom better exemplified than in art.” “For the artist,” he wrote, building to a rhetorical crescendo, “is a priest of freedom, the work of art a symbol of freedom even in the bitterest crisis.”60 This core belief would motivate the heavy-handed political activities for which MOMA would become known during and after the coming war. Throughout the 1940s and beyond, the museum embarked on an exhibition program that encompassed both international humanism (as in the Family of Man show, curated by Edward Steichen in 1955) and the universal right of individual liberty (for which the modern avant-garde itself was made to serve as emblem). 61 This decades-long institutional program took place after Barr’s dismissal from the directorial post in 1943, but it took its didactic liberties from Barr’s own evangelical zeal. It also had its genesis in a special project in which Barr was active beginning in 1941.62 In partnership with Lewis Mumford and Nelson Rockefeller (who would later helm MOMA’s more covert operations on behalf of freedom), and with input from many others both inside and outside MOMA’s ranks, Barr began developing an idea for a massive installation.63 It was to be titled Chapter Four: Empiricism

For Us the Living, and would serve as a permanent monument to cultural liberty in the twentieth century. Referred to as “Exhibition X” in the flurry of confidential memos and telegrams sent among collaborators, the show was to be an immersive multimedia installation housed in a building constructed exclusively for the purpose (one proposal had it built on the site of MOMA’s sculpture garden). The sequential layout was to guide visitors first through a nightmarish future: an imagined scenario of Axis victory unfolding in galleries titled “Avenue of Totalism” and “Totalism Takes Over America.” Later galleries centered on American national history and “character,” building up to explicit calls to action (if the other rooms hadn’t yet made that prerogative clear). These spelled out the unique American responsibility to defend democratic freedom, an ideal that was to assume pride of place in Exhibition X’s final room, the “Hall of Eternal Truths.” Rhetorically on the side of liberty, the exhibition ironically left little room for interpretation. It was to be a highly controlled and didactic space, offering only one possible outcome—allegiance to universal principles, never minding the jingoistic nationalism with which these tenets were expressed.64 In some ways, it’s a very short line leading from Machine Art in 1934 to Exhibition X in ’41—a line drawn confidently, even sanctimoniously, between two shows equally sure of absolute truths and equally explicit about their deference to unquestionable ideals. Readjudicating artistic and even economic values to the governing principle of Platonic form had been the order given by Machine Art. Reckoning political realities and artistic trends by the North Star of individual liberty became the practice of MOMA’s midcentury modernism. But if this kind of heavy-handedness depended upon the adoption of a priori fundamentals, Philip Johnson’s flirtations with totalitarianism in the 1930s were filtered through an alternative structure of meaning-making: a more affect-driven route, reckoned through the experience of charisma and the off-center (if not exactly decentralized) populism of homegrown American autocrats. In one of Barr’s many letters to the editor (this one on the topic of U.S. foreign relations with Spain in the midst of its civil war), he identified himself as among the “majority of your readers who do not agree with Father Coughlin.”65 Fingering Coughlin, Catholic priest–turned–radio personality and one of the era’s more sensationalized political celebrities, Barr sought to distance himself from conservative reactionaries, belittling them through association with an outlandish “fringe” figure. His particular choice of quack here was significant, at least within the context of his political quarrels with Johnson; just months after he took Machine Art down from MOMA’s walls, Johnson left the museum to establish a political party, one explicitly cast in the mold of Coughlin. After Machine Art had been open for a few weeks and the success of Johnson’s functionalist “propaganda” efforts seemed secure, the young roustabout began holding political meetings in his midtown apartment. These eventually 150 151

took on the ad hoc banner of a political party: the National Party, which Johnson and his coconspirators operated under the slogan, “The Need Is for One Party.”66 Regardless of the dictatorial airs of this motto, the group flagrantly rejected the need for a platform (no a prioris here), appealing instead for a political agenda built on “emotional spirit.” One only needed “courage and loyalty” to get things done in political leadership. “Beyond that,” Johnson added, already sounding very much like his later relativistic self, “nothing is needed, not even consistency. The only necessary consistency is consistency of feeling.”67 Although the group began modestly in gatherings of not quite twenty people (including “Mr. Johnson’s German servant,” as the Herald Tribune reported), it had attracted at least a hundred members by the fall of 1934.68 These numbers were modest enough that the press safely reported on Johnson’s activities as nothing more than another art-world stunt. (The Herald Tribune, for example, dismissed it as a “sur-realist political venture,” never minding the seriousness of surrealism’s commitment to politics.69) But the numbers were also large enough to encourage Johnson to abandon art and take up politics full time. Resigning very publicly from MOMA (complete with press conference), both Johnson and Alan Blackburn set off from New York in December 1934. The two had already spent the previous summer traveling around the country in Johnson’s newest Packard (Machine Art, too, was on national tour during this time, and Johnson’s absence left Elodie Courter to manage its circulation from Manhattan). Johnson and Blackburn drove “8,000 miles from coast to coast” that summer, “stopping every two hours to converse with the populace.”70 From this research, they hoped to develop a political movement that would follow popular opinion rather than dispense wisdom to it. When they left their posts at the museum in December, Johnson and Blackburn were embarking on the next phase of their political apprenticeship. Pointing the Packard toward Baton Rouge, they made “Kingfish” Huey Long their new quarry. They hoped to brush up on the work of party formation by visiting the Louisiana governor, whom one contemporary journalist called a “forerunner of American fascism” but whom Johnson and Blackburn considered “the most profoundly interesting man in America.”71 The courtship of the Kingfish was short-lived. Johnson and Blackburn could not arrange to meet Long either in Baton Rouge or, later, in Washington, D.C. (although they followed him to both locations in their attempts). Eventually, Long’s secretary shunted the men into the field, asking that they set up an office somewhere in Ohio (Johnson’s home state) in order to organize for Long’s nascent presidential campaign. Running against Roosevelt would require the Democratic senator to break with his party and establish a third party at the national level—a prized goal for Johnson and Blackburn, and one for which they fancied themselves experienced. But even this work wouldn’t last long, cut Chapter Four: Empiricism

short as it was by Long’s assassination in September 1935. Johnson, somewhat skilled at abrupt changes of role models, quickly turned to Father Coughlin, with whom he and Blackburn had more success. They stayed as private guests of his suburban home outside of Detroit, orchestrated a mass rally for Coughlin’s Union Party in Chicago (which Johnson self-consciously patterned on the Nazi rally he’d attended in Potsdam), and assisted in the editorial duties of Coughlin’s publication, Social Justice, a stridently right-wing journal that found common cause with Hitler on the grounds of shared anti-Semitism. The truly strange biographical detour that Johnson took with Blackburn (a partnership in populism funded by Johnson’s large inheritance, earning them the campaigntrail nickname “the Gold Dust Twins”) continued to occupy his time, energies, and coffers through the end of the 1930s—at least through ’39, when he wrote dispatches from the German front in Poland, where he was a guest of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and wrote for Coughlin’s Social Justice.72 As biographer Franz Schulze has noted, Johnson’s political activism brought him far less success than his pursuits in the arts. It certainly accorded him his fair share of loneliness. His dramatic departure from elite urbanity alienated Johnson from friends and family. Barr kept in some contact, but many of the bridges back to MOMA had been burnt—not least because Johnson and Blackburn had reportedly drawn up “blacklists,” according to Art Front, “of people who will be disposed of when their day arrives.”73 These lists could not have been more professionally damning. At least as the rumors had it, the blacklists included names of several MOMA trustees, such as Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg (who were Jewish) and Nelson Rockefeller (who wasn’t, but whose family name tied him to the Standard Oil Company, with which Huey Long had a lengthy and celebrated feud—never mind that MOMA had just recently enshrined a Standard Oil gas pump in its galleries by Johnson’s own hand). It’s a wonder, really, that Johnson’s political odyssey should have lasted as long as it did—up until his return to Harvard, this time as an architecture student in 1940. Johnson rarely spoke about these more dubious years of his past, and when he did, it was only to express the depth of his regret. But the detour makes a compelling pendant with Barr’s own political activities during the same period, and not just because of the temporary break it forced between them. The trajectories of both men’s political obsessions in those days, so laden with zeitgeist, could be aligned alternately with both democratic and dictatorial sympathies. Barr’s political fervor in defense of international liberty came ironically packaged in top-down tactics of public indoctrination. Likewise, Johnson’s espoused heartland populism brought him squarely into the ranks of some of the era’s most flagrant dictators, whether would-be or full-blown. These complexities also characterized conversations on philosophy in the period, as epithets like 152 153

“Fascist” and “democratic” adhered equally to both formalist and pragmatist structures of thought. As historian Edward A. Purcell has shown, pragmatism’s seeming moral relativism (its validation of whatever “truths” emerge from subjective, timely experience) left it increasingly vulnerable to critiques of ethical laxity in the 1930s.74 But if some philosophers believed that pragmatism was dangerous because it implicitly left the door open to the affect-driven style of mass politics favored by autocrats, others pointed the same finger at formalism, so comfortable with precisely the kind of absolutism that was the stock-in-trade of totalitarianism.75 Machine Art skirted back and forth along this unfixed political line. On the one hand, the show’s very conceit—reinforced by the declarations of the expert panel—presumed to tell people what to think about ordinary objects, as though they didn’t know the worth of their own possessions. On the other hand, in its populist embrace of humble household tools, the exhibit was outwardly congenial to the democratic spirit that animated its popular ballot, and so also seemed in sympathy with the “ordinary Americans” aesthetic of the New Deal arts projects, as well as Dewey’s Art as Experience. This remains one of the thorniest aspects of MOMA’s Machine Art show: it dictated absolute values from on high while simultaneously showing them to have been the province of the people all along. Formalism and pragmatism, deduction and induction: these generally opposed models of judgment had become ironically interwoven such that authoritative a prioris were summoned to legitimize inductive experience, subjective taste, and individual liberty. One might say that Dewey’s very fame illustrated this paradox. He was consulted so frequently as an expert even as he insisted—again and again—that it was your experience that counted most. A cache of letters stored in the archives of another museum in Newark, New Jersey, offers fitting illustration for this peculiar dynamic, so prevalent in a period undecided about the nature of value and judgment, whether in art, the marketplace, the laboratory, or the ballot box. In the last years of the 1920s, the Newark Museum began a series of regular exhibits called “Inexpensive Objects.” Containing items variously promised to cost no more than five, ten, or fifty cents, these shows were a cinch to put on—a curator or other available staff member would take a five-dollar bill to a Woolworth’s and assemble a show in an afternoon—and they were wildly popular. Much more eclectic than Machine Art would later be at MOMA (although Holger Cahill’s activity at both museums suggests more than just accidental similarity), Newark’s vitrines showcased candlesticks, decorative chinoiserie, and ashtrays in the shape of elephants. They were also available as a circulating exhibit, shipped to far-flung venues for a fee of about fifteen dollars—more than the original expense of buying the objects in the first place. Chapter Four: Empiricism

Figure 57 Installation

view of articles from the ten cent exhibit, from the Inexpensive Objects Exhibit, 1929. Photo by Koenig. (The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ.)

Newark officials themselves were uncomfortable with the irony. When a woman from the State Board for Vocational Education of Texas wrote to the museum in 1932 asking that the show might be shipped to rural Mineral Wells for local installation (she hoped that it might “encourage our girls and teacher to see that ‘beauty lies within the purchasing power of the home!’”), Newark’s Beatrice Winser wrote back suggesting that the board save money by assembling its own show from area five-and-dimes.76 But if Newark assumed a doggedly populist attitude toward matters of artistic evaluation (the inheritance of its influential founder, John Cotton Dana), its fans still looked to the institution for authority. Another letter acknowledged the irony but justified the rationale behind it. The writer, from Virginia, noted that of course she could assemble a roughly equivalent show on her own, but explained, “your exhibit would make a greater impression . . . because of the fact that it was selected by trained artists who absolutely know what is good.”77 Even in an exhibit that so plainly dodged

154 155

absolutes, in a show that so overtly modeled eclecticism, from an institution so bent on endorsing subjective taste as the only basis for artistic beauty . . . even here, apriorism had not been eradicated. This tension was equally profound back at MOMA, where competing versions of empiricism at play in Newmeyer’s tournament of judgment—the a posteriori empiricism of the public (Dewey’s “empirical empiricism”) and the a priori empiricism of the museum (the scientific method’s deductive empiricism)—paralleled some of the era’s hottest debates.78 First, the two approaches called to mind perceived disparities in the marketplace, split between unregulated practices of consumerism (atomized and ever changing) and industry’s rationalized modes of feeding it (highly regimented and governed from above). The art world offered similar comparisons: between the indulgence of art seemingly cut loose from standards (abstract, nonsensical, irreverent) and art as it might actually beat its return to them (abstraction as absolute, the sense of the sensate, the reverence reserved for pure form). The laboratory-focused debates over the merits of R&D’s applied science versus the academy’s “science for science’s sake” repeated the argument—as did the back-and-forth over whether the public could govern itself in an era of mass politics, or whether decisionmaking was better tasked to select experts. These seesawing comparisons, never decisive in their outcome, were very much at stake in Machine Art, where both scenarios were allowed to play out. But in the Machine Art laboratory, boiling flasks and petri dishes were repurposed as thought objects, fulcrums for thinking about the various routes to judgment (passive spectator or hands-on shopper?) and differing ontologies of value that each approach presupposed. It is to this central question about ontology—about the relationships between meaning and materiality configured by Machine Art and its antagonists—that we at last again turn. To do this, another pair of thought objects.

In the Circle

It is easy to discern the gallery setting in the original photograph of Earhart, Dewey, and Richards: the three judges stand in front of a row of mounted steel channel sections that hung on the wall between the exhibit’s first room and an adjoining gallery. But this was not the image that appeared in the newspapers. The image MOMA distributed with its press release bore no trace of Johnson’s installation; in fact, either Newmeyer or one of her staffers excised the background entirely. As a result, on the official publicity material, the judges show up like paper-doll cutouts laid flat against an empty gray ground—an indistinct void within which only experts and their chosen objects remain.79 The empty, airless space in which they float visually inscribes what Machine Art’s aesthetic philosophy also insisted: that pure beauty and the ability to discern it occurred Chapter Four: Empiricism

Figure 58  Ruth Bernhard, In the Circle, 1933–1934. (Reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University. Photo credit: Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, CA.)

in the absence of any cultural or historical context. Even the judges’ apparent detachment—holding their objects aloft for the camera but without caress or even a smile—speaks to the exhibit’s rationalized theories of beauty, said to exist regardless of anyone’s pleasure in it. Only Dewey addresses the camera directly, holding the boat propeller near his heart, where he believed matters of 156 157

Figure 59  Installation view

taste might more properly reside. The faces of cultural notables and the artistic

of Machine Art. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)

forms of machine parts here pair off in a visual emblem of rational beauty. Judgment, the photo seems to say, is headwork. Compare this image with another, much different photograph—one that similarly leaves out context and reduces content to a subject-object pair, but to quite different effect. In it we see a nude female figure, folded to fit into a large metal basin. The woman’s left heel rests just on the bowl’s cold, steel lip, her long, pointed toe breaking the circumference—ruining, somewhat, the embryo comparison that the image’s author, Machine Art’s own Ruth Bernhard, made in describing this photograph some seventy years later.80 This photograph is the result of a little late-night playfulness on Bernhard’s part, taken during the course of her Machine Art commission and repurposing one of its shiny objects for yet another use. Much of Machine Art’s cookware, while recognizable, was unlike any that its housewife visitors would have known firsthand; Alcoa manufactured the grossly outsized Wear-Ever aluminum pots, pans, and bowls for use in hotel and restaurant kitchens. Several such pieces are visible in MOChapter Four: Empiricism

MA’s installation photographs of the show. Ruhtenberg carted all of these giant pieces of cookware up to his neighbor’s apartment. “He sent all sorts of objects over,” Bernhard remembered. “I just loved the way they looked. I saw beauty in the light on objects.”81 Whether it was their out-of-scale absurdity or clean lines that suggested the photograph’s composition to Bernhard and her friend Peggy Boone (a woman Bernhard described as “the kind who would take off her clothes at the slightest suggestion”) is anyone’s guess.82 In any case, Boone proved a willing model for Bernhard’s nude study, and the result is a photograph that in fact directly counters Machine Art’s deductive model of evaluation. If the publicity photo demonstrates art appreciation as the rigid, intellectual, and upstanding work of well-known experts, Bernhard’s image suggests its opposite. Form is not visually grasped by the subject; instead, form grasps her, in an experience that appears almost excessively tactile. Contrast this with the judges, who seem simultaneously to hold and not touch. In Bernhard’s photo, appreciation seems to flow naturally through the exercise of use, even if use is here performed against the bowl’s culinary type (but why take an object’s normative utility as constraining a priori?). Moreover, by withholding the body’s face, Bernhard reconceives the act of aesthetic evaluation as an act: one conducted in a body, through the folded surfaces of its skin. In this way, Bernhard pictured another model of evaluation, which Machine Art’s objects also indeed afforded—against all institutional commands to the contrary. In the Circle emblematizes the context-derived meanings of inductive experience: directed by hands-on testing, open to reuse and rehabitation, and available to the kind of future-tense inquiry for which the desirous female figure served so handily as a sign (both for Machine Art’s irreverent reviewers and, before that, for its official photographer). In its styling, In the Circle seems familiar enough. The frankly portrayed flesh—drawn up into a pattern of angles and straight lines—recalls both the coy sensuality of pictorialist photography and the cat-and-mouse games of modernist abstraction. Sensual but stylized, reclining but off-kilter, natural but affected: the work was one of Bernhard’s first nude studies, the genre for which she would become esteemed among California modernists. But the work may also be said to participate in a longer, problem-solving art-historical tradition. With In the Circle, Bernhard responded to the old challenge of how to represent the nude in a confined space: a classic problem for sculptural ornamentation (and one to which she would later return, as in her iconic work of 1962, Nude in a Box). One Renaissance work in particular offers a compelling, if coincidental, precedent. A series of tondos, dating from the late sixteenth century and titled The Four Disgracers, presents four male nudes, each enclosed in a circle and each caught, foreshortened, in the act of falling. All the figures hail from Greek mythology and all are guilty of hubris, having wrongly tried to consort with the 158 159

gods and gain access to the divine. Although I don’t mean to suggest that Bernhard had Hendrick Goltzius’s print series (or the Cornelisz van Haarlem paintings on which they were based) in mind when she and Peggy Boone conspired to shoot In the Circle, the theme of hubris easily avails itself to studies of American interwar culture. Prometheus, the mortal who dared to steal fire from the gods (and was promptly punished by Zeus), was especially popular. Edith Hamilton translated Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound for eager American readers in 1937, José Clemente Orozco painted him in a mural at Pomona College in 1930 (binding him in the confined space of a tympanum), and Paul Manship fashioned a shiny gilt version for the fountain courtyard at Rockefeller Center (a drippingly art deco space that, although overseen by, paid for, and named after one of MOMA’s own founding families, took very little of MOMA’s strenuous antistyling advice). To citizens of the machine age—particularly from the unhappy vantage point of market collapse and ascendant Fascism—the rise-and-fall narrative of aspirations justly thwarted and arrogance rightly tamped down could not have felt more apropos. The dialectical turn of hubris’s comeuppance mimicked the

Figure 60 Hendrick

Goltzius (1558–1617), Icarus, from the series The Four Disgracers (1588). Engraving. (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 [53.601.338(4)]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.)

Chapter Four: Empiricism

widespread view of the Depression as retribution for the greed enabled by mass production, just as it also promised just desserts for the gathering forces of totalitarianism abroad. In this milieu, Icarus was fairly popular, too, suggested as a name for a newly discovered planet in 1930 (the appropriateness of which was believed obvious to “our flying age”) and appearing as the title of one of Lewis Hine’s photos of dangling skyscraper-builders.83 (Mercifully, there was no mention of Icarus in the months after Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in the summer of 1937.) Coincidentally, of The Four Disgracers, it’s Goltzius’s Icarus to which Bernhard’s In the Circle bears the most resemblance.84 Like Icarus, Peggy is crumpled into angles; she is collapsed in the polished aluminum basin, and the resulting pose—one leg crossed over the other and obscuring her face—is somewhat too raunchy in its address. The awkward position leaves only lewd points of entry discouraged by folded, oblique limbs. Only the right, sloping arm, curving along the circumference of the basin, suggests comfort. But it is always, at every point, against the metallic, smooth support of the subtly curving bowl that the body’s postures achieve their definition. Likewise, it is only by the weight of the body (tilting the bowl floorward to the bottom left) and the reflection it casts (the shoulder and arm effectively show up twice) that the bruteness of this bowl and the sensations it affords (we imagine it’s cold; we can almost hear its clanky spin) are allowed to impress us. In Bernhard’s photograph, the experience of subject and object in mutually dependent entanglement becomes the contact point at which aesthetic meaning is made, bound to time, place, and the irreducible particularity of experience. This is just as Dewey would have wanted it. But to Machine Art’s high-flying curators, Bernhard’s antagonistic emblem might have offered a cautionary tale: a reminder that pursuit of the ideal—even in such seemingly humdrum items like mixing bowls—could always land one back again in the compromising embrace of the real. Then again, maybe it is Machine Art that has the last laugh, forestalling any inevitability of decay in the stasis of its displays, its photographs, and even its ancillary emblems like Bernhard’s In the Circle: all of them objectifications of meaning, materiality, and also, we see now, experience—a corporeal and timely means of knowing, yes, but one only made historically legible to us in this sign, available to us only as spectators.

160 161

Epilogue Opening the Circle

The public’s choice of the signal mirror could not have been more at odds with the philosophical treatise Machine Art pushed. Nor could it have been more fitting a figure of the kinds of tendencies against which the exhibit so quixotically railed. Although physically more substantial than many of the show’s other, expert-approved objects, the mirror could not perform as successfully as these items to freight abstraction with solidity. Faceted, pyramidal, and mirrored on all sides, the piece could hardly be seen for what it was. A sign of pure context, the mirror figured the potential for meaning without materiality. So, if the public’s choice was misguided—if it seemed so flagrantly to disobey Machine Art’s emphasis on Euclidean geometry and Platonic “in-itselfness”—the significance of this misunderstanding exceeded the accusations of either public dim-wittedness or feminine narcissism. The mistake of the mirror’s selection struck even more deeply to the very heart of Machine Art, and to the core of MOMA’s idealist formalism. Among all the Neoplatonic objects, said to be perfect incarnations of absolute form and unchanging value, the mirror introduced the impolite embarrassment of simulacra. That is, it let slip visions of perfect, but unreliable, reflections of transitory, even fantastical appearances.1 Redoubling its immediate context while disappearing from it, the mirror also demanded this same sacrifice from its more

stalwart neighbors, which were thus transformed into chimerical, imagistic, even partial representations when in its presence. The repetitions and reflections that flickered across the many surfaces of the signal mirror were not like the objectifying repetitions seen in Johnson’s serial installations or wall-sized aluminum sheeting. Those institutionally sanctioned repetitions had seemed to prove the existence of form, as a standard-setting cause—proven by sheer preponderance of observable evidence. By contrast, the imagistic representations on the mirror did not pretend to any such coherence. These representations were always partial and broken along the faceted edges. They did not demonstrate durability in repetition, but instead threatened dissolution. They did not suggest a strong tether between the material world and a form-giving, ideal prototype, but moved to cut that bind. They did not contain meaning within the body of an object, but superficially reflected it—and this promiscuously, taking on a continual stream of new content as it happened to pass by. In all of this, the three-sided mirror parodied the exhibit’s professed Neoplatonism. Plato’s idea that material things exist as so many copies of unseen, essential forms was a conception of objecthood that was seemingly well-suited to the era of mechanical reproduction. However, while the industrial prototype bore some metaphorical resemblance to Plato’s pure form, a critical difference separated the two. Whereas Plato’s forms provided a set of unchanging, absolute prototypes, the prototypes of mass production could claim no such privilege of inheritance. Instead, the prototypes of manufacturers obeyed different and worryingly dynamic laws: the findings of market research, the costs of production, and the interests of commercial producers and retailers. Worse, and as Barr and Johnson both knew, these industrial prototypes could flaunt principle altogether; they could reflect instead the whimsy of an arrogant designer or the caprice of a company president. Modern commodities were more like the mirror’s changing surface, obeying only immediate, arbitrary causes—cues taken from the in-betweenness of objects, instead of the supposedly authentic demands of objects themselves—and were thus subject to precisely the conditions of modern volatility and indeterminacy that Machine Art protested so much. Johnson later explained that the show had not been meant to influence the future course of design so much as to commemorate the perfection and finality it had reached under the precision of machine tooling. “Alfred was just as convinced as I was,” he reminisced, “that Machine Art was the only possible ending.”2 Hoping to dam the tide of value’s loss to indeterminacy, Machine Art presented machine-made parts and products like so many concrete incarnations of abstract ideals: Platonic form as “made into actual tangible ‘surfaces and solids,’” to use Barr’s felicitous phrase, and meaning as matched perfectly to materiality. I began this book by describing Machine Art and its lively, voluminous reception as a circle of rumination. Ruth Bernhard’s mischievous photograph, In 162 163

Figure 61  Ruth Bernhard,

the Circle, altered this circuit by inhabiting it, revising Machine Art’s possible

Spring Section: American Steel & Wire Co. (U.S. Steel Co.), 1933. Gelatin silver print. (Reproduced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University. Photo credit: Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, CA.)

meanings much in the same way that actual visitors did when they wound their circuitous routes through Barr and Johnson’s laboratory space. In both Bernhard’s experiment and the museumgoers’ experiences, the meaning of Machine Art changed by the pressures that people exerted. I beg attention for one final revolution around this curved conceit, returning to Machine Art’s first-place winner, exhibit #2: incomplete as a circle, after all, and one that must open, at last, into a spiral. Let’s look one last time at the prizewinning coil of shiny, steel spring. Circling in on itself, the form indulges in some material self-reflexivity: a self-referentiality in which form represents only form; material depicts only material. The wound steel loop turns inward on itself to complete Machine Art’s circuit of formalist solipsism. But looked at another way—that is to say, actually looking at it, holding it in your hands, turning it before your very eyes—you notice that the two ends don’t meet, that it’s not a perfect circle. And you might see something else: yourself, your face caught in the turns of an otherwise self-absorbed formal arrogance. After all, and as with the signal mirror, the real world cannot help but show up on the coil’s machine-tooled surface, interrupting the general property of reflectivity with actual reflections—one day the factory worker, the next the art museum curator, and, many years later, you and me.3

Epilogue: Opening the Circle

Notes

Preface 1. In his prose-poem Paterson (serially released and re-released between 1946 and 1969), Williams made a motto of the directive, writing: “—Say it, no ideas but in things—nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees” (William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan [New York: New Directions Books, 1995], 6). He had exemplified this radically simplified and object-based approach to poetry in his famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In its entirety, the poem reads: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens” (The William Carlos Williams Reader, ed. Macha Louis Rosenthal [New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1965], xviii). Williams’s work has been a flashpoint of recent academic writings on thingness and materiality in American literary criticism. Perhaps most notably, Bill Brown used this epithet as a jumping off point for his influential book, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). I will have more to say about Brown shortly. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 236. The essay originally appeared in 1936. 3. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 405, 7 (emphasis added). Latour’s historiographic project is to represent “uncertainty, people at work, decisions, competition, [and] controversies,” shifting emphasis in general from “final products to production, from ‘cold’ stable objects to ‘warmer’ and unstable ones” (Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987], 4, 21). 4. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xvii–xviii.

5. Mary Ann Calo, Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920–40 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 12–16; Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). 6. See especially Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 7. Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 8. Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). 9. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Winter 1978): 28–51. 10. Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 11. Staniszewski, Power of Display, 294, 293. 12. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 395. This aspect of Smith’s argument, especially as it relates to my reading of Machine Art, is addressed at more length in chapter 3. 13. Ibid., 404. 14. A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 86–87. 15. Ibid., 102. 16. Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) 2, 5. 17. Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 18. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 19. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), 21. 20. Ibid., 42. 21. Dwight MacDonald, “The Triumph of the Fact,” in Against the American Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 393–410. 22. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), xiv. 23. Bill Brown, ed., “Things,” special issue, Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001). 24. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in “Things,” special issue, Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–16. 25. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 26. See, for example, Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997); Ian M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl, eds., Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, in association with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1973); and Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1999). 27. For representative and especially illuminating examples of their work, see Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3–63; Fred Myers, introduction to The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2001), 3–16; Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 182–205. 166 167

28. Here I join company with Brown’s voluminous footnotes and with his primary focus on literature as a site of materiality’s emergence (see Brown, A Sense of Things). I also am in debt to the irrepressible legacy of Michel Foucault’s binocular vision: trained equally on material and discursive practices of social formation. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 29. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 3–4. 30. Ibid., 5.

Introduction 1. Joseph W. Alsop Jr., “Pots and Sinks Going on View as Art at Machinery Exhibit,” New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1934; “New York’s ‘Machine Art’ Exhibit Would Have Pleased Old Plato,” Art Digest 8, no.12 (March 15, 1934): 10. 2. Although the exhibition was a popular topic of conversation (at least if the printed record of criticism is a fair indication), and even though its dates were extended to accommodate demand, Machine Art was not the most popular attraction staged by MOMA in its first five years. A solo show of works by Diego Rivera in 1931 (two years prior to the whitewashing of his murals at Rockefeller Center) brought in over 56,000 visitors; American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man welcomed about 102,000 guests in 1932; and Lee Simonson’s International Exhibition of Theatre Art netted more than 47,000 (A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years [New York: A. Conger Goodyear, 1943], appendix H). 3. Machine Art toured to the following venues: the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (July 1–September 15, 1934), the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio (December 6, 1934–January 13, 1935), the Rhode Island School of Design (February 1–28, 1935), Mills College in Oakland, California (June 23–July 21, 1935), the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (September 15–October 13, 1935), the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio (October 27–November 24, 1935), the Milwaukee Art Institute (December 8, 1935–January 5, 1936), Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (January 12–26, 1936), the Brooks Memorial Association in Memphis (February 1–29, 1936), the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences in Virginia (April 25–May 23, 1936), University of Minnesota (October 12–November 9, 1936), the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan (November 16–December 14, 1936), the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland (December 21, 1936–January 18, 1937), Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York (January 25–February 22, 1937), the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery of Art in Springfield, Massachusetts (March 1–29, 1937), the Wisconsin Union at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (April 5–May 3, 1937), Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (January 3–31, 1938), Berea College in Kentucky (February 7–21, 1938), and Northern Illinois State Teachers College in DeKalb (November 19–December 16, 1938). Following that, a smaller version traveled to local New York–area high schools and colleges to instruct and inspire in the ways of industrial design (Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records [hereafter, CE], II.1.72.3, MOMA Archives, New York). 4. Henry McBride, “Museum Shows Machine Art in a Most Unusual Display,” New York Sun, March 10, 1934; Helen Appleton Read, “Machine Art,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 11, 1934; Royal Cortissoz, “Machine Art and the Art of Some Artists,” New York Herald Tribune, March 11, 1934; Anita Brenner, “Frontiers of Machine Art,” Nation, March 28, 1934, 368–69. For more on the vibrant art critics of the early twentieth century, see Susan Noyes Platt, Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981). For more on Helen Appleton Read and Philip Johnson in Berlin, see Frank D. Welch, Philip Johnson & Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 15. 5. Dorothy Grafly, “Deified Machines Spell Art in Well-Staged Exhibition,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, March 25, 1934; C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago News, November 16, 1935; Arthur Millier, “Is Beauty the Same Thing in Auto’s Lines and in Sunset?” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1934. 6. Einstein put it pithily in a public address given in Berlin in 1921: “As far as the laws of

Notes to Pages xvi–3

mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality” (Albert Einstein, “Geometry and Experience,” in Sidelights on Relativity, trans. G. B. Jeffrey et al. [London: Methuen and Company, 1922], 28). 7. A few pieces made out of clay or wood were the exceptions to the overwhelming dominance of glass and metal, but even here the materials, like the shapes, were appropriate to their duties. Wood was an appropriate vessel for salad bowls, for example, since it is a material that only improves through subsequent encounters with vinaigrette. 8. “Machine Art,” New Yorker, March 17, 1934, 18. 9. William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, came up in the Los Angeles Times (at the bidding of Arthur Millier), the New York Herald Tribune (thanks to Joseph W. Alsop Jr.), the Brooklyn Eagle (courtesy Helen Appleton Read), and the Architectural Forum. Since March 1934 was the centenary of Morris’s birth, his virulent opposition to what he viewed as the machine’s inherently corrupting effects on beauty was the subject of many exhibitions, books, and essays (Millier, “Is Beauty the Same Thing”; Millier, “Art and Machines,” Architectural Forum 60 (May 1934): 331; Alsop, “Pots and Sinks”; Read, “Machine Art”). Henry McBride referred to Schiller and Stendhal in a wide-ranging discussion of beauty, using the former to assert that formal perfection, such as that achieved by machines, was “fatal” to the conception of the beautiful, and the latter to reinforce this conceit—beauty is fated always to be an unfulfilled promise, dissipating instantly upon “realization” (McBride, “Museum Shows Machine Art”). Plato, for reasons that will become apparent, was so ubiquitous in the press reporting on Machine Art as to defy exhaustive citation here. 10. By the spring of 1934, Machine Art was a latecomer, taking its bow after numerous exhibitions of industry and industrial design had already captured popular and critical attention. The Newark Museum in New Jersey was among the most prominent institutions to adapt industrial exhibits—so long a feature of world’s fairs—to the special viewing conditions of the art museum. Newark inaugurated this program as early as 1915, when its New Jersey Clay Products made local manufacturing interests a subject of museological scrutiny. The 1915 show was followed by Textile Industries of New Jersey the following year, Nothing Takes the Place of Leather in the winter of 1926– 1927, and Chemistry Changes Our World, which ran concurrently with Machine Art in 1934 and featured a fully equipped modern kitchen. Macy’s Department Store, which engaged in a number of so-called art-in-industry during this period, mounted a weeklong display of aviation mechanics in March of 1928 that displayed tools, motors, parts, whole airplanes, parachutes, and a rudimentary flight simulator (“Macy’s Opens Air Show,” New York Times, March 30, 1928; Nicolas Maffei, “John Cotton Dana and the Politics of Exhibiting Industrial Art in the US, 1909–1929,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 301–17). 11. Read, “Machine Art.” 12. Lewis Mumford, “The Art Galleries: Portrait of the Mechanic as a Young Man,” New Yorker, March 31, 1934; repr. in Mumford, Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s, ed. Robert Wojtowicz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 113–14. 13. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 33. 14. Ibid. 15. Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 116. 16. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), 309. 17. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions Books, 1995), 6. 18. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933,” in Rendezvous With Destiny: Addresses and Opinions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. J. B. S. Hardman (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 39. 19. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: 168 169

University of California Press, 1986). O’Doherty’s influential writings on the “white cube” first appeared as a series of articles in the periodical Artforum beginning in 1976. 20. Both the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company are credited in the Machine Art catalog as having provided display accouterments. The exhibition’s correspondence file at MOMA includes a set of letters between Johnson and Alcoa in which Johnson orders a set of aluminum sheets measuring approximately four by nine feet. These may well be the ones apparent in the far wall of the show’s first gallery (letter from Philip Johnson to P. S. O’Brien, January 15, 1934, CE, II.1.72.3, MOMA Archives, New York). 21. The full quote reads: “I think it was the word, I think it was the idea, and the fact there were a lot of things that weren’t consciously art in the show that made it so famous” (Oral History Project [hereafter, OH], interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p 70, MOMA Archives, New York).

Chapter 1 1. The Machine Art catalog was the most extensively illustrated that MOMA had yet produced. The book accompanying Painting and Sculpture from Sixteen American Cities was a close second earlier in 1934, with 116 illustrations. 2. “Aluminum Propellor [sic] Wins ‘Beauty Contest,’” Aluminum News-Letter, April 1934, Archives of American Art microfilm reel (hereafter, AAA) 5058, Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks microfilm reel (hereafter, MF) 4, frame #802; W. W. Norton, Tenth Anniversary Catalog, 1924–1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #780. 3. By phrasing the logic of interwar objectification in these terms, I purposely mean to insinuate shared terrain with Marx’s concept of the “general” or “universal equivalent”: an essentially semiotic idea important to later thinkers, including Jean-Joseph Goux, whose work in particular has been influential to this study. Put briefly, Marx described the need for a “general equivalent,” or common denominator, to structure and guarantee a circulatory economy of exchange. Money itself was the general equivalent in Marx’s description of capitalist economy, serving as the regulating principle against which all commodities measure their worth. In the semiotic functioning of objects, one might say that brute materiality or thingness itself serves able as a similar sort of general equivalent. See Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Karl Marx, “Commodities,” chap. 1 in Capital, vol. 1, part I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–50. 4. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “The LEF and Soviet Art,” transition (Fall 1928): 267–69; Barr, “Dutch Letter,” The Arts 13, no. 1 (January 1928): 48–49; Barr, “The Necco Factory,” The Arts 13, no.1 (January 1928): 292–95. 5. “Junior Prom Also Is Affected by Modern Cubism,” Wellesley College News, April 25, 1929; “Wellesley and Modernism: Present Tendencies in All Fields Studied—Factories and the ‘Five and Ten,’” Boston Transcript, April 27, 1927. Both clippings archived in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3263; 112, MOMA Archives, New York. 6. During the year before MOMA opened, Barr drew up ambitious plans in typed memos, explanatory documents and many frequently revised diagrams. All of these preliminary notes imagined an American institution that would riff upon the Bauhaus school of architecture, art, and design in Germany, to which Barr had paid a studious visit in 1927. Like the Bauhaus, the museum Barr envisaged would reach beyond the traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture, and even beyond the professional applied arts of architecture and industrial design. Barr’s Museum of Modern Art would be so exhaustive in its sweep as to include the modern arts of daily life: film, photography, typography, and ordinary objects. Unlike the Bauhaus, art instruction would not be the primary aim of the museum; but in its capacities to display and collect modern art—as well as to facilitate its study—MOMA too would be organized around many interlocking departments whose respective purviews would reproduce the visual and material world at large. For more on Barr’s early vision, see A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: 1943); Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 192–211; Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr,

Notes to Pages 5–24

Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 7. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 68. MOMA Archives, New York. 8. John Elderfield, ed., Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art: Studies in Modern Art 6 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 61. 9. Filling out a U.S. Civil Service form in 1941, Barr explained the nature of the trip as mixed business and pleasure: “for health and study,” as he put it (Barr’s responses to Form 3573–01, “National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, Jointly Administered by National Resources Planning Board and United States Civil Service Commission, Technical Check List,” February 1941, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers [AAA 2190; 338–40], MOMA Archives, New York). 10. In discussing Machine Art for an oral history interview in 1991, Johnson made several references to “propaganda.” From the context of the discussion, he seems to have meant “propaganda” to refer not only to MOMA’s self-promoting publicity efforts but also to what he called Barr’s “puritanism” regarding the “Bauhaus approach . . . [and] the whole moral socialism of that day, that Alfred really shared” (OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 61, 64; MOMA Archives, New York). It is important to note that, in the context of the American 1930s, the word “propaganda” was more commonly associated with the business of advertising and public relations than with the nefarious manipulations of political persuasion—a damning connotation the word would take on largely as a result of the rhetorical programs of 1930s-era totalitarian regimes. From the vantage point of 1991, Johnson would have had access to both connotations in his interview with Zane. The slippage between the two meanings is productive in its application to Machine Art. 11. Holger Cahill, “American Folk Art,” in American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 6. 12. In emphasizing the kinship between folk and modern art, these writers advanced a common motif of interwar American writing on folk art, which often went to pains to suggest that early American craft served as a viable foundation—or “usable past”—for contemporary American modernism. Cahill’s own career in the field (as an adviser to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in her folk art purchases and a collaborator with Edith Gregor Halpert at her American Folk Art Gallery beginning in 1931) was instrumental in advancing this line of criticism. For examples of this reasoning in response to American Folk Art, see Helen Hamilton, “From Junk to Art,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 6, 1933; and Jay Taylor, “The Art Forum,” New York Telegraph, December 11, 1932. That said, many critics of MOMA’s American Folk Art show drew attention to its assertions of a “close alliance” between folk and modern art only to refute it, as in one review that contrasted the “simple expressionism, intuitive perhaps” of folk art with “the calculated ‘malice aforethought’” of modernism (“In Gallery and Studio,” Philadelphia Enquirer, February 5, 1933). For more on American Folk Art at MOMA, see Wanda M. Corn, “Home, Sweet Home,” in The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 325; Erika Doss, “American Folk Art’s ‘Distinctive Character’: The Index of American Design and New Deal Notions of Cultural Nationalism,” in Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design, ed. Virginia Tuttle Clayton et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the National Gallery of Art, 2002), 61–73; Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 50–51; Jennifer Marshall, “Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932–33,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002): 447–65. 13. If Barr promised similar numbers for Machine Art, the trustees were fated to be disappointed. The later show received only a fraction of American Folk Art’s crowds, at 31,200 visitors (Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art, appendix H). 14. The canonical importance of this show is tremendous, both for the institutional history of MOMA and for the history of modern, twentieth-century architecture. Although they didn’t mean it as a compliment, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach situated the Modern Architecture exhibition as a tone-setting event for the longer history of MOMA. They maintain that the exhibit exemplified MOMA’s stakes in a version of modernism that “embod[ied] the rational, scientific spirit of mass 170 171

society” (Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1 [Winter 1978]: 49). For more discussion on Modern Architecture, see Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Elderfield, Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art; Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1992); and Vincent Joseph Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, ed. Neil Levine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 15. Letter from Philip Johnson to his family, August 18, 1929, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 16. Letter from Philip Johnson to his mother, dated “Pentecost” [an archivist’s hand-written note indicates “June 1930”], Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 17. Alfred H. Barr Jr., foreword to Modern Architecture, International Exhibition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 13–14. 18. Barr, Modern Architecture, 14; Barr, foreword to Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. 19. Barr, Modern Architecture, 15; Barr, Machine Art, n.p. 20. Barr, Modern Architecture, 15. 21. Barr, Machine Art, n.p. 22. Barr, Modern Architecture, 13. 23. Ibid., 12. 24. The Little Review was proudly avant-garde. It boasted, among other modernist credentials, Ezra Pound’s editorial assistance in the late 1910s, obscenity charges in 1920 for publishing excerpts of James Joyce’s Ulysses (in advance of its full publication two years later), and Francis Picabia’s talents as its European editor in 1921. The publication consistently exposed its devotion to modernism not just across international boundaries but also across modes of artistic production, moving beyond the written word or printed reproduction to include interventions in New York’s teeming art world. Jane Heap, primary editor of the Little Review after its founding editor Margaret Anderson had tired of the project, went so far as to dedicate a portion of the magazine’s Manhattan offices for the display of contemporary art. The space offered itself as a platform for a number of avant-garde experiments, including an exhibition of international theater design curated by Frederick Kiesler in 1926. Exhibitions of “machine art” always seemed to trail exhibitions of theatrical design: the Little Review’s Machine-Age Exposition of 1927 followed its International Theatre Exhibition of 1926, and Machine Art followed just on the heels of the International Exhibition of Theatre Art, staged by Lee Simonson at MOMA at the start of 1934 and proving one of the Museum’s most popular shows of the period. For more on the Little Review and its exhibitions, see Frederick J. Hoffman et al., The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), 60–62; Abby Ann Arthur Johnson, “The Personal Magazine: Margaret C. Anderson and the Little Review, 1914–1929,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 75 (Summer 1976): 351–63; Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 305; Susan Noyes Platt, Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 12, 93–94, 124–25; Platt, “Mysticism in the Machine Age: Jane Heap and The Little Review,” Twenty/One, Art and Culture 1 (1990): 18–44; Thomas L. Scott et al., eds. Pound/ The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence (New York: New Directions Books, 1988). 25. Platt, Modernism in the 1920s, 129. 26. Barr, Machine Art, n.p. 27. Barr, 1928, Russian Diary, unpublished entry, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers [AAA 3262; 1183], MOMA Archives, New York. See also Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 306, 444n124. Burov’s work isn’t explicitly credited in the Machine-Age Exposition catalog, so the architect must have pointed it out to Barr himself. A number of architectural drawings, identified as Russian but not as the work of named artists, would support this argument, as would the reproduction of several collaborative projects in which Burov may well have played a role. I thank Stephanie Rozman

Notes to Pages 24–31

for her help deciphering the Little Review catalog. 28. Louis Lozowick, “The Americanization of Art,” in “Machine Age Exhibition,” special issue, Little Review (May 1927): 18. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. For more on Léger’s cover painting and the wider ubiquity of the ball bearing as a subject for the interwar transatlantic avant-garde, see Corn, “An American in Paris,” in The Great American Thing, 118, 120. Léger’s relevance to our current discussion extends beyond his attraction to ball bearings and his involvement in the Machine-Age Exposition. The year before that show, the Little Review translated and reprinted a short essay by the painter. In it, he urged the use of photography as a way to isolate objects from their normal contexts of use—and so heighten their availability to aesthetic abstraction. Particularly in the decontextualizing effects of the cinematic close-up, Léger argued that photography offered the rare chance to see things “just as they are—in isolation.” This would intensify “the values of the object—even at the expense of the subject.” We might thus be justified in viewing this piece as an important treatise in the nebulous interwar literature on objectification (Fernand Léger, “A New Realism—The Object [Its Plastic and Cinematographic Value],” trans. Rosamond Gilder, The Little Review 11 (Winter 1926): 7). 35. C. J. Bulliet, quoted in “Peas with a Knife,” Art Digest 11 (October 1, 1936): 13. 36. Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914). For a discussion of Bell’s concept as it relates to modernist art photography, see Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 469. 37. Keith F. Davis, An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection (Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 134; Harold Clurman, “Photographs by Paul Strand,” Creative Art 5 (October 1929): 735. 38. M. F. Agha, “Ralph Steiner,” Creative Art 10 (January 1932): 37. 39. Photography historian Keith Davis has called the White School’s emphasis on “the inbetweenness of things” a style of “nonobjectivity” (Davis, An American Century of Photography, 124–25, emphasis added). 40. Agha, “Ralph Steiner,” 37. 41. Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends, 1839–1960 (Minneola, NY: Dover Publications, 1991), 152; Milton Brown, “Interview with Paul Strand, 1971: An Excerpt,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 288–89. 42. Clurman, “Photographs by Paul Strand,” 735. 43. Paul Strand, “Photography and the New God,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 145. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 151. 46. Ibid., 146. 47. C. J. Bulliet, quoted in “Peas with a Knife,” 13. 48. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934, in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison et al. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 498 (emphasis added). See also Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51; Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 199–216. 49. Lewis Mumford, “The Metropolitan Milieu,” in America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, ed. Waldo Frank et al. (New York: The Literary Guild, 1934), 47. 50. Ibid. 172 173

51. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (San Diego: A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963), 339. 52. Ibid. 53. Letter from Philip Johnson to M. Mason of the Torsion Balance Company, December 29, 1933. CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 54. See for example Kenneth Baker, “Over Long Career, Bernhard Helped Make Photography into a Finer Art,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 21, 2006; Philip Gefter, “Photographer Tried to Elevate Female Form,” New York Times, December 18, 2006; Mary Rourke, “Ruth Bernhard, 101; Photographer of Still Lifes, Female Nudes was Mentored by Weston,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2006. 55. I thank Sherwin Simmons for bringing the elder Bernhard’s posters and their significance to my attention. 56. Margaretta K. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 24. 57. Ruth Bernhard, interview with the author, October 29, 2002. 58. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard, 60. 59. Joseph W. Alsop Jr., “Pots and Sinks Going on View as Art at Machinery Exhibit,” New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1934. We’ll encounter Ruhtenberg and his contribution to Machine Art in chapter 3. 60. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard, 60; Ruth Bernhard, interview with the author, October 29, 2002. 61. Bernhard worked for Steiner in the offices of the Home Institute’s journal, The Delineator (Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard, 55). 62. Ibid., 56. 63. Ibid., 57–58. 64. Ibid., 58. 65. Ibid., 56–57. Although the photograph’s pattern would never appear on silk, Lifesavers was still a breakthrough in Bernhard’s career. Advertising Arts printed the photo in 1931, as an example of how the look of modernist photography could also serve the interests of commercial promotion (Advertising Arts [January 1931]: 36). 66. Paul Strand, “Photography,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, 142. 67. The intellectual historian George Cotkin has written about the increasing interest in flexible adaptation among U.S. intellectuals beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Tracking the ascent of the adjustment concept, Cotkin usefully connects it to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories and their influence on other social and philosophical models of development—including those advanced under American philosophical pragmatism (discussed here in chapter 4). George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), esp. 35–38. 68. “Adjustment” had even served a rhetorical function at MOMA. Barr used the term in his foreword to Modern Architecture, noting that two sets of adjustments were required for the advance of the International Style: the architect’s adjustment to modern demands of utility and the public’s adjustment to the functionalist style this would unleash (Barr, Modern Architecture¸14). 69. William Fielding Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1933). 70. Loran David Osborn et al., The Community and Society: An Introduction to Sociology (New York: American Book Company, 1933), 209. 71. Ogburn carefully balanced his descriptions of maladjustment with suggestions for its resolution. All of them betokened a conservative approach. Adjustment should come through a deliberate strategy of reorganization: a self-conscious social program of small-scale adjustment efforts, each one responding to specific symptoms of maladjustment. Exercise and recreation, for example, could be used to offset the weakening physical effects of increasingly narrow specializations in labor. Measures like these, what he called forms of “adaptive culture,” would actively promote cultural assimilation of technological progress, but on a gradual and evolving basis with minimal disruption to the existing nonmaterial forms of American culture. Moderate

Notes to Pages 31–41

adjustments would also alleviate the “piling up” of new and different lags, which, if left unchecked, threatened to tip the country into revolution: a rather more abrupt solution to the problem that Ogburn wanted to avoid (Ogburn, Social Change, 342, 351–52, 280). 72. R. L. Duffus, “The Way the World is Going: Harry Elmer Barnes Traces the Main Currents of Modern Change,” New York Times, July 16, 1939. 73. Harry Elmer Barnes, introduction to The Human Comedy: As Devised and Directed by Mankind Itself, by James Harvey Robinson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), xv. 74. Robinson, The Human Comedy, 379. 75. The now-common image of Frankenstein’s monster, with his square head, lumbering walk, and bad haircut was a product of these years, brought to life by Boris Karloff in the Hollywood film production Frankenstein of 1931. 76. For examples, see “Law Problems Put under Lens,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1929; Mitchell Dawson, “Frankenstein, Inc.,” American Mercury 19 (March 1930): 274–80; George Norlin, “America’s New, and Spiritual, Frontier,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 5, 1933, 9, 18; I. Maurice Wormser, Frankenstein, Incorporated (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1931). 77. Frank B. Gilbreth, “Gibbes Gallery is Preparing Elaborate Exhibit Program,” The News and Courier (Charleston, SC), September 23, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #836. 78. Barnes, introduction to The Human Comedy, xiv; Barnes, The History of Western Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 438. 79. Ogburn, Social Change, 196. 80. Andy Hamilton, “What’s Wrong with Science?” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1936. 81. No discipline better exemplifies this modern epistemological habit of mind than art history, a discipline founded on the belief that objects tell us something about the history they witnessed. For thoughtful discussions on “evidentiary objects,” see Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 82. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–72. 83. Ogburn, “The Influence of Invention and Discovery,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 132, 147, 148. 84. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 59. 85. Katharine Grant Sterne, “American vs. European Photography,” Parnassus 4 (March 1932): 16; Sterne, “In the New York Galleries,” Parnassus 3, no.7 (November 1931): 7. 86. Letter from Philip Johnson to his family, November 18, 1929, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 87. Ibid. 88. Letter from Philip Johnson to his mother, dated “Pentecost,” [an archivist’s hand-written note indicates “June 1930”], Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 89. For more on this portrait, see Carol Troyen, “The Open Window and the Empty Chair: Charles Sheeler’s ‘View of New York,’” in Reading American Art, ed. Marianne Doezema et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 371–86; and Troyen, “Photography, Painting, and Charles Sheeler’s ‘View of New York,’” Art Bulletin 86 (December 2004): 731–49. 90. Agha, “Ralph Steiner,” 37; Clurman, “Photographs by Paul Strand,” 735. 91. Alfred Frankenstein, “‘Machine Art’ Exhibit Attains Effectiveness by Deft Arrangement,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 1935. 92. Florence Davies, “Art for Today,” Detroit News, March 25, 1934; “Art of the Machine,” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1934. 93. Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 153; “Panorama of the Fortnight,” Town and Country, April 1, 1934, 25. 94. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 64. MOMA Archives, New York. 95. “Sees Frying Pan at Art Building,” Berea (KY) Citizen, February 17, 1938, AAA 5058, MF 4, #889. 174 175

96. “Camera” derives from the Latin word for room. 97. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 404. 98. Ibid. 99. In his essay for the Modern Architecture show, Johnson credited this manifesto as the first, era-defining articulation of what would become the International Style (Johnson, “Historical Note,” Modern Architecture, 20). 100. The idea that the beauty of tools is wasted on workers ran throughout the show’s criticism. One critic noted, “For the most part machines carry on their creative labors apart from mankind . . . in factories [populated by] workers too busy with the mass production tempo to note the beauties of their tools” (“Machine-Made Beauty Revealed by ‘Machine Art’ Show, New York,” Springfield (MA) Union and Republican, April 22, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #795). Another commentator surmised that “circumstances of greater practical urgency” generally prevented housewives from noticing “the sleek contours of the dishpan” (“Machine Art Show Opens New Vistas at Smith Gallery,” Springfield News, March 10, 1937, AAA 5058, MF 4, #889).

Chapter 2 1. Plato, Republic, book 10, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), 291. 2. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69. 4. Ibid., 72. 5. Alfred H. Barr Jr., foreword to Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. 6. For Plato’s classic exposition of his theory of the forms, see Plato’s Republic. For more on this theory, see E. E. Benitez, Forms in Plato’s Philebus (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Company, 1989; and Kenneth Dorter, Form of Good in Plato’s Eleatic Dialogues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For insight into the relationship between Plato’s idealism and aesthetics, see Hilde Hein, “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (October 1965): 133–44; Christopher Janaway, “Plato,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut et al. (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–13; and Frank A. Tillman et. al, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 7. Clement Greenberg, “Neo-Platonism in Florence” (undergraduate history paper, Syracuse University, 1930), Clement Greenberg Papers, 1928–1995/ Section III, Manuscripts 1928–1998, Box 23, Folder 1, Getty Special Collections. 8. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1982), 128–29. 9. Thomas F. Woodlock, “Money,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 1933. 10. See Alec Marsh’s illuminating Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 11. See for example George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998). 12. Raphael Demos, The Philosophy of Plato (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 179. 13. Ibid. 14. Machine Art’s dogmatic Neoplatonism connected it to the resurgence of nationalist neoclassicism in France (as did the exhibit’s nearly exclusive focus on American-made objects). It also bears traces of the kind of neoclassical functionalism that was coming to serve as the visual idiom of Italian and German Fascism, as Johnson well knew, given his attraction to Mies van der Rohe. See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). For insight into Johnson’s appreciation for Fascist architecture, see Philip Johnson, “Architecture in the Third Reich,” Hound

Notes to Pages 41–60

and Horn 7 (October–December 1933): 137–39, repr. in Philip Johnson, Writings, ed. Robert A. M. Stern et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 15. While no picture of the Plato wall text exists in MOMA’s photographic archive, a blurb in the Herald Tribune reported, “the quotation from Plato . . . has been prominently exhibited as the show’s explanation and justification” (“Woman’s Vote Makes Mirror Art Show Victor,” New York Herald Tribune, April 23, 1934). 16. Malcolm Vaughan, “Modern Museum has Large Show of Machine Art,” American (March 10, 1934), AAA 5058, MF4, #761. 17. A. Philip McMahon, “Would Plato Find Artistic Beauty in Machines?” Parnassus 7 (February 1935): 8. 18. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 68–69, MOMA Archives, New York. 19. Letter from Philip Johnson to his mother, Louise Pope Johnson, January 19, 1926, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 20. Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January 1926 [day illegible], Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 21. Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, February 27, 1926, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 22. Hayes, the African American tenor, had earlier been discouraged from singing for white audiences in the United States, a prohibition that was lifted after the success of his European tour in the early 1920s. His widely acclaimed concert series, mounted in major venues and to mixedrace audiences after his return to the States in 1923, was hailed at the time as a triumph in African American cultural advancement. Johnson and Demos’s interest signals their own cultural openness and fluency (Steven Otfinoski, African Americans in the Performing Arts [New York: Facts on File, 2010], 97–98). 23. Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January 1926 [day illegible], Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 24. Philip Johnson, “Philip Johnson,” in The Right Word at the Right Time, ed. Marlo Thomas (New York: Atria Books, 2002), 162. For more on Johnson’s struggles with depression, see Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 25. Whitehead’s “process philosophy” was a strongly antidualistic approach to metaphysics, in which entities were defined as continually in a process of becoming—mind from body and experience, instead of supererogatory to it. This lead him to a more Neoplatonic take on Platonism, since a more rigid reading of Plato would demand the determination of all truths in advance and from above, not in process or in experience. 26. David Rodier, “Alfred North Whitehead: Between Platonism and Neoplatonism,” in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, ed. R. Baine Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 184. While Rodier considers the move away from Neoplatonic mysticism as a form of secularization, others have viewed Jowett’s interpretation instead to be informed by a modern view of Christianity, wherein the divine and the earthly are strictly delimited. See Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 124. 27. As quoted in Rodier, “Alfred North Whitehead,” 197 28. Howard Nemerov, “A Lively Interpretation of Platonic Philosophy,” New York Times, September 3, 1939, Sunday Book Review. 29. Raphael Demos, introduction to Plato, Selections, ed. Raphael Demos (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), x. 30. Demos, The Philosophy of Plato, 61, 178. While never precisely naming it, Demos makes frequent, coded references to pragmatism as Plato’s philosophical opposite. Contrasting Plato’s faith in a priori principles with what he called the “current bias” for “common sense” and “empirical” “experience,” Demos invoked pragmatism through its very lingua franca, especially as it had been popularized by John Dewey during this period. The staged opposition was a fair one. Dewey himself often relished being on the wrong side of Plato, choosing to historicize the ancient philosopher’s tendency toward idealism, rather than to capitulate to it. At the same time, Demos’s friendship with 176 177

Whitehead complicated the picture, since Whitehead’s thinking has been associated as much with pragmatism as with Plato. See Demos, The Philosophy of Plato, 49, 175, 178, 181, 186, 189, 190; and Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 33. 31. Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January 10, 1926, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 32. Sarah Greenough, “Gallery 291, 1905–1917: Alfred Stieglitz, Rebellious Midwife to a Thousand Ideas,” in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, ed. Sarah Greenough (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2000), 37, 486n48; “Plato’s Dialogues: Philebus,” Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 68. 33. George Hamilton Heard, “John Covert: Early American Modern,” College Art Journal 12 (Fall 1952): 37. 34. Charles Brock, “The Armory Show, 1913: A Diabolical Test,” in Greenough, Modern Art and America, 135–36. 35. Where MOMA’s Plato declares forms to be beautiful “not . . . relatively, but always and absolutely,” Stieglitz’s Plato takes a slightly but significantly different tack, stating that pure forms “are not beautiful for a particular purpose, as other things are; but are by nature ever beautiful by themselves” (“Plato’s Dialogues: Philebus,” 68; emphasis added). Neither quotation exactly matches the era’s foremost translation of the Philebus dialogue: that of Benjamin Jowett, originally published in 1871 but reprinted for the first time after the turn of the century in 1924 and then again in 1930. But Johnson’s comes closer. Jowett’s translation reads, “these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful . . . but . . . eternally and absolutely beautiful” (Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 610. 36. Cheetham’s stated project to attend to “modernism’s now often forgotten nostalgia for purity” runs parallel to my own intentions here. However, his discussion as to how European modernists struggled to find common ground between art and abstract purity, which he claims is “by definition immaterial,” presents a point of contrast with my aim to understand the double motion toward both idealism and materialism in interwar American modernism (see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], xvi). 37. Schulze, Philip Johnson, 44. 38. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 19; Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 352. 39. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 307, 444n127. 40. Hilde Hein, “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (October 1965): 133–44; Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 72. 41. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 211. 42. Françoise Ducros, “Amédée Ozenfant, ‘Purist Brother,’” in L’Esprit Nouveau, ed. Carol Eliel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 89. 43. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 57. 44. Edward Alden Jewell, “Again a Storm Rages over ‘Modern Art,’” New York Times, February 22, 1931; “The Pros and Cons: An Art Forum,” New York Times, April 26, 1931. 45. George J. Cox, “Modern Art and this Matter of Taste,” American Magazine of Art 25.2 (August 1932): 79–80. 46. Arthur Millier, “The Battle of the ’Isms,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1931. 47. Camille Mauclair, quoted in Millier, “The Battle of the ’Isms.” 48. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Who’s Crazy Now?” Park Avenue Social Review, November 1933, AAA 5091, MF 37, #261. 49. See for example, “Commodity Prices Believed Stable,” New York Times, September 13, 1931.

Notes to Pages 60–68

50. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Rendezvous With Destiny: Addresses and Opinions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. J. B. S. Hardman (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 39. 51. James Truslow Adams, “America Faces 1933’s Realities,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1933, 1; Henry Ford, “Is Mass Production Going Out?” in A Basis for Stability, ed. Samuel Crowther (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1932), 77. 52. Bruce Barton, “Are We Getting a New Idea about ‘VALUES’?” American Magazine 114 (July 1932): 128. Barton claims to be quoting the British economist Josiah Stamp, reporting casually on a conversation the two had. 53. “Warns of Going off Moral Standard,” New York Times, February 20, 1933. 54. Woodlock, “Money.” 55. Edwin Walter Kemmerer, “Gold Standard Is Far from Being Stabilized,” New York Times, March 17, 1929; Harry D. Gideonse, “The United States and the International Gold Standard,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 171 (January 1934): 123; Fred I. Kent, “The Mystery of the Gold Standard,” Literary Digest 116, no.3 (July 15, 1933): 5; “Gold Again in Limelight,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1933. 56. Milton Friedman et al., A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 189–96. 57. An undeniable strain of anti-Semitism ran through the vociferous resistance to monetary abstraction, just as it did through critiques of artistic abstraction. Where the former drew rhetorical strength from the defamatory associations between Jews and usury, the latter turned upon a xenophobic hostility to seemingly unnatural styles of art that came from abroad (see Marsh, Money and Modernity). 58. Woodlock, “Money.” 59. “$1,000,000,000 Gold in Hiding,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 1933. 60. “Return Parade of the Gold Hoarders,” Literary Digest 115 (March 25, 1933): 38; “Comment of the Press on the President’s Message,” New York Times, March 10, 1933; “On the Gold Standard,” New York Times, March 9, 1933. 61. Gustav Cassel, The Downfall of the Gold Standard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 116–25. 62. “Return Parade of the Gold Hoarders,” 36; “Let Us Stay With Gold,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1933. 63. Morgenthau himself started the joke, concluding his explanation of the revised monetary policy by saying, “You might call this the 1934 model gold bullion standard” (“The Dollar: Nation Returns to Gold, on what is Termed the ‘Managed International Gold Bullion Reserve Standard,’” News-week, February 10, 1934, 8). 64. Marsh, Money and Modernity; 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); Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 65. T. J. Clark is also attentive to monetary abstraction as it relates to modernism. I share his reasons for doing so: “Money is the root form of representation in bourgeois society. Threats to monetary value are threats to signification in general” (Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999], 10). 66. Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 67. Ibid., 19. 68. Ibid., 66. 69. Krauss, The Picasso Papers, 6. 70. Ibid, 12. France abandoned the gold standard during the war. 71. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, 125, 23, 26. 72. For more on this work and the other object-centric drawings Picabia produced for the magazine 391, see Christopher Wilk, ed., Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939 (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 91. For the most insightful and useful treatment of Picabia’s irreverent

178 179

modernism, including his emphasis on semiotic play, see Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail. On Âne, Baker notes the corporeal humor of the juxtaposition and writes, “Language surely plays its role here, refusing as it does . . . the adequation between word and thing, between sign and phenomena. . . . It is as if the fixed unity of objects, their singleness, could no longer be maintained” (p. 265). Machine Art, of course, yearned instead not only for the unity of the object, but also for its seamless unification with the ideal as known through text. 73. For more on Export Commodity and its fabrication, see Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915–23 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 92. 74. Amelia Jones, “‘Women’ in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie,” in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 152. 75. Demos, The Philosophy of Plato, 65. 76. Ibid., 200n. 77. Ibid., 74. 78. Barr, foreword to Machine Art, n.p. 79. Plotinus, Enneads 5.8.3, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 413. 80. A full account of the celebrity judging event is provided in chapter 4. 81. American Steel & Wire Co., Catalog of American Springs (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library), March 1934. 82. Demos, The Philosophy of Plato, 53. The coil of steel spring is actually chromium-plated: a dishonest enhancement of its metallic substrate. 83. Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, 158. 84. “‘Most Beautiful Object’ at N.Y. Machine Art Show City Product: Steel Spring Fashioned at South Works Wins Highest Honors,” Worcester (MA) Telegram, April 29, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #796. 85. “Machine-Made Beauty Revealed by ‘Machine Art’ Show, New York,” Springfield Union and Republican, April 22, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #795. 86. Jerome Klein, “The Machine Becomes Art in New York,” Baltimore Sun, March 18, 1934. 87. Correspondence from the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co. to Philip Johnson, January 17, 1934. CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 88. Correspondence from the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co. to Philip Johnson, February 7, 1934. CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, NY. 89. Discussion of Johnson’s overt acts of artistry, in contrast with the alienated labors of industrial workers and designers, is examined closely in chapter 3. 90. Lewis Mumford, “The Art Galleries: Portrait of the Mechanic as a Young Man,” in Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s, ed. Robert Wojtowicz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 113–14. 91. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 19. 92. Ibid. 93. Alfred North Whitehead, “Religion and Science,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1925, 204. 94. Whitehead, “Religion and Science,” 204; Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January 1926 [day illegible], Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. For more on Johnson’s relationship with his mother, which remained close through his early professional development, see Schulze, Philip Johnson, especially 2, 50, 431n161. 95. Whitehead, “Religion and Science,” 202. 96. Barr, “Who’s Crazy Now?” 97. As quoted in Rodier, “Alfred North Whitehead,” 197.

Chapter 3 1. Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911). 2. For more on the wide and complex transition to mechanized mass production in the United States—a transition that was as cultural as it was managerial—see Martha Banta, Taylored Lives:

Notes to Pages 68–89

Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 3. Press release, CE, II.1.72.3 (emphasis added). MOMA Archives, New York. 4. Ibid. 5. For some especially insightful considerations of how labor has variously been modeled in twentieth-century art production, see Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Helen Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003); and John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007). 6. The Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation was represented in the show by five objects, as well as display accoutrements (letter from Philip Johnson to the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, November 16, 1933, Machine Art, CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York). 7. Letter from Philip Johnson to G. R. Gibbons, senior vice president, Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company, November 2, 1933, Machine Art, CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 8. See for example, Aluminum Company of America, Aluminum and Its Alloys (Pittsburgh: Aluminum Company of America, 1937). Philip Johnson’s father, Hosea Johnson, was a business lawyer in Ohio whose friend and client Charles Martin Hall had patented a method for isolating aluminum through electrolysis. Hall paid the elder Johnson in stock upon the sale of the patent (which resulted in the formation of Alcoa); Johnson, in turn, gave the stock to Philip upon his graduation from Harvard. The value of Alcoa’s stock in the 1920s was more than enough to make Johnson a millionaire, affording him many luxuries, including cars, lengthy trips abroad, and a career in the arts for which he drew no salary (Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994], 34); Douglas Sun, “Alcoa Inc.,” in International Directory of Company Histories, ed. Jay P. Pederson et al., vol. 56 (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 7–11. 9. Joseph W. Alsop Jr., “Pots and Sinks Going on View as Art at Machinery Exhibit,” New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1934. 10. “Don’t Make ’Em Eggshaped,” Iron Age, March 15, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #780. 11. Alan Dunn, cartoon, New Yorker, April 7, 1934, 30. 12. Alain, cartoon, New Yorker, April 14, 1934, 41. 13. “Art and Machines,” Architectural Forum 60 (May 1934): 331. 14. This is in keeping with what Terry Smith has observed about MOMA’s interwar design aesthetic: a “two-sided strategy” that celebrated Bauhaus innovation on the one hand, but—in the context of American design, especially—advanced an ideal of “‘pure functionalism’ . . . [that] was acknowledged only in those industrial products created by ‘anonymous’ specialist engineers.” Anonymous, alienated labor, in other words, was crucial to the survival of functionalism’s avowed purity (see Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 390). 15. Matrimonial metaphors ran rampant through much of the criticism, as writers cast aspersions between the union of machines and art. Joseph Alsop hailed Machine Art as the “first formal celebration of the obscurely performed marriage of beauty and the industrial age,” but Henry McBride deemed this “announcement of the wedding of the machine to culture . . . still . . . a trifle premature.” The writer for the Parnassus was even more outspoken about the problem with the match: “To abolish divorce by a biological miracle of eliminating the differences between the sexes would be a measure as fantastic as fatal to its purpose. An attempt to make every tool an object of fine art would be apt to leave us without tools or without objects of art.” Alsop, “Pots and Sinks”; Henry McBride, “Museum Shows Machine Art in a Most Unusual Display,” New York Sun, March 10, 1934; A. Philip McMahon, “Machine Art,” Parnassus 6 (October 1934): 27. 16. Margaret Breuning, “Modern Museum Puts on Machine Art Exhibit,” New York Post, March 10, 1934. 17. Dorothy Grafly, “Deified Machines Spell Art in Well-Staged Exhibition,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, March 25, 1934.

180 181

18. Breuning, “Modern Museum Puts on Machine Art Exhibit.” 19. A. F. C. [Albert Franz Cochrane], “Gyration about a Ball-Bearing,” Boston Transcript, March 17, 1934, 8. 20. “Good Lighting and Grouping at Art Institute,” Milwaukee Journal, December 15, 1935, AAA 5058, MF 4, #872. 21. E. M. Benson, “Art Today: A Radio Review,” AAA 5058, MF 4, #803. 22. Ogburn’s pamphlet is peppered with such ominous headings as, “The Machine Takes Our Jobs Away,” “The Machine is as Dangerous as a Wild Animal,” and “We Cannot Keep Up With Machines.” While Ogburn offered numerous reasons to embrace the machine’s labor-saving efficiency, including the improved working conditions it offered for blue-collar workers and women, its ambivalence was enough for Civilian Conservation Corps director Robert Fechner to ban it on the grounds of pessimism (William Fielding Ogburn, You and Machines [Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1934]; “From Study Windows,” Time, January 7, 1935, 14–15). 23. Ogburn, You and Machines, 21. 24. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” chap. 1, sec. 4 in Capital, vol. 1, part I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–50. 25. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” res 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17. 26. Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro’s Americanism,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 360. 27. Sweeney’s catalog text downplays his curatorial role in the decontextualizing removal of the objects from Africa, which he attributes to other historical forces. He notes carefully that the pieces were borrowed from various private and museum collections—reminding that someone else had performed the politically suspect operation of extraction sometime ago. Indeed, Sweeney reflected self-consciously on the act of removing the exhibit pieces from their original cultural contexts, and characterized this decontextualization as a regrettable act of Western colonialism. James Johnson Sweeney, African Negro Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935). 28. For more on Boas’s influence on ethnographic museum display, see Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75–111. 29. Sweeney, African Negro Art, 12. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. Ibid. 32. There’s no doubt but that this is an evolutionary schema, although Barr’s attitude is properly Darwinian. He shows change as continual but does not give into the temptation of reading progress into the developments. Instead, artistic change happens through an adaptive interaction between artistic problem-solving (internally) and changing historical conditions (externally). Moreover, in its upside-down tree format, Barr’s chart seems to agree with Darwin’s sense of increasing complexity over time. 33. For the most prominent and thoughtful treatment of Barr’s flow chart, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 348–71. 34. John K. Sherman, “Carburetors and Kitchen Faucets: Things of Beauty,” Minneapolis Star, October 31, 1936. 35. Laurie Eglington, “Modern Museum Now Exhibiting African Negro Art,” Art News, March 23, 1935, AAA 5059, MF 19, #421. 36. Alsop, “Pots and Sinks.” 37. “Beauty in Machine Art,” Boston Post, March 25, 1934. 38. American Steel & Wire Company and the Columbia Steel Company, American Tiger Brand Wire Rope Engineering Handbook (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library, 1940). 39. “Industry Art Display Offers Proof of ‘Machine Age Beauty,’” Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1934.

Notes to Pages 90–103

40. Ibid. 41. “Good Lighting and Grouping at Art Institute,” Milwaukee Journal. 42. Note that Barr’s imagery is uniformly picturesque, evoking landscape’s smaller pleasures— pleasing, but not exactly sublime or awesome. Compared to intimidating, larger-than-life industrial apparatuses, snails, bunnies, birds, and berries made unlikely but calming analogies. If the machine appeared to many as a threat to the natural order of things—like Frankenstein’s dangerous monster run amok—Barr’s assurance that machines were as endearing as nature’s most captivating charms was hardly a subtle attempt to tame and temper machine age anxieties. 43. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 13–14. 44. Eulogy delivered by Philip Johnson, trustee, then chairman of the Committee of Architecture and Design, MOMA, reprinted in “Alfred H. Barr, Jr., A Memorial Tribute,” October 21, 1981, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 2.1.c Tribute Booklet: Transcripts of Ceremony. MOMA Archives, New York. 45. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 2190; 638–641, 612. MOMA Archives, New York. 46. Alfred H. Barr Jr., foreword to Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. 47. McBride, “Museum Shows Machine Art.” In an interview, Philip Johnson recalled McBride as a “good friend” to MOMA: “‘Dooby Dooby,’ we called him.” Johnson did not provide an explanation as to the origin of the nickname (OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 21. MOMA Archives, New York). 48. Lewis Mumford, “The Art Galleries: Portrait of the Mechanic As a Young Man,” in Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s, ed. Robert Wojtowicz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 113–14. 49. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 69. MOMA Archives, New York. 50. Grafly, “Deified Machines Spell Art in Well-Staged Exhibition.” 51. Untitled clipping, Arts and Decoration, May 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #813. 52. For an examination on the wider overlap between interior decoration and modernist museum display in the United States during the interwar period, see Richard Meyer, “‘Big, MiddleClass Modernism,’” October 131 (Winter 2010): 69–115. 53. “Utter Simplicity of Design Achieved in Home of Machine Show Sponsor,” New York WorldTelegram, April 28, 1934. 54. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 114–17; Schulze, Philip Johnson, 54–55. 55. Johnson shared the story in a letter to his mother; asking, “Was that why you named me Philip?” (letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, November 8, 1929, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute). 56. Letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, June 20, 1930, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 57. Ibid. 58. Letter from Philip Johnson to his family, November 18, 1929, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 59. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 65. MOMA Archives, New York. 60. Jane Schwartz, “Exhibition of Machine Art Now on View at Modern Museum,” Art News, March 10, 1934, 4. 61. For more on Wright, see William J. Hennessey, Russel Wright: American Designer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in association with the Gallery Association of New York, 1985); Donald Albrecht, “From Hollywood to Walden Pond: Stage Sets for American Living,” in Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, ed. Donald Albrecht. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 83–119. 62. For example, see “Plumbing Orders Gain: Standard Sanitary Unit Working at PreDepression Rate—1,200 Hired May 1,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1933; “American Radiator Gains,” New York Times, March 26, 1935. 63. Norris A. Brisco, Retailing (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947), 42, 44, 46. 182 183

64. For more on the Met’s industrial design exhibition series, see Richard F. Bach, “Contemporary American Industrial Art: An Exhibition of American Industrial Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (September 1931): 202–3; Bach, “Contemporary American Industrial Art: Twelfth Exhibition,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (October 1931): 226–29; Bach, “Contemporary American Industrial Art: An Exhibition of American Industrial Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (November 1931): 259–60; Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 113–16; Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 55–97. 65. Susan Noyes Platt, Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 131. 66. Wilson, The Modern Eye, 71–72. 67. Ibid., 182–83; A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 110–12; Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 159–60. 68. Sidney Lawrence, “Clean Machines at the Modern,” Art in America 72 (February 1984): 127–41, 166–68. 69. Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Saab, For the Millions, 2004; and Wilson, The Modern Eye. 70. Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 263. 71. Ibid., 263, 249. 72. The full line read as follows: “Basically, the Museum ‘produces’ art knowledge, criticism, scholarship, understanding, taste. This is its laboratory or study work . . . this preparation or ‘production’ work is the stuff of which the Museum’s prestige is made” (Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994], 197). In her authoritative book, The Power of Display, Mary Anne Staniszewski routinely refers to MOMA’s first decade as its “laboratory period.” She explains that her “coinage adapts the characterization of MoMA as an ‘experimental laboratory’ by . . . Alfred Barr” (p. xxii) and cites this same internal memo (the motif of the laboratory will reappear in chapter 4). 73. Smith, Making the Modern, 393. 74. Ibid., 395. 75. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Winter 1978): 31. 76. See especially Grieve, The Federal Art Project; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 77. Smith, Making the Modern, 385. In writing about “Life-style” modernity, Smith characterizes a brand of consumerist interwar modernism as idealized on the pages of Henry Luce’s Life magazine, which began publication in 1936. 78. The quote comes from a letter that Barr wrote to industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes in 1934. See Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 181; Smith, Making the Modern, 391. 79. Philip Johnson, “History of Machine Art,” Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. 80. Brisco, Retailing, 71. 81. Gilbert T. Hodges in an address to the Association of Commerce, quoted in “Urges Advertising to Break Depression,” New York Times, January 21, 1932. 82. Ibid.; “Commodity Prices Believed Stable,” New York Times, September 13, 1931. 83. Here the alarm bells of Smith, Duncan, and Wallach would rightly go off: Kirstein’s son, Lincoln Kirstein, was active in the MOMA circle, particularly in the Harvard subset, of which Johnson was a major player (“Sees Retail Trade Aided by Changes,” New York Times, October 24, 1934). Notes to Pages 104–117

84. Wilhelm refers to these designers and many others by their last names only (“Geddes, Dreyfuss, Guild,” etc.), indicating the popular notoriety of these men (Donald Wilhelm, “The Millstone of Style,” New Outlook 163 [April 1934]: 36). 85. Howard Wadman, “New York: The Shape of Things to Come,” Shelf Appeal, January 1935, AAA 5058, MF 4, #841–44. 86. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 63. MOMA Archives, New York. Terry Smith has also observed how MOMA’s regime of “pure functionalism” in the 1930s corresponded with a thoroughgoing anonymity of the American engineers who stood behind the actual products. In Smith’s view, this “discredit[ed] U.S. industrial design” and allowed “European Modern Master architects” to appear at the museum as the only named standard-setters for functionalist modernism. This observation stands given the overall history of the Architecture and Design Department at MOMA in its early formation, though it need be said that the big-name European designers on offer in Machine Art (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and others), were scarcely promoted any more than their named American counterparts (Smith, Making the Modern, 390–92). 87. In an address to a meeting of anticapitalist Quakers in 1932, Hart suggested a seemingly elegant solution to the problem of mass unemployment and poverty: simply employ individuals to run idle factories, so as to produce goods for the poor free of cost. “New Economic System Proposed by Friends,” New York Times, July 14, 1932; “Protest on Hitler Issued by Clergy,” New York Times, May 9, 1933. 88. Hornell Hart, “Wanted: A New Deal for the Consumer,” Journal of Home Economics 26 (October 1934): 481; see also Paul H. Douglas, “The Place of the Consumer in the New Industrial Set-Up,” Journal of Home Economics 26 (October 1934): 469–76. 89. Douglas, “The Place of the Consumer in the New Industrial Set-Up,” 473. 90. For more on the push for standardization in the interests of the consumer, see Norman Isaac Silber, Test and Protest: The Influence of Consumers Union (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 2–6. 91. The seal, which could be incorporated into a product’s packaging, testified to its reliable worth in the eyes of the magazine’s testing experts. Only products good enough to bear the seal were allowed advertising space in the pages of Good Housekeeping. (“It’s The Little Things That Count When You Buy Appliances,” Good Housekeeping, February 1932, 144). 92. Silber, Test and Protest, 17–18. 93. “Machine Art,” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1934. 94. “The Machine Beautiful,” May 19, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #814. 95. “Wisconsin’s 250 Teachers of Art to Meet Nov. 7,” Milwaukee Journal, November 3, 1935, AAA 5058, MF 4, #875. 96. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 99. MOMA Archives, New York. 97. “Don’t Make ’Em Eggshaped.” 98. Often, the streamlined bodies fitted over vehicles like automobiles and airplanes were so heavy as to negate any possible increase in fuel efficiency or speed. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 184–85; Johnson, “History of Machine Art,” n.p. 99. In truth, Loewy may not have had too much of a personal hand in designing this piece. The object in question was a “Communications Receiver (model S-40A)” designed in 1947 by Raymond Loewy Associates with The Hallicrafters Company Design and Research Team (and manufactured by The Hallicrafters Company, too). It was a gift of the manufacturer in 1948, after the end of the war. MOMA’s design collection is not totally shut closed to streamlining. A stunning example of the style is Egmont Arens and Theodore C. Brookhart’s iconic meat slicer of 1940. This, too, was a gift to the museum, which accessioned the piece in 1989, a gift of Eric Brill in memory of Abbie Hoffman. 100. Emily Genauer, “Utility is Stressed in Objects for Home,” New York World-Telegram, March 10, 1934. 101. McMahon, “Machine Art.” 102. Westinghouse Industrial Lighting Equipment; Catalog 219-A (Cleveland: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., 1932), 6 (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library). 103. Anita Brenner, “Frontiers of Machine Art,” Nation, March 28, 1934, 368–69; Catherine

184 185

Bauer, “Machine-Made,” American Magazine of Art 7 (May 1934): 267–70. 104. Barr, foreword to Machine Art, n.p. 105. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 19. 106. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Modern Works of Art: Fifth Anniversary Exhibition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), 15. 107. Ibid. 15; Barr, foreword to Painting in Paris from American Collections (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930), 13. 108. Harold Wilde, “Weekly Talk,” Milwaukee News, August 1, 1936, AAA 5058, MF 4, #886.

Chapter 4 1. Philip Johnson, “Masters: Philip Johnson’s Starck Choice,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 13, 1998, 76–78. 2. Ibid., 77. 3. Reminiscences of Philip Cortelyou Johnson (1979), on page 20 in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, New York. 4. Johnson, “Masters,” 76–78. 5. It’s amusing to consider that this same sentiment might well have been endorsed by the functionalists of the 1930s, but as an excoriation of beauty (in the form of ornament, say) instead of as a statement of preference for beauty above use, which is how Johnson intends it here (Johnson, “Masters,” 76–78). 6. Letter from Bianca Schwartz of MOMA’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions to R. C. Byler of SKF Industries, November 17, 1937. CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 7. For more on the younger generation at MOMA in its early years, see A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: 1943); Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973); Douglass ShandTucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: MacMillan, 2003). 8. Lynes, Good Old Modern, 129–35, 261. 9. The Iron Age had its facts slightly wrong. It wasn’t a “heap of ball bearings” that won first prize, but the fully-assembled, self-aligning SKF ball bearing immortalized on Machine Art’s catalog cover. News of the expert judging appeared in some of the early press on the show, more frequently where it appeared for a concerned professional readership. This was the case for Iron Age, as it was for the Aluminum News-Letter, where it was correctly noted that a boat, not airplane, propeller had taken second place (credit still duly given to Alcoa), and also for the Worcester Telegram, which reported on the success of the steel spring as a case of a local product made good (its manufacturer, the American Steel & Wire Company, having long been a cornerstone of Worcester’s industrial economy). Industrialists were paying attention to this coverage; an official from Alcoa wrote to Johnson to draw his attention to the story in the Aluminum News-Letter. “Don’t Make ’Em Eggshaped” Iron Age, March 15, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #780; “Aluminum Propellor [sic] Wins ‘Beauty Contest,’” Aluminum News-Letter, April 1934, 6, AAA 5058, MF 4, #802; “‘Most Beautiful Object’ at N.Y. Machine Art Show City Product: Steel Spring Fashioned at South Works Wins Highest Honors,” Worcester (MA) Telegram, April 29, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #796; letter on Alcoa stationery to Philip Johnson, April 21, 1934. CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 10. Hoover granted the delegation $10,000 for acquisition of the “finest examples of European decorative and industrial art.” For more on the influence of the Paris Exposition on American design, especially with regard to Hoover’s commission, see Laurence Vail Coleman, “A Year of Progress for Organized Museums,” Science, August 14, 1925, 148–50; Nicolas Maffei, “John Cotton Dana and the Politics of Exhibiting Industrial Art in the US, 1909–1929,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 304.; Janet Kardon, Craft in the Machine Age, 1920–1945 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the American Craft Museum, 1995), 35. 11. Charles R. Richards, The Industrial Museum (New York: Macmillan, 1925). See also George Basalla, “Museums and Technological Utopianism,” in Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Henry Francis

Notes to Pages 117–132

du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1973): 355–73. 12. “Aluminum Propellor [sic] Wins ‘Beauty Contest.’” 13. For more on Dewey’s significance to populist art movements in this period, see Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 14. Dino Ferrari, “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art,” New York Times, April 8, 1934, Sunday Book Review. 15. Daniel Catton Rich, “Saturday News of New Books,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 25, 1934. 16. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1957), 138. 17. Karl Schriftgeisser, “Dewey, Dean of Philosophers, Writes Real Art Means Life,” Washington Post, May 13, 1934. 18. Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 33. 19. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 291, 293. 20. The full epigraph reads as follows: “For beauty three things are required. First, then, integrity or perfection: those things which are broken are bad for this very reason. And also a due proportion or harmony. And again clarity: whence those things which have a shining color are called beautiful” (Machine Art, n.p.). 21. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 221n 148 (emphasis added). 22. Ibid. (quotes again are from Aquinas). 23. Ibid., 77. 24. See the “Pros and Cons” series that ran in the New York Times during the spring and early summer of 1931 (on March 22, March 29, April 5, April 12, April 26, May 3, and May 17). 25. Press release, CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. 26. Earhart had a well-established connection to fashion by the time of Machine Art. In addition to hats, Earhart’s name and reputation were used to sell luggage and flying suits appropriate to wear “up and down Fifth Avenue!” as Earhart proclaimed in one ad (advertisement for Arnold, Constable, New York Times, July 23, 1928). 27. MOMA press release, March 17 or 18, 1934, CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York. “Designs Flying Clothes,” New York Times, November 24, 1933. 28. “Student, Worker, as Well as a Flier,” New York Times, January 4, 1928. 29. “John Dewey Papers, 1858–1970,” Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center. 30. The ballot also included a pair of demographic questions intended to gather information about the sort of individuals who visited Machine Art and to track patterns in their preferences. There were boxes to check to indicate the sex of the visitor and a final line on which to write one’s occupation. A friendly reminder added in subscript, “If housewife, kindly so state.” The information gathered from these demographic particulars is particularly useful to the historian. From it, we know that roughly as many men as women attended the show, and that the audience drew from a variety of laboring sectors. By far, the greatest number of participants in the balloting were students (1,167); from there, the other represented professions, in descending order, were housewives (354), artists (282), journalists (84), architects (71), stenographers (67), “plain businessmen” (65), writers (about 65), engineers (64), salespeople (59), actors and actresses (27), teachers (20), physicians (18), domestics (15), chemists (13), dentists (12), electricians (10), curators (6), aviators (4), museum directors (4), plumbers (4), psychologists (4), “laborers” (4), Civil Works Administration workers (3), sailors (2), radio announcers (2), travel agents (2), professional models (2), missionaries (2), astronomers (1), anthropologists (1), geographers (1), botanists (1), trade union organizers (1), diplomats (1), butchers (1), clergymen (1), undertakers (1), barbers (1), archaeologists (1), inventors (1), and “social agitators” (1). The tallies were not retained in MOMA’s institutional archive, but were reported in “Woman’s Vote Makes Mirror Art Show Victor,” New York Herald Tribune, April 23, 1934. 186 187

The motivation for quantifying the exhibit’s attendance demographics is unclear. While it is possible that Barr and Johnson were curious to see whether their foray into ordinary objects and industrial design would attract a different audience for the museum, neither of them made any notes to the effect in their private correspondence or organizational files. It seems the numbers were put to use only for publicity purposes. The PR department released the demographic tallies to the press, which used them to parse questions of taste according to gender, as we will see below. How employment might have shaped preferences was not addressed. Moreover, the fact that 84 journalists participated in the vote suggests that at least some of the art critics who wrote (and sometimes complained about) the ballot had also participated in it. 31. “Woman’s Vote Makes Mirror Art Show Victor,” New York Herald Tribune. Worcester’s American Steel & Wire Company manufactured the winning steel spring, a fact reported by the local newspaper (“‘Most Beautiful Object’ at N.Y. Machine Art Show City Product,” Worcester [MA] Telegram). Confusingly, the Telegram story pictured a short coil of spring instead of the loop held by Earhart in the publicity photo. Both spring fragments were, in fact, manufactured by the American Steel & Wire Company and were displayed in Machine Art. Because the MOMA press release identified first place as “as section of a large spring,” I am inclined to disregard the Telegram photo as misleading and anomalous. 32. In mid-April 1934, Johnson wrote to Dr. William Marquette of Carl Zeiss, Inc., to tell him that “your triple mirror leads by a great margin,” and that a special photograph was being prepared to accompany the museum’s publicity on the ballot. In the same letter, Johnson requests both the Zeiss laboratory microscope and its didymium glass cube for MOMA’s permanent retention, conspicuously ignoring the mirror (CE, II.1.72.3. MOMA Archives, New York). 33. Sidney Lawrence reproduced a photograph of the mirror in his 1984 Art in America article on Machine Art. Although he credited Wurtz Brothers, an outfit responsible for many of the exhibition’s installation shots, the mirror photograph has apparently not been retained by the MOMA Archives (Sidney Lawrence, “Clean Machines at the Modern,” Art in America 72 [February 1984]: 39). A different photograph of the signal mirror, taken from the side and from an angle that gave it the look of an oversized, cut gemstone, appeared in the press reportage during 1934, but only one (see untitled clipping, Arts and Decoration, May 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #813). 34. The only object that turned the heads of equal numbers of men and women was the aluminum outboard propeller that had come in second by the experts’ estimation. The triple mirror received 700 votes, with 3 women selecting it for every 2 men. Women again were the swing constituency behind the bronze boat propeller’s success; with a ratio of 2:1 in the final tally of its 350 votes. After their two, top-placing favorites, women preferred more explicitly domestic objects that were more likely to be identified with a brand name and designer than were the pieces favored by the men. The female vote placed Arco’s prefabricated bathroom unit at fifth place (designed by George Sakier), the Electrochef model B-2 range at sixth (designed by Emil Piron), Monel Metal’s streamlined kitchen sink designed at seventh (designed by Gustav Jensen), and an electric clock at ninth (designed by Gilbert Rohde). These choices suggest that Machine Art’s female visitors were in fact well-versed followers of contemporary design. This sort of expertise, however, carried little truck with the critics. While the ballots are no longer in existence, the contemporary reports on their outcome included details of their demographic statistics. “Woman’s Vote Makes mirror Art Show Victor” New York Herald Tribune; “Popular Vote Announced in Machine Art Display,” Boston Post, April 29, 1934. 35. These items placed at the following rankings in the popular ballot: the airplane propeller placed third; the SKF ball bearing, fourth; the binocular microscope, tenth; the steel bearing balls, eleventh; and the porcelain wall bushing, twelfth (“Popular Vote Announced,” Boston Post; “Public Disagrees with Art Awards,” New York Times, April 23, 1934). 36. In his catalog essay, Johnson weighs in against the recycled, decorative motifs of “Victorian rococo ornament.” Critics frequently applauded Machine Art’s successful attacks on the “gimcracks” and knick-knacks of the last century. See for example Emily Genauer, “Utility is Stressed in Objects for Home,” New York World-Telegram, March 10, 1934. 37. “Machine Art,” New Yorker, 18.

Notes to Pages 132–141

38. Jane Schwartz, “Exhibition of Machine Art Now on View at Modern Museum,” Art News, March 10, 1934, 4. 39. Ibid 40. Grace V. Kelly, “Gas Pump and Kitchen Sink Crash Art Museum Gate,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 4, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #840. 41. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “The Modern Chair,” typed manuscript for Fashions of the Hour, 1930, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3262; 1065. 42. Ibid., 1066. 43. Ibid. 44. When the exhibit appeared at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, someone absconded with at least two boiling flasks manufactured by Corning Glass Works. A bumper ring for electric refrigerators also went missing during the same installation (letter from Elodie Courter to A. G. Pelikan, director of the Milwaukee Art Institute, November 18, 1935, file I.24/20 (8) Exhibition Correspondence, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York). 45. “Machine Art,” New Yorker, 18. 46. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Creative Intelligence (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), 48. 47. Ibid., 48–49. 48. White, Social Thought in America, 138–140. 49. “Public Ignores Judges’ Idea of Machine Beauty,” New York Herald Tribune, March 8, 1934. 50. Alfred H. Barr Jr., as quoted in Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation,” 197. 51. Interestingly, Vaughan’s comments came in response to the museum’s acceptance of the Lillie P. Bliss bequest as the institution’s first permanent holdings. Noting the “unqualified congratulations” otherwise extended to MOMA for this move, Vaughan opted to withhold praise, expressing concern that a permanent collection would hinder the museum’s experimental mission (Vaughan, “Museum’s Exhibition May Hold Art Back,” Denver Post, June 24, 1934, AAA 5058, MF 4, #680). 52. Ferrari, “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art,” 2. 53. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973); Warren Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 54. For more on their meeting and early friendship, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 277–81. 55. Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 106–8. 56. Ibid.; letter from Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, November 8, 1929, Philip Johnson Papers, 1908–2002, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute. 57. Barr’s text is inconclusive about the number in attendance at the meeting; sometimes indicating five hundred and sometimes one thousand. 58. This account and all quotations within it are drawn from the typewritten draft of Barr’s unpublished article, “A Kampfbund Meeting,” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3262; 714–26. MOMA Archives, New York. 59. In his cover letter, he explained, “The enclosed articles have not been published although they have been offered to over half a dozen leading American reviews” (letter from Barr to Mrs. Charles L. Liebman, January 5, 1933, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3262; 693. MOMA Archives, New York). Friends like Edith Halpert, director of the Downtown Gallery, wrote back to express their appreciation for the news, as well as dismay that no journal had yet picked it up. “It is too bad that the article was not used,” Halpert lamented, “as I still feel it would have been very valuable.” “Still . . . valuable,” she wagered, even though three years had now passed since the original event and Barr’s continued efforts to report on it. “Still . . . valuable,” she dared to presume, when the worst of what Barr warned against was still yet to be unleashed (letter from Edith Halpert to Alfred Barr, October 15, 1936, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3262; 572. MOMA Archives, New York). 60. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “What We Are Fighting For: What Have the Arts to Do With the War 188 189

Effort?” PM, June 11, 1942. 61. For treatment on MOMA’s political cooperation in Cold War–era politics, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 62. MOMA’s Trustees dismissed Barr from his post as director in 1943, largely because his tastes and curatorial interests began to depart from theirs (Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, 354–61). 63. For more on MOMA’s political activities at midcentury and after, see Francis Frascina, Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London: Routledge, 2000), 148–49; and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 64. “Exh. ‘X,’” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3155; 16–560. MOMA Archives, New York. 65. Letter from Alfred Barr to Charles Merz of the New York Times, December 1938, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA 3262; 428. MOMA Archives, New York. 66. Schulze, Philip Johnson, 113. 67. Ibid., 114. 68. “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture,” New York Herald Tribune, December 18, 1934. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. “Artists at Politics,” Baltimore Sun, December 19, 1934. 72. For the most complete treatment of Johnson’s political activities in these years, see Schulze, Philip Johnson. 73. “Surrealist Revolution, Counter-Clockwise,” Art Front 1 (February 1935): 1. 74. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 110–11. 75. According to Purcell, one writer commented in 1929 that the “most remarkable thing about Mussolini . . . is his Platonism” (Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 111). 76. Letter from Ruth Huey, district supervisor of Vocational Home Economics in Austin, Texas, to Beatrice Winser of the Newark Museum, March 30, 1932, 10-cent Exhibit Correspondence File, Newark Museum Archives. 77. Letter from Martha G. Creighton, assistant supervisor of Home Economics Education, Virginia, Texas to Beatrice Winser, March 30, 1932, 10-cent Exhibit Correspondence File, Newark Museum Archives. 78. My description of Newmeyer’s PR stunt as a “tournament of judgment” is in homage to Arjun Appadurai’s conceit, “tournaments of value.” Appadurai describes exceptional moments in social life when issues of power, status, and value are reappraised and negotiated, as in the kula system of the Western Pacific. He writes, “though such tournaments of value occur in special times and places, their forms and outcomes are always consequential for the more mundane realities of power and value in ordinary life” (Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 21). 79. The Herald Tribune piece was the only article to include an original photo of the panelists: one taken by a staff photographer and with the gallery background intact. 80. Margaretta K. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 61. 81. Ibid., 60. 82. Ibid., 61. George Platt Lynes was making similar images at the time: photographs that made sensual sculptures out of nude bodies and trafficked in the queer eroticism of same-sex collaborations between artist and model—a visual milieu in which Bernhard’s nudes selfconsciously participate. For more on Lynes, see Jack Woody, George Platt Lynes: Photographs, 1931– 1955 (Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1981). For more on queer modernism during interwar years, see Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Finally, for insight into the homosexual social network unofficially provided by MOMA during the period of Machine Art and Bernhard’s activities there, see Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter.

Notes to Pages 141–158

83. “Lodge Lauds Feat of Finding Planet,” New York Times, March 27, 1930. 84. My thanks to James Harper for this extremely useful reference.

Epilogue 1. For more on the simulacrum, particularly as it might be considered within the historical context of twentieth-century mechanized modernity, see Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 83–159. 2. OH, interview with Philip Johnson, 1991, p. 87, MOMA Archives, New York. 3. The loop of spring is still held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I encourage you to pay a visit.

190 191

Bibliography

Agha, M. F. “Ralph Steiner.” Creative Art 10 (January 1932): 37. Albrecht, Donald, Robert Schonfeld, and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro. Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Alexander, Thomas M. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience & Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Aluminum Company of America. Aluminum and Its Alloys. Pittsburgh, PA: Aluminum Company of America, 1937. Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co. “‘Wear-Ever’ Aluminum Hotel Ware.” Catalog no. 59. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library,1932. American Artists’ Congress. Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. American Steel & Wire Company. “Catalog of American Springs.” Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library, March 1934. American Steel & Wire Company., Industrial Museum Photography Collection. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Pictorial Collection, Hagley Museum and Library, 1923–31. American Steel & Wire Company and the Columbia Steel Company. American Tiger Brand Wire Rope Engineering Handbook. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Imprints, Hagley Museum and Library, 1940. Anderson, Margaret. My Thirty Years’ War. New York: Covici, Friede, 1930. Antonelli, Paola. Objects of Design from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Apter, Emily, and William Pietz. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Aquinas, Thomas. Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Anton Pegis. New York: Random House, 1945. ———. The Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, revised by Daniel J. Sullivan. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952. “Art and Machines.” Architectural Forum 60 (May 1934): 331. Bach, Richard F. “Contemporary American Industrial Art: An Exhibition of American Industrial Art.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (September 1931): 202–3. ———. “Contemporary American Industrial Art: An Exhibition of American Industrial Art.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (November 1931): 259–60. ———. “Contemporary American Industrial Art: Twelfth Exhibition.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26 (October 1931): 226–29. Bacon, Mardges. Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Baker, George. The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Banta, Martha. Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Barnes, Harry Elmer. The History of Western Civilization. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Barr, Alfred H. Jr. Cubism and Abstract Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936. ———. “Dutch Letter.” Arts 13 (January 1928): 48–49. ———. Foreword to Machine Art, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934. ———. Foreword to Modern Architecture, International Exhibition, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932. ———. Foreword Painting in Paris from American Collections, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930. ———. “In 1930.” In Winslow Homer, Albert P. Ryder, Thomas Eakins, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930. ———. Introduction to Paul Klee, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930. ———. “The LEF and Soviet Art.” transition (Fall 1928): 267–69. ———. Modern Works of Art: Fifth Anniversary Exhibition. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934. ———. “The Museum of Modern Art,” Art News, January 4, 1929, 13. ———. “The Necco Factory.” Arts 13 (January 1928): 292–95. Barton, Bruce. “Are We Getting a New Idea about ‘VALUES’?” American Magazine, July 1932, 128. Basalla, George. “Museums and Technological Utopianism.” In Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, edited by Ian M.G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl, 355–73. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, in association with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1973. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981. ———. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Bauer, Catherine. “Machine-Made,” The American Magazine of Art, May 1934, 267–70. Bee, Harriet S., and Michelle Elligott. Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Bell, Clive. Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1914. Bell, Eric Temple. The Search for Truth. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1934. Benitez, E. E. Forms in Plato’s Philebus. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” In Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 483–89. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. ———. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 192 193

Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Designers and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bordo, Michael D. The Gold Standard & Related Regimes: Collected Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Brenner, Anita. “Frontiers of Machine Art,” Nation, March 28, 1934, 368–69. Brisco, Norris A. Retailing. New York: Prentice Hall, 1947. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–16. Brown, Milton. “Interview with Paul Strand, 1971: An Excerpt.” In Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, edited by Vicki Goldberg, 288–90. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books, 1990. Buchli, Victor. The Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2002. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Cahill, Holger. “American Folk Art.” In American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932. Cassel, Gustav. The Downfall of the Gold Standard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cheetham, Mark A. The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cheney, Sheldon. A Primer of Modern Art. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Clayton, Virginia Tuttle, Elizabeth Stillinger, Erika Doss, and Deborah Chotner, eds. Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in association with the National Gallery of Art, 2002. Clurman, Harold. “Photographs by Paul Strand.” Creative Art 5 (October 1929): 735. Coates, Robert M. “Machine Art.” New Yorker March 17, 1934, 18. Coleman, Laurence Vail. “A Year of Progress for Organized Museums,” Science, August 14, 1925, 148–50. Congdon, Don, ed. The Thirties: A Time to Remember. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. Corn, Wanda. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Corrigan, Kevin. Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005. Cotkin, George. Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900. New York: Twayne, 1992. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The American Housewife between the Wars.” Women’s Studies 3 (1976): 147–72. Cox, George J. “Modern Art and this Matter of Taste,” American Magazine of Art, August 1932, 79–80. Crow, Thomas. The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Crowther, Samuel. A Basis for Stability. Boston: Little, Brown, 1932. Davis, Keith F. An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection. Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Dawson, Mitchell. “Frankenstein, Inc.” American Mercury 19 (March 1930): 274–80.

Bibliography

De Duve, Thierry. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ———. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp; Passage from Pantry to the Readymade. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Demos, Raphael. The Philosophy of Plato. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. ———. Introduction to Selections, by Plato. Edited by Raphael Demos. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century. London: Verso, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dethloff, Henry C. Huey P. Long: Southern Demagogue or American Democrat? Boston: Heath, 1967. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books, 1934. ———. Creative Intelligence. New York: Henry Holt, 1917. “The Dollar: Nation Returns to Gold, on What Is Termed the ‘Managed International Gold Bullion Reserve Standard.’” Newsweek, February 10, 1934, 7–8. Dorter, Kenneth. Form of Good in Plato’s Eleatic Dialogues. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Douglas, Paul H. “The Place of the Consumer in the New Industrial Set-Up.” Journal of Home Economics 26 (October 1934): 469–76. Drexler, Arthur, and Greta Daniel. Introduction to Twentieth Century Design from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Duncan, Carol, and Alan Wallach. “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis.” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Winter 1978): 28–51. Edge, Charles N. “The Changing Values of Man,” Living Age, January 1932, 406–12. Edwards, Junius David, Francis C. Frary, and Zay Jeffries. The Aluminum Industry in Two Volumes. Aluminum Products and Their Fabrication. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930. Eglington, Laurie. “Modern Museum Now Exhibiting African Negro Art,” Art News, March 23, 1935, 3. Eichengreen, Barry, ed. The Gold Standard in Theory and History. New York: Methuen, 1985. Einstein, Albert. “Geometry and Experience.” In Sidelights on Relativity. Translated by G. B. Jeffrey and W. Perrett. London: Methuen, 1922. Elderfield, John, ed. Studies in Modern Art 6: Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998. Distributed by Harry N. Abrams. Eldridge, Michael. Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Eliel, Carol, ed. L’Esprit Nouveau. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001. “Facing the Overproduction Problem,” Literary Digest, May 31, 1930, 46, 48. Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America. Vol. 1. New York: Capricorn Books, 1977. Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Frank, Isabelle, ed. The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Frascina, Francis. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Routledge, 2000. Friday, David. “Maintaining Productive Output—A Problem in Reconstruction.” Journal of Political Economy 27 (February 1919): 117–26. Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867– 1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. “From Study Windows,” Time, January 7, 1935, 14–15. Gaut, Berys, and Dominic McIver Lopes. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2001.

194 195

Gernsheim, Helmut. Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends, 1839–1960. Minneola, NY: Dover, 1991. Gideonse, Harry D. “The United States and the International Gold Standard.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 171 (January 1934): 118–26. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command, A Contribution to Anonymous History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948. Glover, John George, ed. The Development of American Industries: Their Economic Significance. New York: Prentice Hall, 1932. “Gold Default and Defiance.” Literary Digest, May 13, 1933, 7. Golding, John. Léger and Purist Paris. London: Tate Gallery, 1970. Goodyear, A. Conger. The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Goux, Jean-Joseph. The Coiners of Language. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939– 1944. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Greenough, Sarah, ed. Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2000. Grieve, Victoria. The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Grunenberg, Christoph. “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.” In Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, edited by Marcia Pointon, 192–211. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Hamilton, George Heard. “John Covert: Early American Modern.” College Art Journal 12 (Fall 1952): 37–42. Hart, Hornell. “Wanted: A New Deal for the Consumer.” Journal of Home Economics 26 (October 1934): 480–82. Hawtrey, R.G. The Gold Standard in Theory and Practice. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1947. Hayes, H. Gordon. “Production after the War.” The Journal of Political Economy 26 (December 1918): 941–51. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. ———. “The Age of the World Picture.” In Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 57–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hein, Hilde. “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (October 1965): 133–44. Hennessey, William J. Russel Wright: American Designer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in association with the Gallery Association of New York, 1985. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946. “Home Economics and Consumer Education.” Journal of Home Economics 26(October 1934): 515–16. Hounshell, David. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Hughes, Thomas P. A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870—1970. New York: Viking Press, 1989. Hyde, Arthur M. “The Producer Considers Consumption.” Journal of Home Economics 25 (February1933): 91–95. “It’s The Little Things That Count When You Buy Appliances,” Good Housekeeping, February 1932, 144. Jacknis, Ira. “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 75–111. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Bibliography

James, William. Pragmatism and Other Writings. Edited by Giles Gunn. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Johnson, Abby Ann Arthur. “The Personal Magazine: Margaret C. Anderson and the Little Review, 1914–1929.” South Atlantic Quarterly 75 (Summer 1976): 351–63. Johnson, J. Stewart. American Modern, 1925–1940: Design for a New Age. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the American Federation of Arts, 2000. Johnson, Philip. “Historical Note.” In Modern Architecture, International Exhibition, by the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932. ———. “Philip Johnson.” In The Right Words at the Right Time, edited by Marlo Thomas, 162–63. New York: Atria Books, 2002. ———. Writings. Edited by Robert A. M. Stern and Peter Eisenman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Jones, Amelia. “‘Women’ in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie.” In Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, edited by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, 142–73. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Jones, Caroline A. The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Kane, Harnett T. Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928–1940. New York: William Morrow, 1941. Kantor, Sybil Gordon. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Kaplan, Wendy. Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945. New York: Thames & Hudson, in association with the Wolfsonian, 1995. Kardon, Janet. Craft in the Machine Age, 1920–1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the American Craft Museum, 1995. Keane, Webb. “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Kent, Fred I. “The Mystery of the Gold Standard,” Literary Digest, July 15, 1933, 5, 32–33. Kerr, Ann. Russel Wright Dinnerware: Designs for the American Table. Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1985. Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Kinder, Francis S. “Is the Gold Standard Sacred?” World Tomorrow, January 11, 1933, 42–43. Kingery, W. David, ed. Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Krauss, Rosalind. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. ———. The Picasso Papers. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998. Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Laidlaw, Christine Wallace. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Modern Design, 1917–1929.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 8 (Spring 1988): 88–103. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lawrence, Sidney. “Clean Machines at the Modern.” Art in America 72 (February 1984): 127–41, 166–68. Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Translated by Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover, 1986. Léger, Fernand. “A New Realism—The Object (Its Plastic and Cinematographic Value).” Translated by Rosamond Gilder. Little Review 11 (Winter 1926): 7. Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. 196 197

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968. Lozowick, Louis. “The Americanization of Art.” In “Machine Age Exhibition,” special edition, Little Review 12 (May 1927): 18. Lynes, Russell. Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: Atheneum, 1973. ———. The Tastemakers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955. MacDonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. McMahon, A. Philip. “Machine Art.” Parnassus 6 (October 1934): 27. ———. “Would Plato Find Artistic Beauty in Machines?” Parnassus 7 (February 1935): 6–8. Maffei, Nicolas. “John Cotton Dana and the Politics of Exhibiting Industrial Art in the US, 1909– 1929.” Journal of Design History 13 (2000): 301–17. Maleuvre, Didier. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. ———. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Marcus, Alan I., and Howard P. Segal. Technology in America: A Brief History. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace College,1999. Marcus, George H. Functionalist Design: An Ongoing History. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1995. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Hope and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times, 1929–1939. New York: Free Press, 1986. Marsh, Alec. Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Marshall, Jennifer. “Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932–33.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002): 447–65. ———. “In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art Show.” Art Bulletin 90 (December 2008): 507–615. Martin, Ann Smart, and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds. American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997. Martin, Jay. The Education of John Dewey: A Biography. New York: Columbia Press, 2002. Marx, Karl. Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Mayer, Robert N. The Consumer Movement: Guardians of the Marketplace. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Meikle, Jeffrey L. “Material Virtues: On the Ideal and the Real in Design History,” Journal of Design History 11 (1998): 191–99. ———. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001. Melville, Stephen. “Criticism, Theory, and Materiality,” Arts Magazine, November 1986, 44–45. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001. Meyer, Richard. “‘Big, Middle-Class Modernism.’” October 131 (Winter 2010): 69–115. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Mitchell, Margaretta K. Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2000. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language.” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 348–71. Molesworth, Helen, ed. Work Ethic. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003.

Bibliography

Mumford, Lewis. “The Metropolitan Milieu.” In America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, 33–58. New York: Literary Guild, 1934. ———. Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s. Edited by Robert Wojtowicz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ———. Technics and Civilization. San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1963. Museum of Modern Art. Useful Objects Today: Teaching Portfolio #4. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1954. Distributed by Simon & Schuster. Myers, Fred, ed. The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2001. Naumann, Francis M. New York Dada, 1915–23. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. “New York’s ‘Machine Art’ Exhibit Would Have Pleased Old Plato,” Art Digest, March 15, 1934, 10. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Nystrom, Paul H. “Consumer Price Trends under the New Deal.” Journal of Home Economics 26 (October 1934): 487–92. “Obsolete Men.” Fortune, December 1932, 25–26, 91–92, 94. O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Ogburn, William Fielding. “The Influence of Invention and Discovery.” In Recent Social Trends in the United States, Vol. 1, 122–66. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933. ———. Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: Viking Press, 1933. ———. You and Machines. Washington, DC: The American Council on Education, 1934. Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation & Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Osborn, Loran David, and Martin Henry Neumeyer. The Community and Society: An Introduction to Sociology. New York: American Book Company, 1933. Otfinoski, Steven. African Americans in the Performing Arts. New York: Facts on File, 2010. “Our ’1934 Model’ Gold Standard,” Literary Digest, February 10, 1934, 7. “Peas with a Knife,” Art Digest, October 1, 1936, 13. “Panorama of the Fortnight.” Town and Country, April 1, 1934, 25. Payne, Frederick H. “Business Outlook for American Industry: Particularly in Machinery Building and Metal Working.” Industrial Management 57 (June 1919): 465–68. Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, I.” res 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17. Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. The Dialogues of Plato. Vol. 3. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. ———. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Anchor Books, 1973. “Plato’s Dialogues: Philebus.” Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 68. Platt, Susan Noyes. “Formalism and American Art Criticism in the 1920s.” Art Criticism 2 (April 1986): 69–84. ———. “Modernism, Formalism, and Politics: The ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ Exhibition of 1936 at The Museum of Modern Art.” Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988): 284–95. ———. Modernism in the 1920s: Interpretations of Modern Art in New York from Expressionism to Constructivism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981. ———. “Mysticism in the Machine Age: Jane Heap and The Little Review,” Twenty/One, Art and Culture 1 (1990): 18–44. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Podro, Michael. The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933.

198 199

Preziosi, Donald. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Pulos, Arthur J. American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1983. Purcell, Edward A. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973. Quimby, Ian M. G., and Polly Anne Earl, eds. Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, in association with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1973. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. “Return Parade of the Gold Hoarders,” Literary Digest, March 25, 1933, 36–38. Richards, Charles R. The Industrial Museum. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. London: Verso, 2007. Robinson, James Harvey. The Human Comedy: As Devised and Directed by Mankind Itself. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Rodier, David. “Alfred North Whitehead: Between Platonism and Neoplatonism.” In Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, edited by R. Baine Harris, 183–204. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. Rendezvous With Destiny: Addresses and Opinions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Edited by J. B. S. Hardman. New York: Dryden Press, 1944. Roth, Moira. “Marcel Duchamp in America: A Self Ready-Made,” Arts Magazine, May 1977, 92–96. Rowell, Margit. Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Distributed by Harry N. Abrams. Saab, A. Joan. For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Schwartz, Jane. “Exhibition of Machine Art Now on View at Modern Museum.” Art News, March 10, 1934, 4. Schwartz, Ruth. “Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night.” Women’s Studies 3, no. 2 (1976): 147–72. Scroggs, William O. “What Is Left of the Gold Standard?” Foreign Affairs 13 (October 1934): 154–56. Scott, Thomas L., Melvin J. Friedman, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence. New York: New Directions, 1988. Scully, Vincent Joseph. Modern Architecture and Other Essays. Edited by Neil Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sekula, Allan. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning.” In Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, edited by Vicki Goldberg, 452–73. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Shand-Tucci, Douglass. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture. New York: MacMillan, 2003. Shell, Marc. Art and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Bibliography

Silber, Norman Isaac. Test and Protest: The Influence of Consumers Union. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983. Silver, Kenneth E. Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge, 1982. Smith, Bernard. Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Smith, Terry. Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Sorokin, Pitirim. Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships. Boston: Extending Horizons Books, Peter Sargent, 1952. Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Steiner, Christopher B. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sterne, Katharine Grant. “American vs. European Photography.” Parnassus 4 (March 1932): 16. ———. “In the New York Galleries.” Parnassus 3 (November 1931): 7. Strand, Paul. “Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 141–44. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. ———. “Photography and the New God.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 144–51. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. “Surrealist Revolution, Counter-Clockwise.” Art Front 1 (February 1935): 1. Sun, Douglas. “Alcoa Inc.” In International Directory of Company Histories, edited by Jay P. Pederson and Tina Grant, 56:7–11. Chicago: St. James Press, 1988. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Sweeney, James Johnson. African Negro Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935. Swing, Raymond Gram. Forerunners of American Fascism. Julian Messner, 1935. Taussig, Frank W., Frederick C. Mills, F. B. Garver, Frank H. Knight, R. W. Souter, Lewis L. Lorwin, and Mordecai Ezekiel. “The Theory of Economic Dynamics as Related to Industrial Instability.” American Economic Review 20 (March 1930): 30–39. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers , 1911. Teague, Walter Dorwin. Design This Day: The Technique of Order in the Machine Age. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. Tillman, Frank A., and Steven M. Cahn. Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittgenstein. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Troyen, Carol. “The Open Window and the Empty Chair: Charles Sheeler’s ‘View of New York.’” In Reading American Art, edited by Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, 371–86. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. ———. “Photography, Painting, and Charles Sheeler’s ‘View of New York.’” Art Bulletin 86 (December 2004): 731–49. Vaill, Amanda. Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Wallach, Alan. Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. “Wanted—Friends to Buy Our Surplus,” Literary Digest, July 12, 1930, 44. Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Welch, Frank D. Philip Johnson & Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. “Westinghouse Industrial Lighting Equipment.” Catalog 219-A. Cleveland: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., 1932. Hagley Imprints. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.

200 201

White, Morton. Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism. Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1957. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. “Religion and Science,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1925, 200–7. Wilhelm, Donald. “The Millstone of Style.” New Outlook 163 (April 1934): 36. Wilk, Christopher. Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1995. ———. The William Carlos Williams Reader. Edited by Macha Louis Rosenthal. New York: New Directions, 1965. Wilson, Kristina. “Exhibition Modern Times: American Modernism, Popular Culture, and the Art Exhibit, 1925–1935. PhD diss., Yale University, 2001. ———. Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with Yale University Art Gallery, 2004. ———. The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of Exhibition, 1925–1934. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Woody, Jack. George Platt Lynes: Photographs, 1931–1955. Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1981. Wormser, I. Maurice. Frankenstein, Incorporated. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1931. W. W. Norton & Company. “Tenth Anniversary Catalog, 1924–1934.” New York: W. W. Norton. Zabel, Barbara. Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-Garde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Zolberg, Vera L. “‘An Elite Experience for Everyone’: Art Museums, the Public, and Cultural Literacy.” In Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, edited by Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, 49–65. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Bibliography

Index

absolutes, 33, 73, 86, 144, 150; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 147; and gold, 71, 80; and Johnson, Philip, 128; and Machine Art, xvii, xxiii, 9, 13, 21, 58, 59, 60, 70, 78, 79, 84, 86, 96, 150, 153, 161; and modern art, 84, 90, 155; and Plato, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 78, 162; and Section of Spring (Exhibit #2), 80. See also under value abstract expressionism, 58, 59 abstract form, 8, 27, 64, 77, 98, 129, 138. See also abstraction abstraction, xxii, 41; and African Negro Art, 98; and Machine Art, xxii, 8, 53, 59, 64, 67, 77–78, 84, 125, 129, 161, 162; and modern art, 27, 61, 63–64, 73, 77, 78, 84–85, 125, 138, 155, 177n36, 178n57, 178n65; and modernity, 58–59, 61, 67, 72, 78, 134; and money, 58–59, 71, 73, 178n57, 178n65; and Platonic form, 56, 61, 63–64, 77, 78, 177n36; and photography, 40, 45–46, 158, 172n34; semiotic, 40, 53, 59, 68, 73, 78, 155; of universal ideals, 58, 59, 71, 77, 78, 79, 84, 155, 162; and value, 7, 13, 58, 68, 69, 77

adaptive culture, 35, 41–42, 47, 173n71 adjustment, 40, 66, 67, 78, 173n67–68; and Machine Art, 46, 47, 53, 57, 65, 80; and Ogburn, William Fielding, 41–43, 47, 95, 173n71; and photography, 40, 41, 46 advertising, xix, 68, 117, 118, 120, 170n10; and art, 75, 173n65 African Negro Art (MOMA, 1935), 97–98, 100, 181n27 Albers, Josef, 32, 148 Alcoa. See Aluminum Company of America alienation, 116, 180n14; and African Negro Art, 98, 100–1; and artistry, 90–91; and formalism, 98, 101, 104; and Machine Art, 78, 90–94, 96, 101, 103, 104, 119; of workers, 78, 101, 132, 133 aluminum, 24, 160; and Machine Art’s installation, 12, 47, 66, 84, 92, 114, 162; and Machine Art’s objects, 6, 10, 82, 105, 140, 141, 157. See also Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Outboard Propeller (Exhibit #41) Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), 3, 83–84, 92, 131, 157, 169n20, 180n8,

185n9 American design, 3, 109, 121–22, 180n14, 185n10. See also design; names of individual designers American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900 (MOMA, 1932), 25, 27, 167n2, 170n12 American Steel & Wire Company, 3, 80–81, 103, 106, 131, 185n9, 187n31 Americanization, xiii, 89–90; and Lozowick, Louis, 31–32. See also Fordism; mechanization; rationalization; scientific management; Taylorism Âne (Ass). See Picabia, Francis antidualism. See dualism Appadurai, Arjun, xxi, xxii, 189n79 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint architecture, 50, 52; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 24, 29, 30–31, 64, 85, 149, 169n6; and Johnson, Philip, xx, 27–28, 37, 108–9, 127–28, 152, 176n14; and the Machine-Age Exposition, 30–31, 171n27; and MOMA, 22, 24, 184n86. See also International Exhibition of Modern Architecture Armory Show, 22, 64, 67 art-in-industry exhibitions, xiii, 11, 51, 52, 112, 132, 168n10 artistry, 32, 33, 34–35, 90–91, 94, 101, 105–6, 125 Arts and Crafts movement, 33, 94, 168n9. See also Morris, William autonomy, xvii, xviii, 12, 34, 67, 114. See also under beauty

Bach, Richard, 112 Baker, George, 72, 73, 178–79n72 ball bearings, 8, 66, 73, 76–77, 138, 144; and the Machine-Age Exposition, 30–31, 32, 172n34; and Machine Art, 8, 22, 27, 32, 84, 95, 100, 106, 109, 131, 185n9. See also Self-Aligning Ball Bearing (Exhibit #50) Banham, Reyner, 65 Barnes, Albert, 133–34 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 42, 43 Barr, Alfred H., Jr.: as ambassador of modernism, 24, 67, 68, 78, 84–86, 125, 137, 145; and architecture, 24, 29, 30–31, 64, 85, 149, 169n6; and Bauhaus: 1919–1928, 119; and Cubism and Abstract Art, 85, 98–100, 142, 181n32; and design, 29, 116, 118–19, 122, 141–42; as director of MOMA, 24, 25, 29, 115, 125, 130, 131, 145, 149, 169n6, 204 205

183n72, 189n63; and everyday life, 7, 24–25, 29, 169n6; and formalism, 24, 57, 84–86, 90, 94, 98–99, 105, 124, 125, 129, 135, 137, 147, 170n10; and International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, 28–29, 173n68; and Johnson, Philip, 27–28, 105, 129, 147–48, 150, 152; and Machine Art catalog essay, 10, 27, 32, 57, 59, 77–78, 82, 98, 105, 124, 162, 182n42; as Machine Art co-curator, xvii, xx, 1, 7, 10, 24–25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 51–52, 118–19, 137, 187n30; and National Socialism, 148–49, 188n57, 188n60; and Plato, 57, 58, 61–62, 64–65, 77–78; personality of, 64, 105; and politics, 149–50, 152, 170n10; and travel abroad, 25, 30–31, 148, 169n6, 170n9; and trustees of MOMA, 24–25, 115, 130, 137, 189n63; at Wellesley, 24, 38, 108, 147. See also under absolutes; functionalism; Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Bataille, Georges, 59, 73 Baudrillard, Jean, 8 Bauer, Catharine, 124 Bauhaus, xv, 24, 25, 32, 99, 107, 109, 148, 169n6, 170n10, 180n14. See also Bauhaus: 1919–1928; Bayer, Herbert; Gropius, Walter Bauhaus: 1919–1928 (MOMA, 1938–1939), 52, 119 Bayer, Herbert, 52, 112 beauty, 53, 119, 125, 128, 133, 139, 147, 157, 158, 168n9, 180n15, 185n5; of abstract form, 7, 8, 22; and autonomy, 34, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 155–56; and consumerism, 120–21, 154–55; in everyday objects, 27, 47, 50, 52, 61; and geometry, 29, 77, 80; of machine-made products, 29, 77, 84; of machines, 90, 94, 125, 168n9, 182n42; of materials, 22, 80, 82; and Plato, 55, 57, 59, 61, 77, 80; as “unconscious,” 84, 90, 94, 105; and utility, 27, 105, 120. See also under Machine Art; mass production Benjamin, Walter, xv, xxi, 35 Bernhard, Lucian, 36–37, 75, 112 Bernhard, Ruth, 36–40, 45, 46, 53, 57, 73–75, 108, 122; In the Circle, 157–60, 162–63; Lifesavers, 38–40 Blackburn, Alan, 130, 151–52 Brancusi, Constantin, 8, 84 Brenner, Anita, 2, 124 Breuer, Marcel, 108–9, 119 Breuning, Margaret, 94, 95 bric-a-brac, 82–83. See also gimcracks

Brisco, Norris, 111–12, 117, 118 British empiricism, 136, 139, 144, 155. See also deduction; empiricism Brown, Bill, xxi, xxii, 167n28

Cahill, Holger, 25, 27, 115, 153, 170n12 Calo, Mary Ann, xvi capitalism, xviii, xix, 9, 31, 41, 68, 75, 96–97, 101, 114–16, 120, 135, 169n3 Cheetham, Mark, xvii, 64–65, 177n36 circles, 5, 6, 13, 21, 22, 55, 78, 80, 103, 121–22, 162–63. See also geometry; Platonic form Clark, T. J., xvi, 178n65 classicism. See neoclassicism commodities, 9, 56, 68, 71, 117, 121, 162, 163; in Machine Art, 7, 13, 77, 109; and modern art, 8, 68. See also commodity fetishism commodity fetishism, 96–97 consumerism, xiii, 29, 155, 183n77; and capitalism, xix, 115, 116; and the Depression, 3, 9, 58, 68–69, 117, 119–20; and design, 117–21; and Machine Art, xx, 3, 7, 9, 13, 96–97, 101, 109–12, 114–16, 118–21, 122–25, 142, 144; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 122; and MOMA, xix–xx, 121–22; and populism, xix–xx, 114–15; rationalized, 109–16, 119–22, 124–25, 142; and women, 111, 141–42. See also commodities; consumers’ unions; tastemaking. See also under beauty Consumers’ Research, Inc., 120 consumers’ unions, 114, 119–20, 138–39 contemplation, 7, 35, 47, 98, 136, 137–38, 142 contingency, xvi, 76–77, 129, 139. See also indeterminacy Corn, Wanda, xvi, xix Cortissoz, Royal, 2 Coughlin, Father Charles, 150, 152 cubism, 24, 34, 46, 59, 64, 73, 84, 99, 125. See also Cubism and Abstract Art Cubism and Abstract Art (MOMA, 1936), 52, 64, 85, 98–100, 141 cultural lag, 41–42, 43

Dada, xvi, 73–77, 78, 144. See also Man Ray; Picabia, Francis Dana, John Cotton, 154 deduction, 143–45, 147, 153, 155, 158. See also British empiricism democracy, xix–xx, 146, 147, 150, 152–53, 155. See also freedom; judgment; populism

Index

Demos, Raphael, 59, 62, 63, 64, 70, 77, 79, 80, 176n22, 176n30 department stores, xx, 70, 110–12, 124. See also Macy’s department store Depression, 3–4, 9–10, 22, 23, 58, 66, 67, 68–69, 71, 78, 95–96, 109, 116, 117, 119–20, 137, 147, 159, 160 design, xiii, 50, 68, 80, 117–18, 120, 131, 138; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 29, 116, 118–19, 122, 141–42; and Johnson, Philip, 127–28; and Machine Art, 12, 18, 51, 66, 82–83, 90, 92, 102, 106, 107, 118, 121–22, 142, 162, 167n3, 187n34; and MOMA, xix, 22, 24, 28, 116, 169n6, 180n14, 184n86, 184n99; See also American design; art-in-industry exhibitions; installation design; interior design; Museum of Modern Art: architecture and design; styling; names of individual designers. See also under consumerism de-skilling, 89. See also alienation de Stijl, xv, 24, 65 Dewey, John, xx, 133–37, 138, 139, 142–43, 145–46, 153, 155, 156, 160, 176n30 diorama installations, 98, 112, 122, 124 discovery, 85, 90, 92, 101–4, 105, 106, 124, 125, 136. See also managerial model of artistry; revelation Douglas, Ann, xvii dualism, 63, 64, 77, 176n25 Duchamp, Marcel, xiv, 9, 23, 59, 76, 144 Duncan, Carol, xvii–xviii, xix, 116, 170n14, 183n83

Earhart, Amelia, 138, 139, 155, 160 egg-shaped form, 121 Einstein, Albert, 5, 9, 10, 58, 168n6 embodiment. See experience empiricism, 34, 136; and Machine Art, xxii, 8, 52–53, 79, 129, 139, 143–44, 155; and pragmatism, 9, 136, 155, 176n30; and the scientific method, 44, 136, 155. See also British empiricism; empiricism l’Esprit Nouveau. See purism Euclidean geometry, 5, 139, 161 everyday life, xxii, 189n79; and Machine Art, 8, 29, 47, 50, 58, 116, 142, 153; and MOMA, xviii, 25, 27, 29, 116, 169n6; and photography, 33, 36, 45. See also ordinary “nonart” objects. See also under Barr, Alfred H., Jr. evidentiary objects, 8, 43–45, 174n81. See also objects

excess, xxii, 67–68. See also overproduction experience, xix–xx, 67, 153, 157–58, 160, 176n25; and Dewey, John, 134–37, 138, 142–43, 145, 153; of Machine Art, xxii– xxiii, 13, 129, 139, 142, 143–44, 163; and objectification, 31, 33, 38–39, 44, 47, 51; and pragmatism, 9, 134–37, 176n30 “Exhibition X,” 149–50 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs (1925), 131–32

Fantl, Ernestine, 108 fascism. See totalitarianism Federal Reserve Act, 71 Film und Foto exhibition (1929), 45–46 five-and-dime stores, 24, 108, 154. See also Woolworth’s For Us the Living. See “Exhibition X” Ford, Henry, 69–70 Fordism, xiii, 109–10, 119. See also Americanization; mechanization; rationalization; scientific management; Taylorism Ford Motor Company, 3, 51 form: and function, 4; Machine Art objects as examples of, 6, 7, 8, 31, 40, 77–79, 80, 82, 84, 109, 129, 135, 163, 161, 162; and materiality, 61, 63, 65; as pure (timeless, ideal), 6, 12, 90–91, 101, 124, 155. See also abstract form; abstraction: and modern art; abstraction: and Platonic form; formalism; Platonic form; significant form. See also under Machine Art formalism, 7, 46, 58, 65, 98, 129, 153; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 24, 57, 84–86, 90, 94, 98–99, 105, 124, 125, 129, 135, 137, 147, 170n10; and Johnson, Philip, 127–28; and Machine Art, 7, 13, 70, 76, 78, 84–85, 90, 98–101, 104, 122, 127, 135, 161, 163; and MOMA, xvii–xviii, 9, 100–1, 161. See also form. See also under alienation Frankenstein, Alfred, 47 Frankenstein’s monster, 42, 95, 174n75, 182n42 freedom, 127, 148–50 function, 7, 137–38; and Machine Art, 4–5, 10, 212, 77, 80 92–94, 103. See also beauty: utility; functionalism functionalism, xxi, 173n68; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 29, 141–42; and Johnson, Philip, 52, 66–67, 107–8, 115–16, 121–22, 127–28, 141, 185n5; and Machine Art, xv, 22, 29, 52, 94, 109, 115, 116, 141, 175n14; and MOMA xix, 22, 25–27, 98, 107, 121–22, 206 207

180n14, 184n86, 184n99. See also beauty: utility; function

general equivalent, 59, 60, 72, 77, 169n3 geometry, 5, 6, 21, 29, 57, 64, 65, 85, 103, 122, 128, 138, 139, 140, 161. See also circles Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian, 43 gimcracks, 141, 187n36. See also bric-a-brac gold, 58–59, 71, 78–79, 80, 96 gold standard, 58–59, 70–72, 79, 178n63, 178n70; and art, 59, 72–73 Gold Reserve Act (1934), 72 Good Housekeeping Institute, 120 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 72–73, 77, 85, 169n3 Grafly, Dorothy, 2, 94 Great Depression. See Depression Greenberg, Clement, 57–58, 59, 61, 129 Gropius, Walter, 30, 112

hardware store, 124 Heap, Jane, 30, 31, 171n24 Heidegger, Martin, xxi, 44, 45, 53, 56 high modernism xvii, xix, 28, 29, 115 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 28, 66 hoarding, 58, 59, 71–72, 73, 78, 79 Hoover, Herbert, 43, 118, 131, 185n10

indeterminacy, 130; and modernism, xvi, xvii, 86, 67–68, 72–73, 84; and modernity, 13, 61, 162, 67–68; of value, 58–59, 77, 78, 162. See also contingency; semiotic indeterminacy. See also under Machine Art indexicality, 45, 51. See also evidentiary objects idolatry, 94–95, 96. See also commodity fetishism induction, 143–45, 146, 153, 158. See also empiricism: and pragmatism; experience installation design, xviii, xix, xx, 112, 106. See also art-in-industry exhibitions; diorama installations; names of individual exhibitions interior design, 67, 110, 124; and Johnson, Philip, 11, 37, 91, 106–9, 141; and Machine Art, 106–9 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture (MOMA, 1932), 27–29, 36, 51, 66, 119, 127, 170n14, 173n68, 175n100

Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall, 61 James, William, xxi, 136

Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard. See Le Corbusier Jensen, Gustav, 118, 187n34. See also Monel metal sink Jewell, Edward Alden, 2 Johnson, Philip: and architecture, xx, 27–28, 37, 108–9, 127–28, 152, 176n14; and Alcoa, 83–84, 92, 169n20, 180n8, 185n9; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 27–28, 105, 129, 147–48, 150, 152; and Coughlin, Father Charles, 150, 152; and functionalism, 52, 66–67, 107–8, 115–16, 121–22, 127–28, 141, 185n5; at Harvard, 59, 62, 63, 70, 79, 85, 130, 152, 176n22, 183n83; and interior design, 11, 37, 91, 106–9, 141; and International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, 27–29, 36, 66, 119, 175n100; and Long, Huey, 151–52; and Machine Art catalog essay, 27, 82, 116, 187n36; as Machine Art co-curator, xvii, xx, 1, 7, 13, 24–25, 29, 30, 31, 36–37, 57, 90–92, 101, 140, 162, 170n10, 187n32; and Machine Art installation, 10–13, 43, 46–48, 50–53, 59, 80–84, 94, 98, 105–7, 109, 111–14, 124–25, 162; and Machine Art object selection, 70, 80–81, 83, 92, 101–3, 118–19, 121; and the National Party, 150–51; and National Socialism, 2, 148, 152, 175n14; and Objects: 1900 and Today, 25–27; and Plato, 58, 59, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 70, 128, 177n35; and postmodernism, 127–29; and Ruhtenberg, Jan, 37, 108–9; and travel abroad, 27–28, 45–46, 108–9, 148. See also under absolutes; design; formalism Jones, Amelia, 76 Jones, Caroline A., 180n5 Jowett, Benjamin, 63, 176n26, 177n35 judgment, 131, 135, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 153, 155, 157, 158, 189n79

Kantor, Sybil Gordon, xx, 64, 65 Keane, Webb, xxii Kirstein, Lincoln, 130, 152, 183n83 Kirstein, Louis E., 117, 183n83 Krauss, Rosalind, xvii, 72, 73

laboratory, 136, 144–45, 153, 155; MOMA as, 101, 145, 155, 163 183n72 laboratory equipment, 30; in Machine Art, 5, 10–11, 81–82, 111, 112, 187n32 Latour, Bruno, xvi, xxi, 165n3 Lawrence, Sidney, 115, 187n33

Index

Le Corbusier (Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard), 27, 52, 65, 66, 119, 184n86 Léger, Fernand, 30–31, 32, 172n34 Little Review, xx, 30, 31, 51, 171n24, 171n27, 172n34 Loewy, Raymond, xiii, 121–22, 184n99 Long, Huey, 151–52 Lozowick, Louis, 21, 31–33, 44 Lynes, George Platt, 189n83 Lynes, Russell, 115

machine parts, 8, 10, 12, 58, 101, 102, 140, 157 machine age, xix, 6, 32, 41–45, 111, 116, 135, 159; and Machine Art, 43, 50, 52–53, 101, 182n42; and photography, xix, 34–36, 47, 48, 50; and Plato, 56–57, 162. See also modernity Machine-Age Exposition (1927), xx, 30–32, 51, 171n24, 171n27, 172n34 Machine Art (MOMA, 1934): and absolutes, xvii, xxiii, 9, 13, 21, 58, 59, 60, 70, 78, 79, 84, 86, 96, 150, 153, 161; and abstraction, xxii, 8, 53, 59, 64, 67, 77–78, 84, 125, 129, 161, 162; and alienation, 78, 90–94, 96, 101, 103, 104, 119; attendance of, 1, 112, 140, 170n13, 186n30; Barr, Alfred H., Jr. catalog essay, 10, 27, 32, 57, 59, 77–78, 82, 98, 105, 124, 162, 182n42; and the Bauhaus, xv, 32; and beauty, 6, 47, 53, 90, 103, 119, 120, 121, 125, 168n9; beauty contest (expert judging) of, 80, 131–33, 138–39, 140, 143–44, 155–56, 185n9, 187n31, 189n79, 189n80; catalog, 15, 17–21, 36– 37, 40, 50, 57, 61, 64, 73, 76, 122, 169n1; catalog cover, 8, 30, 32, 122, 148; circulating exhibition, 1, 2, 48–49, 100, 104–5, 120–21, 125, 129, 151, 167n3, 188n44; as conservative, xv, 57, 66, 114–15, 119; and consumerism, xx, 3, 7, 9, 13, 96–97, 101, 109–12, 114–16, 118–21, 122–25, 142, 144; and decontextualization, 6, 7, 47, 101; and the Depression, 3–4, 58, 66, 69, 95, 147; and design, 12, 18, 51, 66, 82–83, 90, 92, 102, 106, 107, 118, 121–22, 142, 162, 167n3, 187n34; and designers, 66, 90, 109, 118–19, 184n86; and Dewey, John, 134, 135–37, 138, 139, 142; and empiricism, xxii, 8, 52–53, 79, 129, 139, 143–44, 155; and everyday life, 8, 29, 47, 50, 58, 116, 142, 153; and fetishism, 96, 100; exhibit pieces in, 2–3, 4–5, 10–11, 17, 18, 73,

Machine Art (MOMA, 1934) (continued) 81–82, 84, 109–10, 157; and form, 4, 6, 7, 12, 57, 64, 77, 79, 80, 84, 90, 91, 109, 162; and formalism, 7, 13, 70, 76, 78, 84–85, 90, 98–101, 104, 122, 127, 135, 161, 163; and functionalism, xv, 22, 29, 52, 94, 109, 115, 116, 141, 175n14; and geometry, 5, 6, 21, 29, 57, 138, 161; and high modernism, 28–29, 147; and indeterminacy, xvii, 9, 129–30, 161–63; and idolatry, 94–95, 96; installation of, 1, 2–3, 8, 10–12, 46–48, 51, 59, 61, 80–84, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 110–12, 112–13, 124, 162, 169n20; installation photographs of, 139, 15–56; and instrumentality, 7, 21, 103, 137–38; and interior design, 106–9; Johnson, Philip catalog essay, 27, 82, 116, 187n36; lighting in, 81–82, 124; and Machine-Age Exposition, xx, 30–32; and mass production, 11, 32, 36, 48, 51, 57, 90, 105; and materiality, xxii–xxiii, 7, 8, 12–13, 40, 52–53, 59, 69, 77, 82, 83, 84, 129, 135, 160–63; materials in, 5, 6, 80, 82, 168n7; and modernism, xv, xvii, xxiii, 7–8, 67, 84, 115, 125; and photography (as analogy for installation), 22, 40, 43, 46–48, 50–53; and photography (modern), xv, 32, 46–47; and Plato, 57, 58–59, 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 76, 77–78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 115, 121, 135, 138, 150, 161, 162, 176n15, 177n35; popular ballot of, 139–41, 143–44, 145, 186n30, 187n32, 187n33, 187n34, 187n35, 189n79; and populism, xx, 115, 147, 153; precedents for, 25–29, 29–32; and propaganda, 13, 27, 150, 170n10; publicity for, 61, 80, 131, 139–40; and purism, xv, 65–67; and nationalism, 3, 66, 175n14; natural analogies and, 90, 104–5, 182n42; and Neoplatonism, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 70, 77–78, 84, 90, 131, 135, 175n14; and participatory ontology, 60, 78–79, 84, 94, 96, 135; and particularity, xxi, xxiii, 60, 78, 86, 135; and objectification, 13, 21–22, 31, 32, 44, 47–48, 50, 51, 53, 80, 114, 116, 122, 160, 162; and revelation, 47, 48–50, 90, 100, 102–3, 135; reviews of, 1–2, 43, 47, 61, 82, 83, 94–95, 97, 104–5, 106, 120–21, 122, 141, 168n9, 180n15; seriality in, 12–13, 18, 48, 77, 81, 112, 124, 162; as stabilizing, 73, 77, 78–79, 119, 128, 135, 144, 150; stillness of, 46, 52–53, 94, 106; things in, xxii, 10, 21, 40, 51, 53, 94, 129, 130, 135; and Thomas Aquinas, 208 209

Saint, 61, 137, 186n20; and timelessness, 6, 7, 13, 59, 90, 101, 119, 121, 128, 155–56; and touch, 47, 50, 52, 129, 142, 143; “unconscious” beauty in, 84, 90, 94, 100, 101, 105; visitor experience of, 129, 139, 141, 142, 143, 163. See also under adjustment; aluminum; ball bearings; Barr, Alfred H., Jr.; commodities; function; Johnson, Philip; machine age; mechanization; objects; ordinary “nonart” objects; photography; reflectivity machines, 45, 48, 101, 122, 162; adoration of, 95–96; and art, 21, 30–31, 32, 51, 99–100, 180n15; and beauty, 90, 94, 125, 168n9, 182n42; and labor, 95–96, 175n101, 181n22; and photography, xix, 33, 34–36, 50; and Plato, 57, 138 Macy’s department store, 112, 124, 138, 168n10 managerial model of artistry, 32, 90–91, 94, 104, 106, 124–25. See also artistry; consumerism: rationalized; discovery; reassembly (recombination); re-skilling; revelation Man Ray, xiv, 8, 144; Export Commodity (1920), 73, 76–77 Maritain, Jacques, 137. See also Thomas Aquinas, Saint Marx, Karl, xvi, xxi–xxii, 96–97, 169n3 mass production, xii, 9, 50; and beauty, 90, 105, 175n101; and Machine Art, 11, 32, 36, 48, 51, 57, 90, 105; and modernity, 31–32, 35, 43, 68, 160, 162; and Plato, 56. See also under reflectivity material conditions, xiii, xxii, 13, 21, 31, 33, 35, 39 materiality, xiv, xxi–xxiii, 8, 56–58, 130, 161, 166n28; and form, 61, 63, 65; and Machine Art, xxii–xxiii, 7, 8, 12–13, 40, 52–53, 59, 69, 77, 82, 83, 84, 129, 135, 160–63; and modernism, 59, 84, 165n1; and modernity, 9, 68; and money, 58–59, 70–71; and objectification, 21; and photography, 39–40, 41, 53; and pragmatism, 136–37; and value, 58, 59, 60, 68, 70, 71, 77, 78–79, 84, 135. See also materiality as guarantee; objects; semiotic thingness; thingness; things materiality as guarantee, xxii–xxiii, 8, 40, 53, 71, 78, 144. See also objects McAndrew, John, 28 McBride, Henry, 2, 106, 168n9, 180n15, 182n47

McMahon, A. Philip, 61 mechanization: and labor, 94–96; and Machine Art, 21, 90; and modernity, 34–35, 42, 44, 56, 89–90, 146; and objectification, 31–32, 48. See also Americanization; Fordism; rationalization; scientific management; Taylorism men, 111–12, 140–42 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 112, 122, 124 Michaels, Walter Benn, 72, 80 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 27, 107, 109, 175n14, 184n86 Miller, Daniel, xxi–xxii Millier, Arthur, 2, 67–68, 168n9 mimesis (imitation), 56, 60, 64, 77, 78, 79 modernism, xiii–xix, xxi, 59, 112, 122, 130, 134, 144, 148–49; backlash against, 67, 77, 78, 137; democratizing, xix–xx, 24, 115–16, 153; and gold standard, 72–73; and Machine Art, xv, xvii, xxiii, 7–8, 67, 84, 115, 125; and marketplace, 67–68, 85–86, 115; and materiality; 59, 84, 165n1; and Neoplatonism, 64–68. See also abstract expressionism; abstraction; Armory Show; cubism; Dada; formalism; functionalism; high modernism; purism. See also under indeterminacy; objects; things “modernistic,” 29, 30, 116, 122 modernity, xiv, xv, xvi, 9, 12, 13, 31–32, 33, 40, 44, 53, 56, 68, 115, 116, 144, 183n77. See also machine age Monel metal sink, 109, 118, 141, 187n34 money, xxii, 9, 13, 58–59, 70–73, 80, 169n3, 178n65. See also gold; gold standard morality, 41, 67, 69–70, 80, 95, 135, 137, 153, 170n10 Morris, William, 6, 94, 101, 168n9. See also Arts and Crafts movement Mumford, Lewis, 7–8, 21, 35–36, 41, 84, 106, 149 Murphy, Gerald, xiv, xv, 8 museum display, xviii, xix, xx, 6, 8, 18, 21, 47, 50, 106. See also diorama installations; names of individual exhibits; names of individual museums Museum of Modern Art (MOMA): and architecture and design, 22, 24, 122, 127–28, 182n44, 184n86, 184n99; attendance at, 27, 167n2, 170n13, 186n30; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 1, 24, 29, 131, 137, 145, 169n6, 183n72, 189n63; and the Bauhaus, 52, 107, 119, 169n6, 180n14; buildings of, 1, 2, 22, 57, 51; in the Depression, 67, 137;

Index

display techniques at, xviii, xx, 51–52; and everyday life, xviii, 25, 27, 29, 116, 169n6; founding of, 22–24, 115, 145, 183n72; and functionalism, xix, 22, 25–27, 98, 107, 121–22, 180n14, 184n86, 184n99; and high modernism, xvii–xix, 7, 9, 22, 28–29, 98, 100–1, 116, 128, 161, 170n14; histories of, xvii–xx, 115–16, 170n14; ideology and, xvii–xix, 114–16, 149–50; and National Socialism, 148; permanent collection, 18, 140, 145, 184n99, 187n32, 188n51; and populism, xix–xx, 115; promotion of modernism, 68, 84, 137, 145; publications, 15, 22; public relations of, 22, 61, 130–31, 170n10; social circle of, xx, 38, 106, 182n47; staff of, 108, 130, 131, 183n83; and taste-making, 114–16, 121; trustees of, 24, 137, 145, 152, 183n72, 189n63; and World War II, 149–50. See also names of individual exhibitions. See also under Barr, Alfred H., Jr.; consumerism; laboratory; ordinary “nonart” objects Myers, Fred, xxii

National Socialism (Nazism), 2, 148–49, 152 neoclassicism, 64–66, 67, 73, 85, 119, 125, 139, 175n14. See also Plato; Neoplatonism Neoplatonism, 57–63, 64–65, 70, 71, 77–79, 84, 86, 90, 101, 131, 135–36, 161–62, 175n14, 176n25, 176n26 Newark Museum, 153–55, 168n10 New Deal, xix, 115, 119–20, 153. See also Public Works of Art Project New History, 42. See also Barnes, Harry Elmer; Robinson, James Harvey Newmeyer, Sarah, 131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 155, 189n79 “New Vision,” 45–56

objectification, 13, 21, 40, 44–45, 56, 98, 169n3, 172n34; and Lozowick, Louis, 31–32; and Machine Art, 13, 21–22, 31, 32, 44, 47–48, 50, 51, 53, 80, 114, 116, 122, 160, 162; and photography, 13, 21, 29, 32–33, 38–40, 46 objects, xxii, 165n3, 169n3, 174n81; and Dewey, John, 134–35, 136, 138, 142–43; as incarnations of value, 13, 57, 58, 60, 80; and Machine Art, 31, 32, 47–48, 114, 129, 131, 143, 146, 155; and modernism, xiii–xv, 65, 73–75, 165n1, 178n72; as occa-

sions for shifting values, 68, 144, 162; and photography, 34–35, 36, 37–39, 40, 45, 50, 172n34; and representation, 13, 21–22, 40, 48, 51, 79, 160. See also evidentiary objects; objectification; ordinary “nonart” objects; things Objects: 1900 and Today (MOMA, 1933), 25–27 Ogburn, William Fielding, 41–43, 44–45, 47, 95–96, 173n71, 181n22. See also adaptive culture; adjustment overproduction, 9–10 ordinary “nonart” objects, xiii–xiv, 8–9; and Machine Art, 2, 6–8, 11, 13, 27, 46–47, 52, 73, 77, 84, 121, 129, 134, 153, 186n30; and MOMA, 25, 27, 169n6; and photography, 33, 36–40, 45; and pragmatism, 134–35. See also commodities; ready-made ornament, 29, 80, 82–83, 140, 185n5, 187n36 Oud, J.J.P., 27, 109 Outboard Propeller (Exhibit #41), 73–76, 105, 133, 139, 140, 156, 187n34 Ozenfant, Amédée, 65

participatory ontology, 7, 59–60, 63, 68, 71, 77, 78–79, 84, 96, 129, 130, 135, 161, 162 particularity, xv-xvi, xvii, xx–xxi, xxii, xxiii, 39–40, 58, 60, 61, 72, 77, 78, 86, 135, 136, 146, 160 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 45 Perkins, Frances, 138–39 Perriand, Charlotte, 66 phenomenology. See experience Philebus (Plato), 55–56, 58, 61, 63–65, 80, 139, 177n35 photography: and machine age, xix, 34–36, 47, 48, 50; and Machine Art catalog, 15–22, 36–37, 40, 57, 73, 122, 140, 160; and Machine Art display, 32, 40, 46–50, 51, 53, 81, 82, 106; and Machine Art installation shots, 139, 150; and materiality, 39–40, 41, 53; modernist, xiv, xv, 45–46; in museum display, 29–30, 51–52; and objectification, 13, 21, 29, 32–33, 38–40, 46; and ordinary “nonart” objects, 33, 36–40, 45; and representation, 40, 41, 53; and revelation, 35, 50. See also straight photography. See also under abstraction; adjustment; everyday life; machines; Machine Art; objects; things Picabia, Francis, 8, 64, 73, 144, 171n24; Âne (Ass), 73–76, 178n72 Picasso, Pablo, xvii, 63, 73, 125 210 211

planned obsolescence, 9, 68, 117, 118, 120 Plato, 6, 56–58, 59–65, 85, 137, 161, 176n25, 177n35, 189n76; and the arts, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 61, 63–64, 78; and Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 57, 58, 61–62, 64–65, 77–78; and Demos, Raphael, 59, 62, 63, 70, 77, 80, 176n30; and Dewey, John, 135, 136, 138, 139; and Johnson, Philip, 58, 59, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 70, 128, 177n35; and Machine Art, 57, 58–59, 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 76, 77–78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 115, 121, 135, 138, 150, 161, 162, 176n15, 177n35; and the machine age, 56–57, 162; and value, 69–70. See also form; neoclassicism; Neoplatonism; Platonic form; Philebus; Republic. See also under absolutes; beauty; machines Platonic form, 21, 56–57, 59–60, 64, 78, 91, 138, 150, 162, 177n35. See also circles Plotinus, 57–58, 59, 61, 63, 78, 80, 85 populism, xix, 114–16, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 154–55 Pound, Ezra, xiv, 59, 171n24 pragmatism, xxi, 9, 60, 63, 134–36, 142–43, 144, 146, 153, 173n67, 176n30. See also Dewey, John; experience; induction; James, William precisionism, xv, xvi, 30 presence, xxii, 5, 8, 12, 13, 40, 48, 52, 53, 57–58, 78, 82, 142 primitivism, 90, 97–101 prototypes, 12, 56, 78, 130, 162 Public Works of Art Project, 133 Purcell, Edward A., xxi, 153 purism, xv, 65–67 Puritanism, 60, 70, 170n10

rationalization, 90, 91, 109, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 139, 142, 144, 155, 156. See also Americanization; Fordism; mechanization; scientific management; Taylorism Ray, Man. See Man Ray Read, Helen Appleton, 2, 7 ready-made, xiv, 9, 73, 76 reassembly (recombination), 91, 101, 106, 107, 109, 114, 122, 124, 125. See also managerial model of artistry reflectivity: and Machine Art, 12, 48, 77, 80–84, 129, 140, 161–63; and mass production, 12–13; and ontology, 76, 77, 80, 161–63 relativism, 60, 128, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 151, 153

representation: artistic, 7, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72–73, 78; and fetishism, 96–97; and modernity, 43–44, 53; and money, 58, 71–73, 78, 80, 178n65; objects and, 13, 21–22, 40, 48, 51, 79, 160; and ontology, 7, 56, 78; and photography, 40, 41, 53; versus presence, 68, 78, 79, 96. See also abstraction; evidentiary objects; indexicality; participatory ontology; semiotic indeterminacy Republic (Plato), 56, 78 research and development (R&D) laboratories, 144–45, 155 re-skilling, 89, 90–91, 101, 114, 116, 119–21, 124–25, 142. See also managerial model of artistry revelation, 6, 32, 40, 52–53, 57, 61, 90–91, 100, 101–4, 105, 106, 124, 125, 135. See also discovery; managerial model of artistry Richards, Charles R., 131–33, 139, 155 Robinson, James Harvey, 42 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 22, 23, 24, 27, 170n12 Rockefeller Center, 159, 167n2 Rockefeller, Nelson, 149, 152 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 10, 25, 41, 58, 68–69, 70, 71–72, 119–20, 133, 138, 146, 151 Ruhtenberg, Jan, 37, 38, 108, 109, 124, 158

Sheeler, Charles, xiv, 46, 51 signal mirror. See Triple Mirror for Light Signals (Exhibit #341) significant form, 33. See also form Silver, Kenneth, xvii, 66 Simmel, Georg, xxii, 58, 59 simulacrum, 161 Smith, Terry, xix, 50–51, 115–16, 180n14, 183n77, 183n83, 184n86 sociology, xxi, 41, 42, 44 Section of Spring (Exhibit #2), 79, 80, 105, 138, 140, 163, 179n82, 185n9, 187n31, 190n3 standardization, 8, 46, 50, 90, 95, 120 Staniszewski, Mary Anne, xviii, xix, xx, 183n72 Starck, Philippe, 128 Steiner, Christopher, xxii Steiner, Ralph, xiv, xv, 33–34, 36, 37, 38, 46, 173n61 Stieglitz, Alfred, xiv, xx, 33, 34, 35, 45, 63–64, 177n35 stock market crash, 23, 68, 109, 159. See also Depression, the straight photography, xv, 32–36, 45, 46–47 Strand, Paul, xiv, 21, 33, 34–35, 40, 41, 45, 46–47, 48 streamlining, 72, 116, 121–22, 141, 184n98, 184n99, 187n34 styling, 68, 116–18, 120, 122, 159 Sweeney, James Johnson, 98, 100, 181n27

Saab, A. Joan, xix, 115 Sakier, George, 109–10, 112, 118, 119, 187n34 Schulze, Franz, xx, 152 science, xxi, 34, 44, 85–86, 100, 148, 149. See also laboratory; laboratory equipment scientific management, 89–90, 116, 118, 120, 125, 170n14. See also Americanization; Fordism; mechanization; rationalization; Taylorism scientific method, xxi, 44, 136, 144–45, 155. See also laboratory; laboratory equipment sculpture, xiv, 31, 51, 100, 125; objects in Machine Art displayed as, 12, 112–14, 124; objects in African Negro Art displayed as, 98 Self-Aligning Ball Bearing (Exhibit #50), 12, 122, 129, 133, 140, 141, 187n35 semiotic indeterminacy, 8–9, 59, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 144, 161–62 semiotic thingness, 8, 13, 21, 40, 169n3. See also evidentiary objects seriality, 11, 18, 48, 81, 112, 124, 162

taste-making, xix, 114–16, 117, 119, 120–22, 128, 130, 145, 183n72 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 89–90 Taylorism, xiii, 89–90, 116, 118, 120. See also Americanization; Fordism; mechanization; rationalization; scientific management Teague, Walter Dorwin, xiii, 109, 118, 119 technology, xvi, 6, 35, 41–45, 53, 57, 100, 117–18, 132, 173n71 technological unemployment, 95–96, 120 things, xxi–xxii; in Machine Art, xxii, 5–6, 7, 8, 21, 40, 51, 52, 101, 129–30, 135, 137; in modernism, xiii–xv, 10, 165n1, 172n34; in modernity, 9, 10, 41, 43, 45, 68–69, 162; in photography, 34, 36–38, 40, 172n39. See also objects; ordinary “nonart” objects thing theory, xxi–xxii. See also Brown, Bill thingness, xxi, xxii, 21, 40, 165n1, 169n3 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 61, 137–38 timelessness, 4, 7, 13, 59, 69, 86, 90, 101, 116, 119, 121, 128, 146, 150. See also form: as pure (timeless, ideal); Platonic form

Index

totalitarianism, 120, 147, 150, 151, 152–53, 159–60, 170n10, 175n14, 189n76. See also National Socialism touch, 46, 47, 50, 52, 129, 142, 143, 158, 160 Trachtenberg, Alan, xxi Triple Mirror for Light Signals (Exhibit #341), 140, 141, 161–63 Troy, Nancy, xvii truth-to-materials, 5, 6, 29, 80, 82–83, 98

“unconscious” labor, 84 , 90, 94, 97, 100, 101, 105. See also alienation universals. See absolutes universal standard. See general equivalent

value, xxii, 178n65, 189n79; and absolutes, 60, 69, 77, 78, 120–21; and abstraction, 7, 13, 58, 68, 69, 77; competing versions of, 73, 144, 155; and gold, 58, 71, 78, 80; and indeterminacy, 58–59, 77, 78, 162; and materiality, 58, 59, 60, 68, 70, 71, 77, 78–79, 84, 135; and Plato, 69–70; as volatile, 9–10, 24, 67–68, 72–73, 75, 86, 129, 169. See also under Plato

212

Vaughan, Malcolm, 61, 145, 188n51 Von Nessen, Walter, 109, 119

Wallach, Alan, xvii–xviii, xix, 116, 170n14, 183n83 Wellesley, 24, 38, 108, 147 Weston, Edward, xiv, xv, 33, 45, 46 Whitehead, Alfred North, 9, 10, 62–63, 79, 85–86, 176n25, 176n30 Williams, William Carlos, xiii, 10, 59, 165n1 Wilson, Kristina, xx, 112, 115 women, 111–12, 140–42, 143, 158, 161 Woolworth’s, 38, 153. See also five-and-dime stores World War I, 56, 65, 73 World War II, 23–24, 149. See also “Exhibition X”; National Socialism Wright, Russel, 109, 110, 119