NEW HAVEN, CT.- Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression, an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery from October 5, 2004 through June 5, 2005 , takes a new look at the ways modernism was introduced into the American home. The carefully edited installation shows how certain American designers successfully combined the streamlined simplicity of modernism with the middle-class desire for comfort and familiarity in a time of economic and social disruption. The exhibition includes examples of furniture, tableware, and accessories by designers such as Gilbert Rohde, Russel Wright, George Sakier, and Lurelle Guild, selected from the Art Gallery’s collection of American decorative arts and supplemented by loans from a private collection. Reproductions of 1930s advertisements and photographs of store displays show how skillfully these products were marketed.
A lecture and symposium, American Modernist Design, 1920-1940: New Perspectives, will be held on Friday evening and all day Saturday, October 29 and 30, 2004.
Livable Modernism accompanies a book of the same title that offers a fresh scholarly investigation of the ways modernist design was adapted for the living, dining, and bedrooms of American middle-class homes during the Depression years. Kristina Wilson, assistant professor of art history at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, researched and organized the project during her two years as the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Fellow in American Decorative Arts at the Yale Art Gallery.
Among the many challenges to furniture designers wishing to introduce modernism to middle class America was the widespread popularity of Colonial Revival styles during the 1930s. Objects in the exhibition show how this challenge was met. Russel Wright, for example, in his American Modern Armchair, combined a skeletal bentwood frame with deep reclining seat, upholstered in a nubbly, homespun-like material that would have provided a comforting reference to familiar handicraft skills. Such pieces had the further advantage, in the scaled-down domestic life of Depression-era families, of occupying less space in the smaller living room while creating an inviting environment.
Similarly, American designers experimented with modern materials, such as tubular metal, and created smaller scale furnishings for the dining room, of which Warren McArthur’s Rainbow Side Chair and Alphons Bach’s armchair are examples. Among the many dining accessories exhibited is Lurelle Guild’s chrome-plated-copper canapé plate featuring a raised disc to hold a glass and a winglike handle, perfect for the newly popular buffet party. Marketing it, the Chase Company wrote, “With this smart looking canapé plate, you can hold a cocktail, a canapé and a cigarette in one hand and shake hands with the other.”
The bedroom in the 1930s seems to have been the space where modernism came into its own, hidden away as it was from social expectations. Gilbert Rohde’s elegant Vanity Table, composed of wooden drums supported by a slender length of tubular steel, and its sumptuously cushioned low ottoman, exhibited with whimsically shaped clocks, embody modernist flair and glamour.
The exhibition is supported by the Friends of American Arts at Yale and an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
