MoMA gives Modern a Makeover
Curator Juliet Kinchin and curatorial assistant Aidan O'Connor organized some 300 works in to five exhibit sections.
-- Interior Design, 1/4/2010 12:00:00 AM
Blow Inflatable Armchair, 1967, by Paolo Lomazzi, Donato D'Urbino, and Jonathan De Pas, manufactured by Zanotta S.p.A., Italy, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the manufacturer.
The modern design section of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently received a facelift. Running from December 23, 2009 to July of 2010, the museum’s third floor Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries showcases “Shaping Modernity: Design 1880–1980.” The exhibit houses a selection of visionary objects, graphics, architectural fragments, and textiles from the Museum’s collection that reveal the attempts of successive generations to shape their experience of living in the modern world. Curator Juliet Kinchin and curatorial assistant Aidan O’Connor organized some 300 works into the following five sections:
The International New Art 1890–1914
The International New Art flourished in urban centers around the world taking on many localized forms and names (among them Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Arte Modernista, Sezession, and Glasgow Style). The pieces in this installation were used in the office of the MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Other examples in the exhibition include a side chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a side table by Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, and a plaster cast of Antoni Gaudí’s original finial sculpture for the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Watch the Fords Go By billboard for Ford Motor Company, 1937, by A. M. Cassandre, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer.
New Typography 1927–37
In the 1920s and 1930s, the movement known as the New Typography brought graphics and information design to the forefront of artistic avant-gardes in Europe. Rejecting traditional arrangement of type in symmetrical columns, modernist designers organized the printed page or poster as a blank field in which blocks of type and illustration (frequently photomontage) could be arranged in harmonious, strikingly asymmetrical compositions. Included in the exhibition are 14 works by Jan Tschichold, Ladislav Sutnar, Johannes Molzahn, Theo H. Ballmer, Herbert Bayer, Frantisek Kalivoda, Zdenek Rossmann, Joost Schmidt, and Aleksandr Rodchenko.
Mind, Body, Machine 1925–40
The tone of this section is set by a giant railroad-car spring and a boat propeller first shown in MoMA’s landmark Machine Art exhibition in 1934, which celebrated such items of anonymous industrial design as symbols of social improvement and technological progress. The theme is further explored in utilitarian objects such as a streamlined meat-slicer (given in memory of the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman), and the Vipp trash can, designed for a Danish hair salon.
Streamliner Meat Slicer (model 410), c. 1940, by Egmont Arens and Theodore C. Brookhart, manufactured by Hobart Manufacturing Company, Troy, Ohio, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Eric Brill in memory of Abbie Hoffman.
What Was Good Design? MoMA’s Message 1944–56
This section,which opened in May of 2009, presents over 100 selections from the museum’s collection—ranging from domestic furnishings and appliances to textiles, sporting goods, and graphics—to illuminate the primary values of Good Design as promoted by MoMA within an international debate conducted by museums, design councils, and department stores.
Continuity and Critique 1960–80
The clean and elegant forms of classic modernism continued to appear in the domestic appliances of Dieter Rams for Braun, and the Vignelli Associates’ stacking plastic dinnerware. For many however, the emphasis on pop music, youth, and counterculture opened up new possibilities in materials, colors, and forms, as well as more humorous, expendable design.
Health Chair, 1938, manufactured by The Ironrite Ironer Co., Detroit, MI, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the manufacturer. Side Chair, 1897, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Glasgow School of Art.
Images courtesy of MoMA.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
