Episode 12 - Streamline moderne, Part 2

" Come tour the future with General Motors! A transcontinental flight over America in 1960! What will we see? What changes will transpire? "

Conclusion of a 2-part series on Streamline moderne,  In this episode I'll discuss why  it took particular root in Depression-era America, and also discuss how the critics viewed modern art in the 1930s.

Photo credit: Wes Magyar

To explore future:

• Book,   Bush, "The Streamlined Decade", George Braziller Inc, 1075
• Pictures of the Hoover Model 150 by  Henry Dreyfuss
• Pictures of the Oriole gas stove by Norman Bel Geddes
• Picture of the Electrolux Model 30 by Lurelle Van Arsdale
• Good article on Norman Bel Geddes' mechanical horse race and his War Game
• Original color documentary by General Motors on the 1939 Futurama exhibit.  Ride footage commences at minute 8:00
• Good brief video summarising Norman Bel Geddes' career
• Catalogue of 1934 MOMA exhibition "Machine Art"
• Book, Marshall, "Machine Art 1934", University of Chicago Press, 2012
• MOMA diagram shown progression of modern art 1890-1935

Transcript

Episode 12 – Streamline moderne, Part 2

Welcome back! To episode 12 of “Talking Modernism”, the podcast of the 1920s and 1930s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed their world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman

Last episode I spoke of how the technical practice of streamlining evolved into a wonderfully evocative style of 1930s commercial design known as streamline moderne. In this episode I’ll talk about how it took particular root in Depression-era America, and also use the style to discuss how the critics viewed modern art in the 1930s.

The Great Depression and the birth of planned obselesence

In the last episode I mentioned the contributions of Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn to streamline moderne. Le Corbusier was Swiss and Mendelsohn was German, but it was America that would come to be identified most closely with streamline moderne, and this was due to a number of factors. The first was the impact of the Great Depression, which saw the consumer sector in America suffer a deep and sustained collapse as a fearful populace hoarded their money. If the economy was to be restarted, the public would need to be convinced to start spending again. But if money was tight, how could a consumer who already owned say a perfectly good radio or refrigerator be convinced to replace it? The answer was styling. As a 1930 article in the American Magazine of Art recommended:

“Customer dissatisfaction can be generated through the new merchandising device known as styling of goods. Goods are to be redesigned in the modern spirit, to make them markedly new, and encourage new buying. This will result in the displacement of still useful things by making them outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete.”

And where were the industrial designers who would do this restyling? Up until the mid-1920s, America by and large did not have professional industrial designers, a profession that had its genesis in the German Deutsche Werkbund in the early 1900s. Earnest Calkin, the author of the article I just quoted, was the head of an advertising agency, and it was the advertising industry that provided most of the first group of American industrial designers, included luminaries such as Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Gilbert Rohde, Norman Bel Geddes and the New Zealand born Joseph Sinel, and they would dominate American design for the next 20 years. None except Loewy had training in engineering or manufacturing. Rather they all had a background, to a greater or lesser degree, in advertising and graphic design. They would bring their understanding of consumer desires and motivations to the task of re-starting American consumption.

The roughly 65 years between 1880 to 1945 are sometimes referred to as the “Machine Age”, a period where technological advances in electricity, precision engineering and mass production saw an unprecedented succession of new machines and appliances ranging from the home radio to the automobile to the automated milking machine. At the start of the “Machine Age” there was not too much effort put into making a manufactured object tastefully attractive. Indeed the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 1800s had formed in reaction to early ham-fisted attempts at applying decoration to machines and appliances. And the later designs of the Deutsche Werkbund and the Bauhaus that evolved from the Arts & Crafts movement did not attempt to conceal, indeed they emphasised, the essentially functional nature of a machine. Cogs, cams and battery terminals were all left on show, for instance in the iconic desk fan designed in 1908 by Peter Behrens, one of the founders of the Deutsche Werkbund.

This was all a long way from the smooth flowing surfaces and aerodynamic shape displayed on the Pioneer Zephyr. So in order to restyle machines in the modern streamlined idiom, the new breed of American designers hid the working of an appliance under a smooth, typically teardrop or egg-shaped casing – recall that the egg is an essentially hydrodynamic shape. Take for instance the model 150 upright vacuum cleaner that Henry Dreyfuss designed for the Hoover company in 1936. Before Dreyfuss's involvement with the company, most Hoover vacuum cleaners consisted of a black cylindrical motor and an aluminum base; this was the norm for more than twenty years. In 1936’s model 150 however, the mechanical workings were now completely hidden from sight by a teardrop-shaped black case atop a magnesium base. This streamlined encasing of appliances – “cleanlining” as designer Ramond Loewy called it – gave visual clarity to the function of machines by removing confusing detail and clutter. It is a design convention that survives to the present day.

Like many appliances of the 1930s, the casing of the Hoover model 150 was made of a new wonder material: Bakelite, the world’s first fully synthetic plastic. Bakelite proved an ideal material for casings: it is a good insulator, feels pleasant to touch, is able to be coloured, shaped and molded, and it was cheaper than steel or wood, especially after its patent expired in 1927. And the gentle curves and rounded shapes of streamline moderne facilitated the even flow of molten Bakelite resin during the moulding process. A curved plastic piece was easy to remove from its mould and was simple to finish and polish. Its rounded form was durable, devoid of corners or points. In short. bakelite and streamline moderne were made for each other. The Art Deco style of the 1925 Paris expo had tended to a ‘facade’ type of design, with decoration applied to a single face of an object. Especially when realised in Bakelite, Streamline moderne had a more plastic conception of an object to be seen from all angles.

It would be wrong to think that Streamline Moderne’s embrace of manufacturing was simply a superficial exercise in aesthetics. It’s designers also sought to create designs that significantly lowered manufacturing costs for their clients and improved product performance for the end consumer. In 1932 for instance, Geddes designed the “Oriole” gas cooker for the Standard Gas Equipment Company, creating in the process the prototype of the freestanding stove that we use today. He simplified the existing stove layout, eliminating projections and dirt-catching corners and minimising gaps and joins. Oven doors acted as shelves when opened and closed flush with the front surface, Surface burners were covered with a hinged panel when not in use. Legs were eliminated, along with the need to clean under them, and the resultant space used for a pot drawer. The ivory-white vitreous enamal and chromed hardware made for easy cleaning. Indeed, with the Oriole Geddes “streamlined”, pardon the pun, Standard Gas’ entire line of stoves, which had included around a hundred models and sizes. In its place he devised 12 standard modules that could be combined in a variety of ways. His use of spring clips speeded assembly, and by relieving the enamaled parts of structural tension he reduced cracking and flaking during shipment. 

The aim of “cleanlining” to simplify and declutter had strong parallel’s with functional design movements like Bauhaus. But also akin to Expressionism, streamline moderne went beyond the functional in its desire to appeal to consumer emotions as well as satisfying functional needs. With the sleek and stylish model 150, Hoover had made the humble upright vaccum cleaner glamorous. This mix of functionality and glamour is particularly evident in another vacuum cleaner of the 1930s, the Model 30 barrel vacuum cleaner that designer Lurelle Guild created for Electrolux in 1937. Here the case is of polished aluminium, with a slanted front and parallel speed lines, sitting atop low metal skids looking for all the world like a minature version of a streamliner train. You might be only vacuuming dog hair from the living room carpet but in your mind you could be at the cocktail bar of the Pioneer Zephyr. Streamline moderne took the modern but extreme “ornament is a crime” ethos of pure functionalism and moderated it for the mass market. It eschewed applied decoration - the only purely decorative motifs in streamline moderne tended to be parallel speed lines, - but the overall styling of the object was evocative of the modern streamlined age. And in doing so they managed to successfully develop a genuinely popular modern style for the mass market. The austere stylings of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, whilst displayed in museums as masterpieces of design, had limited appeal in the consumer market, finding buyers mainly amongst avant-garde members of the upper middle class. Streamline moderne style however became the dominant consumer style in much of the Western world by the end of the 1930s.

The quest for a modern American style

The second factor in America’s embrace of streamline moderne was the quest by that country bginning in the late 1920s to establish a uniquely American style of modern design, distinct from innovations from overseas like the Art Deco style of the 1925 Paris Expo or the International, functional style of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.

In episode 8 of the last series I described how a 1910 Paris exhibition of furniture by the Deutsche Werkbund had spurred France to train its own industrial designers as part of a drive to develop a uniquely French style of applied arts, a process that culminated in the Art Deco style of the mid 1920s. A similar process now took place in America in the second half of the 1920s. A series of exhibitions of modern designs from Europe had highlighted how far American applied art had fallen off the pace, limited to rehashing old designs or copying the new European styles rather than producing genuine innovation. And this sparked calls for a modern design style with a local American sensibility. This was part of a more broader inward turn by America in the 1920s. Like most countries at that time, America had a strong nationalist sensibility, but this was exacerbated by a reaction to the chaos of WW1 which had strengthened the conviction that the “old” world of Europe was irredeemably decadent and it would best serve America’s interests to turn inwards and limit engagement with Europe in particular. International relations were to be formulated not as part of a broad narrative or philosophy like “protecting the free world” as the American government tended to operate during the Cold War, but more like where each transaction is assessed more narrowly on its benefit to America, an approach advocated by Donald Trump and his ilk. America cut its immigrant intake from 1 million a year at the start of the 20th century to less than 150k in 1the 1920s. It refused to become a member of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations established after WW1 even though originally this was an initiative of the US president Woodrow Wilson. And part of its response to the Great Depression was to impose steep import tariffs via the Smoot-Hawley bill of 1930, that fatally weakened trade across the globe.

Norman Bel Geddes – from set designer to Futurama

Norman Bel Geddes was one of the most prominent of America’s new breed of industrial designers, or “consumer engineers” as they were sometimes known. A bit like Paul Poiret and Greta Schutte-Lihodsky that I talked about in Series 1, Bel Geddes was an outsized character, managing to pack at least 2 careers into a short life which had him dying at the age of 65. Born in 1863 in the town of Adrian, Michigan, by 1928 he was one of America’s leading theatrical designers, designing sets for the NY Metropolitan Opera, the NY theatre and in Hollywood for director Cecille B DeMille. 

He also found time for a series of meticulous, insanely detailed games he created in the 1920s and early ’30s for the amusement of his friends. The first was an ingenious electric horse racing game that had 20 horses running on copper rails, pulled by pulled by near-invisible silk threads connected to unseen pulleys. The mechanism was sophisticated enough to allow different odds for individual horses. and every Saturday evening for 3 years a crowd of up to 100 put including luminaries such as Amelia Earhart, Cole Porter and Charlie Chaplin would descend on the “Nutshell Jockey Club” at Bel Geddes’ Manhattan basement at East Thirty-seventh Street to bet on his ingenious electric horserace, and drink his liquor. 

The Nutshell Jockey Club was disbanded in about 1927, a victim of “extreme popularity” – neighbours and police complained about the raucous crowds every Saturday night. But Bel Geddes replaced it by an even grander enterprise, known simply as the War Game. Several times a week, teams of participants visited the Bel Geddes residence to play at being the General Staff of 2 imaginary countries at war, with armies and fleets laid out on a relief map 24 feet long and 4 feet wide. Geddes had the complete navies of all five leading powers constructed, the battleships built to exact scale (one inch to one hundred feet), complete with brass hulls, armaments, and planes. This particular “toy” reputedly ending up costing Geddes thirteen thousand dollars, or about $230k dollars in today’s money. Players were drawn from all branches of industry and arts and academia as well as the military, and regulars included a retired British brigadier general an Italian cavalry captain, the former chief of New York City Detectives, and five-time international chess champion Edward Lasker. For a time the New York Sun newspaper dedicated a weekly column to the War Game, reporting developments in breathless prose as if they were dispatches from the frontline of a real war.

Bel Geddes’ first career was so eventful that in his 365 page autobiography Miracle in the Evening”, published in 1960, shortly after his death in 1958. he never in mentions his acheivements in his second career as a pioneer of industrial design. Though they are summrised in the appendix in the autobiography listing his achievements, which modestly stretches over 10 pages.

This appendix states that in 1927, Bel Geddes:

“Established the profession of industrial designer, that is, Bel Geddes was the first designer of national reputation to surround himself with a staff of specialists and offer industrial design services”.

And from the outset, Bel Geddes adopted “streamline moderne” as the house style for his design studio. Indeed he was to become the main public spokesman for the style. In 1932 he published a very popular book “Horizons”, full of futuristic streamlined cars, planes, ships and houses. And indeed trains like the Pioneer Zephyr, though his book anticipated its launch by 2 years. Bel Geddes became widely known, contributing articles on streamline moderne for periodicals like Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. 

Bel Geddes vision was a celebration of the positive aspects of the machine age, the exciting promise that technology and mass production would soon achieve a brave new world free from want and toil, neatly planned and full of technological wonders. Streamline moderne suggested a preview of that future, and indeed, in pulp magazines of the interwar period like Amazing Stories, in the Buck Rogers serials shown at the flicks, and in higbrow movies like 1936’s Shape of Things to Come, the futuristic worlds depicted there were all heavily influenced by streamline moderne. 

This promise of a bright future resonanted strongly with Depression era America of 1932. America had emerged from the catastrophe of WW1 relatively unscathed, and by 1922 had overtaken Australia to be the richest country in the world on a per capita basis. The end of the 1920s saw an America assured of its power, morality and wisdom, and confident that providence favoured an exceptional America amongst all the nations of the earth. But a recession that began in 1928 had by 1929 turned into the Great Depression , which was to affect America more severely and for longer than many other countries, due in part to an austerity program under president Herbert Hoover , and also by the insistence of the chairman of the NY Federal Reserve Benjamin Strong that the US dollar remained linked to the gold standard. The period 1931-1933 marked the depths of the Depression in America, with the economy shrunk by a third and 5 thousand banks gone out of business. Unemployment was at 25%, and shantytowns full of the newly destitute – Hoovervilles as they were known – dotted towns and cities, one even springing up in NY’s Central Park. Some Americans began to lose faith in the promise of the American dream. But in 1932 confidence had finally began to return with the election of the charismatic and engergetic Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Bel Geddes’ futuristic visions held forth the similar promise that America’s wealth, technological leadership and vast industrial base would soon return the nation to prosperity. This hunger for reassurance must be part of the reason why the debut of the futuristic Pioneer Zephyr streamliner I talked about in the last episode attracted so much attention, even though few of the 1m visitors on its 1934 pulicity tour could have afforded such a luxurious form of transport.

Futurama

Geddes’ vision of the future was to achieve its ultimate expression in the “Futurama” exhibit that he designed for the General Motors pavillion at the 1939 New York World’s Fai the inspiration for Matt Groenig’s cartoon series. Easily the most popular exbit at the Fair, people stood in line for hours in order to experience a vision of the future 20s years hence, or as the banner proclaimed:

 “Come tour the future with General Motors! A transcontinental flight over America in 1960! What will we see? What changes will transpire? This magic Aladdin-like flight through time and space is Norman Bel Geddes’ conception of the many wonders that may develop in the not-to-distant future.”

Once inside, spectators sat in three hundred and twenty-two “carry-go-round” seats that tilted forward and travelled along on a 15 minute tour simulated airplane ride of a panoramic vision of the future called “Highways and Horizons.” Spread out beneath the spectators’ dangling feet was a vast miniature landscape, the largest scale model ever constructed, comprising some 500,000 buildings, almost 2 million trees (in eighteen different species, with imported moss for foliage), and at least 50,000 motor vehicles, including 10 thousand mounted on tracks so they seemed to drive down the streets and highways. The attention to detail was incredible. The diorama featured animated waterfalls, low clouds (fashioned with chemical vapors) clinging to mountainsides, and exacting replicas of clotheslines and cow paddies that the World’s Fair visitors would never notice. 

The ride was a huge technical achievement, and took 8 months and the efforts of 2,800 people to build. The ride was devised so that the narration was precisely synchronised for each vistor, courtesy of a twenty-ton sound machine that played 150 individually synchronized loops, whilst the passengers were carried on a conveyor system that turned corners and changed elevations with a complex “wishbone” coupling of its cars that ensured a smooth journey. The design calculations alone took 4 months to complete. The ride carried 2,200 visitors per hour, 28,000 each day. By the time the fair was over over five million visitors had experienced Futurama, all apparently without a single technical hitch. Fortunately there is extensive film footage of Futurama, and I’ve included a couple of links on the podcast website. 

Futurama showed a lush and verdant vision of the American midwest, and this in itself was a statement of optimism as the midwest in 1939 was still being ravaged by the dust bowl commememorated in Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath”. Bel Geddes took his spectators on a journey from farmland to forests, over mountains to finally into a gleaming city of the future. And all linked by multilane highways with cloverleaf intersections – Futurama was after all sponsored by General Motors. At the end of the tour the vistor exited into a replica of one of the city block from the city in the diorama, as if they had actually stepped forward into the year 1960, and were given a blue&white badge that proclaimed “I have seen the future”.

With the benefit of hindsight the lovingly detailed dioramas of a gleaming city appears more distopian than utopian – all historic buildings razed, freeways dominating the landscape, tower blocks placed on sterile plazas, and no hint of public transport. But at the time, to Americans experiencing slums and dustbowls and economic depression it all seemed an inspirational wonder.

Streamline moderne – valid art or superficial commercialism?

Streamline moderne might have been one of the dominant styles of the modernist period, but critics and historians have often been reluctant to include it as a legitimate part of the modernism movement. In March 1934, only one month before the debut of the Pioneer Zephyr, an exhibition titled “Machine Art” opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. You would have thougt that an exhibition with the title Machine Art would have taken the opportunity to showcase streamline moderne, a new style both both American and machine inspired, but this is not the case. And this ambivalence is still somewhat in evidence today. In 2006 the prestigious and authorative Victorian & Albert Museum held a major exhibition entitled “Modernism – designing a new world 1914-1939”. In the lavish catalogue streamline moderne is relegated to the last of the 11 chapters: “Mass Market modernism”. 

The reason for this contradiction was a tendancy, very pronounced in the modernist period but still somewhat in evidence today, to draw a line between high art, fine art, “art for art’s sake” as it is sometimes characterised, and styles like streamline moderne that are the creation of the marketplace. 

Let’s look more closely at the 1934 Machine Art exhibition, and I’m assisted here by an excellent 2012 book on the subject by Professor Jennifer Marshall. The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, was formed in 1929 with the aim of promoting modern art to America. At that time the US did not much contribute to the revolution that was occurring in art in the early years of the 20th century, with movements like cubism, expressionism and surrealism. As in England, museums were generally loathe to acquire or display works of the avant-garde. Indeed America declined an invitation to exhibit in the modernist-inspired Paris expo of 1925 because, in the words of Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce at the time, there was no modern art in America. 

The new MOMA was an immediate success, staging a number of landmark exhibitions under its director Alfred Barr and his close collaborator Phillip Johnston, such as the 1932 exhibition of modern architecture than gave birth to the label International style, and a hugely popular Van Gough exhibition in 1935 which first brought that artist to the attention of mass American public.

MOMA’s remit covered both fine arts – painting, sculpture and the like – and applied arts, especially architecture. The 1934 exhibition focused on applied arts, displaying 660 machine produced items across 6 categories: Industrial units, household and office equipment, kitchenware, house furnishings and accessories, scientific instruments, and laboratory glass and porcelain. The objects displayed had been designed with practical rather than decorative intent, but nonetheless were beautiful in their simple forms and undisguised materials, typically with a highly polished machined finishing. The items were arranged to emphasise common forms: plates and serving platters created a wall of circles, cocktail shakers and glasses an array of cylinders, perfectly spherical billard balls, springs, screws and ships propellers embodying the sprial. 

The exhibition was a huge success. Thirty thousand people visited over its 8 week run, and it then toured America for a further 4 years. A celebrity jury that included Amelia Ehrhart judged the most beautiful object in the show, and the public could vote on their favourite. The term “machine art” entered public consciousness – the term was invented for the exhibition, and apprently had come to the curator Phillip Johnson at 4 in the morning in the course of a boozy night on the town – prohibition had ended the previous year. 

 The whole exhibition was a celebration of minimalist design, of the belief by Alfred Barr, MOMA’s founding director, that for manufactured objects, their beauty came from ideal forms - simple geometric shapes and solids - arising from their essential functional form. The exhibition’s catalog opened with a quote from Plato that captures this philosophy:

 “By beauty of shapes I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the beauty of living figures or of pictures, but I mean straight lines and circles, and shapes, planar or solid, made from them by lathe, ruler and square. These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely.”

 This assertion that minimalism was the only valid scheme for making manufactured objects beautiful placed applied art in a wider framework that Alfred Barr used to structure and explain to the American public the entire modern art movement, commencing with post-impressionism in the 1890s, progressing through fauvism, cubism and expressionism before ultimately splitting into 2 streams of abstract art by 1936: non-geometric and geometric. The geometric stream embodied the machine aesthetic on display at the 1934 exhibition, and the Bauhaus design school and the International style of architecture were explictly included as elements of this artistic framwork. Indeed, the 1934 exhibition included chairs by by Marcel Breuer of the Bauhaus, and by Le Corbusier, champion of the International style. 

 Where did this leave streamline moderne? On the face of it, Streamline moderne embodied many of the qualities of the items on display at the 1934 exhibition. Like Bauhaus, it emphasised functionalism and simplicity, as we saw with Bel Geddes design of the Oriel gas cooker. And streamlining was also based on ideal forms arising from aerodynamics, the teardrop and the French curve.

 But for Alfred Barr, streamline moderne forfietied any claims to artistic merit due to its commercial context. In the introduction to the machine art exhibition catalog he wrote:

 “There has developed in America a desire for ‘styling’ objects for advertising, Styling a commerical object gives it more “eye-appeal” and therefore helps sales. Principals such as “streamlining” often receive homage out of all proportion to their applicability”

According to the high temple of modernism that MOMA was to become, there was a clear distinction between mass market art and high art. Mass market art was a sordid commerical practice, the essence of kitsch, the consumer tricked by false sentiment deployed by unscrupulous capitalists whose sole motive was to make a sale. High art, on the other hand, came from an individual’s artistic insight or from universal artistic truths like Plato’s ideal forms, autonomous, not involved with the concerns of the marketplace. This rejection of commerical advertising was typical of modernism. Modernism after all was the philosophy of the avant-garde, aiming to remake culture, politics and society in opposition to that of the Victorian age, that golden era of the middle class and the free market. Karl Marx saw advertising’s appeal to the emotional rather than the functional as a bad thing, “fetishising” a commodity and so disguising and inflating its true value, which for Marx like for Albert Barr was narrowly defined by its function. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” published in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression, describes a dystopian future where the public have become inured to advertising and the government has to resort to subliminal messaging in order to maintain demand for new products and keep a capitalist economy ticking along. 

But could modernist art really claim to be above sordid considerations of profit when it commanded such high prices? In 1973 the National Gallery of Australia purchased the Jackson Pollock painting for $1.3m Australian dollars, equivalent to about $18m dollars today, a purchase subject to huge controversy at the time. Estimates of its value today range between $100 and $350m dollars. How could modern art be autonomous when it had become an exercise in conspicuous consumption by the ultra-wealthy? Contradictions like this were to be pointed out by the post-modern movement of the 1960s and 70s, a fascinating subject I’d like to explore in future episodes.

Undismayed though by its rejection by the critics, streamline moderne enjoyed a long reign, dominating American commerical design up until the 1960s, evolving over time to become the “Doo wop” and Raygun gothic” styles of the 1950s, and then the Jet age design of the 1960s. And as the streamlined form of the Douglas DC-3 was replaced by new symbols of progress the design influence for the style changed: first the atom and rocket in the 1950s, then the Boeing 707 jetliner in the 1960s.

And so we come to the end of the episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed these last 2 episodes exploring streamline moderne. I definitely think Norman Bel Geddes would be my pick for the person I’d most like to have as a dinner party guest. And if there is an aspect of modernism that you think would make an interesting topic for this podcast, please drop me an email at talkingmodernism@gmail.com. And finally, join me next time when I’ll consider one of the more obscure aspects of modernism – the rise and fall of the Jewish joke. I look forward to speaking with you then.