Art: For Persistent Shoppers

In 1925 President Coolidge sent his regrets to the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts: the U.S. had “nothing to contribute” in furniture design. Last week a big, glossy exhibit, “For Modern Living,” was showing visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts how the U.S. has caught up in a quarter-century.

Of the 500 household designers and manufacturers contributing to the show, only a score had European addresses, though some (e.g., Denmark’s Jens Risom and Abel Sorenson) had learned furniture-making on the continent before setting up shop in the U.S.

Kokomo & Kalamazoo. Detroit’s show was more than a get-together of well-known designing names. There were chairs, rugs, dishes, kitchenware and other useful objects from Kokomo, Kankakee and Kalamazoo, as well as from the designing centers of New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Garbage containers and stainless-steel pails fashioned by factory workers in Sheboygan got as much display as custom fabrics and ceramics from Manhattan’s Madison Avenue.

To the average gallerygoer the majority of the exhibits looked handsome, efficient, worth taking home. Tubular steel and molded plywood chairs, unornamented chests and tables no longer wore the unfamiliar, revolutionary air which had made an earlier generation snort and settle deeper into its mohair easy chairs. Sample rooms designed by Finland’s Alvar Aalto and Manhattan’s George Nelson proved that with modern furnishings a home could be simple and yet warm and livable.

Among the exhibits, however, there were still a few pieces to startle conservatives. Charles Eames’s canvas-and-plastic chair with ventilated seat looked for all the world like an atomic-age version of a toilet seat. Florence Knoll’s immense, pancake-thin air-foam bed, perched on spindly legs, had an insubstantial look that suggested uneasy napping. And too often, for all their inexpensive materials and simplified design, even the most agreable modern furnishings were higher-priced than the overdecorated, overstuffed period pieces most Americans are used to.

Antimacassars & Battleships. In the center of the exhibition, a specially commissioned mural by New Yorker Cartoonist Saul Steinberg put the modern designer’s dilemma into squiggly perspective. In one panel, Artist Steinberg had drawn a cross-section of a block of walk-up apartments: “modern” studios sandwiched between lead-heavy Jacobean dinettes and cluttered Victorian parlors. His stark plywood chairs were ornamented with fussy crocheted antimacassars, his baby carriages fashioned like battleships. The level-headed modern designer, set loose among America’s gingerbread and fake Tudor suburbs and neo-Renaissance row houses, was in danger, according to Steinberg, of having his dearest creations turned into a series of meaningless stylistic mannerisms.

The Detroit show, successfully avoiding the fake modern Steinberg abhorred, managed to make its biggest point: with a sharp eye and a little persistence the average shopper could find enough handsome, well-designed contemporary furnishings to fill any modern home.