Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Kristina Wilson

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691213491
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: History of Art

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers.Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others.A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

Chapter 1

The Body in Control

Modernism and the Pursuit of Better Living

Numerous domestic advice books published in the five years following World War II celebrate the Modern American home and its beneficial effects on the nuclear family unit. Designers Russel and Mary Wright suggest, in their 1950 book Guide to Easier Living, that there should be one room in the Modern house where the entire family will find enjoyment. They present an “active” living room that includes barbells, a Ping-Pong table, an easel for painting, and an area for “lounging and drinking,” thus creating a space of “real warmth and life” for the whole family to gather together (fig. 4).¹ Architect Paul R. Williams, in New Homes for Today (1946), also extolls the vision of family togetherness, although his unifying family room is outfitted in a Colonial Revival style rather than overt Modernism (fig. 5). “Here is a room designed around the informal way the average family lives,” he explains. “The children can study at the dining table; the parents can be comfortable at the other end of the room and if a guest drops in the entire room extends friendly invitation to join the family group.”² The idealized family unit, corralled into one of these model rooms, might be represented in an endearing sketch found in the opening pages of the 1950 Decorate Your Home for Better Living, by interior designer Mary L. Brandt (fig. 6). In this portrait, the five members are merged as a single entity, yet each pursues his or her own distinctive activities while smiling in harmony: the father reads the paper and listens to the radio; the mother sews; the older son reads and listens to records; the daughter talks on the phone; and the younger son is caught up in a game, perhaps of “Cowboys and Indians,” judging from the feather affixed to his head and the roy rifle in his hand.

A closer examination of these illustrations and their accompanying texts reveals agendas that are, perhaps, a bit more complex than the mere celebration of the nuclear family unit. Each demonstrates a persistent interest in how the Modern home can control that nuclear family, both socially and bodily. Brandt’s family is as unified (and maybe as uncomfortable) as the portrait heads on Mount Rushmore. The father’s body is the most complete of the group, as he extends his bent left elbow and knee across the wife’s space, while she herself is surrounded on all sides by the heads (if not bodies) of her smiling children. Brandt describes the value of a room in the Modern home where this five-headed figure would reside, imploring her readers: “Have you a space apart from the living room where, if fixed up, the family could relax at games, hobbies, or for study and reading; like a basement room, an attic room, or an extra studio-room?”³ They are bodily constrained and controlled by their pyramid mass, a metaphor for the social expectations that wrap them tightly together and prevent anyone from breaking away from the group. Really, who smiles happily with LPs, instruments, and telephones just inches from one’s ears?

Fig. 4. James Kingsland, “An ‘Active Room,’” p. 26. From Guide to Easier Living by Mary and Russel Wright (1950) reprinted in 2003 by Gibbs Smith Publisher; by permission of the publisher.

Fig. 5. Frank Jamison, “The Living-Dining Room,” New Homes for Today (1946), p. 95.

Fig. 6. Marylin Hafner, decorative spot, p. 7. From Decorate Your Home for Better Living by Mary L. Brandt. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950. Courtesy of the estate of Marylin Hafner.

The Wrights’ “active” living room likewise thrums with calibrated physical and social pressure (see fig. 4). Physical activity and the ideal of the healthy body are evoked in the gymnastics rings in the front of the room that serve as a pendant to the Modernist light fixture over the lounge area at the back; the misplaced barbells, lying halfway off the exercise mat in the foreground, suggest recent (or imminent) failure in strength. The room itself is perplexing. The light-blue wash of color applied throughout the sketch helps us to parse the layers of accessories gathered in this space, which we view as if through a window. We cannot see a path to enter the room, as if the family that gathers in it is actually trapped. To be frank, the fantasy it offers seems unattainable, perhaps even a bit unbelievable (whether we are readers in the twenty-first or the twentieth century).⁴ But as the Wrights explain, the stakes for our houses are very high, and so perhaps the difficulty of achieving the social model established in this room is a struggle worth taking on:

All too often, comfort, ease, and spontaneity are all sacrificed to an unrealistic dream that makes home life formal and unsatisfying. Far from drawing families together, our homes send adolescent children to the juke joints for their fun, lead husbands to prefer a movie or the local bar for their after-work relaxation, make entertaining friends an ordeal of drudgery. … There are in our times a multitude of complex motives for adolescents getting into trouble, or marriages breaking up, but it is not too far-fetched to say that our homes and the way we live in them must be listed among the important causes.⁵

Williams’s Colonial Revival living-dining room, too, participates in a rhetoric of control (see fig. 5). The deep slant of the foreground rug, half cast in shadow, emerges fully formed from the void of empty space in the lower half of the page to pull us into a room that appears bathed in warm light emanating from the bay window at left. The great expanse between the bottom of the page and the room in the upper third creates a sense of drama, as does the back of the sofa that blocks our view of the warmth of the fireplace: Will we be able to physically traverse the yawning distance and enter this room? What will be required, in terms of class achievement, to be the guest that “drops by” or—better yet—the family group that extends the “friendly invitation”? The air of exclusivity fostered by the distant, sunlit space and aspirational fantasizing in its accompanying text give this image its controlling power: it sets the stage for a story about family togetherness that is performed for the family and guests alike. Furthermore, Williams assures us, this room that brings together living and dining in an open space, common in many new suburban homes, could be designed with “period or modern” furnishings.⁶

Each of these illustrations and texts connects the Modern postwar house—Modern in its open-floor-plan rooms and amenities, if not always in furnishings—with the bodily and physical control of the ideal nuclear family. Questions of gendered control and racialized control percolate through them as well, albeit not as obviously. The mother is the indubitable matriarch who bears the crushing responsibility of creating hospitality in each of these vignettes—surrounded by her husband and children, under threat that any of them might escape the house and run to a “juke joint.” Race would seem not to be present at all. However, as this chapter will argue, it is more accurate to say that in these books, Whiteness is frequently a presumed cultural position of power, unnecessary to call out and almost unspeakable—that “which does not want to be named,” or “ex-nominated” in Roland Barthes’s terminology.⁷ Most of these books coach readers to perform the cultural authority most commonly, if unconsciously, associated with Whiteness. The young boy who plays at being an “Indian” can assume his White superiority without even thinking about it, and then drop the game as he takes up a position playing Ping-Pong in the protection of the Wrights’ room.

These books, with their illustrations that intrigue our imaginations and their engaging prose, are examples of domestic advice literature published in the half decade immediately following World War II.⁸ Offering guidance on everything from floor plans and lighting technology to furnishing arrangements and household maintenance, they embody the aspirational rhetoric of the advice genre. They encourage the reader to construct an unfettered, optimistic view of her future self and life—in this case, her nuclear family, who share and enjoy pastimes together—even as they pointedly remind her of the inadequacies of her present circumstances (embodied in the lack of a room for family unity). In the logic of the self-help world, awareness of one’s current failures should provide the motivation to change, and the advice offered by the all-knowing author will reveal the path forward to achieve that change. Advice literature uses as its foundation the gossamer shimmer of fantasy—the illusion of a perfectly achieved goal—and might be understood as inhabiting a perpetual future. The reader of the book is seduced into spending much time envisioning her future self, with only occasional attention paid to the present (the site of failure), and very little to the past. The lack of clarity about present-day circumstances in this type of advice literature has led many scholars, correctly, to argue that these texts cannot be taken as practical, historical documents reflecting how daily life was, in fact, lived. Yet in their narratives, they demonstrate the fantasies and expectations that may have shaped how individuals imagined their lives. As historians, we cannot know how individual readers understood these texts, but we can interrogate the models that the texts give us. We can examine the attitudes, the blind spots, and the biases that these books represent in their approach to Modernism in domestic life in the immediate postwar years.⁹

As consumers and commercial interests alike anticipated the dramatic increase in domestic construction in 1945, and then swam in the tide of the growing market through the late 1940s and early 1950s, architects, designers, and critics weighed in on the housing boom in the form of thousands of pages of design advice. These appeared in magazines, newspaper columns, radio and eventually television programs, and an ever-growing shelf of domestic advice books. This chapter compares five books that offered advice on the design and care of the home in the years between 1945 and 1950: Tomorrow’s House, by George Nelson and Henry Wright (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945); The Small Home of Tomorrow and New Homes for Today, by Paul R. Williams (Hollywood, CA: Murray and Gee, 1945 and 1946); Decorate Your Home for Better Living, by Mary L. Brandt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950); and Guide to Easier Living, by Mary and Russel Wright (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950). I have selected these books because they were commercially successful: published, for the most part, by major presses and reviewed in popular and professional media outlets. I have also chosen them because of the diversity of lived and professional experiences represented by their authors. Nelson, Henry Wright, Brandt, and Russel and Mary Wright were all Euro-American, and Williams was African American. Nelson, Henry Wright, and Williams were architects, while Russel and Mary Wright were designers and Brandt was an interior designer (trained as an architect). Nelson, Henry Wright, and Williams were all men whose professional identities were independent of their marital status; Brandt was a professional woman who, like the men, did not mingle her married status with her work identity; Russel and Mary Wright built their narrative around their self-presentation as a heteronormative married couple.¹⁰ Finally, I have kept my sample small in order to delve deeply into each of these texts and their illustrations. My intent in this chapter is a careful deconstruction of how these authors—using the commercial product of a book—teach their readers about Modernism.

In particular, this chapter interrogates how the authors of these books position Modernism as a tool for exercising domestic expectations and ultimately exerting control over the lives lived within the postwar home. In these texts, Modernism polices the boundaries of gendered identities and racialized identities as it attempts to shape and direct the comportment of those who live with it. My own narrative is premised on a comparative account of these five books. The monolithic—if stereotypical—voice promoting Modernism has tended to highlight its capacity for rational efficiency. When we listen to the multiple, distinctive voices in these books and put them in dialogue with one another—gathered around a metaphorical table, if you will—what we find, by contrast, is a complex, multifaceted view of Modernism that privileges some audiences and experiences over others. This comparative exercise suggests that there may have been alternative experiences with Modernism that have not hitherto been a part of the dominant academic history. Modernism may have been a rational, efficient servant for White men, in particular, but it set onerous standards of physical domestic labor for both White women and women of color. While the White authors studied here invoke Moderni...