Design and the modern world - exhibition, Wolfsonian Museum, Miami, FL

The catalogue for The Arts of Reform and Persuasion is a series of ten scholarly essays arranged in three sections: "Confronting Modernity," "Celebrating Modernity," and "Manipulating Modernity." Contributed by a multinational consortium of scholars, the essays vary in their depth and quality.(4) All are good. Several are excellent. All are based to a large extent on original research, making the overall work an important contribution to the study of the decorative arts from 1885 to 1945.

Among the really excellent catalogue essays is Laurie Stein's "German Design and National Identity, 1890-1918." Stein, who is curator of the Werkbund-Archiv in Berlin, has focused on the intentional development of a national design idiom in Germany during the years prior to World War I. Extensive political, cultural, social, philosophical, commercial, and other contextual references reveal Stein's impressive breadth of understanding. She deftly handles complex issues, such as the debate over individualism versus standardization in design. In this particular instance, she builds her case using as examples the relatively well known expressions of different design positions in works built and shown at the 1914 Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. She continues with a detailed discussion of these issues in the context of design and manufacturing enterprises such as the Munich-based Vereinigte Werkstatte fur Kunst im Handwerk, principals of which included Richard Riemerschmid, Hermann Obrist, Bruno Paul, Bernhard Pankok, and Paul Schultze-Naumburg.

Stein also has done a fine job of analyzing various entities engaged in the German design debate and has summarized the major design periodicals of the period, including Zeitschrift fur Innen-Dekoration, published by Paul Koch, who also sponsored the famous competition for the Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover), for which British architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh and M. H. Baillie-Scott made well-known entries. She also gives an interesting examination of the role of German department stores, such as Tietz and Wertheim (leaders also in patronage of modern architecture), in the promotion of avant-garde furniture and houseware designs of the period. Finally, there are significant references to trade fairs and their role in the design debate. All this adds up to an impressive overview of the foundations of modern German design down to the Bauhaus, and Stein proves by example her position that "the legacy of the pre-war dialogue continued to shape the direction of German design and architecture throughout the 1920s and 1930s" (p. 73).

Paul Greenhalgh, who is director of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, chronicles the English aesthetic retreat into historical, imperial, and chauvinistic expressions. Others essayists address themes internationally. In "Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence, and Appropriation, 1920-1940," Jeffrey L. Meikle, professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, examines how art and design have been used to "domesticate" a modernity that he defines as a process of urbanization and industrialization with physical, social, and ideological dislocations. He shows how the domestication of this process involved convincing people to bring designed modernity in the form of decorative objects into the home like some form of tamed wildlife. Similarly, in a more directly and politically propagandistic vein, Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., traces the international use of images that aggrandize the worker and his/her (usually his) participation in the industrial production of the nation. While this theme may ultimately derive from Courbet and the realist tradition, Reilly, who is head curator of prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, examines the ways in which the various political systems of the period between the world wars used such imagery to prepare people for the common work of waging World War II.