Interior design in the 1930s

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

During the Great Depression in the United States, taste in interior design continued to swing between the colonial revival and the latest in elegant, pared down furnishings and modern conveniences. A small exhibition that examines the latter extreme within the context of these two poles in design in the 1930s is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, until June 5, 2005. It is entitled Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression and includes twenty-three objects--from pieces of furniture to table-wares and other accouterments by designers such as Gilbert Rohde, Russel Wright, and George Sakier. These are amplified by reproductions of advertisements and photographs of retail displays of the period. The three divisions of the show are the living room, the dining room, and the bedroom. The objects on view are drawn from Yale's permanent collection and loans from a private collector.

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In the introduction to the book that accompanies this exhibition, the curator and author, Kristina Wilson, delineates the parameters for assessing this complex period in the history of design. In her words, modernist design is not "an idealized creation born of a single person's creative genius, but rather is a solution that is forged in response to a set of diverse demands, both ideological and market-based. There is never any single best solution to the constellations of problems faced by a designer. There are instead degrees of inventiveness with which objects juggle and satisfy such competing concerns. That struggle defines livable modernism."

Given the harsh economic times in which these pieces were made, marketing was of paramount importance to their success. In addition, the kinds of objects designers created to make everyday life more pleasurable were affected by new ways in which families lived and socialized; the changing role of women as they moved away from home into the workplace; and the relaxing of social conventions, particularly in the realms of dining and entertaining. Their designs were heavily promoted in exhibitions, in furniture installations in retail stores, and in magazine and newspaper advertisements. Informality was a watchword of the 1930s, which is evident in an advertisement for the Chase Brass and Copper Company incorporating a coupon for a copy of Emily Post's pamphlet How to Give Buffet Suppers (1933), which offered recipes for "simple and inexpensive foods." For this advertisement the company used the tagline "It's smart to be informal and Chase makes informality smart."

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Wilson puts forward the idea that some American designers eschewed aspects of the austere and uninviting industrial designs associated with the Bauhaus in Germany in favor of sleek designs that suggested comfort and coziness. Much of the difference lay in the materials used. For example, Wright's chair in the American Modern line (illustrated on p. 14) features maple supports and upholstery in a cotton and wool fabric that has the texture of homespun. Wilson ascribes the softening of the Bauhaus aesthetic to the influence of the colonial revival movement. Proponents of that style, such as Wallace Nutting, were making reproductions of New England antiques that could share space with the modern in the advertising and editorial pages of the same magazines and newspapers, or on the furniture floors of the same department stores. In 1934 Wright stated his case for the new versus the antique: "If our homes are planned for modern comfort by means of modern materials, it is possible to achieve a new kind of beauty--not the pictorial beauty of the past, but the honest practical beauty of the present, which is the only true refuge in these harsh and strident times."

Wilson's accompanying book, published by Yale University Press, is available by telephoning 203-432-7421.