Selling Good Design: Promoting the Early Modern Interior
is a story of the cooperation of commerce and culture that all
began in New York City at R.H. Macy's when the store mounted its
1927 "Exposition of Art in Trade" in collaboration with The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That collaboration attracted the attention of other great
Manhattan-based merchants who embarked on their own exhibitions
and educational efforts. This, in a way, represented a zenith in
American design as decorators and retailers banded together with
museums to educate the public about the newest trend, Modernism.
Author and decorative arts historian Marilyn F. Friedman
confesses straight away in the acknowledgement section to a
lifelong love affair with Macy's. For Friedman it all began when
she was a child and her father stopped in the meat department on
his way home several times a week to collect the family's evening
meal. Nonetheless, she draws a carefully balanced picture of the
voyage to the modern, illuminating all the signposts along the
way. Her story is fair and equitable. It provides the reader with
a precise detailing of the movement and its many facets.
Macy's exposition stemmed from a series of lectures on period
furniture that began at The Met in January 1914. The project was
the brainchild of Donald Porteus, manager of Macy's Bureau of
Home Furnishings and Interior Decoration. The lecture series was
so overwhelmingly popular that it expanded rapidly to include
employees of all the other great stores in New York: Lord &
Taylor, Bonwit Teller, Best & Co, B. Altman, John Wanamaker
and Abraham & Straus.
The Met set up study rooms in which the lecture series students
could examine objects and in 1917 mounted the exhibit "The
Designer and the Museum," the first of an annual event focusing
on quality in American Industrial Art. Macy's welcomed the
lecture series and exhibits as they enhanced the store's efforts
to improve the design of the products they sold.
Friedman takes the reader through the series of lectures and
exhibits, following the course of the introduction and the
ultimate acceptance of modern design in America. Using high
quality vintage photographs from periodicals of the era, the
Library of Congress, the National Museum of American History and
the photographic archives of Macy's and Lord & Taylor, she
illustrates meticulously the progression of that acceptance.
Room settings and objects of aesthetic and historic interest from
American and European designers are pictured in more than 120
photographs of room settings as grand as those designed by
Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann. The reader is presented with the curious
blend of the European (primarily French, but also German and
Italian) and the homegrown that became American Art Deco and
which was so popular with consumers.
Friedman illuminates the transition from the fustian of the late
Victorian that had dominated the scene for such a long while to
the new, which was sleek, sharp, colorful and jazzy. She also
points out the most distinguishing elements of the modern: the
well-proportioned furniture was comfortable, cabinet storage was
practical and lighting was efficient. These all had great appeal
to apartment dwellers, a rapidly growing sector of urban
populations.
Selling Good Design: Promoting the Early Modern
Interior by Marilyn F. Friedman, Rizzoli International, 300
Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, 2003; 143 pages, $50
hardcover.
