National Post (National Edition)
MID-CENTURY JUDAISM
The surprisingly Semitic roots of modernist design
For talented designers, the middle years of the 20th century were a magic time that brought both excitement and success. Suddenly, everything from clocks to magazines demanded modernist elegance. Every big corporation wanted a logo with style and punch.
This fresh passion was a turning point in North American culture, a moment when visual sophistication invaded capitalism. By 1952, when I first toured the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it had a permanent exhibit of contemporary chairs, the first of its kind anywhere.
I found it odd to file solemnly past a dozen chairs and not be allowed to sit in one. In my innocent way I believed that a chair kept from the public by a rope barrier was impossible to appreciate.
But the curators were following more than the usual look-don’t-touch museum rule. They wanted the public to fix on the sheer beauty of certain modern chairs and see them as objects of aesthetic value. Six decades ago, that seemed an eccentric notion. Since then, the Museum of Modern Art’s favourite mantra, “Good Design,” has become commonplace whenever products are discussed. This year a little-known aspect of that first good-design generation has been noticed in print for the first time: Almost every one of the important masters in that era was a Jew. Design turns out to be one more aspect of modern culture shaped by Jewish artists.
A current exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, “Designing Home: Jews and Mid-century
Modernism” (till Oct. 6), goes out of its way to focus on this remarkable fact. The curator, Donald Albrecht, has said that he wanted, among other things, to tell the story of Jewish assimilation as reflected in this art form.
Henry Dreyfuss designed the Princess telephone and the Hoover vacuum cleaner. George Nelson was responsible for the quality of the chairs that turned Herman Miller, Inc. into a huge corporation. Jews created scores of corporate logos, from Westinghouse to Kleenex, from IBM to Quaker Oats.
Saul Bass set a new standard in films by inventing stylish logos (and sometimes opening sequences) for dozens of big movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. Saul Steinberg, working for The New Yorker, drew the most famous and imaginative magazine covers anywhere. For decades Milton Glaser was the most admired designer of everything from magazines to supermarket chains. He drew an internationally famous Bob Dylan poster and in 1976 invented the “I (heart) New York,” slogan soon imitated on countless occasions.
For some designers this wasn’t an entirely happy process. George Nelson, the child of Jewish Russian immigrants, a Yale architecture graduate, at first devoted himself to publicizing modernist buildings through resourceful and imaginative journalism. From 1935 to 1949 he was an influential editor of Architectural Forum.
He learned industrial design by writing about it, then joined Herman Miller as director of design. Eventually the company decided to develop systems of office furniture. In 1964 Nelson’s studio created the “Action Office Line,” which attracted prestige but inadequate sales. With another design chief the company created a hugely successful product based on the office cubicle. Nelson was appalled. In 1970 he condemned the new system as a dehumanizing work environment, suitable only for companies eager to cram the most bodies into the smallest spaces by turning the workers into “corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority.” He admitted, though, that this format reached a large market.
In retrospect it’s obvious what brought so many Jews into design. It freed them, to a significant extent, from professional anti-Semitism. Corporations might be openly or covertly anti-Semitic in their hiring, but freelance designers could work from tiny studios, if necessary, and sell their ideas one design at a time.
Moreover, modernism had become an accepted style in Jewish communities. As Jenna Weissman Joselit wrote recently in the Jewish Daily Forward,
Design freed Jews from professional anti-Semitism
modernism was expressed by Jewish congregations in scores of post-1945 synagogues built across North America. The old Moorish and Byzantine models for Jewish religious buildings were set aside by suburban
Jews seeking a new environ
ment for worship in their new communities.
In 1947, the leading Jewish monthly, Commentary, collected the opinions of several well-known architects on the design of synagogues. Every one of them argued that within the American scene modernism would work best. One
said this style “commends it
self particularly to us as Jews. It parallels our striving toward clarity and truth.” There was a feeling that a modern synagogue was “visual proof that we Jews are full participants in this momentous period in America’s history.”
Jews found themselves comfortable with the competitive, changing demands of the design world. They were successful because in their different ways they caught something in the air, some essential quality of North American life that may not have been so obvious to more established North Americans. They were outsiders before they became insiders, people who wanted to be accepted but were at first partly alienated from North American life. They could see its needs objectively and respond to its yearnings. And they were not confined by an inherited taste for historic Americana.
A recent article in Architectural Record noted that “the role of Jews in creating and popularizing post-war modernism has largely escaped attention.”
Why? For one thing, as Architectural Record pointed out, some of the key players, including Anni Albers, the textile artist, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an influential teacher and photographer, didn’t have recognizably Jewish names. It’s also been said that commentators felt uncomfortable discussing a cluster of Jewish stars; it could have been seen as insensitive. In the same era, of course, no one hesitated to point out the leadership of Jews in literature, movies, Broadway and comedy.
But in all those art forms ethnicity expressed itself within the art. Design was different. The objects seldom carried bylines. They were usually anonymous, and never showed the inflections of a specific culture. Many manufacturers wanted to publicize only their brand names.
Designers of all kinds had to fight to earn their reputations. So, for good reasons and bad, this was one cultural movement that eluded ethnic analysis and moved into the future while remaining, for half a century, under the radar of public consciousness.