Streamlining and art deco in American industrial design

A NEW AESTHETIC EVOLVED IN AMERICAN DESICN OF THE 1930S THAT DEFIED BOTH ART DECO AND FUNCTIONALIST MODERNISM. This was streamlining. From the Graf Zeppelin to the 20th Century Limited train and the Chrysler Airflow, it gave products of the depression years a futuristic glamour--the glamour of speed. Streamlining had (and still has) multiple meanings but is a single style based on aerodynamic simplification to minimize resistance to wind or water. The style was applied so widely to American industrial designs, many of them stationary, that the 1930s has been called "the streamlined decade." (1) This article and a traveling exhibition entitled American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow, offer a fresh appraisal of the aesthetic. (2) Unlike some recent writers who believe that streamlined design belongs under the umbrella of art deco, we argue for its separate identity. (3)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Take Peter Muller-Munk's Normandie pitcher of 1935, named after the celebrated transatlantic steamship that was launched the year the pitcher was designed (Pl. II). (4) The catalogue of the Revere Copper and Brass Company, which manufactured the pitcher, asserted that it was "inspired by the leaning streamlined stacks of the famous French liner." (5) The teardrop shape shared by the stacks and the pitcher, the acme of streamlining in nature, is dramatized by the slender handle that extends from the mouth to the base in a single uninterrupted curve. There is no applied ornament--a forbidden fruit in modern design. Instead, a slim band marks and secures the precise joining of the vessel's single sheet of bent brass at the front. The sheen of the chromium plating, the taut form, and the tensile strength revealed in the teardrop form create the allure of this pitcher. Although as elegant as the costliest silverware, it was a reasonably priced mass-produced item meant to help Revere diversify by entering the market for household goods. The work is a premium example of streamlining as expressive modernism.

Erik Magnussen's Cubic coffee service of 1927, on the other hand, sums up an older version of modernism and was aimed at higher-end buyers (Pl. IV). (6) This is the cubistic version of art deco, a term coined in 1966 to describe the deluxe, primarily French decorative styles purveyed at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. (7) Magnussen's vessels are traditional in form, but their surfaces are faceted as if seen through the prism of analytic cubism. The varied directions of the jagged planes are accented by contrasting finishes of gilding and oxidized and burnished silver, creating an optical dazzle that recalls the teasing spatial contradictions in Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's early cubist paintings. Some American critics from the late 1920s onward dismissed such styling as "zigzag moderne" and "modernistic"; curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City consistently condemned it as superficial--an updating through surface appeal without a modernist rationale. (8) But the New York Times admired Magnussen's design when it was introduced and captioned its illustration of it "The Lights and Shadows of New York." (9)

The stylistic contrasts between these designs are writ large in the eleventh (1929) and thirteenth (1934) exhibitions in the series entitled Contemporary American Industrial Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (see Figs. 1, 2). (10) The glistening game room of 1934 designed by Archibald Manning Brown (1881-1956) is an oasis of calm and stylish spaciousness compared to a 1929 conservatory designed by Joseph Urban (1872-1933). In 1938 a critic who evidently championed streamlining sniffed that

in only five years all the awkward points had been swept out [of the
1929 room] ... in favor of the circular smooth flowing curves and
contrasting textures which we have come to know as "modern" or
"contemporary" design. (11)

While the 1929 interior (Fig. 1) bristles with triangles--from the supports of the armchairs and paired occasional tables to the conical flowerpots and X-patterned wall decoration--the 1934 room (Fig. 2) looks open and elegant in its streamlined modernism. In counterpoint to the blocks of built-in sofa and window band is a game-board-and-chairs unit distantly derived from a Victorian love seat, or tete-a-tete. This tour de force is achieved by abandoning the plush and mahogany of the nineteenth century for bent chromium-plated steel--a favorite material in streamlining. Here a single tube forms the arms and support of both chairs.

Also on display at the Metropolitan Museum's 1934 exhibition was a mock-up of a designer's studio and showroom by Raymond Loewy and Lee Simonson (Fig. 5). Here a continuous top unites all the cabinets, and the tables extending from it are held up by lamp poles. The walls meet in a curved corner, the ribbon window ends in a curve, and all the furniture is curvaceous tubular steel. Illustrating Loewy's design sources and his wide applications of streamlining are his drawings of powerboats and his model motorcar. Between the car and the drafting board, the flamboyant Loewy presides over this nautical-looking command center in bespoke tailoring. The French emigre epitomized the new profession of industrial design, which was heralded, in this case in a Fortune article of 1934, (12) as a means to lift the United States' consumer economy out of the depression.