Kaufmann, Edgar Jr.: WHAT IS MODERN DESIGN? New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950.

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WHAT IS MODERN DESIGN?

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.: WHAT IS MODERN DESIGN? New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1950 [Introductory Series to the Modern Arts -- 3].  First edition. Slim quarto. Perfect bound and stitched thick printed wrappers. Publishers glassine wrapper. 32 pp. 70 black and white photographs. Faint rectangular shadow to front endpaper. Glassine spotted and chipped, but a very good or better copy.

7.5 x 10 book with 32 pages, and 70 photographs of modern design objects from the ever-growing collection of the Museum of Modern Art, circa 1950. This booklet was a precursor to the Good Design exhibits of the 1950s.

Includes sections on furniture, glasswear, fabrics, kitchen utensils and decorative glass.

Designers represented in this volume include: Alvar Aalto, Finn Juhl, Bruno Mathson, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, Eero Saarinen, George Nelson,  Anni Albers, Marianne Straub, Marianne Strengel, Dorothy Liebes, Stanislaus V’Soske, Antonin Raymond, June Groff, Florence Forst, Bernard Leach, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, Elis Bergh, Vera liskova, Billy Baldwin and William Machado, Eva Zeisel, Jon Hedu, Otto Natzler, Josef Hoffmann, Isamu Noguchi, Peter Pfisterer, Josef Frank, Kurt Versen, Poul Henningsen, Gino Sarfatti, A. D. Copier, Gunnel Nyman, Edvin Ohrstrom, Josef Frank, Paavo Tynell, and others.

Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (1910–1989) studied painting and typography in Europe before serving as an apprentice architect at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation from 1933 to 1934. The Kaufmanns of Pittsburgh commissioned two of the iconic American residences of the 20th-century, Wright’s Fallingwater in 1936 and then Richard Neutra’s Palm Springs Desert House in 1946. Edgar Jr. joined the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 as director of the Industrial Design Department, a position he held until 1955. While at MoMA, he initiated the Good Design program (1950–1955) and was a strong proponent of uniform industrial design education standards.

"Modern architecture isn't just another imitative style. It is an attitude towards life, an approach which starts with living people and their needs, physical and emotional, and tries to meet them as directly as possible, with the best procurable means. Otherwise there are no rules. The results will be as various as the range of materials offered, the human problems posed, and the creative talent employed in solving them . . . The most delicate part of your job as client will be the selection of an architect." -- Elizabeth Mock

Terence Riley noted that the early tastemakers at MoMA understood their job was to separate “the wheat from the chaff.” Few people rose to that challenge with more vigor than Philip Johnson, the young head of the Department of Architecture and Design. Alfred Barr’s insistence on including Architecture and Design as a fully functioning department within MoMA was a radical curatorial departure, which seems only obvious today.

Philip Johnson, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock codified their observations about modern architecture in the 1932 landmark Museum of Modern Art show "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922." The show was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture and architects Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe to the American public. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.

As critic Pater Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated." In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration. The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.

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