ART IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Eleanor Bittermann
Eleanor Bittermann: ART IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE. New York: Reinhold Publishing Company, 1952. First edition. Slim quarto. Orange cloth titled in black. Printed dust jacket. 178 pp. 225 black and white illustrations. Book designed by Paul Grotz. Uncoated jacket edgeworn with a couple of short closed tears and a chipped and sunned spine. Front endpaper corner clipped and a bit of spotting to prelims. A very good copy in a nearly very good dust jacket.
8.25 x 10.25 hard cover book with 178 pages and approx. 225 black and white illustrations. Covers Problems, Background, Murals, Sculpture and Windows, all in a variety of media. Also includes Photographers, Acknowledgments and an Index.
Artists and architects include Isamu Noguchi, Lyonel Feininger, William (sp?) de Kooning, Witold Gordon, J. Torres Martino, Herman Voltz, Buk Ulreich, Jose Maria Sert, Ezra Winter, Stuart Davis, Joan Miro, Saul Steinberg, Edgar Miller, Lily Harmon, Anton Refregier, William Gropper, Eric Mose, Hans Mangeldorf, Donald Deskey, Richard Neutra, Richard Koppe, Philip Guston, Jose Clemente Orozco, Ben Shahn, Conrad Albrizio, Robert Davidson, Max Spivak, Winold Reiss, Helen Bruton, Jeanne Reynal, Elsa Schmid, Herbert Bayer, Gyorgy Kepes, Henry Billings, Alexander Girard, Bernard Rudofsky, Dorothy Farr, Lee Lawrie, Carl Milles, Edgar Miller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Milton Horn, Wharton Esherick, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Calder, Frederic Littman, Bernard Rosenthal, Robert Cronbach, Henry Varnum-Poor, Charles Umlauf, Josef Albers and Alexander Archipenko among many others.
Includes a beautiful full-page image of the undulating lobby ceiling that Isamu Noguchi sculpted in the 1940s for the American Stove Company in St. Louis. Noguchi designed the feature, known as a lunar landscape, with amoeba-shape channels, originally meant to conceal light bulbs. The ceiling was eventually forgotten, hidden by partitions and dropped ceiling panels and the American Stove building changed hands and eventually ended up as a U-Haul branch.
This piece of architectural sculpture became a cause célèbre in 2015 when a plaster model of its contours—which had belonged to the building’s innovative modernist architect, Harris Armstrong—went on display in the St. Louis Art Museum’s exhibition “St. Louis Modern.” News coverage including a radio program alerted the public that the actual artwork survived unseen at the U-Haul facility, and calls for its preservation arose on social media.
David Conradsen, the museum’s decorative arts and design curator, who worked with the show’s co-curator, Genevieve Cortinovis, said experts over the years had contemplated removing the sculpture to transfer it to the museum, but had concluded that “it would be basically destroyed in removal.”
Dakin Hart, the senior curator of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, described the ceiling as a “hugely important” and early example of the artist creating an “all-encompassing artistic environment.”