CONTEMPORARY ART APPLIED TO THE STORE
AND ITS DISPLAY
Frederick J. Kiesler [Author, Designer]
New York: Brentano’s, 1930. First edition. Quarto. Yellow cloth decorated in red [variant binding color with no priority established]. Gray endpapers. 158 pp. Aquatone halftones and elaborate book design and typography throughout. Cover and typography by the author. Spine cloth sun faded and yellow cloth lightly soiled and marked. Spine crown slightly pulled. Overall a very good copy of this elaborate and rare edition.
8.25 x 11 hardcover book with 158 pages of gorgeous Aquatone artwork and avant garde typography predicting a bold future in the merging of Art, Science and Commercial psychology as exemplified by the ‘Telemuseum:’ “Television will not only be used as a “Window Daily” but also as a highly efficient means of decorating the windows and the store itself. A small sketch in your art bureau’s office of some scheme worked out in a distant country, or a transmission of an actual view in some far-off city, can be magnified or so adapted as to create a background of rare appeal at a trifling cost. Tele-decoration services of this type will be syndicated by special broadcasting organizations.” Colophon: Composition by Publishers Typographic Service, NYC; printed in Aquatone by Edward Stern and Company, Philadelphia; bound by Harmon and Irwin, NYC.
Includes work by Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Charles Sheeler, Giorgio de Chirico, Ralph Person, Thomas Hart Benton, Frederick Kiesler, Lucie Holt-Leson, Théo Van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Elie Nadelmann, Constantin Brancusi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Henri Laurens, Naum Gabo, Georges Vantongerloo, Jacques Lipschitz, P. Kramer, Siegel, Bruno Taut, J. J. P. Oud, Erich Mendelsohn, Pierre Chareau & Bijvoet, Firle, J. W. Buijs, Gustave Eiffel, Jean Leon, John Storrs, Paul T. Frankl, Eugene Schoen, Hans & Bodo Rasch, Karl Zeiss, Ch. Siclis, Eric Bagge, Elkouken, Andre Hunnebelle & Roger Cogneville, Krupp, Vayrac-Paulhau, Charles Adda, Poitevin, Jaques Debat Ponsan, Peruche, Foujita, A. Vesnin, Alexander Exter, Sara Parsons, Adolph Rading, Bruno Paul, Pierre Chareau, Arundell Display, Donald Deskey, Reiman School Berlin, Norman Bel Geddes, Jules Bouy, George Howe & William Lescaze, A. Lawrence Kocher, Gerhard Ziegler, George Gay, Martine, Knawles, Marcel Breuer, Pietro de Saga, Ruth Bernhard, Andre Kertesz, and others.
The challenge of performative façades and a new, transparent architecture that theatricalized both goods and customers (and the new form of publicness it gave rise to) appears to have caught the imagination of artists from the second decade of the twentieth century: Surrealists extending their visual contextualization of publications from their jackets to the windows that displayed them (from René Magritte’s 1934 cover designs for André Breton to Marcel Duchamp’s 1945 window display for Brentano’s bookstore in New York, again for a publication by Breton); the Futurists championing the consolidated display of industrially manufactured artifacts (Giacomo Balla’s attitude was not atypical—Fernand Léger was to celebrate the elaborately composed artifact’s “inutility” in this context in his “Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life” of 1923); and the Constructivists’ and the Bauhaus’s willing fluidity between “fine art” and industrial design (Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s agency Reklam-Konstuctor [Advertising-constructor], for example).
Emerging from a Constructivist context, Austrian-born émigré Frederick Kiesler explicitly embraced the shared ground between aesthetics, fine art, and commodity display. Kiesler’s window designs for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York (1928) were his financial salvation and revolutionized commercial window display in the process. Gone were the typological cavalcades of the kind documented by Eugène Atget in Paris, and in their place was an all-encompassing visual system running the length of the building’s façade, 14 interconnected window spaces built into an abstracted theatrical set, staging select items (a single jacket draped over a chair, say) as fetishized elements within a singular idealized context. The uncluttered and unashamedly aestheticized modernity of the presentation was a sensation, the three-week commission remaining installed for the next nine years, and so successful that in 1930 Kiesler was able to publish an intelligent guidebook, succinctly titled Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display. Despite the store’s historical obligation to exhibit a myriad of wares to a passing crowd, Kiesler realized that what it contained for sale would be favorably preconditioned by the desire already projected across the glass of the façade; the first transaction would be sealed in the street. Three blocks north, in 1934, Phillip Johnson’s provocative “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA would further muddy the water with its elegant display of mass-produced, machine-fabricated artifacts, with both catalogue and wall labels including details of where each of the exhibits could be sourced and at what unit price, with the smaller, cheaper items being available for the public to handle.
Throughout his career, Frederick Kiesler [Austria-Hungary, 1890 – 1965] worked across multiple mediums. He believed that “sculpture, painting, architecture should not be used as wedges to split our experience of art and life; they are here to link, to correlate, to bind dream and reality.” After studying painting and printmaking in Vienna in the early 1900s, he became known in Europe for his inventive stage designs, featuring mirrors and projections. In the course of working on these projects, he met and at times collaborated with artists such as El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy. In 1923, Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg invited him to join de Stijl, making him the group’s youngest member.
In 1926, after traveling to New York to co-organize the International Theatre Exposition at Steinway Hall, Kiesler and his wife immigrated to the United States and settled in the city. There, Kiesler helped spread the ideas of the European avant-garde, such as non-objective painting, abstraction, and the merging of art and life. He found work as a professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and as the director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music. From 1937 to 1942, Kiesler was the director of the Laboratory for Design Correlation within the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, where the study program was more pragmatic and commercially oriented than his deep, theoretical concepts and ideas, such as those about "correalism" or "continuity," which concern the relationship among space, people, objects and concepts.
“During the 1930s, Kiesler devoted much of his time to elaborating his design theories, publishing articles (including a series in Architectural Record on "Design Correlation"), and lecturing at universities and design conferences around the country, gaining notoriety for, among other things, his exhortations on the mean-spirited character of the American bathroom and the pressing need for a nonskid bathtub. He also called for the founding of an industrial design institute (for which he prepared architectural plans in 1934) and eventually persuaded Columbia University to allow him to set up an experimental Laboratory for Design Correlation within the School of Architecture. This laboratory, which functioned from 1937 to 1942, was the testing ground for many of Kiesler's biotechnical ideas. During this period, he actively experimented with new materials and techniques, such as lucite and cast aluminum, and executed some of the extraordinarily sensual, organic furniture designs that presaged the form-fitting, ergonomic concepts of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1942, he was chosen to design collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York, for which he planned every aspect, from an innovative method of installing paintings to its lighting, sculpture stands, and seating. In 1947, he designed the installation Salle Superstition for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. In this exhibition, Kiesler also displayed his first work of sculpture, Totem for All Religions, a wood-and-rope construction that stands more than nine feet tall and simultaneously evokes a totem pole, a crucifix, and various astronomical symbols.
Kiesler’s longest-running project was Endless House, a single-family dwelling whose biomorphic form and lack of corners strongly contrasted with the hard geometric edges that defined most modern architecture of the time. He sought to design a structure responsive to the occupants’ functional and spiritual requirements. He developed his ideas for the house over several decades, creating numerous sketches and models. Although plans were made to build a to-scale model in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden in 1958, they did not materialize, and the project remains unrealized. Nonetheless, Kiesler’s Endless House concept was highly influential and stands as a strong expression of his bold statement: “Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality.”
“Kiesler's Greenwich Village apartment at 56 Seventh Avenue was a haven for visiting and emigre Europeans. They were not only welcomed there by Kiesler but by symbols of America — the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building were clearly visible from his penthouse apartment (which was otherwise described by the doorman as a cross between a studio, apartment, and junk shop). Among his many guests were Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Mies van der Rohe, Hans Richter, Jean Arp, and Piet Mondrian. Kiesler generously introduced the newcomers to curators, critics, and dealers — Philip Johnson, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., James Johnson Sweeney, Sidney and Harriet Janis — as well as to other artists and prominent friends such as Arnold Schonberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, Martha Graham, E.E. Cummings, Virgil Thomson, Edgard Varese, and Djane Barnes. Committed to fostering an active exchange of ideas among artists of all disciplines and nationalities, Kiesler also relished the potential drama of these encounters. The spirit of the old Vienna cafe days remained with him, and most of his evenings were spent talking with his friends at Romany Marie's or other Village haunts into the early hours of the morning. He never took phone calls before noon. “ [Lisa Phillips]