LIVING-UP-TO-DATE
Adelyn D. Breeskin [foreword]
Adelyn D. Breeskin [foreword]: LIVING-UP-TO-DATE. Baltimore Museum of Art, 1951. Slim quarto. Printed stapled wrappers. 20 pp. Catalog of 537 items. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy. Rare.
6 x 9 stapled exhibition catalog listing 537 items gathered for “An Exhibition of New Designs for the Home from September 25 to October 28 1951, Baltimore Museum of Art.” The “Cover design adapted from “Sticks and Stones,” a hand print on Linen by Ruth Adler for Creative Looms.”
Catalog of 537 items with curatorial information including designer, manufacturer or distributor, and approximate price in the categories of Furniture, Lamps, Accessories, Fabrics and Wallpapers, and Rugs and Floor Coverings.
The Baltimore show included site-specific custom room installations by Florence Knoll, Jens Risom and Edward Wormley.
"It is very important for an art museum to show the work of modern designers. It enables us to see what is being done today in relation to what has been done, and to realize that the application of artistic intelligence and technical skill to solve the living problems of an age has always been characteristic of the arts in their best periods.
"America like every other country is being rebuilt. A whole new generation is building its homes. There is a flood of new inventions, new materials, new products. There is also a flood of new ideas-nothing less than a whole new approach to the design of homes and other things we live with. Some people are enthusiastic about these new ideas, some dislike them or question them. We have not attempted to interpret these ideas ourselves. We have chosen a group of able and distinguished designers and put these questions to them: What does the best modern design have to offer? Can you, using modern technology, modern materials, give us a new and better setting for our daily lives? Have you, or have you not, discovered a new style-a new ideal of beauty-which will be the expression of our age as other ages of the past created their styles? This exhibition is their answer to these questions.
"The designers in charge of the exhibition have drawn on the ideas of the whole contemporary world. It consists of objects actually in production-not dreams, but things actually available today. But it is not an exhibition of objects. They have made it, first of all, the exhibition of an idea-of how the best modern intelligence can serve our lives by solving the problems of the setting of our lives." — E. P. Richardson, from the Foreword to An Exhibition for Modern Living, 1949—different venue, same sentiment.