INTERIORS & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
September 1947
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor],
Robert J. Wolff [Cover Artist]
Francis de N. Schroeder [Editor]: INTERIORS & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications, Volume 107, no. 2, September 1947. Original edition. Quarto. Perfect bound and sewn printed illustrated wrappers. 174 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Cover by Robert J. Wolff. Wrappers lightly worn and soiled, but a very good copy.
9 x 12 magazine with 174 pages of color and black and white examples of the best modern American interior and industrial design, circa 1947 -- offering a magnificent snapshot of the blossoming modern movement after World War II. A very desirable, vintage publication in terms of form and content: high quality printing and clean, functional design and typography and excellent photographic reproduction make this a spectacular addition to a midcentury design collection. Highly recommended.
Contents include:
- For Your Information: the United Nations, Joseph Salerno, etc.
- Hillside Hideaway: Gordon Drake [Julius Shulman Photographs]
- Cliff Shelter: Chermayeff, Born & Eckbo
- Providing For Essentials: J. R. Davidson [Julius Shulman Photographs]
- Pavillion In The Desert: Raymond Loewy With Clark & Frey [Julius Shulman Photograph]
- House Slanted To The Sun: Michael Goodman
- Studio And Sanctuary: Paul Frankl
- Where The Patient Waits: Frank Howe De Witt
- Two Moods -- One Style: Hanley-Copp Design, Inc.
- Golden Touch For Gentlemen's Furnishings: Paul Laszlo [Julius Shulman Photographs]
- For Sale: Custom Design: Greta Magnusson Grossman
- Made In California: Design Workshops, Gumps, John Dirks, Phillips-Agnew, Paul Laszlo, Robert Dorr, Brown Saltman, Bigelow-Sanford, Charles Eames, Freric Grasse, Merlin Hardy, etc.
- Christmas Suggestions
- Industrial Design: Railroad Travel And The Railroads Discover The Designer: Raymond Loewy, "The Train Of Tomorrow," 20 Pages And 43 Photographs And Images!
- Advertisements for Laverne Originals, Herman Miller, Lightolier, Greef, John Stuart, Dunbar, Thonet, Kurt Versen, etc.
- And much more.
Robert Jay Wolff (1905 – 1978) was the Chicago Head of Easel Painting for the Federal ARts project, as well as one of the founding educators at the New Bauhaus, as well as a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended Yale University and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in France. An educator as well as an artist, Wolff was a professor of art at the Chicago Institute of Design (originally the New Bauhaus, now the IIT Institute of Design), before moving to Brooklyn College where he was chairman of the department from 1946 to 1964. He has written numerous articles on art and is the author-designer of the widely known educational portfolio Elements of Design, published by the Museum of Modern Art. He also wrote multiple children's books about color.
Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began with night school at the Chicago Art Institute in 1928 and ended with a few months in the sculpture atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1930. Paris in 1929 and 1930 was alive with the new art of the School of Paris, and Wolff saw paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque and the sculpture of Brancusi, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all held an inescapable fascination for young and uncommitted eyes," he wrote years later. Wolff returned to Chicago in 1932, where he continued to work in sculpture. "I worked always from life, mostly heads; and though a certain likeness always resulted my first concern was with the sculpture as an object, as a fully realized volume of planes intersecting planes, of an infinite diversity of contours, of surfaces patiently growing to the fullness of a living essence.
From 1936 on Wolff expressed himself in abstract painting: "Spaces of magic light and vivid color, emptied of fixed points of reference, of self-enclosed objects and locally isolated things, color spaces containing only the heavy black lines of brush strokes that defined their limits; this was what emerged....with a kind of furious aimlessness. I was not sure what it was that was happening, but I knew that what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the here and now of my life. I had taken the long, final step out of the shelter of art history and I found that I was quite alone." Wolff became a member of Abstract American Artists in 1937 and exhibited with the group.
Wolff joined with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes in 1937 to open the New Bauhaus on Prairie Avenue in Chicago. During the war years Wolff stayed in Chicago working with the iterations of the School and Institute of Design. After World War II Wolff was professor of Art at Brooklyn College, where as department chairman his faculty included Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, Stanley Hayter, Carl Holty and Mark Rothko.
George Nelson famously served as Editorial contributor to Interiors, where he used the magazine as his bully pulpit for bringing modernism to middle-class America. Interiors was a hard-core interior design publication, as shown by their publishing credo: "Published for the Interior Designers Group which includes: interior designers, architects who do interior work, industrial designers who specialize in interior furnishings, the interior decorating departments of retail stores, and all concerned with the creation and production of interiors-- both residential and commercial."
Interiors during its peak in the 1950s was the most beautfully designed and printed American Interiors magazine I have seen. An amazing vintage mid-century resource, not to be missed. Excellent vintage resource for wallpaper, rugs and floorware, funiture, lighting, decorative objects, etc.