May 16, 2000 — January 9, 2001
The Helen and Milton Kimmelman Gallery and adjacent galleries
Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, first floor
American Modern: 1925-1940 — Design for a New Age, an exhibition tracing the rise of a distinctively American modern design aesthetic through the efforts of 40 of its creative pioneers, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 16, 2000 through January 9, 2001. More than 100 objects, including furniture, clocks, appliances, lamps, textiles, posters, and more, from the Museum's collection and from the John C. Waddell Collection — a major promised gift to the Metropolitan — will reveal the aesthetic, cultural, and economic forces that ultimately shaped the modern design movement in America.
As a major World War I ally, the United States was offered a prime site in the great 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels. There was, however, one condition: all objects shown must be of modern design. Reluctantly, the Americans declined the invitation; there was no modern design in America.
During the next 15 years dramatic change took place. An early group of American industrial designers and artists — including Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Paul Frankl, Raymond Loewy, Isamu Noguchi, Eliel Saarinen, Charles Sheeler, Walter Dorwin Teague, Walter Von Nessen, Russel Wright, and others — employed new materials and took advantage of recent technologies to create a wide range of strikingly innovative objects. Rejecting historicist ornament and preferring the clean, uncluttered lines and geometric forms of European functionalism, they sought to define a new style appropriate to the 20th century and, in so doing, to a great extent transformed the American domestic landscape.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue containing an essay by J. Stewart Johnson, curator of the exhibition and Consultant for Design and Architecture in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Modern Art.
Under the auspices of The American Federation of Arts, the exhibition will travel nationally.
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November 10, 1999
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