Stephen Alexander’s turn his thumb down for the Moderne in this review of 1934’s exhibition of Contemporary American Industrial Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

‘Design for the Parasite Class’ by Stephen Alexander from the New Masses. Vol. 14 No. 2. January 8, 1935.

With the great success of the 1925 Salon of Decorative Arts in Paris the modern movement in design achieved such prestige in Europe as to warrant its importation to our shores. A few of our own designers, mostly architects, had been pioneering since the beginning of the century and earlier, but these were isolated efforts, practically unknown to the public. About 1927-28 a few department stores in New York City gave the movement its debut in this country with several large and well-publicized exhibitions which immediately achieved a success d’estime. Just as Printemps, Bon Marche, and Galeries Lafayette were the main purveyors to the French public so Lord & Taylor, Saks, Macy, Altman, etc., became the carriers of modernism here. The revolt against the cheap and gaudy vulgarity and stupid eclecticism of the Brown Decades broke out into what looked like a real revolution as the successes of the department store exhibitions encouraged more and more designers to “turn modern.” On the whole the effect was salutary, even though great quantities of junk and rubbish were perpetrated in the name of “modernistic.” The return to simple lines and clean surfaces was a necessary and healthy reaction to the meaningless chewing-gum ornamentation and “period styles” that afflicted (and still dominate) most of our design.

But the modern movement in design has virtually died a-horning. As a force in contemporary design it is practically used up. If any evidence of its sterility (in its present form) is necessary the exhibition of Contemporary American Industrial Art at the Metropolitan Museum amply supplies it. It is poorer in quality and quantity than the 1929 exhibit at the Museum, and far inferior to almost any of the early department store exhibits. For an exhibition purporting to represent contemporary design it is pathetic. A few hackneyed and trivial interiors, and a mere handful of objects, for the most part mediocre and not too well selected, make up this exhibit.

Why this decline of the modern movement almost before it had well begun?

Obviously it is beyond the scope of a short article to attempt a thorough and detailed study of so complex a phenomenon but we can touch on some of its salient aspects. One of the essentials of any healthy and progressive culture is its root in the masses of the people. For modern design to “take hold” and grow in this country two component and interacting parts of a single process are necessary.

1. Wide education of the population, child and adult, to a better set of esthetic values (by education I mean not only the schools but also those important forces of opinion-moulding such as the press, the radio, books, magazines, etc.) and

2. The economic and social structure which could make such a program of education possible, and what is more important, provide the public with the purchasing power to buy well-designed commodities.

The movement for good design is suffering from inanition precisely because it has failed in the above-mentioned essentials. Even if it were possible to fulfil the first requisite (which it is not) the second is quite beyond the social and economic system under which we are living. Even today after some years of intensive plugging at manufacturers by our modern designers one cannot buy decent simple furnishings or well-designed industrial commodities that are within the means of the worker of modest income. The poorly-designed junk is far cheaper in price, and so long as this is true just so long will those who buy and “count their pennies” buy the poorly-designed objects. Some of our more ardent reformers in the field of design have fulminated against the manufacturers. “If only they were willing to have good designers design their products we could quickly bring about a revolution in public taste, and raise the standards of design.” But the manufacturer is interested primarily in profits, not in elevating the level of public taste and standards of design. Only if he thinks he can make a profit will he change to new and better design, and the number of such manufacturers has been significantly small. If he is able to sell his poorly-designed article at a profit there will be little or no chance to get him to change. He prefers to exploit the cultural backwardness of the public by giving them the vulgar design to which they have been accustomed. He can hire incompetent designers for less salary and sell the product easily. So one comes up against the vicious circle which a decadent capitalist society makes inevitable.

The modern movement in design has with little and few exceptions been fashioned to serve bourgeois snobocracy. This is due not to any conscious intent on the part of the designer but to the demands of the capitalist market. If only the wealthy can afford to buy modern design then the designers will provide for that class. The commodity is fashioned to suit the demands and character of the purchaser. One has only to look at the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum to realize how thoroughly it is permeated with the habits and mental atmosphere of the rich bourgeoisie. Here is design for a parasite class. That is not to say however that there are no good elements to be found here. On the contrary, the designer who would design appropriately for the working class would make use of the best elements in modern design, but in a new synthesis. His design will be conditioned not only by the class for whom he creates but also by the historic needs of that class. A few modern designers who have come to understand the nature of capitalist society and its inherent barriers to a logical and decent esthetic, have nevertheless held out for various forms of modernism in their bourgeois adaptations as being quite suitable to Socialist and Communist societies …all that would be necessary would be to make these super-fine things available to everyone. A sort of esthete’s version of the automobile manufacturer’s slogan of “Two Cars in Every Garage”…only in this case it would read “A Mies von der Rohe Country Villa for Every Worker.” This sort of thinking fails to comprehend one of the most fundamental truths about design, namely that design has a content. Not in any absolute or mechanical sense, of course, but undeniably the design of a period is inter-related to the socio-economic structure in which it was created, and is of a certain historic period. So with this exhibition. It is the expression of a section of a definite class. It is of interest to rich brokers’ wives who are doing the town house over this season and are not quite decided on whether to make the living room Tudor or Modernistic; to the designer who is looking for a commission or two these hard days; to the decorators and manufacturers who think they may be able to get a cut of what little business turns up; to the stage and movie-set designer who must know what the smart Park Ave. apartment will be like this season so that he can provide the proper background for the new Guild conversation-piece about the sophisticated Younger Set. For the rest of the population it has little meaning or relevance and for the working class in particular it is a brutal reminder of the “charm and grace” with which its exploiters live.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v14n02-jan-08-1935-NM.pdf