Director’s Foreword

Reynolds, Jock

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Director’s Foreword

Jock Reynolds

Description: A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery,...

A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920–1950

The years covered in A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920–1950 overlap with the formation of the Gallery’s American decorative arts collection through the substantial gift of Francis P. and Mabel Brady Garvan beginning in 1930. The strengths of the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection are the colonial and Federal periods, and for decades, these constituted the scope of the Gallery’s holdings in American decorative arts. When Charles F. Montgomery came to the …

Author

Jock Reynolds

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00002.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15200

Director’s Foreword

The years covered in A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery, 1920–1950 overlap with the formation of the Gallery’s American decorative arts collection through the substantial gift of Francis P. and Mabel Brady Garvan beginning in 1930. The strengths of the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection are the colonial and Federal periods, and for decades, these constituted the scope of the Gallery’s holdings in American decorative arts. When Charles F. Montgomery came to the Gallery in 1970 as Curator of the Garvan and Related Collections, he began acquiring pieces that helped bring the collection up to the present day, so that Yale students and visitors could experience the entire span of American production. Montgomery also wanted to showcase American decorative arts in dialogue with the rest of the Gallery’s collection, which included strong examples of modernist painting and sculpture from the collections of Stephen Carlton Clark and the Société Anonyme. This expansive and inclusive view has guided the collecting mission of Montgomery’s successors.

A Modern World captures a transformative moment for the Gallery’s decorative arts collection. In 2008 John C. Waddell, B.A. 1959, approached the Gallery about making a gift of objects from his esteemed collection. Patricia E. Kane, Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Gallery, and John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts, envisioned a publication that would situate this promised gift within the larger context of the Gallery’s existing collection, which has been generously supported over the years by a series of notable gifts, including a core group of objects given by J. Marshall Osborn and Thomas M. Osborn in memory of their parents, Marie-Louise and James M. Osborn; a gift from Jane Ritchie in memory of her husband, Andrew C. Ritchie; and the contributions of John P. Axelrod, B.A. 1968, who donated a collection of textiles by Ruth Reeves, established an acquisition fund for modern American design, and has promised additional works from his collection.

In 1983 the Gallery staged the exhibition At Home in Manhattan: Modern Decorative Arts, 1925 to the Depression, organized by Karen Davies, a graduate student in the History of Art and a fellow in the Department of American Decorative Arts. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue placed the Gallery at the forefront of the reappraisal of American modern design. In 2004 another gifted graduate student, Kristina Wilson, deepened the Gallery’s engagement in this material through the exhibition and book Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression. A Modern World builds upon these exhibitions and is the latest addition to the Gallery’s American decorative arts collections catalogues. These catalogues—documenting the Gallery’s silver, pewter, and furniture—make Yale’s one of the best-published collections of American decorative arts. A Modern World charts a new course for collections catalogues at the Gallery. Under the guidance of John Stuart Gordon, the catalogue thematically organizes a broad range of media to explore the introduction and assimilation of modernist ideology in America.

Every object tells a story. Be it a panel painting or a teaspoon, an object can offer insights into the values, aesthetic preferences, religious and social beliefs, technological capabilities, and aspirations of the culture that made it. One of the missions of the Gallery is to teach students and members of the public how to elicit these stories through close observation and critical thinking. A critic for American Architect wrote in 1932, “That name—Modernism—covers inadequately a great number of diverse styles and movements, individual and local, with differing aims.”1 Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, “Is Originality Leading Us into a New Victorianism?” American Architect (February 1932): 18. In the decorative arts, as in painting, modernism came in many guises, and this catalogue hopes to address a range of them, from Cubist angles to streamlined curves. The catalogue also addresses the breadth of material influenced by modernism, not only the luxurious, handmade designs owned by America’s elite but also the more quotidian objects used by average Americans. Modern designs in sterling silver and chromium plate shared an aesthetic ideal, even if they appealed to vastly different pocketbooks. All the aspects of modernism are too multifaceted to be contained within a single volume, and in this regard A Modern World marks only the beginning of an ongoing intellectual exploration of the meaning and representation of modernity in American decorative arts.

A Modern World reveals how Americans came into contact with modernism, whether through reading the evening papers, visiting shops and museums, or just looking at the seemingly endless series of skyscrapers being built in every major city. Nascent modernists internalized Paul T. Frankl’s observation that “we are no longer preoccupied with our past. We are piercing the future.”2 Paul T. Frankl, Form and Re-Form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 3. And looking at modern art, wearing modern fashions, and owning modern objects brought that future into the present. Modernism eschewed cultural hierarchy, as a contributor to Creative Art noted in 1928: “The idea that beauty may be the handmaiden of commerce is not new. But what is relatively new to this age is the idea that the instinct of beauty expressed in a penny weighing scale is just as valid as when expressed in a studio canvas.”3 Hiram Motherwell, in Creative Art (September 1928): 34. It is particularly satisfying, then, to think about American modern design in the context of the Société Anonyme and that of the Gallery’s early twentieth-century paintings and sculpture in general, and to explore how conceptions of modernity manifested themselves in a variety of media for a range of audiences.

The Gallery is grateful to the generosity of John C. Waddell and to the individuals and entities that supported the publication of this book: the John P. Axelrod, B.A. 1968, Fund; the Friends of American Arts at Yale Exhibition and Publication Fund; the George and Schatzie Lee Fund for European and Contemporary Art; an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and an anonymous donor.

Jock Reynolds
The Henry J. Heinz II Director

1 Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, “Is Originality Leading Us into a New Victorianism?” American Architect (February 1932): 18. »

2 Paul T. Frankl, Form and Re-Form: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 3. »

3 Hiram Motherwell, in Creative Art (September 1928): 34. »

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