Platter

A 1936 advertisement for Congoleum Rugs—featuring a smiling couple seated at their dinner table, the husband poised to carve their main dish of ham—captures the mixture of modernist efficiency and formal traditions that appeared in many popular images of Depression-era dining rooms (fig....

Modernist designers created objects that responded to the world around them. For some, their designs constituted a conscious break with the past. For the majority, though, their designs fit within an aesthetic continuum that updated traditional forms and decoration for contemporary audiences. Designers were not beholden to history; they freely used appropriation and abstraction to create contemporary objects. This historical modernism mediated between the past and the present, grounding …