Art Deco Polemics and Synthesis Richard Striner TH E STUDY OF ART DECO becomes useful precisely when the quest for a perfectly delineated “style” yields to an appreciation of the volatility that characterized early twentiethcentury design. Much as the eclectic design of the nineteenth century served as a medium in which very different inspirations and creeds could influence one another, art deco in the 1920s and 1930s proved to be a middle range between antagonistic ideologies. In particular, it served as an important channel between radical and traditionalist design responses to twentieth-century challenges. I consider art deco to be a movement that drew on design ideas that emerged from the 1925 Paris exhibition and from the streamlining genre during the 1930s. It is well to regard these design impulses as closely related components of an overall movement rather than as two distinct movements, especially since commonalities and hybrid combinations were abundant by the 1930s, as much of the commercial architecture of the period demonstrates (fig. i). Even David Gebhard, the scholar most inclined to emphasize the so-called zigzag/streamline dichotomy, views these two as related subdivisions of an overall movement which he terms the “Moderne.” For convenience, the widely accepted term art deco serves equally well. Art deco designs were in a middle range between polarized tendencies. Gebhard has suggested that its exponents “assumed a lackadaisical middle course between the High Art Modernists and the Traditionalists.”2 This middle range of design could be a freewheeling expression of contemporaneity. It was a spirit that sought to express the vibrant temper of its times; it sought to capture the haunting savor of life in the jazz age, and later it sought to express the upbeat, modish, “streamlined” rhythms of life in the age of “swing.” It frequently exuded joie de vivre and celebrated progress through technology. But for all its exuberance, art deco was not an insubstantial movement, nor did it shrink from artistic complexities. At times it captured the fears, as well as the hopes, of the interwar period in Europe and America. Its mediational role was a function of its broad emotional range. Although utopian and futurist aspects of early twentieth-century design have been amply studied, design historians have not said enough about the angst of the interwar years: the sense among writers and artists that Western culture might be nearing decline and fall. In a period torn by upheavals, depression, persecutions, and the threat of recurrent war, many influential writers and artists believed that Western civilization might well be poised at the brink of either a disastrous cataclysm or a new historical cycle. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, T. S. Eliot’s poetry of desolation (contrasted to the splendor of classical achievements), the pathos of Leopold Bloom contrasted to the grandeur of Homer’s adventurer in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the cyclical theory in Arnold Toynbee’s books and essays—all of this conveys the milieu in which visionary commentators such as Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldous Huxley, and Le Corbusier propounded their theories, fears, and solutions. A knowledge of the interwar period’s apocalyptic moods (notwithstanding its equally important visions of technological utopia) provides a muchneeded basis for assessing the urgency suffusing the modernist, traditionalist, and middlerange responses to the period’s design agenda. To be sure, the threat of impending historical catastrophe affected both radical modernists and twentieth-century traditionalists. While the radicals sought to preempt disaster by a bold departure from the chaos of the past and present to a future world of order (as envisioned by Bauhaus philosopher designers), the traditionalists sought to stave off disaster by maintaining the continued vitality of classical order.
In contrast, the art deco designers sought to blend ancient imagery—from classicism to the symbolic repertoire of ancient Egyptian and Aztec art—with the futurist imagery of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. This simultaneous reaching out to the past and future was highly symptomatic of concerns of the interwar period. Here was a design that sought to “locate” itself symbolically—and by extension to offer a commentary on its times and its cultural milieu—using extremes in historical imagery as points of emotional reference. What better way to “get one’s bearings,” so to speak, to conjure with the question, Who, and where, are we, in this turbulent age of the machine Writers of the period also experimented with historical commentary of this sort. Describing Manhattan of the future, John Dos Passos wrote: “There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn. . . . Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the material of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the million windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloud head above a thunderstorm.” Contemporaneously, novelist and critic Rebecca West observed that on New York’s “Lexington Avenue there is a vast apartment house which rears its dark masses like the Pyramids and which like them is an example of mystery making in stone.” For other social critics, design seemed to promise an actual release from historical cycles— critic Edwin Avery Park ventured in 1930 that the skyscraper is “an eternal principle—nothing of the moment. Past and future, ageless archetypes, and ancient mystery making were reawakened in thrilling new materials: how tellingly art deco designers looked to both extremes of the historical continuum the ancient past and the distant future, the pharaohs’ world and the world of Buck Rogers—and fused the images. Representations of strange gods in futuristic settings, as in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film classic Metropolis, pervaded art deco designs. And the tendency continued, albeit in muted form, throughout the 1930s. One can see it in the myriad public buildings that synthesized classical composition and streamlined curves that bespoke the world of tomorrow (figs. 3, 4). It can also be seen in Joyce’s masterwork Finnegans Wake, with its dream. like blending of historical cycles (adapted from the writings of Giambattista Vico), Jungian archetypes, and mythological presences-a work begun in the mid 192os and slowly, incrementally polished in the ‘93os—as well as in the 1938 vision of William Butler Yeats, who argued, “all things fall and are built again” amid the strange historical spiral.5 The impulse to synthesize, to bridge antagonistic realms-past and future, conservative and radical—was a defining quality of art deco and its role in the world of design. It explains the tendency of art deco to reconcile classical composition and even some aspects of classical language with salutes to the radical modernist idiom. By the 193os, the synthesizing tendency produced a wealth of buildings and objects in which classical composition, modernist simplification of form, streamlining, and Parisian-inspired ornamentation were combined (fig. 5). But reconciliation, while frequently a perilous business in design, was especially risky in this age of angst. Time and again, middle-range design was subjected to merciless attacks. It was art deco’s distinct misfortune to be scorned as the very embodiment of kitsch for precisely its highest achievements. In 1928 noted commentator Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., broadly sketched the character and interaction of what he regarded as the key design tendencies of the times. They were essentially past- related, future-related, and meditational. In the first group were “Traditionalists”-those whose “controlling idea” demanded the “adaptation of the various
architectural manners of the past to the needs of the moment.” At the other pole were the “New Pioneers”-the radical modernists seeking “purity” and “austere beauty” through “ascetic avoidance of ornament.” Finally, there were the “New Traditionalists “those who were “retrospective in their tendency to borrow freely from the past” yet “modern in that they feel free to use and combine . . . the elements thus borrowed [with] new materials developed by science, controlling them so that they shall not shock the eye.” Among the new traditionalists, Hitchcock included Wright, the Wiener Werkstätte, and the works of French designers that were exhibited “at the Exposition of 1925.” Although Hitchcock believed that the new traditionalists represented “an intelligently taken position,” he also stated that traditionalism, whether old or new, was “already wearing itself out.” He acknowledged, “the manner of the New Pioneers may not be that which is destined to supersede the New Tradition,” but could not suppress the opinion, “no other young architectural movement has developed so brilliantly” as the movement of the new pioneers: “they represent a far more living architecture than that of the New Traditionalists.” Thus was the gauntlet hurled in 1928 —respectfully but unmistakably. The movement (or movements) relating to art deco came under attack very quickly by the partisans of what was soon to be called the “International Style.” It is commonplace now to take the diversity of modern design for granted. Students have long looked upon Bauhaus/international style design as merely an influential movement among a range of divergent modernisms. We smile at the notion that the sleek glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were somehow a purer representation of modernity than the products of other very different modernist movements, such as expressionism or (in the fine arts) surrealism. Yet the intellectual hegemony, if not intellectual tyranny, achieved by the purist international style was, in Gebhard’s words, “one of the most impressive sales pitches of our century.”7 The creed of radical “functionalism” and its antihistoricist applications led to a swaggering divisiveness. The modernist crusade became so strident that even the polemics of Le Corbusier, who had initially argued for a modern design that would achieve a twentieth century reformulation of classicism, had yielded by the 1930s to a widely held conviction that classicism and modernism were fundamentally at odds. The rhetoric of Le Corbusier conveys the spirit militant. In his famous 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture (Vers Une Architecture), the principles rang out: “There is a moral sentiment in the feeling for mechanics. The man who is intelligent, cold and calm has grown wings to himself.” Intellectuals were obligated either to acknowledge this and join in or to lose the chance of averting social cataclysm: “Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may achieve or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends upon the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.” The way to avoid revolution was to create “the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass production houses. The spirit of living in mass production houses.” By 1929 Le Corbusier was even more impatient: “This century has officially opened to us gates yawning on the infinite, on majesty, silence and mystery. . . . Never was there an epoch so powerfully, so unanimously inspired. Poetry is everywhere, constant, immanent.” And yet, incredibly, “the past has ensnared us. . . . We are cowardly and timorous, lazy and without imagination. . . . It is my opinion that as yet we have seen nothing new, done nothing new.” There was no mistaking the apocalyptic tone of the manifestos, even with the caveat
“Revolution can be avoided.” The devastation and irrationality of World War I had left a searing impression on the minds of certain writers and artists that Western culture had only one more chance to avert a dark age. The sense of mission infusing so many of the modernist movements-explicitly linked in many cases to millennial creeds of both the left and the right wings_-took on a new urgency in the aftermath of the war. In 1931 Fritz Schumacher proclaimed, “The war shattered all continuity afforded by feeling.” A consequence of this was that architects were under “pressure to express [their] time completely. . . . Out of the darkness grows slowly the rose hour of dawn.” Many commentators in the world of design took up the cause, and their cries became increasingly militant. In 1934 social and literary critic Herbert Read averred: “An artist must plan the distribution of cities within a region; an artist must plan the distribution of buildings within a city; an artist must plan the houses themselves, the halls and factories and all that makes up the city; an artist must plan the interiors of such buildings_ the shapes of the rooms and their lighting and color; an artist must plan the furniture of the rooms, down to the smallest detail, the knives and forks, the cups and saucers and the door handles.”1’ while all of this had no doubt been said before, Read’s tone carried with it a new and terrible intensity. Everything depended on the effort made and the attention paid to the alarming symptoms—as Le Corbusier had said. The polemics prompted a reformulation of the rationalist primitivism that had informed certain byways of eighteenth century thought, especially the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau_...a sense that rationality lies in stripping from the hum an condition all accretions of artifice that suppress the underlying instinctive sense of truth. The twentieth century reduction of artifice into truth in form was intended as much as a work of social engineering as of liberation. No longer would wild, irrational, and destructive passions lay to waste the achievements of Western man, if the environment were stripped of lies to reveal the dignity of human needs—goods and services, straightforwardly delivered through honest form and function. The intellectual hegemony of the new vision in the world of 1930s and 1940s architecture is familiar enough, but less familiar is the pervasiveness of the vision among a wider literary and cultural realm. Two examples display the extent to which the vision had affected social criticism by the late 1920s. Economist Stuart Chase, in a lengthy attempt to assess the impact of machine-made ways of life on society, pronounced, “The most impressive exhibit in the rebirth of art” is “the skyscraper, a pure machine creation.” When that form of architecture is “treated for what it is, rather than as a Greek temple or a Moorish palace . . . we have an authentic work of art.” Social critic Waldo Frank was more vehement. He condemned the “architectural lies that our ambitious architects smear over our steel structures” and the fragments of antiquated styles that are “pilfered and stuck about our buildings.” To men such as these the moral was very clear: modern design should be honest enough to make a clean break with the past, to design boldly for a new century, to take command of the unruly machine age and effectively harness it. The new creed did not go unchallenged by architects trained in the Ecole des Beaux Arts tradition or by sympathetic and genteel critics. The responses were often impassioned. The radical creed, traditionalists protested, was a false prescription for the ills of Western culture —._the very last thing that society needed in an age fraught with chaos, threatened by disintegration, and marked by a center that could not hold. What was really needed was a shoring up of the Western tradition, an affirmation of its continuities. In 1927 Milton B. Medary, president of the American Institute of Architects, publicly condemned the precepts of radical modernism as “sophistry” and proclaimed that one might as well go beyond
architecture and reduce all civilization to the absurd and the unintelligible: “Let us have an entirely new written language, as well as the physical one; let us stop using the words used by Shakespeare and express our thoughts by sounds never heard before.” In 1930 at an institute convention, avowed traditionalist C. Howard Walker returned the fire of modernist George Howe—who had condemned the “overwhelming majority” of traditionalist buildings as “ramshackle, sentimental, pretentious, dishonest, and ugly”—with his own declamation: “It has been reserved for the so- called Modernists to be irritated at any resemblance to anything that has calm, and to adore excess in every direction, to be shapeless, crude, eliminated in detail to nothingness, explosive in detail to chaos and to create sensation with the slapstick and the bludgeon.” Yet in their writings architectural conservatives were often quick to acknowledge that traditions might still require revitalization and possibly something even greater—as in the mythic parable of Leda and the Swan, a new infusion of spirit—if the twentieth century’s challenges were to be met. In 1930 an editorial in the influential Federal Architect condemned the “germ of Modern Architecture” with its “thumb-nosing at the past” but admitted, “modern architecture can be good” so long as it entails a simultaneous “breaking away from the old architecture” and “a loyalty” to the more worthwhile aspects of tradition, an achievement the editorial writer formulated as “the Moderne traditionalized, the Traditional modernized.” Three years later, classicist Paul Philippe Cret lashed out at the “left wing of the modernists, which... professes to be strictly truthful,” while inflicting “twice as much glass surface in a room as is usable.” He decried the “holier-than-thou” hypocrisy and insisted on the right to do what he believed to be “appropriate even if somebody else did it before.” Yet as he took this position, he was also reaping praise for synthesizing classicism and modern simplification of form in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (1929—32). For Cret the “modernist trend” was “useful,” when purged of its dogmas and affectations; he pointedly saluted the modernist movement in the buildings he designed for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. Although some influential classicists desired a conditional rapprochement with the modernists, the continued vilifications by modernist writers ensured an escalating feud. By the late 1930S the polemical bloodletting in the controversies surrounding the plans for the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art are notable exam- pies of the level of hostility. The search for a reconciliation in the modernist-traditionalist war was an abiding theme with certain architectural commentators in the 1920s and 1930s. It took on more urgency when the full- blown manifestations of totalitarianism were ascend ant by the mid 1930s and as intolerance of the radical modernists was more than fully repaid in the Nazi-led purge of Weimar cultural “degeneracy” and the Stalinist Suppression of the avant-garde. As the forces of intolerance became more powerful, prospects for pacification appeared more dubious. Even some of the more striking architectural compromises, such as modernized versions of classicism, were easily put to use by repressive regimes. There could be no comfort to the democratic adherents of classicism-particularly Americans who regarded the buildings designed by John Russell Pope and his colleagues as temples of democracy-to behold the structures designed by Albert Speer for Hitler’s Germany. Somewhere, between the Museum of Modern Art and what the Nazis exhibited as examples of “degenerate art,” there had to exist a middle path of humane contemporaneity. But modernized classicism proved an undependable compromise, and radical modernists continued to deny that there was any legitimate basis for compromise in design. In ‘93° Wright_although known for his own frequent intolerance-delivered a powerful appeal in which he argued that neither the “sentim entality of the ‘ornamental” nor the newer “sterility of ornaphobia” could satisfy the needs of modern society: “I believe that Romance-
this quality of the heart, the essential joy that we have in living—by human imagination of the right sort can be brought to life again. - . . Our architecture [will] become a poor, flat-faced thing of steel bones, box-outlines, gas-pipe and hand-rail fittings without this essential heart beating in it. Architecture, without it, could inspire nothing.”5 Three years later architectural critic Talbot Hamlih joined the fray. “It is not quantitative functionalism that is at the root of great architecture. It is not abstruse intellectual content of any kind.... It is not conformity to any theory.... It is never a denial of joy in life. .. . To be beautiful, gracious, enticing—to take the bare limbs of building and make them flower like cherry trees in spring—is this not the engendering power of great architecture? . . . The root of great architecture is like the root of any created beauty, deep in the matrix of human consciousness. ft is spontaneity, delight in form. . . . Can it be that the International Style has never learned how to play?” Against these polemics, art deco, a quintessentially playful design movement, was assessed in the twenties and thirties. Initial reactions to the designs varied widely. In 1925 art critic Helen Applet on Read reviewed the displays at the Paris exposit ion and pronounced that both the “credo of modern art” and “the glorification of the machine” had been “determining factors in the development of this new decor.” Other critics reached precisely the opposite conclusion and attacked the designs for failing to live up to the potential of machine aesthetics. Sheldon Cheney derisively observed that Paris had “spread out the buildings of the Exposition of Decorative Arts, avowedly to bring to focus contemporary French effort outside of the traditional styles—and to bring world Modernism into agreement with the graceful French talent. But that affair and the sporadic outcroppings here and there . . . have only gone to show that outside a few inspired engineers and one or two imported radical architects, the impotent Beaux Arts men still control France.” It was perfectly true that beaux arts training could be found in the backgrounds of numerous middle-range designers; in the United States, also, a significant number of architects widely regarded as “moderni.stk,” in the sense of being sympathetic to modernism while refusing to disavow ornament—architects such as William Van Alen and Raymond Hood, respectively the designers of the Chrysler Building and (with several collaborators) Rockefeller Center— had been trained according to the principles of the école. It was also true that classicism pervaded much of the 1925 Paris exposit ion, notwithstanding the exotic ornamental language. But these middle-range designers were seeking to expand their work to come to terms with modernity and the machine. It was this act of presumption-this intrusion on the preserve of high-art purism—that infuriated the radicals. Only a machine-age aesthetic that was integral in form and content could ever be worthy, the radicals insisted; mere “expressiveness” was contemptible. As Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson pointedly explained in 1934, the problem encountered in introducing Americans to modern design was not “the conflict against a strong handicraft tradition but rather against a ‘modernistic’ French machine- age aesthetic.”8 Six years earlier Hitchcock had lamented, “the vast mass of attendant ‘modern’ crafts which since the 1925 Exposition has flowed into America” was, alas, “not very good.” To him, “the danger [was] that America will copy this special and not very desirable form of the New Traditionalism, forgetting that in Frank Lloyd Wright we already possess a far greater architect than even Perret.” Indeed, the alarm against Parisian art deco had been sounded in America almost immediately. In 1926 Ellow H. Hostache had subjected the exposit ion to withering scorn: October is waning--and so is this Exposition. This Exposition! What of it? . . . A few million cubic feet of concrete and plaster, shedding their varnishes and now ready for the masse of the demolisher. . . . And what of the Decorative Arts? Les Arts Decoratifs are no more! This bastard offspring of anaemic artisanship and efficient salesmanship was not fit to live... But
what was it all about? About ornament! The dictatorship of ornament! . . . The modern world is in full formation, and drags with it too many elements of the past lacking any further reason for remaining.... The entire Exposition might be described as a futile gesture,--if not a hopelessly lost opportunity for helpful accomplishment. Other Critics were more ambivalent. W. Francklyn Paris pointed out that while the exposition featured “many pieces and many effects which are a joy to the eye, and give promise to the flowering of a new style,” there were also “startling new constructions . . . all corners and sharp angles where the designers manifest a laborious striving for riotous incoherency.” What was one to make of it all? “It cannot be that this art is meant to endure,” Paris concluded: “these are all adventitious creations, a peculiarly fascinating combination of good and bad qualities, called into service by apostles of the superlative.” Sculptor and critic Leon V. Solon criticized the show for failing “to impart the Conviction that it is an authoritative and convincing statement of an exalted aesthetic aim.” He maintained that the times demanded an authentic “style,” which he viewed as analogous to biological development. (The language of Darwinism, in a highly popularized form—so often a medium for expressing concerns about the “evolution” of history—pervaded this architectural review, as did the pseudoscientific theories of race identity that gave to this period so much of its sinister quality.) “In the phases of the [prevailing] Modernist movement . . . the French operate under a temperamental disadvantage . . . [because] the characteristics of the style,” by which he meant modernism, “and the actuating impulses are fundamentally Nordic.”2’ No doubt the Nazis, who loathed the modernist avant-garde, took this as a backhanded compliment. Despite his initially negative reaction, three years later Solon was willing to credit an example of art deco architecture--specifically New York’s Park Avenue Building (1927, Buchman and Kahn), with qualities befitting a coherent “stylistic species”: “We are living in a period in which the origination of a new order of aesthetic expression is under way; not as a passing vogue. . . but as a general movement compelling the direction of progressive activities.” For Solon this portended “a radical alteration in the angle from which aesthetic problems will be approached in the future—more in accord with contemporary scientific investigation than that order of procedure which, in the past, attended stylistic evolution.” And Ely Jacques Kahn’s “richness of invention” and “pure logic of all argument responsible for each phase of express ion” in the building were “so self-evident and convincing,” that Solon chose not to “insult the reader’s perception by describing the obvious.” “Pure logic” was exactly what most hostile critics believed was absent from art deco design; and by the early 1930s such critics were increasingly vocal. For the most part, their denunciations proceeded from the premises of radical modernism and became snider as the years passed. In a 1932 issue of Architectural Review designer Serge Chermayeff offered an invidious comparison of two new office buildings Commissioned by London daily newspapers. The Daily Telegraph building “flaunts innumerable petticoats nicely edged with familiar Parisian lace—British-made copies of Paris models, 1925 Exposition,” a venture thoroughly “mannered and unprofitable.” By contrast, the Daily Express building “is quietly elegant in a tight-fitting black dress made of good cut which tells with frankness and without prudery the well-made figure wearing it.” In the same issue, the magazine featured a poem by Michael Dugdale, a young designer with the British Tecton group, satirizing ornament applied to industrial buildings:
Leave no space undecorated; Hide those ugly wheels and pipes. Cover them with noughts and crosses, Mess them up with stars and stripes. Now for curves and now for colour, Swags and friezes, urns and jars. Now for little bits of faience, Now for giddy glazing bars. Whoops! Tra-la! Let’s all go crazy, Tirra-lirra! Let’s go gay. Sanity may come tomorrow, Ornament is in today. What the Country wants is beauty, Art’s the thing for industry. Who’d suppose such curves and zigzags Could conceal a factory? A few months earlier, Dugdale’s poetic mischief— this time in the Augustan tones of Alexander Pope—had ridiculed the British designers of furnishings: Hence, Inhumanity, austere of Line, In Execution harsh, and in Design. Be Chic, be Up-to-date, but still preserve The softening Flute, the mitigating Curve. Be Human, Intimate, and even Funny, New, but Polite, for Manners Maketh Money... Let Germans storm. Who cares for what they say? We can be Functional as well as they. We know our Modern stuff. We, too, can feel The charm of Oil-cloth or of Stainless Steel. How plain our Furniture; no Mouldings there. It’s not too Intricate, nor yet too bare. Thus we outstrip the Germans and the Dutch Severe as they, but with the Human Touch. Lo! Rectilinear the Cupboard climbs (Always politely moving with the Times). Step upon step ascending to its Climax, Within its sheath of Aluminum Plymax. So too the Lights, that skillfully combine The rival claims of Function and Design, Before thy Shrine, Uncertainty, are lit, To shed their Radiance o’er us as we sit Discreetly on the Architectural Fence, Too hard for Sentiment, too soft for Sense.
Such were the vulnerabilities of a design characterized by playfulness and compromise. Although art deco in its Parisian mode was a popular tour de force and diffused with astonishing speed around the world, on the critical and intellectual plane, as commentator Cervin Robinson has said, “Art Deco and its journalism were a pushover for the International Style critics with their verbal attack and defense, their sloganeering, and their emphasis on simplification rather than ambiguity.” Dugdale and like-minded critics made ambiguity in design look ridiculous at best and like mincing cowardice at worst. To be sure, many important designers who worked in the mode of art deco were articulate in self-defense. Architect Ralph T. Walker argued that designers had “come to a bend in the road, a place in which to pause, where we can look backward over the past and see its contributions and at the same time look forward over the future and glimpse its possibilities.” Thoughtful designers had to realize that “while the desire to be economical in structure is laudable, it is not by any means the end of the story. . . . The fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual needs of man can never be satisfied with the thin, austere design of the engineerarchitect.” Muralist and sculptress Hildreth Meiere rebuked the “Left Wing Modernists,” declaring, “human nature demands interest and relief from barrenness by some sort of enrichment.” Among the middle-range architects and firms whose work she praised were the Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker firm, Kahn, the designers of Rockefeller Center, and, above all, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, “the only man to be claimed by both sides of the great Traditional vs. Modern argument.” Architectural journals repeatedly hailed Parisian-style art deco ornamentation for its mediational qualities. In February 1928, for example, the editors of Architectural Forum provided close-up views of floral ornamentation (in the mode of Edgar Brandt, a key designer whose work was featured at the 1925 exposition) adorning a modest art deco commercial building at 420 Madison Avenue in New York: the “architects have struck a new note in this example of conservative modern decoration.” One of the last and most articulate pleas for cessation of the radical-traditionalist war came from Charles R. Richards, director of New York’s Museum of Science and Applied Art, who condemned the “two sets of ideas that divide the architects, viz., dependence upon tradition as the sole source of inspiration and the conviction that design should be thoroughly adapted to modern requirements. ... In each camp one or the other of these ideas is held with such tenacity and intolerance of the other that real progress is severely handicapped.” Richards argued for a “rapprochement”: “We need to relinquish our extreme attitudes and bring the two opposing camps nearer together.” Countless middle-range designers strove to achieve such a rapprochement in the 1930s; “modernized” or “stripped” classicism was frequently the preferred approach (fig. 6). Some designers strove to achieve a thorough interpenetration of classical and modern principles (figs. 7, 8). Significantly, in both architecture and design they often used the language of the 1925 Paris exposition to lend dynamism to their fusion of classical principles and modern simplification of form (fig. 9). By the end of the decade, hostility among the modernist critics toward Parisian-style art deco had heightened. In 1938 Hamlin offered a lukewarm, and half-apologetic defense, acknowledging that in addition to the new and creative flexibilities emerging in the modernized classicism that he admired, there had been a “sudden waking up to the possibilities of independent and creative design…[following] the Paris Exposition of 1925… . Dislike as we may the overwrought eccentricities of much of the work at that show, it is, I think, indisputable that, without the flood of ‘modernism’ which followed that exposition... [the current] readiness to consider and adopt new forms (slight as that may be) would have been impossible.”
The streamlined mode of art deco in the 1930s fared somewhat better, at least with a few critics. Cheney, who had nothing but scorn for the 1925 Paris exposition, zealously embraced the aesthetic of streamlining. In 1936 Cheney and his wife, Martha, hailed streamlining as a “valid symbol of the contemporary life flow ...when it emerges as form expressiveness.” Although the Cheneys acknowledged that the symbols of streamlining were sometimes abused by “superficial stylists eager to…. make them a fad of the moment,” nonetheless there comes a moment when “logical design passes into the essentially unanalyzable region of pure form creation . . . felt by the artist to be in harmony with some larger rhythm and order of the universe.” The Cheneys developed this metaphysical theme with explicitly religious analogies: “When we see a functionally-formed useful product, smoothly encased in some bright machine-age material, corners rounded off, projections sheared away . . . the machineconscious mind begins to relate all such products of scientist- artist design back to the most conspicuous symbol and inspiration of the age, as the reverent medieval mind related everything to the symbol of the cross.” Cultural historians have frequently commented on the popularity of streamlining in depression America and concluded that the related themes of cohesion, unity, and smooth coordination were inspiring in a culture seeking to transform disaster and trauma into an opportunity for twentieth-century pioneering and community rededication. Industrial designers themselves were often among the boldest and most flamboyant publicists of streamlining; Raymond Loewy became a celebrity on this basis. But the priests of radical and high art modernism remained intransigent in their opposition, even though the streamline practitioners bore the credentials of industrial designers and had thereby apparently achieved the rapprochement between art and industry that Werkbund and Bauhaus theorists had sought for years. Johnson disdainfully remarked, “principles such as ‘streamlining’ often