Arts and Architecture

Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant, 1932. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 1/8 in. (50.8 × 61.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

I still can’t comprehend why the 20th-Century built American environment is 99 and 44/100% dreck and only 56/100% gold. Everywhere Golden Arches, and only in Bear Run, Pa., Wright’s “Falling Water.” And why in every small town in America do you find lovely old vernacular houses and churches while modern domestic building is for the most part pretentious piffle? It’s a puzzle.

So when I arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum last October, I was counting on their double header—on the arts and crafts movement (originating at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, its final stop) and the machine age “esthetic between the wars” (originating at the Brooklyn Museum and now at its final stop at Atlanta’s High Museum).

What a lucky convergence, made even more serendipitous by the presence across the street at the Craft and Folk Art Museum of a show on Kentucky folk art. Now, if ever, I’d understand.

Take the more recent period first. Like all other Americans, our artists have been mostly too callow machine worshippers. Listen to Paul Strand exude in 1922: Man has “consummated a new creative act, a new Trinity: God the Machine, Materialistic Empiricism the Son, and Science the Holy Ghost. . . The deeper significance of a machine the camera, has emerged here in America, the supreme altar of the new God.”

He did qualify his enthusiasm by saying that “not only the new God but the whole Trinity must be humanized unless it in turn dehumanizes us.”

Richard Guy Wilson and others’ catalog, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, is a treasure chest of images and ideas about how the American artist responded to the machine. Margaret Bourke-White, whose image of Fort Peck Dam in Montana was the cover photo for the inaugural issue of Life magazine in 1936, shared Strand’s euphoria:

“The beauty of industry lies within its truth and simplicity; every line is essential and therefore beautiful.”

More or less. In 1927, GM started a styling section that countermanded Henry Ford’s Model T aphorism—“You can have it in any color as long as it’s black.” The consumer was to be schooled in the new “virtues” of obsolescence and installment buying.

Philadelphian Charles Sheeler was sent by N.W. Ayer to River Rouge to generate visual hoopla for the introduction of the Model A in 1927. His campaign started a fashion for eulogizing the machine and its products. Norman Bel Geddes, a one-time theatrical set designer, began using the term “industrial designer” in 1927 when he set up shop in New York to orchestrate the drama of mass consumption.

Following the prescient vision of Newark Museum (and Public Library) director John Cotton Dana—who argued that art had nothing to do with age, price or status as he organized dime store design exhibitions before World War I—museums and department stores collaborated to spread the concept of high fashion as both good design and art.

Why didn’t their vision take? Probably because they were Lord and Taylorized. What was needed was a demotic aesthetic grounded in the public schools, K to 12, like Richard Saul Wurman’s substantial workbooks for the Philadelphia Public Schools in the 1960s, or like the Walker Art Center’s Everyday Art Quarterly (known now, less polemically, as the Design Quarterly.)

When I studied these puzzles in Scandinavia, I found that the higher level of everyday design stemmed from governmental initiatives, like the Design Centre in Stockholm or the crafts cooperative department store across from the main train station in Copenhagen.

Now come with me across Wilshire Boulevard to the Crafts and Folk Art Museum. Don’t bother with lunch (as I always do) at The Egg and the Eye, L.A.’s finest omelet emporium. Come and schmooze with me over the Kentucky folk art show. Glory in the split-oak baskets, the white-ash chairs, the hickory walking sticks. Wow.

Then move on to the current batch of Kentucky M.F.A.s, whose notion of folk art is to make one-of-a-kind parodies of their state’s traditional crafts. Why one of a kind? Because they sell for inflated figures. The MFA-ification of the folk muse is yet another factor contributing to the mess around us.

Status symbols for the glitterati of Louisville and Lexington. What a waste. What a demeaning alternative to that taken by Sigurd Persson and the other Scandinavians who did their own things and enhance their common environment.

The arts and crafts movement failed for the same reason. It cast its lot with the upper middle class—Tiffany and friends. What we need is a Henry Ford of the built environment, who sees that if everybody doesn’t get cut into the good design deal in America, eventually nobody does.

I think Sam Hall Kaplan, design critic of the L.A. Times, probably understands that. His L.A. / Lost and Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles (Crown, $27.95) is a marvelous way to end a search-and-enjoy mission in that puzzling city. I like the fact that his column is printed in the real estate, not the arts section as it is in Philly. That’s where he belongs, ameliorating the ameliorable, rather than stroking the culturally conscious.

There is one sad episode in his book that accounts for a lot of the mess. It’s the story of an idealist defeated by prejudice. Gregory Ain developed a 280-unit housing project on a hundred acres in the San Fernando Valley community of Reseda.

“The project, called Community Homes, was to be a model neighborhood, sensitively landscaped with parks, playgrounds and plantings. But after years of planning, the Federal Housing Administration denied the project financing. It seems some of the potential homeowners were racial minorities. This was a violation of something called Regulation X which, out of the fear that resale values would be harmed, prohibits federal funding for projects where there was a mixing of races.

“There were strong protests in which it was noted that many of the subscribers in question were veterans who had fought in the war. All was in vain, and the plans were scrapped, with the land eventually falling into the hands of the so-called ‘down-and-dirty’ developers.” Nice.

Regulation X marked the spot where idealists are undone by bureaucrats with rotten hearts. The arts and crafts movement failed because it didn’t reach out to the average American. Machine art got subverted by advertising agencies serving the Great God Turnover.

And here we are, an allegedly democratic culture, falling apart at the seaminess of street people. Just because a lot of corner-cutting folks had got “theirs” and couldn’t care less what happened to those who hadn’t yet got theirs. Until we learn to live up to our putative ideals of sharing, we deserve to fester in the mess around us.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, January 20, 1988