BLOOMINGDALE'S PRESENTS ORGANIC DESIGN

Furniture And Furnishings Planned For Today's Living, Sponsored By The Museum Of Modern Art

6.25 x 9 booklet with 12 pages and 15 black and white photographs of manufactured furniture pieces from the 1941 Museum of Modern Art Organic Design In Home Furnishings competition. Several images photographed in situ at Bloomingdales. Cover features a small reproduction of E. McKnight Kauffer's design for the Industrial Design Competition For The 21 American Republics held concurrent with the Organic Design competition.

Includes photographs and descriptions of work by Oscar Stonorov and Willo von Moltke; Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen; Martin Craig and Ann Hatfield; Peter Pfisterer, Marli Ehrman; Harry Weese and Benjamin Baldwin; Emrich Nicholson and Maier; Carl Anderson and Bellah; and Antonin Raymond.

A magnificent snapshot of the blossoming modern movement before World War II, and of the collaboration between the agenda-setters at MoMA and the merchants of Park and Lexington Avenues.

A key document in the history of the Good Design Movement -- the apex of the Expositions where prestigious and trend-setting New York department stores introduced modern design to the public before World War II. Macyıs, Lord & Taylor, Altmanıs, Wanamakerıs, and other New York department stores had previously teamed with designers such as Pierre Chareau, Francis Jourdain, Josef Hoffman, Gio Ponti, William Lescaze, and Paul Frankl to create exhibitions that featured modern home interiors.

Bloomingdales entered the fray with an all-star lineup that introduced the furniture designs of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in the world. In 1940, these two Cranbrook partners stunned the judges at the MoMA competition for Home Furnishings with their Seating and Living Room designs - and the rest is history.

This aesthetic arms race began in New York City at R. H. Macy's when the store mounted its 1927 "Exposition of Art in Trade" in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. That collaboration attracted the attention of other great Manhattan-based merchants who embarked on their own exhibitions and educational efforts. This represented a zenith in American design as decorators and retailers banded together with museums to educate the public about the newest trend, Modernism.

Macy's exposition stemmed from a series of lectures on period furniture that began at The Met in January 1914. The project was the brainchild of Donald Porteus, manager of Macy's Bureau of Home Furnishings and Interior Decoration. The lecture series was so overwhelmingly popular that it expanded rapidly to include employees of all the other great stores in New York: Lord and Taylor, Bonwit Teller, Best and Co, B. Altman, John Wanamaker and Abraham and Straus.

These stores produced lavish exhibitions of modernistic furnishings and interior design complete with mock living rooms, boudoirs and kitchens. The distinguishing elements of the modern: the comfortable, well-proportioned furniture, practical cabinet storage and efficient lighting held great appeal to apartment dwellers, a rapidly growing sector of urban populations.

In 1940, probably due to the widespread influence of his mentor Walter Gropius, Elliot Noyes became the first curator of the new Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That year Noyes organized and presided over the competitive exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishings and published a catalog documenting the results. On the inside cover Noyes set the competition terms with his definition of Organic Design: A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is none the less great -- in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use."

This last statement is telling, because the competition was as much a business deal as a museum exhibit; each of the winning designers was awarded a production and distribution contract with a major American department store. The overwhelming winner of the competition was the team of Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, taking the two most important categories --living room and chair design -- with their innovative method of anthropomorphically bending plywood.

Noyes defined design, albeit implicitly, as a matter of teamwork. The exhibition was itself a collaboration between museum, designers, and corporations, and all of the winners of the competition, with the exception of textile designers, were teams of two or more designers. More important, Noyes stressed in Organic Design not only the role of the machine in design and production but its formative impact on society as well.

Also on the inside cover, alongside his own definition of organic design, Noyes included two quotations from Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization: "Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests in our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human. The economic: the objective: and finally the integration of these principles in a new conception of the organic -- these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilation of the machine not merely as an instrument of action but as a valuable mode of life."

Here was the central problem of design, as Noyes saw it in 1940. The chair, and the living room, were points of interface between the human and the machine. The success of that interaction hinged on the development of a newly organic -- that is, newly organized -- environment, and demanded the study of the boundary between human and machine (to be defined later as ergonomics).

Thus the appeal of Saarinen and Eames's designs, which expressively mapped the form of the human body onto machine-made furniture and integrated these new forms into the bright white rooms of the modern home. It was these preliminary efforts at achieving a synthetic and social approach to the mechanical and the natural -- that is, of navigating the liminal territory of the ergonomic -- that Noyes spent the rest of his life exploring.

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