flie Museum of Modern Art

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1 West 53 Street, New York, N.Y. 10019 Circle 5-8900 Cable: Modernart * _„__,.„_ #
Tuesday, May 26, 1964

PRESS PREVIEW:
Monday, May 25, 1964
11 a.m. - h p.m.

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIC*! COLLECTION ON VIEW IN NEW GALLERIES

Beginning May 27 The Museum of Modern Art will be the only place in the world where

an international selection of 20th century furniture, useful objects, posters and

other graphic design, and architectural medal's rnd drawings selected on the basis

of quality and historical significance will ba permanently on viev;.

The exhibition, installed in the new Philip L. Goodwin Galleries, indrawn from

the Museum's unique Architecture aad Design Collection of almost 4,000 items survey-

ing the major styles of the 20th century xrora Art Ncuveau to the present. Arthur

Drexler, Director of the Musaum's Department of Architecture and Design, has selected

and installed the exhibition which is one of nine shows marking the opening of the

Museum's new galleries and enlarged Sculpture Garden.

The material on view ranges from Tiffany Glass to mass-»produced plastic boxes,

from turn-of-the-century innovations in manufacturing and design to new products;

from machine art to electronic components.

Among the Collection material being exhibited for the first time are selections

from 57 original drawings by Mies van der Rohe covering three decades of his work

and from kO original drawings by Louis Kalm. Both gifts were made to the Museum by

the architects. Models of the Robie House by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Savoye House

by Le Corbusier and thfl Richards Medical Center by Louis Kahn are also shown in this

section.

Examples of graphic design, drawn from the Museum's extensive poster collection,

will include more than 30 posters from 10 countries.

Historically the earliest group of material on view is Art Nouveau. the inter-

national style that flourished from approximately 1893 to 1910 and was the first

movement in the arts to break with the custom - prevalent in the 19th century - of

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imitating past styles. Like the painting ef van Gogh, Gauguin and Lautrec, Art

Nouveau was influenced by the curvilinear patterns of Japanese prints at the time

popular in Europe and America. The sinuous whiplash curve became Art Nouveau's

typical contour, embracing everything from poster design to architecture with forms

often reminiscent of plants and flowers.

Examples on view include a large desk by the French designer Hector Guimard,

which not only employs what are now called free-form shapes, but also anticipates

todays practice of grouping separate storage elements in a convenient "L" plan;

tableware from Scotland; a pewter candleholder from Germany; and a silver jewel box

from England. A special vitrine is devoted to a selection of the more than 200 ob-

jects by the famous American Louis C. Tiffany in the Joseph Heil Collection given

to the Museum in I96I.

The influential de Stiil movement, initiated by Dutch painters during World War

I, existed as an organized group from 1917 to 1928. Its best known exponents were

the painter Piet Mondrian, the painter-architect-writer Theo van Doesburg, the

architect Gerrit Rietveld and the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo.

Like Art Nouveau, de Stiil developed unifying concepts affecting all the arts.

But while the richly curvilinear Art Nouveau was dependent on organic forms, de Stiil

reduced the elements of composition to independent rectangles and circles; replaced

traditional symmetry with freely asymmetrical balance; and used clear, flat, primary

colors. The theories advanced by de Stijl artists still provide the basic formal

aesthetic of much modern design and most modern architecture. Examples in the exhi-
and
bition include a table lamp, a side chair/ an armchair by Rietveld, and a perspec-
tive drawing of a house by van Doesburg and van Eesteren.

Established successively in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin from I9I9 to 1953 > the

Bauhaus school was the focal point in the integration of design with the machine age.

The artists and designers who taught and worked there were far more preoccupied with

problems of function than were de Stiil artists, but their functional solutions w«r«
expressed in geometric forms influenced by de Stijl concepts. Some Bauhaus ideas
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that broke with European precedent were the use of metal tubes in the design of

furniture and other household objects; stacking furniture designed for easy storage;

and highly polished surfaces relieved by textures rather than ornament. Objects on

view designed at the Bauhaus include a silver tea pot, a lamp, a fruit bowl, tea

glasses, textiles, and a cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer - the prototype of

thousands of metal chairs now seen throughout the world.

The section of the exhibition devoted to industrial design objects include an

airplane propeller blade, laboratory equipment, a boat propeller (shown in the

Museum's "Machine Art" exhibition in 195*0, a s well as printed circuits and other

electronic components. Among the mass-produced useful objects are the Olivetti

office typewriter, plastic kitchen containers by Tupper, porcelain cups and saucers

and stainless steel flatware, industrial packages, and a group of clocks.

Furniture in the exhibition is arranged chronologically on a low platform at

one end of the galleries; posters from each successive period are mounted on the

wall behind. Beginning with a bentwood Thonet chaise, a 19th century design which

led to the mass production of standardized furniture, and followed by chairs by

Gaudi and Mackintosh, the sequence includes an early chair by Frank Lloyd Wright,

the classic chairs of the '20s by Breuer and Le Corbusier, Mies van der Robe's

"Barcelona Chair," and chairs from the '^Os and '50s by Alvar Aalto, Charles Eames

and Eero Saarinen. The section concludes with a 1965 couch by George Nelson and a

new rattan chair from Japan, designed by Kenmochi. Desk lamps are shown with the

furniture and there is a separate group of floor lamps.

A selection of 20th century crafts includes Japanese pottery, glass by the

Italian Venini, wood platters from Finland and America, a tapestry by Anni Albers

and one of a set of vestments designed by Matisse for the Vence Chapel.

Although the Department of Architecture and Design has presented 169 temporary

exhibitions of loan and collection material, and has published many books and cata-

logs, lack of space has prevented its unique and constantly growing collections

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from being permanently on view. Now, with the completion of the first phase of the

Museum1s building program, a significant selection can be continuously shown. When

the Museum's west wing is added later in the '60s, the Philip L. Goodwin Galleries

of Architecture and Design will occupy four times the space now available, allowing

a more detailed presentation together with ready access to material in storage.

This permanent exhibition of work selected from the Collections is presented

as a standard of reference for the general public, students, designers and artists.

It supplements the program of temporary loan shows of architecture and design which

will be on view periodically in other galleries in the Museum. This summer the

temporary exhibitions are: "Two Design Programs: The Braun Company, Germany and

the Chemex Corporation, U.S.A. (May 27 - Sept. 20); and "Twentieth Century

Engineering" (June through the summer): In the fall, the Department will present

"Architecture without Architects" and in the spring of 19^5? a survey of modern

architecture in this country.

Photographs and additional information available from Elizabeth Shaw, Director,