Kem Weber (American b. Germany, 1889–1963), "Airline" Armchair, 1934. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, by exchange M2001.128. Photo by Pat Jazwiecki.

This chair is one of my favorite designs of the 20th century. Period.

So sleek, yet soft! So comfortable, yet efficient!

When contemplating a move to Milwaukee to accept my current position, I made a short list of things I loved: “Lake Michigan. Calatrava-designed building. Beer culture. Kem Weber’s Airline chair.”

And now here I am, lucky enough to work every day in a building with “Airline” chair, the perfect type of museum object that looks stunning and can tell stories about its time and place. The Milwaukee Art Museum purchased the chair in 2001, and it is currently on view in the 20th-century Design Gallery (Gallery #30) on the Museum’s main level.

The chair form is an icon of streamlined American Modern design. It is titled the “Airline” chair, but you don’t need to know its name to catch the visual reference to fast-moving locomotives and airplanes.

Kem Weber was a 1930s-era designer living and working in California, and he is often credited with bringing Modern style product design to the West Coast. He was born Karl Emmanuel Martin in Berlin, and studied with the architect Bruno Paul (German, 1874–1968) before coming to the United States to oversee construction of Germany’s pavilion at the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition. With the outbreak of WWI in 1914, Germany canceled plans to attend the upcoming fair, and Weber was trapped in California.

So Weber built a career on the West Coast, even changing his name to be less Germanic–Kem, based on his initials (K.E.M.). He worked as an art director for the Barker Brothers store, and later formed his own industrial design studio in Hollywood.  He is credited with adding a modern flourish to products. A great example is the Weber-designed “Zephyr” electric clock of 1934, with its case molded into a “sweep” shape that suggest the forward flowing motion of time.

“Airline” Chair is his most well-known design today. It was an early form of furniture that was to be sold to the consumer in parts for final assembly at home (like IKEA). Unfortunately for living rooms everywhere, the design did not catch on and only about 200 were ever produced. California’s Walt Disney Studios office complex purchased many of the limited 1934 production. An article in Collectors Weekly about an upcoming LACMA exhibition includes an image of a woman both assembling “Airline” chair and toting it in a cardboard box.

This year, curators Wendy Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way”.  Their major exhibition is the first major study of California mid-century modern design, and along with other designers, will bring new attention to California designer Kem Weber. LACMA’s exhibition (Oct 1, 2011 – March 25, 2012) includes the re-creation of a modern-style room that Weber designed for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

Fly, don’t walk, to Los Angeles this fall and winter to see this important design exhibition.

And, in the meantime, stop by the Milwaukee Art Museum to visit this spectacular chair.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Margarete Heymann Löbenstein Marks (German, 1899–1990), Tea Service, ca. 1930. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, Decorative Arts Deaccession Fund, M2011.17.1-.21. Image from Wright auction (Chicago, IL).

The papers are signed and I can say it: The Milwaukee Art Museum welcomed into its permanent collection a Tea Service designed by Margarete Heymann Löbenstein Marks.

After we purchased the work at auction two months ago and the wire transfer payment was complete, several of the Museum’s art preparators traveled to Chicago to pack the ceramic pieces carefully and adeptly deliver them to the Museum’s art vault. I patiently waited a few weeks for the next scheduled meeting of the Museum’s Acquisitions & Collections Committee, when I was able to share the artwork in person.

In the final act of acquiring artwork for the permanent collection, the Museum’s Chief Curator, Director, and the Chair of the A&C Committee signed the paperwork that officially make the object part of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

And now I can say it: Welcome to Milwaukee, Grete Marks!

About the Work and the Artist
The artwork is a 21-piece tea service designed by Margarete Heymann Löbenstein Marks (or, Grete Marks) and manufactured at her German Haël Werkstätten factory sometime around 1930. Marks was trained as a ceramist at the German Bauhaus school. In 1923 she established a factory near Marwitz that both embraced forward-looking geometric abstraction, but also the careful integration of handicraft and design with material selection and the manufacturing process. I see all of this in the bold shape of her conical teapot, and the thoughtful integration of good craft with efficient production that mass-produced this design.

Reviewing all components of the Grete Marks tea service. Surprise: Glossy cream glaze on the interior of the sugar bowl. Photo by the author.

As a left-leaning Jewish woman running an artistically avant-garde factory in early 1930s Germany, Grete Marks caught the negative attention of the Third Reich. Her factory was forcibly overtaken in 1934 and her designs publicly derided by the Nazis as “degenerate” in Joseph Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff.

Marks fled to England.

Not only do I find Grete Marks’ work stunning, but her compelling life story witnesses the horrific squelching of Modern art under the German Nazi regime.  She was a forward-looking artist and a successful business manager who was crushed from her full potential by the brutal circumstances of her political time and place.  My November 2010 blog post “A Time When Modern Was Degenerate” shared the start of my research on Grete Marks, and I will be continuing this presentation of her story at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Cataloging the Work
For this blog post, however, I’m detailing the steps in bringing an object in to the Museum–what we call cataloging the work. Let’s just say that from my research I already know the basic information like artist life dates and the object date, so I was at a good starting place.

Examining and recording details on the Grete Marks tea service after it arrived at the Museum. Photo by the author.

At the start of cataloging the artwork, each part of the 21-piece tea service will receive its own unique identification, an accession number. The registrar department assigned the number M2011.17.1-.21 for the tea service. This might seem like a mishmash of random numbers, but every bit gives us information. The “M” indicates the object is part of the Milwaukee Art Museum Collection, the “2011″ is the year it entered the Collection, and the “17″ means it was the 17th object to get a number this year. The next numbers indicate the pieces of the set. So M2011.17.1a,b will be the teapot and its lid, M2011.17.2a,b the sugar bowl and its lid, M2011.17.3 the creamer and so on, through .21.

Carefully measuring all components of the Grete Marks tea service. Photo by the author.

Each of the 21 pieces will get a very small removable tag with its unique accession number, applied by the registrars and conservation staff. Each number corresponds to that object’s files and record in our computerized collection database. That database records all types of information–from the gallery’s address to conservation treatments–and uploads select information to the Milwaukee Art Museum Online Collection.  It is my job complete the information on records for any new objects I acquire, since I’m the one gathering all the research. (And yes, it did cross my mind that I would have been better off finding a 10-piece tea service instead of 21!)

I carefully gathered measurements of every teacup, creamer, and saucer–height, width, and depth. Did you know that measurements are always recorded in that specific order? When you see an artwork–like the teapot above–listed as 5 1/2 x 10 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches, you know from the order it is 5.5″ in height, 10.25″ wide, and 6.75″ deep. I had been working as a curatorial assistant for a year when I put down an object measurement as 5 W x  6 D x H 2 inches. Colleagues laughed at me, so I’ll save you the same embarrassment. Always H x W x D!

Recording the marks and stamps on all components of the Grete Marks tea service. Photo by the author.

In looking (lovingly) at every piece, I carefully recorded all the stamps and markings or any signatures I might find. In this case, each object is stamped “181 6 / HL”, but I honestly can’t say I know definitively what all that means.

If that intertwining smudge you see in the photo at left is “HL,” as I think it is, it would mean Grete Marks’ Haël Werkstätten factory. The word Haël came from the blended H and L names of Grete and her husband, for Heymann and Löbenstein. I don’t yet know all the codes for the factory marks (like the 181), but I plan to investigate this as part of the ongoing research.

I am thrilled to have this wonderful artwork for the collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Behind the scenes, I’ll be working during the next year to bring together and analyze the academic details of Grete Marks’ story and her artwork, but also to coordinate the logistics needed to gather her artwork together for an exhibition.

This is the final post in a four part series. Part 1 detailed the steps I took to get pre-approval to purchase artwork for the Museum at auction. Part 2 detailed a trip to the auction preview to investigate the object’s condition.  Part 3 detailed bidding at auction.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

C. A. Buffington & Co. (Berkshire, NY), Automobile Folding Chair, patented 1912. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of David and Toni Damkoehler, M2011.10. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Do you think this rusty iron folding chair deserves a place in a world-class art museum alongside priceless paintings by Mark Rothko and Vassily Kandinsky?

It looks like something you might find in a barn.

Well, in fact, it did come to the Museum from a barn, and we are thrilled to have it.

This metal folding chair is a patented design made sometime in the late 1910s by the C.A. Buffington & Co. manufacturers in Berkshire, New York. Buffington specialized in designing all sorts of equipment for the newfangled automobiles of the “Horseless Age“, including special jacks for changing tires, luggage carriers, and special automobile folding chairs like this one.

So how and why did this chair come to be part of the Museum’s Collection?

The chair was a gift from David and Toni Damkoehler, friends of Museum Director Dan Keegan. The Damkoehlers knew that we are interested in building our 20th-century design collection and that our institution is never afraid of “quirky.”  They had this unusual chair as part of their collection (yes, kept in a barn!) and asked, Would the Milwaukee Art Museum be interested?

As the curator working with this part of the collection, I investigated this bizarre object. On one level, I knew it was visually interesting and it seemed to have a good story. But did that warrant it becoming part of an art collection? Is it aesthetically compelling? Is it the best example of its type? Does it fit into an overarching story about design movements?

C. A. Buffington & Co. (Berkshire, NY), Automobile Folding Chair (in folded position), patented 1912. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of David and Toni Damkoehler, M2011.10. Photo by the author.

I learned that this chair was designed in response to a specific need, or, in another way of looking at it, designed in response to newly developed market. In the 1910s, American car culture boomed. Fifteen million of Henry Ford’s Model-T automobiles rolled off the assembly line between 1908 and 1927. This means that at least 15 million folks enjoyed a new type of mobility and could spend their leisure hours exploring with their new cars. A market developed for objects like driving gloves, touring maps, and collapsible “automobile chairs”. You can see above how compactly the chair folds, allowing several to be fit into the limited stowage of a Ford Model-T.

Henry Ford's "Model T". 15,000,000 were produced from 1908-1927. Image from The Henry Ford. http://www.hfmgv.org.

Calvin A. Buffington filed a patent for his folding chair design in September 1911, and it was granted by the United States Patent Office in 1912. If interested, you can review the full patent for this “new and useful Improvement in Chairs” with diagrams at Google Patents. The patent states that:

A further object of the invention is the provision of a chair which is simple in construction, capable of being readily and compactly folded, possessing maximum strength and durability, and that may be manufactured at a minimum expense.

To me, in this unrelated context (a patent application), Buffington clearly summarizes one of the tenets of Modern design–to efficiently mass-produce simple objects that were made of strong materials in the right shape (ie: Form follows function).

Diagrams from United States Patent #1,023,717 (April 16, 1912) for C. A. Buffington's Chair. From Google Patents.

He doesn’t, however, mention whether he aims for this folding chair to be attractive or pleasingly-proportioned, a mandate for good Modern design. And that brings us to the aesthetics of this chair: Is it attractive? Does it matter?

After pondering how the chair would fit into a timeline of chair design, and alternately, how it rather exists outside of a standard chronology of furniture history, I fell for this chair in ways both academic and aesthetic. I think it has great personality, a terrific shape, and it was inarguable in wonderful condition.

I dunno, I just liked it.

Just when I’d decided that I would go out on a limb and move forward with bringing this chair into the Museum’s Permanent Collection, I learned that The Metropolitan Museum of Art scooped us and acquired a Buffington Chair in 1979.  On one hand, I felt vindicated that the response I’d landed on (Chair = Museum worthy!) was the same as The Met, on the other hand I was disappointed that we wouldn’t be the only Museum with this wonderful quirky chair in our collection.

[This post is from a series called "From Museum Storage" that highlights Milwaukee Art Museum objects currently not on view. In the next few years, we are making major changes to our permanent collection galleries, and this necessitates closing areas for renovation and having artworks in storage.]

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Charles Eames (American, 1907–1978) and Ray Eames (American, 1916–1988), DCW (Dining Chair Wood), 1948. Manufactured by Evans Products Co, Distributed by Herman Miller Inc. Molded birch plywood, rubber shockmounts. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Kenneth and James Kurtz M1976.66. Photo credit John Nienhuis.

Late in 2010 I advocated that the Museum accept a Ray and Charles Eames DCW (“Dining Chair Wood”) into the Permanent Collection.

No big surprise there, as this bent plywood chair is the iconic work of two of the most influential 20th-century furniture designers. It is a must-have for any design collection!

However, this chair wasn’t the Museum’s first Eames object. The Collection already included one DCW chair (pictured at left), a 1946 folding plywood screen, and several examples of the World War II U.S. Navy leg splint that bolstered Ray and Charles’ experiments in complex two-way bent molded plywood.

So why an additional example of the DCW? And, why this one?

Well, to tell the truth, I put in to motion the Museum’s acceptance of the DCW based on a hunch…and I just might be wrong.

Charles and Ray Eames, DCW (Dining Chair Wood), 1948. Manufactured by Evans Products Co, Distributed by Herman Miller Inc. Molded birch plywood, rubber shockmounts. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Janet and Marvin Fishman, M2011.46. Photo by the author.

This additional version of the DCW (pictured at right) came to us from a situation where we had no information from its owner about details of its past or how it was acquired. There was little documentation, and we had to act quickly. I saw that the chair had a maker’s label on the bottom, which is encouraging. I also saw that this particular chair, as you might be able to make out in the photo, showed remnants of a red stained or painted surface.

This red stain was either a very good sign (original!) or a very bad sign (someone later added it).

But, my brain linked together “red” and “Eames” with the word “rare,” so I felt good about this chair’s place in our permanent collection.

I’ve since confirmed that the DCW (and its sister the DCM-”Dining Chair Metal”), when first manufactured by the Evans Products Company (Venice, California) from 1946 to 1949, were available with a red aniline dyed plywood, like this example in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. These original red examples are indeed very rare. However–and here we return to the part where I might be wrong–I’m still not completely sure that I have one here.

When you look at the bottom of this DCW (see below) you’ll see that there is a harsh red paint applied later around the affixed label. I think it was applied later because to my eyes, the paint is slightly layering over the label itself.  On the other hand, the rest of the surface appears to be more “stained” but very faded. When and why was this red paint added around the label? Or was there once paint all over the chair that was later removed, excepting around the label? Is this an original red aniline dyed example… or not?

I have a lot of questions that I can’t answer about this:

Charles and Ray Eames, DCW (Dining Chair Wood), 1948. Detail of underside. Manufactured by Evans Products Company, Distributed by Herman Miller Inc. Molded birch plywood, rubber shockmounts. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Janet and Marvin Fishman, M2011.46. Photo by the author.

When it comes time to exhibit or write further about this chair, I’ll call in the expertise of our conservation staff to see what we can learn from a materials standpoint. In the meantime, I’ll concentrate on the label itself.

For more information on situating that particular label and the information it contains, I turned to a trusted source on all things Ray and Charles Eames: the “Eames Office.”  Using their thorough website, I could compare the Museum’s newly-acquired chair with their original 1948 LCW on the Eames online furniture raisonne, without even leaving my desk. I could confirm that the Museum’s chair has the “transitional label” just like the one on the bottom of the 1948 LCW in the Eames collection chair.

Charles and Ray Eames, DCW (Dining Chair Wood), 1946–56. Manufactured by Evans Products Co, Distributed by Herman Miller Inc. Molded birch plywood, rubber shockmounts. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Kenneth and James Kurtz M1976.66. Photo by the author.

This type of label, mentioning both companies, means it was manufactured by the first mass-producer of the design, the Evans Products Company in California. But, this particular label also tells us it was made late in that period, during the transitional period when the chairs were distributed by Herman Miller out of Michigan. This dates the chair to almost exactly 1948. After 1949, Herman Miller Company was the sole producer and distributor.

As another comparison, I’m showing at left the underside of the other DCW (pictured at the top of this post) in the Museum’s collection. It has none of the red stain issues (or possibilities!), but its label is not in great condition. If you look closely, it is the exact same “transitional label” as on the newest DCW in the collection.

Also visible in this photograph is the 5-2-5 arrangement of screws often used to help distinguish between eras of Eames chair manufacture. I’ve learned that if you see the screws arranged like this with 5 attaching the front legs, 2 securing the seat at middle, and then another 5 at the rear holding on the rear legs, you have found a chair produced at the Evans Products Co (1946-1949). After Herman Miller produced the chair for about a year or so, the bolt configuration changed to 5-2-4.

This post, like much other research, is a work in progress. If you have additional clues about the red aniline dye on this chair, please let me know through the comments section.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Hilda Jesser (Austrian, 1894–1985), for Wiener Werkstätte, Vase, ca. 1921. Hand-painted earthenware, 9 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Morris and Denis Gallion, Historical Design, New York City, M2002.104. Photo by John R. Glembin.

I’ve just learned that Hilda Jesser could design anything.

Correction: I’ve just learned who Hilda Jesser was.

To back up, I should explain that I often use this blog as an excuse to explore something in the Museum’s collection that I should know more about. This colorful ceramic vase is charming, but I’ve never selected it to go on view in the galleries because I wasn’t quite certain how to explain it.

Thanks to the markings on its base and the curatorial cataloging records here at the Museum, I knew that the vase was designed by Hilda Jesser while at the Wiener Werkstätte sometime around 1921.

But it doesn’t look anything like my preconceived notion of what Wiener Werkstätte ceramic designs would look like, so how could I select it to represent that influential moment in modern design history?

It was time to find out more.

The Vienna-based workshop Wiener Werkstätte evolved from the Vienna Secession, a group that had been founded in 1897 as a progressive alliance of artists and designers. (The Secessionists seceded from the established art academy, citing disagreement with the academy’s reliance on historicism.) To further solidify the Secessionist’s promotion of modernity as it applied to design objects, in 1903 Josef Hoffmann and Kolomon Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte as a community of craftsmen.

Jutta Sika (Austrian, 1877-1964) for Wiener Porzellan-Manufaktur Jos. Böck (Austrian), Cup and Saucer, 1901/02. Hard-paste porcelain with stenciled decoration. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Antiquarian Society through the 1986 New York Trip Fund, 1986.1095-1096.

The Wiener Werkstätte became a type of brand in itself. Under its progressive ideals, it produced and marketed not just furniture but also small articles in glass, ceramics, silver and other metals, jewelry, and clothing. It hosted exhibitions to promote its ideals of quality craft and forward-looking design.

The main idea was that all designs were unified and part of one contemporary artistic vision, with craftsmen working across all media to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art). This possibly unrealistic ideal was never-the-less perhaps most fully realized at Hoffmann’s 1905 Stoclet Palace in Brussels. Visit this site for a great collection of images showing the exterior and interior of Stoclet Palace–you’ll see the building’s unity of architecture, ornament, artwork, furniture, and textiles.

Vase Josef Hoffmann (Austrian, 1870-1956) c. 1905. Painted perforated metal, 4 1/4 x 3 1/8 x 3 1/8" (10.8 x 8 x 8 cm). Manufactured by Metall-Arbeit Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna, Austria. Estée and Joseph Lauder Design Fund 400.1988

In general, the celebrated Wiener Werkstätte artistic vision relied on geometric, simple, and abstract aesthetics, and is often credited with setting the tone for “Modernism” of the 20th century.

What does that look like? Along the right are some, to me, quintessential Wiener Werkstätte designs. In Sika’s tea service design and Hoffman’s famous metal grid vase, you see the characteristic simple shapes and reduced ornament.

Hilda Jesser’s wildly-painted, wildly-ornamented ceramic vase doesn’t seem to fit.

What I learned about Hilda is that, after attending the Vienna School for the Applied Arts (studying with Hoffmann for part of that), from 1916 to 1922 she produced works for the Wiener Werkstätte. She was apparently prolific, working in fashion, textiles, painting, glass, and embroidery, but only produced a few examples of ceramic like this one in the Milwaukee Art Museum collection.

Dagobert Peche (Austrian, 1887–1923), Jewel Box, 1920. Manufacturer Wiener Werkstätte. Gilded silver. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift, 1978.8a-c.

The dates here are key. By the time that Jesser was working with the workshop, it was directed by a man named Dagobert Peche instead of Josef Hoffmann.

Peche joined the Werkstätte in 1915, and was co-director from 1917-23. It is key to note that his general aesthetic was markedly different from Hoffmann’s geometric abstraction, drawing eclectic inspiration from classical sources, rococo and baroque periods, and folk forms.

What I learned is that Peche led in a playful, ornamental spirit that replaced the earlier geometry. His work is characterized by objects like the exquisitely-crafted and extravagant  jewel box at left or this enamel box in the Victoria & Albert Museum‘s collection.

Peche’s influence as artistic director at the Werkstätte is noticeable in work produced after World War I–and this explains the look of the Hilda Jesser ceramic vase.

By 1921 the Werkstätte was no longer dominated by geometry. Designers allowed a greater sense of whimsey and decoration to enter their work. Jesser’s hand-painted vase allows the ornament to playfully follow the contour of the shape. The shape even seems to purposefully reference a Japanese paper lantern.

Essentially, Jesser’s vase reminds me that the conversation about what modern design meant to any given person at any given time is very complicated. All those associated with the Wiener Werkstätte agreed with unity of design and breaking from traditions, but aesthetically even within one craft community the realization of their ideals appeared in many different ways.

To Hoffmann, “Modern” was a square. To Peche, “Modern” could be a deer. And, by the looks of this vase, to Hilda Jesser “Modern” could have a swirling handle in the shape of a pig’s tail.

Hilda Jesser (Austrian, 1894–1985), for Wiener Werkstätte, Vase, ca. 1921. Hand-painted earthenware, 9 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Morris and Denis Gallion, Historical Design, New York City, M2002.104. Photo by John R. Glembin.

This post is from a series called “From Museum Storage” that highlights Milwaukee Art Museum objects currently not on view. In the next few years, we are making major changes to our permanent collection galleries, and this necessitates closing areas for renovation and having artworks in storage. The blog is a place where we can share information about such works.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Installation shot, MIAD's "Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection" exhibition. Photo by the author.

Don’t answer that. Most jokes beginning that way aren’t very nice to the subject. My answer, in this case, is: six.

This fall, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) Director of Galleries Mark Lawson asked six design-lovers to curate an exhibition in the college’s Brooks Stevens Gallery.

Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection (Oct 7, 2011 – March 1, 2012) shows the results of his experiment.

MIAD has a significant collection of industrial design objects–ranging wildly from a Betty Crocker mixer to wheelchairs to a Motorola Razr cell phone. In 2010 MIAD’s webmaster Dave O’Meara and MIAD alumnus Dave Hinkle created a new digital catalog of these objects and illustrations.

To celebrate and advertise the possibilities of this new resource, Mark Lawson used it at the center of an exhibition. He called in a variety of voices to help, and I was thrilled to be one of the six involved.

We six curators were given a password to access the digital catalog (it is not yet publicly available) and asked to select 20 to 25 objects that somehow fit together or told a story. We were not aware of what the others were compiling as we individually point-and-clicked our way to a mini-exhibition on an interface that looked like this:

Screen shot of MIAD's design collection digital catalog.

As I scrolled through hundreds of images of MIAD’s collection, I was delighted to see familiar objects, intrigued to see unfamiliar designs, and stunned at the limitless ways these could be combined in an exhibition. What would we all select?

TIME magazine cover, June 6, 1960. MIAD, Grassl Collection.

Perhaps because the material was unfamiliar to me, I was drawn to a collection of mid-century TIME magazine covers illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff (American, b. Ukraine, 1899-1965), like the one at right. Artzybasheff included a variety of art and design influences—from Surrealism to Post-Modernism—and made those visual aesthetics relate to the social issues and politics contained within the covers.

Could I continue his witty visual relationships into physical objects from MIAD’s collection?

I tried, and had fun doing it. For instance, this June 1960 cover showed cartoon-like space vessels, illustrating the article “Rush Hour in Space: U.S. and Russia take Different Roads.” Within the MIAD collection images in the digital catalog, I found contemporary everyday objects there were a veritable celebration of missiles and spaceman helmets (see image below). We expect that TIME magazine would discuss the Cold War space race, but isn’t it fascinating that this obsession carried over to an ice bucket that looks like moon-landing equipment? I continued this game by pairing a 1964 TIME cover celebrating the plastic advancements by the DuPont Company with Bakelite, vinyl, and plastic objects. A 1957 cover shows a repairman facing off against a variety of anthropomorphized household machines, with those same machines shown right in MIAD’s gallery.

Installation shot showing a grouping of space-theme objects (1952 Rembrandt TV antennae, a ca. 1950 ice bucket, and a JVC Videosphere model 3240 television) in MIAD's "Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection" exhibition. Photo by the author.

What was most interesting about the exhibition, of course, is the variety of ways that six individuals approached the selection of objects. We came from a variety of backgrounds–design teachers, practitioners, historians, etc.

Miller High Life Lamp, MIAD Collection.

Richard Wright, renowned Chicago-based auctioneer who focuses on 20th-century design artifacts, focused on the idea of “Aspirational Design”, finding objects that function in a pragmatic sense, but that also have the ability to mentally transport the user from the realm of the everyday. For instance, Wright’s installation included the Miller High Life Lamp, that is, the elevation of an everyday lager to the “Champagne of Beer”.

Kipp Stevens, son of legendary designer Brooks Stevens, talented industrial designer and retired president of Brooks Stevens Design, selected a variety of communication devices. He pointed out that these products were considered modern in their day, and that the distinctive styling of these televisions, radios, and telephones was the designer’s formula for successful products just like the iPhone of 2011.

John Caruso, industrial designer and MIAD Professor, created a dazzling array of advertisements and related products. He explored futuristic visions of technology and optimism is the post-WWII era.

Installation shot showing part of John Caruso and Kipp Stevens selections, MIAD's "Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection" exhibition. Photo by the author.

Vicki Matranga, author and design historian for the International Housewares Association, researched deeply into the back story of each product. She included rich information on small text panels that uncovered user, technical and market issues that the given designer sought to resolve.

Installation shot showing Ryan Ramos's installation, MIAD's "Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection" exhibition. Photo by the author.

Ryan Ramos (MIAD ’07 Industrial Design alum), Lead Industrial Designer at GE Healthcare, curated the collection based on the experiences and expectations a person had when they interacted with a product.

Installation shot showing Mel Buchanan's installation, MIAD's "Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection" exhibition. Photo by the author.

I was thrilled and honored to be asked to represent the Milwaukee Art Museum curatorial department in this exhibition at MIAD. I think the resulting installation is not only a great way to view hundreds of design objects from their collection, but to contemplate the multiple meanings these objects have to us today. By showing six different approaches to “curating” the objects, the exhibition essentially offers justification for the collecting of our material past. These tricycles and vacuum cleaners can teach us about children and housework, aesthetics and style, production and manufacture, and even aspiration and dreams.

What are the objects we use today that should be stashed away for future historians and designers and students to contemplate?

Style, Innovation, & Vision: Six Perspectives of a Design Collection is on view until March 1, 2012 in MIAD’s Brooks Stevens Gallery at 273 E. Erie Street in Milwaukee. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am-5pm. Admission is free.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Burniture on fire. Photo courtesy of the artist.

On Tuesday, November 22, 2011 a chair was born in the most unlikely of places, Sweet Water Organics.

Sweet Water Organics is an urban acquaponic farm located in the Bayview neighborhood of Milwaukee. If you haven’t already been, you should make it a point to visit. The space is amazing.

It’s a big open warehouse with rows of fish tanks. There are beds of lettuce and other vegetables growing above the water tanks, being fed by the tanks below. In Sweet Water’s sustainable system, the plants act as a water filter for the fish and the fish waste acts as natural fertilizer for the plants.

The Sweet Water Foundation uses a wide-open space in the building as an area for performances, artist collaborations, and educational programming. Their mission is to develop inter-generational and interdisciplinary educational programming for sustainability with a focus on the potential of urban agriculture and aquaculture in the 21st century setting.

Conversations between Jesse Blom of Sweet Water Foundation and Michael Carriere of the Milwaukee School of Engineering led to the idea of having artist Hongtao Zhou create a wax chair at the urban farm.

Hongtao Zhou is a Madison-based artist born and raised near Harbin, China. You may remember his chairs made out of wood scraps in the Museum’s 2009 Green Furniture exhibition. He also created furniture made out of snow and ice outside the Milwaukee Art Museum in January of 2010. Hongtao received a PhD in Furniture Design and Manufacturing from Purdue University in 2008.

This knowledge allowed him to calculate how long it would take for a chair to break, a skill that was of interest to big furniture manufacturers. Hongtao soon realized, though, that he was meant to be an artist, and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sculpture and Furniture Design MFA program. Since then, he has created multiple sustainable forms that tread the line between furniture and art, as his Burniture exemplifies.

Burniture is one of a series of works that will be displayed in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s exhibition The Tool at Hand. For this exhibition Chipstone curator Ethan Lasser asked sixteen established artists to create a work of art using only one tool. The tool, the medium, and the directions’ interpretation were left up to the artists.

Hongtao Zhou melting wax and preparing wax slush in preparation for "Burniture". Photo by Jeff Redmon.

Zhou was one of the artists asked to participate in this challenge. Zhou quickly and excitedly accepted, and his work quickly turned into the aforementioned performance at Sweet Water Organics.

Zhou set up a double boiler, a tub full of recycled wax, and a frame made out of found twigs on an old conveyer belt at the urban farm. A crowd watched as Hongtao, and participating audience members, melted wax and molded it around the fragile frame. Once the chair was complete, Zhou lit it on fire in a beautiful coda.
What follows is a short interview with the artist.

Hongtao Zhou applying and molding wax on the chair. Photo by Jeff Redmon.

Claudia Mooney: Where did you get the idea to make chairs out of wax?

Hongtao Zhou: The idea was from rebuilding my winter piece in normal season: I missed winter and snow so much in the summer. One day I had dinner with some friends. The candle on the table sparked this idea. The dipping hot wax seemed like water or tears, which also reminded me my last snow sculpture Leaking Glacier in Quebec City. Human is consuming the ice cover of the earth. In the furniture piece, the wax is ice, it is also energy.

CM: Have you made these before?

HZ: I made this piece in the summer of 2010.

CM: Can you describe the making process?

HZ: The making process is very much like making snow chairs in the winter, the difference is that the water is now liquid wax, the snow is now wax chips. The basic process is to mix the hot liquid wax with wax chips so that they become wax slush, then you can shape it as clay. It takes a while to cool down and become solid structure, after this, more wax slush can be constructed on the top of it to continue the process. For a large structure like the chair, it would be easier to have a small armature inside. In this piece I put some small tree branches together taking their natural forms to generate an organic shape.

CM: What would you say is your one tool?

HZ: In the beginning, I think the hotpot. Now I do think my major tools are my hands, you can still see the trace of them in the surface of the chair. Always wear gloves please! (Protect your “tool” from heat in the wax chair or from the cold in the snow chairs).

The Tool at Hand will be on view in the Museum’s Decorative Arts Gallery from December 8, 2011 through April 1, 2012. Be sure to stop by and see Burniture, as well as the fifteen other innovative artworks, for yourself!

Claudia Mooney works for Chipstone, the Milwaukee-based foundation dedicated to promoting American decorative arts scholarship. She researches objects and creates relevant programming for Chipstone’s exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum and in the community.

"Milwaukee Art Museum" in various sizes of the Weiss font. Graphic by Sierra Korthof.

A sense of competition led me to learn a little more about typography this week. What started as a challenge from a friend to best his score on the wonderful online Kern Type: The Kerning Game, became an interest in examining the typefaces, or fonts, that surround me here at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The Museum has a specific graphic identity that unites our signage, publications, website, and even the circular stickers visitors wear in the galleries. Our graphic design team of Leslie Boll, Sierra Korthof, and Brenda Neigbauer make certain that all our printed materials look snazzy and unique, but also that they incorporate identifying elements, like our specific shade of blue and the same fonts. Part of their responsibility is to make everything produced by the Museum have the Museum branded look.

I was curious about the names and history of the fonts that I see in the Museum’s galleries and billboards, so I met with the design team about typefaces they use to create the Milwaukee Art Museum identity.

If you loved the documentary Helvetica, you would have loved our conversation.

The designers first told me the background of our Museum logo.  The words “Milwaukee Art Museum” are almost always shown in a font called Weiss Antiqua (or, Weiss Roman).

"Milwaukee Art Museum" in Weiss Antiqua font. Photo by the author.

Our design team uses the Weiss font for branding the Museum name on all types of materials, like the signage you see just above, but also throughout the Museum’s permanent collection galleries for most of the object labels, like you see below.

Weiss Antiqua font used on Milwaukee Art Museum object label. Photo by the author.

Book designer and typographer Emil Rudolf Weiss (German, 1875-1943) developed his namesake family of fonts in the late 1920s. Weiss is a “serif” style font, meaning it has the little dash details (serifs) on the ends of some of the strokes. Fonts without these little structural dashes are called sans-serif, or without serif.

"Milwaukee Art Museum" in Weiss Antiqua font on the wall leading to Museum staff offices. Photo by the author.

The design of the Weiss letters is reminiscent of Italian Renaissance typography. During the Italian Renaissance, book makers and scribes moved from heavy Gothic-era lettering (like the style shown here in a ca. 1490 English book by William Caxton) to the classical lettering styles of ancient Greece and Rome.

"Milwaukee Art Museum" in Weiss Antiqua font on Museum Members tote bag. Photo by the author.

In a great example of how designs transfer through history, the lettering that Emil  Weiss designed in the late 1920s, that copied Italian printing of the 1400s, actually owes its inspiration to the Classics. Doesn’t Weiss look exactly like the Roman stone capital letter inscriptions shown here with a plaque from the Arch of Titus from 81 A.D?

I think this style font conveys the perfect visual message for the Museum. Weiss shows an interest in art history by referencing three great art moments–the Ancient world, art’s European Renaissance, and German art of the early 20th century. When you ponder its influences, you see that Weiss font subtly conveys these historic artistic moments, but at the same time it also manages to be visually light and modern. I think the font describes what we try to do at the Museum–We show art history and contemplate the heavy ideas of the past, but we also strive to inspire contemporary thoughts.

In a much more modern style font, the design team shared that they rely on Myriad Pro for additional Museum signage, especially for materials they create for the Visitors Services team. Myriad Pro is known for its ease of readability and a sense of openness and friendliness, which makes perfect sense for Museum signage. It is the first things many visitors will read when they stand at the admission desks and read the sign below.

Myriad Pro font used on Milwaukee Art Museum signage--"become a member", "drop-in guided tours" and "museum admission". Photo by the author.

Myriad Pro was developed by type designers Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach in 1992 for Adobe Systems.

Myriad Pro font used on Milwaukee Art Museum signage. Photo by the author.

Myriad is a contemporary font that was designed especially with typography on a computer in mind. It has been used since 2002 as Apple Computers’ font, and is used extensively for company signage including Walmart and Wells Fargo bank.

Museum graphic designer Sierra Korthof noted that she enjoys using Myriad for the Museum because the font family offers a lot of different weights that mix and match beautifully. (Font “weight” refers to the thickness or thinness of the characters.)

For the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Member magazine, the MAM Insider, the designers use a mix of Stag Sans and Meta Pro.

Stag Sans is used throughout the MAM insider for titles. As you can see in the picture below, the font family of Stag Sans offers a lot of variety in weights. The chunky word “MAM” and the thin letters saying “Accidental Genius” and “Impressionism” are the same font. If that doesn’t seem quite clear, you can examine the Stag Sans charts at the Schwartzco website to see all the versions lined up clearly.

Stag Sans font used in the MAM Insider magazine. Photo by the author.

You can also notice, of course, that the words “Milwaukee Art Museum” remained in the Weiss font there amid all the Stag Sans.

Meta Pro font used in body copy of MAM Insider. Photo by the author.

Christian Schwartz developed the Stag Sans font in 2007 as a commission from Esquire magazine for a “sans serif” version of the Stag font he previously developed in 2005 for the magazine.

In the words of the designer on his website, Stag and Stag Sans were requests for a new font to make bold headlines, and he was pushed by his magazine client to make the design “weirder and weirder”.

I could tell from our design team that they love Schwartz’s results. Stag Sans was the first font they mentioned in our conversation.

However, Head Graphic Designer Leslie Boll noted that while Stag Sans is very versatile for titles, it is not a font that is appropriate for body copy. The designers use Meta Pro for the body copy throughout the magazine, as you can see in the detail of the MAM Insider at left.

Much thanks to Leslie Boll, Sierra Korthof, and Brenda Neigbauer for all the beautiful work you do for the Museum, and for taking time away from your humungous design-department computer monitors to talk with me about it!

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

American Studio Glass installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Photo by the author.

The year 2012 is considered the 50th anniversary of the American Studio Glass movement. The anniversary is being celebrated with exhibitions and events across the country, organized in large part by the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass.

The Milwaukee Art Museum has a terrific collection of studio glass, and we were thrilled to be part of the celebration. Along one wall of the newly-designed Kohl’s Art Generation Studio is a new installation that celebrates using glass as a medium of creative impulse.

The glass sparkles, tells an important art history story, and I hope that its visual beauty inspires young artists as they create their own artwork nearby.

What is the American Studio Glass movement, and what is this anniversary?

Harvey K. Littleton (American, b. 1922), Lemon/Red Crown, 1989. Blown and drawn glass, cut and polished, 15 3/4 x 28 1/4 x 31 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Peter and Grace Friend, Mr. and Mrs. Wayne J. Roper, Laurence and Judy Eiseman, Dr. and Mrs. Jurgen Herrmann, Dr. and Mrs. Leander Jennings, Nita Soref, Marilyn and Orren Bradley, Mr. and Mrs. Frank J. Pelisek, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Mann, Burton C. and Charlotte Zucker, James Brachman, Mr. and Mrs. John F. Monroe, Mr. and Mrs. Donald Wiiken, Elmer L. Winter, Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Goldfarb, Mr. Ben W. Heineman, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Hyman, Janey and Douglas MacNeil, and Friends. Photo by Efraim Lev-er. © Harvey K. Littleton.

Fifty years ago, in 1962, Wisconsin artist Harvey K. Littleton (American, b. 1922) and glass scientist Dominick Labino (American, 1910–1987) introduced glass as a medium for artistic expression in two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

This was groundbreaking.

Littleton and Labino developed small furnaces and a glass formula with a low melting point, making it possible for individual artists to work with glass outside of an industrial setting. In 1963 Littleton taught the first glass-blowing class in an American college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

This combination of events kick-started the American Studio Glass movement and introduced a generation of trained artists to glass as a medium for individual, creative expression. In other words, glass moved out of the factory and into artists’ studios.

The Museum’s installation features glass by both Littleton (like the Lemon/Red Crown above) and Labino that shows how they created glass not for a functional purpose, but purely for beauty and expression in color, form, and optics.

Fritz Dreisbach (American, b. 1941), Maternal, 1979. Blown glass, with multicolor inclusions, 11 1/2 x 5 x 4 3/4 in. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the Sheldon M. Barnett Family M1991.2. Photo by Efraim Lev-er.

The installation includes artwork by glass artists Dale Chihuly, Tom McGlauchlin, Fritz Dreisbach (at left), and Howard Ben Tré. These mostly abstract forms display the technical virtuosity of their makers and the optical beauty of glass. We see wild color, trapped air bubbles, and creative shapes that are simply beautiful, with no mind toward utility.

To give a contrast to the creative advancement in the American Studio Glass movement, the installation also includes glass objects that are primarily functional rather than creative (even if they are decorative and beautiful). A pressed glass covered dish, lamp, and a gorgeous “lily pad” pitcher show the practical applications of glass, a medium that has been embraced for 3,500 years for its transparency and delicate appearance. Glass windows let sunlight enter a room. Glass lampshades protect a flame while letting the light shine through. Glass containers keep liquids safe without affecting taste.

While there is no substitution for viewing this artwork in person, the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass has shared some wonderful videos of artists making and speaking about their glass work, including Pioneers of Studio Glass, a video produced by AACG to commemorate the 50th anniversary of contemporary studio glass in the United States. And then, of course, you can see the fires and kilns and molten glass that we are unable to experience in Museum galleries!

For the benefit of our Blog readers, during the installation of the glass I snapped a few pictures that show details of the artwork and the care of our art conservation and technician team.

Here, the Museum’s objects conservator Terri White polishes the silver elements on a stunning Christopher Dresser designed “Crow’s Foot” Claret Jug (designed 1878):

Museum staff working on the American Studio Glass installation. Photo by the author.

Before objects were installed in the case, everything was removed from its storage box and laid out on a padded table. Everything was then inspected for condition. Below, a variety of the glass artworks await a quick cleaning by Terri White. You can also see in this image an object file folder that contains information and reference pictures about how the more complicated artwork (like nesting Chihuly glass) should be properly installed:

Museum staff working on American Studio Glass installation. Photo by the author.

Below the Museum’s exhibition designer John Irion and I work together to situate the objects so that they look good from both sides of the case:

Museum staff working on the American Studio Glass installation. Photo by Terri White.

Art technician John Dreckmann carefully arranges all the arching parts of Harvey Littleton’s Lemon/Red Crown (1989). The Museum has a paper template that maps out how the pieces are oriented:

Museum staff working on the American Studio Glass installation. Photo by the author.

After all the objects are carefully situated in the case, conservator Terri White applies small bits of “Museum Wax” to keep everything anchored in place:

Museum staff working on the American Studio Glass installation. Photo by the author.

The finished installation can be viewed from the long corridor that connects Gallery #15 (American Modernism) to the Gallery #23 (Contemporary Art):

American Studio Glass installation. Photo by the author.

Thanks to graphic designer Sierra Kortoff and design intern Nate Pyper for devising great little labels that include images of all the objects!

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein Marks, ca. 1925. Photo courtesy Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.

Ever wonder about the details of developing an art museum exhibition? I have to admit, an advanced degree in art history does not directly prepare a curator for the loan agreements, budget constrictions, press relationships, and conservation concerns that must be negotiated and balanced along with telling a great story.

In order to break down and share what I think is a pretty fascinating process, I’ve put together a six-part blog post series that addresses the steps I took in developing the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Grete Marks: When Modern Was Degenerate exhibition (on view September 6, 2012 – January 1, 2013).

Every exhibition should start with and keep at its core great artwork and a meaningful story.  For me, this exhibition germinated when I encountered a Bauhaus-trained ceramist named Grete Marks in 2007.

I’d never heard her name. I wasn’t a Bauhaus expert.

But I felt something for her teapots.

I was working as an assistant curator at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Our team was putting together Subject to Change: Art and Design in the Twentieth Century, a survey that would showcase The RISD Museum’s collection and be instructive to students at the art and design school. We wanted to dedicate a section, therefore, to the German Bauhaus school (1919-1933) and its new scholastic approach to art education. The Bauhaus was the seat of the Modernist multidisciplinary movement to integrate handcraft, fine art, and the science of mass-production.

The RISD collection had several great works for telling this story–a Marcel Breuer chair, a Wilhelm Wagenfeld glass teapot, Richard Neutra architectural drawings–but there were no collection objects by a Bauhaus-trained woman or any examples of Bauhaus Pottery ceramics.  In a quick attempt to fill this gap, I noticed in a December 2007 Sotheby’s auction catalog a stunning teapot and footed bowl by the artist Margarete Heymann-Löbenstein-Marks, or “Grete Marks.”

Grete Marks (German, 1899–1990), Haël Werkstätten Factory (Marwitz, 1923–34). Footed Bowl, ca. 1930. Photography by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Using all the secretive curatorial research tools at my finger tips (read: Google), I quickly learned the outline of Grete’s story, convinced my colleagues that this artwork was perfect for RISD, and after many steps (similar to these blog posts detailing how a Museum goes about purchasing artwork at auction) was thrilled to shepherd Grete Marks into The RISD Museum’s permanent collection. The works went on view in the “Subject to Change” 20th-century art and design survey installation.

One work, the footed bowl, is pictured at right. Together with RISD’s teapot, it will be traveling to Milwaukee to be part of our upcoming exhibition–reunited and it feels so good.

For several years, I continued to add to my understanding of Grete’s training, artwork, entrepreneurial career and its political context. I compiled secondary literature, learned the whereabouts of her artwork in private and public collections, and discovered that there had never been an American exhibition dedicated to this designer. After moving to a new curatorial position at the Milwaukee Art Museum, I was helping to plan the annual symposium of the American Ceramics Circle in 2010 and took the opportunity to bring Grete’s story to that crowd.

The story I presented was the tragic tale of a forward-looking Modern artist whose great designs were deemed “degenerate” by the Nazi government. That audience, too, loved Grete’s artwork and fascinating life journey. The presentation became the impetus for the exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, through the process I’ll describe in coming posts.

Here is the basic artwork story:

Grete Marks was born in 1899 to a bourgeois family in Cologne, Germany. She attended the Bauhaus and, together with her husband, later founded the Haël Werkstätten für Kunstlerische Keramik (Haël Workshop for Artistic Ceramics) near Berlin in 1923.

Grete and the Haël factory embodied the teachings she learned as a Bauhaus student from 1920 to 1921, under instructors like Johannes Itten and Paul Klee. Grete, an independent spirit, provided the creative leadership for the factory, which united modern design, quality handcraft, and industrial manufacture.

Grete Marks (German, 1899–1990), Haël Werkstätten Factory (Marwitz, 1923–34). Tea Service, ca. 1930. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, by exchange. Photo by John R. Glembin.

In its ten years of production, Haël Workshop introduced a variety of tableware—including striking conical teapots (like the one above) and vases with expressionistic brushwork—to consumers across Europe and the United States. The promising young designer lived the Modern utopian idea that thoughtful art would improve society.

Today, we would call the Haël Workshop ceramics modern, stunning, or sleek.

But with Adolph Hitler’s rise to be Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Grete’s teapots were called “degenerate” and placed in a “chamber of horrors,” or schreckenskammer.

In the new political environment, Marks was guilty of being artistically vanguard, politically left leaning, and Jewish. In 1934 a Nazi agent purchased the Haël Workshop at far below its appraised value. On May 20, 1935, the propaganda newspaper Der Angriff slandered Grete and the Haël Workshop, calling the designs “the product of a degenerate and misunderstood functionalism.” The picture in the newspaper, shown below, compares Grete’s ceramic artwork on the left to the works made at the factory under new (Aryan) leadership on the right.

Nazi propaganda “Der Angriff” newspaper, May 20, 1935. Caption generally translates to “Two races have different forms for the same purpose. Which is more beautiful?”

Although the Haël Workshop was a victim of Nazi Germany, Grete was not.

She immigrated to England in 1936, but not without losing friends and family, including the death of her mother in the Nazi’s Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland.

Using her reputation and business contacts, Grete began work in England’s Stoke-on-Trent potteries in 1937. In these traditional manufactories, she held a variety of design positions, including her own named line at Minton & Co., but she never regained the artistic excellence she had attained while running the Haël Workshop.

Ultimately, Grete Marks’ legacy is that of an accomplished designer who dedicated her life to the pursuit of useful and visually powerful artistic objects. Her remarkable talent unveiled itself fully in her designs at the Haël Workshop, where she realized the utopian Bauhaus vision of merging good handcraft and Modern design with new modes of large scale, efficient manufacture. In many ways, Grete Marks is a true Bauhaus success story.

I am honored to share her history.

Grete Marks (German, 1899–1990), Possibly Haël Werkstätten Factory (Marwitz, 1923–34). Tea Service, ca. 1930. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: The Charlotte and Perry Faeth Fund. Photo: Jamison Miller.

In this “Making an Exhibition” series, I’ll address the next steps in taking this story and making it into a museum exhibition. The background work involves conversations with private collectors, trips to London and Berlin, meetings with registrars and press managers and development officers, think tanks with exhibition designers, lectures for Museum staff, and emails, emails, emails.

To read all five parts of this “Making an Exhibition” series, click on the links below. (The links will be updated as they are posted, so stay tuned.)

Part 1: The Artwork’s Story (August 7, 2012)
Part 2: Research (with Travel!) (August 14, 2012)
Part 3: Approvals and Loans and Email and Paperwork (August 21, 2012)
Part 4: Storyboards, Design, and Installation (August 28, 2012)
Part 5: Finally, Enjoying the Gallery (September 29, 2012)

The exhibition was organized with the cooperation of the artist’s daughter, Dr. Frances Marks, and is supported by the Chipstone Foundation, the Mae E. Demmer Charitable Trust, and The Collectors’ Corner.

Mel Buchanan is the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design. Mel’s curatorial responsibility includes interpreting, displaying, and building the Museum’s collection of craft, design, and decorative objects.

David Russick, Exhibition Designer. Photo by the author

This is the second in a series of blog posts highlighting a variety of different positions within the Milwaukee Art Museum. Each day, hundreds of visitors enter the Milwaukee Art Museum to stare in awe at the incredible wealth of artworks within the museum’s collection. But what can too often go unrecognized is the equally awe-inspiring work of the many museum staff members, without whom the museum in its current state could not exist. “MAM Behind the Scenes” is a blog series written by Digital Learning intern Emma Fallone to showcase the wide range of positions that make up a museum, and to reveal just a few of the many people whose work makes the Milwaukee Art Museum a source of inspiration and education.

Can you give a brief description of your job, in thirty seconds or less?
To use an analogy: the exhibition designer is the person who shows up on moving day when you’re moving into a new apartment, and helps you to arrange everything so that the space is used efficiently and everything looks really good! At the Milwaukee Art Museum, the “apartment” is usually the special exhibition space, which is cleared out and rearranged for each new show. So, every time we have a new special exhibit, it’s like one tenant is moving out and another is moving in – and their belongings are the artworks which are going to be displayed. The exhibition designer works with the curator to figure out what goes where, so that you don’t have your kitchen appliances in the bathroom, so to speak!

What would be a “typical day” in the life of an exhibition designer?
You always come ready to problem-solve. I always have to keep one eye on function and one on form. You’re always trying to find good, practical solutions which also feel very exciting and engaging.

What is your favorite part of your job?
Well, I’ll have to slightly contradict what I just said – because no two days really are the same. The specifics of the set of circumstances that you happen to be working under always requires a new type of solution. So, that’s a very rewarding aspect: you can hone your skill in terms of what you do well – thinking about space, color, traffic flow – but, if you’re like I try to be, you also try not to fall back on the same solutions every time. It definitely keeps you engaged and challenged.

Is there anything that you have done in the past, any particular problem that you have had to solve, which has especially interested or surprised you?
The last two exhibits that we’ve put on, Uncommon Folk and Thomas Sully, both had opportunities for us to create unique areas within the larger space of the exhibition gallery. After seeing the list of paintings for the Sully show, I realized that we had a group of works in which the importance was not on the order in which they were painted, but rather on revealing and highlighting the connections that they had to each other. So, we created an open room where you could take in and appreciate all of those works almost simultaneously. And then we once again had an opportunity to revisit this technique with the Uncommon Folk layout. This is what really makes my work fun for me, encountering the challenge and figuring out how to solve it. Each problem becomes an opportunity to problem-solve, in an even more clever fashion.

This is really what we do in exhibition design – we’re like the invisible man in the room. To draw a comparison, if you go to a big party, and the food is fantastic, and the service is incredible, and the music is all well-chosen, and the temperature in the room is never too warm or too cold, it all adds up to a wonderful experience. But, during the evening, you’ll never consciously think about the temperature in the room – unless it is too hot or too cold, in which case it’s the only thing that you’ll be able to think about. A lot of what we do is like that. After the fact, a guest might think, that was really a great party – or a great exhibit, in my case – but more often than not, our work isn’t really thought about, unless something didn’t work correctly.

But this is the way of many things in life – it’s much the same for the work of a doctor, or a newspaper editor. Exhibition design is lucky in the sense that you really do have the ability to “raise your own bar,” so to speak. It comes from constantly working to innovate, to be ever more creative. In approaching a problem, when creating a new exhibit, you could always use the same solutions, which would be perfectly fine. You can do good exhibit design by rote, if you’re a really good exhibition designer. But you can do great exhibition design by being a good exhibition designer, and then pretending that each project that you do is the first time you’ve ever designed something. Exhibition design really benefits from that kind of creative approach.

View of the exhibition model. Photo by the author

Is there something unusual or unique about your position that most people may not know?
One of the things that people probably don’t think too much about is actually one of the most elementary parts of the design of an exhibit: traffic flow. I personally find it one of the most challenging aspects. What is the best way to guide people through a space? The really simple solution is always the back-and-forth “S curve” shape, with one clear path for people to follow. To me, this can feel a bit like a ride on a water slide: you go in there and are pushed through a series of twists and turns, you have a great time for the entire path, and then you get dropped out on the other end and you’re done. And to me, that’s absolutely fine, but at the same time, it’s very basic. I think of that type of design as something to fall back upon if necessary – not something to have as your main, “go-to” layout. That said, the upcoming Kandinsky exhibition is a retrospective, so it will have this sort of chronological, snaking layout, with one clear path to take – because there’s a clear narrative, this kind of design makes the most logical sense.

In contrast, this very straightforward layout was completely absent in the [thematically organized] Uncommon Folk exhibition. Thus, I didn’t feel the need for that kind of “S”-path, with its clear implication that one must view the artworks in a certain order. The design for the Folk show was intentionally much more of a meander, giving visitors the opportunity to choose their own path, and in doing so, take a more individual journey of discovery. And one of the real benefits of this type of design is that when you give people multiple ways of navigating a space, you also give them the opportunity to go backwards, to look at something from a different angle, and perhaps accidentally discover another new work along the way.

One of the things that I try to keep in mind when I’m designing is that we live in an era where we’re surrounded by screens, and mainly encounter two-dimensional representations of our world. And when you go to an exhibit, even if you’re looking at paintings, you’re still having an encounter with a three-dimensional, physical object. Even if you’ve seen a photograph of a painting, you still haven’t experienced the work itself, in person: there’s scale, there’s surface texture, there’s the way that the light reflects, and your movement around the work is such a key part of this experience. So, this is always something that I try to consider, to design exhibits in a way that will allow people as many opportunities to have this unique, personal interaction with the artwork as possible.

Designs in progress. Photo by Chelsea Kelly

Tell a bit about yourself – how did you come to have this position?
I have always loved art. I studied it in school, and I knew that I wanted to make my living doing something which involved art. I did make art myself, and I still do, but I recognized that it was very difficult to make a living that way, especially because I wanted to have a family and a stable life as well. So, I knew that I was going to have to figure out some sort of a “9-to-5 job,” and this led me to exhibition design. My background is in working with commercial galleries in Chicago, and then a university gallery in Indianapolis, for Indiana University. I eventually wound up as the chief designer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and that led me here to the Milwaukee Art Museum. It’s a path that I participated in creating, but as is true of most people’s lives, it’s not one that I could have anticipated when I began.

Why do you believe that art and art museums are important in today’s society?
Two hundred years ago, people were surrounded by handmade things, and today it is exactly the opposite. If you lived in 1800 and you encountered a machine-made object, say a cast-iron pulley, it would seem like something remarkable which you would want to examine and admire. We live in exactly the opposite time today – now it’s handmade objects that are so highly appreciated and displayed.

When people make art, it is one of the few times when human beings – who are innately “makers” – are still making. Museums are such incredible resources in that they allow you to experience something in person – it’s really there in the room with you – and it’s the original, it’s not a recreation or representation. And more likely than not, the artwork itself was made by hand, by a person. Each work is a part of history, a unique object with so many stories associated with it. It’s so important to still have a way to connect, on the most elemental level, with this basic creative force that resides within us. I think that art museums allow us to do that.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (American, 1910–1983), Untitled [portrait of the artist’s wife, Marie (standing)], ca. 1940s. Four gelatin silver prints. Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of Christopher Goldsmith, M1991.614-.617. Photo credit: Larry Sanders © Lewis B. Greenblatt

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Emma Fallone is a summer digital learning intern at the Milwaukee Art Museum, focusing on blogging. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Emma is currently a junior at Yale University, majoring in History and Art History. In June 2014, she will be moving to Washington, DC to work at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Christopher Dresser (English, 1834-1904) Manufactured by Watcombe Terracotta Clay Company (Torquay, Devon, England, established 1867) Pitcher, designed 1870-75; produced by Watcombe of Torquay. Terracotta or red stoneware, gilding 7 1/8 × 5 1/2 × 5 1/4 in. (18.1 × 13.97 × 13.34 cm) . Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Morris and Denis Gallion M1991.323

In 1898, the artists periodical The Studio called Christopher Dresser “perhaps the greatest of commercial designers imposing his fantasy and invention upon the ordinary output of British industry.” This seems an appropriate description for an Englishman who was interested in art but first trained in botany, and then found inspiration for his designs both in the ancient past and traditions of Japan.

Looking at two of Dresser’s designs in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum–a pitcher produced by the Watcombe Terracotta Clay Company and a claret jug produced by Hulkin & Heath–you can see how he applied his own personal motto to his work: truth, beauty, power. The sleek and angular vessels lack the decoration that most people associate with the Victorian period, which would have been at its height in the 1870’s.  They look like something from the 20th century!

It may surprise you then, that Dresser was also known for his interests in flat patterning.

Dresser was just as likely to use highly-decorative surfaces.  For instance, here is a vase he designed for Minton in 1868 or a flask designed for Wedgwood around 1873

His use of patterns was inspired by ancient cultures, particularly Egypt, which was in the height of revival in England. One source of these patterns was the architect and designer Owen Jones, one of the most influential design theorists of the 19th century.  Jones’s important publication, The Grammar of Ornament,  grouped patterns by culture such as Persian, Greek, Chinese, and Egyptian.

Dresser was also hired a number of times as an interior designer known for his Arts & Crafts style.  In fact, although much of it doesn’t survive, Dresser’s most successful work was done in wallpaper and textile designs: two examples are this fabric at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and this wallpaper in collection of the Henry Ford Museum. For a short time, he even had a workshop producing furniture.

So, what’s going on here?  Dresser can’t be easily pigeon-holed as proto-modern or Arts & Crafts.  He would say that he is using rules of design—from many sources—to produce beautiful things for everyone.

Christopher Dresser (English, 1834-1904), Manufactured by Hukin & Heath (Birmingham, England, established 1885), “Crow’s Foot” Claret Jug, designed October 3, 1878. Silver plate and glass, 9 5/16 × 6 1/2 × 4 1/4 in. (23.65 × 16.51 × 10.8 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, by exchange M1998.75 Photo credit: Historical Design.

In fact, he readily accepted machines as a useful way to improve peoples’ lives. He felt that using machines meant that more people could be exposed to artful domestic objects. This is in direct opposition to proponents of the Arts & Crafts movement such as John Ruskin and William Morris, who believed that good design only came from hand-producing everything.

Dresser believed that a functional objection is beautiful if it functions as it should. If that meant it should be simple in line, then that is what it should have.

He also was found inspiration in Japanese decorative arts. He traveled to Japan and collected Japanese objects. Through his mass-produced objects, he got the Western world interested in Japanese design. He respected Japanese “breadth of treatment, simplicity of execution and boldness of design.” The interest in the visual culture of Japan would also be expressed in Victorian styles, such as the Aesthteic movement.

Also, for Dresser, the cost of the material didn’t matter. The Watcombe factory in Torquay, a seaside town in Devon, was proud of their beautiful red clay and chose designs that highlighted it. The humble clay fit nicely with Dresser’s interest in simple materials and showed off the clean lines of his designs extraordinarily well–see top photo in this post. Meanwhile, the claret jug (middle photo) uses a brand-new material—silver plate—which allowed him to contrast the shiny metal with the clear glass without adding the cost of using pure silver.

Dresser’s focus on the geometric comes from function and Japanese design, but it also comes from the past. The Claret Jug uses crow’s feet for the base—commonly used in ancient metal work. The glass body has rounded shoulders and a pointed bottom, which suggests the shape of an ancient Roman amphora. Even the squared off handle is reminiscent of ancient pottery made simply and for a practical purpose.

Catherine Sawinski is the Assistant Curator of Earlier European Art. When not handling the day-to-day running of the European art department and the Museum’s Fine Arts Society, she researches the collection of Ancient and European artwork before 1900.

What did socialites in Milwaukee read during the jazz age of the late 1920s?

Well, naturally, everyone was reading The Modern Milwaukeean!

The magazine circulated from September of 1928 through the spring of 1930 and billed itself as the key publication for keeping up with the latest technological trends and everything modern. It proposed modernity as a way of life, but what really set The Modern Milwaukeean apart was its modern graphic design.

Editor and graphic designer Warner Kreuter was a Milwaukee native, but he spent time in the mid-1920s in New York City. There, he would have been exposed to all the latest design trends coming in from Europe.

Falling in love brought him back to Milwaukee.  To this city he introduced some lessons from the vibrant magazine industry of the east coast metropolis.

He started a magazine of his own in the tradition of The New Yorker, filled with short stories, poetry, opinion pieces, and news, but his magazine would focus on the city of Milwaukee. To distinguish the magazine as one for sophisticated readers, he added the word “modern” to the title, and The Modern Milwaukeean was born.

In the earliest issues, Kreuter took his design inspiration from the avant-garde covers of Vanity Fair. The second issue, published in December of 1928 (at the top o this blog post), bears a striking resemblance to a Vanity Fair cover from earlier that year (right)–both feature a glamorous couple enjoying the city. The composition of each cover is very different, and the issue of The Modern Milwaukeean is printed with metallic ink (perhaps for the festive season).

In 1929 Kreuter began to stand out from his contemporaries. Two months later, The Modern Milwaukeean published its third issue with a drastic change in design direction.

The bright red border catches the eye while the asymmetric design provides a window into the cityscape in the center. Tall buildings, fast trains, and automobiles were all hallmarks of modernity in the 1920s, converging on this magazine cover.

While Milwaukee’s skyline looked nothing like this in 1929, it was a vision synonymous with the future, progress, and modernity. It bears a strong resemblance to the establishing shots of the German silent film Metropolis of 1927, which took place in a distant future.

The issue for November 1929 embraces abstraction. The cover takes its cue from European modernism with flattened surfaces, silhouettes, and simple geometries, which demonstrated a radical shift in the 1920s.

Traditionally formatted magazines and books used centered headings and blocks of text, which can be seen in the covers for both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

This was a brave venture into a style known as “international constructivism,” (essentially a de-politicized version of the Russian constructivist movement) which is characterized flat color, geometric planes of color, and photo-montage.

It is significant in this case because large, mainstream magazines like Fortune, Vogue, and Vanity Fair would not begin to adopt the style until the mid-to-late 1930s. Warner Kreuter was ahead of the curve, and his progressive design sense proliferated throughout the magazine’s layout and advertising in an artful blend of the popular American Art Deco and European Modernism.

So, what happened to The Modern Milwaukeean? Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer. There are no copyright entries for the magazine after 1929, but we know there were at least two issues in 1930 (in a smaller format). Given the timing of its disappearance, it’s probably safe to speculate that the Great Depression played a role.

Five issues of the The Modern Milwaukeean are on display in the document case in the 20th and 21st Century Design Galleries on the first floor of the Milwaukee Art Museum, where they will remain through June 2017. Make sure you take a look the next time you are in the galleries!

–Kelsey Soya, Curatorial Intern

John Rieben (American, b. 1935), Chicago Has Two Great Zoos, 1965–1966. Photolithograph. 50 × 35 in. (127 × 88.9 cm). Lent by John Rieben.

The exhibition currently on view in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Bradley Family Gallery (through June 25) is How Posters Work. On Thursday, April 6, 2017, the museum hosted a program in conjunction with the exhibition called Local Luminaries: Poster Provocation. This gallery tour welcomed luminaries from the Milwaukee area to share their unique perspectives about the works in the show.

 John Rieben, graphic designer and professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, could not be present for the program due to inclement weather. We are happy to share his thoughts below:

I would like to spend a few minutes talking about my design hero and inspiration, Josef Müller-Brockmann. I think the greatest of the poster makers were [Toulouse] Lautrec, Cassandre, and Müller-Brockmann. Müller-Brockman, however, was more than a poster maker. He was the leading protagonist of a new way of visual communication, which became a worldwide movement that affected virtually every designer in the profession and every commercial message. It became known as Swiss Design.

The father of Swiss Design was Ernst Keller who directed the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich in the early 1900s. He removed the study of art from the design curriculum seeing its aims and process having little relevance to contemporary communication. Among his originations was the use of the grid as a unifying organizational design tool.

When Josef Müller-Brockmann took over the directorship of the school, he injected the theories he had been developing during the 1950s, and the design world took notice. I think one can say that the school under his direction became the incubator of Swiss Design.

Josef Müller-Brockmann (Swiss, 1914–1996), Beethoven, 1955. Lithograph. 50 × 35 1/2 in. (127 × 90.17 cm). Lent by Merrill C. Berman.

The timing of the movement was perfect catching the profession during a period of stagnation with excessive illustration, unstructured typography, and lack of logic and order. In this void, particularly in the U.S. where the modern movement had not made much impact, the Swiss dogma became widely accepted. The movement became a National Swiss export business.

The tenants of the program were simple to state, and perhaps not so simple to employ:
• A formal organization of the surface by means of a grid
• A distinct arrangement of typographical and pictorial elements by a predetermined priority
• Objective imagery that had little use for subjective expression
• Knowledge of the rules and a sensitivity that govern good typography

Helvetica became the industry-standard typeface, which had to be used exclusively. This is ironic since Müller-Brockmann’s font choice was Akzidenz Grotesk.

Josef Müller-Brockmann (Swiss, 1914–1996), SCHÜTZT DAS KIND! [PROTECT THE CHILD!], 1953. Lithograph. 50 3/16 x 35 5/8 in. (127.5 x 90.5 cm). Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund 1999-46-1.

I was born and grew up in Wisconsin in an environment that did not include things like design and art. I was drawn to art but the high school counseling at the time could only identify being an art teacher and architecture as a career choice. At university, math torpedoed any architectural ambitions and the direction of the information design curriculum was to prepare design directors for Detroit ad agencies. I don’t remember graphic design ever being discussed. For me nothing stuck.

Immediately upon graduating, Uncle Sam demanded my services and sent me to Europe and that is where my design education began.

I started to see things. During a leave I went to Switzerland to visit the home of my family. I stayed a couple of days in Zurich and was drawn to the poster kiosks, which were on every street corner throughout the city. There I saw examples of a design I had not seen before. Strong simple graphics with limited typography and images that demanded attention and introspection. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing Josef Müller-Brockmann’s work for the first time.

John Rieben (American, b. 1935), A is the First Letter of the Alphabet, 1965–1966. Screenprint. Image and sheet: 50 × 35 in. (127 × 88.9 cm). Lent by John Rieben. Photo credit: John R. Glembin.

When I was mustered out of the army I found that I was unemployable, having no relevant skills or knowledge that employers required. So I made one of my best decisions. I went to graduate school. Even there I didn’t have a clue, but my major professor George Sadek put me out of my misery and directed me to concentrate on graphic design. In particular, he gave me a stack of books to read. The Bauhaus and the Modern Movement attracted my interest, but of greatest appeal were the Graphis annuals and magazines like Gebrauchgraphik, which published the kind of work I had seen in Zurich. I was able to put a name to the style: Swiss Design and its champion Joseph Müller-Brockmann.

Here I had found a direction that commanded my attention and most significant, something in which I could understand and maybe even experience a career.

At the time there was virtually no literature available about the Swiss design movement. In fact there were no available textbooks about graphic design. Miegs hadn’t come along yet and Joseph Müller Brockmann’s history of the posters, graphic design, and his grid system were still to be written.

So, in my last year in graduate school, in desperation, I set off for Europe with the purpose of finding the guys who were doing the kind of work I admired, and I determined to steal, borrow and beg from their “bag of tricks”.

In Zurich I went to the Kunstgewebeschule where I thought Müller-Brockmann was teaching but found that he was instructing at the Ulm school. It didn’t matter that much since the instructors and students were practicing the formal principles he had established, and I became a design sponge absorbing every bit of information into my empty head.

John Rieben (American, b. 1935), Chicago, the Town that Van der Rohe Built, 1966. Screenprint 50 × 35 in. (127 × 88.9 cm) Lent by John Rieben.

In the evenings while sitting in a beer hall on the Nederdorphstrasse with my design buddies, I learned the names of the leading designers in Zurich, and I set out to visit most of their studios. I surprised them by turning up unannounced but they were cordial and willing to show me their work. And of course I asked for examples of their posters. All in all I collected 35 or 40 posters from these sources, which made up a major part of my MFA exhibit when I returned to Indiana University.

I did meet the Master a couple of times, once in Hans Nuemans’s studio where one of the Neue Grafik issues was being put together. I was so inexperienced and intimidated that I don’t remember much of the conversation.

Language was a barrier, of course. Many of the young design students were interested in practicing their English since they were planning on going to Canada to work on the World Exposition. Their arrival in Montreal and their subsequent work in New York and Chicago were instrumental in spreading the gospel and popularizing Swiss style in the United States.

My first job was with Container Corporation of America in Chicago. I am certain I was hired because of my Zurich experience. The Swiss influence was being felt in Chicago and, as I recall, so recently that Helvetica was not yet available from the type houses.

I think that over the years I have retained those lessons and followed them in a fairly consistent manner. I still use a grid, fashioned for each particular assignment, I still use a very limited number of typefaces, and I use geometric and objective imagery to express the message of the client. I don’t like the term “Swiss Style” since to me it was more of a design philosophy than a style.

For a farm boy from Wisconsin with very limited design credentials, Joseph Müller-Brockmann and the Swiss School provided me with a way to see the world and enjoy a rich and exciting profession. And most important, have a lot of fun while doing it.

–John Rieben, in an email to Monica Obniski, Milwaukee Art Museum’s Demmer Curator of 20th and 21st Century Design, April 11, 2017

Installation view of Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017. Photo by John R. Glembin.

On view now through March 25th in the Bradley Family Gallery, Jaime Hayon: Technicolor brightens up wintertime in Milwaukee with a colorful splash of fun and fantasy. The energetic exhibition features work from two decades of the Spanish artist-designer’s career, including textiles, ceramics, glass, drawings, and playground equipment. These works represent a wide range of approaches to making, thinking, and viewing, while also remaining unified by a refreshing sense of playful whimsy.

Jaime Hayon trained in his native Madrid and in Paris before directing the design department at Fabrica, the Benetton-funded design and communication academy in Italy, for nearly a decade. In 2003, he left Fabrica to focus on his own studio practice. Hayon Studio now has offices in Italy, Spain, and Japan and is acclaimed worldwide.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Technicolor, a set of textiles and ceramics which—like most of Hayon’s projects—began as drawings, some of which are included in the exhibition. Hayon uses drawing as a tool for exploration, allowing him to creatively construct the characters and scenes that populate his work. In doing so, he draws upon the fantastical realm of his own imagination and his wide-ranging travels. This includes his exposure to the bold graphics of skate culture and street art, which he was immersed in as a teenager. The details waiting to be discovered in Technicolor, from subtly sinister vampire fangs to topsy-turvy houses, provide ample opportunity for viewers to use their own imaginations as they experience the work.

Jaime Hayon (Spanish, born 1974), designer, Tilburg Textile Museum TextielLab (Dutch, established 2004), fabricator, Technicolor, Yellow, 2016–2017, merino wool, lurex, viscose, polyester, mohair, acrylic, cotton, 145 × 67 inches. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Robert S. Griffith Jr. family, 2016.206.6.

Materials and process are also important to Hayon’s conception of Technicolor, especially the relationship between machine and hand production. The textiles were woven at the Tilburg Textile Museum’s TextielLab in the Netherlands on Jacquard looms, a centuries-old technology that automates textile production. Hayon brought this technology into the twenty-first century by incorporating new synthetic materials, including some that produce shimmering metallic surfaces for the weavings. The Technicolor ceramics exhibit a comparably hybrid quality; the vessels were manufactured by the Italian ceramics company Bosa before being painted by Hayon. This mixing and matching between machine and hand production is a common theme in the Museum’s Design Collection, which seeks to complicate the boundaries between art, craft, and design through works such as Hella Jongerius’ Repeat collection bowl, which dares to mix ceramics with cotton thread.

Hella Jongerius, (Dutch, b. 1963), produced by Royal Tichelaar Makkum (Makkum, Netherlands, founded 1572), Bowl, from the collection Repeat, 2002. Porcelain and cotton. Milwaukee Art Museum. Purchase, with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust, M2015.12.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, a playful narrative is created by three works that feature an unforgettable character: a vibrant green chicken transformed into a rocking chair. The earliest of these three objects is a full-scale piece of furniture called Green Chicken. Hayon, like many other contemporary designers included in the Museum’s Design Collection, radically re-thinks what constitutes a chair in this work. Like Mathias Bengtsson’s Slice Chair and Jonathan Muecke’s recently-acquired Bench, Hayon’s Green Chicken pushes the idea of a chair to the edge of what we may recognize as functional seating.

Left: Mathias Bengtsson (Danish, b. 1971), Slice Chair, 1999. Aluminum. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Friends of Art, M2011.11. Photo by John R. Glembin; right: Jonathan Muecke (American, b. 1983), Bench, 2011. Carbon fiber and epoxy resin. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Stern Fund, M2017.58. Photo courtesy of Volume Gallery, Chicago.

The Green Chicken rocking chair is shown alongside a portrait of Hayon taken by photographer Nienke Klunder, in which the designer rides his own creation. The figure appears once more in miniature, as part of a porcelain figure that Hayon designed for Spanish ceramics company Lladró. In each case, the chicken shifts slightly in tone—from silly to sweet, absurd to surreal—and demonstrates how factors like scale and material can convey just as much information as a design’s figurative elements.

Installation view of Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017. Photo by John R. Glembin.

As playful as many of Hayon’s works may be, there is no match for Wabbit and FunkioMonkio, two larger-than-life wooden play sculptures which visitors are invited to climb and explore. The works are part of a larger installation of play equipment called Tiovivo: Whimsical Sculptures by Jaime Hayon, which Hayon designed for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Handmade by artisans at the Italian company La Veneta di Remigio Scapin, these wooden sculptures create an interactive experience, allowing viewers to physically enter the designer’s imaginative world. The inclusion of these play sculptures in the exhibition also raises a worthwhile question: how can objects designed for outdoor play function inside of an art gallery? In the case of Tiovivo, 3D-printed maquettes help viewers envision what the other, larger pieces in the series look like, and brightly painted walls bring an energetic sense of the great outdoors to the gallery.

Installation view of Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Finally, the most recent works in the exhibition are a set of glassworks, together titled Afrikando. Commissioned specifically for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent Collection, this “family” (as Hayon describes it) of seven vessels infuses the storied history of Murano blown glass with Hayon’s unique sensibility. For more on Afrikando, look out for another upcoming blog post that will focus on this exciting new work.

Installation view of Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Jaime Hayon: Technicolor is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the Bradley Family Gallery December 8, 2017–March 25, 2018.

–Hannah Pivo, Curatorial Assistant for 20th- and 21st-Century Design

Jaime Hayon, designer, with Nason Moretti, producer, from left to right: Umi (Life), Saidah (Fortunate), Chausiki (Born at Night), Malawa (Blossoms), Sauda (Dark Beauty), Wambua (Rainy Season), and Abayomi (Brings Joy) from Afrikando, 2017. Milwaukee Art Museum, purchase with funds from the Jill and Jack Pelisek Endowment Fund, the Sanford J. Ettinger Memorial Fund, and by exchange, M2017.23.4-7. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Among the many eye-catching objects in the exhibition Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, the delicate etching, dangling earrings, and dazzling glass surfaces of Afrikando are particularly alluring. This set of seven glass vessels is on view for the first time in the exhibition of work by Spanish artist-designer Jaime Hayon. Designed by Hayon expressly for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent Collection, Afrikando fuses the tradition of glassblowing with the designer’s delightfully fresh contemporary sensibility.

Hayon envisioned this work as a “family” of figures. Though the individual vases are unique, each shares qualities with the others, some more than others. For instance, the pieces Abayomi (Brings Joy) and Saidah (Fortunate) are two-of-a-kind, with the same basic column form and circular ears, but their different color and ornamentation also make them entirely distinct. This creates a tantalizing game of compare-and-contrast for the viewer, as the pieces suggest and simultaneously defy any sort of consistent decorative formula.

Abayomi (Brings Joy) (left) and Saidah (Fortunate) (right) from Afrikando, 2017. Milwaukee Art Museum, purchase with funds from the Jill and Jack Pelisek Endowment Fund, the Sanford J. Ettinger Memorial Fund, and by exchange, M2017.23.4-7. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Afrikando also serves as a fascinating study in light and color. A mixture of translucent and opaque glass produces intriguing effects, as does the visual layering of stems, funnels, and attached decorations inside and around the vessels’ bodies. The various components that make up each piece are not fixed together. Instead, funnels balance delicately on the vessels’ mouths, and the red staffs that adorn Malawa (Blossoms) are held in place by two small openings in the vase.

Malawa (Blossoms) from Afrikando, 2017. Milwaukee Art Museum, purchase with funds from the Jill and Jack Pelisek Endowment Fund, the Sanford J. Ettinger Memorial Fund, and by exchange, M2017.23.4-7. Photo by John R. Glembin.

As the title Afrikando suggests, the collection is inspired, in part, by the decorative arts of Africa. Hayon, who travels relentlessly, was inspired by collections of African masks and costumes that he has seen in museums around the world. This is evident in some of the vessels’ mask-like features. These, when observed closely, lend a somewhat more somber quality to the bright and cheerful figures. This is also apparent in the titles of the individual pieces. Wambua, a Kenyan name meaning “born during the raining season,” and Chausiki, a Swahili term for “born at night,” further emphasize a connection to African cultures.

Wambua (Rainy Season) (left) and Chausiki (Born at Night) (right) from Afrikando, 2017. Milwaukee Art Museum, purchase with funds from the Jill and Jack Pelisek Endowment Fund, the Sanford J. Ettinger Memorial Fund, and by exchange, M2017.23.4-7. Photo by John R. Glembin.

These visual and linguistic references to African cultures speak to how such forms have been consistently appropriated and transformed since European modernists, like Picasso and Gauguin, began using them towards the end of the nineteenth century. Today, the aesthetics of primitivism are critically examined by scholars and artists, who understand the risks inherent in approaching non-Western cultural production from a Western viewpoint. With Afrikando, Hayon directly acknowledges the debt that modern Western aesthetics owe to African cultures, while also celebrating the cultural fusion that has resulted from the realities of globalism.

Left: glass is blown into a mold; right: Chausiki (Born at Night) is marked for etching based on a specification drawing from Hayon Studio. Courtesy of Hayon Studio.

Afrikando demonstrate how globalism can manifest not only in aesthetic forms, but also though mediums and traditions of making. The glass studio that produced the work is part of a long and storied tradition of glassblowing on the island of Murano, off the coast of Venice, Italy. For centuries, glass has been produced on this island, with highly skilled artisans developing the techniques used to produce this work. The basic forms were shaped by blowing glass into molds, these were refined with additional “gobs” of molten glass, and then decorated by etching once cooled. (For more on the making of Afrikando, check out the video below.)

The Milwaukee Art Museum is thrilled to welcome Afrikando to its permanent Collection, both as a way to commemorate the exhibition Jaime Hayon: Technicolor, and as a significant contribution to the Museum’s robust collection of studio glass. Afrikando can be seen in the Bradley Family Gallery as part of the Hayon exhibition now through March 25, 2018. Following the exhibition, it will join other examples of studio glass from the Museum’s Collection on view in Baumgartner Galleria.

Jaime Hayon: Technicolor is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

–Hannah Pivo, Curatorial Assistant for 20th- and 21st-Century Design

Spring cleaning isn’t just for attics—the Museum’s Design Galleries were recently refreshed with a new coat of paint and numerous recent acquisitions. From turn-of-the-century silver to twenty-first-century furniture, these objects demonstrate the wide range of what we mean by “design” at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Josef Hoffmann (Austrian, 1870–1956), produced by Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna, Austria, 1903–1932), Basket, 1905. Silver and ivory. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust, M2017.56. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Among the newly-installed acquisitions, the earliest is a silver basket from 1905. This piece was designed by Josef Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte, a workshop in Vienna that Hoffmann co-founded with fellow designer Koloman Moser in 1903.  The workshop sought to eliminate boundaries between art and design; it brought together artists, designers, and architects, who produced textiles, ceramics, metalwork, and more. This basket’s elegant gridwork is an excellent example of how Hoffmann created visual interest through an object’s structure, rather than by adding additional ornamentation.

A different set of design priorities are demonstrated by Erich Dieckmann’s armchair (model 8219). Dieckmann was educated at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany during the 1920s; his interest in rational and affordable design solutions reflects Bauhaus teachings. In the period that he was working, many notable designers were experimenting with tubular-steel, and in this case Dieckmann used the material to create a low-slung, comfortable seat with a simple—yet striking—profile.

Erich Dieckmann (German, 1896–1944), produced by Cebaso Stahlrohrmöbel (Ohrdruf, Thüringen, Germany, 1882–1934), Armchair (model 8219), 1931. Nickel-plated tubular steel, painted wood, fabric, and original Eisengarn. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust, M2017.15. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Finding creative and compelling ways to use cost-efficient materials is a common theme in design history, and Eva Zeisel’s Cloverleaf bowl continues this narrative. Zeisel worked primarily as an industrial ceramics designer, but in 1947 she was hired by a Plexiglas manufacturer to produce a series of bowls, trays, and serving utensils from the firm’s acrylic plastic (which had been developed for military applications during World War II). By employing rich colors and biomorphic forms, Zeisel transformed the material into servingware worthy of a modern dinner table.

Eva Zeisel (American, b. Hungary, 1906–2011), manufactured by Clover Box and Manufacturing Company (Bronx, New York, active mid-20th century), Cloverleaf Bowl, from the Cloverware series, 1947. Plexiglas. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust, M2017.54. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Jonathan Muecke’s Bench, designed in 2011, serves as a contemporary example of material and formal experimentation. Throughout his practice, Muecke aims for a careful balance between color, material, texture, and scale—often leading to objects that are at once familiar and peculiar. Made from a composite of carbon fiber and epoxy resin, this spindly bench is both light-weight and surprisingly sturdy.

Jonathan Muecke (American, b. 1983), Bench, 2011. Carbon fiber and epoxy resin. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Stern Fund, M2017.58. Photo by John R. Glembin.

These exciting new acquisitions can now be seen in the Museum’s 20th- and 21st-Century Design Galleries. We are also thrilled to have recently installed Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Exhibition House Chair (previously featured on the Blog here), two new posters by John Rieben, and many other works of textile, metalwork, and industrial design.

Hannah Pivo is Curatorial Assistant for Design. She works on acquisitions, gallery rotations, and exhibitions of 20th- and 21st-century ceramics, glass, textile, graphics, industrial design, and more.

UWM-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts students (left to right) Anna Emerson, Paul Manley, and Jessica Schubkegel installing the House of Cards spiral. Photo: Ray Chi.

In the early 1950s, designers Charles and Ray Eames painstakingly arranging penny cars, pencils, pills, and papers to photograph for their House of Cards construction set. They probably never imagined that decades later, thousands of children and adults in the Milwaukee region would meticulously decorate their own House of Cards, let alone that these cards would be installed together in a towering spiral at the Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America.

MAM ArtXpress teen program participants decorating cards with seniors at St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care. Left to right: Carrie Gray, Rosalie Dupree, Taylor Anderson, Beverly Laabs, and Thaddeo Smith). Photo: Shannon Molter.

The Eameses were a husband-and-wife team who worked widely in furniture design, architecture, filmmaking, and graphics. They are considered among the most influential of midcentury American designers, and known for embracing play and experimentation in their work. In 1952, they created the House of Cards toy, an eye-catching, easy-to-assemble construction set geared towards children and adults.

Publicity photo for House of Cards, 1952. © Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com).

Original mock-ups and prototypes for the House of Cards are on view in Serious Play.  Inspired by these objects, as well as by a 2012 project at the ArtPrize festival in Grand Rapids Michigan, MAM began planning its own House of Cards initiative. In the spring and summer of 2018, the museum distributed blank House of Cards sets to dozens of groups across the region, including schools, senior centers, community groups, businesses, and professional associations. Participants were invited to express themselves by painting, drawing, collaging, and otherwise making their mark on the cards.

Sandy Szymkowski’s Milwaukee Recreation Department 55+ class with their decorated cards. Photo: Sandy Szymkowski.

Card decorating at MAM. Photo: Sandy Maxx.

Some cards were returned decorated with glass, tree bark, and other surprising additions.

Eventually, the cards made their way back to MAM, where Milwaukee-based artist Ray Chi assembled them (with the help of UWM Peck School of the Arts students Anna Emerson, Paul Manley, and Jessica Schubkegel) into two installations that will remain on view until early January 2019. One is a towering spiral of cards that rises from the musuem’s lower level parking garage entrance. It can be viewed as visitors make their way up the stairs from the garage, as well as by peering into the oculus in Windhover Hall.

The House of Cards install team (left to right): Ray Chi, Anna Emerson, Jessica Schubkegel, and Paul Manley. Photo: Ray Chi.

A second installation is located in the museum’s East End, and is comprised of numerous smaller structures that form a sculpture park, of sorts. This portion of the project will continue to evolve over the course of the Serious Play exhibition, as we invite visitors to join Ray for monthly Community Build Days. At the first of these hands-on events, participants built structures featuring passageways and hideaways that visitors are now welcome to explore. You can also contribute to the installation by decorating a card in MAM’s Kohl’s Art Generation Open Studio, any day the museum is open, between 10 am and 4 pm (and until 7pm on Thursdays!) throughout the course of the exhibition. House of Cards decorating will also be a featured activity at the upcoming event, Kohl’s Art Generation Family Sundays: The Joys of Toys on Sunday, December 2 (10am-4pm).

House of Cards Community Build Day at MAM. Photo: Ray Chi.

Students from Maryland Avenue Montessori School at Community Build Day. Photo: Ray Chi.

As a whole, the House of Cards Project has aimed to celebrate connection, collaboration, and creativity in the greater Milwaukee community. We wish to thank everyone who contributed to making this project a reality, including each and every community member who participated in decorating a card.

For more information on Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America and related events, see our website.

This project was generously sponsored by Herman Miller Cares.

Zahara Schatz and Heifetz Manufacturing Company, Table Lamp, 1951. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift from the George R. Kravis II Collection. Photo courtesy of Wright.

In 1950, the Museum of Modern Art and New York-based Heifetz Manufacturing Company announced a design competition for floor and table lamps, offering cash prizes and the tantalizing promise that Heifetz would put at least three-quarters of the winning designs into production. [1] Ultimately, eight table lamps and two floor lamps were chosen for manufacture from over 600 entries. [2] These lamps were exhibited at MoMA from March 27–June 3, 1951 (alongside drawings, diagrams, photographs of the designs), published in Arts & Architecture magazine, and offered for sale across the United States at numerous stores, including Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. in Chicago and Macy’s in New York and San Francisco. [3] Now, two of these lamps are on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum as part of Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America (Sept 28, 2018-Jan 6, 2019).

Among the jurors was renowned modernist architect Marcel Breuer, who had sparked a debate about modern lighting design the previous year that resulted in the competition. In 1949, Breuer designed an exhibition house for the Museum of Modern Art. Called The House in the Museum Garden, it was intended to model a modern and moderately-priced single-family home. Among the house’s many noteworthy features—such as its V-shaped “butterfly” roof and prominent children’s playroom—was the exclusive use of built-in lighting. Claiming that he had not been able to locate a single free-standing lamp on the market that met his criteria for good modern design, Breuer turned to wall-mounted spotlights and fluorescent “horizontal, wall-strip, indirect units.”[4] In visitor surveys, 77% approved of this “unconventional lighting,” which was supplied by New York’s Gotham Lighting Corporation and the Kurt Versen Company of Englewood, New Jersey. [5]

Installation view of the exhibition The House in the Museum Garden, April 12, 1949–October 30, 1949. Photographic Archive, Exhibition Albums, 405.9. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN405.15. Photo by Ezra Stoller.

Though a majority of visitors to the exhibition approved of Breuer’s lamp-free approach, this was bad news for lamp manufacturers such as Heifetz, and explains their interest in sponsoring the subsequent competition. In determining winners, the jury clearly selected for certain qualities; all of the manufactured designs use modern metals such as aluminum, incorporate bold geometric forms, and rest on delicate rod bases. Arts & Architecture noted (following MoMA’s press release) that Heifetz worked collaboratively with the designers, adjusting scale, material, color to prepare the entries for manufacture—a company clearly had a vision for what modern lamp design from the outset. [6]

Spread from Arts & Architecture, May 1951.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Evil Genius of a King, 1914-15. Museum of Modern Art 112.1936. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SIAE, Rome.

Interestingly, three paintings from MoMA’s collection were exhibited alongside the lamps, including Giorgio de Chirico’s, The Evil Genius of a King (1914-15), a surrealist work depicting geometric volumes in an inexplicably-angled, architecturally-defined space. [7] Perhaps the curators thought that the various painted forms would resonate with the lamps’ bold, even alien geometry.

MoMA characterized the winning designs as showing “a trend towards lightness of appearance, unusual flexibility in the control of light, and multiplicity of use.” [8] Notably, all of the winning designs were adjustable in some way, “either in height, degree and strength of light or position in the room.” [9] This quality of adaptability recalls the modernist embrace of modularity for architecture and furniture design—both offer a means for personal customization within a larger framework of standardization. In the case of Zahara Schatz’s design (pictured above), both the narrow, upward-facing cone (containing the lightbulb) and the wider, reflective shade above it were adjustable. By manipulating the angle between these two elements, a variety of lighting effects could be achieved. This was communicated in the exhibition by a set of photographs, visible on the right edge of this installation photo:

Unidentified visitors at the exhibition New Lamps, March 27, 1951–June 3, 1951. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN473.16.

Zahara Schatz, publicity photograph released in connection with the exhibition, New Lamps, March 27, 1951–June 3, 1951. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN473.4.

Zahara Schatz (1916–1999) was the daughter of prominent Israeli artist Boris Schatz, who founded the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1906. [10] After studying art in Paris, she came to the United States in 1937, where she became recognized as an artist and designer, particularly regarded for her experimental use of Plexiglas for paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and other functional objects. [11] Her work was exhibited frequently in the late 1940s and early 1950s in New York and elsewhere in the United States, and both her abstract sculpture and decorative objects received positive reviews. [12]

Lamp by Zahara Schatz, published in the New York Times, 1951.

Her participation in the MoMA/Heifetz competition was not her first, nor last, experience in lamp design. In 1947, a lamp by Schatz that featured wires sculpturally arranged within a plastic base was recognized by the American Institute of decorators, and in 1951 her design featuring a laminated plastic shade embedded with copper wire and gold fibers on a metal rod base was available at Modernage Furniture Corporation’s New York outlets. [13] These pieces, like her design for Heifetz, depart from traditional lighting to consider new materials, abstraction, and innovation strategies for light diffusion. Schatz retuned to Israel in 1951, where she founded the Ya’ad design firm with her mother and brother and continued a vibrant career in art and design. [14]

Lester Geis, publicity photograph released in connection with the exhibition New Lamps, March 27, 1951–June 3, 1951. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN473.6

Much less is known about Lester Geis, who also received an honorable mention for his table lamp design. In a press release, MoMA notes that on the whole the winning designers were young and relatively unknown, and that many were GI’s; it’s possible that Geis was among this group. Patents filed between 1945 and 1949 suggest that the New York-based Geis was working for various manufacturers around this time, designing items such as a projector for the American Optical Company of Southbridge, Massachusetts, but more research is needed to illuminate his history. [15]

Lester Geis and Heifetz Manufacturing Company, Table lamp (model T-5-), 1951. Collection of George R. Kravis II. Photo courtesy of Wright.

See Schatz and Geis’s winning lamp designs, alongside over 200 other works of midcentury design, in the exhibition Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America, which explores how many designers working in the United States after World War II achieved serious design innovations by fundamentally incorporating playfulness and whimsy into their work. On view in the Museum’s Baker/Rowland Galleries now through January 6, 2019.

[1] “Prizes Total $2,600 for Lamp Design,” New York Times, May 9, 1950.

[2] “Prize-Winning Lamps, On Exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Go On Sale Here,” press release, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 12, 1951, 1.

[3] Ibid., 20.

[4]“House in Museum Garden by Marcel Breuer to Open April 14,” press release, Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 8, 1949, 2.

[5] “Modern Architecture Favored in Poll: Survey of Visitors to House in Museum Garden Reveals Majority Like New Designs,” press release, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 11, 1949, 1; “The House in the Museum Garden: Marcel Breuer, Architect,” master checklist, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949, unpaginated.

[6] “Results: Lamp Competition,” Arts & Architecture 68, no. 5 (1951): 28.

[7]“New Lamps,” master checklist, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1951.

[8] “Prize-Winning Lamps,” 1.

[9] “10 Winners Shown in Lamp Contest,” New York Times, March 28, 1951.

[10] Dana Gilerman, “Prof. Schatz’s Wayward Children,” Haretz.com. Jan 5, 2006. Accessed December 5, 2018. Available online: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/1.4888779

[11] Margaret Anderson, “An Artist Works in Plastic,” Craft Horizons 12, no. 4 (1952): 8-12.

[12] “Prints, Plastics,” New York Times, February 2, 1947; Aline B. Louchheim, “Of ‘Material and Immaterial,’” New York Times, February 20, 1949; “Artists Display Work in Plastics,” New York Times, May 4, 1949; “Exhibit to Depict ‘Deception in Gold,’” New York Times, February 14, 1950; Stuart Preston, “At Two Modern Museums,” New York Times, August 6, 1950, “In Brief: Exhibitions,” New York Times, December 16, 1951; “Decorative Mobiles Offered for Homes,” New York Times, June 12, 1952.

[13] “Honors for Design,” New York Times, February 15, 1948; Betty Pepis, “For the Home: Modern Lamps Use Fresh Materials, New York Times, February 14, 1951.

[14] Gilerman, “Prof. Schatz’s Wayward Children.”

[15] Lester Geis and Charles L. Metzler, assignors to American Optical Company, Southbridge, MA, “Design for a Projector,” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office v. 581 (December 1945): 154; Lester Geis and Charles L. Metz, assignors to American Optical Company, “Tiltable Cabinet with Holding Mechanism,” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office v. 621 (April 1949): 1225; Lester Geis and Robert E. Pope, assignors to Radio Corporation of America, “Article Holding Album,” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office v. 623 (June 1949): 567.