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Letter from Max Weber to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1956. The
Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY: Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers,
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In a 1991 oral history interview for
The Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson, noted architect,
collector, former staff member, and Trustee and benefactor
of the Museum, discussed Machine Art (MoMA Exh. #34,
March 5-April 29, 1934), the influential exhibition he organized
in 1934. In the transcript of his reminiscences, Johnson mentions
that the initial inspiration for the exhibition derived from
conversations with founding Director of the Museum Alfred
H. Barr, Jr., the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock,
and Alan Blackburn, at the time Executive Director of the
Museum, all of whom valued the aesthetic merit of certain
industrially manufactured objects, those created without artistic
intention.
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For Machine Art, Johnson selected
items such as typewriter carriage springs, a self-aligning ball
bearing, an outboard propeller, a toaster, a cash register, pots
and pans, a microscope, a compass, and scientific flasks and petrie
dishes, as typifying the beautiful in industrial objects. In the
forward to the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, Barr identified
abstract and geometric beauty, kinetic rhythms, beauty of material
and surface, and visual complexity and function as being central
to the aesthetic of "machine art."
Johnson was the founding Chairman (1932-34) of the Museum's Department
of Architecture, the first department of its kind in a museum of
art. Johnson, like Barr, believed that industrial objects of good
design merited aesthetic praise and validation, a conviction stemming
from the Bauhaus approach of dealing with various media on an equal
aesthetic scale. This belief led to the expansion of the scope of
the department, which, in 1935, became the Department of Architecture
and Industrial Art. The establishment of a separate curatorial department
devoted to architecture and design was a natural outgrowth of Alfred
H. Barr, Jr.'s original conception for the Museum; on the eve of
the opening of the Museum in 1929, Barr wrote that "the Museum would
probably expand beyond the narrow limits of painting and sculpture
in order to include departments devoted to drawings, prints, and
photography, typography, the arts of commerce and industry, architecture…stage
designing, furniture, and the decorative arts. Not the least important
collection might be the filmotek, a library of films."
SZ:...We talked about the Modern Architecture
show last time. We didn't talk about Machine Art...
PJ: Oh, yes.
SZ:...which I guess was a highly unusual exhibition for you to have
conceived of and put together.
PJ: Well, it sounds as if I conceived it. I never conceived anything,
so it must have been...It was really in talks with Alfred (H. Barr,
Jr.), because the whole Bauhaus approach--that the decorative arts
were no longer in existence, but that art could still be made without
the handcraft approach--so it was an anti-handcraft show. The worship
of the machine was an important part of it, kept over from the Futurists,
but it was mostly based on the Bauhaus approach. But you see, the
whole impetus is gone, the whole moral socialism of that day, that
Alfred really shared. He came through with his puritanism, and with
me it was purely stylistic, as coming from the Bauhaus. But Hitchcock
and I were more interested in the style side of things--a word that
everybody hated and still do--but we felt that a machine made an
ideology, a theme that would be good to substitute for the handcrafts.
The word we did coin--Alan Blackburn and I did--while we were drinking.
SZ: While you were drinking, did you say?
PJ: Yes. It was about 4:00 in the morning, and the words "machine
art" just came out of the air, a very, very good idea. Funny that
it doesn't seem like an idea anymore, it's just machine art, but
in those days it was an invention from the air. So, that made it
very, very easy because we could find the objects all the way from
non-designed things--pots and pans (INTERRUPTION)...
SZ: Continuing, yes, you were telling me about the everyday objects--pots
and pans...
PJ: Yes, all the way from there, and then we tried to find objects
that were designed by names, and there hardly were any names, so
we felt we'd better stress just the very fact of the beauty of objects
that were just the result of other forces than design. But the beauty
of them--like the propeller, which is always beautiful--and things
of that kind. The result, of course, was extraordinary. Everybody
hated us deeply for being anti-art. Barnett Newman--I've been reading
his new book--has a strong attack on machine artists being the antithesis
of what art should be, which is very funny coming from Barney, who's
a modern artist. That's an interesting book, by the way, because
it shows the prejudices of a modern architect of the early Abstract
Expressionism. It's funny. He didn't like Alfred Barr very much
because Alfred liked Cézanne as the founder of modern art,
and everybody knows it was really Manet, an entirely different direction.
That's not the Museum, though, except his attack on Alfred.
SZ: That show's been called the beginning of the Museum's life as
a tastemaker and...
PJ: Yes. Trying to force pots and pans down...
SZ: When you went looking for objects to include, were you already
looking at your...I guess you were looking at your environment in
that way all the time anyhow.
PJ: That's the reason we did the show, because we were looking at...Alfred
and I had been looking at beautiful, plain objects like ball bearings.
I think we exaggerated that, but it made a good propaganda point.
SZ: Another thing that was said about it...Even though you ran into
a great deal of criticism, I guess on the content of the show, your
installation technique was heralded.
PJ: I know. Isn't that funny.
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