Back to the Lost Future

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Brooklyn Museum's entrance hall is a period room of the recently lost future, haunted by a peculiar American dream from the days when model-airplane kits were still mostly balsa. A 1929 high-wing monoplane, bravely lacquered in sky blue and wasp yellow, hangs from the ceiling, almost low enough for the grown visitor to touch its spats. Nearby sits the Chrysler Airflow -- not, alas, the classic 1934 model with the "waterfall" radiator, but still modernity on wheels, squinty windshield, fairings and all. Between them are such icons as the 1936 Sears-Roebuck Waterwitch outboard, offering its owner some whiff of the thrill associated with Henry Dreyfuss's bullet-nosed locomotives or Norman Bel Geddes' flying wings. Your trousers shorten as you look.

Was it only 50 years ago? How touching our grandfathers' faith in the future seems, in our day of acid rain, exploding shuttles, decaying inner cities and general creeping dystopia. The mood is epitomized in objects like the male costume of the future dreamed up for Vogue -- a bearded figure in an immaculate white jumpsuit wearing a circular antenna as a halo on his head, John the Baptist among the insulators. Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush toward Utopia is clearly signified by things like a 1933 Raymond Loewy metal teardrop desk-mounted pencil sharpener. In the twelve years between the Wall Street Crash and Pearl Harbor, the American imagination seems to have oscillated between two images, the streamline and the breadline -- the former promising relief from the latter. And in the maxim of the 1939 New York World's Fair, "See tomorrow -- now!," lay the siren syllables of undeferred gratification that would abolish the constraints of Puritan America while preserving its millenarian fantasies.

A plethora of dreams flowed from America in the 1920s and '30s; and though, at least on the face of it, we have ceased to share them, they lend a deep and sometimes rather scary poignancy to the remarkable exhibition organized by Art Historians Richard Guy Wilson and Dianne H. Pilgrim, titled "The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941." The show will run until Feb. 16 at the Brooklyn Museum and travel to Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Atlanta through 1987.

It was in the '20s and '30s, and in America, that a cultural fascination with machinery that had been growing since the early 19th century reached its apogee. One is used to reading, in prattle like Tom Wolfe's 1981 book Bauhaus to Our House, that the American affair with machine culture during those years -- functionalism, steel-and-glass buildings and so forth -- had been imported, as intellectual fashion, from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers of a technology whose emblematic climax was John and Washington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge, were among the prototypes of European avant-garde thinking before and after World War I. Even to the Russian constructivists, "Americanism" was something infinitely desirable: it stood for electricity, progress, a society knit together and made transparent by fast communication.

In Europe, World War I -- history's first fully mechanized conflict, a production line of death -- had given climactic form to the image of the bad machine, a Moloch bent on destruction and alienation, that had haunted the imagination of artists and writers through the 19th century. No one was going to see the machine as an unqualified good. But America's role in that distant war had been small, its trauma of human loss slight. With industry booming, Americans found it not just easy but almost obligatory to believe in machine- created Utopias. Their country, wrote the photographer Paul Strand in 1922, was the "supreme altar of the new God," a trinity formed by "God the Machine, Materialistic Empiricism the Son, and Science the Holy Ghost." Its factories, thought Strand's colleague Charles Sheeler, "are our substitutes for religious expression."

The machine, with its stripped and logical forms, its imagery of power, change and fast communication, would make concrete what Walt Whitman had dreamed of: "The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new." Farewell to Henry Adams' Virgin, to the Renaissance and Gothic nostalgia that had assuaged the cultural elites of New York and Boston at the end of the 19th century; welcome to the dynamo, to the total plan, the slick shell housing, the fins and flanges, the didactic sheen of stainless steel, the Aztec-style bracelet of imperishable Bakelite. Goodbye, Hell's Kitchen; hello, skyscraper.

The traditional American frontier of horizontal space was receding into memory by 1920. In its place grew a new myth that supplied one of the core images of American art deco: the conquest of the air, by buildings and machines -- the taming of vertical space. The aircraft, with its fairings and streamlines, became the formal metaphor for a host of products from milkshake machines to staplers. Fantasy piled on fantasy: Bel Geddes, one of the master industrial designers of the period, looked at airfoils and fish and came up with the finned, monocoque body of his Motor Car Number 9, 1933, which was never built but which launched a thousand period spaceships into the popular epic of the future.

Meanwhile, as static conquest of the air, the skyscraper multiplied the site, extruding a patch of earth into a stack of pure property: the abstract, universal sign of capitalism. The standardization of its floors invoked the image of the machine, like the use of bodies as mechanical parts in Busby Berkeley's choreography or the precisely drilled production-line kicks of the Rockettes. Its soaring shafts, tapering setbacks and elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells and slots of shadow suggested exuberance and secrecy conjoined, the "metropolitan style" of Big Business. Instead of quoting Gothic or Renaissance detail as an indirect sign of quality, the whole tower changed into a business logo, architecture as advertisement -- the archexample being William Van Alen's Chrysler Building, 1928-31, with friezes of hubcaps and wheels, gargantuan winged chrome radiator ornaments and stainless-steel finial.

The imagery of this "architecture of joy" is one of clean impaction and ecstatic reaching toward the light; not even the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, made as much of solar disks, sunrays and other bursts of radiance as deco America. As the Utopian form to end all others, the skyscraper manifested itself as chairbacks, bookcases, table lamps, cocktail shakers and, of course, refrigerators. That these things were not tall mattered no more than the fact that most streamlined objects did not budge. It was the image that counted.

Drawing on public and private collections all over America, but especially in New York, the curators of this show have done a wonderful job of bringing all this, and more, together. At last one can see, in full detail, how the mass- produced, democratic nature of American machine-based design gave it a quite different flavor from French art deco, which was less a response to the myth of modernity than a continuation, by souped-up means, of the high luxury tradition of ebeniste furniture. The work of painters and sculptors was far less important to this process than that of photographers, engineers, architects and designers. What epitomized the machine age better: a gas pump quoted in a painting by Stuart Davis or a DC-3? John Marin's watercolors of the New York skyline or the Empire State Building itself, surging upward before the astonished eyes of Gotham at the rate of one floor a day? A relief sculpture by Charles Biederman or the prodigious steel catenaries of Othmar H. Ammann's design for the George Washington Bridge?

There are some delightful "pure" works of art in this show, like Alexander Calder's little maquette for a huge motorized sculpture at the New York World's Fair -- a small, sharp orrery with strong cosmological overtones. There are also some rarities by lesser-known artists, notably the huge cubist- derived portrait of the workings of a watch by Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate on whom Scott Fitzgerald was to base his character of Dick Diver. . But compared with the knockout confidence of the work of engineers and designers represented in this show, the machine-esthetic painting of '20s and '30s America was mostly feeble, decent and derivative -- an appendage to a larger cultural framework.

No American sculptor who tried to make metaphors of technology, not even Calder, came up with an object as striking as Walter Teague's "Bluebird" radio, 1937-40, whose integration of a spartan constructivist design ethic into an American sense of technology as spectacle -- the big blue glass disk suggesting the ether from which broadcast signals were gathered -- shows how little truth there is in the idea that design is condemned to lag behind "high" art in expressive clarity. We certainly need more shows as thorough and intelligent as this one, to counteract the vulgar mania for "art stars" and remind us of the real continuities of visual culture.