Barr, less wealthy, settled for knock-offs. He ordered up a suite of tables and chairs, made with steel tubular armatures and a plastic laminate surface, from a furniture catalog from Ypsilanti, Mich. － the Design Within Reach of his day. Next to Johnson’s Mies originals, Barr’s cheaper furniture, made by the industrial designer Donald Deskey, more than holds its own. These men were modernist apostles who lived their own teachings.
Barr embraced modernism as a series of intellectual principles, propounded like a science in pedagogical charts. Johnson treated it above all as an aesthetic － though Barr had no problem with pretty things either. A case in point was MoMA’s fetishistic “Machine Art,” a show of everyday design from 1934 that was utopian and commercial at once. Against steel- and linen-covered walls of Johnson’s design, the show held up industrial objects as art in itself, and praised their unadorned beauty over the Art Deco housewares more popular at the time, which Johnson derided as insufficiently modern and too French. （This was just the start of MoMA’s pesky habit of treating Germany as the locus of European modernity, and putting France in the shade.） Cake pans, coffee pots, cash registers, and a white ElectroChef stove appeared aimd scientific instruments such as steel calipers and a brass plumb bob. Five glass boiling flasks may put you in mind of high school chemistry, but Johnson reported from Dessau that Anni and Josef Albers used them as wine decanters. Soon enough, Barr was doing the same.
The show steps gingerly around the question of how much Johnson’s design tastes fed into his embrace of fascism of the 1930s （he later apologized for his youthful politics）. He had already gushed over “all those blond boys in black leather” at a Hitler rally, and after “Machine Art” Johnson resigned from MoMA and designed gray shirts for a imagined fascist party he wanted Huey Long to lead. He soon returned to Europe and filed anti-Semitic dispatches for Father Coughlin’s newspaper, with such headlines as “Jews Dominate Polish Scene.” Barr deplored it all. Yet despite Johnson’s Nazi infatuation, he and Barr too helped several Bauhauslers come to America after the school’s closure in 1933. Johnson would eventually become their student: He enrolled at Harvard in 1940, where the exiled Gropius and Breuer were his teachers.
There is a biting irony to the history lesson of “Partners in Design”: how contemporary and covetable it all looks. Barr and Johnson were obsessed with the design of their time, but what about us, who furnish our apartments now with the exact same daybeds and housewares? One wonders if there's anything you could put in your house today that would express the same forward drive that Barr and Johnson embraced.
Barr embraced modernism as a series of intellectual principles, propounded like a science in pedagogical charts. Johnson treated it above all as an aesthetic － though Barr had no problem with pretty things either. A case in point was MoMA’s fetishistic “Machine Art,” a show of everyday design from 1934 that was utopian and commercial at once. Against steel- and linen-covered walls of Johnson’s design, the show held up industrial objects as art in itself, and praised their unadorned beauty over the Art Deco housewares more popular at the time, which Johnson derided as insufficiently modern and too French. （This was just the start of MoMA’s pesky habit of treating Germany as the locus of European modernity, and putting France in the shade.） Cake pans, coffee pots, cash registers, and a white ElectroChef stove appeared aimd scientific instruments such as steel calipers and a brass plumb bob. Five glass boiling flasks may put you in mind of high school chemistry, but Johnson reported from Dessau that Anni and Josef Albers used them as wine decanters. Soon enough, Barr was doing the same.
The show steps gingerly around the question of how much Johnson’s design tastes fed into his embrace of fascism of the 1930s （he later apologized for his youthful politics）. He had already gushed over “all those blond boys in black leather” at a Hitler rally, and after “Machine Art” Johnson resigned from MoMA and designed gray shirts for a imagined fascist party he wanted Huey Long to lead. He soon returned to Europe and filed anti-Semitic dispatches for Father Coughlin’s newspaper, with such headlines as “Jews Dominate Polish Scene.” Barr deplored it all. Yet despite Johnson’s Nazi infatuation, he and Barr too helped several Bauhauslers come to America after the school’s closure in 1933. Johnson would eventually become their student: He enrolled at Harvard in 1940, where the exiled Gropius and Breuer were his teachers.
There is a biting irony to the history lesson of “Partners in Design”: how contemporary and covetable it all looks. Barr and Johnson were obsessed with the design of their time, but what about us, who furnish our apartments now with the exact same daybeds and housewares? One wonders if there's anything you could put in your house today that would express the same forward drive that Barr and Johnson embraced.
