Whose Design? MoMA and Pevsner’s Pioneers

On 3 October 1947, Philip Johnson wrote to Nikolaus Pevsner on the subject of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius, published in 1936 by Faber and Faber in London [fig.1]. Praising Pevsner’s account of the origins of modern architecture and design, Johnson informed the historian, who had emigrated from Germany to London in 1933, “as always when I read it, I am learning from it.”¹ Johnson however, had one major gripe, which he could not resist divulging:

Of course you realize that I feel the name of Walter Gropius is overstressed. If you promise to throw this letter away when you have read it, I can tell you that I believe that Mr. Gropius has never designed any building, whether it has appeared over his name alone or not. In other words, to say From Morris to Gropius is too much of a compliment to our estimable and excellent pedagogue Walter Gropius.²

That there was no love lost between Johnson and Gropius has been discussed elsewhere, and is not what concerns us here.³ Rather, what is compelling about Johnson’s appraisal of Pioneers is that it was solicited by Pevsner during preparation of the book’s second edition, published in 1949 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where Johnson was then curator of architecture. If, as many scholars have suggested, Pevsner’s later revisions to his text during the 1960s exposed his historiographical reflex in the face of emerging narratives of modernism that countered his own,⁴ the 1949 edition of Pioneers — an overlooked episode in the book’s contentious history — demonstrates a reflex of an entirely different nature. The repackaging of the book, from its text to its appearance to its title, which conspicuously changed from Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) to Pioneers of Modern Design (1949), marked its deployment in MoMA’s campaign to cultivate an American breed of modernism. Yet, as the book’s new title suggests, design had seemingly eclipsed the very notion of a modern movement. How this elision was mobilized is a narrative of mixed messages, which in turn reveals the malleability of the term design at this historical moment.

While the book’s totalizing claims and exclusions have sustained decades of criticism, when it was first released in 1936, Pioneers offered a striking interpretation of the genesis modernism, a then nascent subject of scholarship.⁵ Structured by typologically diverse chapters, the book tackled architecture and the applied arts, painting circa 1890, Art Nouveau, and engineering, and it argued that a modern style had developed during the two decades preceding World War I.

According to Pevsner, it was William Morris — “the true prophet of the twentieth century, the father of the Modern Movement” — who had recuperated art’s social import by promoting the “decorative honesty” of handicraft, thereby establishing the theoretical foundation for the artists, designers, and architects in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States who, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would develop a modern style across the arts.⁶ This inherently universal style reached its apotheosis in the work of Gropius, whose model factory for Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne in 1914 is the focus of Pevsner’s conclusion to his narrative. As the historian (too) neatly articulated the “historical unit” encapsulated within Pioneers, “Gropius regards himself a follower of Ruskin and Morris, of Van de Velde, and of the Werkbund. So our circle is complete.”⁷ Therefore the “Modern Movement,” Pevsner insisted, must be understood as a “synthesis of the Morris Movement, the development of steel building, and Art Nouveau.”⁸

When Johnson contacted Pevsner on behalf of MoMA in the summer of 1947 about republishing Pioneers, it was an opportune moment for both parties. Whether due to postwar paper rationing in England or to meager sales, Faber and Faber did not invest in a second edition of Pioneers, which had gone out of print in 1942. Yet, unbeknownst to its author, in 1946 Faber and Faber had authorized Rosa e Ballo, a Milanese publisher, to produce an Italian translation of Pioneers.⁹ After learning of this agreement, an irritated Pevsner informed Faber and Faber that “one or two pages in my book... are now definitely out of date and there is one page in which an Italian item should have been moved from footnotes into the main text” — here referring to the architect Antonio Sant’Elia, the first edition’s only Italian representative (though indeed relegated to a footnote).¹⁰ Presented with the opportunity to incorporate into his text this and other revisions that he had been contemplating in the decade that had passed since the book’s first printing, Pevsner accepted MoMA’s invitation.

As the architectural historian Alina Payne has pointed out, it is Pioneers’ inter disciplinary scope that distinguishes it from contemporaneous accounts of modern architecture, such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929) and Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) — two important texts (and authors) quite familiar to MoMA’s protagonists.¹¹ Indeed, Pevsner’s broader perspective of modernism held a particular appeal for MoMA; since the 1930s, the museum had been searching for the appropriate language and methodology with which to address the categories of architecture and design.¹² Owing to the popularity of its Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), curated by Johnson and Hitchcock, the museum established a department of architecture that same year. An engagement with the “minor arts” began soon after with two exhibitions, Objects: 1900 and Today (1933) and Machine Art (1934), both curated by Johnson. In 1935, the department appended “Industrial Arts” to its title, only to separate into the Department of Architecture and the Department of Industrial Design in 1940, and then to reconsolidate as the unified Department of Architecture and Design in 1948. More than just symptomatic of MoMA’s efforts to reconcile the role of the “minor arts” within its broader program, these departmental changes also reflected differing curatorial points of view — differences that at the moment of MoMA’s appropriation of Pioneers created a contentious split within the department between Johnson (who had returned to the museum in 1945 following a ten-year hiatus) and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., curator of design between 1946 and 1955.¹³ Often privileging architects as designers of objects, Johnson attempted to establish aesthetic standards across architecture and design, “focusing on design as an extension of the fine art of architecture,” as Edward Eigen and Terence Riley have remarked.¹⁴ Working closely with retailers and manufacturers, Kaufmann’s mission, by contrast, was to promote modern design to the American public and to make objects of “good design” widely available to domestic consumers.¹⁵ Yet, as the fields of architecture and design became increasingly blurred within MoMA at midcentury, whether in its departmental reorganization or its exhibitions or its construction of a series of Houses in the Garden — fall-scale structures replete with furniture and objects — Pevsner’s inter disciplinary reading of the origins of modernism resonated with the Department of Architecture and Design’s varied curatorial activities as much as it validated them.

Late in the summer of 1947, in a letter to Monroe Wheeler, the museum’s director of publications, Pevsner outlined his plans for updating Pioneers. He indicated that he wanted to change the order of some material (in the introduction, “Sullivan’s Ornament in Architecture of 1892” was to precede Henry Van de Velde, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Frank Lloyd Wright); expand upon the contributions of certain figures (Philip Webb, Norman Shaw, H. H. Richardson, and Arthur Mackmurdo); introduce several new figures (in the second chapter, Stanford White, and in the last chapter, “[e]arly Mies must appear with Poelzig etc.”); and develop further his analysis of building typologies and technology (in the chapter on engineering, “a little more on the early skyscrapers,” more on “Giedion’s St. Louis [river] fronts,” as well as more on “earlier iron structures in England”).¹⁶ Pevsner anticipated that his chapter on Art Nouveau would require the most reworking [fig.2]. Not only did he want to add Sullivan as a protagonist in the movement but also, more ambitiously, Pevsner intended to demonstrate that the “earliest true Art Nouveau forms are really English 1880ies,” which, he predicted, “will come as a surprise to most people.”¹⁷ If the development of a modern style was, according to Pevsner, an absolute phenomenon, the same could not be said about its historiography, which in the case of the second edition of Pioneers became a matter of rearranging existing materials and sharpening their contours. In effect, it was a process of redesign, of providing a new form for the transmission of the book’s argument. But by inviting Wheeler, Johnson, Kaufmann, and Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, to propose further changes to the text, Pevsner transformed this process into a uniquely collaborative affair, which would in turn transform Pioneers’ very message.¹⁸

A look at Johnson’s and Kaufmann’s responses to Pevsner’s text helps elucidate both the mediations that shaped the 1949 edition and also how the book inadvertently offered a palliative intermediary between the two curators’ perspectives on modern architecture and design. In addition to candidly questioning the valorization of Gropius, Johnson also challenged Pevsner’s omissions, to which a steadfast Pevsner responded:

I want to concentrate in the book on the main line of development more or less as I have drawn it. This is why I left out two [sic] other currents, namely
l) Art Nouveau developing into Expressionism (Gaudí)
2) Art Nouveau developing into something quite close to the Modern Movement (Cologne theatre)
3) Neo-Classicism developing into something close to the Modern Movement (your point a propos Mies[)]
If I include the latter I would also have to include the much weaker English Neo-Georgian which in a similarly negative way can get just as close to the modern idiom. Doesn’t Corbusier become the great leader only after 1920? How right you are: we should talk this over.¹⁹

Fully conceding that the book was not a comprehensive narrative, Pevsner made clear that his argument relied as much on the inclusion and exclusion of certain phenomena as it did on maintaining very precise distances between them. As he insinuated, the danger of portraying the proximity of particular strands of artistic activity put the autonomy of his “historical unit” at risk.

But Kaufmann, too, kept the author on his toes regarding the book’s rigid historical boundaries, though he did so by honing in on the lineage of design theories outlined in the text. To Kaufmann’s inquiry about the absence of Gottfried Semper, whose theoretical and pedagogical engagement with industrial art predated (and indeed influenced) many of his “pioneers,” Pevsner replied:

The book goes from Morris to Gropius and I feel that it would be lead [sic] back ad infinitum if I went into the Semper problems. I would certainly need Pugin and so back to Laugier, Lodoli, etc. I don’t think one can connect it with the term modern movement before the Morris date, (with the exception of engineering design).²⁰

Embedded in Pevsner’s defense of his historical time frame was his own recognition of its arbitrary basis. Pevsner was, however, receptive to many of Kaufmann’s other suggestions, namely, to further emphasize the influence of Japan on late-nineteenth century artists, to address the relationship between impressionism and the Arts and Crafts movement, to provide more detail about the history of cast iron, to include additional illustrations of C. F. A. Voysey’s work, and to offer more on Art Nouveau glass — a request which prompted Pevsner to inquire, “Can you recommend to me by return anything sound I could read up on Tiffany and on the School of Nancy? I know too little about them.”²¹ If Johnson had learned from reading Pioneers, Pevsner was also learning from the museum in the process of revising his text. And to broaden and arguably influence the historian’s perspective, the museum tactically forwarded Pevsner books, including MoMA exhibition catalogs, that were germane to the story outlined in Pioneers. Johnson sent a copy of his Mies van der Rohe catalog, produced for the museum’s monographic show that ran from September 1947 to January 1948, as well as the catalog for MoMA’s 1933 exhibition Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910, authored by Hitchcock.²² At Pevsner’s request, Wheeler sent his own personal copy of Hugh Morrison’s Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935), as the museum needed its “library’s only copy” to prepare for an exhibition titled Louis Sullivan: 1856-1924, which would open in the spring of 1948.²³

Both Pevsner’s willingness and unwillingness to incorporate Johnson’s and Kaufmann’s suggestions into Pioneers present an unusual historiographical methodology of negotiation. A brief consideration of the 1949 chapter on Art Nouveau illustrates how Pevsner integrated his own revisions and those suggested by his American colleagues at MoMA into his original text. For the most part, the changes that Pevsner had initially proposed to Wheeler in 1947 appeared in the second edition. By identifying Arthur Mackmurdo’s title page illustration for his book Wren’s City Churches (1883)²⁴ as the earliest manifestation of Art Nouveau, Pevsner could now argue that the movement had begun in England, thereby reinforcing the overall narrative trajectory of Pioneers [fig.3]. While the 1936 edition of Pioneers had identified Victor Horta as the creator of Art Nouveau architecture, with his Hotel Tassel (1893) as evidence, the 1949 edition demoted the Belgian architect to the position of co-creator, a title now shared with Sullivan [fig.4]. Surreptitiously, and with unequivocal reluctance, in a footnote Pevsner identified Antoni Gaudí as a third co-creator of Art Nouveau architecture. Though he cites the Catalan architect’s work as “every bit as surprising and original as Mackmurdo’s and Sullivan’s and also every bit as close to Art Nouveau,” Pevsner believed that Gaudí’s work was so inconsistent with the modern movement as a whole “that one remains embarrassed wherever one tries to allot him a historical place.”²⁵ To prohibit Gaudí’s irreconcilable individualism from tainting even his footnotes, Pevsner illustrated this commentary with a particularly staid detail of Gaudí’s Palau Güell: striking for its uncharacteristic representation of the architect’s oeuvre, the inclusion of this image was perhaps a disingenuous defense of the architect’s appearance, which was clearly a concession to Johnson.²⁶ Though buried in a footnote in this way, MoMA’s influence surfaced more visibly in the space of the refurbished chapter on the Art Nouveau movement, which featured images of glasswork by Emile Galle and Tiffany from the museum’s collection, thus rendering the institution inextricable from the history of modernism.²⁷

If behind Pevsner’s impressive body of research, the museum’s role in the second edition of Pioneers remained indiscernible to the reader, the book’s physical appearance betrayed the institution’s signature. For the 1936 edition, Pevsner had shaped both the text and the visual identity of the 6-by-8 ½ inch book. In his initial proposal to Faber and Faber, he had suggested a layout in which nearly every page paired text with a corresponding image, a “yet untried” format that he proudly argued would permit a “far more pleasant” and uninterrupted reading experience.²⁸ Boasting a new typeface, the second edition of Pioneers maintained the coupling of illustrations with text — accord to Pevsner’s wishes — in a broader 7 ½-by-10 inch format, which allowed for the juxtaposition of multiple images on a single page.²⁹ But it was on the outside of the book the museum boldly overwrote Pevsner’s original vision of Pioneers. Reviewing Faber and Faber’s mock-up for the title page of Pioneers in 1936, Pevsner had contested the layout of the photographic portraits of Morris and Gropius, who appeared disproportionate to another; their heads, Pevsner argued, “really should be exactly the same size, implying that the book’s appearance should reflect the argument that it contained.”³⁰ For the 1949 edition, a sans serif typeface eviscerated the identities of Morris and Gropius, displacing the reification of Pevsner’s “historical unit” in the physiognomy of its leaders with a typographical portrait whose modern aesthetic inscribed the institutional presence of MoMA onto the face of the book. As Pevsner’s original text and illustrations became the palimpsest for a new history by the name of Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius, the book’s new title suggested that this object of modern design might reveal some secrets about its origin.

To be sure, Pevsner was by no means a stranger to the field of design; however, he viewed it from a different perspective than did his peers at the museum. Since his arrival in England in 1933, the historian had fully immersed himself in a developing discourse on design that was contemporaneous with MoMA’s increasing investment in the subject. In England, Pevsner began his career with a research fellowship at the Department of Commerce at Birmingham University, studying the contemporary state of British industrial production; in 1935, he was hired as a fabrics buyer at the furnishing firm of Gordon Russell Ltd. As Paul Crossley has noted, Pevsner there found himself “in an art-historical gold mine,” since the “treasures of British art, from Anglo-Saxon crosses to Voysey, had singularly failed to inspire English scholarship” beyond connoisseurship and biographical studies.³¹ Indeed, Pevsner was himself a pioneer in this nascent field, publishing a series of articles in 1936 on the “Designer in Industry” in the Architectural Review (which at that time devoted a small number of pages to decorative arts and interiors), as well as his book An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, published in 1937 and written at the same time as Pioneers. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the meaning and contours of design would continue to develop in England, fueling a lively discourse and various forms of production, which are beyond the scope of this essay.³² But the possibility that the American and English “design fields” were perhaps more parallel than confluent is suggested by a review of the MoMA catalog Machine Art, published in the Architectural Review in 1934, in which the author snidely remarked, “God’s Own Country has discovered beauty in the machine.”³³

In a letter to Pevsner in the autumn of 1947, Kaufmann enthusiastically proclaimed that “re-publishing the book is the best single thing that we could do in the design field at this time.”³⁴ The title of Kaufmann’s 1950 publication What Is Modern Design?, part of a series that introduced the public to MoMA’s activities, thus posed a burning question, which Pevsner’s newly christened narrative seemed to partially answer. If design meant “conceiving and giving form to objects used in everyday life,” the curator explained in his text, then modern design must be understood as “the planning and making of objects suited to our way of life, our abilities, our ideals.”³⁵ And with a nod to the recently published Pioneers, Kaufmann noted that modem design “began a century ago when creative and perceptive people reacted to the vast problems posed by technological change and mass production.”³⁶ To demonstrate its “steady development since then,” Kaufmann illustrated the “number of outward forms” that modern design had taken,³⁷ juxtaposing numerous examples of contemporary American design from the 1940s with “older works” of European origin from preceding decades, thus implying that the American design field had picked up where the European pioneers had left off. It was an objective that Kaufmann — like his predecessors and successors, though in different ways³⁸ — would attempt to fulfill through his curatorial position at MoMA, most notably in a series of exhibitions, mounted between 1950 and 1955 and titled Good Design, in which the museum collaborated with domestic manufacturers with the aim of improving consumer goods and public taste.³⁹ The value of Pevsner’s Pioneers was therefore not just its documentation of the achievements of this historical moment but also the way in which its establishment of a historical past set the stage for contemporary progress in American cultural production.

But there are further implications of Pioneers’ new title. While pitching the book to Faber and Faber in 1935, Pevsner had declared his objective “to prove that the modern style is in all its distinguishing characteristics a creation of the ten or fifteen years before the War,” and “to fix once [and] for all the exact facts and dates about the development.”⁴⁰ By contrast, the title Pioneers of Modern Design proposed a development that was more ongoing, more fluid, and therefore broader in its embrace. Modern design had not only subsumed machine art, useful objects, industrial art, and industrial design, terms that the museum had previously employed and some of which appeared in Pevsner’s text, but also architecture, a salient aspect of Pioneers story. As design became increasingly ubiquitous towards the middle of the twentieth century, it steadily infiltrated the field of architecture — appearing in the titles of publications and educational programs — and even the identity of the architect, whose title became interchangeable with designer. Launching the discipline into terrain beyond the materiality of the architectural object, design encompassed its own latent ideas and concepts.⁴¹ (To further complicate the multivalence of design, it is worth noting that in the title of the German edition of Pioneers, design is translated as Formgebung rather than Gestaltung.) Demanding a conceptual and formal balance between material, function, and available means of production, modern design also departed from Pevsner’s notion of a historically defined modern movement. Rather than a series of finished objects and characters, or even a stylistic program, what design offered was the possibility of a methodology driven by theory.⁴² In this way, the displacement of movement by design in the title of Pioneers destabilized the historical “circle” that Pevsner had outlined in his book. Emblematic of this process of destabilization was the very redesign of the book, from its collaborative revisions to the refurbishment of its graphic identity; and its renaming, then, could not have been more appropriate.

With the success of Pioneers of Modern Design, which sold more copies in its first six months on the market than the first edition had over a five-year period, “God’s Own Country” had discovered Pevsner. In a review of the second edition, which appeared in the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal in 1950, author John Gloag bemoaned the fact that an English publisher had not yet rereleased “this authoritative work.”⁴³ Yet, Pevsner did in fact attempt to make Pioneers of Modern Design available in England. An initial distribution arrangement had been coordinated between Architectural Press in London and MoMA, and 1,050 copies of the book were produced with the names of the publisher and the museum stamped on the title page, and with MoMA’s name appearing again on the spine. When Architectural Press was unable to obtain the proper import license, Pevsner offered the copies to Faber and Faber. The appearance of the name of a different publisher on the book’s title page was not the only factor that led Faber and Faber to decline: “Our feeling is that the book would start with the serious disadvantage of its entirely American appearance, accentuated by the imprint of the Museum of Modern Art on the spine of the binding, and we couldn’t enter into the undertaking with the full confidence we should have had if the book had been our production or even cased in an English style of binding.”⁴⁴ Denied entry because it wore its modern American design too boldly, Pioneers was ironically rejected in England — the very place where the book had originated, and where, according to its narrative, modernism had begun.