Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design by Kristina Wilson (review)
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Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers important rethinking of the "butterfly chair," "womb chair," and other design icons (made familiar for new generations by Mad Men popular culture). Far from representing neutral expressions of style, Wilson declares, Modernist objects embedded racialized assumptions and experiences, serving as "a powerful tool for constructing Whiteness to White consumers" (p. 3). Wilson unpacks how postwar architecture books, decorating photographs, magazines, and advertisements marketed Modernism to white families. The book then develops what Wilson calls a "counter-history of African American Modernism," in which Black media and Black designers embraced the new fashion on different terms (p. 15).
Wilson reads white architects and designers promoting Modernism as offering white nuclear families both "gendered control and racialized control" (p. 25). Mary and Russel Wright noted in 1950 that uncluttering kept their home neat after their Black maid left (effectively allowing the exclusion of nonwhite presence). White designers praised backyards as protecting children from street risks and pollution, implying a racialized "binary between dangerous and safe, smelly and natural, criminal and law-abiding" (p. 65). But Black architect Paul Williams celebrated backyards instead as private spaces where Black people could enjoy outdoor living, escaping segregation's public barriers and hostile scrutiny. Wilson assesses Williams's support for Modernism as "less invested in establishing boundaries against something and more committed to promoting the agency" of residents (p. 65).
Wilson shows that both Life and Ebony magazines ran images of Modernist furniture dramatically staged before big picture windows, symbolizing idealized postwar living. Life stressed the middle-class affordability of Herman Miller seating, but Ebony featured glamorous new homes of wealthy Black elites: "In Life, Modernism signifies control, discipline, and cleanliness … preservation of a newly articulated sphere of Whiteness—by contrast, in Ebony, Modernism is a sign of social confidence, economic success, and physical comfort … an arena of empowerment for bodies of color" (p. 72). Comparing beer and television advertisements in Life versus Ebony, Wilson spotlights small but telling alterations made in Modernist home settings. Life's ads for vacuums and cleaning products implied a distance between suburban Modernist lifestyles and urban grittiness.
Wilson critiques specific Modernist objects as racialized, arguing that Eames and George Nelson chairs locked users into awkward postures and proved physically uncomfortable for differently sized users: "In an era when [End Page 369] White bodies could control bodies of color, … to design objects that discipline bodies into specific comportment is an act of White privilege" (p. 145). By writing an upmarket article stressing that some traditional African and Asian cultures never used chairs, Nelson "implied … that the Modernist chairs … are evolutionarily appropriate for its White readers" (p. 153).
Publicity for Herman Miller accented Modernist shelving units with woven baskets and miniature totem poles. Wilson reads this appropriation as signaling the value of corporate-manufactured furniture versus "primitive" folk art, not for sale and thus "inconsequential … displayed on shelves divorced from any context like objects isolated in a museum display" (p. 148). Similarly, magazine photographs paired Modernist furniture with non-Western accessories, supplying "a touch of curiosity, in the mode of a colonialist tourist, but … always clearly secondary to the dominant aesthetic of simplicity" (p. 188). Life presented masks from an undifferentiated "Africa" as exoticized collectibles. By contrast, Ebony positioned Black people's displays of African masks as validating personal identity and reflecting cultured appreciation of African artists' skill. Meanwhile, decorators also popularized white Americana, featuring sentimentalized Grandma Moses or Scottish-heritage themes. Consumers literally bought into décor stereotyping Chinese peasants and Black "lawn jockeys"; a white designer named 1949's "Ubangi" pitcher by fetishizing its protruding lip.
Wilson acknowledges ambiguities in this complex vision of "a multivalent mid-century Modernism" (p. 97). The author aims to distinguish between different messages that Modernism sent to Black and white consumers about comfort, security, control, and home. However, the illustrations include evidence that sometimes makes...
