The Magazine Antiques

In the early 1950s, modernism’s newness was rationalizedin several other ways in the mainstream press. In anApril 1952 column in Better Homes and Gardens, a columnist posing as an everywoman homemaker expressedone of the standard complaints about modernism: inbreaking from the past, it seemed to eschew social propriety.Modern designers, she wrote, “have no ancestralresidues. No nostalgia. Their new houses are really designedfor a race of very young orphans of unknown parentage.With amnesia, if possible.” But the forgoing is only asetup for a narrative in which the writer ends up confessingto a surprising change of heart. No longer biasedagainst modernism’s newness, she now appreciates the factthat contemporary design allows for a liberating breakfrom precedent: “Today’s good Modern has an airy lightness, a lean, picked, bare-boned look. There is a thin, heronlike grace to it. Certainly it gives an uncluttered serenity to living that is a great relief after the last 50 years of… neo-Colonial with its arch, chintzy, revivals of coffee mills for ivy holders and bootjacks for book ends.”3

By the later 1950s, however, Saarinen’s furniture hadacquired a diff erent status, and it was no longer necessaryto argue for it. In 1957 Knoll introduced the architect’sPedestal line: the side and armchairs and assorted tables,each perched on a single lily-padlike base (Fig. 5). Theconfident pose of the designswas almost breathtaking:Saarinen had devised a slendermetal support that emerged, ina single liquid movement, froma round base (see Fig. 4). Hewas quoted in Knoll’s press release for this furniture andsubsequently in countless journals and newspapers acrossthe country, declaring, “I’ve been wanting to clear upthe slum of legs in our rooms for many years. Iwanted to make the chair all one thing again. Allthe great furniture of the past from Tutankhamen’schair to Thomas Chippendale’s have always beena structural total.”6 The designer had become anoracle, and his formalist explanation for thevalue of his work was rationale enough.

The celebrity status of this generation of designerswas immortalized in a photograph takenfor Playboy magazine in 1961 showing severalmajor designers with their creations (Fig. 7).Saarinen is represented by the Womb chair, buthe is emphatically not curled up in it, rather hashis feet placed commandingly on the ground.

Rockwell’s cover is part, albeit an irreverentpart, of this confi dent moment. It seems possiblethat modernism, and not the domestic scene,was the object of the illustrator’s joke: whiledesigners might preach and swagger, their productswere reduced to playing supporting roles inroutine family dramas. For the millions of consumerspicking up this issue of the Saturday Evening Post, these designs were no longer threateningor strange. They were as familiar as thefamily next door.

1 Mary Roche, “New Chair Offers More Relaxation,” New York Times, May 19, 1948, p. 24.

2 Quoted in Brian Lutz, “Furniture,”in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonenand Donald Albrecht (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006),p. 253.

3 Marian Castle, “I’ll Take My Modern in Moderation,” Better Homes and Gardens, vol. 30, no. 4 (April 1952), pp. 6, 9.

4 Marion Gough, “Are You Aware of the Increasing High Styleof Durability?” House Beautiful, vol. 94 (April 1952), p. 118.

5 “It’s Engineered to Speed Home Chores,” Better Homes and Gardens, vol. 30, no. 5 (May 1952), p. 62.

6 “Products: SaarinenStemware Sits Well in Today’s Architectural Space,” Architectural Forum, vol. 106 (July 1957), p. 169.

KRISTINA WILSON is the author of Livable Modernism:Interior Decorating and Design During the GreatDepression and The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA,and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934. She teaches at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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