The 1940s are about as far back as the living can remember, yet no era could be more resistant to the warm glow of nostalgia. This was the worst of decades, not just in the twentieth century but arguably all of human history: a time of trauma and destruction that we are still trying to understand. Into these deep waters steps the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a depth charge of an exhibition called Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s. It’s a darkly clever title, referring both to the violence that defined the decade’s first half and the explosive cultural recovery that started in its second.
One salutary aspect of the show, indeed, is that it bridges the demarcation year of 1945, conventionally used to begin “postwar” histories. While this chronological boundary has an obvious logic, it tends to obscure continuities between the war years and their aftermath—the creative work that was being done even as the conflict raged, and its ongoing effects after peace had been declared. It’s a lot to fit into an exhibition, but the PMA is well positioned to pull it off.
Jessica Todd Smith, Director of Curatorial Affairs and the lead on the project, notes that the museum had “extraordinary strength in the period, and comparatively little on view.” Initial research turned up more than twenty-four thousand artworks to consider, which she and her colleagues, including curators Elisabeth Agro, Amanda Bock, and Dilys Blum, eventually narrowed down to 250. All are drawn from the permanent collection—something museums should be doing more often at a time when resources are limited and storage areas are overfull. The final selection is truly cross-departmental, with an emphasis on craft, design, photography, and other works on paper.
These disciplines, once considered “minor,” are ideal for telling the complex stories of the decade, sometimes harrowing, sometimes inspiring. The show opens with diverse representations of the USA, ranging from the jingoistic (Norman Bel Geddes’s red-white-and-blue Patriot Radio) to the realistic (William Henry Johnson’s screenprint Sowing).
A network of interconnected portraits, including an early painted likeness of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney—himself depicted in a nearby charcoal drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe—makes up a sensitive depiction of the era’s artistic community. When the imagery of the war itself arrives in force, in the next section of the show, you feel the shock anew, thinking of the horrors these people faced. Alongside the expected agitprop posters and photojournalism—Air Raid Over the Kremlin, by the ever-intrepid photographer Margaret Bourke-White, is a highlight—selections from the costume department, including a faded Red Cross volunteer uniform, stand in poignant witness.
As the exhibition continues, the war is rarely seen but always felt, just as it was on the home front. Sometimes the influence is quite literal: the well-known story of Charles and Ray Eames’s military plywood research, for example, is accompanied by an Emeco aluminum chair, originally developed in 1944 for use by the US Navy. Light and incredibly tough, this was deck seating designed to withstand aircraft fire. There is also a two-piece swimsuit made out of a map of China showing paratrooper escape routes; it is made of artificial silk, ideal for folding and unfolding in silence. Such tangible examples of the war’s all-pervasive presence make an ideal context for sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Isamu Noguchi, and early abstract expressionist paintings by Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock.
It has long been recognized that these artists channeled the destructive energies of the war into individual creative forces; that act of imagination has never felt more courageous. A final strength of the project is the accompanying publication, co-edited by Smith and Alison McDonald, chief creative officer for Gagosian Gallery. Together they have conceived a book that feels a lot like a magazine—a great one, recalling the glory days of Life and Look, with smartly written texts marching in columns next to beautifully chosen images.
Boldface names have been recruited to the effort: documentarian Ken Burns, musician Christian McBride, and potter-author Edmund de Waal, who has beautifully told the story of his own family during this period, one tragedy among so many others. “In dealing with the events of the early 1940s,” de Waal says in an interview with McDonald “I wanted to present them in a very measured, non-emotive way, almost like drawing a camera back from the intimate moment—back, and back, and back, so that you can see what happens day to day.”
The same can be said for Boom as a whole. It certainly doesn’t make you wish you’d lived through the 1940s; but it fills you with admiration and understanding for those who did.
—Glenn Adamson
Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s • Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania • to September 1 • philamuseum.org
