Depression modern
Subtitle: the thirties style in America
By: Martin Greif.
Publisher: Universe Books
Published: 1975
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
Subjects: Art, American -- 20th century; Decoration and ornament -- Depression modern style
Description: Depression Modern was gleaming glass block and black Vitrolite. It was chrome and Micarta and round peach-tinted mirrors. Depression Modern was the primary style of the 1930s, a design revolution that was the turning point of modernism in America.
By focusing on the period between two great expositions - Chicago's Century of Progress (1933-34) and the New York World's Fair (1939-40) - Martin Greif shows that a relatively small group of young, brilliant, energetic designers of the 1930s created, perhaps for the first time, a national style that was uniquely American. So revolutionary was this style, in fact, so all pervasive, that in a period of only half a decade it changed the shape of virtually everything in the American home, including, finally, the home itself. DEPRESSION MODERN corrects a misconception, that Art Deco was the predominant style of the decade - a misconception which obscures the essentially modern spirit of the time. On the contrary, the major American designers of the Great Depression hated Deco (which they considered "the modern deprived of its manhood") and despised its effete luxuriousness. What they created, largely in recreation against Deco, was a new machine art: honest, simple, and functionally expressive of tension, vigor, and energy. In less than five years, they converted the stress and balance in form and design from cluttered, ornamented verticality to smooth, clean horizontality. Curved, flowing lines replaced the modernistic style's squares and zigzags. Streamlining became the vogue - in furniture and clothing, clocks and typewriters, toasters and vacuum cleaners, but especially in houses, factories, public buildings, airplanes, railway trains, and automobiles. So total was the success of Depression Modern, so complete its acceptance (we live surrounded by its offspring today), that its origins in the 1930s and its innovative creators, if not completely forgotten, are now simply taken for granted.
In his informed, informal, essentially personal text, and in two hundred carefully captioned illustrations, Martin Greif gratefully acknowledges the accomplishments of Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey, Russel Wright, Normal Bed Geddes, George Fred Keck, Walter Dorwin Teague, Gilbert Rohde, and other founders of the style. DEPRESSION MODERN recreates a glorious era in American design.
Notes: Includes index.