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Vernacular Modernism

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Contributors.........................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Vernacular Modernism BERND HPPAUF AND MAIKEN UMBACH..................................................................11. Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York MARDGES BACON.................................................252. At Home in the Ironic Imagination: The Rational Vernacular and Spectacular Texts MICHAEL SALER...................................533. Spaces of the Vernacular: Ernst Bloch's Philosophy of Hope and the German Hometown BERND HPPAUF.................................844. The Deutscher Werkbund, Globalization, and the Invention of Modern Vernaculars MAIKEN UMBACH.....................................1145. The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier FRANCESCO PASSANTI...................................................................1416. The Vernacular, Memory and Architecture STANFORD ANDERSON........................................................................1577. The Vernacular in Place and Time: Relocating History in Post-Soviet Cities JOHN CZAPLICKA........................................172Epilogue: Critical Regionalism Revisited: Reflections on the Mediatory Potential of Built Form KENNETH FRAMPTON.....................193Notes................................................................................................................................199Subject Index........................................................................................................................253Index of Names.......................................................................................................................261

Chapter One

MARDGES BACON

With its founding in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art in New York provided a principal site of modern visual culture in the United States. To the leadership of the Modern, and especially its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., modernism was inextricably associated with the European avant-garde but held a global destiny. By establishing the museum as a locus of modernism in the New World, Barr and his colleagues confirmed the teleology of the movement to be international. As a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary enterprise, modernism shared a set of values that sought to give artistic expression to modern times. Thus, a concept of the "present" infused an international language of the avant-garde. Working against the dominance of the European project as well as the homogenizing currents of internationalism, like warp against woof, a local vernacular associated with regional and cultural identity entered the American discourse on modernism: the vernacular of authenticity that could plumb native sources of modern art within an academic tradition, the vernacular of folk art, the vernacular of indigenous traditions and ethnography, the vernacular of the everyday, and the vernacular of regional artists, photographers, and filmmakers giving expression to national consciousness during the lean years of the Great Depression. In architecture, modernism looked to the vernacular in its search for cultural authenticity and models of utilitarian urban building, through an "Americanization" of the "International Style" synthesizing received traditions from Europe and native ones associated with place, and in its commitment to social housing.

During the 1930s, modernism on both sides of the Atlantic continued to embrace machine-centered imagery and symbolism, long associated with European production, while it turned increasingly to representations of human-centered concerns where the touchstone was vernacular and regional expression. Promoting modernism as both a transatlantic and interdisciplinary project, the Museum of Modern Art engaged both cultures-mechanical and human-in forging its identity as an avant-garde American institution. This dichotomy entered into the Modern's early art and architecture exhibitions. For example, in exhibitions of American painting, Charles Demuth's My Egypt (1927; fig. 1.1) presented a precisionist image of American technology, while Ben Shahn's The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-32; fig. 1.2) invoked social injustice. In architectural exhibitions, a shift of axis toward more explicit references to the vernacular was evident, for example, in the trajectory within Le Corbusier's work from the Villa Savoye, Poissy, France (1928-31; see fig. 5.3), emphasizing purist forms and metaphors associated with the machine, to his design of the de Mandrot House at Le Pradet near Toulon, France (1929-31; fig. 1.3) whose rubble walls suggested a pre-industrial artisan culture.

My contention is that in its mission to acquire, display, and educate, the Museum of Modern Art was confronted with an ideological conflict that emerged in conjunction with the Depression: to introduce European avant-garde developments and yet also be both "American," and "democratic." On the one hand, Barr and his mentor and founding trustee Paul Sachs shared an elite vision of "exacting standards." On the other hand, the museum's charter underscored its educational mission of "encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life, and furnishing popular instruction," but intentionally left "modern" undefined. Reluctant to circumscribe modern art "with any degree of finality either in time or in character," Barr eventually characterized it as an "an elastic term that serves conveniently to designate painting, sculpture, moving pictures, architecture, and the lesser visual arts, original and progressive in character, produced within the last three decades but including also 'pioneer ancestors' of the 19th century." Many of the museum's early exhibitions bring into sharp relief, sometimes in a tensional relationship, the dual commitment to the formal search for quality and the institutional mission to democratize an appreciation of modern art. Among the competing voices and agendas of the leadership, Barr, Holger Cahill, Sachs, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and other trustees pursued these objectives to varying degrees. In architecture and design, Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Philip Johnson advanced a set of formal principles based on aesthetic standards, while Lewis Mumford and others advocated a social program. With little established museum policy, the Modern took no formal position on resolving any variance between an elite vision and a democratizing mandate. Indeed, its organizational structure decentralized power through a series of trustee-curatorial committees, initially giving Barr more influence than actual power. Moreover, although Barr felt that art performed an important role in helping modern democracies understand "that which is different from us," there was resistance to his Eurocentric persuasion. Rather, what emerged during the Modern's path to institutional maturity was a discourse on modernism that incorporated the received tradition of European abstraction, American traditions of realism and romanticism as well as abstraction, American folk art, the indigenous art of both Africa and the pre-Columbian New World, contemporary American art, and other forms of visual culture. In...