Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson

This sleek and accessible catalogue, edited by Hanks (The Century for Modern Design), focuses on the historic relationship between Alfred Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Philip Johnson, the well-to-do Harvard grad he selected in 1929 to lead the museum’s department of architecture and design. As the essays here repeatedly stress in different ways, the two brought about “a transformational period of American design.” Barr and Johnson helped make the slick, nondecorative functionalist aesthetics of Germany’s Bauhaus palatable to mainstream Americans. They developed novel, ambitious, yet popular exhibitions that advanced the art of the everyday object and encouraged the public to seek it out. Much of the book foregrounds these, such as the 1934 Machine Art exhibition on industrial design that marked the “beginning of the museum’s role as tastemaker” and represented the “culmination of the Barr-Johnson partnership.” The best essay looks at Barr and Johnson’s apartments, and how they used their own living spaces to articulate concepts of the new modern interior. The book is full of crisp, cool examples of relevant objects, some from the exhibitions or the personal collections of Barr or Johnson, and each with an explanatory paragraph. These include cake pans, lamps, tables, Josef Hartwig’s chess set of abstract geometric shapes, and wickedly handsome chairs designed by Mies van der Rohe. The slick design and layout of the book clearly take a cue from its subjects. Illus.[em] (Nov.) [/em]