Sit-Down Show

Visitors at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week sat and lounged all over exhibits and pushed them around with impunity. The visitors enjoyed it because they spent as much time on their rumps as on their feet. The museum did not mind because it was doing its best to boost modern furniture out of the fad stage.

Holding a hemisphere-wide competition for furniture, lamps and textiles of "Organic Design," the Museum had agreed not only to exhibit its prize-winning entries, but to sponsor their manufacture and distribution. To do this, the Museum had set factory wheels humming and enlisted the help of twelve U.S. department stores* who stocked their furniture floors with duplicate exhibitions and invited the public to buy as well as look.

To conservative furniture-fanciers, the Museum of Modern Art's display looked about as homelike as the waiting room of an up-to-date airport. Tea wagons that looked like bathroom fixtures shared honors with kidney-shaped coffee tables and tubular steel reclining mechanisms. Most of the weird-looking gadgetry was much easier on the spine than on the eye.

To dramatize the exhibition, the Museum's directors illustrated the history of furniture design with a series of models and photographs, beginning with furniture's first move toward modern functionalism: the ugly old-fashioned "Morris chair" designed in the 1870s for British art-crafter William Morris, in a mistaken attempt to defy the Machine Age. The historical survey moved onward with examples of tubular steel sitting machines by German Bauhausler Marcel Breuer and French Architect Le Corbusier, to the light, cardboardy modern plywood seats and tables by Finland's Alvar Aalto.

Climax of this historical build-up was a horrible example: the dismembered body of a comfortable old-fashioned overstuffed easy chair which lay behind the bars of a big animal cage under a life-size photograph of Gorilla Gargantua. Said an accompanying placard: "Cathedra gargantua, genus americanus. Weight when fully matured, 60 pounds. Habitat, the American Home. Devours little children, pencils, small change, fountain pens, bracelets, clips, earrings, scissors, hairpins, and other small flora and fauna of the domestic jungle. Is far from extinct."

Best-looking entries in the show were a group of splashily printed fabrics, done with the silk-screen process by Czechoslovak Architect Antonin Raymond. Most practical furniture was a set of unit bookcases and cupboards by Cranbrook, Mich.'s Eero Saarinen (son of famed Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen) and Charles Eames. Resting on smooth, knee-high benches, the Saarinen and Eames cupboardry could be stacked in as many window-seat and pigeonhole combinations as any modern apartment would hold.

Most sensational exhibit was also a Saarinen & Eames invention: a chair cast like a piece of sculpture, from a single piece of laminated plywood. Saarinen & Eames's new chair, carefully molded to fit the human form and cushioned with a covering of sponge-rubber, looked something like a fur-lined bedpan on stilts. But sitters found that it made up in rump-appeal what it lacked in looks.

The exhibition's designers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, proved that they could ingeniously solve some of the main problems of modern furniture design: lightness, mobility, ease of manufacture, comfort. Two problems remained relatively unsolved: 1) prices low enough to suit the average man's purse (sample: $75 for Saarinen and Eames's plywood chair); 2) looks handsome enough to improve the average man's home.

* L. S. Ayres & Co., Indianapolis; Barker Bros. Corp., Los Angeles; Bloomingdale's, Manhattan; Famous-Barr Co., St. Louis; Marshall Field & Co., Chicago; Gimbel Bros., Philadelphia; Jordan Marsh Co., Boston; The Halle Bros. Co., Cleveland; The J. L. Hudson Co., Detroit; Kaufmann Department Stores, Inc., Pittsburgh; The F. & R. Lazarus & Co., Columbus; Wolf & Dessauer, Fort Wayne.

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