Inviting the viewer to identify with its mother-heroine, this 1943 poster looks a lot like a movie ad. Of course, it's actually pitching domestic support for the war effort--in effect, casting the viewer as a heroine in a real-life saga.
The poster is one of 33 U.S. war posters on display at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena through January 26. Covering both world wars, they range in style from realistic illustration to stylized graphics. With a few exceptions (notably the famous Uncle Sam recruiting poster), most address not actual or potential troops but civilians at home. The goal is to imaginatively enlist the general public in the greater cause: heightening sympathy with allies, strengthening antagonism toward enemies, and giving everyday hassles like recycling cooking grease a grander significance.
Can such propaganda create social solidarity? Or does it merely reinforce and direct existing feelings?
In 2005, Steve and I happened to catch this great exhibit, "Driving Through Futures Past," at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Although the highlight of the exhibit had to be the 1954 Bonneville Special (sorry for the low-quality of my snapshot), the real revelation was the art on the walls: concept car renderings done by mid-century car designers. (Here's a slide show of samples from the exhibition.) Although I'm far from a car buff and don't even like the fins-and-chrome look of mid-century cars that much, I loved both the aesthetic feel of the renderings and their exuberant futurism. What a great thing to collect, I thought. I wonder where you get them?
At the June Art Deco and Modernism Show in San Francisco, I met one of the sources: Leo Brereton, who has rescued many of these drawings from Detroit area basements and attics and sells them to collectors. (He also collects and sells original illustrations from pulp fiction and, as you can see from the photo, mid-century science fiction.) He talked to me about car renderings.
Q: How do you define what you collect and sell?
A: I deal in automotive concepts or renderings, which are the drawings done by the designers for the Big Three as well as independent automobile manufacturers, from the '30s through the '70s, with an emphasis on the '50s and '60s.
Q: Where do you get the drawings?
A: Primarily from the designers themselves. As a designer, you were not encouraged to keep the stuff you were working on. However, if you were the guy who worked for 24 years in the Buick Division and all of a sudden you were transferred to Cadillac, your boss might say, "All the stuff in these files that we haven't cleaned out in 20 years, if you want it fine. If not just throw it out."
There was no thought--not a moment's thought--at a place like GM that this archive might be important one day, that we should open up a museum, if nothing else to toot our own horn. That lack of vision is astounding. So routinely the work is now found in landfills across Metropolitan Detroit.
Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: About 10 years. There really wasn't a market for it when I started.
Q: And what do these represent to people who buy them today?
A: Visions of the past, examples of great designs. It's a nostalgia thing, as well as a clear recognition that this work has gone unrecognized.
I wound up buying several renderings by automotive designers from Leo. Here's a slide show. But only one of the drawings, by a Czech designer Leo knew nothing about, is of a car of the future. The rest take the glamour of high-speed transportation to the sea and to space, in inspiring but wildly impractical forms. When I showed them to our friend Greg Benford, the astrophysicist and hard science fiction writer, he rolled his eyes. Looking at the moon vehicle John Aiken (later famous for the Mercury Cougar) designed as a student project, he asked, "Why would you want streamlining in a place with no atmosphere?" For the same reason Golden Age Hollywood put actresses in gowns they couldn't sit down in and Cecil B. DeMille demanded high heels even for Paulette Goddard in Northwest Mounted Police--to transport viewers to a world that transcends the practicalities of real life.
Before visiting the National Building Museum's exhibit, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," which runs through Sunday, August 23, I had thought of Saarinen as the designer of such icons of optimistic, swoopy modernism as the TWA Terminal (pictured here), St. Louis Arch, and tulip chair. I was ignorant, but not unusual.
What's been largely forgotten by the non-expert public is that Saarinen's future-shaping architecture included the design of many corporate research campuses, including those for Bell Labs, IBM, and GM. These facilities were just as forward-looking and glamorous in their day as any airport. "Coming to work at the Tech Center was like stepping into the future," Wayne Cherry, GM's vp for design, told Metropolis magazine in 2003. (Great slideshow here.) In December 1955, Architecture Forum called Saarinen's GM Technical Center "nothing less than the Industrial Versailles--the nerve center, the capitol of an empire whose corporate directors and managers believe in what GM stands for and what it does even more firmly than Louis XIV ever believed he was divine, and have declared themselves (as he did) in the way they built."
Click here, or on the photo above, for examples of Saarinen's work from the National Building Museum exhibit.
