On March 5, 1934, an exhibition entitled Machine Art opened at the Museum of Modern Art, which was then just five years old.
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Unlike the paintings of post-impressionist masters like Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh that the museum displayed during its first years of existence, Machine Art found beauty and aesthetic value in a different sort of object. Rather than paintings and sculptures, its displays were filled with common household objects like furniture, fans, pots, and ladles, trappings of industry like springs, insulators, and car pistons, and even scientific instruments like microscopes, slide rules, and beakers–all made by machines, but designed by humans.
A series of photos of the exhibition, dug out of MoMA’s archives, offer a fascinating look at the influential show. Curated by the architect Philip Johnson, the museum’s first Architecture and Design curator, Machine Art put machine-produced design on the same pedestal previously occupied only by fine artists. “Everybody hated us deeply for being anti-art,” Johnson later said.
Designers were no longer cogs in the manufacturing process, but bonafide artists with real-world impact who deserved to be named. Ultimately, the exhibition served as an advertisement for a new kind of art emerging from America’s economy–now known as design. The rest, as they say, is history.
