Domesticating history

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Patricia Johnston

During the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Steichen was the most successful photographer in the advertising industry. Although much has been said about his fine-art photography, his commercial work - which appeared regularly in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Ladies' Home Journal, and other popular magazines - has not received the attention it deserves. In this book, Patricia Johnston uses Steichen's work as a case study of advertising photography as it developed in the consumer culture between the wars. She traces the evolution of Steichen's work from an early naturalistic style through increasingly calculated attempts to construct consumer fantasies. Steichen's work convinced advertising agents that photography was a far more effective medium for engaging and persuading consumers than the more traditional drawn illustrations. Johnston presents an intriguing view of advertising agencies from the inside. Using agency archives, she reconstructs the teamwork of clients, art directors, account executives, copywriters, and photographers. And she goes on to assess how these widely distributed images work in American culture - how they interact with their audience to express, reflect, shape, and challenge social values.

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Edward R. Ford

v.1, covering 1890-1932, focuses on various recognized architects, explaining the detailing and construction techniques that distort, camouflage, or enhance a building. v.2 continues the study of the relationships of the ideals of design and the realities of construction in modern architecture from the late 1920s to the present.

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essays by Kendall H. Brown, Sharon A. Minichiello

"Catalogue entries on popular songbooks, kimono, and decorative arts further investigate the potent relations between styles and ideologies imported from the West and those newly established as Japanese tradition. The nihonga paintings, woodblock prints, textiles, and domestic artifacts discussed and illustrated here come primarily from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which organized the exhibition documented by this book. Many of these works have never been published and several major paintings, exhibited in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s then lost after the war, are brought to light here for the first time in decades. This catalogue not only presents newly discovered works but also, in bringing together a broad range of objects representative of mainstream Taisho visual culture, reconstructs the styles popular from 1915 to 1935 in a celebration of Taisho Chic."--BOOK JACKET.

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Victor Margolin

Following World War I, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged with the ambition to engage the artist in the building of social life. Nowhere is this project more evident than in the lives of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy whose careers covered a broad range of artistic practices and political situations. The remarkable continuity between the various forms of their work stems from their belief that art had to be extended beyond the aesthetic sphere. But given that the social situations they confronted changed radically in their lifetimes, their operative strategies were severely tested and underwent significant revisions. Through close readings of their work as it relates to the situations in which they were active, Victor Margolin examines the way these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and the political realities they confronted. He follows them and their affiliations through the 1920s and 1930s in Moscow, Berlin, and Chicago, documenting their contributions to utopian architecture, Constructivist ideology, industrial design, photography, visual communication, and design education. Each essay features one or two of the artist-designers and shifts from one medium to another through a chronological narrative that begins with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ends in Chicago just after World War II. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.