Midcentury Design in Play at Milwaukee Art Museum

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“Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America,” on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) through Jan. 6, 2019.

“Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America,” on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) through Jan. 6, announces itself as a paradox from the outset. And the baked-in contradiction between playful whimsy and serious rigor collide delightfully in this show, unloading a cascade of related issues about the circumstances of mid-century design and the visual future it helped define.

The exhibition is divided into three parts: “The American Home,” “Child’s Play” and “Corporate Approaches.” Off the bat, the show has a familiar spread of modern interior design: ovalene Eames coffee tables, wire-grid Bertoia chairs and futuristic womby loungers by Eero Saarinen. A wall of Irving Harper-designed atomic-age clocks eventually locates some legitimately far-out quirk in our clean-lined mid-century home. When your vintage-store nostalgia relents, you’ll be reminded of the clocks’ visual strangeness—and maybe of their place in a blustery, Cold War history. Despite their obedience to the predictable, purposeful and precise logic of modernism—and of clocks in general—the creativity at their heart pours out. A series of preparatory drawings for the clocks bears this out sweetly. These gorgeous, handmade, graphite renderings on paper offer a Bauhausesque demonstration of analog iterative design processes that will make post-Adobe children blush.

The most interactive, audience-minded notion of modernist creativity in “Serious Play” is enacted in the portion devoted to design for children. This makes sense because, in the case of children’s toys, the designed is designed for designing. The displays of Tinker Toys, Magnet Master 440’s and Builder sets make the show’s point clearly and directly. An interactive playset nearby is also seriously on target. This portion unpacks a participatory energy and cacophony that energizes the show. The play is palpable rather than inferred and offers a story that the textbooks often tell silently or leave out altogether. And who knew that Charles and Ray Eames made precious films of toys that make Wes Anderson’s work look like nouveau réalisme? The five-minute example in the show, “Parade,” shouldn’t be missed.

Not as playfully on point as the design for children, but telling in its own right, is the final portion dedicated to corporate play. A comprehensive modernist makeover of the now defunct Braniff Airlines by designer Alexander Girard fills the final gallery space. From soup to peanuts, one can see modernist design’s high rococo moment laid bare in the 1965 VIP lounge—where elevated design merged with Madison Avenue before hitting the American bloodstream at large. The wing-shaped maize-and-vermillion chairs, Herman Miller storage system and streamlined Braniff logo punctuate a long arc of modernist simplification, while the “high-octane color montages” announce a more extroverted esthetic coming down the chute. These final rooms say less about play and design than they do about the inevitability of high art to become institutionalized and popularized. It’s not total coincidence that I overheard a young man inside the galleries say that it looked like he was in an IKEA store.

His comment speaks to both the resounding success as well as the inadequacies of mid-century modernist design, in America and abroad; it was truly an international movement. The term “midcentury design” and its fraternal twin “high-modern design” have since come to mean everything and nothing at all, dissolving indistinguishably over time into our cutlery, storage containers, school clocks and office chairs. If it’s difficult now to locate the visual changes of this history, it’s even more difficult to locate the ethical ones. Regularity, sameness and autonomy once symbolized the possibility of social and economic equality. Recall the giddy hope of the Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini Green homes once represented. That idealism seems laughable today. Deep social wounds and traumas were beginning to fester in the 1950s and ’60s, when most of the work in this show was conceived. Knowing this, the less-is-more utopianism can seem like the visual equivalent of arranging deckchairs on the Titanic—lacking in vision at a time when vision was especially necessary.

However, by emphasizing the kinetics and interactivity of play over usual formal rhetoric, MAM’s “Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America” speaks up for a history that’s taken a beating and reminds us that the actions and motivations behind art will remain potent long after the products of action have solidified into historical artifacts.