Interior design in the 1930s.(Current and coming)(interior design exhibition, great depression era)

During the Great Depression in the United States, taste in interior design continued to swing between the colonial revival and the latest in elegant, pared down furnishings and modern conveniences. A small exhibition that examines the latter extreme within the context of these two poles in design in the 1930s is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, until June 5, 2005. It is entitled Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression and includes twenty-three objects--from pieces of furniture to table-wares and other accouterments by designers such as Gilbert Rohde, Russel Wright, and George Sakier. These are amplified by reproductions of advertisements and photographs of retail displays of the period. The three divisions of the show are the living room, the dining room, and the bedroom. The objects on view are drawn from Yale's permanent collection and loans from a private collector.

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In the introduction to the book that accompanies this exhibition, the curator and author, Kristina Wilson, delineates the parameters for assessing this complex period in the history of design. In her words, modernist design is not "an idealized creation born of a single person's creative genius, but rather is a solution that is forged in response to a set of diverse demands, both ideological and market-based. There is never any single best solution to the constellations of problems faced by a designer. There are instead degrees of inventiveness with which objects juggle and satisfy such competing concerns. That struggle defines livable modernism."

Given the harsh economic times in which these pieces were made, marketing was of paramount importance to their success. In addition, the kinds of objects designers created to make everyday life more pleasurable were affected by new ways in which families lived and socialized; the changing role of women as they moved away from home into the workplace; and ...