Reflections on the Wright Look

By Wolf Von Eckardt

American Modern: aesthetics at the dinner table

Young marrieds of the 1940s could not go wrong with Russel Wright, then easily the country's best-known designer. His furniture and tableware were smart, modern, practical and informal. Best of all, they were cheap. In 1940, a 20-piece "starter set" of Wright's American Modern pottery dinner dishes cost about $6. The announcement that year of a new shipment at Gimbels' New York store caused block-long lines and a near riot. The design had never been as popular in America.

Wright's designs went out of fashion long before he died in 1976. The exhibition "Russel Wright: American Designer" (currently at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., and opening at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., in November) should revive fond memories and be an exciting discovery for those who never heard of the man.

With few exceptions, Wright's pieces still look good--not elegant or sophisticated like a Barcelona chair, but pleasing and "user friendly." They remain contemporary, a word often used in Wright's heyday partly to overcome the prevailing resistance to "modern" and partly because, like Danish furniture, Russel Wright designs were different in spirit from the work introduced by New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

Modern, by that definition, came out of Europe's revolt against Victorian eclecticism and ornamentation. It was a polemical style that was widely perceived in America as strident and upsetting. Contemporary implied that new functions and technologies required new forms, but that there was no need to get bizarre or belligerent about them. Exhibit Organizer William J. Hennessey points out in his excellent catalogue (published by the Gallery Association of New York State, which is sponsoring the show) that Wright's aim was to avoid both "forced adherence to past periods" and "the abrupt introduction of unprecedented ideas." He wanted to overcome what he saw as America's cultural inferiority complex by demonstrating that U.S. designers could combine comfort, efficiency and aesthetic pleasure.

The creator of this populist style was born in 1904 in Lebanon, Ohio. He was a set designer and stage manager before he took his theatrical flair into industrial design. One of Wright's earliest and handsomest pieces, designed in the mid-'30s, was a "corn set" made of chromium-plated brass and consisting of a 5 1/4-in.-high melted-butter pitcher and salt and pepper shakers on a tray. His first popular hit was an assortment of spun aluminum accessories: vases, teapots, spaghetti sets and "sandwich humidors," all buffed to a pewter sheen. In a burst of breathless feature stories on informal entertaining and other trends, Wright was hailed as an innovator. He was catapulted to the top of the new profession of industrial design along with Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Donald Deskey, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss.

Industrial design in America was born during the Depression to keep up with European trends and to boost product sales with "styling," "consumer engineering" and "planned obsolescence." But Wright remained an artist and craftsman. Says Hennessey: "His personal identification was not with the cool professionals of the New York corporate world, but with the painters, sculptors and theater people he had met in Woodstock." The promotional talents of the artist's wife, Mary Small Einstein, helped project the Wright look. She organized press conferences, planned distribution and even traveled extensively to popularize her husband's name. Wright was in fact the first designer to use his name as a sort of trademark etched on his wares.

Wright launched his first furniture line in 1934. Boxy and heavily upholstered, the pieces were displayed at Bloomingdale's with Wright-designed carpets, curtains, lamps and fabrics. Some of these accessories, notably the copper torchere lamp (which projects light onto the ceiling), are still distinguished pieces. The sectional couch was Wright's idea. A later furniture line, in natural or subtly stained maple, was sold as a package labeled Modern Living. There was also an Easier Living campaign, including a book that gave such dubious advice as "Cut down on dishwashing with one-dish meals," and "Use only throwaway paper plates for most meals." Easier Living was emphasized with a lounge chair whose one arm folded up to provide a broad writing surface, while the other arm opened into a magazine rack. The headboard of a bed concealed a storage compartment that tilted to support a reader's head.

But the quintessential Russel Wright is his dinnerware set molded of thick ceramic. The forms are sensuous and heavily glazed with muted, mottled colors--"Seafoam Blue, Granite Gray, Chartreuse Curry, Bean Brown." Wright's dishes give a carnival flavor to the simplest meal and stack well to boot. But there were problems. The pottery clay broke easily, and crevices and overhanging lips made the dishes difficult to wash.

Some critics were enraged. Manny Farber of the New Republic saw in American Modern "a quality of steeliness ... a nudity ... a hammer-like statement ... and chichi color." Emily Post refused to acknowledge even the idea of informal service. Nevertheless, with more than 80 million pieces sold between 1939 and 1959, the style became the most popular mass-produced china pattern ever sold.

Wright soon expanded the line with glasses, flatware and linen to match the dinnerware. The fragility of the earlier line was corrected in a new pattern of vitreous china, originally produced for restaurants and guaranteed against chipping and breakage in normal use. But while these new dishes were surely more functional, they were also less distinctive in form. By 1951 Wright even applied a floral pattern to his dishes--an irony if not an outright betrayal of his early principles.

After launching American Modern, Wright overreached himself by promoting household goods and furnishings under the label American Way. Not all of the items were of his design. Acres of reportage could not cover the fact that in the end, American Way was never more than an elaborate sales scheme. In time, as Hennessey notes, "Wright somehow lost touch with the public mood. With the war safely behind them, American consumers preferred furnishings that expressed conventional prosperity, conformity and tradition. The modern designs that did manage to succeed in this climate possessed qualities of aesthetic compromise that Wright now seemed unable to provide."

After the death of his wife in 1952, Wright gradually retreated to his estate overlooking the Hudson River near Garrison, N.Y. He turned the house into a demonstration of his ideas of domestic efficiency. But he never resolved the conflicting demands of standardization and individual expression, American tradition and international innovation, financial gain and artistic integrity. Wright's major achievement was that he made Americans aware of the need for beauty in daily life.

--By Wolf Von Eckardt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.