Wolfsonian Opens on Miami Beach
--Elise Turner

Was it worth it? With eight years in the making of a museum, 20 years in the collecting of a sprawling trove of cultural artifacts (the haul nearly doubled in size during the museums’s gestation), the November 11, 1995 opening of the Wolfsonian does make us pause.

Was it worth it to put a public face on this private collection of 70,000-plus objects? The vast majority are still owned by the Miami Beach millionaire who assembled them, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., though there are plans for Wolfson to give the collection to the institution that bears his name.

Was it worth it? The answer is yes, and resoundingly so. So far.

Spanning the years from 1885 to 1945, Wolfson’s remarkable collection explores the minutiae and monuments produced in Europe and the United States as the 20th Century swiftly reared its bold, bloody and streamlined head. That story is recorded by an utterly amazing range of art, architecture, decoration, and design -- all the way from matchbook covers to the magnificent ornament once part of a 1929 movie palace facade that now adorns the Wolfsonian’s inside entrance. Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945, tells us the story in scholarly detail, with 256 objects on display and many more in the exhibit’s weighty 352-page catalog.

The collection’s key promise, summed up by curator Wendy Kaplan: "Design is never neutral. Even teapots and toys can be agents of political and social agendas, manufactured to manipulate the way we see the world and our place in it."

Given the vital importance of understanding our volatile past as we race toward the future, the Wolfsonian’s undertaking is abundantly worthwhile. And yet Designing Modernity on display through April 28, gives us the merest cupful of the vast collection.

That cupful might be a representative serving, yet one exhibition does not an institution make. To make a truly valuable contribution, the Wolfsonian must open succeeding exhibits with much greater speed to secure visitors and funding.

No future exhibition schedule has been released, though director Peggy Loar says exhibits might explore issues of intolerance and the early warning signs of current environmental concerns. She’d also like to give contemporary artists a chance to produce work relating to the collection. These are laudable plans; we wish them timely execution.

But back to the lessons told by teapots and toys. The best examples in Designing Modernity have a comic and fascinating quaintness to them, because their efforts to advance state-sanctioned policies seem so obvious now. There is the 1932 Russian teapot, gaily painted with factories and tractors, encouraging the tea-drinker to work hard for the new Soviet state. In one of the supreme ironies of the exhibit, this and other Russian porcelain pieces, including a plate reading "He Who Does Not Work Does Not Eat," were created from elegant blanks produced by the Imperial Porcelain Factory of Czarist days.

Technology in toys
As for toys, we can also look back in shocked disbelief at the 1936 Italian board game, "Conquest of Abyssinia," aimed at making the notion of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia acceptable by trivializing it. Less obvious examples of how toys have been designed to make new ideas digestible are the miniature 1928 Zeppelin and 1934 train, easy to hold and unthreatening. Their subtle goal was to make people comfortable with new modes of transportation, which rapidly stepped up the pace of living and shrank distances between towns, countries and continents.

Such games go on today. Modern toys embrace technology in a way that primes children to become travelers on the information superhighway. Designing Modernity uses the past to open our eyes to life before us.

This is a major goal of the Wolfsonian's educational programs, says education curator Lynn Anderson, who's preparing extensive guides to be available on the Internet in December. Instead of a cassette tape guide for visitors, she is using a newer device called Inform. It resembles a cellular phone and allows viewers to self-select objects they want to learn more about.

Although Inform was not available during my visit, I suspect many will welcome this digital assist, included in the price of admission. The carefully orchestrated exhibit is somewhat cramped, and the wall texts' many references to historical, social, political and artistic developments take time to absorb. But it's worth the effort.

There is much here to stimulate the eye as well as the mind, and the gradual transition of design styles is apparent: The show outlines the long shadow cast by the Industrial Revolution, moving from a discomfort with the machine to an enthusiastic embrace of industrial materials and forms. Thus we first see the sinuous, organic forms in turn-of-the-century works such as an Italian wooden secretary and the cast-iron theater seats of Hector Guimard, who designed Paris's famed Art Nouveau subway entrances.

Early on, we also see how the theme of national pride was woven into designs for daily life, paving the way for later, strident examples from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Included is a beautifully patterned tapestry of 1895 with scenes from Norwegian folktales and implying resistance to Sweden's rule of Norway, which ended in 1905.

As the show progresses, the machine becomes more admired. Worth the admission is the chance to see the unfolded accordion book designed by Sonia Delaunay for a poem by Blaise Cendrars, recounting his trip across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad. Their 1913 La Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France glows with Delaunay's concentric circles, sliced into prisms of color, reflecting her fascination with the halos of electric streetlights just installed in Paris. It's a jewel.

Propaganda, a loaded word favored by Wolfson and sidestepped here for the less controversial "persuasion," gets its most obvious due in World War II. The exhibit does us a great service by showing how propaganda is used by both good and bad guys. For example, there is the 1942 U.S. puzzle game, "Yank Thru the Lines," with sliding scenes of firing soldiers. Perhaps it's not so odious as the Italian board game, but neither is it neutral. And the eagles here, found on a Nazi plaque, a Fascist flag, and a U.S. poster show how a treasured icon can be used to various political ends.

Indeed, design is never neutral, and neither should our response be to the lessons of Designing Modernity.

Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945 showing at The Wolfonian, 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida USA through April, 1995. Reprinted with permission of The Miami Herald.

TOUR SCHEDULE

The Wolfsonian: 11/11/95 - 4/28/96
Los Angeles County Musueum of Art: 7/21/96 - 9/22/96
Seattle Museum of Art: 10/24/96 - 1/12/97
The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: 2/22/97 - 5/18/97
Indianpolis Museum of Art: 11/16/97 - 2/1/98
Victoria & Albert Museum, London: 3/14/98 - 5/31/98
Kunst-und Ausstellunghalle, Bonn (tentative): 7/11/98 - 10/4/98
Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome: 10/31/98 - 1/17/99
Palazzo Ducale, Genoa: 3/13/99 - 6/6/99
Setagaya Museum, Tokyo: 7/17/99 - 9/26/99