After Pearl Harbor, the active machinery of American production shifted from consumer goods to military equipment. From War Facts: A Handbook for Speakers on War Production (Washington, D.C.: Office of Emergency Management for the Division of Information, War Production Board, 1942)Īlthough World War II was fought on distant shores, it profoundly affected all aspects of life in the United States, as Americans mobilized for the war effort. Machines to make vacuum cleaners have been shifted to making weapons. Automobile manufacturers-and one of them alone can fabricate more metal than all Japan-are making tank engines and plane engines and antiaircraft guns. made it impossible to disregard the problem of subject matter.īut we could not fight Germany and Japan with ice boxes and automobiles our tremendous industrial power had to be shifted from peacetime production to war purposes. painting men playing violins or cellos or flowers.
During the war it became sort of nonsensical to get involved in. The history of my generation begins with the problem of what to paint.
SPACE AGE DESIGN TV
Indeed, two principal factors in the acceleration of this mobile society were the automobile and the television set, both of which existed before the war but came fully into their own only afterward, with the interstate highway system and the affordable home TV set. The visual language of vital forms expressed the conflicts and complexities inherent in this remarkable period of America’s history.Īs suggested by the 1953 Chevrolet Corvette shown here, the increasing speed of transportation, as well as of communications, helped spread the vital forms vocabulary in the postwar years. In this era, the country witnessed many cataclysmic events, from World War II-with the Holocaust and the atomic bomb-to postwar McCarthyism and the Cold War, yet also saw a burst of optimism with the prosperity, and the growing consumerism, of the 1950s. The language of vital forms expressed the dualities of its times: the hopes and fears, the dreams and nightmares, of the middle years of the twentieth century were reflected in organic forms that were highly mutable, seemingly as changeable as life itself. The exhibition features paintings, sculpture, photography, architecture, ceramics, fashion, and graphic and industrial design.Įvery period has its own visual vocabulary, which it partly borrows from the past and partly invents to meet new needs. “Vital forms” are shapes inspired by nature innovative artists and designers used them in the 1940s and 1950s to evoke living entities, ranging from amoebas and plant life to the human figure. This automobile serves to introduce an exhibition on view on the fourth floor, Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940–1960.
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