6:7. Aesthetic tastes of decade

Defining Modern  What is Modern?

Paul Frankl, Form and Reform: A Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930, pages 23-31 ...  Today we stand at the threshold of a new era—an era youthful but mature, full in stature and declaring its independence of the antiquated styles of older nations. Ours is the era of the Machine. Machinery is creating our style. It is imposing a new tempo and a new mode of life. With shameful sentimentality we still cling to the outgrown "styles" of the past -- to houses designed in period styles ridiculously alien to their settings; to gilded gewgaws and polished marbles, to pseudo-period furniture. To create works in the tempo of the new spirit means to break with old conventions and to establish new aesthetic values. New materials demand new forms and treatment consistent with their inherent nature. To distort, to mutilate or to disguise the innate essence of a medium in a vain effort to make it conform to conventions of the past, to superimpose upon it some preconceived "style"—this is very denial of any sound comprehension of the meaning of Style. No longer can we turn back to the era of handmade and peasant crafts. It would be silly affectation and hypocrisy to attempt to do so. We must accept the machine. But we must accept it as masters and not as slaves. In the matter of furniture and fabrics. Let us recognize the fundamental fact that the machinery is most suitable, not for reproduction, but for production. Why turn our Tudor chairs with twentieth-century machinery? This is as incongruous as it is artistically dishonest. Machine-made reproductions of handwork, machine-made copies of period styles, are incongruous. Machine-made productions of contemporaneous designs, soundly manufactured in materials of our own day, and intended for mass production, are innately consistent, honest and well built, and in addition, are specimens of a more authentic style than all the copies in the world. Let any sound aesthetician, of no matter how conservative a stripe, refute the essential truth of this fact! Style, then, we may define as the external expression of the inner spirit of any given time. When that expression is the mere aping or borrowing of the spirit of an alien epoch—of any other country, or any other century, but our own, as Gilbert put it—it becomes dishonest affectation. It may assume, but it can never convince. The recent craze for the more extreme atrocities of the Victorian era, indulged in by neurotic and sexless decorators, told us nothing about the Victorian era, but exposed the psychoses of its perpetrators. It was amusing; it was frivolous; it was silly; it was an aberration of idle minds. But worst of all, it was irrelevant. While veritable style lives, it is incessantly changing. Nature knows no style. Her forms are constantly repeated. Trees, ferns and herbs, despite their evolution, maintain their fundamental forms throughout the ages. Style is the symbol of man's creative genius. It is the outward record of his relation to God, nature and mathematics. It is evident in the Assyrian temple, the Buddha of Kamakura, and the Issenheim Altarpiece. In these monuments the style differs, but Style informs all. Change is the life of style. If for generation after generation man repeated the same architecture, the same painting, the same music, his world would be like that of the bees --  the endless proliferation of beehives through eternity. What elevates men, in the last analysis, above the bees is the mastery and the recognition of Style. Modernism has been called the style of reason. Its appeal is an appeal to the intelligence. Its emphasis upon simple forms, its return to mathematical axiom and the fundamentals of form, confer upon it a classical rather than a romantic beauty. Romanticism relies upon associational values, upon the stimulation of suggested memories. By line, proportion and inherent relations, the new classicism makes a direct appeal to the vision and the mind. Modern forms are simple: the square, the circle, the horizontal line, skill-fully and dynamically coordinated—these are a return to the Greek ideal. Their success is due entirely to the correlation and the coordination of elements.

If I follow the gist of Frankl's claims about "modern", the sense of the new concept of "modern" is revealed in its twofold purpose: (1) to begin with the premise that the lives of humans base are organic, that is, their lives are  under constant change, but also at the same time, "stable", i.e., unchanging; and that (2) to be modern is "to make logical use of the products of invention". As a tradition, modernism elects makes a fresh approach, and frees itself from constraints, by consciously ignoring tradition and the expectations which the latter imposes with regard to facade and plan. 

Human need comes first, where -- in skillful hands  traditional styles discarded, to let new appropriate and beautiful forms emerge from the inside outwardly to express the life within.]

Among the numerous assumptions that I have realized since beginning this project is how important it is to -- step by step --  define terms, both for yourself, as author, and for you, the reader. Without definitions, especially in the areas of woodworking and/or of furniture design, soon communication would collapse. "Modern" is one of these terms.

The reasons why in this history of amateur woodworking "modern" begins in the 1920s is yet to come, later, when I deal with Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. (while the paragraphs below deal with "modern", later, in the 1930s, "moderne" becomes widely used term  Source Noel Riley, page 353)

The term that I believe was the final trigger for my concerns about the necessity of defining terms is "Modern". For example, provocatively, Martin Eidelberg introduces readers to his volume, Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was , dedicated to furniture design from 1935 to 1965 by speculating about what "What  Modern Was", that  is, thinking about  "Modern in the Past Tense".

As a term, "Modernity", itself, I think we all agree, "closely linked with a sense of time". "Temporality", that is "time", normally, in our minds we associate with the "present"; occasionally, perhaps, modern is linked to the future, especially Eidelberg argues, "if it carries implications of lasting values".

His examples: "Modern is ..." and "modern will be ..." he says are "the standard declensions". On the other hand, when we are confronted with "Modern was ...", are we guilty of a contradiction? For me, I admit, "modern was" is a new coinage. 

Eidelberg deliberates further on this theme of "Modern in the Past Tense" by noting that "the emergence of the term Postmodern has, if anything, emphasized the curious sense of separation that now exists between us today and that age that we designate as Modern". Our sense of difference -- Eidelberg uses "distance" is temporal, for sure,  in that it is the result of  a very sensitivity of both how time has passed and the major shift in ideas and values, both public and personal.

My 40-year sojourn in the academic world merely reinforces Eidleberg. Just looking at the titles of books on the shelves in my den provides testament to Eidelberg's claims:  The First Moderns, The Modern Mind, The Postmodern Adventure, The Postmodern Turn are but a few among several.

The term Post-Modern itself was coined both the 1930s and 1950s -- for somewhat different reasons and is something I can document -- as each generation recognized its distance from a previous generation.

Postmodern and Postmodernism, in their simplest usage, refers to the period of 20th century marked with the development of atomic weapons and other technological innovations (like television and contraception devices), which, taken together, in Western culture especially, have had a major impact upon human behavior and beliefs.

Its connotation, postmodernism is characterized by a dismissal or rejection of traditional values, and an resounding dismissal of absolute truth. Postmodernism's approach to understanding society produces doubt and uncertainty about tradition and challenges hierarchy and authority. With such evidence, postmodernism is thus visualized as a challenge to traditional cultural values, which puts it into a contest with conservative social and political thinking. Postmodern/ Postmodernism are terms used in different Disciplines, including History, Visual Arts, Literature, and Music.)

Semantics aside, our goal issue is to understand and explain what really occurred, especially as these terms, Modern and Postmodern relate to an amateur woodworking movement. I found Eidelberg's book, Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was, instructive in that it sets out with both images and text significant artifacts of that relatively short, but explosive -- in all senses of that term -- period.