In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production. Telling the story of this extraordinarily popular but controversial show, Jennifer Jane Marshall examines its history and the relationship between the museum’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and its curator, Philip Johnson, who oversaw it. She situates the show within the tumultuous climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression, considering how these unadorned objects served as a response to timely debates over photography, abstract art, the end of the American gold standard, and John Dewey’s insight that how a person experiences things depends on the context in which they are encountered. An engaging investigation of interwar American modernism, Machine Art, 1934 reveals how even simple things can serve as a defense against uncertainty.

The Modern Eye explores the origins and development of early 20th-century modernism in America through the lens of the major exhibitions that introduced this art to the general public. Author Kristina Wilson shows how modern artists and curators sought to relate high art to mass culture in order to make it accessible to more people, and successfully popularized modern painting and design during the interwar years. A major contribution to our understanding of the origins of modernism, this book captures the vibrant diversity that the term "modern art" meant at this time. The chapters examine exhibitions held in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, including those organized by Alfred Stieglitz, the Little Review, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In examining the marketing of modernism, Wilson reveals how these exhibitions attempted to stage an intersection between art and everyday life, and how they taught viewers to look at, and care about, modern art.

Celebrates the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Public Works of Art Program, created in 1934 against the backdrop of the Great Depression. The 55 paintings in this volume are a lasting visual record of America at a specific moment in time; a response to an economic situation that is all too familiar

Edited by Deborah Wye and Margit Rowell. Essays by Jared Ash, Gerald Janecek, Nina Gurianova, Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye.