Reviews & Interviews 

A Review of Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Gretchen Von Koenig

In design history, midcentury modernism tends to be characterized by technical and stylistic innovations of the post-war era, emphasizing how wartime materials, like plastic and fiberglass, and the American import of Scandinavian modernism, paved the way for the emergence of biomorphic forms seen in the work of Cranbrook Academy graduates like Florence Knoll and Charles Eames. What is missing from many of the conventional interpretations of midcentury modernism is the political and social backdrop that these designs were produced, advertised, and consumed in– an era of Jim Crow segregation and civil rights activism. Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body centers racial and gendered relationships in the postwar landscape and successfully destabilizes midcentury modernism. Through a close reading of print media and objects, Wilson highlights the presumed neutrality of white identity and its “structured invisibility,” shows African American counter-narratives of modernism, and provides us with an intersectional methodology to analyze how furniture and objects can hold racialized meanings through bodily control. 

Kristina Wilson is an art and design historian, a nexus that is evident in the book’s methods. Through visual and material culture analysis, she argues that Modernism is laced with “ex nominated” male whiteness. Roland Barthes used “exnomination” to describe the bourgeois, a class that did not want to be named. Whiteness, Wilson argues, also has difficulty acknowledging itself. Wilson deploys “ex nomination,” in tandem with critical race theory, to argue that modernist design was a powerful tool for constructing whiteness, using rationality and cleanliness as proxies for white racial order. Building on the work of Diane Harris in Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Wilson analyzes how white domestic advice literature had “deeply buried discourses of bodily control” whereby efficient homes would eliminate the need for housekeepers –cleaning the home of any “unwanted” bodies in white suburbia. Wilson argues that the rhetoric of a “clean and rational” modernist design was a way to keep racialized identities out of the suburban white house. 

Wilson doesn’t just unveil hidden racism in the valences of white modernism but uses John Fiske’s concept of “counter-narratives” to show the valences of Black modernism. Whereas modernism that is deployed to white audiences, seen in Life magazine, reinforces distinctive racialized whiteness rooted in exclusion and superiority, modernism in black media, seen in Ebony magazine, was an agent that protected bodies of color, provided physical comfort, and fostered communities. A particularly strong case study that exemplifies her approach is the comparison between editorial spreads of Charles Eames in Life and Add Bates in Ebony. Charles Eames’s editorial photography emphasizes the abstracted nature of his designs, where his own body is compositionally positioned to mirror the geometric forms of his architecture. Add Bates’s editorial photography shows him laboring in his studio with his brother to produce his design. Artistry in Life was positioned as a cerebral artist where the design springs from the mind of the maker-genius, whereas artistry in Ebony was emphasized through physical and communal labor performed by the body. 

In the last two chapters, Wilson looks at objects themselves and proposes a new methodological framework that she calls “empathetic design.” Empathetic design is a way to understand how objects, specifically furniture, register first visually as catering to, or excluding, certain bodies. We first understand furniture by whether or not it looks like it will adequately support our body. Furniture registers secondly during use, when embodied comfort is, or is not, realized. Rooted in material culture, this analytic framework helps us think through more specific points at which furniture interacts with a user’s perception in determining if furniture is designed to include or exclude, them. George Nelson’s iconic Marshmallow couch can be understood as visually exclusive because it favored formalism over bodily comfort (the individual pads aren’t large enough for an adult’s body), whereas the Eames DCM chair was physically exclusive because the  “ghost bodies” imprinted into their chairs, which are seemingly ergonomic and comforting (unlike Nelson’s work), ultimately define a prescriptive mode of sitting that privilege a particular bodily ideal. While race wasn’t consciously inserted into their designs, “we should recognize that these objects strategically control bodies” through form and “in this historic moment, when white bodies could control bodies of color, and did so in order to define superiority and establish racial identity, to design objects that discipline bodies into specific comportment is an act of white privilege” (145). 

Wilson’s book importantly offers up an intersectional method that aims to reveal associations of race and gender through a close reading of the material and visual culture. Her approach can help us reveal the ways race and gender are subconsciously constructed and reinforced through furniture, objects, and advertisements. 

NOTES

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design. By Kristina Wilson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 254 pp.; 77 color and 76 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)