John Cotton Dana and the politics of exhibiting industrial art in the US, 1909-1929

Journal of Design History

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 301-317

  Maffei, Nicolas ^a  

^a ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Dana; Deutscher Werkbund; Industrial design; John Cotton; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museums; New Jersey; New York; Newark Museum

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249188463     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/13.4.301     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. H. Cahill, 'America is making real progress in art', Forbes, 1 April 1929, p. 22.
2. The entire front page of the May 1928 issue of the Newark Museum's newsletter, The Museum, read 'BEAUTY HAS NO RELATION TO AGE, RARITY OR PRICE'.
3. The Museum, Museum Association, Newark, NJ. J. C. Dana. 'The gloom of the museum', The Newarker, October 1913, p. 400.
4. In his paper Dana argues that the exhibition of a glass of water could effectively teach the museum public about beauty. J. C. Dana, 'In a changing world should museums change?', Papers and Reports Read at the Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums, New York City, 17-19 May 1926, American Association of Museums, New Series, No. 1, Washington, DC, 1926, p. 23.
5. From an obituary circa July 1929 Forbes reprinted in The Museum, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, p. 82.
6. Those who applauded his services in obituaries of 1929 included: Henry W. Kent; Robert W. de Forest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Walter Rendell Storey, writer for the New York Times.
7. Other obituaries that recognized his pioneering efforts appeared in Forbes, The Nation, Women's Wear, New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Evening Post. 'John Cotton Dana', The Museum, vol. II, no. 10, October 1929, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, pp. 75, 75-81.
8. Historians who have credited Dana with pioneering the exhibition of industrial art in the museums include: J. L. Meikle in Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939, Temple University Press, 1979, p. 20;
9. K. Davies, At Home in Manhattan: Modern Decorative Arts, 1925 to the Depression, Yale University Art Gallery, 1983, p. 88;
10. B. Shifman, 'Design für die Industrie: Die Ausstellung "German Applied Arts" in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1912-1913', in Deustsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe 1909-1919, Pandora, c.1998.
11. See also J. E. Cantor's 'Art and industry: reflections on the role of the American museum in encouraging innovation in the decorative arts', in M. Quimby & P. Earl, Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1974, pp. 331-54. The museum historian, E. P. Alexander, has recognized Dana as a 'museum master', and one of the most radical and important museum directors of his time.
12. See E. P. Alexander, Museums Masters: Their Museums and Their Influences, American Association for State and Local History, 1983, pp. 378-411.
13. For a history of the Metropolitan, see: C. Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, E. P. Dutton, 1972.
14. C. W. Laidlaw, 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Modern Design: 1917-1929', Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Spring 1988, Wolfson Foundation of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Inc., p. 92.
15. The Metropolitan began a series of 'art in industry' exhibits in 1917 that required entrants' hand- or machine-made products to be based on the museum's collections. This restriction was dropped after 1924. MoMA's industrial design exhibits were concerned more with promoting mass-produced goods and included: 'Machine Art' exhibit of 1934, which aestheticized machine-made products; a series of useful products exhibits were focused on affordability, such as 'Useful Household Objects Under $5' (1938); 'One-hundred Useful Objects of Fine Design Available Under $100' (1947); and a group of 'Good Design' shows of 1950-5 emphasized modern design and the museum's role as an arbiter of taste.
16. 'Art for the people's sake: the Newark Museum idea', New York Times, 20 April 1924, p. 12.
17. J. C. Dana, 'Art in industry: products of machines are now shown in museums', New York Times, 15 April 1926.
18. J. C. Dana, 'Cash value of art in industry', Forbes, 1 August 1928.
19. J. C. Dana, 'Introduction', in E. E. Calkins's Business the Civilizer, Little, Brown, and Company, 1928. The Museum, the Newark Museum's monthly journal, began publishing in March 1925 and was delivered to local press. It was explicitly designed to 'make the Newark Museum better known; to give it more publicity; to advertise it', March 1925, vol. I, no. 1. The journal was also 'Sent free to members of the American Museum Association; to other museum ... to a few libraries and to many art, scientific and industrial journals', September 1926, vol. I, no. 6.
20. H. W. Kent, 'John Cotton Dana', The Museum, vol. II, no. 10, October 1929, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, p. 75.
21. Originally appeared as an obituary in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August 1929.
22. F. J. Schwarz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996.
23. J. Campbell, The German Werkbund: Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts, Princeton University Press, 1978.
24. G. Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory, E. P. Dutton, 1985.
25. Dana to Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May 1899, in Barbara Lipton, 'John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum', Newark Museum Quarterly, vol. 30, nos. 2 & 3, Spring/Summer 1979, pp. 17-19.
26. E. Boris, Art and Labour: Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America, Temple University Press, 1986, p. xi.
27. H. Cahill, 'John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum', in A Museum in Action: Presenting the Museum's Activities, Newark Museum, 1944, p. 24. Dana's interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement continued into 1900, when he was in contact with Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Chicago's Hull House, an important settlement house that embraced social reform politics and promoted the craftsman ideal to Chicago in the late 1890s.
28. Letter from J. C. Dana to E. G. Starr of Hull House, Chicago, 19 October 1900, Dana Papers, Newark Public Library (hereafter referred to as Dana). Boris, op. cit., p. 45.
29. Cahill, 'John Cotton Dana ...', p. 24.
30. Letter from J. C. Dana to H. L. Johnson, 17 July 1912, Dana.
31. J. C. Dana, The Romance of Labour: Scenes from Good Novels Depicting Joy in Work, Macmillan, 1916.
32. J. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1997, p. 14.
33. A detailed account of the Deutscher Werkbund exhibit can be found in Michael Fehr & Gerhardt Storck (eds.), Deutscher Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe 1909-1919, Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, Gent, Belgium, c.1998.
34. Alexander, op. cit., p. 395.
35. Dana accepted the librarianship of the Free Public Library of Newark, New Jersey on 18 December 1901. On 29 April 1909, the Newark Museum Association was chartered to establish its own metropolitan museum. Alexander, op. cit., pp. 386, 390.
36. J. C. Dana, The Survey, no. 49, 1923, p. 581.
37. Dana's best explication of his philosophy of the gazing museum can be found in Dana, 'The gloom of the museum', p. 399.
38. J. C. Dana, The New Relations of Museums and Industries, Newark, NJ, Newark Museum Association, 1919, p. 20.
39. Alexander, op. cit., p. 284.
40. Smithsonian, Annual Report, 1881, p. 83.
41. G. B. Goode, 'The museums of the future', US National Museum Report, 1897, p. 434.
42. G. Semper, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, ed. Hans M. Wingler, 1852, reprinted 1966, passim.
43. P. Thompson, The Work of William Morris, Oxford University Press, 1993, passim.
44. F. Kingdon, John Cotton Dana: A Life, Public Library and Museum, 1940, p. 98.
45. A. J. Pulos, The American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1986 (1983), p. 304.
46. J. C. Dana, 'Draft of Art in Industry Society Certificate of Incorporation', 1928, Dana. Letter from J. C. Dana to C. L. Dana, 3 November 1920, Dana. Letter from C. L. Dana to J. C. Dana, 1920
47. Dana. Dana suggests that American industrialists and museum professionals look to Britain's recent efforts to establish a 'British Institute of Industrial Art', The New Relations of Museums and Industries, p. 6. The British government did establish the BIIA in 1920 with a government grant. This, however, was withdrawn after 1923-4.
48. Pulos, op. cit., p. 304.
49. Charles Richards, 'America's part in exhibition is threatened', The Museum News, vol. 1, no. 5, 1 March 1924, p. 2. Richards led a special commission of 100 representatives of trade association members, architects and designers to visit and report on the Paris exposition. Pulos, op. cit., p. 304. Richards' findings were published in US Department of Commerce, Report of the US Commission to Appointed by the Secretary of Commerce to Visit and Report upon the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris, 1925, Washington, DC, US Department of Commerce, 1926.
50. The Werkbund exhibit travelled to the following locations: National Arts Club, New York, New York; The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; The John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana; City Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri.
51. Naylor, op. cit, pp. 37-9.
52. See Meikle, op. cit., Davies, op. cit., Shifman, op. cit. and Alexander, op. cit. J. Meikle notes that Dana 'led an industrial art museum movement', and that while 'a few smaller cities too poor for old masters, heeded his gospel of utilitarian beauty and opened up industrial art department ... His most important convert was Richard F. Bach, who in 1918 began an industrial art program in the nation's most prestigious art museum, New York's Metropolitan', Meikle, op. cit., p. 20.
53. Dana, 'Art in industry: products of machines are now shown in museums', The Museum, vol. 1, no 11, February 1928, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, p. 164.
54. Originally published in the New York Times, 15 April 1926.
55. Lipton, op. cit., p. 40. However, the great cost of the show may have been a contributing factor in the Metropolitan's refusal.
56. Dana, 'Art in Industry', op. cit.
57. Cantor, op. cit., p. 342.
58. J. C. Dana, 'In a changing world should museums change?' Originally presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums held at the Metropolitan, New York, 19 May 1926.
59. The Museum, vol. 1, no. 6, September, 1926, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, p. 82.
60. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, Oxford, 1997, pp. 187-9.
61. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management and the Progressive Era, Chicago, 1964.
62. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920, New York, 1969.
63. On transatlantic social politics between 1880 and 1940, see D. T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1998.
64. Alexander, op. cit., p. 403.
65. C. Hadley, John Cotton Dana: A Sketch, American Library Association, 1943, p. 56.
66. Rodgers, op. cit., 1998.
67. J. C. Dana, 'A museum of, for and by Newark', The Survey, no. 55, 1926, p. 615.
68. 'Newark Museum is opened with private view', The Museum News, vol. III, no. 20, 1 April 1925, p. 3.
69. 'An industrial exhibit in a municipal museum', American City, July 1915, p. 22.
70. Laidlaw, op. cit., p. 92.
71. Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. xv, no. 2, 1920, p. 34.
72. Laidlaw, op. cit., p. 97.
73. Dana, 'Art in Industry'.
74. Bach to Dana, 31 March 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, quoted in Cantor, op. cit., p. 345.
75. Laidlaw, op. cit., pp. 88-101, 91. Laidlaw refers to Karen Davies' comments in At Home in Manhattan: Modern Decorative Arts 1925 to the Depression, Yale University Art Gallery, 1983, p. 88.
76. Laidlaw, op. cit., pp. 88, 92.
77. H. W. Kent, What I am Pleased to Call My Education, ed. Lois Leighton Comings, Grolier Club, 1949, pp. 101-2.
78. After 1925, American department stores began to promote vigorously the new developments in the decorative arts through window displays and 'expositions'. This was both an effort to spark consumer interest during a period when the furnishings market was sluggish and saturated by overproduction and a response to the Paris Exposition. Department stores that followed this trend included Altman's, Wanamaker's, Macy's, Lord and Taylor's, and others. Davies, op. cit., pp. 86-7.
79. Dana, 'In a Changing World Should Museums Change?', p. 83.
80. 'American Industrial Art: An Exhibition of Current Manufactures Designed and Made in the United States', Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14 January-2 March 1924.
81. 'America's part in exposition is threatened', The Museum News, vol. 1, no. 5, 1 March 1924, p. 1.
82. 'Sixth Exhibition of American Industrial Art: Current Work by Manufacturers and Designers Showing Study of the Collections', Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15 January-26 February 1922.
83. 'American Industrial Art: Ninth Annual Exhibition of Current Manufactures Designed and Made in the United States', Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29 March-3 May 1925.
84. The collection was purchased by Richards for the AAM with $10,000, and toured the US. 'Richards back for two weeks stay in N.Y.C.', The Museum News, vol. III, 15 October 1925, p. 1.
85. Laidlaw, op. cit., pp. 99-103.
86. Lipton, op. cit., p. 41.
87. B. A. May, 'Progressivism and the colonial revival: the modern colonial house, 1900-1920', Winterthur Portfolio, no. 26, Summer/Autumn 1991, pp. 108-9.
88. M. Coult, 'In the interest of technical arts', reprint from Civic Pilot, September 1923.
89. May, op. cit., pp. 108-9.
90. C. W. Wood, 'The connection between art and bathtubs', New York World, 28 May 1922.
91. Cahill, 'America is making real progress in art', p. 22.
92. T. P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 324-45.
93. P. Johnson, 'History of machine art'. Museum of Modern Art, Machine Art, The Museum of Modern Art March 6 to April 30, 1934, reprint, Arno Press, 1969, not paginated.
94. J. C. Dana, 'How industrial leaders create ART', Forbes, June 15, 1929, pp. 38, 40, 42.
95. Dana, 'Cash value of art in industry', pp. 16-18, 32.
96. Dana, 'A museum of, for and by Newark', p. 614.
97. R. G. Wilson, D. H. Pilgrim & D. Tashjian, The Machine Age in America 1918-1941, New York, Abrams, 1986.
98. Robert W. de Forest, 'John Cotton Dana', The Museum, vol. II, no. 10, October 1929, Museum Association, Newark, NJ, p. 78.
99. Letter from J. C. Dana to Jennie Hinch, 2 June 1928, Dana.