Art and Design in 1960s New York

By Amanda Gluibizzi

Art and Design in 1960s New York explores the mutual influence between fine art and graphic design in New York City during the long decade of the 1960s. Beginning with advertising's "creative revolution" and its relationship to pop artists, the book traces design and art's developing interest in responses to civic problems such as the proliferation of billboards, navigation through the city's streets and subways, and issues of deteriorating infrastructure. The strategies exploited by these artists and designers resulted in similar approaches to visual imagery and shared techniques for thinking about and responding to the city in which they lived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785276675

Book preview

Art and Design in 1960s New York

Frontispiece: Robert Rauschenberg, Skyway, 1964

Art and Design in 1960s New York

Amanda Gluibizzi

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Amanda Gluibizzi 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-665-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-665-4 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Venturelli Luca / Shutterstock.com

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Entire Visual World

1.Designs on 1960s New York: The Image of Pop and North by Northwest

2.Breaking the Rules with the Beetle: Volkswagen’s Revolutionary Advertising and the Visual Wit of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art

3.Navigating by the Vernacular Glance: Billboards, Signs, and the Urban Combine

4.Way-Words: Wayfinding by Following Pieces

5.What’s the Matter with the Megalopolis?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Robert Rauschenberg, Skyway, 1964

1David Ogilvy, The man in the Hathaway shirt, 1951

2Saul Bass, Vertigo (one-sheet poster), 1958

3Saul Bass, North by Northwest (poster), 1959

4North by Northwest (still), 1959

5Saul Bass, North by Northwest (title sequence), 1959

6Saul Bass, North by Northwest (title sequence), 1959

7Are they making the turnpikes shorter this year?, Advertisement for the 1961 Plymouth car, 1961

8Doyle Dane Bernbach, Lemon., Advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, 1959

9Doyle Dane Bernbach, Think small., Advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, 1959

10Doyle Dane Bernbach, How to do a Volkswagen ad., Advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, 1962

11Doyle Dane Bernbach, 2 shapes known the world over., Advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, 1962

12Robert Rauschenberg, Coca-Cola Plan, 1958

13Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, 1962

14Andy Warhol, 210 Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

15Doyle Dane Bernbach, No point showing the ’62 Volkswagen, Advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, 1962

16Andy Warhol, Double Elvis, 1963/1976

17Carl Rose, illustration from Robert Moses, A Broadside against Billboards, New York Times, November 12, 1950

18Robert Rauschenberg, Satellite, 1955

19Robert Rauschenberg, Stripper, 1962

20Robert Rauschenberg (recto), Untitled, ca. 1954/1958

21Robert Rauschenberg (verso), Untitled, ca. 1954/1958

22Robert Rauschenberg (detail), Untitled, ca. 1954/1958

23Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy V (for Jasper Johns), 1962

24Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham), 1959

25Robert Rauschenberg (detail), Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham), 1959

26Robert Rauschenberg (detail), Trophy I (for Merce Cunningham), 1959

27Robert Rauschenberg, Black Market, 1961

28Unimark International, one-way street signs, 53rd Street project research photographs, 1967

29Robert Rauschenberg (detail), Black Market, 1961

30Unimark International, notes on New York City signage (reference photographs), ca. 1968

31Robert Rauschenberg, Estate, 1963

32Robert Rauschenberg, Bait, 1963

33Robert Rauschenberg (detail), Skyway, 1964

34Massimo Vignelli, Bob Noorda, Unimark International, design of the information tree, New York City Transit Authority, Graphic Standards Manual, 1966–70, p. 2

35Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969

36Vito Acconci (detail), Following Piece, 1969

37Unimark International, mandatory sign: All persons are forbidden to enter upon or cross the tracks, design for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, New York, 1970

38Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969

39Massimo Vignelli (detail), Bob Noorda, Unimark International, various situations showing how not to use the arrow(s) at any time or in any place in the subway signage system, New York City Transit Authority, Graphic Standards Manual, 1966–70

40Unimark International, NYC subway lines and proposed color coding, late 1960s–early 1970s

41Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Bagism, 1969

42Van Ginkel Associates (detail), project proposal for Ginkelvan, 1972–73

43Unimark International, 53rd Street project reference photograph, ca. 1967

44Unimark International, 53rd Street signage proposal, 1967

45Unimark International (detail), 53rd Street signage proposal, 1967

46Hans Haacke (detail), Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a real-time social system as of May 1, 1971

47Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a real-time social system as of May 1, 1971

48Burk Uzzle, East Harlem, 1969, Plan for New York City

49Burk Uzzle, East Harlem, 1969, Plan for New York City

50Burk Uzzle, Upper Lexington Avenue, 1969, Plan for New York City

51Gordon Matta-Clark, Walls Paper, 1972 (2015 installation)

52Massimo Vignelli, New York subway map, 1970/1972

53Metropolitan Transit Authority (detail), The Weekender, 2020

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Art and Design in 1960s New York was written several years ago, but I prepared the manuscript for publication during New York City’s shelter-in-place orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Each night at 7:00, our block has erupted in cheers, applause, the ringing of bells and blowing of horns and Frank Sinatra singing New York, New York as our neighbors celebrate the first responders, emergency workers, nurses, doctors, hospital technicians, public transportation employees, package deliverers and grocery store and bodega clerks who have kept us healthy and safe and our city running. It has been sobering for me to think about the fear I feel in New York now and the frustrating city described here: they are so different, but they also cause us to think about community and our evolving definitions of what that means. I thank our health-care, emergency and essential workers for what they have given to the rest of us.

This book began as a dissertation written for the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University. My thesis adviser, Aron Vinegar, and my committee members, Lisa Florman, Ron Green and Kris Paulsen, offered invaluable help to me as I worked through my ideas and were open minded as I explored the mutual interests of art and design; I am also grateful to the faculty members who indulged me as I developed these concepts throughout my coursework. Aron proved to be an especially important interlocutor for me, and I am honored to express my thanks to him here. My time researching and writing benefited from an Ohio State University employee tuition waiver and special research assignments, and the Ohio State University Libraries and my coworkers in that college – particularly Nena Couch, Anne Fields, Alan Green, Deidra Herring, Dracine Hodges and Eric Johnson – proved supportive and interested. After I moved to teach in the Departments of Art and History of Art at the university, I was grateful to find a warm welcome with another encouraging group of artists and scholars, and the friends and colleagues with whom I discussed this project include Roger Beebe, Ann Hamilton, Erica Levin, Laura Lisbon, Daniel Marcus, Michael Mercil, Gina Osterloh, Dani Restack, George Rush, Andrew Shelton, Sergio Soave, Suzanne Silver and Jared Thorne.

Outside of Ohio State, I first started thinking and teaching about art and design at the Art Institute of Boston (AIB; now the College of Art and Design at Lesley University), and I would like to acknowledge Susan Ashbrook, Chris Ford, Christopher James and Raye Yankauskas, as well as my students at AIB, who were the initial inspirations for my investigations. Phong Bui, Charles Schultz, Nick Bennett, Louis Block, Sophia Pedlow and my fellow editors and writers at The Brooklyn Rail are wonderful cheerleaders and have reminded me again and again about the importance of community. I have presented aspects of the work at Ohio State, Parsons School of Design/The New School, the Wentworth Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published a portion of Chapter 3 in Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture, edited by Carla Taban and released by the University of Leuven Press. I thank the audiences and readers for their helpful questions and suggestions. My research would not have been complete without access to the archives and library at the Museum of Modern Art and the Vignelli Archive at the Rochester Institute of Technology; I am grateful to the archivists and librarians for their aid. Pursuing image rights for artworks, motion pictures and advertisements is a skill in and of itself, let alone during a crisis that has closed the world’s cultural institutions, and I would have been lost without Gina Broze helping me to do so. Megan Greiving and the editors and production team at Anthem Press have proven extremely supportive, and I also thank Richard Pult and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for offering me such useful suggestions. Any mistakes or omissions are mine.

This has been a long process, and I have accumulated many debts to friends who have worked with me to puzzle things out or given me encouragement. Among those I must mention by name are Danielle Callegari, Derrick Cartwright, John Christopoulos, Holly Flora, Byron Hamann, James Hansen, Michael Lobel, Jonathan Mullins, Alexander Nagel, Emily Neumeier, Aimee Ng, Joe Paganucci, Diego Pirillo, Olivia Powell, Courtney Quaintance, Kirun Sankaran, Amelia Saul and Jenny Sliwka. My family have helped me more than they can know. Sincere thanks to my siblings and their partners and children for understanding my single-mindedness while I was writing and for being willing to hear what was being done, and to my grandparents for being curiosity role models. What I know about hard work, civic responsibility and caring for others I learned from the best teachers, my parents Lynne and Steve Halasz.

When I write that none of this would have been possible without the interest and support of Christian Kleinbub, I am not exaggerating. He has read every chapter almost as many times as I have, and many of the ideas I like the best come from my conversations with him. Christian constantly pushes me to be better, and for that, I cannot thank him enough. He is a true lover of New York, and I so value the explorations we have undertaken in this and many other cities. Together with our daughter Angelina Lynne, I will be excited to continue those journeys. This book is for him.

INTRODUCTION: THE ENTIRE VISUAL WORLD

When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with the entire visual world, he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw.¹ Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets and landscapes where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture. Thus, a project such as Albers’s assignment to build a gray scale out of photographs found in a single magazine was intended to hone students’ awareness of the subtlety of the increments between the darkest black and the brightest white, as well as to attune them to the existence of these subtleties in print materials.² And indeed, printed images were all around them: in a 1966 discussion of pop artists titled The Image Duplicators, Ellen H. Johnson noted,

Caught in traffic jams, packed in buses, subways, elevators, or spending a quiet evening at home, never has the human being been such a captive of the printed image, constantly changing and endlessly repeated: in books, newspapers and magazines, on the shifting world of the TV or movie screen, the blaring billboards, highway signs, giant lighted ads for hotels, theaters, stores—everywhere pictured products and pictured people beckoning, commanding and assaulting. These are the fields of Suffolk and the Fontainebleau Forest of our painters.³

In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. And designers’ own concerns included the very urban makeup described by Johnson.⁴ Although the visual workings of mass culture have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians, artists’ engagement with designed objects—their personal sense of looking, as Rauschenberg went on to describe it—has a long and significant history.⁵ This book proposes to investigate a moment of that history through an exploration of the interaction between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972. I shall consider the following questions: What were the art and design problems facing New York in the 1960s? What did design work look like in response to these concerns, and how did art produced in this time and place look to design, referencing its tropes and considering its potentials? Furthermore, how did artists respond to the designed city in which they were making art and how did designers respond to the changing focus of art? In so doing, I hope to consider more fully the mutual influence of art and design in this pivotal period of their intertwined modes of production.

By most accounts, New York was an unpleasant, dirty, and even dangerous location to live in the 1960s and 1970s. Through a combination of population decline, governmental neglect, and bureaucratic tangles, New York City reverted to a seemingly ungovernable—and unlivable—place. In official, governmental literature as well as the popular media, New York was portrayed as a city that was broken. One need only think of films such as Midnight Cowboy, released in 1969, and the New York streets it depicts to imagine the depressing sense that the city was deteriorating irreversibly. Even a movie as celebratory as Manhattan, made a decade later, pictured streets filled with garbage and a romantic outing marred by mysterious muck dredged up from the bed of Central Park’s boating pond. Crime was rampant, manufacturing moved away from the area, public services were cut, an estimated one-in-four lived in the city in poverty, and in 1975, New York City experienced a credit default, plunging the city into financial turmoil. For all intents and purposes, it seemed as though the world was content to let New York die, as exemplified by a famous front-page headline run by the New York Daily News after President Ford declared that the United States would not bail out its largest city. The headline read, Ford to City: Drop Dead.⁶

Yet within this apparently dying city was developing one of the most vibrant centers of the visual world. Postwar New York witnessed a consolidation of artistic output and accomplishment that permitted it to rival the art capitals of previous generations. Madison Avenue was shorthand for the advertising industry, as so many of the field’s major firms were headquartered on that thoroughfare; even now, New York’s preeminence in the fields of advertising and marketing remains recognized. And it was precisely because New York City seemed to be experiencing so many urban ills that design for civic use—design such as street signage, subway maps, and street furniture intended to ease the ugliness of the sidewalks—was promoted by government officials as a possible solution to the discomforts of living in the city. If artists saw in New York’s problems an aesthetic impetus toward even greater disruption and pushing of limits, then designers and advertisers saw a singular opportunity to attempt an urban rescue, or at least to rebrand the city as exciting rather than miserable. Seen in this light, New York in the 1960s and 1970s becomes a center for visual experimentation and testing of boundaries: if the environment were in such disarray then the rules for successful living in the city were already up for reconsideration.

The art world of New York in this period was incredibly broad, encompassing as it did the last expressions of color field painting, pop art, minimalism, and the beginnings of conceptual, performance, and installation art. Because of this, I shall concentrate my primary discussion on artists who had or have a relationship with design. Andy Warhol’s experience in advertising in the 1950s is the best known, as his commercial practices are widely acknowledged to have influenced his work as an artist. While his engagement with design is less discussed, Robert Rauschenberg supported himself for a brief time early in his career by designing with Jasper Johns storefronts for Bonwit Teller in Manhattan, and Vito Acconci left his art practice at the end of the 1970s for a career in design. In looking at the art that each of these men produced, though, I will not be considering it as design or as the product of a design inheritance (or foreshadowing, in the case of Acconci). Rather, I am most interested in each artist’s engagement with his visual environment and in exploring the logic that each artist’s work shares in common with the systems and methods exhibited by designed objects. Thus, Warhol’s use of photographic images can be fruitfully discussed in terms of advertising’s use of similar imagery, Rauschenberg’s awareness of the way that signposts work has a bearing on the approaches the viewer might take to navigate through his Combines and silk-screen paintings, and the grammar and execution of Acconci’s writings and performances are mirrored in the processes employed by designers to develop sign systems and maps.

In keeping with the focused number of artists considered here, there will be similar touchstone designers who will play larger roles in my discussion. David Ogilvy will feature throughout the first part of the book, as the advertising executive who literally wrote the rules for advertising at mid-century. Responding to such rules will be Saul Bass, best known for his opening titles of Hollywood films, whose work on the film North by Northwest will be discussed here, and the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, which self-consciously exploited and disrupted Ogilvy’s prescriptions for successful advertising. The firm Unimark International, and its principals Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, which developed both a subway map for New York City and a plan for subway and train station signage as well as street signage, plays a significant part in the latter half of the book. In addition, I engage with the thoughts and work of designers and urban planners as diverse as Milton Glaser, Peter Chermayeff, Robert Moses, and Kevin Lynch. Before turning to an outline of what follows in the body of this study, though, I would like to take a look at the trouble design caused for critics of modern art, as the suspicion with which the designers mentioned above were held had profound ramifications on the ways their work was understood and how the art of the period, which often engaged design, was received.

The Problem of Design in the Art of the Twentieth Century

The suspicion of design’s influence is a thread that runs throughout the discussion of the art of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly because modern art featured instances of mass culture from its very beginnings (such as the collage elements in Pablo Picasso’s earliest synthetic cubist constructions), tackling the prevalence of popular art and culture found within fine art has been an unavoidable feature of the critical writing that has attempted to come to terms with that work. Whether in the typographic decisions of F. T. Marinetti’s Parole in Libertà (Words in Freedom) or the application of Constructivist ideals in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s advertisements, artists have employed the language of design, in its commercial and civic manifestations, in their work.⁷ The return of commercial imagery to pop art after the heroic abstract efforts of abstract expressionist and color field painters must have been understood as what the architect Adolf Loos referred to as a retrograde step to those critics who envisioned for art an inevitable progression into self-awareness and purity.⁸ In what follows, I would like to examine briefly the history of the fear of design, looking closely at critical writings by Hilton Kramer and Clement Greenberg to explore the instances in which the word design was used as a term of derision in their art writing.⁹ This contempt stemmed from a disdain for the appearance of avant-garde art or popular art in the 1950s and 1960s (and, in Greenberg’s case, the 1930s and 1940s), but also involved a rhetorical strategy, in which design was equated with fashion, kitsch, and the fleetingness of popular good taste. I will also explore the issue from the opposite direction, looking at the problem of design writing and history and exploring the ambivalence designers and design writers express in becoming part of a greater art historical discussion. Through this commentary, I am attempting to uncover the prickly situation of design, a form of visual production that plays to the mass audience of popular culture but whose products are refined to the point of requiring an elite audience to appreciate their subtleties.

The modernist abhorrence of the decorative can be traced back at least as far as to Adolf Loos, whose famous 1908 essay equated ornament with crime.¹⁰ The crime of ornamentation is one that Loos terms an abomination of the evolution of culture.¹¹ If to be modern was to be free of decoration, then the ornamental leaves and filigrees of Art Nouveau signaled for Loos a disturbing decline in the capacities of supposedly sophisticated Europeans. According to Ornament and Crime, every civilization prior to the nineteenth century was capable of stripping away the decorative elements in its buildings and furnishings; it did not bode well for the people of the nineteenth century that they fell prey to such a scourge. Even more suspicious for Loos is the fact that the government subsidized this scourge of ornament, encouraging it to manifest on official buildings or appear at fairs, meaning that citizens were kept in a state of servitude to the easy pleasures that decoration can afford.¹² This opiate that blinds people to poor quality and decadence is something that Loos claimed to abolish in his own constructions, favoring a simplified—yet politically resistant—façade that removes the frosting from the cake that is more delicious without it.¹³

Loos’s idea that the allure of the popular is mistaken by the masses for the more satisfying sustenance of high art is one that is picked up by generations of writers that succeeded him, each in its way arguing for the importance of the high and the wasted calories of the low. In his 1959 review of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns’s paintings, Hilton Kramer indicates that their art works most successfully on bourgeois feelings, which yearn for a bit of decorative nastiness […] intended to offend (which is to say ‘delight’) them.¹⁴ The Rauschenberg of this review is a deft designer with a sensitive eye for the chic detail, a claim that both dredges up Rauschenberg’s recent past as a window decorator for department stores and neatly dismisses his paintings.¹⁵

But why is designer the right term for Kramer in this instance? To call Rauschenberg’s paintings and Combines decorative is to move them away from the all-consuming requirements of a reduction to canvas and paint that is found in all-over painting, and indeed, Kramer notes that Rauschenberg includes passages of painting that call to mind the official good taste of abstract expressionism. The decorative elements in Rauschenberg’s Combines are those parts of the work that are not abstract expressionist.¹⁶ Thus, Kramer sees Rauschenberg’s paintings as uncomfortable conglomerations of preapproved painting techniques and unfortunate intrusion of the stuff of everyday life into the purity of such paintings. Rauschenberg’s screen prints, signs, and other detritus are, for Kramer, decoration that covers over the clarity of an appropriately abstract painting.

However, designer is something else entirely. A designer could be the person to decorate a store window or the interior of an office or home, but a designer might also be one who has designs on art. It is clear that Kramer intends to conflate the terms decorative and designer, but there are other aspects of the word design to which he is inevitably alluding. If Rauschenberg has designs on art and the art world, then he is the artist for whom it is possible to destroy that world. To de-sign is literally to strip away the signal achievement of art.¹⁷ In this construction, to be a designer, to have designs on art, is to deploy the strategies of mass art and visual culture to attempt to deconstruct the edifice of art from within. Thus, the decorative elements of Rauschenberg’s Combines not only cover over the abstract expressionist segments of his work, but also visually pull them apart, rendering them powerless and therefore mocking what notions of high achievement they might have represented. The designer is deemed suspicious precisely because he is willing to press such slight advantages. It is the art itself that is not taken seriously in a designer’s work, because the designer is prepared to exploit the techniques used to achieve aesthetic pleasure for something that will not repay the effort. According to Kramer, this is not the art that will reward the disinterested gaze, but rather that which tickle[s]‌ the eye, to arrest attention for a momentary dazzle.¹⁸ If it is only dazzle that is the aim of the images produced by Rauschenberg, then he is nothing more than a designer, producing work that is easily consumable, that sells itself well, and that is quickly forgotten when the next piece is encountered. It is art that will suffer because of the designer’s focus on dazzle and his introduction of the viewer to the concept of good taste.

It is this reference to good taste and the means by which it can be produced by design that links Kramer’s criticism to that of Clement Greenberg.¹⁹ Writing seven years later in his review article Recentness of Sculpture, Greenberg decries minimalist sculpture as little more than Good Design, claiming that the continued infiltration of Good Design into what purports to be advanced and highbrow art now depresses sculpture as it does painting.²⁰ Greenberg’s suspicions about minimalism are not that it is decorative in the same way that Kramer indicted Rauschenberg’s work, nor that it borrowed popular culture imagery, but rather that its techniques of construction move it toward an ethos of the mass production of modular elements that can be configured and reconfigured to produce unending trains of barely differing structures: minimalism was on the borderlines between art and non-art.²¹ Greenberg’s distaste for serialism—an inevitable result of the mass production of objects—which he linked to the first step in a degeneration of the decorative toward fashion, turns artists into designers, those cultural producers who only envision a work but do not make it come into being with their own hands.²² The difficulty with art becoming fashion is that art then becomes merely a matter of good taste.²³

The linking of Good Design and good taste was not an arbitrary one on Greenberg’s part. In labeling Good Design as a capitalized, proper name, Greenberg was undoubtedly making an allusion to the Good Design exhibitions held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibitions, curated by Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr. and held both at the museum and at the Merchandise Mart of Chicago, were juried shows intended to showcase the best industrial design products developed or manufactured that year.²⁴ The installations allowed the objects to be handled by visitors, were purchasable at Merchandise Mart and Kaufmann department stores, and provided funding for designers to bring prototypes into the market. The relationship between design and commercial production was clear, yielding popular exhibits that included saleable art objects. In this capacity, MoMA’s exhibitions played roles in both sides of the equation Good design is good business, moving the museum away from displays intended to promote disinterested contemplation of art in the Kantian vein and toward an active relationship between the viewer and the object, as well as the museum and commerce.²⁵

However, in addition to introducing consumers to postwar domestic products, the exhibitions were also intended to ease the visitor/consumer’s relationship with modernist visuality. Indeed, a more developed sense of good taste was the raison d’être behind the Good Design exhibitions. In staging these exhibitions, the museum’s aim was, according to its director René d’Harnoncourt, to raise the level of awareness and acceptance of modern art among the populace. In a speech given to promote the Good Design program in the Midwest, d’Harnoncourt suggested, Of every 100 persons who come to the Museum, we estimate that no more than 10 actually accept a geometric abstraction by Piet Mondrian as valid art[,]‌ […] but when principles of good design permeate a home, the occupants tend to be more tolerant, more receptive to new ideas in art.²⁶

Although historians documenting the