Wright Auction

A predominant current of 20th century design, Machine Age Modernism brought the excitement and allure of mechanization into everyday visual vernacular, permeating art, architecture, and industrial design alike. Far from a singular movement, the Machine Age emerged from the Second Industrial Revolution, embracing new technologies of mass production and encompassing a variety of design styles that departed dramatically from traditional ornateness: Art Deco, Bauhaus, Precisionism, and the closely related aesthetic philosophies of Cubism and Futurism among them. As the National Gallery describes, there were a many methods “used in evoking a machine age modernism: angling...sights up or down along towering buildings, streamlining and abstracting forms, exposing the underlying geometry of architecture and machinery, treating dark shadows as solids, and focusing on interlocking parts.”

“New mechanical forms and forces offered themselves as inspiring symbols of unprecedented human well-being, signaling a new epoch in communications, transportation and the mass production of consumer goods...”

Machine Age Design 1925–1950 features examples specifically from the period between World War I and World War II, considered in many respects to be the peak of the era. “While much of Europe was in disarray at the end of the Great War in 1918,” wrote Alan Trachtenberg for the New York Times, “the United States was entering a period of extravagant development of the man-made environment.” Among these new arrivals were stunning skyscrapers, majestic suspension bridges, streamlined automobiles, and airplanes, accompanied by major infrastructure and minor accoutrements alike. “These new mechanical forms and forces offered themselves as inspiring symbols of unprecedented human well-being, signaling a new epoch in communications, transportation and the mass production of consumer goods,” wrote Trachtenberg. Each work offered in Machine Age Design 1925–1950, from a gleaming silver-plated coffee pot fashioned after a skyscraper to furnishings by Paul T. Frankl and Donald Deskey to renderings of a movie theater, speak to the optimism and energy of this transitionary and transformative moment in cultural history.