Starting in the 1930s and lasting through the 1950s, the Museum of Modern Art embarked on a series of influential exhibitions that would create an entirely new way of thinking about design. By elevating everyday, inexpensive objects that fit the museum’s criteria of “good design,” MoMA paved the way for modernism to hit the mainstream, launching the careers of seminal designers like Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames and displaying designs that visitors could actually buy.

But there was a hidden agenda–one explored in the museum’s latest exhibition, The Value of Good Design, which opened over the weekend: to extol the virtues of American consumerist capitalism in comparison to Soviet communism, and to boost the American economy in the post-World War II era.

Peter Schlumbohm (American, born Germany. 1896–1962). Chemex Coffee Maker. 1941. [Photo: courtesy MoMA]

If the Soviet design of the time was nationalistic and austere, American industrial design was focused on the intersection of functionality, beauty, and sheer creativity–which in some ways symbolized the American ideal. “Governments on both sides of the Cold War divide… woke up to the seductive power of contemporary design as a political tool,” reads one of The Value of Good Design‘s wall texts... [ read more ]