“The Total Absence of Foreign Subjects”: The Racial Politics of US Interwar Exhibitions of Scandinavian Design

Abstract

Typically viewed as a postwar trend in home furnishings, Scandinavian design, then classified as “art”, gained a following in the United States between the First and Second World Wars. It melded traditional and modern aesthetics, and was viewed by curators, critics, and audiences as familiar, and even “native” to the United States. This article contends that keywords in the promotion of Scandinavian design, namely “democratic”, “craft”, and “traditional”, reflected concurrent cultural debates surrounding American identity, immigration reform, and race in the interwar years (1912–46), rather than exclusively representing Scandinavian design. Focusing on the exhibitions Contemporary Swedish Art (1916), the Exhibitions of Arts and Crafts of the Homelands (1919–20), Swedish Contemporary Art, or the Swedish Art Exhibition (1927), and Paintings, Sculpture, and Arts and Crafts of Denmark, or the Danish National Exhibition (1927–29), the author establishes the cultural context in which these exhibitions and the works included were viewed, distinguishing the exhibitions of the 1910s as racially exclusive and the displays of the 1920s as models for American designs. In the postwar period when racial pseudoscience fell out of favor internationally and US immigration policies were in place, the meanings of “democratic” and “traditional” design shifted, removing the racialized mythmaking from Scandinavian design’s promotion.

Keywords:

• eugenics
• immigration
• race
• Scandinavian design

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Following its installation in Brooklyn, the exhibition traveled to Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, St Louis, Indianapolis, and Toledo. Most of the exhibitions discussed within this article traveled widely. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I refer to these with regard to the originating museums.

2. The Swedish Exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) initiated transatlantic interest in US exhibitions of Swedish art. Shortly thereafter, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts asked Swedish painter Anders Zorn to organize an exhibition of his countrymen’s painting, culminating in Representative Works of Contemporary Swedish Artists (1895–96), which traveled to Chicago, Cincinnati, St Louis, Boston, and Brooklyn (Art Institute of Chicago 1896). A later regional exhibition, Contemporary Scandinavian Art (1912), organized by the American Scandinavian Society of New York, had a catalog introduction by American art critic Christian Brinton, but the primary essays were by curators from the Scandinavian countries (American Scandinavian Society of New York 1912). This show was the subject of a centennial exhibition, Luminous Modernism (2011–12), and recorded in full in Berman (2011).

3. For analysis of Brinton’s political positions and their relation to his art criticism, see Walker (1999).

4. Scholars disagree on the nature of these programs, whether racially motivated or the extremes of functionalism, but they need not be exclusive of one another. Interest in functionalism and the development of the welfare state certainly influenced the development of fully fledged eugenic programs between 1935 and 1965, but Scandinavian or Nordic interest in eugenics prior to 1935 remains poorly documented, at least in part because it predates national programs. US interest in eugenics programs incorporated both Progressive-Era functionalism and faith in bureaucracy, and Progressive-Era racial theories. Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race provides but one example of the transatlantic discourse on race and eugenics and the overlapping interests of the United States and Scandinavian countries. The text was quickly translated into German, French, and Norwegian, including up to four editions by 1920, thus circulating the text amongst nations Grant viewed as most in danger of foreign infiltration (Germany, in particular, but also France), and those most celebrated sites for the Nordic race outside of America and England, which could use the English-language version. Similarly, American eugenicists referenced Scandinavian programs, as did Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Key to this discussion is Broberg and Hansen (2005) (see also Alexander 1962; Osborn 1921; Pickens 1968; Spektrowski and Mizrachi 2004).

5. A search for “Bauhaus” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collections database dates the earliest acquisition in 1948. Whether coincidental or telling, the Metropolitan’s exclusion of German contemporary works in the period parallels Grant’s claims to summarizing wider-held beliefs when he claimed in 1916 that “Germany is feeling the replacement of Nordic by Alpine blood very severely, and many of her foremost thinkers regard her as almost lost to the Nordic race” (Grant 1924, 348).

6. Hammershøi produced several works based on views of his parlor or drawing room, including Interior with the Artist’s Mother (1889) and at least four in the series Sunshine in the Drawing Room. It is unclear which of these was on display in the exhibition, though all included the sofa, also pictured in his apartment (Larsen 2014, 190). For illustrative purposes, I refer to Sunshine in the Drawing Room IV (1910) (Figure 7).

7. A series of speeches prepared for the opening of the exhibition are included in the Papers of the Office of the Director, then William Henry Fox. The other speeches incorporate an identifier, as if submitted for Fox’s review or in preparation for the program. This speech is unsigned, and as both the museum’s director and the exhibitions organizer Fox undoubtedly spoke at the opening.

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Erin Leary

Erin Leary recently earned her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation, “Decorating for Discrimination: Nativism and Eugenics in American Decorative and Domestic Arts, 1893-1924”, uses decorative arts to understand women's participation in the immigration restriction movement at the turn of the twentieth century. She is a lecturer in design history and visual culture at Parsons, The New School for Design, and at the Sotheby's Institute of Art.

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