Norman Bel Geddes: A Modernist da Vinci

The Miracle "Gypsy Woman" costume rendering

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Boudour Ballet photo of idol drawing

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

In 1929 American theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes drafted "Airliner Number 4," a plan for a nine-deck amphibian airliner with areas for deck games, shops and salons, an orchestra, a gymnasium and a solarium. He calculated that twenty engines would be needed to achieve cruising altitude. In Horizons (1932), a book on American streamlined design and urban planning, he carefully detailed the airliner's projected flying time and fuel usage, along with the cost of building, equipping, furnishing and operating the plane. To financial backers, the design seemed innovative but extravagant, and it was never built.

The Miracle "Another Lady Guest" costume rendering

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Jukebox sketch

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Most of Bel Geddes's plans and drafts of buildings, cars, airplanes and buses remained drawing-board fantasies, a fact that he embraced and even enjoyed. The painter paints without commission. For him to test his experiment it is not necessary that he first have a contract signed and a client, he wrote. While many of his projects remained sketches or scale models, he kept dreaming, drawing and writing about his designs and theories. Finally he was remembered more for the brilliance of his visionary designs—many of them modern works of art and models of streamlining—than for realized products.

Hamlet, Hamlet costume rendering

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

In the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci, Bel Geddes was a Renaissance man: curious, diversely talented and artistically fearless. Few twentieth-century artists or designers were as adventurous or loved the process of creation as much as he did. Like the Italian polymath, he conceived ideas ahead of their time, designing everything from radios and refrigerators, vending machines and jukeboxes to transcontinental highways and theaters. Out of every ten projects he conceived, perhaps one actually saw the stage or was produced for sale.

Hamlet, Queen Gertrude costume rendering

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Born in 1893, Norman Bel Geddes lived until he was seven in uppermiddle class comfort in Adrian, Michigan. In 1900, his father lost the family fortune in the stock market. Depressed and unable to deal with failure, he drank himself to death, leaving Norman, his mother and younger brother impoverished. Thus began a life of frequent moves—he lived in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana—and odd jobs as a delivery boy, bus boy or whatever he could find. Despite their hardship, his mother instilled in her sons the love of art and theater and encouraged Norman's drawing and painting. In Chicago she took him to see Rip Van Winkle and Ben Hur at the historic Iroquois Theater, which inspired him to make toy theaters and card-board characters for his made-up stories.

Motor Car #9 sketch

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Rebellious and independent, Bel Geddes was expelled from the ninth grade. A cartoonist who had heard about the adolescent's emerging talent got him into the Cleveland School of Design. Discouraged by the school's formality, he left after three months. At the Chicago Art Institute he again chafed at the formal curriculum and was advised to leave and try to make it on his own. Very early, Bel Geddes developed a simple ethos: if you want something badly enough, you can will it to happen. Hoping for a career in the arts, he toured Ohio's summer vaudeville circuit first...