Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture At the Hagley Museum and Library

Raymond Loewy was the most important industrial designer in twentieth-century America. The term of art—"industrial designer"—doesn't quite do it. Loewy's scope was greater than that: designing consumer goods, color lines, striking and effective interior spaces that were themselves works of art. He was a master of what marketing specialists now understand as "branding," the creation of distinctive, memorable, and evocative designs. Readers of Technology and Culture are likely to know him best for his signature locomotives. Glenn Porter, until recently the director of the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, brings all of this into perspective in an elegant valedictory exhibition. Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture occupies the second floor of the Henry Clay Mill on the Hagley grounds. The exhibition's origins lie in Porter's acquisition at auction in May 2001 of important materials from Loewy's personal papers. It is complemented by a handsome catalog of the same title.

The introductory label makes clear that this is to be an exhibition on Loewy's importance in shaping, even defining, "America's culture of consumption." These are bold claims, which the exhibition impressively addresses. The corridor leading to the exhibition includes two quotes that raise the stakes. Jay Doblin, author of One Hundred Great Product Designs (1970), avers that products are not just the "basis of our economy" but the basis of "our aspirations and our way of life." Loewy goes even further (though we have to think the quote is at least tongue-in-cheek), telling an audience at the Harvard Business School in 1950 that the "spiritual value of a vacuum cleaner may not be terribly high, but it may do the trick until we have an American Gandhi." By itself the Loewy quote is a witty or tasteless throwaway; next to Doblin's assertion that consumer goods are the basis of our aspirations—all our aspirations?—it serves to put Loewy's work in a grander, and perhaps more sinister, light.

Loewy was born in Paris in 1893, into a family that was comfortably upper middle class but not wealthy. His father, an immigrant from Vienna, was the managing editor of a financial journal; his mother, the descendent of landowners in the Ardèche. He seemed poised to pursue an engineering degree in Paris when World War I intervened. Loewy served with distinction as an officer of engineers. The influenza outbreak of 1918-19 claimed his parents. His two brothers left for the United States, where he joined them in the fall of 1919. The exhibition's introduction offers images of the young Loewy and his precocious sketches of speedboats, locomotives, and wine chilling in ice buckets. In general, reading much into such youthful enthusiasms is a mistake, but Porter convincingly captures Loewy's career trajectory.

From a four-story walkup on the Upper East Side of New York City, Loewy began a career as an illustrator, window dresser, and commercial artist. Although he would later claim that he had nothing to do with advertising, it was American advertising that gave him his start. Drawn to the high end of the market, and gifted in what we now know as "networking," he crafted a trademark for Neiman-Marcus, an advertisement for Bonwit Teller, and worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. His 1928 ads for the White Star Line, in Porter's persuasive account, were cutting edge. Stunningly realized, they evoked style and emotion in a surrealistic register, the copy deftly appealing both to the wealthy, who sought exclusivity, and to the "economical," who required assurance that they too would be treated well. Loewy's work on this project left his literal-minded competitors in the dust, a fact that the exhibit catalog makes clear but which the exhibition itself obscures. The White Star ads, and Loewy's other advertising work, are badly placed...