Design and Abstraction

...Their beds that fold into little tables and domestic appliances that slot together into one glorious cube are triumphs of anality for families who function every day in a one-two-three sequence, or who have servants...

...It has also staged a contest for young designers...

...The pictures still look quite strange...

...The contestatory crowd subdivides into those who refuse to design at all but may indulge in polemical writing, and those who produce objects and environments that, hopefully, carry no class implications...

...It is truly fascinating to watch the near-whimsy of the early Fauvist landscapes and groups give way to the rather ugly turbulence of the semi- and non-objective works, with blobby forms sliding about the canvas scarred by black calligraphic scrawls...

...What comes through is a moving impression of a man who took, as it were, a priestly vow of self-denial, as originators always seem obliged to do...

...It is divided roughly into two sections: furniture and appliances (160 of them), displayed in colossal cratelike booths in the Museum garden...

...Spectators might, I think, pay money to see this item brimful with, say, your typical American Family, tooling along the Jersey Pike toward "the woods...

...Some of them get off the hook by using "already existing industrial elements [and] by this recycling [avoid] the proliferation of formal matrices...

...The Kandinskys on view at the Guggenheim through September 5 were wrongly described here last month as late works...

...Indeed, the show is more like an adjunct to the substantial book, edited by Emilio Ambasz, curator of design, and priced at $9.95 in paperback...

...The creator of the Kar-a-Sutra is against the automobile for all the usual reasons, but feels that as long as it is here it should be a MOBILE HUMAN SPACE...

...The Museum, believing that the contestatory attitude corresponds with the "preoccupations of a changing society," has stressed the environmental section of the show and invited established people to submit concrete ideas in writing...

...This is no place to continue the discussion, but it must be admitted that the exhibition makes a good case for artists being edited like writers: The early figurative works are reduced to a tasteful minimum and stress is properly laid on the abstractions that have been so influential...

...Up to a point, one can sympathize with those who refuse to design at all, for we are what we produce and consume, and we don't look so good right now...

...Reformists, on the other hand, are embarrassed to do this "in a society that fosters consumption as one means of inducing individual happiness...

...It is as if the furtherance of abstraction, of painting from inner necessity, was for him a vocation demanding, paradoxically, abstinence from virtuosity and every other form of painterly self-indulgence...

...We are also busy expressing our virility and status by our style of driving and choice of make...

...As for the group who actually appear to be doing something about urban environments, their solutions would require people to be conditioned, much like the new type of salmon scientists are breeding to thrive in polluted waters...

...This environment is emblematic of prevailing attitudes, political or architectural, whereby decisions are made in air-conditioned remoteness for "the masses," who might as well be Congo Pygmies...

...Though it cannot be proved that his total abstractions (circa 1910) were the first of their kind, he is generally credited with the breakthrough...

...In barely perceptible contrast, the Kar-a-Sutra, which holds 12 without baggage, permits us to "stretch out, sleep, smile, converse face-to-face, observe the outside world . . . stand up, take films . . . play cards . . . put away and pick up all kinds of objects, carry children and play with them," etc., etc...

...As an introductory film demonstrates, Italian designers are split more or less into three groups: conformist, reformist, and contestatory...

...The concept of flexibility is, of course, a golden oldie, but it acquires new luster and provides some unintentional humor when combined with a countercultural contribution, nomadism...

...The first continues the tradition of turning out nice things that are beyond the financial reach of most people...

...It is becoming daily more obvious to residents of large cities that innumerable tasks must be tackled at every level, but visions of existence that presuppose machines doing all the work while we, the people, frolic with our flexible, nomadic environments compel reappraisal of Marie Antoinette and Nero for sheer political nous...

...A sofa shaped like a baseball mitt and a tractor seat turned domestic chair are among the examples from this group...

...Despite audio-visual guidance, the point of the exhibition, better expressed by its subtitle, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, is liable to be missed unless considerable homework is done on the catalogue...

...The container that can be turned "in only a few minutes" into a mobile home by sliding out kitchen and bedroom alcoves was particularly appealing-as a script possibility for an old Hollywood farce...

...When the space is small, designers rush in our old friend "flexibility," permitting people to "express their own views" through the manipulation of sliding doors and retractable furniture and rooms-although anyone who has lived with so much as a hide-a-bed knows it helps to be a terminal obsessive-compulsive to exist in such flexible surroundings...

...Given a lot of space, architects are more often than not grandiosely irresponsible, as was Corbusier in his Indian town of Chandigarh, today considered to be a disaster of symphonic proportions...

...Without the 432 pages, 380 of them illustrated, the sharpness of the designers' political and conceptual tilts would be overlooked in the general atmosphere of World's Fair euphoria...

...A place for everything and everything in its place, and God help you if you bought more potatoes than the container holds...

...As a result, architects have been driven into mere product designing, and the exhibit at the Modern seems to be more an expression of their personal frustration with this situation than a serious attempt to improve living conditions...

...They are neither flat decorations nor studies having depth or spatial qualities, but something in-between-meticulously-painted elements hanging in a vacuum...

...and 11 environments, installed inside in a specially built fun house of black rooms and passages...

...Yet, with the passage of time and the skillful editing, it seems to reveal much more of the man, who, incidentally, hated people to see how he really felt...

...smoke, think, read a bit, talk to the passenger next to us or others behind us, switch on the radio, watch the landscape out of the corner of our eye, and finally get out...

...Comprising the Museum's entire collection, they represent all phases of the artist's development...

...No longer believing good artifacts can improve the quality of life, they design with irony or nostalgia while waiting for the political structure to change...

...The little government-sponsored building there is functions primarily as an aspect "of the employment problem rather than as an integral part of urban planning...

...In Italy, according to Ambasz' epilogue, there is "no coordination between the furniture industry and what might be called-if it existed?the building industry...

...Alternatively, a couple of dudes could blast off with nothing but the Kar-a-Sutra and its cushions, and after having all the fun they can take fooling with adjustable roof and windows, could decide "on the way . . . [to] buy a horse or a piano...

...He knew he was doomed to live in a little box but saw no reason to ram home the claustrophobic point by filling that box with littler boxes which dictate the size and extent of his possessions so arrogantly...

...It is, of course, very pretty, though scarcely an advance on the fancy campers put out by Detroit...

...The way things are now, we enter a car in "motionless groups of five or six...

...His painting lacks sensual and lyrical properties, and cannot really be called attractive...

...At the age of 68, Kandinsky was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he spent his last 10 years...

...His work had already entered its final phase of geometric and biomorphic shapes, scattered against solid light or dark grounds...

...These, in turn, yield to more precise geometric works done during the artist's teaching years at the Bauhaus...

...A passing museum guard, who for present purposes can serve as one of the dummies architects and designers are so concerned about, marveled at the midgets for whom the beds were designed...

...Born in Moscow in 1866, Kan-dinsky passed his most important years in Germany...

...There is, though, a touch of France in its greater elegance...

...But the director, Thomas Messer, states with "a measure of institutional pride" that the paintings have been "carefully pruned"-a reference, no doubt, to the recent uproar over museums selling works bequeathed them...

...It is less easy to feel for the artists who think the answer lies in "communication" -as if the air weren't already clogged with it, not to mention the pine trees felled just for this catalogue alone...

...He appears to have been influenced by his colleague and friend Paul Klee...