In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard,and the Machine Art Show, 1934Jennifer Jane Marshall

In the spring of 1934, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the Krst director ofNew York's new Museum of Modern Ait, saw one of hisprimary goals for the museum fulfilled: the incorporation ofeveryday objects of industrial design into the institution'sexhibition program. The result of a collaborative effort be-tween Barr and his good friend Philip Johnson, Marhine Artdisplayed some six hundred artifacts of mechanized massproduction like so much modern sculpture, hoisted on top ofpedestals, .set low on the floor, and arranged along galleiywalls like factory-inspired bas-reliefs (Fig. 1). The show, whicheasily could have included the sort of mural-sized photo-graphs already common in the Museum of Modern Art'sdisplay practice, was instead thoroughly three dimensional.Eveiy galler\' in all four stories of the museimi's brownstonequarters featured things: things with heft, shape, texture, andsubstance, displayed in the fullness of their materiality, andavailable for artistic contemplation on all sides and in thelound.

Machine Art served a number of purposes for the fledglingart museum. At the most basic level, the show generated goodpublicity. Calling ball bearings, airplane propellers, andkitchen sinks "art" was just the sort of irreverent stunt that thepublic had come to expect of modernism. In this case, itproved to be a remarkably successful stunt, as the showcontinued to draw copious visitors and journalistic commentboth duiing its six-week run in New York and throughout itslengthy nationwide tour, lasting und! December 1938. As anexhibit of ordinaiy objects, Machi?ie Art zho drew praise for itsapparent poptilism. A show of shop tools and dinnerwareperhaps by its nature appealed to a broader audience thanthe recent experiments in Dadaism and Surrealism or func-tionalist architecture, movements that had also been thesubjects of Barr's and Johnson's respective curatorial effortsduring these years. Wliat's more, the relative affordability ofthe show's many dime-store pieces (their low prices werelisted in the catalog) served as a reminder that artistic beautywas not dependent on price (Fig. 2).' Cheap things couldhave value, too, and this was no small comfort duiing whatproved to be one of the lowest points of the American GreatDepression. Indeed, MackineArí was in many ways the quint-essential example of Depression-era modernism: inexpensiveto mount, sensibly functionalist, and a boosterish endorse-ment of both AiTierican industiy and tasteful consiunerism.Accordingly, the show also bore the reactionaiy hallmaiks ofwhat might be called "late Machine Age" anxiety. In its in-stallation, catalog, and extensive publicity texts, the showemphasized timelessness and transcendence to a public thathad grown wary of technological change. Machine An em-braced the machine, sure enotigh. but in the consenativelanguage of Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas (both promi-nently quoted in wall texts and the catalog), rather than inthe iconoclastic terms of Dada or Futurism. .\11 of these

aspects of the show have been duly noted by art historiansand, in fact, amount to the basis for its increasingly canonicalplace in American art histoiy." Underlying all this, however,was a rather ambitious commentary on the nature of abstrac-tion in modern life, and not just the sort of abstractionusually on view in the Museum of Modern Art's painting andsculpture exhibitions. At base. Machine Art was first and fore-most a treatise on meaning and materiality: two terms in direneed of redefinition in the early 1930s, both in everyday lifeand in modern art.

During the intei-war decades of the twentieth centur)',value itself came under new investigation, specifically, as atroubled category of material existence. The mass productionof commodities introduced new factors into the arbitrationof their worth, from massive economies of scale, to stylefads and planned obsolescence. No longer could scarcity oruniqueness serve as the primary determinants of a commod-ity's value. Nor was modernity's radical transformation ofevaluation limited solely to marketplace stulîs. The radicalrenegotiation of meaning and materiality also assumed newimportance in the era's national conversations over politics,philosophy, morality, and, notably, art, which, by its verynature, ventures itself as a model of how meaning mightalight upon materiality. By the time Machine Art opened in1934, to both crowds and good reWeu-s, the current culturalcriticism had come to take this broad-based réévaluation ofmeaning and its foundations as the defining hallmark oftwentieth-century modernity. This was the age of Albert Ein-stein's relativity and American pragmatism's "radical empiri-cism," a miheu in which value obtained in the relationsbetween things, not in things themselves, nor even in anyoverarching standard ideal. Haward Universit)" philosopherAlfred North Whitehead summed up the Zeitgeist succinctlyin 1929: a new "notion of fluent energy" had taken intellec-tual precedence over the old "notion of static stuff."' Modemmeaning was an abstraction; it was unmoored from standardsand divorced from the palpable proof of materiality as such.

Besides consumer goods and contemporaiy art, whichboth suffered criticism during these years for an apparentdrift away from principles (and were both ver\- much at issuein Machine Art), money also became a frequent topic foranxious conversation in the 1930s, and for the same reason.Money, according to Georg Simmel's influential treatise onthe subject in 1900. is an especially sophisticated solution tothe ongoing challenge of adjudicating concrete pardculars toabstract universals. A "triumph." Simmel called it, "One ofthe great accomplishments ol' the mind."' If money can betaken as a model for negotiating between meaning and ma-teriality, the end of the American gold standard in 1934 canbe seen as perhaps the most telling example of modernvalue's dissociation from materiality. A year almost to the daybefore Machine Art opened, a writer for the Wall Street Journal

598 ART lU' l .LF/r iN [»K.CF.MBIÍR 2( VOI.UML XC

Arl. cxhibilion ;il ihe Miiseiini of Motlci ii An, M.iich ti-April 3U. 19'M, iiisuilliuion view ol' Uic ÜLsl-llourdesign by Philip Johnson (digiial image © The Museum ol Modern Art/Licensed by StALA, provided by Art Resource, NY)

observed, "There is something about 'money' nowadayswhich resembles time and space, at least in the matter of itselusiveness as a concept."'' Like time and space, particularlyafter Einstein revolutionized tlieir study, money seemedmore and more like an indecipherable iibstraction, well be-yond the comprehension of most people living under itsspell. Some moderns, including Cieorges Bataille in Paris andMarcel Duchamp in New York, took notice of money's newsemiotic openness and pulled ftirther at this loose thread.Others, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams,leavened their modernism with the conservative monetaiyanalogies of the American Social Credit Movement, uphold-ing faith in currency and rejecting the abstractions of usuryand debt.'' In otir own time, the literary critics and art historians who have examineci tlie period's productive analogybetween art and money have tended to take their cues fromBataille and Duchamp, viewing the end of the gold standardas a bellwether for empty signifiers and token abstraction.'However, another analog)' presents itself in this context: notthe end of the gold standard per se, but the popular reactionagainst it (and another of Simmel's favorite tropes)—the actof hoarding gold.

Machine Art offered an aesthetic philosophy of meaningmatched perfectly to materiality, which shared the motivatingassumptions of the rash of gold hoarding that was historicallycoincident with its staging. Turning to Platonic Form as boththe origin and the standard of all artistic value—a conceitunderscored both in Barr's text for the show and in John-son's installation—the two men advanced a model of artisticbeatity gtiaranteed by timeless ideals. Raphael Demos, aninterpreter of Plato during these years (and a tiientor toJohnson at Hai^vard), wrote that "tmiversals may be calledabstractions, if the word abstraction be used neutrally, with-out derogation as to realness.""^ Machine Art retained respon-sibility, above all, to the stabilizing force of this realness;realness as conceived doubly not jtist as Demos's Platonicideal (which he called the "really real"^) but also, convinc-ingly, as incarnate in the palpable stuff of modern life. Thosewho put their stock in gold assumed the same ontology ofvalue: at once real as so many coins, and really real as anabstract universal standard.

Neoplatonic formalism in the Machine At1 show had realsocial significance given the historical circtimstance of value'sincreasing dematerialization, especially as signaled by the

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end of the American gold standard in 1933. In the end,Machine Art ventured more than just a new way to appreciatevacuum cleaners and office chairs, and more than just apopulist approach to understanding modern art. Like thosewho hoarded gold in the face of encroaching monetary ab-straction (and unlike, incidentally, Duchamp and his ready-made). Machine Art held onto obdurate things as reliableincarnations of intangible ideal.s: ideals that were at once theorigin, standard, and substance of meaning and materiality inmodern life.

Interwar NeoplatonismWhile a preoccupation with materiality' has long been centralto modernism'.s interpretation, the philosophical content ofmateriality itself has been less well considered. In the case ofMachine Art, an idealist model of materiality was in play, onemade possible in the show through explicit and repeated

reference to Plato. Howe\'er, the Plato of Machine Art was a veryparticular version of Plato. Mmhtne Art\ Plato belonged to theNeoplatonic tradition heralded by Plotinus in the third cen-tuiy and exiending into the tw'entieth to include both pro-gressive advocates ofthe avant-garde and consenative philos-ophers seeking an alternative to the growing dominance ofAmerican pragmatism (known for ÍLS rejection of ideals). IniLs presentation of household objects as ideal forms, theexhibition implicitly advanced a Neoplatonic interpretationof the theoiy of the Forms, emphasizing the mysticism of"participation" over the more conventional (and more hier-archical) emphasis on "mimesis." Like the Puritan idealistsand New England transcendentalists who had discerned inPlato a kindred approach to \iewing the sensible world ascoextensive with the divine absolute, MorAmc Ari suggested aparticipatory ontology of value, in which concrete objectswere guaranteed notjust by absolute ideals but by their very

f600 ART DL'LLKTIN DECEMBER 200« VOLUME XC NUMBER 4

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xaXà KaiV ai'ià neipvnérai . . .

By beiiiity of shapes I do not mean, as most people would !4iippose,

the beauty of iivin^ figure» or of picture», but. to make my point

cleitr. I mean straight line.H and cirrlirs, and sliapfs, plane or »olid,

made from them by lathe, ruler and square. These are not, like

other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely.

3 Detail of a page from the exhibition caUilog Machine Art,.showing the (|tioiation fruni Plato's Fhtlel/us (difriuil image© The Musetim of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA. providedby Art Resource, NY)

manifestation. Accordingly, the show followed in Neopla-tonism's long attempt to reconcile aesthetics with Plato'stheoiy of the Forms, and this notwithstanding the ancientpliilusopher'.s famotis indictments of the fine arts.

Plato was clearly Machine Art's philosophical mascot. Hettirned up repeatedly in the form of a single qtuitation. Thiswas emblazoned on the wall of the first galleiy, repi iiited inthe .show's catalog (after a list of the corporate lenders), andincluded in the materials that the mtisetim's new publicitydepartment distribttted nationwide to art journals, popularmagazines, and local newspapers (Fig. 3).'" Taken from oneof Plato's later dialogues, the Phikbus, the qtiote went asfollows:

By beauty of shapes I do not mean, as most people wouldsuppose, the beauty of li\ing figures or of pictures, but, tomake my point clear, I mean straight lines and circles, andshapes, plane or solid, made from them by lathe, rtiler andsquare. These are not, like other things, beatitiful rela-tively, but always and absolutely."

This rather dogmatic excerpt provided support for MachineArt's fundamental assertion: that straight lines and perfectcircles, found eveiywhere in the ntilitarian goods of modernmachine production, constituted the essential buildingblocks of pure beauty and the material basis of absolute value.

While two other qtiotations appeared at the beginning ofthe catalog, it was the short passage from Plato's Philebits thatgave the show its most strident epistemological banner. Theother qtioles were taken Irom Saint Thomas Aquinas's thir-teen th-cen tur)' Summa theologtae and Lawrence Pearsalljacks'scontemporary cultural criticism of 1925, Responsibility andCulture. Plato's words, though, were the only ones to bereprinted in the exhibit's press releases, gttaranteeing that itwould be to Plato that the nation's art critics would turn intheir response to Ban" and Johnson's provocative exhibition.Most of these writers recognized the excerpt as a didacticdevice used to justify the museum's high esteem for ordinaryobjects. As critic Malcolm Vaughan put it, the quotationappeared as a "way of relating, for the average visitor, thebeauty of a saucepan or a waffle iron to the lofty ideals ofart,"'' There were some writers who objected to the attempt

to sqtiare Plato with the cause of art. In the pages of Pama.s-sus, art historian A. Philip McMahon declared that the exhi-bition's appropriation of that snippet of Phikbu.s (a dialoguedevoted to ethics. McMahon pointed out, not aesthetics) was"not appropiiate," adding that any misplaced hope for aPlatonic redemption oí' the fine arts had its origins in themistakes of "Plato [as] revised and interpreted by the Neo-platonists," especially Plotinus.'^ However, and in spite ofMcMahon's opinion (which Barr himself had itrged towardpublication after McMahon had sent it to him in a personalletter), there existed a strotig case in favor of Plotintis andNeoplatonism in contemporary readings of Plato, and it wasnecessarily in the spirit of this argument that Machine AHadvanced its version of abstraction.

Nearly sixty years after the fact, Johnson remembered thatthe idea of bringing Plato into the mix had been Barr's, buthe claimed that he had been the one responsible for pickingthe exact quotation. In an interview conducted during thewinter motiths of 1990 and 1991 for the Mtisettm of ModernArt's oral history pr()ject, Johnson recounted. "[BarrJ wasveiy big on Plato. So I looked tip the Plato for him. . . . thatkind of purity was Alfred's big meat."'"'Johnson certainly hadthe background for acting as Barr's philosophical coiuisel. Asa philosophy major at Harvard dtiring tlie li)20.s, Johnsonhad cultivated a special foctis on ancient classical thotight,developing both leading fluency in Greek and Latin and aclose personal relationship with his mentor, Riiphael Demos,an authority on Plato. One might even say that Johnson'spassion for philosophy, and for Plato, was hard to distinguishfrom his passion for his professor. W^eu Johnson introducedDemos to a friend as the man who had inspired him toconcentrate in ancient philosophy, his mentor—identifyingwhat would become Johnson's trademark fickle fanaticism—joked, "Jtist now he is concentrating in Demos, next year insomething else I stippose."'''

Johnson and Demos freqttently dined and attended cul-tural events together, and it was through Demos that jolinsonalso gained social acquaintance with one of the department'smost distinguished personalities, Alfred North Wliitehead."*Johnson quickly became a repeat visitor to the Whiteheadresidence in Cambridge, but the man whom he described as"the greatest philosopher we have today" wotild not becomea direct source of intellectual infltience.' In fact, Jtfhnsonlater recalled that a conversation with Whitehead, in whichthe professor ranked liim tinfavorably against his peers, hadbeen what eventually tempered his philosopliical ambi-tions."^ Nonetheless, Whitehead's antidualistic brand of "pro-cess phikwophy" was con.sisteni wiili the appioach taken byJohnson's mentor, wlio dedicated thanks to Whitehead at thestart of his 1939 volume The Philosophy of Plato. Passively fromWhitehead, then, and more directly through Demos. John-son's Harvard ttitelage in Platonism was decidedly itiflectedby a particular breed of interwar Neoplatonism.

Wliitehead consistently credited Plato as iht- basis for histhought (and for philosophy as a whole), but his reading ofPlato dramatically departed from tbe modern era's caricatureof Plato as a strict dualist. David Rodier has recently arguedthat Whitehead derived inspiration from a version of Platothat more closely resembled the Neoplatonic tradition ofPlotintis and the seventeenth-centur)' Cambridge Platonists

NtOPl.ATONISM, THE GOLD STANDARD. AND MACHtS't: AHT. H1S4 QQ\

than the "secularized Platonism" that had gained dominanceHt the turn of the twentieth centiiiT (largely tlirough theinfluence of Benjamin jowett, whose translation of Plato'sdialogues remains definitive).'"' Distinct from the hierarchi-cal dualism of Jowett's Platonism, in which the ideal is alwayskept separate from the phenomenal, Whitehead"s thoughtadvances a more continuous ontology of participation, one inwhich, in Wliitehead's words, "some eternal greatness [is]incarnate in the passage of temporal fact."""

Demos maintained his colleague's Neoplatonic notion ofcontinuity in interpreting Plato for American readers. (TheNexv York Times I'eviewed his book 'flif Philosophy of Pialo as animportant interpretation over and above the householdJowetl."') Although explaining that Plato's dialogues vacillatebetween dualism and participation, Demos him.self alwaysseemed to settle on the latter, characterizing Plato's state-ments in favor of "connectedness" as typical of the philoso-pher's "maturer and more emancipated period."~" Taking iipWhitehead's cause of antidualism (and self-conscioasly op-posed to pragmatism's encroaching dominance^^), Demos ad-vanced the idea that Plato's Forms are 'both absolute andrelative," and, as such, the physical world should properly beviewed not as an unfortiuiatc corruption oí perfection, but asthe harmonious commingling of "essence and instance."^"^This view was suited to a Platonic apology for the arts, whichjohason, for one, had always felt was implicit in the dia-logues. In a letter written home to his mother during hisHar\^ard days, Johnson expressed a yearning to reconcile hisbeloved Plato with the cause of art. "We must not forget," hewrote, "that Plato loved poetry even though he wished tobanish it. . , . It was a rather poetic idea of his ., . in theory."^"*

In the oral history interview, Johnson did not indicate bowlie had decided on the Philehus excerpt for use in Machine Art,btit in truth, it probably did uot depeud on his associationwith the philosophical elite of Harvard. By 1934, the excerptfrom Plato's last dialogue was already in fairly regular rota-tion among the international avant-garde, usually put to rhe-torical work in defense of pictorial abstraction. Privilegingnonfigurative shapes over "living figures or . . . picttires," thequotiuion pro\ided felicitous support for modernism's swingaway from naturalistic representation. Alfred Stieglitz, theAmerican photographer and galleiy impresario, used it forprecisely tlii.s purpose in the October 1911 isstie of CatimaWoik, where he printed it alongside an abstract charcoalsketch by Pablo Pica.sso titled Standing Femalf Nitdt- (Fig. 4). *According to the art historian Geoige Heard Hamilton, thiswas "the first time, in America at least, that this now familiarstatement was used to justify ab.stract painting,""' The quota-tion popped up in tlie United States two years later, againtinder Stieglitz's influence. On the heels of the ArmoryShow's sensational success, Stieglitz mounted a solo show ofCubist works by Francis Picabia, recently made famous as oneof tbe more colorful foreign exbibitors at tbe Armory.' ** Abrief catalog accompanied this exhibit, and it was there thatthe Philebus excerpt appeared again, once more exalting thePlatonic virtue of nonfigurative abstraction.

Johnson later made no mention of these earlier AmericanprecedeuLs. The Stieglitz usage wa.s not likely to have been hissource material, as the quotation printed in Camera Workdiffers noticeably from that in tbe Machine Art catalog, which

4 P a b l o I ' i c a s s o , SlaiuUiig imtuir .\iiiii; l i l l O , i l i a i v u a l i»iipaper, 19 X 12% in. (48.3 X 31.4 cm). The MetropolitanMusetim of Art. New York, .\lfred Stieglitz CoUcciion, 1949,49.70.34 (artwork © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists RightsSocictv' [.AiiS], New York, photograph provided by tlieMetropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY)

may well have been Johnson's own translalion."'^ In any event,these a\"ant-garde appropriations of Plato all work to reposi-tion abstraction itself as an adequate solution to the problemposed by Plato's outward bostility toward the arts. After all,and as Mark Cbeetham has pointed otii, niodeinism's rejec-tion of naturalistic representation in favor of ptiie, abstractform was itself an aesthetic ethos well in keeping (often

self-con sei otisly so) with Plato's hierarchy of form over itssoimitation."

Contradicting Johnson's claims to have picked the quota-tion for Machine Art, Sybil Gordon Kiintor, Barr's most recentbiographer, credits the museum director with the selection.All signs, in fact, point to Ban 's comparatively greater inter-est in Plato at the time of the show. By tbe late 1920s, and inline with Demos's prediction, Johnson had largely retired hisinterest in Plato, in favor of a new affection for tbe Germanic(aud decidedly anti-Platoni.st) thought of Friedrich Nietz-sche. Moreover, and as noted above, Johnson himself citedBarr's inclination toward "purity" as the main reason for

.Mil ULLLliTlN DFXKMBF-R 2008 VOI.UMF. XC NLMIUIR 1

Plato's inclusion."'" Barr's apparent preference during thislime for the "intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometri-cal, rectilinear and cla.ssical" in modern art (as he put it in hisessay for Cubism and Abstract Art) is in keeping with Johnson'srecollection, as is tbe young director's sense of himself a.stending toward "objectivity instinctively," and his "feelingihat. . . emotions were too ephemeral to be indulged."' "^Nonetheless, as Kantor rightly notes, the degree to wbichBarr may have been personally attracted to Neoplatonic phi-losophies was likely subordinate to his scholarly sensitivity toPlaio's increasing currency among the transatlantic avant-garde.^^

Neoplatonism, and its defense through recourse to thePhilebus quotation, enjoyed renewed popularity among Euro-pean modernists during the early twentieth cenluiy. Its mys-tical itUermingling of spirit and substance attracted the inter-est of the likes of Giorgio de Chirico (whose avid reading ofArtluii- Schnpenbauer would bave exposed bim to aeslbeticNeoplatonism) and Piet Mondrian (wbose tutelage in The-osophy came courtesy of M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, who in-cluded the ñiilebus excerpt in his writings of the 1910s). 'C^heetliam's history of modernist Neoplatonism examines itscurrency in the work and reception of Paul Gauguin, PaulKJee, Wassily Kandinsky, and the De Stijl artists, includingMondrian, all artists to whom Barr attended closely in hisscholaiship of the 192()s and 19 0s. Yet while (^heethani'sstated interest in nonmimetic formalism precluded his exam-ination of French Purism, it was this movement's appropria-tion of Plato that was perhaps closer to Machine Art's, in thatit acijusted Platonic idealism to the material world of manu-factured form.

Barr and Johnson botb closely followed French Piuism, or"l'Esprit Nouveau," and Kantor identifies this influence as themost likely source of Barr's interest in Plato, and in theFhilehus qtiotation in particular. Developed during tbe yearssurrounding World War I by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Cor-busier (then Gharles-Édouardjeanneret), Purism advanced acoolly rational version of modernism, one based on "theobject, the type, the Platonic, mechanistic and geometric," asReyner Banbam later cbaractedzed the movement's centralpreoccupations (Fig. 5)." '' The Philebus quotation so nicelyarticulated Purism's brand of modernist neoclas.sicism tbatOzenfant included it in tbe Marcb 1916 issue of L'Élan,sbortly after baving been introduced to it by the Parisian artdealer Lt-once Rosenberg.'*'

In its work to adjust the formal experiments of the Frencha%ant-garde to the neocla.ssical ideals of Western civilization.Purism offered a conservative and highly nationalist defenseof modernism, and it did so at a moment of cultural andpolitical crisis. Kenneth Silver has described the movement aspart of "an important cultural transformation" of the avant-garde, shifting it away from tbe iconoclastic posture of "dis-rupt[ion]" and toward a modernism inclined toward culturalaccommodation."^^ Later, during tbe context of the Depres-sion, Machine Art filled mucb the same role in the UnitedStates. Conservative, nationalist, and reactionaiy, Barr andJohnson's display of American-made machine products[night be said to amount to tbis coimtiy's version of tbeFrench l'Esprit Nouveau. The parallel is unsurprising, given

Johnson's well-known affection for Le Corbusier and MachineArt's de facto status as tbe industrial design sequel to theso-called International Style exhibition Modem Architecture,staged by Johnson with Henry-Russell Hitchcock at the Mu-seum of Modern Art two years prior. As it bad been in thatearlier show, Le Gorbiisier's presence was strongly registeredin Machine Art—in tbe chair he designed for Thonet Broth-ers, in tbe ahiniiimm tubing accents, and even in the ballbearing itself, wbitb Charlotte Perriand, the architect's de-sign assistant, had only recently reconceived as a necklace in1927 (Figs. 6, 7). Fven tbe cboice of wall color for MachineArt—a pastel array of pinks, blues, and grays—reilectedjobn-son's affectionate familiarity with how European neoclassicalfunctionalisni migbt be adapted to tbe work of interior de-sign. Machine Arl also shared Purism's putative goal to find areconciliation between the apparent disiaiptions of modern-ism—abstraction in particular—and the established values ofclassical art and philosophy. Such conciliatoiy gestures wereperhaps necessaiy ibr tlie Museum of Modern Art in 1934,when mounting calls for a "swing back to sanity" and a"forced readjustment" of values bad come to cbaracterize tliepopular response to an increasingly uncomfortable era ofabstraction.

Interwar IndeterminacyWiien the Museum of Modern Art opened its cloois in No-vember 1929. modern art was entering a period of renewedpublic debate. .\rt critics of tbe 1930s retreated to skepticalposturing and exhorted readers to be on the defense against"hocus pocus" and "tommy-rot.""* Among all tbe condemna-tions, a certain tendency emerged: distrust of modernism'sapparent autonomy. No longer responsible to the externalgoverning norms of naturalistic representation (or any othergreater guiding principle), the most recent experiments ofthe avant-garde seemed to pursue only the most fleeting andidiosyncratic sort of aesthetic valties: self-expression, subjec-tive experience, and intellectual and stylistic trends. Further,and to the vociferous dismay of many American critics, theunmooring of art from any general standards opened it up tounchecked and directionless proliferation.

Such criticisms closely paralleled contemporary concernsabout tbe modernized American marketplace. Critics of bothmodern art and modern commerce resorted to the same setof complaints: both were called too arbitrary, too irrational,too premised on self-indnlgence, too deceitful, and too fa-vorably inclined toward excess. At times, these twinned sets ofincriminations braided togetber. Tbe artist George J. Coxmade this association in an article for the Arnerican Magazineof Art in 1932. Arguing tbat contemporaiy modem art hadfallen prey to "facile eclecticism" in its growing diversifica-tion. Cox threw up his hands in the face of a field "almost assubject to change as tbe style of ladies' hats."^" Los AngelesTimes Cl itic Ai'tbur Millier worried tbat the younger followersof modernism had gotten carried away in their zeal, resultingin a "market [now] . . . flooded with offerings."""^ Millier thenwent on to quote a bit of contemporaiy criticism from Paris,which suggested that even there, in the most famously hos-pitable environment for modernism, critics bad grown unre-ceptive to art .so closely resembling "the woist practices of tbestock market."^' The conceivable similarity between modern-

N E O P L A T O N I S M . THF. G O I Ü S r A N D . \ R D . A N D MACHIS'E .Aß'/, 1<131 5 0 3

5 Amédée Ozenfant, Fugue (Accorils),1922, oil on canvas, 51 ^Á X 38i/i in.(130.8 X 97.1 cm). Honolulu Academyof Arts. Hawai'i, Gifl of John GreggAllerton. 1967, 3478.1 (artwork ©Artists Rights Society [ARS], NewYork/,\DAGP. Paris)

ism's rapidly reproducing "isms" and modernity's rapidlyreproducing commodities did not escape the director of theMuseum of Modern Art. Addressing readers of thf Park Av-enue Socicil Revino \n 1933 (and recalling Cox's criticism of thepi ior year), even Barr expressed dismay that modem art'sra])idly changing developments were "as confusing as-. . . modern fasliions for ladies."'" In [his resurgence of be-

wilderment, then, modern art was distrusted not so much forits departure from academic traditions (after all, Paul Cez-anne, Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were then widelyaccepted by American audiences as modern masters) as forits aimless pursuit of excess—pursuing innovation just forinnovation's sake, without any fundamental principles toguide its course. Il was to this perception of modern art thatBarr addressed his work at the Museimi of Modern Art,seeking to present an interpretation of modernism that

would presene faith in art's tempering responsibility to anexternal cause.

Depression-era anxieties about modern art paralleled con-temporaiy worries abotit modern commerce because \'aluehad become especially indecipherable and unpredictable inboth spheres. In the marketplace, this was perceived as afundamental dissociation between things and tlieir values. Asthe number and types of things multiplied more rapidlyunder mass production, their values rose and fell not justaccording to supply and demand hut also according to themanipulations of early-twentieth-century capitalism, such asplanned obsolescence, ma.ss advertising, and industrial design'simpact on product "styling." Alter the collapse of the stockmarket, commentators tended to identify market unpredict-ability itself as a sotnce of contiiuicd economic trouble, blam-ing it for declining consumer confidence and, therefore, a

DECEMBER 2008 VOLUME XC Nl/MRER 4

6 Machine Arl, installiition \-iew, installation design by Johnson (digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA,provided by Ait Resource, NY)

perpetuation of low prices and profits.^'' The contemporan'art world had similarly been rocked by trends that struck itscritics as increasingly arbitrary, superficial, and short-lived. Inboth spheres, materialit)' did not appear to limit or evennecessarily guide evaluation. The degree to which objectswere just convenient signs of shifting abstract value, ratherthan its reliably concrete incarnation, was now plain—andalso, in both cases, deeply uncomfortable.

In his first inaugural address in early March 1933, Presi-dent Franklin D. Roosevelt cautioned the nation against "fearitself." He spoke of the era's many hardships—"our commondifliculties," as he called them—but extended a note of con-solation: "They concern, tliank God, only material things.""To roaring applause, the new president had artictilated whathad come to be a common sentiment among Depression-weary Americans. Real meaning had nothing to do withmaterial wealth, and true value was an abstract intangible,never to be found on any store shelf or mail-order catalog.Seeking a correction to prior extravagances, for which manyviewed the crisis as punishment, Roosevelt joined other cul-

tural obser\'ers who urged Americans to return attention tothe deeper "goods of life" and to look beyond "materialobjects . .. to discover what iife is about."^^ Such, also, was thewisdom of Bruce Barton, the era's great advertising gtiru,who imparted the following words of wisdom to readers ofthe American Magazine: "We used to talk about "moral values'and 'material \alties' as though they were two different andcontradictoiy things. This depression must have taught tisUiat they are the same thing, that without moral values therecan be no material values.'"'*' This Depressioiw^ra moralizingthus assumed a model of value in which ordinal^ valuesderived from—and were limited by—unseen absolutes.Uliile appealing to an Implicitly religious high ground. Roo-sevelt, Barton, and others also assumed an essentially Platonicontology of value. As stich, they were well within the Anglo-.\inerican Puritanical tradition of blending Christian andNeoplatonic idealisms as a corrective to the scourge of ma-terialism. ' ' They, too, like Demos, deemed abstract values asironically more "real" than material values, presenting themas the barometer by which all meaning would be measured

N F O P L . A T O N r S M , THF. G O L D S T A N D A R D , \!<í) MACHINE ART. I 9 S 4

and the standard from which all objects would lake theirworth.

Absolute \alue and reliable worth, the spiritual and theconcrete; these were also the poles of one of the most con-spicuous of the era's many debates concerning meaning andmateriality, namely, the debate over the gold standard. Thismonetary policy, which tethered both currency and exchangeto a (theoretically) absolute measure of worth, was itself aparadigm of the sort of value compromises that Machine Aritried to strike in its Neoplatonic formalism. By 1933, it wasalso a monetary policy that was no longer in effect in theUnited States. In the year leading up to Machine Art's de-but—a year in which Johnson was busy visiting factory show-rooms and department stores in search of so many idealobjects—a national conversation was taking place over tliesame Neoplatonic model that became so central to the exhi-hiiion: the physical incarnation of absolute value.

Elnd of the American Gold StandardIn late FebruaiT 1933, the New York Times reported on asermon that compared the international gold standard to theChristian ethic of the Golden Rule. Both, warned the Rev. Dr.Frank Wade Smith, had a tendency to be abandoned duringtimes of great stress."'" The year 1933, of course, fell into sucha category, surely enough, and during that year. PresidentRoosevelt, newly elected, set into motion a series of legislativemeasures to put an end to the gold standard in tlie UnitedStates. This move was protested by a host of critics whotended, like the reverend, to \iew any tampering with thegold standard as a flirtation wiUi "evil."*'* Called "probably thebest monetary standard that the world has yet devised," goldwas eulogized as an inviolable standard of économie valueand stability, rooted in an "established tradition" of Westerncivilization since "olden times.""'"

In fact, the American gold standard was not so well estab-lished, having been only somewhat recently, and halfheart-edly, reinstated in 1879 after a period of "greenback" circu-lation during and after the Ci\'il War. Nor had the policy wellserved its vaunted purpose of ensuring stability. The "moneyquestion," long one of the most di\isive issues in Americanpolitics {beginning with Thomas Jefferson's quarrel with Al-exander Hamilton on the subject), raged during the latenineteenth century and reached an apogee in 1896 withWilliam Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. More-over—and as Biyan's fearful visions of rural farmers crucifiedto a centralized economy of unary value would suggest—thegold standard itself had once been characterized as evil, andnot that long ago. Indeed, this ongoing national fight overcredit and currency faded only after the passage of the Fed-eral Reserve Act in December 1913. Although initially a con-troversial compromise, the ultimate success of the FederalReserve was in its largely rhetorical commitment to maintain-ing gold as a standard, while managing the value of this stan-dard according to flexible models of credit and interest."'*'This compromised implementation of the gold standard inthe United States—and in the very year in which modernismhad its touted debut at the Armory—made for a decidedlyflexible fiduciary policy—the very sort of relativism that crit-

7 Charlotte Perriand,Ball Benring Necklace,1927. Locationunknown {artwork© Artists RightsSociety [ARSJ, NewYork/ADAGP, Paris)

ics would come to dread in abstract art as well as in papermoney.

Although never a rigidly fixed system of fiduciary manage-ment, the international gold standard had nonetheless oper-ated according to certain general principles during its globalexpansion in the nineteenth centuiy. Fixed at a imiversalprice per pound, gold was the ultimate commodity againstwhich all others could be measured. This representationaleconomy of exchange was modeled on the early-nineteenth-century theories of Da\-id Ricardo, who advanced gold as anexpedient standard because it partakes equalh' of the samequalities it is used to measuie: value and materiality. As such,gold—which both is and refers to economic worth—modelsan ontolog}' of value that nicely corresponds to the Neopla-tonic notion of paiticipation. This ontology of value provedespecially palatable to Americans wary of economic impre-dictability. Groping toward an understanding of money's realor imagined value, writers in the early 1930s turned again andagain to gold's material participation in an abstract ideal.Defending the need for the gold standard, one writer for theWfl//.S7ri?iiyoiima/asserted that money could never succeed as

just paper, backed only by mathematical, statistical, or prob-abilistic analyses. Instead, money needed a sturdier materialfoundation, "something that is real, tangible and desirable."^^No wonder, then, that in the midst of rapid and unpredict-able fluctuations in the dollar. Americans in the early 1930sturned to gold itself for comfoi't and security.

The collapse of the British gold standard in late 1931 set offan international wave of gold hoarding. By March 1933, theLeague of Nations estimated that nearly a billion dollars'worth of gold had been withdrawn from banks and treasuriesworldwide.'' For their part, Americans squirreled away hun-dreds of millions of dollars of the metal, tucking it into"safe-deposit drawers . . . coal-bins and mattresses." "buriedcans and bureau drawers," all in a "panic loss of confi-dence."'' Yearning to hold onto value in itself, rather thansurrender to the relative values of dollars or commodities,hoarders put their faith in gold's potent incarnation of abso-lute value. In response to the widespread withdrawals, andonly days after his inauguration, Roosevelt issued a set ofemergency measures, including a "bank holiday," a prohibi-tion on any trade or dealing of gold itseli. and steep fines andprison terms forfaiture to return private stockpiles of gold tobanks and treastiries.^'' The last decree resulted in a "goldrush in reverse," but in spite of all the highly publicized

.\R¡ HULI.KTtN DECEMEU'.R y \-O[,liMF, XC NUMBER 4

returns, inore than $700 million in gold still remained un-claimed by the government in May, and die problem contin-ued to dog Roosevelt through the beginning of 1934. ^ As are.snlt, on January 30 ofthat year. Congress passed the GoldReserve Act, legislation ihal effectively spelled tlie end ofthe American gold standard. Its replacement, the "managedinternational g<ild bullion reseiTe standard" (a revised goldstandard as qualiKed and changeable as it was a mouth-ful), altered public perceptions of money's representationalreliability. Called the whim dollar or the Roosevelt dollar,American currency after the Gold Reserve Act obeyed thetransitoiT needs of marketplace exchange rather than theunchanging anchor of $20.67 per ounce of gold. Like fash-ions for ladies, money had also become seasonal. In explain-ing the Gold Resei-ve Act at its official unveiling, TreasurySecretary Henry Morgenthati Jr, called the new system "the1934 model gold bullion standard." Catching the reference,one witty journalist reqtiested just one point of clarification:"Streamlined?"^^

Symbolizing a perfect balance between meaning and ma-teriality, gold promised a reliable, universal, even Neopta-tonic way by which to interpret the object world. Its replace-ment in the 1930s with a purely instrumental model ofevaluative flexibility—a model wherein function trmnpcd theanchor of form—marked a shift toward the slippery sort ofopen-ended abstraction in which contemporary art alsotraded.

Participatory IdealismA number of scholars in both art history and literary criticism,Alec Marsh, Walter Benn Michaels, Edward J. Nygren, andMarc Shell, have seized on the functional analogy between artand money in the American context.^^ A number of others,such as Rosalind Kraass and George Baker, have paid .specialattention to how this analogy plays out in European modern-ism, given the historical concurrence of the end of the goldstandard and the rise of abstraction in the early twentiethcentuiy. Starting from this coincidence, these writers havedeepened the view of modernism as a semiotic economy of"token" signs: a representational regime in which meaninglacks guarantee, is negotiated locally, and may slip freelybetween registers and degrees of value, according to thewhims of chance or the fiat declarations of state.

Much of this commentary derives its potency from literaiycritic Jean Joseph Goux's tlieories, especially as elaborated onin The Coiners of Language, where he makes ready comparisonbetween the end of the gold standard and the era's dramatictransformations in literature and linguistics."'' Consideringgold to function like figurative realism for painting, languagefor signs, or the father for the psychoanalytic subject, Gouxpositions the gold standard as another in a series of generalequivalents, serving as a baseline for exchange that guides theadjudication of particulai"s to universals. The gradual extinc-tion of these standards in the decades following World War Iand the emergence of increasingly relative processes of eval-uation posed a crisis of representation—one that drew de-cidedly mixed reactions among artists and writers. The sign-post at this junction, as Goux would have it, pointed in twodirections: either to the nihilistic attitude of what he calls the

"tragic-destructive approach" or to the idealist reifications ofan effectively "constrnctivist" tactic.''" Against the threats tomeaning posed by Cubism, Dadaism, and other provocationsof the historical avant-garde (and not at all a synonym ftir theSoviet project of Constnictivism ), Goux's constructivist forcessought "to counter . . . devaluation and discrédita tio n . . .with . . . eternity and solidity."''' Such an anxious defense ofstable meaning can be witnessed both in gold hoarding andin the Machine Art show, yet this tendency to preserve valuehas captured far less art historical attention than the exuber-ant work of its erasure.

Drawing heavily on Goux, Krauss has marshaled his theoryof the "tragic-destructive approach" to art historical ends,taking notice of the "strange chronological convergence"between monetary indeterminacy and a modernist aestheticsof the same.''- Krauss takes the demonstrative case of Picasso,arguing that, in eifect, the artist presaged the end of the goldstandard model of representational stability in devising (-ub-ism's visual economy of open, relational meaning, only thento fake "a return to the gold standard of visual representa-tion" in his post-World War I neoclassicism (a version ofPurism's return to stability, which Krauss deems counterfeitby dint of its highly attenuated mode of qnotation and pas-tiche).'' Goux's monetary semiotics ol abstraction lias alsoproved useful to Baker, specifically in his recent réévaluationof Francis Ficabia's involvement with international Dada inthe 1910s and 1920s. In contrast to Picasso's post-gold stan-dard send-up of semiodc guarantees, Baker considers howDada sought to "exacerbate" modern vahie's slide into n omadism, deterritorialization, and Bataille's celebrated econ-omy of profligate wastefulness,**"*

If Baker is right in asserting that Dada perpetnated "anever-ending semiotic voyage"—especially in its ironic use ofreadymade materials as a means to further destabilize mean-ing—then Machine Ar¡ worked to the opposite effect, andthrough nearly identical means. Not only did the exhibitrepeat the move to reclassify ordinary objects as works of art,but Machine Art also u.sed a number of the same objects thathad been featured in the earlier Dadaist incureions. Theseincluded both an aluminum outboard propeller, which Pica-bia had featured (with the unflattering title Âne [Ass]) on thecover of 391 in 1917, and the ball bearing itself, which ManRay had disa.ssembled, bottled up, and titled Expori Commodityin 1920 (Figs. 8-10). Counter to these playlul appropriations,which engaged the open trafficking of meaning in both artand commerce. Machine An presented commercial objects asworks of art in order to stabilize evaluation in both spheres.Not irreducible particulars but responsible reflections of ex-ternal norms. Machine Art's things shared patterns, repeatedforms, and literally reflected one another, amoimting to avisual illustration of how singular objects partake in universalideals.

In The Phi.tosoph.'S of Pialo. Demos maintained, "There havebeen philosophies which have divorced value from being,conceiving standards as inefíective in nature. . . . But forPlato this biftircation does not exist'"^' As we have seen,Johnson's mentor advanced a particular interpretation ofPlato, seeking to revise the increasingly canonical view ofPlato as a strict dualist. Insisting that Plato equally "resorts toboth notions of participation and imitation," Demos made

NF.OPLATONISM, THE GOLD STANDARD, AND MACH INI-: ART. I9S-1

8 Detail of a page from the exhibitioncatalog Machine Art, showing no. 41,Outboard propeller. AluminumCompany of America (photograph byRuth Bern-hard, reproduced withpennission of the Rutli BernhardArchive, Princeton Universit)' ArtMu.seum, copyright © Trustees ofPrinceton University, digital image© The Museum of Modem Art/licensed by SCALA, provided by ArtResource, NY)

room for an alternative Platonic ontology: one that imaginesthe ideal not as distant archetype and standard, but as whatGoux would call "the embodied general equivalent," imma-nent in the very things to which it gives rise and governs."^'For Demos, this extension of the ideal into the actual is anecessary precondition for the practice of philosophy. "Fromthe observation of beauty in concrete things," he promised,"we are led to beauty in the forms."''' This maxim .servesnicely as an explanation of Marhine Art's project, which tookfunctional objects of ordinary life and turned them intouseful object lessons in Fonn and value. For a museum taskedwith explaining modernist experimentation to an increas-ingly skeptical public, the implied payoff of this Platonicapproach was considerable. Once abstract values could belocated in the familiar, physical world, then modern art'sapparently meaningless abstractions instead became clear-sighted meditations on what Demos termed the "really real":those abstract Forms from which actual objects derived theirvalue and very being.

In the first sentence of his catalog essay for Machine Art,Barr underscored the exhibit's allegiance to Plato, but he did

so in language that evoked a Neoplatonic intermingling ofabstract ideals and concrete particulars. The result of thisintermingling, Barr explained, was beauty: "The beauty ofmachine art is in part the abstract beatity of'straight lines andcircles' made into actual tangible "suifaces and solids.'"*'^Barr's passive verb construction leaves the [neans of produc-tion up to speculation. What is clear (besides a certain com-plicity with the alienation of industrial labor) is Form's pri-ority as the determination of all things, but not in a mannerthat would necessarily lead to its corruption in the phenom-enal world. A.sserting that the "abstract" is "made . . . tan-gible," Barr thus implies a much difierent relation betweenthe ideal and the man-made than the one presented byPlato's best-known diatribe against the arts.

hi book 10 of The Rfpublic, Plato pictures a mimetic chainof increasingly degraded value: God creating ideal Forms, thecarpenter impeifectly imitating them, and the artist thenimperfectly imitating these imperfect imitations. Art is thusleft in the unfortunate position of being "thrice removed"from the absolute value of pure Form, hi his essay for MachineArt, Ban" rejects this mimetic ontology in favor of one in

ß O 8 •'^'*T B U L L E T I N D E C F . M B E R 2 U 0 H V O L U M E X C N l i M B K R 4

391

9 Francis Picabia, Ane, cover of 391, no. 5 (July 1917) (artwork© Ai-tisis Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

which the absolute is in fact made real in the sensible world,not as a representation but as presence itself. If the problemof abstract art wa.s that it failed as a mimetic copy of tbenatural world, AlachÍ7ie Arts Neoplatonism hinted that thisperhaps was no problem at all. Here abstraction's rejection ofmimesis is recast as the triumphant overcoming of exactlythat aspect of art that Plato had found so troublesome. Re-jecting mimesis in favor of the ennobled status of participa-tion, abstract form afforded a solution to art's degradedstatus in the representational economy of aesthetic value ofPlato's Republic. In distinction to abstraction's supposedslide into valueless indeterminacy—much to the hand-wring-ing of art critics and the applause of the Dadaists—MachineArt hypostatized absti"action as a stable and stabilizing ideal.Both immanent presence and an absolute guarantee, the"abstract" was now the "really real," flowing freely betweenthe general to the particular.

Plotinus explained his understanding of participatory on-lology this way: "There can be no representation of it [theideal], except in the sense that we represent gold by someportion of gold."** Whether in coins, bullion, or treasuryreserves, gold both is and refers to value. As the embodimentof pure value, gold money takes for granted the immediacy ofits representational capacity. Certainly, this was gold's attrac-tion to Depression-era hoarders, eager to hang onto some

10 Man Ray, New York {Ex-port Commodity), 1920, one ofan edition of nine signedand numbered copies. Fon-dazione Marconi, Milan,1973. Private collection(artwork © Man RayTrvist / Artists Rights Society[ARS], New York/ADAGP,Paris; photograph © Teli-mage, Paris)

type of palpable, intrinsic wealth. A material form of currencyperfectly adjusted to tinqtiestionable worth, gold felt like theperfect legal tender, solid, immediate, and real. Thus, if tlieparticipatory ontology at work in Machine Art v/^ in keepingwith the Neoplatonic tendencies of Johnson's mentors atHarvard, it also ran parallel to hoarding as a response to theend of the gold standard. Machine Art, with its representa-tional economy, was not approximating an aesthetic versionof the gold standard, wliich is effectively a mimetic system inwhich currency imitates gold in its function of exchange.Machine Art 3.sserted more than just an abstract guarantee forits machine parts and household goods, and something evenmore bankable than convertibility. Barr and Johnson's ex-hibit effectively ventured an aesthetic economy homologousto gold coin ctirrency. No mere promissory notes of value, thesteel springs and kitchen sinks themselves embodied value,made it physically incarnate and available to the empiricalproof of presence.

In a publicit)' stunt that drew on the twin competitivetraditions of academic salons and industrial fairs, a panel ofcelebrity judges was called to the Museum of Modern Art inthe days before Machine Art opened, charged with the task ofidentifying the show's most beautiful pieces (Fig. 11). Thejury of this "beauty contest," as it was called in the press,consisted of philosopher and educator John Dewey. aviatorAmelia Earhart, Charles Richards, a museum official whospecialized in the cultivation of the so-called arts-in-industrymovement, and Roosevelt's secretary of labor, Frances Per-kins, who forwarded her vote from Washington. The judgeswere asked to select the objects that most faithfully reflectedthe definition of geometric beauty as put forth by the Philrbusquotation. Best in show went to a single coil section of thicksteel spring, or "Exhibit item #2: Section of spring," manu-

NEOPLATONISM, TUE (¡OLD STANDARD. AND .MACHtS'E ART. 1934

11 The Jiidg ing panel for the McichineArt "Beauty Contest": /Amelia Earhait,John Dewey, and Charles R. Richards(photograph by Paul Parker, 1934,digital itnage © The Museum ofModern Art/licensed by SCALA,provided by Ait Resource, NY)

factured by the American Steel and Wire Company inWorcester, Massachusetts (Fig. 12).

One of Plato's preferred shapes, the circle is made mani-fest (to borrow Barr's revealing verb tense) in the piece ofrolled and coiled steel. The spring has neither a 'Japanned"nor a "black temper" finish, surface treatments made avail-able by the American Steel and Wire Company, although its1934 catalog warned against such finishes as a friction-caus-ing impediment to functional efficiency.'" The aesthetic ef-fect of the spring's plain finish is twofold. First, the springhonestly discloses its material substance, which is absolutelycoextensive with its form. In this way, the spring sectionfulfills functionalism's often moralistic rebuke of ornament,at the same time that it nicely illustrates Demos's definition ofthe Platonic ideal as "in-itselfness."" Second, the lack ofapplied finish, given also the coil's curvature and breadth{rolled into a rectangular shape about two inches thick),allows the spring a chance for material self-re il exivit)'. Insideits inner loop, the spring reflects itself. The spring both is andrefers to ideal form, perfectly adjusting instance to essenceand further figuring the very adjustment in its literal perfor-mance of self-reflection. A circle indeed.

As Plotinus knew, gold's value is both proximate and de-ferred, immanent and transcendent, since it embodies a partof the collective ideal from which it derives its worth (that is,gold in general). Its shininess is in some ways a sign of thisvery duality, indicating at once the integrit)' of the metal'ssubstance and the mirroring way in which it expresses anexternal absolute. In The Gold Standard- and the Logic of Natu-ralism, literary critic Walter Benn Michaels makes the casethat besides its ability to catch the eye, gold's reflective sur-face acts as a physical iteration ofthe metal's representationalfunction as money: "It is as if the gold reflects itself and soreally is its own reflection, an object that becomes what it isby representing itself."^" Shine, reflection, representation—

12 Detail of a page from the exhibition catalog Machine Art-,showing no. 2, Section of spring, American Steel & Wire Co.,subsidiary of United States Steel Corp. (photogra|)h bv RiilhBernhard, reproduced with permission of the Ruth BernhardArchive, Princeton Univemt)' Art Museum, copyright © Trusteesof Princeton Universit), digital image © Tlie Museum of ModernAjt/licensed by SCALA, provided by Art Resource, NY)

these are congruent terms in Michaels's argument. They alsofigured prominently in Machine Art.

Reflectixity played a major role in the selection and displayOÏ Machine ArC% many objects. The ovei-whelming majorlt)' ofthe things on \4ew were made of high-polish »letals or uncutglass, and tliose that were not—the more uncommon woodor porcelain pieces—also had been burnished to a nice gloss.In fact, elbow grease had played a role in the success of the steelspring, as noted in the April 29, 1934, issue ofthe WorcesterTelegram, which proudly announced that the regionally madeproduct had won top prize in an art show in Manhattan.'^Clifford F. Hood, the district manager of the American Steel

610 ART Bl!l.l.ETI\" DECEMBER 2ÜÜ8 VOLUME XC NUMBER 4

13 Machine Art, installation view,installation desij n by Johnson {digitalimage © The Museum of ModernArt/licensed by SCAIA, provided byArt Resource, NY)

and Wire Company, recounted how the spring had been justone of many samples lying around in the warehouse when"the museum's representative" paid a visit. The scout, almostdefinitely Johnson himself, saw its potential. The piece "wasbuffed until it glistened" and then promptly carted ofF to itsart museum debut. Johnson also took great care in lightingall the objects in order lo maximize their reflective surfaces,and this was e.spcciaily apparent in his theatrical display oflaboratory glassware (Fig. 13). In this section of the show,[ohn.son arranged vessels on tabletops covered with blackvelvet according to type and size and in serial gradation,formally echoing one another in a series of identical shapes.By lighting the groupings with bright, low-hanging spotlights.Johnson brought out the surface brilliance of even these mosttransparent things. The reflective glare from the lights lent(he glassware substance, and reflection itself appeared as the¡jriniaiy content of material form.

The squeaky clean surfaces of the show's objects advertisedthe sort of material honest)' that Barr and Johnson advocatedin their catalog essays. Barr espoused the need for things toproclaim only "the sensuous beauty of porcelain, enamel,celluloid, gla.ss of all colors, copper, aluminum, brass andsteel." while Johnson touted "smoothness" and "polishedmetal" as the virtues of machine design. "Mak[ing] a cleansweep of inherited bric-a-brac," as one critic put it, the exhib-it's straightforward things displayed their substance as forth-rightly as their shape, hiding behind no frumpy patterning orornate design.''* This, many believed, was one of the show'sbest features. In fact, critics were so enthusiastic in support-ing Machine Art's celebration of material self-expression thatseveral took Johnson to task for not staying even truer to hisown ethic. Baltimore critic Jerome Klein contended thatobjects like electric toasters, carpet sweepers, and heating

ttnits were really too complex to fit the show's aestheticmandate. Klein praised the "grandeur of the mighty hotelsauce pans" but maintained that the contraptions with "neatlypainted or brightly surfaced casing[s]" had no rightful placein a show like Machine Art.^' Klein held material honestyparamount, and, indeed, such self-<iisclosure was more inkeeping with the show's stated Platonic aims. After all, unob-structed engagement with the concrete was meant as a meansof communion with the ideal.

Johnson's concern with shiny, self-disclosing surfaces isfurther evident in the curator's considerable correspondencewith the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), carriedout in the months leading up to Machine Art\ opening. ThePennsylvania outfit supplied Johnson with large panels ofshiny aluminum sheeting for use as display accents but ex-pressed do^lbt that the material could uniformly attain thehigh level of finish that he had explicitly requested. '' Abouta month later, the exacting curator wrote again. Apparentlynow satisfied by the panels,Johnson's complaint this time waswith the poor surface quality of exhibition number 142, theWear-Ever griddle lent by the Aluminum Cooking UtensilCo.. Alcoa's subsidiary (Fig. 14). In response, the kitchenwaremanufacturer instructed Johnson to use "a pad of #00 steelwool . . . [and] rub the surface . . . with circular motions."^^Ironically, though beauty was said to be automatic, natural,and "unconscious" elsewhere in the show's official rhetoric,Johnson missed no opportunity to buff, primp, and polish.The efforts paid ofT. Ait critics roundly embraced Johnson'swork as a masterpiece of installation, and many .slyly won-dered aloud if perhaps Johnson's was not the only art inMachine Art. More deeply, however, the thoroughgoing bril-liance amounted to a visual iteration of the exhibit's Neopla-tonic aesthetic of formal participation. Johnson's highly re-

i.

NEÜPLATONISM. THE GOLD STANDARD. .A.ND MACHI.\t¿ AKT. Q\\

flective objects gave material figuration to Barr's idealistnotion of materialit}' by simultaneously disclosing the physi-cal e.ssence of the thing itself and performing deference to anexternal absolute.

Neoplatonic Participation and Modernist FormalismLews Mumford, in his review of Machine Art for the NewYorker, promised "If you like ball bearings and springs, youare prepared for Brancu.si, Moholy-Nagy, Jacques Villon, andKiuidinsky."'^ Barr and Johnson's show contained no worksof modern art (neither actual nor ilhistrated), but the ideathat the exhibition must contain some sort of thesis onmodern art, staged as it was at an institution casually knownas the Modern, seemed a given. Wbile it was impossible tocontemplate a ball bearing directly against the comparison ofa sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, the show's dogged insis-tence on the absoltite primacy of Plaionic Form established afotmdation on which to build an appreciation for modemart, albeit a rather conservative one. Claiming to reveal idealForm made manifest in ordinary things, MarAm^ Art asserteda realm of the "really real," at once abstract and proximate, towhich the apparently groundless abstractions of modern art-ists could now be seen to refer. Retethered to an externalabsolute, all those Cubist squares and sculptural ovoids couldnow be viewed more charitably as efforts to reveal value inmateriality, rather than to further the dissociation betweenthe two.

Machine Art's formalism was premised on the renunciationof abstraction—at least, "abstraction" as many American crit-ics then understood it: as the rejection of natural, externalprinciples. In this respect, the exhibit was consistent withBarr's thinking at the time; in other writings, he tended tocast modernism's diversity not as an unfortunate lack ofpurpose but as goaUi rien ted research into fundamentals. Inhis catalog essay for the Musenm of Modern Art's Cubism andAbstract Art show of 1936, Barr explained how the greatdiversity of modernism's many "isms" could be grasped moreeasily once broken into "two main traditions."™ He describedthe first through a chain of hard-nosed equivalents: "intellec-tual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear andclassical." The second, accordingly, is mtich softer, and Barr'smore florid prose on this side reflects it: "intuitional andemotional rather than intellectual; organic or biomorphicrather than geometrical in its foniis; curvilinear rather thanrectilinear, decorative rather than stnictnral, and romanticrather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, thespontaneous and the irrational."*^" In keeping with White-head's prognostication of a cultural trend toward "fluentenergy" and away from "static stuff," Barr forecast that thesecond class of modernist projects was poised to overtake thefirst in influence and importance. Nonetheless, and as wastypical of the majority of his writing in that period, Barr wasnothing but evenhanded in his treatment of the two tenden-cies, and he certainly did not cast the latter in terms thatwould be familiar to Goux. Those artists in Barr's romanticcategory were not "tragic-destructivists" bent on destabilizingmeaning but simply artists working toward Form throughother means. He even gives Plotinus as a source of influencefor the second tradition, indicating that Machine Art's ideal-ism extended beyond neoclassicism to include also romanti-

14 Detail of a page from ihe exhibition catalog Machine Art,showing no. 142, Wear-Ever gdddlc. the .-Muiiiinuin ('.«»okiiigUtensil Co., subsidiar)* of Alcoa (photograph by Ruth Bernhard,repro-duced with permission of the Ruth Bernhard Archive,Princeton University Art Museum, copyright © Trustees ofPrinceton University, digital image © The Mtiseum of ModernArt/licensed by SCALA, provided by Art Resource, NY)

cism. (Perhaps tellingly, it is not Plato named among theheroes of the first tradition but P)thagoras, suggesdng thatthe Plato OÏ Machine Art. cou\á not be divided between the twotendencies and instead gave cover to both.) Wliether geomet-ric or organic, then, classical or romantic, all varieties ofmodern art in Barr's pantheon participate equally in thematerial expression of value.

This attitude reflects something of the views of Whitehead,who saw variance in contemporary thought as a productiveforce, operating in the interests of progress. Mtising in 1925on the apparent impasse between modern science and reli-gion, Whitehead urged optimism, "In formal logic a contra-diction is the sign of a defeat, but in the evolution of realknowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a vic-tory."* ' The article, which preached "the utmost tolerance ofvariety of opinion," was one Johnson singled out for specialmention in one of his many missives to his mother, and itnicely expresses Barr's ethic of practiced magnanimity in theface of artistic undecidabiiity,*^^ "We should wait," Whiteheadurged, cautioning patience with science's multiple paths to-ward discovery.' ^ Likewise, Ban- preferred to see artistic di-versification as a form of research, wherein the discovery oftrue principles was always at stake. In the Park Avenue SocialReview piece, where Barr admitted that modern art might beas confusing as "modern fashions for ladies," he also pre-sented what he beheved was a tnore useful analogy. Scientificresearch, perhaps bewildering, was excused its diversity for itspresumed efforts toward the pursuit of truth. How could itbe, Barr wondered, that the public could stand "in awe beforethe mysteries of modern physics and biologv." while at thesame time "resent the fact that modern painting is also acomplex affair."' '* For Barr, as for Whitehead, contemporarydiversification was not at odds with greater historical purpose,nor even with the evaluative structure of ideal absolutes, as inWhitehead's comforting claim that "some eternal greatness[is] incarnate in the passage of temporal fact."** As such, the

(312 ARI lU'LI.ETlN DECEMBER 2Ü08 VOLUME XC NUMBER

15 Cover of the exliibition catalogMachine Art (photograph by RuthBfinluiid, design by Jcwef Albers,reproduced with permission of theRuth Bernliiud Archive, PrincetonUniversity Art Museum, copyright© Trustees of Princeton University,© The josef and Anni AlbersFoundation/Artists Rights SocietyLARS], New York, digilal image © TheMuseum of Modern Art/licensed bySCAIA, provided by Art Resource,NY)

split in interwar modernism that Barr described wa.s not a realquanel, tior did it admit to the specter of modem indeter-minacy or valuelessness. Instead, and in keeping with White-head's brand of Neoplatonism, the exigencies of the partic-ular were ever and always bound up in eternal absolutes.

The Trouble with GoldWith his near-obsessive emphasis on reflective sttrfaces, Jolni-son walked an unsteady tightrope. The shiny metallic exteri-ors, while intended to demonstrate h(inest material self-dis-closure, tlireatened to become sitrface ornatnent in its ownright. What's more, the ornamental excess allowed by reflec-tion cotild not contain the solipsism of idealist participation.Indeed, reflectivity botti proclaimed and renounced materialintegrity. On the one hand, and as with gold, the objects'shine stood as a testament to their ontology of pardcipation

and reflection, manifesting their embodiment of an externalideal, which it was always their duty to reflect. At the sametime, the reflective surfaces of Machine Art's things revealedmore than jitst the inmianent object and its transcendentexemplar. The objects more immediately reflected gallery-goers, passing museum guards, and tlie occasional loiterer.By figuring context on their vei y faces, the machine-tooledthitigs threatened to reference not an original, Platonic pro-totype but the continually shifting outside world. Thought ofin this way, the surface reflections stitured the objects to thetime-bound particularities of ordinary existence—the shiftitigfield of reladons in which meaning became unpredictable,contingent, immaterial, and loosed from any ideal absolute.

The cover of the Machine Art catalog furthered Johnson'sscrupulous attention to the material property of reflectiveself-disclosure (Fig. 15). Designed by the former Batihaus

N E O P I A T ü N I S M , THE G O L D S T A N D A R D , . \ N D MACHINE .^RT. I<ia4

instructor Josef Albers (who had immigrated to the UnitedStates only the year before on a visa secured for him by theMuseum of Modern Art), the cover bore the hallmarks ofinternational functionalism. The majestic self-aligning ballbearing took up the expanse of the cover, and the show's titleappeared fully across the width of its bottom in straight-edged, sans serif letters.^^ With its concentric circles andembedded steel spheres, the ball bearing gleams mightily inthe cover image, witb high tonal contrasts obtaining betweenlight and dark. In this case, the surface brilliance came cour-tesy of some careful photographic retouching, seen to by thecatalog's photographer, Ruth Bernhard (later a prominentCalifornia photographer in the circle of Edward Weston, butat the time working as a commercial photographer in Man-hattan). The ball bearing, floating in a dark, ambiguousspace, appears isolated. Albers altered Bernhard's originalphotograph, clipping out the minimal spatial context it im-plied and leaving only form: timeless, absolute, and apartfrom all contingency. The image segregates the object fromuse or exchange and gives visual form to the initial decon-textualization performed by Johnson when he escorted theobject from factoiy floor to museum galleiy. It is an especiallyfitting cover image, then, as it so perfectly figures the Neo-platonic formalism by which Machine Art reckoned meaningand materiality.

Looked at closely, the ball bearing, however, also containsa trace of opposition to the Museum of Modern Art's her-metic formalism—something potentially sullying the purityof its material transcendence. Bernhard's photograph showsoff the bearing's surface brilliance, embellished by multiplepoints of light bouncing off each individual bearing. One arthistorian has claimed to be able to discern "the windowbehind the photographer in every individual sphere."^'While what is reflected is in fact a photographic spotlight(based on my understanding of Bernhard's techniques), it is

just this sort of external reference that tugs at the untidy endsof Machine Art's formalist ontology.^^ Wliether window, spot-light, or curious gallerygoer, the reflections on the show'smany objects opened up the possibility that values couldcome from a source other than that of the closed-circuitreflection of thing and pure value. Immediate context ap-peared in these reflections; its trace simultaneously regis-tered as the content of the objects' form, and also testified tothe unpredictability and contingency of that content. Mean-ing, figvired here as reflections, always capitulated to thetime-bound vicissitudes of use and experience.

In 1929, the well-known economist Irving Fisher predictedthe coming changes in American fiduciary^ policy. He notedthat such changes would force an uncomfortable end to whathe called the "Money Illusion": the misguided faith in papermoney as perfectly exchangeable for gold. Against the"Money Illusion," Fisher tried to remind his readers that allmoney, even gold money, lacks inherent worth, that it isalways only as good as its purpose. In short, "money is asmoney does.'""^ Expanding on a sixteenth-century economicprinciple known as Gresham's Law (which maintains that theinstrumental logic of token money will always trump thematerial value for which it stands), Goux boldly concluded,"The history of value in the West is the inexorable shift romArchetypes to tokens."'^'^ In other words, leaving behind any faith

in external absolutes, modern economies of evaluation in-stead come to rely on the immediacy of context: they shuntimelessness for the time-bound, prefer the instrumental tothe ideal, and choose—as Whitehead also concluded aboutmodernitv'—"fluent energy" over "static stuff." Fislier, with hisdebunking of the "Money Illusion," would have amended thisnarrative only to add that it was always thus.

In this milieu. Machine Art struggled to define a perfectontolog}' of meaning as matched to materiality. Trusting thatthe material world not only reflected absolute values but alsoparticipated in them, Barr and Johnson presented machine-made parts and products like so many concrete incarnationsof abstract ideals; Platonic Form, in Barr's evocative phrasing,was "made into actual tangible 'suifaces and solids.'"^' Thisplaced Machine Art on the side of the hoarders, holding outagainst modernity's slide toward token values and indctenni-nate meaning. Like those who hoarded gold. Machine Artlooked to external ideals and clung, in the meantime, toobjects; offering things as concrete proofs of abstract ideals,and meaning as guaranteed by materiality.

Jennifei' Marshall is acting assistant frrofessor of art history atStanford University. Beginning infanuaiy 2009, she will he assis-tant professor of cni history at the University of Minnesota. She iscurrently preparing a book on the Machine Art exhibition (Depart-ment of Art History, University of Min ne.sota, 338 Heller Hall, 2711^ Avenue South, Minneapolis., Minn. 55455-0121, jjanemarshall®yahoo, com}.

NotesI wish to thank the following individuals for iheir indispensably helpfulreadings and responses tti ihe présent work: Miwon Kwon, Sara Beth Levav'y.Maik MrGurl, Angela Miller. Kale Mundloch, Rudy Navarro. .Sieven Nelson.John Ott, Donald Preziosi, Jason Piiskar, Kevin B:ileman Smiih. tlèrile Whit-ing, and Bryan Wolf, and the excellent anonymous readei^s siiiiinioned to tlieta.sk by Tfe Art liutktin. Support was also pruvided, during varii»us stages, fromthe following funding sources; the Terra/ACI-S Disseitaiion Fellowship, aPostdoctoral Felloivship at the American Academy <jf /\rts and Sciences, andtlie Deparimeni of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

1. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Mturhine Art (New York: Museum of Modem Art.1934). Perhaps the most salient precedeni for Machine Art's democra-tizing aesthetic could be found in the exhibitions of ordinaiT ohjetcsmounted by ihe Newark Museum. NJ.. dtiring the late 19!2Ûs and early1930s, incltiding hoih Ikauh Has .VÍJ Relation lu Age, Rarity or Price(1928-29) and Exhibit oJ Articles Costing Nol More than t'ifiy OÍ Í ÍS (1929).For more on this exhibition program, the hrainchild of Newark's direc-tor, John Cotton Dana, see Carol Duncan, Huit' to Get n Musntm withBrains: ¡ahn Oiltim Dann and the Making of n liemocr/itic Cultiiir for .Amrr-icn (Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2008); and Nicolas Maffei, "JohnCotton Dana and ihe Politics of Exhibiting Industrial .\rt in the US,1909-1929,"7o"mrt; of IMsipi History 13. no. 4 (2000): 301-17. Natu-rally, ihe populist emphasis oti affordable beaut)' expanded beyondmuseum display, to include phenomena ranging from commercial de-sign to ihe New Deal arLs projects. For a recent and general view ofthis democratizing tendency, see A. Joan Saab, Fm- the Millions: Am^canArt and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylva-nia Press, 2004).

2. Especially useful treatments of the M<ichine /Irt show are offered inSybil Goixlon Kantor. Alfred H. Ban, Jr. and the ¡ntelteituat Origins of theMuseum of Moiifiii Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); SidneyLawrence, "Clean Machines at ihe Modern," Art in Atmrira 72 (Febru-ary 1984); 127-41, 166-6H: Saab. For the Milliotis: Terry E. Smith, Mak~ing the Moilern: Inrlti-stTy. Art. anil Design in AjnMm (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Pie.ss, 1993); Mar\' Anne Staniszewski, The POUHT of Display: AHistory of Exhibition Imtallaiions at the Museum of Modem Art (Cambridge,Mass.-' MIT Press, 1998); and Krislina Forsyth Wihon. "Exhibiting Mod-

614 AR! lU'LI.KTIN DECEMBER SOUH VOl.UME XC NUMBER 4

ern Times: American Modernism, Popular Ciilliire. and the .Ari Ex-hibit, 1925-1935" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2001).

3. Alfred North WTiitehead, Froress and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (NewYork: Free Press, 1978), 309.

4. Georg Simmel, The Phitosophy of Monty, trans. Tom Boitomore andDavid Frisby (London: Rouiledge. 1982), 128-29.

5. Thomas F. Woodlock, "Money." Wall Street Journal.. March 14, 19. 3, 1.

6. See Alec Marsh's illuminating Monty and Mmlemity: found. Williams,and the Spirit offeffenon (Ttiscaloosa; University- of Alabama Press.1998).

7. See, for example, George Baker, The, Artwork Caught by the Tait: FrancisPicahia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007). ]25. 23,26; Dalia [iidoviu. Unpacking Durfinmp: Ail in Iramil (Berkeley: Univer-sity of t;alifomia Press, 1995); and Rosalind Krauss, The ñcasso Papen(New York: Farrar, Slrauss and Giroux, 1998), 6.

8. Raphael Demos, Thi- Philosophy of Plato (New York: Charles Scribner'sSons, 1939), 179.

9. Ibid.

10. While no pictuie of (he Pluto wall text exists in the Museum of Mod-ern Ari's photographic archive, a hlurb in the Hmild-Trihune reponedthat "the quotation from Plato . . . has been prominently exhibited asthe show's explanation and justification." "Woman's Vote Makes MirrorArt Show Victor." ,VTO York Hnald-Tnbune. April 23. 1934. in the .V-chives of .J\iiierican An (hereafter .WA) leei 505fi. Museum of ModernArt Public Information Scrapbooks. microfilm (hereafter MF) reet 4,frame no. 798,

11. As printed in Barr, Marhine Art, n.p. No source was given tor the trans-lation of the Phitehus excerpt, which was also given in Greek. See note29 below.

12. Malcolm Vaughan. "Modern Mtiseum Has l,arge Show of MachineArt," Ammcan, March 10, 1934, AAA 5058. MF4, no. 761.

13. A. Philip McMahon, "Would Plato Find Artistic Beauty in Machines?"Parnassus 7. no. 2 (Fehruary 1935): 8.

14. Philip Johnson, inieiview with Sharon Zane, The Museum of Modem AnOral HUtory Pnijert (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991 ), 68-69,the Museum of Modern An. Archives, New York (hereafter MoM.\ Ar-chives).

15. Philip Johnson (o his mother, Lotiise Pope Johnson, Jantiaiy 19, 1926,Philip Johnson Papers. 1908-2002 (hereafter John.son Papers), GettyResearch Institute, Los Angeles.

16. Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January [day llleg.], 1926,Johnson Papers, Getty Research Institute.

17. Philip Johnson to Louise Popejohnson, dated January [day illeg.],1926. John.son Papers, Getty Re.search Institute.

18. Johnson recalled WTiiiehead as saying, "I have two types of students,Philip: A students and B students. . . . Philip, you're a B student." PhilipJohnson, "Philip Johnson," in Thf Right Word at the Right Ti-me, ed.Mailo Thomas (New York: Atria Books. 2002). 162.

19. David Rodier, "Alfred Nonh Whitehead: Between Platonism and Neo-platonism," in Neoplatonism and Contttmporary Thought, ed. R. Baine Har-ris (Albany: State Univei-sity of New York Press, 2002), 184. WTiile Ro-dier considers the move away from Neoplatonic mysticism as a form ofsecularization, others have \ie\ved Jowett's interprétation instead to beinformed by a modern view of f Christianity; wherein the diwne and theeanhly are strictly delimited. See Caroline Winterer. The Culture of Clas-sicism: Ancient (ireere and Rime in Ammran Jnletlrctual Life, ¡7H0-Í910(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 124.

20. Whitehead. as quoted in Rodier, "Alfred North Whitehead," 197.

21. Howard Nemerov, "A Lively Interpretation of Platonic Philosophy,"Nni) York Times Book Rniinu. September 3. 1939, 2, II.

22. Raphael Demos, introduction to Selectiotts, by Plato (New York: CharlesScribner's Sons, 1927), x.

23. While never precisely naming it. Demos makes frequent, coded refer-ences to pragmatism as Plato's philosophical opposite. Contrasting Pla-to's faiih in a priori principles with what he called the "current bias"for "common sense" and "empirical" "experience," Demos invokedpragmatism through ils veiy lingua Iranca, especially as it had heenpopularized hyjohn Dewey during this period. The staged oppositionwas a fair one. Dewey himself often relished being on the wrong sideof Plato, choosing to historicité the ancient philosopher's tendencytoward idealism rather than to capitulate to it. See Demos, The Philoso-phy of Plato. 49, 175, 178, 181, 186, 189. 190; and Michael Eidddge.Transforming F.xperienre: John Dewey's Cultural InstrumeniaUsm (Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press, 1998). ,^3.

24. Demos, The Phitosophy of Plato, 61. 178.

25. Philip Johnson to Louise Pope Johnson, January 10. 1926, Johnson Pa-pers, Getty Research Institute.

26. Sarah Greenough, "Gallery 291, 1905-1917: Alfred Stieglitz, RebelliousMidwife to a Thousand Ideas," in Modern Art and AmMra: Alfred Stie^îtzand His New York Galteries (Boston: Bulfinch Press. 2000), 37. 486 n. 48;and "Plato's Dialogues: Philehus," Camei-a Work M (October 1911): 68.

27. George Heard Hamilton, "John t^overt: Early .Ajnerican Modern," Col-lege Art Journal 12 (Fall 1952): 37.

28. Charles Brock, "The Annory Show, 1913: A Diabolical lest," inGreenough. Modem Ari and America, 135-36.

29. Where the Plato of Machine Art declares forms to be beautiful ' n o t . . .relatively, but ahvays and absolutely." Stieglitz's Plato takes a sHghlly—bul signiHcantly different—tack, stating that pure forms "are not bmuli-ful for a paiiicular purfnne, as t)ther things are; hui are by nature everbeautiful by themselves." "Plato's Dialogties: Philebtis," 68, emphasisadded. Neither quotation exactly matches the era's foremost transla-tion of the Philebus dialogue, that of Benjamin Jowett. oiiginally pub-lished in 1871 but reprinted for the first time after ihe luin of the cen-tury in 1924 and then again in 1930. But Johnson's comes closer.Jowelt's translation reads, "these 1 affirm to he not only relatively beau-tiful . . . b u t . . . eternally and absolutely beautiful." Joweit, Tlw Dialoguesof Plato, vol. 3 (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1953), 610.

30. Mark A. Cheetham's stated project to attend lo "modernism's now of-ten lorgoiien nostalgia for purity" mns parallel to my r)wn intentionshere. However, his discussion as to how F.uropean modernists struggledto find common ground between an and abstract purity, which heclaims is "by definition itnmatedal," presents a point of contrast withmy larger study, which seeks to understand ihe double motion towardbotli idealism and materialism in interwar .American modernism. SeeCheetham. The Rhetoric of Purity: t'^sentialist 'Theory and the Atti'ml of Ab-stract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), xvi; and

Jennifer Jane Marshall, "The Stuff of Modern Life: Miiteriality andThingness in the Museum of Modern Arl's Machiiie .Art Show. 1934"(PhD diss.. University of California, Los .Ajigeles. 2(M)i)).

31. Franz Schuke, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: .Alfred A.Knopf, 1994), 44.

32. Alfred H. Barr Jr.. Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Mod-ern .\rt, 1936), 19; and Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 352.

33. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 307, 444 n. 127.

34. Hilde Hein. "Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas," journal of ihe History ofPhilosf,}>hy ?. (Odober 1965): 133-44; and Bernard Smith, Mwtemism'sHistory: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press. 1998), 72.

35. Reyner Banhani, Theory and Design in the Fini Machine Agf (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 198O'),211.

36. Françoise Ducros, "Amédée Ozenfant, 'Purist Brother,'" in L'Esprit Nou-veau, ed. Carol Eliel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Mu.seum of Art,in association with Harry N, Abrams, New York, 2001), 89.

37. Kenneth F. Silver, Esprit de Carps: The Art of the Parisian Avanl-Garde andthf First World War. t914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press.1989), rj7.

38. Edward Alden Jewel!. "/\gain a Storm Rages over 'Modern /\ii,"' NnuYn^ Times. Febmar>- 22. 193], 71; and "The Pros and ilons: An Art Fo-rum," Netv York Times, April 26, 1931, Xl l .

39. C^orgeJ. Cox, "Modern An and This Matter of Ta.ste." American Maga-zine of Ait'¿5 (August 1932): 79-80.

40. Arthur Millier, T h e Battle of the isms," Los Angeles Times, May 31,1951, BI4.

41. Camille Maticlair, quoted in ibid.

42. Alfred H. Barr Jr., "Who's Crazy Now?" Park Avenue Social Rniiew, No-vember 1933. in AAA 5091, MF' 37, no. 261.

43. See, for example. "Commodity Prices Believed Stable," New York Times,September 13, 1931, N9.

44. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933," in Ren-dezvous with Destiny: Addresses and Ofrininns of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,ed,J. B. S. Harman (New York: Dryden Piess. 1944). 39.

45. James Trtislow Adams, "America Faces I933's Realities," New Y<nit TimesAlagiaiiie, Jamiaty I, 1933, 1; and Henry Ford. "Is Mass Production Go-ing Out?" in A Basis for Stability, ed. Samuel Crowther (Boston: Little,Brown, 1932), 77.

46. Bruce Banon. "Are We (ietiing a New Idea about 'VALLits'?" AmericanMagazine 114, no. 1 (July 1932): 128. Barton here claims to be quotingthe British economist Josiah Stamp, reporting casually on a conversa-tion the two had.

47. For more on the Plalonic and Neoplatonic tradition within Puritan the-

N E O P L A T O N i S M , T H t G O L D S T A N D A R D , .^ND MACHI.VK ART. 1934

ology, see Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philos-ophy in America, vol. I (New York: Capricorn Books,' 1977), 68, 85-90.

48. Rev. Dr. Frank Wade Smith, qtioted in "Warns of Going Off MoralStandard," Nni) York Times, Febmary 20, 193. . 13.

49. Woodlock, "Money," I.

50. Edwin Walter Kemmerer, "Gold Standard Is Far from Being Stabilized,"A'«<' York Times. March 17, 1929, XX13; Harry- D. Gideonse, "TheUnited Stales and the Internationa] iktid Standard." Atináis of Ihf Ameri-can Acadtmy ofPnlitiml and Social Srimre 171 (January 1934): 123; Fred1. Kent, "The Mystery of the Gold Standard," Lilnary Digf.st 116, no. 3(July 15, 1933): 5\ and "Gold Again in Limeliglii." Lo.s Angfks Tirrms,March 11. 19.33,8.

51. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary Histoiy of theVnilid Stales, 1867-1960 (Princeton: Prinreion Universiiy Press. 1963),189-96,

52. Woodlock. "Money." 1.

53. "Si.000.000,000 Gold in Hiding." Walt Street Journal, March 15, 1933,14.

54. "Return Parade of the Gold Hoarders," l.itfrary Digpst 115 (March 25,1933): 38; "Comment of the Press on the President's Message." NewYork Times, March 10. 1933, 8; and "On the Gold Standard." Nm YorkTimes, March 9. 1933. 12.

55. Gustav Cassel. The Dowjifatl of Üw Gold Standard (Oxford: Oxford Uni-vers i tv Press, 1936). 116-25.

56. "Reium Parade of the Gold Hoarders," 36; and "Let Us Stay withGold." Watl Sireel Journal, March 8, 1933, 6.

57. "The Dollar," Nmsweeki (Febmary 10. 1934): 8.

58. Marsh. Mortry and Modtmity, Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standardand the Logic of Naiurrdism: American Literalure al ihf Turn of the Ontury(Berkeley: University of California Press. 1987). 158; Edward J. Nygren."The Almighty^ Dollar: Money as a Theme in American Painting," Win-lerthurPorlfotioti (Summei-Autumn 1988): 129-50; Marc Shell. Money,Language, and Thought: tJinary and Phitosophirat Economies from Ihe Medi-eval lo ifw Modem Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);and idem, Ari ùf Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

59. Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Langtmge, Irans. Jennifer Curtiss (iage

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

60. Ibid.. 19.

61. Ibid.. 66.

62. Kraass. The Picasso Papers, 6.

63. Ibid.. 12. France abandoned the gold standard during lhe war.

64. Baker, The Artiuork Caught by the TaiU 125, 23, 26.

65. Demos. The Philosophy of Plato. &b.

66. Ibid., 2(10 n.; and C<oux, The Coinrrs of Languagje. 22.

67. Demos, The Philosophy of Plato, 74.

68. Alfred H. Barr Jr.. foreword to Marhine Art, n.p.

69. Plotinus, The Ennrnds 5.S.S. trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Pen-guin Books, 1991). 413.

70. .\nierican Steel imd Wire Co.. Catalogue of Ameiican Springs (March1934), Hagley Museum and Libi ary. Wilmington, Del.

71. Demos, The Philoiof}hy of Plato. 53.

72. Michaels, The Gotd Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. 158.

73. "'Most Beautiful Object" at N.Y. Machine Arl Show City Product,"Worcester Telegram, April 29. 1934. in .\.\A 5058. MF 4. no. 796.

74. "Machine-Made Beauty Revealed by 'Machine Art' Show. New York."Sfmngfieid Union and Republiam. April 22. 1934. in .\A,\ 5058, MF 4, no.795.

75. Jerome Klein, "The Machine Becomes An in New York," Baltimore Sun,March 18. 1934, in AAA 5058, MF 4, no. 759.

76. The Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co. lo Philip Johnson. January 17,1934. Machine Art File no. 4/5, MoMA Archives.

77. The Aluminum Cooking Utensil Co. to Philip Johnson, February 7,1934. Machine Art File no. 4/5. MoMA Archives.

78. Lewis Mnmford. "Portrait of the Mechanic as a Young Man," NrwYorker, March 31. 1934, in AAA 5058, MF 4, no. 786.

79. Barr. C.vMsm and Abstract Art, 19.

80. Ibid.

81. Alfred North WTiitehead, "Religion and Science.' Attantic Monthly 136(August 1925): 204.

82. Ibid.; and Philip Johnson to Louise Pope John.son. January- [day illeg.],1926. Johnson Papers. Geitv' Research Insiituie.

83. Whitehead, "Religion and Science." 202.

84. Barr, "Who's Crazy Now?"

85. Whitehead. quoted in Rodier, "Alfred North Whitehead." 197.

86. Schulze, Philip Johnson. 105.

87. Wilson, "Exhibiting Modern Times." 237.

88. Ruih Bernhard, interview with the author. October 29, 2002.

89. Irving Fisher, "Money Illusion Big Gamble in Dollar's Value, FisherSays," Washington Pmi, January 6. 1929. M17.

90. Goux, Tlie Coiners of Language, 65. emphasis in the original.

91. Barr, Machine Art, n.p.