The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Machine Art exhibition of 1934 is one of those events that historians love, seemingly so rooted in its time and place that it all but becomes a metaphor, a defining moment of high modernism. Even the catalogue is iconic. With its cover photograph of a complex ball bearing system—all circles within circles—silhouetted against a black field, its lofty quotes from Plato and Aquinas, Josef Albers’s clean page layouts, and its crisp photographs of industrial equipment and household items, the publication exudes self-assurance and conjures a world of endless perfect forms in steel and glass.

In its day, Machine Art garnered no shortage of attention; in Jennifer Jane Marshall’s Machine Art, 1934, the exhibition gets its due as the center of a book-length study. Marshall places the exhibition in its times, introducing readers to a lively cast of characters including the young Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s first director and the driving force behind the show; his close colleague Philip Johnson, who designed the exhibition layout; and the photographer Ruth Bernhard, who took many of the photographs for the catalogue. Readers are given a fine-grained story of the conception, execution, and public reception of Machine Art, though Marshall’s book is not structured as a narrative. The exhibition serves as a reference point in a landscape of philosophy, social history, consumerism, and a host of other potential contexts, though the book does not deal much with the longer legacy of the Machine Art exhibition. Marshall’s main concern is modernist idealism itself. She wants to anchor Barr’s philosophy to its time and to its substance, and proposes a reading of modernism rooted in the very materiality of the smooth, machined objects selected for the exhibition.

The framework for Marshall’s analysis is a cultural moment defined by a tension of opposing forces—what might broadly be termed absolutism and relativism. The book begins with the experience of the 1934 exhibition itself, with its elaborate mechanisms of defamiliarization that allowed relatively common objects—glassware, sinks, ball bearings—and some more recondite machinery to be considered completely separate from their uses in the real world, as embodiments of a purity of form and unadorned honesty of material. This effect was accomplished largely by Philip Johnson’s exhibition design, with its brightly lit arrays of goods. Ironically, Johnson had to screen out the decorative moldings on the walls and ceilings of the nineteenth-century brownstone in which the MoMA was housed at the time to achieve the rational neutrality he sought. Marshall persuasively argues that the exhibition staging was inherently photographic: “Exhibiting ordinary objects such that they were held still and isolated in front of nondescript backgrounds,” she states, “bracketed, we might say, from their ordinary relationships to use, touch, and even the flow of time—Johnson’s installations approximated the effects and ideals of straight photography” (46). The effect was continued, even accentuated, in the catalogue in which Bernhard’s crisp photographs created abstract patterns out of the clean lines of the exhibited pieces.

A passage from Plato’s Philebus on the absolute beauty of perfect shapes served as the epigraph for both exhibition and catalogue. Yet whereas Plato had felt that no real object could equal the absolute perfection of the world of forms, Barr argued, in his foreword to the catalogue, that “as a result of the perfection of modern materials and the precision of modern instruments, the modern machine-made object approaches . . . those pure shapes” of Plato’s ideal (Machine Art, March 6 to April 30, 1934, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934, n.p.). Marshall traces the lineage of this line of thought to a Neoplatonism popular in American academic circles in the 1920s and 1930s. Underpinning the Machine Art exhibition was a concept of “participation,” a Neoplatonic understanding that the real, rather than being an imperfect copy of the ideal, as Plato might have it, was its physical synecdoche—a part signifying the whole, sharing its very substance.

Following this philosophy lesson, Marshall’s book takes an excursus into financial policy of the 1930s. Readers are asked to view the exhibition within the context of anxiety surrounding Franklin Roosevelt’s move, in 1933, to de-peg the U.S. dollar from the price of gold. For many at the time, this meant a crucial undermining of something real—the value of a precious metal—by something inherently relative, i.e., the arbitrary and conventional value of paper money. “Gold,” Marshall argues, “models an ontology of value that nicely corresponds to the Neoplatonic notion of participation” (71). Inasmuch as the gleaming metal objects in the MoMA show were signs of some absolute value of pure form, a gold standard of taste as it were, they represented a fixity in contradistinction to relativistic notions of value in the arts and in the commercial world.

This dualist format, of absolutism against relativism, is also employed by Marshall to situate the Machine Art exhibition as a conservative force in modern art. She quotes many critics who in the 1930s decried modern art’s waves of -isms, each seemingly narrowly absorbed by its own system of signification, as with Cubism, or with confounding the idea of meaning itself, as with Dadaism. By extension, Marshall proposes, Barr’s exhibition championed Purism and the Bauhaus aesthetic as repositories of an objective truth in a world unmoored from standards; furniture by Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer were included in the show. Marshall makes an effective comparison of an outboard motor propeller in the MoMA exhibition with a very similar unadorned propeller adorning the cover of Francis Picabia’s irreverent journal 391 in 1917. The propeller chosen by Barr and Johnson bears its meaning in its own curves and planes, determined by fluid physics and executed with precise engineering. Picabia’s propeller, cheekily captioned “âne” (ass), undercuts the authority of the precise drawing. “A drift in meaning,” as Marshall describes it, “fully squaring with capitalism’s deeper self-interest: that values be manipulable” (75). Dada’s inherent anarchy, in this reading, is thus analogous to the protean nature of value in consumer capitalism.

Many of the objects in the Machine Art exhibition were consumer goods, the catalogue even listing their prices. The exhibition was not simply a display of elegant objects but an exhortation to share their world. Because of this, the 1934 exhibition has often been discussed as an extension of the visual vocabulary of commercial display into the museum—a shopping lesson. Marshall counters this view, arguing persuasively that the intended lesson of the exhibition, the rightness of honesty and pure form, would empower the consumer not to be deluded by the vagaries of styling and fashion. In this sense, Machine Art can be read as an experiment “waged in agonistic opposition to the capitalist, consumer marketplace and its trend-conscious manufacturers” (116; emphasis in original). Armed with a sense of a fundamental, proper taste for unadorned functionalism, consumers would eventually, the theory went, pressure American manufacturers to produce better quality merchandise.¹ In the larger framework that the book proposes, the utopian aspirations of the Machine Art exhibition are thus contrasted with the shifting sands of fashion, consumerism, and populism.

Late in the book, readers are introduced to the efforts of MoMA publicist Sarah Newmeyer’s campaign to promote what would be one of the most successful exhibitions of the museum’s early period. Events staged around the exhibition included a “beauty contest” of machine parts, complete with celebrity judges, including Amelia Earhart, secretary of labor Frances Perkins, and John Dewey, as well as a public popularity contest for the favored object in the exhibition. This latter gimmick provides Marshall with a counterpoint for her larger argument about Barr’s hopes for the exhibition. The popularity contest ultimately singled out the flashier and more potentially decorative pieces as public favorites—objects that were not even illustrated in the catalogue and ultimately not acquired by the museum for its permanent collection. If Barr had intended the exhibition to demonstrate to museum-goers the inherent and immutable beauty of fitness to function and pure geometric form, this rarefied idealism foundered on the rocks of emotion, traditionalism, and sentiment. Indeed, sentiment seems mostly to play an oppositional role in Marshall’s construction of Barr’s aesthetics, thus undercutting the book’s ability to consider the significance of the affective qualities of objects in the exhibition.

Marshall opens her final chapter discussing how Johnson, much later in his career, wholly embraced aesthetic pluralism. He would call his essay in the Machine Art catalogue “juvenile” and deemed the project “propaganda by the great preacher and proselytizer for modern art Alfred Barr” (Machine Art, 60th Anniversary ed., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994, n.p.). In contrast to Barr’s faith in his own sense of right, Johnson proved more mercurial. Marshall treats Johnson’s later political errancy as an opportunity to revisit her dichotomy, though it complicates the categories a bit. Barr, readers are shown, remains true to democracy, though he would preach about aesthetic absolutes and try to convince the masses from his raised dais. Johnson, on the other hand, flirts with fascism for several years, yet arrives there via a populist relativism.

Curiously, for all of the book’s discussion of the alienation of workers from machine parts and of the vagaries of consumer desire, the economic straits of the Great Depression in the United States play only a small role in Marshall’s discussion. She reads the solidity of the largely American-made objects in the exhibition as an affirmation of faith in domestic productive capabilities, engages with the gold-standard debate, and likens Barr’s contention that an object’s value was in its design not its market price to political bromides of the time that “real” values had nothing to do with material wealth. Beyond that, however, most of the book’s concern is with the exhibition’s philosophy and visual culture.

Marshall sets up many frames of reference, including the eighteenth-century British Enlightenment, the scientific method, automation of factories, fashion and jewelry design, graphic design, and the personal lives of many of the people involved in the exhibition. Some of these, however, run the risk of being merely historically coincident issues, not illuminating anything further about the MoMA exhibition. For example, she includes a detailed discussion of the differences between Barr’s philosophy of things and Dewey’s. For Dewey, meaning is not imminent in materiality, as a Neoplatonist would have it, but must be a product of experience. Dewey disdained Plato. Given the centrality of Neoplatonism to Barr’s thinking, the inclusion of Dewey in the exhibition seems full of irony, perhaps indicating a rhetorical fissure. Yet Dewey’s role, Marshall concedes, was essentially limited to his participation in the publicity stunt of the machine art “beauty contest.” There is no indication that Barr or Johnson ever felt the need to reconcile their ideas with Dewey’s.

Such digressions seem to arise from Marshall’s intent to unpack the intellectual ancestry and cultural moment that defined Barr and Johnson’s aesthetic philosophy, and to counter the implicit claim of ahistorical inevitability of the genre of modernism that came to be MoMA’s hallmark. As Marshall puts it, “formalist modernism’s claims to unchanging timeless stability came as timely defense against the encroaching indeterminacy of modernity’s material conditions” (13; emphasis in original). The argument is well taken, though the book could use a more comprehensive estimation of the impact of the show and the afterlife of the idealism of the 1930s. A reader would be hard pressed to gauge from this book what were the direct and indirect legacies of the exhibition and its aesthetic.

Nevertheless, Machine Art, 1934 is an incredibly welcome book, and it gives this hugely influential exhibition the deep focus it deserves. The book keeps circling back to the rooms of gleaming bowls, springs, and beakers, and readers are asked to consider the variety of intersecting meaning systems as they inflected the exhibition. Binding it all together is the concept of objecthood. The various methods and fields of interest explored define the outlines of a kind of epistemology of objects wherein the relationships of material, form, and value, along with the nature of how things carry meanings, can be itself historically determined.