# Machine Art (マシン・アート)

> The name of an exhibition the Museum of Modern Art held in New York from March to April 1934. Springs, pots and pans and scientific instruments, all factory made and all utilitarian, were placed on pedestals and treated as sculpture. Philip Johnson screened the walls and ceilings of the museum's nineteenth century brownstone to hide its mouldings, so that undecorated objects could be seen against nothing.

- IndexStyle No.531 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/machine-art
- Kind: Style · Family: Modern Design Movements · Era: 1934
- Mood: Technique, Calm, Futurity
- What this family collects: Organizations and theories formed early in the twentieth century to settle how art should relate to mass production, split between the workshop and the standardized type.

## Defining characteristics

- Utilitarian factory parts set out one to a pedestal, spaced apart
- Mouldings on walls and ceilings screened over, leaving a background with no pattern in it
- The objects are springs, pans and instruments, things never made to be looked at
- Manufacturers' names standing where an artist's name would normally go

## Best used for

- Shooting a set of parts or tools by stripping every pattern out of the background and the fixtures and giving each object its own plinth
- Selling an undecorated product on a page that leads with the form alone and holds the feature copy back

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: Only the object's name and its maker, small, in one undecorated face. No adjectives.
- Layout & structure: One plinth per object, evenly spaced, with nothing added to the background plane. Cover over any trim or moulding rather than working around it.
- Material & texture: Metal, glass and porcelain as they come from the factory. No paint and no pattern, so that tooling marks and sheen are all there is to see.

## Colour

Read off the reference works below, so a direction rather than a fixed palette.

- Ground: #F2F1ED
- The colour it is remembered by: #B9BEC2
- Text and outlines: #1E1F21

## What to avoid

Assuming the work is done once the objects are undecorated leaves the room and the fixtures decorated, and the forms lose to the pattern around them.

## Application checklist

Work through this before calling a piece an application of this style.

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Utilitarian factory parts set out one to a pedestal, spaced apart
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Mouldings on walls and ceilings screened over, leaving a background with no pattern in it
- [ ] Visible in the piece: The objects are springs, pans and instruments, things never made to be looked at
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Manufacturers' names standing where an artist's name would normally go
- [ ] The layout follows: One plinth per object, evenly spaced, with nothing added to the background plane. Cover over any trim or moulding rather than working around it.
- [ ] The lettering follows: Only the object's name and its maker, small, in one undecorated face. No adjectives.
- [ ] The material and surface follow: Metal, glass and porcelain as they come from the factory. No paint and no pattern, so that tooling marks and sheen are all there is to see.
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #F2F1ED as ground, #B9BEC2 carrying the style, #1E1F21 for text and outlines
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Ulm School (HfG Ulm) (ウルム造形大学)** — Founded by Max Bill as the Bauhaus's successor, the school redefined design as science, method and system. Its collaboration with Braun made the functionalist face a world standard. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/ulm-school
- **AEG Corporate Identity (AEGの企業アイデンティティ)** — Products, factory and printed matter all handed to one architect, so that a company looked as though a single hand had made it. The lettering, objects and buildings Behrens drew for AEG from 1907 became the prototype of corporate design. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/aeg-identity

## Compose it with something else

The dictionary can put this entry in a structural role and another in an accent role, and report where the two fight: https://indexstyle.org/compose?ids=machine-art+ulm-school

## Further study

- how the height of the pedestals and the spacing between objects were decided, in the 1934 installation photographs
- what is recorded as authorship in the 132 page catalogue and the 16 page checklist
- the terms in which the beauty contest judged by Amelia Earhart and John Dewey was discussed

## Reference works

- The Museum of Modern Art — Machine Art (Mar 5–Apr 29, 1934) — https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1784

## Source of record

- The Museum of Modern Art — Machine Art (Mar 5–Apr 29, 1934) — https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1784

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/machine-art
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/machine-art/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compare_styles, compose_styles, find_related_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)