"The Machine Age in America 1918-1941," an Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

Americans between the world wars self-consciously thought of themselves as entering the Age. Innovations such as the automobile, radio, movies, and electrical appliances had made people aware of the increasing importance of technology in their lives. Designers, architects, commercial illustrators, fine artists, social critics, and even historians discovered in their era a cohesive theme-that of mechanization-and embodied it in their own widely varied works. Whether as expressive icon or as social metaphor, the machine seemed to encompass an entire society and its culture. theme of coherence informs this important exhibition and its ambitious catalog.' Curators Richard Guy Wilson and Dianne H. Pilgrim here have extended an interdisciplinary method first used by them in 1979 for another Brooklyn exhibition, The American Renaissance 1876-1917, which argued that an omnipresent neoclassicism reflected the nation's coming-of-age as a coherent civilization. Once again, they have successfully portrayed an era by discovering and revealing its own centering definition-in this case the machine, its processes and products. Much of the visual power of The Machine Age derives from unexpected juxtapositions of artifacts. Entering the museum's lobby, the visitor confronts a dramatic arrangement of representative objects, including a streamlined 1935 Chrysler Airflow automobile, behind which sweep the five panels of Joseph Stella's dynamic, expressionist painting of 1922, Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (see fig. 1). Similar arrangements throughout the exhibit invite viewers to discover

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