A Universe of Things: 1939

Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero created this chair for a ski lodge in the Italian alps using a new material, buxus, made from resin-infused paper. This new material was championed in response to developed autarky, a program of economic self-sufficiency championed by dictator Benito Mussolini. Designers replaced exotic woods with buxus after sanctions were levied by The League of Nations following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

Two magazines, both published in September 1939, illustrate the rapidly shifting events of that year. Fortune, a monthly publication, featured an image of electrical insulators, still referencing the New York World’s Fair.

While Fortune focused on the excitement of the recent World’s Fair, Life, a faster moving weekly, swiftly pivoted from peacetime concerns to the outbreak of the Second World War with a cover photograph of a gas-masked British gunner.

Though the tone of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was optimistic, some artists and designers sought to bring attention to the troubling developments in Europe. Alfonso Iannelli proposed The Threatening Shadow as a large-scale sculpture to warn of the imminent fascist menace. Despite appeals to fair organizers, as well as New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ianelli’s prophetic vision was rejected and never executed.

The United States hosted two world’s fairs in 1939, one on each coast. In San Francisco, the Golden Gate International Exposition celebrated the city’s role as an American gateway to Asia. The aesthetic of the fair matched the theme, with a generalized “Asian” style exemplified by many of the major architectural features. For the Portals of the Pacific, which flanked the fair’s main entrance, Donald Macky designed enormous ziggurats topped by stylized elephants, seen here as a maquette. Within two years, the artificial island built to host the exposition would be converted to a processing center for sailors heading off to fight Japan in the Pacific.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair imagined the “World of Tomorrow,” replete with technologically advanced consumer products and adventurous architecture. The Trylon and Perisphere, the fair’s theme center and de facto logo, captured this optimistic spirit. This stainless-steel model was one of forty-nine that toured the country, mounted on General Motors limousines, to promote the fair.

This banner positions the industrial working class at the vanguard of opposition to violence against African Americans. Although lynching was less common in the 1930s than in previous decades, the threat of racial violence was still very present in the national consciousness. The Rebel Arts Group was a New York-based artist cooperative founded in 1934 by students and members of the American Socialist Party, the Workmen’s Circle, and other leftist groups. Famous for theatrical and musical performances, they also produced murals, publications, and protest banners like this one.

Printmaker Elizabeth Olds’s leftist politics are made plain in this lithograph which depicts Jesus enacting a modern-day version of the cleansing of the Temple. In Olds’s depiction, Jesus is backed by marching workers in front of the modern-day Temple, the New York Stock Exchange, as he drives away villainous top-hatted bankers. For Olds, social justice was intersectional: workers’ rights are linked to demands for racial equality and democracy, while the frightened capitalists are joined by a robed Ku Klux Klan member.

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain declared, “I believe it is peace for our time” after acquiescing to Germany’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Chamberlain’s statement expressed hope that appeasement of Adolf Hitler’s aggression would head off war in Europe—a hope that was dashed when Germany invaded Poland the next year.

The use of chemical warfare in the First World War brought about the need for mass-produced gas masks and training for their correct use. The British government distributed gas masks to every citizen at the start of the Second World War. Some retailers developed cases and even handbags specially designed to hold the respirators, allowing civilians to maintain a semblance of normalcy amid the crisis.

Anticipating the need for protection against chemical agents, the French government issued this poster on gas masks, providing step-by-step instruction on their correct use.