ABSTRACT
This paper reexamines the apparent contradiction between modernist designers' claim in the 1920s that their work was genderless (in that it was “universal”), and the gender assumptions and biases in their writings and work. The modernists' claim to universality began to be critically demolished in the later 1950s, but a gender critique of modernist design has been developed only since the early 1980s. That critique has tended to concentrate, understandably and rightly, on modernism's relationships to political, economic, and cultural power. The emphasis has been less on the designers and artifacts within modernism than, for example, on the gendering of particular design activities or those designers and areas of material culture excluded in conventional histories. This essay returns to “high” modernist design of the 1920s and some “star” designers—Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and, at the Bauhaus, Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers—in order to unpack particular gender values at the “micro” level of particular texts and statements. It attempts to examine not only explicit and implicit modernist values about gender, but also to look at the contested area of aesthetics—which nowadays is contested at a macro level, but is often ignored at the micro—in order to see whether all modernist design can be labeled as “male” aesthetically. This will help us to reassess not only the values of modernism, but also its value, in terms of aesthetic achievements in relation to gender.
