From the 20th-century limited train and Chrysler’s Airflow automobile to the Zephyr digital clock, the aerodynamic style known as streamlining endowed many classic American products with a futuristic sheen-the glamour of speed. That style is on display Dec. 17-Feb. 19 at the Georgia Museum of Art in the exhibition American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow.
This comprehensive exhibition, in its first U.S. venue, addresses the scope and impact of this style, whose particularly voluptuous modernity of sleek speed lines and parabolic curves swept middle-class America in the 1930s and remains to this day shorthand for glamour and the promise of the world of tomorrow.
American Streamlined Design offers a fresh appraisal of the aesthetic of streamlined design, placing the achievements of its best-known exponents-among them Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague-squarely alongside the contributions of other lesser-known but significant designers such as Lurelle Guild, Clifford Brooks Stevens, Harold Van Doren, and newly discovered practitioners such as John R. Morgan, William B. Petzold and Louis Vavrik.
