The Romance of commerce and culture: capitalism, modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen crusade for cultural reform
by James Sloan Allen (University of Chicago Press, 1983)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 01 November 2009
This review was previously published in the Design Research Newsletter, no. 19, May 1984, pp. 14-15.
Are the materialist values and goals of big business compatible with the spiritual goals and values of high culture? What role did modern art and design play in the success of American business in the twentieth century? In what ways did American businessmen encourage the development of culture in the United States? Is the dependence of art and design upon big business a healthy state of affairs? Can the values of Western Humanism survive untainted in a commercial, consumer society?
Anyone interested in questions such as these will be fascinated by James Sloan Allen’s detailed account of the cultural activities of Walter Paepcke, a Chicago entrepreneur whose business, the Container Corporation of America, was one of the largest packaging companies in America. Fired by his wife’s taste for modern art and design, Paepcke employed an art director, Egbert Jacobson, to endow the CCA with an up-to-date corporate image. Leading modern artists such as Léger and De Kooning were also commissioned to produce prestige advertisements. Paepcke discovered that modern art and design increased profits and enhanced public relations. When Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago to establish a new Bauhaus, Paepcke became one of its main supporters. He also backed the ’Great Books of the Western World’ educational and publishing programme of humanist, non-specialist learning associated with the University of Chicago. In the 1940s, Paepcke invested in the ex-mining town of Aspen, Colorado, turning it into a high-class ski resort, tourist and cultural centre. (Property development and cultural development went hand-in-hand.) In 1949, Paepcke sponsored a festival in honour of Goethe in Aspen. He also founded the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. During the 1950s, an annual International Design Conference was established. [Some readers may already be familiar with Reyner Banham’s (Ed.) The Aspen Papers, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1974)].
In the light of subsequent developments, Paepcke’s successful blend of business and modern design was a modest initiative. His ambition later became, in Allen’s words, “disseminating culture in hopes of redeeming a vulgar technological and philistine civilization” (p. 246). This was to be the purpose of the Aspen Institute.
As James Sloan Allen makes clear, in the beginning the founders of the Institute were motivated by high ideals: they wanted to assert the values of humanistic culture as against those of science and technology; to restore a sense of wholeness in a fragmented world; to foster a universal humanism, a cultural internationalism that would unite mankind after the horrors of the second world war; to reverse the trend towards specialization by examining fundamental principles common to all intellectual disciplines; to extend access to culture, particularly to the business community; to reform the education system of America. Artists, academics, businessmen, politicians and intellectual luminaries such as Ortega y Gasset and Albert Schweitzer were assembled in Aspen to discuss the above issues. (Female and black speakers, it would appear, were few and far between.) As can be imagined, lectures and seminars based upon such broad themes resulted in a great deal of windy rhetoric.
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