Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home

摘要

This book is the result of 16 years of work that began when Monica Penick enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Texas to research what became her PhD dissertation, The Pace Setter Houses: Livable Modernism in Postwar America' (2007). The term 'livable modernism' will be familiar to readers of this journal from Kristina Wilson's book Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (2004), which is not mentioned by Penick although Wilson herself is thanked in Penick's acknowledgements. In developing her thesis for publication, Penick has shifted the focus from 'livable modernism' to place this term within a group of keywords used by Gordon in her work at House Beautiful, including 'taste', 'good design', 'bad design', '"modern" and all its derivatives' and 'organic' (p. x). Penick's writing is easy and vivid. In closing her first chapter, she notes that Elizabeth Gordon's first book was 'far more than an advice book: More House for your Money was a road-map to a self-determined domestic future' and that while '[m]any of her counterparts believed-or hoped-that her tenure [at House Beautiful] would last only through the Second World War' '[s]he surprised them all: she led House Beautiful for the next twenty-three years' (p. 8).