A couple of you have been curious about Designed for Moderns, later called New Dimensions Furniture. That was my father's business ? his name was Archie Kaplan, and he and Sol Bloom did most of the designing. Designed for Moderns existed between (roughly) 1951 and 1954. They mostly made small pieces (candlesticks, baskets, and the best-known piece, the catch-it-all) mostly made of metal. This is the catalog, an 8 by 3.5 inch accordian fold brochure ? but the catalog doesn't include everything. I also have product sheets and photos, and I'll post more soon. There's some great stuff, and he'd be so pleased that people are still interested.
catalog
thought I'd figured out how to post the pictures - I'll try again
http://s30.photobucket.com/user/katek11/library/Catalog
Thank you for posting! ...
Thank you for posting!
For future reference: this is the type of line you add to the section "associated web images" http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c306/katek11/Catalog/Catalog4_20130621...
In other words you have to link each photo individually, not just the whole album.
more ..
first of all, thank you, l1flafly, for help in posting. truly appreciate it.
Sol did design the scoop chairs and the stacking stools, also the troughs - and I think more, I don't have my files organized by attribution, but I'll look. I know of only two other designers, a Richard Hudson, who designed some candlesticks, and Seymour Robins, who designed a table - pix to come - I don't know much about them. Sol and my father continued to work together after the end of Designed for Moderns, and were friends, but I don't remember ever hearing the other names.
Heath, if you mean the rick rack tray, etc, no, I don't think they're springs - I do have better pictures, and will post.
products, attributions
just to be clear, the materials I have are things my father happened to save - ads, product sheets, photographs - with small exception, they don't name a designer - attributions are found in ads (and this, the MOMA press release for the 1951 Good Design Show ( http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/1522/release...)
I'm tempted to say that anything not attributed to someone else was designed by my father - but then again, the Guardian ad specifically attributes some things to him, and other ads attribute the products on the Expanded Metal Product sheets to him. So I don't really know. (Never thought to ask, and I thought we'd talked about everything.) He did design furniture in the rest of his career, but only for clients (he had an office design firm in NY) and for the family . ..
more ..
here's another product sheet, and picture of some of the bowls - these are the two I have - I'm not planning on posting the ads unless there's some special reason to, seems like they'd be outside the scope of what people on this site are interested in, but the scoop chairs look so good in the Haymaker ad - from Vogue, August 1, 1953
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