Eero Saarinen PEDESTAL ARMCHAIR WITH CUSHION designed 1956, made circa 1970

Innovative artists and designers in the 1940s and '50s used vital forms to evoke living entities, from amoebas and plant life to the human figure. They sought to replace the hard-edged, machinelike imagery of the '20s and '30s, creating paintings with curvilinear forms, buildings with fluid contours that defied the rigidity of the International Style, and even bathing suits that unabashedly celebrated the shape of the female figure. From Lee Krasner's canvases of undulating flora to kidney-shaped swimming pools and the soaring wings of the TWA Terminal at New York's Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, these forms challenged the orthodox geometries of the preceding era.

Nancy Warren WALLPAPER, SIDEWALL Chicago, circa 1953

Vital Forms explores the cultural moods of these two decades. The long ordeal of World War II, including the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic bomb, was followed in the United States by an era defined by anti-Communism, McCarthyism, and the Korean War. Yet the 1950s also became a time of great prosperity. This exhibition examines design and the visual arts as reflections of postwar ambivalence between anxiety and optimism during these decades, sharing ways that innovations in material and the increase in consumer demand inspired the rapid growth of vital forms from purely functional designs into an interdisciplinary style.