“Vital forms” are shapes inspired by nature; innovative artists and designers used them in the 1940s and 1950s to evoke living entities, ranging from amoebas and plant life to the human figure… Every period has its own visual vocabulary, which it partly borrows from the past and partly invents to meet new needs. The language of vital forms expressed the dualities of its times: the hopes and fears, the dreams and nightmares, of the middle years of the twentieth century were reflected in organic forms that were highly mutable, seemingly as changeable as life itself […]
The gravity of the war changed the course of American art and design as well. It made 1930s American Scene painting and Regionalism, which often showed an agrarian daily life, seem naïve and nostalgic, and WPA photographs outdated. At the same time, the free-thinking Surrealist artists who came to this country from Europe to escape Hitler exerted enormous influence. In this era of international crisis, American artists and designers often used organic forms, especially the human figure, as a way of reasserting humane values.
Public awareness of the Atomic Age began with the horrendous explosions in 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war. It was not until 1955 that atomic energy became available for peacetime uses in the United States. During this time of uncertainty, artists responded to the atomic phenomenon with powerful abstractions […]With the onset of the Atomic Age, disturbing, mutant forms—the result of exposure to radiation—began to appear in films and novels. Yet at the same time, the playful, positive form of the atom’s structure, with electrons circling the nucleus , also became an integral part of the period’s imagery, in art as well as in domestic products. By the mid-1950s, some Americans were optimistic about the atom’s role as a new source of energy, a replacement for coal and oil in generating electricity.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and the resulting arms race, however, fed the persistent fear of nuclear destruction. The paradox remains with us today, as we continue to struggle with how to reconcile the positive and negative aspects of atomic energy.
(Brooklyn Museum) Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960