«The glass used for the show-case, displaying products, isolates the consumer from the product at the same time as it superimposes the mirror-reflection of his own image onto the goods displayed.
This alienation, paradoxically, help arouse the desire to possess the commodity» (Graham 1977, p. 72).
A short premise
The methodology adopted in this essay falls within Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) as applied to artistic and exhibition contexts (Braathen, et. al. 2008; Andrews 2015; Rampell 2016; Sherry and Fischer 2017); the following paper is going to focus on narrative strategies and specific gimmicks through which an object intended for viewing and consumption is transformed into an object of desire and, eventually, of acquisition. Drawing on a selection of articles published in «Display World», the essay shows how storytelling very often coincides with storyselling in exhibition contexts.
«Every sign and every display is a sale persuader»
The definition of the word “display” given by the renowned American designer George Nelson in the early 1950s is perhaps one of the most frequently quoted linguistic reflections in the history of exhibitions and curatorial practices. This is the case not only with regards to the historical development of the exhibition as a “device”, which, as is well known, was first defined by key figures such as Klaus Franck, Martin Pegler, Roberto Aloi, and many others, but above all in terms of its originality and semantic articulation: in other words, paraphrasing the American designer’s formula, the display can be understood as a physical or immaterial instrument aimed at generating an unspecified form of attraction or desire in the viewer toward an object or a form of relationship.
Far less known is the acrostic devised by Elmer W. Swanson in his manifesto-article Defining Display published in «Display World» in December 1939. By way of context, it is useful introducing the magazine «Display World» itself: founded in 1922 by the Display Publishing Company (Cincinnati, Ohio), the magazine symbolically took over from its predecessors, The Show Window (founded by L. Frank Baum in 1897, the same author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [1]) and Merchants’ Record and Show Window. Until the early 1970s, «Display World» was the leading magazine for the culture of store and department-store display in the United States [2]. Its pages featured innovative thoughts concerning the relationship between merchandise, exhibitions, and consumption; furthermore, the magazine was edited by prominent figures in the field such as H.C. Menefee, R.C. Kash, Nathan Silverblatt, and Paul T. Knapp. From the 1940s on, the cultural network surrounding the magazine also facilitated the creation of professional associations, public events, and publishing initiatives, including NADI – National Association of Display Industries, Displayweek, and Displayland (New York).
Let us return to our main topic: in defining the term “display”, Elmer Swanson assigns each letter of the word a quality that the ideal product presentation should embody: «Let us define each individual letter in the word D-I-S-P-L-A-Y. “D” stands for “Dainty”. […]. “I” stands for “Imagination”. If you are to create new, novel displays with some unique ideas, you must put imagination into your work. […]. “S” stands for “Sales”. The word certainly does fit into display, for it represents the very fundamental reason for which we make display. […]. “P” stands for planning. […]. “L” stands for “Lure”. If it is a window display, it will lure customers into the store, and then with that window display properly backed up with interior display it will lure your shoppers’ money from their purses to your cash register. “A” stands for “Action”, which means to perform, to fulfill, to put forth power. […]. “Y” stands for “Yield”. Displays will repay in sales according to the amount of imagination, planning, and action that you put into them» (Swanson 1939, p. 30).
Besides its playful tone, what is particularly significant is the emphasis Swanson places on the attractive and persuasive practices that an effective display should possess. He himself, director of the sales department at Chicago’s Scott-Burr Stores during the second half of the 1930s, deserves considerable attention to luring, as well as to the agency that display should convey – a quality that is “dramatic”, etymologically speaking. Equally relevant is the “imaginative” quality he advocates in planning the presentation of the products; indeed, the article should be read in relation to Swanson’s professional experience in 1930s Chicago, but also to a highly attended public lecture – titled Display As I See It – he gave at the Hotel Sherman on behalf of the Chicago Display Club in September 1939 (Editors 1939, p. 41). As display art was becoming increasingly successful and lucrative in the US context, reflections of this kind were by no means unusual. As a matter of fact, five years earlier, and in similar terms about the “dramatic” character of display, Katharine Pearce addressed readers of the applied-arts magazine «Commercial Art» as follows: «The aim of those who arrange the exhibition stands should be to present the goods in a systematised display which is vivid and dramatic and makes it more easy for tired visitors to receive a quick impression of their value and meaning. […]. Since the prime object of the exhibitions is to introduce products in the most telling and agreeable way, it is necessary that art, imagination and practical knowledge should go into the designing of exhibition stands» (Pearce 1934, pp. 218-220).
The author makes this observation immediately after highlighting the role of cinema as a “tool for creating desire” in shops and exhibitions [3]. In this light, it is difficult to resist linking this discussion to the phenomenon of herd mentality, which Pearce herself examines scrupulously in The Psychology of the Window Display, published in the very same issue of «Commercial Art» (Pearce 1934, pp. 37-41).
Pearce’s and Swanson’s articles reveal interesting similarities, shared also by many other scholars who, during the same period, were grappling with how to increase store profits and, above all, with how displayed merchandise could be used as a catalyst for consumer desire (Leslie 1923, pp. 11-13). However, what is important here is the general and theoretical nature of their arguments: whereas earlier attempts had focused on emphasizing the specific qualities of the merchandise on display (Fleming 1924, pp. 48-49), these examples shift attention away from the merchandise itself toward the mechanics of attraction as strategy in its own right. The displaymen is, above all, someone who, paraphrasing Vance Packard and Arthur Danto, sells a story before selling a product – more or less consciously transforming the ordinary in ways that challenge the conventional presentation of the object as such [4]. Indeed, as «Display World» reminded its readers: «Every sign and every display is a sale persuader» (Lamb 1941, p. 24).
This suggests a close, if not entirely explicit, convergence between storyselling and storytelling within the commercial and exhibition context. It is precisely in this light that the editors of «Display World» asked to their readers the question «Does the display trick the public?»: in other words, whether the principles underlying strategies of persuasion and attraction, and the persistent search for ways to stimulate consumers desire, were eventually legitimate and whether they were shared by magazine’s readers; «Does the display trick the public? Each large shop window is a masterpiece of artistic trickery, intended to induce you to spend money you don’t probably have. The best of these display should be preserved in the Metropolitan Art Museum, so that historians of another day may look at them and say: ‘See how merchant class back in the early twentieth century was in league with the artists to trick the money out of the people’s pockets’» (Editors 1936, p. 28) [5].
Strategies and practices designed to attract customers and facilitate sales were widespread and took many different forms, ranging from the use of animals publicly displayed in shop windows (McCampbell 1928, p. 15; Stewart 1959, pp. 60-61), the use of television screen («Television and Display are Sisters Under the Skin!»; Worsham 1950, pp. 24-26), the deployment of the so-called crowd pullers, and as well as the use of directional devices to manage the flow of consumers in shops, exhibition spaces, and trade fairs. Indeed, within the first issue of «The Show Window» (1897), L. Frank Baum recommended employing anonymous window gazers – a window-shopping crowd-like – to facilitate sales (a practice later discussed in «Display World»; Editors 1924, p. 39) and to attract visitors and consumers, encouraging a generalized form of herd mentality, right in front of a shop window. Although episodic and spread out over time, these examples should not be understood as isolated occurrences, but rather as manifestations of the persistent continuity of a long-standing cultural phenomenon, as stated by Jackson (1950, pp. 26-29) and Lewis (1961, pp. 46-47). What is rather intriguing about the article in question is not only the tone of its ethical “indictment” – the spectator being forced to buy and to take an interest in specific cultural objects – but also the comparison with coeval forms of contemporary art; the latter is presented as something ambiguous and yet seductive, novel and yet tricky, and, ultimately, capable of generating new forms of cultural and commercial consumption.
The collaborations of artists such as Salvador Dalì, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and several Pop artists – notably Andy Warhol – in the design of shop windows and display stands are, of course, well documented and studied. «Display World», for instance, meticulously records the various projects done by the French Surrealist in prominent New York stores, while reports on the influence of Surrealism on the visual imagination of displaymen during the 1930s and 1940s appear with a certain frequency (Rivers 1939, pp. 6-7).
One of the earlies articles entirely focused on the linking between the display, the store, the artwork, and the exhibition and trade-fair context dates to 1931; significantly it focuses on what would later be described as «a decided milestone» in the use of photography in exhibition design: the Film und Foto exhibition, curated by the Deutscher Werkbund (Stuttgart 1929). The author of the article, R.M. Harrington, vice-president of the advertising division of New York stores Lyddon, Hanford & Kimball, draws attention to the creative freedom shown by contemporary European photographers and urges his fellow displaymen across the Atlantic to reproduce their sophisticated visual effects. Among these was the «photogram», whose result «have a ghost-like mysterious quality and a rich shading from pure white to deep black: Man Ray, of Paris, and Moholy [Nagy], from Berlin, are two great masters of this art» (Harrington 1931, p. 6).
The awareness of the relation between merchandise and the artwork as forms of display is also evident in the «Display World» column The Play World, edited by Barbara Baer Capitman [6] during the first half of 1940s; in a 1942 article she highlights the importance of Peggy Guggenheim’s newly established Art of This Century gallery, stressing Frederick Kiesler’s innovative exhibition ideas («outstanding features like a new system of coordinating architecture with painting and sculpture», while also addressing the problem of museum fatigue, which, apparently, was a concern shared by displaymen and salesmen; Baer 1942a, pp. 34-35). Equally revealing is her interest in the well-known exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and designed by Herbert Bayer The Road to Victory (June 1942, MoMA, New York) where «a novel arrangement of 150 photographs, which, sequence after sequence, tell a dramatic story of America’s mighty resources and the power of the people in their struggle to the victory […]. The visitor standing on the ramp looks down at the photographs, lying flat, of plane formations and gets the effect of flying» (Baer 1942a, p. 47).
Lesser known are the reflections offered by displaymen on cases of (more or less) unauthorized appropriation of contemporary artworks, which are adapted and, in a sense, translated for their displays. This intersection can be understood both as an attempt to assimilate the art vocabulary into display design and as a persuasive strategy aimed at enhancing the appeal of merchandise through innovative visual structures that drastically departed from the traditional and standardized forms of scenographic composition. This tension emerges clearly in the article Is Creative Artist Wrong When Display Uses His Style?, that reports on the highly contested debate between James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of MoMA, the American painter Stuart Davis, and, on the other side, the James Leuter&Co. display designers working for Jay Thorpe’s stores, whose displays and theatrical solutions were considered excessively similar to the paintings of the mentioned American painter.
The magazine’s editors and Gerald Weatherly, member of the firm James Leuer&Co., answered the issue of artistic plagiarism and unauthorized appropriation by emphasizing the educational and cultural role that contemporary art should play in the US society, placing it above questions of copyright. Particularly significant in this regard is the editors’ appeal to the pragmatist theories of George Santayana, author of the well-known Reason in Art – essentially their argument was: what could be wrong with taking inspiration from great American artists such as Stuart Davis when designing displays for our stores? – as well as Weatherly’s ending argument: «I can see no substantial distinction between so-called fine art and museum art done for money, and equally fine art done for money in stores, magazines and like places. I confidently deny that there is any difference» (Editors 1946, p. 132). Therefore, while Sweeney and Davis insist on the ontological nature of art and on the problem of artistic appropriation/influence, the other parties involved in the debate adopt a more pragmatic and common-sense view: their concern is with the implication of contemporary strategies for merchandise displayed in the stores – the latter are curiously considered as cultural and educational environments for the US public.
As noted above, the close relationship between the two spheres – “commercial art” and “fine art”, as they were considered at the time – is documented in numerous articles. John T. Chord, for instance, reflects on the role that «non-objective art» might play in the design of displays, with direct reference to the exhibition setting in Art of Tomorrow (1939-1940), while Carl Jackson praises the results achieved by Syl Risier, display director of Stix, Baer&Fuller’s stores in St. Louis, through the use of abstract-art-inspired solutions in the company’s retail spaces (Chord 1940 pp. 10-11; Carl Jackson 1947, p. 80). Examples of this kind abound in «Display World»: As non-objective art gradually became familiar to the public, displaymen began to break down abstract artworks into their underlying compositional structures and rework them for commercial display. One particularly successful example was what might be called the “Mondrian structure”, in which the Dutch artist’s famous grid was turned into a framework for arranging products in shop windows: a simple perforated panel, the typical three-colour Mondrian pattern, a few hooks and shelves are enough to present merchandise in a cool and persuasive manner [7]. (Hoffmann and Heidrich 1952, pp. 20-21).
Following Louis Cheskin’s experiments in visual merchandising, the editors of «Display World» reflect on the appropriation of Mondrian’s work as a visual model and on the agency of the display itself in shaping the viewers’ response: «While touching on the influence of art on display, have you noticed how many displaymen currently are using background or panel treatment obviously based on the work of the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian? […] Over the years we have seen many attempts to define display, none of them particularly satisfying […]. Display is a visual medium for influencing people: it seems to us that this sums up modern display about as well as it could be done…» (Editors 1952, p. 74).
Conclusion
Similar observations can be made in the case of Alexander Calder, whose work has been extensively “plundered” by the displaymen featured in «Display World», but it is also worth recalling the case of Sol Berger and Frederick Amour who, in 1952, in «Business Week», suggested using Calder-like sculptures, called Displa-Mobiles, to enliven the retail space and give the viewer the impression of being in a museum-like setting. Years lates, the same fate would befall Frank Stella’s paintings, with a surrogate version of one of his works being created for the window display of a Los Angeles store designed by Tom Nicoll.
Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, the magazine editors would go even further, encouraging their devoted readers to experiment with forms of «total environment» designed to create a proper engaged spectatorship using moldable polyurethane foams (Editors 1971, pp. 44-45).
Taken together, the examples implicitly reaffirm how contemporary artistic production is shaped, first and foremost, by specific cultural logics of consumption, and how the persuasive forms triggered by these “artworks-device” actively draws the viewer in, transforming the banality of everyday life into an extra-ordinary aesthetic performance – as Pop Art teaches us.
The historical perspective offered by «Display World» deserves further investigation, particularly in the light of the distinctive nature of the interventions discussed here, that, for length reason, could only be examined partially. The relationship between storytelling e storyselling is not to be intended as a settled matter, of course; rather, it continues to challenge, even today, the identity and purpose of certain curatorial projects, as well as the poetics of a lot of artists who have considered the display as a starting point for exploring the linking between merchandise, products and contemporary forms of spectatorship. One might think, for example, of the recent group show Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art (Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2025) or, notably, Céline Condorelli’s essays, projects and installations (i.e. You Display, I Display, We Display and Support Structures).
The questions raised in the pages of «Display World» invite also in-depth studies on the forms of spectatorship that show window displays helped shape in the public imagery, and more specifically, among US consumers. What emerges above all is the extent to which displaymen were aware of the persuasive potential of the techniques and strategies at their disposal, to the point of drawing on solutions associated with the “fine arts”. In doing so, they contributed to making the boundaries between commercial and artistic display increasingly fluid and porous.
Notes
[1] For further information about the mentioned magazine and L. Frank Baum, see Maxwell 2018.
[2] In response to coeval consumer culture, the magazine was renamed «Visual Merchandise and Store Design»: on the other hand, the history of «Display World» offers useful insights not only into the changing conception of the exhibition display, but also into the shifting cultural logics underlying the presentation of goods for sale. From the 1950s on, the magazine developed a regular structure of recurring columns, research projects, targeted market surveys and comparison between European and US approaches to the so-called display art.
[3] Even if Pearce does not explicitly mention it, it is worth recalling that, in the same years, Frederick Kiesler – then architect and display designer for Saks’ department store in New York – had already envisioned the use of film in show windows within his Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display. Contrary to what one might expect, his book received little promotion in the pages of «Display World». Instead, regular contributors to the mentioned magazine enjoyed a greater promotional exposure – among them Leonard S. Marcus (The American Store Window, 1978), Martin Pegler (Show and Sell, 1970), Frank J. Bernard (Dynamic Display, 1952), and Frank A. Rowe (Display Fundamentals, 1965).
[4] See also Andrews 2015. Concerning the “show-window visual regime”, see Cometa 2020, pp. 138-140.
[5] The quote is itself a quotation from an unidentified article published in «The New York Times». It should be noted that the editors of «Display World» not only toned down the accusatory thrust of the quotation – the displaymen simply as people who tricked the public – but also emphasized the relevance of the parallels between display practices and contemporary art (Editors 1936, p. 48).
[6] Barbara Baer Capitman is an interesting figure, especially for her campaigns to raise awareness of Miami’s distinctive Art Deco architectural and artistic heritage.
[7] For further insight about the popularization of Mondrian within consumer culture and the success of the so-called “Mondrian Brand”, see Troy 2014.
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Alessandro Ferraro, Ph.D., insegna a contratto “Storia delle mostre”, “Artistic Image Analysis” ed “Elementi di storia dell’arte” presso l’Università degli Studi di Genova. Oltre a essere stato visiting professor presso la Stockholms Universitet, ha pubblicato la monografia L’astrazione come condizione storica (Mimesis) e, di recente, l’edited volume Mostra come dispositivo. Prospettive di ricerca sull’esperienza espositiva (Postmedia Books); si occupa principalmente di storia delle mostre, pratiche curatoriali e di storia dell’astrazione.