The Century of the Child: Contributions of women as architects, designers, teachers, critics, and social activists

“Our age cries for personality, but it will ask in vain, until we allow them to have their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own knowledge, form their own judgements; or, to put the matter briefly, until we cease to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping later on in life to revive it again.”
— Ellen Key, Century of the Child (1900, p. 232)

The Museum of Modern Art presents Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, an ambitious survey of 20th-century design for children and the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking, now to November 5, 2012.

The exhibition brings together over 500 items, over half of which are on loan from institutions and individuals in the US and abroad, and many of which are on view for the first time in the US. Ranging from urban-planning projects to small design objects by celebrated designers and lesser-known figures, the exhibit brings together a number of areas underrepresented in design history: school architecture, playgrounds, toys and games, animation, clothing, safety equipment and therapeutic products, nurseries, furniture, and books.

The exhibition additionally extends MoMA’s commitment to highlighting the contributions of women as architects, designers, teachers, critics, and social activists, a commitment which was also foregrounded in MoMA’s recent Modern Women’s Project, a series of exhibitions, events, and a publication that focused on the contributions of women throughout the Museum’s history. Century of the Child is organized by Juliet Kinchin, Curator, and Aidan O’Connor, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.

In 1900, Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key published Century of the Child, a manifesto for change — social, political, aesthetic, and psychological — that presented the universal rights and well-being of children as the defining mission of the century to come. Taking inspiration from Key — and looking back through the 20th century 100 years later — this exhibition examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the “citizens of the future” to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. In this period children have been central to the concerns, ambitions, and activities of modern architects>and designers, and working specifically for children has often provided unique freedom and creativity to the avant-garde. 

Century of the Child is organized in seven roughly chronological sections in MoMA’s sixthfloor exhibition gallery, exploring different themes through a mix of design type, material, scale, and geographical representation.

The first section covers the period from 1900 through World War I. For many designers, writers, and reformers at the turn of the 20th century, children were the living symbol of the sweeping changes that ushered in the birth of the modern. Leading designers and intellectuals, many of them women, in emergent artistic centers in Europe and the United States — from Chicago to Glasgow, Rome, Vienna, and Budapest — took up the cause of children’s rights, welfare, and education.

New visual languages informed by the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau — together known as the New Art — helped break down distinctions between design,  architecture, and art, catalyzing a reformed and integrated approach to all areas of children’s experience. These aesthetic roots coalesced with the kindergarten movement, in which a new emphasis was placed on the child’s enjoyment of the creative process and an intuitive investigation of materials and abstract form.

(1) Teaching materials commissioned by Maria Montessori. 1920s;  Wood. Manufactured by Baroni e Marangon, Gonzaga, Italy (est. 1911). Collection of Maurizio Marzadori , Bologna

(2) Mariska Undi (Hungarian, 1877–1959). Design for children’s room, 1903; Lithograph. Published by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture in Mintalapok (1903), New folio 1 (IX), no. 1, sheet 2. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase