The Marshmallow Sofa, 1956, is perhaps the most flamboyant piece that George Nelson designed for Herman Miller. Courtesy of Herman Miller Company.

But the museum’s strength lies in its coverage of theAmerican scene. The galleries hit all the highlights, from theskyscraper bookcases of Paul Frankl to the kettles and toasters ofMichael Graves.

In addition, the Brooklyn Museum has for many years provided designers with practical support. After World War I, the museum established a study center where designers and design students could consult the collections. Because of its usefulness for the textile industry, this resource was supported, in part, by the local department stores.

Also, the museum has hosted and organized exhibitions of contemporary design. These events, which were the modest descendants of the great Victorian trade shows, were especially popular from the 1930s to the 1960s.

In 1931, the Brooklyn Museum was the site of the first exhibition of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC). The exhibition comprised showrooms furnished with the latest abstract screens, streamlined bookends and chrome lamp tables. The AUDAC show was compared favorably with a similar event that took place earlier at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum has many works on display from that period, although none was exhibited at the AUDAC show and most were acquired only many years later. The RCA Electric Phonograph, circa 1935, by John Vassos is representative of the streamlined style with its minimal ornament and curved corners. It was made of aluminum, which was then something of a novelty when used in home furnishings and appliances.

Despite such activity, the 1920s and 1930s were not the museum’s most prosperous period. The design center seems to have been abandoned during the worst years of the economic crisis.

Further proof of neglect are the quarterly acquisitions lists, which suggest that the museum was not being patronized by the city’s most important collectors. Small gifts trickled in; antique curling irons and coverlets, Dutch shoes and Spanish fans.

The museum was even given a walking stick that once belonged to John Ruskin – this at a time when the Victorian critic’s reputation was hardly at its zenith.

Moreover, the building was suffering from serious deterioration, and there were problems with erratic recordkeeping and haphazard exhibition displays. Such problems were everywhere and some sort of overhaul was in order. Thus, the Brooklyn Museum came to be transformed during the brief, controversial directorship of Philip Newell Youtz (1895-1972).

Silver Streak Iron, circa 1946, manufactured by Saunders Corporation, Pyrex glass, metal, cloth and plastic. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Youtz was more of an activist than a scholar. He began hiscareer as a curator at Amherst College, but after this conventionalstart, he moved to China to teach. Then it was back to the UnitedStates, where he was affiliated with the People’s Institute, anadult education center in New York City.

Before going to the Brooklyn Museum, he was at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, where he opened the first branch museum. In 1933, he was hired as the assistant director of the Brooklyn Museum, and the following year he was made director, a post he held until 1938.

Some of the changes overseen by Youtz were helpful in modernizing the museum. The conservation laboratory was given better equipment and more space, there were new lecture rooms for the education department, and more attention was paid to security and fire safety.

Other changes, however, have proved enduringly controversial; hence, the dubious wisdom of imposing the spare vacancy of the international style on a McKim, Mead & White building. This meant eliminating as much of the interior decoration as possible. The ornamental plasterwork, the coffered ceilings, the columns – such features were either torn out or covered up with white paint. Even the display cases were shorn of all ornament when metal replacements were unavailable. As for the exterior of the building, the grand staircase leading up to the central portico was broken up and removed, so that visitors would henceforth enter at street level.

These were not the accidental blunders of a mismanaged renovation. Rather they were part of a plan that was regularly reported on in the museum’s magazine, in a series of articles with titles that ranged from the understated (“Alterations”) to the ominous (“Curing the Blind”). Usually such changes were explained in the clearest language. “As far as possible, the interior architecture of the galleries was suppressed” is a typical example of the museum administration’s plain speaking.

Critically, the renovation was a success. No one (or, more precisely, no journalist) had anything but praise for the project. The removal of the grand staircase, which is cited today as one of those blights from the pre-Landmarks era, was back then regarded as an improvement. The newly configured entrance hall was likewise praised in The New York Times as a “clean, invitingly bare, and modern” space.

However drastic the changes seem many years later, at the time they reflected the latest theories on architecture and museum management. Accounts of the renovation give a real feel for the period – right down to the WPA workmen. To many people today, though, that era seems as remote as the Victorian fustiness that the museum was trying to clear away.

By the early 1940s, the museum had revived its relations with industry, and it occasionally hosted exhibitions related to wartime needs. It was not until after the war, though, that the museum could again host big important shows of contemporary design. The 1950s and 1960s were especially busy, with the museum the setting for exhibitions of the latest from Europe and America.

In addition to the exhibitions, the museum worked with industry in other ways. At the Design Laboratory, designers in search of motifs or techniques could study objects in the museum’s collections.

In an account of the project published in 1955, historic pieces in the museum’s collection were paired with the contemporary pieces they had inspired. Thus, a Victorian milk glass compote is paired with a recent fabric design depicting, among other things, a Victorian milk glass compote. The article also shows the coffee table, 1947, with a curved L-shaped base and a curved triangular glass surface that the sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed for Herman Miller.

Significantly, the museum did not acquire an example of the Noguchi table until the 1970s. Despite the museum’s support and promotion of contemporary design, it was for many years less consistent in its acquisitions. This was made clear in a pictorial essay profiling the budgets and acquisitions for one year of six American art museums that was published in Life magazine in the early 1950s.

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed this coffee table with a biomorphic glass top, manufactured by Herman Miller, 1947. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In “What Do US Museums Buy?,” the institution that theBrooklyn Museum matched most closely was the Museum of Modern Art.The Brooklyn Museum picked up an Egyptian sarcophagus and a fewworks by traditional artists like Benjamin West. But it went allout for Modern painting, buying Paul Klees, Mark Tobeys andBonnards. The Museum of Modern Art, not surprisingly, had similarcollecting interests, though it also acquired some kitchen utensilsand an Art Nouveau desk. The article left it to the big-spendingMidwestern institutions to stock up on the Old Masters.

But in the past three decades, thanks to a directed acquisitions policy and a base of generous donors, the museum has been able to fill in the gaps of its design collection.

The work of George Nelson is a case in point. Nelson was for many years the design director for the Herman Miller Company. The “Marshmallow Sofa,” 1956, is arguably his most flamboyant design for the firm. It has the form of an old Puritan settle, but the seat and back are made not of plain oak, but bright round cushions.

In 1957, Nelson was one of a handful of American designers invited by the Brooklyn Museum to create showrooms, mixing their recent pieces with the museum’s historic pieces. Nelson chose some Wedgwood basalt ware and a Seventeenth Century Dutch chandelier to display alongside a contemporary pedestal table, commode and bed.

Nonetheless, the museum was not aggressive about acquiring Nelson’s work in the 1950s. By the 1980s, though, things had changed, and the museum was given a chair, circa 1956, that Nelson designed with Charles Pollock. Black and white with a pedestal base, it is perhaps the most refined variant of the molded fiberglass chair.

The work of Ray and Charles Eames is another area where the museum has conscientiously built up its holdings, so that it is now an important destination for anyone who wants to see their screen, room dividers and a host of other designs.

The museum also has a selection of the Eameses’ early experiments using molded plywood, including a striking lounge chair, 1946.

Fiberglass was another material associated with Ray and Charles Eames. Their rocking chair, circa 1950, combines a traditional American seating form with what was then the last word in furniture manufacturing.

The Brooklyn Museum displays its most important works of American design in the American Identities Galleries and in the nearby Luce Center, a neatly arranged storeroom that opened to the public a few months ago.

This overlooked institution is a worth a visit from anyone who appreciates Twentieth Century design. The Brooklyn Museum of Art is at 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. For information, or 718-638-5000.

Preview Benefits Museum On November 9

NEW YORK CITY – The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s achievements are being honored on November 9 at a benefit preview for the antiques show Modernism: A Century of Style & Design, 1900-2000. The preview for the annual fair, organized by Sanford L. Smith & Associates, will benefit the Brooklyn Museum’s department of decorative arts.

In addition, there is a small exhibition of highlights from the museum that is curated by Barry Harwood, curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition covers the range of Twentieth Century Design – and then some. It begins with examples of Art Nouveau and runs right up to the present to include the work of Ross Menuez, who is the recipient this year of the Brooklyn Museum/Modernism Young Designer Award.

The evening is also the occasion to recognize the Herman Miller Furniture Company with the Brooklyn Museum/Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award. The American firm has worked with many of the most important Modern designers. Most famously, there were Ray and Charles Eames, who popularized the use of molded plywood and fiberglass in mass-produced American furniture, and George Nelson, a designer who was for many years associated with Herman Miller.

Both awards will be handed out before the preview by Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. Modernism: A Century of Style & Design, 1900-2000 takes place at the Seventh Regiment Armory and continues through November 13.