Designer Muller-Munk to be featured at Carnegie Museum

Peter Muller-Munk; centerpiece and garniture, c. 1929–30; silver. Collection of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler. Photo: Tom Little for Carnegie Museum of Art

PITTSBURGH – Carnegie Museum of Art announces “Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk,” opening Nov. 21 in the museum’s Heinz Galleries. Peter Muller-Munk was a brilliant silversmith, a pioneering industrial designer and educator, and a visionary spokesperson for his profession. “Silver to Steel” is the first retrospective of his four-decade career.

With more than 120 works of hand-wrought silver and popular mid-century products, supported by drawings and multimedia interviews, and playfully incorporating period advertising, the exhibition presents the untold story of a man who rose from anonymity as a young silversmith at Tiffany & Co. to become a crucial postwar fulcrum, promoting the practice of industrial design across the globe via a top American design consultancy: Pittsburgh’s Peter Muller-Munk Associates (PMMA).

The exhibition opens with Muller-Munk’s celebrated Modernist silver of the 1920s and 1930s. His best-known designs—the streamlined Normandie pitcher (1935) and the skyscraper-inspired Waring Blendor (1937)—reveal his transition from silversmith to industrial designer and herald an eye-opening presentation of his mass-produced objects. These highly functional and visually striking designs include Bell & Howell cameras, Westinghouse radios and appliances, Griswold cookware, Val Saint Lambert tableware, Porter-Cable power tools, Texaco gas stations and corporate identities, and prototypes in new materials for US Steel. For all its clients the PMMA firm addressed the challenges of a surging postwar consumer culture with vigor and intelligence, producing designs that pleased consumers and became highly successful in the marketplace.

“Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk” establishes Muller-Munk, and PMMA, squarely in the canon of mid-century design, and introduces a new audience to a founding father of the field. It reveals the creative side of Pittsburgh, a complement to the city’s industrial might in its manufacturing heyday. Through striking presentations of once familiar objects, the exhibition emphasizes the pervasive influence of good design on everyday life.

Peter Muller-Munk Associates, Westinghouse portable radio, 1951, Carnegie Museum of Art. Photo: Tom Little for Carnegie Museum of Art