By Gerd Korinthenberg, DPA
Ghent : They come from flea markets across Europe and the US, from Internet auctions or dusty lofts – the vacuum cleaners and hot irons, toasters and pans from the avantgarde of modern design, which French collector Jean-Bernard Hebey has picked up over decades.
Around 375 of these extraordinary domestic appliances from the 1920s to the 1970s are on display at the design museum in the Flanders’ metropolis of Ghent, northern Belgium, in an exhibition entitled ‘Esthetique Domestique’ (Domestic Aesthetics) open to the public until Sep 30.
The first item he bought was a lemon squeezer in the US when he was 16, says collecting enthusiast and America fan Hebey, whose Paris collection has some 8,000 items and is likely the largest European collection of designer domestic appliances.
“America was coloured, Europe was still black and white,” says Hebey, who was born in 1945 and is well-known as a television and radio presenter in his country. This is how his passion for collecting originated in the 1950s.
In fact, objects like the bright-red ice-crusher The Ice Gun from 1940, which strongly resembles a futuristic space patrol pistol, would have been unimaginable in Old Europe at the time.
Some of his toasters look as if they could fly and his vacuum cleaners resemble rockets on vats, which are more likely to do their service in orbit.
“Over the last 50 years modernity has always been associated with space travel or aviation,” Hebey describes the industrial designers’ recipe for success in times past.
Domestic design had to “fulfil necessities and dreams at the same time”, Hebey tells DPA.
It’s not hard to see the enthusiasm for blimps in the cocktail shaker with its racy empennage from Germany’s Golden 20s.
Nobody would be surprised if the sedate US turkey roaster made of shiny aluminium suddenly took off from the kitchen table on Thanksgiving Day, or if the bizarre, bomb-shaped potato boiler Top-o-Stove sent beeping sounds from the universe.
Naturally, the scarcity of metal during the war years was a challenge for US designers – there are hot irons made of coloured pressed glass with only a thin metal base, which are hard to find nowadays and among Hebey’s valuable rarities.
Art lovers are stunned by the Ghent design exhibition: a British heater looks like a deep-red sun fetish from a natural history museum, an Italian espresso maker is modelled on an antique mini-temple.
A giant US meat-cutter of 1943, whose counterpart can be found in the New York Metropolitan museum, meanwhile, with its shiny circular knife and spiky gripping tool looks very much like a surrealist sculpture from Max Ernst’s studio or that of the early Picasso.