Sarah Greenberg

3 weeks ago | theartnewspaper.com | Karen Chernick |Andrew Maerkle |Martin Bailey |Sarah Greenberg

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So went the 1940s—a decade split into wartime devastation and scarcity, followed by peacetime innovation and abundance. Marking 80 years since the end of the Second World War, a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art titled Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s plays on the double meaning of the word “boom” as either the rumble of weaponry or the boost of invention and progress.