Sometimes a cigar,” Sigmund Freud is reputed to have said, “is just a cigar.” If Freud was cognizant of the limits of interpretation—this was, after all, the man responsible for the contemporary tendency to divine symbolic portent within even the most negligible of objects—then why isn’t The New York Times? In his review of “John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist,” the critic Ken Johnson notes that the exhibition curator Deborah Bricker Balken resisted phallic elaborations of Storrs’s streamlined and columnar meditations on urban architecture. That doesn’t stop Johnson from mulling over how “the rigidly upright autonomy of Storrs’s sculpture reads as a symbolic bid for . . . undiminished masculine potency.” A hard man may be good to find, but sometimes a vertical is just a vertical.
Besides, it’s a stretch to assign erotic intent to an art as machine-tooled and ascetic as Storrs’s. Sculpture was the thing, and “Machine-Age Modernist” is an exhibition many devotees of the art form have been eagerly awaiting, if only on the strength and peculiarity of the sole Storrs piece seen in this-or-that survey of American art. Over the years, Forms in Space #1(1924) has been intermittently on display at The Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the permanent collection; its snug synthesis of Cubist innovation, Futurist speed, and Secessionist ornament has proved diverting—and a tease. Hilton Kramer made something of the same point in a 1970 review of a Storrs exhibition at Schoelkopf Gallery. There was, in Kramer’s estimation,