Through the design of inexpensive, mass-produced furniture, cutlery, tableware and textiles, most notably under the label American Modern, and through the influential Guide to Easier Living, Wright and his wife, Mary, proselytized a particularly American style of modernism. Acknowledging Wright's role as an influential tastemaker, noted designer George Nelson called him the person most responsible for "the shift in taste toward modern in the late 1930s.

This fall, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York is mounting Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, the designer's first major retrospective. The exhibition includes tabletop vignettes, complete with Wright-designed dinnerware, flatware, linens and accessories, entire room settings similar to Wright's department store demonstration rooms of the 1930s, furniture designs and a multimedia presentation on Dragon Rock, the designer's modernist home in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Coming from a background in theatre set design, Wright imagined he could do more than design individual pieces for the home. He set out in the early 1930s to combine objects, lighting and people to create dramatic "moods" for modern living. He applied this holistic environmental approach throughout the rest of his career, working for large companies such as General Electric, Samsonite and DuPont, or small factories that were revived by his innovative products.

Like today's lifestyle marketers, Wright embodied significant contradictions. He and Mary wrote of how to achieve happiness in the suburbs, while they themselves divided their time between Manhattan and the rural Hudson River Valley. Negotiating the inherent paradox of dictating freedom of choice, they provided detailed instructions on how to be spontaneous.

On view at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York from November 20 to March 10.

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middle two photos - Mary and Russel Wright's Guide to Easier Living

bottom and top photos - samples of Wright's work