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A Chicago native who grew up
in New Jersey, Harold
Livingston Van Doren studied
at the Art Students League
in NYC following WWI, then
headed to Paris where he
worked as an artist for the
Chicago Tribune
newspaper's Paris office,
and lectured at the Louvre.
While there he also worked
as a book translator and
even acted in a Jean Renoir
film.
By the mid 1920s he was back
in America writing free
lance articles and working
as an assistant director of
the Minneapolis Institute of
Arts. When he and John
Gordon Rideout set up shop
in 1931 their first major
clients were the Toledo
Scale Company (using new
plastics, like Plaskon), Air King
radios, American National
tricycles and scooters,
Maytag washing machines and
a gasoline pump for the
Wayne Pump Company.
Like Henry Dreyfuss, Van
Doren was included in a 1934
Fortune magazine article by
George Nelson about up and
coming American product
designers.
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A book by Van Doren,
Industrial Design: A Practical Guide, was
published in 1940. In it he wrote:
Once the industrial
designer had made a dent on industry, it was
perhaps natural for him to exaggerate his own
importance in the scheme of things.
Indeed, one might almost say that he would not
be a good designer unless he had that sort of
excited enthusiasm that makes salesmen sell and
designers create. But in sober moments he
must have realized that, important as his
contribution might seem to him, its relative
importance might not be so great. As a
rule, the artist is, and should be, only one of
the gears in the train that includes management,
sales promotion, advertising, engineering,
research -- all those departments making up the
complex mechanism of modern commerce.
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