Presenting a slice of American life from 1940 to 1960, this exhibition catalog examines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the arts and popular culture of mid-century America. From Alexander Calder's sculpture to Noguchi's organic forms and every step in between, the authors look at abstract natural forms within advertising, commercial design, decorative arts, and the fine arts. The exhibition, organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art presented a thought-provoking and entertaining look back at a reactionary, but cautionary, period in American art and culture. It revealed how in a post-atomic age the resulting paradoxical mix of relief, fear, and guilt induced American artists and designers to reject the rigidity of machines and turn instead to softly curving, organic, or vital forms evoking nature, the human body, and the life force itself in their search for new forms of expression in a radically altered world. Deftly illuminating the work of such painters and sculptors as Pollock and David Smith, designers Charles and Ray Eames, and architects Wright and Saarinen, the authors present a serious inquiry into the vital artistic forms of a contradictory, acutely relevant time.