Midcentury Playforms Family

A toy family by Swiss designer Antonio Vitali (1909-2008). The designer was an interesting man. As a young father, Vitali was frustrated by the cheap, garish plastic toys available for sale. He noticed that his children liked to play with simple objects, using their imaginations to imbue them with life. So, in his time off, he carved wonderful, simple forms from local larch wood. His creations soon became popular in Europe, and eventually came to the attention of an American company, Creative Playthings.

New Yorkers Frank and Teresa Caplan founded Creative Playthings in 1945. They shared Vitali's belief that children benefitted from playing with simple toys that stimulated their creativity and imagination, rather than with fully-realized, life-like objects. By 1949, the Caplans were collaborating with MoMA, stocking the children’s room of Marcel Breuer's “House in the Museum Garden” with their toys. The company also collaborated on a series of modern playground designs with such modernist luminaries as Louis Kahn, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.

Antonio Vitali designed this family for Creative Playthings in 1954, as part of their "Playforms" collection. The set includes a mother holding an infant, a father, a boy, a girl, a cat, and a dog. One could look at it as just another boring, heteronormative, mid-20th-century nuclear family. But then we wouldn't be using our imaginations, would we? Lets say...