<< BACK

SEARCH

Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth Street NW
Washington
202.639.1700
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939
March 17, 2007-July 29, 2007

Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 explores the foundation and meaning of Modernist art and design and its evolution into a mass movement that continues to impact the way we live. As it explores key Modernist movements—such as Bauhaus, DeStijl, Constructivism and Purism—the exhibition reveals how the distinctive style developed and what principles defined it. The show also investigates Modernism’s key themes, including Utopia; the role of the factory and mass production; the spiritual aspect of modern life; fascination with the healthy body and organic forms found in nature; and, national identity.

Modernism contains more than 390 works and 50 film clips and encompasses a broad range of media, including industrial and graphic design, architecture, painting, film and photography. While its works represent 17 countries, the Washington exhibition has a distinct American flavor, featuring American works not in the V&A’s exhibition..

Among the key Modernist figures featured are artists Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis; architects and designers Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, Gerrit Rietveld, Marianne Brandt and Alvar Aalto.

Modernism is understood more as a loose collection of utopian ideas than a movement or single approach. Modernist artists aimed to use new art and technology to positively transform the world around them. The Modernist aesthetic rejected ornamentation, embracing abstract, geometric forms and strong colors. As such, it provided a template for the Modern world.

The designed world in which we live was largely created by Modernism, which is best identified as a loose collection of ideas that developed simultaneously in different countries rather than as a single movement. The unadorned, geometric forms, abstracted shapes, and bold colors of Modernist art and design are unmistakable, seen in everything from teacups to skyscrapers, from paintings to living room fixtures and furniture. But behind the look and forms of Modernism lay a set of radical ideas and conditions. This exhibition explores how the movement developed, what principles defined it, and some of the themes that characterized it, including Utopia, the machine and mass production, nature and the healthy body, and national identities.

The author H.G. Wells, writing in 1933, knew that he was witnessing a time of unprecedented transformation. People were living in a new era, and given the extraordinary powers science had delivered, Wells saw that humanity might either perfect the world or use its new capabilities to bring about total annihilation. This was a nervous and frenetic time that fell between the grim bookends of two World Wars. Technologically, it was not an especially innovative period. The electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the skyscraper, the radio, and the telephone all predate World War I. It was, however, a time of development and dispersal rather than invention, giving rise to widespread use of modern technologies.

During the interwar years of 1914 to 1939, many architects, designers, and artists passionately committed themselves to the ideas which we now call Modernism. Reacting to the unprecedented violence and destruction of World War I, they searched for ways to create a better world through art and design.

Modernist artists and designers were frequently driven by a Utopian belief in the power of their creations. They believed artists and designers could apply new technology, combined with a single, all-embracing methodology, to every part of the manufactured environment—including buildings, furnishings, products, interiors, signage, posters, and clothing—to significantly improve people’s physical and psychological conditions. This passion, together with political transformations taking place throughout the world, gave the Modernists powerful motivation. They believed in a “total art”; the idea that all art should work in unison to transform the environment. How their work looked was just one of their concerns; what it meant and how it was used were equally important.

Utopian movements and schools flourished internationally. These included Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, De Stijl in the Netherlands, and Purism in France. Suprematists such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky refined their art to pure abstraction. Geometric shapes, lines, and colors were placed against flat backgrounds that seemed to reference a transcendent new beginning.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution established the first worker-controlled state in modern Europe, symbolizing for many the transformation of society. Russian avant-garde artists prominently promoted their new vision of a Communist Utopia. Termed Constructivism, the work of Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Naum Gabo declared an end to “pure art” in favor of a social aesthetic that could be used to help “construct” a better world by integrating art into everyday life. Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International(1920), with its spiral structure, open-frame construction, and rotating glass shapes, was progressive in both form and function, symbolically projecting the spirit of the revolution skyward.

Artists in the Netherlands also worked to coordinate all the arts around a nonrepresentational agenda known as De Stijl. Piet Mondrian’s spare abstractions, based on ideas of spiritual harmony, inspired others such as Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and J.J.P. Oud to explore geometry and pure color in painting and architecture as a foundation for social and spiritual understanding. Purism, the Modernist movement centered in France around the work of architect Le Corbusier and painters Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, was premised on the integration of form and function. Le Corbusier believed that a building’s form, inside and out, must convey its purpose. His structures favored simple geometry and industrial materials including concrete, steel, and glass, as well as open plan designs that integrated different functions of a building.

No idea was more central to the creation of a new Utopia than that of technology, represented by images of “the machine.” The industrialization of the landscape and the prevalence of a machine aesthetic in the design and production of goods linked Modernists to workers and helped connect artists to the realities of everyday life. This notion inspired the multidisciplinary design and art program at the Bauhaus school in Germany. Bauhaus founder and architect Walter Gropius believed that the innate design of an industrial object, building, or home could directly affect community and city planning. Many important artists, designers, and architects contributed to the Bauhaus experiment through teaching, including László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer.

Modernism’s cultural and political associations were often central to its dissemination. The crusading nature of Modernism gave rise to countless exhibitions, books, journals, posters, and advertisements influenced by abstract painting, simple graphics, and photomontage (cutting and combining different photographs to create a new image). Modernist theater, dance, and cinema were also laboratories for Utopian ideas. Theater designers such as the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer experimented with new materials and choreography, moving beyond the stage into galleries, shops, and the street. Filmmakers including Soviets Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein developed cinematography and editing techniques that altered, manipulated, and reinforced dramatic subjects through their juxtaposition. The syncopated flow of imagery through time, and the off-kilter collision of disparate pictures, helped establish a new Modernist language in filmmaking which strongly influenced later documentary and narrative cinema.

Modernism’s engagement with the social world was also characterized by a deep concern for health and hygiene. World War I and the ensuing flu epidemic had killed millions internationally; consequently health was seen as a metaphor for a new life and bright future. In practical terms, it meant that both private and public buildings were designed with modern healthy amenities ranging from indoor plumbing and hygienic kitchens to swimming pools, gyms, and sun decks. A focus on the healthy body can also be seen throughout the mass media and visual arts, which were permeated with images of sportsmen and women, dancers and gymnasts, swimmers and sunbathers.

During the 1930s especially, some avant-garde designers and architects shifted their attention away from the machine-inspired forms of the 1920s and toward the organic materials and curvilinear shapes of nature. Some embraced natural materials such as stone, wood, and organic textiles, finding new, more gentle alternatives to the technological focus of the factory.

Modernism’s Utopian agenda, as well as the ambiguous, sometimes subversive qualities associated with Modernist art, design, and architecture cut against the grain of authoritarian political regimes. During the 1930s, artists in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were severely persecuted for producing experimental, forward-looking work. Europe’s loss proved to be America’s gain as many of the innovators of Modernism fled their home countries to seek refuge and artistic freedom in America and Great Britain. Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Legér, and the photographer André Kertész all came to New York before and during World War II, prominently influencing American art. Gropius, Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Albers, Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes also arrived in the U.S. during this time.

The legacy of Modernism remains here, seen in our widespread acceptance of the positive benefit of integrating art and life, as well as in our belief in the power of art and design to create new models for living. In this way, much of the new world envisioned — and designed — by the Modernists continues to exist to this day.

Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 was originally organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).