The Rise And Call of Modernism
Corcoran Explores the Birth of A Movement Whose Chilly Forms Wrought Sweeping Changes in Art

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2007; Page N01

"You really like that modern stuff? It's so cold and intellectual. Who can even understand what those kinds of artists say?" For an absurdly long time -- the better part of 100 years, now -- lovers of the modern have had to mount a rear-guard action against those kinds of questions. Even Ikea still has to seed its modern displays with spindles and chintz.

But a show that opened yesterday at the Corcoran Gallery of Art ought to convert even the die-hard detractors. "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939," on tour from the great Victoria and Albert Museum in London, includes more than 400 stunning images and objects that make the argument themselves: Except perhaps for the time around 1500 in Renaissance Italy, no moment in Western art has had the breadth and depth and simple world-changing greatness of modernism.

A skeptic doesn't have to take an expert's word on this. Just looking at the objects at the Corcoran should do the trick.

I dare anyone to walk into the Corcoran lobby and resist the luscious, aerodynamic sweep of the modernist car that fills it, dubbed the "77A" and made in Czechoslovakia by the Tatra company in 1938. It shows how modernism, born just before World War I as a radical movement in fine art, transformed the way the world around us has looked since. A sleek Acura coupe couldn't exist at all without precedents like the 77A.

Behind the car, marching up both sides of the Corcoran's grand staircase, are a dozen copies of Gerrit Rietveld's "Red Blue" chair, which was perfected around 1923 and is now one of the great icons of modern design.

The Dutchman's chairs register as superb sculpture: They define space using a bare few uprights and horizontals in black, then breach it with slender diagonals -- the slanting chair seat and its back -- in two primal, primary colors. But for all its sculptural impact, anyone who's lived with the "Red Blue" can vouch for its surprising comfort. (I know one amateur woodworker who has copied the chair in every size to seat grandkids of all ages, as well as full-size, in pressure-treated lumber, to guarantee the comfort of her garden furniture.) Like all the best of modern design, the "Red Blue" wants to inspire, but it also wants to work.

Most importantly, even eight decades after its birth, the "Red Blue" can still energize a space that's as imposing as the Corcoran's neoclassical atrium. A great modernist chair doesn't just fill the room it's in, as decoration, the way most earlier furniture does; even after all these years of familiarity, the "Red Blue" still has the impact to compete with architecture and change the way any room feels. If it came out tomorrow, the "Red Blue" would still win big play in the design press.

At the top of that chair-lined staircase, the Corcoran's lovely rotunda has been reserved for a very few of modernism's greatest creations, picked out with spotlights.

There is a room-size model of Vladimir Tatlin's 1920 "Monument to the Third International," which, had it been built, would have been 100 stories tall. Again we see art and design in perfect balance. The Russian's model works as an exciting piece of modernist sculpture: It has an amazing distillation of upward, sideways and spiral thrusts, like nothing ever done before. As an idea for a building, it profoundly rethinks the relationship between a supporting skeleton and the spaces such a skeleton can hold. The structures that support Frank Gehry's twisting skins are foreshadowed in it. Even Washington's conservative Cato Institute on Massachusetts Avenue is housed in a recent building that depends on Tatlin's exoskeletal ideas.

The great "Wassily" armchair, by German designer and architect Marcel Breuer -- who much later built the Whitney Museum in New York -- helped change the whole idea of what seating could be. Even Rietveld's "Red Blue" was still essentially four wooden legs with boards attached for seat and back and arms; Breuer's chair is built around a single, sinuous line made of chromed tubing. Breuer found that, rather than looking back to furniture tradition and making subtle tweaks on it, a whole new kind of chair could come from looking to the latest bicycle technologies.

In a show on modernism, a movement whose tentacles reached everywhere, even an object as modest as a vase can get big play. Alvar Aalto's 1936 "Savoy" vase, mold-blown in Finland of undulating glass, clearly deserves its spotlighted place in the Corcoran rotunda: It's been in production almost since its birth, and now lives on mantels all around the world. Rather than quoting directly from nature, as the leaves and fronds decorating so many earlier designs had done, Aalto's vase evokes the look and principles of nature, in the abstract. The gently rippled sides of his vessel recall natural processes and forms -- the surf, erosion and tide-washed sand as well as cellular growth and aquatic plants -- without citing any single one of nature's creations.

Touching All the Bases

The themes introduced in the Corcoran's atrium and rotunda play out across the rest of this massive show, which takes up very nearly the entire museum. (Even spending less than a minute with each object -- some pieces would repay days of study -- it still takes something like five hours to get a good look at everything; the Corcoran's fond wish that visitors will make return visits, even at $14 a go, may yet be granted.)

After a kind of "antechamber" that highlights the role cubism played in launching the modern movement, we're swept into spacious galleries that set out the full sweep of modernism.

There are rooms devoted to most of the great movements, moments and makers in modernism -- Russian constructivism, Italian futurism, Germany's great Bauhaus school and others.

The show also includes sections devoted to how modernism played out under the political systems of different countries: Swedish socialism, Italian fascism, German Nazism, Soviet communism and American capitalism. (The American section -- located, maybe appropriately, just before the gift shop -- is the weakest in the show; it wasn't in the London version, and its very modest holdings make it feel like an afterthought.)

Then there are themed displays, on subjects such as "The Machine, Sitting on Air" (a thrilling wall covered floor-to-ceiling in experiments in cantilevered seating), "Modernism and Nature" and "Mass Market Modernism."

Anyone who spends the time this show deserves will leave feeling a deep connection with modernism, and a renewed love for it. They may also feel a new affection for the Corcoran, a museum that's been languishing for years. Those who've doubted that new director Paul Greenhalgh could pull this survey off -- this critic was among them -- will have to eat their hats. (Someone tell me which goes best with felt, ketchup or A1.)

Modernism's Real Meanings

And still the show isn't anything like comprehensive. Especially in the fine arts, there's more great modernism out there than any single exhibition could present. In all areas of modernism, there are more important, complex arguments to make than can be touched on in the wall texts of a single survey show. You could argue that "Modernism: Designing a New World" may be big, but it's not particularly clever.

Yet the failures of this show are what make it such a success.

The exhibition makes the standard argument that modernism is really about imagining utopia, then using new design to get us there. That's got some problems. There's the fact that cubism, the home ground of modernism, was hardly a utopian movement -- or no more than any artistic movement that believes it has advanced from what was done before. And that some of Europe's very first minimal, modern abstractions were by dadaists Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp, who were more interested in anarchy and the absurd than in forging a promising future for mankind.

More crucially, it's not clear that such social and political ideas are enough to cause any particular kind of art or design. After all, is bent chrome more inherently utopian than a bunch of floral decoration, straight out of the Garden of Eden? The hand-carving of the Arts and Crafts movement was built on the same utopian ideals as machine-age modernism.

A cause that can have almost any outcome doesn't explain much.

The sheer variety of ideas and warring "-isms" on display in this show reveal that modernism can't be tied down to any one or two or 10 of them. In fact the glory of modernism, like the glory of many watersheds in art, is that it produced a single set of potent forms that could be used to do so very many different things.

That's what this show proves.

Just as the lifelike figures of Renaissance art could happily inhabit both a sternly religious altarpiece and the naughty pictures of a sybarite -- as well as gracing the walls of a modern museum -- while serving all those functions brilliantly, so the new, pared-down forms of modernism could be employed to all sorts of ends. They could inform the curved bumpers of a Nazi car such as the "Strength Through Joy" (later dubbed the "Volkswagen," the "people's car") but also the decadent pleasures of a handmade sterling silver teapot with an ebony handle, designed by Marianne Brandt at the Bauhaus -- a school closed down by the Nazis.

The point isn't -- and this is crucial -- that modernist forms are really without meaning, or that all you need to do is look at them to get what they might mean. It's that, like most great art, modernism provides a hugely powerful toolbox of possibilities, helping us say and mean a thousand different things. Modernism is full of meanings, which often stretch beyond the abstruse words some artists found to talk about the novel forms they had invented.

We shouldn't expect that visiting even the largest show about a movement such as modernism, or studying its history, will tell us some single thing it is "really" about. Even reading what its founders said will not do that. Its history, and their words, merely expand our understanding of the movement's range and power.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier once said that a great modern house ought to be considered a "machine for living." The modernism that informs it should be thought of as a great "machine for thinking" -- one of the greatest that we've ever built.

The Corcoran's new show lets us hear it whir.

This exhibit requires timed tickets, which can be purchased in advance by visiting the Web site above.

Make It New
"Modernism" exhibit shows dark side of the Utopian dream

Glenn Dixon
Express
Thursday, March 18

To get along in life, everybody needs pretty much the same thing -- but not exactly the same thing.

That's the problem given historical shape by "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939," the vast, thought-provoking show opening Saturday at the Corcoran. It touches on virtually every art form, from drawing and painting to cinema and dance. But because the show originated at the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the worldýs great repositories of design and decorative arts, the more populist media -- architecture, design, graphic art -- resonate loudest.

The entrance to the show is pure seduction: a streamlined silver Tatra 77a boasting triple headlamps, suicide front doors and a louvered rear panel with dorsal fin -- an absolute shark of an automobile. Mount the main stairs, flanked on either side by seven reproduction armchairs by Gerrit Rietveld, and you enter the rotunda, filled with modernist icons, from models of structures actual and imaginary by Le Corbusier and Vladimir Tatlin, respectively, to a period Marcel Breuer chair and an Alvar Aalto vase still in production.

Then the show tips its hand, with a vitrine that holds not only Thomas More's "Utopia" but Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George Orwell's "1984."

As the show fills with idealized views of apartment blocks, photos of group calisthenics and jewelry made from ball bearings, manifesto snippets set the tone for an era of scientism. Corbusier promises "a great epoch ... a new spirit." Adolf Loos declares war on ornament. Above a wall sprouting milestones in the evolution of the modernist chair, Breuer proclaims, "In the end, we will sit on a resilient column of air."

It's that grandiose, hopeful lunacy -- combined with bullying, one-size-fits-all efficiency -- that drove Grete Lihotsky to create her "Frankfurt Kitchen." If all of ýModernismýsý good intentions and bad faith could be condensed into a single item, it would be the ironing board that folds down to stretch between wall and sink. Itýs undeniably elegant -- and completely unadjustable.

The show feeds out, as all blockbusters must, to a gift shop. But before you cough up $800 for either a strappy leather "Wassily Chair" by Breuer or a wooden Rietveld of your very own, ask yourself a couple of questions: Does this object suit the way I actually live? Or does it merely correspond to the aestheticized way I might wish to?

Then interrogate the object itself: Are you, pretty thing, nothing more than a trap?