Old-Time Modernism
Long Ago Hailed as the Look of the Future, the Enduring Style Embraced by Fascists to Fashionistas is Taking a Victory Lap

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 9, 2006

LONDON -- The iPod is the latest symbol of everything that's up to date. But its best-selling, sleek design is built around ideas that have been with us for decades and decades.

A bakelite radio from the 1930s could exploit the same principles of crisp forms, smooth surfaces and clean concentric circles as Apple's music player.

Same goes for all the chrome-and-leather furniture and cubic shelving that sells to our most fashion-forward loft dwellers: It was all first dreamed up in the 1920s or before.

Almost every recent building that gets any kind of praise -- from Frank Gehry's famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the shiny new Katzen Arts Center in Washington -- is also deeply retrospective. The same is true for much of the current art they house.

You see that we haven't come very far as soon as you get a good look back at where we've come from -- such as the view provided by "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939," a massive survey exhibition that opened here Thursday at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It claims to be the first show to explore the modern movement in all its forms -- from radio design to innovative furniture and clothes to architecture and fine art.

People are always talking about today's surge in design: They cite the way Gehry's splashy building turned a Spanish backwater into a profitable tourist destination, and how Apple's success depends on its investment in the innovative look and feel of its products. This design "boom," and the way it's changing homes and offices, has even made it to the cover of Time magazine. But what they're really talking about -- what's really being brought within our reach when a successful furniture chain dubs itself Design Within Reach -- isn't design in general. It is specifically modern styling. What's being hailed is the final victory of modernism as the model for the way good objects should be made.

That must be why the V&A show seems so absolutely timely, and winning.

It displays the long-ago birth and halting development of the bent-chrome cantilever chair, now so popular that it gets knocked off on the Web for a few dozen bucks. Or how about the first glass-walled, knife-edged skyscrapers? Incredibly, the original concept for the form was explored in a huge drawing that Mies van der Rohe made in 1921 -- and that could absolutely pass as the latest flashy K Street office-block proposal. Almost every fresh idea from the early days of modernism still has the power to impress.

(Modernism expert Paul Greenhalgh, a former staffer at the V&A and new director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, hopes to take advantage of that fact. He says he's in the last stages of negotiations to bring the London exhibition to the Corcoran sometime next year. The show is a sequel, of sorts, to the major art nouveau show that Greenhalgh curated for the V&A, and which toured to the National Gallery of Art in 2000. Living up to that lavish National Gallery example will be a major challenge for Greenhalgh's new, much smaller museum -- but he says it's a challenge that he welcomes, and that will do the long-troubled institution good.)

The greatness of modernism was once up in the air. It faced some temporary opposition in the postmodern '70s and '80s, when it was the domineering father-figure that needed a good slaying. But after a full century, modern design and art now look set to have the kind of ongoing, long-term influence that only a very few other artistic movements have ever had. Modernism stands almost alone alongside Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and Renaissance painting, as the kind of force that compels every later artist to come to grips with it. Our own tussle with modernism feels as though it's barely begun, even though it has obsessed many of our leading culturati for decades already.

Like many of the greatest movements and figures in art, what may be most impressive about modernism is how fertile and wide-ranging it turns out to be. Like the buildings of ancient Greece and Rome, or the pictures of Michelangelo and Titian, modernism doesn't so much provide powerfully final answers and definitive take-home messages as offer an almost unending set of novel questions and probing propositions. The London exhibition doesn't just confirm how glorious good modern objects look ; it shows us that their slick, attractive surfaces have always triggered original and even subversive ideas.

Over the years, the forms and principles of modernism have stayed surprisingly the same. Modernism tends toward sleek shapes, avoids decoration and explores industrial materials and techniques, all of which gives it the kind of coherent syntax and vocabulary that columns and capitals and arches give to classical buildings. But, like classicism, modernism's few, potent visual ideas could always be read and used in wildly different ways, by vastly different kinds of people.

The left could adopt them as design principles that would at last transfer a modicum of power and pleasure to the masses. One of the first built-in apartment kitchens was commissioned by Frankfurt's leftist leaders of the later 1920s and installed by the thousands in their huge new public housing projects. It was conceived to relieve women of the burdens passed down to them by the inefficient, old-fashioned interiors of their grandmothers. As presented in period promotional footage, the modern kitchen provided workstations with window views, unornamented surfaces that cleaned up with a wipe and built-in everything to save working women steps and labor. (Few examples of such kitchens still exist, but the one now at the Victoria and Albert amazingly survived in situ, and in use, until its restoration for this show.)

The Nazis and Fascists could buy into modernism, too, as representing the bright future that a race of supermen could bring upon the Earth. Germany's Aryan leaders could happily promote a purely modernist car design called "Strength Through Joy" -- now better known by its other name, Volkswagen. (The first models were in fact toys of the Nazi elite. During the war the Strength Through Joy was assembled by slave labor.)

And what could better suit a portrait bust of Mussolini than the radically modern take on him produced by futurist sculptor Renato Bertelli? Bertelli took the outline of Il Duce's famous profile and turned it on a potter's wheel, and later on a lathe, through 360 degrees, to make a kind of stubby balustrade that, whatever way you look at it, reveals the strong lines of the leader's nose and lips and chin.

Even the resolute brats and anarchists of dada could use modernist forms to their own ends, as Washingtonians have witnessed in the survey of the movement now at the National Gallery of Art. Dadaist Hans Arp made crisp gray-on-gray collaged-paper grids -- almost like oblong checkerboards of barely varied tone -- that look like lots of later, tamely stylish works of abstract art. With the warping view of hindsight, it's easy to imagine Arp's grids as slick artistic analogs for the tidy ordering of modern life -- but that would get them wrong. In dada days in Zurich, the pared-down abstraction of Arp's works was so radical, so seemingly absurd that it could deliver a slap in the face to coldhearted modern order. When Sophie Taeuber, Arp's partner, adopted symmetrical lathe-turned forms not that different from what the fascist Bertelli later did for his Mussolini bust, she meant her almost abstract sculptures to evoke a child's toy or top, and a dizzy, childlike enjoyment of the strange and arbitrary.

Modern form may remain relatively stable, but its meaning, and its social role, were always up for grabs. (They're still amazingly in flux: Karim Rashid, the most devoutly modernist of today's design stars, has happily turned Bertelli's fascist portrait into a line of vases, for sale in the V&A's big modernism shop.)

Even streamlined automotive styling, which looks like it should have been an ideally stable symbol for a new, entirely modern mass-market world of speed and high-tech factory assembly, doesn't settle down as comfortably as that. Streamlining is represented in the London show by the fabulous tailfinned Tatra T87 saloon, a car that began mass production in Czechoslovakia in 1936. But its forms didn't actually depend on some reality of modern manufactured life. Around this same time the very greatest streamlined "modern" cars were in fact being custom-crafted, one at a time, from hand-bent ashwood strips. These automobiles were produced by traditional French carriage builders, as their last-ditch attempt to win back the wealthy clientele they'd been losing since the advent of the motorcar.

Modern design, that is, could lend a helping hand to newly employed women, but it could also be the plaything of a disappearing class of toffs. (One of the first, most radical experiments in cantilevered chrome-tube seating was in fact used to furnish the music room in the palace of the last ruling Maharajah of Indore.)

No single reality or condition or ideology of modern life gets reflected in modernist forms. Almost every group of movers and makers and thinkers -- from atheist pragmatists to spiritual idealists -- picked up on modernism's novel style, then loudly justified it as the look that best reflected the world as they saw it, or as they hoped it would become. More than anything, modernism simply signified a new and forceful point of view -- on whatever side of whatever argument.

That, by the way, is not the normal take on modernism, or for that matter the one promoted in the V&A show. The standard thing to say is that modernism is more ideology than look, and that it was triggered by a certain relatively narrow notion of modernity and modern life -- usually one with a strongly utopian bent, despite the very powerful counter-example provided by dada's confirmed dystopians, whose art was modernist as anyone's.

But the glorious mess of modernism's past argues against such tidy causal chains. Over its 100-year history, the movement's relatively modest repertoire of forms has pleased the righteous and comforted monsters; it has represented inspired chaos and oppressive order; it has harassed workers in its factories -- think of Chaplin's view of things in "Modern Times" -- and charmed them in their homes, been promoted by Lenin then reviled by Stalin, brought music to the masses and delightful ease to the tender bottom of the Maharajah of Indore.

Now it may even be doing something it has never done before. Where once it inevitably signified the new and daring, of whatever stripe, modernism now can represent the comfort of an old-time vision of the future that we know and love.

Could it be that modern design helps sell the iPod not by promoting its fundamental novelty, but by putting it in a "futuristic" package that is familiar and reassuring to us? Modernism no longer trumpets the truly and profoundly new, with all the dislocations that implies; it stands for an image of a future that was once on its way, and that we know panned out more or less all right -- because we're living it today. Like the Williamsburg knockoffs our grandparents preferred, modernism now represents a past -- but a very special past where the future seemed safer, brighter than it does now.

By embracing modernism in 2006, we're allowed to avoid a crucial, terrifying question.

What's next?