The Rise And Call of Modernism

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.