Summary: The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will be the sole U.S. venue for Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939, an exhibit originally organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibit, which runs from March 17 to July 29, 2007, contains more than 400 works—from fabrics and furniture to sculpture, paintings, photographs, architectural models, machinery, and video—each presenting a thread of the overarching concept that has shaped the world as we know it today. For architectural edification and just pure enjoyment, it is a must-see for all architects visiting the AIA headquarters building (just across New York Avenue from the Corcoran) this spring and summer.

The fascinating and crystal-clear logic of this very large exhibition exhibits itself through its context. It presents not just stylistic Modernism, but rather the concepts behind Modernism’s early utopian roots—a reaction to the horrors of World War I—and through its multi-directional development during the 1920s and ’30s as it enveloped and transformed every aspect of human endeavor. In 11 displays, the exhibit, curated by Chistopher Wilk of the V&A Museum, encompasses:

• What Was Modernism?
• Searching for Utopia
• The Machine
• Performing Modernism
• Building Utopia
• Sitting on Air
• The Healthy Body Culture
• Film as a Modernist Art
• Modernism and Nature
• National Modernisms
• Mass-Market Modernism.
  

Of all the arts
Fitting to these concepts of Modernism, which transcended any one artistic medium, yet united them all equally, the exhibition shows all scales of design, from architecture to jewelry (ball-bearing jewelry in The Machine section). Architecture is everywhere: The work of Le Corbusier is particularly well represented, as is that of other gods of Modernism: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius (with a whole room devoted to the Bauhaus), Marcel Breuer, Gerrit Rietveld (chairs and house), Alvar Aalto (in the Modernism and Nature section), Richard Neutra, and even Frank Lloyd Wright in a few of his moods.

The Corcoran’s show added dozens of American works to the V&A exhibit, including 25 pieces from its own permanent collection. The museum’s curators and designers (this exhibition involved all 180 of the museum’s staff, according to Director and President Paul Greenhalgh) have created a visual and aural feast in this exhibition, no small feat in the late-Victorian Corcoran. You ascend the entrance staircase to a silent and knock-your-socks-off greeting by a 1937 Tatra T87, pride of the Czech Tatra Company’s luxury car that boasted a rear-mounted engine and aerodynamic stylin’ that enabled its center-seated driver to floor its V-8 to 140 miles an hour. Just behind this sleek and silver vision, the Corcoran’s grand staircase climbs, replete with a parade of Rietveld chairs—the black, blue, red, and yellow kind—inviting you into the gallery proper. As you ascend, your eyes hone into a spotlighted large-scale model of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie. You know you have crossed the threshold into Modernism heaven.

Social/political philosophy over style
Through two floors of show, all ilks of students of Modern, capital-A Architecture will recognize works through the movement’s schisms of “isms”—Constructivism, Purism, Supremism—that graced their history books, from Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (canary paper sketches and a plaster model) to the art of de Stijl to a photo of Buckminster Fuller’s 1933 dymaxion car in full three-wheeled glory in front of the U.S. Capitol. In short, though, the show offers Modernism as a collective consciousness among intellectual artists intent on bringing spiritual and earthly comforts to the masses. Clearly, though, one “ism” reigns supreme: “This show is about optimism,” Greenhlagh said.

The exhibit concludes with the 1939 New York World’s Fair, evidence that the movement had crossed the ocean to America to take root here and flourish just as Europe reentered the ordeals and ravages of yet another world war. Optimism in the end prevails: even the horrors of World War Two could not tamp out the irrepressible spirit of Modernism is part and parcel of our world today, from teapot design to skyscraper.

—DG and SS