Modernism @ the Corcoran Gallery of Art
What is Modern? Is it a teapot, an office chair, or the architecture of a building? Is it characterized by clean lines and minimalist tendencies? Something mass-produced for the worker and staunchly anti-Bourgeois? Is it an idealist utopia?
This is the question that the Corcoran set out to answer in its exhibit Modernism Designing a New World, 1914 – 1939.
Showcasing over 400 works encompassing a broad range of media, including industrial and graphic design, architecture, painting, film and photography, the exhibit is extensive to say the least, and downright exhausting to take in the over seven individual art movements that together contribute to the definitive answer of Modern. Here you'll find such a broad range of Modernist styles, with paintings from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Stuart Davis, to the three-dimensional works of architects and designers Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
A grand staircase, flanked by Gerrit Rietveld’s Red, Blue Chair, leads to the entrance of the exhibit at the Icon Room. Another, earlier, stage of Rietveld’s chair is found here, before it was influenced by Mondrian and Rietveld’s induction to De Stijl, a movement that sought to erase the natural in order to isolate pure artistic creation. Alvar Aalto’s Savot Vase, The Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer, a working replica of Tatlin’s Tower and a model of Le Corbusier’s most famous building, the Villa Savoye, share the honor of being the iconic representatives of Modern. A small sampling of the show, the Icon Room sums up nicely what the rest of the exhibit holds.
The show weaves through several distinct art movements that manifested at different points throughout the world between 1914 and 1939. Individual rooms highlight influential works from each of these movements -- Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructionism, De Stijl, Purism, Bauhaus, as well as the driving principles of the time –- Utopia, a healthy body, the factory and mass production, nature and national identity. Each is emphasized by a different wall coloring, often completely breaking from the last and contributing to an overall disjointed feel, but which helps in conveying the general sense of each movement and theme.
One room, for example, explores the subject of man as machine alongside an exploration of mass production and the promise of factories. The walls are covered in aluminum sheeting, literally reflecting the feeling of the time. A photograph of Alexander Rodchenko dressed in a wool work suit he designed adorns the wall. In the center of the room the suit itself is on display. It is two pieces, made of grey wool and trimmed with black leather. It looks like an early space suit or mechanic’s jumpsuit, designed to represent the factory worker, and Rodchenko wore it to identify with the worker.
Piet Mondrian, on the other hand, is featured though his Tableau No. III, a canvas painted only in primary colors, plus black and white in only geometric forms. By bringing forms down to their basics, Mondrian sought out spirituality in painting. The order and harmony he found by doing so was also an expression of utopia, an ideal world. Many artists on display throughout the exhibit were expressing this same ideal, railing against the horrors of World War I and seeking out a new reality.
The highlights of the exhibit are the three rooms that showcase the Bauhaus and the resulting products from this design school. In the first room a mock up of the building itself is displayed, the design by Walter Gropius. The use of concrete, steel and glass, typifies the school and the art that the students produced there. It was a place where architecture, craft, visual arts and design were linked. Textiles by Ruth Hollos-Consemuller in wool and cotton woven together to produce hard geometric lines and rectangles hang on the wall in muted colors.
Cantilevered chairs by Mart Stam, Marcel Bruer and Mies van der Rohe cover an entire wall of the next room, illustrating the variety of this innovation. The exploration of steel tubing led to the production of the cantilevered chair by Stam and sparked this whole theme of chair designs by Stam, Bruer and van der Rohe. Many of these chairs are still in production today.
Ansel Adams’ black and white majestic nature photographs also hang in this exhibit, along with Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstract flowers. A room highlighting the influence of nature on modernism is soft and soothing compared to the cold of the rooms showcasing mass production and the development of transportation technologies. As World War II broke out in Europe many designers and architects came to the U.S. and spread Modernism’s influence through the country. Though American artists like Adams, O’Keeffe and Wright were already considered to be a part of the modernism movement, it was only when van der Rohe and Le Corbusier moved to the U.S. that the heart of the movement finally arrived.
The end of the exhibit picks up on this theme and presents how Modernism influenced American art and design, with graphic posters from Roosevelt’s New Deal and New York's 1939 World Fair adorning this wall. Still very typical of Modern design, the posters and paintings incorporate geometric clean lines, but more importantly, this “World of Tomorrow” explored the promise of the future, searching for Utopia once again.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is located at 500 17th Street NW. Modernism runs through July 29. See the gallery's web site for hours and ticket information.