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.
