Last week Mark and I went to the final day of the exhibit on Modernism at the Corcoran Museum downtown. I’d love to tell you to go see it; I wish we hadn’t waited until the very last minute to go see the show. It was a top-quality blockbuster, organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London with material from mostly European collections.
When I say blockbuster, I’m not kidding. This show was huge. Room after room of posters, building plans, painting, sculpture, industrial design and more and more. We kept coming around corners into new sections of the exhibit saying, “There’s more?”
Favorite things:
- A rotary airplane engine designed by W.O. Bentley in 1917. This was the same Bentley who later founded the luxury car company. The gleaming aluminum engine was all shiny fins and smoothly machined surfaces. Gorgeous.
- Several groupings of elegant modernist china, always in pure white. I’m a sucker for this stuff. See my article on Eva Zeisel.
- “Der Mensch als Industriepalast”, a German poster showing the internal organs of a man organized like a factory. It was both funny and stylish.
- Short clips from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” shown on a gallery wall. I own a restored DVD copy of “Metropolis” myself, and I’m fascinated by every single image from that film.
- Continuous profile of Il Duce, by Giuseppe Bertelli. A Futurist work, this bust creates the illusion of Mussolini’s famous profile spinning through 360 degrees, like something cut on a lathe. The Futurists were all Fascists, and I know I shouldn’t like their art so much, but I do anyway.
After spending the full afternoon there, I was really amused by how little styles have changed in architecture and domestic design since modernism was new in the 1920s. There was much space devoted to Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and others of that ilk. Any of these homes or items of furniture could have come straight out of last month’s Dwell magazine. It really brought home the fact that modernism nowadays is in fact deeply conservative!
My one regret about the exhibit was that it was very weak in covering American modernism. They had a small assortment of items from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and little else. But that’s a small gripe since I can see American Modernism lots of places. This collection of so many items from Germany, Italy and other European museums was all fresh and new to me. If you missed the exhibit, I can at least really recommend the catalogue. That link will take you to the hardcover version on Amazon, but the paper-bound edition may still be available directly from the Corcoran.
