Art

Given that the staff and students at the Bauhaus in Dessau radically redesigned practically everything we use on a daily basis – from furniture and textiles to crockery, cutlery, books and clothing, not to mention the buildings that house them – it would have been easy for the V&A to fill this exhibition with design classics. This would have allowed us to name-check familiar favourites – Marianne Brandt’s light fittings, Marcel Breuer’s chairs and Anni Albers’ wall hangings – but it wouldn’t have been very challenging.

Curator Christopher Wilk has attempted something far more ambitious; Modernism wasn’t a style so much as an idea, and he has tried to encapsulate the utopian vision that inspired architects and designers to hope that, after the chaos of World War I, a more rational world could be created. ‘The age of destruction is over and done with. A new age has arrived, the Grand Age of Construction’, announced Dutch architect Theo van Doesburg.

It all began with wishful thinking and, because the semi-mystical phase of Modernism is little known, the introductory section of the show is, in many ways, the most interesting. Russian architect, Georgii Krutikov’s ‘Flying City’ hangs in the air like a chandelier, while the apartment blocks look like ‘Dr Who’ Daleks. Needless to say, this fantasy didn’t get off the drawing board. German painter Wenzel Hablik portrayed a communal town on a hilltop – a multi-faceted glass dome rising above crystalline rocks. For the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, Bruno Taut actually built a dome-shaped pavilion from glass which, he wrote, ‘allows the light of the sun, moon and stars to enter not merely through a few windows… but through as many walls as possible…

The new milieu created in this way must bring us a new culture… Then we should have a paradise on earth.’ Vladimir Tatlin intended his 400-metre-high monument to the Russian Revolution to be built, but it never got beyond the nine-metre-high model. Inside a spiral structure symbolising progress, he envisaged housing government offices in revolving cylinders and a cone made of glass to symbolise the new transparency of government – an idea recently used by Norman Foster for the Berlin Reichstag. Visionary symbolism and progressive technology; it was a heady mix that soon gave way to a love affair with the machine – to rotary engines being displayed like sculptures and ball bearings made into jewellery. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film ‘Metropolis’, on the other hand, portrays workers enslaved by the machines they operate. As well as providing welcome breaks, the film clips are extremely illuminating. Salvaged from a flat in Frankfurt built in 1927, the earliest surviving fitted kitchen comes with a film demonstrating an obsession with time and motion studies.

While preparing a meal in a traditional kitchen, we are told, the housewife walks 90 metres, but a fitted kitchen reduces this to eight metres. The captions to Hans Richter’s film ‘The New Flat’ tell us: ‘A car is a machine for driving, a plane is a machine for flying, a house is a machine for living’. Le Corbusier, who frequently quoted this maxim, pulls up in a car that looks really dated outside one of his iconic buildings that, by comparison, seems  ageless.

This says it all. The best Modernist designs are so simple, so intelligent and so beautiful that it is impossible to improve on them. On the other hand, when architects began to envisage utopia on a grand scale, disaster threatened.

On film, Le Corbusier demonstrates his plan to replace a great swathe of Paris with a monotonous series of identical, rectangular neighbourhoods – the kind of thing they are doing in Beijing right now.
Letting light into buildings was practical as well as symbolic. Given that millions died in the flu pandemic of 1918 and TB was rife, health was a primary concern and light, airy designs help eliminate germs. People were also encouraged to keep fit and slim. A hilarious photograph shows women following Dr Flaxlander’s regime – shedding weight while sleeping upright, hanging from life-saving rings.

In this inspiring exhibition there’s too much to take in, so the accompanying book (hardback £45, paperback £24.99) is a must. For browsing rather than reading, this definitive tome will remain an invaluable source of information on all things Modernist.