What holds the show together, more or less, is the vision of the metropolis. “Skyscrapers are the expression of confidence in the future,” architect Cesar Pelli has said. The skyscraper was first built in America, and for Americans it has always meant power and prosperity; in the ’20s, Hugh Ferriss captured the romance of the first skyscrapers in his dreamlike drawings. For war-ravaged Berliners, the metropolis was a more urgent fantasy: make order out of chaos, redeem national pride. To such artists as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Rudolph Schlichter, life in Germany in the early ’20s was a cabaret of limbless beggars, exploited workers, sexual fetishism–a nation whipped. So the unnamed architect in Wilhelm Schnarrenberger’s 1923 portrait, his lips pursed in determination, became a new German hero. In 1925, Berlin architect Ludwig Hilberseimer proposed the ideal “High-Rise City,” with vast, faceless slabs of buildings connected by pedestrian bridges and malls five stories above the street. Three years before, Le Corbusier had tackled the problem of urban density by imagining spectacular “Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants” (about the population of Paris at the time), with soaring cruciform high-rises interspersed with low building blocks.
The image of the new metropolis didn’t just rise up from the architect’s drafting table. It was everywhere–in the backdrop of such paintings as Tamara de Lempicka’s icily mannered portrait of Madame Boucard; in the raucous photomantage of Kazimierz Podsadecki or the futuristic collage of Karl Steiner; in eye-popping posters by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg or Edward McKnight Kauffer; in the elegant photographs of Edward Steichen.
Not that everyone shared the same vision of glory. In Fritz Lang’s 1926 film, and the machine dominate the working man (the word “robot,” as it happens, was coined in 1921). Herbert Bayer, in “Untitled (Lonely Metropolitan),” his famous surrealist photograph of a pair of eyes in the palms of two hands, saw the city as a source of desolation. And the most visionary plans of the great modern architects of the ’20s came to look ruthless and forbidding. Years after he designed his “high-Rise City,” even Hillberseimer denounced it as “more a necropolis than a metropolis.”
Modernism didn’t respect barriers between the disciplines. What’s great about exhibitions like this one is the chance to see the links among art, architecture and design. Some architects crossed over: Le Corbusier painted cubist still lives in the ’20s. Gerrit Rietveld used the ideas of DeStijl painting (think of Mondrian) for both furniture and house design. And objects like Jean Theobald’s silver tea service were streamlined as sleekly as a skyscraper. The 1920s didn’t invent modernism, but it was the decade that tested design’s modern ideas and fixed them in the life of this century.
Photos: Visions: Kem Weber’s American side table (far left), German wine jug by Christian Dell (left) (NORWEST CORPORATION, MINNEAPOLIS)
title: “How Yesterday Saw Tomorrow” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-08” author: “Raul Pedigo”
What holds the show together, more or less, is the vision of the metropolis. “Skyscrapers are the expression of confidence in the future,” architect Cesar Pelli has said. The skyscraper was first built in America, and for Americans it has always meant power and prosperity; in the ’20s, Hugh Ferriss captured the romance of the first skyscrapers in his dreamlike drawings. For war-ravaged Berliners, the metropolis was a more urgent fantasy: make order out of chaos, redeem national pride. To such artists as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Rudolph Schlichter, life in Germany in the early ’20s was a cabaret of limbless beggars, exploited workers, sexual fetishism–a nation whipped. So the unnamed architect in Wilhelm Schnarrenberger’s 1923 portrait, his lips pursed in determination, became a new German hero. In 1925, Berlin architect Ludwig Hilberseimer proposed the ideal “High-Rise City,” with vast, faceless slabs of buildings connected by pedestrian bridges and malls five stories above the street. Three years before, Le Corbusier had tackled the problem of urban density by imagining spectacular “Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants” (about the population of Paris at the time), with soaring cruciform high-rises interspersed with low building blocks.
The image of the new metropolis didn’t just rise up from the architect’s drafting table. It was everywhere–in the backdrop of such paintings as Tamara de Lempicka’s icily mannered portrait of Madame Boucard; in the raucous photomantage of Kazimierz Podsadecki or the futuristic collage of Karl Steiner; in eye-popping posters by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg or Edward McKnight Kauffer; in the elegant photographs of Edward Steichen.
Not that everyone shared the same vision of glory. In Fritz Lang’s 1926 film, and the machine dominate the working man (the word “robot,” as it happens, was coined in 1921). Herbert Bayer, in “Untitled (Lonely Metropolitan),” his famous surrealist photograph of a pair of eyes in the palms of two hands, saw the city as a source of desolation. And the most visionary plans of the great modern architects of the ’20s came to look ruthless and forbidding. Years after he designed his “high-Rise City,” even Hillberseimer denounced it as “more a necropolis than a metropolis.”
Modernism didn’t respect barriers between the disciplines. What’s great about exhibitions like this one is the chance to see the links among art, architecture and design. Some architects crossed over: Le Corbusier painted cubist still lives in the ’20s. Gerrit Rietveld used the ideas of DeStijl painting (think of Mondrian) for both furniture and house design. And objects like Jean Theobald’s silver tea service were streamlined as sleekly as a skyscraper. The 1920s didn’t invent modernism, but it was the decade that tested design’s modern ideas and fixed them in the life of this century.
Photos: Visions: Kem Weber’s American side table (far left), German wine jug by Christian Dell (left) (NORWEST CORPORATION, MINNEAPOLIS)
