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  • The Mechanic as Twentieth-Century Mona Lisa: Modernism’s Utopian Designs at the Corcoran Gallery
  • John Paul Riquelme
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 1703– 2907, 2007; conceived by and first shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 0604– 2307, 2006.
Essential Modernism. Philip Brookman, Paul Greenhalgh, and Sarah Newman . London: V&A Publications, 2007. 100 illustrations, mostly color. Pp. viii + 88. $19.95 (cloth).
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939. Christopher Wilk , ed. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Pp. 447. 360 color plates, 60 black and white illustrations. $85.00 (cloth).

The Mechanic[by Fernand Léger] of 1923 just struck me as being the twentieth century's Mona Lisa, you know? He's a confident boy.

—Paul Greenhalgh, Director, Corcoran Gallery of Art

Exhibiting and Interpreting the Utopian Machine Aesthetic

The memorable exhibition of largely European modernist art and design at the Corcoran Gallery (originally at the V&A) is the most recent [End Page 755]of several ambitious, exceptionally interesting exhibitions concerning late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century art and design that have traveled from the V&A to American museums. 1The objects and the argument of Modernismhave been presented with care in two beautifully designed books that provide important resources for anyone interested in modernism. The exhibition's range and diversity, a few exemplary objects and spaces, and the curatorial attitudes that shaped it are available in the streaming video of an eight-minute PBS segment from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer(19 April 2007). 2The segment includes a selective walk through, Jeffrey Brown's reportorial commentary, and excerpts from interviews with Paul Greenhalgh, Director of the Corcoran, and Christopher Wilk, Keeper of the Furniture, Textiles, and Fashion Department at the V&A and curator of Modernism.

No brief report could communicate sufficiently Brown's accurate assertion that the exhibition was "huge." The books suggest more fully the show's monumental size and the stunning impact of many of the objects. The PBS interviews are revealing, particularly Greenhalgh's declaration concerning Fernand Léger that provides my epigraph. He continues: "He looks as though he knows what he's doing, and he looks in control of his life. And for me, it makes it this big, optimistic symbol." Greenhalgh and his coauthors put The Mechanicon the dust jacket of Essential Modernism. Wilk is equally declarative concerning modernist intentions: "When architects of this period got together, they tended to talk about three things, maybe four: housing—by which they meant public housing, social housing—housing, housing, and then how to build it. . . . the burning issue of the day was how to improve the plight of ordinary people by providing them with much better conditions." He points to Mies van der Rohe's influential sketch for the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project(1921) as epitomizing with its glass sheathing the goal of "letting light in, and light is health-giving, and it's creating a sense of something higher." These claims about modernism's machine aesthetic, utopian aspirations, and Apollonian character articulate the exhibition's main directions and sharply defined focus.

Although providing clarity for visitors is crucial, these claims beg many questions and leave the ostensible intentions of modernism largely uncriticized. Nietzsche, who was taken seriously in the period by Thomas Mann and others, had much to say about the limitations, delusions, and instability of cultural ideals that adopt the vocabulary of light, health, and the contrast of higher to lower. But we need not rely on Nietzsche's legacy to question Utopiaand its political implications. The term was widely understood to mean a Marxist-Leninist commitment to the establishment of communism by revolutionary means. It was not a universally admired term in debates concerning future social structures. This marvelous exhibition is conceptually weakened by not presenting more strenuously both the contemporary objections from the right to Utopia, a term with a contentious history, and the critique from the left that modernism was complicit with existing hierarchies of power. Understanding modernism depends on situating it in relation to these criticisms from its own time.

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