Modernism Internationally

Broadly considered, Modernism represented multi-disciplinary cultural expressions from art, architecture, the applied arts, music and literature beginning in the early twentieth century. With the aid of the machine and the idea of practical experimentation, Modernism's progressive stance crossed political, social, and artistic boundaries across many cultural forms in the Western world. Welcoming change, twentieth-century Modernist thinkers rebelled against nineteenth century standards, beliefs, and systems. They directly encountered the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age that represented permanent and imminent certainties to be embraced by all, especially in the second generation of Modernism that took place after World War II.

In outward material expression, Modernist objects could not fully dissolve their links to nineteenth-century precedents in that art and design relied on traditional forms against which their newness could be read. Varied sources of inspiration included the Bauhaus, analytical philosophy, Surrealist painting and Abstract art, photography as a medium and the advent of moving pictures, new building materials and technologies, quantum and relativistic physics, well-made objects from the Arts and Crafts movement, twelve-note composition in music, and 1930s Art Deco and Art Moderne skyscrapers. All of these prototypes stood as examples of what might be possible when not looking to the classics for inspiration. Manifest in consumer products from radios to kitchen appliances to cars to suburban enclaves, Modern artifacts tell us something of the mid-century world that inherited expressions from many Modernist thinkers who emigrated to the United States before, during, and after World War II.

Icons of Modernism

The images in this exhibition result from a collaborative project among three classes and provide a visual catalog of some of the most quintessential images at mid-century. Rather than placing them in a chronological or topical arrangement, we elected to organize them as they might have been experienced...a series of mediated images that arrive in consistent form -much like a photo album, movie, or television show -that express the cacophony of sources for mid-century design. You read in this exhibition F-11 bombers juxtaposed with flared A-line dresses, large-scale satellites near bobby soxers, movie stars mixing with everyday people, bowling alleys alongside ranch houses, and beatnik poetry providing the foil for images of patriotism. The images in sum symbolize the post-war era and suggest some key themes for understanding the American world of the mid-century: a burgeoning consumer society, a climate of fear in encountering the difference of others, and a nation that looked inward to consider its own desires rather than the diverse needs of the world.