MODERNISM 1920 - 1940

from 8 to 26 November 2000

The dominating cultural force of the Twentieth Century was, without a doubt, Modernism. As a design idiom or language it enforced itself through a series of disparate, yet at the same time, unified international forms: so much so that from city planning and the built environment to the buildings and objects we surround ourselves with, it still impacts on our lives today.

Modernism, or the ‘machine aesthetic’, can be simply defined through the 
legendary dictums ‘Form follows function’ (Louis Sullivan) and ‘Less is More’ (Mies van de Rohe).

Through the use of the machine a new formal un-ornamented language would be created, escaping the local boundaries of historical revival and acquired taste, creating an international or universal aesthetic which represented the ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘spirit of the age’. It is this juxtaposition of machine and aesthetic that perhaps more than any other describes modernism in design, highlighting the desire to manufacture standardised, functional objects whilst at the same time drawing attention to the application of an aesthetic of clean formal proportions. Aligned to standardisation was the breaking down of the boundaries between artist/craftsman and designer/engineer in order to create the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or ‘Total work   of art’ which would fuse architecture, furnishings and applied arts into a single creative union.

Opening paragraphs from our catalogue essay by Frank Cartledge