Sharp tailoring or a blueprint for living?
Ernesto Michaellis Thayaht's designs for
a "Tuta" suit. Copyright: Sporintendenza
Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino,
Galleria del Costume, Florence
The V&A's Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39 exhibition opened last week. According to the Guardian's Adrian Searle, the show is full of "fascinating, bizarre, silly, grim and beautiful things". Simon Jenkins, writing last week, wrote that "it is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art". The gallery's curators, on the other hand, suggest that we are a culture that "still identifies itself in terms of Modernism".
But what did visitors to the show think?
- Can't make the V&A? Take a sneak preview inside with our interactive gallery tour
James Wykes, 33, Ealing: The exhibition reminded me what a cliché a lot of Modernism had become. It was innovative for about 10 years, then it got hijacked by fascism, communism and mass-market capitalism, and lost a lot of its originality. It was quite a short-lived movement in a way, but it remains with us. The architecture works very well on a small scale, but we've had to live with its legacy in prefabricated concrete monstrosities. Sara McLaughlin, 51, Hackney: There was a small, elite group deciding what the future was going to be for the masses, and this whole Aryan philosophy of everyone doing things simultaneously.
Elsa Ward, 45, London: The main thing I got from the exhibition is that Modernism is so relevant. It's amazing to think that it emerged in the 1920s. If you walk into Ikea now, you'll see very similar ideas.
Louise Wykes, 31, Belsize Park: Modernist architecture is beautiful as long as it's pristine, but it doesn't wear well. I live in the Isokon building and it's very expensive to keep up. Modernism had always seemed like a very serious movement to me, but so many bits of this exhibition are rather silly.
Paul Fox, 41, Chippenham: [Modernism] is about simplicity of form, but it's also about bringing art into everyday life. It's to do with art as a useful thing, rather than as adornment for rich people to look at. The exhibition makes Modernism seem left-wing and emphasizes that the Nazis rejected it, but the symbol of Nazism is a modernist construct. I think the fascists were partly a Modernist movement.
Barrington White, 76, London: I'm particularly interested in geometry, technology, architecture and science, and I found this exhibition fascinating. After the first world war and the Russian revolution people were looking to a new future very much dominated by technology, and a lot of design and science came together around that time.
James Clary, 40, London: Modernism was a rejection of the forms that had come before. It was a clean slate. The movement got hijacked by the Nazis for their propaganda. When I saw that kind of design as a kid, I thought of it as Russian, but it's just Modernism. Judy Allsop, London: I think Modernism was trying to get back to a much simpler line, set of colours and way of living. I was quite taken by the political philosophy underpinning it. It stood for a much more egalitarian world. They were building for the workers.
Janice Forde, London: The exhibition made me think about my grandmother and her flat. There's a poster showing an overstuffed, overfrilled, over-decorated living room with a big red cross through it. It would have been quite good to have had that at the beginning of the exhibition. Modernism started off as an aesthetically, morally and philosophically idealistic movement. Then it became largely the province of the rich.
