Museum stakes hopes on ambitious Modernism show

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life!) - With works ranging from a Czechoslovakian car to a Picasso painting, Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art is casting a broad spotlight on Modernism, a period of cultural rebirth the museum hopes will signal its own recovery from long struggles.

The exhibition opening Saturday, "Modernism: Designing a New World," is billed as the most comprehensive survey of an era from 1914 to 1939 when artists and designers sought to transform a society convulsed by war.

Painters abandoned realism for abstraction, architects inspired by industry cast the home as "a machine for living," and political activists used art to promote a new utopia.

"This show is about optimism. It's about a point in the 20th century when the most nightmarish things were going down," said Paul Greenhalgh, the Corcoran's director.

The grinding carnage of World War One was followed by an influenza pandemic that killed tens of millions. The stock market crash of 1929 and Great Depression further shook society.

But the modernists had a passionate optimism that -- through objects as simple as a painted wood chair by Gerrit Rietveld or as complex as a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe skyscraper -- they could create a new world from scratch.

"Everything that you see in this show is about reinvention," said the curator, Christopher Wilk.

Greenhalgh cites the Modernists' optimism as emblematic of the museum's hopes for revival. "We kind of feel like that here at this moment," he said at an exhibition preview.

Greenhalgh, a former senior curator at London's Victoria & Albert museum, took over as head of the museum across from the White House Ellipse last April.

The Corcoran was founded in 1869. It houses an extensive permanent collection of European and American art, and an art college. But the privately-supported institution must compete with free museums in the U.S. capital such as the National Gallery of Art, and it has weathered years of turmoil.

FIRESTORM

There was a firestorm in 1989 over an exhibit of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe which included explicit homoerotic images. The show was ultimately canceled.

A display of sculptures depicting famous Impressionist paintings was criticized by Washington Post critic Blake Gopnik as the worst museum show he had ever seen.

Financial troubles forced the museum in 2005 to scrap plans for an addition designed by architectural star Frank Gehry.

The Corcoran is hoping the Modernism show will put it back on the map as a major arts institution, with an enhanced art college also contributing. A sequel exhibition on Postmodernism is in the works.